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Scene Fourteen



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 as if a blood tinged cast to the scene.



“Come and lie down,” Kit said. “Why did you change aspect, even as 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 looked with uncomprehending eyes at the elf and blinked.

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

But Quicksilver only cast him a vague glance, as if in that space it had taken Kit to close his eyes and open them again, Quicksilver had forgotten Kit’s name and visage and the joy of their erstwhile embraces.

How he 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 his kind welcome by the elf, help but remember 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.

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

Kit shivered. Sweat cooled fast upon his body. He reached for the blanket that he and Silver had tossed to the floor in their exertions, and pulled it over himself. Caught on the edge of the bed, it would only come up at an odd angle, covering Kit’s legs and little more. Not enough to stop the chill that climbed up his body, as he looked at Quicksilver.

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 vain swoop that maybe signified the impossibility of all human endeavor or of human loving elf. And those hands were the same -- they were so white, and long and more perfectly shaped than mortal hands ever.

Kit wanted those hands and that touch, and the magical entrancement that came with elven love, and didn’t care in what form he got it, so long as he attained that state where he was lifted out of his mortal nature, and touched the heavens with an immortal madness. “Come to bed,” he said, aware that he sounded peevish and whined with a child’s ill-hazarded tantrum. “Come to bed.”

Quicksilver looked at Kit -- a long, hard and appraising 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, fleeting 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, leaving nothing but 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 that curt, never that facile. “But why?” Kit asked. “In whose name should I leave now?”

“In mine,” Quicksilver said, and something like a somber shadow descended upon his face, like the darkness of eclipse defacing the moon. The moss-green eyes seemingly turned one shade darker, and the soft mouth, so well suited to pleasant smile, shrunk 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.... Silver’s loneliness, these many years when she’s not even been allowed to exist.” 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 Neptune’s blessed abyss and drowning in the air that sustains other creatures.

He felt like such a fish, too, and knowing it, felt angry at his weakness and his mistreatment. He felt angry on behalf of this poor Kit, this much-abused sometime scholar and present playwright, who loved only once and that once truly, only to have his love twice turned on him, twice rejected, twice flung in his face like refuse. Twice.

This Kit who was threatened by powerful, dark personages, and had naught to defend himself with. This Kit who had, despite himself, betrayed his own best feelings, his own best conscience and had not even the consolation of his own honor to take with him into dark loneliness.

He felt it as if this Kit were someone quite other, a dejected, sad being not himself.

Himself was still caught, breath suspended, from the impossibility of his dismissal.

From the moment he’d first glimpsed Silver in Paul’s Yard, the day had turned into a dream, a mad dream, a dream now turning dark and dreary and foreboding, as dreams do when the sleeper turns in bed and startles at his own movement.

Kit closed his eyes, heard the mad drum of his own heart, entrapped within his chest and seeking escape. He bit his lips hard, seeking pain and the taste of his own blood that might awaken him. But even the pain and the blood wouldn’t bring him to his full senses, and nothing would undo these last few hours.

He was trapped in this nightmare like a sprite that once conjured by a dark magician must remain sewn to someone else’s schemes and unable to beat the air free with his wings.

Kit opened his eyes again, and Quicksilver stood there, his back to Kit, all the way across the room, seemingly entranced in the view from the window, the nightlife of Southwark in full swing.

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, in that life and know nothing better. Oh, to be in the real life, of real, 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.

Oh, to never have known this love that now kept Kit as if apart from all others, separated by a sheet of something as hard and clear as diamond, and as impossible to shatter.

Blinded by tears, Kit reached for his hose, with trembling hands, pulled them on, and then, standing, pulled his breeches on and fastened them. He tried to do it all without looking at the bed where his clothes sat.

Each of the creases and folds on the sheet, marking as they did the path of his recent delights, now choked him with resentment. The cloying sweetness that had filled his heart rose to the back of his throat like bitter bile.

There Silver had sat, and there reclined, offering her tender, white body to his mercies. Where that wrinkle, there, folded the sheet over, she had pulled away and laughed at his too-rough attentions. And there, there, where the imprint of her body still marked the mattress, he’d cupped her breasts in his hands, and straddled her soft body.

And all for naught.

“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.”

He 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.

It didn’t matter. His hair -- he forbore to even run his fingers through it, matted and tangled as it must be -- and instead, concentrated on keeping the snivel from his voice, the catch from his breath, the tears from his eyes. He was a man, and damn it, no longer the boy of seventeen who’d cried shamelessly at first losing his elven love. Men must forego the consolation of tears.

It was the only pride he had left, and a sore-tested pride it was. The unthinkable thought had come and installed itself in Kit’s brain, and he would speak it though he died in uttering the words.

