EXIT,

PURSUED

BY A BEAR

Also by Greer Gilman

Moonwise

Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales

Cry Murder! in a Small Voice

EXIT,

PURSUED

BY A BEAR

Greer Gilman

Small Beer Press

Easthampton, MA

Exit, Pursued by a Bear is no. 12 in the Small Beer Press chapbook series.

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed

in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear copyright © 2014 by Greer Gilman. All rights reserved.

greergilman.com

Cover illustration © 2014 by Kathleen Jennings. All rights reserved.

tanaudel.wordpress.com

Print edition printed in a saddle-stitched edition (isbn 9781618730954)

by Paradise Copies of Northampton, Massachusetts.

Also available as an ebook (isbn 9781618730961).

Text set in Centaur 12 pt. Titles set in Caslon Antique.

Small Beer Press

150 Pleasant Street #306

Easthampton, MA 01027

info@smallbeerpress.com

www.smallbeerpress.com

weightlessbooks.com

First edition.

September 2014

For the bears, in septentriones

sempiterne.

At Whitehall, St. Stephen’s Day, 1610

Halfway in the air, the moon stuck fast.

“Boy,” said the Surveyor, wearily.

But already a fellow in a satyr’s netherstocks had swarmed the scaffolding with five or seven of his rout, all twitching at the shrouds.

And now she toppled on her back, lay hicketing and heaving toward an exaltation endlessly denied.

Ben Jonson—mere Poet to these Roman pomps—snorted. “I wrote her for a virgin; see, she labors.”

“Yet she travels not,” squeaked a fairy, and was brutally suppressed.

The Surveyor was among them, jutting with his beard. “Asini! Will you overset the heavens? Back!” He laid about him with his staff of office, like a dancing master’s, rapping at the satyrs’ shins. They disentangled; they descended. “The moon is planetary, look you, she is ductile; but with gentilezza, with decorum, with a silken thread.” The long hands were unbraiding, ordering the ropes. The great device came meekly to his pull. “See now: the tackling passes through these rocchetti—so—”

“That by cogging she may climb?” said Ben. “A whore’s trick.”

“It is Italian.” The moon lay now in Signior Surveyor Jones’s hands, broader than an alderman’s bowl. A drum of parchment.

Ben, half unwilling, was fascinated: “And the candles?”

“So: behind this wicket. But a lamp.” Smirking, Inigo Jones unlatched. “See now: this vial of glass—Venetian—that will throw the beams; the back of silvering. I have made the schema for the Prince, in silverpoint. Will have it vellum-bound.”

“Is he a child to play with whirligigs?”

But Inigo had done with words. He clapped his hands. “Bis, bis.”

The smaller consort of music now was gathered, tuning; solemnly, they bleated, scrawked and mewled. The dancing master took his herd of satyrs through their footings: an antick dance full of gesture and swift motion. Up and down, up and down, went Selene, bobbing like a milkmaid in a morris jig: swift now, but barely seemlier. The antimasquers mopped and mowed; their ape-leader raved and shrieked; the fiddles clicketed and caterwauled. Absurd. Ben boomed. “My lady must beware, lest she scorch Endymion and cancel all his progeny.” Thump, thump, scrawl, twitter, thump.

Ferrabosco leaned to him. “No one marks thy wit, Ben. Nor will heed my music. Our best invention is a serving dish for Jones’s moon.”

“Pox rot it for a Suffolk cheese.” A snort. “The King at least will have no eyes for lantern-lerry.” A thumb at the satyrs, sweating well now, shirtless: hairy-haunched, broad-chested, brown (with walnut juice, for want of Phoebus’ bold regard). They leapt, o’erleapt each other, clattering with their hooves. Their figures ended in collision and a heap.

And at the rapping of the Master Surveyor’s stick, a stillness. Feet, viols, voices, sackbuts, shawms: all silent. Servants bore away the branches in the room: so it was dusk. And vanishing behind a painted crag, a snub-nosed prentice of the Master’s took a rushlight.

One and two. And with a sweep of arms, a solemn music. Now: ascent. The Moon herself, as Peter Quince had dreamed, upsailing through the hall turned heavens, high and disposedly. Her light indwelt in her, cast living shadows on the wall: a greater faerie than was painted, sawn, or stitched.

O marvellous.

Mere awe. And then as if the wonder were a white stone cast into a pool, their stillness broke into a thousand waverings and ripples of delight.

The Master in his cockscomb of a velvet cap upswept a pointing finger—marginalia to the revelation. “And look you, there is art.”

Eclipsed, thought Ben. The spirits come when he does call for them. He bowed ironically. “Signior, I stand as Joseph with the ox and ass: a cuckold to the light.”

A pattering and stir, as if the wind would turn—but Monsignior Mountebank held sway, all eyes upon his scene: all obscure, as Ben had written and the carpenters had made: nothing . . . but a dark rock, with trees beyond it, and all wildness. Like Moses—if the patriarch were but a tetchy Welsh Cockney with Italian airs—the Surveyor struck the rock.

It parted with a creak and thunder, like a cart on cobblestones—and wonderments gushed forth. There the whole scene opened, and within was discovered the frontispiece of a bright and glorious palace,whose gates and walls were transparent.

Transfixed, they all—the tirewomen, tailors, broiderers, the singing boys, musicians, satyrs, sylvans, Faies, aye, Phosphorus himself, his fiery wings half tacked—stood murmuring.

Again the rumble and the groan.

Sphere after sphere, thought Ben: like Jack Donne diving through his mistress’s petticoats. Now gown; now smock; now anywhere. Perspective to the cleft.

Again, the great enchanter raised his staff. Struck once. The palace opened to his spell, discovering a nowhere, painted gorgeously. “Here within, the fairies with their lights, immingled with the ladies of the court.” A stride. “Within, afar off in perspective, the knights masquers sitting in their several sieges.” Another stride. “At the further end of all—” He’d reached an empty chariot, as brilliant as the starry Wain. “—the Fairy King, our Oberon, his carriage drawn—” He turned with arms outspread “—by two white bears.”

“Madonna!” cried the second hautboy. “Will they eat us all?”

Art eclipsed by nature, Ben thought.

The Surveyor looked graciously upon his servants. “Men of the Prince’s household,” he said. “In ermine rugs.”

Ben was beginning to enjoy this. “The play—” he said sententiously “is allegorical: the court, the nursery of princes, as a bearpit.” The Surveyor coughed. “Nay, I wrote it as the Prince conceived. His Grace had entreated with his Royal father that they dance a-horseback; he would capriole. But then an embassage of Faerie—three most reverend goblins—would betake it to the air, mount up on humblebees. In parley, I bethought me of a tertium quid: nor earth aspiring nor air, but aether. I would set his chariot amid the stars; and in his traces, bind the Great Bear and the Less.” A downward glance at the pelts. Mothy. “For thy next, Master Jones, thou shouldst disfigure the whole Zodiac. I myself would take the Whale.”

Beyond the further end of all, a trampling. Ben grinned: the fellow came upon his cue. A curtain was twitched back, and a paltry door behind flung open, in a waft of stink—blood, bowels, tobacco, slaver, and Left Leg. The man himself succinct and leathery: as black as an ale-jack, seamed and ravaged with old scars. Half a face. Tom Tukeler the bearward in his butcher’s coat. The one eye, sharp as a kestrel’s, cast about the room, picked out the Surveyor. Ben up-nodded.

“Monsewer In-he-goes? From Master Alleyn.”

“So? So? I am busy.”

A scabrous bill outthrust. “On New Year’s Day at night. Item: one couple o’ white bears to hire, six pound, with chains and wardens—”

“Bears?” Almost a squeak.

“By command o’ Prince Harry. Two bears, with their attendant wardens: the same to have privilege o’ the buttery. Item: three pistols, balls, and powder—”

“Pistols? Will not the beasts be muzzled?”

The one brow lifted. “Nick Held, Noll Parrett, and I come along with. The Queen, she would have pistols, being it’s the King in eggshell. Say I, this brace o’ cubs are Master Alleyn’s cosset-lambs. Master Henslowe, he dotes on ’em above his daughters. He’d not lose ’em for a nest o’ hypocrites. If they are slain—say, mauling o’ the prince’s jacket—”

The Surveyor paled; assented with his hands. “So then: you three are of the progress; but you must be suited with the rest.”

“O excellent, as city sylvans!” cried Ben. “And the perfuming?”

The bearward stared about the room, at garlanded and skirted boys. “’Leven pence. Each. No wings.” Another reckoning stare. “And let the ladies not bring lapdogs in. The wench-bear’s peevish.”

Most excellent. Inches of cynosure, flapdragoned.

“Are they . . . accustomed to music?”

“Drum and trumpet? From their leading-strings. They abhor a lute. But will rise to a fiddle and will dance a measure. I taught ’em so.” Another reckoning glance: there were haunches in it, forepaws, questing snouts. He shoved the chariot two clothyards back. “Fish, we diet ’em, fat cod like very bishops. Aye, and porpoise o’ Sundays. They do eat half Billingsgate for breakfast, wives and all.”

“So?”

“Your bear now, is a great expostulator of your whoreson bearshit. And if the Queen tread in’t. . . .”

“Can they not be—save you—purged beforehand?”

“That ’d be behind. Your worship has our leave to try.”

Very small. “Fasted?”

“What, would you have them craunch the princes’ heads? Like apple-johns?” The bearward thrust his bill at the Surveyor. “Shovellers is ha’penny. You may rig ’em out as elves.” Hobs, ob., thought Ben. And with a shrug for epilogue: Exit, the Bearward. But at the curtain, Tukeler turned. “You ladies—and you lily-livered mawkins o’ the court—need not fear. The bears are very Chapel Children, meek as milk; have played twice to this court in Mussydoor, by turn and turn. Master Alleyn, he will call ’em foul names out o’ grammary: the brother’s Die-o’-Jennie’s—which is no blazon for an honest whore, much less her house—and the she-bear’s Clyster. I call ’em Jug and Toby.” And he clapped the door behind.

The Surveyor stared after, his wand sliding sideward in the crook of his elbow. Then he drew himself up, and twice or thrice clearing of his throat, said, “Gentlemen and women, men and boys: well begun. There is nooning in the buttery.” And with the prospect of ale and gossip, capons and cattery, the masque dispersed. A few still lingered by the fires, or in corners, murmuring. Nothing in the playing space but a powdering of sequins.

Ben thought his rival drooped; but when he turned, the Surveyor was himself again, spruce as a puppet. A spark of satire here and there had scorched his wizard’s robe; touched nothing of his damned complacency. As good wound water with a gun.

“So. There is the masque in three inventions: lux mobilis, machina versatilis, scena ductilis . . .”

“Circus maximus—”

“Thy bestiary? They will speak of nothing else.”

“Indeed. Not thy whirligigs.”

“Far less thy wording.”

A hit.

