‘WAKE UP, WAKE UP!’
The voice comes through bottle-glass, or snow, or earth. Kit would reply, but his body is only meat on a butcher’s slab, his tongue a lump of bloody gristle. His skull echoes, emptied of all but a single impulse, lower than thought: Run, run, run, run, run!
‘Come on, man, wake up!’
Kit sucks spit and sets his jaw straight. For a moment he feels nothing but the first rush of air in his lungs, like the first drink after an unbearable abstinence. But then pain follows, a web of cracked bones and burst vessels that stretches into every extremity, even his gums, his eyelids, his fingernails. No matter how many times he has started awake this day, ’tis always as if from one nightmare into another. But this time is different. This time Frizer is here.
‘Man, I thought you were dead!’ Frizer says. He is out of breath. He shudders, leans his head against the edge of the bed. ‘Christ, you gave me a fright!’
The sheet sticks fast to the wound above Kit’s eyebrow. With a wince he peels himself free, feels fresh blood seep from the gash. His heart throbs in the bleeding, rapid, drumming footfalls: Run, run, run, run, run!
‘Jesus, man,’ Frizer says, squinting at the sheets. ‘Did you piss yourself?’
Kit knows not what to do with this information besides laugh.
‘But you’re well, are you?’ His eyes are still frightened. ‘You’re not dying?’
Kit reaches out and finds Frizer’s sleeve, trying to hold the world still, or to hold himself still. All day, he has been steeling himself to say something urgent. Now his mind is blank. ‘Frizer,’ he says, ‘Frizer,’ hoping the rest will come to him.
Frizer collects the untouched food and drink from the floor and stands up, fluttering around the room. He speaks all the while, almost as if to himself but clearly for Kit’s benefit. ‘I’ll have them make you a bath… Clean the room… Get ye some new clothes… I hope you have clothes in here, man, otherwise I know not where I’ll find any to fit ye!’ He hunts through Kit’s bag, turning up the rust-coloured, quilted doublet and long, Venetian-style breeches of a winter suit that Kit had taken with him when he’d fled Leathersellers’. ‘I’ll take the sleeves off,’ Frizer decides, turning the doublet in the light. ‘You’ll look like a sailor but at least you’ll suffer less for the heat. The air is more like a soup every day!’
Something about his fussing makes Kit smile. ’Tis oddly maternal – a word he had never expected to associate with Ingram Frizer – the anxious busywork of a mother who knows not how to show love except through her labours. But ’tis also terribly sad to watch Frizer plan out a future for him, even if only an immediate future. In his nervous hands there’s a hope of hours yet to come, days even. Kit can see him anticipating the day when yesterday’s wounds have become scars, as if they shall be together when that day comes.
Run, run, run, run, run, run.
‘Frizer,’ Kit whispers.
‘I’ll go downstairs to order your bath. Stay still, ay? Just a little longer and I’ll have ye out of that filth.’
He is gone. The room hums in his absence, as if all his hurry has produced a little whirlwind, gusting with hope. To that ghost Kit manages to say, at last, ‘I have to run, Frizer. I have to get out of England.’ But to say it even to an empty room is a knife in the heart.
Frizer is gone long enough that Kit slips into half-sleep. When he returns, ’tis with even more noise and haste than before. ‘They’re coming,’ he says, and Kit’s heart leaps in his chest before he adds, ‘Coming to clean the room.’ Frizer hooks his arms beneath Kit’s, pulling gently. ‘Come on, now. They made you a bath in the laundry. ’Tis too heavy to bring upstairs.’
With a roar of pain, Kit labours to his feet. Air from the open window runs down the backs of his legs like a tongue, trailing filth, blood, piss. Another man’s scad. Every breath is a reminder of the snap of that sinew inside him, the blinding shock of its recoil. The door to the stairs, with no one outside it.
The light of the body is the eye—
‘Shh,’ Frizer says, holding him.
Kit cannot stop crying. How can he live, if only sleep will cure him of crying?
‘There, now,’ Frizer says. ‘There, now. A bath, ay? A bath will help.’ He steps back, looks down and blushes, seeming to have only just realized that he has been embracing a naked man. He hurries to the cot and searches inside his own bag, retrieving an extra shirt. ‘Put this on. It’ll be short on ye but better than nothing.’
