ON THE WAY NORTH, Baines confers with his boys in their native language, a harsh tongue, like a kind of primordial English. Kit can only decipher a phrase or two, but they discourse in code anyway. Something about horses, about riding a wild mare.
‘Your Dutch has improved, I see,’ Kit says.
‘It had no choice but to improve,’ comes the reply.
The streets are emptier today. The smoke of plague-fires hangs like curtains in the still air. But a sound carries from the distance, growing gradually louder the nearer they come to Bishopsgate. By the time they turn the corner at St Helen’s, Kit has long since identified the sound as the clamour of a large crowd, hundreds at least, who sometimes bark and howl like dogs, other times chant a word or a phrase as one. From outside the Black Bull, where activity teems in the otherwise vacant street, Kit can hear them railing:
‘Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood!’
The crowd around the Black Bull has all the makings of a mob. A few men are exchanging insults with the guards perched along Bishopsgate’s ramparts, while nearby, another bellows away like a street-preacher about how there is no plague at all, only a conspiracy to lock up London’s Christian population so that foreigners and Jews may take over: ‘They’ll shut the churches next, mark my words!’
Kit and the others must push their way into the tavern’s gaudy, roisterous common room, a space that reeks of spilled bowse and something heady, masculine, like the aftermath of a brawl. Baines leads them through the room, up a leaning staircase. Above, they emerge onto a gallery so crowded with bodies that the daylight hardly penetrates. Baines turns towards an inner corridor, shouting, ‘This way!’ but either Frizer hears him not or cannot contain his curiosity, for he shoves into the throng at once.
Kit follows, squeezing through sideways to the gallery’s edge. He finds Frizer perched above the churning inn-yard, where men clamber and moil over every inch of space, bursting from the sagging galleries, hanging over the stair-rails, clinging onto the posts. Myriad voices bay as one, for blood, blood, blood.
Below, within a circle of roaring spectators, several creatures are locked in ferocious combat: four dogs piled atop one writhing, reeling creature, slightly larger than they. Each dog is chained about the neck, the chains held by men who stand at the edge of the circle with their heels dug into the dirt. The whole picture resembles a cartwheel, the dogs’ chains radiating like spokes out of an axle of fur and fangs.
‘I thought all the bear gardens were closed by the plague!’ Frizer says.
Kit is startled by Baines’s voice at his shoulder: ‘Does this look like a bear garden to you?’
Strings of bloody foam fly from the dogs’ chops as their keepers drag them back for a rest. At the centre of the circle, a little bear is revealed: standing on its hind legs, hugging the stake to which it is chained through a ring in its nose. Its frightened wailing is uncannily human, the cry of a small child in pain.
‘’Tis not a fair fight,’ Kit says, quietly.
Frizer shouts, ‘What?’ but somehow Baines has heard Kit, clapping his shoulder, at which Kit tries not to flinch.
‘Still a Puritan at heart, I see!’ Baines remarks. ‘Fear not, I have a room reserved for us inside.’ He turns to Frizer. ‘You – with that appetite for sport – I trust you’ll want to take in the game.’ He bows slightly, glancing again at Kit before slipping away. Frizer follows him with narrowed eyes, like a watchdog.
‘Frizer,’ Kit says, leaning close to be heard, ‘remain out here awhile, ay?’
‘You want to be alone with that fellow?’
Kit grunts bitterly. Indeed no, he wants none of this. He glances over the crowd, to the doorway where Baines stands between his boys, one of whom is speaking into his ear. But Baines has no eyes for the boy, only for Kit, his glare steady and cold, as if he knows, somehow, what Kit intends to do.
‘I like not those Dutch fellows,’ Frizer says. ‘They have dead eyes, marry. Like fish!’
