Any Man So Daring (2 page)

W
ill glowered at the paper and at his hands resting on either side of it, with something between impatience and dread.

Never had Will felt such fear of a blank page and the words he should pour upon it. Nightlong, he’d tried to write, yet the page remained virgin of any ink.

Taking up the pen, he subdued the treacherous tremor in his right hand. He dipped the pen into the ink well which he had earlier filled with the grindings of his ink stone and water.

Vortigern and Rowena
, he wrote upon the virgin page.

He knew what he
should
write next. This was the grave and most piteous story of the king of the Angles in northern Britain who, for a woman’s love, sold his kingdom to the Saxons.

  
Will put his pen to his mouth and nibbled upon the feather end.

  
Words poured into his mind. He could picture noble Vortigern beholding Rowena’s beauty and being stricken with awe, speaking, “But what may I, fair virgin, call your name, whose looks set forth no mortal form to view, nor speech betrays aught human in thy birth.”

 
He closed his eyes and allowed his hand that held the pen to trace the letters of these words upon the willing paper. “Thou art a goddess that delud’st our eyes and shrouds’t thy beauty in this borrowed shape.”

 
The movement of his pen stopped.

The words were familiar, and yet...

As he'd been many times before, in the night, Will was sure that someone stood behind him. Without turning, Will could feel someone there, a suggestion of laughter, a hint of amusement.

A soundless voice played in Will’s mind the next line of what he had been writing.
But whether thou the sun’s bright sister be.

  
Will stopped, as the hair at the back of his neck prickled up, for the words had the manner, tone and voice of the late Christopher Marlowe, once a greatly admired poet, but dead now for three years. Dead and buried.

Yet the feeling of his voice, if not its sound, ran through Will’s mind.
It is Dido, Queen of Carthage, Will. My Dido, Queen of Carthage. Those lines are spoken by Aeneas to Venus.

Can’t you wait till a man turns to dust in his grave before stealing his words?

The mockery, the feeling of disdain were as much Marlowe’s as the tone of voice. When alive, Marlowe had been the playfellow of nobility, the best-dressed dandy of sparkling London.

Will could swear that if he turned, dead Marlowe would stand there, behind him, in all of his marred elegance, his brittle grace.

He would smile at Will, a mild, ironic smile made horrible by the wound in his right eye, and the blood trickling down his small, neat features to stain the white lawn collar of his well-cut velvet suit.

Cold sweat dripped down Will’s spine. He shivered.

He should turn. Turn and dispel this irrational fear.

Turn,
he told himself,
turn. The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures; ‘tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil
 

But his body would not obey, and he remained sitting, his hands on his table, his quill pen beside them -- black ink slowly seeping into the blond oak wood.

Between his hands, the paper sat, with Marlowe’s words shining upon it.

This was the first time that, unknowing, Will wrote Marlowe’s words in his own hand. But he’d long suspected that every word that trickled from his pen was indeed Marlowe’s.

The words came through him as though originating in some unknown fountain, not within Will’s brain. And they had the cadence, the effect of Marlowe’s own plays.

There hung the problem.

For if the words were Marlowe’s that made Will a success, it was not Will’s success, but rather Marlowe’s. If Marlowe’s words had earned the gold that, accumulating, would soon allow Will to buy the best house in Stratford-upon-Avon; if Marlowe’s were the words that had created Will’s new found wealth, what right did Will have to use them to buy a coat of arms that his only son, Hamnet, might proudly display.

Marlowe was dead. After life’s fitful fever, he slept well.

But then, whence came his words, like pieces of himself, evading his pauper’s grave, at Trinity Church in Deptford, and filling Will’s brain and his plays and his purse?

What a horrible form of grave-robbing this was, were it true.

Will meant to steal from no man. Yet each of his words echoed the words of Christopher Marlowe, the greatest playwright the world had ever known.

Warm air drifted through Will’s open window, stale and smelling of the city’s odd mingling of spices and refuse.
 

Despite it, Will felt cold, with the cold of the grave.

If Kit Marlowe haunted Shakespeare, why did he do it?

Will had been but an acquaintance of Kit’s, not close at all.

