All Night Awake (50 page)

Kit had no idea who this blond man might be, and yet here he was, greeting Kit with extended hands and ready smile and calling Kit by his Christian name.

Had Kit been another sort of man and his life another sort of life -- and how often he dreamed of that in the hollow darkness of his solitary nights -- he’d have thought this dandy had some plan, some scheme to do Kit out of money.

But Kit was the man he was, knowing London and its unsound spots, like a farmer knows the blight on the wheat he grows, aye, and what fields to grow good wheat upon, too.

His was a London of tavern and bank-side theater, of treason and intrigue, of fatal secrets whispered in the press of bodies around a bear pit, late at night, after much drinking, secrets that could shake the foundations of the court and topple the thrones of Europe. Secrets that could be sold, as Kit had sold them, now and then, back and forth, to Queen and Privy Council, and Catholic, and Puritan, and whoever would pay the most.

No con man, no swindler would think of stinging Kit Marlowe. Serpents did not bite each other, nor did tigers devour their congeners.

So -- Kit swallowed a lump in his throat, a raw, undigested fear that would not stay down -- so, this strange young man, whoever he was, could only be one thing and come from one person, and that one the one Kit least needed now.

Yet he plastered a smile on his face fearing that he must have gone the white of fresh snow, and, through the smile, spoke in what he hoped was a convincing imitation of his everyday banter. “Now, well met, well met, good fellow,” he said.

He allowed the blond to pull him, casually, laughingly, into the space between the two printers’ tents, towards the back, where the tall, windowless back wall of a house that encroached on Paul’s yard provided a safe harbor for conversation, a safe retreat for intrigue.

Anyone seeing them, Kit knew, would think that it was bawdy desire that drove them and that they thought illicit satisfaction in each other’s bodies. Surely, anyone who knew Kit’s reputation would think such.

An ill reputation could be a good thing to have, when perforce you must meet in dark corners with men you have no rational reason to associate with.

How shocked they’d be, those good citizens of London who turned their backs on Kit Marlowe’s lewdness and whispered behind their hands, and smiled into their ale mugs at his scandalous life, if they knew that the same Kit Marlowe, like the innocent virgin kept sheltered and confined until her wedding day, had known only one lover. One lover only, and that one neither man nor woman.

An image of the elf, Silver -- the dark lady with her pearl-white skin, her beguiling silver eyes -- flooded Kit’s mind like a high wave, like the sea at the filling tide conquering the helpless sand.

For a moment he looked amazed and stood still, thinking of that creature he’d not seen, not met, not touched for twelve years now, and yet whose very touch his skin remembered in soft velvet and tantalizing feather.

Silver was the female form of Quicksilver who had been an elf prince. Or at least, a prince who could be a princess and exchange body and manner as men exchanged moods. He’d met Kit when Kit had just turned seventeen, before Cambridge and London had put in Kit a strong distaste of the ways of the world and the minds of men.

In that golden summer, between childhood and manhood, Kit had fallen in love. He’d loved Quicksilver in both his forms, now a dark lady now a fair youth, both forms perfect and complete and more beautiful than even a young man’s dreams could aspire to.

Even the recollection of it, now, these many years later, put authenticity in what Kit intended to be the besotted smile he gave the strange blond youth, and it made Kit’s heart beat fast, and gilded his thoughts and sighs with an edge of innocent romance that he knew better than to believe in.

Much better, for even that frothy romance had turned to dust.

Quicksilver had dismissed Kit, curtly dismissed him at the end of that summer, and told Kit he’d not see him again, and not all of Kit’s tears, not all of Kit’s pleas had moved that faithless heart.

Now, sometimes, Kit wondered if he’d dreamed it all and if that summer, like his whole, remote adolescence as a cobbler’s son in the pious town of Canterbury had been a fantasy, spun of a fevered brain.

But this -- shabby encounters behind tents and between buildings, and in dark alleys late at night, where others saw passion and Kit and those he met knew there was only the urge to pass on a message, the necessity to let another spy know what Sir Robert Cecil, master of spies, knew and meant, and what orders he intended for his puppets -- this was reality.

