JUST AFTER DAWN ON the 29th of May 1593, an army of some eight hundred men on horseback thunders up the old Watling Road towards the Marshalsea Prison, leaving a quagmire in their wake that stretches all the way back to Canterbury. At the lead, Archbishop Whitgift rides in his customary pomp, sheltered from the elements by a velvet canopy carried by two comely acolytes. Eight hours from now, the archbishop’s old nemesis John Penry will be put to a lingering death – the same Penry who, in his infamous pamphlets, had amplified certain revolting rumours regarding the archbishop and his dear, late mentor at university which, although true, his Holiness is nevertheless obliged to crush with the utmost prejudice.
Soon, Whitgift and his personal cavalry reach Thomas-a-Watering, formerly a shrine to Thomas-a-Beckett, now a desolate crossroads with gallows in the centre. Here, his Holiness dismounts and trundles alone to the gallows, the hem of his chimere slapping in the mud. He labours up the stairs, kneels beneath the gallows-tree and folds his hands in prayer. ‘O heavenly Father, may the condemned be strong of heart!’ For men with weak hearts die quicker.
Across the road, from the second-storey windows of the old Thomas-a-Beckett Inn, Thomas Walsingham watches this little spectacle unfold. Deep between his ears, Robin Poley whispers, over and over: You do not want to see your friend butchered alive. You do not want to see them pull the heart out of him, still beating.
Walsingham had left Greenwich hours ago. Not even Nick Skeres knows where he is. For longer than he can estimate he has stood here, on the landing of a staircase, waiting for someone who knows not to expect him.
As the archbishop plods back to his retinue and ascends the saddle by way of a cushioned footstool, footsteps approach on the stairs, from above. Walsingham turns, watching as the man he’s awaited all this while finally descends into view: Thomas Phelippes, squinting myopically in the clear light.
They stare at one another for all of three seconds before Phelippes blanches from crown to chin and tries to hurry on his way, muttering, ‘Oh, no. No, no, no—’
Walsingham catches him on the landing, his sleeve in his fist. ‘Five minutes, I pray!’
Phelippes whispers, ‘The Lord Keeper is upstairs! If he should see me with you—’
‘Then talk with me outside.’ Walsingham half-draws his short-sword, just for the sound. ‘If you do not, Tom, I’ll make certain he sees you with me.’
The colour in Phelippes’s toadish face deepens. Yet he no longer resists, resuming his descent with a grudge in every step. Outside, Walsingham leads him away from the inn and off towards the steep bank of the putrid River Neckinger, sheltered by trees. They are alone here; nothing lies beyond the river but a wasteland of beehive-shaped skips in the mist.
Phelippes’s crunching footsteps come to a halt. ‘Do you mean to kill me?’ he says, a jest, but an anxious one.
‘I am afraid I simply do not care enough to kill you, Tom,’ Walsingham says. ‘Half the intelligencers still active in this country haggled their way out of prison at the expense of my hide. I have not the patience for vengeance of that scale.’
Phelippes lets out a humourless grunt. He says, ‘Ille crucem sceleris pretium tulerit, hic diadema’ – for the same crime one man gets the gallows, and another, a crown. There’s a twinge of remorse upon his lip, much to Walsingham’s surprise. Suppose he might have considered Walsingham a friend once, though the feeling was never mutual. Everyone at Seething Lane used to joke that Phelippes had no friends besides Trimethius and Simonetta, whose weighty, mouldering tomes on cryptology had lain forever splayed upon his desk like drugged concubines.
‘You were at the Marshalsea last night,’ Walsingham says, ‘with the Lord Keeper, and Topcliffe… and Robin Poley.’
Phelippes looks as if a pin were pinching him under the collar. ‘You still have your ways, I see.’
‘While you and the others took to your horses, Poley spoke privily with Topcliffe for a few moments outside the courthouse. I understand they appeared “peculiarly disposed” towards one another. There might have been a quarrel, and some talk of selling and trading…’
Phelippes lets out a jaded grunt as if unsurprised, but then seems to regret having revealed even so little of his own thoughts, looking over his shoulder as if hoping, or fearing, that someone will come. ‘If you know the devil’s game—’ he starts, but stops, saying instead, ‘I will not undermine my own work. The case against Marlowe, you see, is my responsibility, and I stand to profit well by it. Better, I think, than you could afford.’
‘I only wish to speak of Poley. I have my suspicions, and ’tis plain you have yours. Let us speak simply of what we have observed, and leave one another to our separate conclusions.’
