The Mercury drifted toward Flushing’s docks just as the sun sank from sight. Over the rail of the ship, the waves glittered a slick, sealskin purple, the sharp red of approaching sunset flaring at the horizon. Kit’s stomach turned with the remnants of seasickness. Lips pressed together, he gripped the ship’s rail until splinters sliced his palms. Before this, he’d never left England, never set foot on a ship, never braved water wider than the Thames. Nauseated and fighting a splitting headache, he began to understand why.
He watched the city rise into focus as dockhands rushed to prepare their arrival. From afar, Flushing had been a dark smudge on the horizon. From here, their ship swaying at the docks, it exuded a slanted, rickety dignity. Kit felt most at home these days among close buildings and briny streets, but London always seemed to have sprung up overnight, houses rising in a panic to cope with a sudden onslaught of men. Flushing laid claim to the land and water as twin birthrights. Its two long, narrow docks jutted out into the North Sea, which penetrated the land in a thousand places, canals and inlets and waterways slipping narrow fingers through the city’s brick and stone walls. From the center of town, a sharp steeple stretched toward the heavens. Sea and land and sky and God, cutting against one another until their borders blended.
Kit felt a firm hand on his shoulder. He turned, irritation rising with the bile in his throat. Richard Baines stood behind him, expression sour, pale skin slightly pink from the sun.
“Keep your head down, when you go,” Baines said.
Kit shrugged his hand off. “I have someone to meet,” he said in Dutch—rusty but passable, dredged up from Cambridge lessons he’d never expected to use. “I’ll find you when you’re needed.”
He felt Baines tense, but he didn’t care. Kit had a job to do, and he meant to do it fast. Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Northampton—those had been easy compared to this. Yes, the stakes had been high, a nation’s safety depending on his quick thinking. But it was different now, the consequences more immediate. Any mistake could be the one to get Tom killed. It had never dawned on him until now how much he suddenly had to lose.
If only there had been someone else he knew he could trust. But the only man who had ever been able to help him in this business was Walsingham, by now entombed in marble. Walsingham would never pull him aside again to propose a solution, to reveal the next step, to lend him the warm glow of confidence, of faith. Kit was on his own.
The moment Kit’s boots hit the dock, a rush of relief spilled through the nausea. A voyage spent vomiting had left his head pounding and his stomach weak. He longed for a few restorative hours of darkness and silence, but that would have to wait. He wandered along the inner harbor, going slow while his legs remembered the feel of land.
London fancied itself cosmopolitan, but its fear of immigrants, sects, and difference permeated every wall and cobblestone. Kit hadn’t realized the extent of that fear until now, when he saw its absence. Stepping into Flushing was like tumbling into a kaleidoscope. Kit had never seen a patchwork of humanity like this. People everywhere, weaving across the cobbled streets, pouring out of buildings timbered like matchsticks, shouting at one another from the rigging of bobbing ships flying flags of a dozen nations. He heard five languages without trying, though the throaty, lilting voices of Dutchmen seemed to carry the loudest.
An ideal city for a man to disappear in. So much the better.
A broad canal split Flushing in half, narrowing as he plunged deeper into the city. Gradually, he reached the square at the center of town, where a market would spring up the next morning. Nearby, a stone bridge spanned the canal, now only ten feet wide, too narrow for ships. Kit saw his destination on the opposite bank: the steps of Saint Jacob’s, the tall-spired church that spiked upward like the Tower of Babel.
He settled in to wait as Flushing’s inhabitants milled around him. He sat midway up the stairs, leaned back on his forearms, and stretched out his legs. The welcome of dry land nursed his headache. The sun had dipped behind the buildings, eliminating the stabbing pain of reflected sunlight. Sparks like will-o’-the-wisps danced along the waters of the canal. It might have been beautiful, if he’d been in the mood to find it so. But all he could see were the lengthening shadows, spreading like the dark double images of gravestones at sunset.
