Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (15 page)

Alice was not so certain. How were they to get Arthur back, two women against the combined might of Faerie? The despair had gone, though; she felt to her own horror that her strongest desire was that Oriana should lose the war.

The Stationers' Company met in a hall east of St. Paul's. Rows of cushioned benches faced the front, where speakers would stand and address the rest of the company. Behind that was a fireplace taking up nearly the entire wall. Once, Alice remembered, the stationers had used it to burn all the copies of a book Archbishop Whitgift had declared immoral. She thought that that was the sorriest thing she had ever seen, all that work and knowledge and thought rising up the chimney in flames.

The stationers had closed their stalls for the meeting, but faint noises from Paul's told them that their absence was hardly noticed: the business of the gallants and usurers and cutpurses went on as usual. Nearly everyone had come to the hall except two men down with the ague. As Alice looked around she noticed, as she noticed at every meeting, that she was the only woman in the room.

Speaker after speaker stood and moved to the front. Elections were coming up; names were proposed for the offices of junior warden, senior warden and master. A stationer rose to warn the company that spies from the Privy Council had been through the churchyard, looking for unlicensed books.

One printer accused another of stealing his copyright; the other claimed he had been given the copyright, but could not prove that it had been by the author. Manuscripts were frequently copied by scriveners and passed from reader to reader, and too often an unscrupulous printer would publish a book from a third-hand copy. The second printer was ordered to give up his copyright and was fined, and the change was entered in the register.

The room grew hot, and Alice, her mind on her son, found it hard to pay attention. “Has anyone other business?” the Master of the Company said, and Alice looked up with relief. The meeting would soon be over.

“Aye,” someone said.

The stationers turned to watch as George Cowper made his way to the front of the room. Someone murmured; George, like Alice, had never spoken at a meeting before. He stood dwarfed by the vast fireplace open like a mouth behind him. “I propose that the company reconsider the membership of one of the stationers.”

The murmurs grew louder. “Who?” the master asked.

“Alice Wood,” George said, his voice clear and strong.

Alice had been thinking of other things. She looked up, a little surprised to hear her name. “Alice?” someone said from the audience. “For God's sake, man, why?”

George's eyes sought and found Alice in the crowd. “Immoral living,” he said. “And necromancy.”

9

Tom Nashe blinked as Arthur disappeared before him. Christopher moved quickly, stepping through the curtain of gold after the other man. Tom could not bear to let them go without him. He hesitated only a moment and then followed.

It was dark where he found himself, the way lit by a pale three-quarters moon and scattered stars. He looked around, puzzled. He knew he had been sitting in the tavern for a few hours, but surely night could not have fallen yet. Christopher, ahead of him, was a dark blur against the black, and he could not see Arthur at all.

He hurried after his friend. The way lightened before him, though not by any agency of the moon; it seemed instead that light seeped outward from the rocks and trees. He found himself wandering in a grove of old elms and oaks, following a narrow path covered with leaves and moss and stones. He heard a stream close by, water falling ceaselessly over rocks.

When he looked up from the path he saw that Christopher had disappeared. He ran to catch up with him. The strange light made dappling overlapping shadows of the leaves; he blundered into roots or rocks and nearly went sprawling.

Suddenly it seemed to him as if he were the focus of someone's, or something's, scrutiny, as if everything in the land had turned the vast weight of its attention on him. The force of that gaze was so strong that he had to stop his headlong rush for a moment, to stand and let whatever it was study him. He felt as he had on that strange journey through London: that the inhabitants of this land hunted something, something they had lost.

Then the feeling passed, as if the eyes that probed him so intently had released him, allowed him to go. What was it they searched for? Could it be Arthur?

Someone beckoned to him up ahead, near a bend in the road, and he forgot all his questions and hurried after it. He could barely see it through the trees, a squat misshapen man not even a foot high. But when he came to the bend what he thought was a man resolved itself into an old gnarled stone. He looked at it for a moment and continued on.

The stone—the man—moved at the corner of his vision. He glanced back quickly but saw only stone, nothing more. Something called out to the moon, a lonely, yearning cry. The voice of the stream changed, became a sound like music heard far off.

Farther down the road a hand reached out to him from one of the trees. He quickened his pace. Someone laughed, and an animal padded quickly away from him as he ran.

The laughter came from above him, in the trees. He looked around and saw nothing but branches and twigs swaying in the wind. Then a woman stepped from the trees.

She had long dark-brown hair, and he decided the moment he saw her that that color was his favorite for hair in all the world. Her skin was nut-brown, nearly as dark as her hair, and her fingers long as twigs. She looked at him boldly and motioned to him with those fingers, then ran away down the path. He could do nothing else but follow her.

The path widened. She stopped for a moment and turned as if to make certain of him; he saw to his surprise that her eyes were as blue as berries. She hurried along the path to a meadow. More of the nut-brown women sat by a stream and wove garlands out of the flowers around them.

The women reached for her as she ran to them. They bound her hair in a garland of flowers, laughing and calling to one another. When they had done she turned away from him and studied her reflection in the stream. Had she forgotten him? Or had he misunderstood her—had her gaze been disinterested after all?

He followed her through the meadow. The grass was soft, and greener than any April grass he had ever seen. She turned and laughed as he came up to her.

For once in his life he could think of nothing to say. She took a silver flower from the garland in her hair and held it out to him wordlessly. He reached for it, and as he did so the meadow before him, the stream, the women, all disappeared. In the space of a breath he found himself back at the tavern, holding the flower she had given him.

He returned to the tavern the next day. Christopher and Arthur had not come back with him the night before, and he had spent the rest of the evening waiting for them and studying the flower in his hand. He had never seen another like it; its silver petals curved upward and together like the groin of an old church and then unfurled outward.

