Scene 37
Marlowe’s room. He holds the dagger in his hand, and looks, amazed, now at the dagger, now at the hand that holds it, and now at his own face, reflected, haggard and shocked-looking, from his mirror.
Kit stared at his reflection, disbelieving.
Was it his imagination that prefigured another’s will where his own cowardice prevailed?
Again he tried, with renewed fury, to bring the blade to his waiting throat. His hand moved not. His mind raced.
Was an elf within him, controlling his every thought? Not Kit’s own damned soul at all, not his darker half, but something like this, something evil, come from the darker reaches of the under world to plague him.
“Ah no,” the voice of the elf spoke through Kit’s mouth, in more pedantic accents than Kit had ever used. “Ah no, you won’t lay all the blame on me. For it was your own dark soul that called to me, your tainted heart that held me fast.
“Twice, before you, did I try to possess those touched by fairykind. The first died before I’d fully installed myself. He died at the thought of blood, the thought of killing. The second rebuffed me before ever I got near.” Kit’s mouth twisted upward and smiled at him, in a suave, superior way that reminded him of the dark elf in the night. “But in you I found my match and my mark, and you will serve my turn.”
Before Kit’s tongue rested, a scream in his own voice tore through his lips. It surprised him as much as the voice of the elf, and yet he knew it was his own, his own anger and injured grief screaming out of his grief-bruised throat. “Oh monster, oh creature from the abyss, I will avenge me.”
Laughter echoed through Kit’s mouth, stopping the grief there with bitter gall, and smooth words poured out. “Vengeance? What? Thyself upon thyself? How will you contrive such, Master Marlowe? When your own hand plays you false and will not ply your dagger to seek your death?”
Kit’s eyes looked at the mirror, horrified.
“Yet will you do my bidding and attain my goal, like a good servant who does his master’s will.” Kit’s lips smiled at his blank, shocked stare in the mirror. “Ah, good Kit, you shall be tame, a common household Kit. Your evil called to mine, your darkness bound me to you. You shall reign with me upon the earth once we have conquered. And to that end, we must only kill a Queen. A Queen ephemeral and passing as is the common run of mortals. And she is old. We’ll be robbing her of a few years. Nothing much.”
Kit thought of the Queen, of his plan of gathering all warring courtly camps, and the Queen, too, in Deptford.
Had that been the wolf’s doing all along? Kit had thought himself free. Kit had thought it his own clever plan. He’d thought he’d contrived it to free himself of Poley.
Oh, how cunning, how marvelous a genius Kit had believed himself, seeking to lure the Queen to Elinor Bull’s. How great he’d believed the workings of his mind to be.
And all the time, there had been another, within his mind, spinning his own plans.
If Sylvanus took Kit to Deptford, if Kit allowed himself to be controlled thus far, then would Sylvanus kill the Queen.
And war would rage, bloody, over fields and towns. England would erupt in fighting and blood, should Elizabeth die without an heir.
To the murder of Imp, Kit would add the murder of England.
A frozen terror clasped Kit’s heart in a band of icy panic.
Kit didn’t know, didn’t fully understand, why the elf wished this, but he could see the deaths, many deaths.
All those Kit knew, Will and Tom Kyd, and even cursed Robin Poley, dying side by side in senseless fray.
And Madeleine, and Kit’s family too: that uncaring father, Kit’s soft-eyed mother, and Kit’s three younger sisters, in far-off Canterbury. All would be caught in the maw of the disorder to come.
It would all come through Kit, yet Kit could do nothing to prevent it. Carried like a lamb bound for the slaughter, he would be both victim and sacrificer, see his world destroyed, his present as obliterated as his future had been by Imp’s death.
“This is hell,” Kit whispered, his lips barely moving. “Nor are we out of it.”
Yet what could Kit do? How could Kit prevent it?
He stared at his own wide-open grey eyes that gazed upon him from the mirror.
And in the mirror, he saw a flash.
In that moment, without his thought, without his saying so, Kit’s body turned.
The elf’s voice returned to his throat, the elf’s roar of surprise, of anger erupted from his lips.
“Dare they?” the elf said.
Kit’s hand, still raised, dropped his twelve-pence dagger.
It fell, point down, and stuck a-quiver on the floorboards.
Kit’s heart sped up. Was this Silver? He couldn’t let this elf hurt Silver.
But the elf who’d materialized in the burst of light looked slighter than Silver had ever been, a blond girl-elf, blue-eyed, with a child’s wide-eyed innocence, a child’s wide-eyed despair.
She stared at Kit with anger and disgust. “Sylvanus,” she said.
Grasping her skirt all into her right hand to uncover thin legs in white stockings, she marched forward in broad strides. “Sylvanus. Give me my husband.”
She raised her hand also, the mirror image of the gesture Kit’s body made.