Distraction would only open him to mistakes, and he couldn’t afford to be careless. He’d think of Tom when he was alone, once the day was finished and he’d chased down a flea-bitten bed somewhere in this rickety city to call his own. Then he could hate himself as long as he cared to. Now he would do what he’d trained to do.
Walsingham would never have believed it, but years of intelligence work had taught Kit patience. It took half an hour before he saw two men cross the bridge toward him, but the time hardly troubled him. He unfurled from the steps, nodding as they approached. Evan, looking fresh and unbothered by the sea crossing—more happiness to him, if he’d been born with sea legs. And a second man, short and ginger haired, dressed in rough wool. The man took in Kit’s appearance in one sweep of his eyes, evaluating him as a potential threat. Kit couldn’t see where he concealed his weapon, but surely this man never went anywhere unarmed.
“Marlowe,” Evan said, beaming. “Pleasant journey?”
Kit thought of the hundred and fifty miles he’d spent vomiting into the sea, Richard Baines over his shoulder looking for reasons to have him hanged. “We didn’t sink,” he said fairly.
“Although it looks like you’ve suffered everything else,” Evan said, taking a step nearer. “Mary and Jesus, what happened?”
“This?” Kit gestured vaguely at the bruises across his face.
Evan sighed. “No. Your charming personality.”
“It’s nothing,” Kit said with a shrug. “You ought to see the other fellow.”
“Something tells me I don’t want to.” When Kit didn’t contradict him, Evan—perhaps wisely—elected to change the subject. “Apologies for the wait. I had a friend to collect. Gifford Gilbert, goldsmith extraordinaire,” he said, indicating the ginger-haired man.
“I’ve heard reports of you, Marlowe,” Gilbert said. His voice took Kit by surprise: higher than he’d expected, and rougher, as if he spoke only when necessary. “Lord Strange says you’re quite the poet.”
International celebrity, or something close. “I try to be,” Kit said, with unconvincing modesty. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
Gilbert smiled. Kit thought of a lizard sunning on a rock, lipless mouth curved. “No,” Gilbert said, “it isn’t. Unless you need to rest?”
Kit shook his head. He hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep in weeks. No reason to begin now. “Lead the way,” he said.
Evan clapped Kit on the shoulder as they left the church, his smile warm beneath his weak mustache. Kit suspected Evan was new to Lord Strange’s ranks. Perhaps this was his first official task, to accompany Kit across the sea. It seemed the only way to explain his enthusiasm. Evan was thirty if a day, but Kit felt like a jaded old man beside him, wary and bitter.
Gilbert guided them off the main thoroughfare, into the heart of the city. Even as they left the canal, Kit could still hear the soft lap of water. Perhaps there was another conduit nearby. Land threaded through with sea, like blue veins on the back of an old man’s hand. They passed into the southern quarter, where Kit could see the city walls in the chinks between buildings, each brick slick and almost green with the sea air. As in London, the buildings grew shabbier the farther they passed from the city center. Not quite Bankside’s orgy of immorality, but all the same, these were the sorts of alleys mothers warned their children to avoid.
The shop, when they entered it, reminded Kit at once of his father’s. The tools were different: harsh iron shears, a battered mallet, delicate knives for etching, the forge reeking of smoke. But the feel of it, everyday objects broken down and made strange, came too close to childhood for comfort. Gilbert looked at home here, as he lit a lamp and bathed the shop in amber light. Kit could picture him working contented for hours, shaping and bending ribbons of gold. He shivered, though the room was warm.
Gilbert bent to a cabinet along the wall and pulled a small key from his pocket. As he spoke, he pulled the door open, then rifled through the detritus inside. “The funny thing about gold,” he said, “is how little you need. So long as the outer layer looks good, no one cares what happens inside. Like a courtier, hmm? Loyal on the outside, rotted black within.”
He stood with a grunt, holding two small circular pieces of metal in his hand. Kit stepped forward, squinting at them. It was as if someone had split a shilling in half. The queen’s portrait, etched in perfect sunken reverse on one side, and the crown embedded into the other. A mold, Kit realized, picking it up to examine it. An impeccable piece of work.
