ROBIN PRESSES MARLOWE INTO a seat at the dining table. Widow Bull, her raw face scrubbed clean of paint, stands in the corner by the garden door, shouting. Several seconds pass before Frizer understands her words: ‘Nay, put it away! I’ll not have that thing drawn in my house!’
She means the pistol. Robin approaches her and stands close, speaking mollifying words, the gun’s aim alighting, as if by chance, against her heart. Marlowe sits with his head bowed, his knee jumping under the table. Something nudges Frizer from behind and he turns to see Nick lurching into the room, Marlowe’s bag slung over his shoulder. His gaze is brief, yet baleful.
‘Master Frizer,’ Robin calls.
Widow Bull has fled the room. Robin indicates the chair at the head of the table, the one with the window behind it. The pistol wags in his hand like a switch.
Frizer drifts forward. Beads of sweat run down his scalp, the back of his neck. When he arrives at the head chair, he understands not one word of what is said to him, but Robin takes his wrist and wedges the grip of the pistol into his limp hand, moulds his fist around the dog and slides it back with an icy click—
‘No no no no no no,’ Frizer sputters. ‘I cannot, I nay—’
Robin turns him down into the chair like a screw, shushing him.
‘No, no, no—I pray you—’
Robin wrenches Frizer’s arms up off the table, smacks the underside of his fists, twists his shoulders until the barrel is aimed directly at Marlowe’s head.
Robin points. ‘You keep that on him.’ A slap jolts Frizer in the middle of his back. His arms quiver at the weight of the gun. Its smell is like the taste of sickness, the taste of blood coughed up. Beyond the end of the barrel, Marlowe looks on him in rapid, sidelong glances, vibrating as he breathes, opening and closing his eyes. As if to say to himself, This is happening now. This is no dream.
‘Now then.’ Robin moves to the chair across the table from Marlowe. With one hand, he upends Marlowe’s bag, dumping the contents. Sheaves of paper slap onto the floor. He sits. It seems he is about to say one thing, but after a moment of consideration, changes his mind. ‘I would like to know something, before we go forward.’
Frizer realizes that Robin is looking directly at him, his close-lipped sneer scornful, betrayed. He knows. He must know.
But he speaks to Marlowe instead. ‘What was it that inspired you to run?’
Frizer blurts out, ‘I told you he just said it, he just said it out of nowhere—’
‘I asked Master Marlowe.’ Robin shrugs at him. ‘What planted the idea in your head?’
Marlowe’s attention hovers on a corner of the ceiling, as if he is gazing down upon this scene from that vantage. His lips move but no words escape, only a high breath of pain, a kind of laugh.
Robin sighs through his nostrils. He sits back in his chair and looks from Marlowe to Frizer and back again, his bloodshot eyes anatomizing, stripping flesh from bone. It seems he will speak venom, but suddenly he throws his head back into a great yawn, at the tail end of which he murmurs, into his fist, ‘Complications!’
Frizer flinches as Widow Bull bangs into the room, accompanied by two serving-girls carrying bread and wine and a wedge of white, watery cheese. All business ceases while the women are present, fluttering around the table in their starched skirts, as silent as ghosts. Marlowe turns his cheek on the widow as she leans in to pour out a sputter of dark red wine, only a portion of which finds its way into the goblet. When finished she backs away, nearly scoops her two maids off the floor, and retreats into the rear of the house.
‘What happens now?’ Marlowe rasps.
Robin seems to deliberate upon this question at length, like a judge upon a plea for clemency. ‘We wait.’
‘How long?’
‘Not long. They shall come before midday, I expect.’
‘And then what?’
‘What’s to come for you, I cannot say. I can tell you what is happening upriver at Whitehall, as we speak: the clerk of the Star Chamber is reading Richard Baines’s letter aloud before an audience of thirteen sober gentlemen, all seated around their big table like teeth around a tongue. Thirteen noble fellows fuming and sweating and twisting their handkerchiefs, as they silently ponder what sort of fate is deserved by the creature the letter describes. Should they make an example of him? Should they bury him, like a witch-bottle, where he may do no more harm? Do they dare hang him – invite him to the stage, for a final turn?’
