He who is in emptiness

Chapter Two

Bankside belongs to Will Twentyman. Kit’s home has been anywhere he rules, the dusty road from the Silver Moon, Squire Kay’s tavern where the bells of St Olaf ring over wherry men and wool traders east of the river, down along the Thames westward to the red painted whore’s door of Twentyman’s best brothel, the Cardinal’s Hat. Then on to the bear-baiting pits where Kit fights bare-knuckled and bloody, and beyond it, his favourite place in the world, the Rose Theatre. Squire Kay (so called for a jest in her youth that no one now dares recount) is currently standing fierce and alert, in the doorway of the Silver Moon. Everyone in Southwark jokes she must be a royal bastard with all that milky skin, those robust curves and flaming Tudor hair. It is true that there is often less of landlady and more of monarch in the way she governs her tavern and the urchins that call it home but, at thirty-nine years old, Griffin assures Kit that his little sister has always been imperious.

‘You’re late,’ she scowls. ‘I worried.’

Squire Kay brushes the curls back from his new brand for inspection. The close-to smell of her is reassuring; sweat and ale and the dandelion soap she uses on her ferocious red hair.

‘Well, it won’t make you any uglier.’ She pets him fondly. He has always been odd to look at; gingery curls as tight as a sheep’s, one blue eye, one green, and the darkest freckles all over that Squire Kay always says looks like he has stood next a cartwheel on a muddy day. Customers at the Moon make fun of him, saying his mother must have been a whore twenty times over to get a child so ugly. He does not mind, he is grown; he has no need of parents but a sweeter master would do.

‘Skevy!’

The door is kicked open and there he is, Will Twentyman, with all the look of a man freshly dug out of the grave. Sallow, yellowing preserved skin, teeth too big for his mouth, muddy hair clasping the back of his head in thin drabs. He is barely forty but his unfortunate countenance suits his ominous moniker: the Grave Eorl of Southwark. It’s a title earned by selling corpses, among other things. Kit’s master is an Upright Man who sees a weakness or a need and meets it. He sees fat country purses in the city, he assembles an army of Southwark thieves to cut them. He hears of hot-blooded young gentry, looking for gritty amusement and saucy girls, he runs fist fights fights and the most lucrative whorehouse south of the river. Kit has been assured that there is an ugly iteration of his master in every city in the world, a king of rats in every rat pile, and even if it is risky to live under such a man, he is more likely to live under him than die under him. Yet Twentyman has no kindness for those he employs and only rewards those he finds useful. Now, with that cadaverous unforgiving gaze upon him, Kit has the discomforting feeling of not being useful.

‘Twenty-nine lashes, they say. You could not endure for thirty?’ his master snaps. ‘There was money laid against you, lad!’

‘If you had come and watched you might have told me so.’ Kit wants to sound defiant but he is doleful and loathes it.

‘What good does it do me to come and watch my prize brawler swoon for the whip?’

‘What was he to do?’ says Mariner. ‘Politely ask to be tied back up?’

‘Who asked you?’ Twentyman glares at Mariner. The bitterest of contention simmers between them, as always. Twentyman thinks her a shrew, but Mariner steals her own weight in coin, so his distaste never brews too sour. He switches his glare back to Kit: ‘Did you cry?’

‘The sun was in my eyes.’

‘Can’t blame the lad for crying when flogged, Will,’ Griffin says, winking at Kit, who tries not to smile because Twentyman detests Griffin. Older lads swear up and down they were childhood friends, the only relic being that Griffin is the one person in all of Southwark who still calls Twentyman by his first name. Rumour is, not even his mother does. She calls him Twenny. When Kit is being humiliated by his master in front of other lads, it’s this insipid, twittering nickname that he remembers.

‘Can he fight?’ Twentyman turns to Ezra, standing in the doorway behind him. Ezra Prophet should have been born a prince. His dark skin is smooth and he keeps his black hair and beard short, both heavy with speckled grey. He tells no one his true age, but Kit reckons him to be fifty at least. The stories around him are legend; he was Bishop Bonner’s Worthy Moor, he was a Spanish general in the Armada who swam to England, he confirms or denies none of it but he is married to Squire Kay, manages the brawls and ledgers of Twentyman and has the best handwriting on Bankside. He gives Kit a quick, reassuring smile whilst looking over his back.

‘Sorry, Young Kit, it’ll need stitching. You’ll be no good for the next few days.’

‘To the barber surgeon with you!’ Twentyman aims a kick at Mariner and she glares at him, making a lewd gesture behind his back before walking down the street towards the butchers. ‘I’ll not pay for your stitches, Skevy, it’s coming out of your takings.’

‘I’ll pay for it,’ Griffin says.

‘Oh, course you will,’ Twentyman sneers. ‘Which of your alchemists have you been sucking for it?’

‘You don’t object to my friends when they buy from you,’ says Griffin.

The kind of men of science and alchemists who want to buy corpses from the Grave Eorl are the kind of people Griffin knows; buying his equipment and ingredients for stage craft from their odd little stalls up on the bridge. Consequently, Griffin is one of the few people in London who makes money off Twentyman, a compensatory cut for introducing clients, and the Grave Eorl despises nothing else more.

