Ill Met by Moonlight (6 page)

Oh, if only his parents’ shadows would send him a willing instrument for his vengeance. Someone outside the realm, someone base and crude and mortal. Someone like the mortal his brother had commanded for his foul deed. Someone who would strike at Sylvanus’s rotted-through heart and kill him and not be banned from the power of the hill forever.

And never mind if mortals who did harm the inhabitants of fairyland bought themselves death in that one action. What did Quicksilver care for the life of mortals, when his heart remained cold at his parents’ plight and he had no more than a sense of what he
ought
to feel to guide him through his awful duty?

He stopped. A man stood in front of him.

Man
might not be the right word. This looked scarcely more than a raw boy, with overlong bones beneath supple skin, his angles and jagged ends showing only a hint of future manly power. The hair on his chin was no more than a dispirited feathery growth.

Yet his skin glowed as pale and even and smooth as Lady Ariel’s, and his forehead rose noble and broad. His small pink lips held an unexpected hint of stubborn strength. His dark hair fell in soft curls to his shoulders. His yellow-brown eyes were the eyes of a falcon intent on the chase.

Not unpleasant to the eye, the young man might have been mistaken for one of the elven king’s own guards, except for his clothes, which were all mortal, and cheap. Russet wool, such as the poorest peasants wore, made up his garb, though it had been cut into a respectable enough doublet and breeches.

The garments showed the boy for a mortal. A mortal aspiring to middle class and falling short.

Yet he looked at the enchanted palace and saw it, where mortal eyes should perceive nothing but darkness and rustling trees.

Quicksilver sighed. This must be another Sunday child, blessed with enchanted sight. He wished the creatures wouldn’t whelp on Sundays. It only caused trouble, for elf and human alike.

And yet . . . if the boy could see Sylvanus, maybe he could kill him, too. Maybe Quicksilver had found his henchman. Addling the mortal’s wits, persuading him to cooperate could not be hard.

Quicksilver reached for the boy’s thoughts and heard the tumult of them:
Nan, my Nan
.

The youth’s eyes, fixed in a mournful gaze, turned to where the peasant girl danced with the elven king.

Ah, so this would be the butcher’s apprentice, or the law clerk, or whatever he was, who’d married the woman that the elven king coveted.

And he would be—Quicksilver smiled—the willing instrument of Quicksilver’s vengeance.

Silently, Quicksilver thanked his parents’ shades for sending him such a one.

Then, by an effort of his elven will, he bent his body to his pliant mind, and, taking advantage of the gift his brother so disdained, wished upon himself his female aspect and changed his clothes to match his form. Thus armed, he set out to begin his vengeance.

Scene 3

A forest, thick enough to obscure the light of the cloudveiled moon. A shimmering, translucent palace stands amid the trees, overlaying the dark trunks. Within the palace, the fairy company dances. Outside, Will watches the dancers. Quicksilver, in female form, looks on him, unobserved.

O
pen-mouthed, Will watched the finely dressed dancers, and Nan, dressed like a fine lady too, cavorting with the dark-haired man who’d sat on the throne in the translucent palace amid the trees. Will felt as if his wits had been addled by wine or sleepiness, and he couldn’t think clearly from one end of a thought to the next.

The man looked like a king. He felt like a king, too, to Will’s damped spirits, his muffled, despairing jealousy.

But king of what?

England had a queen, and no king, and may Elizabeth live and reign many more years, if it would avoid the civil wars that tore a country apart when a sovereign died with no legitimate heir.

Will shook his head. No kings in England. He must be dreaming.

Yet he felt awake. His feet hurt from the rocky forest path, and his bare hands felt the cool night breeze that made the bushes rustle and the trees whisper overhead.

Still, he must be dreaming. He knew the path through the forest to Shottery much too well never to have noticed a palace—and an enormous palace such as this, made of gleaming white marble. There weren’t even ruins of a palace on this site, that Will might be seeing a ghostly projection of past glory.

In human memory, this forest was as it had ever been. Only its confines had shrunk more with each passing generation, till it was no more than woods, rambling through a small part of the country it had once covered.

Vague legends of Druids, the writings of Romans who’d first arrived in Britain, bobbed up in Will’s mind, sending a shiver down his spine, clouding his thoughts like stories heard on a dark night, while the wind howls outside the shuttered windows.

Perhaps he was watching the unhallowed ceremonies of the pre-Christian savages who had once lived here.

But, no, such things didn’t happen in this well-ordered world of flesh and blood. And if these were savages, why would Nan be among them?

No, it had to be a dream, all a mad dream. Only illusion could make marble walls transparent, a feat quite common in dreams, and not startling at all to the sleeping mind, though impossible in the waking world.

But if he was dreaming, what should he do? Did it matter where he wandered? And where had his dream begun? Had this whole day been a dream, and did he still lie snug beside his Nan in their bed, in the predawn mists of this day that his fevered brain told him was ending? Or had the dream begun sometime when his weary body had reclined deep within the forest, and he’d fallen asleep on a rough bed of moss and leaves?

He willed himself to wake, opened his eyes so much he felt they’d split. Nothing changed.

Will closed his eyes, and wished, and hoped that he would wake up in his bed, next to Nan.

He opened his eyes again to see Nan, dressed all in silk, covered all in pearls, hopping and skipping beside a royal personage that could not exist, within a semitransparent palace where no palace could rise.

Thus had she danced with Will, when he had courted her, at the churchyard at Temple Grafton in May of the year past. A year ago, little more, and he’d already lost her.

“Um . . . oh, um . . . good sir,” a soft voice called, from amid the trees.

Will turned to look and, for a moment, forgot the palace and Nan and the impossible, prancing king.

In that moment he knew for sure that he wandered lost in a dream spun from a fevered brain.

