FRIZER PRESSES HIS HANDKERCHIEF to his face as he squeezes through the crowded common room of the Saracen’s Head, envisioning a greenish vapour of pestilence radiating off the unwashed throng. He searches for a landlord, a chamberlain, a pot-boy, anyone who might direct him to Richard Baines, but encounters only soldiers with the winds of Hades at their backs and exhausted-looking whores at their fronts, singing, ‘Men are fools who wish to die, hey nonny no!’
After doubling back to the entrance, Frizer finds a fellow who might be the chamberlain, to judge from his ring of keys, or possibly a jailer on repast from nearby Newgate Prison. ‘I have a message for Richard Baines!’ Frizer shouts at him.
The man with the keys cups his ear. ‘Who?’
‘Richard Baines! He’s a guest here.’
‘Richard who?’
Eventually this farce arrives at its obvious conclusion: the man has never heard of a Richard Baines, neither here nor anywhere. Perhaps Baines is here under an alias; perhaps Marlowe has sent Frizer to the wrong inn; perhaps this is a wild goose chase concocted by Marlowe for malicious purposes, intended to keep Frizer busy, and far away… Any rogue in this crowd might be Richard Baines. The man with the keys might have been Richard Baines!
Frizer squeezes his way to the bar, where a malnourished wench ignores him a while, scurrying back and forth at others’ beck. He leans over the plank to shout his enquiry as she passes by, to which he receives a blank look that might just as easily be panic as ignorance. ‘Sorry, master.’
Baines is here, Frizer is sure of it now. Armed with conviction, he pushes his way back onto Newgate Street and turns to look up at the inn’s timber-clad, gabled façade, a sign above the door displaying its gruesome namesake in profile. He expects to see a figure appear in one of the glazed windows, watching him, but the Saracen’s Head is enigmatic, fittingly enough, the glass showing nothing but a reflection of the darkening sky.
Raindrops begin to fall. Frizer finds a dry spot beneath the awning of a derelict building across the street, where in little time he is joined by several stinking beggars, who look so puzzled at his presence that he suspects himself an intruder in their customary squat. What an ass he is indeed – and Marlowe too, for that matter! How had it never occurred to either of them that a description of the devil’s person might be useful?
One of the beggars approaches Frizer and stands uncomfortably close, open-handed.
Frizer presses the handkerchief tighter to his face. ‘I carry no coin,’ he says, the same lie he always tells.
The beggar goes nowhere. He shifts gently from one foot to the other, like a small child with a terrible urgency which he is either too polite or too abashed to name.
‘I said I carry no coin!’ Frizer dares to glance in the beggar’s direction and finds, to his astonishment, that the dirty hand is not empty. It already contains a coin. Silver, by the look of it, but like no English coin that Frizer has ever seen; no image of the Queen’s hatchet-headed profile, no ‘ELIZA-REGINA’.
The beggar looks down to the coin and up again with wide, innocent eyes. Somewhere behind the mat of grizzled beard a lopsided mouth grinds away speechlessly, lips tucked together.
Frizer holds out his hand. Smiling, the beggar tips the coin into his palm.
Hunger eventually drives Frizer back to Bishopsgate, under a tepid drizzle. He examines the coin as he walks, the beggar’s swift disappearance having denied him any hope of an explanation. The coin neither feels nor smells like silver, but is not heavy enough to be lead. Tin, perhaps, or pewter. One side shows a faint impression of a crest with an animal, possibly a lion; the other side, a bust of a man with a sword.
He has seen a counterfeit coin before. Nick had showed him an example once, some years ago, having taken a brief interest in the art of forgery. ‘Let no one see it,’ Nick had said, cupping his hands around Frizer’s hand. ‘They catch you with one of those and—’ the finger across the throat. As always, Nick had seemed extraordinarily proud to have something so deadly in his possession.
But Nick’s coin had been far more convincing. Frizer cannot even say what currency this one is meant to feign, not that he’s an expert in foreign coin. Marlowe might know it; he seems to know many odds and ends of things. Oh yes, he’ll say, that’s an Egyptian guilder, or a Roman ducat, or a Spanish shekel, and Frizer shall have to take his word for it.
Frizer gobbles down his dinner at the Inn-in-the-Wall and then heads south for Seething Lane, arriving just as the clouds open. The closest shelter is the lychgate of St Olave’s Church, where he squeezes himself into a corner, too squeamish to sit upon the coffin-rest. Within minutes, the world outside turns slanted and grey. Thunder dances across the sky, like cartwheels over a rutted road. Across the street, the gates of the Privy Court open sporadically, releasing figures who scatter in every direction, arms and cloaks over their heads. But no sign of Marlowe.
