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I WAS DREAMING OF BEING kissed by Euripides when Mog’s voice penetrated: “Kit, I swear that if thou dost not rise upon this instant, I shall set Tabbey on thee.”
“Umph, wha—” I managed, then realizing in a panic that I still clutched the book, rolled over like a foundering horse and thrust it down into the bed-clothes. “Mog, what art doing in my room?” My assumption of outraged dignity would perhaps have been more effective if my voice had not squeaked on the last word.
Mog stood in the middle of the room, hands on hips, and glowered at me. “Thou hast been called to breakfast three times and neither sound or sight of thee have we had. So Mother sent me to fetch thee. Or wouldst prefer Tabbey?”
“No, no, I thank thee, Moglet. Thou art a paragon among sisters. Now wilt leave that I may get dressed?”
“Hast grown a tail overnight that thou needs must hide?” I was not the only one of Katherine Marlowe’s children afflicted with insatiable curiosity. The sparrow-like lean to Mog’s head told me she’d scented a secret and was hot in pursuit.
“Out!”
She paused a moment, clearly debating the matter, but then we heard Annie’s unmistakable shriek from the kitchen, quickly followed by a shout of dismay from Joan, a wail from Tabbey, and a whoop of laughter from Mother. Mog whisked out with only a glare over her shoulder to tell me she would not forget.
As soon as the door closed behind her, I dove after the Euripides, breathing a sigh of relief when I saw the pages were undamaged. I dragged my clothes on, considering ways and means of getting out of the house, getting the book to Tom, convincing my mother that I did not have to go crawling back to Croley just yet. Was the book small enough to hide beneath my shirt? I thought it was, and that was of a certainty safer than leaving it anywhere in my room.
I was standing, hesitating, the book in my hand, when I heard the hated and familiar sound of the front door banging open. It was like ice-water down my back; I had the book stuffed into my shirt and was myself halfway down the stairs before I even had a coherent thought: I never reckoned Tom would be so quick.
“Katherine!” My father’s voice, and though you might think a man released from gaol would be in a sunny humor, with my father it was otherwise. It seemed he’d been saving all the wrath he’d not shown to Magistrate Arnell and the Watch—aye, indeed, saving it, as he always did, for us.
I was just far enough down the stairs to see my mother’s white face, the grim lines around her mouth. And then she said, “John!” as sweetly and naturally as any courting girl and moved just far enough toward the stairs to block my father’s view of me scrambling into the kitchen. I slid into place beside Annie, the Euripides butting against my ribs like a fractious goat, and joined my sisters in staring with wide-eyed, innocent consternation at our unkempt and unshaven father as he came up into the kitchen, red-faced, furious, and snorting like a bull.
He cast a jaundiced eye over the lot of us, gaze lingering longest on me. I ducked my head so my hair would fall across my bruised cheek, lest the purpling be mistaken for a ploy for sympathy, and applied myself to the bread and butter Mog slid under my nose although my throat was so dry I could barely swallow.
Mother said, without a quaver, “John, thou’rt home. Is... ?”
“Our Christopher has friends in high places, it seems,” Father said. I put the bread down in a hurry because my hands were starting to shake and I did not want him to see.
Through my hair, I saw Mother’s frown. “What mean’st thou? Kit, what is this?”
Oh a fool I was. A fool and twice a fool for not thinking that there would needs be some explanation of Tom’s intervention. Thou art not in a child’s tale, Kittycat, and thou wouldst do well to remember it. I said, “Not my friend. A friend of... of Master Latimer’s.”
“Who just happens,” Father said, his voice rich and poisonous with sarcasm, “to know about my five starving children and pregnant wife? Was your Master Latimer much given to gossiping about my affairs with his friends, Christopher?”
Duly noted for the future, and pray God it may matter to me: Tom Watson has no tact.
I said, and my voice was shaking, “Father, I know thou didst not kill John.”
The silence in the kitchen was thick enough to slice and butter. “Dost thou, Kit?” said Father. “And how dost thou know what in sooth I know not?”
“John!”