Through this, Kit somehow stands unassisted, propped up on his legs like a scarecrow on its stake. Frizer helps him lift his arms through the shirt, helps him slide on some used underclothes, as there’s no sense in wasting clean ones, followed by his winter breeches. There’s devotion in Frizer’s gaze, or else Kit imagines it. Suppose ’tis only kindness, though kindness alone is a rare and precious thing. Kit feels abashed, as if undeserving, looking at the floor.
‘You should have been a doctor,’ Kit says.
Frizer laughs. ‘With my piss-poor Latin?’ For a moment they are still, Frizer with his hands upon Kit’s arms, Kit ashamed to look him in the eye.
‘Frizer,’ Kit says, in disbelief that he has the will to say it, ‘if I stay in England, they will kill me…’
‘I know. I know.’ Frizer’s eyes are as clear and melancholy as sapphires. Kit parses every flicker of his expression, reading into even the way he clears his throat ere he speaks again. ‘Just come with me. Can ye walk?’
Kit nods. ‘Ay.’ Indeed, he can run. Broken as he is, he could take Ingram Frizer by the hand and drag him all the way to the sea.
Frizer settles Marlowe in the bath and then rushes back upstairs to retrieve all the things he’s neglected to bring: Marlowe’s boots and stockings, fresh underclothes, a tooth-scrub, a washcloth, a satchel of rosemary ash for the underarms, the little ball of almond-scented soap that Betsy had given him at Easter. In the room, he finds three chambermaids gathered around the bloody bed like mourners around a coffin. All at once, they turn to him with stifled gasps, as if fearing that the savage beast that lately fed here might have returned to feed again.
‘I will pay for everything,’ Frizer says, fumbling in his purse. ‘Your silence on this matter too, ay?’
They take the coins but go on staring at him, their expressions unchanged.
‘’Tis not his fault. He was attacked. They almost killed him!’
But of course, he need not explain himself to a pack of scullery wenches. This shall be practice, he decides, for when he must lie to the master later.
Downstairs in the yard, Frizer hesitates at the door to the laundry, his arms laden with clothes. Something watchful seems to prowl about the redolent, smoky interior. Clearly, the space was once a stable. Rows of hanging sheets recede into the dark, strung between posts, vestiges of former stalls. Even with a fire smouldering just inside the doorway the place reeks of mould and lye, and of the slough of innumerable bodies, and the musk of long-departed animals, thick as a lungful of dust.
In a far corner, behind a half-wall, Marlowe sits crammed into a linen-lined washtub with his long arms hung over the sides, fingertips touching the sawdust floor. The bandage is gone, exposing his bruise-blackened ribs, his sinewy, undernourished nakedness. Frizer feels an impulse to pull a clean sheet from one of the laundry lines and wrap him in it.
Instead, he hands him the soap and a washcloth and says, ‘Scrub yourself. I intend no insult, marry, but you need it.’
Marlowe stares at him. ‘What happened at Seething Lane?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You were there, no?’
‘Ay.’ Frizer’s face feels hot. He sets most of Marlowe’s things by the tub, then pulls a low stool into a shaft of daylight and arranges the woollen doublet in his lap, unknotting the laces that hold the sleeves in place, delaying answer until he can bear the silence no longer. ‘Nothing happened, marry. They asked some hundred and sixty questions of me, and then they let me go.’
‘What questions?’
‘Just… my name, and whom I serve, and how well I know ye—’
‘Anything about Baines?’
Frizer grows suddenly aware of the paper folded against his chest. ‘Had they made any mention of him, I damn well would have said so!’
Silently, Marlowe takes this in, and then shifts onto his knees, bending forward to palm water over the back of his head. The row of dints in his spine stand out like pearls.
‘Can you look after yourself tonight?’ Frizer says.
‘Look after myself? Where will you be?’
Frizer hesitates, knowing this next shall be ill received. ‘At Greenwich, with my master.’
‘Your master,’ Marlowe scoffs. ‘And what will you tell him?’
‘The very least that he need know.’
‘Have you heard one word from him this week? Has he sent a single message?’