Trembling, but not with lust, Kit stopped beside the blond man, in the sudden cool shade of the wall, behind the striped tents.

“What is it?” Kit asked, his voice cold and cutting and so business like that even poor Will Shakespeare would have been shocked. “Whence came you and what claim have you on me?”

“You don’t know me,” the blond said. His green eyes had that facile cockiness of someone still unaccustomed to secret dealing.

“Why, perforce not,” Kit said, and smiled, a smile that didn’t look at all besotted, but sharp and clean as a new-forged knife glinting in the noonday sun. “I’m not so old that I should wander in my wits and not know who I know. Yet I asked you your name, sirrah.”

The blond started, surprised, and blinked, again demonstrating to Kit that he was new to this and that this game, newfangled, new created, felt as odd to him as another man’s coat. He looked away, looked at Kit again. “We have a common friend.”

“Perforce, we do. And his name is Robert Cecil.” He’d been expecting this. Daily, he’d been expecting death to come, disguised as a greeting. Was this it? He looked at the man’s hands, but saw no flourished dagger.

Surely, they remembered Kit’s reputation as a street fighter. It wouldn’t be so simple to kill Kit.

At the name of the Queen’s secretary, the chief of her secret service, the blond’s eyes widened and he looked ever more shocked. He drew in breath all of a startle, then said, “You need not know my name.”

Kit sighed, and tapped his foot on the floor, the tip of it slapping the flagstones in an audible manifestation of his impatience. He crossed his arms on his chest.

So, it wasn’t death. Just a message. For surely not even idiots feared to identify themselves to men as good as dead.

Little boys and their little toys. How foolish these new recruits were. Had Kit ever been that foolish himself? Had he ever been thus unsullied?

“Your name, sirrah, and the real one. I don’t take orders from everyone who comes to me in Paul’s yard and whispers thus and thus upon my tired ear. Better men than you have tried that and failed. Give me your name, or else give me a sign of your intent. Did anyone send anything you should show me? A handkerchief? A ring?”

The blond looked vexed and a blush of embarrassment flourished upon his well-shaven cheek. “My.... My name is Nicholas Skeres, and I am milord Essex’s man,” he stammered. “He.... No one gave me anything to show you. Only I was to tell you to be at Deptford on the twenty first, where you shall be given a commission.”

Kit allowed his eyebrows to rise. “A commission? From Milord Essex? What have I with Milord Essex? My, that’s droll. What commission and for what?” Deptford was the docks. A seedy neighborhood in which a man might be slaughtered like a new-landed calf. Did Essex intend to make Kit read from Essex’s missal, and incriminate Raleigh on his command, or else die for it?

But the blond had found his feet. He might be new and he might be young, but something, someone, had given him the idea that Kit’s position was less than solid, and told him what to do to push Kit up against the wall. “Master Marlowe, you know better than to ask. Not that they’d tell me, and you know that. At any rate, why should they trust you? You’ve managed, have you not, to bring yourself under the scrutiny of the Privy Council, like a fool boy caught in the act.”

“There was no act I was caught at,” Kit said, bristling. “I did not post the Dutch church libel. I do not wish the apprentices to rebel. I--” His voice had risen with each syllable.

Now, Nicholas Skeres brought his finger to his mouth, commanding silence and making Kit aware of how he’d been yelling.

The smile on the young man’s face was enough to set Kit’s blood boiling. He’d let himself be goaded. He’d shown his fears, his vulnerability to this toy soldier in the wars of the mind. After so many years of this, he’d proved himself a fool, yet again.

“Goodbye, Nick,” Kit said, his voice suddenly low and harsh. “And if Essex did send you and truly wishes to see me, he can send a better messenger. And if it was Cecil, he can send a better cony catcher, a better cutthroat. I’m not in the habit of taking my orders from babes, and a lamb won’t lead me to the slaughter. And if not Cecil nor Essex, but his cousin, old Nick sent you, then may he welcome you in his fiery abode.” With that, Kit turned on his heels and, his mind a bubbling of rage and humiliation, walked rapidly the narrow alley into the main passage where people crowded and shoppers examined the latest offerings of the wits of London and the printing industry.

