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  Ill Met By Moonlight

  Sarah A. Hoyt

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Ill Met By Moonlight © 2001 by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61824-038-5

  TO MY HUSBAND, DAN HOYT

  “One half of me is yours, the other half yours—

  Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,

  And so all yours.”

  The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.16–18

  Prologue

  Scene: A vague place, the stage fogged over with thick white clouds that veil the backdrop, turning it into mere shadows and shapes, half perceived as though in a dream.

  Enter: An elegant young man, flawlessly attired according to Elizabethan fashion, in black velvet breeches, hose and doublet. The disarray of his auburn hair, his hand covering his left eye, the blood that trickles from beneath his fingers to drip onto his broad, fine white lawn collar—all give witness to recent calamity.

  Yet he speaks in the composed tones of an impersonal narrator.

  “Between what happened and what didn’t happen, what could have happened exists like a dream, suspended halfway between the safe, dark night of illusion and the harsh dawn of wakening reality.

  “To peaceful Stratford, where we lay our scene, let us then go, and, within Arden Forest’s ancient confines watch the drama about to unfold, the drama of treason, and love, and star-crossed passion.

  “There, two households exist, nay, two kingdoms, which side by side have endured these many centuries with no strife. Now, mutiny breaks out between them.

  “Two households, alike in dignity. Two young men chafe, each under his destiny, and curse the stars that have brought each to his subservient position.

  “Will their travails change either? Can ill will bring good? Does treason ever turn good to ill? Is there a price to pay for elven love? Does deceit leave its mark upon the mind? Or can power be won at no cost?

  “Watch, kind ladies and fair gentlemen, the fearful clash of these two realms which is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage, the which, if you with patient ears attend, what here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.”

  Scene 1

  An Elizabethan town of whitewashed wattle-and-daub buildings, nestled in the curve of the gentle-flowing Avon. Ducklings waddle in the current and pigs walk the streets. Tall elms grow amid the houses, giving the very streets the feel of woodland glens. In an alley at the edge of town a poorly dressed young man stoops to open a garden gate.

  Will stopped at the entrance to the garden, his hand on the rickety wooden gate. A feeling of doom came over him, like a presage of some evil thing.

  A young man of nineteen, with overlong dark locks that curled on the collar of his cheap russet wool suit, Will felt as if he were about to walk into a trap. He looked around anxiously for what the trap might be, but saw nothing amiss.

  The green garden ahead of him lay undisturbed. A few bees, from the hives next door, buzzed amid the flowers. The reddish rays of the setting sun burnished the flowers and made the vegetables a deep green. A fat brown chicken walked along the garden path, pecking at the ground.

  Will shook his head at his fear, yet his fear remained. With his feet, in their worn ankle-high boots, solidly planted on the mud of the alley behind his parents’ property, he looked into the sprawling garden for a hint of the great unnamed calamity that he knew awaited him just around the corner.

  Half of him wanted to run in through the garden; the other half wished to hide, with animal cunning, behind the wall and spy . . . spy, he knew not on whom nor for what.

  His mother’s stories must be getting to him, her dark muttering about the velvet-clad gentlemen who visited Nan in Will’s absence.

  Will shook his head again and half chuckled at himself, but his chuckle echoed back strangely, visiting his ears like the cackle of a gloating demon.

  He raised his white-gloved hand to his face and stroked the nest of soft hairs that only a young man’s pride could mistake for a beard.

  Nonsense. Sick fancies born of tiredness. It was all because of his job in Wincot, wearing him low enough that fancies preyed on his mind. His work, supervising the smallest children at their learning of the letters and numerals, would be dreary and arduous enough, but the two-hour walk each way to Wincot and back made it crushing.

  This very day, Will had left Stratford at the crack of rosy dawn, when the pink tints of morn were no more than a promise in the east. Now, he came back home with the sun turned to bleeding glory in the west and night closing in on all sides, like creditors surrounding a penniless debtor.

