Edward went on the way it had begun, as raucous a success as ever, but it scarcely mattered to Kit anymore. He hadn’t felt this nervous—or smoked this heavily—since the first production of Tamburlaine. Then the nerves had been from standing on the brink of a new life, waiting to see what would emerge when the play stood on its own legs. This time, the fear was of his old life rising back up, and whether he’d be clever enough to live through what followed.
After each performance, he broke away from the players early and retired to his Shoreditch room, puzzling over the letters by candlelight. Thomas Kyd, interpreting this as evidence that the muse struck at all hours, said nothing at all about it. Each night, Kit worked until he couldn’t keep his eyes open another moment. Each night, he felt the weave of the cipher loosening, more entry points unfurling to meet him. The work was thrilling, in a way he’d only ever felt after the close of a new play. The thrill of doing something he was good at, of transforming chaos into narrative.
Lord Strange clearly thought himself clever, but he was nowhere near as shrewd as Mary had been. It took slightly more than two weeks before Kit, hunched over his candle sometime past midnight, felt the intoxicating current of a freshly broken code. The letter before him was a short one, and it took almost no time at all to match each ciphered letter to its equivalent, the revealed message spilling forward at his command.
Ask de Vries to approximate how much he’ll need for the task, using the figures provided in your last letter. Impress upon him that time is of the essence.
Kit scowled at the paper. Strange’s cipher might be easily broken, but at least when Kit had untangled Mary’s, he’d known at once what sort of crisis he and Walsingham faced. All Strange had given Kit was the name of a Dutchman and a need for haste. It might have been anything: typical business, a trade deal Strange wanted to follow personally.
It might have been, but it wasn’t. Innocent men didn’t cipher their business communications. There was more to this, but Kit wouldn’t find out what through Sir Robert Cecil’s sanctioned channels. No, when he returned to Whitehall with news, he’d have something more to show for it than this.
The following week, Kit watched the afternoon’s performance of Edward II from his usual haunt in the second gallery, doing his best not to let his anxiety show. It became increasingly difficult as the play neared its climax, and when Henslowe appeared beside him at last, the theater manager’s appearance startled him as if he’d been slapped. He jerked away, attracting annoyed glances from the spectators, who had paid for a seat precisely so people like Kit wouldn’t disturb them.
“He’s here,” Henslowe said simply.
“Where?” They both kept their voices low—the audience had turned back to the stage, more interested in the drama in front of them than the one behind.
“Outside,” Henslowe said. “First rule of theater: Don’t antagonize the money.”
Kit gave him the ghost of a smile. “I thought the first rule of theater was ‘Don’t antagonize Philip Henslowe.’ ”
“For you, Marlowe,” Henslowe said gravely, “I’ve had to write a great many new rules.”
As he followed Henslowe down the rickety stairs to street level, he tried to siphon confidence out of the man’s terse remarks. Kit had the talent and the social cachet to needle the owner of the city’s most celebrated theater and get away with it. He wasn’t a nobody anymore—he knew how to get what he came for. They left the Rose and stepped into the muddy Bankside street, and Kit stood as tall as he could. He kept his expression as mild as a tractable servant. Someone with nothing to hide.
“My lord,” Henslowe said.
A man standing alone in the street turned to face them, and Kit laid eyes on Lord Strange for the first time.
By now, Kit had lived in London for a quarter of his life. He’d shared rooms and streets with powerful men of all kinds: men who pretended to gentility, who expected a full theater to fall silent and gape as they entered. Kit had always enjoyed a private laugh at these people’s expense—given what it had cost him to make London know his name, the idea that anyone owed you respect was laughable. You receive the respect you earn.
Or so Kit thought, until he first saw Lord Strange.
The man’s charisma was undeniable; even Kit, who would have dearly liked to deny it, couldn’t do it. Elegant, graceful, a native Englishman with the hooded eyes and dark flowing hair of a foreigner, Strange commanded attention. He looked nothing like Anthony Babington, except in one respect: though Kit had expected him to be older, he couldn’t be far beyond thirty. His doublet nearly blinded Kit—a rich purple no flower would have dared to sport—but he wore flashiness well.
Kit sank into an elegant bow, a far cry from his awkward attempts at Cambridge. This was the bow of a man who spent his time among people in power. One harder than most to scare. Lord Strange’s Men weren’t the only people who knew how to act, after all.
“Marlowe,” Strange said, and there was something energizing about it, to hear his own name spoken to him in that way.
“At your service, sir,” Kit said.
