TO EXPLAIN THE COIN, Kit must also explain what happened in the Low Countries early last year, with Baines. But he must be careful with his words. He omits entirely the circumstances that had led to his going abroad, which had really begun in the spring of 1590, with Tom’s release from Newgate: rushing to Little Bedlam, only to find the doors bolted against him. Returning day after day for a fortnight, knocking on every shuttered window, pleading with a locked door, knowing, all the while, that he was being watched from within. The last time Kit ever saw Tom was another whole year after that: not Tom exactly, but one eye peering through the upstairs shutters while the parish watch wrestled Kit from the doorstep below, a scratch from Anna Watson’s fingernails bleeding fresh upon his chin. ‘What did I do?’ Kit had screamed, drunkenly. ‘Tell me! What did I do?’ But all this, Kit omits from his story.
Instead, he begins in January of 1592: with the letter he’d written to the Lord Keeper requesting employment in the Low Countries, because there was nothing left for him in England.
Kit had been given letters to deliver, which he’d thrown overboard halfway across the Narrow Sea. After arriving at last upon the fortressed, island city of Flushing, Kit had spent his first few nights at a tavern by the English barracks, until a soldier recognized Baines’s name and told Kit his whereabouts – in exchange for a cocksucking, of which Kit makes no mention to Frizer either. The soldier directed him to a pedlars’ camp by a gull-infested dump, where Kit found Baines living in a scrap-wood hovel with a tarp for a door. Strangely, Baines had not seemed surprised to see Kit. There was but a blinking of the pale eyes in a haggard, soot-blackened face, after which Baines stepped aside, a wordless invitation. Also wordlessly, Kit stooped in.
They’d sat on the dirt floor, on opposite sides of a sputtering firepit. Kit drank some acrid, vagabond fermentation out of a Bellarmine jug that grinned at him with a ghost of Baines’s old, crooked grin. Little was said by either man, at first. Baines bowed into the work which Kit had evidently interrupted, tending to some object which a second glance revealed to be a miniature forge or kiln, assembled out of singed bricks. Baines pumped a bellows, sent sparks dancing about the dark room. From inside the kiln a light flared, lemon yellow to pith white.
Kit soon realized that the hovel’s walls gleamed with all manner of metal objects: dented pots and plates and pitchers, bent spoons and knives, spade-heads, axe-heads, hammer-heads, all of which reflected the fire’s soft surges like hundreds of watchful eyes.
‘This here,’ Baines had said, holding up a rectangular object, ‘is a coin mould. It may look solid, but ’tis a fine sand mixed with a little gun-oil. The oil keeps it pliant, you see. And this – here, inside the crucible – this took me months to perfect. ’Tis three parts pewter, one part lead, for the weight.’ Thus, he’d lectured, as if Kit had happened in upon a demonstration in progress. Baines withdrew a coin from his pocket, a genuine Dutch dollar, and let Kit hold it with greatest pride but also greatest reluctance, as if to let a child handle glass. ‘From that coin,’ he explained, ‘was birthed a score of bastards. I do not use them myself. Only a fool would try to spend his own mint. No, the goal is to sell them on for some other wight to try his chance. Gamblers like them. We have many gamblers here; soldiers love to gamble. At table, in poor light, with all present in their cups – many times, even a lacklustre impression will pass unnoted. Eventually, I’ll have made enough to buy my way off this accursed island. At a few pence per coin, it shall take time, but if I am rich in anything these days, ’tis time.’
Silently, Kit watched him work, the way he’d used to watch his father work as a boy, when even the trade of shoemaking had seemed to him a marvellous alchemy. A memory came to him from years earlier, when he had just returned to Cambridge after a few weeks back home, in Canterbury. Baines had no sooner looked at him but he’d swept a lock of Kit’s hair aside, exposing a bruise that Kit had tried to hide. If he ever touches you like that again, Baines had said, I’ll kill him. When a man says that about one’s father, he becomes another father, the true father’s shadow: kind where the other is cruel; cruel where the other is kind. When a boy finds his father’s shadow, he tends to live in it. He loves it as he cannot love the man who casts it.
Soon, half an hour had passed, and still, Baines had not asked Kit why he’d come to Flushing. Yet Kit felt the need to explain – to confess.
‘I fear,’ he rasped, ‘I fear I may be… evil.’
What he’d meant was that he feared they might belong together.
