All Night Awake (22 page)

“Ah, Shakespeare,” someone said. From the table near which the footman stood, a young man rose, holding Kit Marlowe’s elegantly penned note in his hand.

For a moment, still dazed, Will thought that this person was Quicksilver.

There was the same finely sculpted face, the same high bridged nose, the expressive eyes, the gold-spun hair combed over the left shoulder to the waist over a velvet suit of dark blue.

But Will knew that this was a human, younger and, perforce, less perfect than the lord of Fairyland.

This resemblance disquieted Will, who had just left the female form of Quicksilver in his room, after being unable to rid himself of her.

More disquieting yet was the way the lord gazed eagerly at Will and extended both hands to him. “Welcome, Master Shakespeare. Welcome. I’ve heard from my servants, all around, that you are the next great poet. A very sweet swan of the Avon.”

Will felt his face heat, as his cheeks colored. This had to be a lie, for who in London knew of his poetry?

Uncomfortable, he bowed and murmured something, even he knew not what.

And Southampton laughed, and gestured for a chair to be brought forth and placed next to his, and when it was, he sat and waited for Will to sit. “You are too modest, I know you are,” he said. “A rare quality in an accomplished poet.”

Will felt uncomfortable and hot in his worn suit.

He noted how everyone’s gazes fell on him. In some of those stares he fancied he saw something less than bonhomie.

“Kit says you intend to write a long poem on a worthy subject,” Southampton said, and as he spoke, his long-fingered hand tossed the die upon the polished dark wood table. He looked at the result and watched, with a small smile, while other gamers heaped coin upon the table in front of him. “Would you tell us what the subject would be, Master Shakespeare?”

“I intended it to be . . .” Will raked his brains and came up only with Marlowe’s suggestion that this be about a famous couple and much be made of their embrace. Out of this confusion, he murmured, his voice catching, “Venus and Adonis, your lordship.”

Southampton, who’d been counting the money, turned and looked at Will. “Indeed? You mean it so?”

He placed all the money again forward, indicating a new bet. “And when might we expect this masterpiece?” The hand that held the die and rolled them displayed as many rings upon it as fingers could hold—ruby and diamond and sapphire—so many rings, any one of which would have given Will more than he could expect to earn his life long even if all his dreams came true.

“I do not know, your lordship, for I lack the wherewithal to write it. I’m at the end of my stipend and must find other work.”

“Indeed?” Southampton asked, without turning, as he supervised the other men’s handing over of the money they’d bet.

Southampton raised his hand and gestured.

A servant appeared, carrying a small sack. Into the sack, Southampton’s careless, bejeweled hand scooped his win for the night. At a glimpse, Will counted over ten pounds.

The earl grinned at Will. “Poets should have the money to write poetry. Take this and write about Venus and Adonis. And mind you, compose me a pretty dedication.” He grinned at Will, looking, in the grinning, more mischievous and more like elven spawn.

Breathless, still expecting all this bounty to melt like elven gold, Will held the purse. “Milord,” he said. “The love I bear your lordship—”

“Oh, take it, take it,” Southampton said. “It is a trifle. Only, mind the dedication.”

He turned his back and forgot Will. But the other people in the room did not.

Servants, as though wakening to his presence, plied Will with honey cakes and cheris sack.

Unused to any drink stronger than small ale, Will drank the sack with relish and soon felt the dizziness that often comes with unaccustomed indulgence.

Around him conversations swirled, on matters of importance and state, on the pressing matters of the realm.

“But she is old,” one of the younger men said, “Gloriana is.”

And before Will recovered from realizing it was the Queen they spoke of, in such a careless tone, the same cultivated, measured cadences, sounded again, “Why, I hear she has grown so suspicious, like old women will, that she holds an old rusted sword in her room, and thrusts it into the arras cloth in the evening before she lies abed, to ensure no assassins hide beneath the tapestry.”

The rest of the room tittered.

