All Night Awake (81 page)

To go to Deptford, he must buy a horse, and that would take all the money he had.

And Will still didn’t know what he’d do once he got there.

Scene Forty

The in-between worlds -- a desolate land with no taste, no smell, and no feeling save overpowering cold. Shadows appear and disappear, like windblown clouds, now prefiguring trees, now seemingly palaces, but nothing is, in solid reality. Amid these shadows Ariel walks.

W
here was Quicksilver? Where? Why couldn’t she find him in the mutable landscape of this lost land?

She wanted to see him. She needed to see him, and sometimes, through the shadows of trees, the glimmering of buildings never built, she almost thought she saw him. But it was always nothing.

Yet she must find him. For they were near the end and she must tell her lord that she loved him and loved him true. Oh, let the world end, let faerieland be destroyed and gone, but she would tell Quicksilver what she had discovered, first -- that the fault she saw within him was within her, in the way she saw him; that though he might not be what she’d prefer, he was what she wanted and needed; that she meant to make their marriage a true union, were the it the last thing they ever did. Which, likely, it would be.

She’d walked what seemed like forever, though she knew not where she’d been or where she was going. This land had no more direction than it did sense or smell.

No sensation defined this land, except cold which leeched at her body, at her soul, at her magic.

Even if Sylvanus didn’t kill her, she would not last long in this land.

Her foot caught on something, and she tripped. But what could she trip on in Neverland?

She fell on something soft and cold and, for a moment, blinking, recognized Quicksilver and thought him already dead.

But he opened his eyes, and then his mouth, in astonishment at seeing her here.

He put his arms out to her, and he sat up. “Milady.” He said. “Oh, how I longed to see you. But not here.”

“I thought you dead,” she said.

He shook his head, tangling his already tangled silver-blond hair. “No. Sleeping. Trying to preserve what little strength remains to me.”

Never would Quicksilver appear thus disheveled in his court, never had she seen his face so grave, his moss-green eyes so intent.

He had never looked so much like a king.

Standing on tiptoes Ariel offered him her lips and, after a brief hesitation he covered them with his own. His lips were ice cold, as they would be. Quicksilver had lingered too long in Neverland.

“Oh, milady,” he said, as their lips parted, “I bless your presence, but I wish we could have met beneath the sun of mortals.” He ran his long, soft hand along her face, as if to ascertain by touch the truth of all her features.

He looked so grieved at her presence here, yet so relieved at seeing her that the warring expressions upon his face made him look comical.

Ariel laughed, as she couldn’t remember laughing in days -- nay, in years.

Quicksilver raised one eyebrow and looked bemused. “Do I look, milady, like a jester?” But he spoke softly, and his mouth still pulled in a smile, as if her mirth amused him.

She shook her head. “Not like a jester, no. Never, milord. It’s just that I...I’ve just realized I’ve been a fool.”

Both his golden eyebrows went up, arching in perfect, puzzled demi-rounds. “You mean it not,” he said. “Or else, why do you laugh?”

“Because I’m done being a fool, milord and I only wish.... I only wish the world weren’t coming to an end through my folly.” Tears sprang unbidden to her eyes and rolled down her cheeks to meet her smile.

“Your folly?” Quicksilver asked. His voice was distant, a tolling bell of death over hope. “Your folly, milady. Oh, if you knew my folly and what I’ve done....”

“I know your folly,” Ariel said. “Or at least most of it. The human called Kit Marlowe.” To his astonishment she started telling what she’d seen, what had happened to precipitate her leaving the palace in such haste.

“And you hate me not?” Quicksilver asked.

Ariel shook her head. “It was not you, but Lady Silver. And why should Lady Silver wish me well, when I’ve kept her chained and hidden all these long years? Like a prisoner who evades her jailor, she would wish to do all that her deprival of liberty has prevented.”

Quicksilver tilted his head sideways, as though trying to understand. “Then you mind not....”

“Oh, I mind,” Ariel said. “It is still you. But perhaps Lady Silver and I must get better acquainted.”

At first his eyes looked unbelieving, and his eyebrows descended in a frown over his moss-green eyes.

“She is you,” Ariel said. “And, milord, I do love you.”

The clouds of doubt dissipated. A slow grin crept across Quicksilver’s lips. “I love you also, milady,” he said. “I love you too much, if not too well.”

He put his cold arms around her warm body, and pulled her close.

Sitting on the grey ground of never land, side by side, they told each other all they’d discovered and perceived in the last ten years and in their time apart.

It did not make for happy telling. Quicksilver admitted his remorse, his certainty of having brought Kit Marlowe to his present torment; Ariel spoke of the palace revolution, of how she might have encouraged the rebels without meaning.

But even these sad tales with all their woe, even the nothing land, and the grey landscape that shifted with every moaning sigh, even the chill of Neverland could not impair the happiness they had found.

In her sad captivity, with her husband’s cold arms around her, Ariel felt contented as never before.