The Surveyor spread his hands. “The court—and those who envy them—will talk of gallantry: with whom the Queen danced, and the Prince. The bears will be a nine day’s wonder—what of that? There is no artifice in bears. And none to praise—”

“But God?” A perilous quiet, like a great wave drawing out.

“Just so: but God.” A perfectly dismissive piety. “A masque is nothing else but pictures with Light and Motion. Thy words are but the string on which to hang my pictures; I may buy it by the yard. And I—”

The wave rushed in.

  O shows! Shows! Mighty shows!

The eloquence of masques! What need of prose

Or verse, or sense to express immortal you?

Abristle like a porcupine, Ben advanced on the Surveyor. Jones jutted with his chin as if he would hold him at beardpoint; yet fell back. The poet jabbed an inky finger at the architect’s paunch. “I am no juggler, sirrah. There is nothing up my sleeve: no whirling whimseys nor kickshaws of smoke. I build with words: which will outlast thine exhalations as the firmament a falling star.” He had backed him to the crag: no further.

“I have written, sir, a pattern for princes; my Silenus a tutor, a Chiron for wisdom. And thou? hast turned all virtue into braveries. Wouldst make of Jove’s temple a babyhouse. Dollmaster Jones.” Now Ben pressed the very nap of his velvet.

The beard struck. “The bears, at least, will be muzzled.”

“O thou block of painted porphyry! Thou thing of tinsel! Thou alchemist, thou ignis fatuus, thou bubble-pipe, thou glow-worm!”

“Off me, sir.”

“Thou night-pollution of a meteor, thou jelly . . .”

“Lout.”

“Conjuror.”

“Ruffian.”

“Lick-fig.”

“Bricklayer.”

“Surveyor. Eat carpentry. Fart wasps.”

From the great doorway came a high voice calling out. “Is that the bear?

Both turned like filings to a lodestone; and in turning, bowed the knee.

A pale and pointed boy; a puny, hirpling boy in grey-blue and vermilion silk; a paraquito in a rookery of tutors: Charles, the younger prince, the Duke of York. He was pointing at Ben.

Ben raked his hair upward; the Surveyor all but espaliered himself in bowing.

“Is that the b-bear?” And to a hoodie crow amongst the tutors, “Thou didst fable me it wad be real.”

Hoisting himself by degrees, as he might a tun, Ben shaped himself to speak.

But the prince had caught sight of the fairy palace, and was gazing up in admiration. He walked toward it. He wielded his body with great care, Ben saw, as a child might a pen: a thing to be practiced. His great rosettes hid shoes of brass and leather. Brazen-shod: like a puny Achaean.

All butter now, the Surveyor stood before his market-stall of wonders. “A triumph, your Grace. For a prince.”

“I am not he.” A silence. “My brother Wales will ride as Oberon.”

But he the wonder is of tongues, of ears, of eyes. Ben’s words. His yard of string. York’s worship.

Now turning to his tutelary corbies, hand on hilt, the prince said, “I will play in this masque. I am na babby. I am b-breeched these five years, and in the second book of Livy. I can dance.”

The youngest of the crows, a Scot, said carefully, “Your Grace has made great progress in that art.”

Wheeling, almost pink with pleasure, the child caught Ben off guard. “Thou, sirrah. Will there be bears?”

“There will be two: white bears, as soft and heavy as a snow, as fell as January, one beyond the other, like the mountains on the edge of Thule. They have waked. There is old fire in their bellies; yellow moonlight in their seeking eyes; blood only in their minds.” And leaning close, he whispered. “They are for a prince to tame.”

All there were silent, gazing out where nothing was.

The satyr slept. Kit Marlowe, rising on his elbow drowsily, regarded him, asprawl on leaves, his sweeter parts displayed like grapes for the plucking. Pleasures proved, he thought: and kissed. Above them in a bank of thyme, two faun-cubs—vixens—curled about each other, scuts to noses, murmuring.

Kit rose, and cast his gown about his shoulders: that he kept, in token of his mastery here, his kind. Alone among his fellows here he knew his nakedness, and he rejoiced. He took his staff, and striding down with it beside the falling brook, with its endless changeful musics, he came upon the seacoast of Bohemia.

A flawless cove; a quartern moon of gold. Beyond it lay a stormless yet a lively sea, its azure melting into air, its waves a changeful endless tabbying of green, and greyer green, and white. There were set great ships upon it with their bellied sails, and banners forked like serpents’ tongues. All show: for his delight. None here would ever make its landfall.

Kit stared out at it. He turned, surveyed the compass of his kingdom, with its woods, fields, groves, and temples: his Arcadia, unvarying in all its endless variations of delight. Then walking out between the land and water, with his staff he dragged a circle in the sand; within, a pentacle. Stepped back.

The stainless dawn was misted, like a mirror breathed upon. He called: “Titania!”

And she arose, welling up within his circle scratched in sand: there and not there, green against the grey and gold.

“My Icarus?”

“I would have work.”

“Hast thou not everything?”

“But death.”

“Oh, thou art dead indeed: thyself was eaten by the Deptford worms long since.”

“Then time.”

“Is it not endless here?”

As a concert of lutes: when he would have the one cracked trumpet at the Rose, blaring out for a play. Would trade his pastoral for a garret and a pot of ink. “Then chance. I weary of this bliss.”

“I plucked thee from the burning; set thee in this island, fairest jewel of my diadem. Thou hast ’scaped the harvest of thy kind.”

“If there is hell indeed. Is’t so?”

A wind among her leaves, that whitened like blind eyes. To his knees. “If not, then my great realm hath paid a tithe to nothingness these many thousand years. Am I cheated?”

“Mistress, I know not.”

A sweet wind—airs of roses and of thyme, co-mingling with the smoke of torches—wafted from the steeps. “Here is bonniest. There else is heaven—which thou wouldst not like, my Icarus—or hell.”

“Or nothingness. Or else—” Else what? “Are there not other stars, with worlds to them, as I have read in Nolan’s book? I would discover.”

“Wouldst thou wager Arcady against this little chance?” Again the wind-white leaves, her seeress’s eyes. “Choose then, if thou dar’st: this sure felicity or that least chance, that prospect of imagined heavens. Which may be—if they are—all hells.”

Kit was silent.

“Thy forfeit is to be my teind. Stake all?”

“Mistress, I will chance it.”

For a moment, in her green, Kit saw a leafless thorn, that like an old hag crouched in snow. There were jewels on her hands, like coals of fire, and she counted haws. Then his lady smiled, and it was May. “I have an embassage for thee. To the English court.”

“To the Queen? Is she yet living? Pan! She would be older than the sibyl at Cumae, but a voice in a jar.”

“To the King.”

“An heir? Poured out from her withered bottle? O miracle! Who filled her?”

“Not her body’s heir, but Scots James—”

“Is he King then? James?” Kit drank the news eagerly; had not known how he thirsted for the commonplace, for change and accident.

“—that hath himself an heir: the pattern of all virtues. I would have that princeling in my train.”

And in your bed, as toy. So then will Oberon, thought Kit. There’s play in that. And said: “Will I fetch you this paragon? This pearl of chastity? And how?”

“There is presented at this court a masque of Oberon: whom he enacts.”

“O perilous!”

“Absurd.” Titania laughed, in a great froth of white blossom. “The part is written chastely—for Diana in Apollo’s cloak. My consort as a Ganymede, a beardless boy—O ’tis the rarest mockery of him!” Maliciously: “He will be vexed.”

With his wakened thirst for news, Kit said, “Who writ this masque? Tom Lodge? Jack Lyly? Nashe?” And halted: when was England now? Were they all dead, as he was?

“Our spy at court says one Ben Jonson.”

Jonson? Jonson. Kit remembered him, a lubberly great youth, a prentice with astounding Greek and loud opinion; an ambition like a water screw, an Archimedes engine that would carry all before it. Crushed pages in his horny hand. What was his trade now? Smith? Mason? Ah, a bricklayer’s son. “What, young Amphion? I will make of his Troy wall a downfall for the English realm.”

“Then do.”

Kit louted low. “My lady Queen. I go now to abduct your Helen.”

And the queen, like a fountain of green fire, rose laughing; and went out.

It still was dawn. As ever, came the piping as the dance awoke, and came with wreathing figures—fauns and dryads—through the greenest wood. A serpentining that disguised a circle: their garland his chains. Kit scuffed the circle with his heel. He stood, considering what figure he might draw.

In Blackfriars, St. Stephen’s Night

In his study, wreathed in smoke, Ben slouched and glowered in his chair, the great unravelling strawstack that was his alone. After his flyting with Inigo, he smouldered still.

Above him, perched up on the window ledge, Nat Field had slipped his ring off, and was graving with it on the pane. Where the candle caught the web of scratches, it was wreathed; it made of them a garland of pale fire round his head. Now one impresa, now another, glinted out amid the maze. Nat worked his own device beside IF&FB in a fine italic interlaced. He knew the quarrel where a bold RB was cut; and the cantle where WS in a crabbed hand scuttled uphill into hiding. At his work, he sang beneath his breath: a little catlike tune, with pounces. He surveyed; went back to his last stroke, and flourished it. He knew the way to lull his friend and master: where the great bear would be scratched.

“And Tildrum? Dotes he now on boys or wenches?”

Ben roused. “What, my Dol Common?”

“She.”

“An Utraquist,” said Ben. “Communion in both kinds.”

Nat laughed and let the ring fall on its chain. “And Toldrum?”

“Takes nothing but cock posset and a little tongue, for his health.”

“Quaeris quis hic sit? Excidit mihi nomen.”[1]

“I may not tell: but you may meet him in Cock Lane o’ nights, in a yellow ruff. Let him not pluck thy sleeve.” Up now in his chair, and playing. “Castor and Pollux?”

“Two quills and but one inkpot.”

And having set Ben roaring, Nat leapt lightly down. It was November ever in the study: dry leaves pattering down and stacks of quartos, folios, octavos springing up like mushrumps in a wood. He waded through them to the sagging chair. (The younger poets swore it sprouted vine-leaves and ivy; swore it rose and lumbered, baffled, with its blind snout, seeking ale.)

“Come, Ben. Come old Sylvanus, rise. Is not thy beehive smoked enough? Thy swarm now will drowse; its king not issue forth his myrmidons with vengeful stings, but give us honey of his work.”

Ben found his jack of ale beneath a nest of pamphlets; drank deeply. “Good my Face, I am confounded.”

“How, sir?”

“By my great archrival: he, the Unmov’d Mover. He hath turned the Book of Revelation to a ballad sheet. Didst hear, my Face, my Sylvan?”

“I did lurk with Phosphorus on the horizon.”

“Eavesdropping Lucifer? Conjunct with him? O Mercury!” He leaned to Nat. “But this demiurge of deal, this Inigo—Saw you not his great machine, Apocalypse? His stage? How it gaped to swallow us?”

Nat’s face on a sudden was a prince’s; the study his scene: “O, monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of Ben to this intolerable deal of masque!”

