FRIZER CRAWLS OUT OF the boat on all fours as it bumps and scrapes against the lowest step of the Deptford watergate. Above, a steep ramp of scum-furred stairs ascends towards the grey sky. ’Tis too slippery to stand; Frizer can but turn over onto his backside before Marlowe comes scrabbling out almost on top of him.
The African throws their bags out after them. He leans to scan the water in either direction, as if mindful of pirates. Robin had never said anything to Frizer about pirates.
Frizer unfastens the master’s purse from his belt and tosses the whole of it to the boatman. ‘We are grateful. Truly.’
‘Get ye to land,’ the boatman says, shooing them. He pushes off with an oar, drifts backwards into the jasper-coloured water. Despite this warning, they sit and watch him float away across the wide, empty bend. Frizer’s heart thumps high in his chest. He feels a touch of giddiness. They have made it. They are safe! He turns to Marlowe, smiling, only to find him gazing across the water at the wild shore of the Isle of Dogs, as if contemplating the distance he would have to swim to reach it.
‘Perhaps they’ll be waiting for us at the house,’ Frizer says, to break the silence.
‘ “They”?’
Frizer groans. ‘Hell, Marlowe, “they” are my master and a few unhappy jades like myself who do his bidding.’ He loops the strap of his sack over his head and starts to crawl towards land. Above the waterline, he is finally able to stand without slipping, and looks back to find Marlowe seated with one leg dangling carelessly in the Thames, like a seal about to slide in.
‘Would you prefer to wait here for better help?’ Frizer says.
Marlowe’s shoulders rise and fall. Suspicion radiates out of his back. Frizer can hear himself breathing sharp liar’s breaths, biting down upon the unspoken, unspeakable name, Robin. He has lied so long, by this simple omission, that to confess now would be a bolt to the heart of whatever it is that he and Marlowe share. May it live a little longer, just a little longer, holding the venom of this lie in its mouth.
At last, Marlowe picks up his bag and begins the slippery climb with his head bowed. When he is two steps down Frizer pulls him to his feet. He looks like a drowned man back from the dead, the eyes deep-socketed, his face bloodless save for the purple wound above his eye, whip-stitched in black. ‘How is it with you?’ Frizer says.
‘Well. I’m well.’ He seems anxious to move on.
‘Wait.’
Frizer pulls him close. On the stairs, he is almost as tall as Marlowe, tall enough to wrap both arms around his neck and look past his head at the swift river, a muscular, serpentine thing, carving the land with its flanks. A thought surfaces and gradually grows louder: What will come after this? He has no idea. This may be the last moment they are ever alone. This may be the last moment they are ever, even briefly, safe.
‘Do you trust me?’ Frizer says.
Marlowe says nothing. He presses his face into the side of Frizer’s neck, and there remains a second or two, breathing him in, before pulling away.
At the top of the stairs, they emerge behind a boarded-up victualling house and then onto the green with the ship embedded at its centre, which Robin had showed Frizer two nights ago. ’Tis somehow even more absurd by daylight, but Marlowe seems wholly uninterested in the ship, looking towards the row of grey, keystone-shaped houses on the far side of the grass. He seems to know precisely where they are going: the one on the end, with three horses waiting at the post.
‘You’ve been here before?’ Frizer says.
‘In another life.’ Marlowe is quiet a moment. ‘Walsingham told you to bring me here?’
‘Ay, of course he did! What’s the matter?’
‘This is a Privy Council house.’
‘So is the house of Walsingham.’
Marlowe grunts. ‘Fair enough.’
He takes a breath before starting off across the grass, leaving Frizer skipping to keep up. At the fence, Marlowe recognizes the master’s horse even before Frizer does, murmuring, ‘Thomas!’ as he hurries to the door. A symbol has been branded into the timber lintel, which Frizer had not noticed the other night: a black bull, in full charge.
