Текст книги "Ink and Steel"
Автор книги: Elizabeth Bear
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Текущая страница: 29 (всего у книги 29 страниц)
The door opened behind him. He turned, sighed in half relief and half panic when he saw who stood framed in the opening.
“Will. Distract me from my study; I am all black thoughts and foul humors tonight.”
Will shut the door and shot the bolt. He held something white as angel wings wrapped in his arms; it gleamed while he leaned against the door, hugging it as a child hugs a doll.
“Will, what hast thee?” Kit tugged the window shut and limped toward Will, stopping a few feet away. Will shrugged and dropped it on the chair that had settled kitty-corner, where Puck had left it. He stepped away, but not before Kit saw the shininess in the corners of his eyes. Will walked toward the sideboard where Kit kept wine and overturned cups. Kit came to the chair, picked at the wax and twine sealing the bundle; it fell open at his touch.
Oh. A waterfall of rainbow colors spilled across Kit’s hands, silks and satins and velvet and taffeta and lace. His cloak, in all its dozens of patches. And something more; someone’s hands had sewn a collar on it, an upright blunt-cornered affair of soft black velvet that was the second-richest thing that Kit had ever touched. The stitches were as neat and tight as Kit’s own hand, I imagine Will sews a tight stitch too, growing up in a glover’s house,and he knew before he pressed it to his face that it would smell of smoke and strong liquor. He bundled it in his arms, walked across the carpet, and leaned against the bed. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, feeling the tears prick under his eyelids and hating himself for weakness as he did.
“He sent my cloak back.”
Will came back to him, carrying a cup. Kit slung the cloak across the coverlet, as if he meant to sleep beneath it. Accepted the wine. “I have a gift for thee as well,” he said. “I meant to give it upon thy leaving.”
“Kit, what could you…”
“Hush,” he said, and turned to root in the box on the bedside stand. The ring was gold, cool and heavy in his hand, the flat face marked with Will’s initials, which were both surmounted and linked by true-love’s knots a pair of them. “You’ll need a signet, if you’re to be a gentleman.”
Will took it from his hand and stared down at it, a muscle twitching in his jaw.
“We should sleep early. As early as we can.”
Tomorrow Will dragged a stool over, crouched on it, and began to work on his boots. “I have to go home to Annie, Kit.”
“Aye.” Kit tossed back the wine, set his cup aside, and methodically began stripping his buttons from their holes. “I’ve decided not to get drunk after all.”
“Wilt stay by me tonight? Wilt flinch when I touch you?
Kit couldn’t look at Will, but he could imagine the expression on his face.
“And what will I do for peace now, now that this is lost to me too?”
It seemed an ungrateful question, given what he had traded that chance of peace for. Power. The ability to protect Will. And his children. The strength to do something about Richard Baines.
He tossed his doublet aside and stripped his shirt off over his head. And heard Will’s sucked-in breath and remembered his own dramatic gesture with the candles and the brilliance of the lighting a moment too late. Kit, you’ve a bruise… . Kit reached up and over, felt down the sprung plane of his shoulder blade. His left arm with its old injury wouldn’t flex so far; he reached with the right. Blood-gorged flesh heated his fingertips. He could feel, almost, the outline of each perfect tooth, the roughness of a seeking tongue. Right where someone might bite a lover taken from behind Right where a wing would take root, if he had wings. His burn scars pained him suddenly, a low, sweet ache like the ache inside him. A longing that almost made him reach for the wine bottle again.
“It’s a witch’s mark,” Kit said without turning, and pulled on his nightshirt with a grimace. “Lucifer’s unclean brand. Come, Will. Get ready for bed.”
“Kit.”
“Will, no.”
“Kit. What was it that thou didst in Hell?” Kit read the play of emotions across Will’s face: fear, grief, concern.
I don’t want him to know. I want anything but for him to know. And if I pretend I do not understand what he’s asking, I’ve lost not only a lover, but the trust of a friend.
Kit swallowed. He doused the candles with a snap of his fingers, feeling the power move to his whim as if he tugged a dozen tiny threads. The room fell into near darkness; starlit from the window, a glow like the blue light of Hell except where it cast shadows. He reached up over his head and knotted his fingers in his hair, pulling; the pain felt good. Clean. Will’s words, again: for them both, it always came back to the blasted words. And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil by telling truth: tell truth and shame the devil
He smiled at Will, a smile no more thick than gilt on a page, and said, “I whored myself out to the Devil.” And was surprised when it felt good to say it, another good pain like ripping a scab back from the wound. “I let, God. Don’t touch me. Please. I can’t.”
