IT TAKES THE LANDLORD and the chamberlain working in furious tandem to lug the Inn-in-the-Wall’s only strongbox up to Frizer and Marlowe’s room. At the door they drop their load and proceed to shove it across the floor to the window, a piece of metal screeching at the base all the way. At last, the box comes to rest: an iron-clad, age-blackened, toadish thing, armoured in the scraps of perhaps a dozen predecessors.
Panting, the landlord hands Marlowe a heavy-looking key. ‘You lose it, you pay,’ is all he manages to say.
As soon as they are gone, Marlowe begins emptying papers out of his bag and stacking them inside the box, taking his time as always, flipping through pages he has no doubt thumbed a thousand times before. Meanwhile, Frizer sits upon the sagging cot, holding a letter which Marlowe had dropped onto the floor beside his head first thing this morning. The paper-bolt with which it is sealed is heartbreakingly amateurish, as if Marlowe had grown bored or frustrated halfway through making it.
‘This Baines fellow,’ Frizer says. ‘Will I have to talk to him?’
‘No!’ Marlowe says, barely glancing up from a bound manuscript. ‘He may try to pull ye aside, but do not let him. Meet with him in a public place, hand him the message and be gone.’
‘I thought you said there was no danger.’
‘To you, no. Perfectly safe.’
Frizer opens his mouth to protest, but is interrupted as the manuscript in Marlowe’s hands comes sailing at him, landing upon the cot. Frizer turns it right-side-up, squinting to read the title scribbled at the top of the first page: The troublesome Reign & Cruell death of Edward II, unhappy Kinge of Engladne – a mouthful, even without the misspelling.
‘’Tis not a good copy,’ Marlowe says. ‘If ’tis too much of a bother ye need not read it.’ Practically blushing, he is. Frizer’s heart swells just slightly with forgiveness, or something equally as generous.
They sit together on the steps above the inn-yard. Marlowe breaks the last caraway cake in two with his big hands and gives half to Frizer. A silence falls as the first bites are taken, then Marlowe probes, slyly, ‘Did your wife make these?’ Frizer has not yet mentioned anything of a wife.
‘No,’ Frizer says, and for a moment plans to leave it there. ‘Her mother.’
‘Ah.’ Marlowe sounds pleased with himself. ‘I knew it.’
‘Knew what?’
‘Any children?’
‘Not yet.’ A thought of Betsy comes to him – sprawled in bed, sweating, swollen, possibly labouring even as they speak – and Frizer adds, by rote, ‘Any day now.’
Marlowe beams. Frizer can hardly bear the brightness of it. ‘A father!’ Marlowe says. ‘How strange it must feel. Does it feel strange?’
Frizer scoffs, ‘ “Strange?” ’ Ever since his wedding day, he has often felt as if a chasm had suddenly opened up before him, and that, when he looks out across the abyss, he can see himself, or a version thereof, standing on the other side – so distant, so unreachable.
‘Ay,’ he murmurs, bitterly. ‘’Reckon I’ll have to call it “strange”.’
Marlowe picks at his cake in silence, as if sensing an impasse. But then he smiles again, as if having thought of a good joke. ‘My father is a cobbler, you know. His father too, and my mother’s father – my father was his apprentice, in fact. A cruel old man he was, they say; I’ve never met him. But his daughter was beautiful, and as clever as her father was cruel.’
‘Oh?’ Frizer wonders where he means to go with this.
‘One night, just after my father’s apprenticeship had ended, he crept upstairs and met my mother in her bedchamber. Together, they proceeded to rob the old man blind. From room to room they crept, taking all that they could carry: his tools, his leathers, the spoons from the cupboard, the shoes from his bedside! But they’d been too greedy, you see, for as they made to leave the bedchamber, something fell from my mother’s arms – a hammer or a block—’
‘No!’ Frizer gasps.
‘The old man awoke, drew a cudgel from under his pillow and gave chase through the house, up the stairs. In the attic, my mother and father wrapped the leathers ’round their backs, embraced, and threw themselves out the window—’
‘Full of fables, you are!’
‘Ask my mother. You would not call my mother a liar, would you?’
‘No doubt it runs in the blood.’
‘So, by that logic, does thievery.’
