“Kit,” Ned Alleyn said, and then again, louder: “Kit. The line.”
Kit’s eyes snapped back into focus. He stood to the side of the stage while rehearsals unfurled in front of him, until now without his paying attention. What was the last speech they’d practiced? Had it been Wagner’s? Either way, they were well past that now. Ned was looking to him for a prompt, and Kit had been thinking of knives, of nooses, of the awful silence of a deserted church, and nothing of poetry.
It had been hell enough trying to navigate his weekly probationary meetings with Cecil. He pushed Anne Cooper as far as he dared for information, well aware that her distrust in the wake of Evan’s execution was monumental. Strange was regrouping, reaching out to his contacts in the country to strategize after the disaster in the Low Countries. Kit continued deciphering the intercepted letters, but they only reiterated what Anne told him in their terse meetings: that plans would need to change, that they needed to develop a more careful approach. More now than ever, Kit needed a breakthrough, a shining gem of intelligence. Without one, God knew how long Cecil would give him the benefit of the doubt.
He and Anne met weekly in Saint Saviour Church in Bankside, an arrangement they’d begun in the aftermath of Evan Lloyd’s execution. Each meeting lasted only a few minutes, clipped questions and shorter answers. And then, last week, she hadn’t come. Kit had waited for hours, sitting in the back pew as the church gradually filled for afternoon services. It was easier that way, to let the world wash around him, as if he were only as much a part of it as the wooden pews, as the stone under his feet. In Anne’s absence, each prayer from the priest sounded like a condemnation.
Onstage at the Rose, Ned sighed. “Figures of every adjunct to the heavens…” he repeated, beginning again the half-forgotten line.
“And characters of signs and erring stars,” Kit said mechanically, without checking the prompt book.
“By which the spirits are enforced to rise,” Ned said, snapping his fingers in satisfaction. He was off from there, charging forward through the scene. “Then fear not, Faustus, but be resolute…”
Kit let his attention drift away again, to the terrible silence of Saint Saviour. It was meant to be today, his and Anne’s next rendezvous. A prophetic feeling in the pit of his stomach whispered that she wouldn’t be there, but he couldn’t go on like this, or his blood would burst his veins. He couldn’t think about poetry if there was the slightest chance she might be waiting. Not if there was anything left for him to try.
He turned to Will, watching the scene with the rest of the actors not involved in it. Without explaining, he pushed the prompt book into Will’s surprised hands.
“Take my place for a minute,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
He hopped down off the stage and jogged across the pit, ignoring Will’s protests that he couldn’t manage the prompts, he didn’t know the lines, he wasn’t the one who’d written the bloody thing.
Saint Saviour’s was nearly visible from the Rose, its four-peaked tower clear against the gray sky of a damp afternoon. The church had once been splendid, though nothing but a shadow of that remained. It looked half naked as he entered, stripped of its finery with only whitewash and plain stone to hide behind. High windows arched over the nave, but the glass was so clouded with dirt and grime that the light spilled through in beams as if at the floor of some great sea. A lone priest stood near the altar, his bald head catching the light, though the crucifix in front of him had fallen into shadow. Each of Kit’s footsteps rang terribly through the vaulted space. Other than the priest, only a few people sat in the dim pews of the main nave, each of their heads bent in prayer.
And one of them, he saw at the front of the church, was Anne.
Kit felt his lungs fill with the first clear gulp of air in days. He rushed down the aisle toward her, already framing each movement as part of the story he would tell Cecil. I came down the center aisle, he’d say, I genuflected at her pew and knelt beside her, and when she broke off from her prayer, she—
When Anne looked up, Kit drew back as if he’d sat beside a monster and not a woman. Anne’s face was narrower, her eyes rimmed with red. She looked at him like Christ on the cross, a silent dead-eyed gaze that looked down on sinners and let them assign the blame themselves. The silence seemed to last a lifetime.
“You didn’t come last week,” he said finally.
Her laugh made Kit think of the wind between gravestones. “No. I think you know why.”
“Please. Tell me what’s going on. I have to know.”
Anne looked at him one moment more, then spoke without inflection, without anger, without anything at all. “Lord Strange is dead.”
The words didn’t make sense. They were simple enough, but they couldn’t mean what he thought they did. It wasn’t possible.
Lord Strange was dead.
That careless familiarity at the George Inn. The concerned frown behind a cloud of pipe smoke and shadow. Lips outlining silent prayer at a man’s death. Are you angry, Marlowe? This had always been the intention; it was always meant to end this way. But Kit felt as though Anne’s words had severed the muscles in his knees. He thought of the beads of Mary Stuart’s rosary, skittering against the floor, dropped by a nerveless hand. Another tick on the list. Another man killed because of him. Will it be me next?
It had been. But not because of Kit.
“How?” he breathed.
“How?” she repeated. Her voice never rose above a murmur, but it didn’t need to. No one needed to hear her but Kit, and he could hear nothing else. She turned in the pew, her knees pointed toward him. “Poison, as you know full well.”
Poison. Kit felt the bile rise in his throat.
“He was at supper in Derbyshire a week past when he excused himself from table, claiming he felt ill,” Anne went on, taking savage pleasure in the way the details struck him. “Thirty minutes later, he was vomiting blood. By morning, they’d called for the undertaker. But you know how poisons are. The expensive ones work fast. And no one even notices a drop in a glass of wine. Helps to have the well-connected on your side, to get the good-quality sort.”
Kit sat still, feeling desperately exposed, like a heretic at the stake. Strange was dead. Strange, the people’s man. Poisoned. Poison that turned breath to blood, that ate the body away from the inside. Kit’s own insides roiled with acid. His own shame might eat him alive.
“How—”
“What do you mean, how? You told them to do it, didn’t you?” It was the closest she’d come to raising her voice, and the vehemence didn’t last. She turned away, red-rimmed eyes trained on the cross at the head of the church.
This was Cecil’s work; Kit knew it as surely as Anne did. Cecil had given up on Kit’s increasingly scant reports and taken matters into his own hands. He’d had Lord Strange poisoned, no doubt by an agent he’d placed within the Derbyshire household. An agent who wasn’t Kit.
He clasped his hands until the web of his fingers ached. “I didn’t know,” he said. “They didn’t tell me anything.”
It didn’t sound like an excuse, not to his ears and not to Anne’s. It sounded instead like a magistrate passing sentence. If Cecil could do this without telling him, if he could sit stoic behind that grand desk of his and take Kit’s reports while he held a stoppered bottle of hemlock in one hand and said nothing about it, then Kit was nothing to him.
Three weeks ago, he’d have spun any excuse that could save his skin, and he wouldn’t have stopped building his wall of words until he was sure Anne believed him. But now, he had no words left. Words only did any good if someone was listening. Where before he’d been standing in a glass cage, his every action on display for both sides to scrutinize, now he stood in a windowless hallway full of locked doors, shouting in the dark to no one.
“They didn’t tell me,” he said once more, then let the silence rush through him like fire.
Anne still didn’t look at him. Her face might have been carved from granite. “I don’t care what they told you,” she said. “I don’t care if it was you who killed him, or who you work for, or what you are. You deserve to die, but I won’t be the one to do it. Your life isn’t worth the weight on my soul.”
“Anne—” he began.
“Get out of here,” Anne said, in that same low voice. “I don’t ever want to see you cross my path again. And if you come back, it will be the last thing you ever do. Make no mistake.”
Shut out. Turned away. Pound his open palm against every locked door and no one would come to answer him. He could scream as long as his voice held, and no one would come. There was only one thing he could do, one choice that was not a choice at all.
Without a word, Kit rose from the pew and ran.