Ill Met by Moonlight (17 page)

He heard a scuffle behind him, the sound of rushing footsteps, and then the voice of the nursemaid, rolled
r
’s and broad vowels and all, raised in shrewish defiance: “I thank you, milord,” she said. “I thank you for saving my husband’s life. My blessings go with you, no matter who else curses you.”

Pain torturing his bones, mincing his flesh, Quicksilver gathered himself. He couldn’t stand but, kneeling, he half turned, bruised and quaking, to look at the stairway.

The woman, Nan, stood at the door, pushing through, as though to come out. Two guards held her back, pulling at her arms. A massed crowd behind her, too, as if more courtiers gathered there, seeking to pull her back, or perhaps to get a last gloating look at Quicksilver’s piteous disgrace.

Admiring the force that gave this woman the will to stand against the very power of the hill and the disapproval of the court, Quicksilver bowed low in acknowledgment of her words.

Then she did allow herself to be dragged back in, disappearing from view. The guards resumed their accustomed position.

With enormous, incomprehensible pain and small, aching torment, Quicksilver drew himself to his feet. The rain that fell ceaselessly as it had this whole afternoon, soaked him to the skin. What little magical power he had ached, rendered too shredded and raw by its separation from the whole of the hill for him to be able to use it, even for such a small task as keeping himself dry. But the rain revived and refreshed him. Its clean coldness washed away dirt and soothed the knot of pain his body had become.

Unsteady on his feet, swaying, he looked at the palace and tried to comprehend the enormity of what had just happened. If Sylvanus had killed him, it would have been more merciful. Instead, he had sent Quicksilver away, cut off from the hill, neither elf nor mortal.

Quicksilver shivered, contemplating his new state, his horrible fall. His little power would wear down as surely as a mound of dirt wore down under the storm, and the time would come when his power was exhausted and the craving for magic would consume him. In such a state, would not his now fallible flesh lead him to enormity? What crimes would he not be willing to commit for just a touch of the hill’s power? Would he not become one of those dark demons that humans feared?

Worse, the ancient legends spoke of even darker things, of a god-demon of untold antiquity, the Hunter who rode through the sky with spectral dogs, and chased down the supernatural prey of Fairyland. An elf without the protection of his hill would be all too prone to becoming such quarry.

Quicksilver blinked, shook his head at the thought. He’d never believed in the Hunter as such, nor had anyone provably seen the Hunter, for centuries untold. Elves like humans could make up stories to scare themselves. The Hunter was a myth, a word to curse with, and as such possessed only of the power that belief gave him. Quicksilver refused to believe. He refused to fear more than slow, slow, inevitable dwindling, and the temptation it would bring, the need to feed on human emotion, on human pain, and through it acquire a touch of power.

Quicksilver looked at the white palace that had been his parents’, and shook his head. Not him. Never. Rather beg Will to use that dagger of his on Quicksilver’s own unlucky heart.

And yet, he couldn’t do that. Not yet. Not while his parents stood unavenged in the land of shadows. For if Quicksilver had brought tragedy on his own head, by his pride, his rash interference, his lack of confidence in Pyrite, his parents had done nothing to deserve their deaths, and they must be restored to the wheel of life.

Quicksilver nodded. He might never see the inside of this realm again. But his brother would not reign in it long, nor happily.

Knowing what would happen, but willing to test it, to confirm the loss of all he had been, Quicksilver raised his foot to the first step of the stairway that had felt so solid as it bruised his body and macerated his muscles. His foot went through it, as though it were fog.

He had been severed from the hill, as unable to enter it as Will. It had become as impenetrable to him as to mortals.

Scene 10

The same back alley where the story started. Will reaches down to open the same wooden gate, then stops.

S
tooping in his accustomed way to open the familiar gate, Will stopped.

This time, no fear disturbed his thoughts, no strange premonition. His fears were all rational, all well-founded. The elf’s—Quicksilver’s—strange words at parting tortured Will’s reason, not his heart. Half-heard then, they now loomed upon Will’s mind obscuring all other thought.

What did John Shakespeare owe, and to whom? Why would the elf say that John owed
no man
anything? He’d said it after asking Will about the dagger.

Standing in the dark and the pouring rain outside his gate, Will pulled the knife out of its soggy sheath and tried to examine it. He remembered the blue spark that had flashed when the elf touched it, the eerie glow that contact with elf blood had brought to the ancient blade.

Now it looked like nothing much. A dirty old blade that Will had found moldering behind forgotten pelts in his father’s shop. Surely the cabalistic signs on it were just decoration, misdirection, trying to make it look older than it really was, and more important.

But Will could not be easy in his mind. He remembered the flash of fire, the fantastical, magical elf dissolving into a pile of wind-blown rubbish. Fingering the dagger’s blade uneasily, Will tried to remember the moment he had decided to intervene in the fight between the elves.

He remembered standing amazed, scared, while the two of them roared insults and attacked each other with their odd swords. Thinking about it, he recalled how his hand had strayed to the dagger handle and how, all unmeaning, he’d found his hand clasped upon it, holding onto it with intent and force.

Then, the urge to intervene had taken him, as though the dagger itself had whispered
yes, yes
, and sent a surge of confidence and an urge to do murder up his unwilling arm, to cloud his amazed brain.

Shivering, partly because of the freezing rain, partly because of the thoughts in his mind, Will returned the dagger to its sheath.

All these events were mad, he decided, and he a madman, led screeching and laughing with no reason, down a public street for the entertainment of passersby. What he should do is put the whole matter out of his mind, and open the rickety gate to his parents’ yard and go inside, to his lonely, deserted home, and have the rest of the fast-souring ale that Nan had left brewed, and eat the rest of the hard, stale bread she’d baked two days ago, and retire to his cold, lonely bed and not think, not think at all.

