THE BAIL WAS AS high as Walsingham had feared. Worst of all was the moment he’d watched a spotty-faced clerk write his name in a ledger beside Kit’s, as surety and bond: Tho: Walsingehamm. ’Tis on paper now, their entanglement, as binding as marriage.
He keeps the flask hidden from Kit as best he can, stuffed uncomfortably into his waistband as they ride north, through streets deserted of all but a few miserable-looking, masked creatures, scavenging the plague-fires for rosemary and kindling. On the way, Kit describes what little he’d seen of his interrogator’s face: the yellow hair, the squinting eyes, the spectacles. It can only be Thomas Phelippes, who was one of Uncle Francis’s best men back in the old days, a master of ciphers and codes, speaker of some fourteen languages. No ordinary spy. He was among a lucky few who had spent no time at all in prison after Uncle Francis died, but in fact found his fortunes much improved, as surely he hopes to see them improved again by delivering Kit. A sly fox, with the heart of a worm.
‘Well,’ Walsingham murmurs, mindful of his voice carrying, ‘they have not held you. That is a piece of good news. Neither have they charged you with anything but suspicion.’
‘But they knew the paper was mine, Thomas,’ Kit says, his eyes narrow above the line of his plague-mask.
‘’Tis a piece copied from a book, as you say – the words are not your words. There’s no proof of ill intent.’
Kit laughs bitterly at this. Ever since he’d emerged from behind the iron gate at the Privy Court, he has not met Walsingham’s gaze for more than a second.
He says, ‘There’s one question that I cannot put out of mind: what brought them to the house in the first place? Whether they came looking for Kyd or for me, they had to have a reason for coming. Someone had to make a report, a complaint—’
‘Anyone might have done that,’ Walsingham snaps. ‘Did you not, just two weeks ago, put living men on the public stage and rub them together like a wanton boy with his sister’s dolls? Or do I misremember?’
Kit bows his head, stewing in silence. He growls, ‘Do you think I am so stupid?’ and heels his horse, trotting on ahead.
Walsingham rankles – whether at himself or at Kit, he could hardly say. He is deep in this lie now, about Baines. But sometimes, the best way to protect Kit Marlowe is to lie to him.
They arrive at Bishopsgate: an arched gateway set into London Wall like the façade of a derelict fortress, providing passage north to Shoreditch, Spitalfields, Norton Folgate. Even now, the gatehouse guards are inspecting a fly-buzzing cart bound for the grave pits outside the city, holding cloths to their faces as they peer beneath a stained, flesh-coloured tarpaulin. The braziers burning around the dry fountain in the square barely cover the stench, a putrid muddle of fetor and sweetness that Walsingham had come to know well, sitting by Tom’s deathbed at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
Across the street stands the Inn-in-the-Wall, a five-storey stack of half-timber jetties, all bowed slightly with the settling of centuries. Inside a passage large enough to admit horse and rider into the inn-yard together, a doggish little man with a handkerchief wadded over his mouth awaits them. He must have received Walsingham’s letter sent yesterday, though he is discreet enough not to mention it. The landlord of the Inn-in-the-Wall is among the longest serving of Walsingham’s many informants, inherited from Uncle Francis.
‘From inside, I warrant you, there’s hardly a trace of the smell,’ the landlord says cheerily, leading them into the yard. ‘And from your usual room, Master Walsingham, ’tis undetectable!’
Walsingham’s usual room sits on the fifth and highest floor, well removed from prying neighbours, though not entirely, it must be said, from the whiff of death. ‘Not one single case of contagion have we had!’ the landlord boasts as he opens the shutters, throwing light upon the monkish little room’s only form of adornment, above the desk: the same wall-painting one may find clumsily reproduced from a stencil in every public house in the kingdom, showing the Queen enthroned. In this case the face is subtly, alarmingly crooked, the image candle-stained at the base, as if she were rising out of black smoke. Many a night here, Walsingham has sat up in bed and stared at her white face like a child at a shadow, terrified to be caught thinking of ways to cover her up.
Just as the landlord is extolling the cleanliness of the sheets, an explosion sounds in the distance, causing Frizer to clasp Marlowe’s bag to his chest like a shield. The landlord waves it off. ‘Ah, ’tis only the gun foundry on Houndsditch, testing the wares! Happens no more than once, possibly twice a day…’
Kit moves to the window, his shoulders blocking out the daylight as solidly as a door.
‘No bedmates, I presume?’ the landlord asks, sweating at Walsingham’s side.
‘No, no bedmates – the same, friend, as if I occupied it myself.’
