He heard every word of the sermon and listened to none of them. He knew their God too well for that. The God who watched, cleaning dirt from under his fingernails, as men and women spied and betrayed and planned assassinations in his name. The God who dug in his heels over the minutiae of centuries-old ritual while giving his benediction to murderers and zealots. A God who would damn men for how they prayed and loved but not how they cursed and killed.
“And all that had heard it wondered at the things which were told them of the shepherds,” read the rector. “And the shepherds returned glorifying and praising God.”
The Catholics had one thing right, he thought, ignoring the rector. Both sects were hypocritical asses, but at least Mary Stuart and her lot understood theater. A little sleight of hand, a little magic, and before you could say “Ave Maria,” bread into flesh. Quite the trick. The Church of England was an aesthetic affront. Stilted and sober, down to the diction of its Gospels. “The things which were told them of the shepherds.” If Kit met a living human who arranged his prepositions and verbs that way, he’d take pleasure beating some rhetoric into them. The New Testament was as filthily composed as a grammar-school Latin exercise. Any poet worth his salt could do better.
“Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven…”
Kit flinched. Surely they hadn’t returned all the way to Genesis, he thought, forcing himself to genuinely listen. No. The rector painted the same scene of the Nativity, button-eyed livestock watching the wailing infant savior. Nothing to do with the way Kit’s attention wandered to the third-row pew where Tom’s head bowed in prayer. If God couldn’t bestir himself over sectarian violence, surely he wouldn’t berate Kit for whom he happened to fuck. In any case, the distance between them would have satisfied the most celibate Levite. But that wouldn’t erase the warmth of their bare skin together, the sound of Tom’s hoarse voice when he whispered Kit’s name the night before, lips meeting, first soft, then with urgency—
“And looking toward Sodom and Gomorrah, behold, he saw the smoke of the land mounting up as the smoke of the furnace.”
Go to hell, Kit thought, turning away from the rector. All this from a God whose idea of morality oscillated between drowning the world and turning the other cheek. Murdering for peace. Sinning for salvation. At least the devil was consistent. Consistent as the death of a thirteen-year-old girl. As a well-crafted lie. As symbols on the page, omnipresent and tauntingly opaque. As the slanted beam of light from the high windows that made Tom’s hair shine radiant across the church. Always present, never turning.
“The Gospel of the Lord,” said the rector.
* * *
—————
Christmas came and went, then the new year, and still Kit was no better off than when he’d started. Mary’s ciphered letters haunted him, mocking him every waking moment, worming their way into his dreams. He fought for calm, confidence, stasis. Three things in short supply as he stared hour after hour at a cipher that would not come right, feeling time slipping away.
Tom, knowing the symptoms of Kit’s disquiet but not the cause, did his best to distract him. Tonight, Kit sat cross-legged on the floor of his dormitory, leaning against the bed with Tom across from him, a chessboard between them. Kit was on the defensive, dancing away from Tom’s imminent threats, but that was all right. Between the letters, the disaster of his trip home, and the prospect of defending his degree in less than six months, his mind swarmed with anxiety. It was almost a relief to play a game he was allowed to lose.
“Your move,” Tom said. He’d been waiting for Kit to act for upwards of three minutes.
There was a move here that would lead to victory, if Kit could only find it. But his mind would not stick on the pieces. “You can’t rush tactical genius,” he said to the chessboard.
“Tactical genius?” Tom repeated. “God help the battalion under your command.”
“I don’t know,” Kit said, still looking at the board. Every move he saw led to death, one way or another. “I’ve always thought of myself as a latter-day Achilles.”
“Absolutely,” Tom said. “Renowned for the powerful thrust of your spear.”
Kit looked up to see Tom’s grin and laughed. Six months ago, he’d have spent a week trying to decide what Tom meant by that. “You’re becoming more like me every day, Tom. Your mother will be thrilled.”
“Play,” Tom said, gesturing at the board. “Before I die of old age.”