Perhaps he is gone, truly gone. And then Frizer shall have to ride for Greenwich in the rain, to tell his master – but first, of course, back to Bishopsgate, to collect the papers. Marlowe never did specify what Frizer ought to do with the papers. Perhaps he would not mind if Frizer kept them, so long as he kept them safe. He could do that. Hide manuscripts in the barn back home, in the loft or in the walls. Read them at luxury, when no one is around to hear him, playing all the parts.
‘ “I that am termed the scourge and wrath of God, the only terror of the world!” ’
The next time Frizer glances at the lion-fronted gatehouse, a great hop-stalk of a man stands in a puddle upon the sunken stoop: dripping wet, his posture a question mark.
Frizer sheathes his knife, steps into the downpour and waves his arm high above his head. No response. Both arms. Marlowe looks in his direction and still seems not to see him.
‘Hallelujah,’ Frizer cries, ‘he is God damn risen!’
Sheets of rain vibrate off the muck on Bishopsgate Street as first Marlowe, then Frizer sprints under the shelter of the Inn-in-the-Wall’s gate. Frizer doubles over and gasps for breath, worn out from trying to keep up. Marlowe rakes the wet hair back from his eyes and immediately grows still, hands at his temples, a look on his face as if he were plotting out the finer details of an especially gruesome murder. He has not said a word since he emerged from the Privy Court.
‘Ho,’ Frizer pants, and prods Marlowe’s arm with two fingers, ‘shall we go in and have a drink?’
Marlowe throws that same fearsome look in Frizer’s direction, silent far too long.
Then, ‘Ay,’ he says, letting down his hands. ‘Ay, a drink.’
They splash across the muddy inn-yard, arriving at the door soaked all over again. The rain has driven a small crowd into the common room, which reeks both of mildewed wool and frying oysters. Marlowe wedges himself between two damp merrymakers and sets his flask on the plank. Frizer burrows in beside him, wondering how long he should wait to be asked about Newgate. Marlowe could not have forgotten about it, could he?
‘By the way,’ Frizer begins at last, ‘I went to the Saracen’s Head and asked for Baines, but no one would confess to knowing him. I waited most of the day, but well, I knew not who to look for, so I gave it up. But I can try again tomorrow. ’Tis better than waiting around on you. What kept ye so long, anyway?’
Still Marlowe says nothing, fumbling with a pearl button on his doublet, the only button of its kind, like a blind man trying to tell a sixpence from a groat.
Frizer empties his purse into his hand, picking through coins in search of one of the Inn-in-the-Wall’s tokens. ‘I shall have to find a way of passing the time while you are inside.’ A thought occurs to him. ‘The playhouses are still closed, no? For the plague?’
‘Ay,’ Marlowe grunts.
Frizer stares at him, startled to hear his voice at last, then looks down at his hand again. ‘That’s a shame. I could see a play while you are inside. Or we could go together, afterwards.’ Frizer’s face feels hot, having said this. We. Together.
‘But we could not,’ Marlowe says. ‘Not even if the playhouses were open.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m not allowed outside the Wall. All the playhouses are beyond the Wall.’
‘Ay, right.’ The beggar’s coin appears in Frizer’s hand, so bright that it takes him by surprise. Perhaps now is not the time to bring it up. In retrospect, the incident is so strange that Frizer would not believe it himself had he not the evidence at hand. Perhaps the only proper time to have mentioned it would have been immediately upon Marlowe’s release, and having delayed, he can do naught but delay indefinitely. ’Tis clear, from the pinch of fear in his guts, that ’twere best to say nothing now.
He pockets the coin, places a token on the bar. ‘Small ale with water, is it?’
‘Whisky,’ Marlowe says. ‘No water.’
Night falls and the rain moves on, but the crowd at the Inn-in-the-Wall only grows larger and louder as curfew draws near, as if intent on drinking the plague away. Having reached his limit some time ago, Frizer now feigns every sip from his cup, for he would not have Marlowe think him less a man than himself. Marlowe’s capacity is tremendous, as if he can fill himself like a bottle, from the feet upwards. Emboldened by drunkenness, Frizer thinks, Now is the time to mention the stars, and blithers, ‘The stars… the way you write of them… I have always admired it.’
Marlowe puts down his cup just to grin at him, with an expression somehow vain and hungry and fragile all at once, as if he needs, and expects, more. Frizer’s mind goes blank.
‘You are interested in the stars?’ Marlowe says. It comes off almost like a threat.
‘Well. I reckon so. The way you write about them.’
Marlowe responds not with a discussion of the poet’s craft, but with a rambling lecture on astronomy, delivered with exponential imperiousness and replete with obscure references, each one like another barb in Frizer’s ear: Aristotle, Copernicus, Maimonides, Thomas Harriot, Tycho Brahe; cosmos, metaphysical, parallax, nova stella. After close to half an hour, he regrets having brought up the damned stars at all.
