A Tip for the Hangman

by Allison Epstein

  He sat on his heels beside Kit, who began to sit up, slowly and not well. Tom brushed the blood from Kit’s brow with his thumb and ignored the forty men watching them. The unevenness of Kit’s breath. The hand Kit pressed to his side as though holding his ribs together. All Tom could see was Kit’s blood on his own hands, and Bradley’s. But Kit was alive. Bloodied and panting and pathetic, but alive.

  “Stand down, in the name of Her Majesty the Queen.”

  Tom looked over his shoulder. The voices sounded distant, vacant. Three uniformed men ringed him and Kit, their swords turned on his chest. Behind them, nearly eclipsed by their broad shoulders, the young drawer stuttered out his statement to a fourth man. Of course. He’d run for the watch the moment fists turned to blades. No doubt the tavern keeper sent him.

  A temporary inconvenience, Tom told himself, willing down the panic that had begun to butt up against the numbness. Of course the watch wouldn’t know Kit had only fought on the crown’s business. They wouldn’t know the difference between a street fight and an act of political violence. Tom’s heart flailed against his ribs, but he stood, relieved his legs could hold him. Prison, but only temporarily. Until Kit got word to Walsingham. Until they explained.

  “What man is this?” The nearest watchman tipped his sword at the body.

  “One who deserved what he got,” Tom said.

  The man stared. “You confess?”

  Tom raised his bloodstained hands, fingers wide. No need to say anything else.

  He didn’t resist as the men grabbed him and wrenched both arms behind his back. Beside him, they yanked Kit upright onto legs that barely supported him. Kit almost lost his footing in the slick of blood but kept his balance, face pale and jaw set tight. The crowd parted to let them pass.

  The watchman who had spoken jerked his head toward the door. “Take them away.”

  Thirty-Three

  Kit awoke in darkness. He lay curled on his side, left arm pressed hard to his ribs. The ground beneath him was cold, slick, rough. Stone, he thought. Blood had pooled beneath his head and dried there. He felt the stain crack as he winced. Everything hurt. His ribs most of all. He took an experimental breath—it hitched, but he’d expected worse. Perhaps not broken, then. Though all but. With a small moan, he opened his eyes. It was so dark he might as well have left them closed.

  “Welcome to Newgate, Lazarus,” said Tom from somewhere nearby.

  Kit tried to sit. The pain made him retch; the pervasive scent of shit did nothing to help. Resigned, he lay back again. “I am risen,” he said, leaning on irony as he might a crutch. His voice sounded awful and felt worse against his throat. He’d have given anything for a drink.

  “I assume you have a plan.” From Tom’s voice, he assumed nothing of the sort.

  Kit didn’t respond. He lay flat, looking at the ceiling. From here, their prison seemed vast, twice the size of the Rose’s stage. High walls stretched like the sides of a pit, punctuated at the top by narrow barred windows. Tendrils of moonlight drifted above, casting a hovering glow that failed to reach the floor. Around him, Kit heard the indistinct shadow of men’s voices.

  He remembered all of it now. Evan’s proposition, Tom in the tavern, the fight with Bradley. He searched within himself for guilt at having incited his lover to kill his sister’s husband, but found nothing. Meg would be better off without that man. Meg would be free to accept help now, and he’d send her his full cut from this latest play. She’d marry again, and happier this time. She would be better than she’d been before. At present, the only futures that alarmed him were Tom’s and his own.

  With great care, he tried again to sit. The room blurred again, but he put his head between his knees until the wave passed. “How long?”

  “Two days. As best I can tell.” He could see Tom now, sitting beside him. Legs folded, back straight. A crust of dried blood slashed across his brow. Kit wondered whose it was.

  Tom had been conscious for two days. Consumed by the stab of hunger and the stench of shit, both worsening every hour. Feeling dried blood crack and peel on his hands. Listening to the murmurs and labored breathing of unseen men in the darkness, the occasional curses and fights as fear spilled into rage. Anger was understandable.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to come round.” Tom’s voice sounded terribly distant through the dark. “No one’s asked about that man, so I have to assume he was one of Strange’s people. If you’d attacked someone on Cecil’s pay, they’d have had something to say about it.”

