‘WHAT KEPT YOU SO long?’ Marlowe pulls Frizer into the room, bolts the door and puts his back against it. Inside it is as dark as a cell, and as close, reeking of whisky and of the piss in the piss-pot. One candle burns upon a little table, Marlowe’s bag slumped beside it, packed and ready.
Frizer has no excuse prepared. He can only whisper, ‘I’m sorry.’
Marlowe rubs his face in his hands, as if tempering himself. ‘Nay, but ’tis well. ’Tis dark now anyway. Better.’ He moves past Frizer towards the table, speaking with his back turned. ‘I must be gone before Poley comes back. Marry, I know not what he intends for me, but I trust him not. Neither do you. I’ve seen it in your face. The way you look at me, when he is near…’
Frizer lets out a strangled laugh. He wonders whether Robin knows, somehow, what he will do next, even before he knows it himself. Perhaps Robin has foreseen this very thought, and every thought that follows it. To Robin, Frizer is a simple creature. There’s no mystery, is there, in a frightened man?
‘Frizer,’ Marlowe says, turning to face him. ‘I do not care, do you understand? I care not that you lied. Whatever he has asked of you, it does not matter.’ He falls silent. Frizer can see him biting his tongue, the light quivering upon his eyes.
‘I want you to come with me,’ Marlowe says. ‘I know, I know it is much to ask of you; I know what you would leave behind. But if we could get as far as Dover, I have family there. And in Dover ’tis easier to steal one’s way onto a ship. There are some who do it week after week; every day there are hundreds crossing the Narrow Sea, back and forth. We could stir up a little gold somehow. I’ll borrow it or steal it; I’ll suck cock for it, I care not. But I will get us on a ship, one way or another. I will get us out of England.’ He lifts his long hands into a peak, fingers at his lips. ‘I want to see you away from this. I want to see both of us away from this!’
‘Away from what?’ Frizer rasps.
‘Everything – I know not – somewhere safe!’
‘But where is that, Marlowe?’ He could break into screams. ‘Where is that? Where is that?’
Frizer drops to his knees. He makes a shield out of his arms, hinges himself at the waist and rocks like a madman. ‘I tried to help you. I’m so sorry, I tried!’
Marlowe kneels with him. ‘Shh, I know you did. I know.’
‘I swear I knew nothing when I brought you here! I thought you would be on a boat tomorrow or the day after. I swear that’s what they told me!’
Marlowe grows still, as if feeling the bullet but not yet the wound.
‘Some man, some devil is coming for you tomorrow. From the Marshalsea. Robin means to sell you to him. If you try to leave, Nick is outside, guarding the door – he will stop you!’
The only response to this is silence. Frizer keeps his head down, blubbering sorries. He reaches out with one hand until it finds Marlowe’s knee, only to feel him abruptly shoot to his feet, hear his footsteps clamber away across the room. Frizer sobs aloud, into the floor. He is alone in a way that no other man is alone; there are thousands of miles between himself and the nearest living soul.
Marlowe should kill him. It would be a kindness, all things considered. Even Frizer is sick of himself, having lived all his life as if from a hole in the ground, vile even to his fellow worms. ’Tis an affront to the man he might have been that he lives as the creature he is now. For he is not a man at all. He is a dead boy.
‘Enough,’ Marlowe whispers, from the window. ‘He can hear you.’
Frizer holds his breath to stop crying.
‘Who told you all this?’
‘Nick.’
‘Him, down there?’
Frizer nods.
‘And you did not know before? You knew nothing at all?’
Frizer shakes his head.
‘Look at me. Say it.’
‘I cannot.’
‘Look at me,’ Marlowe growls.
At last, Frizer wipes his face on his sleeve and sits up. Marlowe has blown the candle out, opened the shutters. He seems to glow against the moonless night sky, looking as if he were in another room or another time altogether, long past.
‘They told me they would help you,’ Frizer says. ‘And I believed them! But… the Council has put up a bounty—’
Marlowe laughs. ‘A bounty?’ But his smile fades at once. ‘Did they promise you money?’
