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WE HAD NO TIME TO EXAMINE our prize, nor for more than the barest of exchanged whispers: an agreement to meet the next day when and where we could. Then Ginger went off one way, back to his own house—and I breathed a prayer to the night sky that he might return to his own bed safely and with no one the wiser—and I went the other, back to the room which had been John Latimer’s, and which I was coming increasingly to think of as Tom’s. I paused along the way only to retrieve Joan’s—Mog’s—basket from the shadowed stairway where I had hidden it.
As I rounded the turn of the stairs, I saw that the door was open, and my smug pleasure in our successful raid curdled on the instant.
Surely thou thinkst not that there is but one Papist in all of Canterbury.
I did not call his name, although I wanted to. I crept up the last half-flight of stairs, ready at the first hint of a threat to go pelting back down, screaming at the top of my lungs. There might be Marianists in unexpected places, but they could not all be John’s neighbors.
As my head cleared the level of the floor, I saw Tom sprawled in the doorway of the room, face down. But there was no hint of movement within the room, no spreading pool of blood beneath Tom. I crept closer, peered around the door-frame. The room looked just as I had left it, save that half the bed-clothes were on the floor, and Tom Watson was lying across the threshold like a cut-stringed puppet.
“Tom?” I said, almost whispering. Whatever had happened, it must have happened recently enough that no one had either heard him fall or come upon him where he lay. I crept up the stairs and dropped the basket and the precious silk packet within the door, crouching beside the mad poet, Tom Watson.
His good eye flickered open, and I felt weak-limbed with relief. “Kit,” he said, a drowned mumble. “Thou wert gone. John was gone. Did not come back. I came to search for thee.” And, as plaintive as a child, “I can’t find John anywhere.”
Oh sweet Christ he was worse. Timidly, I touched his forehead; he was burning with fever. “Tom? Tom, canst walk, dost think?”
“I know not. Kit, is it thee?” One swollen-knuckled hand groped forward; I stretched my own out to meet it. He gave an odd little sigh of relief. “Art not an apparition then. I have not got thee killed.”
“No, Tom, not at all. But thou must get up.” I had no idea how to begin, but finally wormed my way under his outstretched arm and heaved up with all the strength in my shoulders. Something wet and hot soaked my shirt. Blood, I thought: my scabs had broken open. He did his best to help me, but he was very muddled in his wits. Twice on the way back to the bed, he called me John.
As I dropped him onto the bed, with all the grace of a side of beef, a horrid thought struck me. I had been so concerned with the blood on his face and hands that I had not thought to check for other injuries. But surely he would have told me... The thought trailed off as I contemplated Tom Watson’s stubborn, stubbled, unhandsome face. No, he would not have told me, not if he felt himself responsible for me, as clearly he did. I closed and barred the door, then returned to the bed. Grimly, I chivvied him into sitting up again and wrestled him out of his shirt.
It gave me a new appreciation for my mother and my elder sisters, who did this with Anne and Tabbey every single day. Tom wanted to help, but could not seem to remember where his hands were, nor from one minute to the next what it was he was trying to help me do. We were both sweating freely by the time the shirt came off and he flopped back down onto the bed. I thought hopefully that I remembered sweating was supposed to be a good sign in fevers.
I lit another taper and brought it over to the bed. The cause of Tom’s fever was not far to seek: a long scabbed-over gash along his ribs, not deep, but crusted and inflamed.
“Why didst not tell me?” I demanded in exasperation. Tom made no answer, nor had I expected one.
I did know what to do here—in fact was more comfortable with this than with the pinpricked pupil of his one good eye and his dizziness. I rooted out John’s wine, of which he had little and that not the best, and washed Tom’s injury out, using a clean pillow-slip I found in a cupboard. Tom hissed with pain, but did not fight me. Before long, he passed out again, and I thought it most likely a mercy. Water. He needs water. How long did I leave him here without water? There was a pitcher and a pail; I got both, trotted to the public fountain down a block, filled them, hauled them up the stairs with my shoulders screaming, and wet my feet thoroughly as I fumbled the door. I couldn’t think how to get it into him except trickling it into his mouth from a rag, and I stroked his throat the way you do a nursing kitten’s to make him swallow.
