AS DAWN BREAKS ON the 29th of May, a seagull reels, cackling, over the Inn-in-the-Wall’s jagged rooftop, as shrill and petulant as a child jumping on the bed. Wake up! Wake up! Facedown, Kit traces the gull’s noisome progress around the ceiling with one eye, unsure whether he is awake or asleep, on dry land or on a boat. A boat to where?
But a moment later a cannon blasts somewhere to the north-east, startling Kit upright – the gun foundry on Houndsditch.
Kit turns to see the man in bed beside him and meets frightened blue eyes. Kit tries to speak, but can only whisper, ‘We have to go.’
He scrambles up his underclothes and breeches from the floor, dressing himself halfway in the dim light. He then shakes open his bag and sweeps his arm across the desk, shoving all his effects into its mouth at once. The strongbox, however, is still locked.
‘Frizer, the key,’ Kit says, from the floor. ‘The key, quickly!’
Frizer sits at the edge of the bed, still naked. Painfully slow, he drops his shirt to the floor and picks up his breeches instead, withdrawing the key from a pocket. He hands it over as mournfully as if it were a dead bird.
‘Get dressed and then look outside,’ Kit says, unlocking the box. ‘Try not to be seen.’ He packs up his papers, runs his hands through his hair, finishes dressing himself. At last, he turns his attention to the bed and the bedclothes, smoothing over the places where their bodies have been. His search turns up a faint stain on one edge of the bed, another in the centre, and he scrubs away at both with a damp cloth as if it were blood.
Frizer stands with his back to the door, his complexion green.
Kit asks, ‘Did you look outside?’
‘They are going to torture us,’ Frizer gasps.
Kit stops scrubbing. ‘Listen… I will not—’
‘They are going to kill us!’ Frizer lifts his hands as if to claw his own eyes out.
Kit leaves the bed, crosses the room and takes him by the wrists. ‘Nothing will happen to you. I promise.’
‘He’ll know. He’ll take one look at me and he’ll know!’
‘Who will know?’
‘I cannot breathe!’ Frizer sucks hard at the air. ‘I need to get out!’ He turns and barrels outside, stumbling to the gallery’s railing as if about to throw himself over. Kit catches him in his arms, glancing down into the yard just as six men emerge from the common room: first the landlord, nervously hunting through his ring of keys, and behind him, moving as patiently as a thunderhead, a man in a bailiff’s livery and four helmeted guards, two in the archbishop’s livery and two in the Privy Court’s, all bound for the opposite staircase. From the centre of the yard, the landlord turns and blithers some excuse for his disarray, shooting a frantic glance upwards, into Kit’s eyes.
Kit hauls Frizer backwards into the room and shuts the door, hoping to have done so quietly. For too long, he stares at the latch while his heart kicks away at his ribs, turning at last to find Frizer tearing at his own hair.
‘Oh God,’ Frizer says. ‘Oh God what have I done what have I done?’
Kit cups Frizer’s face in both hands. ‘We need to go. Now. Do you understand?’ Frizer’s gaze scatters. ‘Nod if you understand!’
Frizer’s head jerks up and down.
Kit rushes across the room for his bag. Frizer spins in a circle, one hand at the small of his back, his eyes on the floor. ‘Wait, my knife! Where’s my knife?’
Kit cares nothing for the knife. He takes Frizer’s hand, prepared to drag him out, but Frizer twists away and snarls, ‘Give it to me!’ The eyes are yellow, glistering; the voice as black as pitch. A stranger’s voice.
Kit tries to speak, but the words will not come. He can move only his eyes, glancing twice at the space beneath the bed, which is enough for Frizer to deduce the rest. Even as Frizer rises again and slips the knife into its scabbard, Kit remains frozen for a moment too long, as dazed as if he had been slapped.
‘We’ll have to run,’ Kit says, finding his voice at last.
‘Can you manage it?’
‘I’ll have to.’ Kit opens the door just enough to peer across the yard with one eye. On the far side of the inn, the guards turn the corner on the fourth landing. The bailiff now leads the rest, the same man, Kit realizes, who had arrested him at Scadbury.
‘Keep apace with me,’ Kit says. ‘Do not charge.’ He waits until the whole party of guards have arrived at the fifth gallery, takes a breath and then throws open the door, letting it swing behind him. Shouts come from across the yard, but Kit looks only at the stairs under his feet as he plummets down one flight after another, leaping over the railings, reeling dizzily to the dirt. At the bottom, Frizer nearly crashes into Kit’s back and then halts, gawping up at the stairs opposite, where guards tumble down one atop another like ants on a wall. Kit snatches Frizer by the sleeve and pulls him through the gateway, to the street.