“Peace, Katherine. I am told by my son that I have not killed Master Latimer, and perforce I must believe him. But, truly, Kit, how dost thou know?”
I hated him in this mood, even more than when he was drunk. Another day, a different conflict, I might have told him, simply to be free of his relentless savagery, no matter what the punishment. But I did not have to be told that Tom Watson’s work against the supporters of Scottish Mary was not something to be blurted out to the family, just to save myself a hiding. “Father, I cannot tell thee.”
“Aye, I rather thought thou wouldst not.” I was startled by his tone into looking at his face, and the satisfaction I saw there made me want to crawl under the table. He had read something out of my words I had not put in them, and I feared even to guess what it might be. The Euripides, pressed against my stomach, seemed almost to burn. “Christopher, I would speak with thee alone.”
“Yes, Father.” I followed him back down the stairs, locking my hands to keep them from trembling.
Father leaned against his bench and said, “To be sure, ‘tis the strangest morning I have ever spent, to be called into a room with Magistrate Arnell and a saucy pup I know not—and not a soul else, my Christopher, marvel on that—and be told that on this pup’s word, I am to be released back to my family, for their need is great and the pup has pledged to stand surety that I will not run. And when I ask, as any man might ask, who this pup is and why he interests himself in my affairs, he says only that he is a friend of my son’s, as if ‘twere a thing not worth the commenting.”
“Father, I can—”
“Hold thy tongue.” He looked at me in long silence, and I pressed back against the stairs and prayed for I knew not what.
At length, he said, quietly, “Didst thou kill this man, Christopher?”
The words made so little sense that for a moment I thought, truly, that I had been struck with a brain-storm. “What? Father... how canst say that? Thou know’st John was my friend.”
“Aye. Such a friend that he gave thee costly presents. And I ask myself, Christopher, what kind of friendship there can be between a scholar and a gutter-rat such as thyself that leads to gift-giving and the passion thou hast shown in his defense a double-dozen times. An thou killed him, Christopher, I shall understand, and we will not speak on it again.”
Father thought... Father thought... I jammed one fist against my mouth to keep the hysterical giggles pent within. “Father, I suh—I swear to you that my friendship with John was not of that... that nature, and I did not kill him.”
His stare, red-eyed and sullen, was unreadable. But at length he said, “Thou’lt keep thine own counsel, as thou always dost. But I’ll not have thee dragging thy mother after thee.”
“I won’t.”
“Thou hast thy mother twisted round thy finger, and I know it as well as thou dost. But I’ll not be taken in, and thou, boy, wilt not be going out.”
“Father?”
“Thinkst thou I know not why thou gazest at the door like a hound at a rabbit? Thou wishst to run off and find thy friend and thank him for his kindness. Aye, boy?”
“No, Father.” And it was not a lie. I did not wish to thank Tom. I wished to give him this book which was jabbing into my ribs like Mog’s elbows.
“Good,” said my father. “For thou art not going. I am much behind, and thou hast no other ‘prenticeship, eh, Kit? Thou’lt work for me today, and be grateful I do not give thee bruises to remind thee of thy place. Thou’rt my son and shouldst not be prancing about as if thou wert better than the magistrates.”
I could not keep the incredulity out of my voice, “Thou wouldst welt me for freeing thee?”
“‘Tis not a matter of freedom, Christopher. ‘Tis a matter of obedience. Now.”
All that morning, I was slave to Father’s hectoring voice. He boxed my ears twice for clumsiness, and knocked me half across the room just before midday, though I know not for what. Mother brought dinner down to us, looked thoughtfully at my father, more thoughtfully at where I sat dabbing blood from my split lip, and said, “John, I need Kit in the garden this afternoon.”
“I need him here,” Father said without looking round.
“Thy shoes will neither be spoilt nor eaten by rabbits if they are not tended,” she said tartly, “and I will not have Mog and Joan ruining their hands. Would do it myself, but...”
At once, Father was all contrition. He never meant to behave ill to Mother when she was breeding—I believe that much good of him, if no more. He sent me with her with no more than the instruction, bellowed after us, that I was not to be allowed outside the gate.
