Any Man So Daring (7 page)

How did he expect Miranda — Miranda who had scant training in magic, and whom her fath... the immortal Hunter had forbidden from meddling with the higher books and spells in his library — to perform such a spell?

The spells in the Hunter’s library were, after all, designed for the Hunter himself, with his immense, cold, immortal power.

What would they do to a mere elf?

She tried to push her fears to the back of her mind, and yet they returned, sped thence by her aching heart.

She couldn’t do this, she thought. But neither could she bear the thought of losing Proteus.

Opening the gate and leaving it open, she slipped out of the castle, with Caliban, onto the black waves of rock outside.

Across an expanse of broken rock, the forest stood, wreathed in misty twilight.

Miranda tried to see Proteus amid the trees, but she could discern neither his look, nor his golden hair, nor any limb of him, and when she got to the forest, she found their usual meeting place empty.

Oh, had her evil uncle, the dark king of elves, found out where Proteus was headed? Had the tyrant stopped him?

Scene Four

The inside of a peasant’s kitchen in Elizabethan England. A broad fireplace, overhung by an even broader chimney, holds a brightly burning fire. Over the fire a pot of something bubbles with a merry sound. By the fireplace itself cooking implements sit — pots and pans of iron and of clay. In a corner, not too far from the fire, a cradle hangs upon a stand and moves slightly, now and then, giving the impression of a child or babe turning within it.

To the left, at a bench pushed near a scrubbed pine table, a woman sits. She wears plain peasant clothes, kirtle and shirt, with neither lace nor embroidery. Over them, a plain apron. She scowls at Will, who sits across from her.
 

“S
peak,” the woman said. “Or go. I have no time for this.”

She was young, with a rounded face. A white cap covered her brown hair. Her dark eyes, surrounded by bruised circles, gazed with the intent wisdom of a much older woman.

Will, sitting across the table from her, felt the power of that glare. He shouldn’t have come here. He shouldn’t
be
here.

What did he, Will Shakespeare, master playwright, the toast of the London stage, have to do with witches, with fortune tellers, with those who had commerce with dark forces and other worlds?

Oh, playwrights of the past had been involved in such things. Kit Marlowe had been a rumored member of the School of the Night-- that group of dark seekers -- the disciple of magic, involved with things beyond the ken or interest of mortal men.

Marlowe. Will felt as though Marlowe stood behind him, fixing him with an intent gaze. Will shivered. In this homey kitchen, redolent of herbs and cooling, Will felt cold. Yet sweat beaded on his upper lip. He found words. Innocuous ones.... “I came, good woman, in search of help in my trouble.”

The woman’s dark eyebrows rose, above her young-old eyes.

She flung herself up from the bench suddenly, with an impatient quickness that reminded Will of his own wife, his Nan, back in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Approaching the fire, she stirred her pot with a long-handled wooden spoon. “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,” she said, and turned and grinned at him, displaying white, even teeth. “Indeed. Much you tell me. Do you think people come to see me when they’re not in trouble? Nay, I tell you. When the thread of their life runs smooth, they stay in their homes, by their snug hearths away from the likes of me. Which trouble brings you to me, Master Shakespeare?”

Will’s heart skipped a beat.

She’d called him by name. And he’d not given her his name. It was the first sign, the first display of power from this woman. Will had come here, blindly, on Ned’s word. He’d not known what to expect, save cobwebs, exotic animals in jars and the hands and fingers of long-dead criminals on display or bubbling over the fire in noxious potions. He expected a crone, muttering curses and glaring at him with half-mad eyes.

Instead, he’d found a kitchen not so different from his own kitchen at home, and a young woman not so different from how his own wife back home had looked ten years ago.

But now, at last, she showed her otherworldly power, her true nature.

Trembling, Will repressed an urge to leave while he could.
 
If she had such power to look into his mind and heart, he shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t meddle with her. Yet if he meddled not with her, the ghost would stay with him. If there was a ghost.

“You called me by name,” he said. “How did you know it?” Because if she could read his thoughts, she already knew his fears. Why did she not calm them?

She turned around and laughed, an easy, young laughter that vibrated in the homey, food-scented air of the kitchen. “Not through my powers, Master Shakespeare, which, at any rate, I would disdain to use for such a purpose.” She reached to the shelf over the chimney and, from it, pulled a much-thumbed booklet, which she held up.
 

On the cover was an awful woodcut of Shakespeare himself. Beneath it, faded words proclaimed,
The poems of William Shakespeare, the sweet swan of the Avon, his Venus & Adonis & the Rape Of Lucrece.

It was not any edition that Will himself had authorized. Likely a print laboriously copied from the first editions and full of errors. Doubtless, sold more cheaply than the original print, though. As for the likeness, the best that could be said was that it was enough like him. Enough to recognize him.

“But if you have no great powers...” Will said.

The woman set her hands one on each side of her waist and grinned at him. “I did not say that. But I have more respect for my powers than to do tricks for you, like a pet witch, a tame witch, a juggler on the street corner.
 

“Those who do tricks, mind, are tricksters and swindlers and no-accounts, trying to get pennies from your pocket, nothing more.” She paused and looked wistful. “As for me, for years, I denied what I was. I would have no commerce with the supernatural, no part in witchcraft. I denied and resisted till the forces beyond took me and held me in their palms, and made a mockery of my reasons and senses. I denied till I ran about, with my hair unbound, insane and pursued by things none other could see.

