Any Man So Daring (11 page)

“Show me the child,” she said. “The child we would steal.”

Proteus looked oddly at her. “The child? Why, my lady? He is a mere mortal.”

His words failed to reassure her, rather spurred her sense of guilt to frantic exasperation. Proteus cared not for the innocent creature.

Why felt it she, so keenly?

Mayhap because she, herself, had been raised as a foundling, far from her own people and those to whom she belonged.

 
Imagining removing a child from his parents made her head pound and her heart clench in shame.

“Show me the child,” she said.

Proteus sighed and rolled his eyes, as though signifying that the madness of elf princesses must be indulged.

Absently, he traced cabalistic symbols mid air.

Something like a window opened in the clear air in front of Miranda’s eyes.

Through that window, she beheld a forest, but not a forest as this one that she knew so well.

These trees were smaller, their trunks more embraceable, their tops not reaching so far into the distant sky.

Amid the trees, a boy scrambled.

He was a mortal boy, with brown hair, roughly cut, in a round cut short about his ears. His rough suit of once-good cut and material showed wear at knees and elbows, as if he’d scraped it against too many trees.

His eyes, as wide and golden as those of a falcon intent upon the chase, looked fixedly and feverishly ahead of him, as he rushed, tripping, into the forest.

It was as though the boy followed an alluring phantom or a glittering vision that would not tarry for him, and that rushed deep amid the trees, ever out of reach.

Pixie-led
, Miranda thought, remembering legends she had heard of mortals lured by illusions into fairyland snares.

She looked at the boy’s wide, golden eyes and felt an odd sense of identity — as if the boy were a part of her and she, herself, were thus being tricked into some unimaginable trap.

A shiver ran up her spine.

Pixie-led.

Scene Eight

The Witch’s cottage, where Shakespeare stands, his hand — which trembles — holding his knife at the witch’s throat. Nearby stands Marlowe’s ghost looking like a live man save for the gore and blood that drip, continuous and seemingly unnoticed, from his eye.

C
ould Will cut the woman? Kill the woman?

He looked to the cradle in the corner, moving still in tiny movements. From it a mewling sound emerged, as of a young baby starting to waken.

Could Will kill the baby’s mother?

Faith, Will did not know and hence his hand trembled. But he commanded his voice to be firm and in as false a firm voice as had ever rang across stage, he said, “Give me some potion, woman. Or perform some spell, as will from hence take me to my son’s side, not passing mortal land or ever covering the lengthy distance weary mortal feet must walk. For I must go to him, in all haste.”

“You fool,” Marlowe’s ghost wailed. “You poor wretched fool. You know not what you do. Put up your knife.”

But Will shook his head. “What know you, Marlowe? What know you, spirit that was Marlowe’s soul? What know you of a father’s care?

“Your fathering of a boy was only of such kind as any may do, late one night, gorged with drink, at a tavern.

“What know you of a father’s heart?”

The ghost of Marlowe wavered, going gray and dim, then reappearing in full firmness. The effect was that of a mortal staggering under a harsh blow and then recovering. “I know I saw my son grow through the whole seven years of his life, and held him in my lap and told him stories, and marked daily the changes in his countenance as he waxed in wisdom and size,” he said, and smiled. “When last did you hold your son upon your knee, Will? You, who labor in London, so far from your family — what do you know of that son so far away? Know you that often, tired of his house where women prevail, he runs into the forest and there finds solace in solitude? Know you how much he misses you? How he pines for you? And yet you live in London and there pursue your fame. How dare you compare your fatherly love to mine?”

“All I do is in care of him,” Will said. Marlowe’s comparison hurt him more than he dare acknowledge, even to himself. When had he last held Hamnet upon his knee? “I make money that he might wax prosperous. I labor far from him that he might lack for nothing. He is my only son.”

Marlowe raised skeptical eyebrows, made all the more ironical for one being raised above a wounded orbit. “Faith, you have two daughters.” His voice dripped with something like envy. “You have two daughters that, yet, were your son taken up, would remain behind to light your days. How can you say, 'He is my only son, ' and thus make it sound like he is your only child?”

“Daughters,” Will said. His hand that held the knife trembled. “Daughters are their mother’s mirror, her rightful company. My son, him I can guide in the way of men, in the road of learning, in a profession worthy of the name.

“My son wears my surname and he shall crown with pride my waning years. The fairyhill shall not have him.” He turned his attention to the witch once more. “You will transport me wherever he is, that I might protect him.”

“Your heir and not your son you love,” Marlowe said.

“The both are one,” Will said. “The two of them are one, conjoined. My only son is my only true heir.” Will’s head hurt and his eyes stung with tears that he refused to shed before Marlowe’s dead and mocking eye. He pushed the knife closer to the woman’s neck. “Therefore, send me to him.”

He did not see the woman move, but felt as though the air trembled all around him. His eyes stung, as though a cobweb had fallen upon them.

He blinked, and the homey cottage changed. Light dimmed.

It seemed to Will that he stood in a rocky cave, the walls rough and moist, covered in green and crawling things and dripping with lichen from which ran foul, stinking liquid.

The ground underneath his feet, instead of scrubbed oak and clean rushes, turned to bubbling foul mud, from which grayish effluvium climbed to his nose in stinging vapors.

He felt his feet sink slowly into the mud and the cold slime seep into his shoes.

Within the mud creatures crawled, their horror only visible now and then, in a claw surfacing, a many-toothed snout emerging above the ooze, dripping venom from sharp fangs, only to vanish again beneath the mud.

