All Night Awake (17 page)

Oh, curse the creature, the mutable magical creature that no mortal could understand, no mortal hold.

Looking at her, Will could have wanted her, Will could have loved her. Again as in that night, so long ago, Will felt the enchantment of the creature, the magic of the woodland, the spell of the shaded glen that no man knew and no man could conquer.

His gaze traveled her soft skin and dwelt on the graceful form of her. Oh, to touch such treasure. To dwell in such palaces.

Nan had never been that perfect. Nan had never been that full of charm. Nor had any mortal woman. Ever. No queen’s majesty rivaled the pearly perfection of Silver’s skin, the unfathomable depth of her eyes.

And yet, looking on Silver, Will saw, as if with double vision, Quicksilver’s broad shoulders, his taller form, the waist that narrowed from the muscular chest, the arms accustomed to fighting, the hands large enough and strong enough to ply a sword as it should be plied.

Again Will reached, again his hand touched the bare shoulder above the ruffled dress. Again, he shook it.

“Wake up, lady, curse it all. Your seduction is not going to work. I have one wife only, and she’s alive.”

Her shoulder felt hot to the touch and silky smooth, and she looked, in her sleep, vulnerable and almost transparent, like a feverish child who struggles through the night from breath to breath, while his trembling parent stands vigil.

And this, Will knew, had to be glammour and disguise, for these creatures were neither soft nor vulnerable.

For a moment Will hesitated.

Silver looked so tired. As though she’d been doing battle. And she had said something about the Hunter and Sylvanus, the same things Will had heard in—and barely remembered from—his odd dream.

But it couldn’t be true. Furious at himself, Will poured water into his cracked ceramic basin where it sat, atop the trunk at the bottom of the bed. He washed hands and face with scrupulous care. He pulled his hair back and ran his fingers through it.

He cast another resentful look at Silver. She couldn’t have been telling the truth and well did Will know that the only reason this seductress would have come to London would be to lose Will to his marriage vows, to lose Will to his own conscience.

He knew that her still looking like Silver in her sleep was deliberate, malicious.

Will remembered well enough that this creature, when asleep, reverted to his primary form, his male form. But Quicksilver would not have moved Will thus.

Will pulled his gloves on, and stepped toward the bed.

Yet, after two steps, he stopped, and stared at her sleeping form. He felt as if his fingers still burned with the touch of her skin.

He did not trust himself to touch her again.

And she looked so tired, so forlorn. If he touched her again, he would long to console her.

If Will touched her, he would be her lover, enslaved by her, like people in the stories old men told taken forever into the bowels of Fairyland, into the heart of illusion and away from the sane world.

Away from the world where Will had three children and a wife he loved, and a job waiting for him at The Rose, if only he would take it.

He took a deep breath. Mentally, he said goodbye to Silver and her enchantment, and walked out the door and down his steep staircase and onto the road below, to meet his destiny in the theater.

But there, in the midmorning bustle of street vendors and apprentices hurrying away to dinner at the nearest tavern, and forges and small factories working in the tiny, ramshackle hovels and huts of Shoreditch,
there,
he found the broad gate to the enclosed precinct of The Rose closed, and nailed shut.

The paper glued to it was already curling in the hot sun, the sticky, humid air.

The writing on paper began with “By the order of the Bishop of Winchester,” and went on to say that the theater had been closed for fear of the “great and common plague” ravaging London anew.

Will’s fingers touched Marlowe’s note within his sleeve. Useless now. Will’s stomach hurt and growled with hunger.

Blinking back tears that sprang, unbidden, to his eyes, he turned around.

Another hour without food and he would lose consciousness. How long from there to death?

He’d never seen anyone die of hunger. No one had died of hunger in Stratford in living memory.

He was like the prodigal son who’d left his father’s plentiful table to pasture swine in a foreign land and crave in vain the husks which the swine did eat.

Who had told him he could be a poet? Who had told him to come to London?

On that thought, he heard a cheerful voice, with a cultivated Cambridge accent. “Holla, Will. Will Shakeshaft.”

