Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (24 page)

At the asylum Hogg walked up to the steward's office and knocked on the door, showing no trace of the doubts George had witnessed earlier. He talked with the steward a while and then paid the penny entrance fee for each of them. The steward pointed to the left wing and went back into his office.

George followed Hogg down the dark corridor, looking around him apprehensively. How had Arthur come to this dreadful place? Who had paid for his lodgings? If it had been Alice, wouldn't she miss him when they took him away?

He shook his head. It was not his place to ask such questions; no doubt Hogg knew what he was doing. George hurried after the other man.

Hogg stopped at the last cell. The young man they had seen in the scrying glass sat in the room, leaning against the wall. His clothes were torn and dirty and he seemed even thinner than he had in the glass. He had the look of someone who had been exposed to the elements for a very long time. Despite this, George felt jubilant. They had won; they had found Arthur first.

“Good day, Arthur,” Hogg said pleasantly. “We've come to take you home.”

Arthur laughed. Had he even heard the other man? It didn't matter: they would trade him to the red king and have done with him. “Come,” Hogg said.

At this Arthur turned to him. “Where?” he said. His hand moved up and down by his side, as if to unseen music.

“I'm taking you home.”

“Home? Where is that?”

“To your people, the Fair Folk.” Hogg's voice was gender and more persuasive than George had ever heard it.

“Ah.” Arthur met the other man's eyes for the first time. “Will it be safe for me there?”

“Aye, very safe,” Hogg said.

George looked away, hoping that his face did not betray his thoughts. He had never wondered what the red king wanted with Arthur, but now he felt certain that what the king had in mind would not be safe at all. Battles, probably, and harsh conquests, blood and war.

“Who are my people, then?” Arthur asked, plaintively. “Do you know? I know only that my mother is a queen.”

A queen? George thought. What folly was this? Alice was Arthur's mother.

“This is no fit place for you, Your Majesty,” Hogg said softly. “You should be at the front of your troops, leading them into battle.”

“Aye.” Arthur's green eyes seemed to shine in the dark room. “In battle. I fought, you know, when I left. I went to far countries, and men flocked to my banner. Aye.”

Which side did he fight on? George wondered, but he thought that it probably didn't matter. The man had never held a lance or ridden a horse in his life.

“I saw many things, many strange sights,” Arthur said. “Giants, and folks with tails and paws, and a sword that would fight by itself. And the solitary phoenix, the only one in the world, that dies and is reborn once every thousand years. And everywhere I went folks knew me, they bowed to me and did me honor. So I came home, thinking that I would have honor among my own people as well.”

He stopped and looked around him, puzzled, as if coming out of a dream. What he had claimed for himself was so at odds with his true surroundings that George expected him to veer off into madness again. Instead he looked closely at Hogg and said, “Who are you?”

“A friend,” Hogg said.

“Aye? I wonder.”

“Why should you wonder, Your Majesty? I'm here to take you to your people, your subjects. They're waiting for you. They need to be shown a true leader.”

Arthur seemed to think it over. His hand moved to the music again, up and down, up and down. They could force him, of course, but it would be easier, and attract less attention, if he would agree to go with them. George stepped closer to the bars of the cell. “Come, Your Majesty. Do you remember me? I was a friend of yours, in the churchyard.”

“Nay, I won't go there again. Go away, all of you! Alice Wood is not my mother—my mother is a queen!”

Hogg turned to George angrily. “Nay, we won't make you go to the churchyard,” George said, as gently as he could. His heart was beating very fast. What if Arthur would not leave now, what if he had ruined everything? Arthur had to agree. “We're here to take you to your true family, not to Alice. Alice has lied to you all these years, do you understand? She's not your mother.”

George nodded, satisfied. What did it matter if he hadn't told Arthur the truth? Alice had lied often enough on other subjects; she was a liar. And he would say anything if only Arthur would leave with them. He did not think he could face Hogg if they had been unsuccessful.