‘You cannot help Marlowe, if that is your hope,’ Phelippes says.
‘I have no hope of that, I warrant you.’
‘The Lord Keeper has put out an order for his arrest. Maunder and the others should be arriving at the Inn-in-the-Wall as we speak, if they have not already been and gone.’
Walsingham feels the blood drain from his face. Yet Phelippes seems not to notice; he only goes on, overly familiar: ‘My hand to God, old man, I know you to be somewhat unchary with your associates. Even your uncle thought so. But a friend like this, he could be the end of you. I would like to believe that you are but some sheltered, simple fellow, too stupid to know what manner of man he is… but I know you are nothing of the kind.’
Walsingham stays silent, his gaze drawn northwards, as if he might see Bishopsgate from here.
‘I suppose that is the trouble with fellows like you,’ Phelippes adds, sneeringly. ‘You’d rather put both feet in hell then draw one out of it, lest the wine of penitence should wash that other taste out of your mouth.’
Walsingham cannot stop himself from turning a look of both terror and fury upon him. He swallows the yolk of dread in his throat, trying to sound calm as he says, ‘Tell me what you saw last night between Poley and Topcliffe, and I’ll tell you everything I know of Robin Poley.’
Not everything, of course. What little Walsingham does say, however, is the truth: that Robin Poley is but one of many men upon whose senses he has come to rely these past three years, and that of late he has employed Poley specifically to the end of keeping Kit Marlowe under watch. Phelippes, in turn, can merely confirm that Poley and Topcliffe did seem to have some scheme afloat last night, one requiring an almost grotesquely high price on Kit’s head, should the bailiff fail to capture him. ‘Two hundred pounds!’ Phelippes says, as if he took such extravagance as a personal affront. ‘And I daresay they would have tried for a far higher price, had his lordship indulged them any further.’
‘What do you make of it?’ Walsingham asks, for it must be said that Phelippes is one whose intuition is rarely wrong.
‘What do I think? Marry, I should think it quite clear that if anything is being sold or traded, ’tis the life of your friend Marlowe – and therefore yours as well!’
Before the hour is out, Walsingham is galloping downriver to Deptford. Along the way, he discovers that the Southwark streets, so deathly serene this morning, are now a garrison for Whitgift’s thugs, whose ranks form a necklace of glinting helmets around the village verge – a necklace which, as only the eye of God might see, garrottes the whole throat of the Thames’ southern bank, from Thomas-a-Watering to Bankside, from the Neckinger in the east to the Rose estate in the west, where the archbishop’s men hover around the Rose Playhouse’s boarded-up windows like urchins jostling for a glimpse of the stage.
By the time Walsingham reaches Bull’s House, the sun leers high through the Golden Hind’s naked masts. He leaves his horse at the fencepost and sprints for the door, hoping that by some chance Kit and Frizer might have set out last night and arrived here in the twilight hours. But as Nick Skeres greets him, looking surprised, such hopes die at once.
‘Is he here?’ Walsingham snarls, panting.
‘Who, master?’
‘Your “friend”, Nick, that the Devil’s dam named Robin – is he here?’
Nick stammers, ‘He’s, he’s asleep.’
‘Come!’ Walsingham tugs Nick outside as if to drag him by the ear, across the lawn and to the edge of the green. ‘Who would you say is the dearer of your two friends,’ Walsingham asks, ‘Master Poley or Master Frizer?’
‘What?’ Nick looks as muddled as if he’s only just been awakened, though Walsingham sent him here hours ago. ‘I understand not the question, master.’
‘Let me put it in other terms: if I were to hold Master Poley and Master Frizer both at gunpoint, which would you try to save, if either one? Who, to you, matters more?’
Nick has turned a touch pale. He darts his eyes as if hoping to be rescued himself. ‘Are you… do you mean to… do something, to Ingram?’
‘Not I, Master Skeres. But your other friend, Poley, was the last man to see Master Frizer, who is now unaccounted for. I do not mean to suggest that he brought Frizer to any harm, nothing so crude as that, but if I were you, I should wonder at how Poley intends to use him.’
Nick shakes his head, emphatically. ‘Master Poley would not hurt Ingram.’
‘You trust him, do you?’
Nick’s cheeks take on a touch of red. ‘Why should I not trust him, master, if I may beg your pardon? With all due respect, master, the man’s a hero, is he not? It bewilders me, master, the way some fellows talk of him, when they should be thanking him, they should, that we’re not all praying to the damned Pope and bowing at the feet of some Scottish witch! They resent him, they do, because he’s cleverer than they are!’
