I THINK I WAS DREAMING about that day. In Deptford—
A touch comes to Frizer’s chin, silencing him.
Think not of that. ’Tis over now. You are here, with me.
The hand passes across Frizer’s cheek, then his temple, smoothing back his hair. Still tense with fear, Frizer lays his head against the broad chest and listens, in vain, for the reliable drum of the heart. The body sounds hollow and wide, yet busy with anthill energy, like a great mine or a forge.
He looks up at the face. ’Tis gelid, smooth, the way it had looked at the inquest: head back upon the tidied pillows and pooled in dull hair, not blood; the wound wiped so clean he can make out a watery remnant of the eye in the ruined socket, a diamond nestled in velvet.
A strange impulse overtakes him. His hand alights upon the cheekbone, one finger extended towards the eye’s inner, glistering light. Gently, he probes. Penetrates. Beyond, he feels nothing – an utter absence of feeling, surpassing numbness, surpassing sleep – and so withdraws his hand at once, half-expecting to find the finger sheared off to the bone.
Please tell me, Frizer whispers. Tell me the truth: are you in hell?
The answer throbs in both his ears at once:
I am with you.
Frizer wakes in darkness, hugging his own doublet. The prison sounds come to him: that anthill rummaging, hollow but not empty, and the occasional thud against his ear of a door slamming, somewhere far but near. When he runs his tongue over his teeth, he finds a gap where a fang-tooth used to be. When he moves, his clothes grind against bare planks of wood.
He has been in the Marshalsea nearly a month now. Still, the doublet in his arms reeks of blood.
A rattle at the door, and then with a shove it opens, dragging a quarter-circle into the dust. One of his usual keepers is on the other side, a young man with cabbage ears. He carries a large, soot-black kettle. Even with a cloth tied around the lower half of his face, Frizer can see him smirking.
‘Your pardon’s come in,’ says the jailer.
A shiver starts between Frizer’s shoulder-blades, but this he disallows, gripping the edge of the bench till his fingertips turn white. ‘Am I—’ He has no voice. ‘Am I free?’
‘Not yet.’ The jailer enters, followed by another ragged creature with a mask covering nearly all of his face, a lopsided patch cut out for the eyes. The second one bears a bucket of water, sloshing on the floor. ‘Get up, strip yourself.’
This explains the wicked smirk, the bitter smell emanating from the kettle. A lye-bath. Frizer still has scabs from the last one.
‘Are we going to have trouble?’
‘No,’ Frizer whispers.
‘Good. Always were a good boy, marry, we’ll miss ye when y’are gone. Go to now.’
Frizer stands, undresses himself with his head down. A good boy, yes. No trouble from him. The jailers ruminate aloud upon his obedience, how some men need a dozen beatings ere they learn, if ever they learn at all; but not this one, no: one beating had done the trick, clearly not the first he’s ever earned himself. A dog knows as well as he does, and one like him would surely make an excellent dog for someone, i’faith, quick at the fetch and with a soft mouth to boot.
They laugh, and gaze upon Frizer’s nakedness like something they have purchased for little money and hard, short use.
The jailer lifts his kettle over Frizer’s head. ‘Eyes closed.’
Frizer complies. The liquid is slightly thicker than water and smells like drought, like a tanner’s pit, a little like semen. It does not burn immediately. The fire on his skin kindles slow, rising by the second, until eventually he must dive deep for every breath he takes. He must not whine or whimper or flap his arms or writhe or beg or weep, because that is the point of these games they play: to let the wailing woman out of him, so they may tear her to shreds.
He is crouched on the floor, screaming without opening his mouth, when a splash comes straight at his face, turning his seething skin to cool smoke. They leave him with the bucket, a few inches of water at the bottom. That is his reward, for being a good boy.
Frizer bows over the bucket, splashing himself. Even in his frenzy, he remembers that this visit began with a pardon, of all things, and he calls out to the jailers at the door, ‘Am I free now?’
The answer is another cruel smirk, a bolted door.
The water provides a little relief, but not enough. Too raw to dress himself, Frizer stands in a narrow shaft of sunlight with his arms out like Faustus summoning devils, imagining that he can see the pain leaving his body as steam. ‘Slicing edge,’ he whispers, ‘slicing edge slicing edge slicing edge,’ and when his tongue trips up, ‘one thought one grace, one thought one grace.’ He cannot speak speeches any more. They all come out in shards.
