Ill Met by Moonlight Read Free

probably made by the child’s own hand, which explained its crude imitation of human features.
    Will smiled in the dark, musty workshop and sighed in relief. His mystery was solved, to his mind’s content. Now he must go to Shottery and fetch his Nan. At Shottery, his kin by marriage would give him food and ale, and he could stay the night with Nan, or walk Nan home.
    True, his legs were tired, and this walk would take away from his well-merited rest. But he’d rather put himself to the trouble of walking to Shottery and there spend the night with Nan than spend the night here, alone, in his cold bed.
    Will closed the front-hall door behind himself, and squared his shoulders. After all, though only nineteen, he was a married man and married men had responsibilities. His wife would depend on him to come to her.
    When Will stepped outside his kitchen door, the sun had fully set, its panoply of color hidden beyond the edge of the Earth. The sky spread over Stratford like a blanket: a deep, cloudless, blue dome with pinpoints of stars. Will blinked up at it. It looked like the velvet gown the Queen had worn when she’d come for the pageant the Earl of Leicester had put on for her at Kenilworth, when Will was less than eleven years old. Will had gone to see the pageant with his parents.
    In his mind, Will saw again the shows for the Queen: the dancers, the plays, and, best of all, the dolphin, surmounted by the merman, navigating slowly down the river. That dolphin and merman, had fallen on young Will’s credulous eyes like supernatural manifestations, and remained in his mind as a promise of a magical world that had never come true. The true world meant debts and hard work and short-lived pleasure purchased by long-lasting toil. He would never see the like of such wonders again.
    An owl hooted from the barns at the other end of the Shakespeare backyard and Will jumped, startled. His foreboding returned, called by the ill-omened bird.
    Along the garden path, a dark shape approached, an ominous shape, like a man with two heads.
    Will swallowed and his breath halted, suspended, before the shape moved closer and a soft giggle revealed the imagined monster for a woman carrying a child.
    “Nan, thank God,” he said, before he realized that the woman was too short to be Nan.
    The shape giggled again, the childish giggle of Will’s sister, Joan, and, as it approached, the shadow revealed Joan’s still round features, obscured by her unkempt curly hair.
    “Goose,” she said. “Your Nan is gone. Neither hide nor hair of her have we seen all day.”
    “She’s gone to Shottery,” he said, speaking his wish as reality. “To help her sister at her labor.”
    Joan stopped on the path, a little to the side, allowing Will to walk by her. As he went past, his brother Edmund, on Joan’s hip, three years old and weighing down fourteen-year-old Joan, stretched out his hand to Will’s arm. Will caressed Edmund’s chubby face, glancingly, as he walked past.
    “Mother says Nan is gone with the gentlemen as call on her while you’re at work,” Joan said.
    Will turned back. “Mother is like a witch poring over her cauldron, brewing lies and plots around Nan.”
    With it said, he wished it unsaid, and bit his tongue in belated reproach. What manner of son called his mother a liar and a witch? Truly, the Bible warned of ungrateful children, their tongues sharper than serpent’s teeth. But on the subject of Nan, Will’s mother didn’t speak as a dutiful wife and mother, but as a raving hag, a lunatic spouting infamy. She claimed that Nan had entrapped Will into an ill-thought marriage that was as ruinous to him as disgraceful to Nan herself, and more, that Nan cavorted with others while Will was away.
    “Mother says she saw Nan go early morning, before the sun came up, amid a large company, with twinkling lights all around,” Joan said, behind him. “No Shottery people, for certain.”
    “Mother knows not what she says,” Will