Sweet Robyn passed the time on that mild May morning gently buffeting Widow Bull with his customary banter, though perhaps his smile was more forced than usual. With him was the man Skeres, who skulked, watchful and sullen, in the background. He had lurked on the periphery of events before: in Paris when Kit first met Thomas Walsingham and Tom Watson; as a Walsingham man in Robert Poley's garden as the Babington plot worked its way to a nasty end; and more recently as a tout for money-lenders, which brought him into contact with Matthew Roydon and others of Kit's circle. Mrs Bull was correct in thinking him not quite a gentleman. His father, who had died when he was three, was a merchant tailor and had left him lands in Yorkshire and Surrey, but twenty-seven years on, Nicholas Skeres was neither craftsman nor gent. He haunted a shadier world. In his teens he had taken up with a man he met in a tavern, one Richard Parradine, as an accomplice in a money-lending racket; at twenty-two he appeared alongside rogues known only by underworld tags like 'Staring Robyn' and 'Welsh Dick' on a list of 'masterless men & cut-purses, whose practice is to rob gentlemen's chambers and artificers' shops in and about London'; he was a fixer and a fence, a rakehell, a friend of thieves and a catcher of gullible conies. A man with contacts and an eye for profit, he slipped easily from the shadows of the criminal world into secret alcoves of espionage - a useful conduit to be used when spying spilled over into the murkier areas of murder, theft and violence.
Kit arrived with Ingram Frizer, just after ten o'clock. The two had the taut, tired look of men who had been locked in difficult discussion. Like Skeres, Frizer had connections with Thomas Walsingham, but while Skeres was a low-life lackey serving Walsingham in his work as a spy, Frizer was more respectable, a small-time businessman whom Thomas used as a steward and property agent - though he was not averse to a little scurrilous dealing, and had already been involved in loan-shark trickery with Skeres. Frizer was unknown to Sir Robert, but the name 'Skeres' on the inquest report would carry an authentic whiff of the underworld upstream to Westminster.
Upstairs, in the room apart he had asked for, while Ingram Frizer and Skeres indeed played 'tables' - backgammon (you had to believe that Cecil had eyes everywhere), Robert Poley pursued the discussion that Frizer had begun with Kit that morning, outlining what he and Thomas Walsingham had planned in their long private parley three days earlier: that it was 'bootless to fly' [useless to flee], as Kit would be pursued, and Poley would be compromised; that the securest way to escape Cecil was to let him think his plot had gone forward and that Kit was dead. Walsingham, he continued, had already sent word to Oliver Laurens, who waited at the river with gold, books and the means to help Kit disappear across the Channel. Walsingham would send more money, and perhaps seek help from Southampton - though for his own safety, Kit's 'sweet rosy lad' (like Poley and Frizer) would be kept in ignorance of his whereabouts. If Kit wrote any more plays, Oliver, who was now going on frequent missions abroad, would bring them back for sale to London theatres. Overreaching Will Shakespere was easily bought, and was sure to seize the chance to masquerade them as his own as the upstart crow had already been doing with the Henry tragedies. Skeres had found a ruffler (a superior sort of vagabond and trickster) outside The Crown at Bishopsgate (a known 'harbouring house' of thieves and cozeners), a man who 'in face, in gait, in outward form somewhat did resemble [Kit]', and who, as they spoke, was waiting, as instructed, at the end of Mistress Bull's garden, ready to change habits and places with him. Lured by promises of gold, he thought he was playing a part in one of Skeres's schemes to gull a gentleman, and had no idea that his only chance of reward would be in heaven. Skeres, of course, knew Kit, and so was able to make a reasonable match.*
But Kit would have none of it. He would send no man to death for his sake, thinking it 'full lamentable that the skin of another be made parchment for [his] own life to be scribbled on'. The point of his warning to Lord Strange had been to prevent an innocent man dying in order to favour a corrupt one, and he could not, with any sort of conscience, live out a parallel course.
At around eleven o'clock, Eleanor Bull came in with the meal. The four ate in silence. Poley had ordered a feast of neat's-tongue, capon, lamb and stag, knowing that Kit would be eating poorly for a while, but Kit barely touched it. When the dishes and trenchers had been cleared, he and Poley continued to talk 'in quiet sort' but deadly earnest, while the other two - waspish and bored by now - went back to playing tables. Skeres threw hard glances across to Kit, with eyes that 'could drop a man's heart into a sink of fear'. He did not care to whom he did the deed, so long as he got his money. He knew that by the evening there was going to have to be a corpse. The four walked out into Widow Bull's garden.
Some may argue that Kit was a coward finally to succumb to Poley's scheme, that he acted simply from self-preservation. Whatever his motivations, he certainly never forgave himself. The death of the ruffler in Deptford (as that of Walter Hoochspier) would haunt him, like the ghosts that afflicted Richard III. We can hear his agony in Richard's speech of self-hate and stricken conscience; we can spot the stain in countless plays in the years to come. In the history plays, writes biographer Katherine Duncan-Jones, 'one man's sudden death is very often the occasion of another man's sudden promotion'. In Measure for Measurethe parallel is even more telling. The Duke of Vienna (in the guise of a friar), in order to save the young nobleman Claudio from execution, persuades the prison Provost to disguise one Barnadine, a dissolute murderer, as Claudio and send him to the block instead. He dismisses the Provost's concern that the swap will be noticed with 'O, death's a great disguiser, and you may add to it' (IV ii 166). In the event, a third prisoner dies of fever - 'A man of Claudio's years; his beard and head/ Just of his colour' (IV iii 68) - so Barnadine momentarily escapes execution and Claudio is unburdened of a guilty conscience.
