ON THE 18TH OF May 1593, a clerk of the Star Chamber draws up the order for Christopher Marlowe’s arrest, on suspicion of treason, suspicion of heresy, suspicion of sodomy, and a host of other charges besides. The least comes with a sentence of years in prison. The worst, with death.
Swiftly, this document travels east across the city, from Westminster to the Privy Court on Seething Lane, where it passes from the hand of another clerk to the office of Sir John Puckering, the Lord Keeper, who peruses it disinterestedly, grunts his approval and then hands it back, for delivery unto the arresting bailiff. But before the document can reach its final destination, it is intercepted by a man with a clean-shaven face who, every morning, brings the Lord Keeper’s clerk a pinch of tobacco and then sends him outside to smoke it. The clerk thus occupied, the man then half-sits on a corner of his desk and scans through the outgoing letters, never regarding any long enough for an average reader to glean anything. But Robin Poley remembers every word.
Later, from his home in St Helen’s Bishopsgate, Poley dispatches a message bound for Scadbury, which is received that same night by Ingram Frizer. Walsingham has the message in hand by midnight:
You have two dayes to make ready, use them well. They will demand a bail.
Walsingham spends the following day closeted in his study, sweating over his accounts. He will say nothing to Kit until the last possible minute. First, he must scrape together enough gold to pay Kit’s bail, which he can only pray shall be within his means. Year after year, the little reserve left to him by Uncle Francis dwindles. Already he owes money to some of his informants in London, whose eyes he can ill afford to lose, especially Robin Poley, especially now. He must rekindle certain urgent negotiations which Kit’s arrival at Scadbury had put to a halt – that is, the business of acquiring a dowry, a wife.
Walsingham therefore devotes two hours to the composition of a love-letter of the tawdriest sort, comparing eyes to the green of the sea and hair to the gold of autumn wheat, a thing which leaves him feeling sullied, and therefore satisfied that it shall be effective. Visions of a lavish wedding arise: himself hand-in-hand with Lady Audrey Shelton, the Queen’s beloved handmaiden. With her by his side, he’ll step back into the light of grace. There shall be a seat in Parliament for him, perhaps even a knighthood. A respectable, comfortable life, such as was once ripped from his grasp.
Stepping out of his study at last with the finished letter in hand, Walsingham stumbles into Kit in the corridor. ‘Your staff seem preoccupied,’ Kit says, darkly. They have spoken little since the other night in the orchard.
Walsingham decides upon a half-truth. ‘As it happens, I must go to Greenwich soon. Next week, for Whitsuntide.’
‘You never said so.’
‘It was not necessary. You are not the sum of my concerns, you know. My life was flowing along freely before you stepped in it.’
This lands like a slap. Kit winces and storms away to his room like a churlish boy. But Walsingham lingers long after he has gone, the letter temporarily forgotten, a vice of fear squeezing his chest, tighter every second.
He instructs his steward to keep Kit under watch for the rest of the day, but this turns out to be an unnecessary precaution, as Kit hardly leaves his room. By nightfall, everything is ready for the guards’ arrival in the morning, as ready as can be expected.
Still, Walsingham cannot sleep. Three or four in the morning finds him back in his study, brooding over a message from Robin Poley that he should have destroyed days ago:
Youle find the services I offer convenient, I feare, in the dayes ahead.
Shal we not speake of figures yet?
Walsingham knows precisely what ‘services’ Poley means. Not that he can bring himself to name them, even silently. He tries, instead, to pray. He tries to see his own future again, the same as before, except that Kit is there too in one way or another, that dissolute, baseborn friend whose company his wife begrudgingly tolerates. But there is no present that could engender such a future. The nerves that might have fed this limb are dying, one by one.
One hand upon his shuddering heart, Walsingham begins to compose a reply to Poley’s letter – slowly, to disguise the weakness in his hand, which comes and goes ever since his year in the Marshalsea:
What figure… must one paye… to sleepe sound at night forever…?
A knock comes at the door, and Walsingham tears the paper to shreds. He finds Ingram Frizer in the corridor, white-faced with anxiety, saying, ‘Nick – Master Skeres is back from Greenwich, master. He says the men are coming for Master Marlowe. They’re on their way.’
Kit awakens at the bang of the door, opening his eyes just long enough to see Walsingham barge into his room, a candle in hand, calling, ‘Get up!’
Kit closes his eyes again and exhales. He knows already why Walsingham is here, he can feel it.
Walsingham throws the casement wide open and stands on his toes to lean over the window ledge, his head swinging left and right. ‘They are coming. They would have left Greenwich an hour ago. We must be ready.’
Kit remains pinned flat to the bed.
