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BY THE TIME WE REACHED the river outside the walls, it was raining. Spring and high ride had swollen the banks, and at least one young tree leaned dangerously over the water, its roots undercut by the flood. Ginger walked silently beside me; I wanted more than anything to reach out and take his hand and didn’t dare do it while anyone might be watching.
I wondered how many there would be. Arnell and his barrel-chested helpmate, I wagered. I thought about the marginalia in Tom’s book—there had been so many notations, but perhaps not all of them were names—and clutched the book in my hand tighter inside its oilcloth cover.
It was the cover boards of the Plutarch Ginger had given me, with such random pages as I could salvage from the mess in John’s room stuffed between them to give them bulk.
But wrapped up in silk, and without its own pages, it looked very much like the Euripides I no longer had. I’d even taken a clean quarter-sheet of paper and scribbled a nonsense list of numbers on it that might pass muster in the dark, although I’d had to recut the broken nib of John’s quill to manage it.
We moved as quietly as two boys in the darkness can, until the cold rain down my neck started making me sneeze. It was no night for Tom to be out in, sick as he was, and I had to remind myself not to fret for him lest I forgot to listen ahead in the dark.
“Ginger, you should stay hidden. They’ll be expecting only me. When I go in to give them the book, you must get Tom and my sister free. You’ll probably have to carry Tom, the two of you.”
He nodded, though I did not think he liked my plan overmuch. I might have been reluctant to risk being seen, but he kissed me on the cheek before he dropped back. I heard his footsteps growing more distant, and then I was alone in the rain. My eyes had adapted well enough that I could see the shapes of trees and the smoother blackness of the water down the bank. I wondered how I was intended to find the villains who had Mog and Tom—and how I was intended to fight them, moreover, given Mog was twice the wrestler I was, and with a fierce uppercut to boot. I wondered if God loved the Marianists better, after all, or if he even noticed our little wars. Mother would say he’d see a sparrow fall.
God protect me and those I love.
Does God listen when we pray for selfish things?
He must, because it was as I opened my eyes again and resumed walking that I saw the flickering orange light of a shielded lantern through the trees.
“Fiat lux,” I whispered. Let there be light. “Just follow the light.”
I knew very well that as soon as they had the book in their possession, they’d probably kill Mog and me and take Tom off to see what information they could wring from him if he recovered. I didn’t like to think of what methods they might employ, but given what they’d done to Tom and John and me, and what they’d been willing to do to my father, I didn’t think they’d stop at much.
They’d picked a good spot, too, in the middle of a clear space with no bushes around it to hide my coming. They must have known the light would draw me like a moth.
I wondered what had become of Ginger. I hoped he would be ready. The rain redoubled, turning the soft spring grass slick as black ice underfoot, and I told myself that I had hesitated enough. Surely even John couldn’t have faulted my preparations tonight.
That is to say, if I had managed to author a plan better than ‘walk in and distract them while Ginger rescues Mog and Tom.’
I had no cloak or hood, and cold spring rain streaked my hair into my eyes. A night bird called, the disconsolate hoot of an owl. A bird of ill omen: Father said they portended death, and I wished it had stayed home in its dry warm nest and left the night to such fools as were out in it.
I hunched my shoulders against the downpour and started forward.
They were waiting for me when I came up to the edge of the lantern’s dim circle of light. Three men bunched within the glow. I saw no sign of Mog and Tom. I hoped they were off in the darkness and not dead in the river already. I prayed they had Tom, at least, covered with a cloak and out of the rain. If they want to question him, they’ll have to keep him alive, won’t they?
I recognized Magistrate Arnell under an oiled leather hood. The other two men I did not know, but they looked capable and strong. “I’m pleased thou did’st choose to come,” Arnell said, when I came no closer. “Dost have the book?”
I had to buy time for Ginger to get Mog and Tom away. I held up the package. “Where is my sister?”
Arnell half-raised his hand, a gesture followed by muffled cursing from the darkness, and the sounds of an abbreviated scuffle. Then Mog’s voice, dignified and angry: “Here, Kit.”
She didn’t intend me to hear the fear, but I did. “Mog, is Tom with you?”
“Aye,” she said. “He’s not—” Her voice ended in a mumble, and I knew someone had clapped a hand across her mouth. He’s not breathing? He’s not hurt? There’s a guard with them, at least one. Be careful, Ginger.
“Let them go,” I said, “and I’ll give you the book.”
“Give me the book and I’ll let them go.”
I smiled, wide enough, I hoped, to be seen in the darkness, and took three or four steps to the side. “Let them go now or I’ll throw the book in the river.” I could see it, shining just down the bank. An easy toss—
“Kit!” Mog, frantic with warning, and then a grunt that wasn’t her. Arnell glanced over his shoulder and then lunged for me. One of his henchmen followed while the other turned toward Mog.
Arnell was twice my size.
Clutching the book to my chest, I ran right towards him.
He hadn’t been expecting it. I ducked under Arnell’s outstretched arm and sidestepped the other man as he slipped on the grass. It didn’t help me any either, as my ankle went sideways and my frantic dive to overturn the lantern became an undignified sprawl. I heard more yelping in the darkness, followed by silence, and hoped that wasn’t Ginger’s voice that cut off so abruptly.
