Part 56 (2/2)
Gina's name came out a stammer too.
”Come in,” Matthew said, and gestured her to a dusty orange armchair. She locked the door behind her before she fell into it. ”Coffee?”
There was a pot made, but he hadn't actually gotten up and fetched any. He waved at it vaguely, and Melissa shook her head.
He wanted to shout at her-What were you thinking? What were you doing there?-and made himself look down at his hands instead. He picked up a letter opener and ran his thumb along the dull edge. ”I am,” he said, when he had control of his voice again, ”so terribly sorry.”
She took two sharp breaths, shallow and he could hear the edge of the giggle under them. Hysteria, not humor. ”It wasn't your fault,” she said. ”I mean, I don't know what happened.” She held up her hand, and his words died in his open mouth. ”I don't ... I don't want to know. But it wasn't your fault.”
He stood up. He got himself a cup of coffee and poured one for her, added cream and sugar without asking. She needed it. Her eyes were pinkred around the irises, the lower lids swollen until he could see the mucous membrane behind the lashes. She took it, zombie-placid.
”I was safe inside the circle,” he said. ”I was supposed to be the bait. Gina and Katie were unlucky. They were close enough to being what it wanted that it took them, instead. As well. Whatever.”
”What did ... it want?”
”Things feed on death.” He withdrew on the excuse of adding more sugar to his coffee. ”Some like a certain flavor. It might even... . ”
He couldn't say it. It might even have been trying to lure Matthew out. That would explain why it had left its safe haven at the north end of the island, and gone where Prometheus would notice it. Matthew cringed. If his organization had some wardens in the bad neighborhoods, it might have been taken care of years ago. If Matthew himself had gone into its court unglamoured that first time, it might just have eaten him and left the girls alone.
A long time, staring at the skim of fat on the surface of her coffee. She gulped, then blew through scorched lips, but did not lift her eyes. ”Doctor S.-”
”Matthew,” he said. He took a breath, and made the worst professional decision of his life. ”Go home, Ms. Martinchek. Concentrate on your other cla.s.ses; as long as you show up for the mid-term and the final in mine, I will keep your current grade for the semester.”
Cowardice. Unethical. He didn't want to see her there.
He put his hand on her shoulder. She leaned her cheek against it, and he let her for a moment. Her skin was moist and hot. Her breath was, too.
Before he got away, he felt her whisper, ”Why not me?”
”Because you put out,” he said, and then wished he'd just cut his tongue out when she jerked, slopping coffee across her knuckles. He retreated behind the desk and his own cup, and settled his elbows on the blotter. Her survivor guilt was his fault, too. ”It only wanted virgins,” he said, more gently. ”Send your boyfriend a thank-you card.”
She swallowed, swallowed again. She looked him in the eyes, so she wouldn't have to look past him, at the memory of her friends. Thank G.o.d, she didn't ask. But she drank the rest of her too-hot coffee, nerved herself, licked her lips, and said, ”But Gina-Gina was ... ”
”People,” he replied, as kindly as he could manage with blood on his hands, ”are not always what they want you to think. Or always what you think they ought to be.”
When she thanked him and left, he retrieved the flask from his coat pocket and dumped half of it into his half-empty coffee mug. Later, a TA told him it was his best lecture ever. He couldn't refute her; he didn't remember.
Melissa Martinchek showed up for his next Monday lecture. She sat in the third row, in the middle of two empty desks. No one sat beside her.
Both Matthew and she survived it, somehow.
The Iles of Dogges THE LIGHT WOULD LAST LONG ENOUGH.
Sir Edmund Tylney, in pain and reeking from rotting teeth, stood before the sideboard and crumbled sugar into his sack, causing a sandy yellowish grit to settle at the bottom of the cup. He swirled the drink to sweeten it, then bore it back to his reading table where an unruly stack of quarto pages waited, slit along the folds with a pen-knife.
He set the cup on the table in the sunlight and drew up his stool, its short legs rasping over the rush mats as he squared it and sat. He reached left-handed for the wine, right-handed for the playscript, drawing both to him over the pegged tabletop. And then he riffled the sheets of Speilman's cheapest laid with his nail.
Bending into the light, wincing as the sweetened wine ached across his teeth with every sip, he read.
