Crawling Between Heaven And Earth (13 page)

"Margaret Wheeler's babe. The poor wretch died giving birth to it, and she accused your new brother in law, Thomas, as the father."

"Oh," Susannah said, unable to say more. She felt cold, polluted. There had never been such dealings in the Hall family. Would John set her aside as unworthy, tainted with her sister's crime?

Susannah looked at John's blue eyes, his salt-and-pepper hair, his well-trimmed beard, his strong features. She didn't think she could bear it, if he left her.

"Well . . .. Well . . .." John seemed to soften at her true horror. "Don't distress yourself with it, good wife. Your father is, even as we speak, changing his will, so that she will not get the equal portion of yours, rather a meager one. And his plate, that should have been hers, shall go to our Elizabeth." He looked up, his gaze disturbed. "Your father is not an ill man, despite his past sins. His very prosperity is a sign of God's favor, and God doesn't favor the wicked. But as for Judith . . .. It's just that I find it hard, sometimes, to see the wicked prosper like the green bay tree."

Susannah nodded, feeling truly grateful for John's compassion and understanding.

But when she retired to her room, upstairs, John did not visit her, as she half expected.

He said something about being tired, and the cold, hard rain outside and left her alone, in her narrow bed, listening to the rain falling on the thatch and thinking, thinking.

At least her parents had shared one room. When her father came from London, he shared her mother's bed. Sometimes Susannah would hear them whisper and laugh late into the night.

But John said it wasn't seemly that he should share her bed year around, even through her monthly emissions. John was right. Order and proper behavior were needed, if she didn't want to recreate the riotous ways of her own family.

In the morning Susannah felt tired and barely got up in time to serve John his breakfast ale and mutton, and to accompany him to his store room, to help pack the bag with the remedies needed for the day's round of patients.

This was a work she'd gotten used to, and in which John used her familiarity with reading and the Latin that her father had made her learn. Though he always told her this knowledge ill befit her sex and made her sign documents with her mark, yet her knowledge came in useful for reading labels of the many jars that—filled with oddly colored potions—lined the walls of his study.

"I'll need a small flask of that cough mixture—the green one there—for widow Tremly. And some of that Galene, from that jar there—No, not that one," he yelled, with unaccustomed alarm, as Susannah reached for a jar filled with yellow lumps in a greasy residue. "That's phosphorus," he said, more calmly, as she withdrew her hand, "and truly good for nothing but to poison rats when the vermin runs riot. Look you well on the label and give me the Galene from that—Yes, that jar."

Susannah read the label on the phosphorus, anyway, curious. It was soluble in grease and the symptoms the same as those that came upon elderly who caught a chill—an embarrassment of walk and speech, a looseness of the bowels, and death shortly after.

Thus they worked, till John left, with his full bag and his mind also full of prescriptions and decisions and ideas.

As for Susannah, having seen that Elizabeth was seated and practicing her sewing upon a piece of cloth under Jane's supervision, she put her cloak on and ventured forth, into the rain, the scant space along the road to her parents' house next door.

Her mother was resting, so one of the serving wenches told her, when Susannah entered the well-appointed parlor crowded with silken throws and damask pillows, but her father sat in the small room at the back, the one that overlooked the garden.

Susannah thought it made for sad contemplation, for such a day, but went to the back and there she found him, indeed, gazing out at the rain and the large tree he had planted so many years ago, when he'd bought the house and before he'd started to renovate it, much less had moved into it.

Every time she saw her father, Susannah felt a shock for in her mind he was still the younger man who came from London, in clothes unseen in the neighborhood, with his dark curls and his shining dark eyes, the man with the easy jest and the ready story.

This man was old, his hair almost completely white and so receded that the front part of his head was left uncovered. He sat on a chair in this small room, and, even so, leaned forward on his cane. Nearby him stood a brazier—a metal bucket full of glowing coals—that tried in vain to infuse heat into the aged body.

He looked up a little, at Susannah's entry, but soon his gaze returned to the falling rain outside.