Mother shut the back door behind us. “Didst truly get him freed, Kitten?”
“I... I guess so.”
“Thou’rt a good son,” she said, and gave me an awkward, one-armed hug around her belly. “And thou art repaid with weeding.”
“I don’t mind,” I said uncomfortably.
“A good son, indeed.” She ruffled my hair, then caught her breath against another kick from the baby. “‘Tis a strong child,” she commented with a wry smile. “Stronger than Tabbey, methinks.” The words hung heavy between us, though did neither of us speak them: Pray God ‘tis a sign it will live. Mother sighed, both hands going to the small of her back. “Do thou take as long over the weeding as thou likest. I’ll not stay out with thee in this hot sun, but I trust thee to be obedient to thy father.” And with that, she went back inside—slow, awkward, and clearly in some discomfort, if not outright pain.
I weeded half a row, waiting to see whether Mog or Joan might not be sent out to keep an eye on me. And then, in despite of my mother’s trust and my father’s command, I vaulted the garden gate and set off at a run for John Latimer’s lodgings, at last to give Tom Watson the book for which it seemed possible John had died.
It seemed I spent an insupportable amount of time running to and from John’s lodgings, like that gazehound Father had named me. I moved as fast as I could, in the no doubt forlorn hope that I could be home and back at my weeding before Mother noticed my absence. So focused was I on running, the book held against my ribs by an elbow, that I almost ran down Ginger when he stepped in front of me, waving for my attention. “Kit!”
I slid to a halt, Euripides bumping my ribs. “Ginger, what?”
He beckoned me and stepped down a narrow alley beside the garden of a double-gabled house. I glanced over my shoulder to see if we were observed—subtle, Kittycat—and followed after, trying to look like an apprentice off for the afternoon with never a care in the world. If my face was flaming, I’m sure it was no more than the effect of my headlong flight.
I wondered if he was going to hit me. It was surely no more than I deserved—I thought of Father’s easy assumption that it was I who had murdered John, and his arrogant conviction of why, and of why Tom might have intervened on his, on my behalf—and closed my eyes. God, was everything I felt for Ginger written on my face?
How can a man help what he dreams?
Once we rounded the corner into shadow, Ginger turned to me, not smiling. I gathered up my courage and stammered, “Ginger, I’m sorry—”
“Thy father...” He gestured to my face. “They’re saying he murdered Master Latimer, Kit. Beat him senseless and drowned him in the river.”
“He did no such thing.”
“Thou need’st not defend him,” Ginger said.
I noticed he stayed well back from me and swore inwardly. Never again. I’ll never do such a thing again. God, help me through this, and preserve me from sin, and I’ll serve thee all my days—
“I’d not curse thee for a disobedient son, Kit.”
“No,” I said. “I know. I know he didn’t do it. I can’t say how. In any case, he’s been released.”
“Bound over for trial,” Ginger said. “Not released. Kit, what wilt do if he is hanged?”
I sighed and scrubbed my face with my hands. “Become a cobbler, I suppose.” I thought of apologizing again for kissing him, but the look on his face suggested I might be better not mentioning it. “Marry off my sisters. Take up my father’s habits. Drink—”
“Don’t even joke about it!” He shook his head. “If thou can’st, meet me tonight by the tree. I’ll teach thee what I can. It’s three months to the examination—”
“Ginger....” He smiled at me, and I smiled back, my heart too full for words. And then I remembered Tom, and the book, and the weeding— “Mother! Oh, Ginger, I have to go.”
“Tonight,” he said, as I turned to run.
“Tonight,” I shouted over my shoulder. If I can.
I pelted up the steps to John’s lodging in the half-light, ricocheted off the wall of the landing and made the turn without slowing. It was a miracle in fact that I managed not to trip and fall headfirst over—
“—Tom?”