He turned over the last leaf, part-covered in secretary's script, as he drank the last gritty swallow in his cup, the square of sun spilling over the table-edge to spot the floor. Tylney drew out his own pen knife, cut a new point on a quill, and-on a fresh quarter-sheet-began to write the necessary doc.u.ment. The Jonson fellow was inexperienced, it was true. But Tom Nashe should have known better.
Tylney gulped another cup of sack before he set his seal to the denial, drinking fast, before his teeth began to hurt. He knew himself, without vanity, to be a clever man-intelligent, well-read. He had to be, to do his job as Master of Revels and censor for the queen, for the playmakers, too, were clever, and they cloaked their satires under layers of witty language and misdirection. The better the playmaker, the better the play, and the more careful Tylney had to be.
The Ile of Dogges was a good play. Lively, witty. Very clever, as one would expect from Tom Nashe and the newcomer Jonson. And Tylney's long-practiced and discerning eye saw the satire on every page, making mock of-among a host of other, lesser targets-Elizabeth, her Privy Council, and the Lord Chamberlain.
It could never be performed.
RIGHTEOUS-IN-THE-CAUSE SAMSON:.
Why is't named Ile of Dogges?
WITWORTH:.
Because here are men like wild dogges. Haue they numbers, they will sauage a lyon: but if the lyon come vpon one by himselfe, he will grouel and showe his belye. And if the lyon but ask it, he will sauage his friends.
RIGHTEOUS-IN-THE-CAUSE SAMSON:.
But is that not right? For surely a dogge should honour a lyon.
WITWORTH:.
But on this island, even the lyon is a dogge.
It could never be performed, but it was. A few days later, despite the denial, Jonson and the Earl of Pembroke's Men staged The Ile of Dogges at the Swan. Within the day, Jonson and the princ.i.p.al actors were in chains at the Marshalsea, under gentle questioning by the Queen's own torturer, Topcliffe himself. The other playwright, Thomas Nashe, fled the city to elude arrest. And The Theatre, The Curtain, The Swan-all of London's great playhouses languished, performances forbidden.
The Ile of Dogges languished, likewise, in a pile on the corner of Tylney's desk, weighted by his pen-knife (between sharpenings). It lay face down, cup-ringed pages adorned with the scratch of more than one pen. The dull black oakgall ink had not yet begun to fade, nor the summer's heat to wane, when Tylney, predictably, was graced by a visit from Master Jonson.
Flea bites and shackle gall still reddened the playwright's thick wrists, counterpoint to the whitework of older scars across ma.s.sive hands. Unfas.h.i.+onably short hair curled above his plain, pitted face. He topped six feet, Ben Jonson. He had been a soldier in the Low Countries.
He ducked to come through the doorway, but stood straight within, stepping to one side after he closed the door so that the wall was at his back. ”You burned Tom's papers.”
”He fled London. We must be sure of the play, all its copies.”
”All of them?” For all his rough bravado, Jonson's youth showed in how easily he revealed surprise. ”'Tis but a play.”
”Master Jonson,” Tylney said, steepling his hands before him, ”it mocks the Queen. More than that, it might encourage others to mock the Queen. 'Tis sedition.”
Recovering himself, Jonson snorted. He paced, short quick steps, and turned, and paced back again. ”And the spies Parrot and Poley as were jailed in with me? Thought you I'd aught to tell them?”
”No spies of mine,” Tylney said. ”Perhaps Topcliffe's. Mayhap he thought you had somewhat of interest to him to impart. No Popist sympathies, Master Jonson? No Scottish loyalties?”
Jonson stopped at the furthest swing of his line and stared at the coffered paneling. That wandering puddle of sun warmed his boots this time. He reached out, laid four blunt fingertips and a thumb on the wall-his hand bridged between them-and dropped his head so his arm hid the most of his face. His other hand, Tylney noticed, brushed the surface of the sideboard and left something behind, half-concealed beside the inkpot. ”No point in pleading for the return of the ma.n.u.script, I take it?”
”Destroyed,” Tylney said, without letting his eyes drop to the pages on his desk. And, as if that were all the restraint he could ask of himself, the question burst out of him: ”Why do it, Master Jonson? Why write it?”
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