Marlowe knocks. Twice. At last, a woman answers, dressed head to toe in mourning black, a bottle of some yellowish liquid in hand. She looks like a portrait of the Queen from the neck up, a netted wig, Bess-red, set far back on her head; the eyebrows plucked almost to nothing, so that there seems scant difference between skin and bone. There’s something familiar in her high cheekbones, her dimpled, almost masculine chin.
‘Master Marlowe,’ she says, and curtseys. She makes a brief yet thorough study of his appearance. ‘Somewhat taller than I remember you.’
Marlowe bows. ‘Madam Bull.’
‘’Tis Widow Bull now, dear boy.’ She lifts the bottle. ‘Hold out your hands.’
She rinses both their hands in vinegar. They then follow her into a corridor which stretches unnervingly far into the house’s depths, towards a mouth of daylight. Marlowe drags his fingers along the side of a staircase, his own shadow trailing after him as if he had dipped his fingertips in it. A quiet panic seizes Frizer by the chest, throwing into doubt every decision he has made since Sunday night, when Robin had first brought him here. But ’tis too late to turn back, later still with every step.
The corridor ends at a dining room containing an over-large ebony table and little else. Two men bolt to their feet as Marlowe halts at the threshold: the master and Nick. Robin, smiling, keeps to his seat.
The master looks so pale, Frizer wonders if he will faint. But suddenly he darts forward, clipping Marlowe in a forceful, unreciprocated embrace. Frizer bows low, dodging Robin’s steady gaze, though ’tis not for him. Only Marlowe.
‘God be praised!’ the master says. ‘Kit, forgive me, I knew nothing until two hours ago.’
‘What is he doing here?’ Marlowe snarls. He shoulders past the master, exposing Frizer to the room.
The master stammers, ‘Kit… There are some things I cannot accomplish on my own. I have not such power as I used to have.’
‘Yet you have power enough to engage “the vilest of all two-legged creatures” in my affairs.’ Marlowe fills a cup with wine; drinks greedily.
‘Now, be not ungrateful. Master Poley is here as a free agent. There is no man whose expertise is more useful to ye—’
‘’Tis not necessary to defend me, Master Walsingham,’ Robin says. ‘I take no offence at the epithet, Master Marlowe. I earned it from the man who gave it to me. You, however, I should think might owe me some modicum of gratitude, given the many risks I have taken on your behalf of late. My superiors are most exasperated with me.’
‘All this time,’ Marlowe growls. ‘Thomas, why did you never tell me?’
The master and Robin speak at once, but ’tis only Robin’s voice that Frizer hears: ‘Had he told you, would it have made any difference?’
‘Did you know, Thomas, that he has been at the Marshalsea?’ Marlowe says. Robin leans forward in his chair, starting to speak again, but Marlowe goes on, ‘Did you know he was there, at Topcliffe’s side, while Thomas Kyd was being racked!’
‘Enough, now!’ the master says, pounding the table. ‘Enough!’
Marlowe’s look of betrayal splits into an eerie grin, a laugh. When he looks up his gaze alights on Frizer, and there is admonition in his stare, perhaps even accusation, at which the fist in Frizer’s belly tightens around some buried doubt.
‘I would have you come and talk with me outside, Kit,’ the master says.
Marlowe is already refilling his cup. ‘Only if I may sit.’
‘Be not such a child. Come with me.’
No, no, no, Frizer begs them, silently. Do not leave me here! But they are already moving towards a corridor at the back of the room wherein Widow Bull has also vanished, one direction leading to a garden door and the other, perhaps, to the kitchens. Through the wide, glazed window, Frizer sees them enter the high-walled garden from the right and, like puppets, pass straight across in tight, earnest conversation, slipping out of view at the other side.
