Midnight Never Come (42 page)

“With all my heart.” Deven smiled up at one of his queens, and out of the corner of his eye, saw his other queen echo the expression.

It was a divided loyalty, and if a day should come that Elizabeth turned against Lune, he would regret occupying such a position.

But he could not leave the faerie world, and he could not leave Lune. So together, they would ensure that day never came.

Epilogue

R
ICHMOND
P
ALACE
, R
ICHMOND
:
February 8, 1603

The coughing never went entirely away anymore. They sent doctors to pester her; she mustered the energy to drive them out again, but every time it was harder. The rain beat ceaselessly against the windows, a long, dreary winter storm, and it was easy to believe that all the world had turned against her. She sat upon cushions before the fire, and spent many long hours staring into its depths.

Her mind drifted constantly now, forgetting what it was she had been doing. Cecil came occasionally with papers for her to sign; half the time she was surprised to see it was Robert, William’s hunchbacked little son. The wrong Cecil. Burghley, her old, familiar Cecil, had died . . . how long ago now?

Too long. She had outlived them all, it seemed. Burghley, Walsingham, Leicester. Her old enemy Philip of Spain. Essex, executed on Tower Hill — oh, how he had gone wrong. She could have handled him differently, perhaps, but when all was said and done he would never forgive her for being an old woman, too proud to give in, too stubborn to die. She was approaching seventy. How many could boast reaching such a great age?

She could think of some, but her mind flinched away. Those thoughts were too painful, now that illness and the infirmity of old age were defeating her at last.

“But I have done well, have I not?” she whispered to the fire. “I have done well. ’Twas not all because of her.”

She glanced behind her, half-expecting to see a tall figure in the shadows, but no one was there. Just two of her closest maids, keeping weary vigil over their crabbed old queen, periodically trying and failing to convince her to go to bed. She looked away again, quickly, before they could raise their incessant refrain again.

Sometimes she could almost believe she had imagined it all, from her visitor in the Tower onward. But no — it had been real. Invidiana, and all the rest.

So many regrets. So many questions: What would have been different, had she never formed that pact? Would the Armada have reached the shores of England, bearing Parma’s great army to overrun and subjugate them beneath the yoke of Spain? Or would she never have gotten that far? Perhaps she would have died in the Tower, executed for her Protestant heresy, or simply permitted to perish from the damp cold there, as she was perishing now. Mary Stewart might have had her throne, one Catholic Mary to follow another.

Or not. She had survived thirteen years without Invidiana, through her own wits and will, and the aid of those who served her. She was the Queen of England, blessed by God, beloved of her people, and she could stand on her own.

“And I have,” she whispered, her lips moving near-soundlessly. “I have been a good queen.”

The rain drumming against the windows made no reply. But she heard in it the cheers of her subjects, the songs in her honor, the praise of her courtiers. She had not been perfect. But she had done her best, for as long as she could. Now the time had come to pass her burden to another, and pray he did well by her people.

Pray they remembered her, and fondly.

Gazing into the fire, Elizabeth of England sank into dreams of her glorious past, an old woman, wrinkled and ill, but in her mind’s eye, now and forever the radiant Virgin Queen.

Acknowledgments

I owe a great debt of gratitude to the many people who helped me research this novel. During my trip to England, I was assisted by the following wonderful volunteers: from the Shakespeare’s Globe Library and Archives, Victoria Northwood; from the National Trust, Kate Wheeldon at Hardwick Hall; and from Historic Royal Palaces, Alison Heald, Susan Holmes at the Tower of London, and Alden Gregory at Hampton Court Palace. (The rooftop scene is his fault.)

I’m also grateful to Kevin Schmidt, for the astrology in Act Three, and to Dr. William Tighe, who taught me everything I know about the Gentlemen Pensioners, and mailed me his dissertation to boot. He is not to be blamed for anything I got wrong.

Finally, I have to thank Kate Walton, for needing someone to keep her awake on a late-night drive to the airport back in June of 2006. It was the first of many fruitful midnight conversations about this story, and it wouldn’t have been the same without her.

extras

Meet the Author

Perry Reichanadter

M
ARIE
B
RENNAN
holds an undergraduate degree in archaeology and folklore from Harvard and is now pursuing a PhD in anthropology and folklore at Indiana University.

interview

Why did you choose the Elizabethan period as your focal point for
Midnight Never Come
?