Spirits walked for many reasons: for injury done to them — aye, and Marlowe had been murdered. Yet, Will was not one of the murderers. For something left behind — and who knew what Marlowe might not have left? Yet, force, Will did not know it, nor did he have the object or the riches. For the craving of grace and forgiveness — and Marlowe, who in life had blazed forth atheistic opinions, might well need that. But Will neither judged Marlowe nor condemned him, understanding the man’s brittle genius and the doomed love that had led him astray.

But maybe this was different. Maybe the reason Will felt Marlowe so close to him was that Will, and Will alone among mortal men, knew the truth of Marlowe’s death.

Most people believed -- and not a few averred as though they’d been there -- that Marlowe had been killed in a tavern brawl over a bawdy, disreputable love, variously given as male or female, as best suited the speaker’s indignation.

Moralists and puritans had rushed to see in Marlowe’s death a judgment on Marlowe’s mad, carousing life, on Marlowe’s too-free opinions, his too-analytical mind.

Yet, Will would wager that the divine weighed men upon different scales from those of sour-lipped envy.

If those who spoke could but guess, if they could but know that Christopher Marlowe had died in a brawl over the throne of fairyland, in a fight to preserve the world from the grasp of a dark power! Oh, if they knew that Kit’s death, his sacrifice, had earned freedom for them and their children, aye, and their great-grandchildren, too, how they would revere Kit Marlowe, how his cynicism and mocking would be forgotten.

And, remembering Kit Marlowe, how they would recognize, in each of Will’s words, the tone, the cadence, the fall of Marlowe’s words. Will had written the
Merchant of Venice
. Aye, and it was like Marlowe’s
Jew Of Malta
.
 

And in Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus
there echoed the powder and blood feel of
Tamburlaine The
Great
, with which Marlowe had stormed and conquered the London stage.
 

And there, upon his
Venus and Adonis
, and his
Rape of Lucrece
, the long poems that had settled his literary fame, how come no one saw the rhyme and word, the very turn of phrase that Kit Marlowe would have used?

For here was the puzzle, here the coincidence that haunted Will’s mind like a bad dream standing in wait through a sleepless night.
 

Will Shakespeare had never written much worthy of note up to the night of Kit’s Marlowe’s death. And then, as though through a transference of power, a magical transfusion of the poetical vein, he’d found himself able to write: to write words like Marlowe’s.

But were these Marlowe’s words, grafted onto Will Shakespeare like an alien strain onto the homely vine? And if so, did Will deserve one coin of the money he’d earned? Or should he cease writing and let Marlowe rest in Peace in his unmarked grave in Trinity churchyard in Deptford?

The need to write, the need
not
to write, the words trying to emerge, the fear that these were not his words, blazed behind Will’s eyes in pounding headache. Impulses dwelt within him, locked in close fight like relentless duelers, with his writing as a prize.

He was late with his writing. It had been more than a month since he’d promised Ned Alleyn, the chief investor and share holder in Lord Chamberlain’s men, that he’d have a play for him. More than a month since that play had been set to open up on the boards of the Theater.

But no more of the play was written than that one sentence upon the page, and now, thinking about it, Will knew — knew — that he could never write it. For this play would be about a man betrayed by a woman into giving up his power.

Even the theme was Marlowe’s and not Will’s. Marlowe had written about war and masculine courage and the danger of love and feminine gentleness. Women were either near onto inanimate objects in Marlowe’s plays — bargaining chips in the games of male power -- or vile seductresses.

And here Will was--Will, who’d been married since he was nineteen and who loved his absent Nan as tenderly as man could love woman. Why should he echo Marlowe’s themes and Marlowe’s philosophy, save that Marlowe’s ghost was in his brain and infected his thought?

Will put his hands over his eyes and groaned. It seemed to him, for just a second, that his groan was echoed in Marlowe’s tones from just behind him and to his left.

If he opened his eyes and turned, would he see Marlowe standing there? Russet hair pulled back into a pony tail, one large, almond-shaped gray eye watching Will with weary amusement, while his other eye trickled the blood and brains extracted from it at dagger point?

Instead of turning, Will closed his eyes and called to the still room behind him, to the mundane sounds of the wakening streets outside, “Stay, illusion,” he said. “If you have any sound or use of voice, speak to me. If there be any good thing to be done, that might do you ease and grace to me, speak to me. If you are privy to fate which, happily, foreknowing may avoid, oh, speak! Or if you have uphoarded in your life, extorted treasure in the womb of earth, for which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death, speak of it. Stay and speak.” And hearing a slithering and a sound like the door opening, he called out. “Stay, Marlowe.”

