All Night Awake (33 page)

Kit had feared so much and dared so much, he’d got involved in so many schemes and deceptions. He’d flaunted his meager knowledge, he’d braved hell itself, in betraying others for his son’s sake.

And now, watch how from his own corruption his son’s death had bloomed like a rank flower from an abominable stalk.

His gloved hand stroking at Imp’s auburn hair, Kit felt his tears renew and spoke louder, as though to drown out the cold, implacable voice within his brain. “O, pity, God, this miserable age! What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly, erroneous, mutinous and unnatural, this deadly age daily doth beget! Oh boy, thy father gave thee life too rashly and hath bereft thee of thy life too soon!”

Grief washed over Kit’s mind, bringing with it thoughts and images that might be unconnected, but that in his heart seemed to fit with this most mournful occasion.

Kit remembered his childhood in his father’s small workshop: his clumsiness with the leathers and needles, the easy gallop of his mind in school.

He remembered the masters who had praised him, the neighbors who had envied him, the father who had scolded him for daring his mind to stray beneath the bonds of decent piety.

He remembered his scholarship and how hard he’d worked for his masters at Cambridge. He remembered his plays and what acclamation they brought, the recognition and the wild bouts of drinking and discussing poetry with the fashionable youth and other poets in the Mermaid.

And Kit had spied, and Kit had betrayed, and Kit had turned himself from what he was so that like a sleeve made of coarse stuff but lined with satin, he’d turned himself inside out to become something that he was not: a spy and a dandy, a knower of lies, a friend of corrupt aristocracy.

And through all this like a thread of gold in the base stuff of Kit’s heart, Imp had run. Imp’s innocence, his simple trust.

From the moment of Imp’s birth, from the moment that Kit had beheld his own face sculpted small in another soul’s possession, Kit had done everything for his son’s sake.

The love Kit’s father had denied Kit and that natural pride that did stem from having begotten his like and his successor, all that he had invested in Imp’s skipping grace, Imp’s quick mind, his irreverent wit, his daring ways.

And all for this. Bloodied meat in the mud of an alley. Nothing more.

Carrying the child, he walked slowly across London streets.

His appearance and bloodied face and hands made passerby recoil, but he noticed not.

He would go, like one on penance.

If another had done this, then Kit would have killed the other.

Yet, he himself had done it though he remembered it not, or only as through a glass darkly—the darker, secretive half of him was a murderer—and upon that must Kit take revenge.

At the door to his lodgings he hesitated, delaying the moment of grieving Madeleine, and almost laughed at his own scruples.

How considerate of others he had grown, now that there was so little to consider. He saw Will standing by, Will looking at him. Will had followed him here, and would follow him further.

Will, whom Kit had sought to implicate in his own treasons, in his dark plots. Will, who would have died, as surely as John Penry, to keep Kit and Imp safe.

Only there was nothing to keep safe anymore.

The motor of the world had come to a stop, and in this halt, by the sudden clarity of his grief, Kit realized that there was nothing left anymore, and no reason to tie Will, who was also a father, to the ill-fated coils of his fallen plan.

Kit put his bloodied hand out and surrounded Will’s wrist with his cold fingers. “Leave me now, friend, leave me now.”

Will said something of which the word “Deptford” emerged.

Remembering his plan and recoiling from it, Kit shook his head. “There’s nothing to go to Deptford for now,” he said. “Pray, friend, Will, stay away from it. Even if . . . . Even if I should, myself, entreat you. Do not go there.”

And leaving Will amazed on the doorstep, Kit turned and went in to discharge his fell duty.

Scene 34

Will’s room. The fairy queen sits upon the shabby bed, her torn skirt neatly arranged, her muddy shoes demurely together. Will comes in, looking stunned.

“D
id you find him?” Ariel asked.

The question took Will by surprise. “Find whom, milady? Whom should I have found?”

“The man to help us,” she said. She stood up. “You said you knew someone.”

Will sighed. He closed his door slowly. His mind was full of what he had just seen. Too full.

He thought of Kit and the boy. Had Kit ever acknowledged his paternity? Will could not credit that, yet how fully did Kit reap the grief of the child’s death.

How dubious the joys of fatherhood. Will’s mind returned again and again to his children, Susannah, Judith, and Hamnet, who, in Stratford, might meet an evil fate at any moment and no one know.

“He won’t help us,” Will told Ariel. “His son has died. I couldn’t ask his help now. He’s insane with grief.”

“His son?” The Queen of Fairyland stopped her pacing and stared at Will.

She trembled. Her eyelids fluttered, as though in the gale of memory. “His child? The child I saw . . . last night?”

Will nodded. “Possibly. It was a boy. If only there would be a way . . .” he said. He knew he spoke nonsense, knew he spoke out of a heart too full and a mind too drained. Yet he spoke. “Could not the magic of Fairyland . . . . Couldn’t the child live again?”

Ariel shook her head. Tears from her eyes fell down her face. “No, Will. That is beyond my power, beyond Quicksilver’s even, even when the hill is at its most powerful. And now . . . . And now Quicksilver himself is in Never Land and will be dead before this day is through, his magic drained by nothingness. And once he’s dead, not all the magic of Fairyland, and not all my wishing, can get him back. We have limits also, Will.”

“Oh, you magical creatures and your limits,” Will yelled. He paced back and forth across his room.

Ariel watched him, her eyes wide, looking every wise shocked and alarmed.

