Ink and Steel

“First He would have to forgive Himself. And that, I assure thee, he will not.”

“Father of lies. Oh, Christ, Christ, Christ.”

Silent laughter. “Is that the name thou chooseth for me?.” A lingering caress. “Tis sweet, isn’t it, child?.” ‘Did you like it, puss?’ But even that pain was so far buried that Kit had no answer, no speech, no reason; was too far lost for anything more eloquent than whimpered sacrilege. Died blaspheming,he thought, and laughed out loud, and cursed again.

   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