A Tip for the Hangman

by Allison Epstein

  Haywood glared at him—and then his eyes darted to the page of half-translated cipher balanced on Kit’s book.

  Kit stopped breathing. His hands trembled. He tucked them under his thighs and looked at Haywood with as much boldness as he dared. Kit hadn’t prayed with conviction in years, but he implored any god that might be listening to keep him from looking as suspicious as he felt.

  “Given that your graduation seems exceptionally precarious at present,” Haywood said, “perhaps you would do well, Marlowe, to pay attention.”

  With that, he turned back to the room at large, lapsing again into Latin. The class scrambled to keep pace, Nick included, having escaped public chastisement by a hair. Kit knew he should wait, should run the rest of the key that night in private. But this was too important, Haywood be damned. He slid out the letter, keeping the key shaded by his book. Thank God the morning lecture lasted three hours. He’d need every moment.

  The words came with effort, then faster as Kit eased into his stride. He’d wrongly identified a handful of symbols, flipped the G’s and K’s, but with the skeleton of the message in place it was child’s play to correct his errors. The sound of the lecture faded away as the letter took shape before him.

  My trusted and well-beloved servant,

  In order to ground our enterprise and ensure its success, you must plan carefully what forces you may raise among you, and what captains and generals you shall appoint for them. Take me out of England in advance, and be assured to set me in the midst of a good army where I may safely remain until our foreign forces are assembled on these shores.

  Kit set down his pen. His breathing unsteady, he pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. Calm, he thought. Finish the work. But he couldn’t stop his hands from shaking. He stared at the page, at the words foreign forces, in the midst of an army.

  He’d underestimated Mary. So had Walsingham. This wasn’t an assassin’s dagger concealed in a shirtsleeve. This was the Spanish Armada on the banks of the Thames.

  This was invasion.

  Beware of spies and false brethren, and never keep a paper around you that may do harm if discovered. Such errors have led to the condemnation of many, whose intentions could not have been proven otherwise.

  It was horrifying. Meant death, war, revolution. But the absurdity of it threatened to make him laugh. Beware of spies. If he’d written it in a play, it would have strained credulity.

  God Almighty have you in his protection. Burn this privately and quickly.

  Your assured friend,

  M.R.

  Kit set down his pen. The words gazed up at him. Translated. Broken. Finished.

  He looked up. The lecture hall had emptied. Two and a half hours must have passed, perhaps more. In his frenzy of productivity, no one—to his surprise, not even Haywood—had dared interrupt him at lecture’s end. Privacy: one of the benefits of a reputation for poetic madness. Standing felt like surfacing from an extended period underwater, dark blue silence echoing in his ears.

  He’d done it. The cipher was broken. No more flinching at shadows, no more Arthur Gregory breathing down his neck waiting for news. Walsingham had trusted him, and he had done it. If the country were to fall, it wouldn’t be because of him. He imagined it, thrusting the broken cipher in front of Walsingham and the rest of the Council, accepting their praise as his due. The queen’s finest spy, the only man they could trust. He held Mary’s downfall in his hands, but in that moment, all he could see in her shattered code was his own future stretching unchallenged before him.

  “Are you coming?”

  Kit’s head snapped toward the door. Tom watched him with exasperated indulgence from just inside, the sole of one foot propped against the wall. God knew how long he’d been waiting. Tom wasn’t even enrolled in Haywood’s seminar. Kit swept up the letters and tore down the stairs to ground level. The spring in his step must have looked ridiculous.

  “How long have you been an astronomical devotee?” Tom asked, rolling his back away from the wall.

  “Hang the planets,” Kit said. Something close to hysteria bubbled within him; he felt laughter stretching toward the surface. “I’ve done it. It’s done.”

  Tom looked toward the door, but there was no one there. The next lecture wouldn’t begin for another hour. “What’s done?”

  The question tore the laugh out of Kit. Success went to his head, more potent than any liquor. If he could have burst into song without the college having him chained up as a madman, he’d have done it. “The letters. Words. Words,” he said, brandishing the pages. He was hardly mastering words himself at this point, but no matter.

