A Tip for the Hangman

by Allison Epstein

  “Some sort of penance, I thought, sir,” Kit said.

  Norgate ignored this. “I remember your application. It isn’t often a boy of sixteen submits something that remarkable, and Master Seymour tells me you haven’t disappointed. Your skills in rhetoric and disputation are stunning, if morally flexible.”

  No secret what that referred to. Two weeks ago, Master Seymour, dean of poetics, had pitted Kit against a fourth-year master’s candidate to debate the spiritual imperative of a celibate clergy. Kit, assigned the affirmative position, bested Francis Masterson in two minutes. When Masterson whined that Kit’s obvious position gave him the advantage, Kit flipped sides without missing a beat and spent five minutes explaining why England’s priests ought to fuck widely, loudly, and well. His logic had been impeccable, though Seymour sighed like the north wind when he awarded Kit victory.

  “Your writing, too, is exceptional,” Norgate went on. “Leaving you in the care of an illiterate shoemaker who spends half the year in prison would have been a crime.”

  Kit clenched his fists to keep from speaking. Leave it to a Cambridge master to conceal an insult in a forest of compliments. Granted, Kit owed Norgate everything, and the master hadn’t said anything Kit hadn’t heard before, or said himself a hundred times. But calling your own father an ignorant peasant was one thing, hearing the head of the college do it quite another. If this was Norgate’s attempt to remind Kit to stick to his place and be grateful, he didn’t need to hear it. Why bring up…

  Oh. That was why.

  God damn it all. Not again.

  Likely—more than likely—his father’s drinking and debts had caught up with him, landing him back in debtor’s prison. But what could Kit do about it? Leave Cambridge and plead John Marlowe’s case before the court, as he’d done as a schoolboy in Canterbury? Manipulating a magistrate wasn’t the glorious purpose he’d envisioned for his new-lauded skills in rhetoric.

  Norgate stopped walking. Though he’d never stated their destination, Kit supposed this must be it. He glanced at the closed door between them and identified it with a despairing lack of surprise. The master’s office. This could not end well.

  “I know prudence is not your best quality, Marlowe,” Norgate said, “but please do not do anything stupid.”

  So saying, the master turned and knocked three times on the office door. Kit barely had time to consider the strangeness of it—under what circumstances did a man knock on his own door?—before a voice Kit didn’t know answered from inside.

  “Come in.”

  The two men looked at each other. While the master was not the companion Kit would have chosen for such a meeting, he dreaded entering that room alone.

  Kit stepped into the office. The latch clicked as Norgate closed the door behind him.

  Two

  Kit had never been inside the master’s office. Though he’d accumulated a considerable number of offenses at Cambridge, they had always been minor enough for the fellows to arbitrate themselves. Petty theft. Private blasphemy. Showing up to recitation with the stink of the alehouse on your breath, wearing the same clothes as the day before. It took something more to earn a summons to this office, something irreversible.

  The room looked no different from any other modest study. Dark walnut bookshelves lined the walls, packed with volumes in Greek, Latin, and German. Two tall windows divided the shelves on the far wall. They opened onto a view of the green, where three first-form boys tossed a tennis ball in the dying light. Before the window stood a large oak desk, leafy vines carved around the legs and into the sides. Kit could imagine Norgate reading Petrarch’s sonnets there, or annotating a Latin sermon. A scholar could be happy here, away from the daily irritation of academic affairs.

  But instead of Norgate, a strange dark-eyed man leaned his elbows on the desk. Short hair inclining toward gray, beard fastidiously trimmed. Hands folded before him in a poor imitation of patience. His eyes, black rather than brown, turned down at the corners like a greyhound’s. Kit knew the look in those eyes well enough. It was the look he saw in accountants and lawyers who frequented the same taverns as Cambridge’s students, men who made their fortunes on slipped figures and miscalculations. Those eyes knew more about him than he had any cause to expect, or any reason to doubt.

  “Sir,” Kit said, and bowed.

  “Marlowe,” the man said. His heavy brow and low forehead lent him an air of permanent disapproval.

