©2011 by Sarah A. Hoyt
Cover arrangement by Sarah A. Hoyt
Smashwords Edition
Published by Goldport Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations for the purpose of review. For information address Goldport Press – goldportpress@gmail. com.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events and people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For Whose Dear Sake was published in Dreams of Decadence in 2001
For Whose Dear Sake
by
Sarah A. Hoyt
I remember it well, the night I met him and the darkened tavern, small and close confined by twentieth century standards.
I didn’t think it was confined then, of course. Nay, nor dark. Why, there were tapers aplenty on the twelve long pine tables, casting their vacillating light upon drunkards and bawds and the sweating, hard-working serving wenches.
The tapers must have been made from old bacon grease. The lingering smell of their burning mixed with the scent.
of scorched mutton fat from the carcass roasting over the broad hearth at the back. Through it all, the smell of sweaty bodies and the reek of old, spilled ale wove, like a familiar thread.
I remember all this now. Back then I didn’t notice it. Unwashed bodies were the norm, aye, and bacon tapers too.
Besides, I was too excited, rushed, feverish, almost drunk with my own triumph and the unaccustomed setting.
I was a Cambridge divinity student and I’d come up to London without permission from my masters. Having finished my English translation of Ovid’s Amores, I had received enough gold with it to buy a second hand suit — dark velvet slashed through at the sleeves to show the flame-colored silk commonly called harlot leg, all of it ornamented with more golden buttons at sleeve and down the middle of the doublet, as I’d never seen together in one place before. In a fit of daring, I’d allowed a friend, Tom Watson who lived in London and wrote plays for the theater, to dye my mouse brown hair to a deep auburn, with ill-smelling henna.
And I had enough money left to buy my supper at a tavern, though a dubious, low class tavern where writers and actors gathered and such that my pious father — a cobbler and a lay deacon in Canterbury cathedral — would have shuddered to think of my frequenting.
Which was what made my pulse race and my own daring sing like sweet music upon my ears and dazzle, like intoxicating wine, within my veins.
I sat at that tavern table that night and wished for something to happen, something.
It did.
On my second cup of ale, my second bite of stale bread that yet tasted better than anything I could buy in Cambridge buttery, I felt a hand on my shoulder, heard a deep, masculine voice behind me, “Master.... Marlowe? We have common friends.”
I turned and beheld the most unusual man I would ever meet in the centuries of life that waited ahead of my unsuspecting self.
He had an elongated face, almost Italian, I’d say.
More Italian yet was the feeling of secretiveness about it, the feeling of closed knowledge that made my pulse pound. I thought of what I’d heard of the city states of Italy, their murderous feuds, their efficacious, secret poisons, their instructed, enlightened leaders who murdered with a smile and stole with a kind word and always, always ended up as the victors. His long face, with its heavy-lidded eyes reminded me of an inscrutable saint glancing out of a darkened portrait.
He wore a beard, close trimmed to a point, and a short moustache. Beneath it, his skin was an odd tone of ivory, as if it had been designed to be swarthy but its owner had kept out of the sun for too long. Not to say he looked unhealthy. His dark brown eyes shone with enough vitality to shame the most athletic dancer, the most exalted athlete.
I realized I’d been staring into those eyes, and that my pulse had quickened and my face flushed.
The stranger smiled at me, without opening his broad, sensuous lips. “May I sit down?” he asked, looking significantly at the seat next to mine.
“Yes. Yes,” I answered, my voice breaking as it hadn’t in years.
“Thank you.” He sat down with easy elegance, that made the gesture seem like he’d accepted a throne instead of a poor tavern bench.
He tapped the thick white ceramic mug in front of me and wrinkled his nose.
“Thin ale, Master Marlowe?” he asked.
I nodded, not knowing what else to do. Thin the ale might be, but it had more alcohol than anything I’d ever tasted at Cambridge or in the poor, puritan household to which I’d been born. Enough alcohol to turn my head.
My new friend lifted a hand and, as if he’d shouted or thrown gold, a wench appeared, smiling at him.
“Get my friend some cherris sack,” the stranger said. “And make it good.”
“Sir,” I said, the title coming easily to my tongue. He had all the demeanor of gentility about him. “Sir, it’s not needed.”
I’d never tasted cherris sack — that fine Spanish wine — before, nor did I know how my brain would react to it.
Already, the thin ale and this man’s presence seemed to be acting together to intoxicate me. He smelled of sandalwood, I thought. As he turned to look at me, the black curls that fell to his shoulders moved, revealing a very small golden ring on his left ear lobe.