Awakening, opening his aching eyes to the bright light of day that entered through his sparklingly clean windows, Kit smelled a heavy scent of rotted flesh and spoiled meat.
Kit’s head pounded with the worst of hangover headaches. His mouth tasted like a midden. Every small movement of his waking body caused untold agony, as though a fiend armed with a sharp dagger worked him over, pushing the tip into his skin, piercing his muscle.
Aching, Kit lay still for a while.
A heaviness rested upon his stomach as though hot lead had been poured down his unsuspecting throat in the night.
He moved not, and he hurt, and hurting, he thought he might as well move.
He pulled himself up on his arms. Hellish pain ran from his wrists to his shoulders. He rolled on his side and lifted himself on his elbow. As he rolled, the cover of his bed came with him, glued by a black substance.
His head pounded and he saw everything as if through a dark veil.
Memories of the night before came in fits and starts, each of them hurting as much as physical movement.
Kit remembered Silver, beautiful Silver, and he remembered their love-making, though both mind and heart flinched from the memory as a man will from touching a bruised spot.
After that, his memories became tangled, like a thread that the cat has got at.
There had been . . . an elf? As Kit tried to bring his memories into the light, they shied away farther into shadows and his head pounded to the rhythm of his vain efforts.
Kit sat on his bed and tried to shake his head, but stopped as sharp pain made it feel as if a dagger were worked into his left temple.
Had he got drunk? He might have. He probably had. Yes, no doubt about it. Wine was the best way to drown the sorrows of lost love, and perforce, Kit had used it. And in his cups, what had he done?
He cradled his head in black, sticky hands, and wondered how and with what he’d got himself so befouled. He remembered the mud of the alley, the stickiness of it, but this stickiness was greater than any clay, and it had the heavy smell of the slaughterhouse.
The thought gagged Kit, his throat working against his mind and body to close and stop all thought, all breathing, with overpowering nausea.
He must wash. Whatever it was, he would wash, and it would be gone.
Getting up on unsteady legs, Kit reeled to the washbasin. His landlady, or Imp, had set a large pitcher full of water on the dresser, beside the metal stand that supported the ceramic washbasin.
Kit poured water into the basin, dipped his hands in it, preparing to splash at his face.
He stopped. The water in the basin, into which he’d dipped his hands, had turned a deep, dark red, like freshly spilled blood.
Kit looked, with wide open eyes at his sleeve, caked with the same black that had been on his hands.
Blood. How had he got himself all over blood?
Had he gone to a bear baiting? To get this fouled, he’d have needed to participate, to climb into the ring with the dogs and tear at the bear with his teeth and hands.
Gagging with nausea, he washed, with his eyes closed. Rushing to the window, he opened it, and threw the bloodied water out of it, to the outcry of inattentive passerby whose clothes got bespattered.
Had Kit himself got bloodied in this way?
But so much blood . . . .
He poured fresh water into the basin, and again washed his face and hands.
The water ran out, and wrapping himself in a blanket, Kit ran to the door of his room to ask for more.
Upon first touching the iron doorknob, Kit flinched, because the thing felt red-hot, and burned his palm. Why and how had this knob got heated?
He shook his head. No matter. Grabbing his blanket around his fast-blistering hand, Kit used a tip of it to protect his hand as he opened the door.
With the door open, Kit hollered into the cool, dark interior of the house for more water to be brought. While waiting, he paced back and forth the narrow confines of his room.
How could this have happened and what had he done?
The memory ran away from his searching, hiding in the shadows of his mind, whence nothing but evil dreams come to torment unknowing reason.
Imp’s small, curious face showed at the turn of the steps, looking up into the hallway and into Kit’s eyes. He carried a large pitcher in his hand.
Kit bowed, wondering how fearful his countenance might be, if it were as blanched by fear as his heart was and said, “I thank you, I thank you. I got fearfully spattered. A dog run over by a cart and I was near and suffered the blemish. A dog. A dog. Thank you for the water.”
