ROBIN POLEY WALKS HIS horse through the arch of Great Stone Gate, under another scarlet, smoke-choked dawn. As the portcullis creaks closed behind him, he knows without looking that the skull of Anthony Babington now hangs directly overhead, the chin aligned with his right ear, as surely as if he can feel breath upon his cheek. For one second, man and skull look south together, in the direction of the Marshalsea Prison.
Wish me luck.
Three years ago, when Poley still had all ten fingers and no limp at all in his walk, he had been borne through this same gate in the bed of a rumbling wagon, chained up along with several other men, all with bags over their heads. Quietly, so their captors would not overhear, they’d passed murmurs around the wagon-bed in a circle: ‘Who’s that?’
‘Poley. Is that Young?’
‘Yes. Young and Poley, here. You?’
‘Drury. Drury, Young, Poley…’ and so on. They were seven, they’d determined. All had, at one time or another, been hired as spies by Sir Francis Walsingham, then recently deceased.
‘I heard they arrested Thomas Walsingham,’ whispered Poley’s neighbour to the left.
‘I heard they drove him to the heath and slit his throat!’ said the one to the right. ‘Who’s to say they’ll not dispatch us just the same?’
‘Tush,’ Poley said. ‘’Tis all a game.’
Eventually the wagon had stopped here: before the long, toothy colonnade of the Marshalsea Court. Poley and the others had rushed inside in a cluster, blind to the prodding of their captors’ cudgels. Their arraignment, such as it was, had lasted all of five minutes: the bang of a gavel, a name read out and a charge of suspicion to commit treason, then another name followed by another, identical charge. Ambiguities and suppositions, but still enough to put all seven of them away for an equally ambiguous length of time. When the last charge was read, guards then herded them to the back of the courtroom, and through the towering, oaken doors known as the Hellmouth, into the Marshalsea Prison.
Poley and the others marched double-quick past scores of jeering voices, clubs jabbing at their backsides. At the bottom of a flight of stairs, the procession paused just long enough for a hand to rip the bags from their heads and shove them, one at a time, through another door, into the Marshalsea’s infamous Strong Room. It was originally meant to hold fifty men at a stretch, but had contained somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred, all standing shoulder-to-shoulder in at least three inches of grey water, whereon rafts of oily shit floated like seaweed. A chink in the stones high above emitted a coal of white light, a trace of breathable air. Ghastly creatures clambered over one another towards this source, or towards a hump of high ground in the centre of the room, shoving for the privilege of dry feet. Along the walls, in the corners, corpses lay in piles: laddered ribs, butterfly pelvises, long, smooth, knob-kneed bones.
All a game, Poley reminded himself – meaning, of course, that it may be played to win. Marshalsea, much like the world without, bends to the will of gold. He’d had a diamond ring concealed beneath the glove on his right hand that could have bought him the run of the place, but he would have sooner starved than given it up. In his pocket, there were just enough coins for paper and ink and a courier’s services, through which he’d sent a message to a friend – well, a woman, and something of a friend, who was more than happy to raid her husband’s money-chest for him. She’d sent enough for a private cell upstairs, a feather bed, meals served at his own table. The diamond, Poley kept, and so spent the many long, dull days watching a greenish flame within its depths kindle and spark, like a soul sealed in amber.
After a month of monkish solitude, the warden himself paid Poley’s cell a visit. All his life, Poley had been hearing stories about Dick Topcliffe, the Queen’s own cousin, who might have chosen any office in the land but preferred to rule over the Marshalsea. Topcliffe arrived with a bottle of good French claret, a rarity since the war began, took a seat at Poley’s table and poured two glasses. Poley found the company refreshing. The wine too. He imagined himself on the outside again, and soon, perhaps, regaling wide-eyed listeners with the tale of how he’d befriended the so-called Master of Tortures.
After they’d drunk the bottle dry, Topcliffe had suggested they retrieve another from his private chambers. Another floor up, at the end of an ever-narrowing corridor, Poley stepped through a humble door and immediately felt a club strike the backs of his knees, knocking him to the floor. Men descended out of the darkness, pinioned his arms.
