All Night Awake (32 page)

A fresh burst of tears issued from Ariel’s pansy blue eyes.

Will, not believing himself that he was doing this—encouraging an elf—offered Ariel his arm.

“Milady, you’re not well,” he said. “If you wish to come to my quarters, you may rest there.” He thought of his landlord, briefly, as Ariel’s hand clasped on his arm, but then he threw caution to the winds.

Ariel, with her restrained, high neckline, was no more likely to invite assumptions of her being a harlot, than was Will himself.

Should the landlord complain, should he ask, Will would say that Ariel was his widowed sister, come to town to consult with him on some family business.

Surely, Ariel’s crying eyes, swollen with tears, gave the truth to recent widowhood. Will shivered. He hoped Ariel wasn’t widowed.

Silver was in Never Land? Oh, he should never have sent her forth, should never have repelled her. Would she die so soon?

By sunset this day, he thought. But she’d tried to seduce him. Yet she’d warned him also.

And how could Sylvanus catch her unawares? Didn’t she know his tricks and accustomed ways?

She’d said she was going to someone who’d help her. She’d said . . .

Will’s head reeled with guilt and worry.

Ariel’s hand upon his arm felt light, ethereal. The creature looked half alive. Something was indeed wrong, something that extended to Fairyland.

“How can Sylvanus be free, though?” he asked Ariel. “Was he not in thrall to the Hunter?”

Ariel shook her head, then nodded. “Aye, he was, and aye, how he came to be free I know not. Only, there was a menace, an alarm, and my lord went to look at it, and my lord returned not.” She took her hand from his arm to wipe her tears on the back of her fragile-looking hand. “And Sylvanus says Quicksilver helped free him.”

Will fished in his sleeve for his rumpled, clean kerchief and pressed it into her hand.

Ariel took it and wiped her eyes, with an almost impatient gesture. “Ever since Quicksilver left, the hill has been blighted, power draining from it like grain pouring forth from a slit sack.” She was quiet a long time. “The servant fairies, the winged ones, have died. Almost all of them. And the changelings . . . .” She spoke in a whisper, a low whisper, for which Will was glad since, all about him, people walked, and there were people who lived in the area they crossed, only two streets away from Will’s own lodgings, only too close, and neighborly enough to take an interest in Will’s affairs.

Ariel’s lips trembled. “Oh, Master Will, you do not know how we suffered.”

Her little face—yet oval and pale and perfect—hardened. The lines of her delicate bones became more solid, more square, her little lips firmed into something like a straight line of disapproval.

She swallowed once, as though she swallowed things she wished to say but could not. “I thought it was Quicksilver’s absence that did it. I thought . . .” She wiped her eyes, with decisive swipes of his handkerchief. “I know that he was unfaithful, that he disported himself with someone, that he . . . I thought it was that, nothing more, causing the blight in the hill, and I came to London to call my lord to his senses. But midway here, I heard him cry, as if in my mind,
I am betrayed.
And then I could not find him.

“Then, last night, in an alley, I saw Sylvanus, the evil one.” Her voice trembled, and her arm also, within his grasp. “And he told me he’d sent Quicksilver to Never Land. And he told me that my husband had helped free Sylvanus from the Hunter and that Sylvanus meant to destroy both male and female elements—the fundamental essences of the universe that compose all that is male and female in both elven and human realms—and in their place weave himself, and thus master and control all.”

Male and female elements from which all was woven. Will thought of his odd dream, the three women saying they were that of which all females were made. Was his dream then right? Was his dream more, then, than the foolishness that his mind spun in his sleep?

While Will’s mind reeled at the thought, Ariel’s small, determined voice went on, “And there was a child, the remains of a child, that this creature—this creature that was Sylvanus and yet not him but a mortal man—had
eaten
. Oh.” Fresh tears burst forth, and Ariel covered her eyes in the handkerchief.

A child had been eaten. The animal attacks. The animal must have been a wolf-dog, a creature that Will had seen once, in unhallowed circumstances. In Will’s mind, the square muzzle formed, remembered, with its cruel, massive teeth.

Will heard again Quicksilver’s words, while Silver’s sweet breath tickled his ear. He’d spoken of possession, of elves possessing humans.

So, Sylvanus had possessed someone.

Will thought of his impression that he’d seen the wolf in Southampton’s garden. Had he been so near danger, and not known it?

But who could Sylvanus be possessing? And why? Even Quicksilver didn’t seem to know that.

They had arrived at the bottom of Will’s staircase and clambered up. Atop the narrow platform they squeezed, one against the other, while Will opened his door.

No one on the street below seemed to notice them, Will thought, and his landlord, duly paid from the Earl of Southampton’s purse, now seemed less interested in following Will around and pursuing him. Or perhaps Will, his conscience appeased by the payment of his debts, imagined his landlord’s prosecution of him less, and disdained to see the man in every shadow.

Inside the room, he led Ariel to the bed, and bade her rest.

As for him, he must find the reason for all these mysteries, and his poor mind was not up to all of it. It would take a genius.

Will thought of Kit Marlowe. Kit Marlowe, worldly Kit Marlowe, might not believe Will. Aye, he might even think Will was insane. But Will had to try. Kit was the only kind person Will had met in London, and kind Kit would have to help Will save human and elf worlds.

Will could always show him Ariel for proof of his words, and thus bid Marlowe believe in the impossible.

Scene 33

The alley where Imp’s body lies. It’s undisturbed, abandoned in this isolated spot. Kit runs in, looking bedraggled, and drops to his knees on the mud.

T
he memory of the night past had guided him here, fogged and twisted though it was. He knew he’d gone down one road and then the other, and there it was the alley where he’d walked, the very gate he’d touched.