Perhaps the pardon was all a jest. Perhaps he will never be free, no more so than he is now, eyes closed to the sun, pain crawling through his skin like light through embers. He tries to place himself at a distance to his body, the way he’d used to do, to look down from the ceiling on two scenes at once. He is alone in a cell with his own pain; he is alone with Marlowe at the Inn-in-the-Wall, and he can hear rain tapping the windowsill, and he is held, he is beautiful. To Kit Marlowe – to the man for whom Beauty is a boundless, unknowable thing that hovers in a poet’s restless head – he is beautiful.
This is what he must be, from now on, if he is to survive: two men, in two places at once.
‘Because he loves me, more than all the world.
Because he loves me, more than all the world.
Because he loves me, more than all the world.’
Today, Ingram Frizer will be released from the Marshalsea. Poley hopes such shall bring an end to his own penance, which has constrained him to remain within London Wall this past month, a witness to the city’s slow, miserable death by plague. With the scarlet sun still low above the smoke, he sets out for Seething Lane through lifeless streets. Five thousand dead in June, or so the estimate goes. Poley’s house is now among the last in St Helen’s parish to be neither boarded up nor marked with a black cross, Death’s illiterate signature. Even the markets and churches are shuttered now; sustenance for the body is as scarce as it is for the soul.
The Privy Court’s gates unlock at Poley’s knocking. The guards on duty – the same fellows he’d used to bribe with tobacco, in better days – abandon their posts to lead him, in unfriendly silence, through empty rooms and corridors that he could easily navigate himself. Upstairs, the long gallery is deserted, the dark curtains stripped away for either cleaning or burning. A bone-white tunnel remains, like the skeleton of a whale.
Poley’s destination is the Lord Keeper’s office, which is located in a bay just off the gallery: a large room, its crowning glory being its many glazed windows, the most central bearing the same lion-flanked crest that also moulders above the gatehouse. Puckering sits at the desk. Phelippes hovers over his shoulder like a parrot on a stand.
Poley comes to the centre of the room and bows. Puckering releases him with an imperious gesture, grumbling, ‘Let’s get on with it.’ Poley can smell onions on his breath from six feet away.
A film of grey daylight flashes on Phelippes’s spectacles as he opens a slipcase. He clears his throat, and, much to Poley’s chagrin, begins reading aloud: ‘ “Inquisicio indentata capta apud Deptford Strand, super visum corporis Christopheri Morley…” ’
Poley sighs inwardly, praying that this shall be the last time he has to hear the blasted thing. Over the past month this document, the inquest report, has been read to him in full at least a dozen times, with all its tedious praedictus this and praefactum that. The first time had been in the room upstairs in Eleanor’s house, two days after it had all happened. Marlowe lay where he’d fallen, his eyes and lips bejewelled in flies. It was no weather for a corpse. Indeed, so obvious was the smell, packed into that stifling room with a jury of no fewer than sixteen of Eleanor’s male neighbours, along with the coroner and his attendants, plus Poley, plus Nick, plus Frizer, that as the proceedings had worn on handkerchiefs and nosegays had gone up around the room; sturdy men had begun to look faint. The window was opened, Eleanor’s maids came in and sprinkled water and herbs about the bed, all to no avail. Even in death, Marlowe had made his presence known.
Most of the men in attendance that day had not enough Latin to understand the first ibidem of the report. But this mattered not: the coroner’s verdict was a foregone conclusion. The respective bodies of killer and victim told a tale that any simpleton could understand, of David and Goliath.
Obviously, Frizer was the true victim. In fact, many of those present at the reading had witnessed the attack in the garden, and vividly recalled the scene: a giant, surely drunk, lunging murderously at poor, puny Frizer while railing about money. Twenty pounds, some remembered him shouting. Others, a mere twenty shillings. All Poley had to say was, yes, yes, ’twas all over money, as most deadly quarrels are, in this case over the reckoning owed to his sister for her food and drink and hospitality, of which Marlowe had enjoyed more than his fill.
And as to what had happened afterwards, in the room upstairs: when Phelippes’s reading arrives at this part, Poley interrupts, summarizing, ‘Yes: bloodshed narrowly averted, Masters Skeres and Frizer and myself brought Marlowe upstairs and put him to bed, in hope that sleep might prove a balm to his distemper. Alas, such was not to be. With supper served, we three livelier fellows found ourselves seated with our backs to the bed, Master Frizer included. Not a one of us saw Marlowe coming – that is, of course, until Marlowe stole Master Frizer’s knife out of its scabbard, and proceeded to attack him with it. A tragedy in the waiting, it was. Any fellow of reasonable intelligence knows that to carry one’s knife at the back brings more risk to the wearer than anyone, but Master Frizer is of less than reasonable intelligence, poor lad. More child than man, I have often said.’
