Five years, seven months, and eight days after he left Whitehall and the ghost of Mary Stuart behind, Kit passed through the gates of Canterbury in high style, on the back of a horse he’d paid two shillings to borrow for the day. It had been an extravagant expense, and he was quite sure the carrier had fleeced him, taking him—correctly—for a Londoner who wouldn’t know a fair price if he saw one. Still, as he watched the children playing near Saint Peter’s Well drop their ball and crane their necks up at him in amazement, he felt that every penny had been well spent. He nodded at the children, who retreated into a tangle of whispers and youthful excitement Kit remembered from his own younger days. Who was that well-dressed man on the fine horse, riding through these streets as if he owned them? A visiting lord? A foreign ambassador?
Not quite, he wanted to tell them. Only Kit Marlowe, the most famous poet in all of London.
He dismounted near his father’s shop and tied the horse at the post outside, paying a passing youth a penny to supply the beast with water. That done, he leaned against the post himself, looking up at the house with some satisfaction. There were ancillary benefits to literary fame, which the Marlowes realized each time Kit sent them a cut of his profits from a play he’d staged. Tamburlaine—finished, revised, and onstage at last—had replaced the shop’s long-broken window. Then the sequel to Tamburlaine, dashed off as a stopgap to sate the crowds while he scrambled for something original; not his best work, but it had permitted the Marlowes to own the shop outright. Then a bloody tale of deception in Malta, so wildly irreligious that Ned Alleyn, the company’s lead actor, had jokingly offered to perform a ritual cleansing of the stage. Katherine would have denounced the play’s themes if she’d known them, but all she knew were the fine feather bed and three sets of winter clothes The Jew of Malta had paid for.
You built this, he thought as he surveyed the shop, stronger and more solid with each passing year. You and your words, you built this.
Meg and her husband had a home of their own, and his father made a point of being away each time Kit paid a visit, but the rest of the family greeted him eagerly as he entered their lodgings. Anne and Dorothy had been not quite ten when Kit left for Cambridge; now they were bright, ambitious girls of about twenty, with a renewed interest in their extravagant elder brother now that London’s crowds knew his name. Little Thomas—not so little anymore, as the youngest Marlowe stood three inches taller than Kit—shook his hand with a man’s grip, then sat beside him at the table and peppered him with a child’s profusion of questions.
“Is it true they played Malta in front of the queen?” Thomas said. “What did she say? Will she give you a knighthood for it?”
The notion was enough to make Kit laugh. “People like us don’t get knighted, little brother. But Ned told me she didn’t fall asleep, which means she liked it well enough.”
“But you were introduced at court, surely?” Dorothy asked.
“The actors went to court. I’ve only ever met the queen’s secretary, and I doubt you’d like him.”
“Dora, your brother won’t get you a place at court, so don’t ask him,” Katherine said from near the fire, where she sat working the heel of a stocking and watching her children like they themselves were a stage production. “Christopher’s already given us more than he can afford to, I’m sure.”
Dorothy blushed, but Kit shoved her playfully in the shoulder. He was awful with finances, as Tom never tired of reminding him—money isn’t inexhaustible, love, someday the play won’t land, there’s a thing called “economizing”—but after more than two decades of thrift, the luster of spending shone bright. How could anyone expect him to be responsible with money when irresponsibility was so satisfying?
“Don’t worry about that,” Kit said. “There’s more to come, which is what I came to tell you. I have a patron now, you see.”
Anne received this as if Kit had come into possession of the Holy Grail. “How?”
“Surely you know your brother’s a genius,” Kit said, then at Anne’s exasperated expression, amended. “In all honesty, I hardly know myself.”
Kit might be the brilliant star of London’s theaters now, but he hadn’t had an auspicious beginning. Securing an introduction to Philip Henslowe, impresario at the Rose theater, had taken a week of cajoling and shameless flattery, and even then he’d only earned a probationary place among the company’s stable of poets. But Kit knew Tamburlaine was good, and London saw it for what it was worth. Packed houses week after week, until Kit started to see members of the audience, groundlings and galleries alike, murmuring the words along with the actors. And now, after The Jew of Malta had played its turn at court, the impossible had happened: Lord Strange, the company’s patron, had written to Henslowe, offering to fund Kit’s future works personally. Even after five years earning a living with his pen, it all felt like a dream that might be snatched away at any time.