‘The right hand,’ Topcliffe said, and wiggled his ring finger. The guards wrestled Poley’s hand onto a block of wood. They folded down his fingers, exposing the one Topcliffe wanted. When the hatchet fell, Poley did not feel anything at first, he did not even hear the chop. He only saw the diamond flash like an eye just before death, then his own reflection in the hatchet-head: a gaping gullet in a hairy face, a wild, animal stare.
‘Now,’ Topcliffe said, ‘we shall truly get to know one another.’
At the courthouse doors, Poley pauses to take a thoroughly unpleasant swig of home-brewed plague-water from the vial in his pocket. A masked guard then leads him through the currently empty Marshalsea Court into the Hellmouth. But rather than enter the prison proper, they turn upstairs and head straight for the little door at the end of the corridor, whose opening unleashes a gust of stench: piss, shit, blood, bile. Poley must pull a morbid grin to keep from retching.
How Topcliffe’s thugs bear it, he will never understand. The Master of Tortures is never without his retinue of ‘instruments’, as he calls them: dead-eyed, stone-faced cretins who stand about and watch their master work with seemingly limitless patience. Today, the spectacle in the torture room is courtesy of Thomas Kyd, now in the grip of a machine of Topcliffe’s own invention: a simple system of ropes and pulleys designed to fold the body in half, backwards, by gradually drawing the arms over the arse, the feet over the head. Thus hangs poor Master Kyd now, his wiry, naked body shiny with sweat and grime, bent back like a bow about to fire.
‘I cannot breathe,’ he sputters. ‘Please, please, I cannot breathe!’
‘My Robin-bird!’ Topcliffe says, setting some notes down on his scribe’s desk as he crosses the room, arms open. ‘Back to the nest, eh? Did you miss it?’ Topcliffe pounds Poley’s back. He reeks of this room, distilled; his clothes soak it up like a sponge.
‘You look well.’ Poley tries to sound neutral.
‘I am well. Why? Should I not be well?’
‘Working hard?’
Topcliffe barks a laugh, takes Poley about the shoulders and turns him to face Kyd, from whose dangling cock piss dribbles onto the filthy table beneath him. ‘You’ve never seen it from the outside, have you?’ Topcliffe says, quietly. ‘I’ve made some improvements. How is the old hip, by the way?’
Poley readies an indifferent response but cannot voice it. In the back of his head, he hears that terrible pop and pain shoots through his pelvis, though he is standing still.
Topcliffe plucks one of the ropes like a guitar string and Kyd lets out a shriek, followed by pleas. ‘Peace, goat!’ Topcliffe says, ruffling Kyd’s hair. ‘I call him my little goat. They tell me he’s a poet, but I’ve never heard him utter even one pretty thing. He sounds like an ordinary goat to me, does he not to you?’
Poley squats down by the table, looking up into a prematurely wizened face, blood-vessels veining the skin like the surface of a leaf. The brow knits above the bulging eyes, in confusion and fear. What new torments await?
Softly, Poley says, ‘ “When this eternal substance of my soul,
Did live imprisoned in my wanton flesh,
Each in their function serving other’s need,
I was a courtier at the Spanish Court…” ’
As he goes on, Kyd starts to sob. Occasionally, the young poet joins in, uttering a word here and there with a heavy tongue: ‘perils’, ‘Acheron’, ‘soul’, ‘love’. But before Poley can reach the end of the speech, Kyd suddenly thrashes at his restraints, screams like a cat: ‘Mama! Oh God, let me go home! Mama!’
Topcliffe’s instruments subdue the prisoner. Their master helps Poley to his feet. ‘What was all that about, you devil?’
‘It was the prologue of his play, The Spanish Tragedy.’
Topcliffe shows Poley through another door and into his adjoining quarters, a six-sided chamber with panelled walls, a desk and – unsettlingly – a sumptuous, canopied bed, from which a young woman in a nightgown rises, sleepily, as they enter. She ambles to a sideboard racked with glasses, a long, heavy chain grinding across the floorboards behind her.
Topcliffe’s desk, which sits near the room’s only window, is at least half as big as a rubbish barge and piled high with papers, the record of hundreds of sessions in the black cells, with God knows how many victims. Above the desk hangs a youthful portrait of Topcliffe’s beloved cuz, the Queen: a severe, red-haired girl with milk-white skin, a Bible clasped tight against her loins, a sweep of fierce scarlet falling from her nubile, small-breasted frame.
