"This Ortrode came in disguised as a nurse, to be exact the nurse who was supposed to be watching your daughter secretly during her carefully controlled moments of solitude." The administrator sighed, looked ahead for a moment. "Nurses will, of course, be better examined from now on. However, it is too late for your daughter. For her security Lady Cryssa should not remain with us. She will be moved to the rest home in Drivas. Perhaps the icy climate will manage to keep the creature away as the heat didn't. But it is to be feared that with their shape-shifting ability, the Ortroden will adapt."
Kratrina sat in the little conservatory, shivering in her white fur cloak. Outside, a snow storm raged. She held her embroidery frame and worked on a detailed picture of a fairy-tale palace, done all in pastels and metallic thread.
"Lady, do you wish me to bring you a warm drink?" someone asked, just behind and to the side of her.
She turned. He didn't look like any of the male patients she'd met in this place.
This story takes place in the time line of my Shakespearean novels entitled (as of this writing at least) Ill Met By Moonlight (published October 2001), and (upcoming) All Night Awake and Any Man So Daring. It would happen between the second and third novel. The fact that Shakespeare had a much younger brother who, emulating him, went to London to try to be an actor was too interesting a detail to pass up. One has to wonder if he had the same talent and what would have happened if he'd got to use it.
The winter of 1602 lay like cold death upon London, turning the great Thames into a frozen blue vein and putting waxen whiteness on the facades of the five-storied buildings.
St. Paul's yard, that great market of books and pamphlets, lay hushed under the great frost, its few customers hurried and harried, exchanging their few coins for the latest play by Master William Shakespeare, that sweet swan of the Avon, or the latest moral excoriation by puritan preachers.
Within St. Paul's Cathedral, the heart of London, less temple than meeting place and horse market and foreign currency exchange, street urchins urinated on the stone floor for to make it slick with ice and to watch the burgesses and bawds and dandies slip and fall.
Further down near the river, in the new, hastily built and dingy Liberty of the Clink, in the Theater, a wooden amphitheater open to the elements, the King's men rehearsed.
They wore their somber, black or brown everyday suits and cloaks.
Watching them say their lines and take their marks, Will Shakespeare, playwright and sometime actor, sighed. He felt too old now, too worn out, for the capers and acrobatics of the stage. At thirty-eight, he felt worn beyond his years.
But he missed the stage still, and he envied the actors.
This afternoon, for the performance proper, transformed, like tropical birds in this icy London, they'd wear their bright feathers: the satin and the silk, the shiny tinsel and brightly colored paste jewels of their art and craft.
Upon the stage, they'd be kings or noblemen, and figure in this place a distant city of spires and gold. And for a moment the audience would forget the cold and the bad harvests and the price of food, and laugh and cry and applaud the magic on the stage.
But for now the art was all craft, craft that must be polished and honed and sharpened against mistakes in the weaving of the illusion later.
And, watching, Will marked slips in craft and missteps in technique. But, most of all, he marked the absent one, his brother Edmund.
Where could the boy be?
Will Kemp and Ned Alleyn and all the other actors echoed their lines rigidly and made slow movements that would come fluid and tumbling in the play.
"Here comes the almanac of my true date." Will Kemp said. "What now? How chance thou are returned so soon?"
The line fell like a stone into a well of silence, no line answering it.
Kemp, who'd been reciting with his eyes closed, now opened them, startled, like a man who puts his foot down, in a dark night and finds not beneath it the solid ground he expects. " . . .so soon?" he repeated, and looked about, obviously trying to raise a response. " . . ..So soon!" he said, this time peremptorily, as if the very force of the exclamation would force the reply.
Will Shakespeare sighed.
Edmund Shakespeare, who would play Dromio in the play, was not there. Kemp glared around himself and his mouth formed the words, "luckless boy." He took his hands to his waist, and looked towards Will Shakespeare.
"Will," he started.
Will answered not. He heard running footsteps outside, and guessed whose they were. He pursed his lips in a command for silence.
