Ink and Steel

Act III, scene xx

The Prince of darkness is a Gentleman.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King Lear

Will dug all ten fingers to the knuckles into friable loam, sand gritting under his nails, leaning the weight of his shoulders behind it. The earth was black as Faerie ink; he unearthed another turnip and rubbed crumbles between his hands. Neither the resin of pine needles nor the bitter sweetness of the fertile earth soothed the ache in his breast, as sharp as it had ever been for all he’d carved the notches of too many winters to count at a glance on both doorposts of the cottage. It seemed the ever-freshness of his grief was one of Hell’s many charms. Or perhaps it was simply being left alone with it; no one to speak to but the self-murdering trees, no way to express his soul except through the quill and paper Lucifer had left him.

The ink which stayed ever fresh in the horn, for all Will would not set a pen into it. ‘This is Hell, nor am I out of it.’ He thought perhaps he would have preferred the rack, the irons, to the slow wearing of days on his will like water on stone. Irons indeed: then I must be an iron Will, and let me rust shut.

He stood, hands trembling now the work was done, and picked his turnips up. The irons. Aye, which led him to think of Kit’s smooth chest, and the mark etched there that Will’s palm could just cover, if he angled it properly. The irons, indeed. And the irony: when he troubled himself to count, fitting his shaking hands into the notches he had carved in the posts beside the peeling blue-gray door, Will knew that Annie must be gone by now, Susanna and Judith quite possibly grandmothers, Elizabeth cold in her grave and Mary Poley and Richard Burbage and thank Christ Robert Poley and Richard Baines and that thrice-cursed old bastard Edward de Vere as well.

The years slipped by like seasons; the seasons slipped by like weeks; the weeks slipped by like water. And still Will ate turnips and snared rabbits and lived (if it was living) among the quiet of the trees who had gotten what they wanted and perhaps found it less than satisfying and longed for someone to speak to. Someone to hold. Somewhere, he thought, carrying his turnips into the cottage, somewhere Kit is alive. And Morgan. My gentle betrayers. Oh, unkind, William. He laid the turnips on the low table, recalling the glow of banked embers, a young man’s plea. What do you take your Marley for? He had a knife and a hatchet; the rhythm of the words came to him as he worked, the thud of metal on a stump cut into a butcher’s block, the verse cold and lovely as a winter freeze among his lonely pines. That you were once unkind besuits me now no, befriends. That you were once unkind befriends me now. Once unlike yourself, once untrue, once unfair. Unkind. Aye. There under the pines, under the arching branches of dead souls slain by their own pettiness, their own spite, their own grief and helplessness and pain.

Pines. How aptly named. Oak, he hate.

He would not think on it. If he thought, he would think on vengeance. He would think on Kit, immortal, and on Annie, now surely dead. If he thought, he would think on fifty years alone in a forest without end. He would think on how Lucifer wanted him to write, and how he would not do what Lucifer willed of him. How he would not pay the price, even though he knew, somehow, if he did, his horizons would broaden. That the Devil would reward Will if Will gave up that piece of himself. Of his soul. If he served. He would think on how there was someone left alive to take his vengeance for Hamnet on, someone in Faerie, and how poetry was the only tool he had to do it. He would not think on it, because he would not think on any of those things. His knife made cubes of the turnips, cubes of the rabbit. He browned them in the fat left from a pheasant and added an onion from the braid on the wall. Housewifely tasks; he’d learned them all well. And for that sorrow, which I then did feel, / Needs must I under my transgression bow

The words came; he could not stop them. They chewed at his heart, another pain among many. They gnawed at his breast, bosom serpents, venomed worms. He had no need to busy himself so; the pantry would fill on its own, the garden would unweed itself. Will himself had no need, it seemed, to eat unless the desire took him, although his hands did tremble with his illness when he had no task to set them to. Idle hands are the Devil’s playground. Idle hands had a tendency to stray to the well-appointed desk, to lift the white pen that was a twin to the one Kit had found under the covers of his bed. Unless my nerves were brass or hammer’d steel. For if you were by my unkindness shaken…

Perfect words. Better than anything, Will knew, anything he had written before. As I by yours, you’ve passed a hell of time; / And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken / To weigh how once I suffered in your crime. Kit was alive. Somewhere. In Faerie. And his crime was ever less than Will’s; Kit had had no vow of marriage to forswear. Kit had made no promise of fidelity at all. Worse, worse. Kit had offered, and Will had refused him. Only to react like a kicked whelp when he discovered that Kit had believed what Will had told him. Kit, who was alive. Kit who would always be alive. As alive as the Fae who had killed Will’s only son. Alive and grieving. O! that our night of woe might have remembered / My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits, / And soon to you, as you to me, then tendered / The humble salve, which wounded bosoms fits!