It seemed to Will, dizzied by the wine and made sluggish by the unaccustomed pastries, as if too many eyes turned in his direction, to observe his reaction to that story.

He strived to show nothing. He was an honest burgher, a faithful subject, and it did not become him to mock royalty.

But later in the evening, a languid, black-eyed dandy approached him. “And what think you of the Queen’s age, and lack of heir, Master Shakespeare?”

Someone else, a creature with a sharp face, who looked somewhat like a fox, pressed close in. “Pray tell us,” he said. “We long to hear the opinion of the intellectual elite.”

Will, caught with a pastry in his mouth, choked, the taste suddenly sweet-cloying upon his tongue. “I think King James of Scotland will inherit,” he said. “When our Queen is gone to her reward and that no one will be the worse.”

“Oh,” a sharp, high-voiced creature to the left of him said. “You think then that King James will be better?”

Will knew not what to say, but someone else behind him attested, “Well, he is a man, and younger than the old woman. Why, it is said that, as in the days of her youth, she roams the streets of London, in disguise as a common gentlewoman, listening to the opinion of the people, for she’s convinced her councilmen deceive her.”

Will had scarce absorbed this when someone else asked, “What think you of that, Master Shakespeare?”

“I think that, if it’s true, then it’s a great folly.”

Will felt very hot and had reached that stage of light intoxication when every voice appeared to come from a long way off. “Anyone could kill her in the streets, late of a night, and leave the kingdom in chaos till an heir prevailed.”

In the silence that followed that comment, several people in the room traded dark glances. Will wondered what it meant. Had he said something wrong?

No, to his unfocused eyes it appeared more as though these people traded secret glances of satisfaction.

He could understand none of it, and he endured, attempting patience until, later in the night, he could run out through the sweeter, fresh perfumed gardens and hasten home thereby.

Scene 21

Will’s bedroom, late at night. The candle stands on the writing table, half consumed. The bed lies in some disarray, the cheap blanket thrown to the floor, the covers rumpled. Kit’s clothes lie scattered around the dusty wooden floor. Kit himself sits on the bed, looking dazed and lost, like a man who’s endured a blow to the head and hasn’t fully recovered. In his male aspect, fully dressed, his hair perfectly coiffed down his left shoulder, Quicksilver paces the room. The moon, circled with red, sends her light through the window, adding a blood-tinged cast to the scene.

“C
ome and lie down,” Kit said. “Why did you change aspect, even as I slept for no more than a moment? I can’t have closed my eyes for longer than a gathered breath. What can have disturbed you so in such a short while?” He blinked uncomprehending eyes at the elf.

“Come and be sweet, come and be mine again. Come and lie down.” And with what enticement he could muster, Kit patted the rumpled bed beside him.

But Quicksilver only glanced at Kit, as if in that space that Kit had closed his eyes and opened them again, Quicksilver had forgotten Kit’s name and visage and the joy of their erstwhile embraces.

How Quicksilver frowned, and how his countenance changed, moment by moment, like a motley moon.

Staring at him, Kit couldn’t help thinking that the change between male and female was a small thing and this changeableness, from smile to frown, from hesitant hope to utter despair, from love to scorn, the greater change.

Nor could Kit, despite his wishing to hold on to what had just happened and the recent memory of the elf’s kind welcome, help remembering the last time he’d been dismissed by this creature, and in what manner.

He stared, and waited for the ax to fall and hoped it mightn’t, and craved yet more of what had failed to evoke satiety, however greatly enjoyed.

“Quicksilver?” he said at long last. Not a call, so much as plaintive questioning. “Quicksilver, if you so wish to be, I love you as I love Lady Silver. Only be mine again . . . .”

The elf stopped in his pacing. Red moonlight bronzing his golden hair, he turned to face Kit, but what he said were not so much words as something that sounded like a fragment of lost poetry. “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,’tis lust in action.”

Kit shivered as sweat cooled upon his body.

