HIS HEART BEATING HIGH in his chest, Kit lies in bed and counts Frizer’s slow snores. Twenty-nine… thirty… Across the room, the Queen’s face glows out of the darkness, her lopsided, dollish eyes fixed upon him. He resists a childish impulse to pull the covers over his head.
Thirty-nine… forty. Surely he’s waited long enough. Kit steps out of bed and lifts the neat pile of clothes he’s left on the floor, dressing himself. Boots in hand, he tiptoes across the creaking floor, past Frizer’s sprawled form in the cot: dead asleep, like a child at the end of a long day, arms over his face, legs over the sides. Kit cannot help but smile.
Perhaps he should leave a message for Frizer to find. Just in case. Apologies to Kit’s mother, and to his sisters Mag, Anne and Dorothy, who had performed his first plays in their shared bedroom, by moonlight, in whispers. They shall tell you things to make you hate me, but do not believe them… How could he possibly ask that of them, when what he wants, and has always wanted, was for them to know him, fully, and love him regardless? But no man owns another’s heart. Nay, not even his mother’s. If Kit’s father can hate him living, his mother and sisters can hate him dead.
Outside, at the top of the long stairs, a breath of clean night air steels him. He puts on his boots without looking and then ties his handkerchief around his face, eyes fixed on the light in the clouds where the moon should be.
If Baines is in London, Kit will find him.
And then what?
From a dark corner on Bishopsgate Street, a hidden watcher observes Kit’s descent from the topmost floor of the Inn-in-the-Wall, and his eventual appearance at the inn’s gate. The bells rang out for curfew some time ago. Even the lights on London Wall are out.
In such silence, Kit’s watcher can hear him breathe at a distance. Without moving, it marks his long shadow’s crossing of the damp street to the door of the Black Bull tavern, where Kit knocks, slips in through a lighted crack in the darkness, and is gone. Ten or fifteen minutes pass before Kit emerges and hurries on to the Green Dragon next door, where he remains hardly five minutes before rushing out, on to the next: the Four Swans, and then the Wrestlers, and then the Vine—
When finally Kit has exhausted the neighbourhood, he stands by the fountain and turns in a slow circle, as if lost, before suddenly darting west, in the direction of Threadneedle. His watcher follows.
No house in London is meant to be open at this hour, as if the plague should only travel by night. But there are plenty who welcome curfew-breakers, whether out of opportunity, necessity, or even disbelief that the plague exists at all. From tavern to tavern, Kit makes his way towards St Paul’s, past the shuttered poultry market, onto broad, moonlit Cheapside, his search growing more scattered, more desperate, as the hours pass. Halfway to dawn, he despairs, standing in the middle of Cheapside with his head in his hands for minutes on end.
Reanimating at last, he makes his way to the Mermaid, wherein he vanishes for an hour or more before stumbling out, still drinking.
Inside a crowded brothel north of St Paul’s, among the narrow, knotty streets surrounding Newgate Prison – wherein Tom Watson had vanished for eight long months – Kit whispers a word through a slot in a door and then stumbles through onto a dark, narrow stairwell. The walls writhe with living frescoes, bobbing heads and twining limbs. Solemn eyes watch him shamble past, as if to mark a hawk in descent.
The cellar is larger than one would expect, loud with voices, fiddles, drums. A series of ancient-looking stone arches hold up the low ceiling over the many heads, illuminated in the fey glow of lanterns tinted amber, blue and green. Shadows jostle and leap within the light, the air thick with their sweat and breath, perfume and bowse. Many have their faces covered, though such is not unusual here even outside of plague-time: a simple cloth over the nose and chin, or a half-mask around the eyes; some even wear women’s vizards: black, featureless masks which conceal the whole face but for the eyes, held in place by a button clenched between the teeth.
A series of hasty weddings is in progress between the stone arches. The guests stand crammed to either side of the aisle, loudly admiring the gown of a veiled bride as she glides up to meet her glowing groom, her skirts a heap of tailor’s scraps, her bodice glittering with pins. At the beer-barrel altar, a portly, masked man in a cassock performs hasty rites, after which the groom lifts the veil, revealing his bride: a stage-woman’s face, one may call it, that is, a face termed ‘woman’ by convention, in the plucking of her brows, the painting of her lips, the shaving of her beard.
The crowd approves of her – the groom less so, blushing with anxiety – and soon the happy couple bustle past Kit to the stairwell, to honour their vows, to consummate.
Kit is a fool if he hopes to find Baines in a place like this. But no, he is not here for Baines, if he is honest with himself. What he desires most of all now is to sink into the earth. To forget, and be forgotten.
A pot-boy dressed as a cherub comes to fill Kit’s flask. Twice. When the last wedding is celebrated, the musicians strike up a dance. Kit presses his back to an arch as the clockwork of faces reels past, but can only keep to himself so long before someone takes him by the hand, dragging him into the fray. There is just room enough in that space for the dancers to circle one another, palm-to-palm, nose-to-nose, passing from one partner to the next, and the next. Men whisper things in Kit’s ears that pull him further out of sense. He dances with Richard Baines. He dances with a tarred skull. He dances with Tom Watson.