"Father," Susannah said.

He looked at her, then, out of the corner of his eye, but only for a moment. "How fare you, daughter? Well?"

Susannah sighed. "My sister, father. How could she?""

Her sigh was echoed by her father, "Your poor sister, how she must suffer."

"She? She suffer?" Susannah asked. "How about what she makes us suffer, marrying against your will, that creature . . .." She arrested her voice which had climbed to the shrewish tones she remembered hearing from her mother when she was very young. "You should never more permit her to your presence. Never allow her name spoken near you."

This time the once-dark, once-laughing eyes turned fully to give her the benefit of his still-shrewd gaze. "Why daughter? At your husband's council, haven't I already cut her of her portion? Why this further injury?"

"Because," Susannah felt her hands tighten on the dark stuff of her skirt. At John's council, her father said. At John's council. That meant that as soon as his rage passed, he would go over the will yet again and give Judith a bigger portion once more, as if she hadn't done anything, as if her sin shouldn't be punished. "Because she must know she did wrong. She must know you disapprove. You must show her you have authority."

"Ah. Authority. The poor woman. She's punished enough. I only hope her Tom makes her a decent enough husband when all is said and done. She's a sweet girl, you know. Always was a loving child." He looked at the rain again, and was silent for so long that Susannah thought he must have fallen asleep. But then he spoke, as if out of a dream, "Her voice was ever soft, an excellent thing in a woman."

It took Susannah a few moments to realize that this was a quotation from one of her father's plays—those tawdry plays that he'd made and that, in London, had led who knew how many to ruin? And he'd quote it now? And about Judith?

The wicked did indeed prosper like the green bay tree.

Flinging out of the house, Susannah made it back to her own house, where she went about her daily chores—cleaning and mending and cooking—with the quiet manner she always had. Inside, she seethed. Sentences from the Bible that John was wont to read to her in the evening, came to her mind.

Sweeping up the rushes from the kitchen floor, Susannah thought
I gave her space to repent of her fornication and she repented not.

Judith would never repent, and, in time, her father would forgive her, and, more like than not, now that Judith was married she'd get New Place, and Susannah would have to watch it light up every night with tapers and the sound of parties. She'd have to watch Judith enjoy her evil marriage, her lewd fornication.

And yet Susannah's father did nothing. As ever, Judith was his favorite.

Susannah strewed new rushes about.

His favorite ever, and nothing to it, she thought, still, much later, as she set the table. And why should Judith not be his favorite? Were not both of them sinners? He had written his sinful plays and brought evil upon London and the minds of men. And Judith gave scandal onto the community.

Susannah dressed her daughter and combed her afresh to receive her father and for dinner. And she thought, were not the wages of sin death?

John came in brimming with good cheer, though not the good cheer that come from alcohol such as sinners consumed. He talked much to Elizabeth and Susannah, both, about his cases and the treatment thereof, then, in the middle of it paused, "I hear you disturbed your father today, Susannah."

"I?" Susannah said. Called out of her thoughts, she could only think that John would disapprove. For some reason John had always liked Susannah's father and stood by the old reprobate. He viewed his father in law's riches as a sign of God's favor and believed that obeying the old man would not taint his soul. If Susannah gave it time enough her father would surely turn John from his unswerving fidelity to the word.

"Oh, I know you probably didn't mean it," John said. "But he'd like to make his peace with you. He'll be coming by shortly, after his own supper. He's on his way to the Bear, to meet with Ben Jonson who's come from London. They'll be working on a new play together. Make you your peace with him before he goes. You know he's likely to be late and you to be abed long before he returns home."

Her peace with him. And yet, he'd be going to the tavern and drinking with his old play maker friends, and getting soused and rowdy and shameful. The old reprobate, who'd never loved Susannah.

She composed her face, in meek obedience and said, "I will try." If she hurried she could make it to the study without John's noticing. The phosphorus was soluble in grease, and her father was much too fond of her treacle cakes, which were greasy enough. She'd give him one, as a token of her good will.