Frizer cannot speak.
‘How much?’
‘Twenty pounds.’
‘Ha!’ Marlowe cries, too loud, stopping his own mouth with a hand. He paces in and out of the light several times and then suddenly halts, the hand now dropped to his heart.
‘Is your master a part of this?’
Even before Frizer can answer, Marlowe turns pale.
‘I believed it,’ Frizer cries. ‘I believed it because I trusted him, because I thought he was your friend—’
‘Stop,’ Marlowe says. ‘Please, stop.’ He turns his back to the wall, doubles forward, slides down to the floor. Seconds pass wherein he only stares, then at last he wraps his arms about his knees, presses his face against them and lets out a muffled cry that shakes his body from head to foot.
Frizer watches, afraid to move. Marlowe could say anything just now and Frizer would believe it; he could order him to do anything and Frizer would do it. Whatever his word, it would be truer than God’s own truth, the kind of truth that could burn him alive just to hear it.
Gradually, Marlowe uncurls himself. He sits with his eyes downcast, barely blinking. ‘I never asked you, did I, if you would come with me?’ he says. ‘I never asked you what you wanted.’ He seems too calm, as if half-asleep.
Frizer shakes his head. ‘Marlowe, ’tis impossible.’
‘I know. You need not tell me that. But I had to—I had to say it.’ He lets his arms go slack, and then his legs. ‘I saw us. Imagined it, I mean. We were ten years older, and far from here. And we were happy. I wonder if that is not mad, to think we would be happy in ten years, you and I.’
Frizer has never considered it. He knows not how two men should live together, happily or unhappily, for years on end. Lodgers, they would be, as they were at the Inn-in-the-Wall, a temporary arrangement made indefinite. Every morning and every night, an agreement to stay on.
‘I do not think I can kill myself,’ Marlowe says, as if it is the worst of failures.
‘I’ll do it,’ Frizer says. ‘If you do it, I’ll do it with you.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you must live, Frizer.’
‘Why in hell should I live?’ He really would like to know. Why should a creature like himself exist, if Marlowe cannot?
Marlowe crawls across the floor, sits at Frizer’s side and draws him into an embrace that seems to swallow his body whole, enfolding him with both arms and legs, his eye damp against the crook of Frizer’s neck. Yet he gives no answer. No logical reason why Frizer should not simply die when he dies. Perhaps because there is no hope in any case – they are already lashed one to the other, and the further Marlowe sinks the higher the water reaches above Frizer’s head. It is no easy thing to surrender. To breathe in, and drown.
Frizer holds Marlowe’s head in both hands, pressing a kiss to his lips. But it is not enough. Marlowe’s kiss is unbearably patient, lingering, demanding in return that which it gives. A tyranny of tenderness. Frizer wants to bite into his face like an apple. Undo him, mouthful by mouthful. He wants to tear through this body and out the other side, like a trapped rat.
He grips Marlowe’s head by the hair, biting into his mouth, pulling his lip with his teeth. Marlowe tugs free and sputters, ‘What are you doing?’ but the world has shrunk to a single pinhole of light, like staring into the sun. Suddenly, Frizer is alone – alone and grappling with a body that seems startlingly smaller and weaker than his own, easy to overpower, to climb atop the hips. The arms begin to flail and Frizer catches them; the mouth is shouting but Frizer cannot hear the noise. With one hand, Frizer tries to hold both wrists above the head, with the other, he fumbles at his own belt, the flap of his breeches. From the ceiling, he watches himself: a child pinned down in the straw. A man pinning another man to the floor.
At last, Marlowe wrestles an arm free. He slams his elbow into the side of Frizer’s neck, drives a fist into his stomach. All the world turns white with pain. Frizer doubles over. Marlowe throws him off and then kicks him with his heels, skidding backwards across the floor. They lie in place, panting, Frizer hugging himself and whimpering like a dog.
Marlowe covers his eyes and shudders violently, as if about to sob. But he seems to shake the impulse away, snarling instead, ‘If you ever touch me like that again, I’ll kill you. I swear to God, I’ll kill you!’
