BLINDED, KIT ONLY KNOWS they have reached London by the savoury-sweet scent of burning rosemary, a safeguard against plague-spreading miasmas; much good has it done. The deeper they move into the city, the heavier the smell becomes, overpowering even the usual scents of forge and charnel-house, muckheap and sump, stable and slaughterhouse. None of the familiar city noise can be heard over the chopping of hooves to Kit’s left and right, only birdsong, as if the whole of London’s population had been transformed into chittering starlings, cackling gulls.
But not long after they’ve crossed the bridge, a low roar rises in the distance: the sound of voices chanting in unison. For every turn of a corner it swells louder, until suddenly the noise is deafening and Kit realizes that the guards are leading him straight towards an angry mob, dozens strong.
‘Hang him! Hang him! Hang him!’
The riders stop, dismount. From the left, a hand grasps at Kit’s restraints and a man barks, ‘Down, down!’ to no avail. From the right, a fist grasps the tabs of Kit’s doublet and pulls until he tips sideways, scrambling for balance, too late. The landing knocks the breath out of him.
‘There’s no need for that!’ Walsingham says.
Kit is grabbed again, hoisted upright, given no time to find his own footing ere there are arms looped through his shackled arms, marching him into the rabble.
‘Thomas!’ His own voice sounds shrill. ‘Thomas, what is happening?’
The buffeting begins: an elbow or a fist to his shoulder, his chest, his cheek. ‘Traitor!’ someone snarls, and spits. ‘Atheist!’ Legs try to trip him up but the crush around him prevents his falling. At last, a gate creaks and someone shoves Kit through, where he stands dazed and panting for half a second ere he is tugged forward again, into what must be the courtyard.
He knows the Privy Court well. First a stone gatehouse, through which they have just passed, and now the yard, a tight square of gravel and starveling weeds walled in on two sides by long, half-timber wings. At the back, the brick courthouse, crowned with gables as steep as fangs, its doors surmounted by a jawless stone skull: an effigy, or so ’tis said, of Wat Tyler, who spat in the face of Richard II. A Canterbury martyr; a London bogeyman.
‘May I not speak with the Lord Keeper?’ Walsingham whispers, as they enter the courthouse’s echoing great hall. Invisible now are the chessboard floor of red and white tiles, the coloured-glass windows, the oak pillory, with chains bolted to the floor. Straight ahead spans the looming magistrates’ dais; above that, an obligatory portrait of the Queen, attired in cloth of gold, strangling a serpent in her right fist.
Kit senses that the crowd inside is at least as large as the mob without, though more subdued. Their whispers rush like blood in the ears, becoming murmurs of alarm as Kit is thrust through their midst.
Someone says, ‘Is that him?’
A gavel cracks three times. Perhaps they will put him to trial in this very moment, charge and sentence him within a single breath.
‘The court calls John Penry.’
The murmurs swell up louder than before, and the gavel cracks again for order as Kit’s captors rush him past the judge’s voice, through another door and thence into silence, twenty feet, thirty feet. At last, he is jerked to a halt.
Still behind him, Walsingham’s voice breaks above a whisper. ‘Let me speak to the Lord Keeper. I demand to speak to the Lord Keeper!’
Old hinges creak. Kit is pushed forward; the hinges creak again, now behind him. They have breached the rust-coloured iron gate at the far end of the corridor that leads from the great hall to the courthouse’s busy inner hive. Kit has been here a hundred times in his former service to the Council, but never once has he ventured beyond this gate.
‘Who in hell is John Penry?’ Kit whispers, without knowing whether Walsingham will hear him.
‘A heretic,’ Walsingham whispers back, from the other side of the gate. ‘Puritan. Welsh.’
‘I thought they were here for me. All those people.’
A grunt. ‘Now you flatter yourself!’
Nearby, Kit’s captors exchange words with some sort of gatekeeper. For the second time today, he hears his charges spoken aloud: ‘Suspicion of buggery, suspicion of heresy, suspicion of treason. Suspicion of libel against her Majesty and the Church of England—’
‘Kit,’ Walsingham says, and Kit wonders if these shall be the last words he’ll ever hear him say. ‘You are a damned hero – let them not forget that. Remind them of Paris. Remind them of Babington!’
