A Tip for the Hangman

by Allison Epstein

  He spoke easily and without strain. He’d learned nothing in the past week that would be of use to Cecil, not since Anne’s rejection. But the longer he spoke—the more forthcoming he appeared—the higher his value, and the better his odds. He told them everything, repeating information he’d given Cecil weeks ago, hazarding speculations, sketching motives. A poet to the core, spinning out stories and the thread of his life for a little longer.

  Kit had no idea how long he spoke. His nerves made time feel unreal. If food could mark the passage of a day, they talked through the full bottle of sack and a pork-and-rabbit pie brought by Francis, who would not meet Kit’s gaze and locked them back in as he left. Kit, for his part, had no appetite. He ate nothing, drank nothing, smoked a great deal.

  “Impressive,” Frizer said, as Kit finished. He had taken Kit’s knife from his pocket and cleaned his fingernails with it, flicking out small specks of dirt. “All that without notes? Your memory must be a thing of beauty.”

  “Infinite riches in a little room,” Kit said, tapping his temple. “Part of the trade.”

  “True enough,” Poley said, draining his glass.

  Kit set down his pipe, empty now, the dregs lightly smoking. “Now then. You’ve asked your questions. Can I ask one of mine?”

  Frizer’s smile reflected back in the blade of Kit’s knife. “That’s your job, isn’t it? Asking questions?”

  Neither Frizer nor Poley had any reason to give Kit a straight answer about their motives, but there was another person in this room. One Kit thought he could work to his advantage. He turned sideways to look at Nick and leaned forward, hands on his knees. Willing Nick to look up and meet his eyes. This could still end well. This could still all be a test. But for Kit to believe that, Nick had to look at him.

  “Nick,” he said.

  “What?” Nick looked at the floor.

  “What did they promise you?” Kit said, gesturing at Frizer and Poley as if they couldn’t hear. “Money? Power? Influence? What was it?”

  Nick hated Kit, it seemed. Well, Kit hated him too. But they’d been friends once, or if not, closer to that than to other things. If Kit had to trust his life with one of these men, these three men who hated him and couldn’t be trusted, he was least afraid of Nick.

  “I know his sort,” Kit continued, nodding at Poley, when Nick said nothing. His knees were four inches from Nick’s. He could have reached out and taken Nick’s face in one hand, forced his head up, demanded that Nick look at him. “I know what they can promise. But it isn’t worth it. Selling yourself for that.”

  “Oh, it can be,” Poley said. “When the cause is just.”

  But it was Frizer who stood. Kit’s knife hung in his left hand like an extension of his arm.

  “And what cause is that?” Kit said.

  Frizer grinned. “You.”

  * * *

  —————

  Five.

  The demons pressed closer, then parted, allowing their leader, Mephistopheles, to step to the front. Cloaked and masked, Mephistopheles hovered two feet behind Faustus. Tom could read the demon’s thoughts—Kit’s thoughts—in the set of those shoulders, in the angle of that brow, in the wordless shake of that head.

  You signed yourself to me, said the silent Mephistopheles. I warned you, what this would cost. You can’t cheat the devil. He’s the best artificer and double-dealer, better by far than you.

  You can’t cheat the devil at his own game.

  Six.

  * * *

  —————

  Kit had held on to hope long after he stopped believing in it. That hope was gone now. He ran his open palm across the top of his now-unarmed thigh. “Me,” he said.

  Poley draped both arms over the chair back, as comfortable as a country gentleman at his estate. “Strange wasn’t the only one who’s given Cecil cause to worry,” he said. “You’ve made dangerous connections, you have to know that.”

  “Are you calling me a traitor?” Kit asked.

  Frizer took a step forward. “He’s not the only one,” he said. “Your friend Tom had plenty to say on the subject. He was a forthcoming fellow, after some convincing.”

  Tom.

  Kit’s bones flashed cold. The chair crashed against the floor as he stood. His hands clenched in anticipation of a fight he was destined to lose, but he’d fight it, God damn the world but he’d fight it. He could hardly understand what Frizer said. Tom. Tom would never betray him. Not unless he had no choice. After some convincing.