At a guess, I’d have to say my interest started with Shakespeare; I’ve always loved certain of his plays. (Surprise, surprise.) But it grew past that about ten or twelve years ago, when I read
Shakespeare of London
by Margaret Chute; that book approaches him as a working member of a company rather than as a great literary genius, and it may have been my first introduction to the world of Renaissance London. I fell in love pretty fast. It’s a fascinating period all over Europe, really — -ferocious religious tension and conflict, and yet despite that (or because of it?) such a vibrant time culturally. It offers the prospective author a lot to play with.

And Elizabeth herself is interesting because even in her own time, they deliberately built her up as this iconic figure, as a means of legitimizing her rule as a Protestant and a woman on the throne. It explains a lot of her cult following even today. I’m not as much of an idolater as I used to be; these days, I’ve done enough research to recognize her flaws. But I still have a lot of respect for her, and for the people around her. There are a lot of great names from her reign: Walsingham, Burghley, Ralegh, Drake, Dee, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and so on.

Plus, I like the clothes. Though I could do without the extremes of fashion: oversized cartwheel ruffs, enormously padded sleeves, and all the rest. Give me a streamlined Elizabethan look, thank you. (Which is more or less what I put the fae in.)

This novel grew out of your experience with a role-playing game. How did that drive you to create the novel?

Some time ago, White Wolf published a game system called
Changeling: The Dreaming
, which is about playing faeries in the modern world. I ran a game of my own in that system during 2006, but it ended up being pretty non-standard, starting with the fact that it went through six hundred and fifty years of English history — -
backward
. (I called it “Memento,” after the similarly-structured movie of the same name.) The Elizabethan segment of the game, originally set in 1589, grew like kudzu; it sprouted backstory starting in the mid-fourteenth century and repercussions going all the way to 2006, and more to the point,
it wouldn’t leave my mind
. Specifically, Francis and Suspiria wouldn’t leave my mind.

So I did some narrative surgery, lifting that part of the story out of the broader context of
Changeling
and Memento, and reworked it as a novel. A few key points of the plot are drawn from the game, but since we had only three evening sessions in which to play it, I had to do a
lot
of expanding, and things don’t happen exactly the way they did the first time. I also had to do some work to remove the
Changeling
-specific elements, but not as much as I expected; when you get right down to it, both the game designers and I were working from the same source, namely, real-world faerie lore. If you still see some similarity, that’s why.

What types of media influenced this story?

Shekar Kapur’s movie
Elizabeth
left a strong imprint in my mind (and I’m delighted to see he’s made a sequel). I recognize the liberties he’s taken with history, but Cate Blanchett makes a
fantastic
Elizabeth, and Geoffrey Rush ain’t bad as Walsingham, either. The Onyx Court owes a lot to that film; Kapur’s vision is very rich and dark.

I also think Invidiana’s the conceptual daughter of Maleficent in Disney’s
Sleeping Beauty
, though I’d written the whole novel before I noticed that.

Music was a huge part of writing this book. Since I made “soundtracks” (i.e. mix CDs) for my game, I started off with some songs already chosen; I also made playlists for different moods — -the mortal court, the Onyx Court, confrontations, romantic/sad scenes (funny how those two go together), church scenes, and tavern/city scenes. Those were playing on shuffle while I wrote, and then in the end, for the first time ever, I went the extra step and made a “novel soundtrack.” You can see the full listing on my website, and if you have a good film score collection, you can reconstruct most of it for yourself.

What can you tell us about your faerie research?

Without realizing it, I set myself a big challenge at the outset: keeping it English. Most of the faerie fantasy I’ve read, especially the modern urban fantasy, takes a globalizing approach, where a redcap and a kitsune and a leshy might all rub shoulders. That approach has a lot of fun potential, but for a story set in the sixteenth century, I decided I wanted to preserve regionalism as much as I could.

Which turns out to be harder than you might think: many of the most famous bits of faerie lore (like the
sidhe
, or the Seelie and Unseelie Courts) turn out to be Irish or Scottish. If you strip those away, then the next biggest category is probably Welsh. Strip
that
away, and you find yourself looking at Cornwall and Yorkshire. We’ve got precious little surviving faerie lore from central and southern England. But although it’s a lot of work, I’m glad I did it; my own setting felt more real to me because I could talk about continental fauns and muryans from Cornwall and redcaps along the Border, and how the Goodemeades are from the North originally, because that’s where stories of brownies come from.

