He knew not his questioner’s names, nor their ranks. Nothing, indeed, that could identify them, save their faces, and those he might well mistake, wreathed as they were in darkness, in this chamber insufficiently illuminated by the two few candles in the distant chandelier that depended from the penumbrous reaches of the ceiling. “I wasn’t here. I was at Scagmore, working on a poem about Hero And Leander. By gracious permission of Scagmore’s lord, milord Thomas Walsingham.”
At the noble name thus bandied about, all three men, at once, dipped quills into the ink wells that stood in front of them on the massive table at which they sat, and wrote upon the pieces of paper.
The scratch of the quill upon the paper echoed monstrously augmented in this room, where everything resounded and every step, every word, every breath assumed momentous volume.
Kit drew breath and heard the sound of his uneasiness ricochet off the stones and come back to him ten times increased.
His interrogators looked up, eyes alert for a sign of breaking down.
“Master Marlowe, how is it that your plays were used for this pamphlet?” The questioner on the right asked. “That your plays inspire sedition?”
This question was new, and disturbing, implying as it did that Kit was a seditious element.
“If it please your Honors,” he said, and bowed and cringed in a way he’d almost forgotten from his humble childhood as a cobbler’s son. “My plays were approved by her Majesty’s censor. I can hardly control what hot heads make of them.”
“Um,” the questioner said, and his pen scratched the paper.
How had it come to this?
Kit had been away at Scagmore, the residence of Sir Thomas Walsingham, whom it amused to keep the much admired playwright as a pet poet. He’d been working on Hero and Leander, which he hoped would make his name amid brainless young Lords who disdained true learning and yet despised play making as lowly. These young men liked a little tantalizing with their classical tales, and that Kit thought he could provide.
He’d not done anything connected with spying for six months. He’d left all that behind. His work for Robert Cecil, head of her Majesty’s secret service, had landed Kit in jail for counterfeiting, had made him a suspect of other more serious things, and had caused him to betray his conscience, to turn in men he thought were guilty of no more than a quickly whispered word, a hastily formed thought.
Kit had thought he got clear away from that. Yet, here he stood now, again in trouble with the law and again not quite sure how it had got this far.
Henry Mauder, a messenger of the queen’s chamber, had come to Scagmore and arrested Kit and led him away under police escort. To London. Here. For questioning.
Kit didn’t even know where here was -- having been let out of the closed carriage in front of an indifferent door, in an indifferent, dark street, then guided along unidentifiable corridors to this chamber. Was this one of London’s four common prisons?
Common born, Kit didn’t flatter himself that he rated the tower. And yet, if they thought he was part of a conspiracy, he might very well be in the tower, or in a secret chamber in some palace.
If Kit died here, would anyone ever know? What was happening in the other chambers, beyond the thick stone walls? Through walls like this, one wouldn’t hear even the desperate screams of a tortured man.
Kit’s knees felt loose under him.
The quill pen screeched over the paper, its sound slow and threatening like a distant rumble of thunder, coming closer, closer.
The man on the left lifted his head and piercing black eyes peered out, half-hidden in the shapeless flab of his face. “Um.... It says here you have been arrested for counterfeiting and uttering last year, Master Marlowe. Um....” He looked at the paper in front of him, and made a minute mark with his scratching quill. “What I’d like to know.... um.... what I’d like to know is....”
Kit drew breath and shifted his feet. This was definitely a new question and alarming, that such a thing, done in the course of his spying, should be brought up against him now. What did it mean? What was he up against?
His legs felt numb and aching. His interrogators talked and moved as if they had all the time in the world.
They were sitting down.
“What I want to know,” the man resumed, at long last. “Is why you were let go on such charges?”
Each of the questioner’s words reverberated off the far off ceiling, ricocheted from the walls, came at Kit from every direction, seemingly surrounding him.
Kit couldn’t answer the truth: that he’d been working for Sir Cecil and under his orders. True, his actions might be business Cecil would admit to and easily enough -- above board deception and blameless counterfeit in her Majesty’s service.