  “What do they say?”

  “Everything,” Kit said, beaming. “War. Regicide. Treason. It’s wonderful.”

  Tom raised his eyebrows. “Wonderful?”

  Strangely, in that moment, it was. “I can’t send this by post,” Kit said, working out the problem as he said it. Sketching plans as before he’d sketched words. “And Gregory won’t be back for two weeks, there’s no time for that.”

  “Go to town,” Tom said. He looked again toward the door, more alert against discovery than Kit, who had more reason to be. “Find a messenger. I’ll pay, if you need—”

  “No,” Kit said. As the words formed, they seemed the most natural thing in the world. “I’m going myself.”

  Tom looked at Kit like he’d taken leave of any scrap of rationality he’d ever possessed. It was a fair assessment, given everything, but Kit knew what he was doing. He’d survived six weeks in Yorkshire among people who would have killed him in an instant if they’d learned his true purpose. After that, London would be simple.

  “At least let me come with you,” Tom said. “I spent my whole life in the city, I can—”

  “No,” Kit said—God, it was so easy to make decisions in this warm wave of euphoria. “We can’t both disappear, they’re more likely to notice that way. I need you to stay here and make my excuses for me.”

  Tom swore. “What excuses?”

  “That I’m ill. Dying. Getting betrothed to a duchess. Whatever you like. I’ll barely be gone a week.” Kit was halfway through the door by the time he’d finished the sentence. A long beat of silence followed.

  “Jesus Christ, Kit,” Tom said, running after him.

  Kit grinned. Of course Tom had questions. But they’d have the night together, and Tom might ask anything he liked before sunrise. At that point, Kit would be on the road, toward London, Mary’s secrets safe in his head.

  God Almighty have you in his protection, Mary had written. It was time to see whose side God was on.

  Sixteen

  Kit had never been to London before. Fifty miles from home, yet the capital seemed a world away. But though he’d never seen it, he understood—he was sure—its soul. Tom, when drunk, would rhapsodize at length on his youth in the city. The scent of the docks. Saint Paul’s steeple at sunset, against the hawking cries of booksellers and churchyard prophets. The tangle of whores and players and moneylenders roving the south bank like sin incarnate. The stories, secondhand though they were, lent Kit confidence. A city was a city, and he knew the taverns, brothels, and churches of home as well as anyone. What could be different in London except scale?

  A great deal, as it happened.

  As Kit approached the city, the suburbs greeted him first. London hung over the belt of its walls like a man grown too stout for his clothes. He wove through Shoreditch, a sprawling, ill-constructed neighborhood backed up against the dusty expanse of Finsbury Fields. Disarray and disorder, reaching north of the wall to house the excess.

  What came next, as London itself rose before him, was the smell.

  It seeped out through Bishopsgate like a living thing, and Kit gagged, pressing a hand over his mouth and nose. London was a city. Cities stank. But God, not like this
. Enough to knock you over, like week-old meat smeared with shit. Like—

  Heads.

  He looked up. Four scarlet-stumped heads, speared on pikes atop the peak of Bishopsgate’s arch. Eyes long since food for birds, their empty sockets leered down at Kit, rimmed with the black of weathered blood. Traitors. An example. He thought of Babington’s haughty smirk, Morgan’s sneer, Mary’s sharp dark eyes—pecked out by crows. Food for scavengers. Stomach turning, Kit pushed through the gate, out of sight of their blind skulls.

  Within the walls, the narrow streets ran toward mud, sodden with melting snow and rutted from carts trundling toward the Royal Exchange at Cornhill. Everywhere the thick scent of mildew and burning wood and shit and piss and the blood, congealed and steaming, that ran in viscous pools from the butchers of Hog Lane nearby. So loud. So much. Everywhere men shouting, swearing. Somewhere the bellow of a bull as its throat was slit. The shriek of a man from the stone edifice of Bethlehem Hospital, just outside the city.