Robin pauses, as if in hope that Marlowe might pronounce sentence upon himself, but Marlowe is silent, head bowed. Frizer can see the blood leaving his face.
‘They say you are the Devil himself,’ Robin goes on.
Marlowe grunts. ‘They flatter me, then.’
‘Is it flattering to you?’
‘I prefer it over the alternative.’
‘Over being mistaken for God?’ Robin chuckles.
Marlowe half-smiles, as if at some interior jest. ‘Over being taken for a good Christian man,’ he says. ‘A “godly” man. I would fain rather be the Devil than that.’
Robin seems unsettled. He makes a casual, aimless scan of the papers to his right. ‘I assure you, Master Marlowe, you are in no danger of being mistaken. Certainly not by anyone in this room.’
‘Is the Word of God so weak that it needs defending from the likes of me?’ Marlowe sits forward. ‘A coward, is your God. A fainting, cringing coward, just like your Queen, that hateful crone. She and your God are the same, so jealous of their reputations that they would rather drown this world in blood than admit to their own weakness—’
Nick murmurs, ‘I think you’d better stop him, Master Poley—’
But Marlowe goes on. ‘Tyrants they are, and like all tyrants, cowards, just like the Pope and his horde of slathering pederasts, just like the hypocrite Puritans penning their miserable screeds! And what do they fear, these tyrants, what do they all fear, but that some enterprising wight shall tear the mantle off their fraudulence? Why do they kill, why does any man kill, except he is afraid, afraid of his own death? Even God, the coward, slaughterer of His own children, He is afraid to die because He knows He can, just like His ministers, just like that bloody-minded hag in Greenwich – I spit on her, I shit on your God, I’ll see them both in hell!’
‘Shut your cursed mouth!’ Nick bellows. ‘Shut it or I’ll shut it for ye!’
Marlowe falls silent. His body is rigid, his head bowed as if to the axe.
Robin clears his throat. Frizer meets his cold eyes, lifts the drooping pistol and obediently aims it at Marlowe’s cheek.
‘Well,’ Robin says, to Marlowe, ‘perhaps you are the Devil.’
‘Perhaps I am,’ Marlowe says. ‘Had you rather not take a little care with how you use me, in that case?’
‘I do not like this, Master Poley,’ Nick says.
Robin holds out a hand to shush him. A smirk pulls at Robin’s lips, doubtful yet curious, as if pressed into a game he knows to be rigged. ‘I suppose we had better establish some proof, then. Convince me you are the Devil. Show me your power.’
In the air between Robin and Marlowe there comes a charge, like the smell that lingers after lightning strikes close. Frizer senses his own lips moving: Please, please, please, please. No voice, still the silence echoes with his begging, a soft patter like rain on a windowsill.
He should put the barrel under his own chin, and pull the trigger.
‘Master Frizer has spent a full ten days in your company,’ Robin says, flinging a gesture in his direction. ‘He looks much the worse for wear, does he not, Master Skeres?’
Frizer must squeeze his eyelids to see Nick, leaned into the doorjamb with his hands knotted into the small of his back, his expression grave.
‘I never saw Ingram thus,’ Nick mumbles.
‘Ten days with the Devil!’ Robin proclaims with satisfaction, as if he’s only just thought of a good title for a play. ‘And surely it was Master Marlowe’s diabolical influence that brought you to this wretched state? Surely ’twas he that has made you weak?’
‘I never said,’ Frizer gasps, his mouth almost too dry to speak, ‘I never said w-weak—’
‘It hardly matters now, does it?’ Robin speaks over him. ‘Little harm has been done. If I were to ask you to pull that trigger just now, Master Frizer, you would not hesitate, is’t not so?’
Frizer’s head sweeps back and forth, no, though the word will not come to his tongue.
‘Is’t not so?’