  Little wonder, then, that Will’s mind should be filled with presages and wonders, with fears and unexplained dread. Little wonder.

  He needed to rest and he longed for his bench by the scrubbed pine table; for the soft bustle his wife, Nan, made by the kitchen fire—her skirt kilted up on the left, displaying the length of her straight limbs and allowing her to move freely. Even now, she’d be clacking clay pans and stirring enticing smells from the poor vegetables and meager eggs, those homely, cheap ingredients, the best Will could provide for her. He longed for his newborn daughter, Susannah, for her mewling cries, for her wriggling in his tired arms.

  He opened the gate and trotted onto the beaten dirt of the garden path with new decision. “Nan,” he called.

  This sound, too, returned oddly to his ears, like a long forgotten name, nevermore pronounced among the living. But Nan wasn’t dead, nor gone, nor forgotten. Will had left her sleeping in their marriage bed—the broad oak bed given to him by his Arden aunt—when he’d dressed in the half-dark before dawn.

  Still, his trotting slowed to a reluctant walk and he dared not call her name again.

  Around him, the garden bloomed in green abundance. The neatly arranged patches of flax and herbs that Nan had planted in February, when she was already big with child, thrived. The roses she had brought with her from Hewlands, the Hathaways’ farm in Shottery, bloomed big and round, casting their perfumes into the summer air.

  Their scent mingled with the heavy odor of boiled cabbage, wafting from the house of Will’s parents, next door. The two houses, built side by side, and both owned by Will’s family, shared a garden and, until recently, had been used by the one family. But, on Will’s marriage, his parents had made the house to the west private for him and Nan.

  Will and Nan could only use the back and the top floor, since the front hall housed John Shakespeare’s glover shop. But at the back, Will and Nan had their own kitchen, and, above that, their own chamber, and Will was as relieved not to have to share sleeping quarters with his siblings as his mother was glad not to have to share her kitchen with the woman she disdainfully called the Shottery girl.

  Will’s relief at this separation increased as the unsavory smell of cabbage washed over him, mingled with high-pitched screams from his three-year-old brother, Edmund, and the voice of his fourteen-year-old sister, Joan, raised in childish anger.

  His home would never be that way, he promised himself, as he walked the narrow cobbled path between the rosebushes. Rather it would be like the home he remembered from his own childhood: well-ordained, with a few serving girls, and his Nan kept calm and rested enough to look after the children, who would be well fed and better dressed.

  He had no idea how to manage this on his petty-schoolmaster allowance, but he was determined to manage it, somehow.

  He rounded the corner of the garden path, beside the roses,
and came into full view of his side of the house.

  If only he didn’t have to use his earnings to prop his parents’ failing fortunes. If only—He stopped, his feelings of doom stronger than ever. Everything about this side of the house looked wrong.

  The shutter on the window was closed, as was the door. Will frowned.

  Nan never closed the door or the window while the last remnants of light could be gotten from the day.

  Will’s heart sped up like an unruly horse, and his feet raced upon the cobbled path.

  The feeling of wrongness, of foreboding, overpowered him. Once, when he was very small, he had seen a dog swept away by the raging Avon at the flood. He remembered the small brown-and-white animal paddling futilely against the current even as it dragged him on and on to his certain doom. So, now, did Will’s reason paddle against the current of dread that overtook it and pulled it on and on, unrelenting.

  His running feet sped him to the door. Swinging it open, he peered into the dark, cool kitchen.

  “Nan,” he called. His voice broke, as it hadn’t for years. No sound answered his call.

  Blinded by the transition from daylight to dark, Will could see only vague shapes and dark shadows. He listened. No sound came from the kitchen or from upstairs. Nothing stirred. The close air reeked of wood smoke and the old mutton grease used for making tapers. But no tapers burned, no fire blazed in the hearth.

