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Scene Seven



St. Paul’s Yard. Will, holding the Lady Silver who leans limply within his hold, starts steering her out of the yard. They attract little enough attention, in this place. One or two scholars look startled at a bawd in such an unwonted place. But most just walk past Silver, oblivious to her and to Will. Three steps away, lost in the throng, Kit Marlowe looks as if stricken by a thunderbolt.



Will didn’t know what to do about the sweet weight in his arms, the wan face looking at his.

“Milady,” he said. Feeling her body warm and firm in his grasp took him back to days he’d sworn to forget. And though he knew half -- at least half -- her charm was the elf’s glamoury, yet the glamoury nonetheless enchanted him.

The every-day uneventfulness of his life had shattered like unsound glass beneath a sound blow, and revealed a realm of fractured, sparkling light -- the strange, wonderful realm of faerieland.

“Milady? In London? I’d never have expected.... I never thought.”

“London....” She leaned heavily on him, her arm folded into his left arm that he extended to her across his chest, while his right arm encircled her waist. “London is poison to... us. Like.... Like poison to humans. London is cold iron and unbelieving, cynical minds. London.” She spoke with a low, pasty voice, as if drunk, and walked as if she could barely stand. Her silver shoes that had, once, trod Arden forest with light skipping grace, now dragged on the flags of the walk of Paul’s, as if she could barely stand to walk at all.

And Will could think of nothing, nothing, save only that he must get her out of here. He cast a fearful look over his shoulder at the looming shadow of Paul’s cathedral. Once, in a different world, Silver had told him that elves had nothing to fear from what humans held sacred, that humans' prayers and thoughts affected not the realm of faerie.

Yet, here was the Lady Silver now, saying that the cynicism of men could do this to her and rob her of her sparkling magic, her vital strength.

Will did not dare drag her towards the church, or walk her through Paul’s Walk. Who knew what sacred precincts would do to her, when she was already so weakened.

“Here, here,” he said. “Milady, this way.” And, with his arm around her, the other arm supporting her, he dragged her through the crowd of scholars and fools towards the other side of Paul’s Yard, where the dilapidated gates stood askew between what remained of the walls. Sometime, long ago, those walls had ruptured, allowing the houses of merchants and burghers to encroach on the sacred precinct. Now, nothing remained of that once inviolate enclosure, except those leaning gates, always open. “You must tell me what makes you so ill, what brings you to London, what—”

But the Lady Silver didn’t answer. Her weight heavy upon his arm, she looked at everything, all around, with the startled, scared eyes of a deer seeing the hunter’s bow. And like the deer, she seemed incapable of saving herself.

Cold iron, she’d said. Cold iron, Will remembered, acted like poison to Silver’s glittering kind. Once, not quite knowing what he did, Will had encircled her in iron chains. With a shudder, he remembered how quickly that iron had almost killed her, and the blue, scorching flashes that had arisen between her flesh and the metal.

Now, as they crossed the gates, Will fancied he saw an answering blue flash from the gates. Weakened and mitigated compared to when he’d wrapped those chains around her, but a flash nonetheless.

And Will, half crazed with fright and compassion, felt he must get Silver out of here.

Oh, the glamour flowing off her might be untrue, and his passion that answered it was surely an illusion. Yet the need to save her was real, though he knew not how to accomplish it.

If the city itself was killing her, how could he, Will Shakespeare, save her? He couldn’t take her from London, could he?

Still, Southwark, where Will lived, could be said to be another place. A slummy place, full of taverns and bawds and light, easy women, yet less populated than London, certainly less populated than London during the day.

Perhaps Silver would receive material relief from being, however little, removed from this bustling crowd, this overabundance of iron in gates and grates, in signs and fastenings of signs.

Will dragged an almost unconscious Silver along Cheapside -- the broadest of London’s streets -- with its tall, stately houses, its signs, its carts, its press of shoppers and talkers and merchants and bawds. Never had Will noticed so much iron. Never had he thought that London could seem so confining, even here in Cheapside.

Will felt a hand on his side, reaching for his purse, and withdrew his left hand from Lady Silver, long enough to pull his purse to a more secure location, on the other side, where it would be trapped between his and Silver’s bodies.

In that moment, the Lady Silver started to fall forward, as if she could no longer stand on her own two feet, and Will hastily grabbed to hold her once more.

She seemed to remain conscious -- just -- with her silver eyes showing between eyelids so far lowered that they looked like slits upon her pale face.

“Just a while longer milady,” Will said, though it was a while longer indeed -- almost an hour's walk to his lodgings. And once there, what could he do? How did one revive a dying elf?

Yet, looking at the beautiful pale face, the ethereal sweetness of the delicately drawn features, Will knew he couldn’t allow her to die without fighting for her life.

She was a dream he’d dreamed when all the world and love were young, and now, in this time of dying dreams, Will did not wish to see Silver die also.

He grabbed a fresh hold on her arm, and, with his arm around her, prepared to drag her all the way to Southwark, if need be.

It would be a long way.

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Framed