He wondered where the others had gone to. More than that, he wanted an explanation for everything that had happened, starting with who Arthur was. Did it have something to do with Kit's intelligence work?

Finally he saw Christopher and another man come into the tavern. The man was stocky, with brown hair and eyes, and he walked with the confident air of the nobility. He looked nothing like the other young men Christopher brought into the tavern from time to time, and Tom wondered who he could be.

But if Kit thought the presence of the other man would keep him from asking questions he would soon learn how wrong he was. Tom was not good at subterfuge, he had no secrets; no one would ever offer him work as one of the queen's agents. The only way he knew to get answers was to ask outright. “What happened to you last night?” he said.

“Good evening,” Christopher said pleasantly, going to get some supper and a cup of wine. When he came back he said, “This is my friend Will Ryder. Will, this is Tom Nashe.”

“Good evening,” Tom said. “Where did you go last night?”

“Where?” Christopher said, sitting and looking up at him. “Nowhere.”

Not for the first time Tom thought he would never be able to describe Christopher's expression to his own satisfaction: it was a strange combination of curiosity, arrogance and innocence. And now, watching him, he saw that the other man held the meat he ate with his left hand. That would explain five years of smudged and illegible correspondence, he thought; odd that he had never noticed it before. Kit used the same hand as the devil. It suits him, Tom thought.

“Do you take me for a fool?” Tom said. “I followed you.”

“Did you?”

“Aye, I did. I saw the land Arthur led us to, the trees and the meadow, the women sitting by the stream—”

“Tom,” Christopher said, holding up his hand. The man beside him, Will Ryder, looked amused. “I went nowhere last night. I tried to find Arthur but he had disappeared. This is too much like your last tale, the one about goblins wandering the streets of London. Let's have a new song, at least.”

“Listen,” Tom said, furious. “I know what I saw. I saw a strange land, and a path through a wood, and then—”

“You have a good imagination, I'll give you that. Best save it for the stage.”

“Did I imagine this, then?” Tom held out the flower the dark woman had given him. It had not lost any of its color since the day before.

“Nay, I suppose not.”

“She gave me this. And when I took it I found myself here, in the tavern. Look—it hasn't faded at all since then.”

“Since yesterday.” Christopher did not trouble to hide the doubt in his voice.

“Aye.”

“This is arrant superstition. You—”

“Superstition!” Tom said. He could not remember having been so angry with his friend. “You're a man who thinks religion, the proper worship of God, is superstition. You've closed yourself off to any possibility of the miraculous. It's no wonder you saw nothing last night.”

No one said anything for a long moment. Tom thought he might have gone too far. He hadn't meant to become angry, had intended only to ask his friend a few questions. The buzz of conversation in the tavern had not diminished; thank God, he thought, no one had overheard them.

Will Ryder spoke into the silence. “My father,” he said, “thinks God sends plagues to punish unbelievers.”

Christopher looked at the other man. “Do you blame me for the plague, then?”

“Nay. Nay, but I thought—well, I thought that if he was right, then—then you might reconsider. If your life depended on it.”

“Ah. But if I can't believe in God—if I'm incapable of it—don't you think that he would know that? Don't you think he would regard my sudden conversion with suspicion, realizing that I did it only to save my life? If, of course, there is a God.” He looked pleased with the paradox.

“Then you truly don't believe in God,” Will said. Tom winced; this was not the place for such discussions. But Will did not seem disapproving, as Robert Greene had, but genuinely interested. Tom thought that this man, unlike Greene, would take his friends as he found them.

“Nay,” Christopher said.

“Nor in these—these goblins? Not even when you saw them yourself?”

Tom looked at Will sharply. “What do you mean?” Christopher said.

“Those strangely shaped men you told me about a week ago,” Will said. “Who were they?”

“What strangely shaped men?” Tom asked.

“Whoever they were, they were not goblins,” Christopher said. “They told me they had come to petition the queen.”

“Did they?” Will said. “Then why is it no one at court has heard of them, not even the queen?”

“Why? Probably because they were part of the conspiracy against her. Did you expect them to come forward and explain their business, like the Chorus in a play?”

“What conspiracy?” Tom asked.

Christopher and Will fell silent. Tom, feeling desperately that they would not tell him anything, began to pour out his questions all at once. “Does it have to do with Arthur? Why are you so interested in him? Why did you follow him last night?”

Christopher pushed his hair back from his face and took a bite of mutton before he answered. “Because he told us he was a king,” he said.

“But what business is that of yours?”

Christopher shrugged: “None, really.”

“Is it true that you do intelligence work for the queen?”

Will seemed about to say something. Christopher looked at him and he subsided. Then, “Oh, why not?” he said. “Aye, we'll let everyone in London in on the secret—we'll all be conspirators together. You heard, of course, that someone tried to kill the queen yesterday.”

“Aye,” Tom said. “But the assassin shot an actor dressed to look like her instead.” His friend looked a little surprised, and Tom grinned. He might not be an agent of the queen, but he had his own ways of gathering information.

“Will and I were there,” Christopher said, surprising Tom in turn. “Queen Elizabeth had apparently thought it amusing to trade places with an actor in a masque. The thought saved her life. The actor was killed and the man who shot her captured, but he refuses to name his accomplices.”

“But surely he can't remain silent forever? Haven't they—”

“Aye, they've tortured him. He's said nothing. But the odd thing—one of several odd things, really—is that he seemed to expect the audience to rise up against the queen. He had no idea how much her subjects love her.”

“And the other odd things?”

“Arthur was on the stage with him. The assassin brought him out and introduced him as the new king. I don't know if the plot was Arthur's idea—”

“Arthur? He wouldn't—”

“Wouldn't he? Well, perhaps not. Then he was used by these other men, who intended to put him on the throne but control him the way they might control a puppet.”