Frizer lets out a breath. He shuffles into the room with his eyes down, conscious of Nick’s open-mouthed smile, which seems to hover, with a kind of anguish, upon some suddenly forgotten remark he had planned to make. The moment Frizer sits, he shall fall weeping upon the table. For everything will be known, sooner or later. He cannot conceal that which his entire body betrays. Likely Nick is blind to it, as he’s always been, but Robin surely knows. The instant Frizer entered this room, Robin could see Marlowe on his skin, in his mouth, in his walk. It may even be a relief to hear Robin accuse him out loud, for such would set the globe right upon its stand. The world thus restored, he could, perhaps, restore himself too. Yes, he’ll say, he knows the enemy, even when the enemy is himself; he agrees with all his heart that its destruction must be total, merciless, and will do his duty as would any loyal subject, any good Christian… And somehow, through enough nodding of his head, make himself so holy that he needs must be pardoned.
The chair gives out a squeak on the floorboards as Frizer sits, but otherwise no one makes a sound, not even Nick, whose look of ready merriment has sunk into the plate of sweating cheese before him.
Across the table, Robin reclines in his chair, arms folded. His gaze is remote as always, yet not disinterested; the gaze of a spectator, looking down from on high. ‘Master Skeres,’ he says, with an inclination of his chin, ‘I would not rob you of the pleasure of delivering Master Frizer the good news.’
‘Ingram!’ Nick licks his fingers, suddenly rosy. He takes a pause so long that Frizer cannot find his voice when at last he thinks to look for it. Nick sniggers at his distress, and finally proclaims, ‘’Tis a girl!’
Kit follows Walsingham to a stone bench on the far side of the garden. It faces in the direction of Greenwich, or where the view would be, were it not obscured by leafy walls that stand a foot taller than Kit himself. Eight years ago, this garden had lain deep in snow, from which oxblood roses bloomed and naked fruit trees shivered. But the roses and trees are gone now. There were children before, too: two boys and a baby girl. While the older boy and Kit threw snowballs, Baines had sat on this bench with the younger one upon his knee, making coins seem to appear from behind the child’s ears. Master Bull had entered the garden from the back door, taken one long, stiff look at the scene, and ordered the children up to bed.
The bones in Kit’s side seem to realign as he sits. Still, there’s the headache, somehow worse today than it was yesterday, and a sore spot on his cheek where Frizer had struck him.
‘What have they done to you?’ Walsingham says, standing over him.
Kit finishes the wine, feels momentarily sick. He starts to take off his waterlogged boots. ‘Does Frizer know who he is?’
Walsingham kicks idly at the dandelion heads, something petulant in his demeanour. ‘I am quite certain he does not, not that it matters.’
‘You told him not to tell me?’
‘That was Poley’s idea. And can you blame him? Marry, I am not fond of the man either, but I know how to manage him, Kit – as my uncle did, with gold.’
Kit briefly considers throwing one of his boots at him. ‘Manage him? You think that’s what Sir Francis did? Manage him?’
‘Yes, in the sense that Poley served his damned purpose, as you and I served ours! I’faith, I never took you for such a holy idiot – is it not hypocrisy of the highest order for the judge, or the bailiff, to hate the executioner?’
This sounds like something Walsingham must have heard somewhere and thought very clever. Kit peels off his wet stockings and stretches out his legs, feeling like a scolded boy, barefoot in the grass. Walsingham has been right before, after all. How many times has Kit misjudged a man and suffered for it?
A terrifying thought arises: what, then, is he to think of Ingram Frizer?
No. No, he will not look behind that door.
‘Circumstances being as they are,’ Walsingham says, ‘Poley has arranged for you to leave tomorrow.’
‘And where am I to go?’
‘Brittany, I believe.’
‘The army?’ Kit could laugh, had he the heart.
‘It is the best place for you, Kit. Luckily, Sir John Norreys has requested fresh troops, and the Queen capitulated. The first hundred men set sail tomorrow. Poley has assured me that you’ll be among them.’
Kit tries to imagine himself boarding a ship, dragging his heavy, sea-drunk legs through the sand on some alien beach, making camp in the mushroom-smelling woods. He can no more imagine it now than he could eight years ago.
‘I am no soldier, Thomas,’ he says.