‘… Faustus ought not to have asked a devil, you see,’ Marlowe is saying. ‘Of course the heavens are not as Mephistopheles describes them! Ptolemy, the old fool, he knew no better which way the heavens turned than he knew the colour of his own arsehole. Per inaequalem motum respectu totius – ’tis a convenient deflection, nothing more, and Faustus – having reached the limit of his understanding, and too ashamed to admit it – lets it go, sans argument! O crassa ingenia, O caecos coeli spectatores!’
Frizer has no idea what any of the Latin means, nor much of an idea who Ptolemy ever was, nor how this somewhat tedious subject could make anyone so enraged and enrapt all at once. ‘Man, if astrologers are all charlatans, then the heavens matter nothing anyway.’ (Marlowe has also just declared all astrologers to be charlatans, an opinion with which Frizer half-agrees.)
‘But there you are wrong! The heavens matter, not because they are understood but because they are utterly misunderstood. Look, when a man gives the lie to your face you may tell from his eyes that he is lying. When the world lies to your face, where do you look for reproof?’
Frizer shrugs.
‘In the eye!’ Marlowe intones, as if he finds his audience hopelessly stupid.
‘You say… that the heavens lie to us?’
‘No! Great God, how many ways must I say it? We lie, Master Frizer, Man lies! Nature cannot lie – the stars cannot lie!’
Frizer holds his head and whispers, ‘Blind me.’
‘You see, you see, this is how our childish nature overmasters our reason, that we may be shown a painted cloth and take it for the doors to Paradise! On the better stages, they fly gods and angels in on ropes – every man in the playhouse sees the ropes, and yet they all gasp like credulous infants—’
‘I’m going upstairs,’ Frizer announces.
‘And you should know better, Master Frizer,’ Marlowe rants on, unstoppable, ‘for you have seen both the play and the playmaker, and know well enough how one has no magic in’t in the slightest.’
‘What has that to do with anything? What does it even mean?’
Marlowe’s smirk has a terrible mischief in it. As if he is angling for a fight. ‘If I put before you a stripling boy with scruff on his chin and rouge on his lips and tell you, “Lo, this is fair Helen of Troy”, you’ll believe me, no?’
Frizer squares up to him. ‘Oh, I see, I see: a coney-catcher, are you, playing us all for fools? Ay, how clever you are, how stupid the rest of us!’
‘Nay, I am no cozener, Master Frizer, only a juggler. Like you.’
‘Now, what is the meaning of that?’
‘Just as it seems. You do your tricks, I do mine. But let me tell ye, in confidence: ’tis no magic to conceal a cock beneath a petticoat.’
Frizer considers striking him on the chin. Instead, he downs his drink all at once, slams the cup on the bar, and storms out wishing he had struck him indeed, wishing he were man enough to drop him to the ground.
Upstairs he summons the chamberlain, orders the candles lit, and then sprawls on the cot, waiting for his dizziness to pass. The manuscript of Edward II lies on the floor, within reach, bound at one corner with a ratty knot of green thread. He pictures Marlowe leaning down, breaking the thread with his teeth.
With the candles melting into their stands and still no sign of Marlowe, Frizer takes up the manuscript and sits at the desk, his heavy head propped just inches above the paper. The quill with which Marlowe wrote Edward II must have been drunk, taking winding loops that give rise to phantom letters, transpositions. Patiently, Frizer untangles it. In time, a stage appears before him, and from behind the curtains a pompous, surely overdressed fellow called Gaveston struts. He clutches a letter to his breast, and sighs:
‘ “Sweet prince, I come! These, thy amorous lines
Might have enforced me to have swum from France
And, like Leander, gasped upon the sand,
So thou wouldst smile and take me in thine arms—” ’
A knock at the door. ’Tis the chamberlain again, looking nervous. ‘Good sir, I beg your forgiveness that I must beseech you look to your companion. I have tried, but…’ He hesitates, casts a glance down the stairs. ‘He’s too heavy.’
Frizer suppresses a groan. He throws a longing glance to the desk, the state of which might suggest to any stranger that he is, in fact, the poet, and the big, blundering sot downstairs merely his useless bodyguard. He is Christopher Marlowe, that is his candle burning in the stand, those are his papers upon the desk, his handwriting upon them, his words.
‘Where is he?’ Frizer growls. He follows the chamberlain’s gesture over the railing and spots Marlowe lying just above the bottom of the stairs, as if flung there at the head of a wave.
Frizer thumps down, heavy-footed, unpitying. The chamberlain claims that Marlowe would not rouse for him, but he does so for Frizer soon enough, clambering upright as clumsily as a new foal. ‘Do not touch me,’ he snarls, and immediately trips over his own feet.
Marlowe climbs the five flights of stairs on all fours. At the top, he staggers through the door and collapses on the edge of the bed, both hands over his face, looking as if he might weep. Perhaps he is past the mad-dog stage of drunkenness and nearing the point where one could sit and howl all night long.