Will marked Kemp's exasperation and smiled. This was expected, this was normal. Edmund was but twenty and yet subject to those temptations and perils of the flesh that often turned young men's hearts to battle grounds.
Will thought back on his own youth with the soft smile that men reserve for folly survived.
Yet, as Edmund appeared on the stage, shouting the answer to the line that he'd half heard before, the smile vanished from Will's face. His heart turned sick, within him, at his brother's pallor, Edmund's halting speech, cut by struggles for breath.
"Returned so soon! Rather approach'd too late." Edmund stopped and rewrapped himself in his cloak. He shivered, despite the cloak and the sheltering wooden walls of the theater. "The capon burns, the pig falls from the pit. The clock hath strucken twelve upon the bell—My mistress made it one upon my cheek."
A young man of twenty, he gave Will the impression of seeing himself in a time-erasing glass, such the resemblance between the two brothers.
The hair that had receded from Will's forehead, leaving its domed expanse bare, still fell in lustrous curls framing Edmund's oval face and lending contrast to Edmund's intent golden eyes that reminded one of a bird of prey.
But Edmund's lips, that should have been soft and rounded and pink with youth and life, had become pinched, shrunk, blue as if with unknown pain.
He spoke Dromio's lines with no energy, each one pushed out flat and dead. And how pale he looked, Will thought. How deathly pale.
Hag ridden
, Will thought.
Hag ridden.
Once having thought it, he could not rid himself of it.
Will had reason to know that the old expressions, the folk sayings, the words and sentences that hinted at another world beyond this physical stage were more than mere parlance, mere weaving of tipsy tongues upon the scale of verb.
Born on a Sunday Will had ever been blessed with the seeing of that other world that, parallel to ours, runs like a golden thread upon the all too common fabric of existence.
In his youth, Will had consorted with elves in the nearby forest of Arden. And lived to know them neither so glittering, nor so benevolent as they looked, and yet neither so dark nor demonic as legend would have them.
Looking like angels, they were none—fallen nor whole.
And yet, elves were so powerful that to them mortals were like flies to wanton boys. They killed men for their sport.
Will looked hard at Edmund. Was he reading too much in the natural dissipation of his brother's youth? There was no reason for elf here.
Less than a year ago, Edmund had fallen in love—or professed himself so—with a girl, better than a bawd and less than an honest woman. She'd proved with child, though both she and that child were now dead.
Did that not speak of Edmund's hot blood? Could his tired, wan paleness mean more than a few nights of dissipation?
Did that pale brow, those lackluster eyes, those lips tinged my bluish pallor, really mean more than the late nights, the drinking bouts, the easy ways of a twenty year old.
Will watched Edmund shiver and thought that his brother looked deadly tired.
"He'll never make it," Will Kemp said, from Shakespeare's right, making Shakespeare jump.
Like most men gifted in the art of clowning on stage, Kemp compensated for it with a ponderous gravity, a lugubrious seriousness of thought and deed at all other times.
Now his eyes, doleful and brown, met Will Shakespeare's inquiring glance with the forlorn look of a masterless hound. "He'll never make it, Will, you know it well. He has no energy to caper, no joy in his words. Were he not your brother, we would not let him play."
Will sighed. "Leave it be, Kemp. Leave it be. Let well enough serve its turn."
Perhaps Edmund was ill. He looked forlorn, true, but must that sadness mean that Edmund had brushed fingers against the icy diamonds of fairyland?
Will sighed. He must speak with the boy. Sure, he must.
Seventeen years older than Edmund, Will loved Edmund as a father loved his first son.
He'd been lavish with Edmund, in money and education, in help and friendship. But fathers owed their sons discipline as well as love, did they not? Did not the Bible say so?
Yet, in his mind, Will remembered his little brother as he'd been, three or four years old at most, with chubby cheeks and a toss of dark curls, chasing chickens and tumbling with dogs in the garden of their parents' house.
And he knew he could not be too hard with the boy.
Later, after the performance, Will sought Edmund out in the tiring room behind the stage.
Amid the smell of grease paint and in a confusion of discarded garments and hastily dropped tinsel crowns, every actor hurried and talked, each trying to wring from the other the praises that might lack from the audience.
