A Tip for the Hangman

by Allison Epstein

  Ned, despite the playful tone, colored. “You flatter me, Kit.”

  “Absolutely,” Kit said. “My plays come out best when I flatter you to death.”

  “Speaking of plays,” Tom said, glancing at Kyd. “Anything new from you, after your Spanish Tragedy? It’s been ages since we’ve been blessed with a Thomas Kyd production.”

  “Blessed?” Ned repeated, eyebrows dubiously aloft.

  “Oh, you were happy enough to play my Hieronimo,” Kyd snapped.

  The conversation drifted easily, as easy as the possessive slide of Tom’s hand along Kit’s hip. Kit leaned into it, body humming with Tom’s nearness. Six years since they’d admitted to loving each other, and it still felt as mad and wonderful and improbable as ever. He would never know anyone, want anyone, feel so much himself with anyone as Tom.

  “Don’t talk to me about writing,” Kyd muttered. “My mind’s a blank. I’ve stared at half a line for six months. ‘Hamlet, revenge!’ ” He raised a dramatic hand to the sky, then let it fall. “And that’s where I end.”

  “You need six more syllables,” Will said.

  “Thank you, Master of Verse,” Kyd said. “You know so much, you write it.”

  Leaving the Mermaid, they took the long way, skirting around Cheapside. Not for them, tonight, that crowded market, where men and women hawked bolts of cloth and joints of meat at prices no one among them could hope to pay. Instead, they angled away from the cathedral along Thames Street, keeping the distance between themselves and Bankside as slim as they could. When Tom took Kit by the arm and stopped him, no one protested. Walking farther meant returning to the everyday world, where respectable people went about respectable business.

  Kit must have had more to drink than he thought. One moment he was watching Tom, brilliant and beautiful in the sunset, and the next his back was pushed hard against the wall of a nearby cobbler’s shop, and there was no space between him and Tom, none at all. Tom kept him there with a hand on each shoulder, Kit’s spine flush against the stone.

  Tom’s thigh pressed between Kit’s legs, firm and perfectly aimed, and Kit felt his own breath shudder on the exhale. They were celebrating. They were drunk. They were young still, mostly, twenty-eight was almost young, and stupid enough to make up for it. Kit had just watched his words captivate the better part of London for two hours. This was freedom. This was what it meant to live.

  “You ass,” Tom said. Kit shivered with the pressure of Tom’s thigh, just exactly in the right place, and Tom’s breath close against his throat. “You didn’t tell me Edward was going to be like that. My God, why does Henslowe put up with you?”

  Kit smiled. “My unparalleled genius, I expect.”

  “I thought I’d read the worst,” Tom said, soft and low and far too close to Kit’s ear for him to focus. “That damned poem you showed me last Christmas, your lecherous Poseidon leaping out of the sea to fuck Leander.”

  Kit laughed. He’d forgotten that.

  “But this, could you have bothered to pretend? You’ll get yourself killed. Even if you did…”

  Tom made no attempt to describe the death Kit had written for Edward, but the scene needed no reprise. A searing white-hot poker slicing through the king’s rectum, impaling his guts, the imagined scent of charred flesh filling the theater. That image stuck with a person. A feint, of course, and an obvious one. Punish sodomy with enough allegorical verve in the fifth act and the master of revels let you do anything you liked during the first four. But still…

  Kit smiled. It was the same smile he’d worn at Cambridge before explaining in exacting detail why a drunken orgy would bring Protestant priests closer to God. Or when he’d told Thomas Kyd his commission for a poem on Saint Paul was like writing an epic about a charlatan pushing pigs’ bones as saints’ relics. The smile of a man who knew a comfortable death alone was worse than a hot and passionate damnation.

  “I couldn’t have done it without you,” he said. “ ‘London harbors my lord, on whose bosom let me lie—’ ”

  “Don’t quote yourself at me.” Tom’s hand grew bolder, leaving his shoulder, sneaking between the fabric of Kit’s breeches and his bare skin. Kit tensed, barely breathing, shivering at the warmth of Tom’s breath, the slow—so slow—movement of his fingers. “If you’re going to write a play about us, love, give it a happy ending.”

