EPILOGUE
ST. GEORGE’S DAY, 1609
“AND BY SUCH MEANS AS THESE, GENTLEMEN—AND MOST BEAUTEOUS ladies—Love’s Lost Labours are at last, Won.” The raconteur takes an exaggerated bow.
Hands applaud, and laughter envelops the diners at the long trestle. Drinks are replenished in the candlelight. “We know you love these tight-jammed words, Will; but ‘New-York’?” one man asks. “And ‘Tick Tock’?” adds another. Derision breaks out again, and a man smoking a pipe offers his last word on it. “In truth, ‘Rapture ready’ is an excellent jest.”
“But, Will, when will it end? Will it ever end?” The dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty, seated at one end of the table, rises to hand him a richly embroidered piece of fabric. He carefully wraps it around a spice-scented Gallica rose, secures it with two locks of hair, one dark and the other fair, and packs them tenderly into what looks like a prop chest.
“And a red rose, plucked at midsummer,” he says to her. His voice wanders for a moment, then he turns to her with a face full of mobility and humor. “It wants a twelve-month and a day, and then t’will end. It Will, so. Though in this case, the true span of that ‘twelve-month’ is a mystery. A play sees a lifetime in an hour. Nine springs have passed since first we planned our play. Its final compass will defy a man’s measurement.”
“And a woman’s. For how long is the thread?” she challenges him, then points at an empty space at the head of the table. “What shall become of his heart? Shall it flourish where it is planted?”
“Mean you the heart? Or the white hart? Or the heart that is hers, that was his? Or the heart that was his…”—he throws his hand likewise in the direction of the empty chair—“…that will tell her where ’twas hid? Or the heart that was mine that you stole? Or the heart that is his, that he gives freely at midsummer? The heart that beats in her chest—or the heart in the chest that no longer beats? Well, truly, the one is a heart with wit and a will; the other a heart of Will, with a wit. And all are one.”
His dark-haired companion admonishes him with a finger, and he picks up. “Nay, lady. The doctor’s heart rests awhile in darkness, seeking only the light, beating apace below Wisdom’s breast. Yet it is nourished in repose, never truly lost among riddling words. It will leap once more into passion—its meaning clear. The ripeness is all.”
She deflects his wordplay with another dismissive hand gesture, and addresses him now with intensity. “Good plier of ink, have you not said already, many men have learned enough religion to hate, not yet enough religion to love. And will it ever be so? Will there be a time when the pedants no longer cant like schoolmasters, but listen with their minds and hearts to fresh ideas, broaden their narrow world?” She yields to him a tiny portrait, with a forlorn look.
“Nay, not this, Mistress Bassano. This must be in jointure with the King’s Book, and pass through the family. Your bodice here contains the rebus, contains answers to the riddles. And I almost cannot part with it.” He lays it to one side.
“’Tis only a copy, Will. You invest too much in it.”
“My copy,” he emphasizes, and returns to his task of packing the chest. “To this, the jeweled monas he created for the Queen at the alpha of her reign, and which she returned to his keeping at its omega, add only my unwrit playscript, the broken staff, and the show-stone he tells us is from another world. He quite assured us it was given by the angels, with a message of healing that shall be understood when they solve this last riddle he leaves us: when the white rose flourishes in a house of that complexion, in a country that chooses just such a bloom for its device.”
With her gloved hand, she now places these items into the rose-filled casket, and stands it beside the other much heavier corded box. “Here shall his angel rest…”
“But to return to yours,” her companion resumes his discourse. “Aye, marry. Such a time may yet be. It is here writ. The good doctor decrees it shall come…”—he breaks off to read a parchment before handing it to her—“‘when Astraea rises, East of the West of the West. Lo, she shall be married with one Will—and with one large Will, and that Will with a large and peaceless will. This bird in the hand is worth two, and thus may the once bright Sun reappear to render power to the gentle Moon. And now our celestial pair walk forth; and as they do so—while the pedants are truly in the coldest month—the January term at Oxford and at the Law—the zealots shall feel a long winter; others, a rite of spring.’”
“Good shadow, that’s too long for a play. And as you leave them sans words, how shall they con their parts?” Her dark eyes flash at him, and she takes up the parchment he has only a moment since completed writing.
“Yet shall they do it extempore, Mistress Bassano. Their characters are wrought with Wisdom, and they shall live them.”
She reads aloud the few words, in the poor light of the shortening candles.
“She is both sister and bride, and more precious than rubies. All the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.”
And they each take a key: and lock opposite ends of the chest.