The sight of the Black Bull stops Kit in his tracks. There’s the Bishopsgate fountain just visible through the smoke, the Wall somewhere behind him, and, just down the street, the toothy row of windows set high up on white Crosby Place. All recedes into a vast, grey distance, like a half-remembered scene. Perhaps out of habit he turns south, swinging Frizer on ahead as if to hurl him with a sling: ‘Go, go!’ Kit surpasses him in only a few strides. He wonders at his own insensibility to pain. In every doorway light and shadow conspire to imitate the sheen of helmets clustered in wait, around every corner he anticipates their lunge. He thinks of Winding Lane, Leadenhall, Eastcheap, cuts and culverts, parks and piers, anywhere he might conceal himself.
On Winding Lane, the pain in his side hits him like a bullet and he collapses onto all fours. Frizer sprints past, doubles back, clips him about the ribs and hoists him up with a roar, bolting off the moment that Kit is on his feet. Every breath is a knife in the side. By the time Kit staggers to the next crossing he can no longer see Frizer at all, only Leadenhall Market’s serried archways stretching left and right into the smoke.
A childish terror of abandonment overtakes him. He limps into the still-quiet market, making full turns about every few paces. Down one row of shuttered stalls or another, men lumber past with rattling carts in tow. No sign of Frizer. There’s nowhere to hide here, not for long. Despair rushes in, as sharp as panic. Kit is just beginning to consider lying on the ground and giving up when at last Frizer appears as if out of the ether, grabs him by the arm and drags him into a narrow void behind the empty fish stalls.
Kit doubles over and sucks air into his burning chest. The space is no more than three feet wide and ten feet deep, its other extremity blocked by a midden of reeking oyster shells, sloping towards them like a petrified wave. ‘Frizer,’ Kit says, his hands on his knees, ‘we cannot stop here. We are trapped.’
‘We have no choice, do we? Look at you! Would you rather drop dead in the street?’ Frizer lets his satchel fall from his shoulder, sidling towards the tunnel’s entrance. A second later, he returns shaking his head and says, ‘We’ll never escape. I saw them yesterday, I saw them on every gate, on every street!’
‘Breathe, Frizer.’
‘Idiot!’ Frizer strikes himself across the cheek. ‘Idiot, idiot, idiot! Why did I stay, why did I stay?’
Kit reaches for his hands but Frizer shoves him in the ribs with such force that Kit slams backwards into the wall at a steep angle, taking a crack to the skull and shoulders. Dazed, he slides himself upright, eyes fixed on the shell-strewn ground as Frizer’s footsteps crunch past, one way and then the other.
When Kit can breathe again, he blurts out, ‘If we are caught, I will say nothing of what happened last night.’ He hears the strain in his own voice and immediately feels ashamed, diminished.
Frizer’s pacing stops. ‘You have ruined my life!’
Again, that black, unfamiliar voice, the deep gnar of a grindstone on naked stone.
‘You did all this on purpose,’ Frizer says. ‘You knew what would happen!’
‘Why,’ Kit stammers, ‘why would I do this on purpose?’
‘To ruin me, to destroy me. You rapist! You devil!’
Kit almost laughs. ‘A rapist, am I? Ay, the rapist you begged to suck your cock—’
Frizer silences him with a weak punch to the cheek that nevertheless leaves him stunned blind, his head hanging. Through sobs, Frizer says, ‘I trusted you! You knew I was weak, you used me! Why have ye done this to me, you evil bastard, why?’
‘Because I love you, and I thought you loved me! It was no ordinary kindness you showed me. It was a benediction, it was love! I am alive because of you; I want to live because of you!’ Kit has struck the wall with his fist. He clutches his throbbing hand and sinks onto his haunches, doubly wretched. He can only blame himself. He has been selfish, thoughtless, greedy. He has put his hooks into this man; he can feel himself doing it even now. Always so quick to dig in his nails, to wield the word ‘love’ like a sling-stone. But I have nothing else, no one else, he would like to say. He must not allow himself to say it.
Eventually, Kit looks up from the ground to find Frizer staring at nothing visible, one finger scratching at the scar upon his neck so punishingly that the skin has turned red. Kit imagines the blade of Frizer’s knife in place of the fingertip – for that was how it must have happened – but the image touches something raw within himself and he tucks his head behind his knees, fearful he might be sick.