Though his steps shied away from it, he went into the alley, step by step, each step pushed against the instinct to stop.

His mind slid sideways away from full recollection, yet he knew this mud, these buildings. He remembered the hunger and the need, and the hot blood upon his tongue.

Imp’s body lay in the mud that his dried blood had turned glossy black.

The boy might have been asleep, save only for his rent and tattered suit and the undeniable fact that the body had been gutted.

And yet Kit felt nothing. Nothing at all.

He advanced, step on step, sure this was a nightmare, sure it must soon end.

A high, keening scream of someone nearby disturbed him. He wished it would stop and looked around for the screamer.

But his throat hurt, raw and aching, and he realized that he was screaming.

He checked his scream on a deep sigh and in that sigh he heard his own grief and was shocked by it. A half-startled sob followed the sigh. Kit pressed his fist to his half-open mouth, surprised that such a sound should come from it.

He stood over Imp’s body and met the sightless gaze of those grey eyes. Imp looked puzzled in death. As if he could not understand this visitation.

Kit’s knees went slack. He sank to the mud of the alley. He reached gingerly, and lifted Imp’s rigid, cold hand.

Only yesterday the child had come to him. Only yesterday. Kit’s mind remembered, with remorseless clarity, Imp standing in this alley, saying, “Kit, you were late coming home. Kit, you promised you’d tell me a story.”

And instead, what had Kit given him?

Kit stared, in dim-witted incomprehension, at the dead child. How could Kit have done this? How could he? What evil lurked in him? How dark was that dark side of his soul? How could Kit’s nature have separated so—the poet and the spy thus divided?

And how could Imp be caught in Kit’s internal struggle?

Only yesterday, the child had been alive, Kit told himself, as though by telling himself this he could turn back the clock and undo the damage. Alive, he’d been and now he was dead, and this transformation was too sudden and too final.

How could such a thing as life be lost forever in such a moment?

He held the cold little hand in both of his, and wished it warm and moving.

“No, no, no life!” he whispered. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and you no breath at all?”

The glazed grey eyes stared at him but saw him not.

“You’ll come no more. Never, never, never, never!”

From outside the alley, just steps away, came the sounds of the city, the cries of fish sellers, a woman’s high, sweet laughter, a man’s hurried steps.

How could life go on like this? How could no one notice that Imp was dead? Kit trembled with the force of the grief and guilt that rose, battling, within him.

“Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stone: Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so that heaven’s vault should crack,” Kit said. “Look, how he stares at me and all unmeaning. He stares at me as he so often did, those grey eyes so reproachful and so knowing. Well did he know and well should he have reproached. Look what my keeping from the right hand the deeds of the left has wrought. Look.”

Steps had entered the alley and approached.

“Marlowe? Kit?” Will Shakespeare stopped steps away from Kit. “I heard your voice and I—”

“Oh.”

Kit saw Will’s worn boots through his tear-distorted vision, and glanced upward, and up and up and up, at Will’s face.

How Shakespeare had blanched. How shocked he looked. Or how surprised, as though he thought Kit insane.

And well he might.

“What grief was here?” Will asked hesitantly.

Kit held Imp’s hand and caressed it.

“My poor fool is dead. He’s gone forever,” Kit said. “I know when one is dead and when one lives. He’s dead as earth.”

Will’s well-meaning face looked like something carved in marble and worn down by time. He looked with horror on the scene before him. “But dead how? How did the child die?”

Kit shook his head. Hot tears ran scalding down his face and his throat tasted bitter with salt.

How had Imp died? How could Kit explain such horror to Will, the good burgher of Stratford-upon-Avon?

“Murder, stem murder, in the direst degree,” Kit told Will’s impassive face. “All several sins, all used in each degree, throng to the bar, crying all, Guilty! guilty! I shall despair. There is no creature loves me; and if I die, no soul shall pity me: Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself?”

“But you’d never have done any such a thing,” Will said. “Your guilt is misplaced, your grief distorts all. Who was this child?”

“It is mine only son!” Kit said, and as tears multiplied upon his face, he stroked Imp’s blood-soaked hair. “Ah, boy, if any life be left in thee, throw up thine eye! See, see what showers arise, blown with the windy tempest of my heart, upon thy death, that kills mine eye and heart.”

“Courage,” Will said. “Courage. You’ll get other children.”

But Kit shook his head. How could he explain to Will that love of elven kind had cleft him from humans, that spying had separated him from reason, that his multitudinous treasons, multiplied, had turned him into this
thing
—this divided
thing
, a half of which had just killed the one love the other had to live for.

Looking up at Will through the distorting veil of tears, Kit wailed, “Oh, can’st thou minister to a mind diseased?”

But Will only shook his head and, practical and kind, put his hands on Kit’s arms, helped him rise. “Get up,” he said. “Get up. We must take the body to his mother, must give him Christian burial.”

And covering Imp with his doublet, blocking the sight of those piteous open, surprised eyes, Will made as if to pick up the child.

“No,” Kit said. “No. I must do it. For he is my son, and the burden no burden.”

How strange that now, when it was too late, he could recognize Imp and call him son.

Lifting Imp, Kit felt hot tears roll down his cheeks. “Alack. Poor Madeleine. Harsh she is, but she deserved not such a blow. And I bring her this grief. And yet I love myself. Wherefore? For any good that I myself have done unto myself? O, no! Alas, I rather hate myself for hateful deeds committed by myself! I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.

“Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter. My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain. Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree.”

Will gave him a piteous look, no doubt thinking that Kit raved from his grief.

Kit could not explain it. Oh, yes, it was grief and mourning, but it was guilt, yet stronger than both and well deserved.