Ill Met by Moonlight (9 page)

Nan looked at the lovely Ariel’s reflection and hugged herself. No, these were not angels, save perhaps the darker kind, banished forever from the sight of God.

Nan had heard stories about the people under the hill, and what she remembered made her wonder what company she’d fallen in with and how grievously she must have sinned, to deserve such exile. She’d heard of women taken by these beings because they’d missed church, neglected their prayers. What had she done?

It couldn’t be the small matter of giving herself to Will while not yet married, could it? So many did it, and so often. And yet, perhaps she had enjoyed it more than most. Perhaps her lack of repentance . . .

She shivered.

What would Will have thought of this, of her servitude? And how fared it with Will, her own sweet Will who’d made her a woman and a wife, though he was himself barely more than a boy? She held onto the image of Will, to combat the remembrance of Sylvanus that kept coming to her mind, all velvety and fine, and smiling at her with lust in his eyes.

“Is milady well?” Ariel asked.

Nan nodded, but felt guilty color flow into her cheeks. Looking at herself in the mirror, she thought that she didn’t blush prettily like Ariel. Her own blush was a coarse thing, an orange-red peeking through her sun-hardened skin. Once she had been as pretty and young as Ariel, but those days were long gone, and she had spent them in her father’s farmhouse, scaring away what he mistook for suitable suitors, or wandering the forest, playing at being an unruly boy.

Without realizing it, Nan tapped her foot against the floor beneath the dressing table, and regarded Ariel’s hands as they moved the brush slowly through Nan’s long hair.

Nan’s father had told her that her problem was that she wouldn’t be tamed, couldn’t be tamed. He’d made the point often enough, with a switch and a belt, both expertly handled by a man who’d raised four sons before trying to subdue his first daughter.

Yet Nan took her punishment and went on doing exactly as she pleased, not so much an ungrateful daughter as a hardheaded one.

So, why was she tamed now? Why did she cower here, within the hill, held prisoner by creatures that weren’t even human?

Yesterday she had been half-asleep, her wits damped, like a fly in treacle, caught and swimming but making no headway.

But today . . .

Today, she would find her way out with or without Ariel’s help.

Only, Ariel was a hindrance. With Ariel there, Nan could not hope to escape.

Nan had never had servants before. Oh, her father’s house had its serving wenches, of course, as all prosperous farmers’ houses did. But it would never have occurred to the late Richard Hathaway to have a servant brush his daughters’ hair, or help them at their dressing. A dour man, with Puritan leanings, he’d have been more likely to have them brush the cows’ tails, or saddle the horses for riding.

The advantage of such a household, so tightly run, and of being regarded as little more than a servant herself, was that an enterprising girl might leave her father’s house, while everyone was fully immersed in the round of daily chores, and go for a walk in the woods, or a swim in the Avon. Nan had done it often enough. Denied school instruction, as most girls were, Nan had learned solitude like a hornbook, and knew by heart the seasons of the Avon and the flow of its waters. She had taught Will the paths to walk through Arden Forest, and he’d admired her knowledge of bird and animal, of herb and flower. He’d pronounced her mind the equal of his, if not superior, and she fully believed that her wit had captivated him more than her looks, her knowledge had sped him to marriage more than her fast and clumsy caresses in the fields.

But now . . .

She looked in the mirror. Her gaze met Ariel’s and in that instant, Nan saw the elf maid not as an elf at all, but a suffering girl. The prison she imposed on Nan was prison to her as well. And Ariel’s love for the king—was it love?

“Tell me about the king’s late wife,” Nan said, and her sharp, shrewd eyes watched Ariel as she’d watched the merchants measuring wheat at the fair in Stratford.

The girl looked puzzled. Once more, her fair eyebrows descended over her pale eyes and she frowned, just a little. “She was a good lady,” she said. “A kind lady.”

“Was she like me, human, as I’ve heard?”

