All Night Awake (12 page)

What Will would think of this, she also knew well. That she was a temptress, a danger, and that he must get well away from her. No. Warn him of the immediate danger and be done.

“My brother has learned to feed on human suffering, on human pain, on human death, as the gods of old did. He has no true body and yet, incorporeal, he can feed and gain power from death. I’m sure he’s come to London to feed on the deaths from this plague. We cannot afford to let him do so.”

Will’s eyes narrowed when she mentioned the plague, but he shook his head stubbornly. “Milady,” he said, and his voice had gone all cold, dripping with icicles and foretelling separation. “Milady, what is your
brother
to me? What is his power? Why should I be the arbiter and judge of elven disputes?” His eyes narrowed further, but with suspicion. “Do you think to make me your dupe once more? To make me commit your crimes for you?”

Silver gasped at the surprise of this accusation.

Her crimes? What did he think of her?

Her eyes filled with tears, and while she stomped her foot at the humiliation of being thus reduced to tears by a mortal, she heard her voice issue through her lips, shaky and high, “Oh, that you dare. Oh, that you say such things. Will, I would never . . . . That was before I loved you.”

She stretched her hands for him, and he pushed them back, his hands firm and unfeeling.

“Lady, you never loved me.”

And before she could protest, he added, “Lady, I care not.”

“You
must
care,” she said.

Didn’t the fool man see that his own world depended upon that other shadowy, supernatural world, like a tennis ball tethered to a paddle, which can no more go than the string will let it, and which must burn if the paddle burns? Did he not understand that Sylvanus would grow with his feeding, and need more death to feed him anew?

Did he not know that whatever Sylvanus meant, surely he meant to destroy the world?

All this she flung at him in desperate shrilling.

Will shook his head. He set the paper on his desk, and looked up at her. “No more. I care not for you nor for your world. I care for my family, for my wife and children, for my poems that I might perfect and which might bring me fortune and the ability to make my son Hamnet a fine gentleman, and to buy fine clothes for my daughters and give them a dowry that will make them gentlemen’s wives.” He crossed his arms upon his chest. “I care not for you nor for your kingdom, nor for your shadowy plots that always bring me misfortune and blight what I hold dear. It is my wife I love, Lady Silver, not you.”

The words hurt. Being compared with Anne Shakespeare, with her coarse hands, her coarser figure, nettled the Lady Silver like a well-applied bur will nettle the body of a sleeper.

She heard her voice, shrill, a fishwife demanding accounting for her husband’s misdeeds. “You mean that not. How can you mean it? Your wife more than I? Have you forgotten?” And on an unconsidered, reckless impulse that swept over her as if come out of elsewhere to overwhelm her reason, she advanced toward him, arms extended.

Will put his hands forward, and pushed her away. “No. Be gone. I have no time for your mad games. I must be at the theater early morning.”

Checked in her advance, Silver trembled. She stepped back, trying to recover what of her dignity subsisted. What had she been going to do? Kiss Will? Make love to him?

Hadn’t Quicksilver promised Ariel never more to change to Silver? Never more to let Silver have her way with Will?

Bad enough he’d broken the first promise. Bad enough, though perhaps justified by his need to seek Will’s help. Will was as much more likely to give in to Lady Silver than to Quicksilver.

But that was not working, and besides, what justification could Silver have for seducing Will?

Double adultery it would be. And a breach of promise and honor. No.

She must go. She must control herself and go, as Will wished her to go.

She must go out into the streets of London. She would get no help here, no rational word from Will. And she must find what had brought Sylvanus to London.

Without knowing how or why, Silver knew that Sylvanus meant to dethrone her—him—meant to destroy all that she had ever held dear, even Will and Kit.

But she wasn’t sure how Sylvanus could hope to do that, could hope to prevail against the might of the fairy hill, or the strength of mortal reality.

And not knowing it, she knew not how to battle it.