Will drew back the hand he had been about to lay on Kit’s shoulder. “For me,” he said softly, and jerked back in surprise when Kit shook his head.
“Nothing so noble,” Kit answered. “I had thee back already by then.” He turned and looked Will in the eyes. “I love him still, for all I can’t so much as lay my damned hand on his arm. Aye. Damned indeed.”
“Then what?”
Kit shrugged. “Baines. Poley.”
“You could just out wait them. Outlive them.”
Placating. A pleading voice, and he hated to see Will beg.
“Elizabeth is over, Will. Walsingham and Burghley are gone. Whatever happens next is ours. Ours, or De Vere’s and Essex’s. Would you see that come to pass?” Kit smiled.
Will drew back from something: the fervor in his eyes, the glitter of his teeth.
“And now I can melt their Godsrotted eyes in their heads, if I’m lucky. Besides, it’s too late now to give the gift back. I took the shilling, so to speak. Up the arse. Christ, Will.”
“No,” Will said, quietly. His blue eyes were black in the darkened room. “Do you know what Lucifer told me?”
Kit shook his head; whatever he felt was too complex to speak through. “Nor do I want to know.”
“He told me who killed Hamnet. And showed me how to use my poetry to get vengeance on them.”
“Oh.”
“As long as I gave him mine allegiance.”
“Will, I…”
“I didn’t write a word,” Will said. “Fifty years and more I spent in his damned birdcage. Alone. Without books, without conversation. I didn’t write a word for all that time. And then something changed.”
Kit nodded. Will wouldn’t look away, for all Kit must have been barely a shadow in the starlight. Kit could see Will perfectly well, out of his righ teye at least. Could see in the dark like a demon. “What happened, then?”
Will smiled, and clapped Kit on the shoulder too quickly for Kit to flinch away, stinging his flesh beneath the thin lawn of his shirt. “My faith was rewarded, he said softly. My savior came. Come to bed, Kit; you don’t have to armor yourself in nightshirts and dressing gowns like a maiden.” Will turned away, moving through the darkness to their bed, peeling the covers back, leaving a trail of clothes like breadcrumbs behind him on the floor. “Don’t give up hope. I know for a fact that someday your savior will come as well.”
“How do you know it?” Kit ran a comb through his hair in the darkness, scattering crushed beech leaves on the floor. He peeled the nightshirt off again and slid into bed beside Will, tugging the cloak up close to his chin and inhaling the complex scent saturating the petal-soft velvet collar.
“Because,” Will said quietly, stretching against the far edge of the bed.
“That’s how all the best stories end.”
Not Romeo and Juliet,Kit thought. But he couldn’t bring himself to break the warm darkness to say so.
With this ring I thee wed:
with my body I thee worship:
and with all my worldly goods, I thee endow.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Ghost. Amen.
The Book of Common Prayer, 1559
Annie Shakespeare touched the breast of her bodice with two fingers, paper rustling between her chemise and her skin. Her second-floor sitting room was quiet and gleaming with sunset; her needle paused before her frame, glinting in the cold winter light. It had hovered so for minutes as she leaned forward in her chair and looked out the window, and now she sat back with a sigh, and pressed her bosom again. He won’t be here. He won’t.A clatter of hoof beats on the road. Only one horse, and no creak of wheels. A messenger, then, and not my Will.She tucked the needle through the cloth and stood, stretching before the window with her hands against the small of her back, to see who came to her house too late to be sent along to the tavern for supper. She couldn’t see his face for the broad wings of his cap, but he sat his horse as awkwardly as a sack of barley, and the animal shook his head in complaint.
He reined up before the gates of the New Place and tilted his head back, looking up at the facade and the five gables. Annie pressed her hand against the glass: if Will had described the ramshackle century-old dwelling he’d bought for her, that she’d bought under his signature, to be truthful the messenger was unlikely to recognize it, whitewashed and gracious now as a bride in her mother’s remade wedding dress.