They both laugh, Marlowe a tad shrill, a tad frenzied. He reminds Frizer of a hot horse: nose to the air, mane tossing, beating the dirt with its sharp hooves. Before Frizer realizes it, he is telling Marlowe about Papa – Papa before drink had become his only child – breaking the new foals in the paddock with such command, such ease. ‘ “Begging for the whip,” Papa would say. “A horse knows no god. He fears no god. He worships the whip.” ’
Marlowe’s eyes grow wide, hearing this. ‘Let me use that.’
Frizer’s face blazes. ‘No!’
‘Yes, yes! I know not where, but I must use that!’
He is touching Frizer’s knee with a hand that could wrap all the way around his leg. The hand is warm, a warmth that runs, via some channel of nerves, straight up Frizer’s thigh.
‘Well, I must go,’ Marlowe says, turning away to drink. A second later he is on his feet, brushing the crumbs from his lap.
Frizer scrambles after him, down the stairs, across the yard. ‘When will you come back? Where shall I find you? Should I come to Seething Lane after Newgate?’ All goes unanswered.
With one foot already in Bishopsgate Street, Marlowe halts. ‘I nearly forgot!’ He reaches into a pocket and produces the same key which the landlord had given him not half an hour ago, offering it at arm’s length, as if to offer a ring. ‘This is for you.’
Frizer stammers. ‘For me?’
‘Of course. I cannot take it to the Privy Court. If anything should happen…’
‘I understand.’ Frizer holds the key close. It is as heavy as he’d expected. ‘Wait, Marlowe? What should I do, if anything should happen?’
Marlowe walks backwards to say, ‘Go to Greenwich. Take my papers with you!’ The second command is of more importance than the first, it seems. Such is all the farewell that Frizer receives, for Marlowe turns again, his long strides speeding him across the street, towards many-gabled Crosby Place. He vanishes into the alleyway in a trice.
A knot of doom forms in Frizer’s stomach. For a minute or so he waits for Marlowe to re-emerge through the smoke, rushing back with a final word, or something else forgotten. But as the seconds pass, he begins to feel foolish, and finally exchanges the key with the letter in his pocket.
The careless paper-bolt all but falls open for him, revealing handwriting so distinct from that of Hero & Leander that it could be another man’s – scrawled, shaky; a howl, a whimper:
I begge you let us ende this. Commande me, I will do as you saye.
At the corner of Seething Lane, a man comes up at Kit’s right shoulder and paces him, muttering as if to no one in particular, ‘Today shall be difficult. Hold your tongue, no matter how hard you are pressed. Above all: trust me.’
This said, the man strides on towards the Privy Court as if nothing had occurred, a subtle, rolling limp in his step.
Kit enters, sceptical in mind but quivering with nerves. At the iron gate, a different guard from yesterday hoods him with a bag that stinks of some other man’s breath, and then drags him upstairs by the elbow like a child to a caning. After several hard turns and a long corridor or two, the guard jerks him to a halt and knocks upon a door that sounds of metal. The throb of blood in Kit’s neck grows suddenly loud, a lamblike bleating deep within his ears.
The door creaks open; he is shoved through. Several feet inside, a hand snatches his sleeve to halt him, swivels him about, presses him into a chair. Two men wrench Kit’s arms behind him, one arm to each, binding his wrists to the backrest. No one says a word.
Some distance away, moans dribble from a man’s throat.
At last, Kit’s hood is removed. The light is dim, and yet he squints. This is a room he has never seen before, long and narrow, a window at one end showing a marble slab of sky. Several feet away sprawls a table that could easily seat ten, with one figure in the middle, like Christ at the Last Supper. At either end of the table, a scribe sits, each with an overseer hovering at his shoulder, devil- or angel-like: Phelippes on the right, masked as always; Robin Poley on the left.
The man in the middle hangs his head so low that Kit can only see the crown. A string of bloody drool dangles from the downcast face. The hair is grey with dust and filth, yet for all that, Kit recognizes something about its texture, the whorl of the cowlick, the shape of the shoulders.
‘Kyd,’ Kit gasps, and tries to stand. The rogues to his left and right press their hands down upon his shoulders, one gives his cheek a back-handed slap – not hard, merely spiteful. ‘What is this?’ Kit sputters, looking at Poley, who does not look back. ‘What is happening?’
The scratching of pens on paper begins to whirl about the room like trapped wasps. Phelippes comes to the front of the table, hands behind his back, looking smug. Triumphant.
