Scene Four
The inside of a peasant’s kitchen in Elizabethan England. A broad fireplace, overhung by an even broader chimney, holds a brightly burning fire. Over the fire a pot of something bubbles with a merry sound. By the fireplace itself cooking implements sit — pots and pans of iron and of clay. In a corner, not too far from the fire, a cradle hangs upon a stand and moves slightly, now and then, giving the impression of a child or babe turning within it.
To the left, at a bench pushed near a scrubbed pine table, a woman sits. She wears plain peasant clothes, kirtle and shirt, with neither lace nor embroidery. Over them, a plain apron. She scowls at Will, who sits across from her.
“Speak,” the woman said. “Or go. I have no time for this.”
She was young, with a rounded face. A white cap covered her brown hair. Her dark eyes, surrounded by bruised circles, gazed with the intent wisdom of a much older woman.
Will, sitting across the table from her, felt the power of that glare. He shouldn’t have come here. He shouldn’t be here.
What did he, Will Shakespeare, master playwright, the toast of the London stage, have to do with witches, with fortune tellers, with those who had commerce with dark forces and other worlds?
Oh, playwrights of the past had been involved in such things. Kit Marlowe had been a rumored member of the School of the Night-- that group of dark seekers -- the disciple of magic, involved with things beyond the ken or interest of mortal men.
Marlowe. Will felt as though Marlowe stood behind him, fixing him with an intent gaze. Will shivered. In this homey kitchen, redolent of herbs and cooling, Will felt cold. Yet sweat beaded on his upper lip. He found words. Innocuous ones.... “I came, good woman, in search of help in my trouble.”
The woman’s dark eyebrows rose, above her young-old eyes.
She flung herself up from the bench suddenly, with an impatient quickness that reminded Will of his own wife, his Nan, back in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Approaching the fire, she stirred her pot with a long-handled wooden spoon. “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,” she said, and turned and grinned at him, displaying white, even teeth. “Indeed. Much you tell me. Do you think people come to see me when they’re not in trouble? Nay, I tell you. When the thread of their life runs smooth, they stay in their homes, by their snug hearths away from the likes of me. Which trouble brings you to me, Master Shakespeare?”
Will’s heart skipped a beat.
She’d called him by name. And he’d not given her his name. It was the first sign, the first display of power from this woman. Will had come here, blindly, on Ned’s word. He’d not known what to expect, save cobwebs, exotic animals in jars and the hands and fingers of long-dead criminals on display or bubbling over the fire in noxious potions. He expected a crone, muttering curses and glaring at him with half-mad eyes.
Instead, he’d found a kitchen not so different from his own kitchen at home, and a young woman not so different from how his own wife back home had looked ten years ago.
But now, at last, she showed her otherworldly power, her true nature.
Trembling, Will repressed an urge to leave while he could. If she had such power to look into his mind and heart, he shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t meddle with her. Yet if he meddled not with her, the ghost would stay with him. If there was a ghost.
“You called me by name,” he said. “How did you know it?” Because if she could read his thoughts, she already knew his fears. Why did she not calm them?
She turned around and laughed, an easy, young laughter that vibrated in the homey, food-scented air of the kitchen. “Not through my powers, Master Shakespeare, which, at any rate, I would disdain to use for such a purpose.” She reached to the shelf over the chimney and, from it, pulled a much-thumbed booklet, which she held up.
On the cover was an awful woodcut of Shakespeare himself. Beneath it, faded words proclaimed, The poems of William Shakespeare, the sweet swan of the Avon, his Venus & Adonis & the Rape Of Lucrece.
It was not any edition that Will himself had authorized. Likely a print laboriously copied from the first editions and full of errors. Doubtless, sold more cheaply than the original print, though. As for the likeness, the best that could be said was that it was enough like him. Enough to recognize him.
“But if you have no great powers...” Will said.
The woman set her hands one on each side of her waist and grinned at him. “I did not say that. But I have more respect for my powers than to do tricks for you, like a pet witch, a tame witch, a juggler on the street corner.
“Those who do tricks, mind, are tricksters and swindlers and no-accounts, trying to get pennies from your pocket, nothing more.” She paused and looked wistful. “As for me, for years, I denied what I was. I would have no commerce with the supernatural, no part in witchcraft. I denied and resisted till the forces beyond took me and held me in their palms, and made a mockery of my reasons and senses. I denied till I ran about, with my hair unbound, insane and pursued by things none other could see.
“Then did I come to heel and break to saddle, and take on the duties that must be mine. For that I work. Not for money, but for the peace that comes with doing what I’m meant to do. I do not show off. I am no juggler.” Turning her back on Will, she resumed stirring the pot. “And therefore you’ll tell me what troubles you have, or you’ll be gone. There’s the door and yonder the road, and I’ll wager you know your way well enough to your cozy quarters, your respectable rooms.”
As she spoke, Will pictured the street outside: Shoreditch at its worst, with winding, narrow streets from which the hastily built five story buildings on either side excluded all sunlight and all fresh air.
The streets he’d walked to get here were unaccustomed streets for the respectable burgher he’d become.
