Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (31 page)

She studied him as they made the familiar walk to Finsbury Field. He had grown fatter in Margery's house, and he seemed more sure of himself, striding on ahead toward the field. She noticed that he never looked in her direction. What had Margery told him about her?

Evening fell by the time they reached the field. Of course, Alice thought. Creatures of night. But now she could see Oriana and her train, shining silver against the dark field. It was too late to change her mind.

The queen's people stood around her in a semicircle. The horned men looked at the three women with cold challenge in their eyes and moved their lances forward. Then they noticed Arthur and sank as one to their knees. “Welcome, my king,” one said.

Arthur looked foolishly pleased. Oriana held out her hand. “You must tell them to rise, my son,” she said.

Arthur took her hand. “Rise,” he said. He could not keep a note of triumph out of his voice.

“I am pleased to see you back,” Oriana said, as the men around her came to their feet. “The war has gone badly for us.”

“Aye,” Arthur said. It all seemed too much for him. Alice wondered if Oriana would blame her for his slowness. Margery motioned to him and he added quickly, “My queen.”

Oriana seemed pleased at that. “But now I have no doubt that we will conquer. Now that you are here with us.”

Arthur grinned. “I thank you for your help in this matter,” Oriana said to Margery. She motioned to her guard and turned to go.

“What about my son?” Alice said, coming forward. Margery waved at her to stay back but Alice ignored her. Had it all been a trick, then, to get Arthur from her? What did they care if she got her son or not? Oriana had never even embraced Arthur, her own child.

But the queen turned back. “Aye, of course,” she said easily, as if Alice's son were a parcel she had misplaced. “Come, my boy.”

A boy stepped between two of the horned men. Surely this child could not be over twenty! Alice thought. He smiled at her, the expression of someone who hopes to please. She held her hand out to him and tried to smile back, but all the while she could not help but feel that a mistake had been made.

He did not resemble either her or John. He was slight, with long dark-brown hair. A light seemed to shine in his brown eyes, like a candle behind a closed curtain. Now she saw that he must be older than she had first thought, but that a kind of innocence had made him look almost boyish. There must be so much that he didn't know, she thought, so much they hadn't told him. What had it been like to grow up among the Fair Folk?

“Come,” she said. She embraced him, not out of any motherly feeling but out of a certain spite toward Oriana. He responded slowly, as if he had never seen such a thing before.

Margery turned to go. As they left Alice saw Oriana and Arthur deep in conversation, Arthur laughing and nodding eagerly. She felt as if a blade had pierced her heart. Nay, she thought, almost going back to say it. This isn't my child. Arthur's my son, my true son! Then she felt Margery's hand on her shoulder, and she allowed the other woman to lead her back to the city.

There was, first of all, the problem of what to call him. By asking the child questions she found that the Fair Folk had never given him a name, calling him “Boy” whenever they needed him, which hadn't been often. For the most part they seemed to have treated him as unwanted baggage, carrying him with them from place to place.

She remembered that John, who had loved the old stories, had insisted on Arthur as the name for their baby, and at that thought she realized that John had never seen his true son. Her heart hardened further against Oriana. Very well, she thought. I'll call him Arthur, as John would have wanted. It was our name before it was hers, after all. But Arthur had too much of majesty about it, brought back too many memories of the Prince of Faerie, and she soon shortened it to Art.

The nickname was a liberty the old Arthur would never have allowed, but this child was almost pathetically eager to please. He was not disappointed that Alice could not light a room by simply walking into it, the way Oriana apparently had; instead he seemed to think that setting a candle alight was magic as good as anything the queen could do. When they talked it soon became clear that neither of them understood the other: he did not know what a coach was, or a book, or a church. She, on the other hand, could not follow his tales of the queen's court, which seemed filled with intrigue and complicated in the extreme.

