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Scene 7




A narrow street on the outskirts of London. It is obviously a not-too-prosperous but respectable-enough area, the lowest floor of each of the five-floor houses a modest shop. Hatters and glovers, printers and bakers. By a dark brown building, with a ramshackle outside staircase that climbs, crookedly, to a door on the fifth floor, a dark-haired lady in silk appears, as if birthed out of the air itself. No one else is on the street, save for Will, who approaches the woman cautiously.


The Lady Silver stood at the foot of Will’s stairs.

Will’s heart raced. His breath caught. Was this an illusion spun off from hunger?

Or was the elf lady truly here, so far from her green glades?

The dark, silken hair of Lady Silver fell, unfettered, down to her waist, over a white silk dress that Will knew could scarcely be lighter or silkier than the skin it hid. Will felt dizzy.

Suddenly, he was once more nineteen, and tramping unawares the paths of Arden Woods only, to be seduced by the Lady Silver in all her splendor.

Silver’s tiny waist emphasized her abundant womanly charms that overspilled from her tight white bodice. Will felt as though he were falling, headfirst, into a dream of love.

He smiled. He hurried toward Silver.

She smiled at him, her dark red lips promising velvet touch and the sweetness of newly pressed wine.

In Will’s mind, Nan’s face rose in remembrance.

Nan, Will’s wife, was not as beautiful as Lady Silver. Mortal and ill used by fate—hard worn by life and children and husband—Nan had aged in the last ten years, as Silver hadn’t.

Nan’s hands felt calloused and rough compared to the Lady Silver’s soft, smooth silk skin.

Yet, when night came, and when old age robbed food of its flavor and the sky of color, Will knew it was Nan he wanted by his side. And if he died before that, it would be only because of Nan that he regretted it.

He hesitated. His steps slowed.

This fine lady was no more than a passing fancy, a diversion. A fleeting pleasure, fleetingly enjoyed and ever afterward bitterly regretted. Like fairy gold, the love of elven kind turned to dust and nothing all too quickly.

Such momentary joy bred months of pain. This hot desire converted to cold disdain.

The last time the lady had seduced him and made him break his vow to Nan, Will had promised it would not happen again.

He would not break this second vow, not while starving and with death so near.

Oh, he could ask the elf for money or food, but what would that Fairyland aid not oblige him to do in return?

Making his face hard, he stopped and spoke from steps away. “What do you want?”

Silver laughed. Her musical laugh, sweet and soft, rose over the shabby neighborhood, like wine-filled cups tinkling in a golden afternoon pouring mirth over a perfect assembly. “Will, Will,” she said. “Is that the way you greet an old friend?”

Her laughter moved Will. Again, in his mind there rose a younger man he’d been, full of hopes and dreams never yet tried and with a good opinion of himself never yet tested and therefore never proven futile.

But the older Will, this Will who had lost his hopes of being a poet and eaten his fill of failure and frustration, shook his head. “We are not friends,” he said.

Silver looked confused, lonely, like a child who enters a familiar home and finds it changed and a friendly door barred to her access. She blinked. “Not friends?” Her large, silver eyes glimmered with the moisture of tears. “How can you say that, Will? We are friends, aye, if we are nothing else.”

She walked toward him, and he stepped back. She arched her eyebrows in sharp surprise, and advanced still, holding on to his arm, her hand hot and firm even through the bulk of his doublet and shirt. “Oh, come, Will, be not that way. I must talk to you, must have your help. I came to London sensing your sweet soul, and on your sweet soul did I home as a bee onto freshly distilled honey.”

His soul?

Will had never understood elves. Old legends heard when he was young had said elves were ghosts or demons or a long-lost people.

Did Silver truly want Will’s soul? Oh, he’d lost much, but he’d not give that up.

Were elves, then, the demons some legends claimed they were? Or the unquiet dead seeking revenge on life?

Will pulled his arm away from her, and stepped back. He remembered the lying dream that spoke of elves, but he could not remember the details.

It had been a mad dream, a dream that promised Will greatness, only to let waking reality disappoint him.

He remembered the time he’d fallen into the tangled affairs of elves and how Silver’s seduction then had been naught but an attempt to involve him in killing the fairy king, her brother, and stealing the throne from him.

Had Silver succeeded, indeed, Will would have been dead long ago.

