Ill Met by Moonlight (32 page)

The rushy glen by the riverside. Amid the rushes, a wedding table is set, and on it cakes and confections of such miraculous nature that they look as though they might at any minute take flight.

N
an thought that the place should have smelled brackish—of stagnant water and rotted vegetation, but it didn’t. Her wedding banquet table—a golden piece of furniture, with spindly legs—sat by the riverside in a spot where shallower ground invited the river in. There, the river had taken a bite out of the forest, forming a murky pool, where green rushes grew and lilies floated on the stagnant water.

But the wedding table, for her second alliance, was set right atop the rushes and the murky water and there stayed, as though on a carpet, balanced and even. And the air all around smelled of flowers, as if they feasted amid a perfect spring meadow.

And though rain fell everywhere, and Nan could see it, it wet neither her nor any of the elves, nor did the servants, carrying fantastic confections to the lace-covered table get wet, nor the cakes—spiraling, soaring spun-nectar whiteness—run, nor the tablecloth sag.

Sylvanus had led Nan to the thrones set up at the end of the clearing—tall thrones as gilded and perfect as the one in the throne room in the palace. He’d seated her in one of the thrones, but he, himself, had declined to sit on the other.

Like a market peddler, adept at gaining the friendship of his customers, the High King of Elvenland in Avalon, moved, instead, amid the multitudes of well-dressed courtiers, their numbers swollen far beyond those that attended the evenings at the palace, and spoke to each of them in a concerned away, and pressed their hands in earnest of his honesty.

Through the sweet music that a large orchestra of elves played at a corner of the clearing, Nan could hear the song of frogs by the riverside, and coming across it all, again and again, Sylvanus’s powerful voice. “Quicksilver” he said and then again, “Quicksilver” and “Quicksilver,” yet again, the name laden with deep sorrow, infinite sympathy. It seemed to Nan, on hearing it, that all these noble lords objected to the expulsion of Prince Quicksilver and that the king had to mention it, again and again, to explain away the cutting off of a prince from the hill, and justify his stern measure.

All the same, Nan wished he wouldn’t mention the prince, wished his name were not pronounced near her. Hearing it, brought to mind Will and the dark lady cavorting on Nan’s own bed.

The thought still sent a shock like molten lead flowing through Nan’s heart. How could Will? How could he?

And yet, looking around the clearing, she thought that she was about to contract marriage with an elf, to become an elf, like him, part and parcel of his world and never again able to return to her own world, or to Will. Wasn’t her treason greater than Will’s? So Will had spent a night with someone else. Was he, then, the first husband to thus stray? And did many a man not, after such a false step, find his feet again and keep to the path of his marriage and the bed of his wife the rest of his days?

She felt something like a bitter laugh push its way through her lips, but she stopped it in time. If it were only one night . . . If Will had repented . . . But, for all she knew, Will continued cavorting with his dark lady who was really a fair gentleman. Even now, Nan supposed, they’d be beneath the covers in the house in Henley Street, finding new ways to cloy their jaded appetite.

Like that, Nan gazed across the clearing, past the milling crowd of courtiers all in cloth of gold and fripperies of velvet and silk, and saw . . . Will! He stood at the edge of the river, but in the mortal world, so that his feet sank in the mud to the ankle. The rain that fell soaked his poor wool suit, and made him look like a wet cat, when all its fur—the ornament and grace of its state—clings to its poor frail frame and leaves the cat nothing more than a bag of bones, pitiful and pitiable.

Nan felt a stab of annoyance. Will would be ruining his suit, the idiot. And worse, he’d be destroying his boots, the fool man. As though it were easy, on their meager income, to have his boots resoled when they wore thin, much less this, to have to replace sole and uppers and all.

Such was her reflexive indignation, before she thought that it would be none of her business. Will’s clothes, his shoes, should no longer worry her. She would be Queen, Queen of Fairyland, alive and hale and happy, long after Will lay asleep and gone forever beneath the dust in Stratford Cemetery.