  “If you laid a hand on Tom,” Kit said, voice shaking, “I swear to the devil I’ll kill you.”

  “Don’t worry.” Poley dismissed him with a wave of his hand. “His scrivening might suffer a little, but he’s fine. Or will be. Most likely.”

  Kit’s knees buckled; he barely caught himself on the table. He could have wept. He wondered, distantly, if he might still. A scrivener. Thomas Kyd. Of course they’d go to him. Poley had been angling toward this for some time, he’d know where Kit had lived, and with whom. And Kit had seen Tom that morning. He wasn’t thinking clearly, jumping to idiot conclusions. He couldn’t fall apart.

  “Your friend was a godsend,” Poley went on. “Sang like a starling. Underhand allegiances, heresy, secret meetings with traitors in that dingy little suburban room of yours. And those screams, Marlowe, as each of his fingers broke joint by joint. It’s a sound I won’t soon forget.”

  Poley’s words thudded into his gut, replacing relief with horror. Jesus. Poor, pathetic, nervous, innocent Thomas Kyd. Interrogated and broken, all for knowing him. Another name lengthening the list of people he’d damned.

  Kit turned to Nick, who watched him now with wide, owlish eyes. Nick knew what lay behind Kit’s panic. Kit could see him remembering. Three young men in a Cambridge dormitory, air heady with smoke. A blush at a misplaced hand, a wink and a turn away. An offhand comment in a tavern and a broken nose for his trouble. Sounds, drifting through thin walls, when desire made Kit reckless, every moan and gasp and movement perfectly audible. Never a doubt. Not really. Nick had always known.

  “Please,” Kit said, letting the rest hang.

  Don’t tell them. Let them do what they will to me. I don’t care, not anymore. Don’t let them hurt Tom. Anything, anyone else.

  Nick nodded. Kit took him at his word. He had to. He had nothing else left.

  Francis had locked the door. They were twenty feet off the ground, the window overlooking a hard fall to unforgiving stones. Kit took a step back toward the wall. His heart beat an iambic warning in his ears. Get out. Get out. But there was no getting out. Not from this.

  Frizer took two steps forward. Kit took another step back. The wall pressed against his shoulders.

  “Everything I’ve done,” Kit said, “I’ve done on Cecil’s orders.” His voice was oddly level—a saving grace that surprised him. Theater to the end.

  “Perhaps,” Poley said. He still had not risen. He looked like a spider in the center of a web, winding in the threads. “Perhaps not.”

  “I’m on your side,” Kit said, pleading now.

  Frizer’s grin revealed every one of his startlingly white teeth. “No one’s on anyone’s side but their own, Marlowe,” he said. “You have to know that by now.”

  * * *

  —————

  Seven.

  Faustus shook his head. A disagreement to no one, bargaining with a God who wasn’t listening. “I’ll burn my books,” he whispered.

  Behind him, Mephistopheles laughed. Almost like a sigh, a caress. Soft as it was, it carried through the theater, which waited breathless as a tomb.

  Faustus looked. Man and demon regarded each other in profile, half of each face shadowed, the other half to the audience. Even partly hidden, Faustus’s resigned smile made Tom want to retch. He knew that smile. Ned copied it fr
om life.

  “Ah,” Faustus said, in quiet recognition, like spotting an old friend. “Mephistopheles.”

  Eight.

  * * *

  —————

  One moment the wall was at his back, and the next he was on the floor, breath knocked from lungs, brain reeling from Frizer’s blow, the hilt of the knife to his head. He gasped. Drowning. The wood boards pressed against his cheek. He felt the cold pressure of a nail beneath his eye.

  Everything moved too fast. Nick stood by the door, behind which no one was listening. No use calling for help. Eleanor Bull, downstairs, scrubbed away at sticky tables, hearing without listening. She knew already.

