All Night Awake (65 page)

So Kit would die. Soon. No use deceiving himself any longer.

Again, as before, when Quicksilver had dismissed him, Kit Marlowe felt sorry for this Kit, this urchin of the lower middle class who’d climbed under his own impulse and by his own power to be a scholar, and mingle with the great ones of the land. To save his own life, he had betrayed others. To save his own life, he had tainted his own soul.

But which man, being human, wouldn’t do likewise, and hold onto sweet life, while others lost theirs? Surely no one could expect more of Kit than this loyalty to his own person.

For he who doesn’t hold himself dear, who does he hold dear, and what loyalty swerves his path?

And yet now Kit would die, for this sin he had in common with all humanity, and, after his dying, Silver would go on living, and Quicksilver too, one person in two bodies, and both bodies immortal and uncorrupted, like finely wrought gold, and sweet-polished silver.

Silver would go on living, and so would Will, and through the sweet, perfumed springs, the hot, invigorating summers, they would go on loving, their bodies entwined, their souls rejoicing, while Kit moldered beneath a slab in some forgotten church, or in the dirt of a pauper’s grave, somewhere.

Silver and Will would love and live.

The thought pounded upon his mind like madness proper, and rolled along his veins with screaming fever.

It must not happen.

Kit would kill Will.

He must kill Tremblestick. If nothing else, if Kit couldn’t save his own life, then he must, he must prevent Will from living on. If Kit couldn’t have Silver, then he must prevent Will from enjoying Silver and life, and all that Kit had lost.

Clenching his teeth so hard that they ground, one upon the other like millstones, Kit imagined himself climbing the stairs, taking step by step the steps to the top, and there knocking at the door, there demanding to see Silver, there putting an end to Will’s life, in that one fell instant.

But if he climbed the steps, would Silver not intervene, and cast a veil of magic over Kit and, perhaps, make her lover invisible or all powerful?

No, Kit thought, as the wind whistled through the quiet desolate street. No. He would wait till the morrow and near the door surprise Will and kill him, making a fast measure of it.

Yet Kit remembered the way Will had fought, and he hesitated. He wasn’t so sure he could take the provincial married man from Stratford, hand to hand, in combat.

This night, at least, he’d proven himself able to defend his life, and not averse to using force to do it.

Kit remembered the blows he’d endured.

And he remembered Will in the tavern. If that hadn’t been friendly companionship, it had been a close counterfeit. Whatever Will thought, he hadn’t meant ill to Kit.

Yet Kit must kill Will. He had to kill Will Shakelance, or never have rest, in grave or meadow, in life or death. Will must stop breathing and be prevented from enjoying Silver’s favors, from which Kit was barred.

The light went out within Will’s lodgings, and Kit held breath while his hatred, like a living thing, spilled out of its tight confines, and seized hold of his soul.

Oh, for a stronger soul, a stronger body, a dark, winged, evil intensity that could seize Will and drag him down with Kit into Kit’s own pit of torment.

The smell of the graveyard became heavier around him, as the chill wind picked up. A foul taste rose in Kit’s mouth.

He felt as though a cold, furry body rubbed against his ankles.

Scene Twenty

Will’s room, with everything clean and tidy and a few additions. On the bed, there’s a multicolored blanket, woven through with gold threads. The candlestick is gold. The glass in the windows sparkles. Lady Silver, in a filmy white dress sits on the bed. Will, standing, paces the room.

“Y
ou had no right,” Will said. He’d been received at the door by the Lady Silver, who’d pulled him into the room with every evidence of delight. But he’d pulled away from her encompassing arms, her soft rounded breast, the warmth of her body, and he’d rounded on her with his indignation. “It is my lodging, and you had no right.”

She laughed, a musical sound, woven through with delighted seduction, a sound that suggested fields in full flower and the red-blooded rites of May when country boys took their girls out to pick flowers and in so doing picked their flower as well.

“But my dear, it was squalor such as rats would disdain.”

“I am not your dear,” Will said. Seeing his room thus transformed had sobered him. The soft haziness of his drunken camaraderie with Marlowe was replaced by indignation, and the gentle glow of ale in his stomach with a burning, acid coldness. Not even Nan, with her blunt ways, would think to change Will’s living space like this, without asking him. Why, Nan didn’t even mend her suits without telling him she intended on doing it.

And this elf, with her laughing ways, her soft voice, would think to manipulate him, to control him, to make him into that which he was not.

That Silver had taken his room and changed it to be her own reminded Will of the high-handed nature of these creatures, who’d take your very life and redo it, ten times over, with hardly a thought, taking and twisting your words, your purpose and your intent to their own ends.

They were, he thought, like the child playing with insects, directing them hither and thither with a stick. The child might mean no harm and think not of killing the insect. Yet, neither does he think of the insect or of where the insect was headed before the stick came in his way.

It’s all a game for the child, a way of whiling away a boring afternoon, and in that game, played gamely, he might accidentally crush his victim without noticing. All in sport, and the child runs off laughing, but the insect, crushed beneath the careless boot, or the playfully tossed stick, has lost the only one of his brief lives, and is as dead as if death had been meant.

“It is my room. My room. My place, paid for with my money and maintained by me.”

Again the laughter. Though Silver sat still on the bed, her legs composedly drawn together, her hands resting side by side on them, yet her laughter contrived to color all of it with wanton abandon and put a spark in her shimmering silken hair, a glimmer of enticement in her silver eyes. “But you can’t maintain that you liked the way it looked. Surely, you must have meant to change it, had you had the money.”