‘We should go,’ he mumbles.
Frizer says nothing. He offers his hand and helps Kit to his feet, all without looking at him.
They continue south through alleys and backstreets, headed for the river. At a quarter past nine they pass beneath the clock tower at the peak of Fish Street, and descend the steep hill to the wharf. Kit hunches against Frizer’s arm, partly in attempt to disguise his height. A few guards mill about the docks, but there are plenty of ways to hide within the crowd; the fish market is like a battlefield this time of morning. Men shout over great silver slabs of meat, ragged children and cutpurses weave about the fishmongers’ carts, gulls squabble over piles of viscid guts.
At last, Kit can go no further. At the edge of a pier, he stumbles backwards into a heap of coiled rope taller than himself and collapses, legs sprawled into the path of passers-by. The boards beneath him seem to bob and lurch. Nothing moves but it groans, like cattle overcrowded in a pen.
‘You’re as white as a sheet, man,’ Frizer says. He crouches beside Kit and lays a hand on his shoulder. ‘You’ll not die, will you?’
Kit has not the breath to reply. He fumbles his half-empty flask free of the hanging on his belt and drinks, restraining himself from downing all at once. Men pass by without looking, step over Kit’s legs as they would rubbish. To them, Frizer and he are but drunkards or beggars, the sort of men one deliberately fails to see. ’Tis an unexpected comfort to be so plain-sighted, yet so invisible.
‘We must get to Deptford,’ Frizer says.
Kit watches his face for some hint of his thoughts, but Frizer avoids his gaze. ‘I would need papers to board a ship at Deptford.’
‘I’ll have to see my master for that, no?’
‘So you’ll leave me here, at Billingsgate? They’ll look for me here.’
‘I will leave ye for ten minutes while I find us a boat.’ His gaze touches Kit’s – a shock, like cold water to a sore tooth – only to drop away at once.
Kit tries not to guess at his mind, so often does he guess wrong. He scans the jungle of masts and rigging past the far end of the pier: St George’s crosses receding into the grey-white distance like the wings of the heavenly host. Not a single foreign ship to be seen.
Frizer’s hand extends into Kit’s periphery, and Kit stares at him blankly before at last understanding. He offers him the flask.
Frizer drinks, wincing at the sting. ‘I should not have said those things to you. I should never have hit you.’
At these words, Kit feels a shiver of relief, and more than relief. He cannot say, I forgive you, because he would rather imagine there were nothing to forgive. Instead, he finds Frizer’s hand at his side and takes it in his own.
Frizer lays his cheek against his knee and is silent for several seconds, his eyes grey against the light reflected off the river. And then, ‘It was the morning after Chestnut Sunday,’ he murmurs. ‘I was twelve or thirteen. My father went out to clean the stables, and he found me curled up in the straw, all naked, feverish, talking nonsense. He put me in my brothers’ bed. I thought my skin would burst, as if I were cooking in it. I remember lying there, looking up at them, my father and my brothers, while they argued over whether to call the doctor, what to tell him, how much of me they could let him see. My father said, “What were you thinking? Did ye not think on how this would seem?” My brother, my eldest brother said, “It was a punishment, fit for the crime.” My father asked what crime, and he said it was the way I walked. The way I smiled at people. “Like a cunt,” he said. “He’s got to learn: that’s what a cunt gets.” ’ For a moment Frizer seems unable to go on, his mouth working to form words.
‘But what they’d done to me… it left no marks. The doctor looked me over, gave me something for the fever. Told me to pray. A few months later, they did it again. And again. The doctor kept coming. Kept telling me to pray, pray harder. “Malingerer,” he said. “There’s naught wrong with him. Just likes an audience.” ’ He laughs silently, bitterly, and takes another drink. ‘The next time they did it, I knew it would be the same. No marks. So, I made them myself. The doctor came again, stitched me up… and that was that. They kept doing it, and so did I. The doctor kept coming. Never said a word to me any more, barely looked at me. But I kept trying. I kept trying to, to show him.’ Frizer touches the centre of his chest with two fingers, looking down upon the hand as if ’tis separate from himself, an enemy who shares his body, his blood.