Old Sylvanus splurted ale through both his nostrils, porpoise-like; and lying back in his chair—which creaked ominously, swaying like a ship in a gale—he drummed his heels and howled.

“I have hope of thee, my Face.” He set his empty jack aside. “But here is Will now, that hath caught this tragi-comedy, this trick of romance, as a justice would the pox.” Not resentful of his rival now, but impatient, baffled. “Not all in outward show, as pustules on the muse’s cheek: but in his bones. His poetry—” A puzzle. “Wants hackling.” Ben raked the air, unravelling conceits. Elf-ridden Pegasus! “Ill-matched to his small matter: he would bring a consort of celestial music to a puppet show. His plotting—” Nat refilled his cup; but set by it the cold goose he had brought. Being hungry—and half drunk—the bear would rage. “—skimble-skamble. Dead queens to be dredged; lost daughters, unbegotten at the first, to be restored with joyful weeping in the last—Is there mustard, boy?”

Nat rummaged on the table. Orts and Aristophanes, crusts, lyrics, eggshells, bones. “In the inkpot. Here.” He stirred it with a quill.

“But three days since I asked if he’d a play in hand. He said, one in mind: there’d be a shipwreck in Bohemia. Where there is no sea, I told him, by some hundred miles. Yet there might be, he said. If I do write of it.” A snort. “Thou wast ever in the mood subjunctive, Will, said I. And he, Thou, Ben, imperative.” Ben took a wing and gnawed it savagely; then pointing with the bone, he said, “Yet will not write a masque for court.” He tore another wing. “Will not whore with me: aye, there’s the barb. There’s gold in’t, I told him: £40 for six sides. Yet he writes semi-demi-masques for the groundlings to gape at, for their pennies. I the courtesan; and he, the common jade.” Another on the heap of bones. “Not so: he is the King’s Men’s wife, and does the thing by covenant. Well, he will come to it. He hath cheaped with Alleyn for a bear.”

Head in hands, his mane upraked with greasy fingers, he groaned. “’Tis all one, all nothing: our invention, Jones’s whims. Forgotten ere the stick has fallen or the smoke dispersed. A fire on air.”

“Your words? And Shakespeare’s? Beaumont’s?” Nat turned Ben’s words on himself: “How nothing’s that?”

A silence: so they heard the wind, that howled and muttered in the chimneytops. “I am that my father damned.” Nat stood. “Thou know’st he preached against the lewdness of our trade; that when the scaffold fell at Paris Garden, he exulted in the deaths of many: whose great sin on the Sabbath was to see the bears.”

“I mind,” said Ben.

“But coming from my school, there stood a dark knight in the road, the Queen’s catcher of children. And the wittier I answered him, the more would have me. So the pander of players took me: and my soul was lost.” A turn. “I give thanks he toyed me not. Dared not, lest my stones drop and his prize be spoiled.”

Turning east of north, the wind now cast a fitful hail against the glass. The names were blotted out with snow. “My father then had died: so could not rail upon my whoredom and eternal fall.” A silence, understood. He dead, I cannot beg redemption; so I take fathers of my company. Like you, old Chiron.

A creak and rustling from the chair. As I have taken sons. For that I lost.

“By good fortune my first part was one of thine: I quarrelled for the prologue’s cloak; and lost; and won.”

“In a measure, thou hast thrived.” The pearl that dangled at one ear; the lustrous silks—Bah! frippery, thought Ben in his old coachman’s coat that would stand itself alone—and O! that fine fine linen, blackworked, like a hedge of thorns against a January snow. The ring he tucked within his doublet not of brass: no serving wench’s pledge.

“I have been in Bridewell and at court. In church, but this last Sunday, when I went to take my Savior’s blood and body, I was hindered from His table. As a player: as a thing outcast. Yet those who scorn our mystery I disdain: “a play is not so idle a thing as thou art, but a mirror of men’s lives.”

“And of bears’.” Ben spoke less blackly; yet a cloud—a front of cloud—oppressed his spirit. “I dreamed of Kit last night.”

“Sir?”

“Kit Marlowe, dead when thou wast yet in petticoats, thy father’s Benjamin.”

“What, Faustus Marlowe? He? The atheist?”

“The poet, aye. Out of fashion now: but strode our antick theatre like a tyrant; set his foot on vanquish’d necks. The style then was for kataklysmos, deluge rolling on in measured waves: a thund’rous line; a stop; another; and a stop. As if passion went by halts and vehemence were governed by caesura.” In his deepest voice:

Holla, ye pamper’d jades of Asia!

What, can ye draw but twenty miles a-day,

And have so proud a chariot at your heels,

And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine?

On his feet now, flourishing a viewless whip.

You shall be fed with flesh as raw as blood,

And drink in pails the strongest muscadel:

If you can live with it, then live, and draw

My chariot swifter than the racking clouds;

If not, then die like beasts, and fit for naught

But perches for the black and fatal ravens.

“O barbarous! yet passing high,” said Nat: whose plays were nimble.

“’Twas an age of Titans: Kit, Hyperion.” Ben dizzied, looking back: but twenty years from then to now, from Aeschylus to Apuleius; from Kit’s great rants to Will’s late witchery. “His team was emperors. Mine, brutish beasts.”

Softly. “But the ghost? The vision? apparition?”

“Not in pain; as if the fire were his element.” A halt. “Not as in life: his eye was lost.”

“Spoke he?”

“In riddles. Let the chariot roll on. I thought of Paris, and the regicide, the tutor Ravaillac, who killed good Henry of Navarre. The street was thronged; the carriage halted by a quarrel of carters; and the villain climbed upon the wheel and struck. The cause? That Henry suffered Huguenots to live.”

Nat Field had seen the broadsides of Ravaillac’s death; to which the torments of Guy Fawkes were but a pinch. He shuddered. But to kill a king!

Ben had brooded on the thing for months—his faith was argument—and at Martinmas was reconciled and took communion in the English church, in both kinds. When the chalice passed to him, he took it in both hands and drank it down: the full cup.

Nat said, “I marvel that the King should hold his revels in the shadow of his brother’s death.”

“And I fear the Queen’s great openness would let his Death, like a Christmas beggar, in at door.”

“’Tis not the open street, but Whitehall. The King is wary since the Plot.”

“He was ever wary: drank suspicion at his mother’s breast. With reason. I am told he wears a corslet that would turn a dagger.” The thought of the King’s mistrustfulness cheered Ben. He took a scrofulous orange from his store, and broke it with his thumbs.

“Mayhap this show will be like Solomon, when Sheba overset her burden of delicates—herself the syllabubs—in the Danish King’s lap; and rubbed the place with a napkin to expunge the fault: so enlarging his confusion. Up he rose—and stood as well: would dance with her, but missing of the steps, he fell, and so was carried giggling to his chamber and laid out upon his bed of state in a welter of jellies. On then came Hope and Charity and Faith, sheep-drunk, and made a cast—or six or seven—at the throne; the highest of their speeches was a belch. I met them spewing in the lower hall. Last, Peace was lion-drunk, and laid about the King’s pate with her olive-branch.” Ben snorted happily. “Now that was a masque. Tim Toldrum’s.”

“What a coil,” said Nat Field, stepping lightly as a cat amid the pyramids of books. He whistled softly as he turned about: that little miching music. “Will my lady Argyll be of the Queen’s company?”

“Ho,” cried Ben, now wonderfully revived. “Didst thou not play to her wedding but a year since?”

“To old Grimbald? Gillesbuig Grumach? He hath eyes for her dowry alone. But she—at Twelfth Night last—”

Ben’s turn to whistle. “Ere those shoes were old!”

The player held his ring up, so the jewel winked, cast a flittering of lights like butterflies about the room: so it was summer in the wintry dusk. He made to slip it on his finger; stopped. “Not yet, but she will.”

“Thou wilt be hanged, boy.”

But Nat sang. “What cares she for her new-wedded lord, and her sheets turned down so bravely O?” He tossed the ring up in the air, and caught it. “She would give them all for an open Field.”

At Whitehall, Childermas

Far in the night when the boy waked, Kit was standing next his bed: a stranger reading, a flicker of the dying fire in his hair. Amber in shadow.

An outbreath, scarce a word.

Kit held a finger to his lips. “They sleep.” As he had cast them, grooms and guardians. “As you do.”

Very still. “What art thou?”

“A candle at your bedside.” Kit closed the book, his finger at his place.

“Why?”

“God keep your Grace”—but he did not say what god—“I am sent to watch you, lest you wake and see bugbears.”

“Na harm will come to me.” His voice was very small. “I say the collect, kneeling, as the King our father taught us.”

A schoolmasterly voice: “Lighten our darkness . . . ?”

In antiphon: “. . . we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us . . .”

“. . . from all perils and dangers of this night—”

“. . . for the love of thy only Son, our Savior Jesus Christ.”

“Amen,” said the stranger—and he did not vanish in a bleeze of fire. He sat. “Would you then have a candle?”

“Nay, the shadows like me not.” A hesitation. “They flecker.” And lowering his voice impressively, the boy said, “I hae seen things na canny.”

“Like to me?”

“Much waur.” His cradle-tongue was Doric, Englished over. “There was once a wee man creepit in by my cradle, and he cast a black cloak ower me. And old Marioun that was my rocker, she said he was Lankin, and wad p-prick me all ower wi’ a siller pin, and fill a basin with my b-blood.”

“Would. I see did not.”

“My daddy wad hae made the stake for him. And Harry wad hae thrust the torch.”

Can shadows burn?

Softer still. “There are warre wolfis in Embro. Gavin has seen them at the moonrise drop and gang on a’ fours, snatching at bairnies. At dawn they cast awa’ their slouches, and are naked men.”

As I have cast away my fell of man: rise daemon.

“They mak war with the witches, Gavin says. As I will do, when I am man.”

“You are too great a boy for such winter’s tales. Do you not now learn the manage of arms?”

“What art thou?” said the boy a second time.

“One that lost an eye in the Queen’s service.”

“Oh! A knight?”

“Of ghosts and shadows.”

“Awa’ wi’ your auld wives’ tales” said the boy, daringly. “I am na babby.” Then wrying about, he twitched his nose. “What . . . ?”

“Smoke,” said Kit. “Tobacco.”

“Och, awa’ with it. The K-king my father will be much displeasured.”

“Then I will take it elsewhere.”

Charles sat up now, his arms round his knees. “Nae, bide. I wad talk with thee. Canst thou fight na mair?”

“From the hour of my great wound, I have not drawn steel.”

“Wae’s thee! To have lost thy sight and thy guid mastery. Thou sal be recompensit for thy griefs, as I am leal. Thou knowest I am a Knight of the Bath?” Kit knew he had been carried to that honour. Tittivill had seen. “Master P-pelletier says I grow stronger by the day.”

“A very Hector.”

And a third time: “What art thou?”