  So many people, pressing close to Kit, from all directions. Begging for money with the same phrases they’d said to a hundred men before him and would say to a hundred more after he’d gone. Kit pressed his hands into his pockets, his gaze on the ground. If they’d known, these desperates, that only the chance interest of wealthy strangers separated his circumstances from theirs, would they still have swarmed him? Likely yes. Poverty was not rational, but sprawled outward, many-headed, amorphous, all-encompassing. Walsingham ought to have paid some of his blood money here, where it could be used.

  Tom had grown up here. He knew this city, knew its horrors and its cruelty. And he’d never said a word about any of this. If Tom had come with him, he’d have navigated the streets with native ease, glossing over the beggars, passing from person to building without registering the difference. No thought spared for this hell of wandering spirits. If he were to see Kit’s family, with their mended clothes and boarded-up window—which he couldn’t do, which he could never do—what would he think? Kit didn’t know, and feared what the answer might be.

  Don’t think about that, he told himself. He hadn’t come to London to philosophize. He forced himself to focus on the imminent threat of Whitehall, which he would reach in a matter of minutes. His mental picture of the palace was inaccurate, no doubt, but he’d rectify it soon enough. Walsingham would receive him, bring him to the Privy Council, to give his direct report to—

  The Council. And he’d thought Walsingham’s visit to Cambridge was agony. What would those men think of him? Worse even than a beggar: a poor man who aspired above his station. His nausea had nothing to do with the scent of the Pissing Conduit running along the churchyard nearby.

  To hell with it, he thought. They’d want to hear from him. He’d done what they asked, what they thought no one could do. He was arriving in triumph, even if the smell of severed heads still hung in the air.

  Through Cheapside out to the Fleet, then along the river, to Whitehall’s north entrance. He skirted its main door and the ostentatious gate overlooking the main road, but even from an awkward angle, the palace was arresting. Not one edifice but a compound, sprawling across both sides of a broad avenue and backed against the Thames. Whitehall reveled in its own eccentricity, its varied stones and scattered cupolas jutting piecemeal skyward. If someone told Kit as a child that at twenty-two he’d walk into this palace seeking a meeting with the queen’s secretary, he’d have laughed himself sick. There was nothing amusing about it now.

  A servant met him at the door, an older man with a severe beard and unwelcoming eyes. Kit stood up straighter and tried to look as reputable as he could, stinking of horse, the stiffness of travel in every article of clothing.

  “I need an audience with Sir Francis Walsingham,” Kit said.

  The performance wasn’t as impressive here as it had been at Westgate. The servant narrowed his eyes and did not move. “Is Sir Francis expecting you?”

  Kit paused. “If I say yes, would you believe it?”

  “I would not, no.”

  “All right, he isn’t expecting me,” Kit conceded. He craned his neck, trying to see around the servant. “But if you’d only tell him Kit Marlowe’s come with news, I promise he’ll want to speak with me.”

  From the servant’s tight lips, he doubted this. But there must have been something to Kit’s words that rang true. Most likely he wasn’t the first rough-looking fellow to turn up at the back door asking for the spymaster. The servant sighed, then glanced over his shoulder.

  “Wait here,” he said, snapping the door shut.

  It wasn’t the first time Kit had a door slammed in his face, but it was the first time he’d been left waiting on the doorstep of a palace. He took a deep breath, trying to tamp down the vomit rising in his throat. He would be all right. He would tell them what they needed to know. All he had to do was remember the letters, and not think of severed heads, and hope that the queen took the announcement of her pending assassination as good news.

  “Come on,” said the servant, opening the door again. “Sir Francis is in council, but he will see you.”

  All of the terrors at once, then. Well, Walsingham had never been one to waste time.

  The servant led Kit into the corridor and toward the chamber where the Privy Council was in session. It wasn’t far—not nearly far enough for Kit to quell his rising panic. With those words, in council, the terror swelled to an almost-unbearable pitch. He looked down at his mud-caked boots, bought with Walsingham’s pay—the first pair of shoes he’d ever owned that John Marlowe hadn’t made and mended. Pathetic, to think he’d ever be welcome in a place like this. But he’d done what none of them could. And he’d be damned if he’d let nerves undo him now.