  Animal instinct flooded him. Like he was a child again, wild and reckless, and Frizer a fourteen-year-old brawler in Canterbury streets. Kit fought desperate, fought dirty. Anything went. Anything fair. He felt blood beneath his nails where his fingers raked Frizer’s face. Landed a blow, two, heard Frizer howl, bent double. But Poley, moving at last, seized Kit’s wrist and twisted backward.

  Kit heard himself scream. The crunch through the fog was the bone in his arm breaking.

  He crumpled to the ground, clutching the shattered ruin of his arm. The room blurred, lost to a blackness sharpening at the edges. Unreal. He thought his arm had fallen from the shoulder. The twisted remains spooling toward his fingers belonged to someone else. Poley grabbed him by the collar with both hands and wrenched him to his feet again.

  With his good arm, Kit reached for his knife. He’d kill them. Kill them all, to live, and to hell with the damnation that followed. His fingers closed on empty air. Remembering a second too late. Poley pinned Kit’s arms behind his back. He screamed against the searing pressure on splintered bone.

  * * *

  —————

  Nine.

  Mephistopheles extended a hand. Faustus stared, then held out his arm, the same arm he’d slashed three acts ago, spilling blood to sign away his soul. Mephistopheles gripped it, hard enough to bruise, and dragged Faustus to his feet. The trapdoor in the stage opened. Faustus made no sound.

  It would have been less horrifying if he’d screamed.

  Ten.

  The entire stage, the entire theater, had gone silent. Mephistopheles and Faustus stared at each other, demon hand around human wrist. Eye to eye, man to not-quite-man. It might have been intimate, if not for the lesser demons circling, silent vultures, breathless.

  Mephistopheles closed his eyes and flung Faustus forward.

  Eleven.

  * * *

  —————

  For a minute, pinned and fading, looking at Frizer, Kit saw the flash of a Cambridge office, and a man behind a desk, and eyes like ink watching him over steepled fingers. The knife shone like five gold crowns winking in the lamplight. It shone as bright as Frizer’s glittering smile.

  “Wait,” Nick said from the door, to no one.

  And Frizer plunged the blade through Kit’s eye, hilt-deep.

  * * *

  —————

  Twelve.

  Forty-Nine

  Nick pressed his back against the door. He watched as the body’s limbs buckled and it sank, slowly, as if suspended, to the floor. He called it the body, in his head. He refused to think of it as him.

  Frizer tugged at the knife until it gave, then wiped the blade against the thigh of his breeches. It left a dull smear like the path of a slug. He twirled the knife between his fingers, letting the blade catch the light.

  “Well,” Poley said. “There you are. Easy as breathing.”

  Frizer continued watching the knife as it darted back and forth, flipping dragonfly-like between his fingers. Nick could look at nothing but the body. He had nothing to say.

  Nick, my good man, came the echo of Poley’s voice. You could say nothing else and this business would have your name all over it.

  “The watch will be here soon,” Poley said, a reminder.

  Frizer nodded. This had all been part of the plan. They would be arrested for the murder of Kit Marlowe, reckless blasphemer, Bankside heretic. They would be arrested, tossed in prison for the night, and tried the next day in a court overseen by the very men who had tacitly condoned the murder. Come tomorrow afternoon, they would stand there as the court pardoned Robert Poley, Ingram Frizer, and Nicholas Skeres for killing an unarmed man in self-defense.

  Nick could hear Poley’s voice telling him the story for the hundredth time, as he’d done all morning, repeating it until the moment Kit walked into the room. Marlowe had charged them with the knife, they would say. He drank too much (Kit drank nothing) and grew aggressive and violent (Frizer attacked first) in an argument over the bill (they came that day to kill him, there was never a chance he wouldn’t die).

  No one would be surprised. Kit had never been trustworthy. He’d never been respectable. The dangerous, reckless son of a shoemaker, known the city over for his empty pockets, daring blasphemy, and debauched friends. Some, Poley said, would think he deserved it. The clergy. The master of revels. Richard Baines. And Sir Robert Cecil’s servants weren’t condemned for following orders. There would be a brief flurry of interest, a penniless poet or two penning an unimpressive elegy in Marlowe’s honor. And then within six months, no one would remember a thing.

  No one would remember a thing.