“Then did I come to heel and break to saddle, and take on the duties that must be mine. For that I work. Not for money, but for the peace that comes with doing what I’m meant to do. I do not show off. I am no juggler.” Turning her back on Will, she resumed stirring the pot. “And therefore you’ll tell me what troubles you have, or you’ll be gone. There’s the door and yonder the road, and I’ll wager you know your way well enough to your cozy quarters, your respectable rooms.”

As she spoke, Will pictured the street outside: Shoreditch at its worst, with winding, narrow streets from which the hastily built five story buildings on either side excluded all sunlight and all fresh air.

The streets he’d walked to get here were unaccustomed streets for the respectable burgher he’d become.

He shouldn’t even be in this part of town. And yet he knew it well enough. It was but three years since he’d lived here, as had Marlowe, as still did many of the poorer actors.

The thought of Marlowe again brought a chill, again the feeling of being watched, and Will imagined walking that street, alone, back to his quarters.
 

And, step on step, Marlowe’s steps would dog his, and, thought on thought, Marlowe’s voice would echo in his mind, mocking Will’s worries, smiling derisively at Will’s wit.

Marlowe had been dead for three years. To Will, he was more alive than ever.

And Marlowe would write his plays through Will or — barring that — prevent Will from writing plays all together.

What, then, would Ned Alleyn do, having lost his investment? And what of the other actors of Lord’s Chamberlain’s men, good men all, some with large families.

How would they attract an audience away from so many rival companies, but for plays and words that stood above the rest?

“It is a ghost,” he said, half expecting the woman to laugh. “I’m prosperous enough, happy enough, but there’s a ghost that haunts me and stands by me and, day and night, will ne’er let me be.”

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even turn to look on him. Her arm moved steadily, the spoon in her hand stirring the cauldron.

And that silence, more than any entreaty, called Will’s response. “It is Kit Marlowe,” he said, and having said it felt like a bladder that, pricked, spilled its substance into the air and was left empty, purposeless.

Now the woman spoke, now she turned, now she let go of the spoon. Her dark eyes, serious, fixed on his. “And was he a friend of yours?”

“Nay,” Will said, then misgave, as in his mind Kit Marlowe’s look reproached him. “Or maybe yes. He was such a multi-folded creature, so...” He sighed, words failing him. “Too good to be so and too bad to live. He... I believe he meant me well, but he died before I truly knew him.”

She sat at the table, moving slowly, like a cat afraid of disturbing a skittish bird.

“How did he die?” she asked when Will remained silent. “I’ve heard such various accounts,” she said. “That he died of the plague, or that he died in a tavern brawl over a lewd love.”

“He died of his love,” Will said, surprising himself with it. Strangely, it seemed to him as though Marlowe now spoke through his lips. He remembered Marlowe giving just such a discourse on love three years ago, over a meal at the Mermaid. “Love is a lethal disease, and it claims more victims than are accounted.”

Now she smiled a smile as cynical as any of Marlowe’s own. “No. Faith. The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person 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 he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being taken with the cramp was drowned and foolish chroniclers 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.” She paused and looked at Will, and her smile turned to a slow, puzzled frown. “And yet believe you this of Marlowe? Mean you to tell me that, like a lovesick maiden in a chivalric tale, he sat like patience upon a monument, staring upon grief and, from this green and yellow melancholy, he thus sickened and died?”

Will shook his head. He’d never spoken of this before, but he felt as though Marlowe stood behind him now, and smiled upon his speech.

Had this woman been the witch of his suspicions, in a smoke-filled den filled with despicable relics, would Will have spoken?

She looked like Will’s Nan, and she mocked his turn of phrase and spoke with such familiar, gentle persuasion that he couldn’t help but confide in her.

“Wish that he had died thus, of such green and yellow melancholy,” he said. “By God, I wish that he had. Then would my mind be easier. But he was a sanguine man, and his love, like everything else about him, was a mad blaze of the fire that ran too hot and dry through his veins. He could not love mortal, could not be contented with that. It was too easy, that, and too clean. Too meek and small, such joy, for Marlowe, the great poet.” Will paused. He shook his head and for the first time looked upon Marlowe’s memory as upon that of a young man, too young, too rash, too foolish, who’d really never known anything about the world.
 

“The great fool,” he said. “He loved a creature who was....” And there he misgave, and there he stopped, his mind turning upon this point of much import: the woman to whom he spoke had been so curt, so perfectly possessed in her practical view of the world, so much like his Nan, that Will feared to mention the fairy kingdom and its denizens.

Would she not throw it back in his face? Would she not laugh, as an adult laughed at a child’s fantasy? Did she know of the elven kingdom’s which twined mortal realms, existing side by side, and yet not touching, like two sides of a single paper?

“If you mean to speak of the good neighbors,” the woman said, startling him, “I already know you’ve been among them. There’s the mark of their magic in you.” She stared at him, her eyes squinting like the eyes of an old woman who tried to discern some exceedingly small object in a dark midnight. “I would say the mark of their love, if I didn’t know better. For the love-protection upon you is a hot love, a burning flame of passion and selflessness and they do not love so. Their love is a cold thing, meager and small, like their gold that, once spent, changes once more to leaves and dirt, like their food that only makes one hunger for more.”

“It is love,” Will said, and felt a great anger grow within him, his gorge rising at the thought of this love, unrequited, as insulting, as hurtful as hate unprovoked. Had he truly, still, the fingermarks of the creature upon himself? “It is love and he who loved me--”