Baines had looked up from his work, the flame catching something like sadness in his gaze. ‘It does not matter what you are,’ he said, in a paper-thin voice. He then picked up a set of tinker’s shears – a tool Kit had seen him use in Paris, for other purposes – and offered them across the fire. ‘Would you like to help me?’ He almost sounded ashamed.
Kit set the bottle aside. He crawled towards him.
But Kit cannot tell Frizer this story, which he never has and never will tell anyone, because no one could ever understand. It is like the sand in Baines’s coin mould, so seeming-solid, so quick to dissolve. He can only tell Frizer the barest facts: that he became a willing accessory in Baines’s counterfeiting scheme, a part which he’d played for nearly two weeks, earning the scar upon his hand in the process: a burn from molten metal, soothed in snow. One night, while Kit slept, Baines had gone to the governor’s office and reported him as a coiner, a betrayal which Kit admittedly did not comprehend until the morning after his arrest, when he’d awakened in his cell to Baines flinging nutshells at his head through the bars: ‘Now I’ve got you, you ungrateful little shit.’
Frizer remains silent for a long time after Kit has finished his story, his head bowed over the coin. He runs a fingertip around the edge that Kit had once so carefully filed smooth. ‘I thought the Council was after ye for… other reasons.’
Kit, seated now upon the windowsill, frowns in confusion but dares not speak.
Frizer goes on: ‘So you’re a coiner? That’s the worst of it?’
Kit can hardly bear the hope in his eyes. The man must be someone’s little brother to be so practised in this look that begs never to be let down.
Kit tries to laugh. ‘The worst of it? According to whom?’
Frizer lowers his head. Kit is grateful for his silence. He turns to the window, scanning the empty street. At so late an hour, none but two or three sleepy guards roost upon the ramparts at Bishopsgate, chins upon their chests. Now would be a perfect opportunity to run. But to run is not so simple. ’Tis a thing that, once done, cannot be undone, not the petulant running away of an angry child but the becoming of something precarious and truant, a paper escaped from a bonfire, burning as it flies.
‘Why,’ Frizer murmurs, but then hesitates. ‘Why does this Baines fellow hate ye so much? And why do you do what he says? I’m sorry – I did not mean to – I saw the message. You said he should “command” you. Why would you let a man like that command you?’
Kit will step outside; say he needs the privy. He’ll simply walk away, and be halfway across the city before anyone, even Frizer, knows he’s gone.
‘Marlowe?’
Something moves on the far side of Bishopsgate. In the corner where a tower meets the Wall, two figures lean close together, as if to shelter some delicate object from the wind. Two men. At first only one of them notices Kit in the window, nudging the other, as if caught. Both stand upright, facing him. They are both tall, rangy creatures like himself. A matched pair.
They speak not, but their bodies say it: Now I’ve got you.
‘Marlowe?’ Frizer says again. ‘What is’t?’
Kit commands himself, in Baines’s voice, to Move, breathe, do something; in his father’s voice, he admonishes himself that he is a man: Act like one. What did Frizer call him yesterday? A big brute? And yet how small he feels, like a hare in the grass – a tiny gyre of terror spinning in place.
Poley arrives on Deptford Strand just after midnight. A mist rises off the Thames that smells not unlike unclean skin, unwashed sheets. Upon the high bank, houses stand in a gabled row running towards the somnolent village green, as dark as racked skulls and each as similar to the next.
Poley’s destination lies on the riverside extreme of this row, the only house with a lit lantern above the door and a sign at the front, of a bull. Two horses are already tethered to the fenceposts, pawing at the squelching earth. After securing his own horse, Poley knocks at the door, which is answered by a woman in mourning attire, her white face floating upon the blackness like a moon. She and Poley share the same strong jawline, the same dimpled chin. The same father.
‘God by’ye, Eleanor,’ Poley says.
Eleanor instructs Poley to step back, takes a bottle of vinegar from a table by the door and pours a little over his hands, leaving them stinking straight up to his nostrils. ‘He’s at my table,’ she mutters, as he steps inside at last. ‘I would have spiced his wine with quicksilver, but alas for me, the devil will not deign to drink.’
‘Arsenic, sister,’ Poley whispers, handing over his hat and half-cape. ‘Quicksilver is far too fickle for table use. Now be a good hostess. Your guest will hear you.’
Eleanor throws Poley’s things over the stair-rail. ‘I care not if he hears me!’