“Had I had the money, yes, I would have changed it. Or maybe not, for it suited me well, and the money must be saved for Nan and for the children. It is still my room, not yours. You must not do things to my room, while I’m away. You must not do things to me for your amusement. You must not seduce me because you’re bored. You must not beguile me because you’re scared. I am my own man and have my own life, and my own wife, and my own true love.”

Silver sighed, and waved a dainty white hand around the room. The golden candlestick became again a chipped, much used clay one. The table that had been polished, gleaming rich wood, became the broken-down pine wreck it really was. And the window clouded once more with foggy grime.

Silver yawned, the lazy yawn of a cat, and covered her mouth with her pale hand, then stretched, also like a cat, in theatric manner. “Your boring room is back, Will. Do not fuss.” She lowered her arms, and smiled at him. “There, are you happy?”

But Will could not feel happy. His heart clenched with fear or something very like fear.

He cleared his throat. “No, I’m not happy.” How did he even know she’d told him the truth about anything? Had Silver truly come to town to rescue the world from Sylvanus’s ill intent? Or was all this a crazed game, a play devised by the elves’ eternal high spirits, seeking to call him once more into a mad round? Was this all a game designed to seduce Will to Silver’s soft eyes and softer body, her love that was no love, but a cold thing, and yet, as a cold thing, burned in multicolored splendor.

“Not happy?” The dark arched eyebrows rose up the pale forehead, and the silver eyes opened in round amazement, as if to say that surely everyone would be happy, whom she dared touch with her magic glamour.

Her lilac smell filled the room, overpoweringly strong, making Will’s head more confused than any amount of ale could do.

She leaned backward, and threw her shoulders back, displaying her womanly figure in full bloom, and smiled. “And what can I do, Master Shakespeare, to make you happy?”

Will took in her cleavage, the top half of it soft, and white, and bare, the bottom half cradled by flimsy wanton lace, the top creamier even than the white bottom, and promising heat and shelter. In his younger days, this would have been irresistible. But now his indignation, even at this one gesture, was stronger than his errant attraction.

He looked away, and stared at the window, and walked that way, and looked down at the street.

Few people ventured out on the street, this late at night, before the early morning rush of working people. And yet, the man standing in front of the tavern across the street looked like Marlowe, and might well be him.

Yet, what would Marlowe be doing there? Surely Marlowe had been in no state to go stand about. And Will had seen him home.

He must be in his room and well asleep in his bed, as Will would be if his bed were his own. At this distance, one man looked much like another.

“You said you’d be gone at night,” Will said, turning around to face Silver. “You said at night my room would be my own. Yet, here you are, and night fully underway.”

Silver smiled. “Well, tonight you were absent most of the night.” Her smile curled around an indefinable insinuation, even as her sweet voice dripped honey over him. “So I thought it no harm being here. And, surely, there is no harm in talking to you this way. We are friends, are we not, Will?”

Will, in whose bosom a vat of emotional poison boiled, threatening to spill over everything, looked at the fair elf with suspicion, and took her measure with weariness. He tore his gaze away the better to think, and frowned, and said, “If you wished to be friends, you would be Quicksilver.”

The soft laughter echoed in the room and Silver’s voice sounded like Quicksilver’s as she spoke next. “Why, Will. I thought you liked women better.”

Will spread his hands wide, as if to mean that he knew what he liked and he didn’t see any reason to account for it to this creature. He sighed. “Listen, lady, it’s not going to work. You’ve got me scared enough that tonight, on my way to see the Lord Southampton, I thought I saw the wolf. And yet, it was all a game, was it not? A game of elven kind. There is no wolf, and it’s all your deception. So, do you wish to tell me what really happened?” He stared at the fair creature on his bed, and managed to keep his expression composed to sourness and disdain. “Your marriage grew too boring, your life too steady, and you thought to snare the fool, Will Shakespeare to your bed, to amuse you with his bumbling folly?”

This arrow struck home, its barbs penetrating deep into the flesh.

The Lady opened her mouth, then closed it. The color fled her cheeks that, during his speech, had collected in bright crimson pools upon her pale skin. “Is that what you think?” she asked slowly. “Think you that of me? Think you I’m no better than a bawd who’d come all this way to seduce you?”

Will nodded. Indeed, he thought it, and the way she’d reacted only proved it further. For what, save truth, will make a creature blanch so? What, save ill-will, would make an elf look as if discovered by a mortal, and sore humiliated at that?

Silver rose.

By the soft candlelight coming from Will’s table, she flickered. It was an effect like the sun seen through winking eyelids. She flickered, and shone, and flickered again, and a soft heat permeated the room.

In her place, stood Lord Quicksilver, king of faerieland, fully attired in male fashion.

Only once before had Will seen that change, and that had been in his poor kitchen in Henley Street, and the change induced by the fearful heat, the glaring burn of forged iron applied to this creature’s flesh.

Now the change was voluntary, and, unlike then, when Quicksilver changed so did his clothes. The lord who took the lady’s place still wore white, but his clothing consisted of a creamy doublet, and shiny velvet hose, both of them embroidered with gold and silver threads.

White, translucent stockings molded the shapely, muscular calf, and a black dagger depended from Quicksilver’s belt.

Will knew, from having seen elven weapons ten years before, that this dagger would be crystal. Black crystal, honed to a point, beautiful and strange to behold, but for that no less lethal than the forged steel of men.

Quicksilver was taller than Silver, tall enough to dwarf Will, upon whom he looked, like a child judging a rebellious worm.

“I see the friendship I imagined is all to naught.” Walking over to stand beside Will, he reached with thumb and forefinger and pinched the candle’s wick between his fingers and out of the darkness he spoke, like a waning sprite, “I’ll be gone, now, Will. I see the battle for your friendship, nay, your regard, is lost, and I was foolish to think it possible. You shall see me no more.”