He turned.

A smiling Kit Marlowe walked toward Will, cutting through the dusty, dark-dressed crowds of Southwark like a ray of sunshine through grimy glass.

Marlowe wore a bright sky-blue doublet, figure-molding blue stockings, fine velvet breeches, and his beautiful gloves and boots.

And he grinned like a man who has eaten enough and has money in his pocket.

He clapped Will on the back familiarly, and cast a casual, uninterested glance at the door of the theater. “Closed. Oh, the luck. Never mind. We’ll find you something else. Let me buy you dinner.”

Will would have followed Marlowe into the very mouth of hell on that promise.

Scene 15

An Elizabethan tavern, furnished with long pine tables and benches that have seen better days. The walls are dark with the soot of torches, yet more torches burn in the metallic holders that protrude from the walls. Their burning smoke smells of rancid bacon grease, and it mingles with the smell of mutton and pork from the broad cooking fire. Men, most of them in the workaday dark clothes of laborers, crowd shoulder to shoulder at the vast tables, and eat meat. No natural light penetrates beyond the immediate area around the door. Will and Kit enter, and Kit, assuredly, leads them to two open spaces, side by side at a table near the broad fireplace, around which five cooks labor over the carcasses of dead pigs and cows and sheep.

A
s they entered the tavern, Kit glanced at Will, taking in Will’s swollen eyes, his pale face, his whole look like that of a man condemned to die an ill death on the gallows.

At the thought Kit shivered, thinking that he, himself, might very well end up being the one who would die such a death.

No. Better turn in Will. And look at the hapless fool, in his old doublet and with no money. Kit would warrant that the man hadn’t eaten in more than a day.

What good was he doing? None, losing time and money and happiness in London.

And as for Will’s poetry, Kit still winced at the thought of it.

No. No. Will was, at any rate, doomed. That much bad luck could not be fought. Kit might as well help Will to a quick end.

He escorted Will to the empty broad bench at a table by the fireplace. Will sat down beside Kit.

Almost immediately, the wench came. Kit knew she would. He was a customer here and well known for his liberal purse. Besides, this middle-aged woman hadn’t yet given up on attaining Kit’s love. And Kit’s purse, too.

What fools women were.

Feeling superior, he gave the faded blonde, with her much-mended shirt, her pale, reddish-looking brown kirtle, orders for two full dinners of mutton and bread.

When the plates came, filled with steaming portions of boiled mutton and large pieces of bread, Kit allowed Will to eat a little first, to fill his mouth.

The silence in which Will greeted his food, his haste in eating, the gratitude in his voice as he turned to Kit and said, “I am not able to pay you, Master Marlowe,” all of it gave Kit a measure of the man’s hunger, all of it convinced Kit that Will was doomed.

Doomed, doomed, before Kit ever stepped into his life, before Kit had need of Will as the moving piece in the plot that would save Imp and restore Kit to the world of honest men.

If Will were a conspirator, he was a poorly paid one.

“Pay?” Kit asked. “Pay? Why, good Shakestick. It is a matter of courtesy, almost a matter of duty, for a poet to feed another. Other professions have leagues and guilds. Tinkers and weavers and even players, all have someone to resort to when their luck runs out, but not poets. When I came into town, I was like you, starving and poor.” For a moment, in his mind rose the image of the despair he’d felt when he’d been forced to pay for his lodging in Southwark with his presence in his landlady’s bed.

Who would know that such despair would lead to Imp? Still smiling, Kit took a piece of his meat upon his knife, and tore a bit of his bread. “I’ll feed you now and someday, mayhap, you’ll feed another starving poet.”

Will shook his head. Stuffing the stale, dry bread in his mouth as it were manna of the gods, he shook his head. “Nay. I’ll be gone come morning. Gone back to Stratford.” He paused in his eating for a moment, then said, “Mayhap I can send you the money to pay for the meal then. If I don’t starve on the road.”