Into the dark she leads him, down the narrow corridor that runs like a vein through her over-large, lifeless house. To the right is the staircase where Poley’s niece and nephews had used to put their heads through the railings and bay like goats, and to the left lies the stain where, five years ago, Eleanor’s poor husband Master Bull had bled out on the floor, his cracked skull cradled in her lap, on the day that Richard Baines was dragged away to exile.
Eleanor has been in mourning ever since. But the children are gone now too, the eldest to crack skulls himself out on the Irish moors, and the others to stay with their late father’s family in Lincoln. In their absence Eleanor has taken on that humiliation most commonly reserved for childless widows, to operate as a sometime victualler for travellers and other single gentlemen, who may be found guzzling ale at her table or stinking up the beds with their post-prandial farts two or three nights out of every week. A sad burlesque of the old days, when it was Privy Council spies who had lodged here, on their way to and from the Continent.
Tonight, Eleanor has but two guests at her dining table, one Nick Skeres, munching on roasted almonds, the other Thomas Walsingham, begirt in so many layers of courtly damask and fustian that he sits as straight as a spit, emanating a fug of rose and almond-oil from his gleaming, silvery-black locks.
‘How goes the courting, Jack Robin?’ Poley says, just to see him turn red.
At once, Nick puts down his cup and rises to pull out a chair for ‘Good Master Poley’. The big ape had taken an inexplicable liking to Poley back when he was only a spotty-chinned little pudding of a lad, one of Sir Francis’s personal runners, and has remained steadfastly loyal ever since. Boys raised by the rod are always looking for a man to follow. And Nick has proved himself useful over the years.
‘I’ll begin with the good news,’ Poley says, lifting his cup of brandy as soon as Eleanor has filled it. ‘Despite Master Phelippes putting up a terrible fight – one in which I daresay my time at Gray’s Inn did me yeoman’s service – I have persuaded him not to act upon Thomas Kyd’s testimony against Marlowe. For now.’
Walsingham does not look especially relieved. ‘And what of this testimony? I assume you heard it yourself.’
‘Oh yes, I was in the room. That, too, took some persuasion. As to the veracity of Kyd’s accusations, I have no comment. I did observe, however, that his statement seemed well rehearsed. No doubt he’d received instruction from our dear Dicky Topcliffe.’
Walsingham baulks. ‘You would accuse Dick Topcliffe of falsifying Kyd’s testimony? To what end?’
‘Falsifying, no! I would not credit the warden with the necessary powers of invention. But if I may offer another theory?’
Walsingham gives his hair an insouciant flick, as if drawing deep from the well of indulgence. ‘Go on.’
Roundly, Poley regales him with his ‘theory’: that Dick Topcliffe has – somehow – made contact with Richard Baines, through whom he’d acquired unique knowledge of Marlowe, knowledge which Topcliffe had, in turn, passed on to Kyd. The Council, for their part, might well have arranged the whole scheme, and rewarded Topcliffe for his part in it – whyever not? Inconveniently for them, their case against Marlowe is currently founded on the word of Thomas Kyd, accused heretic, and of Richard Baines, late exile, long-suspected deviant – two witnesses of dubious character, whose separate testimonies may be easily coloured as the desperate or vindictive ravings of old friends scorned and creditors unrepaid. ‘Yet,’ Poley concludes, ‘as your uncle used to say: “two doubts, when they agree, equal a certainty”.’
Walsingham looks as if his stomach has turned several times since Poley began speaking. His hand makes a nervous gesture at the tabletop, as if to pluck furiously at a phantom loose thread. ‘And, Kyd’s accusations?’ he says at last, voicelessly, and takes a drink before saying more. ‘What leads you to believe that they come from Baines, and not Kyd himself?’
Poley bows his head. ‘Let me put it this way, Master Walsingham – if there’s more than one man on earth who knows your friend’s sins as intimately as that, then you have troubles beyond my skill to solve.’
Walsingham laughs once, strangely. He rubs at his chin as if to rub the hair right off.
‘Tell me,’ he says.
Poley takes in a breath, rolls his eyes up to heaven, and paraphrases three or four examples from Baines’s letter, his favourites: the charlatan Moses, the hypocritical Protestants, the whorish Virgin Mary, the sodomite Christ and his Ganymede St John—
‘For God’s sake, Kit,’ Walsingham whispers, ashen-faced. ‘For God’s sake!’
Poley bows, as if ashamed to have sullied his tongue. In truth he crawls from head to toe, as if with fleas. He is so near now. Walsingham needs only a little push.