Scene 10

A neighborhood in Southwark. Amid the muddy fields, the reeking, unpaved lanes, some poor houses stand, tall but graceless and looking like slums anywhere and any when—as though built by children, hastily, with the poorest materials available. Down the narrow, dark street, Kit walks, his clothes strangely out of place in this poor working neighborhood.

K
it walked blindly. The memory of the elf lady he’d once loved overpowered him—the dark lady who could also be a fair youth—took over his senses. He remembered hair of black silk and pale golden hair like moonlight overspilled through a dark night. He remembered hands now soft and small and now large and weapon-calloused. But both hands had been, alike, knowing and daring, both full of arts that humans had never learned, of pleasing vices and gentle sins, of sweetness and tempting older than any human.

Kit remembered the scent of lilac permeating all and making him drunk.

Walking, Kit found, unbidden upon his lips, the simple poem he’d written for Silver—and Quicksilver—in the too brief flowering of his youth.

“Come live with me and be my love,” he sang. “And I will give you beds of roses and a thousand fragrant posies.”

Somewhere, in the darkened upper floors of the nearby houses, someone cursed loudly.

“It’s that creature, Marlowe,” a louder, shriller female voice answered. “He’s drunk again.”

Marlowe smiled and, drunk on nothing but memory, lifted his voice that had once been famous in the Canterbury Cathedral choir, “Our fair swains will—”

A dog barked, and another, shrill voice rose from a window, far above the street, this one saying, “Oh, not again.”

“Kit, Kit, Kit.” Someone small and looking, in the distant moonlight, like little more than a dark shadow, came running down the center of the street and threw himself at Kit’s midbody.

Hit, Kit shut up, jumped back to regain his balance, and reaching forward, grabbed his small attacker around the waist.

“What is this?” he said, recognizing Imp full well, but pretending not to. “What is this? Pray, do footpads come this small?”

He lifted the squealing boy up, till Imp’s face was at a level with his. “Speak, sirrah, want you my purse?”

A small image of Kit’s own face looked at him—the grey eyes the same, cut in the same almond shape and surrounded by the same dark lashes. The child wore his hair long, tied back with a leather strap, and his clothes were much too fine for this poor area of town.

For years now, Kit had formed the habit of giving his old clothes to his landlady, Madeleine, who, with great cunning and ability, cut them down and took the best portions to make perfect clothing for Imp. So Imp wore a velvet doublet and hose in the best style of two years ago, with a fine lawn shirt whose collar showed, clean and unpatched, around his small neck.

“Ah, a well-dressed footpad,” Kit said, marking how much more the boy weighed in his hands than a month ago.

Imp would be what . . . . seven, for it had been almost eight years ago that Kit, first come to London and penniless, had succumbed to the blandishments of his landlady, then so newly a widow that the ensuing product of their brief, unloving tryst was taken by all to be her husband’s get.

By all who had no eyes, Kit thought, marveling once more that every neighbor didn’t point a finger at him and name him Imp’s father, when Imp’s paternity was written all over his son’s guileless face.

He shook the child with mock fierceness. “Tell me, rogue, are you one of these scions of nobility who go around robbing poor people for their fun?” he asked.

Imp opened his eyes very wide. As always, he seemed none too sure that Kit was joking. “I am Richard. Richard Courcy, as you well know, you fool.” He kicked his legs. “Put me down. Put me down. You were making the fool of yourself again, Kit. And you are drunk.”

It was Kit’s turn to laugh as he set the child down. “Peace, Lord Morality. I am not drunk, haven’t drunk anything since I took dinner, much too long ago. And that was but a vile ale, milord, as you would not give your dogs, and certainly not enough to make my spirits soar.” He tugged on the child’s ponytail. “It must be the joy of your presence, milord.”

Imp looked up, and frowned slightly. He had this trick of narrowing his eyes, of lowering his eyebrows upon them, while pinching his mouth in something not quite a smile.