  Kit pressed his eyes closed. His brain was still loose in his skull, but even if it wasn’t, he wouldn’t have had a way to explain this. Tom thought—

  Of course Tom thought. Only an idiot would risk his life over anything less than the life of the queen, especially when he had so many other opportunities to get himself killed.

  “So what happens next?” Tom said. “After Walsingham manages this. You can’t go back in with Strange, not after you’ve—”

  “Tom,” Kit said wearily. “That man wasn’t with Strange.”

  “Then who was he with?”

  “He was my sister’s husband.”

  Tom fell so silent Kit could almost hear him blink. Kit didn’t need to ask what he was thinking. Tom was a lawyer—he knew what would happen next. Murder in defense of the queen would have been ill-advised but defensible. Walsingham and Cecil could smooth that over with a few coins and a promise to look the other way. Tom might even be commended for it: extraordinary acts of heroism. But this? Murder in a public house, unprovoked? Men were killed like animals for that.

  “I see,” Tom said slowly. “So the danger here isn’t that Lord Strange might have you murdered. It’s that you are, without a doubt, the stupidest person I’ve ever met.”

  “I—”

  “You almost got both of us killed,” Tom said over him, voice rising, “in a fistfight with your drunk brother-in-law. And because you wouldn’t know self-restraint if it shook you by the hand, we’re both set to be hanged. Whatever connections you think you have, they won’t save your neck from this. Or mine. Christ, Kit,” he shouted, his voice breaking, “you’ve made me a murderer, did you ever think about what that might mean?”

  Kit took his head in his hands. He couldn’t think fast enough to argue. Tom was right. If Kit hadn’t lied, Evan’s appearance wouldn’t have sent Tom into a panic. If Kit hadn’t been reckless enough to pick a fight, Tom wouldn’t be here. If Tom hadn’t become a murderer, Kit would be lying in a back alley, a broken corpse for rats to pick at. If not for Tom, knife dripping scarlet in his hand, death dispensed with a flick of the wrist. Tom had driven a knife through a man’s ribs, to save him.

  “They won’t hang us,” Kit said. It took no effort to keep his voice down. His lungs could only pull enough air for a murmur. “They need me. What I found out, what Evan told me, it changes everything.”

  “It’s been two days,” Tom said. Kit had never heard his voice so cold, not even with a knife in his hand. “If they were coming for you, they’d have done it by now.”

  Kit’s vision still blurred when he turned his head too quickly, but he reached to put one hand on Tom’s knee. “Thank you,” he said, “for—”

  Tom twitched away. “Don’t touch me.”

  Kit opened his mouth, but speech wouldn’t come. Only words precisely chosen could bridge this gap, and at the moment, even coherence felt ambitious. He shifted gingerly to lean his back against the wall. The cool stone against his spine was both painful and soothing. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes. His stomach chose that moment to let out a loud moan. Kit winced again. He hadn’t been this hungry in years.

  “Damn it to hell,” he muttered.

  Tom’s laugh reminded him of a bloody cough. “Honestly, Kit. Where do you think this is?”

  * * *

  —————

 
; How Tom had measured time in Newgate, Kit had no idea. Minutes, hours, weeks, all felt the same, undercut by the low breathing and rough voices of strangers. Tom didn’t speak to Kit again, and Kit didn’t expect him to. He drifted in and out of consciousness, between the fear of sleep and the pain of waking. And all the while, his mind clung to Evan’s words like a conjuration, turning them over and back in his head.

  A goldsmith in the Low Countries. An army raised on English soil. Walsingham and Cecil would find value in that. They had to. Everything depended on it.

  When he heard the noise, he thought it had been the stray invention of a rattled brain. But then he saw the other prisoners turn to the door. A few feet away, Tom stood, as if his nerves were wound too tight for his legs to stay bent. No hallucination, then. The footsteps were real. The rattle of iron keys, that was real, too.

  The door opened, admitting an influx of light from a torch, and a man holding it. The light would have been too dim to see by under ordinary circumstances, but in the gloom it made Kit squint.

  “Marlowe, God damn you, get up,” said a man’s voice. “You’ve been sent for.”

  Kit had never been so happy to hear a stranger curse him to hell.