“A patron is quite something,” Katherine said, with her usual equanimity. He could have said he’d conquered all of Greece, or that he’d finally learned to make a proper buttonhole, and in either case Katherine would reply, That’s quite something. “You’ll stay for supper tonight? Nothing grand, but—”
“If it’s with you, it’s grand enough,” he said. It never failed to stun him how much easier it was to be with his family when another, more comfortable world waited to welcome him back afterward. “And Meg?”
Katherine hesitated, and Kit didn’t ask why. He scarcely saw his oldest sister now, their communication dwindling as his financial means increased. Privately, he believed Meg’s husband was to blame. William Bradley wasn’t the type to accept help from a man he deemed beneath him, and Meg had little choice but to avoid the people he told her to avoid. Kit knew he should write to her, and promised himself he would the moment he returned to London, as he had promised himself many times, to no effect.
“Never mind,” he said, waving off an explanation. “I’m as happy to spend an evening with the four of you.”
“You’ll take me back with you one day, won’t you, Kit?” Thomas asked eagerly. “To the city?” In his brother’s eyes, Kit could see the glimmer of court masques, royal favor, all the gold-edged parts of London life.
Kit smiled and clapped Thomas on the back. “London’s a den of iniquity, my boy,” he said. “Best keep your tender soul far away.”
“You’re going back,” Thomas muttered.
“Naturally. It’s too late for me.”
He returned to London shortly before curfew, stopping only to return the horse to the untrustworthy carrier before setting off for home. Not exactly high living: he and his co-boarder, an actor and poet named Thomas Kyd, split a single room in Shoreditch, near the sprawl of Moorfields and Bethlehem Hospital. The first six weeks after Whitehall, shrieks from the hospital had infiltrated his dreams, blending with the echo of Mary’s scream to form something horrible, half nightmare and half memory. But as time went on, the dreams faded, and so did his awareness of the madmen outside the door. Proof, he supposed, that a man could get used to anything.
Thomas Kyd was lying across his bed when Kit entered, staring at the ceiling with a stymied expression. Faintly amused, Kit shrugged off his cloak and dropped down on the bed beside his co-boarder, earning himself an irritated noise in return.
“Trouble with act three still, Hieronimo?” he asked.
Kyd groaned and turned his face to the wall. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Sympathize?”
“Don’t be successful around me. The play’s a disaster and I can’t bear it.”
Kit shrugged, then stood and crossed to the desk where Kyd had left the abandoned wreckage of an incomplete third act. “If it soothes your pride any, I just spent an evening with my mother, who three times asked me if I’d invited my parish priest to see my plays.”
At this, Kyd sat up, shaken out of his own self-pity. “I assume you didn’t mention the priests you strangled in Malta.”
“Or the holy books we burned in Tamburlaine. Sometimes it’s best to eat quietly and say nothing.”
“For you, maybe,” Kyd said. He gestured at the pages in Kit’s hand. “Give that back. I won’t have the king of Bankside crowing over my failure.”
“I wasn’t crowing,” Kit said indignantly, but he did return the pages to the desk.
Turning away, he leaned absently against the windowsill, watching as candles illuminated the covered windows in the building opposite, one by one like a sky dotted with stars. The sprawling countryside of Kent he’d traversed that day had been beautiful, all vast fields and endless sky. But it inspired nothing in him compared to this dingy little street in north London that turned to impassable mud each time it rained, where screams were so common they faded to nothing in time.
Five years of London living had changed everything. Ciphered letters and rising armies had become an unpleasant dream that could be dismissed with the morning light, the Armada nothing but splintered wreckage at the bottom of the sea. The world wasn’t shadows and secrets anymore—it was roaring crowds, thrilling words, coin in his purse, and no one to answer to but himself. It crossed his mind, not for the first time, how little the city resembled the London he’d first entered as a student, that grim place where each street seemed to wish him gone.
Somehow, that forbidding city had become home.