PAST MIDNIGHT, KIT AND Tom cross London Wall at Bishopsgate in the north, and soon after arrive at a gabled cottage on Hog Lane, Norton Folgate, commonly known as ‘Little Bedlam’. Though the name was intended as a slur, Tom has embraced it, for after all the house is bedlam on the best of nights, with its ever-changing roster of players, poets and misfits. Six currently lodge in the attic, more than the law allows for a private house, but Tom need not fear the law; he still has powerful friends.
The nightly curfew shall detain Little Bedlam’s other lodgers at the Dancing Bears in Bankside till morning. Inside, Kit and Tom find Anna Watson sitting alone upon the stairs in her nightgown, a single candle puddling at her feet, a gory clot of red yarn dripping between her fingers. She smiles her tipsy smile as she descends to meet them, stands on her toes and kisses Tom’s mouth as if to bite into a ripe fig. ‘The bed was cold without you.’
Tom and Anna stand with their hips almost touching while he untangles the knitting from her fingers, enquiring after her night, her supper, her prayers, looking as if at any moment he’ll put her fingers in his mouth and suck them. Once freed from her handiwork, Anna turns her attention to Kit, stroking him beneath the chin like a favourite pet.
‘Did they love you?’ Her pupils gape at him, solid black, her breath sickly-sweet with the sleeping potion from which she takes sips all day, every day, whether she would sleep or no.
‘I think they did,’ Kit answers, trying to smile.
Behind her, Tom grips the banister, ready to ascend. His eyes hold fast to Kit’s. Tonight, they say.
The waiting begins. Kit takes some water out to the privy and spends far more time than truly necessary washing up, and then creeps upstairs, past the closed door of Tom and Anna’s bedchamber, the sound of her anxious murmurs and Tom’s soothing replies. In the attic room, Kit huddles, shivering, beneath the blankets, ears attuned to every soft creak of the house’s cooling timbers, waiting for a footfall on the stairs, for a shadow to rise through the trap in the floor. He half-expects to see Richard Baines appear. Indeed, to his shame, a part of him longs for it. Another chance to plead, to bargain, to fawn. To barter for liberty, with pieces of himself. Perhaps there’s no remedy for one such as him, who had learned to love first by loving a father who had terrified him, second, by loving God, whose love can never be declined or refused. A child of God never truly owns his body. If God says, ‘Give it to me,’ it must be yielded.
By the time the trapdoor creaks open, Kit is near frantic. ‘She was restless,’ Tom whispers, kneeling upon the corner of Kit’s bedroll, lined up in a row of other such bedrolls, all empty. He slides himself over Kit’s body like the closing of a lid, and in the darkness kisses him, with urgency of purpose. ‘Come now, the others shall not return for hours yet.’ Through his nightshirt his body is hard and lithe and straight, a pine curtained in mist. Moonlight gleams in the whites of his eyes, silvers the small hairs of his beard.
‘You belong to me,’ Tom says. ‘I will keep you in a golden collar.’ He always says suchlike things, words of lordship and conquest, of benevolence and magnanimity. Facedown, with Tom’s hot mouth on the nape of his neck, Kit could be a ruby, a crown, a kingdom, a spoil of war coveted and plundered. How he has yearned to be captured. To be possessed. Waiting has bred a kind of bedlam in him that gushes forth unabashed, raving of his desires with a voice made hoarse as if from screaming.
‘Shh.’ Tom covers Kit’s mouth. ‘Someone will hear.’
Let them hear, Kit thinks. Let the world hear. Eyes closed, his fingers squeezing the back of Tom’s thigh. He lets his soft moan travel through Tom’s fingerbones like a song through guitar strings, vibrating all the way to the heart.
Nay, this is what it is to be adored.
‘Did you tell me the truth?’ Tom says to him afterwards, when they lie facing each other, Kit almost asleep.
Kit knows what he means. On the way to Little Bedlam, he had told Tom a story he has told no one else: a bedroom in a house on Deptford Strand. Baines’s hand burning like a firebrand on the back of his neck.
‘I tried,’ is the best Kit can answer.
‘He is a monster.’
To this, Kit has nothing to say. Years, he has left these waters undisturbed, now doubt clouds his mind like silt. He is not the only monster.
‘I am afraid,’ Kit says at last. ‘He can destroy me, Tom. And he will. One day, he will. He knows things about me, things I fear even to tell you… They would put my skull on the gate, if they knew!’
‘Nonsense.’ Tom strokes Kit’s cheek with his thumb as if to wipe away a tear, though there are no tears. ‘Your mind is prone to extremities. Know ye not how rare a thing it is to spend eternity on Great Stone Gate? You are as likely to be born with eleven fingers.’ Kit smiles, but after a little silence Tom says, ‘What things? What can you not tell me?’
Now there are tears.
‘Listen to me.’ Tom’s hand sweeps over Kit’s face, his hair, his shoulder. ‘This man must go. Thomas Walsingham will help us. But understand, the story you have told me will not be enough. ’Tis dreadful, yes, but some may not see it as you and I see it. When we meet with Thomas tomorrow, you shall have to call that darling muse of yours into it, ay? I know you have a talent for that, for horrors.’
That word ‘horrors’ resounds, so limitless. ‘I like it not, Tom. You know him not as I do—’
Tom lifts Kit’s head by the chin. ‘If you do this, you will never have to fear Richard Baines again. We will go on as we are, and in little time every Jack and Jill between Penzance and the River Tweed shall know the name Christopher Marlowe, and I shall grow jealous and resentful and fat.’
