FRIZER SPENDS THE MORNING of Wednesday the 23rd reading Edward II, even to the expense of breakfast. But by the time Marlowe and he must set out for Seething Lane, he contemplates swearing off the play altogether. He must never say so much to Marlowe, the man being of so volatile a disposition, but the thing is a rudderless mess. Not one person in all the play has an ounce of worth in him; all are weak, corrupt, despicable creatures, right down to the king and his beloved minion Gaveston, an insufferable upstart, with queer, unsettling appetites. There’s not a single Tamburlaine, nor even a Faustus among them, certainly not the king, who spends every minute on stage either pining after his Gaveston or swearing revenge on those who would keep them apart. ’Tis disgraceful indeed for Marlowe to write of a king who desires no more lands, nor wealth, nor maidens than he already has. All Edward desires in all the world, and therefore all he speaks of, is some odious, mincing mollis whom the whole of Creation detests.
At one point, some minor player asks the king, Why do you love him whom the world hates so?
The answer: Because he loves me, more than all the world!
Hours later, Frizer’s face is still hot from having read these words. As he paces up and down Seething Lane, waiting for Marlowe to either come out of the Privy Court or vanish forever, his chief thought is for the manuscript he’d locked up in the strongbox this morning and the taste of anger it had left in his mouth.
How powerfully he yearns to taste it again!
In this same moment, inside the Privy Court, Phelippes throws back the curtains on Kit’s stifling little cell, startling the flame of the candle, which has burnt halfway down in the time Kit has spent waiting on him. A vein of rage already throbs at Phelippes’s temple. ‘I suppose after yesterday you think yourself to have ducked the noose,’ he hisses. ‘Is that what you think, Marley? Did you sleep sound last night?’
Kit had not slept at all last night. From the window of his and Frizer’s room, he’d watched the twin shadows by the gate, watched them watching him, until the first light of dawn had appeared beneath the dun clouds. At that point, the two lads had looked at one another and started to walk away, headed west. One of them had turned, and winked.
They are even younger than Kit had first assumed. Eighteen, nineteen. The same age Kit was when Baines first found him in the buttery at Cambridge, soaking his ration of stale bread in beer. He wonders where Baines had found them, what unwholesome and desperate place he’d reached into and drawn them out of, what kind words he’d said.
Phelippes slaps a sheaf of papers onto the table. ‘This is you,’ he says. ‘This is every record from our archives that you have touched, or that contains some version of your name. You recognize this one? Signed by Thomas Walsingham: “… that Richard Baines did on several occasions enforce himself bodily upon the aforesaid Christopher by use of violence, against the conventions of Nature and the Laws of her Majesty, her Church and Realm…” How old were you when these alleged violations took place – nineteen? Twenty? A big lad, were you? And Richard Baines, he is of average height, would you not say? He must have used a weapon, no? Or drugged you? Tricked you? The word used here is contrectus, which would imply something stolen. Was it your manhood, Marley? Did he make off with it?’
The following afternoon, after Phelippes has finished with him, Kit blindly estimates that he is just steps away from the staircase to the great hall when a four-fingered hand reaches out of the void, grasps his arm and pulls him sideways, out of his guard’s grip. Behind him, a door closes; that same hand touches Kit’s chest, presses him backwards until his spine meets with a wall, and then finally pulls the bag from his head.
Robin Poley looks relieved to see him. ‘’Tis harder every day to have your ear for a moment!’ he says, overly friendly. The room is crammed to the ceiling with dusty boxes. Poley stands so close that Kit must look down his chin at him. ‘How is it with Master Phelippes these past two days? He’s making you pay for that humiliation with Kyd, I trust?’
Kit answers him not. These past several hours, he has barely kept the impulse to drive his fist into Phelippes’s face at bay. Just now, any face will do. ‘What do you want?’
‘Well, no pleasantries, then: were you able to find Master Baines?’
‘I’ll no longer discuss such things with you.’
A pout. ‘May I ask why?’
‘Ask Thomas Kyd. Now put the damned bag on and lead me out.’
Poley exhales a nervous chuckle, somehow manages to inch even closer. ‘Listen now, for I must say this quickly: whatever Master Kyd may have told you, make no conclusions out of it. You know not my mind, Master Marlowe. I do not move in straight lines.’
This begs several retorts, all too cheap to dignify. Kit can but laugh, and say, ‘Ay, marry, I know your mind, Poley. All the world knows your mind. That is what happens when you build your reputation on deceit. Now let me go.’
Poley’s jaw tightens. ‘You would be in jail now, were it not for me.’
For one blazing instant Kit believes he will punch his perfect teeth in after all, if not do far worse. But all he can think of is what little good it would do him – what a poor substitute Poley would make for the one Kit most desires to destroy.
Before the tears can reach his eyes, Kit shoves past Poley, making for the door. But of course, there is no escape.
‘Tell me of your session with Phelippes today,’ Poley says. ‘The questions asked, and your answers.’