To his surprise, this made Lord Strange smile. “Believe it or not, Marlowe, today it isn’t your service I’m after. I’ve wanted to speak with you for some time, so I was happy to receive your request to meet. You’re at liberty for supper?”
As Kit’s usual dining plans involved a meat pie in one hand and a bedraggled copy of Ovid in the other, at liberty was putting the matter somewhat grandly. “Of course, sir.”
“Good,” Strange said. “If a conversation can ever be had over food, it should be. I know a place not far from here. Good day, Master Henslowe,” he added pointedly.
Henslowe’s mouth narrowed. “Good day, my lord,” he said. As he turned, he shot back a sharp glance that detailed how deep and protracted Kit’s suffering would be if his misbehavior caused Lord Strange to withdraw his patronage. Kit didn’t have the heart to tell him that if this meeting went as he hoped, Lord Strange would soon lose a great deal more than a theater company.
As it transpired, Strange’s destination was the George Inn, a Southwark tavern that, while by no means seedy, was nonetheless several notches below the sort of place Kit imagined a member of the peerage spending his time. He watched in surprise as his patron greeted the tapsters and drawers by name without pause, before commandeering a table set slightly off from the main room by a wooden partition. Two pints of ale appeared before them almost before Kit had fully sat down.
“Yes, Robin, the usual will do nicely, thank you,” Strange said to the boy who had appeared over Kit’s shoulder. The boy bobbed his head and ducked away without a word, and Strange arched his back before taking a drink with relish Kit associated more with an apprentice than a nobleman. “It’s a relief to get away from the estate, frankly. So thank you for that, as well as for making my players the most successful in London.”
“I don’t take credit for that, sir,” Kit said, with his best approximation of modesty.
Strange laughed. “That’s not what Henslowe tells me.”
Until now, Kit had been aligning his behavior with the subservient, respectful persona he’d adopted in Mary Stuart’s service. Henslowe’s voice in the back of his head, murmuring, Don’t antagonize the money, was just as strong as Walsingham’s orders to probe the depths of Strange’s secrets. But with this remark, he felt the last of his reserve drift away. Not enough to indict himself with a thoughtless phrase—the task at hand still came before anything. But enough to imagine that, if Kit himself had come into wealth, he’d behave with it more or less like this. At least, it was pleasant to imagine he might.
“I hope you don’t pay too much mind to Henslowe,” Kit said. “The portrait you’ll get of me might be accurate, but it won’t be flattering.”
Strange shrugged and leaned back in his chair. The whole atmosphere was so reminiscent of the White Stag that Kit almost checked over his shoulder to see whether Mistress Howard wasn’t surveilling their conversation. “I pay you to butcher people onstage in verse, Marlowe,” Strange said, “not to make friends with Philip Henslowe. If that were the task, I’d have to pay you double.”
“Let me know if there’s too much butchering, sir,” Kit said. “I’m afraid pastoral comedy has never been my strong suit.” Walsingham would have been bursting with impatience if he could see Kit’s tactics—to say nothing of how Cecil would have responded—but with this man, Kit was certain, the indirect and convivial route would be by far the more effective. Besides, what he said was true: the only shepherd he’d ever written about had killed a dozen kings.
“Too much?” Strange repeated. “Don’t be absurd. It’s what the people want, any fool can see that. That’s the trick to getting ahead, Marlowe. Listen to the people and give them what they want.”
He glanced at Robin with an appreciative smile as the boy returned with a roast capon, browned skin steaming over a bed of roasted root vegetables. The boy glowed with pleasure at the acknowledgment before skittering back into the kitchen at a shout from the cook. Strange took up the knife and carved the capon expertly, transferring a piece to Kit’s plate before taking his own. It was, frankly, remarkable. Kit had expected Strange to be another Babington. He’d never met a nobleman like this, who served poets before serving himself.
“What do you think they want, then, sir?” Kit asked, stabbing at a quartered parsnip as casually as though Strange were Ned Alleyn, and the George Inn the Mermaid Tavern.
Strange glanced over his shoulder, though with the partition and the ambient noise of the front room there was precious little risk of their being overheard. Perhaps that wasn’t the point at all—rather, to signal to Kit that what was said next would be worth listening to. “Tell me something,” he said. “I’ve seen your plays, and there’s something in them I’ve never seen from another poet. Are you angry, Marlowe?”
Kit wrapped both hands around his pint, appetite suddenly gone. Was he?