Scene Forty One

Deptford, a busy dockside town. There are some nicer streets and houses obviously built by the nobility. Mistress Bull’s house sits near the river, the garden bordering on it, and it is a good house, with shabby-genteel charm. It rains; the rain rather increasing the suffocating heat than relieving it. In a room at the back, four men sit. It’s a narrow, clean, white-walled room, furnished with a bed and a table. At the table three men sit playing at tables. One of the men is Frizer, the other Skeres, the third sweet Robin Poley. All three have pipes. Skeres’ and Frizer’s sit beside them at the table. Poley lights his. On the bed, Kit Marlowe reclines, looking spent and vacant, like a man who’s run a long race and is no longer sure towards what.

“M
arlowe,” Nicholas Skeres said, turning from the small table, where he played at tables with the other two men. “Tell us that you told me in the garden, that thing about ruling the whole world and our ambition never again going lacking, once we knit our fate with yours.”

Kit groaned.

He couldn’t remember telling Skeres anything in the shaded garden of Mistress Bull’s house. Or yet, if he remembered it, it was but dimly, through a fog as if from too much ale, or too little sleep.

What was he doing here?

What was he doing here and still alive?

He should be dead.

Yet he did not want to die.

He
was
dead, dead within the wolf’s grip, and yet walking still. And this dying life, this living death, made Kit feel that almost anything, almost, would be preferable. Maybe even dusty death, his mouth forever stopped, his body consigned to a common grave in a forgotten churchyard, or floating downriver, bloated and gross, anonymous and horror-inspiring.

These men wanted to kill him. So why allow the wolf to persuade them otherwise? Why did Kit cling to this half life? Why struggle so hard to remain here, in this torment?

But that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzled the will and made him rather bear those ills he had than fly to others that he knew not of?

And in that fear, undone, Kit gave the wolf, the wolf’s persuasive tongue, the power to argue his case.

As for these men, wolf-tainted themselves, wolf-like, living on living flesh and beating hearts and enjoying it, these men bent and swayed to the wolf’s oratory and had all but already sworn fealty to the wolf’s dark designs.

If men like this would reign after the wolf’s victory, oh, let Kit be dead.

And yet, no.

For how was Kit better than these men? And what torments waited Kit hereafter?

Upon meeting these three men who should have been his doom, these three men he could identify from his days in the secret service and name as to their nefarious thoughts and expectations, Kit should have been dead. He should have been dead within minutes of his arrival at Deptford, his body buried in the pestilent river out back, or else thrown in some forgotten hole, sequestered in a common grave as a pretended plague victim.

On seeing them together Kit had known that indeed it was his life they sought. No doubt about it. No room for doubt.

There was Nicholas Skeres, to make sure that he was dead and couldn’t somehow turn the plot of the duke of Essex back on the duke himself, as they all feared Kit could do, by power and virtue of his magical words, his silver tongue.

And there was Frizer, come to ensure that Kit was dead on behalf of Kit’s own patron and good friend Sir Thomas Walsingham, who no more wished the Privy Council to know how he’d lined his pockets than did any other secret agent.

Finally, the third man was Poley. Robert Poley, sweet Robin Poley, the main betrayer of the Babington conspirators, if indeed not the instigator of those poor fools who, lured in a moment of bravado, had signed statements swearing to kill the queen, but who’d in fact tried nothing against her, and who nonetheless had ended in their graves for Poley’s sake.

He was a smooth, middle-aged man, with a wealth of blond and white hair, carefully coiffed, and a dark, circumspect suit.

He’d been the right hand of Francis Walsingham, and he was, no doubt, in an equally important position with Cecil.

He -- he had come to make sure Kit was dead and Robert Cecil and all the high Lords at court could sleep in peace, the mouth of such a dangerous member having been stopped.

Even looking at these men now, Kit felt himself sweat with the fear, the cold, clammy fear of death.

Aye, and that was the rub, for when he’d first seen them, thus, together, he’d feared death as much as he had in that dim chamber where he’d first been interrogated, ten years ago.

And from that fear, through that fear, he’d heard the wolf’s voice again, the wolf promising him life everlasting, if he let the wolf handle this, if he let the wolf deal with this potentially lethal situation.

Looking at the three men, Kit closed his eyes and wanted to groan again, but the wolf’s voice poured from his lips, in well-modulated words that possessed the magic of faerieland, the dark enchantment of inevitable death.

The wolf was promising these men power and wealth, and mastery over everyone who’d ever done them a wrong.

Men like this would not deny it. Nor could they resist an evil that spoke to their evil.

As yet, Kit kept the wolf from fully possessing his body, from tearing men to pieces and taking their life force. But the sun would be setting soon and, tired and spent, Kit would not have the strength to resist the wolf for another night.

Sitting back, in the sweltering heat of the afternoon, leaning on Mistress Bull’s dubiously clean cushions, Kit wondered whether Sylvanus would kill these men and take their lives, or use them for his acolytes.

It seemed to him that the wolf would value these men as his allies, these men who’d committed plots and murders, vile assassinations and character destruction, treason and most foul entrapment.

Men like Kit himself.

Feeling sick to his stomach, Kit could see a world where such men ruled. And there was no room for poets, or for well-intentioned affectionate fools like Will.

Looking at those three men, it seemed to him they all had wolves' heads, like the Egyptian god who devoured the entrails of the dead.

Closing his eyes, while yet from his mouth the wolf’s words poured, Kit thought that all he’d done these last few days had been in vain.

He remained a coward, too afraid to die, and he’d managed no more than to bring the wolf to his natural allies.