‘No, by’r Lady, he has not.’
The water becalms. Frizer senses Marlowe’s eyes on him. ‘Frizer,’ Marlowe says, and then seems to wait. The word unspoken: Come.
Frizer makes no move. He knows what Marlowe will say, for he has said it already. Why say it again, except out of cruelty? But this is no time for hand-wringing. Marlowe is helpless. Frizer must lead. And here he is with a man’s doublet in his lap, altering sleeves, like a damned housemaid!
Finally, Marlowe says, ‘I have no choice, Frizer. I have to run.’
Frizer bites his lip, silent.
‘’Tis not what I want.’
‘I know,’ Frizer says.
‘I cannot wait for Walsingham.’
‘But look at ye, man! Ye would not get as far as Bishopsgate!’
‘Then help me.’
‘’Tis my master’s help you need.’
‘Your master has left me to rot!’
Frizer stands, flinging the doublet down. ‘And what am I to do for ye? What more can I possibly do? You want me to carry you to the mountains on my back?’
Marlowe hangs his head as if ashamed.
‘Ay, I thought so!’ Frizer starts to pace but after only a stride or two sinks onto his haunches, trying to think. He can produce no sensible argument against flight, for indeed there is none. If Marlowe knew of Baines’s letter, there would be no stopping him, not even his injuries would stop him. He would be gone before sunset and he would be right not to delay.
‘I can help ye but one way,’ Frizer says. ‘I can go to my master and beg his help. That is all I can do. Do ye understand?’
Marlowe nods at the floor between them.
‘You’ll need money, for one thing. You’ll get nowhere without money.’
At last, Marlowe sighs in surrender, with a wince that makes Frizer wince also. ‘Whatever he says, you’ll return by morning?’
Frizer nods.
‘Promise me.’
‘I promise, man. I promise.’ If all else fails, he shall find a hole somewhere, an unsuspecting, inconspicuous place, like a hermit’s cave, and hide Marlowe there. Hide himself too perhaps. They shall live together, unmolested and unmissed, like men on the moon. Frizer will read Tamburlaine to his heart’s content, and Marlowe will write new plays, and Frizer will read those too, one player playing every part, one spectator to watch him.
’Tis all so ridiculous that Frizer laughs aloud, his head in his hands. Marlowe says, ‘Are you well?’ and it occurs to him to answer, No, marry, I have never been well.
But instead he stands up, makes a henpecking gesture at the tub. ‘Stay not so long in there or you’ll catch your death.’
‘Ay, Mother.’ Marlowe smiles, warmly. They are friends. But there’s danger in friendship, especially in the beginning, before it becomes worn-in and comfortable, maintained by habit, like the shape of one’s boots. Perhaps it always begins like this, with the pinch of wanting more than any man could reasonably give to another. Perhaps ’tis the wanting by which friendship endures. Perhaps that is love.
Nay, he is too much a coward, too stupid, too wicked to be touched by a thing like love, which was, after all, invented by God! How dare he aspire to love, a loveless thing like him? This very place is an admonishment. Everything herein exists to remind him of what he is: the hooks, the ropes, the skeletons of old stalls, the faint musk of beasts and hay. The air reeks of pain ere it comes, as with a storm.
With his eyes on the floor, Frizer hears Marlowe take in a sharp breath, and then the suck and swell of the water as he pulls himself upright, the silence as he stands still, his body dripping. Seconds pass. Frizer cannot look up; must not look up.
‘Frizer.’ Again, unspoken: Come.
Frizer lifts his eyes. He has seen Marlowe naked before, but not like this. His body is pale and bright like a tallow candle, long-necked, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped. Knife-shaped. His sex could be either weapon or wound – like a wound, Frizer feels a throb of sympathy in himself at the sight of it, how sorely it begs for soothing; like a weapon he longs, strangely, to find its slicing edge, to prove its sharpness by touch. To draw a drop of blood, and suck it from his fingertip.
Marlowe appears poised on the edge of speech, his breath pitched high and cold. Perhaps he has no words to say. His desire is simply to be seen. And then what?
Frizer steps backwards. He turns, facing into the maze of laundry lines, and so retreats, pushing through blankets and bedsheets, towards light.