For a few moments Walsingham only clutches his head in his hands, looking as if he might either be sick or start to weep. Then at last he draws himself up, saying, ‘If we take this theory of yours as truth, then who else besides Topcliffe might have seen Baines’s statement?’
‘There’s no knowing, really,’ Poley says. ‘At the very least, it has not yet been officially received at Seething Lane.’
‘And no word on when that should occur?’
‘None. I have spoken with Baines myself, or tried to. He will show his cards only when “good and ready”, so he says.’
Walsingham sinks once more into his thoughts, no doubt scrabbling around the cluttered attic of his brain in search of any shred, any glimmer, of hope.
‘Perhaps there is a way,’ he says at last. ‘Perhaps Baines will have a price—’
‘Look now,’ Poley says, bemused, and growing annoyed that he need say this at all. ‘One way or another, the Council will make a meal of your friend. Baines’s delay may be up to them, or up to Baines himself. Either way, ’tis revenge that motivates him, and revenge may wait, but not forever. You, Master Walsingham, should count yourself lucky. After all, it was you who convinced your uncle to order Baines’s arrest, you who sent a gang of bumbling cutthroats here, to this very house, to collect him. Yet you are not the target of his ire, but only likely to be a collateral victim of it.’ This, Poley has said with a glance to Eleanor, who has been staring at the back of Walsingham’s head incandescently all this while, as if dreaming of putting a bullet through it.
‘We may sit here night after night hammering away at increasingly absurd schemes and counter-schemes,’ Poley goes on, ‘but the fact of the matter is that Kit Marlowe is a liability to you, Master Walsingham, as surely as Tom Watson once was. I need not remind you how that ended. Not that Master Watson should be held at fault for what happened to you, of course. Or to any of us. We cannot be blamed, can we, for the pain we inadvertently cause in the torture room. A name – ’tis but a word, on the rack. Such a little word, with which, so we are promised, we might buy our wretched selves one moment of mercy… A man in pain has no loyalty. A man in pain knows no love.’
Walsingham speaks not, his dark eyes – his uncle’s eyes – fixed upon his own nervous hand as he, no doubt, ruminates upon the torments of the Marshalsea. ’Tis an intimate thing they share, Walsingham and Poley, for they share Topcliffe. Almost as intimate as if to have shared a lover.
‘When Marlowe’s turn comes,’ Poley says, growing restless, ‘I warrant you, it will be the same—’
‘It shall not be dealt with your way,’ Walsingham snarls.
‘We would not be here now, were there another way. You know this—’
‘If you persist in telling me what I know or what I think, by God, I will terminate our business. Ay, though it would inconvenience me greatly, I will!’ Walsingham strikes the table, causing every object upon it to jump.
Nick catches Poley’s eye with a worried, doggish look, poised over his decimated bowl of almonds as if interrupted mid-coitus. Poley offers him the slightest of nods in reassurance, and to Walsingham, says, ‘Stewards solve inconveniences, Master Walsingham. I forestall catastrophes.’ To this, Walsingham merely grunts. So, Poley tries again. ‘I assure you, in my trade, far more suffering is avoided than dealt. I am familiar with methods both swift and painless: “mercies”, some call them—’
‘We are finished here,’ Walsingham says, standing up. ‘Nick, come!’
He storms out. Nick hesitates upon his orders, staring helplessly at Poley, to whom Eleanor looks also, with betrayal in her glare. To both, Poley says, ‘He’s no fool. Give me time.’
Nick moves to follow his master. Seconds later, the front door slams. Poley puffs out his cheeks, rising to go also, but Eleanor catches him by the sleeve. ‘You promised me Walsingham would suffer!’ she hisses. ‘You said he would be back in the Marshalsea by summer’s end!’
Poley feels a headache coming on all of a sudden. ‘Always so quick to doubt me,’ he says. ‘I do wonder whereof it comes, this lack of faith.’
Her eyes dart. ‘He’s not taking to it, Robin. Perhaps ’tis time you tried it another way…’
‘What way might that be, sister?’
‘Give the snake what he wants. Tell him you’ll help Marlowe escape!’
Poley but raises his hand, and Eleanor skids backwards into the wall as if he had grabbed her by the throat. Gently, he cups the hand beneath her chin, she looking proud and stoic all the while, too good to meet eyes with him.
He leans close to say, ‘Silly girl! Master Walsingham would never trust me to do that – but he will trust me to kill him.’