‘Nay, you are not!’ Walsingham agrees. ‘But take heart: desertion is so commonplace nowadays that they’ve ceased to hang men for it. It should be little trouble for you to slip away at the first opportunity…’ He trails off, as if considering something anew. ‘And, as you know, a deserter’s best hope of surviving is to join the enemy. I have no doubt that they would take you in at the seminary in Rheims, if you can find your way there. Strapping fellow like you, with your learning, and your Latin – hell, you ought to have joined the seminarians ages ago!’
Kit feels another urge to laugh, though his throat will not permit it. He would sooner die, is all he can think. Just let me die.
‘As for myself,’ Walsingham goes on, ‘I will be at Whitehall tomorrow, for the Council meeting. I know not whether they’ll let me in, but I suppose I might stall them a little in any case. Give you time to set sail.’ He sits, a posture which it seems the confines of his courtly attire will barely permit, leaving him listing awkwardly to one side, flicking his gloved fingertips. ‘So, that’s all, then.’
Clearly, he means the opposite. ‘Is it?’ Kit says.
Walsingham shakes his head, more anxious by the moment. ‘God’s blood, Kit! I asked you – two weeks ago, I asked you whether there was anything you had not told me—’
‘Thomas—’
‘I asked you what it was, this fearful secret that Baines knew but I did not! Had you told me then… I know not, but I wonder whether we would be here now. Perhaps I might have done something much sooner.’
Kit snorts. ‘You would have had me killed!’ He expects Walsingham to laugh, but looks over to see his lips quivering, eyes welling with tears.
‘I know,’ Walsingham rasps, ‘I know you are not evil, Kit. I know that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Kit says, without knowing what he is sorry for.
‘I like ye. I do, God help me. Some days, I think I like ye better than I ever did Tom. I loved him, of course, but you know how unequal those things can be, liking and loving. He had a tyrant’s heart, he did. Give him an army and he would have declared himself king!’ He laughs, fondly, distantly, and yet looks almost ashamed. ‘You have a gentle heart. I knew, even in the beginning, that this was why he chose you: you have a gentle heart, and I do not. Whatever you may have said… all these vicious things, I know you have said them. I believe it. Because you are a boy, and boys can be vicious, it does not make them evil. You are a boy, and you are so lost – I have seen you – I have seen you crawl inside a tiger’s mouth for want of warmth, again and again. It breaks my heart.’
It seems right for Kit to take his hand. To comfort him, as he’d used to do, in the months after Walsingham had returned from the Marshalsea. Kit’s nervous eyes alight on Tom’s ring, glinting between Walsingham’s fingers. The running hare. He feels an inexplicable sense of peril, like a gun to the back of the head.
‘Well.’ Walsingham lets out a long breath, looking up and out at the world as if straining to reacquaint himself with it. ‘All will be well. These days will soon be over.’
Something in these words conjures Frizer like a ghost – for Kit and he are strangers who inhabit separate countries, are they not? It has ever been thus, from the moment they’d first met. They are seaborderers, swimming towards doom.
It seems that a string running down the centre of Kit’s body comes unwound.
‘Master Frizer told me you were hurt,’ Walsingham says, looking him over. ‘He said that there were two assailants, but by the state of ye I would say more.’
Kit almost laughs, wondering whether he should tell Walsingham what really happened in the attic of the Black Bull; never mind the shame of it, he is plenty humbled already. Not that he would know how to say it. They did such-and-such to me. ’Tis an additional humiliation to speak of what was done to oneself, to become a mere instrument, a bowstring that was pulled back, a cup that was smashed, having no say nor power over its own use. Women, things are done to them. Frizer was done to. But women are weak; Frizer was a child. A man should need some other excuse, should he not? Had he been stabbed or shot, there would be no need. A beaten man is not the same as a raped one.
Kit turns his head a little one way and something heavy, half-liquid, seems to sway inside his skull, like wine settling in a skin. ‘Perhaps I am not the fighter I once was.’
Walsingham blows through his lips. ‘You never were a fighter. You are a lodestone for violence. That is not the same thing.’
That unstrung feeling has not left. It only worsens. A final thread frayed, snapped.