“An usher. I am sent to teach.” Kit showed the book.

“Canst thou read so in the dark?”

“I know the book by heart. It is the Metamorphoses.”

A bounce. “Oh, I begin that in the new year. Will I read it with thee? Master Murray says it is the p-purest of Latin.”

“It is that and more: it is—” Kit caught himself. “Wondrous stories.”

“O rare! Will it not be morning soon? I will show thee my study and my books. Canst thou teach cosmography? mathematick? divinity and disputation?”

“I am a Master of Arts.” He did not say which. “Of Cambridge.”

The boy was kneeling up now, in his plaited nightgown and his cap. Kit looked him up and down, but swiftly, sidelong.

“No Greek as yet?”

A curdle of cream. Would do for some lickspoon paiderastos, but Kit’s tooth was for more poignant meats: green figs and ripe, his stenching goat cheese and his little quails. For island Corydon, late left, whose parting kiss yet stirred him, rod and stones. Jove might have sipt out nectar from his hand.

“I ken the l-letters. I am learning to decline substantives.”

“I will teach you the first and second conjugations. And then you may read of Troy, of Helen that was rapt away by Paris.”

“Is it all of Helen? For I wadna read of sic a lightsome quean.”

“Of Hector then. Of fire-tongued Cassandra.”

But the boy was fidgeting. “I thirst.” His look was to the servant: give me drink. There was the cup at hand’s reach: that Kit could not lift.

Quickly, he said, “When your brother was made Wales last summer, were you not his Ganymede? And bore his cup?”

“Aye. Like this.” York took the cup in both hands, raising it. “God save the Prince of Wales!” He drank, as from a chalice.

“And keep him.” Kit could work here: on the sickly brother overshadowed by the sun. Ad aemulationem.

“Hast seen the gey picture of my brother in the Hall? Upon his braw white horse?”

“With Time at his back? Aye.” Death waits to pull the rider down, will then hold fast. I was that prize: Death changed me in his arms to bone; he cast the earth’s green mantle over me. He wins, he ever wins. And Kit spoke:

O lente, lente, currite noctis equi![2]

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike—

“Sir?”

“I rehearse the ancients.”

When he had lived, he was a poet. He had sailed from that continent: the hills behind him low and brown, that had been empires. And on the island where he dwelt, there was no time. No alpha and omega, first and last, no resurrection and no fall. And so no tragedy. He stayed not in Eden but Arcadia, where he might have his will: love what he lighted on, this faun or that satyr, aye, bright Lucifer himself. And where he could not write.

On a sudden, he was weary of this game. But he was bound, and doubly bound, to serve his Queen against her Oberon, his Oberon against his Queen. Because he must, he spoke. Would spur ambition.

“Would you ride such a horse?”

A shifting. Kit looked where the boy would not. Near at hand, a lover’s last and first gaze, stood a little horse in bronze, round-chestnut-rumped: Italian, masterly. A child had knotted it that bridle of red silk. “A princely toy.”

“It is my b-brother’s.” Twitched. “He may have my ain, if it wad please him. He will be my king.” He spoke as if he swore a fealty, with all his heart. “I wad give anything to him, both my horses and my books, that he wad love me.”

“Doth he love you?”

A silence.

Good: arise, thou unwaked emulation. Kit thought to say, Would you ride pillion to him? Be his prelate, and wear skirts? Tittivill had seen that quarrel. The firstborn prince had seized a priestly cap and crammed it mockingly on Charles’s head: When I am king, I will make thee my archbishop. Thy skirts will hide thy spindle shanks. The child had snatched it off and stamped on it. (The faerie spy had mimed his fury.) Good. So roused, those legs could kick—

Now, even now, between his thought and speaking, Kit was thunder-cleft, possessed with prophecy: the lightning of his vision ecstasy. A dagger to the eye.

He saw a scaffold, high above a crowd. Saw the axe fall, saw the blood leap from the neck—O gods. The downfall of a king. And then the afterstroke. This—child? The tyrant? Who had taken from his bedside book, a paper with a pretty sketch: the Prince in masquing clothes. Aye, he will be, if his brother—vanishes. Stopped. Might be. Or might usher in a Golden Age: a pattern for all princes. Visions lie. And yet he saw this still: the distant figure, kneeling in his shirt. As in a glass, he thought. As on a stage—and laughed. The boy looked quickly up. O brave! A tragedy. If I cannot write a play in ink, I will in blood. And how featly it worked: a prince of earth, a pretty toy for his Queen, and later, when she wearied of the boy, a tithe for hell; mere chaos for his Oberon, who took delight in overturning; and for himself, a play at chess, with kings for pieces. But passing all: a play.

He must go gently: for he must not flight his bird.

The boy showed him the drawing. “Look. Is he not braw?” The cloud had passed. “O it was braw, the masque of Tethys at his great solemnity. Tethys was the Queen my mother, with her rivers all in green. I was Zephyrus with silver wings, and gied the Prince his sword. And now am I Oberon’s page—at Master Jonson’s hest—and I will have a garland and a bow, like Cupit. Save that we are English sprites, not amorous.” He sighed. “But I wad there had been horses, as my brother wishit.”

“There is yet a chariot. Is that not brave?” And Kit turned on him his odd, bewitching smile: a weapon he had left. “They say the Bear is Charles’s Wain, that draws him to his victory. And bear is?”

“Ursus. Urse. Ursum—Didst thou know—?”

A finger raised.

“Ursi. Urso. Urso.”

“Well.”

“But didst thou know there will be bears?”

“Not men in bearskins? Arktanthropoi?”

“White bears of Thule.”

“Have they names?”

“Canst guess?” said the boy.

“Usumcasane and Theridamas?”

The boy laughed. “No.”

“Castor and Pollux?”

“No! I will tell thee in thine ear.” He whispered. “Diogenes.”

“A surly fellow.”

“Master Jonson understudies him, they say.” He laughed, uncertain of the jest. “And the other is Callisto.”

“Ah. Know you why the name is apt?” The boy shook his head. “You will read this story, after Phaeton’s fall. Callisto was a nymph, a huntress of the moon. Jove desired her, so came to her as her great mistress Artemis, with breasts and bow. Not guising: He-in-She. His beard he kept, but elsewhere. As a votary, she knelt to serve her mistress; but Jove knew not the arts of women. So he toused her; yet she opened to the moon: which grew—a manhood.”

Round-eyed. Red of cheek.

“The child he got upon her was a bearward, Arcas.” Kit began to stride. “But when Jove’s wife came to hear of it, she seized Callisto by the forelock; dragged her to all fours: so that in crying out she ate the dust. Her belly that betrayed her Juno scraped along sharp stones, its white now red. Her arms, entreating mercy, bristled out black hairs; her hands curved into claws. That face the moon had made her glass grew terrible, and gaped. When she would speak—O pity me!—her tongue was thick between the horrid teeth; and rearing back her monstrous head, she growled.” He’d shouted that. Kit halted, dizzying with change. Almost he had felt the poet thrilling in him, like return of blood to stiffened hands. Came near to metamorphosis: himself again. Soft now. You astound the boy. “And yet curst Juno gave her not forgetfulness: she was a bear who grieved her loss of nature. And she ran from the sight of gods and mortals to the greenwood, where she lived among the beasts.”

The boy’s voice shook. “Was she huntit?”

“Often.” The schoolmaster’s guise again: he-in-he. “But then Jove took and set her and her son, her Arcas, in the heavens. They are stars: the Great and Lesser Bears. Septentriones.”

“I know them. And Orion, and the Sisters.”

“You know that stars have seasons? That the rising of the Pleiads is a herald of the spring?”

An uncertain nod. But Kit was talking to himself.

“The Bears set never: which the jealous godwife thought a curse. Juno thought that if her rival set, she would defile the ocean. But Juno—even she—was wrong about the Bear. It is the earth that cannot rise to stain Callisto. Other stars may sink beneath it, where is Acheron; but the Great Bear and her starry chariot are of the sky, aethereal. Do you know where they are riding?”

The boy shook his head. All eyes.

“By Walsingham Way, to the Faerie Court.”

“O!”

And bending closer to the boy—so close that had he reached, he could have felt the nothing that was there—Kit flashed his little fishhook of a smile. “And where a prince may go.”

Hooked. Netted.

“’Tis our secret. You may steal away before the Prince of Wales discovers. Think on’t: you would come and go; would enter on him with a fairy sword and crown—”

“Ohh.”

“Exulting. ’Twould be the rarest mock.”

The dark eyes filled with tears; but York spoke stoutly. “He can have my turn.”

“You would give him that? Titania? Oberon?”

“I wad.” A sigh. “I will.”

“A princely gift. He will love you for it.” Softly. “I will tell you the way.”

“What is’t?”

“You walk before him in the masque. By the third door, you must take Callisto’s harness. Can you do that?”

A nod.

“And then you must say, To the Queen! Can you remember?”

“To the Queen.”

“The gates will open.”

A log fell in, the fire flared. The stranger’s hair flamed too, it seemed; and fire-glints peered out from all the slashings in his antick doublet. And perhaps York would have seen; but childlike, he had turned and dived beneath his pillows, burrowing for some old ragged comfort. He emerged, a babby in his fist.

“I wad sleep now.”

“Dream of chariots.”

And softly, over and again, as if it were a lullaby, as if he rocked a cradle of the stars, Kit said:

Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles?—

Usumcasane and Theridamas,

Is it not passing brave to be a king,

And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

The firelight shone through and through him, nothing now but gilding on the empty air, with here and anywhere a twinkling, as of stars or buttons.

On the cheek a curled hand; the lashes fluttering. A sigh. The prince slept.

Kit rose, invisible, and slipped into his dream.

On the Heath

Toward dawn of that frosty morning, Nat Field came staggering by zeds down Hampstead Heath. The Christmas play had been a triumph; he had stayed to wassail somewhat late. He’d come another way than he set out.

In the roots of the Great Elm, at its doorway, sat a little crooked fellow in patched leather, with an offcast battered feather in his cap. Seeing Nat, he jumped up.

“Bless us!” said Nat.

And the fellow sneezed.

“I took thee for a stump. Here’s a penny for thy box.”

The crooked fellow louted low, with all the airs and graces of a courtier—else a mock of them. “I come for Gillesbuig Grumach’s wife.”

“Oh.” As if the stump had flowered. “Thou art?”

“My lady’s gardener. I am sent.”

“On such an embassy?”

The fellow cocked an eye like a robin’s. “Embassy?”

Confusion. “I had hoped . . .” He turned his blush on the messenger as indignation. “Could she not send a nearer person to herself? Her waiting gentlewoman?”

“To the Heath? Afore dawn?”

“Then at some civil hour; to the playhouse.”

“To be seen? In a cloak and mask, to traffic with a player?”

There was that. Field shrugged.

“She bids you remember the ring.”

Had flowered and was setting fruit. A great unholy joy was in him. “Yes?”

