All Night Awake (49 page)

For the first time since Will had met him Marlowe’s face displayed true gravity, and the sudden hardening of his features seemed to make him older, older than Will, more widely traveled and more bitterly tried.

They’d come to the back door of Paul’s, overlooking the yard, and Will waved away a wizened man in a ratty grey velvet suit who thrust in Will’s face a collection of cards engraved with woodcuts of men and women, and men and men, and women and women, in explicit, improbable couplings.

Marlowe slowed a step and appeared to glance at the cards, then shake his head slowly.

They stepped from the dark, shadowy confines of Paul’s church and into the noonday light of a blazing day full too bright and hot for May.

In front of them, the churchyard opened, filled with tents, and on the side of each tent, displayed, a sign or symbol of the printer: the white greyhound and the dying swan, and the knight in armor, and the swine rampant, each of them letting people know which printer abided within.

Clipped to the side of each tent sheaves and clusters of paper, and thick pamphlets and thin booklets waved in the breeze, one proclaiming a sad tale, another recording a ballad, and another yet the taken down words of a play performed on the stage before the plague closed it.

“And this with you?” Will asked. He was puzzled by Marlowe’s long soliloquy, centered as it seemed to be on another’s plight. “What matters to you if the strangers suffer in a riot?” He had never pegged Marlowe for a great, overflowing humanist that would take to his wounded bosom every persecuted thing.

Marlowe tightened his gloved hands into fists, fists much too solid and aggressive for his fashionable clothes, his petulant look. “Some fool has set his pen to paper,” he said. “And that paper to the wall of the church where the Dutch are like to worship. In that paper he said how the strangers would be killed. And that paper he signed Tamburlaine, as if the character and creation of mine had written those libels.” He paused, looked away from Will. “Or if I had.”

Will turned surprised eyes to Marlowe, trying to understand. He’d come across this riddle before, that when Marlowe spoke he often seemed to refer to a world which Will couldn’t divine, as though he were speaking of some truth plucked from distant star gazing.

Will never felt so provincial, so inadequate, so ill-prepared for his life in London and the theater as when coming across Marlowe’s mind and getting a peek of what hid beneath Marlowe’s sophisticated mask.

Like that, Marlowe’s countenance lightened, and the lines of his features loosened, making him look young, very young.

A building chuckle climbed out from his chest, booming in the blazing morning son. But, like a flame ill lit, his laughter extinguished itself suddenly. And the voice in which he spoke was full slow and bitter. “It means, good Wagglance that, as I’ve told you, this is an ill time for poets and for fools.” Something like a shadow crossed the grey eyes, giving the impression of shutters fleetingly thrown open and then just as suddenly closed, affording no more than a glimpse into a darkened house. “They took poor Tom Kyd and tortured him, and Lord knows what that sort of lamb -- innocent of guile and clean of crime -- will say of such as me, when under torture. Lord knows what you would have said.”

Will frowned, trying to follow the convoluted argument. Was he being threatened? “But I -- ”

Marlowe nodded. “You’ve done nothing to deserve it, I know, Shakestaff. But then neither has Kyd. Except that he did write for Lord Strange’s acting troupe, which, unwisely, thought to enact a play on the life of Sir Thomas Moore, who held a dim view of strangers, himself.” Marlowe turned away quickly, from Will’s bewildered look, and Will wondered if this was fair warning. Had Marlowe denounced him to the Privy Council for imagined crimes?

Will wished he was home, wished he could rest his head on his kitchen table and watch his Nan rustle about, cooking, and hear his Nan say that Will worried about vain fantasies only.

Nan had always been the strength of their family, and Will knew it. He wished he could have her strength now, and know that she would help him, protect him if needed.

He’d never felt so heartily sorry he’d come to London, never longed so much for his small house in Stratford and the constrained limits of his father’s glover shop.

At least in Stratford no one arrested you just because you knew guilty persons. Why, half of the Ardens, Will’s maternal relatives, were Catholic, and yet their allegiance to this forbidden faith hadn’t prevented John Shakespeare, Will’s father, from being alderman.

In that moment, if Will could have transported himself to Stratford by the force of his thought alone, he would have done it. But he couldn’t. And going back would be admitting he was defeated, done once and for all with London. Nan would not laugh at him, but aye, even in Nan’s eyes, Will would mayhap be diminished.

As for the neighbors, how they’d laugh and wag their tongues at the wit who’d thought to be a poet and come acrop, only to crawl humbly back to his father’s glover shop.

Will looked at Marlowe, who looked away from Will, as if absorbed in the contemplation of the printed pamphlets hung beside the tents.

Will wished he knew what was really happening and why the Privy Council should be meddling in the lives of poor play makers.

Easier to interrogate a sphinx than Kit Marlowe.

Having crossed a brief stretch of full sun, they now walked amid the printers tents, each tent displaying enticing books many of which Will would buy, had he the coin.

But the coin was scarce and scant and that must last until Will could find new work of some sort in London and make more money to send to his family.

He thought of Southampton. He’d have to try his luck, though it was all folly. And Marlowe was clearly not absent, though perhaps under a shadow. Would Will have to compete with Marlowe to be able to send bread home to Stratford to his family?

Will’s family mattered most of all, his family that expected him to restore their fortunes by his great wit.

Marlowe had said the crops had been poor. In faith Will hadn’t noticed, attributing any lack in his own diet to his lack of money. But what if Nan wanted for food? Or the children? He thought of Hamnet’s intent eyes, fixed on his, he thought of Hamnet asking why his father hadn’t sent money.

“How am I going to make a living without the theater?” Will heard himself ask. “I can’t even be a player, without the theater.”

