SOME OF FRIZER’S EARLIEST, happiest memories are of afternoons spent at the bear garden with his brothers, when he was still small enough to sit on their shoulders. As the bout goes on, he all but forgets Marlowe for some little while, clinging white-knuckled to the railing as a cur snatches the bear by its lower lip and tugs, a high-scoring hit, leaving the other dogs to nip at the beast’s hindquarters or snap at its mutilated ears. One dog hangs back, yelping womanishly, dancing on its forepaws. As if to say, Stop, what are you doing, have you all gone mad?
Frizer imagines the dogs are devils, and the bear Faustus. The circle is the clock. The spectators are the angels of the firmament, placing bets.
But then some knave spills ale down Frizer’s back, prompting him to reach for his knife – not to attack, of course, simply to reassure himself that ’tis there, should he care to attack. He grasps thin air. Slowly, like a vein opened in the heat of combat, its absence becomes real.
‘No!’ Frizer whispers.
He drops to the floor, clambering through the forest of legs. No, no, no – nothing.
But the knife would not leave him, he thinks, half-deranged. Someone has stolen it! A thousand times, he has been warned not to wear the knife at the back. Papa always said, even back when Elias had worn it like so, that he would lose it that way one day. But soon another thought grows heavy in his mind, remembering how strange Marlowe’s manner had been before they’d parted – the way he’d looked at him, as if for the last time. And Marlowe has been gone far too long, for that matter. The sky, bold blue when they’d arrived, is now a tawny shade, like the stains at the bottom of a pipe-bowl.
Baines is easy to find, once Frizer sets his mind to it. Through the doorway at the back of the gallery he finds a corridor lined in doors, one door ajar to the left. It opens on a dim dining room where Baines sits alone at the table, drinking. The fingers of his right hand are bound in a handkerchief. One chair is on its back, and at Baines’s feet lie the remains of a smashed jug or pitcher, little left intact but for the handle.
‘What happened?’ Frizer sputters.
Baines turns and blinks. A gash on the side of his head oozes dark blood.
‘Jesus!’
The old fellow’s eyes brighten with tears – for truly, he seems much older than before, his gaze lost, in the way that Papa had often seemed lost towards the end. Baines touches his wound and examines the blood on his fingertips with a start, as if noticing it for the first time. ‘Oh, Kit!’ he says, fondly, but not without great pain. ‘He has a temper, does he not?’ He sways to his feet, reaching for the overturned chair. ‘Let me make you a seat.’
‘No, no, by’r Lady!’ Frizer swoops in, righting the chair himself. He fumbles his handkerchief out of a pocket and reaches in to staunch the blood.
Baines takes the handkerchief from him. ‘My thanks, young fellow. ’Twas not the reunion I’d anticipated, i’faith. Troublesome lad. No longer a lad, of course, but he’ll always be a lad to me.’
Frizer sits, for his legs are useless to hold him upright. There is blood on the floor by the chair. And something else too, darker, thinner, floating with gobs of white foam. Vomit.
‘This belongs to you, I take it?’ Baines is gesturing to an object on the table: the knife, so alien in the aftermath of another man’s use that Frizer barely recognizes it.
‘God, yes!’ Frizer gives the knife a brief examination before sheathing it, relieved to find no trace of blood. ‘Where did he go? And those fellows that were with you, did they go with him?’
‘Ay.’ Baines’s tone is weary, deep. ‘To entreat him to return, though I doubt they shall find success. I would have gone myself, but alas, I cannot take a knock as I used to.’ He seems to have something to say in confidence, though they are alone, looking this way and that before murmuring, ‘He’s never done ye violence, has he? Always goes for the head, he does.’
Frizer swallows. ‘Not exactly.’ In the corridor, men whoop and bellow as they thump downstairs. The bout must have finished. Someone in the crowd outside has begun to sing and bang a tabor: the ballad of the Golden Vanity – as she sailed by the Lowlands-low.