The thought should have brought her joy and exhilaration and a sense of freedom. Instead, it brought a disconsolate, deep mourning, like the crying over a dead child. Reflexively, Nan looked to the side of the throne, where the double cradle had been set and where grand ladies and great gentlemen of Fairyland sighed and cooed over the babies’ perfect, chubby features.

One of those ladies detached herself from the group. Grand, dressed all in spun silver, her head ornamented with gaily colored feathers, the lady looked like a stranger, and it wasn’t until she got close that Nan recognized Ariel’s small features.

“He loves you, you know,” Ariel whispered. “He’s come to fetch you away.”

“Loves me?” Nan started, then looked at Will again, at the edge of the clearing, his gaze fastened on her like iron called by a magnet. Ah, so he loved her, did he? And how was it that Ariel knew of his presence? Looking at Will, at the way the elves walked around him and through him, Nan was sure no other elf saw him.

“I cast a veil over him,” Ariel whispered. “Oh, they’ll know he’s there when he interferes in the dance, but, until then, I’ll keep him safe from the ravages and defenses of our kind.”

Safe. “Foolish girl, why do you bother? What do you think you’ll accomplish with this? Are you keeping him safe for me, or have you become a procurer for your lord Quicksilver and will, for him, find what his lewd love requires?” Speaking thus, in harsh words, Nan wished to shock Ariel and half expected the elf girl to yell back her response, like a housewife at the Stratford market.

But instead, Ariel smiled. Her pale blue eyes glowed with a light they’d never shown before. “Love is never lewd and my lord Quicksilver has forsaken his claim for your sake. He loves that much.”

“Love.” Disappointed at Ariel’s meek answer, Nan realized that she’d been trying to start a fight because she wished to cause a spectacle and force this whole court to turn toward her. No more would they press Sylvanus’s hand. No more would they mutter sad things about the transgressor, Quicksilver, no more would they walk past the throne, where Nan sat, with just a nod and an arching of eyebrows. If Ariel had started a fight, they’d have been forced to see Nan and react to her. “Love—you believe in that, do you? You believe in a man’s words? Ah, girl, girl. Men were deceivers always.”

But Ariel laughed. “Deceivers, maybe, but you see, Quicksilver is not a man and his dual nature deceives him more than anyone else. For many years, tumbled by it, he’s not known which of his end is feet and which head, and he’s gone through the world like an oyster, shut in on itself veiling the pearl of love it is capable of. But the oyster is now open, the pearl displayed, and this treasure . . .” Ariel shook her head and tears shone in her eyes. “It was your Will who pried the shell open. And it is for your Will’s love that Quicksilver wishes you and your husband reunited. And for Will’s sake, Quicksilver has asked me to help. And for his sake, I will.”

Nan stood up. Even standing up, despite her shiny, rainbow-colored gown, she attracted no attention. Not one of the courtiers turned to look at her, not even Sylvanus, busy as he was, in conversation with several imposing high lords.

No glance but Will’s followed her, but Will’s gaze was so steady, so intently fastened on her every moment that she felt as though it were a hot, smothering blanket that made her sweat with the strength of his regard.

To deny him, to tweak him, to keep him doubting and guessing, Nan walked down the three steps of the throne, to stand beside Sylvanus, as he spoke to the high lords.

“Quicksilver was ever an improper elf,” Sylvanus was saying. “Not, I’m sure, my brother true, not the son of my father. And that improperness has stained the hill. That’s what is causing this unseasonable rain, this distemper of colliding spheres. You know, certainly, that when a hill’s power becomes tainted, it affects the movement of the other spheres, and thus—” He stopped. Nan had come up to stand beside him, and put her arm through his.

She could feel, across the clearing, Will’s startled recoil, as if she’d slapped him. As she should have. She smiled, happily.

Her happiness lasted a scant moment. The three lords who’d been talking with Sylvanus, now turned toward her with frowns of such portentous disapproval that Nan’s smile wilted on her face, replaced with a tenseness of shock, a confusion of embarrassment.