“Very well,” Arthur said finally. He stood up, bracing himself against the wall as he did so. George wondered how long he had sat there. “I'll come with you.”

His tone was that of a monarch commanding his subjects. For a moment George forgot who the other man was and what they planned to do with him, and nearly jumped to do his bidding. Then he looked about him and remembered.

“Good,” Hogg said. “I'll get the steward to release you.” He went back down the corridor and returned with the steward, who now held a ring of keys in his hand. Hogg gave him a number of gold coins and the other man opened the door. Then he backed away, bowing. Hogg went into the cell and led the Prince of Faerie outside.

15

In Shoreditch, just a few streets away from Bedlam Hospital, Robert Greene lay dying. A month ago he had dined with Tom Nashe on Rhenish wine and pickled herring, and he thought it was this rather than the plague that made him grow weaker and weaker, until he finally took to his bed. Now he lay in the house of Master and Mistress Isam, a shoemaker and his wife who been kind enough to take him in, and he thought about his life.

He would go to hell unless he repented, there was no question of it. He had deserted his wife and child after running through his wife's dowry, he had fathered a bastard child on Em of Holywell Street, he had sold his play,
Orlando Furioso,
to two companies of actors, first to the Queen's Men and then the Admiral's Men. Well, but what of it? He needed to eat, didn't he?—and the money paid to playwrights would not keep a dog alive. It was not his fault he had been forced into these and other tricks: he had had hard luck, and then he had fallen into bad company …

Aye, bad company. He had not seen Tom Nashe for nearly a year, but when they met again they had returned immediately to their old habits, eating and drinking heavily and carousing in the streets. If he went to hell it would be the fault of companions like Tom, Tom and that damned atheist friend of his, Kit Marlowe.

He groaned to think of the last meal he and Tom had shared, and its aftermath. His belly had swollen upward until he felt it would burst. He wished he hadn't gone with Tom. He wished many things, that he hadn't left his wife, hadn't come to London … His entire life could have been different, richer, happier—and he would not now be lying in this strange house, dying and about to go to hell.

Hell. He had repented of his life before, but now for the first time he thought he truly understood what it meant to be damned. Terror rose up in him like bile, until it seemed to drive every other feeling out, until he seemed made of fear. “Oh, no end is limited to damned souls,” he thought, and the aptness of the quotation pleased him, made him forget his pain for a while, until he remembered it had been written by that unbeliever Marlowe. How could the man have known?

There had to be something he could do, some bargain he could strike. If he repented, if he showed that he was sincere about repenting …

He called weakly to Mistress Isam. She had been in another room but she heard and came hurrying toward him, wiping her hands on her apron. She had strange notions about poets and playwrights: she thought that they deserved to be honored, and so she had kept him in her house and nursed him through his illness though he owed her at least ten pounds. He was grateful to her for that, and for the enthusiasm with which she talked about his plays and books, but he could not help but feel a little impatient with her. She moved so slowly, and when she started talking it was difficult sometimes to get her to stop. But how could he complain? Without her aid he would be dying on the streets.

“What is it, Master Greene?”

“I need pen and paper. Please.”

She brightened. “Of course.” No doubt she thought he was about to compose something brilliant. And perhaps he would at that. He smiled at her when she brought him what he'd asked for, sat up painfully and dipped his pen in the ink. If he had to die he would at least leave a legacy for his friends. They could learn where he had been too blind to see.

Feeling noble and full of purpose, he wrote: “To those Gentleman that spend their wits in making plays.” And then, “If woeful experience may move you (Gentlemen) to beware …”

September gave way to October. The days cooled slightly and the plague abated, and some of those who had fled London returned.

Christopher walked from his lodgings to the river, and then hired a boat to take him to the Ryders' manor. He and Will had gone their separate ways for a few months, had each left London to escape the plague, but on his return he had sensed a distance in Will that had not been there before.

He wondered what had happened between them. He had never met anyone as even-tempered as Will, and yet lately they had had one quarrel after another, usually over something so trifling he could not remember what had started it. And the last time they had met Will had said, “I'm going home. I'm not going to argue with you. You know everything, anyway.”

Hadn't that been one of the first things Will had said to him: “You seem to know something about everything”? He'd thought that Will had admired that in him, that that was a good trait, not a bad one. How had that changed? Should he pretend to be as ignorant as Will's foolish friends? Most of them hadn't even been able to graduate from the universities their fathers sent them to.

He wondered, though, if Will objected to something else. Will had said several times that Geoffrey disliked it when he went to visit Christopher, that his brother had threatened to tell their father. “And my father,” Will had said, “has warned me often enough about the sin of Sodom.”

Will's father had been the one who had said that unbelievers brought the plague upon themselves, Christopher remembered. He thought the man must be a singularly joyless individual. “The sin of Sodom,” he said. “I always wondered what the sin of Gomorrah would be. And if I would enjoy it.”

Will haunt laughed. “I'm serious, Kit,” he said. “He could disown me if he knew what I've been doing. And Geoffrey might just tell him, out of—out of meanness, perhaps, or perhaps he wants ID inherit everything.”

“Your brother,” Christopher said, remembering a quoted line of poetry, “does not sound like a very pleasant person.”

“Nay,” Will had said, and Christopher had wondered, as he wondered from time to time around Will, how much the other man knew.

Now, going up the steps to the Ryders' manor, he thought about Geoffrey again. Would the man truly disown his brother? What would happen to Will then? Well, perhaps it would be good for him, show him how everyone else had to live. But what would he do? How would he survive?

He knocked on the door and the elderly servant let him in. Geoffrey came to greet him. “Where's Will?” Christopher asked.

“He's not here,” Geoffrey said.

“I didn't ask you if he was here. I asked you where he was.”

“Ah. I was getting to that. He's gone to France.”

“France?” Christopher felt as if he had walked into a room he believed was solid and felt the floor give way beneath him. “Why?”

For a moment, he saw, Geoffrey had been tempted to give a hurtful answer: “To get away from you,” or some such reply. But then Geoffrey's face changed and he saw that the other man was about to tell the truth, or what passed for the truth with him. “He's gone to Rheims. To the Catholic seminary there.”

At first Geoffrey's answer made no sense at all, like a line of nonsense in a ballad. He tried to think. “To the—But why?”

“I don't know. Our father,” Geoffrey said, moving toward the door to signify that the interview was at an end, “is not pleased.”

Thomas Kyd sat in the room he shared with Christopher and stared at the piece of paper in front of him. He had gone to Bedlam earlier that day, intending to make that month's payment for Arthur's lodgings, but the steward told him that someone had come for Arthur, a man claiming to be a relative. The steward had described the man but Tom could not think who he might be. A relative, though: that sounded promising. He hoped that Arthur was safe and well cared for.

Tom sighed and looked around the room. Almost immediately after he and Christopher had taken the room he had begun to regret his decision. Sometimes Kit would come in for a few minutes, scribble something on a piece of paper and then leave. At other times he would stay on from morning to evening, lighting candles against the dark, covering pages and pages. To Tom, writing was a job like any other. He came in for the day and left when the day was done, and he had assumed that Kit would feel the same way. But when he had questioned the other man about it Kit had only laughed.

There were other problems as well. Christopher scattered papers throughout the room, letters and books and manuscripts. Once, on a day when he had felt dull and tired and Christopher had been off somewhere, Tom had sneaked a look at some of the pages. He had paid dearly for his sin, though, for what he had seen had been a poem so beautiful he had been unable to write for a week. And yet after that it seemed as if he couldn't help himself: he read the poem guiltily every chance he got, watching as the story of the love between Hero and Leander took shape before him on the page. He knew that Kit wrote better poetry than he did (though perhaps, if it was not boasting to say it, he liked to think that his own plays were better constructed), but it seemed unfair to have to be reminded of that fact day after day.