Kit ran his thumb along the rounded top of his pawn, considering. Tom had left his bishop exposed, opening an opportunity for Kit’s pawn to surge forward and sacrifice itself so that the queen could slice in for the kill. It was a good strategic move, but he wouldn’t make it. His patience was ground to dust. Easier to vent your irritation on a stone queen than a live one.
At least Walsingham had made himself scarce since December, he thought, considering a horizontal slash of his rook against Tom’s pawn. As promised, Gregory appeared in the village twice monthly to receive underwhelming reports of Kit’s progress. Their most recent meeting in the White Stag lasted all of ten minutes, enough time for Kit to explain he knew nothing and for Gregory to swear like Whitehall paid him to do it.
He nudged his knight forward and across, beginning an advance on Tom’s bishop.
Tom moved his king to safety—a vulnerability Kit hadn’t seen. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.
Kit looked up. “What?”
“You could’ve had me. What is it?”
Any lie would do, but Kit’s mind came up blank. His heart quickened to a rabbit-like fluttering. Damn it. This kind of panic had been overtaking him on and off for weeks, but now was not the time.
Tom raked his hair off his forehead. “Kit. If you have something to say, say it.”
Kit’s dormitory, never spacious at the best of times, now felt like a prison. Tom watched him close, questioning. He had to say something. But his nerves were stretched so thin his tongue wouldn’t form words. He coughed, forcing himself to speak. “Light a candle, would you? It’s getting dark.”
Right. As if that would convince him to drop the subject. But he needed Tom to step away. Turn his back. For a few seconds. Kit’s mask could not be allowed to slip, not now, but it was dangerously close to falling.
Tom looked at him with something between exasperation and alarm. Kit cracked the knuckles of his left hand, then the right. After a moment, Tom sighed, then pushed himself off the floor, crossing to the desk. Tom’s back now turned, Kit drew a deep breath. The exhale rattled in his throat. Don’t say anything you’ll regret, he thought. Tom doesn’t know anything. Nobody does.
“What in God’s name…”
Kit stood so quickly he kicked the chessboard. A small army of pawns skittered into the room’s far corners. Tom stood at the desk, two papers in his hand. One covered in hieroglyphic symbols, the other Kit’s scratched attempts at imposing logic. The drawer where he’d stowed the pages stood open at Tom’s knee.
The letters. The one thing he had to keep secret. How could he have been so stupid?
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Here—”
Kit cut forward and grabbed for the letter, but Tom was faster. He pivoted to block Kit with his shoulder and turned his attention to the page. Idiot, Kit thought. Show him it’s important, of course he’d hold on twice as close.
“Nothing?” Tom’s voice rose. In a moment, he’d be shouting. “What’s wrong with you? What is this? Some kind of, I don’t know, some kind of code—”
Kit swore and lunged across the room. He slammed the door and, under Tom’s dumbfounded watch, drew the bolt across. But it might already be too late. Anyone might have heard in passing. And Cambridge’s population was well connected to a fault. Anyone might have overheard, and who knew who they might tell. One wrong word could get him
killed.
Tom looked at Kit, then at the letter, then back. Kit could see him putting the pieces together. The cipher. The two-month disappearance. The terror of discovery. Walsingham in the library. “Kit,” he said. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“I can’t—”
“You will.”
A lie. Any lie. Tell him anything.
Kit opened his mouth, but only the creaking beginnings of words emerged. Every explanation seemed more implausible and frenetic than the last. A rush of air rang in his ears, a wild energy driving him mad, surely he would go mad, because the answer to Tom’s question, Tell me what’s happening, he couldn’t answer that question, the answer to that question was madness. What explanation could there be for an unreadable code? He deserved to hang for being so careless.
He leaned against the door, fighting down the light-headedness of panic. He had to say something. Tom turned to face him, urgency driving toward anger. Tell him, Kit thought. You have to tell him. Better he knows the truth, so he knows to keep quiet.