The oaf has forgotten himself. Walsingham inches closer, his stare a reminder. ‘Tell me, then,’ he sneers, ‘what has the great unsung hero told you of Dick Topcliffe?’
Nick grows still, a dog coming to attention. His eyes dart again, though his answer is, ‘Why, nothing, master, nothing!’ He takes a step back at last, and with another anxious glance, comes up with the following: ‘’Tis none of my business anyway, the things that went on in the Marshalsea. I’ve never asked him. Nor would I ask you, master.’
This last must be intended to stick like a knife, for it succeeds, a stab which Walsingham feels in a place of unspeakable intimacy. He can deny it no longer, there’s but one man on earth who may put a stop to all this: Dick Topcliffe, whose foul fingers Walsingham can all but smell beneath his chin, whose voice he can hear less than an inch from his ear: Strange – I’d thought a fellow like you might enjoy this sort of thing!—
‘Ah, so you received my message!’ Poley calls. He leans out of a large window directly above the front door, his elbows on the sill. Even from here, Walsingham notices something odd about his clothes, a bailiff’s badge emblazoned upon the doublet. Master Bull was, if memory serves, a bailiff of the Privy Court.
‘You are wearing your brother-in-law’s clothes,’ Walsingham says.
‘Yes, my clothes are soaked through, after last night’s deluge. Shall we?’ He gestures inside, where Walsingham meets him at the foot of the stairs. Down the hall, in the dining room, Widow Bull glances up from setting the table to see Walsingham and Poley approaching, and swiftly orders her maids to the kitchen.
Poley says, ‘I sent word to Bishopsgate as early as possible. With any luck, the messenger was not delayed by his Holiness’s men, who, I take it, have the whole of Southwark surrounded. Fortunately, the nearest watergate remains unwatched, for now. There’s still hope that your man Frizer shall find his way to us.’
‘And if not?’ Walsingham says, taking a seat at the table.
Poley also sits and barks a fretful laugh. ‘I imagine you shall have to pray, in that case! Of course, I am well accustomed to carrying out this sort of work within the confines of a prison, if you should feel it necessary to proceed… although I must admit I was always an inmate myself in such cases. Not a condition I should like to revisit.’
He looks as though he has not slept in days. What is it he hopes to gain from this? Gold? Walsingham has paid him half already, a goodly sum in itself; and belike he’ll have the same or double again from Topcliffe, in whatever scheme they are running. But if gold is all Poley needs, ’tis clear he needs it desperately. Perhaps a creditor has come knocking?
‘I may recompense you for time spent,’ Walsingham says, testing the waters, ‘if the loss should pain you overmuch…’
‘A generous offer,’ Poley says, quite neutrally. He lifts his goblet to drink. ‘Let us hope I need not consider it.’
And now, from down the hall: a knock at the door.
Walsingham’s stomach grows suddenly heavy, anchoring him to his seat. A moment of stillness falls, as all wait for another knock to come and prove the first. When it sounds, Poley motions to his sister, who sets the pitcher of wine on the sideboard and then sweeps down the hall, skirts rustling. A creak of hinges, followed by a voice. Kit’s voice.
As the blood drains from Walsingham’s face, a wave of tears rises, forcing him to bow his head, to stiffen his chin, desperately avoiding Poley’s gaze. Only seconds later, Kit appears in the doorway, looking such a state: filthy, soaking wet from the waist down, as if he had crawled out of the river, his face mangled with recent wounds. There he stands, the lanky boy who, five years ago, had come to Walsingham for aid, who had sat before his desk with Tom Watson’s hand on his shoulder and tortuously, tearfully told of the terrible things that Richard Baines had done to him, and made him do… There is the man who, after the Marshalsea, had waited by Walsingham’s side for a month, as patient as an anchorite at his rosary, loving him back to life.
Walsingham bolts to his feet but for a moment remains paralysed. You do not want to see them pull the heart out of him, still beating. To his shame, all Walsingham can think of is himself on the scaffold, not Kit, and not even the horrors of death at that, but the humiliation, standing there naked, pelted with shit, as the bailiff reads out his sins for all to hear. To be so hated, so far from mercy! What a horror it is, what a lonely way to die.
Like a child to his mother, Walsingham rushes forth and wraps Kit in both arms, smelling the river’s silt upon him, and somewhere beneath it a scent that is inimitably himself, and alive.
Why, Walsingham thinks, oh, why, Kit! – why would you make me do this?