Ill Met by Moonlight (27 page)

She would be a queen and have power such as the banished prince could never give her. And, from what Nan had understood, Ariel’s affair with the prince had never been a happy one.

So, let the foolish girl pale and ponder. It was none of Nan’s business, anyway. Soon Nan would be away from it all.

The king of elves looked at Nan, puzzled, as though he couldn’t quite understand the joy that bubbled up from her eyes and erupted through her expression, like a spring that pierces through hard rock, to rise to the surface of the thirsting soil.

“I have ill news to acquaint you with,” Sylvanus said, and stretched out his hand, palm up, as if expecting a peace offering.

Nan’s heart clenched upon itself, like a fist closing. Ill news? Had the miserable creature managed to undo Will? But no, it couldn’t be. Even beaten and expelled, Prince Quicksilver would defend Will, Nan was sure of it. There was a man—well, an elf, but man in all essentials—who would stand for justice. She had known it from the first time she saw him, alone and grave, dressed in black and somber, amid the gaudy, chattering crowd.

One of the flying fairies swooped down, carrying something in its tiny, perfect hands. It deposited the something in Sylvanus’s extended palm, and flew away, flashing white and yellow light that, for some reason, gave Nan the impression of a secretive giggle.

Beside Nan, Ariel gasped, a small, timid sound, betraying fright and little else.

The king of elves lifted his hand, and gazed intently at the object it held—which looked like no more than a droplet of water—spherical, transparent, minuscule.

Within the compass of his gaze, it grew, till it seemed to occupy his whole hand, like a monstrous, glowing pearl.

Within it figures moved, figures that made human sounds.

At first, Nan—surprised by the novelty of seeing images in an enlarged drop of water—couldn’t understand what she was seeing, nor could she make head nor tails of the figures that moved within the light. Then, little by little, she started to see it. Two people, a man and a woman, moved in that small globe, against a familiar backdrop.

The kitchen, the cat atop the keeping cupboard, all of it made Nan’s heart ache with recognition. Her home. But who . . . ? Then she recognized Will, and her eyes widened at how he held the dark-haired strumpet who melted in Will’s arms.

Her reason paralyzed, her brain stopped so that she couldn’t even feel justifiable ire, Nan stared at the two people making love within that droplet of water. She marked all that happened in the kitchen and followed with wide, horrified eyes, the couple’s ascension of the rickety stairs to the upper chamber and Nan’s own oaken marriage bed, the bed that Will’s aunt had given them at their wedding. The best bed Nan had ever seen. The best bed they would ever own.

Her breath caught in her throat. She had never seen Will so enraptured. Her clumsy, tentative caresses had never wrung from his lips such joy, never brought such shine to his eyes.

This woman, who was she? Nan didn’t know her from Stratford, and she would have known such a one, even in that small a rendition. This woman’s face, once glimpsed, could never be forgotten.

This is what Will had deserved all along—a woman of ethereal beauty, a fit target for his poems, a fit anchor for his dreams.

Beside the woman, Nan saw her own self, juxtaposed in her mind’s eye—graceless Nan, with no beauty, no joy, nothing. Her form was plain and her face as haphazard as a barley cake thrown together for Whitsunday. There was nothing to Nan but that plainness, that earthiness of field and forest. How could she compete with this creature of fire and ice, of sculpted joy and dancing music?

Before her eyes, the scenes of Will’s encounter with the dark lady unrolled, and Nan clasped her skirt within her hands and tightened them so much that it felt as though her nails would go through the heavy satin. But they didn’t. And Nan neither cried out nor screamed. In truth, there was no reason to. She felt nothing, except maybe a small relief that Will was not mourning, not in pain.

Another, stronger gratitude formed, that Will had found someone more worthy of him. Someone like him, young and full of that fire that always eluded Nan except in anger.

She now saw how their bed must have been boring for him, Nan knowing nothing and guessing little of the art of love—her imagination narrow and restricted in such things. Now she understood that their love had all been on her part. She had loved and he’d let himself be loved.

Nan, foolish Nan, tired of being an old maid, tired of her father’s house, had taken this beautiful youth and led him by the hand to fornication and fatherhood and marriage.

Mary Shakespeare had known it all along. Nan had been a harlot, a slut, disquieting Will’s dreams with her all too solid body.