Walsingham’s hand alights on Kit’s shoulder and then awkwardly runs up and down his arm, as if to rub the feeling back into it. Still Kit is all but numb to his touch, as small within himself as is a seed to the earth. Is it too soon to be weary? He is suddenly impossibly weary. He could let his chest grow heavier until his lungs have not the strength to lift it; he could lie here on the ground until the grass grows right through him.
‘Stop crying, Kit,’ Walsingham says. ‘When I leave here tonight, I shall not see ye again, and this is not how I wish to remember you.’
‘Ingram, I could not tell ye before,’ Nick says. ‘The time was not right. But be contented: Betsy is well and so was the babe, when I saw them last. Little chaff-headed poppet, she is. Looks just like you—’
‘When you saw them?’ Frizer sits with his forearms flat against the table, in an effort to steady the world. ‘How many days ago? How many!’
Nick looks to Robin, who merely raises his eyebrows.
Nick counts on his fingers. ‘A week ago.’
Frizer hides behind his hands. He would like to cry out to God, to beg and plead, as though something dear to him beyond measure had been stolen. But he is a fool, of course; he has fooled himself. He has lived these past few days as if locked inside a room with no windows, a room afloat in time. Within that room, there was no other light but Marlowe.
‘How could you not tell me, Nick?’ he croaks, shaking his head.
‘I wanted to,’ Nick says, looking hurt. His gaze darts towards Robin, again and again. ‘Had to bite my tongue, I did!’
Frizer’s head goes on shaking. All this time he has been a man with a child, a man with a daughter; he has been that man longer than whatever he is now – whatever he became, in the moment he laid his hands on another man’s body—
‘You knew this day would come,’ Robin says. ‘Yet you seem astonished!’
Frizer wipes his mind clean. His eyes alight on Robin’s hand around the pitcher, the space where the ring finger should be.
Robin empties the last drops of wine into a goblet. Sediment swirls in the bottom. ‘I suppose the first is always a shock,’ he says. ‘But you shall grow accustomed to the idea in time. That is the trick, my son. Children are but an idea until they grow big enough to either knock ye down or take a husband. The future – that is all that matters now.’
He leans back in his chair, glancing through the window. He then passes the goblet to Nick, who, with a reverent nod, delivers it to Frizer.
‘Have I done something wrong?’ Frizer murmurs.
Robin shrugs. ‘You tell me. You are a day early. You are harbouring a fugitive from justice. You aided and abetted a traitor.’
‘A traitor?’ Frizer sputters, breathlessly. ‘But, he is not—’
‘That is not for you and I to judge, is it?’ Robin says. ‘Better men than ourselves say he is a traitor. Who are we to question their wisdom?’
Frizer feels something crawl down his cheek, like a flea, and he wipes it away. ‘But we are going to help him, are we not?’ he says. ‘You are going to help him?’
Robin touches his fingertips together, in an attitude of pity. ‘Most traitors are given to the warden of the Marshalsea, for questioning. Have you heard of Dick Topcliffe, the warden of the Marshalsea? Your master certainly has. Perhaps you have heard whispers about his office at least. About the voids in the walls?’
Frizer shakes his head.
‘If you stand quietly within Master Topcliffe’s office, you will hear voices – voices, sometimes, of men who have been presumed dead for months or years. They are not spirits, of course. They hang from broken arms, stand on broken legs, in spaces so narrow one cannot shift an inch in any direction. Some go their way one day to the gallows, or even, if they are very lucky, to liberty. But some little fellows, you see, whose lives and deaths are of no real consequence to anyone – the accessories, the accomplices – they are not so fortunate. For, once they have shrieked out all the words desired of them, their keeper cuts out their tongues and seals them in until they stop making their unholy clamour altogether. I have overheard them myself, i’faith. Master Topcliffe swears ’tis the only way he can sleep through the night, hearing their speechless song. He calls it “the Hymn of the Blessed Kingdom”.’
