Read Online Any Man So Daring by Sarah A. Hoyt - Free Book Online Page A

To Will, he was more alive than ever.
    And Marlowe would write his plays through Will or — barring that — prevent Will from writing plays all together.
    What, then, would Ned Alleyn do, having lost his investment? And what of the other actors of Lord’s Chamberlain’s men, good men all, some with large families.
    How would they attract an audience away from so many rival companies, but for plays and words that stood above the rest?
    “It is a ghost,” he said, half expecting the woman to laugh. “I’m prosperous enough, happy enough, but there’s a ghost that haunts me and stands by me and, day and night, will ne’er let me be.”
    She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even turn to look on him. Her arm moved steadily, the spoon in her hand stirring the cauldron.
    And that silence, more than any entreaty, called Will’s response. “It is Kit Marlowe,” he said, and having said it felt like a bladder that, pricked, spilled its substance into the air and was left empty, purposeless.
    Now the woman spoke, now she turned, now she let go of the spoon. Her dark eyes, serious, fixed on his. “And was he a friend of yours?”
    “Nay,” Will said, then misgave, as in his mind Kit Marlowe’s look reproached him. “Or maybe yes. He was such a multi-folded creature, so...” He sighed, words failing him. “Too good to be so and too bad to live. He... I believe he meant me well, but he died before I truly knew him.”
    She sat at the table, moving slowly, like a cat afraid of disturbing a skittish bird.
    “How did he die?” she asked when Will remained silent. “I’ve heard such various accounts,” she said. “That he died of the plague, or that he died in a tavern brawl over a lewd love.”
    “He died of his love,” Will said, surprising himself with it. Strangely, it seemed to him as though Marlowe now spoke through his lips. He remembered Marlowe giving just such a discourse on love three years ago, over a meal at the Mermaid. “Love is a lethal disease, and it claims more victims than are accounted.”
    Now she smiled a smile as cynical as any of Marlowe’s own. “No. Faith. The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being taken with the cramp was drowned and foolish chroniclers of that age found it was -- Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies; men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them but not for love.” She paused and looked at Will, and her smile turned to a slow, puzzled frown. “And yet believe you this of Marlowe? Mean you to tell me that, like a lovesick maiden in a chivalric tale, he sat like patience upon a monument, staring upon grief and, from this green and yellow melancholy, he thus sickened and died?”
    Will shook his head. He’d never spoken of this before, but he felt as though Marlowe stood behind him now, and smiled upon his speech.
    Had this woman been the witch of his suspicions, in a smoke-filled den filled with despicable relics, would Will have spoken?
    She looked like Will’s Nan, and she mocked his turn of phrase and spoke with such familiar, gentle persuasion that he couldn’t help but confide in her.
    “Wish that he had died thus, of such green and yellow melancholy,” he said. “By God, I wish that he had. Then would my mind be easier. But he was a sanguine man, and his love, like everything else about him, was a mad blaze of the fire that ran too hot and dry through his veins. He could not love mortal, could not be contented with that. It was too easy, that, and too clean. Too meek and small, such joy, for Marlowe, the great poet.” Will paused. He shook