The person standing amid the trees couldn’t be real. Such beauty as she possessed—beauty distilled, refined with purity and grace such as the papist sculptors had tried to infuse into their idolatrous statues—such beauty couldn’t exist in reality.

Not that the woman standing at the edge of the trees looked conventionally beautiful. Rather than the golden tresses much admired by poets, she had ink-black hair, so dark it gave off no reflection, even when moonlight, piercing the treetops, chanced to shine fully on her. Moonlight shone upon her high cheekbones, her oval, well-drawn face, her small straight nose and her large, large eyes that shone the color of polished silver.

Her pink lips turned slightly upward at the corners, a smile of amusement at his scrutiny.

She was dressed as finely as Nan in that dream-vision that had enthralled Will, and she did not look like someone who should be tramping about in the middle of Arden Forest. Her glistening garb suited itself ill to forest paths. Her gown fell over a fine chemise, both of them covered all with glistening scrolls of silver-colored thread that formed designs that now looked this way, now that, just like the branches of a wind-whipped tree will form one shape and then another, all of them beautiful, all of them meaningless.

Her pulled-back long hair fell to her waist. A net of shining silvery thread and pearls enveloped it without restraining it.

The woman stepped forward slowly, like a vision, her movement more graceful than anything, save maybe the flight of a bird on a spring morn.

The palace and Nan forgotten, Will had to control an impulse to fall on his knees and worship this vision.

Next, he would be like those papist visionaries of old, and run into Stratford claiming he’d seen the Virgin Mary in the woods. Wouldn’t that be a fine way of ending up accused of conspiring with the Jesuits, or of turning the people against their excommunicated sovereign?

Will’s hand went to the front of his neck, beneath his chin.

He’d always wanted to be in high places, but he’d never meant to have his head displayed on a pike over London’s gate. Not that he would get even that. Common as dirt, with no name and no arms, he’d end by hanging from the gibbet while crows plucked out his eyes.

Gossamer-like and ethereal, the lady floated toward him as if on air. A waft of perfume came with her—lilacs at full bloom, a floral scent like the one Will had smelled in his deserted room in Stratford, but stronger, more intoxicating. Will inhaled and felt dizzy.

The vision stopped short of walking through Will, and smiled intently at him. “My kind sir,” it said. “I need your help.”

“My . . . help?”

The vision smiled. Her too-solid-feeling hand grasped Will’s arm just above his wrist, where the sleeve of his secondhand suit ended. Her hand felt velvety-soft and very warm. “Your help, if you will give it to me. You are, I assume, the husband and master of that fine lady.” She waved a graceful hand toward the translucent palace, within which Nan still leaped and cavorted. The lady’s gesture made the twin globes of her breasts rise and fall within her low-cut chemise.

“Ah. Yes. Nan.” So Nan was still there, too? A coherent dream this was, for all its incoherence.

“Good.” The woman smiled. “My name is . . . um . . . Silver. Lady Silver, and I need your help in righting a great wrong . . . and in . . . um . . . getting your wife back.”

“Nan?” Getting Nan back? But Nan . . . Had Nan really disappeared? In the world of rational men, Nan could not have disappeared. And if this was all a dream, then Nan would still be home, with Susannah, or else in Shottery, with her kin. And if this was a dream, what did it matter what Will did or how he responded to this splendid lady with her rounded breasts, her tiny waist?

Will’s mind spun, in confused wonder.

“Yes, your wife. I understand you love her very much.” The woman’s smile seemed to mock the very idea of love between man and wife.

Will gave her a shrewd look. She was dressed and behaved like a lady, but was she a bawd, sent to tempt him?

Right. He smiled at the thought. Oh, certainly this was a bawd. A bawd in white silk walking the forest at night, beside a transparent palace, to tempt Will, petty-schoolmaster of Wincot, son of a ruined Stratford merchant. Perhaps she was a courtier inside that dream palace. Will smiled to himself.

His smile seemed to startle the dark lady. She cocked her head sideways and examined him, as though he were a strange, wondrous object brought from overseas in the belly of a ship.

“What—What has happened to my wife, and how may I help Nan? How may I help you—and Nan?” His mouth felt too dry. He licked his lips and gestured expansively toward the palace. If he was dreaming, he might as well find the rules behind the dream, that would allow him to rescue Nan, or at least to change the dream into something more pleasant. He eyed the lady Silver, her tightly corseted waist making an indentation between her ample bosom and her flaring hips. If this were a mad dream, then he’d dream what he best pleased. He longed to lay his face on the two satiny globes at her chest, but something in her eyes warned him against it.

The lady smiled, as though reading his mind, or maybe just the hungry expression in his eyes. “Your lady wife and your daughter have both been taken by the people below the hill.”

The people below the hill? Below what hill, in this flat ground of forest and fields? It took him a while to realize what the words meant, to equate this with the
good people
of which his grandmother had muttered and his mother had spoken, long ago, when Will was a small boy.

He remembered his aunts and his mother, gathered in a furtive group by the fireplace, discussing mysterious, supernatural beings that inhabited mounds and disused glens, and intercepted travelers on their way through Arden Forest.

The women had to speak of such things behind the backs of their newly converted men, because the new, Protestant religion lacked the old religion’s accustomed patience toward the ancient beliefs of the people.

From what Will had gathered when—a child of small years and tender imagination—he had listened to stories obviously not meant for him, the people below the hill must be the same as the beings who’d consorted with the druids. Magical beings, of unhallowed magic. His adult mind told him it was all nonsense, but dreams often were, so he thought on.

Some of his aunts and their neighbors had said these supernatural beings were a few of the fallen angels, the less guilty ones, who’d never been cast all the way to the depths. Others believed that they were the ancient, dethroned gods of the mistaken faiths. Others, yet, that they were the souls of the dead.