Kit remains at the window. Suppose he is taken in by the view, which spans clear beyond London Wall, over gabled rooftops and stony church towers, founts of black smoke and clumps of nodding trees. From here, it would be almost possible to spit on Hog Lane, Norton Folgate, were doleful Bedlam Hospital not standing in the way. Perhaps Walsingham should have prepared Kit for this, though it had never occurred to him that Kit may find it strange, or even sinister, that Walsingham should have a ‘usual’ room practically overlooking Little Bedlam. Their every interaction is now tainted with a lie to which Walsingham cannot bring himself to admit. Poley is right, of course: Kit will learn the truth about Baines sooner or later, if he is not certain of it already, and from that point on he shall trust Walsingham less and less; he’ll become reckless, frightened. Vengeful. Guilt is what Walsingham ought to feel, and yet all he feels is anger – anger that Kit should dare think him a liar, even though he is one. Is he not the same man who had pushed for Baines’s arrest, and had fought to see him exiled? Is he not the one who protects Kit far better than Tom ever did, or ever could?
If, one day, Dick Topcliffe should wrap Kit Marlowe’s head in a rag and pour water over his face, or bend his body backwards until the spine breaks, or hang him from the wrists until his lungs collapse and his hands turn grey and his fingernails flake off, what name will he cry out to save himself? What will he say? He could say anything. The truth matters not in the torture room. He could say, It was he who led me astray, it was he who put the Devil in my heart, it was he who taught me to hate the Queen, to hate her church, to plot against her very life – it was Thomas Walsingham!
When Kit turns around, Walsingham feels a look of guilt settle indelibly upon his face, as if caught in the act of a crime.
The first trace of dusk finds Kit at the bar in the inn’s low-ceilinged common room, drinking cup after cup of watered-down ale. A child’s drink, but it keeps the sweats and tremors at bay. Kit can hardly think straight when sober; at least, he can hardly recognize the thoughts as his own. But he must not let Walsingham smell drink on him, not if he wants the truth.
Eventually, Walsingham enters from the yard as if he has been looking everywhere for Kit, announcing himself with one of his world-weary sighs. ‘Come outside and talk with me.’
‘You are leaving?’
‘’Tis late, Kit. The way to Greenwich is not safe at night.’
Kit could confront him now. Walsingham is all but begging to have it over with. But all Kit truly desires is for Walsingham to stay: tonight, and the next night, and the next. ‘Did you stay here when Tom was at St Bartholomew’s?’ Kit asks.
Walsingham nods. ‘Three nights.’ Just this much is new information, never offered before: that Tom had taken three days to die.
‘I keep things from you because it will do you no good to know them,’ Walsingham murmurs. ‘It will only bring you pain. If you had seen him, believe me, it would haunt you. ’Tis better that you move on—’
‘You think that is what angers me? Because you lied about Tom?’
‘I have not lied about that, Kit. I’ve only held my tongue.’ In the sliver of space between their shoulders ice forms, unbearably, untouchably cold.
‘To hell with you,’ Kit says. He slams the cup down and storms out into the yard, under a lid of amber-tinted sky. The fat man waits upon his master at the inn’s gate, holding two horses by the bridles. He nods at Kit. Kit does not nod back.
Walsingham comes up at Kit’s heels. ‘A fine trick this is, coming from you! You have lied to me, Kit, need I remind you! You keep such secrets from me that I might rightly say I hardly know ye!’
‘Baines is back,’ Kit snarls, but as soon as the words are out a measure of strength leaves him too, seeing guilt come over Walsingham’s face, a silent confession.
Still, infuriatingly, he refuses to submit. ‘Kit… how can you be so certain?’
‘Because I have seen him with my own eyes, my eyes, which you made me doubt!’
‘You, with more whisky in your brains than blood, you should doubt your damned eyes – you would be a fool not to!’
Kit raises his fists, wishing he could punch through a door, smash out a window, if only to prove the world exists exactly as he sees it. But Walsingham recoils in fright, and all at once Kit remembers himself: that wretched creature who, not so much as a month after Tom was taken to Newgate Prison, had slunk into the nearest tavern and effectively never came out again.
‘Kit…’ Walsingham speaks with his hand outstretched, as if to soothe a wild horse. ‘This does ye no good. Now you are afraid, you are angry. Neither feeling shall be of any use to ye. You must carry on as if Baines were a thousand miles away, or else you will stumble, you will undo everything that I do for you.’
‘Where is he?’ Kit says. ‘He must be somewhere in London. Where?’
‘Ha! I have no inkling of where he is, and if I did, heaven knows I would not tell you.’ Walsingham comes forward, bravely it seems, to set a hand on Kit’s arm. ‘Be patient. Let me work. I will not let you go to prison. I will get you out of the country first. Now, look, I hesitated to give this to ye’ – he reaches for something tucked under his doublet – ‘but, well, it belongs to you. I acquired this for ye today, at the Privy Court. Take it.’
Kit stares, disbelieving, at the silver flask. Liquid shifts inside as he takes it in his hand. Tom’s sigil, the hare in flight, glows copper beneath his thumb.
