All Night Awake (13 page)

“Your mother knows not what she says, Imp. I love you as though you were my own son.” His voice caught in saying the words, and it hurt, as if in speaking he had torn the skin of his throat, the restraint of his truth.

“What about the man?” Imp asked. “The man who came? Mother said he was dangerous and you are dangerous and you must give up your rooms.”

Kit shook his head, and swallowed hard. This time as other times past, the two times Kit had got arrested for being caught amid street brawls, the third time, a year ago, when Kit had been arrested for counterfeit coining undertaken as part of a project for the secret service—every time Madeleine protested and threatened to throw him out, it was but a plea for Kit’s money, maybe for Kit’s love.

His love he couldn’t give her, but money he could and aplenty.

Long ago he could have traded these threadbare lodgings, which he’d once shared with Tom Kyd, another playwright, for better lodgings in a better part of town.

Thomas Walsingham’s patronage assured Kit of that ability.

But Kit liked these lodgings, and needed to be near Imp, even if under the pretense of a renter and a family friend.

He shook his head. “Fear not, my Lord Despair. Your mother is a mother and she worries and in her worry she says who knows what.”

Imp was Kit’s well-loved son, and Kit would stay nearby and would protect him, and would ensure the boy went to university when the time came.

Imp would be a great philosopher, a great master, greater than his father by that much as Kit was than his cobbler sire.

“What about the man with the teeth like a wolf?” Imp asked, and sitting up straight, held his two fingers in front of his mouth, as prefiguring cruel fangs.

“Teeth like a wolf, had he?” Kit laughed, thinking of Henry Mauder. “I rather thought him more like a dog who craves a bone and has none. A wolf’s teeth would be like this.” Giving low growls, Kit pretended to ravage Imp’s shoulder.

The child smelled of herbs and rosewater.

It made Kit wish he could be a child again, running free in the abandoned orchards of the monastery in Canterbury. It would almost be worth enduring again his father’s beatings for that.

Imp laughed loudly as Kit, who’d kept walking, carrying the child, arrived at the door to his lodgings.

Before he could open it, the door was thrown open, by Madeleine Courcy.

Imp’s mother had never been beautiful. Or never since Kit had known her.

At least ten years older than Kit, when he had met her she had already shown a severe face, a closed, hardened expression, probably acquired from living for years under the thumb of a ponderous Puritan husband.

One beautiful feature she’d had then which had drawn Kit like a magnet. Her waist-long hair had been midnight black and silky, so that if Kit put his face in it, he could pretend to himself that this was his love, the elf lady Silver.

But Madeleine’s hair had coarsened and turned white and her figure, once good enough to pretend it might be Silver’s, had thickened, leaving her with an immense, shapeless bosom that overshadowed a body where no waist emphasized the broader hips.

“What is this?” she asked in the sharp French accent she hadn’t lost after fifteen years in England. “What is this? You debauch my son? Why is he not abed?”

Kit swallowed. Lifting Imp, Kit handed him to Imp’s mother. “He came to meet me,” Kit said, feeling like he’d committed some crime. “He came to meet me, and I brought him back.”

Madeleine’s black eyes, which he’d never been able to convince himself were just like Silver’s shiny metallic ones, narrowed and looked at him with unabated suspicion.

She took her child in her arms, and pushed Imp’s face against her shoulder, as if to cover his eyes.

Kit cleared his throat. “I hear you’ve had an unpleasant visit.”

“One? We’ve had them all day and they haven’t ceased yet,” Madeleine said, and compressed her lips as she glared at Kit. “It is time you should be quitting your rooms, Master Marlowe. You pay me not enough to endure the thread of constant feet, the suspicions of countless officers, the danger to my child. If my husband were alive, he’d have thrown you out long ago.”

If her husband were alive, likely Imp would never have existed, and Kit would have no reason to be here.

“Nothing will happen to Imp, madam,” he said. “And as for paying you, tell me how much you want, and like enough, I can find it.”

She glared at him over Imp’s shoulder.

Imp turned to look back at Kit, his pale little face anxious and drawn, visibly resenting the harsh words flying around him.

Kit remembered when he was very young and his parents argued, how it made him hide under the bed, how it made him wish he could stop existing.

Later, when he’d been scarcely older than Imp, he’d stood in front of his mother, protecting her from his father’s rages.

Madeleine opened her mouth and Kit drew breath, ready to counter imputations and insinuations, fearing she’d air, in front of Imp, what she thought she knew of Kit’s interests and amusements.

But instead, her mouth, which had learned her severity too early to be able to soften now, said, “His name is Richard, and I wish you’d stop calling him the name of a kind of demon. His name is Richard, after my sainted husband, his father.”

And as if she could rewrite Imp’s origins with her short words, she turned her back on Kit and vanished, down the long narrow hallway, to where her room and Imp’s lay.

Kit sighed and took his way up the stairs, to his own rented room.

That night, carefully watched, Imp would never dare climb the stairs in the dark and beg Kit for a story, as he did almost nightly.

So, Kit had time to plot the snare that would catch Essex and hold him at bay and thus allow Kit and Imp to go free.

First he must make sure Will voiced treacherous opinions and had contacts beyond his sphere with noblemen in Essex’s field.

Then it remained for Kit to invent a goal for this conspiracy—killing the Queen would always serve. Everyone feared the death of the childless monarch. It had become a national nightmare. And then Kit would denounce Will.

He paused for a moment, staring at the ceiling over his bed, remembering Will’s innocent look, his effusive gratitude.

How could Kit ensnare such a lamb?

He closed his eyes.

It must be.

If the noose thus designed to keep Imp alive and safe must catch in it that poor fool, Will Shakespeare, then so be it.

For one Imp, would Kit sacrifice the world.