If Strange had asked the question while Kit was writing Edward II, he’d have said no, not in the slightest. He’d have said London was everything he’d dreamed, that he was free and successful and exactly where he wanted to be. But in this Southwark tavern, plagued by the memory of Sir Robert Cecil’s terse orders, he knew the truth, and the truth was that he’d been angry every day of his life for seven years. Ever since Arthur Gregory first showed him the sketch of the woman he was meant to betray to her death. His hands the ones covered in blood, so that a queen who would never even speak to him might wield power beyond imagination. Might conquer the world while Kit fought for a cut of his own profits, to spend an uninterrupted hour with the man he loved, to stay alive in a world where he could trust no one.
Yes, Kit was angry. And there was something intoxicating about admitting it.
“It’s hard not to be,” Kit said. “If the world gave me a reason not to be angry, I’d happily take it.”
Strange nodded, seemingly pleased with Kit’s answer. “That’s all the people want, in my experience,” he said. “A reason not to be angry. Or, failing that, a sense that their anger can have some effect. That it matters.”
Priests strangled by freed slaves. Twenty young women beheaded and spiked on the gates of a besieged city. The king’s triumphant procession into his sacred city, drawn not by an ass but by six bridled captives, each man burning with shame, frothing at the mouth with pride. Anger that achieved something more than a scream in the middle of the night, more than a gesture into the dark. Kit imagined Mary Stuart sitting in the empty chair beside him, the black-marble eyes of Catherine of Siena gazing through the back of his head. Strange couldn’t have given Kit a better explanation of his own plays if he’d tried.
“Surely it’s not our place to be angry, sir,” Kit said. He methodically drained away the honest emotion he’d allowed himself to feel, mentally chastising himself for it. He was a spy. A spy could not allow himself to be seen so clearly, not by a man like this. “Or it’s not my place. It’s the way the world is. Men like me, we don’t change that.”
Strange looked at him searchingly. From the other side of the partition, the sound of men in warm conversation, the clink of knives against plates, a call for more ale. The sounds of men like Kit, men beneath notice, without influence. Men who, perhaps, harbored unspoken anger in their breasts too.
“The world is one thing,” Strange murmured. “But surely every man has the right to look after his own soul?”
And there it was. A backward way of expressing the creed—Luther himself couldn’t have put it better. Strange could have passed the sentiment off as pure Protestantism, if anyone in the George Inn was listening with an ear to theological orthodoxy. But Kit knew what his patron meant. Look after his own soul by turning to the doctrine that would send it closest to heaven, its incense and holy relics and feast days of saints. Kit should have felt triumph. He’d guided Strange around every conversational bend until they arrived here, the one place Walsingham and Cecil needed him to be. From here, the task was simple. Why, then, the rancid taste rising in his mouth, as though the words he was about to speak next had spoiled?
Perhaps, he thought, it was because the crown’s justifications had never touched his heart quite the way Strange’s had.
“Would to God every man did,” Kit said, steadying himself with a long drink of ale. “You wouldn’t think that would be a radical proposition.”
Strange nodded. He didn’t take his eyes off the capon, but Kit felt the man’s energy shift. Had he pushed it too far? Had that word, radical, had that been too obvious? It had been years since Kit had tried to extract information like this, and while the theater had been its own sort of practice, he felt the pit of his stomach drop at the thought that he couldn’t play the part anymore, that years of London living had robbed him of his touch.
Then Strange looked up, and Kit caught the tail end of the emotion his patron had been trying to hide. It wasn’t distrust.
It was hope.
“True enough,” Strange said, “and all the more reason not to say too much here. Privacy is one thing, but it’s not the same as solitude. If you were to come by my estate, perhaps next week, we might discuss further.”
Kit’s mouth tasted metallic now, as if he had swallowed gunpowder. He clenched one fist until the nails carved into his palm, but when he spoke, his voice was clear. “I’d like that very much, sir. I think we might have a great deal to talk about.”
Strange smiled. “I think we might. Now, enough of this. We have business to discuss.”
As though a spell had been lifted, Kit felt the noise of the tavern crash over him, the usual melodies of Southwark. Shouts, curses, laughter, rage. Not far off, Ned Alleyn, rising from the dead to take his bows as Edward. The city hadn’t felt so vast or so loud since his first day in London, when every voice called its own damnation, when every hand grasped for his throat.
“Do we, sir?”
“Of course.” Strange raised his pint in a toast that seemed only half ironic. “This play, Marlowe. My God. After Malta, I thought you couldn’t startle me more, but clearly your well of ways to kill people never runs dry.”