“Sir, don’t worry,” Ingram Frizer said, grinning from ear to ear. “Do we look like two men who would steer you wrong?”
Based on Andrew Woodleff’s expression, Frizer knew the man would have answered yes if he’d dared. Of course, the fool was too deep in debt to risk insulting anyone. That was how you made money as a bondsman, wielding both honey and the knife. Bring debtors in with your charm, then close the door behind. Fleecing a few idiots a week in the Bull and Boar’s second-floor parlor wasn’t as lucrative as it might have been, but he was good at this, and being good at something offered its own pleasure. The right slouch, the right angle to your smile, and gamblers like this thought you could move the moon and stars. It was steady going, if slow. Find a rich mark who’d pay up, and Ingram Frizer would be made for life.
He leaned forward, resting both elbows on the table. “Fifty pounds is no small sum, my friend,” he said. “But it’s nothing we can’t manage.”
Beside him, Frizer’s partner Nick took copious, silent notes. An idiot and an ass, Nick was, but Frizer needed him. He himself had no head for numbers, and Nick had studied far beyond grammar school. A gentleman’s son, fallen on hard times and then fallen into Frizer’s path like a gift from God. Besides, Nick looked respectable. Barely thirty and almost handsome, with reddish-brown hair, a patchy beard, and a nose only slightly crooked. People trusted a face like that. Frizer himself, nearly six feet tall with a mane of golden hair and a flashy manner of dress that would have been flashier if not for his poverty, was all too aware of what he brought to the partnership. Nick brought a public face and an aptitude for calculation; Frizer the skill, brains, and charm.
Frizer glanced at the figures Nick scrawled in his ledger, feigning comprehension for Woodleff’s sake, then resumed ignoring the whole affair. “We can lend you the fifty pounds, in sterling and commodity,” he said, “to get you through the worst of it. All we ask in return”—he nodded to Nick, who took a swift note—“is something for our effort.”
Frizer saw a smirk cross Nick’s face, identical to the smirk currently adorning his own.
Woodleff shifted in his chair. “What do you mean?”
Frizer shooed away his concern. “Nothing to worry about. But my partner and I need to make a living, same as any man.”
“That’s to say,” Nick said, “that if you fail to repay your loan by the stated date, the principal will accrue interest at a rate of—”
“Mathematics,” Frizer interrupted, with a careless wave of his hand. “A dull business. Don’t spare it a thought. I don’t.”
Woodleff, broke and desperate, had no choice, and Frizer knew it. He could almost taste success as Woodleff took the pen Nick offered, peering at the contract. Fifty pounds. And Lucifer himself couldn’t keep up with the diabolical schedule of interest Nick calculated, the little Cambridge devil. Those fifty pounds would swell to sixty, eighty, a hundred. Frizer could live like a king on that. He closed his eyes, imagining it.
The door opened, and Woodleff dropped the pen like a poisonous snake. Frizer jumped up, hand traveling to the knife at his hip. Leaning against the doorjamb, Robert Poley regarded the trio with the barest hint of a smile.
Frizer’s hand did not leave his hip. He might still stab this man before the day was out.
It had been nearly a decade since Robert Poley first crossed his path, back when Frizer made his living in the illegal boxing matches that kept money flowing in Southwark. He’d been a sure bet back then, penniless and twenty-two and happy enough to adjust the shape of another man’s nose if it put food in his belly another night. He’d made Poley a comfortable sum the night they’d met, knocking out a fellow against five-to-one odds, and since then they’d struck up an occasional partnership. Frizer knew Poley’s business. From time to time, he’d delivered messages and carefully balanced threats to one of Poley’s enemies: a skill he’d honed over the years, and one he was well paid for. But that didn’t mean he was happy to see the man, or that satisfied smirk, or the panic in Andrew Woodleff’s eyes.
“Apologies, Ingram,” Poley drawled. “I didn’t realize you had company.”
“What are you doing here?” Frizer said.
Woodleff glanced from Frizer to Poley, then back to Frizer. “Gentlemen,” he stammered. “I’ve just remembered an appointment I need to keep.”
In his haste to descend the stairs, he knocked against the scullery maid, who stood out of breath on the landing.
“I told him, Master Frizer, I said you weren’t to be disturbed, but he wouldn’t—”
Frizer’s chest flamed with anger. He flung one arm wide, finger quivering toward the door. “Out.”