‘Ay,’ Frizer croaks. ‘’Tis so!’ He sinks towards the table, but Robin snaps his fingers, starting him upright. Marlowe’s eyes are clenched shut, as if awaiting the shot. Praying for it, perhaps. Last night, before Frizer had crept downstairs to meet with Robin, he’d had an opportunity to end this. Marlowe had slept so deeply that only his breath betrayed the life in him. Then and there, Frizer should have killed both Marlowe and himself. He should have cut Marlowe’s throat while he was sleeping, he should have stabbed himself through the heart.
Robin rises from his chair. He approaches Frizer with his hand held out, fingers beckoning. ‘Give it to me, now.’
Frizer hesitates. He could kill Robin, this very instant – that would put an end on it – aim the barrel straight up at his face and watch it disappear… or miss, or fumble, and undo himself utterly.
He surrenders the gun, lays his head on his arms and heaves bruising, vile sobs, choking on his own breath, his own snot. There is naught to do now but preserve himself.
‘He is a monster!’ Frizer wails. ‘Nay but he’s the Devil himself! I swear it! On my soul, I swear it!’
Through the window, ivy leaves glisten, scale-like, along the garden walls, rattled by a sluggish rain. Widow Bull stands in a pool of pecking chickens, scattering corn from her pockets. At some point, she stoops down, gathers the fattest bird into her arms. For a minute or two, she only stands there, stroking seed-pearls of rain from the bird’s back; and then, with one motion, takes the hen’s neck in her fist and flings its body backwards over her arm, dead.
Inside, Robin reads Hero & Leander. Aloud. Frizer lays his head upon the table, his hands over his ears. Robin’s mouth, Robin’s tongue jawing at the words feels like a violation, ‘delicious’ gliding off into a forked hiss that slithers coldly down Frizer’s spine.
‘Exquisitely lewd,’ Poley remarks.
‘Fit for the privy of a bawdy house!’ Nick adds.
Marlowe says nothing at all.
The spatter of raindrops on the glazing gradually fades.
‘ “It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate,
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin
We wish that one should lose, the other win;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots, like in each respect.
The reason no man knows: let it suffice,
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight;
Whoever loved, that loved not at first—” ’
A knock resounds down the corridor. All present hold their breaths and listen. Nick starts upright, his head swivelling to Frizer, Robin, the front door. ‘Is that them?’ he says, prematurely relieved.
Robin shrugs with his head, looking at Marlowe as he says, ‘Let’s see.’
He leaves the room. Widow Bull, having just set the leftovers of yesterday’s pie upon the table, picks up her skirt and flees into the back of the house. Nick turns and drifts halfway down the corridor, hands at his sides. Marlowe and Frizer are momentarily unobserved: Marlowe with his eyes closed, his face so drained of blood that even his lips are white.
He might have destroyed Frizer today with a word. Instead, he has destroyed himself. It cannot be out of love that he has done this. To love Frizer, Marlowe would have to forgive him, and Frizer has done an unforgivable thing. Perhaps he pities him. A miserable thing, pity, and yet to have even so little from Marlowe would be like manna. One word from his lips, if ’tis the right one, would mean absolution.
‘I’m sorry,’ Frizer rasps, the sound barely escaping him. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—’
‘Shut your God-damned mouth.’
The reddened eyes meet Frizer’s just long enough for him to feel their heat, and then drop. Regret? Despair? He knows not what he sees in Marlowe, only that it is at the end, nothing will come after it.
Marlowe draws in a stiff breath, sighs. ‘You cannot save yourself this way, you poor fool. They have you forever now.’
Poley hesitates, his hand on the doorlatch. He can see Dick Topcliffe’s face even through the door. That doggish, sneering mouth. Wine-stained lips and teeth.
Now, little bird, let us see whether we can find your cunt.
Poley opens the door with his eyes closed. But there is no Topcliffe at all waiting for him, only a boy of twelve or thirteen, strawberry-cheeked, a rim of sweat around his hat. A blue-eyed pony stands snorting in the grass behind him, the reins dangling loose down its neck.