Ariel shrugged, raising thin shoulders upwards and letting them fall, a movement as slow and graceful as a swan opening its wings in the moment before startled flight. “Human. To begin with, human. But she wasn’t taken by charm and guile. The . . .” And here, once more, Ariel’s lips trembled and her voice faltered. “Our lord Sylvanus found her, wooed her, with stories and songs from a manor house in the north where he courted her, amid the crags of Scotland, and there he won her heart and from there he brought her.” Ariel brushed Nan’s hair vigorously, warming to her work and to the topic at the same time. “A stock was left in her bed, as ancient law commands, a painted piece of a tree trunk, or an enchanted twig that, by charm, looked and seemed to breathe like her, only mortally ill, and from that illness she appeared to die in days.” Ariel looked up, and her gaze again met Nan’s in the mirror.

Ariel’s eyes were grave, serious, seeming to say more than her mouth could. “Long before she ate the charmed food and became . . . Sylvanus’s subject and his wife, her people thought her dead and buried in the frozen dirt of the north lands.”

Nan shivered, at the words as much as at the thought.

Had a stock been left behind for her, if ancient elven law demanded it?

Was Will, even now, mourning the death of his wife and daughter, never dreaming that both of them were alive and well, held captive, away from his bed and his home, his love and his care?

The thought so startled Nan that she had as if a glimpse of herself in her bier, her body in the ground of the Stratford cemetery. She almost saw Mary Shakespeare, her unloving mother-in-law, hosting the funeral and talking about how God had punished Nan’s wickedness in leading Will astray.

She closed her eyes. It took her three breaths to compose herself, three more to realize that Ariel’s answer, though it said much, added only one thing, to Nan’s purpose nothing—that Ariel did indeed shy away from calling the king’s name, or called him by a more private, personal name. Did that mean love? Ariel’s eyes had looked most unloving.

Staring up at the elf-maid’s clouded eyes, Nan decided that she must find an excuse to dismiss fair Ariel. But would fair Ariel go when dismissed? She’d hoped the girl would confide in her and, in the first blush of nascent friendship, would accede to leaving Nan alone and unwatched. That having failed, Nan would have to try to send the girl away without such an aid, and hope it worked. Maybe it would.

Maybe Nan could just escape, without bothering with the intrigues of this shadowy court, or the love of an elf maiden for her king.

Then Nan remembered the sort of private water closet they had here, nothing like the privy in the garden of the Henley house. It stood next to the bedroom, attached to it, and yet odorless as nothing but magic could make it. And next to the privy seat stood a bathtub, and the maids had chattered while they bathed Nan the day before, and implied that these baths in perfumed water were their daily habit. Not a weekly obligation, such as Nan and Will fulfilled in the half barrel set in front of the fire on Saturday night.

If that were true . . . “Ariel,” she said, and reached back, to grasp the elven maiden’s wrist, letting go of it again, very fast, when the flesh she touched felt cold enough to be the flesh of the dead. “Ariel, I would bathe, before I see the king . . . since I think he might call on me to verify why I’m not going on the hunt. Could I bathe? Could that be done?”

Ariel’s eyes opened wide in surprise, but then she nodded, bobbed a curtsey, and turned to disappear through a small door behind the canopy of the bed.

The winged fairies had left too, somehow unnoticed. Nan was alone in the room.

She heard the sound of running water from the bathing room. The day before she had seen this: water cascading from midair, transported there by the magic of the elves, and by them converted to warm, softly perfumed liquid. Moments later, Ariel emerged and bowed again. “Milady.”

Nan got up, paused. “Yesterday, I was under some magical compulsion,” she said. “But today I’m not, and I would rather be alone. Would you, Lady Ariel, leave me alone in the room and in the bath, that I might wash in peace? I am not used to servants standing by while I undress.”

Ariel opened her mouth and took in breath, as if to speak, then shrugged, nodded, bowed. “I’ll be outside your bedroom door,” she said and retreated.

As soon as the heavy oak door closed behind Ariel, Nan hurried to one of the windows—an unbelievably broad, thin panel of glass, encased in a very fine wooden frame which latched at the bottom.

Unlatching the frame, Nan pushed the window open—open to the forest of Arden, trees and rocks, and blessed freedom. She saw neither fairies nor elves on that side of the palace.

Hurrying back into the room, Nan reached into the double cradle and pulled Susannah out. She’d nursed both babies in the night and then again on wakening, and they both slept contentedly. The fairy princess looked perhaps a little rosier, a trifle blonder than Susannah, but they were alike enough to be sisters.