The maid dropped a curtsey and beat a hasty retreat. Frizer slammed the door behind her. Poley stood not two feet away, that half smile firmly in place.
“God’s death, Poley,” Frizer said. He shoved Poley in the chest with both hands, to insult rather than injure. “We had him for fifty pounds. Fifty pounds and half his estate. You couldn’t have waited ten minutes?”
“Ingram, don’t think I’m not sympathetic,” Poley said. “It’s just that, speaking as your friend, I don’t care.”
“We aren’t friends, Poley.” Frizer flung himself back into the chair, still seething. Fifty pounds. Christ on high. No matter what Poley wanted, it wouldn’t pay fifty pounds. “You don’t have friends.”
“No,” Poley said. “That’s true, I don’t.”
This preening peacock. The audacity of him. “Can’t you take care of yourself for an hour at a go?” Frizer snarled. “You need a whipping boy for a scrape you got yourself in, look somewhere else. I’m not yours to come when you call.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Ingram,” Poley said. “I’m not here for you.” And to Frizer’s total shock, Poley shifted in his chair to face Nick.
Nick gaped. It was the second time in recent memory his expression had mirrored Frizer’s exactly. “Me?” Nick said.
“You,” Poley said smoothly. “Robert Poley, by the by. An occasional associate of your partner here, though it seems he hasn’t mentioned me.”
Nick stared. It reinforced Frizer’s belief that his partner, though excellent with compound interest, was not terribly bright. “How did you know my—”
Poley swept over and sat in Woodleff’s recently abandoned chair. “Knowing things is my profession. And it’s not every day we find a genuine Cambridge graduate in our midst,” he added, taking a savage sort of pleasure in Nick’s shock. “Not your lot’s usual social sphere. I understand it was the gambling debts that ruined you?”
Nick flushed to his hairline and said nothing.
Poley smirked. “I thought as much. I think the Cambridge term for your new profession is ‘cruel irony.’ ”
Frizer pressed a fist to his mouth, folding the other arm across his chest. It was Poley all over, this playing with men’s fears, but that didn’t make it less irritating. Nick quaked to the worn soles of his boots. He wasn’t cut out for this. Frizer was. He felt at home with the criminals and mountebanks roaming Bankside and the Strand, men who had killed and would kill again. It felt more honest than working for Cecil. Cruel as cats, the queen’s agents, toying with their prey before they broke its neck. It had never been Frizer’s way. Say what you wanted, take it with your fists, and be done.
“What do you want?” Nick asked. It came out like a whine, which caused him to flush deeper.
“Information,” Poley said simply, folding one leg over the other.
“What kind of information?” Frizer said, trying to take charge before this turned sour. Nick couldn’t tell a matter of royal intelligence from a Bankside bearbaiting. God’s bones, Frizer barely trusted Nick to speak to marks, let alone this.
But Nick silenced Frizer with a curt gesture. He looked braver than Frizer had ever seen him, though admittedly the bar wasn’t high. “You’ll pay for that information?”
Poley grinned. “Of course.”
“Then ask away.”
Anxiety did not make Frizer agreeable. “You’ll pay us fifty pounds, will you, for what you’ve—”
“Ingram,” Poley said, “for once in your life, be quiet and listen.” He slouched in his chair, one arm draped over the back. “Right, Nick. To it, then. Do you know a man named Christopher Marlowe?”
Frizer frowned. Marlowe? Christ. So Poley was running after poets now. From the queen of Scotland to the prince of Bankside. How the mighty fall.
Nick laughed, half surprise and half amusement. “Kit? Hell. Yes, I knew him.”
“You do?” Frizer said, rounding to stare at Nick.
Nick pursed his lips. “I know people who aren’t you, Ingram.”
Irritated, Frizer waved a hand, gesturing for Poley to continue. What did it matter, if Nick knew more about the world than Frizer thought? He could hardly have known less.
“I wonder if you know how Marlowe leans,” Poley said, nodding at Nick.
“Leans?”
“Politically. Religiously. Socially. Anything you like.”
A good job no one ever approached Nick Skeres for a career in intelligence. His thoughts played clear in his eyes. Nick knew Marlowe, though God knew how. Schoolmates, maybe—Marlowe was said to be a Cambridge man—though it sounded like “friends” would be stretching matters. And Nick knew something that could hurt him. Frizer saw the moment Nick decided he didn’t care. He could follow the thoughts as if they were his own. Marlowe, lording his poetic celebrity over London, while Nick scraped out half a living as a bondsman in the suburbs. In some cases, betrayal made good business sense. Frizer had worked hard to teach Nick that lesson.