‘From Whitehall,’ the boy says, and for one moment Poley anticipates a bullet through the forehead. He is handed a letter he has never seen before, though it is sealed with his own customary bolt, written in his very own handwriting:
Alas, my poore syster is sicke & I pray you come not to visit her, come straight to my house at sunrise & bringe with you the physick you promised.
Poley turns the letter over and back like an idiot marvelling at a shard of mirror. On the reverse, a postscript is inscribed in another hand altogether, hidden along a crease:
Where is Dicke Topcliffe, Robyn?
The second hand is Thomas Walsingham’s.
Poley startles himself, and the boy too, by laughing aloud, though that reliable armour is of no comfort to him now. ’Tis more like a twinge, a tic, rearing up rampant and bare-arsed whether he would have it or no, his lips pulled back so wide that he imagines his skull will slide out if they open any wider.
‘Any reply?’ the boy squeaks.
Poley lets the air out of his laughter with a groan, raises his hand and settles it upon the boy’s shoulder. A little weed of a thing, where did Walsingham find him? Some minister or secretary’s nephew? A sluttish stable-hand? Poley would like to bite off his nose and spit it into the grass.
Instead, he squints up at the sky, and the lad turns to squint with him. From this angle the sun cannot be seen.
‘Tell me,’ Poley says, ‘has the eclipse begun yet?’
The front door slams, making Frizer jump in his seat. After a little pause, Robin re-enters the dining room at a speedy clip, alone, letting out a horsey huff of breath. ‘It seems we have a little wait ahead of us.’
Nick baulks. ‘Look, I’ve been up all damned night!’
‘Well, it would appear that Master Topcliffe is preoccupied with the session at Whitehall at the moment. Another hour or two, at the most.’ Robin had previously arranged Marlowe’s papers into several stacks around his place at the table. He now stands fuming over his work, like a cook before a feast that he’s only just learned shall go uneaten.
Nick says, ‘Marry, I’ll need a rest before long, and a piss—’
‘He’ll be here before suppertime!’ Robin snaps, and then follows it with a graceless chuckle, rubbing at his temples. He takes up Marlowe’s bag and digs through it, turning up a cut quill and an inkpot; takes a sheet of paper from one of the piles – a page of Hero & Leander, perhaps, or Tamburlaine, or Edward II – and hastily scribbles out a message on the verso without sitting down or giving the ink time to dry.
Again, he leaves, and is gone less than a minute ere he charges back into the room, snapping his inky fingers at Nick. ‘Get him up. We’ll go outside. There’s an eclipse today, you know. A rare sight.’
Nick takes a nervous step or two towards Marlowe but then halts, eyeing him up and down as if he were a snake poised to strike. Marlowe is not even looking at him.
‘Pick him up, Nick.’
Nick makes no move. Robin scoffs, jabs the barrel of his gun into Marlowe’s cheek and hoists him to his feet by a sleeve, shoving him out the back door.
Frizer rises to follow, weak-kneed. In the henyard, Robin shoves Marlowe so hard he nearly trips, but then catches the back of his doublet, stopping his fall. He spins Marlowe to face the white sky directly above Widow Bull’s house, points, and says, ‘There,’ to be sure he dares look nowhere else. This done, Robin walks half the length of the garden backwards in search of the best view, a hand shielding his eyes. He winces at the light, turns away, attempts another peek. ‘Will you look at that?’ he says. And to Marlowe: ‘Shall we discourse on the movement of the spheres, as Faustus and Mephistopheles did?’
Frizer brims his hand over his eyes. He’d thought that the sun and moon might appear together, overlapping like two coins, gold and silver. But through the thick clouds only the sun shows itself, albeit with a morsel bitten out of its backside, the gloomy day sprawled indifferently around it. Upon looking away, it takes longer than he’d expected for his vision to return, seeing the world through a rondel of molten glass that slowly cools and clears.