“Be patient, sir: it will be worn.”

A leap of heart.

“For now she gives you this, in token of the play of Oberon.” The knave held out his earth-creased hand. An acorn.

“What?”

“Try it.”

Ah, a little silver catch. Most curious. Nat pressed it, and it sprang. “O!” An inbreath of wonder. Within was a great pearl, lustrous as the moon: to be worn at ear. A princely gift. Hesitant, he made to touch.

The gardener snapped the springe. “Not yet.” And with a smile, “But soon. She bids you wear it for Oberon.”

He could frame no thanks, but said foolishly, “I will be in a sylvan’s guise. Would not this jewel look strange?”

The gardener smiled, dangling the acorn at his barky ear, by its string

“Oh. Oh, I see. If Master Tyrant Jones sees it not . . .”

“My lady will. You walk before the chariot, she says.”

“Before the bears! To a loud triumphant music”: playing now in his blood. He sang:

Melt earth to sea, sea flow to air,

  And air fly into fire,

Whilst we in tunes, to Arthur’s chair

  Bear Oberon’s desire

At which the gardener laughed himself to tears: which shook a late owl from the elm. It flew away, hooting: Two, two to woo.

“And then my speech,” said Nat. He spoke it as reproof:

Give place, and silence; you were rude too late;

This is a night of greatness, and of state,

Not to be mixt with light and skipping sport . . .

And like the antimasque that heard this speech, the gardener was subdued. He held the acorn with its little catch out on his earthy palm. “Wear this for the lady’s sake. For Oberon. She keeps the key.”

“I will.” Nat took the gift. “Do thou bear my deep obeisance and my loving thanks to her ladyship; tell her I will fail not.”

And again, that birdlike glance. “There is another matter. But ’tis odds you would not dare—”

“Dare what?”

“A trial of love. Your lady bids a thing of you, before the key is in the lock.”

“What? If aught an honest man may do—”

“When they do sing that laud, that song of Oberon’s desire—”

“Come, come, sirrah.”

“Take the bear by its harness.” And bowing, he was gone.

All the birds of the heath woke chittering, as a red sun rose. Nat stood high above the smoke of London, with an acorn in his hand, that rattled.

On Ludgate Hill

The Horace was too dear. Ben flapped away the importunate bookseller, buzzing round his ear; and went on reading. “This? Or this, but lately in from Holland? Or this Quintilian? In quarto, sir: ’twould look rarely, bound in calf.” A drone, yet honeying his ear: “A scholar, sir, of your discernment . . .” At last, Ben sighed and closed the book; and by long habit, nearly walked away with it under his arm. “Half a crown, then?” called the seller. Ben acceded. It went on the stack.

So: my lady Rutland kept table to poets. He need not starve. He looked over the table once more. Disputations, riff-raffs—ah, The Scourge of Folly. On the stack. In among the riff-raffs, by oversight perhaps, was a pamphlet in Latin: Siderius Nuncius. Hum. The Starry Messenger, revealing great, unusual, and remarkable spectacles—more damned turbulent Scenes. He nearly tossed it down; but his glance had caught a name. Ah, by the Florentine, Galileo. Had he not devised a glass—perspicillum—to spy upon the gods? O great Surveyor! ’Tis the fashion now: to make toys even in philosophy. All arts, all sciences, to do with nothing now but light and motion. Four planets, swiftly revolving about Jupiter at differing distances and periods, and known to no one before the Author recently perceived them. On the stack. Which was all the silver he had.

On his way to Paul’s Walk, Ben mused. To call this quadrumvirate of planets Medicean was but good policy: to exalt his patron was an artist’s, an astronomer’s, a poet’s burden. The work served but as a foil to glory. His own masques might be called—what?—Jacobean? (A halt; a going on.) But then, laid Tuscany its claim to these four worlds, as England to Virginia? Were there riches in these furthest Indies? Spices? Gold? Apes, ivory, emeralds? Tobacco? Would a Company be chartered for the trade with—what? these Jovians? And in what ships? At that he laughed: conceited fantasy. Tobacco? Smoke! And Will’s voice in memory said, Yet there might be. (A turn.) Yet this flattery of mere earthly princes liked him not. These stars, Jove’s waiting boys, should have high names befitting to their sphere. Ha! He clapped, once, sharply. Ganymede. No other boy so loved? Why then, his mistresses. Too many. Semele. Callisto. Io. Leto. Leda. And Europa . . .

He went by the south door into London’s voice. A still roar at first, its many seeming one; but as he walked, he heard the great polyphony: each line a moment flashing out from the discordant concord. Tallis’s forty-part mottetto—that was praised so—forty-fold. This Babel of Londoners was Ben’s own music: his choir.

“. . . and bore a monster with two fishes’ heads . . .”

“. . . sweet oranges, a penny!”

“. . . turd in thy teeth! Thou liest . . .”

“. . . had his pond fish’d by his next neighbour . . .”

A clackdish. “. . . poor Tom. Remember Tom . . .”

“. . . woe befall great Babylon! whose spawn is Players . . .”

Up against the vestry wall, a whore, still beating down her skirts. “. . . a pox on thy Harry tester! And thy ha’porth o’ prick!”

The thieves alone were silent.

Up and down Ben went, and in and out the great pillars, hacked with centuries: I was here, I loved, I won so much at dice. And the monuments answered them: all die. We are ephemeral, as flies are; and our span a play.

In the north aisle, Ben spied his masquing Phosphorus, their own Siderius Nuncius, idling—graceful as a gossamer—beside a noseless bishop’s tomb, as if he read the inscription: Ranulphus Munday, decidit 1331. A snub-nosed, yellow-haired boy went by, glanced back as if to deprecate the angels. And anon, the player drifted on the same way. O ho, thought Ben: a riddle for the game. Nostoch? No planet, but a shooting star; no star, but shotten.

Musing on his epigram, Ben only half heard a voice behind him: “. . . by the chariot . . .” Turning, he heard a lower voice reply: “. . . with powder . . .” Turned, he saw no one this could be: a pair of city wives talking of the price of fish, a pantaloon; a small girl playing jackstones on a tomb. Yet he knew—he thought he knew—those voices. Musicians? Sylvans? Carpenters? Behind him again: “. . . if the prince . . .” A device against his person? Powder? O treachery! Quicker now, he turned; and seeing no one, slid (or rather stuffed himself) behind the tomb: whereon the child in green tatters glared at him in high dudgeon; and gathering up her jackstones, stalked away.

For a quarter of an hour, he prowled about the church, stalking those voices, in and out, up and down. One or twice heard whispers, and a laugh. What so? There were ever voices in this roof, high-vaulting echoes.

He passed Nuncius again in the chancel, at another tomb, alone. Huh. Slighted. Or an Estrich for appetite.

Compassing once more, his eye was caught by a patch of yellow, like a pissabed sprung up between the stones. Behind a pillar in the north aisle, by a knight and his astonied lady (as if he’d risen from their blameless bed), he saw Snub-Nose buttoning. He grinned—and all at once, he quivered like a gaze-hound.

For by that chance of yellow, he espied at last what he’d been seeking: two of the sylvans in Duke Humphrey’s walk, bent close in conversation. As they moved away, he heard: “. . . and the powder? Is’t enough . . . ?” Full sail, he followed, the small craft scattering before his prow; when someone caught his sleeve. Another, his coat-tail. And a third, in a great fume of canary, pawed his shoulder.

“Good Master Muldsacke!”

“Sweet Sir Words.”

“Holla!”

Three satyrs, drunk as lords. The riot of the tipsie Bacchanals.

“We have con—con—Devil take it! What we’ve done?”

“Consheaved.”

“—the rarest mock of Jones’s moon.”

“His idol.”

“Looks mobilious.”

“O swear not by the moon, th’inc!—th’incontinent moon . . .”

“There is no man in’t.”

“By’r lady, what’s a moon without a man?”

“So we will paint a great face—”

He had lost his quarry. “Down, sirs! Down, you puppies! Down, you pissing litter of a draggle-dugged bitch!” He pushed past them onto Ludgate Hill.

On Friday Street

A knocking at the door. Gil again? Back for the scarf? Nat Field, in nothing but his blackwork shirt, glanced once at his glass, and called, “Anon!”

“You must let me in.” A boy’s voice, none he knew. A jangling of sweet bells.

“Is it the guisers?” Nat threw on his gown.

“If you will, it is.”

“Walk in.”

And the door flew open. In came but one small guiser, in his petticoats and tawdry crown. The skirts were too long for him; they draggled, and he held them up.

Enter Dol Common as the Queen of Fairy. O most excellent mock!

“Who sent thee, boy? Here’s silver for thy box.”

“My embassage is from the Queen.”

    She now is set

At dinner in her bed, and she has sent you

From her own private trencher, a dead mouse,

And a piece of gingerbread, to be merry withal.

O, a witty boy. To play Ben’s own play to his Face. Would have it word for word. They all did, these upstarting boys. All suitors: for a part, a piece, a tumble. The playhouses ran with them, as kitchens with mice. But Nat took the gingerbread with its dim star, and ate it, gilt and all. “Art thou not she? The Queen of Fairy?”

A deeper courtesy. A dancer. Could he sing?

“Thou art overparted, boy.”

“You, underclad.”

An impudent boy, with a fire of red hair; who bore himself as if a Queen indeed. And bowed as to a brother King, or consort. But the face he raised to Nat, alight with mockery. A whey-faced brat. But one that stirred him.

He had a choice of revels he might grace this evening: two or three ladyships whose admiration he was; a tittering lord, who doted more the more refused; or any of the Inns of Court. But it snowed; the ways were foul. He thought he might as well stay in.

“Come then, I will hear thy piece.” He sat on the table’s edge. “But where’s thy hobbyhorse? Thy company of sword?”

“But one sword: which is yours to wield.”

Stark impudence. “Will George not die and rise?”

“Over and again, since time began.” The imp laughed. “But the play is new.” That tilt of face: appraisal of the blackwork shirt, and that it clad. “You do not know / What grace her grace may do you in clean linen.”

Alchemy again, thought Nat: which worked in him an exaltation. Noted, with another, lower glance. No novice.

Nat kissed him—O the mouth was sweet—and felt against his thigh the eager little horn. “My smock rampant!” Two could play at capping verses—were their mouths not stopped.

When he pulled the smock up, over the bright hair, the boy came away with it, as if his body were attire. And something else emerged—a she-in-he—as from its husk a butterfly, and shook its wings.

O . . . ! He breathed; but could not speak for awe. Astounded still, as if the smock had pulled with it himself, his wits.

Now perfect in her nakedness, the creature wafted once or twice her iris’d wings; was still.

A whisper. “O thou witch, self-Circe.”

She spoke: no boy had ever such a voice, as if the night itself commanded. “Down o’ your knees and wriggle.”

Willy nilly, he obeyed. Her fingers twisted shrewdly in his hair. And shrewder still. A shudder; then a sigh.