Scene 11

The fairy palace. Queen Ariel sleeps on her high, gilded bed, beneath a green silk cover embroidered in gold thread. Suddenly, the darkness above sparkles with pinpoints of light that, like falling stars, burn for only a moment and then are gone. They leave behind a sulphurous stench of waning magic, and objects rain down on Ariel’s bedspread like large hailstones.

A
riel dreamed that Quicksilver was a child again, fourteen or fifteen no more and barely into the prolonged elven adolescence that would last till he was fifty.

They played together under a mighty oak, Quicksilver trying to steal a kiss and Ariel avoiding his advances and laughing.

Rain started pattering on them, heavy rain that quickly turned into gigantic rocks, which cut through leaves and broke the branches, and shred the wood of the wondrous overarching oak.

The air smelled of waning magic, of magic gone wrong.

“Beware, milord,” Ariel screamed. “Someone attacks us.”

But when she turned to look at him, Quicksilver was not beside her. He was away, at the edge of the human town, talking to a young man with dark curls and the golden eyes of a hawk.

Ariel woke with a muffled scream.

In her dark room, flashes of light showed her bed, her bedspread, all of it unreally lit, too white, too bright.

Something fell on her bed, something small and heavy. The smell in the air was real, not dreamed.

The smell of magic gone wrong.

Ariel reached for her bedside table where, at her word, a tall, never-consuming candle lit up, bringing cool, sane lighting to the room.

On her bed lay the countless bodies of many servant fairies, some lifeless, others yet twitching. Dying of some plague, some curse.

Ariel screamed. People ran down the hallway toward her room.

First arrived her maids, Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Cowslip, in their nightly finery of silk lace and embroidered caps. They put their hands over their mouths and joined their screaming to their mistress’s.

After them came Malachite, who threw the door open and ran in, dagger at the ready. He didn’t scream, but sheathed his dagger, made a sound like a man drowning, and went pale, his legs visibly buckling beneath his long, white nightshirt.

He approached the bed and, with horror, poked his finger at a lifeless dragon-fly-fine wing, a small, perfect, humanlike body.

“They’re dead,” he said. He looked at Ariel with horrified green eyes, grown unusually large and scared upon his pale face. He swallowed. “They’re dead.”

He gaped at Ariel as though he expected her to explain the mystery of the servant fairies’ deaths. The dread wonder of death in deathless Fairyland.

His lips trembled.

Other people had come into the room, by twos, by threes, by trembling loneliness.

All of them, including Hyllas, the centaur ambassador, wore their nightclothes, which for Hyllas seemed to be a cap all askew on his dark curls.

And all of them looked horrified.

Ariel recovered her senses first.

“Stop screaming,” Ariel snapped at her maids, while yet servant fairies glowed and—their magic burned out—fell to writhing on the bed. “Stop screaming and fetch me my wrap.”

Peaseblossom, the quickest to recover, handed Ariel her gauzy wrap—though the maid’s gaze remained on the bed, her eyes yet wide and wondering. Ariel wrapped herself and stood up.

“Lords, ladies,” she said. “There’s nothing here to see, nothing. Our servants are suffering and I must minister to them, but for that I must have silence and peace.”

As she spoke, she noticed that several of the servant fairies, seemingly untouched, still flew amid the crowd. She stared at them, wondering what made them different from their stricken fellows, while the ladies and lords, muttering, withdrew to the door of the room.

They walked out but went no farther, collecting in little nervous groups and gossiping crowds in the hallway.

Ariel closed the door in their faces unceremoniously, and left alone with her servants, she walked back to the bed.

It didn’t take Ariel’s gift of second sight, acquired by being born on summer solstice, to allow her to see that what had killed the winged fairies was lack of magic. Their magic had failed somehow. That power that had come to elvenkind from the very first formation of the Universe had now deserted these small beings.

And not all of her gift could show her why the fairies’ magic had failed.

While Ariel watched, several of the dead fairies winked out, returning to the nothing that had birthed them, their bodies disappearing as their magic had.

“Milady, what is wrong?” Peaseblossom asked. The maid held her hands in front of her mouth and spoke through her fingers, as though afraid that her words would give yet more force to dread reality.

Ariel shook her head and, with imperious thought, sent for the leader of the servant fairies, a prim and proper small creature called Marmalade.

Marmalade had tawny hair and a bronze-colored body. Today, her tiny features looked as sick, as bleached of color, as Malachite’s had.

Winking her light in the speech of the winged ones, she told Ariel that the servant fairies who were dying were the least powerful of them and that power blight and death seemed to be escalating, climbing the ranks of power.

A mysterious illness, Marmalade said.

Soon, Marmalade said, all servant fairies would be dead. And who after them? As she spoke, tiny Marmalade cast a frightened eye to the bed, where fairies still dropped and writhed and vanished.

See,
she winked and blinked her light in fear.
See, oh, lady, how they came to you for help in their extremity. Who will be next to feel this blight?

Changelings,
Ariel thought, though she didn’t say it. Changelings—though given elven power and elven nature at their adoption—never completely lost their mortal dross, nor did they ever acquire as much power as those elven born.

They were the members of the hill who had the lowest magic, after the servants.

She thought of Malachite’s color, wan and pale, turned from its normal on seeing the dying fairies.

He’d looked like he knew what was wrong and that he’d be next.

Faith, Malachite, Lord Malachite, Quicksilver’s right hand, Quicksilver’s friend, knew more about this blight and its likely course than anyone in the palace.

And Malachite alone had been with Quicksilver when they’d met whatever the menace was at the boundary of Fairyland, near Stratford-upon-Avon.

Thus thinking, Ariel opened her door, and ignoring the many high lords and dazzling ladies of Fairyland who crowded around her and pressed her with questions and comments and condolences, she searched for Malachite.