Baines leans to one side, reaching into the breast of his doublet. He withdraws a damp letter, folded in three and sealed with a paper-bolt daubed in red wax, like a bloody blade. He slaps it wetly against the table. ‘I have something for your master. Tomorrow is already Sunday, no? I recommend you be sure it finds him before then. I take it he is still at Greenwich, angling for a wife?’
‘A wife?’
‘A woman.’ As if this clarifies the matter.
That shall have to wait. Frizer blots the letter on his sleeve. It contains probably two or three pages. He stuffs it into the breast of his doublet, the paper unnervingly warm.
Baines looks him up and down. He laughs. ‘Take my advice and go to Greenwich, lad. You’ll bring worse upon him if ye stay. Such is how it always falls out with Kit and his – well, I would say “friends”, but ’tis not the word for it, is it?’
‘The word for what?’
‘Come now, I am not green. I can see it in the way he looks at you. All babes-in-eyes.’
Everything stops. Even Frizer’s heart, for just a moment, seems to stop.
Baines chuckles again. ‘Nay, look not so on me, lad. I mean no judgement! I pity you lot, I do. How strange it must be, to live without a soul – to be more beast than man – but then, you’ve never known another way, have you? Gets you young, the Devil does.’
He grins, the tongue a wet flash in the empty side of his mouth.
The bubble of fear behind Frizer’s ribs bursts. He shoots upright, overturning the chair behind him, and runs to the corridor. To the left he finds no exit, only a staircase leading upwards into blackness, into nowhere, so he pivots instead to the right, which will eventually take him across the street, to the Inn-in-the-Wall. Where else would Marlowe go?
Footsteps drum hard upon the stairs to the left, in swift descent. Frizer turns in time to see the Dutch lad with the mangled face spring over the final step, wearing a sickled grin that fades as he meets Frizer’s eyes. The other brother follows soft-footedly, and together they stand at the bottom of the stairs, their foreheads bright, their clothes dishevelled. For three seconds they stare at Frizer, and he at them, before the bruised boy erupts into crazed, piercing cackles, knees buckling, eyes yellow in his scarlet face.
They let Frizer charge past. Upstairs, he finds a little landing followed by a door through which he must duck, ramming his head on a beam on the other side. Pigeons scatter into flight somewhere above. One step forward and he trips on something soft: Marlowe’s doublet. A grid of light stands out between the floorboards, rising from below.
A few feet away a body lies with its hands bound behind its back, near naked, knotted up like a bloody skin. One dark eye rolls upwards to see him and then closes, the face around it a livid scarlet smear.
‘Frizer,’ Marlowe whispers. ‘You came. You came.’
Whatever Frizer does, he must not cry. He must carry this numbness with him like a coal in his bare hands, however much it burns.
Of Marlowe’s clothes, he is able to salvage only the tattered doublet and breeches; the rest are ruined with blood and filth. Frizer dresses him with care, slings Marlowe’s long, heavy arm over his back and drags him to the door on all fours. Downstairs, they find chaos. In the street outside, a skirmish has broken out between the Black Bull’s mob and the local constabulary, the latter of whom are desperately outnumbered. Those same men who’d lately howled for blood in the inn-yard now swarm the plague-fires in search of weapons, hurling stones, burning sticks, horseshit. Some are shouting, ‘Open the gates!’ Others are chanting, ‘Liberty!’
Someone barges into Marlowe’s side and he sinks like a stone, taking Frizer down with him. Frizer strains to lift him again. The moment he stands upright, a burning log sails overhead, forcing him to cover Marlowe’s head and duck.
‘Tom,’ Marlowe murmurs into his shoulder. ‘Leave me, Tom, I am dead…’
‘Almost there,’ Frizer pants. ‘Almost there.’ Across the street, the Inn-in-the-Wall’s windows glow, full of gawking shadows. He charges towards it with no more awareness of his surroundings than of the earth’s turning, dodging swinging clubs and whirling flames by sheer luck. Beneath the inn-yard gate, he stumbles headlong into a man on his way out, the night porter.
‘Help me!’ Frizer pleads.