That sweet face of yours hath turn’d the tide,

And made it flow with joy

And overflow. O nectarin! When he could draw his breath, he said, “Mistress . . .”

“What you will.” And came to him.

“My fine flitter-mouse! My bird o’ the night!”

And now she rode him, spurring in an ecstasy of haste.

Gasping, he could manage, “Gallop . . . ough! . . . apace . . .”

“Wrong poet,” said his wagoner, and whipped him to the west. Hesperides.

Where he lay drenched. His mistress over-canopied, as if he lay beneath a moonwhite thorn and breathed it in: all flower and all fox.

The wings beat once. The leaves uprose in fire.

“Mistress?”

Master now. Uncleft. As beautiful: but crested. The voice unchanged.

He that hath pleas’d her grace

Thus far, shall not now crincle for a little—

Gape sir, and let him fit you.

Rougher now: as if he ran with stags. The cry a triumph, belling out.

He lay—he thought he lay—upon a bank, on winter leaves. Cast up. As if he were a tangle of great branches that the water had brought down. Yet still the torrent raged in him, and he was tumbled onward over stones.

The other’s voice now pitying: “Let me now stroak that head.” As gently as a nurse a child. In his great weariness, his eyes were shut: he knew not which, his mistress or his master, coyed him. Neck, inward elbow, anywhere. “Yet, slower yet,” he murmured.

And the backs of fingers brushed his languished pride. “. . . a wither’d daffodil.”

Drowsing, he was lifted up in arms. The voice now in his head. Here is your fly in a purse, about your neck. He felt a something pulled about his ears, up and over; whimpered protest, like a sleeping child undressed. He knew no more.

Toward noon of a snow-bright day, Nat woke: dishevelled, soul and body. I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream. Methought . . . No other in his bed. Bleary-eyed, he patted round him, sniffed and pawed the sticky sheets: where he had crushed a comb of honey, a New Year’s gift. Spilt syllabub. O gods. He sat up suddenly and felt for the acorn round his neck: still there. Still locked: he shook it and the moon within it rattled reassuringly. It still would hatch.

Rising, Nat looked out on London palimpsest. Sheer snow and falling snow that endlessly was overwritten with repassing. Paul struck three-quarters. ’Slid! What’s o’clock? What day? Ye gods, the masque!

At Whitehall, New Year’s Eve

The last rehearsal went ill.

Strings broke, winds flooded or they parched; a satyr’s hoof broke and he fell, twisting his knee; sat rocking and whimpering, protesting his soundness. The boy who sang First Faie had taken cold, and croaked as if the play were Aristophanes. His master spanieled him, soliciting with scarves, electuaries, purges, and succados. Phosphorus, recoiling, flapped them off with his perfumed handkerchief, clapped it to his nose. “Breathe less, and farther off!” Silenus had kept Christmas over well; he sat, head in hands, groaning like the Pythian cave, amid his fumes. (Ben prophesied the wrath of Revels, and was proved: a shilling fine.) The Second Satyr was in a melancholy of rejected love, with no more spirit in him than a sat-on bagpipe. The Third still argued for the Second’s part; the Fourth still urged himself as Phosphorus. No less than three of the fairies were down with styanies. The bears’ cage stank.

And the bears? were in a lordly sulk, like twin Achilles, in their cage. They had caught the distemper of the meeting, and were snappish.

Only Nat Field had not quarrelled with his fellow players: he was truant. The Master of Revels, who was Rhadamanthine in his sentencing, looked black. “Thou, boy, hast seen this reprobate?” The Fifth Sylvan (a megrim), said waspishly, “He’ll be with his aunts. They keep sweet linens, aye, and three or four good cellars.” And the Second (a fit of the mother) tee-hee’d. “He’s away with the fairies, I doubt.”

Just then, most woefully late, the runagate burst in, whited over like a man of snow: through which he glowed like Sol in alchemy. “Twelve pence,” said Revels.

“Overslept,” Nat muttered. His unstudied elegance—the art of ten year’s study as a player’s boy—had vanished. He hung his head and stammered like a boy who sees the birch. He kept patting his breast as if his heart thumped.

Fifth jeered. “I see Queen Mab hath been with you.”

“Sneck up.”

“And twopence,” said Revels. “For that indecorum.”

Field played not with his accustomed fire.

Worst of all, the moon was hicketing again: a witch was in the works. The Surveyor’s velvet cap was crestfallen; and his great dignity was on the point of shirtsleeves and bare head. Pushed but a coin’s edge further, he might stamp. At last he stepped back. “I must consult with—h’rm—”

“Thy Daedalus?” said Ben. This gall was honey to him.

“My workman. My artificer, late of the Doge’s household: a Venetian. He hath good skill of hand, and knows the manage of the thing.”

Hah, thought Ben. The bird looks well upon his glove; but when it will not come to lure, he must call his falconer.

The moon gave one despondent shrug; and slid.

One satyr nudged another, smirking; the Third, seized with a sudden looseness, ran headlong to the bears’ cage and letting down his breech, let fly.

A critic, Ben thought.

He was surly. The Third and Fourth Sylvans had told him—with transparent innocence—of a powder of pearl, far excelling that of Antwerp, for the face: to paint a queen’s ghost or a lady mad in love. “To be had, sir, on Silver Street,” said Third. “At the Chariot.” (Ben knew the sign: Boadicea in a monstrous tire.) He saw his own broad craggy face in Third’s disdainful glance: ale-russeted, and weathered like his coachman’s coat. “Have you need of such a remedy?” A lifted brow, that would have signalled to the furthest gallery: surmise. Blunt Ben? And both had nudged and tittered as he walked away. He’d turned. “I am told, sirs, it is sovereign for a toothache.”

If nothing else, he’d had a watch set on the chariot.

And on the no one—a shifter of scenes—that was Prince’s cipher, riding in his stead in triumph, but to weight the wheels. He kept place until the hour itself, the metamorphosis. For the sheep rehearsed not with the goats, nor antimasque with masque. The courtiers knew the dances; had been walked through Jones’s Troy-town, lest they stumble; would be silent. Do the sun and moon rehearse? Their part is but to condescend to shine on us. All this pudder—the spangling and the bears and Jones’s gilded tabernacle—was to say: Here is a prince.

The music, though, was excellent.

He looked with expectancy—a mingled glee and dread—to when the sluices opened, and the eddies whorled together: water and wine. To when the swan majestic was united with its frantic netherparts.

A flourish of trumpets sounded. All quarrel and endeavor ceased. In came both the princes with their retinues, and all bowed down before them.

Prince Henry Frederick stood—no, not as for his portrait. As himself, a moving icon: as if the sword and garter were essentials of his spirit, and his very plume the flourish of his soul. He would look magnificent in Jones’s armor, as his Roman Oberon.

His hand uprose them.

“Come, we are a’ players here. Na ceremony.”

Ben’s cynic smile was brief; for the Prince beckoned. “Our makar of masques! Our Horace! Master Jonson, I await thy lyrics. For thine art is to command close hearing.”

He turned then to the musicians. “Our belovit Master Ferrabosco! I study to improve what thou hast taught me of harmony, and of the ordering of strings.” A reverence. “And our sweet sangster!” Robert Johnson bowed, still cradling his lute. “The stars, I think, will bend to hear your musics.” He smiled. “And my sister longs to dance.”

And then—he made the last seem crown of all—he turned to his Surveyor. An attendant gave to him a vellum book, which he opened: Jones’s schema of the moon, his lux mobilis. “A most ingenious device, Sir; I wad have it mountit for my cabinet.” He turned a leaf. “Could it not be of use in war? A beacon on a ship?” A glance from page to tackle, and his face grew keener still. “Ah! But thou hast ca’d my peregrine to hand. So then. I wad see a flight.”

Beardfallen: at his wits’ end and the rope’s. Ben had never heard the Surveyor speak so small. “It is, your Grace, distempered.”

“This weather, sir; ’tis passing cald and snell. I will see the fires are made high tomorrow—David?—But I doubt thou art distract with many cares, to bring these revels to perfection; I will leave thee.”

Ben vanished to the backside of faerie, its unpainted wall. Turning his face to it, he thumped with both fists. Softly, as the company constrained him: but he danced his own hobgoblin’s antimasque—he eat the dormouse!—and laughed until he stitched. All Elfland rattled; and a clog left by some rude mechanical danced itself, and toppled from the dome.

Meanwhile the Prince’s shadow, York, had slipped away to the bears’ cage, where the backside shat. The vent of grammarye. Gazing raptly through the bars, he said, “Which is Callisto?”

Tukeler shovelling, said, “Clyster (sir reverence) is no word for a prince’s mouth to hear.” He stroked the head that twitched from him; as would a schoolboy from a scrubbing. “This bully boy is Toby.” He slapped a flank. “His sister’s Jug.”

“She is bonnier than Toby.” At the warden’s nod, he reached a timid hand to her ruff. “O! She’s soft!”

Tukeler grinned at him with his three teeth. “Aye, she’s a May-Queen. A bird o’ paradox.” She yawned: abyss.

“Will they not draw the chariot? But now?”

And just then, Henry, coming up with his retinue and a distracted Revels, said: “Is this my team?”

“Aye,” said Charles eagerly. “And here is Callisto, that was leapt by Jove.”

“Was she so? Thou elf get,” said the elder, pinching inattentively. He turned to the men. “I am na rash Phaeton. I wad mak guid my harness ere I ride.”

“Tom?” said Revels sternly.

The bearward jerked a bow. “I tell ye, y’r emptyship: my chicks is peevy today. But by’r lady, they will draw like lions out o’ love. For them they know. And him there”—he jerked his chin at York—“has made a pretty leg and they’ve cursied.”

“David?” said Wales.

His Master of Wardrobe (Ben knew him: procurator of pearls, Medicean go-between, wiper of the princely arse, poet) said, “Wadna the prudent course be private audience?”

“Wadst bring them veiled? As I wad meet a Moorish princess and her Grand Vizir?” Henry laughed. “I—and my brother York—will parley with these creatures.”

Wardrobe to the bearward. “Thou wilt attend their Graces in the morning.” A blank. “Wait upon them wi’ thy beasties. Nine o’ clock.”

“And thou shalt ride the bear, hey, Charlie?” A smile, which fell like silver to a beggar’s hand. “Oh, and David? Fine that wee man for swearing.”

And glancing from the crooked penny to the man, both tarnished, Wardrobe murmured shrewdly, “Thair ane elph, on ane aipe, ane unsell begate.”[3]

The prince leapt lightly up into his chariot; was at once iconic: Victory entering a city, and the gates thrown open out of love. He leapt down. Looked about him, at the underside of spectacle: the scaffolding, the planks. “So will I stand here—”

“As the sun beneath the horizon—” said a courtier.

“—whilst others watch the antimasque?”

“—that heralds only your arising. They await the dawn.”