The fall knocked the wind out of me, a long painful gasp that didn’t end until I thought my chest would collapse. The book went skittering away, out of the circle of light. I shoved myself to my knees; my vision went black at the edges and my elbows turned to rubber, the welts on my back protesting the action. The next I knew Arnell was hauling me to my feet by my hair, and I couldn’t get my knees to work.
“Get the book, Sanderson,” he said, twisting my arm behind my back so that I went to my knees again. For the first time in my life, I wished I had my father’s size and strength. At least thou hast not his looks neither, Kittycat.
Sanderson, who must also have fallen, got heavily to his feet and walked past us.
“Now then,” Arnell said calmly, “we’ll see thee and thy sister dealt with and be on our way.”
“I brought you the book,” I interrupted. “At least let Mog go. She knows nothing.”
“She knows my face,” he said. “I don’t like it, lad. But I like seeing Catholics burned for their religion even less, and the red-headed bitch on the throne hasn’t put a stop to that.”
“And if Mary takes her place, she’ll burn Protestants,” I argued. “As Queen Elizabeth’s Catholic sister did before I was born.”
“Not if they convert back to the true faith when Mary is Queen,” he said, and fumbled at his belt. I heard the whisper of steel on leather as his knife cleared the sheath. “I really am sorry about this, lad.”
I wanted to argue that if he was sorry about it, he oughtn’t to do it. Wanted to argue that if conversion was so small a problem, why shouldn’t he become Protestant then, rather than resorting to treason against England’s lawful Queen? Protestant or Catholic, it seemed such a small thing to war over, to go to the stake over—
—until I remembered that I, too, had been willing to burn. Not for God, but for Ginger. And then there didn’t seem to be anything that I could say that would be worth saying.
The knife blade nicked my throat. I admit my cowardice: I held my breath and closed my eyes.
“Master Arnell,” the man whom he had called Sanderson said, “I don’t think this is the book we was wanting.”
The knife blade mercifully dropped away, but Arnell’s hand jerked my arm so viciously that I could not repress a yelp.
“What dost mean, Sanderson?”
“‘Tis no book at all,” Sanderson said, coming back into the lantern light. His face was a study. “‘Tis but boards and some papers.”
Arnell had dropped the knife; he dragged my head back by the hair. “Art playing with me, boy? This is no game.”
“No,” I said, wheezing a little with the angle he had my head at. “It is no game, and I am not playing. You must think I’m a fool.”
“What do you mean?” A magistrate frowning down on me, and I cared not. The more William Arnell frowned, the happier I would be.
“Only a fool would bring you the book, knowing how reckless you are with men’s lives.” As if for punctuation, outside the circle of lantern-light, a man screamed. Long experience of my sister, some of it painful, suggested that she had kneed him in the groin. Arnell’s head snapped around, his grip slackening with confusion. I flung myself sideways, rolling, scrambling out of the light—anything to make them come after me, chase me, to buy time for Mog and Ginger to get Tom to safety.
For religiously-minded men, their language was shocking.
I wondered if this was the clearing where they’d killed John, wondered with a sick clench of my stomach how long it had taken. I’d said casually a hundred times, Oh, Father beat me half to death, and never considered my words, how close they were to truth, how far from a lie. Branches whipping wet leaves in my face, men cursing and floundering through the darkness behind me, I remembered Father’s apprentice Lactantius Presson. He had been beaten half to death, and Mother had said once, when she was near-term with Tabbey and exhausted, that it was only the mercy of God that had kept that boy from dying. Wilt God give such mercy to thee, Kittycat? Thinkst thyself deserving?
God’s mercy depends not on deserving, I said grimly to myself, or John Latimer would live now, and John Marlowe be rotting in his grave.
The Stour was very near, and my fear of Arnell began to butt heads with my fear of the river. I could not swim. With the darkness and the rising Stour’s currents, even were those near me friends, I would be drowned before they could find me. And Arnell would doubtless hold me under, given the chance. My breath sobbed in my throat, and though I knew Arnell and Sanderson would hear it too I could not quiet it. I stumbled over a root in the darkness and skidded, caught myself against a tree before I could pitch down a bank that water lapped at the bottom of. My father’s voice in my head called me weakling and coward, and just then someone’s hand caught my arm.
I dug my heels in, throwing my weight back, and swung myself round with all my strength. Like Annie’s whipping top, and I doubt you could have found a more surprised man in Christendom than I when it worked. My assailant—Arnell, I thought, for he was not heavy enough to be Sanderson—went flailing forward and crashed into the tree, the same tree that had just saved me from the Stour, with a thick, ugly sound. He slid to the ground and was still.
I stood, panting and rubbing my arm, and became aware that Mog was calling my name, “Kit! Kit!”
“Mog?” I called back.
“Kit, art well?”
“I’ll do. What of thee?”
“We have three of the four, but, Kit, we cannot find the magistrate.”
“Don’t worry about Arnell,” I said and had to struggle for a moment with hysterical laughter. “I... I’ve got him.”
“Thou?”
“Moggin, ‘tis rude to sound so shocked that thy elder brother can take care of himself.”
Which is when I heard a half-familiar voice bellowing “Young Master Marlowe!” through the rain. So then I had to go out to meet the Archbishop’s servant James, the doctor he had fetched for Tom, and the stout churchdeacon they’d picked up along the way after finding John’s room in a shambles and Arnell’s note on the tabletop.