Frizer paws towards him. ‘Marlowe,’ he murmurs, ‘forgive me, I know not what—’
Marlowe sits up out of his reach, holding his rib, his head. He lurches to his feet and limps to the window, looking out. The light passes through his shirt, revealing an outline of the body beneath it: lean, dark. Knife-shaped.
‘Is he still there?’ Frizer asks softly, afraid of his own voice.
Marlowe takes three steps backwards. He clears his throat and whispers, quieter than ever, ‘Ay. Looking straight up at me.’
He is perfectly still. And yet the very air around him seems to hum, like a cloud of flies.
‘Your friend,’ Marlowe says, ‘could he be enticed away from his post? Just for a few minutes?’
Only gradually does Frizer understand. ‘No. No, Marlowe, if I do anything that might look to them as if I helped you—’
‘Give him drink, then. He’ll have to step away at some point, for a piss.’
‘For a piss, Marlowe? How far do ye think he’ll go?’
‘I could run. I could try.’
Anger kindles behind Frizer’s ribs, as if at the impudence of an underling. ‘What then? Leap out the window? Run all the way to the sea? And what of me? What do you think they’ll do to me, with you gone? They’ll know I told you – they’ll kill me!’
To this, Marlowe says nothing. He rubs his skull in both hands, teeth bared. ‘My head. Oh God, my head…!’
Frizer sits up on his knees. ‘Please, Marlowe! You know you cannot run far. They will catch you. You’ll not get so far as Deptford Creek—’
‘I know!’
These words breathe life into an idea that Frizer has strived to suppress these many hours, one that he cannot put into words but has everything to do with this persistent image in his mind: of pressing down on Marlowe’s face until it collapses under his weight. Until it crumbles to dust.
‘What will you do?’ Frizer says.
Marlowe shakes his head. He seems to change his mind several times as to what he will say. ‘Do you love me?’
‘Of course,’ Frizer says. What else can he say?
‘Then help me. Help me one way or another, but do not let them take me!’
They huddle on the floor, Marlowe with his head against the windowsill, Frizer’s head resting on his thigh. Outside on the lawn, Nick sits so close beneath the window that he is like a third man in the room with them. When he clears his throat or snaps a twig in his fingers, the sound seems to come from just inches away. But he is quiet tonight. Unusually quiet.
What has he overheard? How much? If Frizer could get to him first, if he could explain, perhaps he could save himself, perhaps it is not too late…
Marlowe says, ‘You will look after my papers, no?’
‘I will.’
‘Your master will try to take them. I know him. But if he comes for them, tell him I said he can go and fuck himself. They belong to you.’ He seems to smile, but then falls into even deeper silence than before. Frizer holds his breath, feeling Marlowe holding his.
At last, Marlowe says, ‘My mother, and my sisters… they should know what’s become of me. But someone must go in person. Not to my father’s house, to my sister Mag – Margaret Jorden, she lives nearby – she will tell the others.’ His hand slides over Frizer’s shoulder, down across his ribs. ‘Will you go to Canterbury for me? Will you tell them?’
Robin Poley’s face has come to mind. If Frizer is to survive this, then soon he will have to lie. Soon there will come a time when someone will ask him straight-on about Marlowe – about whatever happened between himself and Marlowe, for it must be clear to anyone that something did – and Frizer will have to give an answer that makes sense, that requires little if any elaboration, and closes the matter once and for all.
He realizes that it shall be simplest to say that he detests Marlowe, always has, from the moment he’d laid eyes on him. That the very thought of him invokes a loathing so absolute, so passionate that he would spit, were it not better than the man deserved. No one would raise his eyebrow at that. Hatred is safe.
Frizer hugs him tighter. ‘Of course I will,’ he says. For there is no sense telling a dying man the truth.
Having drunk countless rounds to her Majesty’s health, Poley finally bids farewell to their lordships, his Holiness, and every smiling sycophant in their combined retinues, and stumbles out of the Thomas-a-Beckett Inn in broad, moonless night. A clear sky, littered with stars. A stiff breeze blows through the gallows square, squeaking a winch, scattering the stench of meat left too long in the sun.