Here a rolling yellow eye with a vertical slit for a pupil peeked in deranged hatred at Will.

There a forked tongue emerged from the mud and lashed itself around Will’s ankle.

Teeth fastened on his foot and pulled him down.

Will screamed, feeling his flesh pierced.

The witch was evil, after all. This was a demonstration of her true powers.

As he thought this, the witch in his arms also appeared to change and writhe into a monstrous black serpent coiling madly against him, her forked tongue licking at his cheek.

This was her mistake.

Will saw the change and the horrid, coiled serpent in his arms. But those same arms felt, against them, the heave of a human bosom. His hand, splayed beneath her chest, felt the rough weave of her apron.

He tightened his grip on her.

“Be still, woman,” he said. “Would you fool me with your childish tricks? I’ve seen better tricks, long ago, in fairyland.”

The witch whimpered and, in a moment, was matronly and soft and human in his arms again.

The space around became, again, a cozy kitchen.

And Will held his knife to the woman’s white throat. “I know you have some potion or some magic which you can give me that will serve my purpose.”

“Do not do it, for it will serve only his death,” Marlowe said. And, with unmistakable fear. “And Quicksilver’s also.”

So the ghost sought yet to preserve Marlowe’s erstwhile beloved, Quicksilver.

With a disdainful smile, Will dismissed all of Marlowe’s prior argument, which he now knew served only to protect Quicksilver.

Quicksilver be damned. Will would save Hamnet.

“Let me have the cure for my ill, woman. And I will make it well worth your while.” At the mention of gain, he felt her tremble, and he pushed his knife towards her throat. “Else, tempt you a desperate man.”

“Such potions have I,” the woman said, her voice fluttering. “But the law, of human and fairy kind both, is death to any that sells them.”

Will cast an eye at the child in the crib. “You have a child who deserves better than an hovel in Shoreditch. A child, I guess, who knows not his father. Who, but you, should provide for your whelp? Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness and fear to die? Famine is in thy cheeks, need and oppression starve in thy eyes, contempt and beggary hang upon your back. The world is not your friend, nor the world’s law. Then be not poor, but break it, and take this.”

He put his knife away and, from his sleeve, pulled out the small but heavy leather purse full of golden coin he’d meant to send to Nan when next he found a trusty messenger.

The woman looked at the purse, her eyes wide, cupidity plainly written in large letters upon her pupils. “But master,” she still protested, though her voice came fainter. “Master, I cannot send you anywhere before your son will be transported. Even now I sense him being taken, not to fairyland but to another place — a place of greater magic and stronger danger.

“Three days in that land and you’ll forever be captive there. And though there even mortal men can perform magic, yet is the magic there so strong that you will not be able to control it. And having used it will you — even if you return — forever be magic in the land of men.”

Normally Will, who mistrusted magic so, would have shrunk from such a menace. But now he could only think of Hamnet alone in a threatening place. “What is this place, if not fairyland? And why would Hamnet be transported there?” He held the purse in his hand, before her gaze.

She stared hungrily at the purse but did not reach for it. “This place is the beating heart of fairyland, the burning ember of magic. It is called the crux. He will go there for the trap has been so disposed.”

“And after three days in the crux one cannot return?” Will asked. He imagined his son, small and inexperienced in dealing with elves, and with humans at that, trying to find his way out of this strange trap.

“That, and more. If you go in there, when you leave, for which you’ll have to attempt to use magic, you will have to leave behind a part of you — something dear — in sacrifice in order to return. I am poor,” she said, and sighed, looking at his purse. “But not so poor that I would do you such wrong. Put the purse away, Master Shakespeare. The specter of Marlowe is right. Stay you here and rejoice in the daughters you have left.”

“No,” Will screamed. They spoke as though Hamnet were lost forever. “No. Give me the potion that will take me to Hamnet. Sell it to me. This money and whatever sacrifice I must make, I count of little importance to recover my son.”

The woman sighed. She stretched her fingers till the tips touched the leather of the purse.

“Do not listen to him,” Marlowe said. “It is his sure death and the death of the king of elves besides.”

Both Will and the witch ignored him.

The witch slowly opened her hand and closed it around the purse. “I’ll sell you the potion.” She sighed. “My poverty, but not my will consents.”

She put the purse in her own sleeve.

Marlowe screamed.

“I pay your poverty, not your will,” Will said.

The woman went to a high shelf by the cradle. Looking into the cradle, she cooed at its occupant. Then she reached for the shelf and got a bottle and, returning to Will, proffered it.

“Drink this, and you shall be transported.”

Marlowe’s ghost cursed them, and belabored them both with his heavy cold hands. “Stop,” he shouted, but they regarded him not.

Will brought the bottle to his lips and drank while the woman felt within her sleeve the golden coin.

No more had Will swallowed the bitter blue brew than a roaring started in his head — a roar like the sea at its fullest tide, like a storm approaching over the waiting land.

His throat closed and his hands clenched in on themselves.

“Woman, you have poisoned me,” he gasped.

She looked at him, mute with terror, her eyes big and blind with fright.

A whirlwind blew all around, cold and howling, carrying him away from present reality. Sounds and sights receded till they were dim and distant like an ill-remembered dream.

The feeling of the bottle in his hand receded too and, from very far, he heard the bottle break.

He had a moment of panic and wondered whether the witch’s cunning potion had sent him bodily to hell.

As darkness closed in on all sides and his vision darkened like falling night, he took with him one last glimpse of Marlowe’s ghostly face, amazed and pale, of Marlowe’s single eye staring in horror.

What potion was this, whose effects horrified the dead?

Scene Nine