  “Yes, sir.” Kit rose and glanced at the chair in front of the desk, but the man gave no indication he might sit.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” the man asked.

  “No, sir,” Kit said. Yes, sir. No, sir. In twenty seconds, this stranger had done what five years of university studies could not: he’d taught Kit manners.

  The man pressed the tips of his fingers together and pointed the resultant triangle at his audience of one. “My name is Sir Francis Walsingham,” he said. “Royal secretary to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.”

  “Oh.” And here Kit was, fingers stained with ink and clothes smelling of tobacco. Norgate might at least have given him a hint.

  What in God’s name had his father done to merit the attention of the queen’s secretary? Kit couldn’t imagine. John was a rat, he’d be the first to admit it, but a lioness didn’t concern herself with rats without good reason. His mind raced with possibilities, each more absurd than the last. Smuggling. Blackmail. Murder. Kit had just escalated to sedition when Walsingham spoke again, severing his thoughts.

  “My time is in high demand, as you can imagine,” he said. “So you may take my presence as a sign of how seriously I regard this matter.”

  The uncertainty was more than Kit could stand. If he needed to negotiate John’s escape from prison, or the Tower by the sound of it, he wanted to know the worst. “Sir,” Kit said, “I swear, if my father has—”

  Walsingham raised his eyebrows. Kit fell silent. With that one gesture, he knew he was fathoms out of his depth. “What the devil does your father have to do with it? My concern is with you.”

  Him? Kit was a student. A poet. The son of a shoemaker. To the queen and those who kept her counsel, he was nobody. A nuisance, maybe, but monarchs didn’t send their secretaries across the country to condemn nuisances. Walsingham must be looking for someone else. William Morley, that third-year undergraduate whose father hunted deer with the lord mayor of London. Anyone.

  “You must be mistaken, sir—” Kit began.

  “It’s my job not to be mistaken,” Walsingham said, cutting him off. “You are Christopher Marlowe. The eldest son of John Marlowe, second-rate Canterbury cobbler. A poor scholar at Corpus Christi in your fifth year of study. Skilled in rhetoric and disputation, disgraceful in geography and geometry. You’ve been smoking all evening and hoped I wouldn’t notice. And you are no fool, so do not pretend to be.”

  Kit stared. His mind had stopped providing thoughts germane to the situation. By the light of Christ, what did this man want?

  “How much do you know of the royal secretary’s duties?” Walsingham asked, ignoring Kit’s evident shock.

  Direct questions with simple answers were all Kit could cope with at this juncture. “Exactly as much as I should, sir,” he said, “and no more.”

  Walsingham gave him a withering look. “Don’t be clever. In addition to my public duties as Her Majesty’s head of state, I am engaged in more sensitive matters. And that,” he said with finality, “is why I asked Norgate to bring you to me. Between the ripples from Bartholomew’s Day and the growing nest of Jesuits within our borders, we are spread thin enough. I can no longer afford to be discriminating in my choices.”

  There was an insult in the phrase, Kit was certain, but he hadn’t grasped the situation well enough to be offended. He willed himself to stop fidgeting.

  Though he had no idea what Walsingham meant by my choices, th
e first half of the phrase was clear. Kit’s evenings in the White Stag with a smoke and a knack for eavesdropping had been as instructive as those in the library with Tacitus. The massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day was more than a decade in the grave, but the taverns of both Canterbury and Cambridge still buzzed with stories of armed Catholics filling the streets of France with burning corpses. It was only a matter of time, or so the tavern rumors claimed, before England’s Jesuits and papists took up arms and did the same. Kit listened to these stories with the interest of a theatergoer, not the concern of a loyal subject. The idea of armed religious zealots, though alarming on its face, had nothing to do with him. As for personal belief, Kit’s primary spiritual conviction was that any god who began services at six in the morning was too cruel for a sane man to worship. But Kit’s spiritual convictions didn’t seem to interest Walsingham.