He lay sprawled on his back on the steps, arms crossed over his face, one leg hitched up and the other flung wide. His hands were smeared and daubed with something dark, and for one terrible instant I thought that he was dead. But more blood, redder, welled from the split knuckles of the right fist, and dead things do not bleed. “God in Heaven. Tom!”
His voice was a little better than a croak, though I heard relief in it. “Young Master Marlowe. I don’t suppose thou could’st trouble thyself to assist me up these steps? They won’t hold still for this poor poet.”
I don’t know how. I got one arm under him, and he clung to my shoulder like Father in one of his kinder drunken moods, swaying from side to side. He was lighter than he looked and he followed orders, or I never would have edged him up the steps. My lungs heaved; I felt the strain in my belly and across my shoulders, and somehow I got him to John Latimer’s door. “Tom, lean on the wall as well while I open this—”
“Key,” he said, and fumbled one from somewhere. He dropped it; I surprised us both by plucking it out of the air on its way down. I got the door open and hustled him inside. In the better light through the open shutters, I winced to see his face.
“Tom, what happened?” God, not Father, please—
“Hast the book?”
“Aye.” I slid him onto John’s bed, and he leaned against the wall as if his neck were made of rubber. “Answer me.” I realized a moment too late that I was ordering a grown man about as if he were Mog—or, worse, Annie—but he didn’t seem to mind.
“I think I met your friend of the other night again.” Tom’s voice wavered between thickness and absolute clarity. I dug the book out of my shirt and tossed it on the bed beside him, and knelt down to pry his boots off. “He thought to beat out of me whatever information they did not get from John before they killed him, I don’t wonder—”
I glanced at his bleeding knuckles again. They were even worse to look at than his face. “You had a fight?”
“I killed him,” he said, and slumped down in the bed in a faint.
#
IT WAS SOME MOMENTS before I could do anything but stand over him and swear, all the worst things I’d ever heard Father say, my voice gone shrill again.
Think, Kittycat. I pressed my fists against my face, not even wincing at the bruises. I had seen no body on the stairs. Had Tom gotten himself back here from somewhere else?
Well, of course, half-wit. Else you would have found both him and the other man here, in John’s room.
I took what felt like my first real breath in some minutes. First things first. I barred the door, dragged Tom around so that his entire length was on the bed, found water and a cloth, and washed the blood off his face and hands.
The water brought him round a little. I said, “Tom, where’s the body?”
His eyes, well, the eye that wasn’t swollen shut already wasn’t focusing on me, or on anything, and I had to swallow hard against panic. “The body, Tom. Where is it?”
“Ditch,” Tom said thickly. “Footpads. T’rrible shame, crime in Cant’b’ry.”
“Tom, please. I have to know—will they find the body? Will they know you killed him?”
“What sort of intelligencer dost take me for, sirrah?” he said with fine, though muddled, indignation. “Rolled in a ditch, poor man. Not even his clothes safe from... from...” And he passed out again.
“Damn thee,” I said passionately. I had wanted only to give him the Euripides and return to my weeding, to be free of this burden. What if his skull was cracked? I knew nothing of sick-nursing. “Tom! Tom!”
He roused, trying to bring his hands up to guard his face. “Tom, ‘tis me, ‘tis Kit. Hast money for a doctor?”
His response terrified me even more than taking him for a corpse had. His hand fastened around my wrist, hard enough to pinch the bones together, and his one good eye opened, glaring straight into mine. “Tell no one.”
“But, Tom—”
“No one. Marianists in Canterbury. Could be anyone. Men of position, John said. Thou must tell no one, Kit, or I shall end like John.”
“But you killed the man—”
Even that snort of exasperation had none of its former force, and his hand relaxed its cruel grip on my wrist as if he were not strong enough to sustain it. “I killed one man. Surely thou thinkst not that there is but one Papist in all of Canterbury. And if thou dost run around saying there’s a man in John Latimer’s room beaten half to death, they’ll know ...”
“Art thou?” Tiny, scared voice.
“What?”
“Beaten half to death?”
“I’ll mend,” he said, as if it were no matter to him an he did not.
“Tom, what must I do? If I mayn’t fetch a doctor...”