‘I thought, if I could make it terrible enough, someone would… see it. And they would do something, they would save me.’ His gaze sinks into the sky past the far end of the dock. ‘I think he knew. The doctor. That’s why he stopped telling me to pray. Because there was no point—’
‘Stop, stop.’ Kit pulls Frizer into an embrace, thinking nothing of the danger in it. He rubs a tear on his sleeve as if it were a mark of possession, an act of enchantment. Would that they had known one another all their lives! Would that they had been raised together, in neighbouring houses, so that the first time it happened Kit might have stopped it: burst in wielding a knife or a club, bashed the monsters’ skulls in or cut their throats, scooped Frizer up in his arms and bore him away from all harm, out into the hills, the forests, sheltering in caves and thickets, feeding on blackberries and songbirds. Wild children, in a kingdom of two.
‘I meant what I said before,’ Kit says. ‘Every word, I meant it.’
Frizer inhales, as if about to speak. He turns Kit’s head in both hands, kisses his mouth just briefly before pulling away. Within seconds he is gone.
‘There’s good money in’t if a fellow can take me to Deptford,’ Frizer says.
The boatmen double over laughing, leaning against their beached crafts on the shell-and-bone foreshore. ‘No man living has the arms to row so far!’ A calculated exaggeration, surely. A pair of them begin to argue over who can get him to Wapping Stairs the quickest, but such is not nearly far enough, and the wrong side of the river besides. Frizer walks away, eager to return to Marlowe on the dock above, even if he must return empty-handed, but halfway to the stairs an African with an accent Frizer cannot place stops him and guardedly questions him on his needs, assuring him no fewer than four times that he is a Christian, like his father before him, as if Frizer would not gladly take help from any heathen that offered it. For an exorbitant fee, the African says he will row them to a ‘quiet place’, just past the mouth of the Neckinger. From there, they’ll have to walk the rest of the way. God knows how long it shall take to reach Deptford, or how much; the master’s purse is running dry.
Frizer runs to fetch Marlowe, for whom the long stairs down to the bank are a terrible struggle. From the bottom the African watches them descend together, half-embracing, with a twist in his mouth as if he has smelled something sour. When at last they arrive on the shore he treats them as if they are delicate, exotic creatures, easily bruised, easily offended.
‘Big fellow in the middle,’ he says. ‘Try not to move too much.’
They cast off, the bridge’s sky-blackening spans sliding away behind them. Frizer spins his knife in an attempt to keep his mind quiet. Marlowe sits facing Frizer, and behind him, the boatman, who mainly keeps his head down, his eyes on the oars. The profile of Marlowe’s face catches the light as they pass out of the shadow of a ship and the Tower appears to float by in its ribbon of walls, gleaming like alabaster in the eastern light. Ravens wheel over the parapets only to halt and turn back, as if to bang against a ceiling of glass.
Somewhere inside, men are pouring water over another man’s face, a man is hanging from his wrists while pinned to the floor at his ankles and stretched until the hipbones burst their sockets, a man has been folded in half, backwards, until his heels are in his armpits, and they are all screaming, all begging for the pain to stop: I’ll tell you anything! I’ll tell you anything! They will hand over their wives, their children, their souls. A man will strangle his own mother for one moment of peace.
Frizer thinks of himself in the places of those men. How quickly he would break! He thinks of Marlowe in their places and himself forced to hold the bucket, the ropes.
‘Will you teach me?’ Marlowe says, with his hand out. It takes Frizer a moment to understand – he means knife-spinning. His dark gaze is kindly and solicitous. I love you throbs between them, an open wound.
Frizer frowns, as if in doubt of Marlowe’s native skills. Truly, he cannot remember another occasion when he has willingly offered his knife to another, not even Nick. How strange it is in Marlowe’s hands, a lanky, artless thing, forgetful of all the tricks Frizer ever taught it. He tries to demonstrate a simple twirl using the first and third fingers, his hands bending Marlowe’s long hand into shape: ‘Nay, this finger never moves, ay? This one lifts; this one presses down…’ Marlowe, smouldering with concentration, clumsily endeavours to please him. Perhaps he fumbles on purpose, so that they shall have a reason to keep trying, to laugh and tease one another, forgetting the boatman and the world beyond the river’s banks. They are but two men in a boat with all the time in the world, riding the swift spring current to nowhere.
When at last Marlowe manages to complete three slow turns of the blade, Frizer all but bursts with pride, crying, ‘Yes! Yes!’ and pounding his big shoulder. But then his gaze alights on the boatman’s retreating glance and he sees it in his eyes, that fretful look of knowing. He’s a cunt. That’s what a cunt gets.