  “My informants have provided thorough and reliable suggestions about papist movements within our borders,” Walsingham said. “But—”

  Wait. Informants?

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Kit interrupted. Walsingham’s greyhound eyes widened a fraction. Astounded, perhaps, that Kit had dared. “Are you telling me—”

  “That I am Her Majesty’s spymaster?” Walsingham interrupted, as if to say, See how you like it. “Yes, Marlowe. That is what I’m telling you. Do keep up.”

  Walsingham had still not offered Kit the chair, but if he dropped one more revelation of that nature into this conversation, Kit’s knees would give out on their own. Spies. Double-dealing. Lies and half-truths. Papists and massacres. It sounded like madness.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, tasting the sharp bitterness of understatement.

  The corners of Walsingham’s mouth inched upward. In other men, it might have been a smile. Here, it was a geographical rearrangement of facial features. “As the Catholic threat grows,” he said, “we have more enemies than I have agents to monitor them. And each time we eradicate one, ten more take their place.” He raised one finger for each name as he spoke them. “Robert Southwell. William Stafford. Henry Garnet. The list,” he said, abandoning the count with a curt wave of his hand, “continues. And so we have begun turning to the universities to recruit. Intelligent, discontented young men with farcical and expensive degrees, facing poverty and uselessness. I’m sure you understand.”

  It was not the most diplomatic opinion ever voiced about a university education, but diplomacy had been thrown out the window five minutes ago.

  “When I asked Master Norgate to recommend a student who might serve, he spoke of you at length. Of your ambition. Your persuasive rhetoric. Your inability to follow basic rules of conduct, manifested everywhere from the chapel to the alehouse.”

  Kit stayed silent, unsure of the proper response. It was decidedly unclear whether Walsingham intended this as a compliment or an insult.

  “I don’t wish to interfere with your education.” Walsingham made the word sound like a crude bodily function. “But in addition to your work at Cambridge, I am proposing further employment.”

  To hell with it. Kit gripped the back of the chair in front of him. Nothing else would keep him upright. Maybe the tobacco had been headier than he thought. There was no other way to explain what he’d heard. “You want me to be a spy, sir?”

  To his alarm, Walsingham did not correct him. “You will have time to prepare for your first operation,” he said. “My associate will brief you before you are dispatched.”

  Kit flinched at the word dispatched—in it, he heard the swish of an axe. He hadn’t forgotten the Jesuit Edmund Campion’s execution, or how the Catholic conspirator Francis Throckmorton’s eyes were said to have roved for half a minute while his head lay two feet from his neck. It was treason Walsingham sought out. Condemning men to the Tower. The metal rolls of the rack, coated with copper rust. The creaking branch of the gallows. Iron pikes on London Bridge, entering one end of a crimson-stumped head and soaring out through the crown. This was the world Walsingham proposed. This was a world men died in.

  “Sir,” he began, “I think, I, I’m not…”

  Walsingham’s look was that of a demon told in the midst of brokering for a man’s soul that his customer wished to seek a second opinion. He paused, during which time Kit forced himself to stop stammering. “I understand,” he said at last. “It is a great deal to absorb at once. And with so much at stake, I do not wish to employ an ambivalent man.”

  Kit tried and failed to meet Walsingham’s eye. Instead, he looked out the window, at the shadows drowning the courtyard as Walsingham continued speaking.

  “I will give you time to consider. But under no circumstances will you speak of this meeting to anyone. My associate will contact you in the next few days. Once you have met with him, we will discuss how to proceed in this business.”

  Business. Was that the word for it? Perhaps to Whitehall. When was the last time a courtier said what he meant? Honesty paved a sure path to the scaffold, everyone knew that. Lies were sterling, misdirection more valuable than gold. Business. Perhaps.

  “Here.”

  The sound of five gold coins striking the desk drove all other thoughts from Kit’s mind.

  Gold crowns sounded different against wood than silver. Their echoes were louder, more persuasive. Kit had never seen so much gold in one place, and he had no doubt that, to Sir Francis Walsingham, these five crowns were nothing. He looked to Walsingham for clarification. Walsingham absorbed Kit’s shock without shifting his expression.