Topcliffe had used to talk often of those breasts. Soft as lambskin, he’d said they were, with nipples as pink and pert as rosebuds.
‘Well, your letter intrigued me,’ Topcliffe says, as his woman shakily offers him a goblet of that Bordeaux wine. ‘You have stones the size of sinkers, my birdy, I’ll give ye that. Now, lay it all out for me again, so I may hear this knavery in your own voice.’
Poley leaves his goblet untouched. ‘You doubt my strategy?’
‘I doubt your motives, man. A fellow like you sells me a boat, I expect a leak or two – not by oversight, but by design.’ He toasts his cousin’s portrait before lifting the glass to his lips, knuckles barnacled in gold and jewels. No sign of the diamond.
In the simplest of terms, Poley recapitulates his recent proposition, taking care not to admit that there are certain details of which he would prefer Topcliffe remained ignorant. Suffice to say, his intention is to take on the bulk of the work involved, leaving Topcliffe with the simple task of turning up when he is called for, to collect a prize Poley will have generously secured for him: the soon-to-be fugitive Christopher Marlowe.
‘I’d say that’s putting the cart before the horse, birdy,’ Topcliffe says, when Poley is finished. ‘The way I hear it, his Holiness is biding his time with this Marlowe villain. The old man thinks he’s found himself one of the Devil’s own foot-soldiers, you see. He’ll not take him for some measly little charge of sedition or libel; he wants Marlowe on a platter, trussed and bled.’
‘Oh, he’ll be bled,’ Poley says.
‘And moreover there shall be nothing in it at all if Marlowe makes no attempt to ’scape justice, less than nothing should the Council then fail to set a bounty on his head. It shall have to be a substantial bounty, at that – to the degree of a Babington, shall we say – to make it worth my while.’
Poley smiles, undaunted. ‘You know Richard Baines?’
‘Why, who hath not heard of the great Richard Baines?’
Annoyed, Poley thoughtlessly takes a sip of wine and tries not to wince. ‘Master Baines was once Marlowe’s intimate associate, and has purportedly witnessed the full gamut of cardinal crimes on the poet’s part: treason, heresy, buggery – more than enough to satisfy the archbishop, I should think, and to fetch a high price in the offing. Baines has promised to deliver a statement, detailing all, to Seething Lane—’
‘Promised, has he? When shall we see this promise fulfilled?’
‘Within the week, I should think. Alas, Baines is a man of many subtle designs. But once the statement is delivered, it should be no trouble at all to persuade Marlowe to take flight, especially with the promise of an escape, which I shall provide him withal: a counterfeit passport and passage to the Continent. All with the co-operation of Marlowe’s trusted friend, no less.’
‘And this “friend”,’ Topcliffe says. ‘Is he in agreement with your end?’
Poley harrumphs. ‘Agreement, yes – mind, he knows not what he agrees to, but that is neither here nor there. I have a little need of his purse, to pay my associate. To you, he shall be of negligible consequence.’
Topcliffe licks wine from the tips of his whiskers, sucks his teeth. ‘I’ll tell ye what I like: I like that I see small risk to myself should aught go awry, short of time and dignity. But I do not like hinging my hopes upon the actions of other men, with “designs”, as you say, that I neither understand nor care to. Nor do I like the lingering mystery of your extraordinary generosity. Tell me, why do you offer me this fat pig, which you might just as easily enjoy at your own table, all to yourself?’
Poley falters, having glanced in the direction of Topcliffe’s little slave, who stands by the sideboard with her head bowed, a curtain of dark hair over her face. In the silence, voices become faintly audible through the walls, even from behind the icy gaze of the young Princess Elizabeth herself, in her looming portrait: wordless groans, muffled screams.
‘You want something from me, do ye not, birdy?’ Topcliffe says.
‘You know perfectly well what I want from you,’ Poley answers, and coughs to find his voice. ‘You have something that belongs to me, and I would like it back.’
