All Night Awake (62 page)

Kit’s collar felt too tight around his neck, and he rubbed his finger inside it, imagining what the executioner’s rope would feel like there, imagining that plunge from which there was no return.

He drew breath, and trembled in drawing it. If he were not the coward he knew himself to be, he would die now and save the good gentlemen of the Privy Council the expense of persecuting him; save his parents the shame of his trial; save himself his endless heartache.

What had life to offer to him?

Base fortune, now Kit saw, that in its wheel there was a point, to which when men aspired, they tumbled headlong down: that point he’d touched, briefly, today, in Silver’s arms, when he’d been the most admired playwright of London and had his lady love, besides.

In her arms, he’d forgotten his fears of the Privy Council, and his heartache and sorrow of many years standing. But now, now cast from her arms, he’d been cast out of fortune’s darling hands. And fear and death ran fast at his heels, hot wolves with foul breath.

Seeing that after that perfect, crowning moment, there had been no place to mount up higher, why should he grieve at his fall?

Let sweet death come and rid him of his grief.

Closing his eyes, clenching his white ceramic ale mug hard within his hand, Kit asked, “Will, only tell me one thing. Is your wife, indeed, your only love?”

No answer came for a little while, but when Kit opened his eyes, he saw that Will was smiling, with the smile of a man recalling pleasant memories. “Aye,” he said. “Nan and my children. Nan has a rough tongue, now. And she’s not always comfortable to be about. But she loves me, and I do love her.”

Kit stared. His heart hammered very fast still, from the answer he had feared. Yet, he shouldn’t have feared it. This man loved a woman with a rough tongue. And no doubt peasant features, work-ruined hands. How did other men do that, and settle for less than perfection? Kit had never understood it.

This time he kept his eyes open, as he asked, “And only she, Will? In your full compass from boy to man?”

This was as close as he could get to asking Will about Silver.

Will blushed, a coarse red blush beneath his coarse tanned skin. He looked away from Kit.

    
But, before Kit’s suspicions could quicken, Will shrugged. “In truth, you could say I loved a girl once. Her name was Catherine Hamlet, and we were both sixteen, but she liked not of me; her sights were set higher. A local wealthy yeoman got her with child and then reneged on his promise of marriage and she drowned herself in fast flowing Avon.”

Will’s golden eyes filled with tears.

This was Will’s sin? Will’s great shame?

Oh, sin indeed for which Kit would trade all of his virtues. He grimaced. “A sin indeed, but not for it, making you my enemy. And that one death not even of your doing. If I could count the deaths -- ” He managed to stop. What had he been about to say? Surely he wasn’t going to tell Will about the deaths he’d caused.

What an odd father confessor to choose, and what an odd confessional, even for a man who’d once associated with Catholics.

He drowned his too-easy-flowing tongue in his ale.

Will stared at him with wide, amazed eyes, then shook his head, as if to clear it. His voice was hesitant, as he said,

“You spoke of love? Who do you love? Am I right in supposing that you love?”

Kit sighed. This is what his need to confess earned him.

He plastered his best ironical smile upon his face and said, “In truth, Will, I love a woman.” He felt his cheeks color even at having said so much, and grinned a mirthless grin, displaying his teeth in such a fashion as a dog might bare them at an enemy. “Or maybe a youth, you see, I’m never sure. It is one of the puzzles of my life, that I must always second-guess my own heart, like a blind man walking through pitch black midnight.”

He saw Will’s eyes widen further, and winked at the provincial poet, which made Will frown and look away, quick as a flinch.

Kit Marlowe chuckled. “He who doesn’t like boys or tobacco is a fool,” he said. The one time he’d used this line before, to Tom Kyd, Tom had gone white as a sheet at such a bold statement.

Will only looked puzzled, staring across the table at Kit, as though Kit lived in a different sphere, a different world altogether. And maybe Kit did.

“I thought it was illegal,” Will said, in plain simplicity, and turned away and gestured for the wench to refill his mug. “I thought they would hang you for it.... Having commerce with boys or men.”

