He is here. Confirm Baines, & charges if there be any. Kydd whereabouts.
FRIZER REFOLDS THE MESSAGE for Nick and then tucks it inside his coat, sprinting for the stables. The other letter, bound for the Privy Council’s fabled inner sanctum, the Star Chamber, he dares not disturb. What could the Privy Council want with Marlowe?
Belike Nick will know what to make of all this. Nick Skeres always seems to know everything that goes on, a trick he must have learned from serving the master’s uncle in his youth. Frizer has not the benefit of such an education, being nothing more special than Nick’s childhood friend – and now, his kin, having married Nick’s cousin Betsy last autumn, very much at Nick’s tireless insistence that the match would be a good one. For whom? Frizer sometimes wonders. He is happy, at least, to live in the house that joins with Nick’s on one side, so they live as something more intimate than neighbours; less pleased to share the house with his mother-in-law and Nick’s three young sons, who have all their father’s bombast but none of the charm.
With the sun just up, Frizer lets himself in at Nick’s side of the house, where everyone will be gathered for breakfast. As predicted, he need not tell Nick anything. The moment Frizer steps into the kitchen, Nick heaves his great bulk up from the table, claps Frizer’s face in his incurably damp hands and thunders, ‘ “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, / And burnt the untopp’d towers of Ilium?” ’
‘ “Topless towers,” ’ Frizer corrects him, exasperated.
Nick’s boys chase each other around the table in circles. At the sideboard, Frizer’s mother-in-law stands hip-to-hip with Nick’s perpetually flushed and harried wife, the feathers of a fresh-killed capon heaped about their feet. Frizer’s wife Betsy – a pretty girl, as everyone says, despite her rabbity front teeth – bows into her sewing at the far end of the table, another tiny cap or smock or stocking balanced upon the teeming bulge of her belly.
Seated at Nick’s elbow, Frizer leans close to whisper, ‘Will I ever meet this “friend” of yours in St Helen’s?’ He catches Betsy glancing up at him, then down into her sewing again.
Nick chuckles, reaching for one of his aunt’s caraway-seed cakes. ‘Oh, I reckon you will someday.’ It sounds almost ominous. ‘Come, let me see the other one. You did not open it, did you? I know you cannot resist a paper-bolt!’
‘No, by heaven!’ Frizer says, handing over the Star Chamber letter. ‘What do you suppose the master wants with the Privy Council?’
Nick holds the letter up to a candle, squints, and then hands it back. ‘Knows how to keep his head, he does,’ he says. ‘More than I can say for his friends.’
Such enigmatic answers are all too common with Nick, who, from what Frizer can tell, also knows how to keep his head. Frizer shall have to ask the right questions. ‘And what about Baines?’ he says, after wracking his brain.
Nick frowns. Frizer opens the message for St Helen’s again, pointing. ‘See? It says Baines. “Confirm Baines.” ’
Nick is not looking, smearing butter on his cake. Vaguely, he mumbles, ‘Just some devil or other, I imagine,’ and takes a bite.
‘You should have heard the talk at the well this morning,’ Frizer’s mother-in-law pipes up, without turning around. ‘They say that man at Scadbury is the Devil himself!’
‘Oh Mother, please,’ Betsy mumbles, leaning deeper into her work.
‘They say he had his feet in hot coals and the skin did not even singe.’
Nick smirks. ‘That true, Ingram?’
‘No’ – a cough – ‘no, ma’am. I was there. I put his feet by the coals, marry. To warm them.’
His mother-in-law turns, one hand upon her hip, a knot of entrails dangling from her wiry fist. ‘You saw him close, I hope? Then you would have noticed if he had any horns under his hair or extra teeth. Markings upon the skin, perhaps…?’
Frizer and Betsy’s stares meet, but neither speaks. There are things that only his wife knows. Things only she has seen.
Frizer grows achingly aware of every inch of exposed skin on his body: the barest sliver at the neck, for he wears his collars high; the glaring nakedness of his hands. He tucks his hands under the table, mutely shaking his head.