The tide has risen perilously high by the time they reach the Neckinger’s narrow, reedy mouth. Their boat hugs the overgrown bank, at last skirting into an inlet where the remains of a pier jut out over the water by some ten feet. In the dark cavity beneath the boards, Frizer and Marlowe climb out into hip-deep water. Speechlessly, the African indicates a ladder on the far side, pooled in sunlight. Nothing feels right. ‘No, no, we cannot stay here,’ Frizer says, clinging to the gunwale. ‘Take us further.’
‘This is as far as I take ye.’
‘Listen, I’ll give you…’ He hunts through the master’s purse, coming up with a half-pound in gold, a small fortune really, which the African refuses. ‘A sovereign or nothing.’ Frizer empties coins into his shaking palm, counting aloud, trying not to drop any, at last pleading, ‘I’ll give ye the damned purse, ay? I’ll give ye whatever you want!’
All the while, Marlowe watches the ladder the way a condemned man looks on the gallows, seeming to hold his breath. ‘We should be quiet.’ His gaze sweeps the ceiling of loose boards.
Whether out of pity or in haste to be gone, the African orders them aboard again. Frizer grabs Marlowe by both arms and drags him in, tumbling arse-first into the wet hull. ‘All’s well,’ Marlowe murmurs, hugging him, ‘all’s well.’ ’Tis backwards that he should be the one giving comfort, is it not?
As they pull away from the pier, a group of six men become visible on the bank above: men with the archbishop’s mitre sewn onto their sleeves. A pair stand by their horses, the rest sit against the belly of an upturned skiff, armed with swords, clubs, pistols. They look as if they are waiting to do violence to someone, anyone.
The boatman lets them drift downriver a while, stretching his arms. ‘Más tonto que Abundio!’ he says, or something close to that. ‘You fellows are lucky I have a soft heart. Never tell a man how much money is in your purse! Innocent as babes, the pair of ye!’ All this chastising Frizer gladly endures. He doubles forward and Marlowe does the same, making as if one of them has dropped a coin in the hull and together they search for it among the brown water and dead leaves. They only dare hook two fingers together.
‘We will never make it!’ Frizer whispers, still shaking, trying not to cry.
‘Breathe, breathe. We will make it.’
Somehow, through the still point of their linked fingertips or the slow, steady pump of the oars, Frizer drifts into half-sleep of a kind he’d perfected in childhood: half-death really, for he is not in his body but looking down upon it, watching his jaw slide out of alignment, watching himself turn colourless and slack. He dreams of a man made of ice, but living, a being through whom light passes like sound through a clarion, amplified, exalted. Frizer thirsts, and so drinks, melting him in his hot mouth, slaking kiss with kiss. His body sings, like a wet finger run around the rim of a glass.
This is a sickness, is it not? He has felt a similar sort of witchcraft before, a vision or a memory capable of wielding terrible power over his body, the way the everyday smell of a stable can send dread coursing through his veins. This is devilry of a different sort, if devilry it is indeed. The Devil puts on a pleasing shape, they say, but they misunderstand – the Devil is no common seducer, not merely that charming friend who whispers diabolical notions in one’s ear. A man does not give his soul to that. A man gives his soul to that which seems to him perfect and pure, that which to him is beloved, even above his own life. Yes: beloved. Give me an eternity of this agony.
Why do you love him whom the world hates so?
—Because he loves me, more than all the world!
The sun is hot on Frizer’s back when he opens his eyes, wipes spit from his mouth. His toes squelch inside his sodden boots. He knows not where they are, only that the land is wooded and wild on the bank to his left, and to the right the shore is gouged out into a muddy, crescent-shaped slip, strewn with the looming skeletons of half-built ships, smoke-belching storehouses and pyramids of tree trunks, the whole infernal scene crawling with busy, dirty-looking men. On a high point of the embankment, recently hewn masts stand as close together as teeth on a comb, casting a shadow over the water like prison bars.
In Marlowe’s fingers, the knife revolves haltingly, like a watermill at low tide. Marlowe grins and bounces his eyebrows when he notices Frizer watching him, as if fearful to glance away from the little act of magic he so tenuously performs. Always so hungry for approval, Marlowe. So desperate to be loved.
‘I am so sorry,’ Frizer whispers.
‘For what?’
‘Deptford!’ the boatman chimes, the way a bell tolls the hour.