  “Consider this an advance,” Walsingham said. “In expectation of services rendered.”

  It never occurred to Kit to refuse the money. It chilled the inside of his palm as he swept it up. An advance. Five crowns. And how much would a scholar earn in a year? How much would a shoemaker?

  “You may go,” Walsingham said.

  His attention had already passed to a sheaf of papers resting on the desk. Kit’s mute bow went unnoticed.

  * * *

  —————

  Alone in the corridor, Kit leaned his back against the closed door. He felt light-headed, as if he’d run five miles instead of walking fifteen feet. Without thinking, his hand traveled to his thigh, where Walsingham’s five crowns weighted his pocket. He could still see their brazen glint on Norgate’s desk, the queen’s etched portrait watching him with her golden glare. Shoemakers’ sons didn’t receive crowns, let alone pledge loyalty to a head that wore one. What kind of service could he offer, a man like him?

  The door behind him felt too near, the mouth of a cave with a sleeping wolf inside. Kit shivered and began the slow walk back to his dormitory. His steps echoed through the deserted halls. Had it always been so silent? Had Corpus Christi always been so small? The first day he’d walked through the university’s doors, it had seemed like a palace. King’s School, his grammar school, could have fit inside its walls six times. But Walsingham had pulled aside an invisible curtain, revealing a world of impossible size and a host of eyes watching him from the dark.

  And why not?

  He paused outside his door, hand halfway to the handle. Walsingham’s proposition, overwhelming at first, had taken several minutes to penetrate, but it had done so now. Why not him? Who else, here? Hadn’t Norgate said…

  Norgate. That was something else. How long had the master been watching Kit, judging, evaluating, before writing to Whitehall and putting the game in motion?

  Too many questions for one night. He would answer none of them haunting his own room here in the corridor. He opened the door and stepped into the room, darker now as the sun sank lower.

  Tom and Nick looked up at his entrance. Kit winced. He’d forgotten he wouldn’t be alone, and the thought of navigating this conversation without revealing what had happened was exhausting. He couldn’t tell them a word, but it was all he wanted to do, to have someone else share the whirling disarray of
his thoughts.

  He took a deep breath, then let it out. Two seconds, to stitch together some semblance of calm. Judging from the way both Tom and Nick watched him—one with concern, the other with curiosity—two seconds had been both too long and not long enough.

  “Are you all right?” Tom asked. He frowned as Kit took up his abandoned seat on the desk. “You look like hell.”

  Kit didn’t doubt it. “Fine,” he said, convincing no one. “Tired. A long day.”

  “What did Norgate want?” Nick pressed, ignoring Tom’s warning look.

  “To discuss my scholarship,” Kit said. The answer came with more speed than confidence. Tom looked at him askance. Some spy he would make, when he couldn’t even lie to his friends.

  It was too much. Nick opened his mouth to say something, ask some question, a question Kit didn’t trust himself to answer. Time. He needed time. An hour, two, to think. After that, he could spin equivocations like a Jesuit. But now…

  “I’m sorry.” For once, the hitch in his voice played to his advantage. “I’m feeling ill.” It was a convincing performance. Ought to be—the situation did make him feel sick to his stomach.

  Tom’s frown deepened. “You’ll find me if you need me?”

  For the first time, Kit wished Tom were less kind. “I’m fine.”

  “Christ, Tom,” Nick said. “Don’t go on like you’re his wet nurse. If you won’t help me, Kit, I have work to do. Thanks for nothing.” He spun the chair back to face the desk and left. Tom lingered a moment, then followed him without a word.

  Empty now, the room seemed darker, smaller. The slanting golden light was supplemented by a sputtering candle someone had lit in Kit’s absence. Probably Nick; Tom knew how little Kit could afford to spend on candles. Before Walsingham and his five crowns, in any case. The evening shadows flickered and wavered, stretched beyond their normal bounds except for an untouched, quivering circle of light around the desk.