FRIZER AWAKES FIRST TO the sound of the door bursting open, second to the collapse of the cot underneath him, leaving him sprawled and sore upon the floor of this strange, hot room. From high above, a face lowers into focus: Christopher Marlowe.
‘Are you hurt? Can you get up? I have no time; we must be quick!’
Frizer sits up, rubs his head. ‘Jesus, man! What?’
‘I need you to do something for me,’ Marlowe pants, sitting on his heels. He both looks and smells as if he’s been pickling in bowse all night long. ‘I only ask out of absolute necessity.’
‘Blast ye, what?’
Marlowe sighs into his hands, as if what he has to say costs him dearly. ‘You care for the contents of that bag, do you not?’
Frizer follows Marlowe’s glance up to the desk, the bag of papers.
‘If you care indeed,’ Marlowe says, ‘then you must stay here today. It must never leave your sight.’
‘No, no, my master said—’
‘I care not what your master said, ay?’ Marlowe snaps, but then softens his tone. ‘If the men at Seething Lane get their hands on that bag, they will destroy it. Do you understand? Tamburlaine – you like Tamburlaine best, yes? They would burn it, those men. Every page, straight to the fire! Guard it for me, please. I will try to think of something better for tomorrow, but for now…’
Marlowe trails off, his brown eyes pleading. Frizer must force himself to look away. At Scadbury, he has often heard the other servants say, over the minutest infractions, ‘The master will have me killed!’ Not, ‘He will kill me,’ which smacks of wilful exaggeration, but have me killed. Frizer has often wondered who might do the killing. Probably Nick. Cannot be helped, Ingram. But fear not, I’ll make it quick. Like blowing out a candle.
‘Well,’ Frizer says, ‘very well. But only for today, and my master must never hear of it.’
Marlowe exhales, taking hold of Frizer’s shoulders as if about to clip him in a hearty embrace. ‘Thank you! Thank you! Now I must go. I’ll be late to the court. Do not leave this room, ay? Well, leave if you must, but take the bag with you. But not to the privy. ’Tis not for stool-reading.’
Already, Frizer suspects he’ll come to regret this.
‘Keep the pages in order. Clean fingers. Goodbye!’
Marlowe hurries for the door, but at last Frizer has found space enough in his thoughts to ask, ‘Have you been out all night?’
This question stops Marlowe in his tracks. He holds the doorframe in both hands and presses his forehead against it, as if half-tempted to dash out his brains.
‘Ye cannot go roaming about after dark, man,’ Frizer says. ‘That’s what my master—’
‘To hell with your damned master!’ Again, Marlowe seems to check his temper, glancing up towards heaven. ‘If I do not come back,’ he starts. ‘Well. I know not.’
And so, he is gone.
Frizer stares through the open door long after Marlowe’s footsteps fade, fumbling over his memory of the past few minutes. This is a gift, is it not? Marlowe has seen how Frizer covets his papers and, generously, made him their keeper. He could not have given him a more precious gift! But probably ’tis not mere generosity that motivates him. For all Frizer knows, this is but a ploy to rid himself of Frizer’s company, as men so often do, once they’ve caught a glimpse of his skin. From that moment on, he becomes an unpleasant presence in every room, which must not be spoken of and yet cannot be ignored, like a foul odour in a stranger’s house. Every look at him births a thousand imagined tragedies: mysterious illnesses, capital punishments, horrific accidents. God only knows what sort of gruesome past Marlowe’s mind might have invented for him, given the man’s propensity for excess. Surely not even he could guess the sorrowful, miserable truth.
Like a trespasser, Frizer lowers himself into Marlowe’s chair, mortified at every creak of the joints. The Queen herself seems to be admonishing him from above, one distorted pupil gaping in her crookedly rendered face. Below her, a stack of papers lies in the blazing sun, seeming to emit the light rather than reflect it, like an open door. ’Tis as if the devil has staged this just so, angled it within the light just so, presenting the pages like the rarest and richest of gifts. Like bait.
His bodie was as straight as Circes wand,
Jove might have sipt out Nectar from his hand.
Even as delicious meat is to the taste,
So was his necke in touching, and surpast
The white of Pelops shoulder. I could tell ye,
How smooth his brest was, and how white his bellie,
And whose immortall fingars did imprint,
That heavenly path, with many a curious dint,
That runs along his backe…
Eyes wide, fingers to his lips, Frizer turns the page.
Kit stumbles into the Privy Court just in time to hear his name called by the magistrate, who sends him straightaway to the iron gate. There, the guards on duty summon a clerk, who leads Kit to a desk and writes his name in a book. When Kit glances to his left he finds a baby-faced guard clasping a black bag in both hands, looking at him like a mountain that must perforce be summitted.
Kit bows his head into the bag. Therefore, he sees nothing as the young guard receives a hastily palmed coin from Robin Poley, who then takes Kit by the crook of the elbow and guides him slowly, silently, up the well-worn stairs. In time, they arrive at a set of narrow doors, beyond which lies a long hall lined with windows on the left, the walls whitewashed into an eye-bruising void. In a row down the centre of the hall, seven cells fashioned of heavy, dark curtains appear to float between floor and ceiling. Outside each cell stands a desk, four of which are occupied by a harried scribe, each of whom has a minder bent over his shoulder, monitoring every move of his pen. A low babble of voices seeps through the curtains like water through rock: here, muffled weeping; there, rising terror.
A foreman in Puckering’s livery marches up the hall, and Poley ducks behind a cell until he has passed by. In the innocent, trusting way of blind men, Poley’s charge puts up no resistance.