Together Frizer and the porter struggle up the long stairs, Marlowe braced between them. Frizer clings to his numbness, tries to float above his body like an ember above a flame. At the door of the room, the porter fumbles through his ring of keys, sputtering questions: ‘What is happening out there? Is it rebellion?’
‘I have no idea, man,’ Frizer pants. ‘We need a doctor.’
‘Tonight? With all that going on?’
The door opens and Frizer bursts through, letting Marlowe slide off his back at the edge of the bed. He lifts Marlowe’s head, tries to examine his eyes. To the porter, Frizer shouts, ‘Bring water!’ but the man is already gone, having left the door wide open on a sky of still, watchful stars. A gun fires in the street, and people scream. Three more reports follow.
Marlowe has started to sob. Frizer wraps him in both arms and Marlowe does the same. He screams into Frizer’s stomach, a burst of hot breath through his clothes.
Frizer strokes his hair and whispers, ‘You’ll be well.’ Such was said to him once, and he can think of nothing better. ‘You’ll be well, you’ll be well, you’ll be well, you’ll be well…’ The words strike like a chisel at his numbness, exposing the soft yolk of himself. It seems that Marlowe’s embrace is all that keeps him from sinking to the floor.
‘Please tell no one of this,’ Marlowe says.
… it shal happen Wednesday next, Poley writes, to Topcliffe. My syster hath graciously offerred the use of her home for the transaction—
And then: gunshots.
Poley lifts his head from his cluttered desk, looking into his own warped, candlelit reflection in the window, through which he can see nothing. Outside, in the distance, more shots follow – four altogether – and voices call out in the street, ‘Did you hear that?’ ‘Is it fire?’ ‘Nay, do not go out – you’ll be killed!’
Poley stabs the quill into the inkwell and stands, putting on his doublet. In the listing stair-shaft of his old, narrow, stork’s nest of a house, he stumbles into his manservant, who had been on his way up: a tall blackamoor of twenty-odd years called Ignacio, one of several hundred who, some years ago, were heroically liberated from a captured Spanish slave-ship and then dumped, penniless, on the dock at Rotherhithe. He has another name, but Poley cannot pronounce it.
‘Men at the door,’ Ignacio says, looking stricken, one hand upon the handle of his knife.
Poley draws back slightly. ‘What men?’
‘I know not them.’ He hesitates, as if unsure of how to say it in either of the two languages they have in common. ‘Mucha sangre, señor, mucha.’ Blood.
Warily, Poley follows him down to the little-used front room. Torchlights flash past the windows, headed north. The passing glow illuminates three shadows, which is all Poley has time to take in ere Richard Baines steps forth and clasps him in a stinking, bowse-soaked embrace.
‘Robin, you villain! Still have the old house, eh? And your famous poison garden too? I remember this room – this was the room where we captured Babington’s comrades, was it not? Lured ’em in like fish in a trap!’
Another flurry of torchlights passes outside, revealing a gash on the side of Baines’s head, blood dribbling down to the collar. ‘Master Baines,’ Poley says. ‘You seem far merrier than a man with your aspect has any right to be.’
Baines laughs. ‘Yes, I am merry, by God!’ He snaps his fingers at the other side of the room, at which his two Low Country wags step into the meagre light. One wears an unnerving, wild-eyed smirk, despite having a face still more abused than his master’s; the other looks startled. ‘The lads and I are here with good news,’ Baines says. ‘That statement of mine, which you’d so longed to see delivered, shall be submitted tomorrow. I’ve made enough copies to paper the Star Chamber’s ceiling with it!’
Poley glances to the open front door, through which Baines must have barged in. In the street another group of men rush past, armed with shovels and clubs. ‘Master Baines, have you lately escaped some unrest? Perhaps in the vicinity of Bishopsgate?’
Baines’s only response to this is a cold grin, waxing impatient. ‘I came here to thank you, you know,’ he says, and reaches into a pocket, offering a sodden sheaf of paper. ‘’Twas you, you old adder, who pushed me to my purpose. I want you to have the first copy of my statement, as a gift…’
‘You’ve had your “reunion” with Master Marlowe, I take it?’ Poley asks, quite honestly no longer interested in the damned statement.