“I know not what else to do,” I said when I had done, though I knew he did not hear me. His earring gleamed among his tangled dark curls like a reproach. He whimpered, though, and seemed to sleep easier, although his fingers trembled as if he reached out to something to take hold. “The wound is not rotten yet, and I will pray for thee that it does not become so. But I am no doctor—have only the little midwife’s lore that my mother got from her grandmother.” I laid my hand on his forehead, praying it was cooler. I couldn’t tell. “Tom, please, I don’t want thee to die.”
My voice thickened and cracked on the last word; I folded to my knees beside the bed and wept into the blanket, while Tom Watson slept, unheeding.
Eventually I slept as well, fitfully and troubled. Just before sunrise, however, the bells of the cathedral ringing lauds opened my eyes wide. I sat upright on the narrow boards, feeling for the Euripides and the hard-won oiled silk package I had left in my basket by the door. If I couldn’t take Tom to a doctor because of the Marianists in Canterbury, I would have to rid Canterbury of Marianists if I was going to save his life.
I remembered Ginger’s voice in the darkness, It could be anybody.
But I knew somebody it couldn’t be. Somebody who could read Greek, and whose loyalty to the Queen and England was unquestionable. And as soon as I figured out how an undergrown cobbler’s boy could secure an audience to see him, I was going to see Edmund Grindal, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and throw my sorry self upon his mercy.
#
ALL THAT MORNING WHILE Tom slept—tossing fitfully but not waking—I imagined ways I might reach the Archbishop. Some were merely implausible, others outright ridiculous, but they all fell in the end to the same flaw: they required me to convince the Archbishop’s secretary that my business was to the Archbishop alone. Even with the clean clothes Joan had brought me from Mog, I knew I would be a disreputable figure and I knew how the conversation would run, so distinctly that by midday it was going round and round in my head like a donkey at a millwheel:
Please, I need to speak to the Archbishop.
Aye, lad? (this said with tremendous skepticism) And what might be thy name?
Christopher Marlowe.
Aye, John Marlowe’s son, that will be?
... Yes.
And then a sneering look and a more or less polite reminder that the Archbishop was a very busy man and had no time for the troublesome sons of drunken, murderous cobblers. And I would be out on the street again with every passing hour making it more likely that Tom would die and Arnell would hang my father and so conceal his own treason and guilt. I opened the oiled-silk packet, in the hopes that perhaps instead of the cipher, Arnell had hidden the transcription. But ‘twas a foolish hope, as I knew before I did it. The paper was exactly what I had surmised: a list of numbers in a strong, crabbed secretary-hand. I had little difficulty matching the numbers to the words in the Euripides, but the exercise did me no good except in occupying my mind.
I folded the paper inside the book—where, by the creases, it had been before—and wrapped book and paper together in the oiled silk. And then, from a growing feeling of anxiety and helplessness, I tucked the packet in my shirt, simply because if it was there anyone wishing to take it would have to fight me for it.
And then I returned to the bedside and gave Tom more water and sat beside him, wishing I knew better what to do, wishing I knew what signs I ought to look for that he was either recovering or failing. His breathing seemed level, and when I lifted the covers to look at his wound there was no pus and it didn’t smell of rot. I took that to be a good sign, and trickled more water down his throat when he half-roused.
And all the while I hoped against hope that our enemies, knowing that John Latimer was dead, having searched the place already, would not think to look twice where they had looked once for the Queen’s men.
A soft, creaking step on the stairs brought me from his bedside. I crept to the door and pressed myself against the wall beside it, wishing I’d had the presence of mind to grab a fireplace poker. The tap was soft, though—not the landlord’s or the magistrate’s hammering—and followed by a hesitant whisper. “Kittycat?”