Frizer swallows sick. Longing fills him, the impossible longing that he shall now awake in bed at the Inn-in-the-Wall, look down and see Marlowe’s head upon the pillow beside him, asleep. But a thought, half-image, half-impulse, cleaves through the longing like an axe-head: he sees his own hand press down on Marlowe’s face, as if to smear it out of existence. Frizer tries to shake away the thought. Yet it only grows more insistent, more violent, the features erased like chalk, smudged like paint, squeezed through his fingers like wet clay—
A heavy hand falls upon Frizer’s left shoulder and he flinches, only to find Nick looking on him with sympathy, shooting Robin a glance of quiet disapproval.
‘Master Poley is only trying to say that the situation is…’ Nick searches for a word, ‘changeable.’
In time, Poley excuses himself from the table and stands at the garden door, observing Walsingham and Marlowe with no attempt whatsoever at discretion, as if they were personages in a play and he an audience of one. Several times their eyes shoot daggers at him, and he smiles and nods in return.
Eventually they both rise, and each man turns another despising glance on Poley ’ere they appear to say their goodbyes. Walsingham bows his head and clasps Marlowe’s hand, clinging to him far longer than seems comfortable for either man. At last, he murmurs something, walks away. Marlowe stands barefoot in the grass, as still and straight as a fingerpost, as if he’d felt a breath behind his ear.
‘You’ll not stay for dinner?’ Poley says, as Walsingham reaches him. ‘My sister’s kidney pie is renowned.’
Walsingham sweeps past without a reply. Poley follows. In the dining room, Nick and Frizer bolt to their feet at their master’s entrance, the former with his mouth full, the latter dizzily, grasping the back of a chair for balance. Walsingham offers no final words to either of his men, simply charges down the corridor and out the front door, as if fleeing some embarrassing social blunder.
Poley finds him at his horse, yanking the saddle-strap as if he thought the beast’s suffering was the whole point. Somehow, Walsingham must have heard Poley coming, or seen him clear through the back of his head, for he mutters without looking, ‘It had better not be poison.’
Poley glances towards the house. Thankfully, no one has followed him. ‘Certainly not. Things must appear as if he were taken in the act of flight, if we want to avoid an inquiry. A bullet to the head will do, swift and sweet.’
‘Where is your pistol?’
‘Hidden away, of course. You would not have him get a look of it now, would you?’
Walsingham harrumphs. He fumbles with his gloves, as if unsure whether he had just now been taking them off or putting them on.
‘I’ll send your man Frizer to Greenwich when the deed is done,’ Poley says.
‘Send him to Whitehall.’
Poley blinks. ‘Whitehall?’
‘Ay.’
‘There’s no need for you to go to Whitehall.’
‘Whitehall is where I’ll be; to Whitehall you will send him.’
Poley throws a look to the sky, his mind spinning. The whole Council shall meet at Whitehall tomorrow, in the Star Chamber, a place where Walsingham has likely not set foot ever since the day they’d dragged him out of the Marshalsea. What in hell does he intend to do in Whitehall?
Walsingham also squints at the sky, just long enough to find the sun. ‘They say there will be an eclipse tomorrow, around midday. I may therefore keep time by the same clock in Whitehall as you do in Deptford. If, by the time the sun and the moon touch, I have not yet received confirmation that our business is finished, I will assume treachery, and shall proceed accordingly.’
‘ “Accordingly”?’
‘I will of course protect myself, Master Poley. You expect that.’
Poley forces a chuckle. Could Walsingham have got hold of Topcliffe somehow? When might it have happened – this morning, or last night even? Perhaps Topcliffe has been playing Poley all this time; perhaps he and Walsingham have struck some sort of deal behind his back; perhaps Topcliffe does not have the ring at all, indeed never had it—
‘The Council had an opportunity to hang me once already,’ Walsingham says, ‘and they did not take it. To hang one such as myself is a complicated thing, you see. But who are you, Robin Poley? What are you to anyone, dead or alive?’
