All Night Awake (64 page)

The words poured from her mouth, before she could think how she would say them, and she wiped her tears on the back of her pearl-embroidered sleeve, having quite forgotten a handkerchief.

She told Nan everything, everything, from the day she had married Quicksilver, and Quicksilver had agreed to vows of fidelity and -- in the sweet embraces of that night when their nuptial day was done, and tapers burned to bedward -- had promised never to change into Silver again.

And how those promises had got broken, and how sullied, and how she’d come to despise where she had loved, and yet loved still, and how and what dread threatened faerieland, if she couldn’t resolve her differences with Quicksilver. Quicksilver who was absent and away, pursuing a threat that might be no threat.

At first Nan heard attentively, her head supported on her hand, her elbow resting upon the table. Halfway through, though, she stood up and, stirring the embers in the fireplace to a blaze, got something from a jar, and something else from a basket, and yet something from a small box, put all of it into the smaller iron pot, and set it on the fire.

Ariel stopped, staring at Nan

Nan turned back, “I’m listening, milady. I’m listening.”

“Oh,” Ariel said. And then, “I don’t know what else to tell you. I don’t know what else to do. I think I love Quicksilver ever -- haven’t I ever loved him? But then how can all these people think I love him not? Is to see a man’s defects not to love him? Is to wish him different to deny him? I do not wish my lord dethroned and sent from the hill to die in exile. I do not wish him any ill. I only....”

“You only wish he weren’t himself,” Nan said, and, dipping a long-handled spoon into her brew poured it into two cups and brought them to the table, setting one in front of Ariel.

Ariel looked up. “I didn’t say that,” she said, surprised, shocked at Nan’s conclusion. “Who should he be, if not himself?”

“Ah,” Nan said. She blew upon the contents of her mug, and took a sip. “Let me tell you, milady, how I married Will when he was yet the sketch of a man, the barest sketch, drawn with God’s own hand upon a boy’s body and a witty but unwise mind.”

Ariel blinked. What did this have to do with her? She surveyed the red clay cup in front of her, that was filled with a foamy mixture that smelled sweet and pungent with herbs. She smelled it, but dared not taste it.

“It’s not a potion, milady,” Nan said, noticing her confusion. “Just ale with spices and honey.” She smiled. “It makes it more companionable, and if you’re going to come in and announce yourself as my friend, you’ll get the treatment my friends get. Drink it; it will not harm you.”

Ariel took the mixture to her lips and tasted it. It was not unpleasant, and warmed her. She hadn’t realized how cold she’d felt. The night was warm and yet Malachite’s treason had set her trembling, made her colder than she dared admit.

Had she liked the fool changeling? Were his hopes founded on that much fact?

“I said,” Nan resumed. “That when I married Will he was little more than a boy and, as he grew, I became aware Stratford wouldn’t hold his ambition. He wanted to write poetry and be recognized for his wit and mind. He wanted to go on the stage and be applauded. When the itinerant companies came by, Will would follow the actors around, and drink in their talk, like a child begging for a sweet.” Nan looked up, her blue eyes staring, unflinching. “I’m not an easy woman to live with, either, and I know we often had words when we need not and we.... Ah, but that’s not what called Will forth. It was this thing that he must be, this thing that he needed and I could not give him.

“I could have kept him. I could have kept him here, made him aware of his duty to his children. But what good is a husband kept at home, when he wishes to extend his wings elsewhere? It’s like clipping the hawk’s wings and keeping him blinded and cowed by the hearth. It might keep its owner fed, and serve his purpose, but it makes for a miserable hawk, who cannot soar to the skies. And the hawk I loved in Will must be allowed his chance.

“So, to keep him, I let him go. And he’s mine still, though he be in London.” She smiled at Ariel. “And I wish the Lady Silver much luck, if she thinks to turn his love from me, because even in London, he’s left his heart behind here, with me and Hamnet, and Susannah and Judith.”