Now Will had finally found a woman who would be perfect and inspire him to the heights of his abilities. Nan had always managed to bring him down.

Clasping her skirt hard, pressing the fabric into bunched wrinkles, Nan felt as though she’d died and been buried.

In those few minutes, standing there, watching Will and his new love, Nan had forgotten her purpose, her intention, the animating strength that had kept her going from disaster to disaster and from grief to grief all her life, unbowed. The wish to make her father love her no longer drove her. Her father was dead now and, long since, Nan had become accustomed to the idea that she’d never measure up to the strong sons he’d sired before her and of whom he was proud as of true olive branches, fit to grace his patriarchal table. And she no longer needed to be married.

She
had
been married, to the astonishment of her sisters and the head-shaking of her bewildered brothers. Married not in the grand wedding she had wished for, but in a small, confined ceremony under the falling snow, in Temple Grafton.

Oh, that she could undo that ceremony, and give Will the freedom he deserved, so he could pursue his joy with his new love. Oh, that she’d seen that falling snow, that lead-colored sky, for the omens they were. Oh, that she’d paid attention to Mother Shakespeare’s justified glares and muttering.

One by one, Nan reviewed all the half-whispered comments she’d heard from the woman since the unchancy day when Nan had intruded on the Shakespeare family.

Mary had said that Nan didn’t deserve Will. Faith, that was the truth. And she’d said that Nan had taken Will and made him hers, like a thief that robs from an innocent man. And faith, that too was the truth. And she’d proclaimed that Will was so much better than Nan, and could have found a better wife anywhere, around any corner, if only Nan had let him. And faith, that rang true also, and Will had found his better match as soon as Nan had absented herself from his life.

Nan held her teeth together so tightly that she could not have spoken had she wished to.

The lovers on the oaken bed shown in the drop of water had fallen asleep, still sweetly entwined in each other’s arms. The light went out within the drop of water, which returned to that which it was—a drop of water, nothing more.

“I’m sorry you had to learn it this way, my dear,” Sylvanus said. “But now you see why I must kill your husband.”

Kill him? Kill Will at the height of his joy, when he’d finally found sweet love? Nan started at the thought. “Oh, milord, no. You must not kill him. Let him enjoy his new love in peace and faith—let him be happy. I am, to him, as good as dead, being already in another world. The bond between us is severed and there’s nothing, nothing at all holding us together. Let him be luckier in his second match than ever he was in the first.” Her voice sounded distant and strange to her ears, as though her words were uttered by a stranger. She noticed Ariel, beside her, cast an amazed gaze in her direction.

Nan should be amazed too. From the corner of her eye, she marked that Ariel had regained color, and breathed rapidly. Did the show, then, interest the fair maid and perhaps awaken in her marble countenance an interest in the marriage bed? For the first time since Nan had seen her, Ariel’s eyes shone with animated purpose, intensity and joy.

The king looked as though he’d add something to his words, but then didn’t. He lifted his hand, and one of the flying fairies took the drop of water. He looked at Nan with a concerned frown, then at Ariel with an inquisitive glance, and then shrugged as though to signify that all women, human or elven, were insane and he, a mere male, not able to understand them. “Will you then, milady, consent to marrying me?” he asked Nan.

The words reached Nan’s ears, but didn’t penetrate to her brain. No association formed between the sounds, which, isolated, remained just sounds, with no meaning. Amazed, she looked toward Ariel, as if to ask what strange language Sylvanus could be speaking and what it might mean.

Ariel smiled, and, turning to Sylvanus, spoke in a gentle voice more persuasive than anything Nan had yet heard, “The lady needs time to think, milord. Surely you understand. Such a question after such news . . . It is too much and she can’t answer yet. But give her time in her room, alone, time to compose herself, time to think, and she will have an answer for you, I am sure.”

Nan couldn’t understand what Ariel said, either. Unlike the words of the king, Ariel’s words she heard—each well-pronounced syllable—but she could no more make sense of them than she could of the king’s. What did the girl speak of? Nan, compose herself? Had she ever been more composed? For the first time in her life, Nan saw herself for what she was: the compounded ugliness of her heart, the drab darkness of her soul. All her life she’d wanted that which was not hers, and, coveting the affection or the joy that belonged to others, she’d pushed herself into other people’s lives, and bent them, and twisted them, and made them that which they weren’t supposed to be.