He shouldn’t even be in this part of town. And yet he knew it well enough. It was but three years since he’d lived here, as had Marlowe, as still did many of the poorer actors.
The thought of Marlowe again brought a chill, again the feeling of being watched, and Will imagined walking that street, alone, back to his quarters.
And, step on step, Marlowe’s steps would dog his, and, thought on thought, Marlowe’s voice would echo in his mind, mocking Will’s worries, smiling derisively at Will’s wit.
Marlowe had been dead for three years. To Will, he was more alive than ever.
And Marlowe would write his plays through Will or — barring that — prevent Will from writing plays all together.
What, then, would Ned Alleyn do, having lost his investment? And what of the other actors of Lord’s Chamberlain’s men, good men all, some with large families.
How would they attract an audience away from so many rival companies, but for plays and words that stood above the rest?
“It is a ghost,” he said, half expecting the woman to laugh. “I’m prosperous enough, happy enough, but there’s a ghost that haunts me and stands by me and, day and night, will ne’er let me be.”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even turn to look on him. Her arm moved steadily, the spoon in her hand stirring the cauldron.
And that silence, more than any entreaty, called Will’s response. “It is Kit Marlowe,” he said, and having said it felt like a bladder that, pricked, spilled its substance into the air and was left empty, purposeless.
Now the woman spoke, now she turned, now she let go of the spoon. Her dark eyes, serious, fixed on his. “And was he a friend of yours?”
“Nay,” Will said, then misgave, as in his mind Kit Marlowe’s look reproached him. “Or maybe yes. He was such a multi-folded creature, so...” He sighed, words failing him. “Too good to be so and too bad to live. He... I believe he meant me well, but he died before I truly knew him.”
She sat at the table, moving slowly, like a cat afraid of disturbing a skittish bird.
“How did he die?” she asked when Will remained silent. “I’ve heard such various accounts,” she said. “That he died of the plague, or that he died in a tavern brawl over a lewd love.”
“He died of his love,” Will said, surprising himself with it. Strangely, it seemed to him as though Marlowe now spoke through his lips. He remembered Marlowe giving just such a discourse on love three years ago, over a meal at the Mermaid. “Love is a lethal disease, and it claims more victims than are accounted.”
Now she smiled a smile as cynical as any of Marlowe’s own. “No. Faith. The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being taken with the cramp was drowned and foolish chroniclers of that age found it was -- Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies; men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them but not for love.” She paused and looked at Will, and her smile turned to a slow, puzzled frown. “And yet believe you this of Marlowe? Mean you to tell me that, like a lovesick maiden in a chivalric tale, he sat like patience upon a monument, staring upon grief and, from this green and yellow melancholy, he thus sickened and died?”
Will shook his head. He’d never spoken of this before, but he felt as though Marlowe stood behind him now, and smiled upon his speech.
Had this woman been the witch of his suspicions, in a smoke-filled den filled with despicable relics, would Will have spoken?
She looked like Will’s Nan, and she mocked his turn of phrase and spoke with such familiar, gentle persuasion that he couldn’t help but confide in her.
“Wish that he had died thus, of such green and yellow melancholy,” he said. “By God, I wish that he had. Then would my mind be easier. But he was a sanguine man, and his love, like everything else about him, was a mad blaze of the fire that ran too hot and dry through his veins. He could not love mortal, could not be contented with that. It was too easy, that, and too clean. Too meek and small, such joy, for Marlowe, the great poet.” Will paused. He shook his head and for the first time looked upon Marlowe’s memory as upon that of a young man, too young, too rash, too foolish, who’d really never known anything about the world.
“The great fool,” he said. “He loved a creature who was....” And there he misgave, and there he stopped, his mind turning upon this point of much import: the woman to whom he spoke had been so curt, so perfectly possessed in her practical view of the world, so much like his Nan, that Will feared to mention the fairy kingdom and its denizens.
Would she not throw it back in his face? Would she not laugh, as an adult laughed at a child’s fantasy? Did she know of the elven kingdom’s which twined mortal realms, existing side by side, and yet not touching, like two sides of a single paper?
“If you mean to speak of the good neighbors,” the woman said, startling him, “I already know you’ve been among them. There’s the mark of their magic in you.” She stared at him, her eyes squinting like the eyes of an old woman who tried to discern some exceedingly small object in a dark midnight. “I would say the mark of their love, if I didn’t know better. For the love-protection upon you is a hot love, a burning flame of passion and selflessness and they do not love so. Their love is a cold thing, meager and small, like their gold that, once spent, changes once more to leaves and dirt, like their food that only makes one hunger for more.”
“It is love,” Will said, and felt a great anger grow within him, his gorge rising at the thought of this love, unrequited, as insulting, as hurtful as hate unprovoked. Had he truly, still, the fingermarks of the creature upon himself? “It is love and he who loved me--”
“He?” the woman’s eyebrows rose, startled, above her dark eyes.
“The Lord Quicksilver, the king of elf land. He is a dual creature, able to assume now the aspect of a man now that of a woman and, man and woman, both truly. The Lady Silver, his female aspect, she once loved me well, and maybe Quicksilver loved — loves me too. I much fear he did, maybe does.”