Topcliffe fidgets with the largest of several rings upon his fingers, a pearl almost the size of a quail’s egg. ‘How do you reckon I have not sold it?’
‘Because you do not need to.’
Topcliffe sniggers, raising his glass in approval. ‘Well. We shall see. Perhaps this Marlowe will fetch a diamond’s bounty.’
After less than a full second’s thought, Poley blurts out, ‘If I can bring you a copy of Baines’s statement, for Kyd to memorize prior to testifying—’
‘Now,’ Topcliffe says, a finger aimed at Poley’s breast, ‘that would be useful. Corroboration, and all that. It shall go better if you can bring me that document ere the rest of your comrades at Seething Lane ever see it. Then, we need not wait upon this Baines, nor his designs.’
‘But Marlowe must also be given opportunity to run,’ Poley reminds him. ‘That is essential.’
‘’Tis your worry, not mine.’
Poley stifles a sigh. ‘Once the document is delivered to Seething Lane, I will have a copy made for you.’
‘Before.’
‘I know not whether that shall be possible.’
‘Oh, but you make things happen, my birdy – that’s what you do! You come in here, balls clanging like the bells of le-Bow, promise me a tidy fortune, stir my hopes up to a roaring fire, and then tell me some things are not possible?’ He tucks his bottom lip over his teeth, showing a hint of slimy tongue, and in silence seems to consider several options, some of which bring him rich delight. ‘Let’s say this,’ he begins at last. ‘I require a week to think over your proposal. Within that week, you may hasten my decision, should you find yourself so disposed. Either way, in a week’s time, we shall see whether this Marlowe fellow is the golden goose you suppose him to be.’
Poley stands, eager to be gone. ‘I will talk with Baines.’
‘Do that. And Robin – you have barely touched your wine.’
But Poley can smell it from here. Sometimes, he can smell it in his sleep. For in the seconds after Topcliffe had cut off his finger, Poley vomited up every drop of that red, rare vintage. Its stink had clung to him for the week or more that he’d spent with Topcliffe in the room behind the wall.
You took the Catholic Communion with him, did you? Got down on your knees and stuck out your tongue, did you? How does it taste, the Body of Christ, when a papist gives it to ye? All warm and salty, is it? Is it?
Indeed, no man on earth knows Poley so well as Dick Topcliffe, no man alive.
‘Honestly, Dick,’ Poley says, ‘I have no head for wine.’
Poley takes his leave of the Marshalsea. His legs cannot return him to his horse swiftly enough; his horse cannot run hard enough. To make a deal with Dick Topcliffe is as good as to make one with the Devil, but there are times when one has no choice. Anyway, Poley had learned something of Topcliffe too during their time together: that he is as witless as he is soulless, and not at all unmalleable.
Soon, the Privy Court’s staff will convene for morning prayers, and if Poley is not in the great hall with the rest, mumbling the daily oath of allegiance to her Majesty, suspicions will be raised. Not long afterwards, Marlowe will also arrive at the court, to make his daily report. Perhaps Poley would be better off keeping his distance from him, but truly he longs just to look at the poet again, in better light: the oval face, the red, epicene lips. How familiar they are!
Of course, the resemblance to Babington that Poley had noticed last night is by no means perfect. Near enough, however, to corrupt the memory slightly, as a counterfeit coin corrupts the gold it means to feign. Were Poley superstitious, he might wonder: what power may be gained over a man by writing his name in blood?
But the world has a way of making echoes, of repeating itself ad infinitum. Allow oneself to go a little mad and one begins to see oneself everywhere; all people look like the same two people, bound for the same two fates. Having lost a part of himself, Poley knows something of madness. Sometimes he feels a tingle upon the missing fingertip, or an urge to crack the knuckle no longer there, or the weight of the ring, as heavy as the day Babington had slipped it on:
One jewel have I left: receive thou this.
But he did not say that. Edward said that, to Lightborne.
At Great Stone Gate, Poley takes off his cap and waves it so that the gatekeepers can see him coming and open the portcullis for him, so that he need neither slow down nor stop within the lamplight of the skull’s stare. Galloping through the arch at full bent, he feels the rupture of an invisible membrane, clinging to him like cobwebs that dissolve in the wind.
For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.