‘Trust me, Auntie,’ Nick says, dusting crumbs from his palms, ‘if the Devil were come to Scadbury, I would be the first to tell you.’
One of Nick’s sons starts to chant, ‘Out, Devil, out, Devil, out out out!’ and soon the rest join in, even Nick.
‘Just the same,’ Frizer’s mother-in-law says, ‘I’ve put a ring of salt around the house. If he wants inside, he’ll have to tunnel his way in, like a mole!’ She wraps her hand as she turns to the fire, taking the long iron spit off the hob. With one hand upon the bird’s belly, she forces it up through the bottom.
With two of his mother-in-law’s caraway cakes in his stomach, Frizer goes out to the barn, readying his and Nick’s horses for the ride to London. As he tightens the saddle straps on his reddish gelding, he mutters, ‘ “So burn the turrets of this cursèd town, / Flame to the highest region of the air—” ’ But a glance to the open doors stops him dead: there stands Betsy with the morning light haloed in her tousled hair, hands crossed over her belly.
Perhaps she thinks he was casting a spell. She could rid herself of him that way, if she wanted to. Tell the right people that her husband speaks with the Devil and he could be hanging from the village gallows ere the month is out.
But she says nothing of it. Only draws a nervous breath, and says, ‘I have a favour to ask. I did not want to mention it at table…’
Frizer tries to say, ‘Oh?’ as if it were a challenge, yet no sound leaves his throat.
‘It would please me, greatly, if you would allow Master Purcell to have a look at you. For the baby.’
‘Master Purcell?’
‘The astrologer.’ Something must show in his looks, because her manner suddenly turns conciliatory. ‘He comes highly recommended. Jane Riley says he predicted her boy’s birth down to the very hour—’
‘What has that to do with me?’
‘The marks,’ she whispers, as if to speak heresy.
Frizer bows his head. He is reminded of the wedding night, the first time she’d ever seen his body unclothed. Please do not scream, he’d said. But she’d screamed anyway.
Hastily, Betsy adds, ‘Just to see whether there be anything questionable in them. Anything that may draw the Devil’s eye, you know…’ Frizer pulls the horses forward by the bridles, forcing her to step aside. Betsy follows him, hugging her belly. ‘They say the sun will be in eclipse before the month is out… that it may even happen when I come to bear, or in the churching-time… Eclipses bring forth changelings, monsters!’
‘Did you tell your mother about it?’ Frizer says, halting.
Betsy stares, shakes her head. ‘No. No. Have you heard her? I would not dare!’
‘’Tis no one’s business but mine,’ Frizer says.
‘And mine.’ She has overstepped, and seems to know it, reaching for his arm. ‘If the baby comes out wrong—’
Frizer pulls away. ‘You and your mother!’ he growls. ‘Astrologers and salt circles! By God, you are more likely to draw the Devil’s eye with all your rubbish than I am just by wearing my damned skin!’
On the road north to London, as Chiselhurst vanishes behind them, Nick raises his eyebrows and says, ‘So, did ye talk to him?’
Frizer is startled. For he had just been thinking about Marlowe: about how, the first time he ever saw him, he’d taken him for something supernatural – angel or devil; both, and neither – but now, he has felt the weight of Marlowe’s bones, he has smelled the blood and sweat and whisky on him. ’Tis as if he has touched a wound, like when Tamburlaine cut his own arm and made his sons dip their fingers in it:
A wound is nothing, be it ne’er so deep,
Blood is the God of War’s rich livery.
But hearing Nick’s question, Frizer deflates, admitting, ‘Ay, but he said nothing much. Only that the master would whip me for giving him that whisky.’
Nick grunts a dark laugh. He says, ‘I know how you are, mind, with your Tamburlaine-this and Faustus-that, but he’s best avoided, that one. Has a mark on him.’
Frizer’s breath catches. ‘A mark?’
‘A bull’s-eye,’ Nick says, and mimes drawing an arrow, releasing it.