The bread felt drier and even less appetizing in Marlowe’s mouth. No. Will couldn’t go to the country . . . . Or more likely starve on the way.

Kit needed Will. Penry—he thought with a pang of his sometime colleague—Penry would not hold the questioners that long.

Soon the torturer would find out that though Penry was a heretic, he had no such knowledge as Kit had claimed for him.

And yet—perhaps Penry did.

But Kit dismissed such hope out of hand. Life had never, in her kindness, handed Kit any favors.

Everything Kit had achieved had been hard won, step by step and inch by inch, like a climber working his way up a narrow slope by the strength of his frayed nails, his skinned hands.

No.

Kit needed Will Shakespeare in London, near Elizabeth’s court.

He needed to weave a web of deceit and conspiracy around Will. He must make Will seem like an archvillain, part and parcel of that rolling machinery of conspiracy that was London.

Then the maw of the secret service would swallow Will alone, and let Imp and Kit go free.

Then would Kit be able to consider whether to marry Madeleine or just take Imp and go with him somewhere—France, or Italy, or another country where Kit Marlowe could start anew.

Looking at Will Shakespeare devouring his food with well-mannered hunger, Kit thought all this, and lies came to his tongue in facile speech. “You’re a poet, Will. I can’t allow you to go back to Stratford or wherever it was, and there pasture your father’s cows or run your butcher shop. Stay in London.”

“Not a butcher shop.” Will looked at him, his forehead wrinkled. “There is no theater in London,” he said. He held a slice of mutton, dripping greasy water, above his plate on the tip of his dagger. The grease dripped on Will’s dingy lace cuff and stained his gloves. “There is no employment for poets in London now.”

Kit looked away. He smiled. Funny how, if you allowed them, people had a way of playing into your hands and establishing just what you wished them to establish. He’d wanted to give Will connections to the Essex field, so that he could hold Essex hostage on this poet’s incrimination, just as Raleigh was being held hostage by Kit’s involvement.

And here was Will, obligingly asking if there was some other way a poet could earn a living in London.

“You could follow my own example,” Kit said, and seeing a combative look in Will’s eye, added, “I don’t mean the theater. I mean, lately I have got the patronage and the very great favor of my lord Thomas Walsingham. These young noblemen like long poems that speak of some ancient theme, something that evokes learning like Greece and Rome and yet describes a pleasing couple engaging in that which pleasing couples do.” He caught Will’s amazed eye and grinned. “And then the nobleman gives the poet coin and keeps him in style, in exchange for the poet’s writing one or two lines of dedication, extolling the nobleman’s great learning and generosity.”

Kit grinned at Will, till his face felt like it would crack. “These noblemen will have their pet hounds and their pet peacocks and their pet poets, perforce.”

Will looked back.

He had yellow-brown eyes, golden and clear as a hunting bird’s eye.

Eyes like that, Kit thought, made a man feel discovered and seen-through, as though he wore a glass-front window that Will Shakespeare could penetrate with his intellect.

Never having been transparent, not even to himself, Kit Marlowe very much hoped he was not transparent to Will either.

“I don’t know any noblemen,” Will said.

The game was played as Kit had anticipated.

Step on step, as if in a game of chess, did Will Shakespeare fall into Marlowe’s trap and, without cunning, put his head in the noose.

Why, then, did Marlowe’s stomach hurt and why did Marlowe feel as though a great, nameless doom hung suspended over his own head?

Was he growing a conscience? Oh, Kit could not afford a conscience now.

“There’s Southampton. Henry Wriosthesley, third earl of the name. He’s young. He’s vain. He fancies himself a patron of the arts. I was mid-courting his patronage when Walsingham—an old friend—succeeded to his family’s title and offered me his own.” Kit pushed away the plate which he’d scarcely touched. “Here, I vouchsafe that if you offer Southampton a long poem on such an heroic theme as lovers parted or united.” He did his best to leer at Will’s amazed expression. “I warrant if you do that, he will give you his kind patronage and enough money to remain in London.”