‘Can ye get your own boots?’ Frizer says, exasperated.
Marlowe says nothing, and so Frizer kneels, tugging the old boots off one at a time. He thinks of the kitchens at Scadbury, the livid red and white of those blistered feet. What kind of cobbler’s son has a hole in the sole almost big enough to put your finger through?
‘’Faith, I am sorry,’ Marlowe says.
‘Lie down now,’ Frizer says, pushing his shoulder. ‘There you go.’
Marlowe sinks into the pillow, curling up on his side like an exhausted child. Frizer feels sorry for him. Disgusted too. There’s a smell about him, not merely the stink of drink but something sick, something terminal. Papa had smelled that way, even on his bier.
‘I am so sorry,’ Marlowe says again, sounding practised in such apologies, quite weary of making them.
As if by suggestion, or out of sympathy, Frizer feels a resurgence of his own drunkenness. He can only laugh, and forgive. ‘Marry, y’are insufferable!’
Marlowe laughs also, his eyes closed, and then lies still for so long that Frizer wonders if he’s fallen asleep. His face turns smooth, ageless, restful. The broken nose, the scarred chin, they are of one face, and the lips, so full and red, are of another, a vestige of some gentler, untarnished creature. But suppose all men look innocent in sleep. Papa had. Elias and Rafe had.
But Marlowe is not asleep. His long fingers fiddle with that single pearl button on his breast, twisting it on its threads. ‘My father was apprenticed to my mother’s father,’ he says. ‘That much is true. She was sixteen. He was eighteen. He did steal into the house one night… into her room… and left her with child.’
Frizer smiles, happy to have earned the truth. ‘Let me guess, that child was you?’
‘No. My elder brother. He died before I was born. And the next boy after him. I was only a baby. My elder sister, Mary, died when I was four. She was six. And my little brother, he died while I was away at Cambridge. He was ten.’ He is quiet for a moment. ‘I am the only son now, and the eldest. Four sisters. I mean, three. Jane, she died while I was in Paris. Fourteen… Fourteen is too young to bear a child.’
Frizer knows not how to respond to such sad, intimate revelations. ‘I have two brothers,’ he says, but of course neither one is tragically dead, a terrible inadequacy on his part. And then he remembers. ‘My father is dead. My mother too. She died when I was born.’ He sometimes forgets he ever had a mother at all.
Marlowe chuckles darkly. ‘Are we not a pair?’
Frizer’s smile broadens. We.
‘My father, he was a sot too,’ Marlowe says. ‘I always swore up and down I would never be like him. Choirboy. Pious little shit! But… after Jane… I came back from France, and my sister was dead, and I could not tell them where I had been, why I had not come home. It began, then. Grew worse later, after…’ He stops. A pinch of discomfort tugs at the space between his eyes, as if with pain or dizziness. ‘Take my hand.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I think I am dying.’
Frizer sniggers, sits on the floor by the bed. He stares at Marlowe’s hand a while, wondering if he might have been serious – about taking his hand, not about dying. Perhaps he could touch Marlowe now, without it being strange. After all they are both drunk, both in a companionable mood. Rafe and Elias used to hug one another when they were drunk asleep. Sometimes Frizer would find Rafe snuggled against Elias’s back with his arm around him. Which was quite strange, come to think of it. Strange what sorts of things drunkenness and darkness and the privacy of a bed may permit.
Frizer had tried it once, with Nick, when they were both young: they’d lain down in the deep summer rye, side by side, and Frizer said, now you turn that way, and Nick did as he was told; and then Frizer said, now I hug you, like this. Frizer must have clung to him for twenty minutes before Nick had stood up and said, ‘I’m tired of this game,’ and pushed Frizer down and ran off for home. Frizer feels that old slithering in his stomach to think of it. That sense of something lingering.
Marlowe’s long fingers flex gently, as if with anticipation, the droplet of pink scar on his hand shining in the dim light.
The gesture reminds Frizer of the coin in his purse. Having guarded this secret so long, it startles him how immense it has grown while his watch was elsewhere. It seems to fill the room, to darken the candles like a draught. ‘Marlowe,’ he whispers, with nothing planned to say. ‘Listen: something strange happened today, in Newgate…’
Marlowe breathes almost as if asleep. He murmurs something, a half-finished thought: ‘They want me to— What?’
Frizer takes Marlowe’s hand, but only to peel his fingers apart and press the coin into his palm. ‘I should have told you before, I know. Look, a beggar gave it to me. It could be nothing. But I think… I think it may be counterfeit.’
Marlowe opens his eyes. ‘Counterfeit?’
‘Why would a beggar give me a counterfeit coin?’
Marlowe’s eyes close again, again with a look of pain, sharper than before. He rubs the coin in his fist. ‘That was no beggar. That was the Devil.’