Ariel gulped sweet ale and tried to think how to explain to Nan how different her cases were. “My husband does not wish to be a poet. He wishes to be a lady. At least half the time he does. This is not an ambition I can brook. Were kisses all the joys in bed, one woman would another wed. But they’re not, and I do not wish to.”

Nan laughed. “You’re not married to Lady Silver, milady, and yet she is the component and part of the man you wed, the man you say you love.” She shook her head, and put her hand out to touch Ariel’s wrist. “No, hear me out. I feared this would happen even as I saw you attain your heart’s desire in marrying your husband. For it was not Quicksilver you loved, flawed Quicksilver, bright and flashing like Silver and mutable like mercury, who can change from male to female and from bright to dark, from morning to night and night to morning again. No. You loved the Quicksilver you imagined. And that, milady, is your mistake. You love not the man you married; you do not even know him.”

“Ten years we’ve slept in adjoining rooms,” Ariel protested.

“With the door closed against what you did not wish to know.”

Ariel drank her ale. She didn’t wish to think about it. She’d come to Nan for comfort. She’d come to Nan to be told that she didn’t deserve this calamity of dissension in her hill, a revolution brewing, Quicksilver’s servant turned upon them, and Quicksilver himself unfaithful to her. And Nan would make out that it was all Ariel’s fault.

“He betrayed me,” Ariel said. “Silver did. With a stranger.”

Nan sighed. “And yet, had he been allowed to be Silver, now and then, would not Silver have been kept under control? And would he not come to you, Quicksilver again, at day’s end? Isn’t Silver part of who he is? Shouldn’t you at least befriend her, if you love him? Think of her as a sister of your husband? Would you not wish to know her, had she shared his childhood and his growing up secrets? Yet she shares more than that, the mind and heart of your lord. And you know her not, but treat her as his Mistress that must be kept hidden and away from you. Who betrayed whom first, milady? And who is the worse abused?”

Ariel opened her mouth to reply, but found no words. Tears fell from her eyes.

She wasn’t sure she agreed with Nan, yet Nan seemed to speak the truth. And Nan said Will still loved Nan, though he live as far away as London.

Ariel couldn’t trust her husband outside the palace.

“Now, it’s late,” Nan said, collecting the empty cups and setting them atop the cooking table. “And I’ll to my bed. If you believe what I tell you, or even if you don’t, but you wish to remain married, you’ll to your husband and beg his forgiveness, and learn to know him.”

“But the rebels,” Ariel said. “And the wolf.... If there is a wolf....”

Nan shrugged. “Alone you cannot face them. And without your love I think neither can your husband. I think you’re right and his weakness is that lack of support from those who should give it. So hie to him and with him make peace. You cannot save the world while you live in a marriage that is no marriage with a man you know not.” She banked the ashes around the glowing coals, and turned to Ariel, and waited till Ariel got up, and escorted her to the door.

At the door, she smiled, and pulled Ariel into an unexpected, friendly embrace and, brushing her dry lips against Ariel’s cheek, in the reassuring gesture of an older friend or relative, she said, “Oh, and when you see Will, tell him I’d like him to visit before Michaelmas, or his son will forget his name.”

With that, she pushed Ariel gently out the door, much as she’d pushed Hamnet towards the hallway, and closed the door behind her.

Ariel heard the bolt shoot home.

"When she saw Will.” The nerve of the woman! What made her think that Ariel would be going to London and seeing Will?

Standing outside, in the cold of night, Ariel thought of going back to the hill and facing the duplicitous Malachite, the threatening centaurs, all on her own. Or going to harsh, iron-cluttered London, and from there fetching Quicksilver.

The thought of Quicksilver made her feel warm, like a gentle fire in a stormy night.

Oh, curse it all. She’d go to London. And there, following her lord’s magic, track him down and try to salvage the unsalvageable.