Ben was still chuckling, like a potful of marmalade over a fire, with now and then a bubble breaking. Plop! He could constrain himself no longer, and fluted, “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon / Who is already sick and pale with grief.” Will had his uses.

“What’s that, sir?” said the Master of Wardrobe.

“I quote the Groom extraordinary of the Chamber: who serves well. His moon, I think, stays up.”

Prince Henry had decided; spoke. “I wad see this triumph.” And he ran lightly to the high end of the room, and sat. Not in his father’s place: you were to see that it was not.

He commanded.

All that had been (all that day) mere anarchy was now in order. Sphere within great sphere—the music, scene, speech, act, and art—fit flawlessly as one, one cosmic harmony. All—save the moon—played perfectly. On New Year’s Day, the threshold of the year, the door would open and the elves first-foot it. Satyrs frisked; Silenus lauded in his bass, which shook the marrow of the listeners’ bones. Flawlessly, the gates groaned open and disclosed the faerie court, as empty as a shell: sublimity withheld. All of rank were absent, as they must be. The masque was not yet held. There stood the chariot, as bright and empty as its fellow in the sky. Men lifted the limbers, drew it onward. A loud triumphant music rang out from the galleries, with sackbuts, shawms, and measured drums. On came the viols and the lutes. And all of Elfin sang. But he the wonder is of tongues, of ears, of eyes. The empty chariot rolled on. And before it, Charles, the Duke of York, paced pale and radiant beside a beast of air, as if he held the North wind by its collar.

In Blackfriars

Ben dreamed he was Endymion and could not wake. His sleep was chains. The moon hung towering above him with her great pale wings, her talons of the light. On a sudden she stooped. Her cry was, Regicide! He knew, in his transfixion, she would tear his privities away, devouring . . .

He woke shrieking. Found his jack with trembling hands. Drank heavily and read Quintilian until he fell again into uneasy sleep.

And in the third part of the night, he dreamed again.

Snow falling, snow on snow. And in the snow—of snow—a moving brightness like the moon in clouds, he saw the Great Bear and the Less. They paced the streets of London, that was empty as the sky. The one-eyed bearward turned to Ben: and he was Kit. The burning Thames I have to cross.

The ice will not bear you, Kit.

Then am I lost.

A voice behind them: He must go by Watling Street.

Ben’s mother’s voice. They turned. She crouched like a beggar woman on the bank of Thames, and fed her fire, twig by twig, with lives. Glints of armor showed beneath her rags. The city keeper.

By the Two White Boys, straight on. . . .

Straight on, said Kit.

. . . past the Queen’s Head, and the Swan.

Kit crouched to her. There will be hue-and-cry.

Knock at the Horse and Rider, at the Galilee-door. There’s worlds all beyond.

And Kit sprang up, as if he’d been rekindled at her fire. His hat and knee to her. My thanks, Dame Sibyl.

Ben! Take this fellow’s bears. He must travel light.

As Ben stood lumbered with his leash of bears, Kit turned to him. A riddle: who walks with Duke Humphrey?

He knew that. Nuncius.

Ben woke. Nuncius, of course. Who sauntered in and out among the monuments, as if he tickled for boys. And the snub-nosed fellow following, who read his halts. Amid the Babel of voices, a conspiracy of silence. He saw now, clear as on a figured map, the tombs they’d halted at. Ranulphus Munday. Guillelmus Fay. And last, with a grinning Death about to pierce him with a dart, Henricus King.

Moon. Fay. Henry.

He was up at once. And having dressed in a fumbling haste, was off to Whitehall.

All down the sleeping Strand, Ben knew he was too late. Yet hurried on, through filthy snow, churned up with excrements; past torches long burnt out. Late revellers still bumped and staggered, singing hoarsely. Whores and beggars huddled by a fire they had made of straw. A wain or two still rumbled on; and here and there, a nighted traveller, whose one thought was to get inside, would turn and stare at him: the King’s rhinoceros that had escaped the Tower. He leaned panting in a doorway, with a stitch at heart. Drew breath and thundered on.

His one thought was to rouse the palace, cry out, Treason! at the gates.

But they stood open. Not a candle burned. No: in the windows of the banquet hall, a light, a living thing that sank and wavered, crouched and leapt. But very faint.

He crossed the threshold. “Holla?” His cry was eaten by the air. A step. He twitched a cobweb from his face; put up a seeking hand: felt nothing. They were everywhere and nowhere. With prickling thumbs, he shook a warder. Then his fellows. All asleep.

Sword drawn, he hastened through the shadowed rooms.

He smelt gunpowder.

He went in through the paltry door, at the backside of faerie. A dark lantern burned. By its light, Ben saw the snub-nosed fellow, with the moon before him on a trestle: the Venetian, whistling between his teeth. The artificer.

“You come late.”

He fixed Ben’s gaze: which sought and darted, even as he marked his adversary. There were two of them, he’d swear. Yes: up there on the scaffold. The magician. He that wove the spell. And Ben laughed. Saltpeter, charcoal—and Phosphor.

Coolly, the Venetian said, “They will wake when he bids them. Some will not.”

With his foot, he turned the watchman of the chariot. The cipher. Stone dead.

Then he drew. His rapier and dagger, as sudden and as bright as lightning strikes, against Ben’s hacked sword. They faced each other, circling for vantage. Too old for this, thought Ben. Too old and cumbrous. He had killed three men in open combat, fairly. Within reason, fairly. But—he eyed the young Venetian—never such a swordsman.

Round they went, and round.

And suddenly, the other stilled. His eyes went wide.

“Pistol,” said a gruff voice at his back. Tom Tukeler, with his long long shadows stretched behind him, growling.

“Oh,” said the Venetian. And Tom raised up his iron gad, and struck him to the ground. He disarmed him, rolled him with his foot into the bears’ cage: where he lay amid the filthy straw, astounded, staring up at two pale deaths.

Tom thrust the sword and dagger in a bale. Gave the Ben another pistol, primed. “I sleeps here,” he said. “Those bears is worth Queen Key o’ Pantry’s rubies.”

To the one, he called, “Grip, Toby!” And exultantly, he loosed the other. “Juggy, seek!”

Sweet Christ. One bound, and she was at the scaffold, ramping: long and fell as if a cataract poured upward, rocks and all. But long, long as she was, the pinnacle was higher. Inigo had set a dome above the Heavens, with a lantern-ledge. His day-star would astonish. Enter Phosphorus. At the first, bedazzled blink, Ben thought the player wore his masquing. But no mortal hand could stitch this—body? Do the stars rehearse? Not he, light-bringing. Fire flowed from him as from a comet’s tail, broke off in flinders from his body, endlessly renewing. All that had been ever built, Creation and the works of Man, was but to say: Here is a Prince.

He spoke: “I am the herald of great Anarchy.”

By God, Kit wrote this play.

Callisto jumped and clawed the air for blood. She turned—

“My rise is downfall—”

Hurled herself against the wall, to shake him down. Boom! His palace swayed and shuddered.

“Death to princes.”

Boom! A crack in it.

“Death . . .”

Boom! Boom! The scaffold split.

“. . . to kings and queens!”

And Elfland toppled.

Brightness fell from the empyrean—clawed wildly for the harness—caught it, and was gone.

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” said Ben: and cared not that the words were Will’s.

Callisto, baffled, sought her lost prey, nosing for a scent. Caught only sulphur.

“There, my Pope Joan. There, my Bodyseer. Shalt have a dolphin to thy breakfast.”

They turned back to the Venetian, lying moveless in a sickly terror, under Toby’s paws. He’d raked and buffeted his prisoner; killed not but at his keeper’s nod. “Hup, boy,” said the bearward. “Bully boy! Thou’rt a Salmon for discretion and a Sampson for thy beard. Shalt dine on whale.”

The Venetian’s face was slick; his bravado, like a swealing candle, all but guttered out. A spark of him remained. “Only two of us. I swear it. Two. He promised I . . .” And all that moved of him, the eyes, sought out the moon. “Would have the praise of it. Would be Surveyor.”

“Knowst thou what they will do to thee? As an intended regicide?”

The eyes wide, wide. He nodded. “I repent.” And with trembling hand he signed himself: a cross as tiny as a spider. “Please.”

“Ne reminiscaris, Domine, delicta famuli tui. Remember not, Lord, the sins of thy servant,” said Ben, who’d known communion in both kinds. He whispered. “Christ have mercy on us both.” And shot him through the eye.

In the wakened house, they heard the running feet.

“Tuke. I have no stomach for torture. My soul revolts.”

Tom took the pistol. “Thou wast not here. I heard him and I shot.” He looked down at the Venetian’s body. “’A was a good mechanical. ’Tis cunning work, yon moon.” The shouting now on all sides, almost at the doors. “So then. He’ll drink on Watling Street tonight. At the Rider.” He pushed Ben: “Shift!”

New Year’s Day at Night, 1611

After all, the bears were played by men in rugs. ’Twas thought the Prince’s brother acted with an ill grace, sullen-sick. His eyes were red.

Prince Henry rode in panoply his way to crownless death, of fever and a flux. His brother at the last would curve the dying hands about the bronze horse, will them to desire. They knew it not. Mere dumbshow, prologue to The Tragedy of Charles the First: the scaffold and the axe. As Kit devised for him, there would be blood.

The part of Phosphorus was taken—not by an exultant Fourth Satyr, who would have thrown his rival from the parapet himself, if he’d thought of it—but by a minion of the King’s: a pretty pair of legs, and quick of study.

The moon, played by a parchment lantern and a length of string, was much admired.

And Nat Field broke his acorn to discover nothing but a mouse’s bones within. By cock, an addle egg. Nan Argyll, dancing past with Phosphor, with her bee’s wings and her rosy paps, threw him a ticing glance. Come catch me. So the boy had nothing of the fairies but chagrin and gingerbread.

And elsewhere, Oberon and his—her own!—Titania quarrelled for a prettier new toy, a prince of darkness. He in turn, delighting in confusion, as a salmander in his element of fire, set one against the other. Lightning struck an oak in Arden, burning it from roots to crown. A tempest whirled away a sheepfold in Northumbria. In Wiltshire it hailed: through which a sudden bow shone out. And on a green hill anywhere, unseen, a pear-tree flowered in the frost.

Saint Valentine’s Eve, 1613

Ben, in his good broadcloth with a ruff that galled his neck, attended court. The King his daughter would be wed tomorrow. Crowns and emperors had heaped rich gifts upon the bride: hailed diamonds on her, so she might have walked in Indies to the knee. Her passage like a Milky Way.

The Surveyor had (Ben heard) outdone himself, and would disclose a sky of stars at shovel-board; a great cloud like a sow in farrow, pigging masquers in a sty of chrysoprase. The Queen’s attendants would be silver-gilt as statues, all a-row like a cupboard of plate; would descend to invocation by a droning Orpheus. First four; then (play and overplay) another four: the full chest. Yet another too-substantial pageant: not to fade, but to be trundled off.