He did not know whence his rage came, but he felt angry, an anger without measure. How odd this world, how odd this magic, that magical beings had to ask Will for help and depend on Will’s good grace for shelter. How strange that these same beings who turned Will’s life upside down and played upon him as upon a fiddle knew not how to save themselves.

“First the Fates, the three women, in my dream, telling me they needed me to save them,” he said. “Then Silver coming to me in search of help, though she didn’t seem to know what help she needed or why, and now you!” He flung the words at the queen’s little drained face, her swimming blue eyes. “What good is magic if you must come to me, poor man that I am, a poor poet, a man without words or power, without magic, or money, or knowledge.”

Ariel’s mouth hung open. She sought to close it, looked as though she’d speak, but her eyes betrayed fear of Will’s sudden rage.

“Oh, speak, tell me what a fool I am, why don’t you?” Will said. “Tell me what a fool I am, because I’m not immortal, not one of your charmed circle. Milady, I wouldn’t want to be immortal if in all my immortal years I learned so little and were so helpless as to need Will Shakespeare to protect me.” He stood in front of her, his hands open as if to denote his impotent rage. “
Will Shakespeare,
forsooth?”

“Three women?” Ariel said. She reached a hand for Will’s sleeve and grasped the rough wool between thumb and forefinger, as if she meant to hold him and yet were afraid of his reaction to her touch. “Three women? Pray tell, Will, when did you see three women?”

“In my dream,” he said.

His rage left him suddenly, but something else remained. Anger still, at this fairy world, that so enmeshed itself in his world and yet would not help him, and could do no good. An impotent magic it was, a vain enchantment.

“In my dream, I saw three women. They said they were the three aspects of the feminine, part and parcel of all that’s female in the universe. That humans had created them—
created
them—from their thoughts and dreams and their mad need to order reality.”

In Ariel’s eyes, something like hope quickened. Her breath came fast, through half-parted lips. She swallowed, and spoke again in a trickle of voice. “What did they tell you, Will, in your dream?”

“They told me they wanted me to save them,” Will cackled. “I, Will Shakespeare, should rescue them from Sylvanus, who meant to murder them. But lady, it was all a dream, a dream and nothing more.” He stopped. Sylvanus was free. Sylvanus had injured the Hunter. Will remembered Quicksilver saying so. Was it only a dream?

“Murder the female element? Yes, Sylvanus spoke of it. I thought it was vain bragging.

“But if they felt it, if they came to you in your dream, then perforce he can truly do it. Will, what else did they say?”

“They said if I rescued them, they would make me the greatest poet ever alive,” Will said, his voice drawing out, and drowning itself in empty despair. He made a face.

But Ariel stared at him, serious and solemn. “Then I say it’s time you earned your fee, Will,” she said. “Sylvanus is abroad and possessed of a human body, which he must be using in some way. Why would Sylvanus need a human body, Will? He could kill well enough without it. The pestilence, alone, that he unleashed upon the world, the blight of power that drained Fairyland, could have decimated half a continent. So, why did Sylvanus need a human body? To kill one of the female aspects, you say, but how?”

In his mind, Will heard Silver babbling about the female elements and sympathetic magic. He could feel Silver’s hands upon him, her breath hot and sweet on his ear, and he could hear Quicksilver’s urgent, businesslike voice speaking to him.

Will stopped his pacing, faced Ariel. “Milady,” he said. “What’s sympathetic magic?”

“Oh,” Ariel said. “Oh.” Her eyes grew big. “It’s when you take an object and, prefiguring upon it a person, maim or wound the first object, to hurt the being symbolized. Did the three aspects speak to you of this? You must tell me, Will.”

In a panic of anxiety, she grasped at his doublet.

He shook his hand. “No, lady, no. Silver—Quicksilver—told me about this. He told me that Sylvanus must be trying to perform sympathetic magic, and asked if we had a female priestess or a great female figure that could incarnate the female aspects, or one of them.”

Ariel’s mouth half-opened. “And do you?”

Will took a deep breath. His mind was clearer than it had been with Silver’s arms around him, Silver’s breath upon his face.

He thought about the maiden, the matron, and the crone.

There was only one woman in all of Britain who could figure one of them: the Virgin Queen worshiped by her subjects as much for her royalty as for her virginity.

“No,” he said when he could get breath. “No. It’s monstrous.”

In his mind he saw the Queen, in her barge on the Thames, gliding regally over the black water, oblivious and impervious to her subjects’ sufferings and the plague that ravaged the land.

Who could kill the Queen? Who could get past her bodyguards, her menservants, even her ladies?

But he heard again the conversation he’d heard in Southampton’s study, the talk of how the Queen wandered abroad, mistrusting her counselors, spying and cheating on those who should keep her safe.

“It can’t be,” he said. “It can’t be that Sylvanus would mean to kill Queen Elizabeth.”

Scene 35

Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. He stands alone, still blood-spattered, in the middle of his room. The bed remains in disarray, the basin blood-stained. His bloodstained suit lies crumpled by the door. From beneath the floorboards come the sounds of women mourning. Kit holds his dagger.

“W
hether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?” Kit spoke to the empty room, the dagger in his hands, the bloodied suit. His own voice, little more than a whisper, startled him.

He tested the dagger tip upon his finger.

He’d thought of this from the moment he’d first found Imp dead. But the thought hadn’t fully bloomed upon his tired mind until he’d left Imp with his grieving mother and come here, to his room, to the bloodied suit, the mute witness of his crime.