  Kit’s yelp came out much louder than he meant it to.

  But what did it matter? He ached with wanting Tom, would take him in the middle of the street if there was time enough. Tom pressed close, and Kit closed his eyes, soaring. God above, if they could manage this much in the open street, think of the promise of privacy.

  “Steady on, boys,” Ned said.

  Kit glanced over Tom’s shoulder. Right. They did still have an audience.

  He and Tom stepped apart, not quite looking at anyone. Tom elbowed Kit in the ribs, and Kit, glancing down, hastily turned away. Their knowing laughter at his back, he walked ahead of them toward the river, steadfastly focused on the least arousing subjects he could conjure. Trade embargoes. The election of the new lord mayor. The Lord’s Prayer, backward.

  Ned might have thought Kit and Tom’s behavior stemmed from drink, or he might have suspected something deeper. Kit neither knew nor cared. The church and the crown would have them strung up by their bowels for it, but the theater didn’t give a damn where men’s pricks pointed them. Men proclaimed undying love to other men every afternoon on the Rose’s stage. And it took a great deal to shock an actor.

  “This is why the Puritans want to shut us down,” Will said, gesturing toward Tom.

  “Vulgar crowd of miscreants, the lot of us,” Thomas Kyd agreed.

  “Master Marlowe, sir, wait please!”

  “Speak miscreant and messengers come running,” Will said under his breath.

  Kit glanced down Cannon Street. A boy raced toward him, shabbily dressed, with a cap pulled low over limp brown hair. Kit had never seen him before, but that was no surprise. London was full of them, these young messengers prized for their quick legs and their inability to read the messages they were delivering.

  The boy skidded to a stop in front of the group, then glanced between them. At last, he craned his neck up at Ned. “A message for you, Master Marlowe,” he said tentatively.

  Kit cleared his throat and stepped forward, ignoring the snort of laughter from Thomas Kyd. He could sense the boy’s disappointment: it would have taken a Kit and a half to form someone of Ned’s stature. But then, he hadn’t been crowned king of Bankside on looks alone. “Me, I’m afraid,” he said. “Who sent you? If it’s my landlady,” he added on reflection, “tell her I’ll pay the moment the profits come in from this play. You may give her my word as a poet.”

  “And as for the word of a poet,” Kyd muttered, no doubt thinking of the nine weeks he’d spent haranguing Kit for his half of the rent, “at least it sounds sterling.”

  The boy shook his head and thrust the letter forward. “I was told not to tell you who sent me. He said you’d know.”

  The street, London, all the world narrowed down to the page in the boy’s hand, and a wash of panic sent Kit shivering.

  He extended a hand, and the boy pressed the page into his palm. He’d known even before he looked what he would see, but it was different, holding it in his hand. The page marked with that scarlet seal, the rounded petals of a rose embedded in its wax. He would recognize that seal anywhere.

  Beside him, Tom cursed under his breath. So would he.

  He should have known it wouldn’t last. Five years of freedom, of earning a living with his words as he’d always said he would. Give it another year and he might have been able to sleep in peace, without dreams of shrieking women and armed rebels, not waking with a raw scream when Tom’s hand shook him out of the nightmare. But of course a life like that didn’t come free. He
thought he’d paid his due by watching the axe sever the neck of a woman who had trusted him, but the devil didn’t make a bargain without coming round to collect.

  “Thank you,” Kit said quietly. All the warmth of drunkenness had drained from him; he was now sober as a sermon. “Did he want a reply?”

  “No, sir,” the boy said. He didn’t move—waiting for a tip, Kit realized. How odd, still, to be standing on this side of the divide, the one with the purse. He tossed a penny to the messenger, who took off like a shot.

  Ned and Will exchanged skeptical looks, no doubt wondering what kind of legal trouble Kit had tangled himself in this time. Thomas Kyd, though, was attuned enough to Kit’s moods, and had suffered through enough of Kit’s nightmares, to know a private moment when he saw one. He glanced at his fellow actors, then at Tom, who nodded.

