Ill Met by Moonlight

Ill Met By Moonlight

Sarah A. Hoyt

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Ill Met By Moonlight © 2001 by Sarah A. Hoyt

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

eISBN: 978-1-61824-038-5

T
O MY HUSBAND,
D
AN
H
OYT

“One half of me is yours, the other half yours—

Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,

And so all yours.”

The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.16–18

Prologue

Scene:
A vague place, the stage fogged over with thick white clouds that veil the backdrop, turning it into mere shadows and shapes, half perceived as though in a dream.

Enter:
An elegant young man, flawlessly attired according to Elizabethan fashion, in black velvet breeches, hose and doublet. The disarray of his auburn hair, his hand covering his left eye, the blood that trickles from beneath his fingers to drip onto his broad, fine white lawn collar—all give witness to recent calamity.

Yet he speaks in the composed tones of an impersonal narrator.

“Between what happened and what didn’t happen, what could have happened exists like a dream, suspended halfway between the safe, dark night of illusion and the harsh dawn of wakening reality.

“To peaceful Stratford, where we lay our scene, let us then go, and, within Arden Forest’s ancient confines watch the drama about to unfold, the drama of treason, and love, and star-crossed passion.

“There, two households exist, nay, two kingdoms, which side by side have endured these many centuries
with no strife. Now, mutiny breaks out between them.

“Two households, alike in dignity. Two young men chafe, each under his destiny, and curse the stars that have brought each to his subservient position.

“Will their travails change either? Can ill will bring good? Does treason ever turn good to ill? Is there a price to pay for elven love? Does deceit leave its mark upon the mind? Or can power be won at no cost?

“Watch, kind ladies and fair gentlemen, the fearful clash of these two realms which is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage, the which, if you with patient ears attend, what here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.”

Scene 1

An Elizabethan town of whitewashed wattle-and-daub buildings, nestled in the curve of the gentle-flowing Avon. Ducklings waddle in the current and pigs walk the streets. Tall elms grow amid the houses, giving the very streets the feel of woodland glens. In an alley at the edge of town a poorly dressed young man stoops to open a garden gate.

W
ill stopped at the entrance to the garden, his hand on the rickety wooden gate. A feeling of doom came over him, like a presage of some evil thing.

A young man of nineteen, with overlong dark locks that curled on the collar of his cheap russet wool suit, Will felt as if he were about to walk into a trap. He looked around anxiously for what the trap might be, but saw nothing amiss.

The green garden ahead of him lay undisturbed. A few bees, from the hives next door, buzzed amid the flowers. The reddish rays of the setting sun burnished the flowers and made the vegetables a deep green. A fat brown chicken walked along the garden path, pecking at the ground.

Will shook his head at his fear, yet his fear remained. With his feet, in their worn ankle-high boots, solidly planted on the mud of the alley behind his parents’ property, he looked into the sprawling garden for a hint of the great unnamed calamity that he knew awaited him just around the corner.

Half of him wanted to run in through the garden; the other half wished to hide, with animal cunning, behind the wall and spy . . . spy, he knew not on whom nor for what.

His mother’s stories must be getting to him, her dark muttering about the velvet-clad gentlemen who visited Nan in Will’s absence.

Will shook his head again and half chuckled at himself, but his chuckle echoed back strangely, visiting his ears like the cackle of a gloating demon.

He raised his white-gloved hand to his face and stroked the nest of soft hairs that only a young man’s pride could mistake for a beard.

Nonsense. Sick fancies born of tiredness. It was all because of his job in Wincot, wearing him low enough that fancies preyed on his mind. His work, supervising the smallest children at their learning of the letters and numerals, would be dreary and arduous enough, but the two-hour walk each way to Wincot and back made it crushing.

This very day, Will had left Stratford at the crack of rosy dawn, when the pink tints of morn were no more than a promise in the east. Now, he came back home with the sun turned to bleeding glory in the west and night closing in on all sides, like creditors surrounding a penniless debtor.

Little wonder, then, that Will’s mind should be filled with presages and wonders, with fears and unexplained dread. Little wonder.

He needed to rest and he longed for his bench by the scrubbed pine table; for the soft bustle his wife, Nan, made by the kitchen fire—her skirt kilted up on the left, displaying the length of her straight limbs and allowing her to move freely. Even now, she’d be clacking clay pans and stirring enticing smells from the poor vegetables and meager eggs, those homely, cheap ingredients, the best Will could provide for her. He longed for his newborn daughter, Susannah, for her mewling cries, for her wriggling in his tired arms.

He opened the gate and trotted onto the beaten dirt of the garden path with new decision. “Nan,” he called.