Upstairs, a hand grips the hood in a clump close to Kit’s hair and pulls it backwards over his chin and lips. He must tug his head down to free himself. A camphor candle burns less than a foot away from his light-starved eyes, burning his nostrils. The room wherein he sits is only large enough to contain a table and two chairs. But upon second glance this is not a room at all, only a cell arranged out of heavy green curtains that skim the floor. Daylight seeps through just above the curtain rods, exposing a ceiling carved with birds and beasts, partly obscured by a thick layer of whitewash.
Outside there are footsteps, muffled voices. The curtains part behind Kit, cutting a wedge of light into the space. One man goes out as another comes in and stands close at Kit’s back, like an axe over his neck.
Please God, not him. Anyone but him.
‘Christopher Marlowe,’ a man says, muffled. He takes the seat across the table, taking a moment to smooth out the wrinkles in his white linen plague-mask. A square forehead, sandy hair, small, squinting eyes – Kit knows him not.
The man sets down blank paper, a leather slipcase, a glass inkwell and a quill cut to a fine point. Only once these items are arranged to his liking does he look up, with an air of forced cordiality surely designed to disarm. ‘Or Marley, is it? Morley?’
Kit coughs to find his voice. ‘Marley, really. In London they call me Marlowe.’
The man pinches a set of thick spectacles to his nose, further obscuring his already half-hidden face, the lenses magnifying his narrow eyes. He stabs the inkwell with his quill. ‘And Marlin? Merlin?’
‘When I was in Paris,’ Kit says, a subtle reminder of services rendered, not that anyone at Seething Lane should need any. There was a time when some would come out from behind the iron gate to greet him whenever he’d arrived at the Privy Court, sore-arsed and exhausted after the three days’ journey from Cambridge. He would hand over Baines’s letters and receive letters to deliver in return, and with them, sometimes, a slice of leftover Easter simnel or a half-dozen biscuits wrapped in paper, the work of this or that fellow’s wife. Such kindness had seemed strange to him, coming from these men, but those who deal in cruelty also know how to use kindness, how to wield it like a weapon. Feed a stupid, hungry boy enough cake and he’ll gobble up any poison put before him.
At last, the man begins to write, a task to which he commits himself entirely, head bent close to the page: ‘Marlin… Merlin. Master Marley, are you acquainted with a Thomas Kyd of London, gentleman, son of John Kyd of London, gentleman?’
He has uttered this while still writing and without looking up. Kit trips over his own tongue, at last managing, ‘Ay.’
‘Do you, or do you not, reside in a lodging-house by the Leathersellers’ Hall in St Helen’s parish, Bishopsgate?’
‘I did. For a short while.’
‘You lived there with Thomas Kyd?’
‘Yes.’
‘For how long?’
‘From October. But I left—weeks ago, I left—’
‘You shared quarters with Thomas Kyd?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shared a bed with Thomas Kyd?’
‘No, no. Separate beds.’
‘Shared a workspace with Thomas Kyd? A desk, or a table?’
‘Ay.’
‘Would you recognize Thomas Kyd’s handwriting if I showed you a sample now?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Have you ever intentionally given Thomas Kyd papers of yours, or sent letters to him?’
‘No.’ Kit senses his left knee jittering under the table and forces it to stop. It starts again.
‘Have you ever heard Thomas Kyd profess to deny the deity of Jesus Christ, and the Resurrection of His mortal flesh?’
Kit gasps out a laugh, unthinking. ‘No!’
‘Have you, yourself, ever given utterance to such a denial, in company where Thomas Kyd may have been present?’
Kit shakes his head. The Council’s man continues filling up his notes with scribbled shorthand, or possibly code. Kit can make out almost nothing beyond the candleflame, which twists spindle-like in a draught. When Kit looks up again, he finds his interrogator’s needling eyes fixed upon him in a wordless threat, a look that every child knows. ‘Nay, never,’ Kit says.
The Council’s man stands his quill in the inkwell and folds his hands, passing his gaze over Kit’s person as if to step over a carcass in the gutter. He says, ‘Are you aware that Thomas Kyd is currently under the custody of the warden of the Marshalsea Prison?’