‘Kit, do you understand me? They have a warrant this time.’ Walsingham lifts Kit’s bag out of a corner and begins emptying it onto the desk, one handful of papers at a time. ‘Have you sorted your papers like I asked?’
‘What?’
‘Your papers, Kit – have you sorted them?’
‘I cannot. I could not.’
‘You will do it now, or I will do it myself. I will burn every scrap!’
Two women come to light the fire. Kit drags a chair to the hearth and Walsingham dumps the papers at his feet. In ten years or more Kit has discarded next to nothing. Good paper is a luxury. Most of his manuscripts contain several works altogether, one written verso and another recto, yet another picking up where an earlier work had ended. On one side of a page, he may have a piece of Doctor Faustus and on the other, a note copied from a forbidden book – one of the many forbidden books that Master Kett, Kit’s tutor in divinity at Cambridge, would slip him after lectures: books by Bruno, Algazel, Averroes, Maimonides; heretics, Mohammedans, Jews. ‘Do not copy from this now,’ Master Kett would say, every time, and every time Kit would copy page after page anyway, knowing he would never see those books again.
The Jesuit Stephens writes of texts in India knowne as pooranas, which trayce the historie of Man from thousands of yeeres before Adam & Eve, and showe our Earth to be far moore ancient than Christian reckoning would—
Kit balls this up and throws it into the fire.
That the moiety of so-called prophets were but jugglers and conie-catchers was well-knowne to the moslem scholers of olde: Al-Razi, that we call Rhazes, who wrote Of the prophets’ fraudulent trickes—
Into the flames with it. Just like Master Kett – stoop-shouldered, soft-voiced, grubby-bearded Master Kett – they’d executed him, for heresy, the year after Kit took his degree: doused him in hot tar, rolled him into a ditch and burnt him alive.
‘You should burn every word of it,’ Walsingham says, from the window. ‘Leave nothing for the vultures to pick over.’
‘I cannot burn every word.’ Kit now holds a single page of Doctor Faustus, representing a whole day of his life, a day spent at the kitchen table in Little Bedlam with Tom seated across from him, smiling as he’d watched Kit work:
…now, body, turn to ayre…
O soule, be changed into littel waterdroppes,
And fall into the ocean!…
On the back of this same page, after half a second of scanning, Kit finds the words:
God is but the rod of powerfull men; with such they beate us into submition.
‘May I have a drink?’ Kit says.
Walsingham looks upon him pityingly, as if he knows something terrible will soon happen, as certain as if it has already happened. He goes to the door and calls to someone outside, ‘Whisky.’
In this same moment, Ingram Frizer stands upon the ramparts of Scadbury’s old Norman watchtower – a place where he has never had cause or permission to venture before – poised and waiting to ring the old alarm bell which has been up here rusting through untold decades. He can see for miles: far beyond the woods, where the needled spire of the church in Chiselhurst blazes yellow against the pink dawn. Due north, upon the horizon, a faint cap of smoke broods over distant London.
Yesterday, just as Frizer was sitting down to supper, Nick had turned up with something urgent in his looks, that childhood code. Frizer has, over the years, walked away from dozens of meals for the sake of that look. Out in the yard, Nick began to explain, but with such a roundabout manner that even after several minutes Frizer still had no idea what they were talking about.
‘I mean Marlowe, man!’ Nick said. ‘Christ, I thought you’d shower me with a thousand thanks!’
‘You want me to stay in London?’ Frizer blithered. ‘With Marlowe?’
‘The master asked me to do it, but marry, I cannot sit nurse to the big bugger. I have other business in London, if you catch my meaning.’ He’d looked sly, meaning that he had coney-catching business: selling some poor fool or other a false deed, or a phantom horse, or counterfeit silver. Nick always has a scheme in the works; his father was the same way.
‘It should only be for a few days,’ Nick went on. ‘A week at the most.’
‘But what will the master say? Will he not be angry?’
Nick smiled strangely, cagily. ‘Man, you should worry less and less every day about what the master thinks!’ Frizer had been afraid to ask what he’d meant.
Betsy – confined, these days, to her bed, looking every day a little more like a foot swollen with gout – had merely bowed her head at the news of Frizer’s imminent leave-taking, fumbling with a talisman of pig-iron that her mother had tied around her neck. ‘Iron keeps the Devil out,’ she’d explained, when she saw Frizer staring at it. ‘Or, it keeps him in.’
Frizer could not disguise a wince. ‘Well, you’ll not need it, I reckon. I’ll be gone, and taking my accursed hide with me.’
He’d started to leave, but Betsy stopped him, blurting out, ‘Master Purcell said… Master Purcell said, there’s nothing to be feared of them, anyway. The marks.’
Frizer could only gape at her, betrayed. He had never so much as met this Purcell, let alone allowed the charlatan to examine him.