Frizer returns at dusk, exhausted and saddle-sore, stopping at the house only to deliver a reply to the master’s letter before dragging himself up the path towards his sentry-box, for another long night’s watch. But on the way, a figure on the lawn halts him in his tracks: Marlowe. How he towers against the white orchard at the base of the hill, the black band of forest, the scarlet sky.
Of stature tall and straightly-fashioned…
Such breadth of shoulders…
… amber hair wrapped in curls…
… arms and fingers long and sinewy…
Nay, not even Ned Alleyn so perfectly resembles his greatest part as does the creator of it. There he stands: conqueror of empires, slaughterer of millions, burner of holy books. Tamburlaine, and Marlowe. Both, and neither.
Frizer swallows. He stalks closer, heel-to-toe. Marlowe exhales a puff of smoke into the heady light. Frizer thinks he shall buy tobacco and a pipe first thing tomorrow.
What should he say? He could ask about Marlowe’s newest play, about which he has heard many distressing, enticing rumours. He could ask Marlowe if he really knows how to conjure devils, like Doctor Faustus. He could ask why Tamburlaine had to die at the end of Part Two. He could say, I have always admired the way you write about the stars – for in Marlowe’s words the stars are never still; they gallop and plunge, they cartwheel through the heavens. Is that how the stars look to ye? he would ask. To Frizer, the stars seem quite still.
A stone crunches beneath Frizer’s boot. Startled, Marlowe reels about to face him. All at once, the words burst forth from Frizer’s lips:
‘ “Smile, stars that reigned at my nativity,
And dim the brightness of your neighbour lamps;
Disdain to borrow light of Cynthia!
For I, chiefest lamp of all the earth,
First rising in the east with mild aspect,
But fixed now in the meridian line,
Will send fire up to your turning spheres,
And cause the stars to borrow light of you!” ’
‘What?’ Marlowe sounds out of breath.
The bigness in Frizer’s chest withers. ‘ “Fire”… “turning spheres”… From Tamburlaine?’
Marlowe stares, blinking as if blinded by a sudden light. A frown forms between his brows. ‘ “Cause the sun to borrow light of you.” Not “stars”. Sun.’
Frizer says nothing.
‘Tamburlaine is addressing the stars. Cynthia is the moon.’
Frizer stammers, numb-tongued. ‘Ay, “Cynthia”. ’Tis what I said.’
Marlowe’s lips crook into the cruellest of smiles. He takes the time to draw from his pipe before murmuring, ‘Of course you did.’
Frizer’s stomach lurches. He turns his back and starts to walk away as if the world had suddenly tipped sideways, past his sentry-box, out of the long reach of Marlowe’s shadow.
He will never forget this.
Nick Skeres stops up the doorway of Walsingham’s study, all asweat and stinking from the long ride. His doughy face is caught in the same faint, elated smile he always wears whenever he returns from St Helen’s, like a boy brimming with his father’s praise.
At his desk, Walsingham unfolds a message written in that delicate, arabesque hand:
I can confirm Baynes. Youle find the services I offer convenient, I feare, in the dayes ahead. Shal we not speake of figures yet?
The reply from Westminster, which arrived minutes ago, was even briefer: Keepe him there.
Nick says, ‘Baines has been at the Privy Court on Seething Lane. Twice now, that Master Poley’s seen. Once on Monday, again on Friday.’
‘Did he see who was with him?’
‘That villain Phelippes, he said. Puckering’s man.’
Walsingham shakes his head. If Baines has the ear of Puckering, the Lord Keeper – ‘keeper’, now, of the Council’s spies – then God help Kit Marlowe.
‘And the charges against Thomas Kyd?’ Walsingham asks.
‘No one will say. Master Poley reckons Archbishop Whitgift has got something to do with it, so heresy of some sort. They’ve got him in the Marshalsea, in any case—’
‘Marshalsea?’
Nick nods, sheepishly. Perhaps he can see panic in Walsingham’s eyes.
‘Did he tell you this?’
‘He suggested it.’