‘You must trust me,’ Walsingham says. ‘You must do as I say. Above all, you must obey the terms of your release. Remember, if they find you outside London Wall, or if you fail to make your daily appointment at the Privy Court, they shall mark ye a fugitive, and that will truly be the end of you.’ His touch alights on Kit’s arm again, like the weight of a bird. Whatever they have been to one another until this day is slipping further away every second. Kit can smell the end coming like the scent of rain.
‘If things go badly,’ Kit says, without having planned to, ‘if it happens, Thomas—’
‘Do not even think of it.’ Walsingham steps back and starts to fidget with his gloves, without putting them on. ‘There’s no need for you to think of that, because it will not happen, ay?’
Kit does not press him, glad to have been interrupted. He had been about to say, If the worst happens, I will protect you, to my last breath. But Walsingham would never trust such a promise from him anyway; it would only make him doubt him all the more.
‘I really must go,’ Walsingham says, putting on his gloves at last. ‘At Greenwich, I will plead your case however I can. To the Queen herself, if I am lucky. The entire Council shall be there; I could speak with the Lord Keeper, or the archbishop, even—’
‘The Council threw you in a damp cell!’
‘Well, yes, but I remain civil with them. One must often be civil with one’s enemies. You never did learn that, Kit; it would have served ye well.’
Kit lifts one hand from his side little more than an inch, finding Walsingham’s gloved fingers. At first it seems they will shake hands as if at the end of a businesslike meeting, but neither man lets go; they stare at one another, Kit wondering what sort of heart Walsingham’s breast contains, if it softens to look on him, if it holds him in any way when they are apart.
‘We will see one another again,’ Walsingham says, as if seeing doubt in Kit’s looks. He turns to go, and despite everything Kit must cross his arms to keep from reaching out, wanting to grasp him by the collar, pull him close and offer him anything, anything he desires, so long as he does not leave.
Too loud, Kit says, ‘ “Out of the country,” you said. Where? How?’
‘Let me worry for that.’ Walsingham inclines his head towards the room at the top of the stairs. ‘Go now and look to your papers. Frizer has them.’
From halfway up the stairs, Kit watches Walsingham and the fat man depart through the gate, a final flick of a horsetail ere they disappear from view. He lowers his gaze to the flask in his hand, which Tom had given him after the premiere of Tamburlaine Part Two: ‘If y’are going to drink whisky all day long, at least do it in fashion.’ Kit smiles – for one second, Tom is alive. But only a second.
He unplugs the cap. Warm, over-sweet whisky, the same rotgut he’d been drinking the night before the Council’s rogues took Kyd, blazes down his throat like a purge. A spark of liveliness comes into his step as he climbs the stairs, and he must remind himself to approach the door to the room quietly, so as not to alert his strange companion. Ingram Frizer – what sort of name is that? And that stare of his, so unnerving, like the way a dog or a child stares. Kit never should have left him alone with his papers.
Kit presses his ear to the door. No sound at first. But after a moment of listening, the faintest patter of speech becomes audible. One voice, as in prayer.
Breath held, Kit turns the latch just enough to crack the door, squinting through the inch-wide gap. Frizer sits cross-legged on the floor beneath the window’s fading light, his doublet removed, his shirtsleeves rolled up. Before him lie two neat, slender stacks of papers. He is whispering; Kit hears only consonants. When he finishes a page, he moves it to the stack on the right and straightens the corners with a proprietary sort of tenderness, like a woman finger-combing the hair of a child who is decidedly not her own.
Kit thrusts the door open. Frizer wheels about and freezes, his face whitening from crown to chin. Kit’s bag lies open on the bed, papers spilling from its mouth, violated.
Frizer skitters backwards, scattering papers under his heels. ‘No, I pray you—I was—I was only—’
Kit snatches him by a fistful of hair, readying his flask as a bludgeon. ‘You busy little cunt! What were you looking for?’
‘Nothing, I swear!’
‘Who employs ye, the Council? Did Baines send you?’
‘The Council? I am no spy, ye lunatic! I only wanted to see—I wanted to see—’
‘See what?’
‘Tamburlaine! I wanted to see Tamburlaine!’
Only now does Kit notice a strange mark in the side of Frizer’s neck, at the sight of which some animal impulse in himself shrinks away, releasing him. Frizer seems to know precisely what Kit has seen, clutching at his neck as he clambers to his feet. It is a scar, a thin white line collaring the throat halfway, like a botched attempt at murder. And it is not the only scar. Frizer’s arms, each exposed to the elbow, are tiger-striped, front and back, in scars: age-whitened, stretched thin and broad with his body’s growing, like ice pulled apart in spring.
A child, Kit realizes. He must have been a child.
Frizer wets his lips. He draws a short knife from behind his back. It trembles in his hand, a bright blur of steel. ‘Never call me that again, do ye understand? Call me that again and I’ll cut out your God-damned tongue!’
Kit cannot remember what he’d called Frizer just now. He cannot remember a single word spoken since he came into the room. But between Frizer’s ears, the word pulses like blood from a wound: cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt.