All Night Awake (25 page)

Then in a dark place, far away from the awakening street where he had started, his legs gave out. He fell down. His knees bent, bringing him to his knees upon a muddy street, wet with slops and smelly discards.

Kit’s eyes stung from sweat. Blinking, he looked around, and saw that all the houses here, once taverns and bawdy houses, were blocked, the board nailed across their doors, the seal of the Queen upon the board and a warning that here reigned the plague.

Kit Marlowe made as if to rise again, but his knees wouldn’t support him.

Kneeling like a penitent on the muddy street, he heard the elf laugh and felt a touch, upon his whole body at once, like a million wanton hands seeking to explore his skin, to know his every pore, and trying to possess him and have him and win him as never human lover could have done.

He tried to shrug away from this feel, too intimate and knowing to be pleasurable, but found nowhere to turn since it was everywhere, and his legs would not allow him to rise.

Trembling, he knelt and wished that he would die, or else that he would, instantly, be consigned to the raw attentions of the torturers Poley had threatened him with, torturers which, not feeling this soft, would yet be kinder.

The myriad hands seemed to sink deeper and, through his clothes, touch his very skin.

Then the touch turned burning, hot, intemperate, and sank lower and deeper into Kit’s being, so it seemed to have captured not inconsequential flesh, but his very soul.

Like a bird trembling between the hands that would crush it, Kit sought to escape, but couldn’t. What lay inside could not be escaped.

With a fearful burning upon his every limb, he collapsed to the muddy street and thought that he’d sealed a hellish bargain.

But something in him laughed, something pushed, like a rider will set spurs to a sluggish horse, something whispered within his brain, “You will rise and do my work now. Morning is nigh, and from now on, must you spend all night awake and doing my will, if we are to achieve our revenge over our mutual enemy.”

Scene 24

Will’s room. Silver has made an attempt at straightening the disordered bed and paces, back and forth, her dainty silver slippers ticking a fast rhythm on the floor. Now and then her long, white fingers tug at her neckline, pushing it ever lower, to reveal more of her white, rounded breasts, as if she were too hot to bear the contact of the creamy lace. Will opens the door and steps in.

W
ill opened the door to his room, his head still swimming with confused elation.

The Earl of Southampton had given him money—given money to Will Shakespeare, the boy from Stratford, the provincial that no one believed could be a poet. The earl had given him money to write a long poem.

Will felt drunk without drinking, tingling with excitement and trembling with fear at his own daring.

This one evening Will had been treated like a poet, accepted into the highest circles of nobility by the power of his mind, the strength of his learning. Why, the gentlemen with the earl had asked Will’s opinion on politics and religion and important, weighty matters, and they’d listened to his words as if he held a secret to knowledge they could but guess at.

On this wave of triumph, he opened his door, on this wave of triumph he stepped into his room, to be engulfed in Silver’s arms, enveloped by the cloying lilac perfume of fairykind.

“Milady,” Will said.

Silver’s skin burned, like the skin of a feverish child, and her arms around Will scorched like brands pulled from a blazing fire. Her breasts pushed against his chest, so that he could feel them even through his doublet and his shirt.

“Milady,” he said. He could say no more. Her lips, hot, searched for his with the blind eagerness of a child’s.

For a moment her lips touched his. For a moment their mouths joined, and he breathed in the taste of her—like wine, newly bottled, full of spirit and bursting with life.

He thought of Nan. Nan in Stratford. Nan patiently waiting for Will beside their hearth. Nan, who should hear of Will’s triumph. Nan, who deserved not to have her husband betray her with an elf—something not human, something beautiful but also cold and distant like stars twinkling in the velvet of the night sky.

His hands lifted and rested on Silver’s shoulders, and pushed away at her till she stepped back. Looking dazed, she tried to approach and kiss him again.

He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, wiping the taste of new wine from his lips, and pushed away harder.

Silver lost her balance, with his too-rough shove, and stepped back, till she stood against the bed and looked at him with wide, unfocused eyes. The eyes of a drunkard.

“Milady,” he said again. “Milady, you forget yourself.”

Silver opened her mouth. She took a step toward him, then a step back. Her hands trembled, and her body, too, giving the impression of a great struggle, as if she were two people, one rushing eagerly toward him, the other holding back, pulling back. Like an eager horse being restrained by a severe trainer, like a chained bear struggling against the chains to reach the dogs that wound him.

A mewling sound came through those parted red lips. A sound of complaint. “I don’t wish . . .” Silver said, her voice low and rough. Quicksilver’s voice. “I don’t wish to do this. It is the universe-ordering thought, the elements and images through which elves and humans perceive the universe. It’s all disturbed. The female element—the triple goddess, the eternal trinity, maiden and mother and crone—feels threatened. And like a person preparing for a blow, it increases its strength, it rules all, trying to appear powerful, trying to . . .” Silver’s mouth opened and closed, her body trembled.

Will thought of his dream, his odd dream. He thought of the maiden, the matron, and the crone.

He shook his head. He did not wish to think about it.

He wanted nothing to do with the slippery world of the supernatural. He wanted his solid home, his commonsense wife, his profitable career, his coat of arms. He wanted his son to attend a well-regarded college.

His hand within his sleeve touched and felt the solidity of the leather purse he’d got, the metal coins within. He took a deep breath. The world of reality called him, the world of coin and work and family. The faerie world was delusion, a mad dance of nonsense that permeated reality yet didn’t impinge upon it.

He walked toward his bed, intending to put the purse beneath the mattress.

Silver cut his advance.