“Wilt nurse me thyself? No, I thank thee. I shall do well enough now that I am off those thrice-cursed stairs. All edges, stairs are. You don’t know ‘til you’ve lain on them just how damnably uncomfortable they are.”
For a moment, hope beating brightly, I thought I could believe him, that he was really all right. But then I looked at him again and saw his one good eye roll back in his head as he fainted.
I sat down beside him on the bed, trying to think what to do. Tom was hurt: I didn’t know how badly, but did I dare discount what he said?
Tell no one. And I was already in trouble enough. There was no hoping my absence had gone unnoticed. If I went home, I’d never get out again. Certainly not in time to meet Ginger this night of all nights, and after making such a fool of myself last time I couldn’t leave him waiting in the orchard for a Kit that never showed.
Mother wouldn’t help me. This was too much even to ask of Mog. And I couldn’t take the book home, and I couldn’t leave it with Tom when he was weak as a kitten. Hah! In any case, I couldn’t leave Tom alone. Tell no one.
A lie the size of the cathedral wouldn’t be enough to save me this time.
Well, thou did’st say once thou would’st not mind overmuch if the old bastard disowned thee. Oh, Kittycat, be careful what thou wishst for. I went to build up the fire and rack my brains for anything I could recall from childhood misadventures about the nursing of a banged head. Some little time passed, and I think he slept; at least, he fought the covers and I had to tuck them about his shoulders again and again.
I was warming musty water by the hearth when I heard Tom stirring on the bed again. Leaving John’s single small pot tucked beside the embers, I stood and came back to Tom, who was at least half-awake but shivering frightfully. “Kit?” Feebly, and I knew I’d done the right thing to stay.
“So if my father throws me out of the house, Tom, wilt hire me as thy manservant?” I wasn’t quite sure when we’d become thee and thee, so companionably, but perhaps once you’ve dragged a man bleeding up a flight of stairs ‘tis foolish to cling to formalities.
“Is’t so bad as that?” He pressed tentative fingers to his swollen eye and moaned.
“I’m like as not to find my clothes on the street when I go home,” I admitted. “Actually, no. They wouldn’t waste good cloth on me that they could sell, or remake for my susters.”
I found another rag and soaked it in cold water for his eye; that much, at least, I had experience with. And he seemed clear-headed enough that there was something else I could do for him. “I have your book.”
He took it from me one-handed, balancing it on his knee so that he could run swollen fingers across the cover in disbelief. “Thank God. Open the shutters, would you?”
I had turned away to fetch the warmed water, and hesitated. The shutters were open, the bright afternoon sun streaming in. “Tom—They are open.”
“Oh.” He stopped to consider, frowning. “And thou hast no Greek, to read it to me. And dammit, the list is missing anyway. They must have got that. Useless to them without the book, at least.”
I blinked, pausing with the heavy pot’s handle cutting my hands through the rags I had wrapped around it to stop the heat. “Tom, please tell me thou’rt not raving—”
He stopped suddenly and squinted at my face, as if he realized suddenly that he was sharing the room with a frightened boy and not a fellow Queen’s agent. “Damme, Kit. I’m sorry. I forgot to whom I spoke. John was... John’s been in Canterbury three years, working his way into the confidence of the Marianists. He presented himself to them as a Catholic priest in hiding from the authorities, but he was really a former classmate of mine, a divinity student lately of Oxford.”
A Catholic priest. So of course he could never be seen walking out with a woman. I said, “And someone must have found out he was—”
Tom swore, a quick mutter of misery, and dabbed ineffectually at the eye. I saw the cloth was streaked and clotted, and brought him another. Then I sat down on the edge of John’s bed and set about washing his cuts the way Mother had so often washed mine. The pupil of his good eye had shrunk as if in a dazzling light, and that scared me as well, but he seemed better able to converse, at least. “Working for both sides, aye,” he said. “There were two copies of Euripides. This one here, and another in Oxford. Dost know how a book-code works?”
I opened my mouth. No sound came forth. I closed it and tried one more time. “—no.”