Betsy went on, ‘He told me that you should pray for forgiveness.’ Her eyes glanced off Frizer’s body, as if it were too sad, too shameful to behold head-on.
On the watchtower, Frizer struggles to light his pipe from a wind-tossed lantern. He never should have agreed to this. He has no business going to London, not with a wife in such condition. What shall he do, alone with Marlowe for days on end? He has not even redeemed himself from their last meeting as yet, having avoided the poet entirely this past week, only watching his comings and goings from a corner of the sentry-box. A part of him hopes that everything will go wrong today, that Marlowe will not be bailed and the last he’ll ever see of the man will be as he is dragged into the Privy Court, and oblivion.
From the distance comes a low, irregular drumming, a heart beating out of time. Gradually it grows louder, closer, and Frizer straightens up like a hare, watching the edge of the woods. A flock of starlings explode out of the trees like gunpowder. A moment later, four riders swing onto the orchard pass, a trail of dust at their heels. The horses move at a steady gallop, becoming nervous, jangling silhouettes where the road curves sharply towards the house, spreading ever longer, leggier shadows upon the earth.
Transfixed, Frizer watches them come: so unrelenting, so furious, like a personification of the Inevitable. He thinks of Faustus when the Devil comes to collect his due, begging earth, air and sea to hide him, crying out to the indifferent stars as the fateful hour draws near:
‘ “Lente currite, noctis equi!” ’ Run slowly, horses of the night!
At last, he remembers to ring the bell.
Still kneeling at the hearth, Kit lifts his head at the sound of the alarm. Across the room, Walsingham too freezes and looks up at the ceiling. Together they wait for silence, through twelve strikes, a quickfire midnight knell. When the bell stops, Walsingham finishes off his whisky, slams the cup on the desk and charges across the room. He snatches up a handful of Kit’s papers from the floor. ‘Enough!’
‘No, Thomas, stop!’ Kit grabs his wrist. He cannot bear it, foolish as it is; he cannot bear the thought of every word he’s ever written turning to smoke. He might as well turn to smoke. ‘Please, let me hide them!’
‘There’s no time!’
The papers scatter. Kit falls to the floor, scrambling them together again, but the sight of a drawing stops him, having landed inches away from Walsingham’s foot: a crude sketch of two men, one arse-up before the other, rutting like goats – a thing Tom had pressed into Kit’s hand one night, years ago, as both a proposition and a jest, never intended to be treasured, a thing he ought never to have kept.
Kit looks up, realizing from Walsingham’s reddening face that he has seen it too.
Before either can speak, someone bursts through the door unannounced, releasing a gust of air that scatters the papers all over again. Kit gathers up an armful and recoils, his back to the wall, facing the intruder: that scrawny, boyish fellow, a watchman or something of the sort, the unreserved ardour of whose admiration Kit has felt like a spider on his back all week long.
‘They are here!’ the sentry proclaims with childish urgency, and then stands chastened in his master’s silence. His big eyes dart first to Kit, and then to the papers. Lastly, to the fire.
‘Get the horses,’ Walsingham says, through his teeth. His man blushes and bows effusively as he retreats, taking care, after some brief consideration, to close the door behind him.
Kit hugs the papers, rocks on his heels. Through every nerve he feels a surge, teeming up to the throat, to the eyes, till it bursts out of him at last, a miserable, shameful sob.
Walsingham kneels and takes hold of Kit’s sleeves. ‘There, now, stop it. That’s enough. Kit – we must go.’
‘Please take them for me! Carry them with your things, they’ll never look!’
Walsingham bites his lip, relenting. ‘I will carry them for you, ay? But only for today. And if anything should happen – if the worst should happen – I will destroy them.’
‘I should never have come here!’ Kit says. ‘I should have run for Scotland, or France—’
‘It would have done you no good. Look at me: the time to run may come, but not yet. Now, no more of this blubbering, do you hear? They delight in pulling a woman out of us. Do not let them. From now on, whatever happens, you must be strong: you must be a man.’
Kit looks away. He has been told this a thousand times, by Baines, by his father, even by Tom, and always in this same offhand way, as if he should know instantly what it means. Be Tamburlaine, they might as well say. Pretend. For he is not strong. If they start to break bones, chop off fingers, stop his breath, surely he will say whatever he has to say to make them stop. They’ll ask for names, like they always do – and he’ll give them.
But such would be a perilous thing to confess. Especially to one whose name he might easily speak.
‘Do you think they will hang me, Thomas?’ Kit rasps.
‘You?’ Walsingham smiles. ‘You’d break the rope.’
Kit feels such gratitude for that smile that he can only laugh.