Her trembling hands stretched toward his shoulders, her chest rose and fell in fast, eager breaths—reaching breaths, imploring breaths, demanding breaths. Her lips parted, promising a heaven within—the taste of fresh wine, the caresses of her searching tongue.

Will looked at her lips and at her rising and falling breasts, and heard his own voice come small and strangled from a throat that felt suddenly tight. “Madam,” he said. “Madam, you forget yourself. I am married, and so is Quicksilver.”

As he spoke, he stepped backward, toward his desk, hoping nothing was in his way.

If he fell and she touched him once more, it would all be up.

Will might resist temptation while looking at Silver, but resisting temptation under the touch of those long, knowing fingers—resisting temptation then would take a less lively saint than Will could ever hope to be, a saint of plaster and painted wood like those the papists venerated.

He smelled Silver’s heady scent and felt as though his very blood responded to it, flowing through his veins in a heat of fire and air, demanding action where honor dictated restraint.

She stepped forward, as he stepped back. Her tongue flicked over her half-parted lips. Yet the words that came through those lips were Quicksilver’s, steady and rational, spoken in Quicksilver’s rough, preoccupied voice. “There is some way, Will, that my brother is threatening the female element. He holds one of its aspects hostage, or he will soon kill one of them. And the only way I can think for him to hurt them, the only way that would require a human body, is sympathetic magic, which is a magic stronger in humans than in elves.”

Will blinked. He couldn’t think of Quicksilver’s words, while desire for Silver’s offered body assailed him so. He stepped back, and back and back, and stared at the lovely, unfocused silver eyes, and asked, his own voice too low and gruff, “Sympathetic magic?”

Silver smiled as she gained space, and through her smiling lips Quicksilver’s voice said, “Yes, like when you make a doll to figure a man and upon that doll perform the magic with which you wish to influence the living creature. Thus by affecting a symbol of one of the female aspects, Sylvanus will wound the deity itself, and wound femininity throughout the land, as he’s already injured maleness.”

Will hit his writing table behind him, and felt it totter, and turned around, and reached with hasty hands for the trembling candle, and rescued it just in time, before it overturned and its flame caught the papers strewn about.

In that fatal moment Silver caught him, and her soft, rounded arms surrounded him, her soft, rounded breasts pressed against his back.

In that moment he felt her breath hot against his neck, as she parted his curls, and kissed him beneath his ear and whispered into it, in Quicksilver’s hard and clear voice, “But what would be strong enough to prefigure the female prototypes with which humans and elves have imbued the immense and indifferent universe? Something strong enough to represent at least one of them?”

More soft kisses.

Will trembled as one with the ague, and tried to keep from turning around, from putting his arms around that willing body. He would not meet Silver’s kisses with his own eager lips, he would not let the elf show Will the decadent, exciting ways of elven love.

He tried to tell himself that the thing embracing him was not even human and not even whole. Quicksilver spoke through Silver’s mouth. How fractured had this strange creature become? How much did Silver desire Will?

Or was it Quicksilver, lord of elves, who tormented Will thus, attempting to entrap him with Silver’s favors?

Staying still, staying turned away from Silver’s love, took all the power of Will’s mind, all the strength of his heart.

And through the fever of his struggle, through the sweat that sprang at his neckline and ran down his back in hot rivulets, through the veil of pleasure at Silver’s soft kisses, Will heard Quicksilver’s voice. “Will, do you have a female deity in your society? A female priestess? A vestal virgin?”

Will thought of the virgin that the papists had worshiped and shook his head, “No, that was the papists, that was . . .” He could speak no more.

In his thoughts, he saw the image of the virgin that his mother had kept hidden in the attic, the chaste image of plaster, painted white, the female form swathed in mantels and voluminous dress.

In his mind, the image divested itself of mantels and cloth, and appeared naked, triumphant. Her form was Silver’s—the large breasts, the tiny waist, the flare of hips—beautiful and tempting and clad only in silky white skin.

Silver’s perfume enveloped him like a heady dream, and saliva gathered in his mouth, as though he were a child longing for some tempting confection.

Silver’s arms, reaching around him, unbuttoned his doublet and reached beneath—hot, hot through the flimsy, worn-down material of his shirt.

Will thought of Nan, but he was like a man drowning and reaching for a shadow. He had no more power to fight off Silver than a drowning man to beat back the raging waves.

“Milady,” he said, his voice strangled. “Milady, please.”

Was he pleading for her to leave him alone, or was he pleading for the full satisfaction of the desire she aroused?

He didn’t know. He couldn’t say. His blood ran like a mad spark of fatuous fire along the taut strings of his nerves.

Her hands had found their way beneath his shirt. Her long fingers struggled, blind, with the fastening to his breeches.

He flinched from the heat of her fingers and yet wanted her touch, wanted to feel her whole body burning his, cleansing from him his rough human stuff, replacing it whole with the pure, purged metal of elvenkind.

“Milady,” he said again, in a begging tone.

And Silver’s laughter, her clearest laugh, which he hadn’t heard in ten years, echoed triumphant in his ears.

His thought subsided beneath currents of desire, his hands groped the stuff on the table.

Suddenly, beneath his hand, clear, hard, he felt something that shouldn’t be there.

It felt like sealing wax. It had that rigidity, that round shape.

Will opened his eyes, lifted his hand, looked down.

On the table was a folded letter, sealed with a round, rough blob of red wax—with no impression of a ring.

The outside address—he read it as if through a fog, while Silver’s hands, which had finally triumphed with the tie of his breeches, ventured beyond, beneath, more intimately. The outside address on the letter read:
To Master Will Shakespeare, from his wife, Anne
.

Nan.

It was like a glass of freezing water poured over Will.