Jack Donne (who’d fallen off from his Muse) had sent an Epithalamion: phoenixes and fairies mingling with his hobbyhorses of celestial motion and bed-galliards. Ben snorted. Hah. Spherical smicket-lifting.

And Will? The fripperer had rummaged in his box of offcasts, and would give them an old play. That one with the subjunctive seacoast. A thing of patches from the first, thought Ben. As if thief Mercury turned hussif, stitching what he stole, rebroidering—And said out loud: “He took my Bear!” The courtiers beside him started.

Ben prowled.

And my satyrs. Aye, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. A prigger of sheets.

He eased his neckband with a searching finger. Already a sore.

Like Mercury too, Will went by retrograde. Never lauded but by indirection. Showings in a glass. If Galileo’s moons were his, presented to the King, Will would have named them Ganymede, Callisto, Jug and Toby. Yet Will’s indifference to occasion, his refusal to mourn or celebrate—to court—was here rewarded. Half the crowns of Europe now were talking through his play.

They could have asked me.

Fuming, Ben went out to make water. His piss should have smoked.

And doing up his breech, he thought: If not my work, then not with Inigo. There’s comfort. Tearing off his great frill, he stuffed it in his coat. There went threepence of starching. Bah. He looked in it like a Christmas boar’s head, all but the apple, on a dish. Let them take me for a pantler.

He came in on Leontes ranting. A sniffer of sheets. “Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a fork’d one!” The virgin princess hid her mouth. She was laughing now, in unbelief: as at a savage. Her boy Elector scowled.

This looks not like a nuptial. Will again! He’d a trick of—what?—of forehand echoes: so that his words, like fairy slippers, fitted all. And more: he spoke the inward of men’s souls. Aye, and of monsters, too.

The child on stage to his father: “I am like you, they say.”

Ben watched Prince Charles, the heir apparent, watch Mamillius.

Not Henry’s like. His cipher: all at once anointed and bereft. Charles had walked beside his brother’s empty chariot a second time. (Beneath his effigy in wood and wax, his month-old body sealed in lead; above, his soul in bliss.) The boy, not twelve, had been chief mourner in his prostrate father’s stead. A hundred thousand eyes had marked his carriage; and their stare said openly: You should have died instead. A Tom o’ Bedlam had run stark naked through the mourners, like an antimasque—no, like a play of Will’s, like life—crying out that he was Henry’s ghost.

The play went on: rage, innocence destroyed, grief, banishment, remorse.

And so the bear.

Not Tom’s Diogenes this time—who was now taller than a Maypole, and half-a-dozen Bens in weight. But still: a bear. That woke ’em up.

Now an interval for candling, and a longer for sack, avoiding that damned cheating Chorus. When Ben returned, the tragedy had changed to pastoral.

      O Proserpina,

For the flowers now that frighted thou let’st fall

From Dis’s waggon . . .

And the girl Elizabeth, who could have scattered jewels for flowers, garlanded her waiting-women’s waiting-maids with carcanets, leaned forward, with a wild rose in her cheek. She would try those slippers.

This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever

Ran on the green-sward

She reached for the boy Elector’s hand. He bent and whispered in her ear.

    He tells her something

That makes her blood look out

To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day.

Toward the last, Will came and stood a moment in a doorway, looking in. He wore his livery: an upper servant to the Muses. Clio’s, Thalia’s, Melpomene’s all-serving Will. What he thinks, nobody knows. He stayed as Paulina scolded, as the curtain was drawn back. There stood a boy pearl-powdered, motionless: an artifice of woman in an artifice of death. A paltry trick.

Yet Ben insensibly, with all the room, was leaning inward, all one O.

Still music. Waking light. (A candle through a scarf of silk, rose madder.) Of that light, she borrowed light, that seemed to kindle in her cheek. So like the dawning moon, she stood a space between two elements: uncertainly of stone, of air. When she drew breath, all there outbreathed, conspired in the spell. Ah. Blood moved in her, life waked. Hermione descended.

    O she’s warm

If this be magic, let it be an art

Lawful as eating

And that’s how it’s done. When Ben looked, Will had gone.

On Watling Street

At the sign of the Rider—a centaur with a bow—Kit drank tobacco. All down Watling Street, which lay upon the Southwark side of Paradise, he’d boyed, drunk, diced, and railed upon his fortune in good thunderous lines.

At the Two White Boys, he’d sported with the two: players, brothers, and alike as hand and hand, save that one or another—turn about as in a comedy—wore petticoats. Thirteen: and wick as monkeys, old in vice.

As he came into the street, a roaring boy, with dog at heel, drew sword on him. Each killed the other three or four times running: vauntingly; without a word; with cunning; grimly hacking; swiftly, with a single thrust. Good sport, when neither bled.

At the Bull, he saw a play of seven sisters: which he made, in Greek, and saw acted, even as he thought.

At the Wain, there was Kentish cherry cider that his aunt had brewed.

At the Queen, there lay a night-black whore, stark naked, but for living gold that serpentined her body. At her cloudless cheek she wore the moon itself. Past full? Its rounding yet to come? It changed. And as her kneeling women tended her, she lay asprawl, and pinched and coyed them, pleasuring where she did hurt, still telling Kit what men had shrieked in dying, muttered in their sleep with her. Secrets of state. Of millennia: for she was old as Egypt; suppliants of Persia, Athens, Alexandria, and Troy had lain with her. Near sleeping, she repeated Sappho’s verses that were made to her. She’d forgotten nothing.

At the Swan and Cittern, there was sweet music of a consort, goose with apples, and a brawl. Outside, stood a mountebank that cried his cures of snake’s tongue and of powdered scorpion.

Now in the Rider, Kit played cards with a one-eyed bearward, all in shag-barked tatters, like a city sylvan. Across the room, he saw a flash of yellow hair: a snub-nosed boy with clever hands. Would he go up with me?

“There’s none that lies here,” said the bearward, answering. Though he’d spoken not aloud. “Turns ’em out afore dawn.”

“Who keeps this house?”

The bearward drank. “Old Jump-At-Her. That has more wives than Harry.” And as a door was opened by a potboy’s knee, Kit heard a raucous scolding from the backward of the inn. Followed by a crash, as of a dresser full of plates and knives.

“What’s beyond?”

“Globes.”

“New worlds?” said Kit. “Like Alexander’s worlds, to conquer?”

“Conkers? Nay, like Globes. Playhouses.”

Kit drank down. “To act in? Not to play, but act?”

“Aye.”

Kit pushed his cup aside.

“Time,” said Arcturus.

And as Kit felt by habit for his purse, the other said, “Leave it. Thy reckoning’s paid.”

The door stood open to the sky. A wind blew back his flame-red hair. And Kit looked out upon a roaring up of light, a whirling and a blaze of sparks: the stithy of creation. And by chance—by endlessness of chance—the fire made the hand. Of nothing. Anything. He laughed out loud.

atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum

subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari[4]

And jumped.

Galileo, turning from his glass, took up his little calf, his notebook, and a pen. He sketched the star, and noted: Nova cometa. Subrufa. A new comet, somewhat red.

[After this, they danced their last dance into the work;

And with a full SONG the star vanished,

and the whole machine closed.]

[1] “Do you ask who he is? The name’s escaped me.” Martial, Epigrams I.96.

[2] “O horses of the night, run slowly, slowly!” Marlowe (quoting Ovid), Dr. Faustus V.ii; Amores I.13.40.

[3] “This mooncalf? An elf begot him on an ape.” Alexander Montgomerie, The Flyting Betwixt Montgomerie and Polwart.

[4] “. . . and has trampled underfoot all fear and inexorable fate and the roar of greedy Acheron.” Virgil, Georgics II.491-2.

Acknowledgments

This story came to me—whoosh!—like a falling star, between bites of a strawberry, at tea with friends.

I am fortunate in knowing writers. Thanks, above all and as ever, to Sonya Taaffe, from whose marvellous Kit I kindled mine; and to Tili Sokolov and Lila Garrott. They saw him streak across the sky, called out, and caught him falling.

Many thanks to my percipient close readers: Sonya and Lila, first and last; Tili, who wrote the text for hypertext; Faye Ringel, who (as ever) inked the thorns; and Catherine Rockwood, latest but not least of the Sirenaics, who saw this story finished “to the naile.”

I am twice fortunate to work with Small Beer Press, who asked me for another Ben. As you see, they’ve turned him out exquisitely. My thrice-delighted thanks to Kathleen Jennings for her Great and Lesser Bears.

About the Author

Greer Gilman’s mythic fictions Moonwise and Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales have (between them) won the Tiptree, World Fantasy, and Crawford Awards, and have been shortlisted for the Nebula and Mythopoeic awards. Besides her two books, she has published a companion novella to Exit, Pursued by a Bear, Cry Murder! in a Small Voice, and other short work, poetry, and criticism. Her essay on “The Languages of the Fantastic” appears in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. A graduate of Wellesley College and the University of Cambridge, and for many years a librarian at Harvard, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She likes to quip that she does everything James Joyce ever did, only backward and in high heels.

Small Beer Press is an independent publishing house. Recent titles include:

Greer Gilman, Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales

Winner of the Tiptree Award · Mythopoeic Award finalist

Inventive, playful, and erudite, Cloud & Ashes is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic Joycean fable that will invite immersion, study, revisitation, and delight.

“Gilman fills your mouth with wincing tastes, your ears with crowcalls, knockings and old, old rhythms, your eyes with beautiful and battered creatures, sly-eyed, luminous or cackling as they twine and involute their stories.”—Margo Lanagan, author of Sea Hearts

Greer Gilman, Cry Murder! in a Small Voice

Shirley Jackson Award finalist

Someone is murdering boy players and Ben Jonson, in the way that only Greer Gilman

could write him—“Fie, poetastery.”—is compelled to investigate.

“What is a story but the dance of words? Greer Gilman’s language is always demanding: even short declarative sentences resonate with layers of meaning. The longer cadences are nimble, tricky on the tongue and in that place in the brain where deliberate allusions float like wisps of smoke on a winter morning or snap as flags in a furious gale.”— Henry Wessells, The Endless Bookshelf

Hal Duncan, The A-Z of the Fantastic City

Illustrated throughout by Eric Schaller

“Leads readers and explorers through twenty-six cities of yore (Yore, while included, is one of the shorter entries), including such familiar and unfamiliar haunts as “Loving, clever, entertaining, and of course . . . quite excellently written.”—Rich Horton, Locus

Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“With characteristic wit, poise, and eloquence, Samatar delivers a story about our vulnerability to language and literature, and the simultaneous experience of power and surrender inherent in the acts of writing and reading.”—Amal El-Mohtar, Tor.com

Susan Stinson, Spider in a Tree

“Stinson reads the natural world as well as Scripture, searching for meaning. But instead of the portents of an angry god, what she finds there is something numinous, complicated, and

radiantly human.”—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home

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