Ill Met by Moonlight (8 page)

The women of the house exchanged glances at his words, but didn’t raise their voices.

It wasn’t until Will, buoyed by a mug of weak ale and a hunk of mutton, was ready to walk home again, that Margaret, Nan’s sister, spoke to him.

At the door, away from the family’s men, she leaned toward Will and whispered, in a breath reeking of old mutton grease, “It is the good people who leave a stock in the bed of a baby they steal, my brother. The good people from beneath the hill.”

Scene 4

A rich bedchamber, furnished with a tall bed covered and curtained in green-and-crimson silk, embroidered more delicately than ever human needle stitched, with scenes of fauns and woodland animals. Beside the bed sits a double cradle, draped in white silk and lace and surmounted by a crystal crown. At the foot of the bed is a skillfully painted trunk, and past that, against the wall, a wide, wide mirror, in front of which a dark wooden table stands arrayed with brushes and combs and scents and ear-picks and everything a fine lady might desire. At the table, Nan Shakespeare sits, while near the bed, Ariel works, laying out clothes.

“N
o,” Nan said, and put the fine crystal-handled brush down. Clad in a long nightshirt worked all over with lace, she felt like a doll, arranged and put on display. Her No resounded in the spacious room with its pale-green walls, and echoed off the gilded ceiling.

Deep within the hill, in her room in Fairyland, Nan felt a rage come over her, a rage not unlike what she’d felt at her parents’ house, when enjoined to be a dutiful daughter. “I do not wish to ride with the king on his hunt.”

While she spoke, Nan looked in the mirror, to see her little fairy maid, Ariel, go pale and straighten up, holding a dress to herself as if for protection. Not that Ariel was ever anything but pale. All milk white and pale gold, the girl looked like nothing so much as a fine statue carved in creamy ivory. And yet, Nan thought, she’d hardly be a girl. From the little Nan had understood of the life spans and ways of these people who had kidnapped her, Ariel—a mere adolescent—would be older than Nan, an old woman in mortal years.

Ariel’s lips trembled, and her eyes rimmed with tears. “But, milady. The king wishes . . .”

Nan thought of the king, imposing and manly, strong and powerful. A man. Not like her Will, who was still in many ways a child, and whom Nan had led, by the hand and on tiptoe, through the threshold of adulthood. The king and what the king wished perturbed Nan and disturbed her reasoning. Sylvanus, fine and noble, attired in silk and velvets, had courted her.

She smiled at the mirror, bringing forth a puzzled expression from Ariel’s tidy countenance.

Nan ignored Ariel’s confusion, and wondered what her friends and companions would think of this. A king had courted Nan Shakespeare, who had been Nan Hathaway and whom no one, no one, had ever braved to court save that foolhardy boy, Will Shakespeare, too young and brash to fear her shrewish fame.

“Milady,” Ariel said. She took a deep breath and squared her frail shoulders. “The king said you should go hunting with him, today. And this dress is what you should wear for it.” Her long slim hand smoothed a confection of pearls and green silk, which she held in front of her own white gown.

Nan frowned. “No,” she repeated. “I will not go hunting with the king.” It wasn’t the hunting or the killing. Raised in Hewlands Farm Nan had often had to kill chickens. Dressed in Bartholomew’s clothes, she’d escaped from her father’s too-tight rule, and wandered the forest of Arden, laying snares for rabbits and winging birds with stones from her practiced slingshot, a skill she’d learned from her four brothers.

But she’d come to the end of her patience and her obedient meekness. When the guards of the elven king had stolen her, they’d taken her in early morning, still tired, and they’d draped their magic over her like a golden blanket, making her sleepy and compliant. All the livelong day, yesterday, she’d been too stunned and scared, everything around her new and grand, and supernatural.