With only half a second to decide, Kit chooses to lie. ‘No, I was not aware.’
‘Why, Master Marley, do you imagine Master Kyd would be in prison at this time?’
‘I have no idea.’ At least this is no lie.
The man briefly lowers his gaze to the slipcase and then lifts it again, as if to offer Kit a final chance at some unspoken remedy. At last, he removes one item from the case: a worn and yellowed sheet of paper, covered in large, schoolboyish italic lettering that Kit does not, at first, recognize as his own:
We call God Everlasting, Invisible, Incommutable, Incomprehensible, Imortall, etc… But if Jesus Christ, even he, which was borne of Marie, was God, then so shall he be a visible God, comprehensible & mortall, which is not counted God with me.
The man taps the paper twice. ‘This document was recovered from your former lodgings, Marley. Do you recognize it?’
Kit shakes his head.
‘This is a passage copied from a book. An unusual book: The Fall of the Late Arian. These are, in fact, the words of that self-same Arian, spoken in defence of his own heresy. In vain, of course. If memory serves, the man was burnt at the stake.’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘I myself have seen but one copy of this book, in the private collection of the heretic Kett, late Master of Divinity at Cambridge.’
Kit realizes that he is chewing his lip. A pause descends, long enough that he feels pressured to speak, despite having nothing to say. ‘I—I know not—’
‘Do you know this book, Marley?’
‘No.’
‘But you were at Cambridge, Marley. You studied divinity there, with Kett.’
‘I did, but—’
‘How do you imagine Master Kyd, who has never left London in all his life, might have obtained a copy of this book? Because if this paper is not yours, Marley, then it must belong to him.’
‘I would not say that.’
‘That the paper is not yours?’
‘That the paper is his.’
‘Then whose could it be?’
‘Other men have lived in that house. They – we – all of us – we come through there briefly, stay perhaps a few months at the most—’
‘I’m afraid you will have to give us a name, Marley. A man who protects his friends as he protects himself is, under most circumstances, truly only protecting himself.’ He leans closer, the shadow of his spectacles arching over his brows, and Kit clamps his jaws together. Already – they ask him for names already?
‘Master Kyd did not hesitate to tell us that the paper is yours,’ the man says. ‘What can we do but take his word, in the absence of better intelligence?’
‘’Tis not mine,’ Kit blurts out, ‘nor is it Kyd’s. I know not whose it might be, I know not the names of all the men that lived there before me; when I was there it was only Kyd and myself. But the paper is not mine, neither can it be Kyd’s, because Kyd was trained as a scrivener and I know his hand – this is not his hand. If I knew more, I would tell you.’
Silence. The little eyes search Kit’s; God knows what they find in them. Eventually the man drops his gaze, this time to his own notes. He writes something with great flourish, separating each stroke of the pen so that Kit may hear a word, or any one of several words, take shape out of the eight or nine distinct scratches. He cannot help but picture one word in particular blazing on the paper in block letters: LIES.
Kit has been gone an hour. With his back to the wall and a sandalwood-scented pomander pressed to his face, Walsingham anxiously watches the trial of John Penry unfold: a chaotic affair, despite having a far smaller audience than is typical, made up mostly of clergymen and their bodyguards, who stamp and fume when cued. Bullish, shrill-voiced John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, presides as justice but might just as well be prosecutor. Penry – a much younger man than Walsingham had imagined, perhaps no older than Kit – stands with his wrists chained to the dock, attired in a filthy prison smock. For years, the Council has suspected Penry of distributing Puritanical pamphlets, but the archbishop makes no mention of these, only of a single, rambling, unfinished letter to her Majesty seized in a recent raid on Penry’s home, from which Whitgift sneeringly reads aloud: ‘ “… Your Majesty may well consider what good the Church of God hath gotten at your hands, otherwise as great troubles are likely to come as ever were in the days of your sister Mary…!” ’
Hovering over it all, the Queen gazes haughtily out of her portrait, a gasping snake coiled helplessly about her tight, pale fist, the faintest trace of a smile upon her lips.