  No blazing fire meant no supper. The young man’s stomach twisted in a hungry knot. For a heartbeat, he forgot his anxiety and thought disparagingly of his wife who didn’t even know enough to have her husband’s food ready when he came home from his wearying toil.

  These thoughts so resounded of his mother’s bitter voice that Will frowned at them, reproaching the bitterness into silence. Nan was nowhere in sight. Perhaps she had fallen ill in another room, perhaps she was hurt, and yet Will, her wretched husband, could think only of his stomach. “Nan?”

  He wished to hear Nan call back and name him a fool for his alarm. He wished it so hard that he almost fancied he heard it, very far away and faint. But he knew this for an illusion.

  No matter how many times Will told himself that his fears were nonsense, that Nan must be nearby, that she must be well, dread leaped and danced in him like an obscene, mottled clown at a country fair, mocking his self-assurance.

  As his eyes became acquainted with the dark, he saw that the coals in the hearth remained banked, the ashes raked around them to protect the embers in the middle and reduce the danger of fire in the night. He’d done that the night before, and left all thus in the morning, when he’d walked out eating a slice of cold mutton and a piece of day-old bread for his breakfast. But Nan would have needed to undo this and feed the fire to prepare her dinner, and bake bread. Had Nan not had a midday meal? Had she been gone or ill for that long?

  The dread grew in Will, stronger than ever, and the hair rose at the back of his neck. “Nan?” Still half-blind in the darkness, he pulled his gloves off, threw them on the table, and hurried down the narrow, shadowy corridor that separated the kitchen from the front hall.

  The front-hall shop was darker even than the kitchen, but Will saw, without remarking, the hanging pelts and the wide, scarred workbench of his father’s glover trade. His nose filled with the acrid smells of tanning—old meat, spoiled eggs, and stale flour—familiar to him from childhood.

  Though wooden shutters were fitted over both windows, and the door firmly closed, this was no cause for alarm. These days this was the normal condition of John Shakespeare’s glover shop. No doubt, Will’s father would be hiding in his room, muttering about those who wished to catch him and make him pay his debts, though—that anyone knew—despite his ruined business, his slackening enthusiasm for work, he had no outstanding debts and no one pursued him.

  Will took a sharp turn left, to the almost vertical stairway at the corner of the room, and hurried up it, his feet accommodating themselves to the narrow steps by long habit.

  The entrance to the top floor was a mere square hole in the planks at the top of the staircase and, through this hole, Will pushed his upper body into the top floor. The word “Nan” started but died on his lips.

  Unlike the upper floor of the house next door, which had been partitioned into rooms to hold a large family, this one lacked any dividing walls to obstruct the view. Will could see the entire space at a glance, bathed in hazy light coming in through cracks in the wooden shutters that covered the three windows. Once, those windows had been covered by shutters made of lead and tiny panels of glass, but such luxuries had long been absent from the Shakespeare household.

  The cheap woolen covers had been pulled neat and tight over the mattress of the good oak bed against the wall. On the bed, the fat black-and-white tomcat that Nan had brought with her from Hewlands, woke and stretched his paws in front of him, digging his claws into the bed covers. He looked at Will with an inquisitive eye and gave a little questioning murr. Beside him lay something, and, for a moment, Will thought he saw Nan, reclining there. He started to smile, when he noticed it was not Nan, not even anything close to Nan’s size, but a small twig, broken from a bush, with green leaves still on it. What it was doing on his bed, he couldn’t understand.

  Will took a deep breath. The dread he’d felt in the garden returned, like a horse to an accustomed stable.

  Slower, he climbed the rest of the way into the upper floor. On a peg on the wall hung Nan’s good shirt and bodice and her embroidered kirtle, the clothing she wore to church on Sunday. His own good, black breeches and doublet hung on the other peg. Everything looked reassuring and accustomed, and yet the air felt heavy, impregnated with an odd floral scent.