The rider pushed his hat back on his forehead, looking up from the shadow of the roadway into the light that still gleamed on the wall, and Annie’s hand on the window rose to her mouth. She turned, tripped on her hem, knocked the embroidery frame sideways with her hip and dove down the stairs pell-mell, calling for Susanna and for Judith and for Cook.
Will went to put the girls to bed with a story, a little child’s treat, and perhaps not fitting for young women nearly old enough to go into service or off to wed and Annie turned the mattress and the featherbed and tucked the covers straight. Will found her, she guessed, as much by the spill of candlelight into the hall as by knowing where the bedroom lay.
“The house has changed, wife,” he said. He shut the door behind and, trembling softly with his palsy, set his own candlestand on the shelf beside it. “Tis much improved. As it was uninhabitable when we bought it, I should hope.”
“Tis empty, though without a man.” Annie bit her lip, and tugged the coverlet down. And bit it harder when Will came up behind her and stroked both hands down her hips, laced his fingers across her belly and tugged her into his embrace. “Will, don’t tease.”
His mouth on her neck, tracing the line of her hair, the dints along her spine. “I should not attempt such cruelty.” He strung something about her throat, the soft, lingering touch of his fingers, a stroke as of satin. “I have confessions, Annie. And promises to make.”
“Confessions?”
“Aye.” He was knotting a silken ribbon, a braid of red and black and green. Something that weighed like an acorn hung upon it; she slipped her hand beneath. A silken pouch no bigger than her thumb. “Annie, I have loved thee.”
She held her breath. “And now do not?”
He turned her in his arms and looked into her eyes. Curious, she reached up to touch the golden earring that adorned him. He smiled at the touch. “And love thee more than ever I could have told thee. I, Will, love thee to wordlessness.”
“Never hast thou been wordless,” she answered, and kissed his nose to make him smile like that again.
“Annie, hush,” he said. And she obeyed, and he continued. “I promised I’d love no other but thee whatever sins my flesh was heir to. And I’ve broken that promise, my love.” She’d been lulled by the moment. By the spell of him, the gentleness, the kisses she’d almost forgotten the sweetness of. She closed her eyes and stepped away, acid burning in her throat. “A mistress?”
“No,” Will said, and pulled her close. And kissed her on the mouth. “A man.”
She wanted to jerk away, retreat to the corner between the clothespress and the bed. But his hands were on her wrists, and he held her tight, with a strength she didn’t remember in him. “A man.”
“Aye,” he said. “I won’t, won’t lie to thee. I loved him, and I love him still. And more.”
She steeled herself to stand motionless in his embrace, wondering if he could feel the thunder of her heart. So there’s a reason for his fevered kisses. “Will, I’d not have thought thee so capably cruel….”
“The man I love is no mortal, but an Elf-knight, a warlock. A creature of the Fae. And under a geas, that I may never touch him. No, nor any other, until his curse be lifted.” Anne blinked, not understanding. Thou’rt leaving me for a man thou canst not touch?” Oh, why not? He cannot touch thee either, sister.
“No,” Will said. He stepped back and touched the silk hung at the hollow of her throat. “No, I tell thee so thou wilt understand what he has given me. This man. This knight.”
She reached up and caught his wrist. “What? He’s bought thee from me for a bit of silk?”
“No, Annie.” He kissed the fingers that bound his trembling forearm. Kissed her wrist and the tenderness inside her elbow and bowed his head there, inhaling her scent. “Annie, he’s given thee back to me. How long has it been?”
“Judith is nearly fourteen,” she said softly. “What canst thy meaning be?”
He pushed her nightgown down over her shoulders as he kissed her again, without restraint this time. Despite her confusion, she gave herself up to the kiss, buried her fingers in his hair, tasted mutton and onions on his tongue. “Witches have spells for causing barrenness, my love.”
Author’s Note (brief version)This is the first of two tightly linked novels, a duology collectively knownas The Stratford Man. The second book, Hell and Earth, will be published in August 2008. A complete Author’s Note and Acknowledgements enumerating this narrative sextensive historical and linguistic malfeasances and encompassing asemi-exhaustive list of who may be assessed for the same may be found at theend of the second book.
About the Author
Originally from Vermont and Connecticut, Elizabeth Bear spent six years inthe Mojave Desert and currently lives in southern New England. She attendedthe University of Connecticut, where she studied anthropology and literature. She was awarded the 2005 Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