A man approaches and leans against the wall by Walsingham’s shoulder with a sigh, as if to throw himself down in the grass on a lazy summer’s day. For half a minute, Walsingham and he watch the trial, unspeaking. Then the man slides closer to murmur, with an air of schoolyard gossip, ‘They wanted him for heresy, but the document amounts only to sedition. Under the Act of Uniformity, he should suffer no worse than lifelong imprisonment. Nevertheless, the Council seeks a penalty of death. Whitgift would slaughter three hundred virgins to see him noosed.’
Briefly, Walsingham slips into doubt. He lowers the pomander to say, ‘Marlowe?’
‘Oh no.’ The man smiles, a charming smile. He nods at the crowd. ‘Penry.’
The man’s face is clean-shaven. Walsingham has never seen Robin Poley with a beard. It affords him an illusion of youth, though he must be at least forty by now. Still slender, well-built yet slight, only a hint of silver in his golden hair. Handsome, and knows it too, with his dark blue, feline eyes, his strong, dimpled chin.
‘I have something for you,’ Poley says. ‘For Master Marlowe, in fact.’
He unhooks an object from his belt and offers it with a hand of only four fingers, the ring finger amputated just below the first joint. Walsingham accepts: a round, silver flask with a copper cartouche on one side, inscribed with a familiar mark: Tom’s mark, of the running hare.
‘It was found at his quarters,’ Poley says, ‘but ’tis of no use to our intelligencers.’
The flask is still a quarter full. ‘If I give him this, he will question how I came by it,’ Walsingham says.
‘Question he may. Let him take it as proof that no man on earth is more fit to help him than you. ’Tis better if he fears you a little, marry. He’ll be more obedient that way.’ Poley waits for silence as the mob across the room lets out a cry of outrage, and then: ‘I assume he has made you promises already, has he not?’
Walsingham frowns. ‘Promises? Of what?’
‘His silence, of course. “If they take me, I swear never to breathe your name, no matter what beastly things they do to me—” Has he said that yet?’
Walsingham looks away, feeling a pinch somewhere, just behind his heart. ‘No, he has not.’
‘Well, perhaps he knows better than to make impossible vows,’ Poley says. ‘Or perhaps he is afraid to put the thought in your head…’
‘Is there something else you want?’
‘You have not told him that Baines is in London, I suppose,’ Poley says, his expression that of one withholding a delightful secret. ‘If he knew, I doubt he would have come so quietly as they say he did. Sooner or later, he will discover it on his own, and then you’ll have some new trouble on your hands. I have not seen Baines about the court since last week, but they keep him close. You will find him in Newgate Without, at the Saracen’s Head, dining on the Council’s penny.’
‘Whatever Baines has against Kit is but hearsay, hardly enough to convict.’
A chuckle. ‘In your uncle’s days, that would have been true.’ Poley gestures broadly over the scene across the hall, rows of backs turned to the centre like greyhounds cornering a fox. ‘This trial is part of a crusade, you see – Archbishop Whitgift’s holy crusade, which shall not end until England is swept clean of all those who worship not at her Majesty’s altar. Puritans, papists, atheists – Penry, Marlowe – to the Council, they are the same. And today’s sentencing shall set a worrisome precedent. For, the law and the statutes be damned, John Penry shall swing ere the month is out, and on what evidence? – a single piece of paper, and hearsay.’ He turns a malignant smile on Walsingham. ‘But as for Penry’s friends, they are luckier than you, you see, for they are already dead. Nothing he says in the torture room can harm them. They look down on us mortals from Great Stone Gate.’
‘No doubt you imagine them to be in good company,’ Walsingham scoffs, weakly. He has often wondered how Robin Poley must feel every time he crosses London Bridge, passing beneath the skull of Anthony Babington.
Poley’s smile does not waver. He is made of water; every lance passes straight through those depthless eyes of his, leaving no wounds. ‘We will speak again soon, I expect,’ he says. About to leave, he stops, turning back to whisper, ‘Best of luck to you at Greenwich. I hear Robert Cecil gifted Lady Audrey with a replica of his own cock, in goatskin, to keep her wet when he is away. But you know how gossip can be.’