It reminded Kit of his own mother, and of the loving, patient way in which she’d endured his childish follies.

Unlike Kit’s father, who usually made his leather strap speak and loudly, too, being convinced that sparing the strap would spoil the child.

Kit put his hand on Imp’s shoulder, very gently, almost as an apology to that other Kit long ago, who’d endured not so gentle a father.

But who had a father who acknowledged him, Kit’s conscience reminded him. A father willing to call him son, as Imp lacked.

“Mock not, Kit,” Imp said. He looked grave and something sparked in the grey eyes, something that made Kit think of tears. “Mock me not, for I must tell you something serious.”

Kit picked the child up again, carefully—Imp’s legs on either side of his waist, his hands supporting the boy. Kit did not care if Imp’s muddy shoes ruined his fine clothing.

“What, child?” he asked. This was the closest he’d ever get to calling his boy son. “What? What is so serious that you must look at me like a preacher displeased with sinners?”

“A man came by,” Imp said, and his voice trembled. “An evil man, with dark hair and a nasty face. And he told Mother that you . . . He told Mother he must speak to you, or else all was up with us.”

Tears formed in the child’s eyes.

A man with an evil smile?

Oh, curse Henry Mauder, curse the creature. He’d been scaring Imp, too. Not content with making Kit himself ill with fright for Imp’s sake, he’d frightened Imp.

Kit felt a murderous rage, such as, had Henry Mauder been to hand, Kit would gladly have broken Mauder’s skinny neck with the legs of Mauder’s clerical black hose.

Imp put his forehead against Kit’s shoulder, while Kit walked home along the darkened street.

His steps resounded, lonely, off the facades of surrounding buildings, and each whisper seemed magnified by the darkness.

“Mother says if you bring danger to us, you must go,” Imp said. “She says you’re a dangerous man and I should not let you . . .” A long silence. “She says you’re not a man like other men and that you’ve spent too much time around the theater and got confused by boys who dress like women.”

Oh, by the devils and the eternal fire, Kit thought, and tightened his hold on Imp. “Your mother is scared and knows not what she says,” he said. Which was true enough, though Madeleine had come up with this explanation long ago, to excuse Kit’s not wishing to repeat their clumsy coupling.

She could never understand that it was other arms he longed for, nor could he tell her that her love paled when compared to that of elvenkind, like coarse bread paled next to the dainties of kings.

No, he couldn’t tell her that, and Madeleine Courcy had first conjectured then decided that Kit must prefer embraces of another kind, and finally told one and all that Kit sought this illicit love in alleys and darkened places.

At first it had amused Kit who, relieved that Madeleine no longer pursued him, had taken her ready explanation for his tastes and even let her spread it, thinking that illicit dealing of this kind—rarely persecuted and mostly winked at—would mask other illicit dealing, his presence and his actions in other places as his majesty’s courier, or as a secret service man.

And then, in a way, Kit felt as though he could not deny it. In the memory of his one love there commingled Silver’s soft charms and Quicksilver’s broad back, Silver’s silken midnight hair and Quicksilver’s golden hair for which the youth of Greece would surely have risked much more than for the golden vellum.

Oh, true, it was Silver who had first attracted him, when he was young and innocent. He’d endured Quicksilver for Silver’s sake. But in small steps, so small that Kit wasn’t himself sure how he’d got there, Kit had found that he loved Quicksilver as much as Silver and, when his love affair ended, missed them both equally. And sometimes, to dull his longing, he’d taken consolation of that kind, as fleeting and unsatisfying a consolation as his encounter with Madeleine had proven—as futile and as far short of his elf love.

So, he’d not contradicted Madeleine, feeling she was justified in at least a part of her mad suspicions.

But that she’d tell Imp to be wary of Kit, as though Kit’s cravings would run to children, as though Kit could be so unnatural and accursed—
that
shocked Kit to his core.