Kit does not turn around. ‘He asked me no questions today. He read to me. He read the interrogation notes, from Newgate. From Tom Watson!’ Kit falls silent, and for a long moment neither speaks; the silence grows so deep that Kit believes he can hear, somewhere inside himself, the sound of the rack: the strain of a rope, or a ligament, pulled tight enough to break.
‘He toys with me,’ Kit goes on. ‘That’s all. He knows he has me. You have bought me nothing but the walk to and from this hell every day!’
‘Spoilt little boy,’ Poley says. ‘I have bought you an inestimably precious thing. I have bought you time.’
Kit cannot deny this. Thoughtlessly, he has looked back, allowing Poley to see his face, the ugly, weeping wound of it. Something shifts in Poley’s gaze at the sight of him, as if to blink a third eyelid, so strange and startling that Kit prays to see it again, uncertain of what he’s seen exactly.
Poley lays a hand over his own heart. ‘I am not your enemy,’ he says, softly. ‘Your enemy resides in Newgate Without, and has already trained his cannons on ye. You felt the wind of them with Thomas Kyd, but I tell ye, the fire will be much worse.’
‘What do you want of me?’
‘Master Phelippes read Tom Watson’s interrogation notes to you, you say?’ Poley nods to himself. ‘’Tis true: he toys with you. I suppose he hopes you will crack in the tempering, and undo yourself in some tawdry outburst. You do realize, that is the strategy of a man rich in appetite but poor in resources.’
‘So?’
‘ “So?” ’ he laughs. ‘Master Marlowe, you have a lovely mind, on paper. This is an opportunity, you see, if you are willing to take it. Clearly, these fellows have nothing, if they have not Richard Baines’s testimony against you, which is as good as to say they have nothing. If you are quick enough, you may yet catch the devil by his tongue.’
At supper that night, after having left Frizer to stew in the heaviest of silences all afternoon, Marlowe shoots up from the table and bolts for the door, a hand clasped over his mouth.
Frizer pauses to take a final gulp of ale before following. Outside, he finds Marlowe on his hands and knees under the stairs in the inn-yard, puking his guts out and making sounds like a dying dog. Frizer crouches beside him, close but not too close. He watches his own hand reach towards Marlowe’s heaving back, slowly, as if to reach inside an animal’s den, anticipating a snarl, a snap of teeth. But it never comes. Only the soft shock of contact, followed by dizzying awareness of the body beneath his hand, as if to realize that there is a whole globe turning underneath him: a body not unlike that of a large animal, whose lungs swell with breath like a cathedral with song, whose bones are as timbers, whose heart is a forge.
Kit crumbles at Frizer’s touch. He would like to smash open his own skull, if only to pull Phelippes’s voice out of it, droning away over page after page of yellowed paper: the record of Tom’s many hours spent racked, or with his head held underwater, or hanging by the wrists, and all the many secrets he’d screamed out in hope of relief, from the fond names that Walsingham and he had once called one another to the intimate details of their lovemaking – and, within this record, exacting lists of what methods had proved most effective with him, and to what degree they were applied, how long he’d held out before fainting or falling into incoherent screams, claiming, at one point, to have done ‘unnatural acts’ with the Devil himself, whom he kept in the attic of his house, in a golden collar—
‘Make it stop,’ Kit whispers into his hands. ‘Make it stop, make it stop!’ This agony has but one source, and it is not Phelippes. It is not Poley. Take the Devil’s head, and hell shall empty itself.
How many times has Kit sat by Baines’s side and imagined it?
How many times and in how many ways has he already killed him in his heart?
On the following afternoon, when Kit staggers out of the Privy Court at five o’clock with naught but a long, flat note of pain inside his skull, Frizer meets him in the street and wordlessly hands him his flask, seeming to understand – despite all his usual tics of sighing and grumbling and singing under his breath – that now is a time for silence. He lets Kit drink, lets him stand for a moment within his own subterranean darkness, within the smells of earth and blood… and then he cuffs Kit’s arm gently, the way Tom used to do whenever they were in company, as a way of reminding him I love you.
Frizer says, ‘Look up, man.’
How lovely he is, Kit realizes. How astonishingly beautiful! A little brown wren of a fellow, slow to smile, as if to do so exposed some tender spot to injury; his serious blue eyes a site of confluence between light and flesh, like mirrors turned to the sky.
Marlowe’s miserable silence persists long after they have left the Privy Court. For three days, Frizer has practised a saintly forbearance with him, but now, over supper, the last thread of his patience breaks. He sets his spoon down, with a clatter that startles himself far more than his drooping companion, and then asks, in an accusatory tone that he had not intended, ‘Is Gaveston the villain?’
Marlowe keeps his gaze trained upon the window at his right shoulder, with its view of the crowd outside the Black Bull tavern across the street. ‘The villain?’ he says, distantly.
‘Ay, the villain, Gaveston, is it he?’
Marlowe shakes his head. ‘There is no villain.’
‘No villain?’
‘No, no villain.’ Then Marlowe shifts his shoulders gently, as if feeling an itch, and adds, ‘I suppose Lightborne is a villain.’