I’m deeply indebted to the folklorist Katherine Briggs. Not only does she have two very useful books on general British faerie material (
British Folk-Tales and Legends
, and
The Faeries in Tradition and Literature
), she wrote one called
The Anatomy of Puck
that’s specifically about the lore of Shakespeare’s time. I couldn’t have asked for a better resource.

What about the historical research?

There was a
lot
of it.

I ended up with nearly three shelves of the small bookcase in my office devoted to nothing more than the books I was using to write this novel. Biographies, books about London, some literature from the time period, architectural histories . . . the list seemed endless. Like an optimistic fool, I believed at first that a time would come when I would say “okay, that’s it for the research” and be done. God only knows where I got that idea; maybe my subconscious was in denial. Research never ends. There’s always two or three more books that will be the last, you swear. I think I was reading William Tighe’s dissertation on the Gentlemen Pensioners while I was in revisions.

But the good news is, it’s fun. I can’t remember where I came across this line, but someone once said history was a cross between a disaster movie and a celebrity tabloid; I love that description. The further I got into the biographies, the more people came to life, with all kinds of quirks and warts and behaviors that make you think, humans haven’t fundamentally changed. The surface details, sure, but where it really counts, they’re not so different from us.

So I guess what I would say is, it’s a tremendous amount of work, but the payoff is worth it. As long as you enjoy history, anyway, and if you don’t, what are you doing writing a historical novel? There are easier ways to go crazy.

How was writing this book different from others?

Not since the first novel I wrote (which was not
Witch
) has a project eaten my head so thoroughly. Part of it, I’m sure, was the necessity of research; when I wasn’t writing, I was eyeball-deep in nonfiction. I’ve done spot research before — -reading up on poisons for
Warrior
, for example — -but never on anything like this scale, because I was never representing a real time period and place before. But I think it was more than that.

Like I said above, certain key events in the plot came from the game Memento. That served as a kind of outline for me, and normally, I’m not an outlining kind of writer. Between that and my own growth in the craft, I found myself going through this book less asking myself, “how is this going to get resolved?” and more “how can I make the resolution of this
more awesome
?” Add in the richness of the history and backstory, and the greater number of pieces on my mental chessboard . . . you get the idea. Pretty much every aspect of this book, down to the words I used to tell it, really challenged me. And you don’t meet a challenge firing on only half of your cylinders. I said in a post on my journal that this was the fourteen-year-old boy of books: it ate everything I fed it and demanded more.

Would you write a historical fantasy again? If so, what time period?

I’m pondering this very question right now, actually.

If anybody had asked me right after I finished the draft, I would have screamed “HELL NO” and dived for cover under the bed. But people were smart and didn’t ask me. Now that I’ve had some time to recover, the answer is “maybe, if I get an idea that grabs me.” I found it deeply satisfying, slipping my story into the cracks and open spaces of history, and as I said, the research was fun. But, as I also said, it was a huge amount of work, so it isn’t the kind of thing that I’d enter into lightly.

The question of time period is pretty wide open. If I were smart, I’d do more with the Elizabethan period, so I can make use of the research I’ve already done. Unfortunately, I’m
not
smart, and so I’m likely to skip off to a different century entirely. Running Memento introduced me to a broad swath of English history; I might latch onto any part of it. Of course, then there’s the rest of the world — -who says it would have to be England? But I boggle at the thought of setting something in a country where the best research materials wouldn’t be in English. Knowing me, I’d feel like I ought to get fluent in Arabic or whatever before I try to write the thing.

But all that is dancing around the question. Honestly? Right now the nineteenth century is trying to look enticing. I’ve got a couple of ideas, unrelated to each other, that would all benefit from me knowing more about that era — -even if some of them are modeled on that culture rather than being set in it. Only time will tell which ones will struggle to the top of the heap in my head and make it out into the light of day.

These questions were collected from Marie Brennan’s online fan community. If you would like to read more about Marie Brennan and the world of
Midnight Never Come,
please visit her Web site at
www.mariebrennan.net.