And, since the symptoms would seem natural, everyone would say that William Shakespeare had tarried too long at the Bear, with his friend Ben Jonson, and drunk too much, and had died of his excesses.

I've always been fascinated by the idea of hidden events, of something going on just beyond the veil of mundane reality. Two forms of this are particularly appealing to me: the semi-immortal among us and the shape-changer. This story unites them both in an almost too-mundane setting in which extraordinary things are about to happen.

He'd slithered through snow and walked under scorching sunshine, minding neither the cold nor the heat. He'd crept on his belly through tropical forests, he'd climbed snow-capped mountains, he'd crawled through deserts.

He'd caught late night flights and early morning ones. When he couldn't find a plane, he'd clutched his clothes in an immense clawed fist, spread his leathery wings to the sky, and flown himself.

For days on end he'd forgotten to eat, only to fall, at last, ravenous, on whatever prey offered, animal or human, living or dead. It hadn't mattered which.

He'd made it. He'd arrived.

The drive that had impelled him thither receded, wave on wave, like a retreating tide.

Like a man wakening in a strange bed, George Drake looked around and took stock. He sat at the table of a commonplace tourist-trap bar, in a commonplace coastal town.

Men, sitting one to a table, populated this dimly lit bar. The only girl—young and beautiful—danced under the strobe light on the dance floor.

The hair at the back of George's neck rose in fear. He knew this set-up much too well, and he felt too small and tired for this.

A waiter, a spare middle-aged man, with brown hair and small features, wove through the tables from the bar, to clean George's table with a grayish rag.

Not enough meat on those bones for a decent meal, George thought, then shook his head, blinked, looked at the waiter again. Not food. Not prey. Human. A human amid humans. "Whiskey," George told the waiter. "Whiskey, please. Straight." His voice hissed and boomed like an instrument too long unused.

The man jumped. A tick pulled his left eyelid. "A . . .?"

George cleared his throat. He knew that the man couldn't possibly be intimidated by him as he looked now. In his human form, George was small and dark, with the Mediterranean features that must have been his father's, and green eyes like his mother's. He could have been a little Greek merchant, the owner of a corner grocery store or restaurant. The idea made him smile a little, as men smile at dreams they can't own. "A whiskey," he said.

Dropping his rag on the edge of the table, the waiter scurried away, as if his back brain felt something, knew something that his conscious brain willfully ignored.

George covered his face with his hands. If he had enough will power, he too would scurry away. The waiter's behavior made perfect sense for any simian whose instincts told him something was wrong, though his reason could think of no danger.

Half simian himself, George could feel the same panic surge through him, tightening his heart, closing his throat. But he'd been called here, and the magnet that had pulled him remained, strong. He looked at the dancing girl and shivered.

Unlike the waiter, George knew what he feared and his reason concurred with his instinctive panic. He feared death.

The death he'd hastened here to meet.

George counted the men that sat, each at his own table. Twenty. He groaned. Far too many of them, running the gamut of the types of mankind: Scandinavian giants, small oriental men, dark towering colossi. All of them stared through red-rimmed eyes at the female. All were bigger than George. And they'd be stronger too, since they were, presumably, full drake.

George had no chance. No chance at all to win this game. Not that it mattered. The outcome would be death, win or lose.

The female danced beneath the strobe light, seeming oblivious to them all.

She swayed hypnotically, her perfect figure encased in a tight silver sheath dress. Her long golden hair glinted with a metallic shimmer.

Staring at her, made George's head spin. A hungry need that he'd never known writhed to life in his belly. He clutched the edge of the table, glad of harsh wood against his palm. No. He wouldn't do it. He wouldn't fight for the female. Yet, he felt his lips pull back in a teeth-baring snarl. The drake wanted to do battle and conquer.

The waiter glided across the bar, carrying glasses on a tray, and slid a condensation-dewed glass onto George's table.

George breathed deeply, forced his lips down, made his mouth close.