Kit laughs, surprising himself. Frizer too looks surprised, but then the blare of a trumpet pulls his attention below, where a clown dressed as an ape has started to do somersaults about the yard. The turning of Frizer’s head reveals a scar where someone must have burnt him with a round object: the tip of a poker, perhaps, or the heated pommel-cap of a knife. Kit imagines running his thumb over the mark.
Kit takes a steeling breath. And then, as if someone had shoved him from behind, he stumbles hard into Frizer’s back, mumbles an apology. In that same instant, Kit grips the handle of Frizer’s knife and pulls. He had feared a struggle, but the blade slips free of its scabbard easily, and the crowd is so tightly packed that he need only tuck the knife against his forearm to conceal it.
He touches Frizer’s shoulder. ‘Come and find me when the bout is over, if I do not find you first.’
A few feet into the crowd, Kit stoops to slip Frizer’s knife into his right boot – hardly an ideal hiding place, but the best he has – and then sidles his way to the door off the stairs, where Baines takes him by the arm. ‘I hope to God you do not trust that creature over there,’ Baines says, aiming a scowl in Frizer’s direction. ‘A man like that will betray ye for a slice of cake.’
Baines knocks upon a door in the adjoining corridor. A child of about fourteen with drugged eyes and bare breasts limply shows them into the room beyond, where an older woman, also bare-breasted, welcomes them in effusively. Baines ignores the woman; gives the child a coin and says, ‘Get out.’
The hostess says, ‘If she displease you, master, I’ll fetch another.’
‘Fetch yourself the plague, crone.’ Baines moves directly for the carver chair at the candlelit dining table, like the lord of the manor. One of the Dutch lads has already taken on the hostess’s duties, filling a cup from a stoneware pitcher. The other boy, the one with the bruised face, receives some barely verbal command from his master and comes barrelling across the room, shoves both girl and woman outside and slams the door.
Kit scans the room: walls lined in skins the colour of fresh liver, which glisten and breathe in the candlelight. No other doors; no windows. One way in or out.
‘When I heard you were at Scadbury, I thought such would be the very last I’d ever hear of ye,’ Baines says. ‘That you would be found tragically drowned in a washbasin, or taken fatally sick after a surfeit of pickled eel, that sort of thing.’
Behind Kit’s back, the boy with the battered face snuffs truculently, as if to snuff back blood. When Kit turns to look, the boy wriggles the tip of his tongue at him, through the still-fresh gap in his teeth.
Kit shifts inside his boot, the knife hard against his anklebone. ‘If Walsingham wanted me dead, it would have happened years ago.’
‘I never said Walsingham wanted ye dead. Wanting has little to do with it. Considering how well he fared the last time the Council had their way with one of his friends, he would be a fool to let them take ye still breathing.’
Kit tries to look unmoved. ‘You’ve come here to sow doubts, I take it?’
Baines offers an empty chair. ‘Sit down, have a drink with me.’
The Dutch boys have not moved to sit. ‘May we not talk alone?’ Kit says.
‘These fellows cannot comprehend a word of English! Surely their presence is of no concern. Hier, kom hier!’ Again, Baines snaps his fingers. The battered one leaves the door and takes a place at his brother’s shoulder, glowering across the table at Kit.
Kit takes the seat to Baines’s right, facing the two boys, as Baines leans over the table to fill Kit’s cup. A wave of muffled cheers rises and falls from the gallery, several walls away, a reminder that Frizer is not far.
‘Not the sort you usually go for, is he?’ Baines says, with a cock of his head in the direction of the noise. ‘Could pick your teeth with him!’
Kit takes a drink. He must be calm, above all else. He must be made of stone.
‘I want to know how all this began,’ he says. ‘Did the Council come to you or did you go to them?’
Baines tugs at the hairs beneath his chin, as if arranging pieces in his mind. ‘They came to me. The first time was late last spring, early last summer. The archbishop’s men, they were.’
‘The archbishop?’ Kit rasps.