She realized from his stories that he must have been a very observant child. John would have loved this boy, she thought. For her part she could only try to prepare him for the society of men and women, and she felt herself growing wearier and wearier under the magnitude of her task. She was not a young woman, to raise someone as childlike as this boy seemed to be.

Brownie helped, of course. She had thought that Brownie would return to Oriana now that they had found Arthur, but he had stayed on, and for that she was grateful. Her son had known Brownie from his time among the Fair Folk, and now Brownie kept him company when she went to work, showing him how to do simple household chores and telling him stories. She thought that perhaps the boy might have gotten a better introduction to human society than that, but it could not be helped.

It was only when she saw the two of them together that she noticed the faerie-light shining from her son's face, and it increased her feeling that a mistake must have been made. But why not? she thought. Surely Art had lived long enough among the Fair Folk to become a little like them. The thought made her even more determined to teach him his place in the real world.

She told the stationers that Art was the son of her sister, now dead of the plague. She was sorry for the lie, but she knew how quickly families changed in times of infection, and that it would not surprise anyone in a month or so if she started to call him her son. A few of the booksellers worried that he had brought the plague with him, but when they both remained healthy the objections ceased. Probably folks thought she had kept the illness away by black magic.

19

Christopher turned away, pretending that he hadn't seen the other man. It seemed to him that Robert Poley, of all people, had no place in the timeless holiday of the past week. But Robert came toward them, calling his name. “Do you know him?” Will asked.

“Aye. Let's go before he catches up to us.”

“Christopher!” Robert said, shouting. He had been one of the few of Christopher's acquaintances never to call him Kit. “Wait!”

Christopher waited. He might as well stop and talk. What did he care what Poley said? He was done with spying.

“Good day,” Robert said, looking at Will. Christopher knew that look; he was trying to remember if he should know Will, if the other man was someone of consequence. “How have you been?”

“Well,” Christopher said. As always around Robert he felt impatient, annoyed with the man's subtleties. “And you?”

“Oh, doing well, doing well.” Robert looked off into the distance, abstracted. “We haven't seen each other for—years, isn't that so? Three years.”

Christopher nodded. For a few months after his work in the queen's court he had wondered why Robert hadn't contacted him again. Perhaps, he'd thought, Robert had lost his place during the shift of power following Walsingham's death, or had been envious that it was Christopher who had discovered the conspirators. Finally, though, he had decided that it didn't matter. He had his patron, and would never need to work for Robert again.

The other man seemed surprised to see him still in London, looking fit and prosperous. No one had told him about the patron, then. “What are you doing now?” Robert asked.

“Working for someone else,” Christopher said. Immediately he felt childish; he had responded to an old desire to wound Robert, had reduced himself to the other man's level. Still he couldn't help but feel gratified at the expression on Robert's face, a strange mixture of resentment and curiosity. After Walsingham had died the field was wide open; he could have been working for anyone.

“Are you?” Robert looked at Will again, as if to say, Should we discuss these delicate matters in front of him?

Christopher nodded. Now it was his turn to keep silent, to hoard information. He felt sure that it tormented Robert not to know who his employer was, who Will was.

Robert looked at the ravens wheeling in the sky above London. “We should have a talk, you and I. Catch up on what we've missed. A great deal has changed since that dotard Walsingham died.”

Why not? Christopher thought. Now that he was free of Robert he could listen to the other man rationally, without anger. And he might learn something; Robert's sources of information, he knew, were very good. “When?”

Will moved slightly. “Nay, don't go,” he said softly. “Tell him you're busy.”

Did Will want to spend all his time with him? To his surprise Christopher began to feel hedged in, impatient. What made Will think he had such a claim on him?

“I'm not that busy,” he said to Will. “You're meeting with your father the day after tomorrow. I could go then.”

Will looked defeated. Christopher turned back to Robert. “The usual place?” he asked.

“Usual—? Nay, you have been away a long time. There's a new place now, in Deptford. A widow's house, very private. No one listening over your shoulder. I'll tell you how to get there.”