A shiver climbed up Nan’s back. No, it would not be. Susannah would not grow up thinking herself the sister of this elf. She clutched Susannah to her, hard. The baby, in her borrowed finery of silk and lace, didn’t move, only smiled at her mother’s touch. Sleeping thus, she looked like a doll, and her sleep a morbid unconsciousness.

But Nan told herself the baby would be well as soon as they left this cursed place.

She wished for breeches, like Bartholomew’s old ones that she’d often worn when escaping from her father’s house to the freedom of the forest.

But no matter. She would make do. Hastily, she threw on the green dress that lay on the bed, not bothering with the bolster meant to hold the skirts out. Instead, she kilted the skirt up on the side, and tied it up, as she did with her own skirts, in the privacy of her home.

She would hie back from Arden to the alley behind the Henley Street house, get into her own house, and dress before anyone could see her in this unseemly attire.

And then—she realized she was gnashing her teeth—and then she would dispel anyone’s notion that she might be dead, and undo whatever grief or fear Will might have felt.

She hefted Susannah again, a soft weight drooping in her arms, and put her long, unencumbered leg over the sill.

On the other side, she stepped onto yielding ground cushioned with pine needles, and tree leaves. Trees, so many trees, surrounded her. The sun shone in a distant haze above her, much obscured by clouds, and no brighter than candlelight seen through cheesecloth. Nan frowned at it. She’d get no direction from the sun, as if it also conspired at her captivity. And it was odd, too, for the sun to be poised at noon, though Nan had just awakened. She never slept that long.

Well, no matter. In whatever direction she started, she would find a path she knew, or else come upon the flowing Avon. She knew the place well enough.

So intent upon her purpose was she, that she walked a few yards before she was struck by the peculiar silence of the forest and a sense of wrongness.

The scent she smelled was not the oak and pine of the forest, but a deep, unnatural smell of lilac.

The trees had an odd transparency, the sky above glowed with a greenish-blue haze, and the sun shone like a pale thing that gave no heat. Nan extended her trembling hand until she should have touched a tree trunk.

Instead of touching it, her hand went through it, as if through unfettered air.

Nan stood unmoving, the sleeping Susannah held in her left arm, against her breast. She felt her daughter’s soft breathing, heard the beating of the small heart. Her own eyes filled with tears. This was not freedom, but one more contrivance of her gaolers. A land with neither taste nor smell, a forest cleaned, sanitized, purged of what it was and turned into what it couldn’t be.

Looking down, she saw that her bare feet were set atop pine needles and leaves, yet felt as though they touched a cushion.

Slowly, she spun around, turning back, to look at the palace behind her.

She wasn’t surprised, didn’t even feel betrayed, to see Ariel standing there, outside the palace, in front of the large window Nan had used for her attempted escape.

The strange thing was Ariel’s expression, not gloating, as Nan would have expected, but full of grave sorrow and thoughtful commiseration. She walked up to Nan slowly, and slowly set her cold little hand on Nan’s arm.

“Come. I thought you would be here. I should have told you. You cannot go to the world of mortals. There is no way for you to escape and there is nothing I can do to help.” Ariel hesitated, her expression even graver. “You can’t go on your own, not without help from mortals. In this world of fairy you’re prisoner, until someone from your own world shall release you. As we all are prisoner, each in our own troubles.”

With her hand on Nan’s arm, she led her back to the window, where instead of climbing through it, she made a quick strange gesture, lifting her right hand and waving it back and forth.

The wall opened and the stunned Nan was led back into her room.

Back into the captivity she’d never left.

For a moment she felt as if she’d been dropped, without warning, into a hole. For a heartbeat, she felt as if the very floor under her feet was a poisonous, slippery illusion.

In the next moment, she steadied herself. Her circumstances had changed fast and without warning before: when her mother had died, when her father had remarried, when her father had died leaving her a paltry dowry, when Will had got her with child.

Every time, each time, she’d solved her problems and emerged from them well enough. This wouldn’t be any different.

She walked back to the cradle, set Susannah down beside the fairy baby, covered both with their white lace blanket, the texture and softness of cobwebs.