When he spoke, his voice sounded muted, as if underwater. “I’m a spy.”
The paper fluttered out of Tom’s hand to the desk. “You’re a what?”
“You heard.”
Tom narrowed his eyes. “Kit, if you won’t tell me, fine, but don’t lie to me.”
“I’m trying to tell you the truth!”
Kit hadn’t meant to scream.
Tom fell silent, staring. Kit’s heart had been beating so fast for so long that the inside of his ribs felt bruised. He ran one shaking hand over his mouth. When he spoke, the words were as calm and measured as he could make them.
“I’ve been working for the queen’s spymaster since October,” he said under his breath. “He suspects Mary Stuart of trying to assassinate the queen. And if I don’t break that cipher by about yesterday,” he added, “she might well do it.”
Tom sat at Kit’s desk, picking up the letters again as if he might find answers there. “Who would hire you to spy for Her Majesty?”
Kit’s laugh was more than halfway to hysterics. “Why would I make up a lie this ridiculous, Tom, unless it was the truth?”
“Because you’re you,” Tom said, still staring at the letters. “You once told Master Seymour you hadn’t finished an essay because you’d been visited by the Holy Ghost.”
As if that was remotely the same thing. Kit sank down to the floor, his back against the door, and took his head in his hands. His heart pounded in his ears until he thought his head would split. “You see how that letter’s signed?” he said.
Tom glanced to the bottom of the page. Seeing, Kit knew, two narrow, spiky letters beneath the lines of shapes and symbols. The letters that had been taunting Kit for weeks, months. M.R.
“Mary Regina,” Kit said. “She’s signing letters to English subjects as ‘Queen Mary.’ Do you think there’s a woman more likely to want the queen dead than Mary Stuart, Margaret Tudor’s granddaughter? And,” he added, speaking faster than he meant to, “the legitimate heir to the throne, if you believe Anne Boleyn was a harlot and the queen, her daughter, a bastard?”
The color drained from Tom’s face. “Do you need to shout these things, for God’s sake?”
Kit’s voice had almost been softer than his heartbeat, but now wasn’t the time to argue. The fallen white queen had rolled near the door—Kit picked it up and held it between his spread knees, turning it over in his palm. It was easier to look at it than anywhere else. How many times had he longed to share his secret with Tom? He’d thought it would bring relief. But in speaking the truth, he’d doubled the risk, not halved it.
“You have to be careful,” he said to Tom. “If you—”
The sentence failed midway. He had no wish to explore that hypothetical. But Tom wasn’t stupid. He watched Kit from across the room, head tilted to one side, silent. Thinking, no doubt, what Kit was: one wrong step, one instance of trust misplaced, and they could each get the other killed.
“Kit,” Tom began, but didn’t go on. The color hadn’t returned to his face. Kit wondered if it ever would.
Kit stood. His body had been so tense that the movement sent an ache through his thighs. “I…” he began.
“I’ve told you,” Tom said. He crossed the room and laid both hands on Kit’s shoulders. “You can trust me. You tell me to keep a secret, even this secret”—his voice hitched, but he pressed on—“and I’ll do it.”
Words abandoned Kit. He pulled Tom into a tight embrace, as if his arms were enough to keep away danger, to preserve this moment from any outside force that threatened it. Tears nagged at the back of his panic, but with a deep breath he forced them down.
“I love you,” he said. Nothing else seemed worth saying.
Tom gave a soft laugh and ran a hand through Kit’s hair. “I love you too,” he said. “Although this isn’t how I imagined hearing you say it the first time.”
They stood that way a long moment, bodies entwined, Kit using the rhythm of Tom’s breath to stabilize his own. Behind them on the desk sat the ciphered letters, unbroken, ignored but not for a moment forgotten.