But now, a day and a night had passed since Nan had first been stolen, and she’d slept—in a silken soft bed such as she’d never before lain in—and she had thought, and felt awake and quick. She would not let herself be ruled anymore. If her father had never managed to rule her, no, nor her stepmother either, no matter how many times the switch was deployed or pious sermons preached to her, she’d not be ruled by these creatures, either, who were neither living nor dead, natural nor magic. Nor would she remain forever a prisoner in their nowhere realm under the hill. She meant to show them they had not, as perhaps they thought, kidnapped a hapless peasant, a willing heifer to do their bidding.

Ariel still stared at her, and still held the green, pearl-speckled dress, her mouth open in wonderment.

Funny creature, Nan thought. Did it shock her so much, then, that Nan refused to obey Sylvanus’s will? She studied the reflection of Ariel’s face. Did Ariel think Sylvanus that wonderful? An elf, Ariel might be, inconstant and mutable as all her kind. But she appeared concerned for Nan, and her features, bruised and tired, looked a mirror of Nan’s own grief, the face of a fellow sufferer.

But Ariel was the sort who would suffer with patience, and Nan had no intention of doing likewise.

“Tell the king,” she said, “that I am too tired, from feeding the babes in the night. Surely he’ll grant me leave, then.”

Like that, Ariel’s face unclouded, and a little smile twisted her pink mouth. “Oh, certainly. That he will.”

Nan smiled at Ariel in turn. Well, well. The little maid didn’t seem squeamish about telling lies. And Ariel had known it was a lie, as rested as Nan looked and—Nan spared a glance at herself in the mirror, proud of her ruddy cheeks and clear eyes—as healthy. How far would the maid’s complaisance go? “Ariel, I miss my husband,” Nan said. “I’ve been married to him but a short time. You seem my friend true. If you would hide me and . . . and help me make my way out of the hill, to my home . . . then could I be with my husband, and . . .”

Before she finished asking, Nan knew the answer. Ariel dropped the dress and cast a shocked look all about as if she expected the magnificent walls to sprout ears or perhaps the golden oak door, on the far side, to open and allow an armed guard into Nan’s peaceful chamber. “Oh no, milady,” she said quickly. “You must stay here. Stay here and nurse our princess.”

So decisive an answer, Nan hadn’t expected. The maid condoned lying to the king, but not escaping him. Why not? Absently, Nan lifted the crystal-handled brush and ran its soft bristles down her silken wheat-colored hair. Too late, she remembered the banquet food she’d eaten the night before, and the injunctions found in every fairy tale against eating in Fairyland. Was it possible she wouldn’t be able to leave even if she were to try?

“The food I ate last night,” Nan said, looking out of the corner of her eye at Ariel, without fully turning to face the elf maiden. “Will it make me one of you?”

The girl started. “Oh, no, milady.” Ariel took in a deep, startled breath. “No, milady. Never. We cannot give our food to mortals and bind them to the hill without the mortal’s consent. That food you ate was charmed, true, but only charmed with transport spells to bring it from the tables of rich men around the country, to serve to you at our banquet. It was transported by magic from their tables, from beneath their very gazes. Our king himself . . .” And here, for no reason that Nan could imagine, Ariel’s voice dwindled and diminished, and lapsed into speechlessness, like a brook that flows into the Earth and disappears. “The food, human food, was brought here expressly for you, and only the choicest.”

Not trusting the mirror, Nan dared a sideways look at Ariel’s face. She marked how wan Ariel had gone, how colorless her lips had turned at the word that had escaped them. The king. Was this maiden somehow grieved at her king? Perhaps, just perhaps, Ariel loved her king and resented his advances to Nan. So, she would agree with Nan’s lying and avoiding his company, but not with Nan’s escaping him, since that transgression would likely give him too much pain.

Ariel had turned around, all in a rush, and opened the painted trunk at the foot of the bed. “If milady will stay indoors, then we’ll put on this gown.”

To Nan’s eyes both gowns looked much the same, both green and embroidered with jewels, both too lavish, too ornate, and too fine, and she didn’t much care which she wore. She nodded at Ariel, while reasoning that, yes, surely that was it. The girl was in love with her sovereign. It would explain the girl’s damped look, her bruised eyes, her grief-bearing countenance.