  Will nodded to the cat as to a respected acquaintance, while he went around to look in Susannah’s cradle, beside the bed.

  No sound came from the ancient rocking cradle, which had belonged to Will and each of his siblings in turn. Not the soft mewling of Susannah’s cry, not even the sound of her breathing.

  For a moment, in the darkness, he thought that Susannah was indeed in the cradle, though so immobile that his heart skipped a beat while a noose of panic tightened around it.

  But as he reached into the small bed, he touched not the soft velvet of his daughter’s skin, but something rough and harsh. Throwing the blankets back, he pulled the object out: a piece of a tree branch of sizable girth on which some wit had carved a rounded top and painted eyes and a nose and a mouth, all of it so crude it might well have been executed by one of Will’s five-year-old pupils. It did not look like Susannah at all and, even in the dim light, Will could not imagine how he’d ever come to mistake it for her.

  Puzzled, he turned the wood over in his hands, blinking in wonder. Who had done this? And what was this thing? It wasn’t even a doll. What was it doing in Susannah’s cradle? If a joke, it was a poor one. Had Nan played it? Why would she do such a thing?

  Sometimes, in their scant six months together, Nan had hid herself in a far corner of the house when he got home, and made him hunt for her like a madman, until he brought her to ground in her hideout, desire and laughter interlacing in their embrace. But she’d never done it since Susannah had been born. And she’d never taken her joke to the point of leaving the fire unlit and a mannequin in his daughter’s bed.

  Worry rounded on Will like a hunting mastiff, nipping at his heels, trying to make him take flight. But his sluggish brain lagged, turning round and round, like a blindfolded beggar within a circle of mocking villagers. Hemmed in by worry, it spun over the puzzle of Nan’s absence, and knew not what answer to fetch.

  His hands, working of their own accord, laid the mannequin back in Susannah’s cradle and adjusted the small blanket over it, tenderly, as though it were Susannah herself. Why was Nan gone? And for how long? Could she have left Will for good?

  She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Oh, true, he’d not offered her a prosperous abode, nor did his earnings—halved as they must be with his parents’ household—supp
ort Nan as he would like to support her. But then, Nan had known of his penury when she married him, had even known of it almost a year ago, when, sweet and laughing, she’d lain in the riverside fields with him, awaiting no sanction of parents, or law, or church.

  Yet Nan was gone and Susannah with her. How to explain it?

  Had Will’s mother been right, when she’d talked of Nan’s receiving visitors? Of velvet-suited dandies skulking around the garden paths?

  Will couldn’t credit it.

  He thought of Nan as she’d been just the night before: Nan by the fire, Nan cooking supper, Nan warm and gentle in his bed. She couldn’t have left. Not Nan. Not unless those gentlemen had taken her with them by force, and who would do that? Who would kidnap a poor man’s wife and his little daughter? The shadowy persecutors of his father’s fancy?

  Will grinned despite his misery. These fears of his, these fantasies of doom, were like a plot hatched from his father’s nightmares, his mother’s fancy.

  No, no. The world was a reasonable place, not populated by old wives’ fears, old men’s fancies, nor by the dreams of poets or the nightmares of philosophers. In this rational place, there had to be some good reason for Nan’s absence.

  Will’s feet sought out the steps by feel as he made his way downstairs. Perforce, Nan’s absence must have a cause as solid as the wood under his feet.

  Before he reached the bottom floor, his frantic, searching brain had found one. Nan’s sister-in-law, her brother Bartholomew’s wife, was due to deliver any day. How foolish of him not to have thought of this before. Nan’s kin would have come from Shottery to request her help.

  Someone, probably Bartholomew himself, would have come from Hewlands Farm to fetch Nan, and he’d have brought his children, Nan’s older nieces, to get them out from underfoot in the house. This thing in Susanna’s cradle would be one of the children’s toys, probably made by the child’s own hand, which explained its crude imitation of human features.