Puckering says, ‘There is no confusion as to how Marlowe acquired Master Frizer’s knife. I remain more puzzled as to you and Master Skeres’s failure of alacrity in coming to the defence of your slow-witted friend when Marlowe, apparently, beset upon him with naked blade!’
Poley chuckles, mustering his patience. ‘As I have explained, my lord, I was quite hobbled by my position at table, as was Master Skeres. A small table it was, and with the three of us crammed in elbow-to-elbow, and Frizer in the middle…’
Puckering squints. ‘You sat three men, elbow-to-elbow.’
‘One bench, my lord.’
‘Your sister’s rooms are ill-appointed then. Has she fallen so far in fortunes since Master Bull’s tragic demise?’
‘I cannot account for the furniture, my lord. I assure you, every attempt to come to Master Frizer’s aid was made both by myself and Master Skeres. But by the time we’d freed ourselves, it was too late.’
Phelippes reads aloud the relevant section as if he’s had his finger at it all this time:
Whereupon the aforesaid Ingram, in fear of being slain, in his own defence and to save his life, then and there struggled with the aforesaid Christopher Marlowe to take back from him his aforesaid knife…
Thus it befell that in the affray the aforesaid Ingram gave the aforesaid Christopher then and there a mortal wound above his right eye, of the depth of two inches and the breadth of one inch, of which same mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher Marlowe, then and there, instantly died.
‘An accident,’ Poley clarifies.
‘I thought it was self-defence,’ says Puckering.
‘Can it not be both?’
With a cough, Phelippes cuts in, ‘My lord, if I may: the sort of wound sustained by Marlowe is not uncommon, especially in tavern brawls and the like. The attacker trips, or is pushed, and falls upon his own blade. I agree, there is much to be held in doubt regarding Master Poley’s recounting of events, but that Marlowe’s death occurred as a matter of chance, I, for one, find perfectly credible.’
‘Master Phelippes, you are, as always, a Solomon in judgement,’ Poley says, at which Phelippes flushes crimson and directs his gaze at his feet. Oh, the things the cipher could say, if he dared! But it would do him little good to admit he knew of Marlowe’s whereabouts on the 30th of May with ample time to have stopped the fatal event, yet chose to hold his tongue.
A pause descends. Puckering looks pensive, even troubled, at last muttering, ‘Often, it seems, events occur behind closed doors, when Master Poley is the only man present to witness them.’
Poley clears his throat. ‘There were in fact four men, my lord, counting the dead, and my sister as well, a woman.’
‘Yes: a woman, a dead man, your lackey Nick Skeres, and an apparent idiot.’
‘An innocent idiot, my lord. The Queen herself has signed Master Frizer’s pardon.’
‘Your testimony neglects to explain how Marlowe came to be in your company that day, in your sister’s house.’ Puckering gestures to Phelippes, who turns to another document in his case ere the former has finished speaking. ‘At the Star Chamber sessions that same day, you may recall, Thomas Walsingham testified that you had intimated unto him some plan to aid in Marlowe’s escape. He also submitted a rather enigmatic letter, written in your hand—’
‘A slanderous forgery,’ Poley growls, before Phelippes can read the damnable thing aloud, ‘as I have already sworn, under oath. I found Marlowe’s presence at my sister’s public house entirely surprising, my lord, and most inconvenient. I did make attempts to contact your lordships in Whitehall, but as my missives went unanswered, I did what little I could to keep the fox penned, as ’twere.’
‘Explain then: why would Thomas Walsingham go to the trouble to forge this letter, and lie before the Council?’
Poley chuckles bitterly, ire seeping to the surface. ‘I’m afraid I cannot explain that which I did not witness. As every man is sole and solitary witness to his own thoughts, Master Walsingham’s intentions are not for me to interpret. Well,’ he adds, ‘a man’s thoughts are between himself and God, but God gives no testimony. Such is to my great misfortune, for often I find my testimony discounted, when I have no secondary witness but God. Mind you, the moiety of events in this world have no witness at all but God, and yet no one doubts how they occurred. Fish perish in the deep; trees topple in the lonely woods. Master Marlowe’s death being every whit as straightforward as the death of a fish or the toppling of a tree, I do wonder why it needs must be probed so zealously, and by men whose talents are truly wasted upon it.’