“If it was not for me that you came to London, for whom, then?” Despite Kit’s best efforts, his voice echoed shrill, like a fishwife’s asking her man for account of his time and ill-spent affections. “Is it for Will Shakelance?”

Quicksilver answered not, turned not.

Kit forced himself to laugh, a hollow laughter that seemed to rake his throat like a pestilent cough. “Surely not Will, the very married burgher of Stratford. He’ll never make it, you know? Not in London. Not in the theater. He could, I suppose, make it as a wool merchant in London. But for a playwright, he lacks the fire, the verb, the glory that could be made something of on stage.

“He’s like all other country boys and will spend his meager money upon London for a few years, only to go back home to his wife and die, many years hence, prosperous and bitter, talking ever of how great his plays were that London has forgotten.” Kit’s voice lost force as he spoke, till his very last words came out as little more than a whisper supported only by bitterness and bile. Because halfway through the words, Kit had realized how he envied those young men who, indeed, had something to go back to in the country.

What should Kit do, and where be if he attempted such? His father’s cobbler shop was closed to him. From the age of ten or eleven when he should have been learning leathers and cuts and how to fit a shoe to an unwieldy foot, he’d spent his time with Latin and poetry and abstruse theological argument.

As for his spying work....

Well, and a fine thing that was. An avocation born in blood, to which he’d come like Judas by turning in his friends and those who’d thought to do him good.

It had continued in blood, too. Step by step, by insensible step, like a man that stumbles in the dark down an unknown alley, Kit had grown numb to the thought of all those people -- one minute alive and breathing and happy in their estate, and burning with their faith or with their beliefs -- the next minute bleeding under the torturer’s tools, or hanged high up on the gallows -- in Tyburn, and Westminster and, aye, even in Paul’s yard.

All so that Kit could live and have fine garments and play the gentleman.

Now, himself betrayed, feeling low and empty of purpose, Kit fancied that each of his victims’ long-dead eyes were turned to him in an accusing glare.

There was Peter Watson, ascetic Peter, who’d gone to Rheims and come back as a preaching Jesuit, only to be caught because Marlowe had denounced him as going to Rheims.

His dark eyes seemed to glare at Marlowe out of his faith-consumed countenance.

And there was John Whateley, still lost somewhere, still evading the law that would have his life for being a papist.

And William Cox, a puritan of extremist leanings, hanged and disemboweled because Kit had accused him of partiality for the king of Scotland. Had Cox actually said aught to justify being turned in?

Kit couldn’t even remember it, anymore.

Oh, curse the day Kit had come to London. Curse the day he’d earned a scholarship to Cambridge. Curse the petty schoolmaster who had singled him out for his intelligence and quick wit and told Kit’s father that here was a son who could be more than a cobbler or an honest burgher.

But most of all curse the day, that damned day, when Kit had first seen Silver in the closed, abandoned garden of that manor house in Canterbury. That garden that Quicksilver had told him was a remnant of the primeval forest and, as such, had an equivalent, a parallel in faerieland, where Quicksilver lived.

Bitter with dejection he stood, looking at Quicksilver’s taut back, wanting to touch his shoulder and ask fully why, or yet to cry and snivel and go down on his knees and beg -- plead -- for one more hour, one more minute, one more pretense of affection.

What else had Kit to live for? For the theater? The theater, indeed. For poetry? Sometimes theater and poetry both seemed to him a vain pastime, something he did to recapture in the weak magic of words the voice of Silver, her smile, the smell of her magic body, the movement of their love, so long ago. And that too was vain.

“Is it Will you love?” he asked, this time plainly, his voice even to his own ears cold and emotionless, like the voice of one long dead who comes back to ask the cause of his murder.

And Quicksilver, his back turned, spoke as if from a long distance off, in words dried and cold-cut, like a long cooked and cooled piece of mutton, with all its grease congealed upon it, unappetizing and solid and gagging to the taste. “I am no longer a Prince, Kit, nor a youth. I’ve come of age within my own sphere, and in my own race I’m a king, and within my estate there are duties and ranks and obligations, as there are in mortal life. I’ve a kingdom to run, and I have a wife. To my wife I owe what I promised her and that already sullied by.... But no, it’s not your fault.”

Quicksilver turned and set a hand on Kit’s arm, only to withdraw it, too quickly. “It’s not your fault. It is mine. I did remember you, Kit. Much too well. Memory entangled in my speeding heart led us both to trip.” He glanced at the bed, then at Kit.

“But I promised my wife there would be no others -- as mortals do at their weddings -- and all I can do now is hope she forgives my transgression. I have a duty to her. As for what brought me to London.... A darker errand than I intend to tell you about, Kit. An errand bound with kingdom and elven breed, and the safety of both spheres. Indeed, you are in danger while you are near me.” While speaking, Quicksilver looked down and, as if his gestures were disengaged from his voice, frowned at Kit’s doublet.

