Any Man So Daring Read Online Free Page B

of the snake in Hog’s Lane .
    Well did Will know Hog’s lane, having lived there, hard by Hollywell, in Shoreditch, where the Rose theater had been located in which Marlowe’s plays had found abode and applause.
    It was a hard-scrabble district, full of raw, shoddy construction and the people who could afford nothing better: recent migrants to the city, lost souls, vagabonds and those living just outside the law. A fit place for a witch.
    Going to see a witch was against the law, a minor act of sacrilege and heresy that, depending upon the law’s mood, could warrant either penance and a fine or jail, or even death.
    Will was a good protestant, forever just within the pall of the Church of England, its blessings and its munificence.
    He had willed it so, despite his contact with fairyland. He had willed himself to be a churchman. He wanted the respectability that came with it for his children and their children.
    Not for them to run from the law that outlawed their beliefs. No. They would believe what most believed and be accepted by all.
    If Will went to see Mistress Delilah, she could tell him whether Marlowe’s ghost truly followed him or whether it all were but the spinning delusion of an overheated brain.
    Will bit at the moustache that, following the contours of his upper lip, outlined his mouth in a thin, dark line, merging with his beard on the sides. He chewed the corner of his mouth and his moustache.
    Turn and look, he thought to himself. Turn and look, you fool! You don’t need a witch to confirm the lie of what you know is an illusion. Turn and look.
    Slowly, with infinite caution, he turned his head, to look behind himself.
    But before his head was turned and while only the corner of his eye looked onto that dark space behind himself where he felt sure that Marlowe’s ghost stood, he caught a glimpse of blue, like the blue velvet in which Marlowe had gone to his moldy grave.
    Just that, a glimpse of blue, by the corner of the eye, a hint of movement, a shape that might have been a man and a sound — so light that it would be drowned by the lightest whisper — no louder than the fall of a feather, the rustle of paper in a far off room.
    But that sound, Will would swear, was Marlowe’s laughter.
    Marlowe’s cursed laughter, that should long ago have been stilled by the dirt that filled Marlowe’s long-dead mouth.
    Will jumped, stifled a scream.
    He grabbed his cloak from the peg on the wall next to his bedroom door and, without turning, without looking, rushed out, out of this respectable rooming house, and towards Hog’s Lane and Mistress Delilah.
    As he walked the narrow streets, elbowing apprentices and squeezing his way between slow, fat matrons burdened with shopping, Will could hear behind him the immaterial but ever present steps of Kit Marlowe following him.

Scene Two

    A clearing in Arden Woods, hard by Stratford-upon-Avon. To mortal eyes, it is but a sprawl of rank weeds and straggling bushes, in the gloom beneath the overspreading shade of larger trees. Those with second sight, though, see a castle rising there, a noble palace, the capital of fairyland in the British Isles -- the reign of elven Avalon. The building is a white palace, a thing of beauty, with walls so perfect and smooth, towers so high and thin as to defy the imagination of humans and the reach of mortal artistry. In front of the palace, a clumsy structure of uneven boards rises, under the ceaseless hammers, the untiring work of many winged fairies. These winged servants of fairyland, small and dainty, flying hither and thither in flashes of light, work at building the platform for an execution block. The sound of their hammering penetrates the innermost confines of the palace, the royal chamber. There King Quicksilver stands before his full-length mirror. He looks like a young man of twenty, with long blond hair combed over his shoulder. Around him, his room lies neatly ordered, with a large bed curtained in green, a painted