“We never discussed politics,” Nick said, “but he was reckless, wild, even then. Nothing seemed to matter to him.”
Poley nodded. “Hasn’t changed much, I see. Still dancing his way out of choosing a side.”
Nick looked between Poley and Frizer. “Side?”
Poley laughed as if Nick had told a clever joke. “Your old school friend Marlowe is one of the queen’s best spies, Nick. And your business partner here has been helping me with the rougher parts of that work for years.”
The idea that Christopher Marlowe might be a spy for the queen was a shock to Frizer, but nothing like the thunderclap it seemed to be for Nick. He wasn’t sure which revelation surprised Nick more: that a rogue like Marlowe could be trusted with state secrets, or that a petty criminal like Frizer could. But Nick recovered fast. The next words out of his mouth were confident, as if he’d belonged in this world all his life.
“If you’re asking if I think he’d betray the crown, I’m certain he would.”
Poley folded his hands, resting them on his taut belly. “And what makes you think that?”
“He’s a liar and an atheist and a thief,” Nick said with a laugh, as if he’d waited years to say it. “Do you trust a man like that to know right from wrong?”
Frizer saw hunger flash in Poley’s eyes and knew at once where it came from. Atheism was a heavy charge. Valuable leverage, if a man without scruples could get his hands on it.
“You’re certain?” Poley said.
Nick’s congealed bitterness had started to flow. He leaned forward, gesturing broadly as if drunk. He couldn’t seem to stop talking. “He told me Christ and John the Evangelist fucked each other six ways to Sunday after the Last Supper. That while Joseph was out whoring in Nazareth, the Virgin Mary met a neighbor’s cock and not the Holy Spirit. Shall I go on?”
Poley raised a finger. He snatched Nick’s ledger and flipped to a new page, on which he began to scribble, blotting lines across the grid. “Say that again,” he said. “Christ and John the Evangelist?”
“The disciple Jesus loved, he said.”
Poley laughed. “God above. It’s Christmas for Baines.”
“Poley, what does any of that matter?” Frizer said.
“He’s a traitor, Ingram,” Poley said, still writing. “When you want to get rid of a traitor, you take anything you can get.”
Frizer glanced over Poley’s shoulder. Poley shuffled Nick’s words as he wrote, shifting the syntax, extemporizing wildly when needed. Regarding the damnable beliefs of Christopher Marlowe…That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest…That Saint John used Christ like the sinners of Sodom…Perhaps Poley ought to have gone after a career in the theater himself. He certainly knew how to turn a phrase.
“What do you mean,” Nick said, watching Poley’s flowing pen, “when you say ‘get rid of’?”
Frizer closed his eyes. “What,” he said, “do you think he means?”
The panic in Nick’s voice was almost laughable. “What if I take back what I’ve said? What if I—”
“Nick, my good man,” Poley said, scribbling down a final word and tearing the page from the book, “you could say nothing else and this business would have your name all over it.”
Frizer pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose, considering. Marlowe’s arrest meant nothing to him, just another unfortunate soul who’d fallen afoul of Robert Poley’s ruthless drive to cut away his competition. And where Poley needed help, Frizer saw his opportunity. He could show Cecil that Ingram Frizer was worth more than the occasional threatening word and right hook in a tavern fight. He could earn a regular commission from Cecil, the same as Poley did, and turn his back on this filthy business once and for all. Live respectably, or close to it. The life of one stranger was worth that. He’d have damned fifty for it.
“You’ll need more than that to make a case,” Frizer said. “Confirmation. From someone who knew him recently.”
Poley smirked. “One step ahead of you there.”
Well, let him think so. Poley was used to this business, but Frizer planned his moves three steps ahead. You didn’t live long south of the river otherwise.
“Who’s your man?” Frizer asked.
“Marlowe lived with a man in Shoreditch,” Poley said. “A scrivener, part-time actor, something of a poet. Thomas Kyd. You know him?”
Nick paled, but Frizer ignored this. If the man wanted to make his living in this world, he’d need a stronger stomach.
“No,” Frizer said, “but I’m happy to meet him.”
“He should have something to say, at least,” Poley said.
“I think he will,” Frizer said, smiling. “I’m persuasive.”