‘I need brook no objection to their coin.’ Twentyman spits at Griffin’s feet. ‘I’ll not let a heretic use my arse for play, unlike your bloody Marlowe—’

‘Griffin, you’ll be needed.’ Squire Kay’s voice is sharp, cutting quickly through. ‘At the Rose.’

Griffin and Twentyman stare at one another. There’s a shiver of a moment when Kit thinks Griffin might punch him but then it is gone, a sail falling with no wind. Griffin’s shoulders stay the same, mouth still clenched, but the vivid flash of violence behind the eyes retreats. Kit tries not to be annoyed for Griffin is a kind man and if Kit has family Griffin is part of it, but this flaccid slump in the face of a challenge makes the edges of his respect curdle. As soon as Griffin has strolled away, green cap jaunty and uncaring in the sunshine, Twentyman grabs Kit’s collar, baring his blackened teeth. His breath smells of onions, raw and sharp.

‘You were caught and branded and you cannot even do that right. You are useless, Skevy.’

Twenny, Kit thinks. At least I am not called Twenny. His master gives him a round slap, disappearing back inside and shouting over his shoulder:

‘You’ll fight two days hence or I’ll send you back to fucking Antwerp, no matter whose bastard you are.’

‘Am I a bastard? Twentyman says so,’ Kit asks, later that day. He is stitched and watching Griffin roll a cannonball across the heavens of the Rose to create the effect of thunder. Griffin pauses, legs crouched around the iron, a frog with red hands splayed atop it.

‘It is possible. When I found you, you were motherless and fatherless.’

This is the part of the story that never changes. Griffin found Kit in a whorehouse whilst he was living in Antwerp at barely twenty years old. For Kit, there are no memories of that house of women or his first four years. There is only the memory of Griffin, taking him aboard a ship and then, the sticky taste of the odorous London air.

‘You know Will only talks to start fights,’ says Griffin. ‘Pay it no mind.’

Kit helps him lower the swevel down through the designated hole towards the stage floor below. Tonight, Griffin will set a firecracker off at the bottom of the wire and up, up, up it will shoot, illuminating the stage in a flash of lightning as hell is opened to swallow Faustus. It is Kit’s favourite part.

‘Why do you let him talk to you like that? Say that Marlowe used you so?’ Kit watches the familiar flinch and retreat that happens every time Griffin’s dead lover is mentioned. It is hard to look at him when his face crumples this way, so Kit turns to rolling firecracker papers into cones. He does not think there is a better smell than gunpowder, whispering of tricks and enchantment.

‘Why not?’ Griffin’s mouth is soft, wry, but the lines around his eyes are sorrowful. ‘Even when he lived, they said such things. It is a refrain without end.’

Kit says nothing. He has read every play Griffin has ever put in front of him, and Kit has an uncanny memory, so he is more than literate; he is learned. He’s absorbed over and over the romantic notion of the agonising desire. It is curious to him, he who has never been in love nor felt pain, that the two things should be so regularly paired together. He’s had dalliances, plenty of them, girls and boys, and they’ve mostly been pleasurable but Kit knows it is incomparable. There is a haunting to Griffin that Kit finds simultaneously baffling and repellent.

‘You met in Flanders?’

It’s the kind thing to do, he knows, to let people speak of their losses. Kit’s childhood was punctuated by Griffin’s absence back overseas; taught to write by sending letters to Flushing.

‘Aye, in eighty-five. When Walsingham died in ninety, I was cut loose like so many, but not Christopher. He was kept on for espionage.’

‘You? A spirit?’

These are the things that are said of Marlowe: poet, player, atheist, sodomite, spy. Kit stares at Griffin, his long dirty-blond hair tied back behind his head in that same old green ribbon, his slowly receding hairline. He’s never seen anyone who looks less the part.

‘Everyone did.’ Griffin shrugs away a dangerous past with a tip of his shoulders. Old Walsingham took advantage of every Englishman abroad, it seemed.

‘Did you bring back secrets?’

‘Only one.’ Griffin reaches into his shirt and pulls out a small vial of black liquid on a length of leather string. ‘It’s a great alchemy formula, so they said. Everlasting fire. It was an impotent recipe, as it turns out, burned no more than five minutes. I’ve tried my hand at replicating it, over the years.’

‘You could sell it to some puffer.’ Kit rolls the glass between his fingers, watching the way the black liquid moves in the vial, sluggish and creeping against the sides.

Griffin drops the leather strap around Kit’s neck.

‘You have it. Hold it against your disappointment in me, that I did not knock Will’s head off as you hoped.’

‘There’s always tomorrow,’ Kit tries to joke but Griffin only shakes his head slowly, heavily.

‘We are not all bred for defiance, Young Kit.’

Kit waits in the silence of this omission of Griffin’s failure but nothing comes. He’s been hoping for years that Griffin will put in a good word for him with Mister Henslowe so he can buy an apprenticeship into the Admiral’s Men. Griffin has not done it. The older he grows, the more his disappointment in Griffin is a wet cloak, weighing him down.