‘Thomas Kyd of London, son of John Kyd of London, do you swear by Almighty God that the testimony you give today is the truth?’
A mumble: ‘Yes.’
‘Do you swear upon your faith in the Church of England, and your loyalty to Our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth, and upon your own immortal soul?’
‘Yes!’
Phelippes returns to his end of the table, takes up a paper and brings it to Kyd. He wipes the bloody tabletop with a handkerchief, sets the paper down beneath Kyd’s nose. ‘Be it written that Master Kyd has been presented with the heretical document recovered at his lodgings on the 12th day of May. Master Kyd, are you the author of this document?’
‘No.’
‘Can you name the author of this document?’
‘Not positively, no,’ Kyd says, with a mouthful of blood that obliges Phelippes to move the paper further off. ‘I know not the author.’
Phelippes spiders his fingers upon the tabletop. ‘Can you name the owner of this document?’
Kyd’s head remains bowed. Slowly, he raises his manacled hands, lifting one arm with the other as if both are an all but impossible weight to bear. With one filthy finger, he points directly at Kit.
‘Be it written that Master Kyd has pointed in the direction of Christopher Marley, alias Marlowe.’
‘’Tis not mine, I tell you!’ Kit sputters, glancing again to Poley. ‘I’ve never—’
‘Master Kyd, have you ever heard Christopher Marley espouse heresies of the sort that are contained in this document?’
Kyd takes in a breath. He shoots a glance at Poley in the same childlike way that Kit feels himself looking at him, as if Poley were a cruel father, pitting his sons against each other.
‘He said the prophets were jugglers,’ Kyd says. ‘He said Moses was a charlatan… He said there are Indians far older than Adam, or something like that—’
‘Stop,’ Kit rasps.
‘And he said – he said that Christ and John the Baptist were… marry, I cannot say it.’
‘Stop.’
‘He said the Holy Ghost used the Virgin Mary like a whore—’
‘Stop!’ Kit cries. He has never said any such things to Thomas Kyd, not that he can remember. In this moment, his thoughts are all of Baines, straddling a stool in some grimy tavern, shaking with laughter as Kit tipsily improvised a dialogue between Mary and poor Joseph, surely the most gullible cuckold to have ever lived: ‘ “A dove, you say? Came in through this window, you say? And y’are dead certain y’are still a virgin…?” ’
In falsetto: ‘ “Oh, yes, he assured me it counted for nothing, the way we done it!” ’
‘Stop, stop!’ Baines had cried. ‘Oh God, Kit, you must stop!’
‘’Tis the truth,’ Kyd says. ‘I kept it secret. I took it for jesting.’
‘You… kept it secret?’ Poley says, the first time he has spoken. Kit stares at him like a drowning man at the shore.
‘I mean,’ Kyd stammers, ‘I did not report it when I should have done.’
‘Because you took these remarks for jests?’ Poley leans forward archly, an irate schoolmaster. ‘Master Kyd, did you laugh to hear such things?’
‘What? No! No, I—’
‘This business of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin, does that make you laugh?’
‘No, I swear by God!’
‘Master Poley,’ Phelippes interjects. ‘Master Kyd is not on trial.’
Poley bows his head, slipping on his customary, anodyne smile. ‘I only wonder, Master Phelippes, whether we may not inadvertently expose ourselves to the Devil’s meddling, should we leap upon this fellow’s testimony. Must we not ask first of all whether one accused heretic is fit to testify against another? Especially one who, by his own admission, could laugh at remarks such as these?’
‘I did not—’
Phelippes holds up a hand to silence Kyd, regarding Poley like a picture that simply will not stay upon its nail. ‘That is a question for the philosophers, is it not, Master Poley?’ he says. ‘This is neither the time nor the place to eat of the lotus.’
‘Oh, but ’tis our solemn duty to interrogate our methods, much as we do our subjects,’ Poley parries. ‘Two days ago, on this very ground, we condemned a man to hang for treason based on circumstantial evidence – nay, Master Phelippes, I would never decry the outcome; John Penry is a traitor, and shall die like one. ’Tis the path by which we arrived at justice which I fear was muddied by too much impatience, and God forbid we succumb to the same fallacy twice in one week.’
The scribes’ stares bounce helplessly from one end of the table to the other. Phelippes pulls the mask down to his chin, revealing a ruddy-complexioned, toadish countenance, riddled with pockmarks. ‘Master Poley, if anyone may be accused of muddying the waters just now, it is you!’