Frizer stands on the gravel path beside Nick, the ivy-covered portico behind him, the foot of the moat bridge some hundred feet away. He tries to look solid, square. A little nearer to the bridge the two porters stand guard, guns shouldered. On the far side of the moat, the four riders wait in a patient row, faceless under their brimmed helmets, horses flicking their tails. No one has moved for an eternity.
Nick offers a coin. ‘A groat says he picks up his skirt and flies.’
Frizer shakes his head. He cannot find his voice; his heart hammers as if at the beginning of a bear-baiting, just before the dogs are loosed.
‘They had better hurry,’ Nick murmurs, with a glance to the house. ‘These fellows’ll not wait forever…’
‘They’re burning papers,’ Frizer whispers, startled at himself.
‘What?’
‘They’re upstairs, burning papers.’
Nick chuckles. ‘Oh-ho! There goes your Tamburlaine!’
Frizer stares at him in horror. But finally the doors of the house open, emitting first the master, then the steward and chamber-grooms. Marlowe steps out of the shadows behind the rest, wearing the same old suit he’d arrived in, which may have once been black but rain and time have turned a shade of mottled grey, the breast studded in mismatched buttons and slashed with vivid wounds of amaranth-red. The servants all take a half-step back, as if to make room for him.
Hands raised, sword twisting slackly at his side, the master walks to the middle of the moat bridge before the lead rider commands him to halt. Inaudibly, they speak. Now and then the master gestures in Marlowe’s direction; now and then the rider nods or broadly shakes his head. There is something reminiscent of a transaction about it, like horse-traders enumerating the qualities of their stock.
When at last the master turns to lead the riders on, Nick blows a fart through his lips, disappointed that it all fell out so peaceably. Marlowe stands in the lane, stone-still, even as the riders surround him and dismount. The man in the lead produces a paper, reading from it loud enough for a word to carry here and there: ‘Accused… name of… Majesty… treason… heresy… sodomy—’
‘There is our cue,’ Nick says. They move forward. The steward and grooms jog past, arms laden with bags of what must be the master’s effects, followed by stable-hands, with horses enough for all. Frizer stops short of the guards’ circle of horses, not sure how to breach it. Inside, one of the Council’s rogues lifts a black bag into which Marlowe, much too tall to reach, obligingly bows his head. The guard gathers the bag at Marlowe’s throat with a string, saying, ‘This one has a reputation, is’t not so?’
‘Meek as a kitten,’ says another, watching.
‘And to think they said we’d need more men!’ says the leader.
Marlowe’s wrists are shackled, his back ramrod-straight, his hoodwinked head twisted in Frizer’s direction. At the lead rider’s prodding, he swings his leg over the big gelding as if to hop a garden gate, and then paws for reins before realizing there are none. The bag pulses in and out over his open mouth, a hint of teeth sucking the fabric. Panic stirs from a hub near the base of Frizer’s spine, near to where his knife rests in its scabbard, as though it were the knife and not his body that just remembered what it feels like to be bound and gagged, to know not where the next hurt will come from.
A memory hisses in his ear: Is this what you want?
‘Here.’ The master takes a large object from the steward and shoves it into Frizer’s arms: the same shoe-leather bag that Marlowe had brought with him to Scadbury.
‘Have a care with that,’ the master says, with a worried glance to the Council’s men.
Frizer hugs the bag tight. All that he might hold in his arms, in this very moment: Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, and much else besides that a frightened man might burn. Something within seems to radiate its own living heat, as if the fire were not yet finished with its contents.
An hour later, somewhere in the sheep-dotted hills north of Eltham, the master slows his horse and waits for Frizer to catch up. Frizer slides Marlowe’s bag behind his back.
‘Master Skeres assures me you are a fellow with discretion,’ the master says, quietly, as they ride on together.
‘Yes, master.’ Frizer tries to say it like a discreet fellow would.
‘He shall require your full attention,’ the master says, with a nod up ahead to where Marlowe rides at the centre of the guards, his head bowed so low he seems almost asleep. ‘Often, he knows not what is best for him. You must keep two eyes on him at all times.’
‘Yes, master.’
‘And when I ask for your discretion, Master Frizer, I mean that you are not to speak of matters which you do not understand. He will ask, certainly, but you will deny him. You will plead ignorance. That is why I have agreed to let you fill this position, you see – because of your ignorance.’
Frizer nods, for ’tis true he feels hopelessly ignorant just now. He knows nothing; he understands nothing. Marlowe is the master’s friend, and their purpose is to help him, is it not? That is why they are going with him to London – to help him?
‘Well,’ the master says, even softer, ‘all of this may be moot. We shall see whether they set a bail. If not… I may have another use for you.’
But this other use, he does not explain. He spurs his horse, trotting up to ride alongside the Privy Council’s men.