Scene Nineteen

The street outside Will’s rented lodgings. Though it’s still night, a sliver of pink shows in the east, and the taverns are all closed and the whole street silent, save only for those stirrings of the people who tidy up after the amusement of others: tavern wenches, bear keepers, horse dealers. It is, in fact, one of the very few times when all is silent in Southwark, that short moment between the time when revelers retire and the time the day’s workers rise to do their working. Once more, Marlowe loiters beneath the sign across the street.

I
f Will had thought to fool Kit Marlowe, more the fool he.

Kit Marlowe thought this, but he did not feel gloating, nor victorious over Will’s low cunning or attempt at deception. Instead, facing Will’s lodgings, Will’s lodgings, where the fair Lady Silver had just opened the door to allow Will into the room, Kit felt tired, and old, and used and abused by those circumstances of time and of affection that had made the provincial of Stratford preferred above him.

He’d seen the lady clearly, as she’d opened the door and stepped out, for a brief moment, to let Will in. And he’d seen Will, too. Though too far away to see his expression, he guessed at Will’s eagerness by the way he clutched the lady’s shoulder and pulled her in.

Standing there, Kit felt as though his whole world had shattered, this time irremediably.

Will’s actions were not those of a puppet mesmerized by faerieland magic.

Kit should have killed Waggstaff while he had a chance. But he’d believed the truth of his words. He’d thought, foolishly, that Silver must have used her magic on this creature and that Will, poor clod that he was, had failed to see her, or, having seen her, to remember her.

Kit had been fooled.

Not for the first time.

Kit clenched his fist around the handle of his dagger. A thin streak of light dawned in the east, but as yet the night was dark and secret, and a cold, cold breeze picked up as if out of nowhere, bringing with it a loathsome reek, like the smell of an opened tomb.

Two houses down from where Kit stood, a door was firmly closed and, across it, a nailed board proclaimed that the tavern was a haunt of the plague and that any entering it would not only be risking contagion but breaking the law as well.

The sign over the door swung forlornly in the wind, showing a man in a blue cloak, holding an harp. The Words beneath read:
The Minstrel
.

The brightly painted sign coupled with the plague notice mirrored Kit’s state of mind.

He too went about well dressed and with a smile fit to attract, and yet what corruption lurked inside, and how much danger did he not pose to the unwary entering into his sphere?

The thought came again that he should have killed Will, and he knew -- in the end -- that part of what had stayed his hand had been the memory of all those he’d betrayed, all the men he’d sent to their deaths on the block and gallows: the Catholics he’d turned in over the Babington conspiracy -- which had probably been as much an invention of Walsingham’s as anything else, and his protestant, nay, his fanatic puritan friends whom he’d likewise betrayed to the inhuman arm of state religion.

A voice in him, a meek, small voice, the voice of the child who had grown up as a cobbler’s son, in the shade of the great cathedral at Canterbury, piped up to say that he’d had no choice, that had he not betrayed he would have been betrayed, his motives and reasons as certainly questioned as his companions’. And they would have found more to condemn in him than in any other, as they were about to find more now.

Because Kit Marlowe, with his mind that had ever been his one pride, and his pride in the workings of what he prided himself in thinking his excellent reason -- Kit Marlowe had always strayed too near the dangerous edge of atheism, always stepped too close to the abyss of the dangerous thought, the lonely doubt of the man who walks alone, away from the protective walls of faith.

And now Kit had taken it too far. He’d die for it.

But Silver would go on living.

Looking up at the window where the candle light winked, obscured by bodies that crossed between it and the windowpane, Kit wondered if Silver and Will were making love -- her perfect body entwined in his too-homely one, his great balding head leaning over her black silk hair, her white silk thighs.

Soon Kit would be arrested, and tried, and probably executed.

If things were allowed to go that far, he thought, if his sometime friend and patron, Thomas Walsingham didn’t kill him first, in some street corner, in some carefully faked brawl, to avoid Kit’s revealing under torture all the dealings of the Walsinghams. Dead, Kit could reveal nothing about all the times that the service of the Queen’s majesty had been more excuse than purpose, and the true purpose had lay in the lining of the Walsingham purse, the enriching of the Walsingham family.