“Kit,” someone called.

This time the caller was a printer friend, someone Kit had known a long time. He waved at Kit, from the shadows within his striped tent, at the sign of the grey hound, and showed Kit a fat pamphlet. “Have you read the latest on what Harvey says of you?”

Harvey had been Kit’s master at Cambridge and always had fresh scorn to pour on Kit’s decision to abandon classical forms for iambic pentameter. Their sparring correspondence, not sent directly, rather published in the form of epigrams and letters and scathing references, was part of a larger war of wits going on between London’s playwrights and new poets and the guardians of the old form.

Kit smiled, though he still felt angry and scared, and composed his mouth to shout back something funny about Harvey’s hot air.

But he never spoke.

In the space between thought and utterance, as Kit raised his head to look at his friend and respond to his taunt, his eyes caught sight of someone in a crowd, and every thought abandoned his poor befuddled brain, leaving him like an unarmed man facing an assailant.

The creature he saw amid the crowd was a woman with dark, spun silk hair framing milk-white skin. Her perfect shape, encased in a white and silver gown that started low enough to display a generous portion of her rounded breasts, seemed to cast its own light. And her lips were dark red, her eyes pure silver temptation amid dark lashes. Kit had never managed to forget her features, though he’d tried for last twelve years.

A dream walking abroad in broad day light was a startling thing, a crazed thing. A young man’s dream coming to rouse his older self out of quiet cynicism created the sort of panic that sent grown men crying back to their cradles.

Smaller men than Kit, with lighter wit and quieter mind, might have gone screaming through Paul’s Yard, thinking themselves the butt of a joke, or the fools of an illusion.

But Kit, as his mind reeled, took a deep breath of the sweat- and garbage-tainted air of St. Paul’s, and took a step forward.

Silver had come for him. After all this time, Silver had come for Kit. She’d repented her curt dismissal of him, she loved him still, she remembered him, she craved his touch as he craved hers. She loved him still.

A joyous greeting starting on his lips, his mouth fixed in a manic, joyous smile, his heart beating on his chest with such strong incessant hammering that it might well be a prisoner trying to break out of Kit’s jaded exterior, Kit watched as the dark lady advanced through the throngs of Paul’s. Advanced towards Kit.

Well Kit knew that she’d recognized him, by her face turned in his direction, by her look of expectant knowledge.

And he, and he, who for so many years, in his solitary bed, had dreamed of nothing but her touch, had thought of nothing but Silver’s love, he met her knowledge with knowledge, her expectancy with expectancy and surged forward, elbowing aside strangers and friends alike, heaving them all away, leaving them all behind, wanting nothing, wishing for nothing but to touch her, to feel his arms around her once more.

He remembered the taste of her skin, the exquisite lilac perfume that rose from her. His skin remembered the electricity of her touch, the heart-rending sweetness of her kiss.

He forgot the threatening net that his secret dealing had conjured around him; forgot the death that hung over his head.

Surging forward on dancing feet, Kit saw his lady smile and then dart forward at a light, skipping step.

And fall into the dark-clad arms of a man ahead of him.

Shocked, startled, feeling as if the sky had broken to pieces and fallen upon his head with stunning force, Kit arrested his run.

The smile that had pulled his lips upwards didn’t so much die as fade, by slow degrees, like melting wax under a merciless sun.

Before he could think of what had happened, Kit saw Silver appearing to swoon in the man’s arms, and the man’s reviving shake, the man lifting her, putting his arms around her, talking to her with the earnest knowledge of old acquaintance, of old love.

And Kit, standing there, took a while, a long while, to recognize in that man that apprentice playwright, Shakespeare, the very-married country boy of Stratford.

Scene Six