"We've done well, think you not?" Ned Alleyn said.
And Will Kemp answered in his voice that ever, out of stage, sounded like the mournful tolling of a death bell. "Well at what, well? It did not go as it should. Not as it should, I say it. When young people lack the energy to . . ."
He stared at Edmund.
Edmund stood there, in the dark red velvet suit that had been Will's and that Will had given him barely worn. He had put on his left boot, but the right he held up to his eyes and frowned at the sole as though it had done him offense.
"Edmund," Will said, meaning to invite the youth to a tavern where, over mutton and wine, they might speak, like father to errant son and—with the medicine of Edmund's good repentance—minister the spreading blight that threatened to consume their friendship.
Edmund looked up. "Look here, Will," he said. In the shining pallor of his face, his golden eyes burned with something like fire. "Look here, Will. Look at this boot."
Speaking thus, he waved under Will's eyes the very worn sole of a boot, with a finger-thick hole starting at the center.
Will blinked. He pushed the boot away. "I gave you new boots, Edmund. Less than a fortnight ago," he said. "Why not wear those?"
Edmund cackled like a mad man, attracting the gazes of the nearest actors. "I am wearing them, brother. Your fine
gift
. You never give me aught that's not near worn through, do you?"
"They were new." Will looked around at the staring actors, his gaze making each one avert his own gaze.
But he knew they looked back again, as Edmund yelled, "They looked new. I'll grant you that. But unless they were rotten they would not have worn through in two weeks, would they Will? Not in two weeks, of walking home and to the Theater and nowhere else."
Will felt the pressure of the actors' gazes on his back. He could almost hear them begging Will to put the young pup in his place. The young pup who was an actor only on Will's fiat.
That pressure made Will speak. "But you walk elsewhere, do you not, brother?" Will asked, his voice severe. "To what brothels, what houses of assignation, what drinking holes do those boots carry you, brother, that you come in here late, always late, and always having forgotten your lines, and always looking like death tottering upon its own skeleton?"
Edmund opened his mouth. His golden eyes stared in surprised shock. He roared, an indistinct sound. "Curse your moralizing and your vanity," he said. He stomped his newly-shod foot upon the theater boards and trembled. "Now that your daughter is marrying a puritan, will you be a puritan too?
I wasn't so young that I don't remember how big bellied your Nan was when she married you. You had your fun too, when you were young, did you not? Why must I be a saint? Wouldst you see me still in my tomb before my time?" He glowered at Will, who glowered back.
Will remembered his mad youth all too well. But remembering it, he remembered other things: his consorting with the elves in the forest of Arden hard by Stratford-upon-Avon.
Worse, Will remembered Kit Marlowe, that brittle genius who'd taught Will the ways of poetry.
Kit Marlowe had fallen in love with an elf, when little younger than Edmund. And that love, unrequited, for a creature who could requite lust but never warm human feelings, had been Marlowe's undoing. He'd pined in thought, and with a green and yellow melancholy he'd sat like patience on a monument, smiling at grief till his reason gave away and his mad plots killed him.
There was an air of Marlowe about Edmund, an impatience for joy which life did not give.
Will remembered Edmund as a little boy, with curls, playing in the backyard of their parents house.
Behind him the actors muttered of shame and lack of respect.
Will sighed. He must be firm. "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child! Away, away!"
Edmund looked astonished for a moment, hands on either side of him, slightly drawn, his whole body tensed for a response, a gesture that would quell Will's responding words.
Then he laughed again. The cold ripple of his laughter shook the ice on the makeshift roofs over the best seats.
"You quote your own words at me, do you?" he said, and laughed. "Your own words that you got from the gospel? Ah, Will. You say my own poems are never good enough and that my poetry is trite. But I've never stolen so much from the commonplace, everyday prayers and psalms as you have." He trembled visibly, and a tide of color ascended to his cheeks, then receded again, leaving them paler. "Maybe that is why you always tell me my poetry is no good, Will. Maybe because it's better than yours."