Kit heard himself laugh like a fool. Several of the drinkers looked their way, and Kit shrugged, and said, in a reasonable voice, “Oh, no, good Will, you have it wrong. Though it be, mayhap, a sin, if one believes in a God above who keeps track of such things, and though, mayhap, it is death-worthy, and the law so deals, the law is hardly ever enforced, unless it suits others to have you die thus, instead of for other crimes, in which they might have had a part,” Marlowe spoke wildly, quickly, words salving the wound that nothing could cure, and stopping, for a moment the thought of his own very real pain.

He leaned forward to look at Will’s too-wide open eyes. “No, indeed. Such vices, if you call them that, serve as good cover for darker deeds, deeds that indeed are vice and crime but where you will never be persecuted, lest you should bring down with you the high heads of state, the princes of the land, those who do such deeds every day.”

He took a drink, and wiped the froth from his upper lip to the back of his glove, as he leaned back on his narrow bench and smiled.

“The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good Will, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with the cramp was drowned and the foolish coroners of that age found it was 'Hero of Sestos.' But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

Will stared, his eyes intent, as though actually trying to understand, not so much the speech but what the speech hid. “And yet you love,” Will said when Kit stopped.

“And yet I love, but love is such a coil, that in its coil I pine like man insane. I’m beaten and captive, kept in chains and going without my food.” Kit drained his cup, and gestured for the woman to refill it.

Will finished his also. “And what presume you to do about this.... About your love?”

“What can I do about love?” Marlowe asked. He laughed, though he felt like crying, and his eyes hurt with the pressure of unshed tears.

Oh, for another minute with Silver, another chance to touch that silken skin.

Oh, to hear her fair lips whisper love, even if he knew it a lie.

“Fair is my love, but not so fair as fickle, mild as a dove, but neither true nor trusty, brighter than glass, and yet, as glass is, brittle, softer than wax, and yet, as iron, rusty: A lily pale, with damask dye to grace her, none fairer, nor none falser to deface her.”

He leaned forward, having got Will’s attention, and grinned into Will’s intent scrutiny. “Her lips to mine how often hath she joined, between each kiss her oaths of true love swearing! How many tales to please me hath she coined, dreading my love, the loss thereof still fearing! Yet in the midst of all her pure protestings, her faith, her oaths, her tears, and all were jestings. She burned with love, as straw with fire flamed, she burned out love, as soon as straw outburned, she framed the love, and yet she foiled the framing, she bade love last, and yet she fell a-turning. Was this a lover, or a lecher whether? Bad in the best, though excellent in neither.”

Will put forth a hand, palm outward. “Stop, kind Kit. You make me dizzy. That love is childish which consists in words. Be your love a woman or a man?” And, before Kit could take that opening for another word-glimmering rant, Will went on, “You call her she, so let’s say it’s a woman. If she woman be, aye, wed her and bed her, and sire upon her those children that will give delight to both your ages. If it be a man, then forget him, and turn your love to woman, where the law is lenient and the result life to enrich your life.”

Oh, life was so simple for those men who had never crossed the fine dividing line of sanity, the stark dividing line of honor.

Kit sought for words, but they came not. He gestured for more beer, and drunk it, and gestured for more anew.

He looked at Will, and felt like a puppy scolded, a creature berated who knows not why and whose mute gestures cannot broach the abyss between him and his tormentor. “Well, you have comforted me marvelous much,” he finally said. Oh, how he longed to
be
Will. To be Will, with his fat wife back at home, and his little provincial brats. But the fork in the road Kit had taken led not to cottage love and contented family. “Marvelous much, and yet, you see, I thought you as fickle as I. Yes, for a moment, I thought us rivals in my love. That was why, good Wagglance, I came for you with dagger and hot anger.”

“Too dear a witness for such love, Marlowe,” Will said. “When you do not even know who you love and when I’ve been a rival for no woman’s love, save loving my Nan, which I do prize.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right and your words bear witness to an excellent mind,” Marlowe said, and heard irony march through his own words, giving them better cadence and strength. “You’ll do well in London, mark my words.” He smiled at his own lie.