‘Lightborne!’ Frizer is relieved. ‘What does he do?’
‘He kills the king.’
‘Thank God! When does he come in?’
‘Not till the very end.’
‘The end?’ This is too much to ask. ‘I must wait till the end?’
‘’Tis when the most important ones ought to come in, no? At the end.’ This said, Marlowe drinks with his head tipped back, the way Papa used to do.
Lightborne, Frizer puzzles, silently. Something in the name stands his hairs on end. It calls to mind Lucifer, ‘Light-Bringer’. But it is the opposite of that, is it not – not to bring, but to be borne?
A name in reverse is like a key. Frizer had learned that from Doctor Faustus. It can be heard through the veil that separates worlds. It summons, it invokes.
He tries to disguise a shiver by shaking his head, muttering, ‘I confess I understand it not one whit.’
Marlowe sighs down at the table, faintly combative. ‘What do you not understand?’
‘Nor do you understand it yourself, by God. ’Tis not that this play is without villains, ’tis that every wight in it is a villain, every single one, on all sides! There’s not even a fair speech in it, as far as I can see. ’Tis all in verse, ay, but it sounds of ordinary talk.’
‘Ordinary enough.’
‘No man goes to the playhouse to hear ordinary talk! Whatever became of your whirling stars and blazing swords and fireballs out of hell? “What is Beauty, sayeth my sufferings, then?” ’
Marlowe smirks. Frizer recognizes this look in him by now, itching for trouble. ‘I wonder how you enjoyed Tamburlaine so much, understanding it so little.’
‘What?’
‘Tamburlaine is a clown – know ye not that? Tamburlaine, Faustus, even Edward, they are all clowns. They see themselves not, that is the jest. They see not how small they are, how weak, until ’tis too late.’ Briefly, he studies Frizer’s expression, and then laughs. ‘You think Tamburlaine is the hero, is that it?’
Frizer is too furious to speak.
‘Tamburlaine is no hero, by God! Tamburlaine is not a play of heroes and villains, only buffoons and philosophers – Tamburlaine bethinks himself one while in truth being the other. Which do you suppose it is?’
‘Eat your damned bread, Marlowe,’ Frizer snarls.
Marlowe gives the hunk of maslin a childish flick. ‘’Tis mouldy.’ His eyes drift again to the window at his right, blow-flies dancing in and out of the candlelight like dandelion fluff. He drinks and then swats a fly at his neck, leaving a drop of blood behind, and Frizer cannot help but feel infinitely superior to him, if only for a moment: this shabby, gloomy fellow, to whom life has clearly been unkind. Night could borrow darkness of him!
‘ “What is Beauty,” ’ Frizer blurts out, ‘ “sayeth my sufferings, then?
If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their master’s thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy—
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit—
If these had made in one poem’s period,
And all combined in beauty’s worthiness,
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.” ’
Marlowe sits in silence. Stunned, perhaps. Hopefully not because he’s noticed the tremor in Frizer’s voice, the brightness in his eyes. Frizer clears his throat, but still can only whisper, ‘Now that’s a speech. There’s your blustering Tamburlaine!’
Marlowe’s smile returns, somewhat sadder. ‘You remember when he says that, no? While his men are busy slaughtering all the virgins of Damascus, and hanging their corpses on the city’s walls.’ He downs a gulp of whisky, looks again to the window. ‘There’s your Tamburlaine, indeed.’
Frizer seethes. There must be something he could say to break this man’s heart, if only he could think of it – a word or two that would strip him to the very bones! – yet the best that he can muster is a mewlish growl: ‘Why do ye have to be so God-damned cruel?’
Marlowe shoots to his feet. Frizer nearly dives under the table for cover, but Marlowe’s bloody gaze is fixed not on him but the window, and so remains until he turns and marches for the door, an army of one.
Frizer shouts his name and gives pursuit, across the yard, into the street. He calls out again, but Marlowe continues his charge, aimed straight for the crowd outside the Black Bull. A tall man awaits him, grinning wickedly at his approach, and keeps on grinning right up to the instant that Marlowe punches him in the teeth.
Frizer halts and curses. The jeering crowd makes way for the brawl, such as it is, with Marlowe holding the tall fellow off the ground with one fist and pummelling him like a billet with the other. A second man struggles in vain to pry Marlowe off. At last, Frizer finds courage enough to move, rushing forward and wrapping both arms around Marlowe’s neck, pulling with every ounce of weight. He might as well try to uproot an oak.
Somehow, the beaten man scurries free into the arms of his friend. Together they retreat several yards backwards towards the Wall’s torchlights, then stop. They could be the same man in two different stages of injury, Frizer realizes: both young, hair and skin and eyes all one pale colour, both nearly the same height as Marlowe. The battered one spits out a tooth and runs his tongue over his bloody maw. He almost looks as if he’s enjoyed it, something in his gaze beseeching, More.
‘You tell him to come find me!’ Marlowe roars, with Frizer’s arms around his waist. ‘Tell him to come himself! Let him bring what fire he will bring – I am ready for him!’