‘Nay, but I suspect ’tis my clarity you find most inconvenient. And I do not speak solely of moral concerns. I ask you to consider: what sort of trial shall we mount if we move forward now? This – this is to be our witness?’ He gestures to Kyd as if to a pile of dirty rags. ‘Does this beseem the might of the Queen’s Privy Council? This fellow who hath sworn upon his immortal soul, a thing in which, belike, he has no belief?’
Kyd starts, ‘You said—’
But Poley shouts him down. ‘’Faith, what a humiliating spectacle it shall be, to see the Star Chamber fall behind the word of an admitted atheist, who would make a laughing-stock of our God! What would his Holiness the Archbishop of Canterbury make of it? What would her Majesty make of it? What will the Lord Keeper say, when I—’
Phelippes slams his hand down upon the table, at which Poley finally falls silent – not, it seems to Kit, out of deference, but because there can be no clearer sign that he has won. For a second or two, the room holds its breath. And then, with a jolt, Phelippes comes alive again, storming down the length of the table towards Poley, as if intent on punching his teeth in. As Phelippes passes behind Kyd’s chair, Kit meets Kyd’s bloodshot eyes just long enough to see their terror dissolve into sorrow, regret.
Phelippes growls, ‘Take them away. Put them in the cells.’
Kyd’s face is the last thing Kit sees ere the black bag swallows him up.
Down a corridor and then a spiral stair, Kit stumbles on with a club jammed into his back. He hears the footsteps of several guards around him, plus the scuffle and scrape of Thomas Kyd’s blind footsteps. Somewhere below ground, where the air is chilled, Kit senses Kyd walking beside him – from the smell of him, perhaps, or simply the familiar feeling of his shoulder right up against Kit’s shoulder, just as they’d used to sit at the table in Little Bedlam or at the lodging-house in Leathersellers’, sharing the same inkpot – and come what may, life and limb be damned, Kit hurls himself at him. He feels the soft impact of a body between himself and a wall, his shoulder hard against a breastbone, a strangled cry in his ear. The guards shout, try to drag Kit back. For a moment they succeed and Kyd sputters, unpinned, ‘Get him off me! He’ll kill me!’ at which Kit rams him again, with even less mercy than before.
His hooded head snarls to Kyd’s hooded head, ‘Crying home to mother – that’s all you’re ever good for!’
On the 18th of September 1589, the day that Tom was arrested, Kit and Kyd had been walking home together from the Curtain Playhouse in the afternoon: Kyd studiedly unkempt, ranting on about Bandello; Kit in his new suit, with fourteen pearl buttons gleaming all down the breast. They’d got as far as the corner of Hog Lane, where a man sprang out from behind a fence and shoved Kit clear off his feet.
The attacker lifted Kit’s chin with the edge of a sword. His name was Bradley, an actor and inveterate gambler who had been banished from Little Bedlam after availing himself of Anna Watson’s wedding jewels. To Kyd, Bradley snarled, ‘Bring me Tom Watson!’ and Kyd hopped to obey him, leaving Kit on his knees in the mud. When Tom appeared at last, his rapier drawn, Kyd upon his heels, Bradley had roared for the whole neighbourhood to hear of filthy buggerers and sodomites, half-women, suck-pricks, pimps and pederasts, and he offered to cut Kit’s throat so deep his head would fall off.
Tom lunged. Kit dived out of the way. Bradley charged at Tom, windmilling his blade, and by sheer force drove him backwards up the street, all the way to the edge of the Finsbury ditch. Tom’s heels slipped; he tumbled into the ditch. Bradley leapt in after him.
Kit had rushed forward, but it was already over: Bradley’s body hung facedown over the ditch like a speared fish, Tom’s rapier impaled clean through his chest and out the back.
So much ended in that moment: the halcyon days of Little Bedlam, the second adolescence of success and fame. Perhaps Tom’s love for Kit also ended, or began to end, for afterwards he would ever blame Kit for what had happened – for making him lose himself, throw his life away so carelessly. Kit’s trust in Thomas Kyd surely died that day as well, not because Kyd had brought Tom into the fray, but because of what he did next: turned tail and ran to fetch the constables who would, within the hour, haul Tom away to Newgate Prison.