Marlowe smiled. “The good wife lacks for coin? Fear you not. There is a potion that will get you coin. Write yourself a long poem, about some legendary love, throw in enough tit and leg and what not, and long descriptions of the lovers’ white bodies entwined, all wrapped in your best words, freshly clipped from the vine of verb, take you all of that I say, and crown it with tragic death -- tragic enough to make the whole seem a good lesson, lifted from a worthy book. Dedicate the whole to a foolish young nobleman, and there you have it. You shall be rich as Croesus and twice as regarded.”

As Will didn’t answer, Marlowe grabbed his arm and shook it. “Listen, Shakeshaft. I do not jest. If you want coin, that is what you must do, till the theaters open again. Why, I’m doing the same as we speak. I’ve chosen Hero and Leander, for a subject. All very proper and gentle and sad-sweet, and yet giving the good Lord Thomas Walsingham what he craves, that he might see with his mind’s eye the tragic lovers as they bend and sway and conjoin to part again, and having conjoined regret their folly. If I’ve done my job, he will crown my efforts with glimmering gold.”

Hero and Leander
. Will tried to recall the tale but remembered nothing, save that it was one of those classical stories known by men better than he, like Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, who’d attended universities and learned proper Latin and better Greek, and of which they discoursed as if they’d drunk them in their mothers' milk.

While Will, with his grammar school education, his little Latin and small Greek, must limp behind and catch the grains of glitter that fell from the jewels these true poets fashioned.

How could Will write a long poem about some classical love? What did he know of classical love? And what nobleman would be susceptible enough to Will’s praise to consent to blessing such enterprise with coin?

Maybe Will could indeed write something, a long poem, something scholarly-seeming even if proceeding from no true scholarship. Something that might entice the good Southampton to give him coin.

But the image Will built in his mind vanished before his eyes.

No, it was all foolishness. When had Will written anything that anyone would wish to purchase for a great amount? Will should have stayed in Stratford, and there worked steadily to make Hamnet a better man than his misguided father.

Perhaps it wasn’t too late. Perhaps that was what his dream meant.

Perhaps Will ought to get himself hence, to his native town and there hew the familiar trade of his own father.

“Well met, Kit, well met.” A blond young man darted from between two tents, and extended both hands to Marlowe, in familiar greeting.

Marlowe smirked and gladly pranced there, without a goodbye, all ready smiles and easy wit again whatever his dark mood might have been dissipated by his making ill sport of Will and showing Will how much inferior Will’s wit was.

Will followed Marlowe’s retreating back with an envious gaze.

Oh, for an ounce of Marlowe’s talent, Will would give what hair remained to him, or his chance at happiness, or his hope of immortality. To reach with his writing hand the knee of that great, stage-bestriding presence and have Will’s own plays be known by everyone, Will would give the very blood from his veins, and everything, everything....

Upon that, Will remembered the wolf, and shivered and checked his mind upon its course. Everything except Hamnet and Nan and Will’s two daughters.

To whom he should return, since his hopes of ever reaching the heights of the Marlovian plays had been ever small and grew smaller each day the theaters remained closed because of the plague, and the multitudes were allowed to forget Will’s name as if it had never sounded upon their ears.

Will stopped. Ahead of him, in the crowd that milled among the booksellers stalls, amid well-dressed dandies, somber scholars and hollow-eyed students, he saw someone whose face he’d never forget -- a creature whose countenance had engraved itself upon Will’s heart and Will’s mind.

Her black hair fell like a silken raiment over her small shoulders, beneath which her large breasts bloomed, above a waist so narrow that Will could have encircled it with his two hands. Her features, arranged within her oval face, showed sweetness more than all the nectar of the world distilled.

She was beauty as no mortal woman could attain. She looked, compared to other women, like a snow-white dove amid crows.

As Will drew nearer her, and marked her close, her silver, shimmering gown, her shining black hair that fell like a curtain to her waist, the grace of her walk, the entrancing beguilement of her smile, Will knew that she was neither mortal, nor a woman, but the female form of the king of elves, Quicksilver. The Lady Silver, who had enchanted Will ten years ago.

He felt the snare of her enchantment engulf him once more. He told himself he loved Nan. Perforce, Will loved Nan, sweet Nan, his reality and his strength. Sweet Nan who was warm and kind as bread with honey, homey like a roaring fire on the Earth, and his, his, his, the mother of his children, his plowed field that brought forth great harvest.

His sweet Nan, who could be as forceful as she was kind.

Yet Silver’s hollow sweetness drew Will forth like sucking lips drinking in the juice of a ripe apricot.

As he stepped forward, in shock at seeing in London this being he’d last met in the shadowed green spaces of Arden wood, the Lady Silver -- as the creature called itself in this form -- looked at him, opened her mouth as if to speak, took a step forward, and fell senseless into Will’s arms.

Scene Five

St. Paul’s yard, the market place of choice for book printers and book sellers in Elizabethan England. Around the corners of the yard, houses encroach, shadowing the space and making it look like the inside of a building, lacking only the roof to be a cathedral as imposing as the one beside it. Colorful tents dot the yard proper, streaming booklets and papers like festive ornaments. Amid the tents, the well-to-do stroll, in their finery and velvets and older scholars in dull wool cloaks skulk. Between two of the colorful tents, Marlowe speaks to a young blond gentleman attired in blue silk
.

K
it Marlowe went out to meet the young blond man, who, attired in faultless blue silk, coiffed to the height of fashion, his hair all in ringlets, held both hands out to Kit as if to the dearest of friends.

For a moment, Kit forgot Shakespeare and the conversation he’d entertained with the novice play maker.

The vague foreboding he’d felt all day receded but only because a creeping, crawling fear, like a chill finger drawn up the spine, like a drop of rain out of an unthreatening sky, took residence in Kit’s heart in its place.