Nan’s mind quickened, like a heart that jumps at a chance half offered. She didn’t want the king, and if this maid wanted him, then perhaps . . . perhaps Nan could use Ariel’s love to snag the love of the king to its proper place. And perhaps he would let Nan go then. Perhaps other milk could be procured for the elven princess, or perhaps—sad to say—the king would disdain his first get when there was the chance of fathering others.

“The king,” Nan said, baiting her hook, even as she picked now at this, now at that bottle on the dressing table, and reclined on the green velvet upholstered chair in front of it, admiring their workmanship, smelling their contents. So many bottles, some of them looking as if they’d been carved entire from a single crystal. And how different each fragrance smelled. All were pleasant scents, but some were deep and spicy and strong, others floral and light and airy. “He’s a fine man in all parts the king is, is he not?”

Ariel started.

Looking at the maiden in the mirror, without appearing to observe her at all, Nan marked the wide-open eyes, the lips that parted to let fast breath through. She watched the blush that crept up Ariel’s cheeks, like a tide climbing the riverbank in spring. Color seeped through pale skin, till red stood in vivid patches on Ariel’s cheeks, giving her the look of one afflicted with a raging fever.

While Ariel’s lips parted for a response, the door to the room opened and Nan jumped, startled, as one suddenly awakened. In flew a troop of the little winged creatures who did all the real work around the palace. Humanlike and exquisitely beautiful, the tallest of them did not exceed a palm in height. On their backs they had wings like a dragonfly’s, only larger. They swooped in, lights flashing around their bodies, and pulled the covers on the bed, straightening them taut over the mattresses and making it all quite as neat as Nan herself did at home.

A pang for her Henley Street home prickled Nan’s heart. She’d felt like a prisoner there, and resentful that Mother Shakespeare and Father Shakespeare intruded in her life, watched her every step and took fully half of Will’s pay for their own maintenance.

But now, truly imprisoned in a supernatural gaol, she longed for Henley Street and felt as though her heart had remained there with Will.

Who was making her bed now? And how did Will fare, with neither wife nor cook? A young dreamer with scholarly notions, Will might know by heart the arguments of long-dead Romans, but had no idea how the bread was made that she set in front of him every night, or how the ale was brewed that he drank daily.

His mother would call him over to her side, and feed him
her
bread and ale, and talk to him of how he had been wrong to marry Nan.

A week of that, and Nan might well not have anyone to return to, even if she escaped this gilded prison. Will was so young . . . Her heart skipped a beat at the thought of how young Will was, how frightfully trusting, how eagerly willing to please.

“Would milady have her hair dressed?” Ariel had recovered from whatever feelings mention of the king had awakened.

Stepping behind Nan and, smiling at Nan in the mirror, a smile of near apology, she took the brush from Nan’s hand, and started brushing Nan’s hair gently.

Ariel’s own hair was as bright as rays of the sun worked into an artless kerchief over her shoulders and down her back.

She wore a silk dress, as white as Nan’s night apparel, but cut lower, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been. The elven maiden had prodigiously little to display to the eyes of men.

She had been introduced to Nan the night before, as a Duchess of the Air Kingdoms and handmaid to the two dead queens of the fairy realms.

Now, she’d be Nan’s servant and companion. Which told a lot about the king’s intentions toward Nan. Nan thought of him with mingled pride at his courtship and annoyance at his daring. Beautiful he was of course, like all his kind, and noble. But he was not Will. And thinking of Will caused Nan too much pain.

How much did Ariel’s service cost the little elven maid? How long had she been in love with her king?

Nan remembered the king’s hand, hot and unmerciful, clenching hers, and silently apologized to Will for the heat that had coursed through her own veins. She had not lied. The king was a fine man in all parts. And yet he was not a man, was he?

No, not a man and, despite the beautiful countenances that peopled his court, not an angel either. Nan had seen raw lust in his eyes and something else. Something dark, like a shadow lurking beneath his bonhomie.