Moggy. Oh, thank God. And then a startled flash of wonder—what was she doing there? I unbarred the door in a trice and jerked it open, realizing only as my hand was on the latch that anybody could be behind her—Father, Arnell, anyone.
She was alone, and clutching a bundle to her chest, and shaking as I had never seen her shake before. “Ginger Claybourne told me where to find thee,” she said before I could ask, and shoved the thing in her hands at me. I took it reflexively—it was lumpy and heavy for its size—and then she looked past me and her eyes widened. “Kit, what hast thou done?”
I stood aside from the door to let her enter, and barred it behind her. “Why is it,” I said crossly, “that whenever there is trouble in Canterbury of any sort, my loving family is the first to assume I am at the heart of it?”
“Because betimes thou art,” she answered tartly. “Is this thy Tom? The one who came to Father’s assistance?”
“Aye, but he’s not my Tom—”
She made a little sound of dismissal between her teeth and moved toward the bed, already rolling up the sleeves of her smock. “And thou hast been nursing him— Kit. Is this what thou would’st not tell Father?”
“Aye.” Half the truth, anyway. “The men who killed John set upon him, and may still be hunting him. He won’t see a surgeon, and—”
She snorted. “A surgeon would just bleed him and dose him with quicksilver, and he’d probably be dead before dawn.” It gave me a strange, uneasy feeling, watching my sister strip the blankets down and handle Tom Watson’s pale flesh with cool competence. A combination of relief that someone was here who knew what to do, anger at my own helplessness, and a desire to go and knock Tom’s wrist out of her hands as she picked it up and held it to her cheek, checking—I thought—his fever and his pulse.
I started forward and stopped again, my fingers digging into the rags wrapped around that bundle. Whatever that thing was, that thing that wanted me to pick Mog up by the elbows and shake her, it wasn’t me. And even if she could best me in any wrestling match we’d ever tried—
I cannot control thee if thou wilt not control thyself. As Father would not? Mother, I’m sorry—
“Mog,” I said, when she had been bent over Tom for several minutes, humming softly to herself. “Will he live?”
“Only God can say,” she answered. “But I will do what I can. Bring me the pitcher, would’st thou?”
I did, and set the bundle down on the bed and sat beside her. Tom never roused while she tended him, but I twisted my hands in my lap when I wasn’t tearing rags for her. When I was done, she made me take my shirt off too, and inspected my welts, hissing more than she had over the gash along Tom’s side. No comment did she make, however, when I held the silk-wrapped book in my lap the while.
She was half done cleaning those when I thought to ask, “Mog, why did’st thou come?”
“Mother sent bread and cheese for thee, and a little coin.” She sighed and sat back. “This is healing as well as might be. Thou might’st have a scar or two, but nothing worse than thou hast already.”
“Thou did’st not deign to ask Ginger Claybourne where to find me merely to bring me a few silver pennies and a loaf—”
“Nay,” she said, and grinned. “Kit, Mother’s forbidden Father share her bed unless Father relents of thee. She’s sleeping in thy room, and she will not speak to him except in dutiful answer to a direct question. It’s ‘Yes, husband. No, husband. As you will it, husband.’ He’s beside himself. Thou could’st come home—” She picked up my clean shirt from the basket, and then frowned at me. “Thou’lt wash thyself before thou dost dress, I think.”
Arguing with Mog was if anything slightly less useful than arguing with Mother. I did as she bid, and permitted her to help me with the shirt and fuss over the rose-thorn scratches on my hands. “If I came home, he’d simply forbid me this and forbid me that again, Mog. And I would defy him, and he would beat me, and the world would go on as it has. Perhaps if I win the scholarship—” I shrugged, and it hurt.
“Kit—” She shook her head and moved to sit on the floor beside my feet, leaning her head against my knee. “I do miss thee. And Mother misses thee more. Tabbey asks where thou art a hundred times a day. And Father, for all his wonted temper, simply sulks and can barely be moved to yell at the cat. But thou wilt do as thou wilt. And I do not think in any case that thou can’st leave thy friend tonight.”
Which was, of course, the flaw in my plan to beard the Archbishop in his den. And Mog the potential solution, if I could convince her of my need.
“Moglet,” I said, “Mog-of-my-heart, best and dearest of my sisters—”
She looked up at me, laughing. “What dost want, Kittycat?”
“To make thee laugh,” I said promptly. I crouched down beside her. “Mog, couldst thou stay with Tom a while? I needs must go out—”
“Then thy friend is not the only reason thou hast defied Father.”
“Not... not entirely. But ‘tis his business I must be about. I swear it, and he would say the same did you ask him.”
“I’ll do no such thing!” she said, shocked into a moment’s primness. “He needs sleep more than he needs to be embroiled in thy mad schemes.”
“Mog, I swear, ‘tis not a scheme. ‘Tis deadly urgent, and I would not leave Tom were it not.” I stopped, gulped, and spoke the truth: “I must go, whether thou stay’st with him or not.”
She looked at me, long and thoughtfully. I held my peace, for I could say nothing more to persuade her, and I knew better than to try to bully her. And she knew—I could see it in her face—that I was in earnest. She said, “I did put about, with Mother’s connivance, that I was going to visit my gossip, Anne Niall—and don’t make that face, Kit. I’ve told thee before—”
“‘Tis no harm in Anne Niall. Aye, thou hast.” And in truth, horse-faced Anne with her grating laugh was far better than most of Joan’s friends. “No matter, Moggy. Go on.”
“Well,” she said with a sniff, “‘tis but that they will not look for me again before five of the clock. So if thou must go junketing about, I will stay.”
“Thank thee, Moggy. I said it in jest, but I mean it as well. Thou art the best of my sisters.” I did not ask her what she would have done with those free hours. If she had not told me her private plans all the times I had teased her about it before, she would not tell me now. And Mog was not Joan; whatever it was she did, I did not fear trouble would come of it. Or, at least, not of that sort.
“Kit,” she said.
“Aye?”
“Comb thy hair before thou goest.”
#
WE DID NOT WORSHIP at the Cathedral—Father said the Archbishop was too High Church for the likes of us—but I knew my way about the grounds as well as any schoolboy. All Canterbury swarmed with pilgrims, and pilgrims sometimes had coin for boys who gave directions, or ran errands for them.
King’s School was not far, and I gave its green precincts and initial-carved trees a longing glance as I went by, along with a silent promise. God helps those that shift themselves, I thought, and dusted the front of my jerkin a little.
The cathedral looks like I imagine the white cliffs at Dover must, if you were standing at the bottom; perhaps God likes his houses grand. Not that it’s white, precisely, but it’s not anything other than white either, and the lead roofs catch the sun and dazzle your eye so all you see is the light and the spires, and the shadows of the flying buttresses moving like the hands of a clock as the sun passes over.
Well, it’s as fitting a house for God as any, I thought, and pressed the book against my side with my elbow and went inside like I belonged.
After the sunlight, the shadows inside the door blinded me for a moment. I blinked and scrubbed my eyes, expecting I knew not what. Bustle, perhaps. Throngs of priests and worshippers, voices, music. An Archbishop, hopefully.
There was nothing in the cathedral except silence and light, and a few strayed doves wheeling in the endless spaces overhead.
Somehow, the quiet cowed me as no humming crowds could have. And who dost thou think thou art, Christopher Marlowe? A cobbler’s boy, a failed apprentice, a useless good-for-nothing?
“Someone with a need,” I whispered, and walked down the north aisle as swiftly as I could manage without leaving my dignity behind. If the Archbishop isn’t in the Cathedral, then where would he be?
The answer was simple, and frightening: in the Archbishop’s palace, of course.
Praying that no priest would notice me, I passed the stone which marked the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, and wondered as I always did whether King Henry had truly meant him to die or truly had not. The cloister lay just ahead; I clung to the walls and the shadows—all the while trying to seem as if I did not skulk, but went about some lawful errand—and passed through the door they call Becket’s door and quickly out of the Cathedral and into the narrow space that served as a passageway between it and the Archbishop’s palace.
Which presented another set of problems entirely, because I did not know where to begin to seek the man I needed. My heart pounded in my throat hard enough to make me dizzy. I slipped through the entryway soft as the cat my mother named me, through two empty rooms, and found myself at the back of a hall. A table was set for supper with a great many things that I had never seen—candelabra glittering in gilt and silver, plates and bowls that shone in the afternoon light. There were glasses arrayed on the sideboard, with cloths beside them for wiping them clean when each guest had finished his libation. It looked as though a grand party were expected.
Perhaps I can catch him coming down to dinner. But no, Mog was due home around sunset, and I had been unbrotherly enough to her of late. I chewed my lip and squeezed the book against my side for courage, and then I took a deep breath and went looking for the stairs.
It wasn’t as hard to stay hidden as I might have feared; the palace was an echoing vault, and quite unlike my own small house with the seven of us packed in tight enough to squeak. The rushes over the old stone floors were fresh and strewn with herbs. They cushioned the sound of my footsteps admirably, and a sweet smell rose when I crushed them under foot.
The walls were decorated in ways I had never imagined; painted and embossed leather covered some, and on others was hung coffered paneling carved with coats of arms and faces in relief. The light was dim in the shuttered rooms, and I could easily tell when a chamber was occupied before I entered by the brightness around the door and the voices of servants at work.
The Archbishop was nowhere on the ground floor. I hesitated for a long moment at the foot of the stairs, but remembered Mog sitting patiently by Tom. I could not repay her by failing through mere cowardice. I gritted my teeth and started up.
I was halfway to the top of the stairs when a figure appeared there, a dark shape against the window, and started down. To turn and run—my first impulse—would be to confess guilt. I raised my chin and kept going.
It almost worked. We were only one step apart when he reached out and caught my elbow. “I don’t recognize you. What’s your business in the Archbishop’s Palace?”
“I have a message for the Archbishop,” I said.
“And thou’rt just wandering around with thy message looking for him?”
Well, yes, actually, I am. I gave a little gasp, as if his grip on my arm was hurting me; his hand relaxed, and I broke free, ducking around him and up the stairs.
“Why, thou little—Come back here!” Not an you paid me, I thought.
No time now for stealth or subtlety. I ran from room to room of the first floor, disturbing servants and well-dressed gentlemen, but not finding the Archbishop. And all the while, my pursuer shouted behind me, causing more and more of those servants and well-dressed gentlemen to try to catch me. I had never imagined that a childhood spent fleeing older and bigger boys could prove so useful.
But even the Devil’s luck runs out sooner or later. So says my mother, and in this instance it proved true enough. One of the servants had the wit to block my path rather than trying to lay hands on me, and I went sprawling, adding more bruises to my already extensive collection. A moment later, the servant I had met on the stair was dragging me up by my collar, shaking me as a terrier shakes a rat and demanding at the top of his lungs to know what I had stolen and where I had hidden it.
“I didn’t!” I protested, and there went my voice again, shooting up into treble like a child’s. “I did tell you the truth! I have a message!”
Voices on all sides accusing me of lying, and I braced myself for another thrashing.
And then a new voice, trained to carry but with a quaver that made me think the speaker was not entirely well: “And what, pray tell, is the meaning of this most unseemly noise?”
Oh God in Hell. The Archbishop.
I looked up slowly, unable to keep my shoulders from rising around my ears. I looked like a truant schoolboy—I wished I were a truant schoolboy—and I knew it. “Just a sneak-thief, your Grace,” the servant who had me by the collar said. I fended his partner’s hands away as best I could, but he prodded and poked me, his hands quickly finding the bulk of the book under my shirt.
“A thief, is it?” The Archbishop came closer; he hobbled like an old man, I saw, and his back was hunched enough to show the thinning of white hair. He was dressed in simple black, a priest’s or scholar’s robe, and not the elaborate vestments of purple and gold I had envisioned. “What’s he stolen, Peter?”