Walsingham falls silent again. If Thomas Kyd is in the Marshalsea, with Dick Topcliffe and his machines, his branding irons, his instruments, it shall be only a matter of time before the wolves come for Kit also, desiring what they always desire, names – and then God help Thomas Walsingham.
‘How long do we have?’ Walsingham asks.
‘Master Poley says a week, at the most. All depends on Kyd. And Baines.’
Walsingham sends Nick on his way and begins searching the house and grounds for Kit, who is not mad after all, or not so mad as Walsingham had hoped. No, Kit is only mad in that he harbours that most dangerous of delusions, believing he knows precisely who the Devil is and what he looks like. But the truth is that Richard Baines is but a lesser fiend. The Devil is not just one man. He is a brotherhood.
A gardener directs Walsingham to the orchard. Even from afar, Kit’s shape stands out in the white blooms, his back against a tree, head bowed over a book. ‘You should not be out here,’ Walsingham says, by way of a greeting.
Kit closes his thumb in the book, plucks up a bottle from the grass and drinks. ‘You said I could go out at night. The sun’s nearly down.’
‘Apparently the village gossips have already found a new subject in you. I hear they accuse me of playing host to the Devil.’
Kit laughs. ‘It would not be the first time for you, would it?’ He offers Walsingham a drink, and its subsequent refusal seems to breed a touch of melancholy in him, his gaze drifting towards the dark woods. ‘It matters not, anyway. They will find me eventually.’
Walsingham is exasperated by this, but there’s no time to be angry. ‘This Kyd fellow,’ he asks, ‘would you consider him a friend?’
Something tugs at Kit’s lips. Remorse, perhaps. ‘Of a kind.’
‘More than a friend?’
‘Only the once, and I assure you, he was very drunk.’
‘Damn and blast ye, Kit!’
‘He wanted to suck cock; thought he would be good at it. I tell ye – he was not.’
‘How well does he know ye? Knows he about Tom, or about Baines, even? Kit,’ Walsingham hesitates, suddenly short of breath, ‘knows he about you and I?’
Kit’s look darkens. ‘Why?’
Walsingham can hardly utter the word aloud. ‘Marshalsea, Kit. They have him in the Marshalsea!’
Kit has nothing to say to this, though it seems he loses a drop of colour in contemplating it. He lifts the bottle and drinks again.
‘I fear,’ Walsingham says, but then stops, for he knows not how to ask what he would know, thinking aloud. ‘This play of yours… ’tis a libellous thing indeed, but if the Council only wanted ye for libel, they would have arrested you days ago. They could allege buggery, I suppose, based on the play’s contents, but to hang a man for buggery is to admit that buggery exists, and half the men on the Privy Council are as happy to fuck a boy as they are a girl, so long as he is nothing to anyone – the archbishop being no exception! To hang a man for buggery, they must charge him with something more: witchcraft, treason, heresy—’
‘Thomas, you know my sins as well as anyone.’
‘Do I indeed? Perhaps I know ye not so well after all, Kit. Surely you are no Puritan, or God forbid a papist, but are you even a Christian, in any sense? When was the last time you went to church? Christ, Kit, when was the last time you prayed?’ Kit has no answer for this. Walsingham lowers his voice. ‘You are so frightened of Richard Baines. Why? What does he know of ye?’
‘You said Baines was in Flushing.’
‘I have not said otherwise. Besides, you know well he is in Flushing, Kit. You saw him there yourself.’
‘That was over a year ago!’
‘And what of it? Why did you ask me to send him there in the first place? Was it Tom’s idea?’
Kit scoffs at this, though he does so as if a nerve has been touched.
‘Whatever Baines knows about you,’ Walsingham says, ‘did Tom know too? Is that why he brought you to see me?’
Kit says nothing to this either, his look of suspicion only deepening. He reaches up and takes a branch in his hand, pulling his back straight. ‘Perhaps I should go home,’ he says to the woods. ‘To Canterbury.’
‘No. You must stay here.’