But Imp, setting down the jar, lingered, and watched Kit with wide and worried eye. “Are you well?” he asked, his serious eyes looking like the eyes of Kit’s mother watching over him. “Are you well, Kit?” He wrinkled his small nose. “It smells in here.”
“A dog,” Kit said, not sure what he said. “Go, Imp, go. I must clean myself.”
Kit closed the door after Imp, wondering at his not remembering all this blood, wondering at how much he must have drunk the night before.
With a pang of inconsequent guilt, he remembered that he’d never told Imp the story the boy had requested. Where had he been instead?
He removed his clothes and, scooping clear water with his hands, threw it at his face, only to see it fall, again, as crimson as blood.
Looking at his reddened hands still filled him with nausea.
Deep from within the house, he heard steps and noises, and stopped, imagining the constables, come to arrest him for capital murder that he couldn’t swear he hadn’t committed. Although if he’d murdered someone, perforce the creature had too much blood in him.
He thought he heard a knock upon the door but, listening, heard no more. “Whence is that knocking?” he said, startled upon saying it, and chuckling in his throat, he trembled at the sound.
“How is it with me?” he said. “When every noise appals me? What hands are here?” He lifted his hands from the basin and stared at the red stains in amazement. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas in incarnadine, making the green one red.”
Talking to himself, he knew himself already mad. And with a plot hanging about his neck like a noose and the plot he must create to counteract it, Kit couldn’t afford to be insane. He must make madness sane, or else die, and thus end all reeling thought.
The knocking came again, steady, and this time it seemed to Kit that it came from his door.
Not Imp again!
With shaking hands, he reached for the knob. With shaking hands, burning pain making his hand smart, he opened the door.
“Come,” he said. “Come and I’ll explain.”
But neither of the two people who strode through his open door was Imp.
One of them Kit had seen the day before: it was none other than soft-talking, false-dealing Robin Poley. And with him, beside him, was another face that Kit knew well: Ingram Frizer, personal servant to Lord Thomas Walsingham, so recently Kit’s own patron.
What could Ingram’s presence here mean? Was Lord Walsingham also deserting Kit? Was Walsingham part of the conspiracy to make Kit entrap Sir Walter Raleigh? Did Thomas Walsingham, for whom Kit had written such inspired lines, mean to have his pet poet killed?
With what mind Kit could, with his teeth chattering a mad dancing tune to his aching brain, Kit tried to think of his cunning plan.
He was going to turn in Will, surely he was, and save himself and Imp, and he would marry Madeleine, and . . .
Poley strode in, dressed in an immaculate cream-colored velvet outfit, and matching suede boots so clean they looked as though they were meant to stride on the very clouds and step on the moon. He held an immaculate glove in a spotless, gloved hand, and smacked it upon his bare hand, as though with contempt. The ruffle on his shirt bobbed. Behind him strode Ingram, his plain face set in square discord, his dark, serviceable
wool suit betraying no stain.
“We’d love to hear your explanation, Master Marlowe,” Poley said, and raised a brow at the stained water in the smeared basin, at the blood-splattered room, at Marlowe within his blanket.
Together Ingram and Poley wrinkled their noses at the smell in the room. Poley waved his glove in front of his nose, and Ingram twisted his lips as though he would be sick.
Kit stepped back, in his grubby blanket, tripping over his own feet as he backed up. “I thought . . .” He swallowed down the evil taste in his mouth. “I believed . . .” He stopped short of saying he’d believed them, one or both, to be Imp. He did not want to mention Imp, he didn’t want to remind them of Imp’s existence. He rallied, and managed to stand and square his shoulders, despite the blanket, despite the blood on his hair, despite the smell of carrion in his room. “What should I explain?”
Poley smiled. Walking around the room as though it were a curious exhibit open to the public, like the rooms of Bedlam where the lunatics were displayed for a few coins, Poley looked debonair, controlled, amused. “Signior Marlowe, bon jour! There’s a French salutation to your French slip. You gave us the counterfeit fairly last night.”
“The counterfeit?” Marlowe asked, composure gone. “The counterfeit, I?”