Kit laughs, for he loves this in Tom, the ease with which he assumes greatness, colours the world as he sees fit. He even loves the way Tom mispronounces his name, not shrinking ‘Marley’, but bold, round ‘Marlowe’.
‘I will love you,’ Tom says. ‘I will admire you, as I did today.’
’Tis rare that Tom says ‘I love you’. Those words arise out of want, cousins of I hunger, I thirst, I ache, a reminder that joy is fleeting. But God above, how richly one may live within the stark circumference of an hour!
Nay, Kit shall not permit any man to threaten this life, such as it is, so beautiful and so cruel. He will defend it to the death.
Two days later, as Sunday services end, crowds flow forth from every church in the city, converging on the eye of the Rose Playhouse. The pit fills in less than five minutes. Such a crush forms at the doors that the grooms cannot force them shut. The name flies through the crowd, from lips to lips, in doubt and wonder: Tamburlaine. No one has ever seen a play like it, splendid, ghoulish, perfumed in Orient spices and daubed in barbarian blood. Tamburlaine is a beautiful monster, a silver-tongued savage. Like spilled ink, he bleeds across the map of the world with his ever-growing army, neither conqueror nor king so much as Death itself:
Now clear the triple region of the air
And let the majesty of heaven behold
Their scourge and terror tread on emperors!
In the same moment that Tamburlaine calls for his soldiers to slaughter the virgins of Damascus and hang their corpses on the city’s walls, four miles downriver in the village of Deptford, a rabble of helmeted guards – mercenaries, really, like all the city’s guards – break down the door of a house on the Strand. A woman screams, children cry. The master of the house, a stout, grey-haired man called Bull, blocks the foot of the stairs and demands a warrant. He is answered with a truncheon to the temple. His wife catches his body as it falls.
In a bedchamber upstairs, the guards find Richard Baines with one leg already out the window.
All hands wrest him backwards. They shove him facedown, manacle his wrists, pull a black hood over his head. ‘I am here on the Queen’s business!’ he cries. ‘Take me to Thomas Walsingham! Take me to Sir Francis! They’ll have your heads for this, ye jades!’
A guard replies, ‘Whom do ye think sent us?’
One man links an arm through each of Baines’s arms and together they drag him downstairs, two more men in front and two at the rear. In the corridor below, Madam Bull sits on the floor with her husband’s bloody head cradled in her lap, two boys and a girl clinging to her pooled skirts. One of the cutthroats drops a bag of coins on Master Bull’s chest.
‘Apologies from Master Walsingham.’
The rest haul Baines outside and bundle him into the back of a wagon. ‘What did he say about me?’ Baines asks. No one answers him. ‘What did he tell you? The boy is a liar, I say!’ They close the gate, make ready to go. Baines writhes about the wagon-bed, his hood pulsing in and out with his breaths. ‘I tell ye he is the Devil! A traitor! An abomination! Take me to Sir Francis, let me tell him the truth about Kit Marley!’
On Bankside, Tamburlaine comes to an end – happily, by all accounts, with the conqueror’s own wedding solemnized amidst the Damascene ashes – and applause erupts out of the Rose’s open roof. When the cries for the author arise, Ned Alleyn announces him, ‘Christopher Marlowe!’ and at once a lean colossus strides out from behind the curtains, auburn hair swept back, a pearl in his ear, his humble russet suit concealed beneath a cut-silk half-cape that some in the pit recognize as belonging to Tom Watson. At the edge of the stage he swoops, elegantly, into the French bow that he’s spent the past two days practising.
Kit stands upright, looks over the cheering mob. A single human face, a single human stare can often overwhelm his senses, and here they number two or three thousand. He cannot pick out any one face he recognizes, not Tom, nor the other poets. He searches for Richard Baines, despite knowing what had happened in Deptford just minutes ago. Already, a part of him suspects it was a mistake. He feels a clench behind the ribs, as if at the setting of a fateful clock.
From this moment forward, Kit has less than five years to live. Even now, there are three men within the audience who will be with him when he dies, all of whom are still strangers to him:
Seated up in the first gallery, a man with a clean-shaven face called Robin Poley climbs Kit’s body with his eyes, smiling in satisfaction, as if after a rich and lovely meal. As he applauds, a ring flashes upon a finger of his right hand: a large diamond, shaped like a tear.
Ten feet below Poley, in the pit, a burly, long-haired ruffian of twenty-one named Nick Skeres wraps a meaty arm around the neck of his much smaller companion, pretending to strangle him. ‘Look at you!’ he teases. ‘Lovestruck, you are!’
Wriggling free, Nick’s friend – Ingram Frizer, also twenty, and as scrawny as the other is big – stands on his toes to see the stage. He trembles as if battle-giddy, his boyish, large-eyed face fixed in a mad-dog grin. For indeed, this is love that Frizer feels, for the very first time, love for a thing that cannot love him back, a thing he may only regard from afar, in wonderment. He is in love with Tamburlaine, in love with a play. Its words fill him, animate him, as a hand fills a glove: Smile, stars that reigned at my nativity—‘What is Beauty,’ sayeth my sufferings, then?—I that am termed the scourge and wrath of God, the only terror of the world!… Words like meat, to be chewed over and savoured; words that taste, deliciously, of blood.
That this man who now towers at the foot of the stage was Tamburlaine’s author, Frizer can readily believe. Just look at him! – he is the embodiment of those words. He is not so much a man as the fever-dream of a mad philosopher, a crazed poet, a deluded lover. Magnificent, Frizer thinks. He is magnificent!
Four years, eleven months, twenty-one days from now, Frizer’s hands will be so caked in Kit Marlowe’s dried blood that they’ll crack like clay.