‘It would be safer for you, Thomas. They cannot fault my own mother and father for harbouring me, though God knows my father will take some convincing—’
‘You cannot leave!’
‘Why not?’
‘Because they know you are here, Kit, and if they discover that I have let you go, it shall be my head along with yours!’ Walsingham realizes he is shouting, but cannot stop. ‘Know you not what a thankless chore it is to be your ally? We are all of us in pitch up to our necks, and you go about lighting fires left and right, as if ’tis your pleasure to see your friends burn!’
‘I’m sorry, Thomas.’
‘For two years I have kept my name out of their mouths! Two years! I flattered myself, I did, thinking I could know peace again!’
‘Thomas—’
‘Do not touch me. Drink my whisky, walk at night, walk in daylight, I care not. I will help you because I have no choice in it. Not for any other reason.’
This is the most hurtful thing Walsingham can think to say, and he feels nothing but shame to have uttered it. He turns at once to storm off so that Kit will only see the back of him climbing up the hill with long strides, not the anger in his face, nor the grief.
But Kit does not turn to watch him go. Instead, he gazes into the depths of the woods beyond the orchard with raw, rattled eyes, as if heeding a voice from within.
Now I’ve got you, you ungrateful little shit.
When the sky is nearly three quarters full of stars, Kit picks up the bottle and walks into the meadow. The woods surround a circle of sky like the open roof of a playhouse. Kit turns, searching for ‘North, north, north…’ and finds what he seeks hanging high above the orchard: a jagged diamond snake, Cassiopeia.
He remembers a night in the garden at Little Bedlam, in the feverishly sweet summer that had followed Tamburlaine’s premiere and Baines’s exile, easily the happiest months he has ever lived. He’d pulled Tom outside by the hand and pointed to a faint pinprick of light, just above the arch in the snake’s back. ‘The nova stella, they called it,’ Kit had gushed tipsily, explaining all: a new star, birthed in the year 1572; it had appeared as a fireball, brighter than any planet, and has been fading ever since.
‘It is the proof,’ Kit said. ‘You asked for proof, and there it is!’
Tom squinted. ‘There’s nothing there, Kit.’
‘Oh, come now! You remember. I remember, when it appeared, the whole of Canterbury came out to look at the sky. People were praying; people were on their knees—’
‘It was only a star.’
‘Ay, Tom, a star!’ Kit could not stop himself from shouting. ‘A star that God did not create on the second day! A star that Adam never saw, if “Adam” existed at all—’
Tom grabbed hold of Kit’s chin and twisted his head to face him, rougher than he had ever touched him before. ‘Listen to me: never speak like that again. Not even to me. Do you understand?’ Kit was too frightened to reply. Tom shook him, hard. ‘Kit, they’ll not just hang you for that. Do you want to end up on Great Stone Gate? Do you want to end up like Babington?’
The star is gone now. But the memory of it lives: a heresy in the heavens, defiantly outside of Creation. The deniers must contort themselves to explain it away, as a missive from God, an illusion of the Devil, an evil omen, when all it means is that the stars are alive in a way no man yet understands – they are not pinholes in the paper firmament, infinitely turning on a set dial; they live, they are born, and they die. Kit is watching a star die right now, though he does not know it.
And he too is watched, from atop the hill by the moat bridge, where Ingram Frizer stands spinning his knife in his fingers, practising his stab. Frizer tries not to look at the figure in the meadow, its long, still shadow cut across the grass like a gnomon. He tells himself he cannot bear the sight of Christopher Marlowe, but that is not true. He cannot bear to look away.
As he spins and stabs, spins and stabs, he whispers:
‘ “See where my slave, the ugly monster Death,
Shaking and quivering, pale and wan for fear,
Stands aiming at me with his murdering dart,
Who flies away at every glance I give,
And when I look away, comes stealing on.
Villain, away and hie thee to the field!
I and mine army come to load thy bark
With souls of thousand mangled carcasses—
Look where he goes! But see, he comes again
Because I stay.” ’
He reels around and thrusts his blade at the darkness.
Death takes a step backwards.