“And you’ll never gather enemies, such as I have, that have collected all around, and eye my death as a very treat, a feast to be savored in advance. Treason dogs my heels more than even love, and why should I worry on love, when likely I’ll be dead before the week is out?

“All comfort go with you! For none abides with me: my joy is death, death, at whose name I oft have been afraid, because I wished this world's eternity. But I can’t have it and I’m done with it. You have nothing to fear from me. Only, I’d know, that woman with whom I saw you.... In Paul’s yard.... How long have you known her and in what capacity?”

Will’s blank, blank look turned on him.

“Woman?” he asked. “A woman, Marlowe? You do but mistake me. It was another you saw and not myself. I have not with woman consorted, with woman met, since I left my Nan in Stratford these many months hence.”

Kit exhaled. So, Will had been foolishly manipulated by the magic of faerieland and himself unknowing.

Well, at least Kit was not such a fool. “Maybe I did,” he said, “Maybe I did indeed mistake you. Let’s have more ale.”

And more ale they had, and Will started asking Kit about plays and their construction and how one went about making a play that captured the audience as Kit’s did.

Half laughing, half flattered, Kit told him more than he ever before had, of his learning, his studies, and the bitter brew of intrigue and fame that had been his whole life these many years.

Late into the night, while the only other occupant remaining in the tavern -- a man -- snored over his spilled ale, and when Kit’s head was fair dizzy with ale, Will leaned across the table, and started, in slow cadence, one of those songs men sing over ale, “When that I was and a little tiny boy, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain,” he sang, his voice picking up strength. “A foolish thing was but a toy, for the rain it raineth every day.” The snorer beside him twitched not.

Will lifted his eyebrows and his mug, daring Kit to pick up his challenge and improvise the next verse.

Kit smiled, bemused. As a little boy, he’d watched his father and his friends play this game. But he’d been a quiet child, apart from the euphoria, the socializing of such convivial evenings. And later, he’d been a learned child, who intimidated his father and his father’s friends.

Now, at long last, in the maturity of his years, he was being included in a game men played with their tavern friends. He grinned broadly. Only Will Shakespeare would dare do this with someone of Kit Marlowe’s jaded reputation.

Grinning, Kit picked up the tune in the voice that had made him the star of Canterbury choir -- a clear, resounding voice, if made lower by age and manhood -- “But when I came to man's estate, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain, 'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate, for the rain, it rained every day.”

Will raised an eyebrow and smiled, as though asking if that was the best Kit could do, and Kit chuckled.

Will’s turn to wink -- and not many people had winked at Kit in recent years -- and pick up with “ But when I came, alas! to wive, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain, by swaggering could I never thrive, for the rain, it rained every day.”

Kit picked it before the last line had died in the still, ale-smelling air. “But when I came unto my beds, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain.” He grinned at Will, and lifted his ale mug in silent salutation. “With toss-pots still had drunken heads, for the rain, it rained every day.”

Will laughed at that, and Kit laughed in return. For a moment, in the glow of the ale, Kit relaxed and thought this was what having friends felt like and how he would like to be friends with Will.

Kit could picture many meetings like this. They’d dine and drink, walk together, and talk. Kit could improve Will’s mind and Will’s writing. They could discuss poetry, and Kit could learn the easy joys of undemanding friendship that required neither secret nor betrayal.

It was only a moment, in the afterglow of ale.

Will gave Kit his dagger back, and they clasped hands and clapped each other on the shoulders.

But when they left the ale house, the cold wind sobered Kit and, watching Will retreat, in unsteady steps, down the street, Kit asked himself whether Will would be going to Silver’s embrace.

The thought hurt more than he could bear and suddenly, suddenly, Kit needed to know. He’d never sleep if he didn’t know.

Silently, stealthily, in the way of one used to betrayal and skulking down dark alleys, Kit Marlowe followed Will Shakespeare.