“You fear? You have her love? His love? And you come to me? What can I do for you?” The woman looked outraged, vaguely insulted. She set her hand on the table, and made as if to rise. “As the good book would say, whence am I worthy to receive my Lord?”
And now Will’s anger rose, red-hot, and he trembled as he clenched his fists and stood from the table, facing the woman no longer ashamed, no longer embarrassed, no longer fearing her strange and antic powers. “Oh, curse that love and the one that gave it. Curse his interference in my life. Curse that twisted, strange affection that took Marlowe and, in a fight for the kingdom of fairyland, like a flame consumes a candle thus consumed him.
“King Quicksilver used Marlowe, nay, used all of us like a puppeteer uses the puppets he holds. When his brother, his deposed brother, the past king of fairyland, tried to recover the throne, Quicksilver used us, his mortal slaves, to defend him. And like slaves, nay, like sticks and stones that children play with in a counting game, he threw us into the fray caring not who wielded the fatal blade and who was cut — dead with the blade through his left eye, the blood tingeing his well-cut doublet and that collar of the finest linen of which he was so proud.” Will pounded his fists together upon the table, a violent slam that made the table shake. “Thus died Marlowe, the Muses’ darling, the best poet ever to bestride a stage and reach for the stars.” He swallowed. “Thus died all the countless poems he would have penned in the remaining years of his natural cycle, the children of his genius — all perfect, all fire and air — so died they, with him, broken, throttled, buried in a paper’s grave in Deptford and forgotten by all. All this -- all -- for the cursed elf’s love.”
There were tears in his eyes, and through them the cottage looked weird and distorted like a drowned landscape, like a scene seen from far off and only half-understood. A sob cut his speech, unexpected, like a visitation from outside himself. “And thus I got to live, I — unworthy. But my life is shadowed by Marlowe’s ghost and when I try to write it is his words, those great, echoing words that made the stage tremble, that drip upon my page like echoes of his blood. And thus, miserable, I, have sold my friend’s blood to make a living.” He realized tears were falling down his face, unashamed, like the great crying of a woman or a child. He turned his face away from the woman and sat down.
Anger had left him. Fear had abandoned him. Nothing remained to him but this feeling of having run far and long and now having come to some sort of wall, some sort of end. He could go no further.
A great sob tore through his lips, shaking him.
When he looked back at the woman, he couldn’t read her expression.
She was looking on him, frowningly, not as though she disapproved of what he’d said. More like someone evaluating a piece of work.
Thus had Will’s father looked, when staring at a newly sewn glove. Thus did Nan look after planting flowers in a row, when looking at their arrangement.
Thus this woman now looked on Will, her eyes squinting down, her gaze fixed.
She was going to tell him that there was no ghost. She was going to tell him that Marlowe had died and did not walk the land as did shades that had some work to do, some wrong to right.
She was going to tell him this and mock him and send him on his way like a truant child.
Will found himself longing for such mocking. It was a consummation devoutly to be hoped for. Then could he believe that his work was his own and no one else’s. Then could he shrug that feeling of steps that doubled his own and actions that shaded his every movement — that feeling of words not his own falling in burning sentences upon his page.
“You’ve done well enough from his words, have you not?” the witch asked. “He wanted to give you his words, and you’ve profited from them. Why would you wish it otherwise?”
“It is his words, then?” Will asked, as his heart sank and his blood, seemingly, lost all heat and force. “It is his words I have?”
“His words were a gift, magical, come to him from Merlin, his ancestor. Marlowe willed them to you, with his dying breath. They are yours now. Go home and live contented.” The woman looked at Will, the marks of her former outrage still upon her.
It was, Will thought, as if she believed he was refusing a gift other men would kill to have.
He felt his gorge rise. “Be contented? How can I? When I can’t write my own words? When the sentences that come from my brain and trickle upon the page through my hand are not my own?
“Be contented, you say. I might as well be dead, then, and Marlowe alive, for when a man’s good words cannot be heard nor a man’s good wit understood, it strikes a man more dead than great reckoning in a small room.”
The woman shook her head. “The gift has cost him dearly, for his ghost has been chained by his words and thus banned from the heaven or hell his actions merited. The kindest thing you can do is to accept gracefully what was so dearly purchased.”
“It is his ghost?” Will said. “It is then truly his ghost that dogs my steps? That breathes down my neck? That writes through my pen?”
“His ghost, aye,” the woman said. “And his ghost craves a word with you.”
She waved a hand, and lifted it, the little finger wiggling, and set it down again, the edge of it outward, like a knife cutting the still, warm, homey air.
There beside the great bench at which Will sat, Marlowe stood.
Marlowe, still well attired and carefully combed, his auburn hair pulled back and tied with a blue satin ribbon.
One almond-shaped gray eye looked at Will in great amusement, the other dripped gore and blood, to which Marlowe paid no more mind than if it were tears.
Will felt horror grip him, expelling air from his lungs.
Marlowe might have been alive, there beside Will.
The ghost got a lace kerchief from his ghostly sleeve and with it dabbed at the blood upon his ghostly cheek.
It smiled, a ghastly, blood-stained smile, and said, softly, “Good morrow, Will.”