Oh, that she’d never been born.

In the harsh light of this sudden understanding, she allowed herself to be led, like a child with no mind or purpose, down the endless corridors. Lady Ariel led her, Ariel’s cold little hand clasping Nan’s.

Grand courtiers, and fawning, well-dressed ladies curtseyed to Nan as she passed and Nan thought how foolish they looked and how sad it was that creatures so perfect should bend their knee to her, who was unimportant and pasty, and ugly—some warty thing grown from the ground, with no more charm and no more beauty than a fungus that springs after a rain from the side of a mighty oak tree.

Their curtseys and fawning attention so diverted her, that by the time Ariel threw open the door to Nan’s room, Nan was laughing, giggling at the top of her voice, a girlish giggle such as she’d never heard from herself.

Ariel gestured, anxiously waving her hands, demanding silence, pointing at the cradle where the babies slept.

Laughing, Nan collapsed on her bed, and still laughed, till tears ran down her face. When she could laugh no more, when strength failed her, when her tears stopped, she found herself staring at Ariel.

And Ariel, looking concerned and worried, looked concerned and worried for Nan only. Not for herself. For the first time in the days Nan had known Ariel, the elf displayed no great grief, no overwhelming worry.

Nan blinked at her, in surprise. It was as though the scene they had witnessed, captured as it had been in the droplet of water, had given Ariel some great, secret joy.

Nan frowned at the elf maiden. Had the images somehow been contrived? Did Ariel know something about this? “I see what the king showed us gives you great joy,” she said.

The elf blinked. “Oh, no, milady. Or at least . . .” Her small pink lips shaped a secretive smile, and she shook her head, and still smiled. “Or at least not in the way you think. I’m sure your husband is a good man and that he loves you. You must understand, though, that the glamoury of elvenkind can cloud any judgment. You’ve felt it yourself and only withstood it because you are a rare, strong woman.”

“A shrew, you mean?” Nan asked, but even as she asked it, her mind pursued another line of thought, like a dog that abandons his appointed prey to roust a bird from a distant bush. “Glamoury of elvenkind? Was that lady, then, of elvenkind?”

Ariel looked at her, and blushed, and gasped, and blushed again, and took in a deep breath. “Someone will tell you, anyway, milady. I thought they might already have, and I am surprised they . . . No, but there, I’ll tell you. That was an elf, yes, but not a woman. It was the prince Quicksilver, himself, in his other form.”

Sure she was being made sport of, Nan lifted her brows, creasing her broad forehead. Her eyes flashed in annoyance at being thus played with, like a child led into a foolish game. “What nonsense. That was a woman, not a man. And do you think my Will so thick and childish that he wouldn’t know the difference, when it came to it?”

Ariel giggled. “Oh, he would know the difference but there would be no difference. Quicksilver, you see, is a dual creature, male and female both and both in truth when he so chooses. Your Will would not know the difference.”

The room swam, as if water had been poured in and moved each object to unfelt currents. To the distance Nan had felt before, now was added an even odder discomfort.

The perfect lady of Will’s love was a perfect youth but, even as a youth, Nan thought, the prince Quicksilver far exceeded Nan in beauty and charms. Oh, let Ariel talk of the glamoury of the elven people. Was it not glamoury that Nan herself had cast over Will? Surely she’d never allowed his brain to perceive what he was doing, marrying an illiterate, aged spinster.

And then again, how it looked, now that Quicksilver had interposed his body to save Will. No wonder. No wonder. And Nan had thanked him. Feeling uncomfortably hot and embarrassed, Nan turned on Ariel with shrewish spite: “You seem very happy, milady, that the prince you love dotes on my husband.”

Ariel took in a sharp breath, then smiled, a small smile. “Oh, I’m happy, milady, very happy. You see, I thought him ice, but he loves. And he loves a human—a rare love, rarely felt by our kind. I know his dissembling look and that’s none of it, and I know what he does for calculation, but this could bring him no advantage. So he truly loves and there’s hope that his icy heart will melt to me yet. I have almost eternity to wait.”