He bares his white teeth, slithers away.
‘They’re not here for him, are they?’ Frizer says, to Nick.
The crowd across the street has not let up for a minute. Spurred on by the earnest preaching of some firebrand curate (who had ranted on about predestination for a good ten minutes), the mob has found their voice again, still with nothing to say but, ‘Hang him!’
Nick makes a doubtful noise, but then whistles, loud enough to draw the attention of one or two fellows on the fringes of the mob. He yells, ‘Who’re you here for?’ and a woman lowers the cloth over her face to answer, ‘John Penry, the Devil himself!’ at which Frizer’s heart enters a strange war of relief versus resentment, as if offended that Marlowe is not devil enough for them.
The master’s other servants left their party near Greenwich. Now Frizer and Nick stand alone on Seething Lane, holding the four remaining horses by the reins and sweating in the sun. Tirelessly, Nick expounds upon a new scheme he has heard about somewhere, a method for fleecing well-moneyed gulls out of their inheritances. But Frizer only pretends to listen, his gaze buried in Marlowe’s bag. If he could put his back to Nick for a minute or two, he could take a peek inside, perhaps scan a page…
Nick punches him in the arm. ‘Just open it, man! What, are you afraid the master will put you over his knee?’
‘Oh, leave it alone!’ Frizer whines. ‘You with your coney-catching! You care not for anything but knavery, do you?’
Nick takes no offence. ‘Go on, I’ll not tell. Probably the big bugger’ll not come back for it anyway.’
‘You cannot know that.’
Nick hooks a thumb at the gatehouse across the street, whispering, ‘They would pay a fortune for that bag in there, I’ll bet. If we brought it to the right men, by God…!’
Frizer squeezes in between the horses, too narrow a space for Nick. Nick makes no effort to chase him, leaning over the saddle of his horse to say, ‘You know, I could make you give it to me, if I wanted to.’
Frizer feels a shiver, in spite of himself. Every now and then, Nick looks on him with these stranger’s eyes, their stare as still as the centre of a wheel. It was with this same stare that Nick had told Frizer one night, after several drinks, that ‘The quickest way to kill a man is to stick him in the eye. Not even a whimper. Like blowing out a candle.’
Frizer lifts the bag higher on his chest. ‘I know,’ he says, deepening his voice.
Nick takes a glance to the sky, seeming to consider well what he will say, then leans closer still. ‘Listen, man – all this, this is nothing. I’m not even here. I’ve got two feet planted in the world as it will be a month from now, and you know what I see?’ He grins. ‘I see many changes, for you and for me.’
Either Nick has lost his mind or Frizer has. ‘What do ye mean by that?’ Frizer says.
Nick’s grin wanes, turning cagey again. ‘Ah, nothing!’ He waves a hand. ‘Nothing but: be patient, do your part, make me proud. But never doubt we’ll both be coney-catching by June.’
Something about these words stands the hairs at Frizer’s neck on end. He looks across the street, espying two men fighting their way through the crowd: one is the master, clutching his pomander to his face like a charm; the other towers over every head, conspicuously hatless in a world of identical brown Sunday caps, his mop of curly hair the same colour as dried blood. The master must have posted bail. Frizer had thought Marlowe and the master might look relieved, but neither one of them does.
They approach, Marlowe with his head slightly bowed, in the peculiar posture of one for whom the roof of the world hangs too low. Without so much as a glance to Frizer, he reaches for the bag and murmurs, ‘I’ll take that,’ but the master very nearly slaps his hand.
‘Not here, by God! You want to keep it or not?’
Marlowe crosses his arms, scolded. In daylight, and up close, ’tis clear that his eyes are not black as Frizer had originally thought. They are, in fact, the very deepest shade of brown, as deep as bog oak. There is something faintly animal about them all the same. They seem capable of seeing in the dark.
The master turns to Frizer and speaks quietly, firmly. ‘From now on, every day, you shall bring Master Marlowe to this place. He will go inside, and may be gone several hours, but you shall wait for him here, as long as it takes. Afterwards, you shall see him back to your lodgings. You’ll do nothing else. Go nowhere else. Every day. Until you hear from me.’