“It is a list of numbers, and each number refers to a page and a line and a word of the book. If two people have the same text, they may thus send messages one to another, and only they—and anyone who knows what book they are using—can ever read the code.” He swung his feet gingerly over the edge of the bed, and I stood ready to catch him if he should faint again, but he merely flinched and put his hands out as if the room spun. He no longer seemed as if he might die at any moment, and the painful anxiety in my chest eased slightly.
“That’s brilliant.” A thousand uses flocked into my brain. I grinned, wondering if Ginger also had a copy of the Plutarch.
“Isn’t it? Well, with thy kind intercession, we now have the book. But we have neither the original message, the altered message, nor John’s list.”
“List? And what do you mean, ‘altered message’?”
“Steady, lad, and I shall tell thee.” His mouth quirked ruefully. “‘Tis a web of intrigue thou hast fallen into and no mistake. The Marianists here and in Oxford have been in league these four years past, working for the benefit of that treacherous Scot. They communicate by means of the code I told you of, and their two copies of this.” He hefted the book in his hand. “Euripides’ Trojan Women. For two and a half years, now, John has been the only one among them, on this end, who can read Greek.”
“So he was their...”
I did not know the word I wanted, or even if there was a word. But Tom nodded and then winced. “Amanuensis. The messages from Oxford came to him. He decoded them from numbers to Greek, and then again from Greek to English. Keeping by a second copy, of course, to give to the next Queen’s man he could. And the same with messages from Canterbury to Oxford.
“They—Mary’s supporters—have been working toward something. I know not what, and has not been my place to ask. But it became needful to them that the head of the Marianists in Oxford and the head of the Marianists in Canterbury should meet, without the intermediary of these pagan Greeks.” He tapped the cover of the book that lay at the center of all my misadventures. “A message was sent from Oxford to Cambridge, appointing a meeting place. John was to prepare a false transcription, to send the Canterbury Papists to a place chosen by the Queen’s spymaster. And then, when I came, he would tell me the true place and give me the book, with his coded list of the Marianists in Canterbury. And thus we could behead two snakes with one blow. Dost see?”
I was not sure I did, but something else was bothering me. “But why would John give the book to me? And in such haste? I stopped in to see him unexpectedly, and he had the book already in a package as if he meant to get it out of the room. And he said he had guests that evening—”
“Guests.” Tom sat forward too quickly, and groaned. I knew exactly how he felt. “Guests, distinctly? The plural?”
I thought back, remembered John’s quick hands, his grin as he teased me. “I am having visitors tonight, he said. I would take oath on it.”
“Good. For it occurs to me, young Master Marlowe, that the mad poet Tom Watson is only one guest.”
“Yes,” I answered. “And thou did’st not come that night at all, or methinks they would not have found John’s body in the.... So the Marianists found him out. And—disposed of him. God have mercy on his soul.” Hastily, I picked up the book again and thumbed through it. “Can’st read it now, Tom?”
He took it out of my hands and squinted gamely, then shook his head. “The letters swim like fishes,” he admitted tiredly. “But I do not think I will die on thee now, if thou hast need to be home to thy family—”
I glanced out the window. It was still a few good hours to dusk, at least. “If I went, I’d never get away again, now. And I have an appointment at sunset.” I sighed, and he met it with a lopsided smile that made him wince again. “So thou hast my company until nightfall, unless thou wouldst toss me into the street.”
“In my state?” He snorted, and I’d not have thought I could be so glad to hear it. “And, besides, I think we’ve gone beyond that.” He leaned back on his pillows. “Don’t let me sleep again, Kit. It’s not healthy for a man struck on the head.”
“What shall we talk about?”
“A fine question to ask of a man with an addled brain.” He waved a hand at me in a feeble parody of one of his usual grand gestures. “Thou shalt decide.”
I thought, and shook my head over topics. I knew what I might have talked with John about, but Tom was an unknown quantity. But he had twice said he was a poet— “Tom?”
“Aye, Kit?”
“What think’st thou of Ovid?”