  Ignoring the prisoners staring, the man crossed the pit toward them. In the wavering illumination of the torch, he drifted, pale-faced, phantasmic. His long hair and spotty beard, in the poor light, seemed colorless. An unremarkable man, dressed plainly but well, and yet there was something about him Kit disliked immediately. Walsingham could have commanded the prison with a word, but this man looked as though he feared catching plague from breathing Newgate’s air. The stinking bowels of the city’s underbelly were no place for a man dressed in pressed linen. He didn’t belong here. People with Kit’s clothes, Kit’s habits, Kit’s lack of aversion to sitting on a floor reeking of shit—they did.

  “Standing isn’t in the cards at the moment,” Kit said. “My apologies.”

  The man loomed over him, the torch painting his broad face in shifting light. He looked down at the bloodied patchwork of bruises rising on Kit’s face and made no effort to hide the curl in his lip. Kit did not stand—both from the bravado that came with a severe head injury and lack of confidence in his legs to support him.

  “Christ’s mercy, Marlowe, what in hell did you do?”

  “Christ’s mercy had very little to do with it,” Kit said. Time had not improved the strength of his voice.

  The man grabbed Kit by the collar and jerked him to his feet. The pain was unreal. As if this stranger had shattered Kit’s rib with a blacksmith’s hammer. Kit cried out before he could swallow it and steadied himself by leaning heavily on the wall.

  If this troubled the man, it didn’t show. “Pull yourself together, Marlowe. We haven’t got time for theatrics.”

  “Who are you?” Kit managed.

  “Richard Baines,” the man said coldly. “Cecil sent me. What’s your crime? He didn’t say.”

  Breathing hard, Kit looked over Baines’s shoulder toward Tom. Tom’s jaw twitched—weighing anger against self-preservation. At last, Tom took a long breath, then moved to stand beside Kit. Without speaking, he offered Kit a hand and pulled him up off the wall. Tom dropped Kit’s hand again at once, but it was a start. United, at least for the moment.

  “Murder,” Kit said, adding a “sir” dripping with insincerity.

  Baines blinked. Evidently he had expected a smaller infraction. Blasphemy. Burglary. A drunken brawl with an alderman. “Murder,” he repeated. “Christ. Cecil left out the part where he ordered you to become an assassin.”

  “It wasn’t him,” Tom said. His voice was quiet but firm. Shoulders set, back tensed, fists clenched.

  Kit could read Tom’s thoughts in the shifting torchlight. Blood between fingers, knife between ribs, the smell of a butcher, the last gasp of a man. Sliding to the floor like a gutted fish, leaking blood. Kit reached over for Tom’s hand, intending to reassure him, but Tom brushed him off like an irritated cat and folded his hands behind his back.

  Baines watched them coolly. The movement of Kit’s hand, the shift of Tom’s shoulders, the way the space between them felt different, smaller and wider at once. Baines’s eyes were always narrow, but they became even thinner, until his pale eyelashes nearly obscured his vision. If Baines was one of Cecil’s men, he made his living in observation. Surely he noticed. Perhaps he knew. Well, and if he did? Cecil’s spies had better things to do with their time than wonder whether Kit spent his nights with Tom or some Southwark whore.

  “A fight got out of hand,” Kit said. “Tom killed a man to save me. You should be thanking him. Without him, I wouldn’t be here, and you’d never know what I know.”

  Baines frowned. “And what do you know, exactly?”

  It wasn’t quite the upper hand, not when standing upright still felt like a desperate gamble, but it was close enough. “That’s safe in my head, my friend.” He let the remainder of the thought hang unspoken: that if Baines wanted Cecil to hear it, that head needed to remain attached to Kit’s shoulders.

  Baines swore and stepped forward. “Cecil said you were an arrogant fool,” he muttered. “But I didn’t think he meant this. Come on.”

  “Kit,” Tom said, grasping the situation a moment before Kit did.

  Baines shifted his grip, taking Kit again by the collar. The torch in Baines’s other hand sent warm light licking his face, split between brightness and shadow, expectant like Charon awaiting payment. Kit twisted round, caught in Baines’s grip. Tom looked back like a dead man and said nothing. He knew. He’d known from the beginning.