“Will?” a voice asked.

Will jumped, overturning both the stool upon which he’d perched and the inkwell.

The inkwell bled upon his sleeve and poured its rich black liquid on paper and table, dripping its excess onto the floorboards.

Will, his heart at his throat, the lace of his sleeve dripping with ink, realized all too late that the voice he’d heard was the uncertain, shy voice of Ned Alleyn, theater entrepreneur, insecure financier of plays and poets.

“Will, to whom talk you?” he asked again. “And why did you call Marlowe? I knocked upon your door, but you answered not, and so I came.”

Feeling like a fool, Will turned and lifted his hand to pull back his hair.

He felt the moisture on his hand too late, and realized that he’d painted a black streak onto his forehead.
 

“Er...” Will said and, once more, nervously, he ran his hand back upon his forehead and hair. “Er.”

“All you playwrights are mad,” Ned said.

Ned Alleyn was a medium-sized man, with medium-colored hair and medium-colored skin. He wore his suit shabby and much rubbed, the green velvet faded in spots and, in other spots, showing the weave beneath.

Ned could have walked unremarked into any assembly in this town. In fact, the only thing at all remarkable about him was his brown eyes. Not for their color which, like the rest of Ned’s person, showed that eagerness not to be noticed, that urge to blend in that made Ned Alleyn so commonplace. But in those normal, unremarkable eyes something burned, something urgent and immediate, so urgent and immediate that it seemed to hold in itself the flickering flame of madness.

When he had first met Alleyn, when Will had first started writing plays for Lord Chamberlain’s men, Will had flattered himself that the keen expression in Alleyn’s face was genius and passion for theater.

But over the next couple of years, Will had identified the true cause of Alleyn’s expression: it was fear.

The financier had convinced Ned’s father-in-law, Phillip Henslowe, to allow Ned to finance the start of this new theater company. Perhaps Ned truly loved theater and what went with it. But Ned hadn’t realized, perhaps still didn’t realize, what it took to make money in theater. Phillip Henslowe’s own forays into the theater had been well financed, by brothels and gambling businesses.

But Ned was an honest man, and he was going at it with clean hands. Often the funds felt short, and, on occasion, the actors had to storm his office and demand payment before their shares were disbursed.

The look in Ned’s eyes was sheer, manic fear that his acting company would fail and that he’d be ruined. And today it seemed to Will it burned with heightened strength.

He stepped farther into Will’s room, on tiptoe, as though he were afraid of waking someone. His face looked pale enough to be that of a ghostly apparition.

Will cleared his throat. “Morrow, Ned,” he said. “What brings you to my abode so early?”

Because it was not normal for Ned to be here, it was not normal for Ned to come into his employee’s rented rooms thus, without a knock, without a by-your-leave.

The entrepreneur’s eyes widened, as though he were an intruder caught in an unlawful incursion, and his hand went to his throat, as though feeling the noose with which thieves were hanged. His voice issued from his lips small and frighted.

“Er...” he said. “Your play. You said you’d have a play for us in a week. That was three weeks ago. Where is your play, Will? Can I look at it, can we have it, in foul papers if it needs be? For the rehearsal.” His brown eyes rolled madly about the room as though trying to find, in the spare, carefully made bed, in the neat trunk, in the desk with its piles of clean paper, a hidden play, a stowed-away manuscript.

Finding none, his gaze returned to Will and bore with mad panic into Will’s own eyes. “Will, the receipts are down. Everyone has seen your
Merchant of Venice
.” Ned wrung his hands together, as though one of them were a wet rag and the other one the washerwoman’s hand. “An excellent play, Will,” he assured, confidentially. “But all the other companies are presenting it now, and we have nothing new for to bring in the people, and our coffers are empty. Winter will come soon, Will, and I don’t know how we’ll survive through winter.” His gaze dwelt, amazed, on Will’s lace, peeking at sleeve and collar. “I know your long poems,
Venus and Adonis
, and the other, the one about the rape, give you some protection from the miserable conditions of the theater. And, at any rate, your plays are worth all we pay for them. Only we need another one, Will. Is it ready?”