Poley rides back to Eleanor’s house, grateful that at least his horse is sober. From his post by the front door, Nick pricks up like a watchdog at Poley’s approach, skulking up the path to meet him as he secures his horse.
‘They were fighting,’ Nick whispers, with a glance at the upstairs window.
‘Well. Did you look in on them?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I…’ Nick rubs at the back of his neck. ‘I know not what I heard, marry—’
‘All the more reason to go up and look. What, you were afraid? You dared not go up, for fear of what you might see?’
Nick’s face turns as red as a weal. ‘Are you drunk, Master Poley?’
‘Celebrating, Master Nick,’ Poley slurs. ‘John Penry’s hanging went quite according to plan – the Lord Keeper’s plan, that is; let us not speak of God’s. Rest assured, He looked down on us today.’ Poley starts towards the house, labouring to keep the swerve out of his step. ‘Be a good lad and water my horse. I’ll be at table.’
‘Perhaps you should sleep,’ Nick calls.
‘When I’m dead!’ Poley replies, the laziest of banalities, and yet it reminds him of the crunch of the knife through Penry’s bones, a sound he can feel in his teeth.
Inside, he fumbles his way down the narrow back corridor and into the hot, reechy kitchen, where Eleanor’s maids sleep huddled up in the straw. Quietly, Poley lights a taper from the smouldering hearth, returns to the dining room with his hand cupped around the flame. Having lit the candles, he goes to the cupboard for a bottle of wine, but when he turns again a face has appeared in the doorway, flush as a marigold. His own face, he thinks, for a horrified half-second. No: Ingram Frizer’s face.
‘You cannot sleep, Master Frizer?’ Poley says, pleasantly.
Frizer shakes his head. Those eyes have been crying.
Poley takes a second glass from the cupboard, offers a chair. ‘Join me. I am starved for company tonight. Hangings afflict me strangely – my tongue, rather, with such effluence of speech that I could drown a man in dry air talking about nothing at all! You do not mind, do you? I find you a most indulgent listener…’
Poley nattering on thus, Frizer sinks into the room as slowly as a drop of ink into still water, pulls out a chair and sits. He is unbuttoned, dishevelled, like a prisoner in sackcloth.
Poley pours him a drink. ‘Nick tells me you have committed some of Master Marlowe’s plays to memory. Is that so?’
Frizer fidgets with his fingernails.
‘What was the last play you saw, before the playhouses closed?’
Frizer mumbles, ‘It was about a Roman general… and a Moor… They cut off the daughter’s hands, and they cut out her tongue…’
But Poley takes no interest in this answer. ‘The last play I saw was by Master Marlowe,’ he says. ‘Edward II. You did not see it, did you?’
Frizer shakes his head.
‘Pity. I doubt you shall have another opportunity.’
‘I read it.’
Poley blinks, impressed. ‘You did?’
‘He… he let me read it.’ He is scratching something at the base of his throat: some sort of reddish mark, like a scrape. Or a scar.
Poley waits, but whatever Frizer has come here to say has evidently grown so large that it stops his mouth, burrowing out of his throat like a rat. ‘How is Master Marlowe?’ Poley asks, sipping his wine.
‘Asleep.’
‘He does not know that you are here with me?’
Frizer answers him not, scratching away.
‘Master Frizer, have you spoken with Master Skeres about tomorrow?’
Frizer exhales a sound as if he will cry, but instead a deathly blankness comes over his eyes. Damn Nick! Poley should never have trusted him to keep his gob shut around Frizer, his beloved ‘little brother’. There’s no undoing it now. Anyway, Frizer would not be here had he any intention of resisting what’s to come, would he? Suppose he might have come upon Poley now, by dark of night, with some madcap notion of stabbing him to death and putting an end to it all… But that is not in the boy’s nature, is it? Ingram Frizer is no killer.
‘Have you spoken with Master Marlowe?’ Poley asks, sweetly.