Marlowe and Robin stand shoulder-to-shoulder. Both look to the sky through cracks between their fingers, Robin elated, as though the heavens have put on this show for him alone; Marlowe humbled, diffident. Were Frizer and he alone now, Marlowe would have so much to say, with his erring stars and parallaxes. He would point up at the heavens and draw his finger across the sky and explain how it all functions in that perorating way of his, and Frizer would heed nary a word, so consumed with gratitude to be with him, alive with him, anywhere but here.
From across the garden, Poley only feigns to look at the sky, thinking on the message that Walsingham’s boy carries, bound for the Marshalsea, scribbled on a page from Doctor Faustus:
The missyve you receeved this morninge was a fraud, I await you in Dettford & heere is the proof – I have the man.
Belike the boy will not deliver it to Topcliffe at all. He’ll take it, along with the generous gratuity Poley had paid him, back to his master in Whitehall.
Walsingham is a far better forger than Poley would ever have guessed, he’ll give him that. Better than necessary to fool an imbecile like Topcliffe. Come to my house, the letter had said! Imagine it: Topcliffe swarming Poley’s house in St Helen’s with all his instruments in tow, banging down the door, threatening God knows what sort of violence upon the servants— Or worse, Topcliffe riding for Poley’s other house in Surrey, several hours from London, a place Poley visits barely more than once a year. By afternoon, the wicked cur shall be terrorizing Poley’s poor wife and children while his creatures ransack every room, rip up all the floorboards and smash holes in every wall—
But most likely, Topcliffe will have taken but a quick scan of Walsingham’s forgery, perceived some knavery afoot, and done just as he’d promised, yesterday afternoon: washed his hands of the whole business.
Now the sun and moon have overlapped, meaning that Walsingham may well have done something foolish already, before the Council. Ingram Frizer – that spineless jade! – were he not so slippery, Poley could have sent him to Whitehall with false news of Marlowe’s death; were Frizer not so treacherous, so craven, Poley could have sent him to the Marshalsea, and had him beg Topcliffe to come back with him. Poley cannot send Nick away; he needs him here. He cannot go himself. He’s trapped, waiting for sunset, when Phelippes had said he could expect the Council’s full might to fall on Deptford.
In a way this disaster, and all the horrors yet to come, is all Frizer’s fault. Look at him now: so miserable, so piteous; eyes dribbling tears the way an old whore dribbles piss! Poley ought to blow his brains out into Marlowe’s face.
‘A sorry way to end your career,’ Poley sneers, ‘in farce.’
‘I know not what you mean, Poley,’ Marlowe replies, smug.
‘They said the same thing of Anthony Babington, you remember – that he was the Devil, or possessed by the Devil – but of course he was neither. Neither are you.’
‘Your friend does not seem so certain of that.’
‘It matters not what that porridge-brained swine thinks of ye. You are here with me until this business is brought to an end, one way or another.’
‘One way or another now, is it?’
Poley is silenced. For ay, the ship has veered so far off course there’s no telling where it will land. Both Marlowe and himself may be bound for the same fate: to hang by the wrists and ankles behind Topcliffe’s walls, naked, blindfolded, till they beg for death.
‘I want to know something,’ Poley begins, ‘about Edward II. In watching it, at times, it had seemed almost as though I was but watching ordinary folk – well, mere mortals, anyway – go about their lives. How plainly they spoke. How banal, redundant and futile were their actions…’
Marlowe rubs his eyes and squints, at first in contempt, which then cools into something more like sadness. ‘You are not the first to say so.’
Poley is surprised at having been beaten to this punch. He is loath to imagine by whom. ‘Well. I’ve often wondered whether Edward and Gaveston and the rest were, indeed, ordinary men. Perhaps men you have known, intimately, by other names…’
‘There’s Lightborne, for example,’ Marlowe says, with a sidelong glance.
‘Oh?’
‘He is partly based on you.’
Poley’s smile spreads. ‘Only partly?’ he says, but Marlowe does not laugh. He looks sad, even pitying, at which Poley begins to wonder how much of himself he has exposed just now, how far into his heart Marlowe has seen. He regrets his own choice of words: ‘intimately’.
‘Who told you about the ring?’ Poley asks.