When Poley is finished, Puckering blinks as if stupefied, and then lets out a thunderous laugh, mouth agape in his carbuncle face. The laughter goes on for what feels like half a minute – through which Phelippes fiddles anxiously with the nosepiece of his spectacles – before Puckering finally seems to wear himself out, groaning, wiping his eyes.
He says, ‘You, Master Poley, are a fork-tongued toad, burbling falsehoods and bile. But luckily for you, the dead man was worse.’
Poley feels one half of his face give a twinge. The dead man was worse – even after all these years, that is the best anyone can ever say of him.
Afternoon finds him at the Marshalsea. Over the past several weeks, Poley has sent Topcliffe numerous letters, most of which have gone ignored. The handful of replies he has received have been concerned with nothing but the particulars of Frizer’s keeping, for which Poley has paid himself, out of his own purse. No discussion of Marlowe, nor of Walsingham, nor the ring.
For all that Poley has dreaded coming face-to-face with Topcliffe again, the warden greets him at the Hellmouth with his customary back-slapping embrace, as if all grudges are long forgotten. He then treats Poley to a tour of the prison’s innermost courtyard, the site of ever-expanding mass graves, in which the warden evidently takes great pride.
‘Go on,’ Topcliffe goads him, from the edge of one such pit. ‘Look in.’
Had he any choice in the matter, Poley would decline. As things are, he presses his handkerchief tighter to his nose and mouth and dares a half-step forward, intent only on feigning a downward glance. But his eyes defy him, scattering over the tangle of silvery limbs, the black mouths, the sunken, rat-chewed eyes.
Kit Marlowe was buried in a paupers’ pit much like this, in a discrete corner of the yard at Deptford Church. The last look Poley had had of him, he was lying naked atop a dead whore and her blue, wrinkled whelp, with half-decayed corpses underneath and bones underneath that, a palimpsest of the dead.
Topcliffe slaps Poley’s back. He thoroughly enjoys having startled him. ‘What, you think I would push you in, birdy? Ha! The grave could not hold you down, I’d wager, you’d wriggle out like a worm after a good rain. Come now, I’ll take you to your boy.’
As Topcliffe turns his back, Poley releases a shudder. On the far side of the pit, a jailer barks a command and a row of emaciated prisoners begin shovelling in heaps of quicklime like snow.
At the door, Topcliffe affixes his mask, a muzzled, wolfish thing that looks as if he’s worn it through several plagues already. Calamity has somehow tamed the Marshalsea’s usual chaos. Teams of inmates haul bodies down the corridors in efficient ranks, all lorded over by whip-wielding keepers like foremen on some antipodean plantation. Topcliffe’s instruments salute him as they pass; the prisoners hustle out of his way. Poley has never seen the warden so jovial, especially for a king who has lost more than half his subjects to plague. If ruination and despair nourish him in the best of times, then he has grown fat on them now. This is his Blessed Kingdom in its decadence.
Topcliffe leads Poley out of the prison’s teeming main hall and into one of the branching corridors, which is eerily unpeopled. Most of the cell doors herein hang open, and for each one they pass, Topcliffe strikes it closed with the head of his club. The same club, Poley realizes, that had once struck the backs of his own knees, at the door to the torture room. Slam, and then pause. Slam, and then pause…
‘I trust Master Frizer is well?’ Poley says, in one such pause.
‘Oh yes – lives like a king, he does, on your penny!’
As to Frizer, Poley has no other concerns and therefore can think of nothing else to say, the slam of Topcliffe’s club on every other door wearing away at his nerves.
‘Y’are quiet, birdy,’ Topcliffe observes.
Say something, Poley chides himself. Silence is nakedness. Silence is penetrable. For every moment that passes, he feels as if he is growing soft, translucent, the way butter melts and runs.
Unthinking, he starts, ‘Never could any one of us have imagined that Walsingham would go to such extraordinary measures—’
‘That’s quite enough of that,’ Topcliffe says. He slams a door, then another door which does not shut for him, being propped open by a corpse, the lolling neck distended with black, knotty buboes, some of which had burst before death.
Topcliffe says, ‘You still want your ring, I presume?’