Peter was pulling my shirt-tails out of my breeches while two more restrained my hands. A moment later he held the book up in the dim light of the drawing room. “A book, your Grace.”
“I didn’t stea— ow!” One of the men who held me fetched me a sharp blow across the shoulders. It caught squarely in the middle of one of Father’s welts. The pain silenced me, bringing tears to my eyes.
“Look at him faking,” the man who held the book—Peter—said. “James barely tapped the young villain—” I closed my eyes. I’m sorry, Tom. I’m sorry, Mother, Moggy, Ginger—
“Let me see this stolen property,” the Archbishop said. I glanced up. He was looking at me, however, not the book in Peter’s hands, and the line between his sharp pale eyes was deeper than it had been. My heart beat faster; I felt it in my throat.
He held out his hand and Peter gave him the book with a little bow and a scrape of a boot. He began to unfold the wrappings. Surely he would see the book was not his. Surely he would see it was not stolen.
“Your Grace?” My captor spoke.
The Archbishop looked up. “What is it, James?”
“The lad’s bleeding, your Grace.”
I’ve died and gone to Hell. Any minute now, they would pull up my shirt and see the welts, and then Peter, who had already decided my guilt, would ask— “Who art thou, sirrah?”
He said it so close to the tone I had imagined that it took a moment to understand that he had actually spoken. “Chri—Christopher Marlowe, sir.”
The name meant nothing to the Archbishop, thank God. But I saw Peter’s eyes narrow. “John Marlowe’s son.”
“Aye.” I closed my eyes to keep the tears inside, but I felt them track my cheeks nonetheless.
“His father’s a cobbler, your Grace,” Peter supplied, when the Archbishop stayed expectantly silent. “And stands accused of the murder of John Latimer the scholar.”
“I see.” Silence, and then— “Dost read Greek, lad? Christopher?”
“No, si— No, your Grace.”
“And yet thou hast a book in that language, and I know it was not taken from this house. Curious.” He paused, and I heard pages turning slowly. “Why hast thou brought this book here?”
My stammer was fading; I wondered if I were too frightened to stutter now. “Because you read Greek, your Grace.”
He sighed. “And thy father is a murderer.”
“No, your Grace. He... he stands accused. He is not guilty.”
“And thou knowest this for fact? Interesting.” More rustling. More pages. I dared to peek, and he was holding the book out at arm’s length, as if farsighted with age. There were spectacles hanging in a case about his neck, but he appeared to have forgotten them.
“Your Grace,” I said, daring greatly, “I came to bring you a message.”
James shook me, but not hard; I think he had pity for the blood that stuck my shirt to my back. Peter was less gentle, ready with a cuff. “Arrant lout. How darest thou creep into God’s house like a thief and importune God’s servant?”
Oh, that tongue of mine. I raised my chin to look black-haired Peter square in the eye and snapped, “He’s the Queen’s servant, too. And so was the man in whose name I come.”
That brought them all up short, and the Archbishop lowered the book, remembered his spectacles, and fumbled them on to inspect me carefully. “And whose name dost thou come in, lad?”
“John Latimer,” I said as quickly as I could, and held my breath.
“The murder victim.”
“The man whose book that was,” I offered. James shook me a little. It was nothing to one of Father’s shakes. “Your Grace.”
The Archbishop Grindal looked from me, to the book, to Peter, to James, to me again, and then very casually and with an exasperated lift of his shoulders, up to God. “Turn the lad loose, James.”
“Your Grace,” James said, and obeyed.
“Your Grace,” Peter interrupted, “he’s a drunken cobbler’s brat—”
The Archbishop removed that pale, hypnotic gaze from my face long enough to glance at his unruly servant. “Our Lord was a carpenter’s son,” he said gently, “and angels often come in strange guises. Come along, lad, if thou’rt not too bloodied to walk.”
“Your Grace,” I said, and tugged my shirt down as best I could without rooting around inside my breeches to re-tuck it. “Thank you.”
Peter’s eyes were hotter on my back than the blood as I followed the Archbishop’s slow pace out of the room.