  Nick would remember.

  He stared at the body on the floor, blind and silent and motionless. Through the locked door, he heard voices shouting in the tavern, Eleanor Bull’s unconvincing protest, and the thundering of booted feet against the stairs.

  Frizer tossed the blade aside. It landed on the floor beside the body with a soft clang, like the striking of a bell. He glanced first at Poley, then at Nick, and smiled.

  Then Frizer turned to the door, and the three murderers waited together, listening as a soldier clicked a key into the lock.

  Fifty

  Faustus’s fall seemed to take an age. He no longer appeared quite human, no longer quite alive. He arced forward, curiously suspended, as if the air had thickened to water. The hem of his robe vanished last, a lingering snatch of fabric swallowed by the black. The swarm of soot-blasted demons moved as one, a shadowed wave that clambered down into the pit after.

  Mephistopheles stood alone now. His November eyes passed over the crowd. Not looking so much as watching. Not wondering so much as waiting.

  Who’s next? he seemed to say.

  And he turned away, through the doors at the back of the stage, and was gone.

  The silence in the theater stretched a full ten seconds. The applause, when it came, shredded Tom’s nerves. A whistle from the second tier of seats ached his teeth like grinding metal. They were right to cheer, of course: Faustus was a triumph. London had never seen anything like it. Something so close, so strong, so immediate that, for a moment, for two hours, the city forgot it was fiction.

  Tom hadn’t forgotten the truth of it, not for a moment.

  He pressed his hands deep into his pockets, hunching his shoulders. The weather had been in a state of turning for two hours, though the rain refused to break. A wind rippled Tom’s hair, warm and thick. Traces of applause ringing behind, he turned from the stage. On another day, he’d have waited for Kit to give his ebullient notes to the actors, equal parts wild cursing and useful suggestions. Then, an arm around Kit’s waist, savoring secondhand excitement, they’d drift toward the Mermaid to drown their victory in drink. But though Tom needed a drink more now than most nights, Kit wasn’t here, and Tom couldn’t bear any company but his. Ned would have to celebrate his latest triumph alone.

  Tom wove around the few latecomers behind him, most of them whispering, though there was no reason but awe to keep their voices down. He forced his way into the street. In that moment, he wanted nothing more and nothing less than to be alone.

  Small wonder
Kit hadn’t come, he thought, walking along the Thames. Appointment or not, how could Kit stand there and watch demons speak his own nightmares to an uncomprehending London? Of course he hadn’t shown it to Tom beforehand. Nearly ten years Tom had loved this man, and still there were some things Kit wouldn’t tell him.

  Maybe someday soon.

  Not today, though. He wouldn’t ask today. Kit wouldn’t tell, and Tom couldn’t bear being lied to, not again, not after what he’d seen.

  The sky opened, and it began to rain. Slow at first, and then, with an almost-audible sigh, all at once. A jagged slice of lightning streaked from the clouds, bleaching the street. Theatergoers, tradesmen, apprentices, children pushed past Tom, hurrying toward shelter. He let them go. The rain drenched him through, until his shirt clung to his chest and his hair sluiced water across his brow and into his eyes, but it didn’t matter. He would be wet anyway, whether he ran or walked.

  Kit would be back from Deptford by sundown. Then Tom would do exactly what he’d promised. He’d tell Kit Faustus was a stroke of genius (true) and that it shook London to its foundations (also true). If Tom kissed Kit deeper, held him closer, let his touch linger an extra moment, Kit would attribute it to celebration. Literary awe. For tonight, Tom would let him think that. Tom would love him as if nothing had changed, as if Kit were still that ambitious Cambridge scholar with greatness in his grasp and the world to prove it to. That man with a smirk that meant everything, and none of it good. That man who trailed behind him a cloud of tobacco and innuendo and youthful indifference. Loving that man, as if he still existed, instead of flickering in and out of sight for ten years. Loving him as best Tom knew how. That would be enough. It had to be. He didn’t have anything else.

  I’ll burn my books, Faustus had challenged God.

  Tom would burn anything, if it would do them any good.