Poley has prayed for such an opening. ‘As I mentioned in my previous letter, a man has offered me three hundred and fifty pounds for my house in Surrey. That is more than you would have had from Marlowe’s bounty…’
Topcliffe chuckles, low in the throat. ‘Oh, Bonny Robin! So clever you’ll cut yourself, you are, thinking you can seduce anyone with your little songs! I know you; you forget that. I have held a mirror up to your frailty, and still, you refuse to see it – because how can it be? How can you be anything but the cleverest man in the room?’ He slams his club on another door, with relish. ‘What manner of fool trades his gold tooth for a horse he’s never laid eyes on!’
A blade of ice seems to sink into Poley’s stomach, yet he keeps walking. He wraps his thumb over the stump of his missing finger and squeezes till the joint pops, mute.
‘You were right in one thing,’ Topcliffe says. ‘I never sold the ring. It made a fine gift, it did, for the lady who owns my heart. I changed the band, for her dainty fingers. She always wears it together with the pearls she got from that treacherous Scottish bitch. ’Tis a reminder, she says, of a time when Death got so big of himself that he thought he could take her – the importunate brute!’ His gaze is like teeth at Poley’s throat.
‘If you want to see your ring again,’ he goes on, ‘go to Windsor Castle. Go and beg an audience with my cousin. Say you are a poor man, whose only earthly desire is to kiss her sainted hand. It shall be the last time you ever plant your lips upon anything of Babington’s, I warrant you. Fitting, that you should take it while on your knees!’
Another turn of a corner, and Poley realizes where Topcliffe is leading him: to his own cell, or what had been his cell, up until the day that Topcliffe had come knocking with his bottle of wine. Beyond a solid oaken door lies a narrow room with a lancet window and bare plaster walls. No feather bed now, no private dining table, only a wooden bench for both sitting and sleeping. There, in that very spot, Poley had used to lie on his back with his hand upheld, waiting for the afternoon sun to make its slow slice through the room, to open the green eye buried in the diamond’s heart.
Inside the cell, a man stands with his back to the door, his arms raised to that same shaft of light: stark naked, whispering softly, as if in the midst of some heathen veneration. It takes a second longer than it should for Frizer to fall silent and turn around. Ten years he has aged in twenty-nine days: hair shorn, beard long, fearfully thin. He crosses his arms over his chest.
‘Robin.’
Poley cannot answer.
Frizer lowers his arms. ‘Am I free? Am I free?’ The sound hovers upon the stale air like dust.
Poley fears to enter, lest Topcliffe should shove him in and bolt the door at his back. But even with the light behind Frizer’s body, a mark is visible upon his chest, so strange that it draws Poley across the threshold, near enough to reach out and touch it: a vertical scar, running from the navel almost to the throat in a suture-studded slit. As if a surgeon of exceptional skill had cut him open, emptied him and stitched him up again, to stagger hollowly onward.
A flutter of blackness descends. Poley is no longer aware of Topcliffe behind him, nor of the prison around him. Ingram Frizer’s body unseams like a stage curtain, through which Poley stumbles onto the scaffold at St Giles’ Field: midday under a clear blue sky, a stiff September breeze tugging at his clothes. Around him, a sea of faces swirls into the distance, black mouths barking for blood, blood, blood.
Babington kneels at the foot of the stage. The noose has cut a ring around his neck; he is gasping for breath, held upright on his knees only by the rope. His bloodshot eyes meet Poley’s gaze: they seem drained of their colour, greenish-pale, like Dutch glass. But then a man takes Babington’s head by the hair, bends his body backwards. Another man stabs a carving knife into his belly, slicing upwards until the blade sticks and skids off the breastbone, nicking his chin.
His scream feels older than the world itself, so loud and long and deep that it carries not by miles, but years.
Do not let them see it, Poley commands himself, gouging the blankest of smiles into his quivering lips. Do not let them see it, do not dare let them see it. You do not feel it – you see all, hear all, but feel nothing. You are empty, you are hollow. You are nothing, you are nothing, you are nothing…
And so, what young Kit Marlowe sees from his and Richard Baines’s place near the front of the crowd is precisely what Poley intends to be seen: a void in the shape of a man, smiling through Babington’s agonies the way a craftsman smiles over his own best work. As if to say, Yes, yes, ’tis bravely done.
What sort of man could do that, Kit wonders?
What sort of monster could do that to a man who loved him?