THE MOON’S FINGERNAIL HAS slid out of the sun’s eye, unwatched. Frizer looks up from his place on the ground, among the pecking chickens, to find an unexceptional day come upon them, the sky over the garden a dull membrane of eggshell blue, the erring moon now invisible. The world seems diminished in such an ordinary light, as if some singular opportunity has come and gone.
Marlowe has spent the past hour seated in a patch of weedy grass with his back against the garden wall, his eyes darting ceaselessly between Robin and Nick. Only occasionally does he glance to Frizer. Robin remains slumped on the bench like a Roman at a feast, though one with neither appetite nor good humour, jaw tight, eyes hard, tapping his fingers to an ever-slower rhythm. In all this time he has not said a word, and so alien is silence to his demeanour that it reeks, like a candle just blown out.
‘Something’s gone wrong.’
Nick has squatted down at Frizer’s right shoulder, close enough to whisper. Widow Bull’s roasted laying-hen hangs on his breath.
Nick nods in Marlowe’s direction. ‘I think no one’s coming for him.’
Frizer dares not look.
Nick knuckles Frizer’s arm. ‘Will you wake up, man? I need you to help me think! This has gone on too long. The master must have done something, at the Council meeting.’ He darts another glance at Marlowe, speaking even lower: ‘If you and him—I know not what. S’blood, man, I know nothing at all! But if you know something, or did something, you can tell me; I’ll not be angry, I promise. Hell, that devil’s had you bewitched, he has—’
‘Do you have grievances, Master Skeres?’ Robin says from the bench, wearily.
‘I only want to know what in hell’s happening!’ Nick stands up, flailing his arms. ‘Where’s Topcliffe? Where’s the coin you promised me? How long are we to sit here greasing our pricks? Till my master returns? Till the Lord Keeper gets wind of all this? What do ye suppose this would look like to him?’
Robin leans forward with his elbows on his knees, rubs his face in his hands. ‘Oh, mutiny!’
‘Mutiny? Ay, if you want it that way. I say, let’s do as my master asked, put a bullet in him and be done with it!’
‘’Tis not so simple a matter, my lad.’
‘What in God’s name is so complicated about it? You’ve heard him, you’ve seen what he’s done to Ingram! Belike ’tis not safe to be in his company so long, Lord knows what he might do to us!’ Nick seems to feel Marlowe’s glare, turning to snarl at him, ‘Stop looking at me!’
Robin springs up from the bench, takes Nick by the arm and draws him into the furthest corner of the garden. There’s a touch in his eyes of a man nearing his limit – of patience, of forbearance, of sanity even. They stand close, arguing in hushed voices. In a pocket of silence, Robin slides a meaningful look in Frizer’s direction. Nick glances at Frizer twice, first in perplexity, then horror.
He backs away from Robin. ‘No! No, no, I’ll not hear of it!’
‘Come back here, boy.’
‘I could never do that,’ Nick says. ‘I could never let you do that!’
Robin says nothing, though his jaw grinds, his eyes wide, frantic.
‘How dare you, Master Poley?’ Nick starts to turn. ‘Ingram, come, we’re leaving.’
‘Leave and you get not one penny from me, Nick,’ Robin snarls, his hand on the butt of his pistol.
‘Oh, up your arse with it!’ Nick says.
‘What will you do now, Nick? Go back to washing Walsingham’s dirty linens? With him? You trust him to keep silent to your master about all this treachery of yours? Even now, knowing exactly what sort of creature he is?’
Nick cries out, on the verge of tears, ‘He is my friend!’
Frizer feels a rush in his ears like water, or blood. Ten feet away, Robin and Nick go on arguing whether or not to kill him. But this is not fear that he feels, is it? In a way, it could be called relief. Death renders all things alike, so Marlowe and he will be the same again. They will both burn in one fire.
Frizer ventures a step towards Marlowe, and then another, and another. All the while, Marlowe rises also, like Frizer’s own shadow on a wall, his eyes fish-hooked to Frizer’s eyes.
‘Marlowe,’ Frizer whispers, ‘I—’
Marlowe’s arm swings; his fist stops Frizer’s mouth, a blow that rattles him from eye-tooth to skull-cap. Frizer stumbles backwards and collapses onto his side, blinded as if by lightning.
‘You treacherous coward!’ All of Deptford seems to resound with Marlowe’s voice. ‘Twenty pounds! Twenty pounds for my fucking life!’
Marlowe lurches forward, about to lunge. But from across the garden, Robin rushes in, launching himself at Marlowe’s back. Marlowe and he tumble to the ground in a heap.
‘Help me!’ Robin shouts.
At last, Nick also springs to life. He strides forward, takes hold of Marlowe’s head by a fistful of hair and pulls back, levering him onto his knees.
Marlowe spits into Frizer’s face. ‘You do not deserve this, you poisonous bastard! I have never lied to you, not once! You do not deserve this!’ He would say more, it seems, but a sob stops his voice.
Frizer cannot move even to wipe his face. He watches as Nick turns up his lip at the man he holds by the hair, finally flinging Marlowe down in disgust. Marlowe bows into his hands. For a second or two, he only goes on crying, but then he rears his head and lets forth a battery of screams, wordless, and even louder than before.