Outside, Poley finds Nick hovering anxiously by the front door while, some distance away, Walsingham paces the yard in all his glittering frippery, a peculiar sight against Deptford’s effluvial muck. Some hundred yards beyond him, on the grassy lawn facing Eleanor’s house, lurks one of London’s most peculiar monuments: a hulking, hundred-foot galleon, buried up to its cannon-ports in the muddy earth. In another life, she was the Golden Hind, Sir Francis Drake’s celebrated flagship, but clearly her days of capturing Spanish gold are long behind her. Beached and listing, she seems to have erupted out of the ground, her three naked masts, denuded of sails, reaching towards the sky like bony fingers. Walsingham stops to gaze upwards as if the skeletal hand were about to close around him.
Perhaps he is in love with Kit Marlowe. How tragic!
When Poley is just steps away, Walsingham says, without turning around, ‘You would have me take the coward’s course.’
‘The coward’s course?’ Poley says. ‘Nay – the wise man’s.’
Walsingham scoffs. ‘Perhaps it is so. In this world, only the wicked are wise. Or long-lived.’ He pinches his brow, momentarily still. Then says, ‘You are a poisoner, I hear. A woman’s weapon.’
Poley feels the fist around his heart ease its grip slightly, just slightly. ‘Those who say so misunderstand how poisoning works,’ he counters. ‘’Tis an intellectual endeavour, a game of wits and patience. But I am loath to extol the virtues of an unvirtuous profession. Suffice to say, it keeps the tailor and the grocer happy, when other sources run dry.’
‘I have no doubts as to your “expertise”,’ Walsingham says. ‘But if it must be done, I trust you not to do it as I would have it done: kindly, quickly.’
Poley pities him that he should think either kindness or quickness were feasible, under the circumstances. ‘If you agree to my terms, then my hand is yours. And, in my own defence, let me say that I do not delight in suffering. No, not even in death, despite what you may think. I believe that death should be expedient. Quiet. ’Tis a private matter between the dying man and God, or it ought to be.’
Walsingham laughs, bitterly. ‘A repentant assassin, are you?’
‘Yes. Profoundly so. But I am defiant too. I repent not my actions, I repent only such times as I failed to act. I repent not that our Queen lives. I repent not that Anthony Babington is dead. I repent that I did not kill him myself – kindly, quickly – in some opportune moment, ere the headsmen had at him.’
‘Babington was a traitor.’
‘So is Christopher Marlowe. Just look at this Penry fellow: heretics are traitors now, and suffer traitors’ deaths. I suppose not to burn alive is a kind of mercy. But believe me when I say that you do not want to see your friend butchered upon the gallows. You do not want to see them pull the heart out of him, still beating.’
Walsingham gazes up at the stars, saying nothing for long enough that Poley begins to doubt himself, to feel the squeeze around his heart once more. He must not grow desperate. But he regrets not having put a gun to Baines’s head and forced him to hand over his blasted statement; he wishes that this, now, were a simple matter of putting a gun to Walsingham’s head, and forcing him to buy his friend’s death. He has come so close; he is so close – close enough that he cannot so much as blink without seeing the diamond’s flash, as it had passed from Babington’s fingertips to his own—
Walsingham says, ‘Why were you there?’
Poley shakes himself. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘If you delight not in suffering,’ Walsingham says, looking at the ground, ‘then why were you there that day, at St Giles’ Field? Why did you watch?’
Poley had not expected this. Least of all did he expect the sudden vertigo that overtakes him in hearing these words, remembering the night before Babington died. Sir Francis had come to Poley’s room at the Tower to inform him that he would witness the following day’s executions: that he would stand at the back of the stage among the prisoners, and watch it happen as they did. ‘I hope,’ the Spymaster had said, before leaving, ‘that the next time you do either myself or her Majesty service, you will conduct yourself with restraint.’
Restraint – Poley knows it well now. A closed fist, a locked jaw. A tooth-breaking grin.
‘Because I hated him,’ Poley says, as if uttering it unburdened him, though he has given this answer before, word for word. ‘With all my heart, I hated him. It did haunt me so, that hatred, that even food did taste of it, my sleep did churn with it! I imagined it would give me some relief to see him torn apart, as if by wolves… but imagination is a weak substance. Blood, and pain, run thick. Marry, I am fed up with them.’ His voice has dropped to only a whisper; the world tips slightly underfoot.
Walsingham lets out a long breath. ‘What are your terms?’ he says.
Just like that, it happens: we think the unthinkable. From then on, the rest comes easily.