“Aye,” Murchaud answered, glancing up with shining eyes. “That’s what makes it a tragedy, my dear.”
Had my friend’s Muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth then this his love had brought,
To march in ranks of better equipage:
But since he died and Poets better prove,
Theirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 32
Kit lay on his back against the emerald coverlet, lamplight snarled in his light brown hair, and idly turned the swan-white quill between his fingers while Will watched from the chair by the window. The ornately carved back was winning the war against Will’s spine; Will leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
“These lamps are very fine. They burn paraffin?”
“Spirits of some sort,” Kit said. “Tis a lovely bright light, isn’t it?”
“I might sit up a little,” Will said, feeling dishonest. “If the light will bother you, I can retreat to the library.”
“No need,” Kit said, kicking his legs high to swing himself out of the bed. He dropped the pen onto a shelf as he stood, his fingers returning to stroke the stainless plume briefly before he turned away. “What a little mystery this is, isn’t it?”
“What will you do with it?”
Kit shrugged, his eyebrows arching in cheerful mockery. “Tis too lovely to strip and stain with ink. Keep it as a token of affection, I suppose; I musthave an unconfessed admirer.”
“Perhaps she wants you to write a sonnet to her loveliness. Or,” Will grinned, “on her loveliness, for that matter.”
“Ah, but sonnets are thy idiom, not mine.”
Will leaned back into the shadows, feeling the grin slide down his face. “Where have you read my sonnets, Kit?” He managed to hide a guilty look at his cloak and the brownie-cleaned boots that he had come to Faerie in. They were tucked into the corner beside the clothes press with his sonnets rolled up inside them. Surely Kit would be, if anything, too proud to sneak.
“Romeo and Juliet,” Kit answered. “And nicely done it was. I wouldn’t mind seeing those others you mentioned, though, when you think they re fit for the public eye.”
Somehow, Will managed not to choke. “They may never be so.”
“Really? Not as off-color as Tom’s dildo poem, I trust.” Kit poured water to wash his hands and face and made a little ceremony of it.
“With a better meter, at least.”
Kit turned to him surprised, reaching for linen to dry his hands, and Will laughed. “No; I’ve a touch more decorum than Tom, though I’ve read the poem in question. I rather imagine that one will never see printer’s ink. You don’t mind my rustling papers and cursing by lamplight while you try to sleep?”
“Not at all.” Kit shrugged. “You re not like to have much time for work here. You re a puzzle to them, a toy, and if you claim the library, this palace holds enough creatures who do not sleep to distract you with their demands. Besides, if you’re here, you can wake me if I start to dream.”
“Sensible,” Will said. May I have that lamp by the bedside as well?”
“Yes, and use my table.” Kit brought the squat globe with its odd, tall chimney over to the broad walnut writing table, shoving layers of papers aside. Will picked up the lamp from the square table beside the window and joined him, angling the two so they gave enough light to write by.
“That’s not bad. Better than candles.”
“Aye.”
“Sleep well, Kit.”
Kit pursed his lips as he turned away. “Just don’t wish me dream sweetly, I pray.”
A few hours later, Will rolled the mismatched sheets of sonnetry into a tubeagain and fastened them with a ribbon. He weighed the poems in his hand: a few ounces of ink and paper and emotion and clever word play. Surely nothing to feel such pride and consternation over.
He’d lied to Kit when he said Jonson had a copy; a few he’d shown to friends, but not most of them. Certainly not to anyone who might recognize the subject.
Poley and Baines know Kit is alive now, he realized suddenly. I have to draft a letter to Tom Walsingham.Which he did, hastily, and sanded and sealed it, explaining the situation and that he, Will, would return by Christmas. ‘And may I meet my promise to a conspirator better than I meet my promises to my wife.” Will stood, the poems in one hand, the letter in the other, and hesitated. I don’t know how to send it.
He stole a glance at Marley, curled like a child under his spotted cloak, and stifled a yawn against the back of the hand that held the sonnets. He didn’t feel like sleeping, and he propped the letter and the poems upon the mantel and stepped into his boots before he blew the lamps out.
The latch clicked softly, well oiled, when he turned the handle, and he walked into the darkness of the hall. The Mebd’s palace changed in darkness and solitude. The airy corridors closed in, became low and medieval, and Will thought he saw things scuttle in the corners near the floor. He stopped his hand before he could cross himself, wondering where that ancient reflex had arisen from, and picked his way past the roiling shadows of infrequent torches, certain of restlessness, uncertain of his goal.
He found the spiral stair with ease and followed it down, noting landmarks so he would be able to find his way back when his wandering tired him. An unusual sense of well-being buoyed him; he wasn’t sure if Morgan’s medicines deserved the credit, or if it was simply the magic of Faerie. Will paused in the atrium, in the mellow moonlight drifting through high windows and magical skylights, and nodded to the unmoving suits of armor flanking the relief-wrought doors. He wasn’t sure they were inhabited, but in the very least they felt alive. Felt alive, Master Shakespeare? Can you explain what precisely that means, for our academic interest? Well… …no.But he nodded anyway, and continued past, down the winding side corridor that would bring him to the library. A library worthy of a Cambridgeman’s glee, in Will’s admittedly under-experienced opinion.
The light was better, candles that never seemed to drip or smoke ranged every few feet along the wall, and Will found the tall red cherry doors easily enough. They gleamed strangely in the candlelight as he pulled a taper from its sconce and fumbled for the crystal knob, pleased his hand didn’t shake. A dim strand of light crossed the floor as he eased the door; he slipped in and let it latch softly.
“Good night?”
“Master Shakespeare.” A pleased voice, a thrill of velvet that reminded him of the furry backs of fox moth caterpillars inching along a twig. Morgan le Fey looked up from reading, her light gilding one side of her face and casting the other into shadow. A folio whose illuminated leaves were shiny umber under the ink and gilt lay open before her; she held a thin glass rod in her right hand which she used, delicately, to turn the pages.
“Your Highness.” He bowed, balancing his candle, careful to spatter no wax. The scent of paper and leather filled the library. “An unexpected pleasure.”
“I haunt the place,” she said, laying her wand aside. “Sleepless? Too ill? I have herbs for that, too.”
“Rather, I am too well to sleep, Your Highness,” he answered. “And I thank you for it.” As he came forward, he saw that the light gleaming over her shoulder was neither lamp nor candle, but what seemed a swarm of green and golden atomies hovering in midair. He tucked his candle into a wall sconce, well away from the ancient tome, and seated himself across from her in acquiescence to her gesture.
She smiled. “I’m pleased to find I’m not the only one who seeks the dusty comfort of books when I am restless at night.”
She did not behave in the manner he expected of Queens, and truth to be told he was restless; restless with a sort of longing that his own poetry and his sleepless exhaustion had reawakened in his breast. He ached with the need of it, instead of the pain that had haunted him so much of late. He licked his lips and looked down at her text.