Nick and Robin exchange a look of panic. For one second, neither moves, but then Nick snatches Robin’s pistol from its leather hanging and takes aim at the back of Marlowe’s head. Frizer covers his eyes, but the only sound that comes is the dull thunk of metal against bone. When he looks again, Marlowe lies prone upon the ground.
A woman shrieks, though she is quickly stifled. Widow Bull stands at the garden door, her hands clasped over the mouth of one of her wide-eyed serving-girls. Frizer, too, presses a hand over his sore mouth. A tooth wiggles loose near the front, leeching warm, coppery blood.
‘Stop crying, Ingram!’ Nick snarls, though his own face is red and twisted. ‘Stop your damned crying!’
Robin harrumphs, waggling his fingers at Nick. Reluctantly, Nick hands over the gun.
Widow Bull grabs her skirt and marches across the yard to Robin. ‘You put a stop to this at once! What will the neighbours think of it? What will the neighbours think?’
Indeed, the evening has opened upon them suddenly, full of whispers and muffled voices. Figures lean out of nearly every window of the three nearest houses to the west like spectators in a gallery: old men, young men, women, children. Frizer clambers to his feet, taking in what they must see: three men and one woman in the garden. A fourth man facedown in the dirt.
Robin too takes it in, turning in a full circle. He looks as if he might laugh.
‘If Topcliffe is not coming then you must be rid of him!’ Widow Bull rasps. ‘This cannot happen here, Robin. This house is meant to be a refuge! I have a reputation to protect!’
‘Shut your God-damned mouth, you witch!’ Frizer snarls.
Robin slaps him across the sore side of his face. Shakes a finger at his nose. ‘Civility, Master Frizer. I would be a little kinder towards women, had I a cunt where my arsehole should be.’
Marlowe’s head lolls, ragdoll-like, as they lift him off the ground, Nick at the shoulders and Frizer at the legs. Hastily, they labour upstairs, while behind them, Widow Bull and Robin snipe at one another like children. As they come upon the door of the room where Frizer and Marlowe had spent the night, a maid darts out like a quail from a bush. She has left the room tidy and dim, the closed shutters admitting only a strip of fading daylight.
Widow Bull scrambles up the fine coverlet in her arms just before Nick and Frizer heave Marlowe’s limp body onto the enormous bed. She then turns on Robin as he enters, taking a tone both scolding and deferential, like a steward admonishing his master over some needless expense. ‘Now, how much longer do you think it will be before the constables arrive?’
Frizer cradles Marlowe’s head, blood seeping, warm, into his breeches. Across the room, Nick and Widow Bull have cornered Robin by the door. Both appear to tower over him, even Widow Bull; he looks small and futile, as if held by the scruff of the neck.
‘Take them down to the river,’ Widow Bull goes on. ‘Do whatever you will, but you must be rid of them!’
‘I cannot simply “be rid of” them, Eleanor,’ Robin growls, ‘now that half the neighbourhood has seen them!’
‘Well, you must do something! The constables—’
‘The constables are nothing to us. We’ll say it was a drunkards’ quarrel, nothing more, surely not the first to occur under your roof! Now listen to me: I have sent word to Topcliffe. He may well have only just received it—’
‘To hell with Topcliffe!’ Nick shouts. ‘I want my share of the master’s money, which you promised me, and then I want out – my share, and Ingram’s too!’
Marlowe turns his face against Frizer’s thigh and murmurs something. Frizer hears his own name. Not Frizer. ‘Ingram.’ Marlowe has never called him this before, and a pained smile pulls at his lips as he says it. They are strangers, feeling one another’s names upon their tongues for the first time: ‘Ingram’.
‘Kit.’ Such a little name for such a big man.
Marlowe reaches up, cups the back of Frizer’s neck. Gently, he pulls, and Frizer bends down until their foreheads touch. Frizer holds Marlowe’s face in both hands. He runs his fingers over the lips, his thumbs over the cheekbones, the eyelids, the way a blind man commits a face to memory, as if it were hewn out of ice and melting fast.
‘I’m sorry,’ Frizer sputters. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’
‘Witnesses,’ Marlowe says. His eyes look straight into Frizer’s eyes. ‘He cannot hurt you now.’
Frizer draws back slightly, misunderstanding. Marlowe pulls him close again, his lips to Frizer’s ear. ‘When the constables come, the Council’s men will not be long behind them. They shall take you and the others to Deptford jail. I shall go to the Marshalsea.’ He tightens his grip on Frizer’s neck. ‘When they question you, you know nothing. You were here on your master’s orders. You do not know me; you have barely spoken with me. Understand? And I—I will never breathe your name.’
Frizer need not ask what will become of Marlowe, in the Marshalsea, and after that. He is thinking of the voids in the walls. The scaffold, and the jeering crowds. The disjointing axes, the butchering knives. That this body should ever be torn apart. That a thing like Marlowe could ever be unmade.
Marlowe’s hand moves to the back of Frizer’s head, his fingers in his hair, a grip that is somehow fierce and tender, both at once. ‘Live,’ he whispers, almost too faint to hear. ‘Live!’