‘Oh, yes. They visited me several times. Even came on Christmas, brought me a slice of cold ham, and firewood. They gave me this suit, these gloves, this handkerchief. They paid passage for my boys. Courted me like a rich man’s ugly daughter, they have.’
In the pause that falls, Kit tries to decide whether all this might be a lie calculated to terrify him, but, lie or not, it has worked; he is too frightened to speak.
‘You understand,’ Baines goes on, ‘this goes well beyond you. There’s that Penry fellow caught up in it, and his Brownist friends. There’s your friend Thomas Kyd. And, once they have you in their clutches, well – these things spread like wildfire, my boy. They keep going till there’s nothing left to burn.’
He folds his hands upon the table, fingers interlaced, like a physician delivering a poor prognosis. ‘What I mean to say is, there’s no stopping this, certainly not on my end. Even if I wanted to, I could not put a stop to it.’
‘But you could,’ Kit says, too quietly. ‘You know right well you could.’
Baines looks amused. ‘Is that why you think we are here now, Kit? To negotiate? You think you have something I want, something that would appease me?’
Kit finishes his drink, pours another. He has never killed a man before, though suppose he has come close. It had taken rage and drunkenness and perhaps something more than both, like madness, to bring him to violent extremes, yearning not so much for another man’s pain as for the relief of his own. Try as he might, he cannot summon that madness now. All feels eerily, menacingly calm, like sitting on his father’s knee.
‘What do you want to do, Kit?’ Baines asks, his voice low, ashen.
‘Did you hope that they would hang me,’ Kit asks, ‘when you turned me in, in Flushing?’
‘Marry, I know not what I’d hoped for!’ Baines admits. ‘To hang ye – well, I knew it would be unlikely. I thought they might brand ye, perhaps, or flog ye. Cut off some fingers, or a hand. I wanted you to suffer, that much I know. I wanted you to feel some of the pain I felt, when you and Tom Watson sent me off to die—’
‘Do not say his name,’ Kit interrupts.
‘I have turned my every other thought upon that name and yours for five years, so indulge me while I give it breath, for once!’
This outburst has split the air like lightning. The Dutch lads stare on Baines with mounting anxiety, the timid one murmuring something to the other who says nothing in reply, merely watches with his head inclined slightly forward, as if in readiness to spring.
But then, ‘God damn it all!’ Baines sighs. He refills his cup, leaning over to refill Kit’s as well. ‘You know, we were both of us heroes once. We gave the Council Babington. Certain others may take all the credit, but without us, without the work we did, God knows if they ever would have caught the traitorous buggerer. We saved her Majesty’s life, you and I. We made safe the crown upon her head. And look at us now! Just look at the miserable, bedevilled creatures we are now.’ He offers a mirthless toast that Kit declines to join. ‘The damage you do. Does it not haunt you?’
Kit is startled by the lack of air in his chest, whispering, ‘Of course.’
‘I mean, to me – the damage you have done to me.’
Kit’s blood runs thick for a beat, an impulse to flee. Yet he cannot move.
Baines settles, briefly, into melancholy, emerging again with a twinkle of suppressed pleasure in his eyes. A savoured secret. When he speaks, he addresses his boys, muttering a word or two: ‘Zut ryden.’ One of the boys murmurs something in protest but Baines says it again, a snarl: ‘Zut ryden!’
Baines is breathing hard, sweat upon his forehead. He dabs it on his sleeve. ‘I will admit,’ he says, ‘I am sometimes weak. I was sometimes weak, with you. But you boys – all you boys, with the Devil in your hearts! – you cannot blame me that the Devil is a powerful foe. And anyway, I never, ever hurt you, God knows I never hurt you! You hurt yourselves, by letting the Devil inside you in the first place.’