Unbuttoning it with nimble fingers, he buttoned it again, the proper way, and patted it into place, like an adult making sure a child’s attire answered to the rules of proper appearance.

Looking up at Kit’s face, he started a smile that turned to an intent frown. “Go, you fool, go, before you force me to commit I don’t know what madness. Go before the forces that I came to do battle with smell you out and come for you.”

Kit felt a surge of hope. He raised his eyebrows. Quicksilver wouldn’t let him stay because he wished him safe. Did not that mean that the elf still cared?

He straightened himself, anxious, eager, ready to die if needed to keep his tenuous hold on this worshiped creature’s heart. “I’ll fight beside you, if that is needed,” he said. “I’m not afraid of anything that comes for you. I’m not a child any longer, Quicksilver; I have worked for the secret service. I have fought, I am not afraid of a fight or of killing or dying. I have -- ”

But Quicksilver shook his head, quietly. “It is the stain of what you have done, your betrayals, your compromises, that makes you all the more vulnerable to this attack. Go, Kit. And don’t come near me again.”

Like that, the elf marched to the door, in easy strides of his long legs, and opened it wide, and displayed a swath of night outside, a dark night lit only by the blood-tinged brilliance of the full moon.

Kit, feeling as though he floated above his body -- above this poor Kit who had been sent away like a starving child dismissed from a banquet -- walked through the threshold and out the door, all the while not knowing how his legs supported him, or how his heart didn’t break.

All too soon he found himself outside, on the narrow, unprotected landing at the top of the rickety wooden stairs.

From beneath came laughter and song; the sound of voices, male and female and all ages laughing and shouting and enjoining each other to greater madness, snatching heartily at a second’s pleasure, no matter what it might cost in pain and sorrow later.

Kit looked at the sturdy oak door closed behind him and at the little window, near it. But the window was closed and not a shadow hinted that the elf looked through it.

Kit thought if only he could have made himself as pleasant to Quicksilver -- in his male form -- as he was to Silver, maybe he’d not have got dismissed. He’d thought he accepted Quicksilver well enough, yet maybe this dual creature noticed a chill, a coolness towards him. Maybe that was why --

And for a moment, Marlowe hesitated, his hand poised to knock at the door and a thousand different apologies running through his mind.

Shaking his head, he lowered his hand, turned away. No. No. Kit loved Quicksilver much as he could, with his mortal nature. And Quicksilver perforce knew that. So, while Kit could not believe the talk of dark forces, something other must keep him away from the elf he loved well.

“And yet,” he told himself. “I love in vain, he’ll never love me.”

Starting down the stairs, he looked down at the unprotected left side, down which, if he were to throw himself, he might find swift death upon landing on the hard ground below.

From where he stood, death seemed like a wonderful rest. No more to fear the rack and the torments of the torturer. No more to think of the family in which he no longer fit, of his lost honor and the myriad betrayals that had kept him alive in the dangerous world of politics where two religions warred for supremacy. No more thinking of love.

He stared at that abyss there, at his left side, and yet lacked the strength, the power to jump. “Death ends all, and I can die but once,” he told himself.

Yet that once seemed so final. No more a chance of crossing paths with Silver, no more a chance to enjoy wine and silk and pleasant accommodation. No more, at Scagmore, Sir Thomas Walsingham’s estate, to enjoy the company of nobility, the praise they bestowed on Kit, his pleasure in it.

It would not happen. Kit could no more kill himself now than had he been able to when Quicksilver had first turned him away in hasty sorrow.

No. He must find Will and know from Will’s mouth exactly what Quicksilver meant by dark forces, and what kept Quicksilver from staying with Kit. Was it true that Quicksilver was married and a king?

Would Will know? Well, it stood to reason Will knew something.

With a pang, Kit remembered the way Silver had leaned upon Will’s shoulder.

Oh, Will knew enough and Kit would soon find out what that was. And if he found that Will stood as the sole obstacle to Kit’s possessing of Quicksilver and Silver, the elf’s heart and soul, then may Will be protected by those gods who turned a deaf ear to Kit’s pleas.

At the bottom of the stairs, Kit hesitated. Shakestaff had dined with the earl of Southampton. He would soon be coming home. Kit would to the strand, and there wait for the barge to dock that brought Will to his reckoning.

With light step, he started, plastering a smile upon his face. But beneath his smile and the careless walk, his heart was an anvil for sorrow, which beat upon it like Cyclops hammers, and with the noise turned his giddy brain and made him frantic.

In such a mood, he went to search for Wagglance.

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