‘Coward!’ Kit roars, as the guards chain his wrists to the wall. ‘Milch-shitting coward! The Devil eat you, from the feet up!’
Nearby, Kyd snivels and begs forgiveness. It seems they are both restrained, each to the opposite wall of what must be an ample cell. Kit slides down until his arms are at full stretch, his head almost touching the floor, kicking like a cockerel without hitting anything. One of the guards suggests they stage a fight: ‘Big blind bugger against little blind bugger – no hands, all else goes!’ Eventually, Kit spasms and screams all the rage out of himself, till he lies panting upon the floor and the guards grow bored.
In the silence after the door closes, he can hear Kyd snuffling.
‘Who told you what to say?’ Kit snarls.
To this, Kyd merely whimpers.
Kit jangles his chains. ‘Who told you what to say?’
‘I know not what they’ll do to me if I tell you.’
‘Tell me or I swear by God I will do ye twice as worse!’
‘It was him’ – a whisper – ‘it was Topcliffe. In the Marshalsea. He had a paper with him. He read from it. The man from upstairs was there too.’
‘Which one?’
‘I used to see him Sundays sometimes, at St Helen’s. Has a limp. Topcliffe called him “birdy”, “bird”.’
Kit holds his breath. Somewhere high above his hood a chink of daylight glows, spinning a silvery web through the weave of cloth.
‘He told me I would be released!’ Kyd moans.
‘Who? Poley?’
‘Topcliffe.’ Kyd shudders in despair. ‘I knew he lied. I knew it. I wanted to believe—’
‘What did Poley say? The man from upstairs? What did he do?’
‘Nothing,’ Kyd says. ‘He watched.’
The floor seems to sway. So, this was what Poley had wanted with Baines: upstairs, Kyd had spoken of things only Baines could possibly know about. Kit feels a clench of betrayal, though there’s no reason for it; Poley was never his ally. Kit has no allies. He imagines Thomas Walsingham sighing: You see? This is what you do, Kit. This is why you cannot trust yourself.
‘He came before,’ Kyd goes on. ‘The man with no beard. A few days ago, I think, he came to the Marshalsea, and he spoke the prologue, from my Spanish Tragedy… He was looking into my eyes—’ He breaks off, and gasps, ‘I swear by Christ, Kit, I saw the Devil in that man. Or worse. I do not understand it. What does he want with me; what do any of them want with me? Why is this happening?’
‘I wish I knew,’ Kit lies.
‘That paper Topcliffe had… what was it? Where did it come from?’
Kit shakes his head, thinking of poor Frizer, and of the message he carries: Commande me, I will do as you saye. Baines never could resist the abjection of a naked throat.
After several seconds of waiting on an answer, Kyd seems to give up. He snuffs, and murmurs, ‘Everyone always said your mouth would be the death of ye.’
‘You never heard me say such things.’
‘That matters not. I believe you said them. I know you.’ Kyd falls silent again, his mind grinding away so fiercely that it bestirs the air. ‘I felt such a weight after what happened,’ he begins again, ‘with you, and Tom, and Bradley. I’ve played the scene at least a hundred ways, wondering if I might have been able to stop it. If I had tried… I know not. But I might have tried.’
All these years, they have never spoken of it. Surely Kyd dares to speak of it now only because he believes they will never see one another again. Kit remembers walking beside Kyd, in the moment before Bradley had attacked: the undiluted admiration in Kyd’s shy glance, like a younger brother looking to his elder. Remorse pulls tight through Kit’s chest like a rope.
‘You know how they call me “Mad Hieronimo”?’ Kyd says. ‘Strangers, they say it as if it were a mark of distinction, but when you call me that, or Will, or Michael, ’tis a jest – a cruel jest, because I am nothing like Hieronimo, even though I created him. I’m not cunning. I’m not quick. I’m not brave. And you, they call you “Tamburlaine”, or they call you “Faustus”. As if either should be flattering!’
Kit laughs, glad of the hood for concealing his tears.
Kyd says, ‘They think because God creates in His own image, that we do the same, but ’tis simply not true. We are not gods. We are just men.’
‘I am sorry,’ Kit says: sorry for all that he is and is not, for himself and for Kyd, for Tom Watson and Anna Watson and the prisoner in the cellar and Anthony Babington and even Baines. ‘I am sorry.’
‘You see?’ Kyd murmurs, sadly. ‘Tamburlaine would never say that.’