A scream presses at Kit’s throat like wind at a windowpane, pressing till the glass cracks. He knows what will come next: Baines will say, ‘I love you,’ or some version of it. Kit dares him to say it, say it, say it—
‘I cared for you,’ Baines says, ‘and the ones before you.’ He indicates the Dutch lads with a thumb. ‘I care for them, though they understand but half of what I say! I reckon they’ll turn on me too one day, like you all do – like you sit there planning to do, yet again.’ His face falls into a look of grim anticipation, a twitch in his neck as if readying to take a punch. ‘What are you going to do, Kit? Go on, time’s a-wasting. What are you going to do?’
For an instant, Kit knows not the answer himself. Then, like the hammer on a pistol, he is sprung, reaching to draw the knife from his boot. But as he dives, Baines shouts a word in Dutch, ‘Mes, mes!’ and across the room the bruised boy pulls something metal from inside his doublet and throws.
Kit lunges at Baines in time to dodge the boy’s dagger. Baines’s chair topples backwards; his head strikes the floor. Kit straddles his chest, blind with tears, having but one aim: to let all the myriad deaths Baines might have died at his hands be realized now, all at once. Certainly, he too will die here. Both Baines and he will die here; he embraces it. A scream escapes him as he rears up, the knife above his head, but before he can stab, light and liquid explode in his right eye. A hard, heavy object shatters; it might be his own skull.
The world veers sideways. Kit lands on his chest, one eye watching a curved shard of the stoneware pitcher rock back and forth upon the floorboards near his head, settling to stillness. A single sharp note stretches out in both ears, reedy and stomach-turning.
His body has gone mad. His arms seem to be jointed in a hundred places, far too many to control; his lungs flatten and stay flat. Above, a blurry shadow grows tall, looks down on him as if upon a rat in a trap. To the right, the brass acorn at the cap of Frizer’s knife gleams. Kit reaches for it. Baines puts his foot over the blade and slides it away.
One of the boys utters something, like a voice from another room. Baines growls a response. A tearful protest follows from the other lad: the word ‘nay’ is the same in both languages, and the word for ‘please’ is one with which Kit is already familiar: ‘Bitte, bitte!’ But Baines insists. Kit knows not the precise words, although he’s heard many such commands from Baines in the past: Wretched coward, do as I say!
Kit props himself up on his wobbling forearms, for which he receives a kick to the ribs. Arms scoop him up and he melts right through them, soft as an egg.
For some length of time Kit is nowhere and nothing. He awakens on a staircase, steps birling under his feet like barrels through a chute. At the top of the stairs the boys drop him, facedown, and start to argue. Short, snarled phrases. One sounds reluctant to continue, trying to bargain his way out of it – an ally, thank God, an ally!
‘Bitte,’ Kit says, or tries to say, his jaw sideways, his tongue limp. He finds the ankle of the lad he presumes to be of better nature and lays his aching head upon his foot.
A hand lifts him up by his hair and drags him backwards, flinging him to the floor in the dark room beyond. One boy sits astride his hips as the other pins his arms above his head. A knife flashes and Kit shuts his eyes and cries out because he is about to die, but then he feels his doublet cut open instead, hears buttons rattle across the floor. Above, the boy with the battered face holds a button up to the light that rises through the floorboards, the pearl glinting like an eye rolled back. The boy grins, puts the button in his pocket.
Suddenly ’tis clear what they mean to do.
Kit tries to scream, ‘No,’ but it comes out in a whisper, a moan. Within seconds he is facedown again, hands behind his back, a loose nail digging into his cheek. They wrestle off his clothes. One ear is pressed to the noise of men laughing and shouting in the room below; with the other, Kit hears a rattle of metal behind him – a belt unbuckled – followed by a strange, high-pitched grunt. All at once, he starts to cry.
‘ “The light of the body is the eye—” ’
Silence is shoved clear through his body, to the back of the tongue.
Across the room, the open door shows him the top of the stairs. If he could but scream, someone would hear him. Any second, footsteps will ascend. A man will appear at the door. He will draw a knife; he will draw a sword. He will look ten feet tall; he will look like an archangel. Any second now, someone will come. Someone will save him.