Scene 19
Kit walks by the riverside, having just disembarked from a ferry from Southampton House. The riverside is deserted on that side, bordered by dark warehouses and empty or at least darkened houses and shops, not a few of which are boarded and bear the plague seal, warning passersby to keep away. Kit, wrapped in a dark cloak, starts to make his way inward when a child approaches.
“Kit,” Imp yelled as he ran on the darkened riverside wharf filled with the stench of fish, its streets slippery with carelessly discarded entrails. “Kit.”
Just returned from Southampton House, Kit had been all immersed in the trap he had built. But seeing Imp, he forgot it all.
He looked at the small running figure and for a moment felt a pang.
What kind of father encouraged his son to be out of doors at these hours when who knew what doom might overtake him?
Yet, he reminded himself, Imp would not be kept indoors, not even by his ever-vigilant and severe mother.
Kit reached out his arms, and caught the child and picked him up, and lifted him, and shook him with mock violence. “Now, you scamp, now, you rotter, what are you doing abroad at this hour and tramping where no honest soul ever sets foot?”
Imp giggled. “You told me to watch for a visitor to the bald man,” he said between giggles, his voice distorted by his being shaken. “And he has one. Now the bald man is gone, but the visitor remains. And I knew you would be coming from the ferry for, pray, you said you were going to Earl So-and-so’s house, and that would mean the ferry and the other side of the river.”
“You’re a good scamp,” Kit said, and shook Imp again lightly. “A smart rogue, and with two more like you, you would take over the country and rule it like three Caesars in a new triumvirate.” He smiled, but his heart was not in it. Gently, he set Imp down, and bent over him, to talk to him. “You go home now, boy, go to your mother, eat your supper, and go to bed.”
Imp blinked up at him. “And you?”
“I’ll go look in on this man’s visitor, and then to bed anon. Who is the visitor?”
“A fine lady in a silver dress, with hair as dark as coal and skin as pale as moonlight,” Imp said.
Kit nodded.
The woman.
She existed, for Imp had seen her. And before his plot proceeded any further, Kit must make sure that this woman would not protect Will Shakespeare.
He must verify that Will was indeed friendless, indeed bereft of courtly favor, indeed safe to set up as a sacrificial lamb.
“Now you run home,” he said, and ruffled the boy’s hair.
“Will you come home anon?” Imp asked.
Kit nodded.
“And will you tell me a story when you do?”
Kit nodded. He ruffled the child’s hair again, and the boy was gone, running down the street.
Kit turned his steps toward Shoreditch, up the narrow, muddy road where Will Shakespeare lived, up to where a light shone on the highest window of the otherwise darkened house.
An odd light, not like the light of any earthly tapers, but a shine diffused and glowing throughout the entire space at once, a shine like a million fireflies, captured and held within that room.
Kit had seen that light once.
It was the light of Fairyland.
His heart beating at his throat, his hands trembling, his mind protesting with desperate certainty that such a thing could not be, that it happened not, that elven ladies—or lords—didn’t haunt squalid rental rooms in London, Kit hurried forward.
He grasped the slippery banister of the staircase and he climbed, step on step. Had it been the stair to paradise, he would have been no more eager.
Kit knocked at the door and heard an exclamation from inside.
Though yet he could see nothing, standing on that tiny platform outside the scabrous door, he fancied he smelled, all around him, the smell of lilac, intoxicating him like the best wine.
And something like a voice from his heart whispered that the Lady Silver loved him. Aye, and so did Lord Quicksilver. His elf love had come back to Kit.
The door opened.
Silver stood there, the elf’s female form, her black hair falling unfettered down her back, every strand seemingly charmed into place. And her broad silver skirt had been slashed to display a diaphanous white fabric beneath, which revealed, in its transparency, the length of Silver’s white legs. That inner gown that, beneath her bodice, cloaked her arms in long sleeves was yet so molding, so transparent, that he could see all of her revealed, save for the narrow waist hid beneath the silver bodice. And that mattered little as her breasts, rounded and pale like twin moons rising above a silver sea, were more than half exposed, lifting with her every deeply drawn breath that matched Kit’s own aching, slow, painful breaths, and played a dancing tune to Kit’s mad, beating heart.
“Kit,” she said, her voice little more than a breath, taken by the wind as soon as it was pronounced. “After all this time! Kit.”
He touched her hand. In touching it, she trembled.
Love deeply grounded hardly is dissembled. These lovers parled by the touch of hands. True love is mute, and oft amazed stands.
Thus, while dumb signs their silent hearts entangled, the air with sparks of living fire spangled.
Kit’s breath, drawn, brought him her perfume. Her perfume swelled his heart in further breath. Not knowing why, nor how, nor when, they closed the door behind them and, still no more touching than their hands met, stumbled inside the dim, shabby room.
“I thought you away,” she said, her voice still rushed and wind-driven, as if passion pushed breath and hurried it through her soft red lips. “I thought—”
He touched her lips with his, not so much kissing her as a pilgrim acknowledging his reaching the shrine of his desire. “Away?”
“Away from London. In Lord Thomas Walsingham’s estate. Scagmore. I thought you living there and away, and safe, from all the madness that might come.”
Kit, his ears love-stopped, heard no more than that she’d informed herself of his place of residence, and known, known with certainty where he should be at this time. That was enough. That was plenty.
He’d never thought she’d have allowed a stray thought to venture his way, and here she was, confessing that she knew his current estate.
He kissed and kissed, and again he kissed, those lips of whose taste he’d dreamed, those lips like liquor that no mortal vine could ever equal.
With his love he assayed her, till in his twining arms he locked her fast, and then he wooed with kisses and, at last, her on the bed he lay, and tumbling upon the mattress, he often strayed beyond the bonds of shame, being bold.
And craving, joint craving ignited, that which, lonely, might have stayed itself for eternity. It ruled them and held sway.
The mattress protested beneath them, the bed shrieked and complained like the much-abused thing it was.
Silver said, “Stay.”
She cried, “Forebear.”
But all and all were taken as enticements aimed at making his trespass sweeter.
Kit, surrounded by the lilac smell of faerie kind, her taste on his tongue, the smoothness of her skin traveling like alcohol through his own skin into his veins to intoxicate his brain, thought to die and knew he lived, and knowing he lived knew he died of bliss.
Why did he love this creature and no other?
Why this elf, this fleeting being of moonlight and shadows and deep forest? Why this creature, neither man nor woman—neither and both—and not a mortal chained by the thrall of time? Why was it this creature he must love, in both its bewildering aspects and thus trespass beyond the boundaries of human love?
Why love here, not elsewhere?
Why one especially does the heart affect, of two gold ingots, like in each respect?
No more was there an answer to this riddle than to Kit’s heart-pounding, driving need.
The reason for it all, no man knows. Let it suffice that what we behold is censured by our eyes. Where both deliberate, love is slight.
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?