‘ “Reunion”, ay! My boys did me proud tonight. That was all I needed – to see the ungrateful bitch put in his place. Never was a man more richly served, I tell ye, except perhaps for his own King of the Buggerers!’
Poley need hear no more. He flies back upstairs to fetch his pistol, which must be assembled, loaded and charged, delicate work with only nine fingers, all of which are trembling. Setting Marlowe upon Baines was risky, but at the time it had seemed necessary – Baines had appeared content to dally about forever, for which Topcliffe will not wait. But if Marlowe is dead, what then? All will be lost.
Sprinting downstairs again, Poley shouts to Baines, ‘Stay, stay here until I come back!’ and so rushes into the street, the pistol in his belt ready to fire its single shot.
Outside, the commotion sounds quite near indeed. A bright light emanates from beyond the long, peaked rooftop of nearby Crosby Place, throwing the spire of St Helen’s into shadow. Just as Poley turns the corner onto Bishopsgate Street, a rank of mercenaries in the Mayor of London’s livery march past, spears at their shoulders, headed for the Black Bull tavern with the unhurried menace of those who come not to start a fight, but to end one. Where the street ends at the gate, the last traces of an angry mob dance towards retreat, flinging flaming logs and sticks behind them. The remains of pillaged plague-fires lie strewn about the cross-topped fountain, sputtering at the smoky air.
Poley waits until the mercenaries have passed to limp across the street, planting himself in a spot where he has already spent a collective hour on several mornings and several nights – for from here he can see the topmost gallery of the Inn-in-the-Wall, and the door to Marlowe’s room. Many times over the past week, he has watched the poet’s tall frame uncurl itself from behind that little door, stand upon the stairs and take a drink. Now, Poley finds no sign of Marlowe. Instead, a slight, large-eyed creature straddles the stairs, motioning for someone below to hurry up.
Ingram Frizer. Nick’s dear, boyhood friend, on whose behalf Poley has heard scores of promises. He has spent this past week observing Frizer too, often from the window of his office at Seething Lane: watching Frizer and Marlowe’s daily farewells, a silent, stilted handshake one day, a friendly exchange of waves on the next. He has seen Frizer wait hours on end for Marlowe, drifting up and down the street in circles like a seed on the wind; and he has seen Frizer greet Marlowe again at the end of the day, the spine springing erect, the ears practically pricking upright. So much to be gleaned from watching one man wait for another.
At last, two men ascend into view on the stairs, one with a bucket, the other with a satchel. A physician, it seems. Frizer herds them into the room, lets the door swing shut and then stares at it, unmoving. Such pain in that face, gold with firelit tears. A cherubic face, one might call it. It reminds Poley of his eldest son, who lives with his mother out in the country. Which is to say, it reminds Poley of himself.
For a minute or more, Frizer moves not. Poley has seen young fathers look so, anticipating bad news from the birthing-bed. But what is this agony in his gaze? Is it grief? Is it fear? Is it something else? Behind that door, is Kit Marlowe alive or dead?
‘Look at me,’ Poley whispers. ‘Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.’
Frizer’s shoulders lift and fall with breath. He opens the door, and seems to push himself into the room as if to dive into icy water, braced for shock.
Silence. Kit sleeps like the skulls at the bottom of the river, with darkness reeving through his eyeholes, between his teeth. When he wakes, ’tis to the sound of his own whimpering, to the sensation of a man hammering away at his soft insides, where a sinew is breaking, thread by thread: The light—of the body—is the eye—therefore—when thine eye—is single—then is—thy whole body—light—
A hand fumbles for a grip on his hand, squeezing. ‘Stay awake, man. I told ye to stay awake!’