Fifteen
Master Haywood, gray-haired and sharp-nosed like a disagreeable owl, paced the front of Cambridge’s recitation hall. With forty upper-form students arrayed before him on amphitheater-style benches, he let fly a formidable onslaught of Latin without pausing for breath. Haywood’s monotone flowed with such determination that his students drowned in a dark sea of nominative and genitive terms. They scribbled down every word they could catch, paper and books balanced on small tables, knees, or opposite arms.
Kit’s pen, on the other hand, stalled.
Seated to the left and four rows back, he glared at the page. Any more venom and he’d start shouting curses at it. He hadn’t heard a sentence of the lecture since its first, regarding the Ptolemaic model of celestial organization, or something of the sort. What did it matter? The planets could circle the earth, or they could dance a pavane around the queen for all he cared. Nothing mattered but the letters.
It was a risk, bringing them where anyone could see, but stress made him reckless. He couldn’t miss the lecture—though Norgate had excused Kit’s absence the previous autumn, the fellows hadn’t let it pass without comment. Haywood in particular seemed to spend every free moment searching for reasons to have him expelled. But February’s snows had faded into March. Kit couldn’t put off Walsingham much longer. And the cipher continued to thwart him.
Kit had tried everything he could think of. Searching out characters in Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic that resembled the symbols. Testing Mary’s favored proverbs and psalms as keys. Calculating the prevalence of each symbol against the frequency of Latin letters in common English phrases, then formulating countless potential tables. Nothing. Not a word. The pages seemed to taunt him when he flung them aside. There had to be something else. Some pattern he’d overlooked.
He turned back to the scrap of paper he’d brought along with the letters. In an anxious fit of productivity the previous week, he’d sketched fifty potential keys to Mary’s cipher based on alphabetic frequency. Forty-seven keys, applied to the first line of text, yielded nothing but a string of gibberish. If the final three proved worthless—and the odds were increasingly supportive of this—Kit would be out of tricks. And if he failed to uncover a conspiracy that cost the queen her life, he’d be pleading his excuses to Walsingham from the wrong end of a noose.
He was running out of time.
Again disregarding Haywood and choosing one of the remaining keys, he began. His eyes flicked between the letter and the chart, matching symbol to symbol, transcribing on a third scrap of paper.
My
His pen fell to the floor. He did not move to retrieve it.
God’s fucking seat in the firmament. My. A beautiful, English pronoun. My. It work
ed. The key had worked.
No. He scooped up his pen, forbidding premature hope. Any number of nonsense phrases could begin with M-Y. He bent low over the page, matching letters with the fanaticism of the possessed. His mind racing, his pen sketching words, letters flowing in a cascade of urgency.
Mytrustedandwellbelov—
A light tap on his shoulder. Kit flinched like someone had screamed in his ear.
“What in hell is that?” Nick leaned forward from the row behind, peering over Kit’s shoulder.
Kit shifted a blank sheet over the cipher. With success so close, his nerves transformed into shapeless anger that latched on to the nearest target. “Nothing,” he said. “Keep your nose out.”
Nick frowned. “Don’t be stupid. You expect me to believe you’re taking notes?”
“I said it’s nothing,” Kit said, twisting round to give Nick the full weight of his anger. In that moment, Kit could have stabbed him. He couldn’t be interrupted now, not with the answer this close, not by Nick. “Nose out, I said, unless you want it broken again.”
“Marlowe?”
Kit turned, horror buzzing in his ears. Haywood had ceased his lecture and stood directly in front of Kit. The professor looked more than ever like an owl on the hunt. The entire hall was watching Kit now.
“Yes, sir?” he said, shrinking down in his seat.
“Have you had an astronomical epiphany with which you care to enlighten me?” Haywood spoke English now, a sure sign of ferocious disapproval.
If Kit were discovered not by Catholic insurgents but by an irate Cambridge professor, Walsingham wouldn’t need to bother having him executed. He would die of shame on his own. “No, sir,” he said.
A Tip for the Hangman Page 12
