Any Man So Daring by Sarah A. Hoyt Page A

loved well enough. But Hamnet would carry his name. As a man he would be all that Will had failed to be, better educated and better trained and therefore more accomplished and better received in polite society than his father.
    Hamnet would be the first of a Shakespeare family of scholars and gentlemen.
    The coat of arms for which Will’s father had first applied, and which had been forgotten when John Shakespeare’s fortunes had dimmed, would now be resurrected, with added luster from Will’s toiling with the unyielding quill. From it, Hamnet would receive that status and grace which Will had lacked, the name of "gentleman," the right to wear a sword, the reverence and respect of humbler men.
    Hamnet would attend university. He would know the Latin and Greek that often evaded his father’s rude tongue. He would....
    Kit remained silent, staring at Will, as though studying Will’s changes of expression like a recondite book.
    “What of Hamnet?” Will said, again, and put a hand forward and drew it back, knowing he would touch nothing there, and fearing yet. What would his hand feel, where Marlowe’s ghost sat, immaterial? Nothing? Or, if it felt something, what would it be? The cold of death? The dustiness of the tomb?
    “Hamnet even now and as we speak,” Kit said, “is being lured into the forest by fairy power. And from the forest will he be taken elsewhere, to a place beyond the real world, where magic reigns supreme.”
    Will stood. He forgot his problem with his plays. What cared he now, whose plays those truly were? He’d written naught but for Hamnet’s sake, for the sake of Hamnet’s future.  
    He forgot that he wanted to be rid of Kit Marlowe. He forgot all save that his son would be kidnapped into fairyland, that land of treachery and wonders, of danger and eerie terror.
    For -- once in fairyland -- who knew what might befall Hamnet?
    Hamnet was but a child, easily dazed. The glitter of fairy would deceive him, and those hollow riches that magic could spin would confuse him.
    Taken to the cloud-piercing castle of the hill, shown the power of effortless magic, the joy of elven dances, could Hamnet resist?
    Or would Hamnet, with ready, eager joy, eat of the fairy food and thus become a changeling--one of them who, under the hill, compassed their immortal lives, never knowing the greater joy of brief human lives?
    Would Hamnet thus become a brittle thing, frail and beautiful as spun glass? Know the joy of hate and the pain of lust, but not the greater, mellower fire of human love?
    No. Curse the thought. Hamnet would not be of them.
    They could not have him.
    Marlowe had brought Will news of this, hence Marlowe must, by heaven and hell and the dust beyond help Will save Hamnet from this fate.
    Once before had something like this happened. Once before had Will’s family been taken into elvenland.
    With Susannah but an infant in arms, his Nan had been stolen, and his daughter too, to serve the perverse king of fairyland. Then, ten years later, Kit Marlowe had succumbed to conspiracies engendered by elves.
    Now, Hamnet, his father’s darling, the hope of Will’s old age, would be taken also? Taken to that world of passing promise and empty joys?
    Will dared fairyland to rip his child from his arms.
    Will trembled as he stood and, standing, felt blood drain from his face and leaving him as pale, as colorless, as immaterial as the ghost beside him.
    He reached for the woman who still sat at the head of the table.
    She looked from man to ghost and ghost to man, puzzled, like a child laboring at a difficult problem.
    “Good woman,” he said. “You must send me hence. If there’s a way you can make me travel with magic, like the fairy bridge of air, between two points without touching the gross material world between, then send me to Hamnet now, for I must rescue my son.”
    “No!” Kit reached for Will’s arm.   Strangely, Kit’s hand had weight and could be felt, heavy as the tomb and cold as ice