  “Tom—”

  Baines jerked Kit forward, the movement sending wild pain through his bruised ribs. He stumbled but didn’t fall. He lacked the breath to scream, brain reeling, vision filled with golden specks and the warning fog of vertigo, and he retched, tasting vomit. He could make no sense of it. It couldn’t be happening like this.

  It couldn’t have happened any other way.

  If Whitehall lost Kit, they lost their connection to Lord Strange and his Catholic militants. He was useful, but Tom was no one, a Fleet Street lawyer who’d been dragged in over his head. Kit was the one they needed.

  “Come,” Baines said, and he propelled Kit toward the door. Kit felt Tom’s eyes on his back—desperate, angry, betrayed, alone—before the door shut behind him.

  The hall whipped past, half shadowed in torchlight. He could hardly stand, see, think. He had no sense of distance or direction. When Whitehall finished with Kit, what would stop the Privy Council from getting rid of him, now they knew he couldn’t be trusted? What good was a spy who brought the watch down on him for nothing more than a personal grudge? And Tom was part of all of it now. Tom had held the knife. All Kit could think of was the silhouette of the scaffold, and Tom’s neck, ringed by the rope, and the half-choked scream of Anthony Babington echoing across the years.

  A man emerged from a small office along the hall, dressed in black and wearing a stunned expression. The provost, most likely. “Sir,” he said, “this prisoner is under my jurisdiction, you cannot—”

  “Watch,” Baines said, without turning. He flung open the door at the end of the hall—a blast of cool air curled through Kit’s lungs—and shoved him hard in the small of his back. Kit flung out his hands to catch himself as he fell.

  A fetid wetness soaked through his knees, reached past his wrists. Hands stinging, he looked up. Clear water pattered against his face. Dried blood began to flow down his brow, coaxed into motion by the rain. He stood, up to his ankles in mud. It was early evening, though the persistent rain made it hard to tell. And he was outside. Kit stood with Richard Baines in the middle of a filthy, deserted alley outside the city walls, frightened and aching and confused, but in the open air.

  “This way,” Baines said. He turned away, with total certainty Kit would follow.r />
  Kit remained where he stood. The gray stone of Newgate gazed down from behind him. Accusing him. He was guilty of everything.

  Baines turned back. “You can’t be that much of an idiot,” he said. “We have rules in our business, Marlowe. That’s how things get done.”

  “What about—” Kit began.

  “Your boy whore? Not my remit. Take it up with Cecil.”

  Kit was breathing too fast. The light-headed panic rushed back, threatening recklessness or tears. He bit his tongue hard. Everything depended on his control. “I will,” he said. “Bring me to him.”

  Baines scowled and spat against the ground, sending ripples through an inch-deep puddle in the rutted road. “What the devil do you think I’ve been trying to do?”

  Baines set off again, and this time Kit had no choice but to follow. The rain coursed down his cheeks, dripping from his hair. He was crying. He had no idea how long that had been happening. Newgate watched him go, growing smaller with every step until they turned a corner and its stone walls disappeared completely.

  Thirty-Four

  Once inside Whitehall, Kit and Baines followed a long tiled corridor in which servants appeared as if by conjuration. Baines ignored them, a practice Kit strove to mimic despite the staff’s brazen stares. He’d never belonged here, but it had never been so obvious as now, with the fumes of Newgate still clinging to his heels. At last, Baines paused before a closed door and gestured curtly.

  “He’ll see you now,” Baines said.

  Before Kit could form even the briefest terse remark, Baines shoved him forward. The door slammed shut behind him with unsettling finality.

  Kit had grown used to the spartan decor of Walsingham’s study, which made Cecil’s opulent tastes feel ridiculous. Oil portraits on the walls of ancestors long past. A blade mounted on the mantel above the empty hearth—twice as long as anything Cecil could have lifted. A setter lay on the rug in front of the desk, speckled white and black, its head resting on its paws. The dog watched Kit’s entrance with a slow swish of its tail. Kit kept his distance. He braced himself with one hand on the back of a chair, intensely aware of the filth coating his palms. His body felt like a joint of meat in a butcher’s window, bloody and tender. He wondered what it smelled like to the dog.