Frizer’s wide eyes draw him up. They lie across the bed width-wise, Frizer at the foot and Kit at the head, as if swept here by either wind or tide. A bandage squeezes Kit’s throbbing ribs, but otherwise he is naked beneath the bedsheet. Something slimy and foreign seeps from his insides, pools in the sheets; the sweat upon his neck cools like fresh spit. He could rend every inch of his own defiled and unfamiliar skin with his fingernails.
Frizer nods at the open window full of dizzy stars, looking at Kit to be sure he looks too. ‘Up there, see? Cassiopeia. You were telling me all about the “stella novi”, remember? The new star?’
‘Nova stella,’ Kit corrects him.
‘Ay, that one. So keep talking. Stay awake, that’s what the doctor said.’
‘There was a doctor?’
‘Yes. He was just here.’
‘I told you, Frizer, I told you—’
‘He had to look at your head. Just your head. I promise. I was afraid you would die.’
Kit smirks, or thinks about smirking. ‘And your master would kill you for sure!’
‘Well.’ Frizer hesitates. ‘I know not. If you died, I might well kill me too!’ He laughs a threadbare laugh, as if immediately abashed at his own words, and to reassure him Kit tries to laugh also. But simply to smile disturbs some tenuous balance in the tender part of his skull, just above the eye, a soft bubble-burst at which his head begins to fill with silent, empty ocean.
Frizer pulses his grip on Kit’s hand. ‘Who is Tom?’ He sounds afraid to ask.
To hear Tom’s name is another shock, plucking him back from the edge. ‘No one.’
‘Must be someone,’ Frizer says. ‘You’ve been saying his name all night. So who is he?’
The last person to ask Kit this question had been his father. When Tom fell ill, Kit had been staying with his family in Canterbury. One day, a letter had arrived from Walsingham: Tom is dying. But come not to London, Kit – it will only bring him pain to see you. Kit remembers nothing more of that day. Only waking up in Westgate jail the following morning with a splitting headache and a broken nose, and a charge of assault and battery on his head.
His father was straddling a stool on the opposite side of the bars, Walsingham’s letter rolled into a pipe in his thick-knuckled hands. ‘Who is Tom?’ he’d asked, as if a part of him already knew.
Kit said, ‘The man who used to fuck me.’
To Frizer, Kit answers, ‘He’s dead.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Frizer says, and then falls silent for several seconds, as if from those two words he has gleaned volumes. ‘You know so many dead people.’
‘Ay,’ Kit agrees. He’ll know many more, he suspects, before his own time comes, lest it come soon. Anxiously, he adds, ‘It makes me feel old,’ as if to make a dark jest of it. Such only drives the blade a little deeper.
‘You are old,’ Frizer says, turning faceup, a smile in his voice. ‘You are an old man, given to rambling about nothing, and to chastising youths for their fancies. You tell fables. You put on a sour face at other men’s good humour, and you laugh out of season—’
‘I do not!’
‘But you do. I wish you could see yourself, marry, I wish you could know how it feels – be me, for a moment, looking at you.’
Kit turns to see him. Frizer stares at the ceiling as if he can see clear through it, the long stare of the drowned. Something stirs just beneath his fine, boyish features, like the dawn.
Kit lets an impulse move down his arm, slipping his fingers between Frizer’s fingers. Frizer’s eyes close. His breath swells, ebbs. His grasp tightens, his thumb strokes the side of Kit’s hand as if they have touched in this way a thousand times before, as if, indeed, there were no other way to touch one another but this. But it is simply too much to bear: the weight of Frizer’s grip on Kit’s hand, the ghost-weight of a man upon his back, the weight of Kit’s own profaned and desecrated hide. He cannot bear so much, and still try to imagine a future when he will hold every ounce of another man’s weight against his body and not merely bear it but desire it, with every ounce of his own.
‘Not now,’ Kit rasps. ‘Please, not now.’
Frizer eases his grasp. He clears his throat, turns onto his side. A tear rolls over the bridge of his nose and makes a dot upon the sheet. ‘We must keep you talking,’ he says, as if nothing at all has happened between them. ‘Till morning, that’s what he said. Tell me a story… Tell me how Hero & Leander ends.’