Frizer shakes his head. But Marlowe’s eyes are closed; he sees him not.
Marlowe lets Frizer go, sinking deeper into the bed. Without opening his eyes, he murmurs, ‘ “The light of the body is the eye—” ’ but breaks off sharply, his face tightening as if with pain. Yet the words seem to force their way out of him, hoarse and fast: ‘ “The light of the body is the eye, therefore when thine eye is single, then thy whole body shall be light, even as when a candle doth light thee…” ’ It goes on. Headlong, he plummets through the verse, sometimes breaking against a word, sometimes repeating or doubling back: ‘ “… thy whole body shall be light, having no part dark, but then all shall be light, even as when a candle doth light thee…” ’
Eye, dark, light, candle. Frizer remembers: Like blowing out a candle. The quickest way to kill a man—
Pressure rises inside Frizer’s chest until a wail escapes him, ragged and high-pitched, prolonged until his lungs are emptied of breath.
The quickest way to kill a man is to stick him in the eye.
‘ “… but if thine eye be evil,” ’ Marlowe says, ‘ “then thy body shall be—” ’
Frizer draws his knife and stabs downwards. A muted crack of bone, or something like bone. Marlowe’s eye-socket swallows the blade like quicksand. His legs kick, his hips jolt upwards and then plunge down again. A hand claws at Frizer’s fist, fingernails peel back the skin in strips.
The quickest way, Frizer thinks, almost whispering aloud, the quickest way— Nick had said there would not even be a whimper, like blowing out a candle, but Marlowe is thrashing, screaming, mouth open to the back-teeth.
Frizer rips the knife free in an arc of blood, moves to stab again, to end it. But before he can do so, Robin rushes across the room, grabs him by the collar and hurls him against the wall. Frizer slides to the floor, his vision teeming with spots.
Marlowe is no longer screaming. He is drowning. Robin bends over his body like a widow, smoothing the hair back from his brow as blood jumps from his throat.
‘Oh God,’ Robin says, almost laughing. ‘You lucky bastard!’
Frizer sinks to his hands and knees. He hears a clank of metal on the floor and is startled to see the knife still there, fused to his fist in a resin of blood.
‘Nick,’ Poley says, calmly, with a nod in Frizer’s direction. ‘Get the knife.’
Nick has been hovering at the foot of the bed with a hand over his mouth, his complexion green. At Robin’s command, he barrels towards Frizer, who curls himself up around the blade, wedging it between his ribs and the floor. He will let his body drop, let his weight do the work. It will be a relief, like punching a wall – my body is the wall; the knife is my fist – but his limbs are locked in place, his body frozen. Within moments, Nick has hold of him by both arms, and Frizer can do nothing to harm himself save ram his own skull against the pommel-cap.
‘Coward!’ he screams.
A twist of Nick’s wrist, and the knife is gone. Frizer collapses, sobbing too hard to pronounce the word: ‘Coward, coward, coward, coward!’
Such is all he is. Cowardice has guided his hand, always. He has loved of course, and spited, but above all he has preserved himself, wretched thing that he is. In cowardice he’d cut his own skin, because he could not cut his brothers’ throats; in cowardice he’d come into this world, the refuse of a dead woman’s womb. Marlowe could not, would not see that in him. Like a moth, he saw only light.
‘Shh,’ Poley whispers. ‘Shh. “Now, body, turn to air… Now, soul, be changed into little waterdrops, and fall into the ocean!” ’
It seems fitting that the last words Marlowe ever hears should be his own. The convulsions have ceased; now Death comes to drag him by the ankles, gyring down into the blackness at the centre of his single, staring eye. Not yet. Not yet. Every man dies the same – at least, those whom Poley has seen die up close. Terror, struggle, and then, out of nowhere, surrender. Utter surrender, like a lover into the fold of ecstasy.
Without blinking, Poley looks for it, waits for it, that promise, if anything in this life may be promised at all, that every life shall end the same, indiscriminate of sin; that we shall have it, every one of us, no matter what precedes it: a moment of grace.
Kit does not recognize those last words as his own. He does not recognize the face looking down on him, though it rings familiar. Blue eyes. He has a notion of having encountered eyes like these before, though the face is older. He has a sense of being much older, himself, than he had been a moment ago, a dizzying shift in both time and space. His insides give a steep lurch, like when a cart starts off too suddenly, too fast.
You are well now, a voice says. You are well.
Kit’s thoughts reel, caught between terror like he has never known and the first, tentative stirring of relief – the relief of waking from a too-real nightmare into his own bed, his own life, on a clean, bright morning, in the arms of a man who loves him.
He starts to say, I think I was dreaming about that day in Deptford—
But, gently, the other stops him: Shh. Let it go. ’Tis long over. You are here, with me.
The wail of gulls. Salt-smell of the sea. A finger is tracing the scar above Kit’s right eye, reminding him how much time has passed since it healed. How white it is now. How faint.
Kit smiles. I have let it go. That was what I wanted to tell you.
His mind dips below the horizon, and is gone.