But Will had trouble not thinking. All his life he’d been like a curious fox, nosing here and there, and routing all about, not so much for the possible prize, or meal, or prey, but for the joy of knowing what hid behind every rock and peeked from behind every tree and the secret meanings to be uncovered in the proper and prim poems taught by moralizing school teachers.

He couldn’t lie down in an empty house and not know what made it empty and by what agency his Nan had been taken away. Nor could Will look at this dagger at his waist and not wonder at whose hand he had almost lost his life, or by whose power this dagger had been given the singular virtue of killing supernatural beings.

Taking a deep breath, he reasoned that since this weapon had come from his father’s shop, it must have been set there by his father’s hand. The elf had said that John Shakespeare owed no
man
anything. Did John, then, owe something to a creature not human?

A shiver ran down Will’s back. Had the supernatural world of the hill affected his life long before Nan had been seduced into it? Had John’s failing business been part of a hill curse?

Will’s gaze wandered to his parents’ back door, shut against the rainy evening outside. Even through the closed door, he could hear Joan’s shrilling and Edmund’s wailing.

It was possible that his father sat there, in the hub and wheel of family life, listening to his children squabble and to his wife complain. But, more likely, John hid upstairs, in his room, where he usually sought refuge from both ghostly creditors and his wife and his querulous offspring.

If Will went in through the back door, he’d run headlong into his mother, who, like a Cerberus guarding the infernal regions, would bar Will’s way and prevent his going upstairs and asking his father what this dagger meant and what contact his father might have had with the hill people. However resentful and unloving Mary Shakespeare might be to everyone else, she never vented her discontent with life on John. Though he was the architect and cause of their misfortune, by a perverse turn of strained affection, Mary would protect him from the consequences of his own folly.

With sudden decision, Will turned his back on the alley and the garden behind his family’s house, and, with renewed courage, walked in the pouring rain, along the muddy alley, away from the Shakespeare backyard, and toward Henley Street proper.

Despite the rain and the lateness of the hour, Henley Street still bustled with activity. Whateley’s draper shop remained open, lit by a meager oil lamp and crowded with customers, as was the glover shop of Gilbert Bradley—all the more prosperous since his friend and neighbor, John Shakespeare, had stopped tending his competing business. In front of Hornby’s smithy, under the awning, the tailor, William Wedgwood, stood leaning forward with every appearance of eager conversation.

As soon as Will walked onto Henley’s cobbled ground, his boots still muddy from the alley, curious gazes turned to him. In a town like Stratford, where he had lived his whole life, every deviation from routine was noted, every neighbor’s new affliction became a juicy topic of debate and comforting moralizing maxims.

With a suppressed sigh, Will realized he must be the object of much curiosity indeed. Surely by now Nan’s absence had been noted, as much because no one would have seen her in the daily round of a Stratford housewife, as thanks to Will’s mother’s good offices and sharp tongue.

All would know that Nan had left, but few would credit that she had gone with any gentlemen, as Mary Shakespeare maintained. Instead, Will thought, they would laugh at Mother Shakespeare behind their hands and tell each other that, in her twenty-six years of life, Nan had only managed to hook that young Will, almost a babe and as innocent. How could she now, married and a thin and haggard new mother, have attracted rich gentlemen?

No, Will thought, as he nodded at Mistress Whateley, who stood in the doorway of her house, gazing with wild expectation into the street. No. It would be thought that Nan had gone back to Shottery, at least until some wit uncovered news of her not being at Hewlands.

Will would be pitied. To the widespread opinion that he’d made a rash and unfortunate marriage, would be joined the idea that Nan couldn’t abide Mary and for that reason had left him.

Was it pity that Will saw in Mistress Whateley’s dark eyes? Will gazed at the woman until she turned away.

Perhaps not. Mistress Whateley looked scared, as did her husband, who attended to his customers in the still-open shop. Will remembered that the man had two brothers who had been papist priests, and who were said to still hide somewhere about.

So, the Whateleys minded their own cares, and might not even know of Will’s.

But Gilbert Bradley surely did. Looking out from amid his hanging pelts and the tables that displayed his collection of fine gloves, he gave Will a grave greeting, his eyes intent and sympathizing.

As for Wedgwood, the tailor—a suspicious character said to still have a wife in Warwick, whence he’d come, despite having got another in Stratford—no doubt the news he gave Hornby, the smith, related to the Shakespeare household. As Will passed the smithy, where Hornby stood with his hammer resting whilst his iron cooled on the anvil, both men stopped talking and regarded him with an amazed expression, which couldn’t have been more searching had Will been a marvelous being, a dragon or a unicorn, or another fantasy dredged up from faraway lands and the imaginations of ancient scribes.

Wedgwood, Will noted, held the sheers and measures of the tailor’s trade in his hand and, in his hurry to bring whatever gossip he’d brought to the smith, had thrust his feet into the wrong slippers—the left one in the right foot and the right one in the left foot.

Nodding his head and keeping his gaze averted, Will made it to the front door of his parents’ home. It was unlocked, as it would remain until the family went to bed.

Pushing it open, Will slid into the front hall. This room had seen better days, and Will remembered those days, when polished trunks of good wood, and fine benches graced it, and his father cobbled together great deals within, trading wool and barley like children trade pretty pebbles at their games. It still didn’t look shabby, or not as shabby as the Shakespeare lifestyle had become. There was one fine walnut trunk, ornamented with a fine pewter vase that Mother Shakespeare had held onto as the last vestige and proof of her own almost gentle birth. On the walls, too, there remained three of the painted cloths left to Mary by her prosperous yeoman father, Robert Arden, descended from the great Arden family who had once owned all this great region of fields and forests.