  “There’s hours yet until curfew,” Kyd said casually. “And I know of a house in Southwark that’s more than happy to have us stay the night, if you lot are interested in that sort of thing.”

  “What, my company isn’t enough for you, Hieronimo?” Ned teased.

  “Not unless playing Edward has changed your tastes,” Kyd shot back.

  They were actors—fresh voices and new preoccupations were their business. Whether they cared enough to give Kit privacy or they couldn’t be bothered to think about something that didn’t concern them, it didn’t matter. Before long, the three men had taken their leave, wandering toward Southwark where the radiant Mistress Hopewell and her band of girls would, apparently, ensure a pleasant evening. Tom and Kit stood alone. The air felt colder now, the last dregs of summer gone in a moment.

  Tom sighed and rested one hand on Kit’s shoulder. It was all Kit could do not to flinch. The surprise had left him jumpy, like a rabbit after the first bay of hounds.

  “I thought you were finished,” Tom said quietly.

  “I thought so too,” Kit said, unfolding the paper.

  It was a simple letter, written in a fine hand and unsigned. As if the letter writer had taken pains to include the least amount of information possible.

  W requests a meeting at ten o’clock on the seventeenth of September. Come promptly. Use the west entrance. Keep unnecessary theatrics to a minimum.

  If there had been any doubt of the sender before, the last sentence settled the matter. At ten o’clock the next day, he would be back in Whitehall, across a desk from Sir Francis Walsingham. The man who’d sent him into the lion’s den all those years before, the puppet master who steered Kit’s movements until the show was over and the axe had fallen. How many nights had he lain awake, listening to the shrieks from Bedlam and imagining Mary’s eyes staring from her neckless head? How many dreams of the axe, of Babington’s swinging corpse, of Robert Poley’s smooth, satisfied smile across a makeshift courtroom?

  How had he been so stupid, to think Walsingham would let him leave that life behind? What a fool he’d been, to believe his new life didn’t rest on a foundation of bones.

  “You’re going, then,” Tom said flatly, reading over Kit’s shoulder.

  Kit crumpled the page in his fist. “I can’t very well say no. But I’ll be careful.”

  Tom sighed again, then kissed Kit lightly on the cheek. “You’ve said that before.”

  Behind them, the sun settled behind Saint Paul’s steeple, shadows leaning forward to lick Kit’s heels. While Tom watched, he tore the message into strips, until his fist teemed with stray letters. Then he opened his palm and let them fall into the Thames. The paper and ink hovered there a moment, until water soaked the weave and they sank, feather-like, to the silt-choked bottom below.

  Twenty-Seven

  When Kit arrived at Whitehall the next day, the servant who opened the side door barely blinked at his request to meet with the royal secretary. Perhaps Kit had finally managed the right mix of respectability and menace after all this time. Despite the dread rising in the back of his throat, he couldn’t help but appreciate the quiet deference as the servant led him to Walsingham’s study. Apparently all it took to earn the world’s respect was a confident voice and the swaggering stride of a highwayman.

  Walsingham glanced up at Kit’s unheralded entrance. He sat at his desk with three stacks of paper spread before him in disarray. Many of them, Kit saw upside down, bore an alphabet he couldn’t read. More cipher? Or something else—Turkish? Close to Greek, but not that. Between Gregory and Master Dryden, he could have read Greek upside down and backward. It was easier to look at the pages, puzzle through their meanings, than to look the spymaster in the face after so long away.

  “When a door is closed,” Walsingham said, setting a paper aside, “the implication is for you to knock on it.”

  “It’s a pleasure to see you too, sir,” Kit said—bravado was not quite confidence, but with luck Walsingham wouldn’t tell the difference. The spymaster made a curt gesture toward the chair, and Kit sat with his forearms leaning on his spread knees like a sailor at an Eastcheap tavern about to cast a pair of dice. “Although I’d started to hope you’d forgotten me.”