‘Baines.’
‘Ah.’ A sourness rises to Poley’s mouth. He would have preferred no answer at all over one so mundane. But what had he expected to discover, some supernatural communion between himself, Marlowe, Babington? What a child he is, what a weak, self-deceiving child! The dead do not commune. The dead do not forgive.
‘Poley,’ Marlowe murmurs, gently, ‘you can let me go.’
Poley shakes his head. Marlowe must die, which is all Walsingham had wanted from the first. Phelippes shall not be pleased; still, he’ll have little choice but to let the matter lie. The Lord Keeper had promised half for Marlowe’s corpse, had he not: one hundred and fifty pounds? Not enough to buy back Topcliffe’s favour. Not enough for a diamond. All for nothing, all ruined, and by who else but Ingram Frizer, that snivelling whelp, whose image Marlowe battens upon the way a suicide sucks poison!
Poley should gut the little cretin with his own knife. Show Marlowe how it feels. Rub his face in the cavity and snarl, Look – look upon his steaming insides, his yellow guts, look upon the last beat of his heart! This is how they made me watch!
Kit detects a crack in Robin Poley’s so carefully polished shell, revealing a hint of soft, jellied insides, into which he would dearly like to stick a knife and twist. But he must be gentle, calm, mannered. He must speak as if to soothe a mad dog, for that is what Robin Poley is becoming.
‘Who else knows that I am here?’ Kit goes on. ‘Walsingham would never speak of it; he is too afraid. Topcliffe shall put this matter behind him for a trifle. If they find me here with you, you’ll not fare well by it—’
‘Master Frizer lied to me last night,’ Poley interrupts. ‘I had thought, going into this, that he would walk away no worse than twenty pounds richer when it was over. But now, I know not what trouble he might cause in the future.’
Kit’s gaze darts across the yard. Frizer stands near the back door, staring back at him with bands of half-dried tears shining on either cheek. Even now, Kit feels as if there were no distance between them at all, as if his arms were around him, his face buried in Frizer’s neck; his hand around Frizer’s throat, fighting not to squeeze.
‘What matters it to you what becomes of the wretched boy?’ Poley goes on, needling. ‘He would sooner see you dance the Tyburn jig than risk a hair on his head for you.’
This stings just as intended. Kit looks away. ‘You would not give yourself another body to bury,’ he says.
‘Ha! No one here shall be buried today. Your corpse alone is worth a hundred and fifty pounds! And as for Master Frizer, the river runs deep through Deptford, though not so deep as many suppose, so thick is the bottom with bones.’
‘I do not think the other fellow would be pleased with that.’
Poley scoffs. ‘Oh, Nick? True, he loves that boy like a favourite dog. But he loves me as the dog loves his master.’ His hand touches Kit’s shoulder, a warm imprint of four fingers, a fatherly smack. He then slips away and poses himself upon the bench as if for a portrait, the pistol hooked over one knee.
Frizer has not moved. If he sees the panic in Kit’s face, he shows it not. There’s nothing in Frizer’s eyes but an echo of the question he’d asked last night: Why in hell should I live?
Kit regrets not answering him. How had he let himself be dumbstruck, in that worst of all moments? He would have said, You must live because I love you – because you must be avenged – because to live is a form of vengeance, when so many have sought to destroy you— But Kit, also, wants to live. Each and every atomy of his body burns against death like a star against the darkness; not one mote of it wants to die. Death frightens him not, only dying: to have to face, alone, that unravelling of the self, to become a child, an infant, an impulse, nothing.
‘ “The light of the body is the eye—” ’
Kit nearly slaps himself. Suffer what he will, he shall not surrender his anger. ’Tis the only true power, the only true courage he has ever had. He’ll run himself upon the knives of his enemies. He’ll spit blood in their eyes!
He turns to face the far side of the garden. Above the brick wall, from every visible window in every neighbouring house, pale faces burst forth in clusters like anemones: men, women and children, squinting through their fingers or from beneath their hands, upon the fearful conjunction of sun and moon.
Witnesses.