Scene 36
Will’s room. Ariel and Will stand facing each other, looking shocked, scared.
“Oh, if only Kit weren’t so immersed in grief,” Will said. “If he could speak to me, and understand what I ask him. He’s the only one I know who has acquaintance at court, and who might tell us which of the courtiers might be harboring the wolf.”
“Kit?” Ariel asked. “Kit Marlowe?”
Will sighed. Even the fairy queen knew Kit Marlowe. That was fame as a poet. “Do you know him, milady?” he asked.
Stepping forward, he felt something under his foot, something soft, quite unlike the rushes that covered his floor.
“Not know him, no.” Ariel shook her head. “But Milord Quicksilver did. I mean . . .” She blushed.
Will looked away from her, well understanding what she meant, by the high color of her cheeks. He remembered how he, himself, had known Silver, ten years ago, and felt heat upon his cheeks.
Looking down, to hide his embarrassment, he saw, beneath his feet, a grey object.
Bending down, he picked it up. It was a suede glove, well cut, with fringes upon the wrist and an ink stain on the index finger. Kit Marlowe’s glove.
“When Quicksilver was younger and Kit Marlowe . . .” Her blush increased and she lowered her eyes. “And Kit Marlowe also.”
Kit Marlowe? Kit Marlowe was Quicksilver’s lover? And why not when Will, married and with more reason to abstain had fallen to Silver’s charms?
In his mind, Will heard Quicksilver saying that those who’d been touched by Fairyland would be more vulnerable to Sylvanus, but he shook his head. It was an insane thought.
Yet, this glove proved that someone had consorted with Silver in Will’s absence. And it proved who it was. Did it not?
He smoothed the glove in his hand.
“You say Kit Marlowe knows people at court?” Ariel asked. “Could he . . . Could he be the one that’s been taken over by the wolf?” she asked. “I remember Quicksilver said that Kit was smart and socially adept. Could Kit contrive to kill the Queen?”
Will shook his head. The idea was bizarre. The idea was unbelievable. It was but a dark cobweb of horrible thought stretching tendrils onto sunny reality. “No, no,” he said. “A thousand times no. I’ve known nothing from Kit but kindness.” He looked at Ariel, to meet her skeptical gaze. “Milady, his own son was murdered.”
“Yes, and how came that child to be with that man, so late at night? Will, what does Marlowe look like?”
Will shrugged. “It cannot be.”
“Just tell me, Master Shakespeare, please.”
Will shrugged again. Ariel would see it was nothing. She would see it meant nothing. “He’s a small man,” he said. “Shorter than I. With auburn hair, and an oval face, a small moustache, and grey eyes.”
Ariel’s gaze sharpened. Her breathing quickened. “He is the one, Master Shakespeare, he is the one.” She looked at the glove in Will’s hand. “Is that his glove?”
“Why, I believe . . . But how could you know?”
“There’s a lingering mind print upon it, one that is not yours. I shall home in on that mind print, and I shall rescue my lord. Even if he’s taken over by the wolf, the wolf won’t be so powerful in daylight.”
She put a dainty finger forward, and touched the glove.
In the next breath she was gone, leaving nothing behind, but only a spark and afterglow in the air.
Will looked at the glove in his hand.
Kit Marlowe, a murderer? The murderer of his own child? The harborer of the wolf? Kit Marlowe plotting to murder the Queen?
Will could not credit it. Kit Marlowe was a good man, the best poet Will had ever heard. And he’d helped Will so, finding him patronage that would allow Will to live.
But Will remembered St. Paul’s, and the amusement in Kit’s gaze at Will’s poetry. Why would Kit help a poet in whose words Kit held so little faith? And who had been those men who took Kit away? And how had Kit got free of them?
He stared at the glove in his hand. It was Kit’s glove, indeed. Will remembered the ink stain upon the index finger.
But Kit had never come into this room while Will was here. Once he’d stayed at the door by Will’s choice, and once by his own.
So, he must have been here when Will was not. Kit must have been in while Silver was in here alone.
Will remembered Silver saying she was going to someone who would help her. And Silver had come no more. She’d been transported to Never Land.
Will squeezed the glove. If he could not trust Marlowe, whom could Will trust?
Yet Silver had gone to someone she trusted. And found Sylvanus in that guise.