“Milady,” Kit Marlowe said, amazed. “Milady. I have not the pleasure—” And then, before his lips fully closed, before he gathered his dispersed breath, a voice spoke through his lips, a cold, cold voice that chilled him to the soul. “Ariel. Well met. I’ll be more than glad to help you along to Quicksilver’s company.”
Ariel stomped her foot. “You’ll not find me as unprepared as Quicksilver,” she said. “You will not find me so easy to defeat.”
Raising her own hand, she did something, and a shimmer like diffused light from a candle played up and down her pale, slim figure.
“You oppose me with that?” Sylvanus asked through Kit’s mouth. “Think you that the waning power of the hill can withstand my power? Did I not show you otherwise but yesternight?”
“That was the night,” Ariel said. “This is the day. And you’ll not have such full control of your body under the blessed mortal sun.”
Sylvanus laughed. “You’re wrong, milady. I fed long and well, and the strength thus gained, on sweet mortal lives, more than compensates for the loss of magic that the day brings.”
A tingle ran along Kit’s lifted hand.
All of a sudden, Kit realized what that meant. Magic would issue from that hand.
Understanding seared into his mind. This elf had done something to Quicksilver, and would now do it to Ariel, whom Kit deduced to be Quicksilver’s wife.
With roaring intensity, Kit awoke within his own body. He threw all his willpower at his hand. With all his strength, he commanded it down.
Down and down and down, by slow, measured inches. He closed it, too, though the tingle continued, running through his arm, up and down.
“Milady, run,” he said, forcing his words past the wolf’s incensed roar that would have used up all Kit’s breath. “Milady, run. Be gone. He has the power to send you somewhere—I know not where, but I know there you’ll die.”
Ariel shook her head. She looked amazed, hesitated, as if noticing the difference in the voice, but not sure who spoke. “To Never Land, he’ll send me, aye, where my lord is, where no elf can survive a second sunset. To Never Land, where my lord is dying.” Tears drowned out her blue eyes. She lowered her hand to wipe them.
“You will obey me,” Sylvanus’s voice screamed through Kit’s mouth, and Kit’s hand, breaking free of his control, raised itself.
In vain Kit struggled to pull it down. In vain did he try to regain control of his own body.
The anger of the elf surged through Kit. Kit’s hand lifted. The tingle on Kit’s arm was unbearable, a scouring pain.
“Slave, vassal, vile villain, you will obey me,” Sylvanus roared, and as his hand lifted, a burst of light erupted and engulfed the blond and fragile fairy queen.
“Oh, help, help, help me,” Ariel screamed. “You are our only hope.”
Her voice died away, as if swallowed by a merciless distance.
When the light flickered down, nothing was there, no one was in Kit’s room, but Kit and the elf that possessed Kit’s body.
The elf let go of Kit’s body, then. Kit fell, exhausted, limp, to the floor.
His face to those rushes so recently stained with bloodied water, Kit realized that he’d been the undoing of Silver and Quicksilver also, as well as Imp.
Covered in sweat, too tired, too weak to rise, he whispered his grief to mingle with the howls of grief from below the floor, the female lamentations so loud that they blocked even all that had passed in this room.
“Twice I’ve loved, twice,” he said. “And both loves dead by my hand. How this hand smells still of blood. All the perfumes of Araby will not sweeten this hand again.”
But already the elf quickened within Kit and cut Kit’s breath with a chuckle. “Repine later, now you have my work to do. We have a Queen to kill.”
And on those words, Kit’s weak body rose from the floor, and washed itself carefully, and shaved and attired itself in Kit’s remaining clean suit.
Through it all as a man in a nightmare from which he can’t waken, Kit watched himself act, watched his body perform the routines he’d so often performed, and marveled at his former blindness.
How vile this captivity, how base. He would go to Deptford and destroy the world, in the command of a master he could not disobey. He, Kit Marlowe, who’d never been true to friend or foe before.
He’d do the command of the thing that had slain Imp.
And yet, and yet he would have it otherwise. For it was right and meet he should avenge his son’s blood upon the foul being.
Looking at his smooth face in the mirror, the face from which the elf’s possession had erased all brand of grief, every wrinkle of care, Kit sighed.
But for his own cowardice, this would never have happened. He should have braved the council’s pleasure and by other means confronted the noose encircling him. By means that didn’t require sacrificing others. He should have cut loose the noose by means of truth and courage. Else, should he have run.
That many years ago, in Cambridge, he should have refused to turn anyone in. He should have stood his ground. He should have remained clean and loyal and got his money from poetry only.
“A plague on all cowards,” he whispered to the uncaring face in the mirror. “A plague, I say, and a vengeance, too!”
He must find a way to defeat the elf. But how could he, when he was but a helpless slave?