‘No. But he knows. I did not tell him. But he knows something is, something is wrong.’ The Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. ‘He was going to stay awake, in case Nick should step away, but he fell asleep. He was going to run. He still… wants to run.’
‘Ah.’ Poley smiles, though his every nerve swells with anger. Of course, the gutless brat is lying; obviously he has told Marlowe everything. Poley never told Babington the truth, but he wonders now what might have happened if he had, in one of those moments when he’d wanted to, desperately. Perhaps he would have eventually found himself in the Spymaster’s office, just as Frizer sits here now, insisting, Nay, I never told him anything, I swear! Could anything be more wretched, more cowardly? Sir Francis would have had Poley’s neck snapped out of sheer disgust!
‘Stay here,’ Poley says. He finishes his drink, leaves the room perfectly sober. At the door he pauses to look outside, just long enough to stab a furious glance into Nick’s worried eyes, and then turns upstairs, down the corridor to the room where Eleanor lies abed. He squats at her bedside – pausing to examine her face, for he knows how women feign sleep – then reaches under the bed, towards a glint of light on metal, muscular and viscid, like a heart: his pistol.
Sunlight beats through Kit’s eyelids. ’Tis so bright he cannot peel his eyes open; they are gummed shut with light as if with blood. He has slept upright, his head craned back on the windowsill, his neck stiff. Half-blind, he tries to move but his legs are asleep and he tumbles into the wall, striking a sore spot on the back of his head.
Frizer is no longer beside him.
‘Frizer?’ Kit murmurs, to the room. No answer comes.
Kit pulls himself up to the window ledge by his elbows. The sun has only just summited distant Greenwich Hill, a grim, carnelian disk floating in a sallow haze of smoke. Gulls roost atop the Golden Hind’s masts like pole-sitters. Directly below Kit’s window, a stool stands empty by the front door, a horn mug overturned in the grass beside it.
‘Frizer!’ Kit struggles to his feet. ‘He’s gone!’ But he can see that the room is empty ere he has finished speaking. The bed is unslept-in, the curtains untouched; his bag lies on the table where he’d left it.
Frizer is gone. Gone, and did not wake him.
Kit deserves this. Hypocrite that he is, he deserves this. For he is no sceptic, not as he has always pretended to be – he is a beast of Faith, its willing slave, created out of credulous clay for the sport of ill-intentioned men. Who would pity such an animal?
But no, there’s no time for despair. Kit spins around foolishly, as if Frizer shall suddenly appear, having been here from the start, invisible: Look at me, Marlowe; can you not see me? Frizer’s head upon his thigh, his slow, soft breathing. That shall have to be the end of it. Kit feels buried in time, the seconds heavy upon his chest, moving too slow, far too slow. It should not have ended like this. But the end comes how it will.
He grabs his bag, throws open the door and sprints for the stairs. He can outrun the fat man if necessary, head south into the hills past Blackheath, take cover in the Kentish hedgerows, keep running until the land runs out underfoot, and then swim, and drown when he can swim no more.
Even from atop the stairs, he senses that the front door hangs open below. He can hear birds, see the fan of daylight on the ceiling. But the moment the door comes into view, Kit halts.
Frizer stands upon the threshold, a rigid wooden doll. The world beyond him is calm, bright, callously ordinary: a low tidal thrum, a distant ship’s bell, sparrows and gulls.
Fresh tear-trails cut through the faint tarnish of soot on Frizer’s face, a bright drop clinging to his jaw.
A hard object touches the back of Kit’s skull.
‘You may close the door now, Master Frizer,’ Poley says.
Kit drops his bag. Darkness shunts across his eyelids, and the latch clicks.
Poley says, ‘ “Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, for where we are is Hell,
And where Hell is must we ever be.” ’
Metal presses harder into the back of Kit’s head, urging him to descend. ‘Faustus is my favourite of your works,’ Poley goes on. ‘But I could speak you a bit of Tamburlaine too, if you put drink in me.’
Kit has naught but a scream between his ears, and therefore says nothing.