How did they think he had fooled them? Had they found that John Penry, poor pious John, knew less of conspiracy than of heresy? “Good morrow to you both. What counterfeit did I give you?”
“You escaped our watch,” Ingram said.
Slow, direct Ingram walked right up to Kit and poked a large, sausagelike finger into Kit’s chest. “Last night. You gave us the slip.”
Poley only smiled. He stood over the basin. “What was here, I wonder?” he said. “It looks like murder, murder most foul. Is it murder, Marlowe? Did you murder someone?”
Marlowe shook his head.
Had he? And if he had, why would he reveal it? The slip? What did Ingram mean? Had they been watching him?
Oh, but if they had, then they knew of his visit to Will’s lodgings. How could he convince them that his visit to Will had been in the service of the state, in the service of uncovering conspiracy?
Shaking, Kit wondered if they’d even now arrested Will and put him to the question. If they had, then no chance remained of Kit’s making it appear that Will was guilty, no chance of escaping the noose closing around Kit’s neck.
Kit shook his head, not knowing at what, and opened his mouth to deny an accusation never made.
Poley sighed. “No use lying to us, you know. We will find the truth. Even if you so cleverly evaded our vigilance yesterday, even if you seemed to vanish into thin air outside that door in Shoreditch, we know you didn’t vanish. You went somewhere. You did something. You’d best tell us what.”
He looked directly at Kit with his frank, amiable gaze that was neither.
Kit shook his head again. “I know not what you mean,” he said. This, at least, was true.
Poley stepped away from the basin with its red contents. Looking vaguely disgusted, he waved his glove in front of his nose once more.
At the gesture, the glove’s perfume, like the smell of a hundred pines, diffused through the room, mingling with the smell of carrion.
“Come, come, Marlowe. We are not fools, though you think us so. All your running and all your lying, the stories of a big conspiracy. There’s no conspirator here but you, Marlowe. Let us be well understood.”
“But, John Penry . . . .” Kit started.
Robin smiled. “Aye. John Penry. The songbird sang a song treasonous enough, of desire for Scottish rule and Puritan control. But no hint of a conspiracy in that song, no hint of a false note. The false note is with you, Marlowe, and you must be made to sing. Tell me, will it take the wheel to draw your song from you?”
Once more, he’d got close enough to Kit that their faces almost touched. Once more he started rounding on Kit, around and around and around. “The wheel stretching your body, breaking your legs, wrenching loose every bone from its appointed socket.” Poley smiled and walked around Kit.
Thus, in a display of marvelous beasts from overseas, had Kit Marlowe watched a slick black panther go round and round a dog it meant to eat.
And like the dog, Kit Marlowe turned, trying to keep the panther within the scope of his sight. “I know not what you mean,” he said.
“Well, then, I’ll speak plainly,” Poley said. “For I’m a plain man.” He grinned at this, enjoying his own, self-conscious irony. “Let me remind you, then, Master Marlowe, that a paper has been discovered amid your affairs, written in your hand, a paper proclaiming offensive heresies and denying the divinity of our lord and savior, Christ. This paper you wrote while at Cambridge. What say you to this? Who taught you heresy? We have it on good authority that you learned it from a nobleman, even one close to the Queen. Who was it? Name his name and you shall go free. Do not, and you shall sing upon the wheel, even a higher and sweeter song than was ever heard.”
Kit sweated. It was back to the paper again, back to the accusations of heresy. Enough to hang him. Enough to burn him.
He couldn’t remember such a paper, but it might well have existed. In those days, Kit hadn’t yet learned caution.
And if they had that paper, there was no escape.
And yet . . .
“This paper must be old,” he said. “And some two years hence, I had a roommate in this very room. Thomas Kyd, who wrote The Spanish Tragedy. A loose-living sort of fellow. A theater man.”
Before Kit had finished his sentence, before he had finished turning in yet another innocent lamb to the maw of official condemnation, a smirk passed between Poley and Ingram Frizer.
Kit followed that smirk, mutely, feeling his hopes sink with it.