Would not her plots now be similar to her traps and schemes then? Self-serving plans that bode Will no good.

And did Will believe this immortal creature would have shed a tear for him, had he died in fulfilling her plans?

He looked at the reflective, shining silver eyes that, overshadowed by a rich canopy of black lashes, stared so enticingly into his own eyes.

His body’s weak senses longed to be overwhelmed by all her beauty and to lay complyingly within her enticing arms. But his mind knew better and whispered to him of treason and mistrust.

He stepped away from her. The movement wrenched at his own heart. He shrank away from the reach of her soft, white hand, though he needed that touch more than he needed the air he breathed.

He stepped back till he found, behind him, the decaying wooden wall of the house where he lodged. “When has elf been friend to man, milady? When have you been my friend? You would use me for your purposes, nothing more.”

Silver shook her head, the silken sheaf of her hair rustling in the too hot, too still, too humid night air that was as bad breath, tainted with the odors of London and its wastes.

“You use me ill,” she said.

Her face, frantic with some passion, her eyes narrowed and blinking to keep tears away, she looked human and frail and without cunning. “You use me ill and you should not use me thus. For I come in great important business, not just for me, but for mankind entire.”

The thought of Silver caring about humanity seemed incongruous enough, unlikely enough to keep Will from the depths of desire and awaken in him a shocked interest. “Mankind?” he asked.

She nodded.

Will shook his head and swallowed hard. Her beauty had its effect upon his heart, like the flame of a candle that, shining upon wax, will soften it. Yet he could resist the melting warmth and the molten beauty that gazed upon him from those shimmering metallic eyes. But the thought of Silver concerned with low, ephemeral humans puzzled him so that he could not walk away from that. If she lied not, then here was wonder indeed.

“Please, lady,” he said, both voice and words less resolute than he’d hoped. He wanted to know why she cared for humans, and yet he wanted her to leave him alone. “Please, lady. I am but a fool, but not such a fool who doesn’t know the havoc your kind can wreak. Please go. Be gone. For you must mock. You, care for humans?”

The lady trembled. From the melting eyes, two tears dropped, rolling down her curved cheek like twin crystalline globules, upon which Will saw all his future.

He’d die in London, a lonely, desperate man. He’d never again see a glimmer of magical beauty. Never again would he touch something like the silk of Silver’s skin. Never.

“Humans and elvenkind, in this conjoined,” she said. “Will meet twin dooms if you help me not.”

This was fantastical and unbelievable. “Lady, you have to go.”

Silver looked down at him, her eyes like a wet day, all rainy where it was wont to be bright. “I have nowhere else to go,” she said. “I cannot—

“I cannot go,” she screamed. She covered her face with her pale hands and the whole of her slim body trembled.

She reached for his arm, and encircled his wrist with her small hand. The touch of her hand, soft upon his skin, made her seem human, frail, in need of protection. It made her seem like the Silver he remembered.

“To whom will I go if you don’t let me abide?” Tears chased each other down her face. “I’ve had to come to London.” She stomped her foot and bit her lip, but resolution crumpled upon her face and her eyes filled with tears. “In London I have to remain till I find my brother Sylvanus.”

“Your brother?” Mention of the deposed King of Fairyland, the same mention that the three creatures had made upon his dream, riveted Will’s attention. He remembered Sylvanus as even more scheming than the run of elves. Sylvanus had tried to steal Nan before the Hunter took Sylvanus. Sylvanus would have had Will killed to leave Sylvanus’s path free to wooing Nan.

“Your brother? Is your brother in London? Why would he be?” Creatures of glade and dale, elves both good and bad, did not belong in London’s reek, in London’s crowded, teeming streets, with their tall houses that obscured the daylight.

“My brother . . .” Silver sighed and cried, tears chasing each other down her little rounded cheeks to drip upon her bosom, where they ran down in rivulets between the twin globules of her breasts like a mountain stream disappearing into a deep crevice. “My brother has . . . . He attacked the Hunter. He . . .”

“But your brother is in thrall of the Hunter,” Will said. His astonishment made him forget his hunger, his fear of Silver, his desperate straits. “The Hunter’s slave. The Hunter’s dog. Can a slave thus attack his master?”

He tried to keep his eyes away from the destination of those drops of water that left her eyes only to travel to more intimate locations, and yet his eyes traced their path down her cheeks, to her velvety bosom, and imagined the course beyond, beneath her perfumed garments.