  Walsingham leaned back, and now that the first rush had faded, Kit realized with a jolt that the passage of nearly six years had more than taken its toll on the spymaster. Those bottomless eyes, the stern brow, the perfectly starched and pressed clothes that made him look like the strictest Puritan, none of that had changed. But Kit lingered on the deep shadows under Walsingham’s eyes, the fresh gauntness to his face, the way his doublet hung awkwardly off narrower shoulders. The silver-topped walking stick leaned on the desk—new just before Northampton, its head now tarnished from heavy use. Something had happened, warping something essential about the spymaster. Kit’s fear of what was to come faded, replaced by sudden terror of what had happened to Walsingham, and the absolute knowledge that he could never ask what it was.

  “I couldn’t forget you, Marlowe,” Walsingham said, perfectly deadpan. “The nightmares won’t permit it.”

  Kit laughed, and the worst of the shock quieted. Nothing serious would happen to Walsingham. The terror of the world, the man with a hundred faces. Near sixty years old, yes, but Walsingham had always seemed like Enoch and Noah, great patriarchs destined to live nine hundred years. It seemed inevitable that Walsingham would carry on so long as the sun went on rising—because without him, surely, England itself would grind to a halt.

  “Delightful as this is,” Kit said, “I doubt you called me here for social reasons.”

  Walsingham nodded. “Give him a moment first. He’s late.”

  “Who’s—”

  The door behind him flung open. The man who entered, as he strode into the study and took the chair next to Kit, was unshakably aware of his own importance. He was dressed as if for an audience with the queen, though his exquisitely tailored doublet did not quite mask his slight hunch. What had once been apprehension turned to dread in Kit’s stomach. The man looked only at Walsingham, as if Kit were a pile of clothes that needed washing. If Kit didn’t know better, he’d have sworn he saw a twitch of irritation flash across Walsingham’s face. But that was his imagination getting the better of him. Just because Kit had nothing but bitter memories of Sir Robert Cecil didn’t mean Walsingham would be reckless enough to show he agreed.

  “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” Cecil said.

  “Not at all,” Walsingham said. “You remember Christopher Marlowe, I presume.”

  “Your gutter scholar from the Yorkshire business. Of course.”

  Sir Robert Cecil wasn’t a large or imposing man. Had he been anybody but who he was, a man of his stature would have found the world an inhospitable place. But he had a kind of cruel power about him, one that stripped away years of Kit’s life and left him as self-conscious and exposed as he’d been at twenty-one. No matter how many of his plays took the stage, no matter what success he’d earned in Walsingham’s service, Kit would neve
r be anything but a shoemaker’s son to Cecil, a Canterbury grifter who’d aspired above his station.

  “My lord,” he said with a curt nod. “Did you call for me, or did Sir Francis?”

  Walsingham paused. “It might serve you better,” he said, “to think of Sir Robert and myself, in this business at least, as interchangeable.”

  Kit would rather have thrown himself into the Thames. “What do you—”

  “I’ve asked Sir Robert to assist me in overseeing you and your fellow associates,” Walsingham said, in a voice that expressly forbade questions. “He has been invaluable over the past few months in recruiting new spies, and I expect no disruption of the intelligence flow between his circles and mine.”

  Kit sank back into his chair with a soft breath. The words were innocent, or would have been if anyone but Walsingham had said them. Assistance? The Walsingham Kit knew would rather have swallowed hot pitch than ask for help, least of all from someone like Cecil. The more people who knew the crown’s secret machinations, the more avenues for betrayal. If Walsingham had reached out to Cecil—and judging from the smirk painting Cecil’s face, he had—it could only be for one reason. Kit gritted his teeth and tried not to think about the walking stick, or Walsingham’s artificially stiff posture. There was, after all, another part of the sentence to address.

  “My fellow associates,” he repeated. “Sir, I’m finished. Spying, code breaking, that isn’t me anymore. It’s been years, I have a life—”

  “A life you’re prepared to devote to the service of Her Majesty, like any loyal subject, I’m sure,” Cecil said coldly.

  Walsingham had said he wanted to keep Kit close at hand in London, but as the years went on, it had only been too easy to forget, to assume the spymaster would never call on him to make good on that insinuation. Kit drove one fist into his thigh, hating himself more as the truth became inescapable. “Why did you give me five years, then? If you always meant to bring me back?”