“Thomas Kyd was questioned,” Poley said gently. Too gently. “Questioned before we came to you. For it was amid his effects that the damnable paper was first found. And he said it came from you.” He seemed to think on this point and ponder it. “But he only turned you in after much wracking, Kit Marlowe. I fear your friend Tom Kyd will never write again. There’s one who doesn’t turn in his friends lightly . . . .” Poley shook his head, as if at the folly of such loyalty. “As for you, Master Marlowe, you’ll come with us. If you wish to put down that ridiculous blanket and—”
Tom Kyd questioned? Poor Tom Kyd, broken at the wheel. Not a genius, never a promising playwright, and yet what a friend he’d not been when they’d shared a room.
And yet, Kit himself had been ready to turn him in.
Guilty for a sin he’d never got to commit, afraid for what was to come, Kit muttered, “But, masters—”
A small creature burst into the room, a fury of whirling fists and kicking legs. “You’ll not take him, cowards. Not unless over me.”
“Imp,” Kit yelled. “Imp, to your mother.”
But he might as well have ordered the devil to absolution or the Protestant Queen to the Pope’s bosom.
Imp threw himself on Poley, biting and gouging, his small hands scratching at Poley’s fine clothes.
Ingram Frizer grabbed Imp by the back of the collar and lifted him from the ground, looking on him as though Imp were a noisome insect.
Imp wrinkled his face in rage, but his lips trembled on the verge of tears.
Kit, thinking only that the child was in danger once more, said very softly, “Go to your mother, Richard, for Jesu’ sake.”
And as though the unusual exhortation, the unusual name, had scared Imp more than screaming, more than the strange men in Kit’s room, Imp’s face melted like wax too near a flame.
The wrinkles of anger turned soft. Rage became grief, as tears overflowed the wide grey eyes. The child took a deep breath and sobbed. “They’ll take you,” he said.
“Aye,” Kit said. “And best for all.”
To Ingram, in a tired voice that yet betrayed the certainty of being obeyed, Kit said, “Put him down. He’s not worth your time. You may have me.”
Poley laughed. “Thus is the wiley playwright brought to bay. So easily does his run end. Good Kit, kind Kit will do what we wish for the sake of this cub. Should we take the cub then as surety?”
Kit swallowed. He shook his head. Oh, let Imp go free, and then Kit would do as Kit best pleased.
“No,” he said. “No. You need no surety. I’ll say what you want me to, or else die.”
Ingram put the child down.
Poley waved the child away, “Go,” he said. “We know where to find you, should Master Marlowe not behave.”
Imp hesitated on his normally fleet feet, turned and stared at Kit, and said, “They’re going to take you.”
Kit shrugged. He couldn’t answer. He felt tears prickle their way beneath his eyelids, felt them tighten a knot at his throat.
And then, as Imp walked slowly away, as Poley and Frizer stood there, he felt something else.
He heard an inner voice, clear, in his mind. “Let me,” it said. “This is ridiculous.”
And then a dark tide, a dark wave, engulfed Marlowe’s mind and took over his thought. From that dark wave, words ensued, spoken by Marlowe’s mouth but not, for that, his—or at least not his in any conscious sense.
What was this, then? What was this thing? It was as though another Marlowe lived within Marlowe, another creature within his deepest bosom, a smoother talker to his smooth-talking ways.
He could hear convincing arguments, rolling honeyed, word upon honeyed word from his tongue. They assured Poley and Frizer of Kit’s verity, of his certainty of a conspiracy.
Yet, the words in themselves would not be enough. The words would not suffice to turn the threat from Kit’s door.
But with the words he could feel magic flowing. Magic sparkling and tangy on the tongue and soft-stinging on the skin.
Whence came the magic? How had Kit got it? From his fabled ancestor, Merlin?
And how could he use it thus, so easily?
He told Frizer of the big conspiracy about to be uncovered, and suggested that Frizer, Poley, and a servant of Milord Essex should all meet at the home of Mistress Elinor Bull, in Deptford.
All Night Awake Page 20