“Dip a circle of pewter in gold,” Gilbert said, “close it in this, strike it hard enough, and not a man alive will know you’re passing it off.”
Kit grinned and handed the mold back. “An artist,” he said. “Christ. Where were you five years ago, when I was walking around with holes in my shoes?”
Gilbert warmed at Kit’s appreciation. He removed a box from the cabinet, in which Kit could see a collection of molds in varied sizes and denominations. “It’s slow going. A one-at-a-time business. But if you want something done right, you don’t rush.”
This wasn’t what Kit wanted to hear. The longer they took, the more chances for Kit to fail, to let something slip, to get himself caught. The longer Tom would be at risk.
“We’ll begin in the morning,” Evan said, with a soft yawn. “You’ve found lodgings, Marlowe?”
Kit nodded. He hadn’t, but he didn’t want a place at Evan’s recommendation. Not when Richard Baines might appear around any corner expecting a report. He had two masters as long as he was here, and the only way he’d stay alive was if the one never met the other. “I’ll be back first thing tomorrow,” he said.
“Good,” Evan said. “Rest well. God help you, but you look as if you need it.”
Outside, night had fallen, and the cobblestones seemed coated in silver, counterfeiting as pearls. He took a deep breath of briny air, then let it out. Maybe it was the stress of the journey, maybe something else, but he couldn’t stop thinking of strangers watching him in the dark.
“It went well, I take it?” said Richard Baines, leaning against the building opposite.
Kit swore. His hand jerked toward his knife without thinking. Baines’s unfriendly smile looked alien in the moonlight.
“You followed me?” Kit said.
Baines shrugged. “Of course. That’s why I’m here.”
“Don’t let them see you with me,” Kit snapped. “They’ll have me killed.” He started to walk toward a public house he’d spotted on the way to the church, one that looked dirty enough to offer cheap rooms. Baines followed on his heels. “Christ, are you planning to lodge with me?”
Kit said this without the slightest hint of an invitation. If he found anything less appealing than sleeping on the street, it was the notion of Richard Baines as his bedfellow. But Baines looked at Kit with too much disgust for an ordinary insult.
“Not on your life.” Baines slowed his pace, widening the distance between them. “You think I don’t know what you are?”
Kit blinked. “And what am I?” he said coldly.
“Kit Marlowe, king of New Sodom,” Baines said, spitting against the street. “I swear to the living God, if you think I’ll make a fair substitute for your Newgate whore, I will—”
It would have been so desperately easy to knife Richard Baines between the ribs and leave him to bleed out in this Flushing back alley. It wasn’t as if he’d have people home in London to miss him. How was Kit meant to bear it, this man who could think of Tom in the shadow of the hangman and see only something perverse? If it had been Kit’s life alone at stake, he’d have done it, and to hell with the consequences. Instead, he turned away.
“My dear man,” he said, heading back in his original direction, “I would rather fuck the devil himself than attempt to seduce you. Rest easy.”
Baines’s rough hands moved faster than Kit expected. They shot out, gripping Kit by the collar, and pinned him hard against the nearest building.
The wall thudded against the ridge of his spine, jarring his bruised ribs. Kit stifled everything but a small whimper. It hurt, but the anger was stronger. His childhood instincts flooded back, sparked by his racing pulse. He could have freed himself and given Baines a black eye to remember this bad decision by, but he remained still. Caution. Quiet. Keep his head down.
“Watch yourself.” Baines spoke low but close. Kit could see every one of his teeth. “Your life is in my hands. Your whore’s too.”
Kit narrowed his eyes. “I’ll remember that.”
Baines pushed Kit away. The back of Kit’s head cracked against the wall, stinging hard to the roots of his teeth. He winced and put a hand to his hair, feeling for blood, but said nothing. If this idiot thought Kit was a risk and a traitor and a sodomite, so be it. At the moment, Kit had broader concerns than what Richard Baines believed.
“Good night,” he said coldly, turning his back.