When the hood comes off at last, Kit finds himself in what he can only assume to be the same curtained, camphor-reeking chamber as yesterday, seated at the same table. He turns in his seat to see the man who had brought him here, for he was not led to this place but pulled to it, as if by a confederate, not a captor. As the man sits, Kit recognizes him: firstly, as the stranger who had remembered Edward II so well earlier this morning, only secondly as the man who had watched, smiling, while Anthony Babington was butchered alive. Omnium bipedum nequissimus, Babington had supposedly called him at the end: the vilest of all two-legged creatures.
‘Robin Poley,’ Kit says.
The beardless face arranges itself into a blank smile, much like the one it had worn at the gallows. ‘Master Marlowe. You have stamina, my lad, I’ll give ye that. After last night’s adventures, I confess I feel my age.’
Kit glances at the walls, such as they are. Poley has no papers with him, nothing to take notes. Still, ’tis safer to assume that they are not alone and that this is a trap, one set last night in Newgate, during the lost hours between midnight and twilight, now about to spring. Kit’s mouth goes dry.
‘You were looking for someone last night,’ Poley says.
‘How do you know?’
‘Well, it began that way. By the end, I believe you were only in search of the best taplash in London. By the time I came upon you, you had certainly sampled enough.’
Kit digs through the dark part of his memory as if through sand.
‘You remember nothing?’ Poley is almost whispering. ‘Then you shall have to trust my word that no liberties were taken. Not by me, at least.’
Kit looks askance, searching for a shadow, a movement at the curtains.
Poley says, ‘No one is listening.’ Perhaps he is lying, but in fact, the notion that they are now perfectly alone, in unsanctioned parley, explains too well Poley’s haste in bringing him here, his whispering, the anxious tap-tap-tapping of a finger on his mutilated right hand.
‘I can help you,’ he says. ‘Well, I can give you what you seek, but I would ask something of you in return.’
‘It had better not be a fuck,’ Kit sneers.
Poley laughs shrilly, looking down at his hands. ‘’Tis a delicate subject. But time is short. I would like to know whether the rumours are true.’
‘What rumours?’
‘The rumours about Richard Baines. The ones you yourself began.’
‘I did not begin them,’ Kit says. ‘I ended them.’
Poley looks surprised. ‘So, you mean to say they are true.’
Kit chews his lip. Only a fool would confide anything intimate in Robin Poley. And yet, somewhere in the Privy Court’s archives there exists a document writ in Thomas Walsingham’s hand that details all, quite intimately: the report that Kit made five years ago which had led to Baines’s exile, a document which, Kit suspects, has plummeted in credibility of late. A part of him does long to be believed. Or simply, to be heard.
‘Do you know what happened when Baines was in Rheims, in 1582?’ Kit says. ‘How the papists discovered him for a spy? There was a boy – a cook or a kitchen boy. With Baines, there is always a boy. Together, Baines and he had hatched a plan to poison the whole seminary, all at once. Ludicrous, mind you. Baines had scrounged up a vial of arsenic, which the boy was to add to the common soup. But the boy repented, you see. Or perhaps he was caught in the act. Either way, the Jesuits soon had the truth out of him. That was the end of it.’
Poley frowns. ‘What on earth do you suppose inspired Master Baines to this knavery?’
‘He wanted the boy to admire him.’
‘Admire him? Is that what he told you?’
‘’Tis what I know.’ Kit adds, ‘Admire him, and fear him.’
Poley looks up at the ceiling, as if fondling over some novel object in his mind. But it seems he is brought back by a final, lingering doubt. ‘Did Baines ever tell you what became of the boy?’
Kit shakes his head. ‘No.’ But he knows what becomes of boys once Baines is done with them.
A pause descends. Poley’s stare feels over-familiar, even fond. ‘It occurs to me that this story bears some resemblance to your Jew of Malta. When Barabas poisons the nunnery well…’ He trails off. ‘Is that something you poets do often? Cut scraps out of other men’s coats, and patch together fictions?’
Kit scowls. ‘When the man makes an impression.’
Poley exhales a chuckle through the nose, though he seems more agitated than bemused. Once more, his finger has resumed its tapping. He glances at it as if it were a clock, reminding him that time is short. ‘Richard Baines may be found at the Saracen’s Head, in Newgate Without.’
‘Without?’ Kit sputters. ‘Outside the Wall?’
A shrug. ‘Perhaps ’tis some imposition to you.’
‘Imposition? To do what?’
‘Only you know that. But you know it, let me assure you – you know already what you will do when you see him.’ That smile returns, causing Kit’s skin to bristle just as it did last night, as if at a gentle, undesired touch. A memory arises: of standing in among the crowd before the scaffold on St Giles’ Field, watching Robin Poley as he’d watched Anthony Babington die, with this same expression on his face. That day, Kit now knows, a monster had begun to take shape in his mind, one that smiles the way Robin Poley smiles and kills the way Robin Poley kills, at the soul. In time, Kit would give it a name: ‘Lightborne’.
Out of the silence, the curtains open. Poley shoots to his feet, a player falling expertly into the midst of a scene. ‘Ah, Master Phelippes, speak of the Devil! In that case I shall be on my way.’
Phelippes – the yellow-haired, squinting fellow who had interrogated Kit yesterday – looks stunned, pinching his cloth mask tighter to his nose. ‘What brings you here, Master Poley?’
‘These boys, Master Phelippes! These boys whom we equip in the habit of guardsmen, having neither hair on their balls nor brains in their heads! This impressive creature I found on one such boy’s arm, wandering up and down the gatehouse with not the slightest hope of finding his way here – the blind leading the blind indeed!’
All this, Poley has said as if perfectly happy to be caught in the most blatant of falsehoods, as if it brings him immense pleasure to lie with so little shame, so little care.