He forced his gaze up as one who forces an errant child back to his books. He made himself meet her gaze. “When last we met, you told me that the Hunter was stronger even than elf and that no elf could escape his thralldom. Now you tell me Sylvanus has escaped?”

Silver trembled, and could do no more than multiply the soft progression of her tears.

She nodded, though, and sighed, her sighs like a gentle spring breeze.

This close to her, with her body touching him, Will didn’t smell the rot and garbage of London’s least fashionable district, but the warm scent of lilac from Silver’s skin.

It reminded Will of spring in Stratford, that hometown he despaired of ever seeing again.

He marshaled all his power to resist her, but all his power broke like a dam, carried away by her flood of tears. How could he be her enemy when she was thus, soft and broken and defenseless? How could he call on the iron of his will against an enemy whose weapons were gentle words and desperate pleas? How could he turn harsh and savage when she cried and begged his help?

Yet she was no more, no less than the other aspect of the king of elves and that Quicksilver was neither soft nor defenseless. But knowing this didn’t help. What Will saw overwhelmed what he knew, his eyes reaching for his heart and past his mind.

It didn’t matter what Will’s reason said, when argued against the persuasive argument of his vision.

What mattered it if Quicksilver’s muscles lay hidden beneath this silky skin, these tender charms? It was the Lady Silver whom Will beheld. It was she who cried.

He found his arm, as though of its own accord, encircling those shoulders that felt so frail.

And all the while—while Will’s mind censured him his easy giving in and what would be yet another betrayal of Nan—Silver’s hair tickled his cheek, her perfume filled his nostrils and her beauty dazzled his mind.

He felt giddy. Giddier than hunger alone could make him.

This wasn’t love. Oh, Will knew that.

He knew what love was—Nan’s companionship, her loyalty, her sleeping form warming him through the night.

That was love. That, and the respect that came from knowing and believing in another’s mind and reason as in his own—that alliance of two beings against the madding world.

But this quickening of the blood, the sudden pulses that thrilled upon his veins like perdition; this whispering of a reason older than man that spoke not to the brain but to the eyes—this was much like being drunk, like being crazed, like being a babe, innocent, and led here and there in the arms of a loved nurse.

It was like iron pulled by a magnet, like rain falling helplessly to earth, like a boat drifting on a current, like praying and trusting a higher power.

Will let his body act and let it go, arm over Silver’s up the rickety steps to the door to his room.

Standing on the tiny platform, outside his door, his arm around Silver to balance her, Will slipped the key in the lock and opened it.

And all the while his hands trembled, and it was like an ague, like a fever—like anything which mere man can’t help.

He knew what he wanted, what he craved, the longing for her that drove all his senses. But even to himself he could not confess it, lest removing his denial would render him her too easy prey.

In his room, he wrapped his arms around the immortal creature that trembled and sobbed within his embrace.

His sagging, small bed, with its worn blankets, the lopsided old table that served him as a desk, even his better suit which he threw down as he came in, all looked shabbier, older in her presence.

His room smelled of old meals, of dirty clothes, of dust.

The taper he lit smelled of burnt bacon and smoked, casting only a timid and dismal light.

Her perfume filled his nostrils, and his mouth ached to feel the soft caress of her skin, to taste the exquisite wine of her tongue.

He closed his eyes and pulled her tight. He lowered his mouth to hers.

Her mouth tasted like wine, her skin felt like madness, his heart beat like the rhythm of a youthful dance.

The knock upon the door startled them both. They sprang apart. She laughed, a high silvery laugh.

But the knocking had awakened Will’s reason.

With no money, he couldn’t even afford to pay his back rent, much less the standard fine for adultery, which would be levied should his pious landlord denounce him to the Church.

And Will’s landlord, who was bound to be at the door, having been awakened by their movement, their talk, would want the back rent and, finding this dazzling lady here, in Will’s quarters unchaperoned, would denounce Will for adultery.

Trembling with fear now, all lust dispersed, Will shoved Silver into a corner of the room, where she couldn’t be seen from the door. He whispered fiercely, “Hush, milady. Don’t move and not a sound, if you ever prized my friendship.”

On such flimsy warranty, and fearing very much what she might not do, Will ran his hand back through his hair, smoothing the imagined mark of her hand.

And he opened his door.

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Framed