He reached for the blanket that he and the elf had tossed to the floor earlier, in their exertions, and pulled it over himself. Caught on the edge of the bed, the cover would only come up at an odd angle, hiding Kit’s legs and little more. Not enough to stop the chill that climbed his body.

Once before had this elf dismissed him. Once before, had Quicksilver, in his most foreboding mood, barred Kit from touching Silver.

It was as though this creature were not one and the same with his lady love, but someone else—a tyrant brother or a harsh father—bent and determined to keep her under lock and key.

And yet, Kit recognized Silver’s gesture in the hand that Quicksilver lifted to the air and then let fall in a swoop. And those hands were the same, oh, different sizes and yet the same—they were so white, and long and more perfectly shaped than mortal hands.

Kit wanted those hands and their touch, the magical entrancement that came with elven love. He didn’t care in what form he got it—Silver’s or Quicksilver’s well-loved shapes—so long as he was touched by burning elven love and thus attained that state where he was purged of mortal dross, and reached the heavens with an immortal madness. “Come to bed,” he said, aware that he whined. “Come to bed.”

Quicksilver looked at Kit—an opaque look. Who could read those moss green eyes? Were Quicksilver human, Kit might have ventured to guess at pity and sorrow, and perhaps a touch of affection, a hint of remorse, a brief lament over lost pleasures, flying fleetingly across that gaze.

But Quicksilver was not human and all these emotions flashed in his countenance, one after the other, like shapes within the golden flames of a blazing fire. They darkened the glow a moment, then were gone. Behind them remained only a blank slate, a diamond perfection, a face etched by eternal fire and eternal ice, and not created or doomed by human love.

“No, Kit,” Quicksilver said.

Bending in a fluid movement, the elf gathered up clothes where they lay—Kit’s discarded hose, his breeches, his fine lawn shirt, his well-cut boots—and with cold efficiency, set them on the bed. “You must dress,” he said. “And go.”

Kit couldn’t believe he’d heard right. Even before, when Quicksilver had dismissed Kit, he’d never been this curt. “But why?” Kit asked. “In whose name should I leave now?”

“In mine.” Quicksilver’s moss green eyes seemingly turned one shade darker, and the soft mouth, so well suited to pleasant smiles, and pleasanter sporting, shrank upon itself and closed more firmly, before opening to say, “In mine. It was a mistake all, and I do regret it. It was only my loneliness and Silver’s loneliness, these many years. Or maybe—” The perfect face flinched in momentary pain, then smoothed itself out. “Ah. It matters not. What matters is that you must go, Kit. I bring danger on you. Nothing better than danger.”

Kit opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. He knew he looked like a fish, newly pulled from water and drowning in the air.

Quicksilver stood by the window, looking out.

Faint sounds of that nightlife reached Kit. As from a long distance off came a bawd’s high, insane laughter, and a horse’s mad gallop, and someone singing a bawdy drinking song.

Oh, to be out there and know nothing better. Oh, to be in the real life of true, mortal men. To smell the reek of urine and vomit and human sweat that pervaded these streets nightly, and not to long for the scent of lilac that came from the elves, nor for their immaculate, light-filled world, or the luxuriating of their touch.

Blinded by tears, Kit reached for his hose. With trembling hands, he pulled them on. Standing, he slid his breeches on and fastened them.

“Is all my hope turned to this hell of grief?” he asked aloud, in bitter, querulous tones born of his pain on behalf of that poor Kit who still seemed to Kit’s confused emotions to be someone else, some poor, deluded fool he hardly knew. “On seeing you after all these years, I thought, fool that I am, that you remembered me, that you had cared, cared enough to know where I lived and what I did after that cursed day when you pushed me, ice cold, from your sight.”

Kit fastened his shirt whichever way, then pulled his doublet on and started buttoning it, noticing halfway through that the button was in the wrong hole, and that the doublet pulled askew on his body, rising at a tilted angle at his neck, and protruding oddly below his waist.