No such providence intervened to relieve Kit. It is clear that at some point during that walk in the garden, he agreed to go along with the plan. They found Skeres's ruffler, and behind high hedges Kit handed over his fine hose and doublet in exchange for 'stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease' and, quite alone, slipped away to find Oliver at the river.
Skeres, Poley, Frizer and the ruffler went back to the house, where Mistress Bull had laid out a supper. Poley took her aside to discuss 'the reckoning' so she would not see the others come in. When he returned to the room, he brought up a pitcher of ale, into which he had dropped a measure of potion sold him by the 'notorious physician' Simon Forman (he who would one day be seduced by Emilia Bassano). Directions for the potion are given in one of Forman's compendia under 'Somnes or Slepe' as a method 'to make on slepe whille he is cut', and read:
'Take iii sponfulls of the galle of a swine and of the Joice of hemloke. of wine viniger iii sponfulls. mix them all and put yt in a glasse. & when youe will cut or burn a man, put on sponfulle therof in a gallon of alle or wine. Yf youe will make it strong put 2 sponfulls therof to a gallon of wine or alle. and giue the partie on sponfulle ther of to droincke and he will slepe soundly, whill youe cut him or burne him . . . To make him to a wake - Rub the palmes of his handes and soulles of his feet with wine viniger.'
By the end of the meal, the ruffler was asleep. They laid him on the bed behind the table, with his back to the room, while Poley and Frizer played backgammon, and Skeres drank ale the scene remembered by a servant who cleared the supper dishes. Philip White maintains that Kit never acquiesced to the plan, and that some of Forman's potion was used on him, so that the swap-over could be made without his knowing it. While this neatly excuses Kit of any moral blame in the affair, and raises interesting questions about how far friends may intervene in one's life for (in their perception) one's own good, it is a scenario of excuses. Kit's expressions of guilt and his subsequent behaviour indicate that he was quite aware of what was going on.
It was Skeres that delivered the fatal cut. Cold Skeres knew exactly where the blade should go to strike out their victim with one hard stab - above the eye, so the spurt of blood covered his face and matted his hair. Two gashes to Frizer's head added to the gore, and to the realism. Frizer's dagger was used. He, not Skeres, was to take the blame. As the more respectable of the two, he would earn an easier pardon - but he drew back from an actual act of murder. The sleeping ruffler co-operated perfectly. The deed done, they created the sounds of a scuffle, and called in Eleanor Bull. She did not linger. Ever heedful, Sweet Robyn hastened to calm her, and took control. It was too late for a surgeon, and he did not call the watch. Instead, they waited for the coroner - the Queen's man, William Danby. The inquest was held thirty-six hours later. Neither the coroner nor any one of the jury had known Christopher Marlowe personally, and they were none the wiser as to the identity of the corpse. They accepted the story of the argument over the 'payment of a sum of pence, that is, le recknynge, and that Marlowe had 'moved in anger' against Frizer. They found that Frizer (as Poley had assured him they would) had acted 'in the defence and saving of his own life, against the peace of our said lady the Queen, her now crown & dignity'. The body was carried that day along the Common to St Nicholas's Church, and buried in an unmarked grave.
But by this time the real Christopher Marlowe was on his way to the coast where, despite his terror of the open seas, he would board the Expedition for Flushing. Or Vlissingen, as he would now have to call it. For together with the copy of Holinshed's Chronicles that Walsingham had given him (in a cedar chest with some other books), and a purse of gold, Oliver had provided him with 'a suit of apparel in the Flemish guise'. An Englishman abroad would be easily spotted, as different nationalities adhered to quite distinct fashions. There was, as Philip Stubbes put it in his Anatomie of Abuses, 'one manner of cut called the French cut, another the Spanish cut; one the Dutch cut, another the Italian'. It would not do to be like Falconbridge, the young baron of England in The Merchant of Venice who is so 'oddly suited' that it appears 'he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany', a tasteless mix-and-match for which the English were notorious - like Thomas Nashe's young hero in The Unfortunate Traveller, who 'being a youth of the English cut, w[o]re my hair long, went apparelled in light colours, and imitated foure or five sundry nations in my attire at once', and found on arriving in Rome that he 'had all the boies of the citie in a swarme wondering about me'.
In his Flanders guise, Kit could live in the Low Countries until such time as he might safely return. His Flemish was good enough, so was his French, and he could find work with printers safe from Cecil behind enemy lines in Amtwerp. Oliver had noted for him the names of two people who might help, and (from one of those houses in Gravesend known to men who had occasion for such things) had secured a forged passport to Vlissingen. The alias used on the passport throws a sudden light on Kit's distressed state of mind. It was 'Walter Hoochspier', the first man he had killed, and in whose name hid an anagram of his own. This name - with its variants Walter Hooche, Walter de Hoogh, and later Gualtiero Stangone - would travel with Kit for the next sixteen years.
* For a careful reconstruction of events behind the scenes in Deptford, see Philip White, Innocent Blood, pp. 56-63, which uses papers that appear to be a recollection written by Ingram Frizer.