Scene 34
Will’s room. The fairy queen sits upon the shabby bed, her torn skirt neatly arranged, her muddy shoes demurely together. Will comes in, looking stunned.
“Did you find him?” Ariel asked.
The question took Will by surprise. “Find whom, milady? Whom should I have found?”
“The man to help us,” she said. She stood up. “You said you knew someone.”
Will sighed. He closed his door slowly. His mind was full of what he had just seen. Too full.
He thought of Kit and the boy. Had Kit ever acknowledged his paternity? Will could not credit that, yet how fully did Kit reap the grief of the child’s death.
How dubious the joys of fatherhood. Will’s mind returned again and again to his children, Susannah, Judith, and Hamnet, who, in Stratford, might meet an evil fate at any moment and no one know.
“He won’t help us,” Will told Ariel. “His son has died. I couldn’t ask his help now. He’s insane with grief.”
“His son?” The Queen of Fairyland stopped her pacing and stared at Will.
She trembled. Her eyelids fluttered, as though in the gale of memory. “His child? The child I saw . . . last night?”
Will nodded. “Possibly. It was a boy. If only there would be a way . . .” he said. He knew he spoke nonsense, knew he spoke out of a heart too full and a mind too drained. Yet he spoke. “Could not the magic of Fairyland . . . . Couldn’t the child live again?”
Ariel shook her head. Tears from her eyes fell down her face. “No, Will. That is beyond my power, beyond Quicksilver’s even, even when the hill is at its most powerful. And now . . . . And now Quicksilver himself is in Never Land and will be dead before this day is through, his magic drained by nothingness. And once he’s dead, not all the magic of Fairyland, and not all my wishing, can get him back. We have limits also, Will.”
“Oh, you magical creatures and your limits,” Will yelled. He paced back and forth across his room.
Ariel watched him, her eyes wide, looking every wise shocked and alarmed.
He did not know whence his rage came, but he felt angry, an anger without measure. How odd this world, how odd this magic, that magical beings had to ask Will for help and depend on Will’s good grace for shelter. How strange that these same beings who turned Will’s life upside down and played upon him as upon a fiddle knew not how to save themselves.
“First the Fates, the three women, in my dream, telling me they needed me to save them,” he said. “Then Silver coming to me in search of help, though she didn’t seem to know what help she needed or why, and now you!” He flung the words at the queen’s little drained face, her swimming blue eyes. “What good is magic if you must come to me, poor man that I am, a poor poet, a man without words or power, without magic, or money, or knowledge.”
Ariel’s mouth hung open. She sought to close it, looked as though she’d speak, but her eyes betrayed fear of Will’s sudden rage.
“Oh, speak, tell me what a fool I am, why don’t you?” Will said. “Tell me what a fool I am, because I’m not immortal, not one of your charmed circle. Milady, I wouldn’t want to be immortal if in all my immortal years I learned so little and were so helpless as to need Will Shakespeare to protect me.” He stood in front of her, his hands open as if to denote his impotent rage. “Will Shakespeare, forsooth?”
“Three women?” Ariel said. She reached a hand for Will’s sleeve and grasped the rough wool between thumb and forefinger, as if she meant to hold him and yet were afraid of his reaction to her touch. “Three women? Pray tell, Will, when did you see three women?”
“In my dream,” he said.
His rage left him suddenly, but something else remained. Anger still, at this fairy world, that so enmeshed itself in his world and yet would not help him, and could do no good. An impotent magic it was, a vain enchantment.
“In my dream, I saw three women. They said they were the three aspects of the feminine, part and parcel of all that’s female in the universe. That humans had created them—created them—from their thoughts and dreams and their mad need to order reality.”
In Ariel’s eyes, something like hope quickened. Her breath came fast, through half-parted lips. She swallowed, and spoke again in a trickle of voice. “What did they tell you, Will, in your dream?”
“They told me they wanted me to save them,” Will cackled. “I, Will Shakespeare, should rescue them from Sylvanus, who meant to murder them. But lady, it was all a dream, a dream and nothing more.” He stopped. Sylvanus was free. Sylvanus had injured the Hunter. Will remembered Quicksilver saying so. Was it only a dream?
“Murder the female element? Yes, Sylvanus spoke of it. I thought it was vain bragging.
“But if they felt it, if they came to you in your dream, then perforce he can truly do it. Will, what else did they say?”
“They said if I rescued them, they would make me the greatest poet ever alive,” Will said, his voice drawing out, and drowning itself in empty despair. He made a face.
But Ariel stared at him, serious and solemn. “Then I say it’s time you earned your fee, Will,” she said. “Sylvanus is abroad and possessed of a human body, which he must be using in some way. Why would Sylvanus need a human body, Will? He could kill well enough without it. The pestilence, alone, that he unleashed upon the world, the blight of power that drained Fairyland, could have decimated half a continent. So, why did Sylvanus need a human body? To kill one of the female aspects, you say, but how?”
In his mind, Will heard Silver babbling about the female elements and sympathetic magic. He could feel Silver’s hands upon him, her breath hot and sweet on his ear, and he could hear Quicksilver’s urgent, businesslike voice speaking to him.
Will stopped his pacing, faced Ariel. “Milady,” he said. “What’s sympathetic magic?”
“Oh,” Ariel said. “Oh.” Her eyes grew big. “It’s when you take an object and, prefiguring upon it a person, maim or wound the first object, to hurt the being symbolized. Did the three aspects speak to you of this? You must tell me, Will.”
In a panic of anxiety, she grasped at his doublet.
He shook his hand. “No, lady, no. Silver—Quicksilver—told me about this. He told me that Sylvanus must be trying to perform sympathetic magic, and asked if we had a female priestess or a great female figure that could incarnate the female aspects, or one of them.”
Ariel’s mouth half-opened. “And do you?”
Will took a deep breath. His mind was clearer than it had been with Silver’s arms around him, Silver’s breath upon his face.
He thought about the maiden, the matron, and the crone.
There was only one woman in all of Britain who could figure one of them: the Virgin Queen worshiped by her subjects as much for her royalty as for her virginity.
“No,” he said when he could get breath. “No. It’s monstrous.”
In his mind he saw the Queen, in her barge on the Thames, gliding regally over the black water, oblivious and impervious to her subjects’ sufferings and the plague that ravaged the land.
Who could kill the Queen? Who could get past her bodyguards, her menservants, even her ladies?
But he heard again the conversation he’d heard in Southampton’s study, the talk of how the Queen wandered abroad, mistrusting her counselors, spying and cheating on those who should keep her safe.
“It can’t be,” he said. “It can’t be that Sylvanus would mean to kill Queen Elizabeth.”