Just before darkness consumes him, Kit tumbles into the chest of a man small enough to be Ingram Frizer, and is relieved to think he might have followed him here. Kit leans close, murmuring, ‘Take me home.’
When at last he comes to he is outside in the alley, his hand against the cool bricks, dry heaving over a puddle of pungent puke. Above, the black curtain of Newgate Prison blots out the pre-dawn sky. Kit’s breaths seem to redouble off the prison walls, like a name shouted into a cave:
Tom!
‘You know,’ a voice says to his left, as if from the midst of a conversation, ‘I saw Edward II.’
Kit glances over his shoulder at his companion, a smallish fellow, smoking a pipe. It could indeed be Frizer, but no: a stranger.
‘Oh, did you now?’ Kit says, almost laughing, as one is wont to laugh at anything that occurs in a dream. He rinses his mouth with the contents of his flask and lies back against the wall at the stranger’s side, the world tipping around him like a raft upon a river.
The stranger says, ‘ “You shall not need to give instructions;
’Tis not the first time that I have killed a man.
I learned in Naples how to poison flowers,
To strangle with a lawn thrust through the throat,
To pierce the windpipe with a needle’s point,
Or, whilst one is asleep, to take a quill
And blow a little powder in his ears,
Or open his mouth and pour quicksilver down.
And yet I have a braver way than these.” ’
Kit stares, astonished. ‘Lightborne.’
The man snaps his fingers. ‘Yes – that was his name! A good name for Edward’s murderer. One would have to be a remarkable fellow indeed to come up with that “braver way”.’
‘Well, ’tis no ordinary way to kill a man,’ Kit says, quite stupidly.
A chuckle. ‘Indeed no. But what I found most remarkable was all that preceded the murder – the seduction, as it were. Your Lightborne might have slaughtered poor Edward the moment he entered his cell, but instead, he charmed him. Wooed him, as it were, to his death. For Edward did resist him, at first: “These looks of thine can harbour naught but death,” he said, “I see my tragedy written in thy brows.” Lightborne might well have killed him then. But still, he dallied. They even shared a bed, before it was over – a bed!’ The man pauses, sucking his pipe. ‘It seemed to me as though they were alone together, in that little room, for a time outside of time. Days, perhaps. Or even years.’
To think that Kit’s unloved, orphan play should live so richly in another man’s memory! He fights back a smile. ‘You forget, there were four men in the room when the king was killed. Counting the dead.’
‘Oh, but the others hardly matter! Only Lightborne matters. There was even a marriage…’
‘Yes,’ Kit says. ‘Of a kind: Edward gives Lightborne a ring…’
‘Yes: “One jewel have I left: receive thou this.” And he twisted the last wretched ring off his wretched finger, and he knelt like any common groom…’
‘ “Still fear I,” ’ Kit says, ‘ “and I know not what’s the cause,
But every joint shakes as I give it thee.
O, if thou harbour’st murder in thy heart,
Let this gift change thy mind and save thy soul.” ’
The man whispers, breathlessly, ‘Yes.’ The coal in his pipe flares as he puffs, revealing a hungry, patient look in the eyes, like a dog waiting for the table to be cleared. His face is clean-shaven. Eerily familiar.
‘Of course,’ he adds, ‘the consummation was somewhat unorthodox!’ and snorts out a laugh that touches a trigger between Kit’s spine and his heart, lifting the small hairs of his skin. He wonders what arrangements might have been made while he was in the dark place, what things he might have agreed to do. What things he might already have done.
‘What are you after, man? A fuck?’
‘Never you mind that.’ The stranger offers his pipe. His hand is missing the ring finger. Strangely, it reminds Kit at once of Ingram Frizer’s scars. So much pain hidden in plain sight.
‘What happened there?’ Kit says, drawing smoke.
The man glances at the gap in his own hand as if he’d quite forgotten about it, but then laughs again – a joke, one that Kit does not understand, but that he feels, suddenly, as if he will.
‘You know,’ the stranger says, ‘you remind me of someone. You are much taller, of course, but ’tis more in the shape of the face. The mouth. ’Tis almost uncanny.’
The hairs on Kit’s neck stand on end. Yet he senses, keenly, that he must not show this man his fear. He drinks from his flask, leans in to snarl, ‘To hell with you,’ and then swerves hastily onto empty Newgate Street. He strides east, feeling all the while as if someone were a step behind him, breathing into a spot between his shoulder-blades, until finally he can bear no more and turns on his heel. But the stranger stands just where Kit had left him, now far behind, watching as if to watch a player cross a stage, from entrance to exit.
Robin Poley puffs his pipe, and does not move to go until Kit Marlowe has vanished from sight.