Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (27 page)

She picked up a book and paged through it. Usually the press of business kept her from looking through her wares, but folk still stayed away from the churchyard and she had time for luxuries like this one. She admired the neat rows of the letters, like a plowed field, the vellum binding, the way the whole thing was stitched together. Her printer may have been rude and surly but he did good work; everyone agreed on that.

A shadow fell over her stall and she looked up. Edward stood there, looking worried. “I talked to George yesterday,” he said. “He said he's seen Arthur.”

“Arthur! Where?”

“On Cheapside. He said he didn't tell you because he thought Arthur was going to meet you.”

“I never saw him.”

“Nay. There's something George isn't telling us. I never trusted that man.”

“I think—I think he wants Arthur too. He and that friend of his, that man in black. What if they've found him? What will they do to him?”

“If I know George he'll turn him over to the queen. I heard Arthur was involved with that plot, the attempt on her life—”

Alice nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Edward knew George, but he didn't know Oriana and the red king. George could do worse things than give Arthur to Queen Elizabeth.

She looked across the churchyard and watched as George set out his books. Then she turned back to Edward and began to close up her stall. It was time to visit Margery.

Agnes opened the door to Margery's cottage. After the battle she had stayed on to help Margery with her work. Her husband was dead, she had explained, and she had little to do in the village in any case, since many of the farmers had moved to London. As always the woman annoyed her; Alice's own husband had died as well, but she hadn't run to Margery asking to be taken in. Still, Agnes had proved useful to Margery, assisting at births and bringing a little order to the cottage. And as the plague had worsened she and Margery worked day and night, mixing medicine to bring to those who were stricken.

“George says he's seen Arthur,” Alice said.

Margery looked up at that. She had been stirring something in a large pot, and some of it, a brown sticky paste, had found its way into her hair. “Did he say anything else?”

“He doesn't talk to me, you know that. But I'm afraid that they've found him, that they'll—”

“If they've found Arthur you can be sure he's with Hogg, not George,” Margery said, talking more to herself than Alice. “I know he would not let Arthur out of his sight. And Hogg has lived in one squalid house or another for as long as I've known him. Still, he might have moved since I last saw him.”

She brushed her hair out of her eyes, rubbing in more of the brown liquid as she did so. Then she glanced around the room. The large ginger cat mewed. Margery nodded and went toward it.

The scrying ball lay on the floor near the cat, and Margery picked it up and looked at it critically. Dust and cat fur covered the ball and she took a cloak from a nearby stool and wiped it clean. Then she set it on a table and gazed into it.

The room grew silent. Alice looked at Agnes, puzzled, but the other woman watched Margery with no expression at all on her face. Margery did not dabble in magic, Alice knew that. And yet she had had the scrying ball for as long as Alice could remember. Was it possible that she had been mistaken about her friend, that she had been wrong to defend her against charges of witchcraft?

Suddenly Margery stepped back. Arthur appeared in the glass, but Arthur as Alice had never seen him, dirty, thin, his clothes torn and his beautiful red hair matted. “Where is he?” Alice said impatiently. “And why didn't you use the glass to discover him before?”

“Hush,” Margery said. “I used the glass when he first disappeared, but he had gone beyond my power to see him, to—to a country I didn't know. I hadn't known that he'd returned.”

Hogg came into view as they watched. They saw him sit next to Arthur and say something. “I wish we could hear them talk,” Agnes said.

“He's asking Arthur questions,” Margery said. “He's after knowledge, as always.”

“But Arthur doesn't know anything!” Alice said.

“He knows more than you may think,” Margery said. “He has powers you have never seen, though he's had no way to learn how to use them.”

In the glass, Hogg stood and moved out of their view. Arthur nodded his head as if in time to music. “I know that room. Hogg has not moved in years. And look—he studies alchemy.” She laughed harshly.

Alice could not see what had so amused her friend. “How do we get him away?”

“I don't know. We'll have to go there and see.”

“Now? It's almost evening.”

“Aye, and that's why we have to leave now. I'm certain that Arthur is guarded, and his guards will be weaker at night.”

“Then it's true what Hogg said—that Oriana's people are the children of darkness, the children of Cain?”

Margery said nothing. “Why do you have to do everything in darkness?” Alice said, determined to get an answer from her friend. “And what kind of magic is it that lets you see Arthur in that glass? I've told the Stationers' Company that you're not a witch, and now I find—”

“What kind of magic? How many kinds are there?”

“White and black, of course,” Alice said sharply. Why wouldn't her friend ever answer her questions?

“Ah. And what is the difference between them?”

“White magic comes from God. Everyone knows that. And black magic—”

Margery laughed. “What is magic, Alice? Why is it you can see the Fair Folk?”

“Because—because Brownie breathed on my eye.”

“Ah. And why can George see them?”

“I don't know. Because Hogg gave him the sight, I'd guess.”

“Nay. Hogg holds as fast to his knowledge as a miser to his gold.”

“Someone else gave it to him, then. What does this have to do—”

“No one gave him the sight, Alice. What you call magic is all around us, to be seen by everyone. The world of the Fair Folk and our world are the same—”

“But—”

“And more and more people are coming to see that. London daily becomes more fantastical.”

Alice could think of nothing to say. As always Margery's ideas were as outlandish as anything she had ever heard. Agnes nodded slowly, as if she understood all the other woman had said. Maybe she did.

But what did it matter? The important thing was to get Arthur, after all. Margery left food for the cats, stopping to talk softly to the large ginger tom, and then they set off.

Margery led them through Ludgate and past Paul's. A tree stood by the gate to the churchyard, and Margery stopped and placed her hand on the trunk. Alice remembered that the tree had flourished there all summer despite the drought, and saw that even now, in the fall, it had kept most of its leaves. Margery spoke a few muttered words, and Alice felt her uneasiness return.

They went down Cheapside. The sun was setting as they turned left at the Mercers' Hall and left again into a part of London Alice had never seen. Shadows from the houses leaned inward, and a chill wind whistled past them. Garbage filled the streets, and a few rats, made bold by the absence of people, ran from one pile to the next. Was it safe for the three of them to come here? Without discussing it they moved closer, huddling together in the center of the street.

Margery stopped before a house as rundown as its neighbors. Did she remember which house it was after all these years? And even if she did, what did she plan to do now? Knock politely and ask for Arthur back?

No sound came from inside the house. Margery tried the latch but the door was locked. “Arthur,” she said softly. “Open the door.”

“His guards won't let him come to the door, surely.”

“Quiet. Arthur, open the door. Arthur, do you hear me?”

To her surprise Alice heard footsteps come to the door, and then the sound of a key turning in a lock. The door opened and Arthur stood before her.

Alice barely had time to get over her shock—Arthur, after all these years!—when one of the sea-creatures dropped from the rafters. She cried out and backed into the street, but Arthur only watched the thing incuriously. Margery spoke a few words and made some signs in the air. The creature bared its teeth and padded toward her.

Margery flung her arm in front of her face and shouted to it. Now even Agnes looked worried, her hands twisting in the folds of her dress. The thing hissed and moved closer. Its claw drew blood from Margery's arm. Alice heard herself say something: “Go away! Get out!” but still it came on.

A loud wind blew past them. Margery screamed against it, her clothes blowing out behind her. The creature stopped and hissed angrily. Margery spoke again. The wind howled. Then, in the time it took Alice to blink, the sea-creature disappeared.

The wind died down. Now they could hear Arthur, who must have been shouting over it: “Nay, I won't go with them! Nay, she's not my mother!” The signs that Margery had made in the air still glowed in the evening light, the color of silver.

“Come,” Margery said. “We must leave before it returns.”

“I won't go with her,” Arthur said, quieter now. “She's not my mother.”

“Nay, she's not,” Margery said. “Your mother is Oriana, Queen of the Fair Folk.”

“Queen …” Arthur said. Alice could see him struggle with the new idea; although he had somehow known that he wasn't her son he could never have been completely sure. His pleasure at being a queen's son won out over his uncertainty. Alice saw the delight that appeared on his face and felt that something had been taken from her. Why had Margery told him the truth now? Alice had been the one to raise him, after all, not Oriana.

But nay, she had best get used to the idea that she would lose him. Lose him and gain another, her true son. What would he be like?

“When will I see her?” Arthur asked eagerly.

“Soon,” Margery said.

“He said that too. But he would never let me go—that thing always guarded the door for him.”

“Aye, and we must hurry before it comes back.”

But Arthur made no move to go. Perhaps he didn't understand the danger he was in; perhaps he thought that Margery would be no different from Hogg. “He would have given you to the red king, not to Oriana,” Margery said. “And the king would have used you in the battle he fights with your mother's people.”

Lulled by the promise of learning more secrets Arthur followed Margery as she moved down the street. Probably Hogg had told him nothing at all. Margery began to walk surprisingly quickly for an old woman; no doubt she had spoken the truth when she'd said that the thing might return. As they went she told him the story of his birth, how he had been exchanged for a human baby, Alice's son. He ignored Alice, the faerie-light shining from his face as he listened, enchanted, to the other woman. And when will I get my son back? Alice wondered.

Over the next few weeks Alice thought about visiting Margery, but always the memory of the evening they had rescued Arthur stopped her. Her friend didn't dabble in magic; Alice had known that as certainly as she knew the titles of the books she sold. And yet Margery had used a scrying glass, had spoken words to keep the creature away from them, had possibly even raised the wind she had felt at the end. Nothing was as it seemed to be; her friend was truly a witch and Alice had lied to George and the Stationers' Company. Had Margery sold her soul to the devil like the man in the play?

But still she thought of the other woman a dozen times a day. She missed the talks they had had. And she wanted to see Arthur again; he had looked so thin, so frail, that night he'd come to the door. What kind of mother would let her only child fall into that state? But Arthur was not her son, and no doubt Margery and Agnes, with their knowledge of herbs, could restore him better than she could.

So the weeks passed. Alice waited for a summons from Margery, a message telling her the day they would meet with Oriana, but it never came. Her business prospered: she sold all her copies of Tom Nashe's book and had to order another printing. And then Gabriel Harvey replied to Nashe in his
Four Letters and Certain Sonnets,
and Nashe told her that he was hard at work on an answer to Harvey in a pamphlet called
Strange News.
She wondered that men with so much talent would waste their time on such trifles, but she had to admit that Nashe's book was very funny. When Harvey tried for wit he could not touch him, and Tom knew it.

It was a good season for the stationers. Scandals and gossip swept through the churchyard, a welcome diversion after the grim deaths of the previous summer. All the pamphleteers in London seemed to be engaged in a war of words, but the printers and booksellers were the only winners, and Alice profited as much as any. In December Henry Chettle, who had prepared Greene's
Groatsworth of Wit
for the press, came out with his own book,
Kind Heart's Dream.
In it he apologized to one of the playwrights Greene had insulted, the man Greene had called Shake-scene, but not to Nashe or Marlowe. Alice had recognized Marlowe the day he bought Nashe's book, and she had thought that he did not look like the kind of man who would ask for an apology. And Tom Nashe wrote day and night in order to finish his answer to Harvey and had no time to see Chettle or anyone else.

One day Alice came back from her dinner to find another of the stationers looking through
Pierce Penniless,
chuckling as he read. “You can borrow it if you like,” she said. All of the booksellers frequently lent their books to one another.

The man hadn't seen her come up. He set the book down quickly, then raised one hand to his breast and lowered it. Alice thought he might have been about to cross himself. He turned and backed away, stumbling a little in his eagerness to be gone.

Alice watched him as he went. Her neighbor Edward Blount watched him too, she noticed; she realized he must have seen the whole thing. Suddenly angry, she said, “Does he think it beneath his dignity to speak to a woman?”