“Milord,” she said, wanting to prove her power over the king. “Are you not going to introduce me to these high lords, and let them know the woman you expect to be your helpmeet?”

Sylvanus looked down at her and tried to remove his arm from her grasp. “Milady, you forget yourself.”

“Forget myself, how? Am I not going to be their queen?” She fixed the lords with her best shrewish glare. She wanted them to look on her with respect, to curtsey and bow and scrape and make Will more than ever mad with jealousy at her new state. “Should they not know me and bow to me?”

But the lords only glared harder, and Sylvanus’s voice had a deep chill in it, which raised a snow-covered fastness of disapproval as he said, “Milady, your sphere is the nursery and the kitchen, the supervising of the babes and the meals and the upkeep of the palace. Not the sphere of politics and the business of men, for which your gentle nature, your inferior brain, ill qualifies you.”

Nan took her hand from Sylvanus’s arm, and gladly too. Gentle nature? Inferior brain? Who did the fool think he was talking to? Some maid, with milk still upon her breath, dawdling her time upon the village green until her father, in his superior wisdom, gives her away like a new shirt or a well-tamed horse to a man he deems worth it?

What a fool, what a disgraceful idiot. How could he claim to love her, if he knew her not?

She opened her mouth, ready to remove all illusion from Sylvanus’s foolish mind, to make the misapprehension fall from his eyes like scales.

She would surely have done just that, had the music not changed at that moment.

The sounds that had been a fair accompaniment to gentle conversation now became an insistent drumming, a thrumming of disquieting chords, echoed and repeated by all hearts, picked up by all feet. Without a word, the courtiers started pairing, noble lords picking noble ladies, taking them in their arms, and, with them, spinning, round and round, as if music itself moved them.

Ariel, dragged away by a gentleman all in gold, stopped long enough to whisper in Nan’s ear, “Your true husband will take you in this sacred dance, and do what he might, do what anyone might, don’t let him let you go, or you shall be forfeit.”

And then she was gone, her step light as she joined the many couples dancing round and round in mad joy. The gentleman who seized her and led her, Nan thought, looked much like the banned prince, Quicksilver himself. Except that Nan had heard that since his parents’ death he’d never worn anything but black, and this gentleman was dressed in gaudy gold and laughed with ease as he led the smiling Ariel.

Tearing her gaze away from them, Nan realized that she, herself, was being tugged into the dance by Sylvanus’s thundering majesty.

She followed, half-spirited, not feeling the beat and pull of the music as the elves no doubt did.

But her heart did drum a mad song as she neared the place where Will hid. And she flinched and startled to see that he looked not at her but at the whole company, eyes amazed, going from face to face, as though not sure where she was.

The fool boy. Could he not see her? Would he let her go now, and miss his chance at having her back?

Oh, gladly would she go back to him now, heart and soul. He’d never told her that her brain was inferior or her nature gentle. Her Will knew her, and loved her despite knowing her.

But if he didn’t seize her now, what good would that be? She’d be lost to him, forever a captive of Fairyland.

Scene 20

The same enchanted glade, where fairy couples dance, round and round in mad, joyous cavalcade. Will stands amazed, at the edge of it, worried and fearful, as couples dance by. All the ladies, in every couple, wear Nan’s face.

S
o many couples, so richly attired, pirouetted past Will that it made him dizzy. And the music of the fairy orchestra resounded and moved in his blood, making him nauseous, as witless as a babe who knows not his name and smiles at all who approach his cradle, rewarding friend and enemy alike.

And all the ladies, in every couple, had Nan’s face and smiled on their gentlemen with Nan’s besotted smile. Was Nan besotted with the fairy king? She had seen Will, Will was sure of it, but she had ignored him. Did she no longer love him?

He’d marked Nan’s dress, an odd white glimmering fabric that shone all over, under the light, with the reflected brilliance of the rainbow. But now every woman, every single one, seemed to wear Nan’s dress and, with her face, dance besottedly round and round and round. And all the gentlemen’s faces looked softly blurred.