Two days later Christopher and Will walked to the river, where Will would get a boat to take him to his father's estate. The sun had not yet risen; his father, Will explained, liked to begin the day early. Heavy fog lay on the river.

“Listen, Kit,” Will said. “Are you certain you want to meet with this man?”

“Of course I am,” Christopher said impatiently. “Why shouldn't I be?”

“I don't know. I—I don't trust him. He looks—I don't know—untrustworthy. Devious.”

“Aye, he is untrustworthy. But I know that in advance, and that's what makes me safe from him. Don't worry about me.”

“Well, but be careful. Promise me you'll be careful.”

Christopher was saved from answering by the cry of the waterman. “Westward ho!” the man called from his boat, his voice muffled.

The boat came toward them out of the gloom. It looked black, like a mourning barge. They said their farewells, and Christopher watched as Will stepped inside. Will seemed to grow insubstantial, blending with the pearl and gray and black of the river. The waterman pushed off. Fog curled over them.

He watched until they were lost to sight, and then hailed a boat to take him east, toward Deptford.

Christopher had never seen Robert Poley so affable, so expansive. They sat at a table in the widow's house in Deptford, and Robert regaled him with story after story, tale after tale. His accounts were like those Christopher had sometimes heard in the Black Boar, tales of journeys taken, information exchanged, men betrayed. But he felt certain that Robert's stories, unlike the others he had heard, were true.

The widow came in and set their dinner on the table. Robert stopped halfway through an account of how he had exposed a spy selling information to the Spanish ambassador and began to eat, motioning to Christopher to join him. “Well met,” Robert said with satisfaction, adding sugar to his wine and taking a sip. “Well met indeed. It's been far too long.”

“Aye,” Christopher said. He had prepared himself for everything but this strange new mood of Robert's, and he could not help but wonder what the other man wanted. The name of the man Christopher worked for, probably, but the answer was so ordinary, so lacking in drama, that Christopher hesitated to give it to him. He found himself wanting to match Robert's stories with his own.

“I hear you acquitted yourself well at court,” Robert said. “That was well done, very well done. Though I wish I had heard the story from you.”

Christopher looked at him in surprise. He had thought, when weeks went by and he hadn't heard from Robert, that the man hadn't wanted to see him. And by that time he had found a patron, and there had been no reason to seek the agent out. Did Robert think that they were friends?

He began to tell him about his adventures at the queen's court: the men he had overheard rehearsing the play, the actor who had been killed instead of the queen during the masque, his chase through the hedge maze after one of the conspirators. “I waited for him to turn the corner, wondering if I'd be able overpower him, but in the end I didn't have to. There was another man in the maze.”

“Another man!” Robert said, his pale blue eyes intent. “Who?”

“I don't know.” Suddenly he thought he understood something, and the realization was so strong that he wondered how he'd missed it for three years. “He was one of your men, wasn't he? You had more than one agent at the palace, didn't you?”

“More than one agent?” In the space of a breath the Robert he had known was back, secretive, impassive, closed in on himself like a fortress. “Nay—one was enough, certainly. Why would I want more?”

“I don't know. You didn't trust me, perhaps.”

“Of course I trusted you—”

“Nay, you didn't. You told me so often enough. Perhaps you sent this man to spy on me.”

“To spy—”

“Aye.” It was a relief to be able to tell Robert what he thought, to no longer have to depend on the man for employment. “You told me my opinions were unorthodox. You said you doubted my worth to you—”

“Do you think I have so many men, then, that I can spare one to do nothing but watch you? And who would watch this watcher—another man, I suppose? Nay, you're being foolish. And how can you suppose I would have hired this strange-looking man, barely four feet tall? Who would have trusted such an outlandish fellow?”

It seemed to Christopher that everything stopped suddenly, that the entire motion of the world came to a halt with Robert's last sentence. He felt very cold. “I didn't tell you he was four feet tall.”