‘I want to be bred for stage craft,’ Kit says. ‘Like you.’

Perhaps Griffin senses something of Kit’s true thoughts, because he reaches over and squeezes Kit’s hand.

‘Be better,’ Griffin says.

Two days hence and Kit is fighting for Twentyman rather than being shipped back to Antwerp.

‘They are holding, only just,’ Ezra says, checking his stitches as Kit leans his arms on the fencing and spits blood and, unfortunately, a tooth chip onto his boots. Nearby, Kit watches as Twentyman gloats and bribes in a merry dance around the ring under the summer stars. There is nothing like the smell of a fist fight in June. ‘Maybe punch less frequently and more effectively.’

‘Do you not think I always try to do that?’

‘Kit! Ezra!’ He turns towards Mariner’s voice. She is elbowing her way through men, indistinguishable from the other short-haired beardless lads around her except that her eyes are wide with fear. ‘You must come, it’s Griffin! There’s fire!’

Fire. The most dreaded word in all of London. Kit runs, imagining the Rose ablaze, her boards and magic consumed into nothing, but it’s Griffin’s lodgings near the Cardinal’s Hat they run to. Smoke is billowing out of Griffin’s windows and in front of it, Squire Kay screams for water to be fetched, someone, do something! As rolls of thunderous black fog and smoke leech under the door. The smell is sharp and acrid, worse than the stink of sulphur and gunpowder. Others are coughing, unable to get near, but Kit is only struggling to see since it is so very dense. Yet as he blinks through it he realises there is no flame.

‘It’s not fire!’ he yells.

‘One of his experiments gone wrong?’ Mariner shouts back.

‘He’s inside!’ Squire Kay sobs, clinging to Ezra’s arm. ‘He must be hurt, the door is locked!’

‘A backed-up chimney, I’ll warrant! Come on, Young Kit!’ Ezra shouts and whilst Mariner holds up Squire Kay, they set their boots to it. Again and again, again and again, other men may stop kicking but Kit does not need to stop and finally, the door splinters away from the lock. He cannot see anything; the blackness of the smoke immediately consumes them both and Ezra is turned back, coughing and retching. Kit pushes in, stumbling blindly into the two rooms, navigating by touch rather than sight but nothing seems to be dimming it and all the windows are shuttered. Flutterings of panic begin in his gut because Griffin only ever locks himself away for his most dangerous of experiments, the kind that kill a man.

‘Griffin!’ he shouts, fumbling his fingers on the latches, flinging the shutters open, charcoal-tasting urgency filming his mouth. The thunderous black clouds of smoke are starting to clear, revealing a truly devastated room, chairs upturned, papers rifled, as if Griffin fought his way away from whatever horror he accidentally unleashed. Then there is a body on the floor. Kit’s first thought is relief. This man laid out so haphazardly cannot be Griffin, he thinks, he is surely too small and crunched, frail and broken. Then Ezra steps into the room, bearing a pitch and tow torch.

‘Oh, Griff,’ he says.

The pitiless light illuminates that favourite forest green doublet, the worn velvet that thinned at the elbows, that long hair tied back just so, the same green ribbon. There is an ugly grey spittle around his mouth, evidence of lungs blackened, a throat grey with smoke, choking the breath away. Kit moves closer, all sound and voice lost to his ears as he crawls under the lingering smoke to touch Griffin’s face. He has seen many dead people, but nothing like this, the extravagant absurdity of vacancy in such familiar lips and eyebrows. Come back, he thinks. Then he remembers that neither he nor Griffin believe that there is anywhere else to come back from. Still he thinks it, compulsively, mind so numb to all else: Come back to me.

‘Away, Kit, the constables are here.’ Mariner is pulling him to his feet.

For the first time Kit feels time stretch, for suddenly they are outside and Squire Kay is there, crumbling to pieces, a grasping, bellowing thing and Kit does not understand. How can he be out here when he is still on the floor with Griffin, his cheek absorbing the last warmth of his dead heart? Then it happens, thundering through him at last: pain.

No one said his body would become wrong, and small, that he would be sure he must be out of it, immediately, because there is an enormous yawning stretch of anguish inside his chest that he must outrun. He has seen the hearts of bulls on market day, lumpy and firm, with no secret places to hide, yet perhaps the heart of man is made differently to hold such hideous, invisible forces. He is fighting Mariner without noticing, her arms wrapped tight around him, and he hears a voice chanting; no, no, no, no! Is it him, his mouth? Is it his knees that buckle under him, uncaring of the horse shit, and his hands that dig into the mud, wanting to push down and back into the past? He has been a fool to be curious of pain, a fool his whole life, for he would rather be dead or buried alive or have his legs severed than this monstrous, drowning sensation. He knows he must find a way to breathe through it, fucking breathe, Skevy, but there is not enough air in the sky. As he wheezes at the indifferent stars above, there is the lightest flicker of something else, a distant robin’s wing brushing against his mind. Despite thinking himself loveless and painless all this time, something inside reminds him: This is not the first time. I have felt this before.