This sound, too, returned oddly to his ears, like a long forgotten name, nevermore pronounced among the living. But Nan wasn’t dead, nor gone, nor forgotten. Will had left her sleeping in their marriage bed—the broad oak bed given to him by his Arden aunt—when he’d dressed in the half-dark before dawn.

Still, his trotting slowed to a reluctant walk and he dared not call her name again.

Around him, the garden bloomed in green abundance. The neatly arranged patches of flax and herbs that Nan had planted in February, when she was already big with child, thrived. The roses she had brought with her from Hewlands, the Hathaways’ farm in Shottery, bloomed big and round, casting their perfumes into the summer air.

Their scent mingled with the heavy odor of boiled cabbage, wafting from the house of Will’s parents, next door. The two houses, built side by side, and both owned by Will’s family, shared a garden and, until recently, had been used by the one family. But, on Will’s marriage, his parents had made the house to the west private for him and Nan.

Will and Nan could only use the back and the top floor, since the front hall housed John Shakespeare’s glover shop. But at the back, Will and Nan had their own kitchen, and, above that, their own chamber, and Will was as relieved not to have to share sleeping quarters with his siblings as his mother was glad not to have to share her kitchen with the woman she disdainfully called
the Shottery girl.

Will’s relief at this separation increased as the unsavory smell of cabbage washed over him, mingled with high-pitched screams from his three-year-old brother, Edmund, and the voice of his fourteen-year-old sister, Joan, raised in childish anger.

His home would never be that way, he promised himself, as he walked the narrow cobbled path between the rosebushes. Rather it would be like the home he remembered from his own childhood: well-ordained, with a few serving girls, and his Nan kept calm and rested enough to look after the children, who would be well fed and better dressed.

He had no idea how to manage this on his petty-schoolmaster allowance, but he was determined to manage it, somehow.

He rounded the corner of the garden path, beside the roses, and came into full view of his side of the house.

If only he didn’t have to use his earnings to prop his parents’ failing fortunes. If only—He stopped, his feelings of doom stronger than ever. Everything about this side of the house looked wrong.

The shutter on the window was closed, as was the door. Will frowned.

Nan never closed the door or the window while the last remnants of light could be gotten from the day.

Will’s heart sped up like an unruly horse, and his feet raced upon the cobbled path.

The feeling of wrongness, of foreboding, overpowered him. Once, when he was very small, he had seen a dog swept away by the raging Avon at the flood. He remembered the small brown-and-white animal paddling futilely against the current even as it dragged him on and on to his certain doom. So, now, did Will’s reason paddle against the current of dread that overtook it and pulled it on and on, unrelenting.

His running feet sped him to the door. Swinging it open, he peered into the dark, cool kitchen.

“Nan,” he called. His voice broke, as it hadn’t for years. No sound answered his call.

Blinded by the transition from daylight to dark, Will could see only vague shapes and dark shadows. He listened. No sound came from the kitchen or from upstairs. Nothing stirred. The close air reeked of wood smoke and the old mutton grease used for making tapers. But no tapers burned, no fire blazed in the hearth.

No blazing fire meant no supper. The young man’s stomach twisted in a hungry knot. For a heartbeat, he forgot his anxiety and thought disparagingly of his wife who didn’t even know enough to have her husband’s food ready when he came home from his wearying toil.

These thoughts so resounded of his mother’s bitter voice that Will frowned at them, reproaching the bitterness into silence. Nan was nowhere in sight. Perhaps she had fallen ill in another room, perhaps she was hurt, and yet Will, her wretched husband, could think only of his stomach. “Nan?”

He wished to hear Nan call back and name him a fool for his alarm. He wished it so hard that he almost fancied he heard it, very far away and faint. But he knew this for an illusion.

No matter how many times Will told himself that his fears were nonsense, that Nan must be nearby, that she must be well, dread leaped and danced in him like an obscene, mottled clown at a country fair, mocking his self-assurance.

As his eyes became acquainted with the dark, he saw that the coals in the hearth remained banked, the ashes raked around them to protect the embers in the middle and reduce the danger of fire in the night. He’d done that the night before, and left all thus in the morning, when he’d walked out eating a slice of cold mutton and a piece of day-old bread for his breakfast. But Nan would have needed to undo this and feed the fire to prepare her dinner, and bake bread. Had Nan not had a midday meal? Had she been gone or ill for that long?

The dread grew in Will, stronger than ever, and the hair rose at the back of his neck. “Nan?” Still half-blind in the darkness, he pulled his gloves off, threw them on the table, and hurried down the narrow, shadowy corridor that separated the kitchen from the front hall.

The front-hall shop was darker even than the kitchen, but Will saw, without remarking, the hanging pelts and the wide, scarred workbench of his father’s glover trade. His nose filled with the acrid smells of tanning—old meat, spoiled eggs, and stale flour—familiar to him from childhood.