But he could not leave the faerie world, and he could not leave Lune. So together, they would ensure that day never came.
Epilogue
RICHMOND PALACE, RICHMOND: February 8, 1603
The coughing never went entirely away anymore. They sent doctors to pester her; she mustered the energy to drive them out again, but every time it was harder. The rain beat ceaselessly against the windows, a long, dreary winter storm, and it was easy to believe that all the world had turned against her. She sat upon cushions before the fire, and spent many long hours staring into its depths.
Her mind drifted constantly now, forgetting what it was she had been doing. Cecil came occasionally with papers for her to sign; half the time she was surprised to see it was Robert, William’s hunchbacked little son. The wrong Cecil. Burghley, her old, familiar Cecil, had died… how long ago now?
Too long. She had outlived them all, it seemed. Burghley, Walsingham, Leicester. Her old enemy Philip of Spain. Essex, executed on Tower Hill — oh, how he had gone wrong. She could have handled him differently, perhaps, but when all was said and done he would never forgive her for being an old woman, too proud to give in, too stubborn to die. She was approaching seventy. How many could boast reaching such a great age?
She could think of some, but her mind flinched away. Those thoughts were too painful, now that illness and the infirmity of old age were defeating her at last.
“But I have done well, have I not?” she whispered to the fire. “I have done well. ’Twas not all because of her.”
She glanced behind her, half-expecting to see a tall figure in the shadows, but no one was there. Just two of her closest maids, keeping weary vigil over their crabbed old queen, periodically trying and failing to convince her to go to bed. She looked away again, quickly, before they could raise their incessant refrain again.
Sometimes she could almost believe she had imagined it all, from her visitor in the Tower onward. But no — it had been real. Invidiana, and all the rest.
So many regrets. So many questions: What would have been different, had she never formed that pact? Would the Armada have reached the shores of England, bearing Parma’s great army to overrun and subjugate them beneath the yoke of Spain? Or would she never have gotten that far? Perhaps she would have died in the Tower, executed for her Protestant heresy, or simply permitted to perish from the damp cold there, as she was perishing now. Mary Stewart might have had her throne, one Catholic Mary to follow another.
Or not. She had survived thirteen years without Invidiana, through her own wits and will, and the aid of those who served her. She was the Queen of England, blessed by God, beloved of her people, and she could stand on her own.
“And I have,” she whispered, her lips moving near-soundlessly. “I have been a good queen.”
The rain drumming against the windows made no reply. But she heard in it the cheers of her subjects, the songs in her honor, the praise of her courtiers. She had not been perfect. But she had done her best, for as long as she could. Now the time had come to pass her burden to another, and pray he did well by her people.
Pray they remembered her, and fondly.
Gazing into the fire, Elizabeth of England sank into dreams of her glorious past, an old woman, wrinkled and ill, but in her mind’s eye, now and forever the radiant Virgin Queen.
Acknowledgments
I owe a great debt of gratitude to the many people who helped me research this novel. During my trip to England, I was assisted by the following wonderful volunteers: from the Shakespeare’s Globe Library and Archives, Victoria Northwood; from the National Trust, Kate Wheeldon at Hardwick Hall; and from Historic Royal Palaces, Alison Heald, Susan Holmes at the Tower of London, and Alden Gregory at Hampton Court Palace. (The rooftop scene is his fault.)
I’m also grateful to Kevin Schmidt, for the astrology in Act Three, and to Dr. William Tighe, who taught me everything I know about the Gentlemen Pensioners, and mailed me his dissertation to boot. He is not to be blamed for anything I got wrong.
Finally, I have to thank Kate Walton, for needing someone to keep her awake on a late-night drive to the airport back in June of 2006. It was the first of many fruitful midnight conversations about this story, and it wouldn’t have been the same without her.
EXTRAS
Meet the Author
MARIE BRENNAN holds an undergraduate degree in archaeology and folklore from Harvard and is now pursuing a PhD in anthropology and folklore at Indiana University.
INTERVIEW
Why did you choose the Elizabethan period as your focal point for Midnight Never Come?
At a guess, I’d have to say my interest started with Shakespeare; I’ve always loved certain of his plays. (Surprise, surprise.) But it grew past that about ten or twelve years ago, when I read Shakespeare of London by Margaret Chute; that book approaches him as a working member of a company rather than as a great literary genius, and it may have been my first introduction to the world of Renaissance London. I fell in love pretty fast. It’s a fascinating period all over Europe, really — ferocious religious tension and conflict, and yet despite that (or because of it?) such a vibrant time culturally. It offers the prospective author a lot to play with.
And Elizabeth herself is interesting because even in her own time, they deliberately built her up as this iconic figure, as a means of legitimizing her rule as a Protestant and a woman on the throne. It explains a lot of her cult following even today. I’m not as much of an idolater as I used to be; these days, I’ve done enough research to recognize her flaws. But I still have a lot of respect for her, and for the people around her. There are a lot of great names from her reign: Walsingham, Burghley, Ralegh, Drake, Dee, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and so on.
Plus, I like the clothes. Though I could do without the extremes of fashion: oversized cartwheel ruffs, enormously padded sleeves, and all the rest. Give me a streamlined Elizabethan look, thank you. (Which is more or less what I put the fae in.)
This novel grew out of your experience with a role-playing game. How did that drive you to create the novel?
Some time ago, White Wolf published a game system called Changeling: The Dreaming, which is about playing faeries in the modern world. I ran a game of my own in that system during 2006, but it ended up being pretty non-standard, starting with the fact that it went through six hundred and fifty years of English history — backward. (I called it “Memento,” after the similarly-structured movie of the same name.) The Elizabethan segment of the game, originally set in 1589, grew like kudzu; it sprouted backstory starting in the mid-fourteenth century and repercussions going all the way to 2006, and more to the point, it wouldn’t leave my mind. Specifically, Francis and Suspiria wouldn’t leave my mind.
So I did some narrative surgery, lifting that part of the story out of the broader context of Changeling and Memento, and reworked it as a novel. A few key points of the plot are drawn from the game, but since we had only three evening sessions in which to play it, I had to do a lot of expanding, and things don’t happen exactly the way they did the first time. I also had to do some work to remove the Changeling-specific elements, but not as much as I expected; when you get right down to it, both the game designers and I were working from the same source, namely, real-world faerie lore. If you still see some similarity, that’s why.