Again, Poley laughs, as involuntary as a shiver. What is Walsingham mad enough to try? Would he report Poley for harbouring a fugitive? Have the Council send their men here, where they shall arrest all present, including Marlowe? No, he’d never dare. He is at Poley’s mercy, the silly popinjay, and seems too stupid to know it.
‘There’s no need for hostilities, Master Walsingham,’ Poley says. ‘I will send your man to Whitehall by midday.’ Still, he cannot resist. ‘What sort of confirmation shall I send? A finger, or an ear? Or would you prefer some other part of him, one that you could not fail to recognize?’
Predictably, this puts murder in Walsingham’s gaze. How fragile they are, these men; how delicious it is to stare down a muzzled dog! Poley could eat the hatred in those eyes.
Walsingham snarls, ‘If Marlowe is taken alive, I shall have nothing to lose, will I? You had best take account of all that you have to lose, Poley, material and immaterial. You presume I cannot take it from ye, but I can.’
Walsingham rides away towards the village. Poley watches him go, squinting to see which way he turns in the distance: left towards Greenwich, or right towards Southwark, the Marshalsea, Whitehall? But the door of Eleanor’s house opens and shuts, causing him to glance away for but a second, long enough for Walsingham to have vanished when he looks again.
He senses Nick Skeres’s bearlike bulk lumbering closer, breathing little whistles through the nose. ‘Why did you say all that to Ingram?’ Nick sounds genuinely perplexed, even sore.
‘What things?’
‘All that about Topcliffe, and the Marshalsea?’
Poley smirks, but the expression feels strange, as if it comes upon him in the absence of something else. ‘You worry too much for your friend, dear boy. He is a grown man, is he not?’
‘He is—’ Nick stammers, as if about to blurt out a thing that troubles him. ‘He’s not like you and me. All your stories have got him pissing himself.’
‘Master Frizer has never spent a single day of his life unafraid. Why should he start now?’
Nick shakes his head, his doughy face furrowed and severe. An unnatural look with him, it smacks a tad too much of mutiny. Mutiny, from the ever-loyal dog? Is it even possible?
‘I have something for you,’ Poley says, and reaches for his moneybag, emptying the contents into his palm. He picks out enough silver and copper to add up to the somewhat uneven sum of six pounds and sixpence, and hands it over as if his own generosity touched him slightly. ‘I must be off to attend John Penry’s hanging, I’m afraid. I’ll have the rest for you tomorrow.’
Nick looks either disappointed or baffled. Not the response Poley had hoped for. ‘Well. It shall be twenty-five altogether, no? Because if the master lands back in the naskin, I’ll need me a nest-egg…’
‘Oh yes. But I cannot very well carry twenty-five pounds on my person, can I?’
Still, Nick looks doubtful, staring at the coins in his palm. ‘And twenty for Ingram?’
‘Yes, yes, twenty for Master Frizer.’
‘And you?’
‘Me?’
Nick’s eyes narrow. ‘Master Walsingham’s paid you half already, ay? Twenty-five for me, twenty for Ingram, leaves just five pounds for you. But you’ll get something else, no? You’d not… do all this for five pounds!’
Poley puts on a cagey look, strained, perhaps, by the unexpected sensation as if a hand had reached straight through his spine, into his guts. What, indeed, if he has done all this for nothing?
‘Will you share the bounty with Topcliffe?’ Nick asks, too anxious to let silence hang.
‘Yes,’ Poley says, ‘of course.’ And if Nick has espied anything awry in Poley’s gaze, there’s no knowing, for Nick turns away at once, nodding like a man who is telling himself lies.
Poley walks Nick back to the house. Still, his gaze returns more than once to the distant domes of Greenwich, as if some perfect resolution shall appear in the eastern sky. At the door, he turns to look again, but this time his eyes alight upon the Golden Hind: decks bleaching in the sun, the remnants of tattered sails wagging in the breeze like pallid tongues, the bullet-riddled hull emitting daylight like a sieve.
It occurs to him that all along this ship has been a jest sitting in plain sight, one invisible to Marlowe himself – for it is, and has ever been, the only ship awaiting him in Deptford.