Will added well water to the stewpot, crumbled rosemary, stirred with a long peeled stick. Not pine; he’d learned the flavors of lingering resins in the wood the unpleasant way. Oak. For all he would have liked to burn it. Annie. I hope Kit found you. I hope he told you what became of me. He propped a plate across the lid of the stewpot, left a little gap, banked the coals about the iron bottom. He glanced at his desk, at the fine already-cut leaves of paper, at the elegant pens. At dust that covered all. He glanced at the door, at the notches whittled bright and new in the posts, the oldest ones silvering to match the weathered texture of the beams. He closed his eyes and inhaled the savor of garlic and onions and rosemary bubbling over the fire. He turned in the center of the room, the soft light of evening slipping in through opened shutters, the dark streaks of loam on the thighs of his breeches, the strange incongruity of the clock on the rough-hewn mantel with its scroll-worked hands for seconds, minutes, days, months, years.

A Hell of time.

He dusted his hands again; black dirt made moons under his nail-beds. A bit of grease daubed the left one’s back. He thought of turnips and swore. If I called on Lucifer, would he come to me? Aye, and bid me write, and chide me for childishness.

It had happened before. Will blasphemed a little. It did nothing to ease the bitterness in his throat, the emptiness in his bowels. He picked up his greasy oak stick and his broom and crouched before the fireplace, upsetting the stewpot intentionally, spilling gravy and vegetables on the hearthstone and away from the fire. He burrowed in the embers like a badger, raked them from the fireplace, scorching his shoe, burning his hands. The broom smoked as he swept the heaps of coals against the cottage walls;with the ash shovel he carried a smoking log outside and heaved it up onto the thatch. He caught his cloak from the peg by the door frame and settled under a pine tree, where he remained late into the warm autumn evening, watching the snug little cottage burn. He slept smiling, rough on sponge-soft needles, savoring the pain of his blistered palms when he woke in the darkness before morning. When the sun rose in tawny and auburn, Will crunched across soft-rotted pine boughs and mounds of needles to wash soot from his face and bathe his hands in the well. The cottage sat where it had always been, a thin ribbon of smoke and the smell of cooking bannock rising from the chimney. The door was propped open and had been repainted red; Will could see the unmarked, silvery doorpost from where he stood just under the roof-edge of the pines.

But that your trespass now becomes a fee; / Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.

He sighed, and went inside, and somehow, again, managed not to pick up the pen. Will knelt in the sunlight over a bowl full of water, shaving himself as best he could. He kept his hair haggled to the shoulders with his dagger; the palsy made keeping his beard trimmed hard, but he was damned if he’d let himself turn into a wild man. Truth to tell, he was damned even if he wasn’t pretty. He laid the blade aside and dipped hands in the water, washing the trimmed hairs from his face. He sat back on his heels and blinked; a shadow fell over him and he startled, overbalanced, and fell on his ass as he began to rise.

“Master Shakespeare.” Lucifer bent and extended a hand; Will took it reflexively, surprised that it felt … so much like a hand. “Still thou hast written not a word. Stubborn man.”

“I am what I am.”

“Stubborn enough.” Lucifer said. “Come. Thou art released. Thou art no longer welcomed in Hell.”

Will blinked, tilted his head to the side. “Released?”

“Aye.” Lucifer chivvied him along with a guiding wing. Will might have glanced back at the little cottage, the glade in the pines. But Lucifer’s wing blocked his vision, and he was half certain that if he turned the house would not be there.

“Your Highness, I do not understand.”

“Thy lover has purchased thy freedom.” The Devil smiled, his blue eyesglittering.

“And lucky thou art to command such loyalty. And such a ferocious soul.”

My lover? I haven’t one,Will thought. But I did. Once.“Morgan? What would Morgan want with me again?”

“No,” Lucifer said. “Not Morgan, gentle William. Ah, look. Already, here is the door.”