  They paused before a closed oaken door, a lion’s-head doorknocker standing sentinel in the center. Kit could hear the pitch of male voices within, though the door obscured the words. He strained to listen, but before he could translate the sound into sense, the servant let the knocker fall back against the wood. The voices stopped.

  After a pause, a man spoke. “Enter.”

  Kit took a shaky inhale. From nothing and nowhere to the threshold of the Privy Council. Everything depended on this performance. The queen’s life and England’s survival. Nothing like pressure to force one’s hand.

  “Go on, then,” the servant said.

  Kit opened the door and stepped inside.

  Long and dim, the room dripped gravitas from its wide-set walls. A long table and fourteen high-backed chairs dominated its center, and heavy scarlet curtains shielded the tall windows. No late-night walkers in the garden below would catch sight of these proceedings, backlit by the fire sparking in the hearth. Scattered lamps illuminated each face around the table, giving the gathering the feel of a secret cabal.

  Kit shivered. The Privy Council. It was like sharing a room with the Knights of the Round Table. He sank into a mute bow. Neither Canterbury nor Cambridge had taught him the vocabulary for this.

  Rising, he found his focus pulled to the elderly, frail man at the head of the table. To his right, a small foxlike man with a sandy beard and a slight hunch watched Kit with a sour, appraising gaze. Though younger and with a decidedly more pinched set to his narrow mouth, his resemblance to the older man was unmistakable. Lord Burghley, head of the Privy Council, and Sir Robert Cecil, his son. Had Kit faced Abraham and Isaac themselves across the table, the effect couldn’t have been more startling.

  Walsingham, seated silent at the opposite end of the table, seemed to enjoy Kit’s sudden humility.

  How many other giants of English politics would in a moment hold Kit’s life in their hands? He coughed and tried to stop his face burning through force of will. A chair stood empty at the table, beside Walsingham, but Kit wouldn’t have taken it for a hundred pounds.

  “You’re Walsingham’s boy,” said Cecil, cutting through the silence. “M
arlin.”

  Kit turned. Cecil’s gaze stripped all other thoughts from Kit’s mind. Marlin. Like the fish. Christ’s light. He’d thought Gregory’s quick temper had been off-putting, but at least Walsingham’s man had bothered to remember Kit’s name. “Marlowe, sir,” he said.

  “The Cambridge wit,” Cecil drawled, as if Kit hadn’t spoken. “Sir Francis has lionized your talents to me on multiple occasions.”

  Kit swallowed. The possibilities of what Walsingham might have said were horrifying. “I’m sure he exaggerates, sir.”

  “Without a doubt,” Cecil said, with a rather pointed sweep of his eyes along Kit’s doublet. It had seemed well made in Cambridge; under Cecil’s observation, Kit felt as if he’d transformed into a Bishopsgate beggar.

  Walsingham’s patience for men like Cecil spanned about thirty seconds. His patience with Kit, though slightly longer, did not exceed twice that. “I must admit, Marlowe, I’m surprised to see you,” he said. “I thought the arrangement between you and Gregory was quite clear.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Kit said. “It couldn’t wait. It’s the letters.”

  Walsingham leaned forward, and his irritation turned at once into interest. Kit had to stop himself from grinning. He’d been right to come: Walsingham had waited for this as desperately as he had. Even a moment’s delay would have been too long. The Council’s attention shifted as one to Kit, and Lord Burghley leaned forward in his chair to see him properly. The old man had a nation resting on his frail shoulders. Every danger his concern, every plot his responsibility. Everyone in the Council knew of the letters, but none so intimately as Burghley.

  Walsingham nodded. “Marlowe, you can read them?”

  “I can,” Kit said.

  The room, quiet before, was silent now. Walsingham’s expression bordered on a smirk. If Kit didn’t know better, he’d think the spymaster was proud. Or perhaps the reason was simpler. Relishing the irony that a simple country peasant had outsmarted these perfumed bureaucrats. Anticipating the victory of disarming the Stuart threat. It was as practical as that.