Or it could all have been something else, one of the many con games that Cecil and his associates ran and that, at times, blurred with their secret work, faded into it, so there was no telling where the catching of conspirators began and where the lining of Sir Cecil’s pockets ended. In that, Cecil was no different from his predecessor, Francis Walsingham.
If Kit spoke, he would be turning Cecil in, and he wouldn’t live long after that.
Kit cleared his throat. “It was judged, at the time, that I was innocent, your Honor.”
His voice echoed back to his ears, enormously distorted. The veneer of Kit’s Cambridge education quite stripped from the older, underlying working-class accent.
Kit sounded like his father, the shoemaker, cringing and apologizing to a customer for an ill-fitting shoe.
All his quick mind, his agile social climbing had gone for naught. Here he was, still the cobbler’s son from Canterbury’s narrower alleys, and facing the rope, like a base-born malefactor.
Kit let air out through his nose, an annoyed, vexed sound.
His three interrogators stopped writing and looked up at him.
He stood like a bird under the hypnotizing glare of a serpent, very still, hoping they didn’t notice his fluttering heart, his guilty mind that darted like a prisoner behind his open eyes, finding no escape.
The old men wrote for a long time. The scratch of their pens echoed in the room. Now one cleared his throat, and then another coughed, making a great show of it and retrieving from within his sleeve a lacy handkerchief to sniff into.
Kit found himself staring at their black garments. Why was black clothing equated with respectability? He’d been meant to wear just such dark, somber clothes when he’d been a student at Cambridge.
He’d complied well enough his first year, and small choice. A scholarship boy, whose father’s always meager, failing business left him with broth and bread for his supper and nothing at all for fine laces and ribbons, could do no better.
But then he’d made friends with the Lord Percy, Earl of Northumberland, a Catholic lord.
That was when Kit had first been arrested, the very first time.
Same as now he’d been taken to an unidentifiable chamber, and interrogated on suspicion of having converted to Catholicism and seeking to convert others.
Kit remembered how terrified he’d been. How he’d quaked, even more than he did now, at the thought of torture. His fear, his mindless, heart-stopping terror of the rack and the hangman’s noose had led him to talk. He’d told himself he couldn’t let his staunch protestant parents be thus shamed, to have their only son hanged for a Catholic. It would lessen his sisters’ chances at marriage and put the whole family under suspicion.
So, when the council had demanded he hand in others in exchange for letting him go, Kit had complied, spinelessly denouncing friends and acquaintances -- fervent Catholic missionaries and casual sympathizers alike.
The secret service had told Kit it would go ill with him unless he spied on those who attended upon the Lord Percy at his house, and reported any plots they might contrive. And Kit, scared, defenseless, had complied.
If it had ended there, then Kit’s conscience, though wounded, might still have been salved and
rebuilt, his self-love managing to make him believe he was no great traitor, but only a desperate man.
However, the cunning Sir Francis Walsingham, then the chief of her majesty’s secret service, had rewarded Kit generously for the information so unwillingly provided.
Then had Kit known himself the equal of Judas, the kissing cousin of the creeping assassin, who, under cover of a fair smile, sheaths his dagger in his friend’s bosom.
Knowing himself thus, as such a low creature, how could Kit have stopped from giving further information? Indeed, how could he have demurred at any crime, hesitated before any bald-faced treason?
The honest man can say that he is honest and to his honesty sacrifice much. But the traitorous coward has no virtue, save the virtue of drawing breath, and for that virtue he will do anything.
So had Kit Marlowe gone on living, like a tree that looks sound and whole outside, though the worm has long since consumed the inside and nothing but dark rot and ash remains for its support. So had Kit Marlowe gone on living, aye, and enjoyed life.
The silver pieces from his treason had lined his pockets well. Aye, and bought him new lining and new pockets, too, these splendid clothes of velvet and silk he’d worn ever since, and a limner to paint Kit’s fine portrait, that hung still in Cambridge buttery hall.
“Master Marlowe, we have a paper here... yes, a paper....” The middle interrogator lifted and rustled a sheet with some minute writing. “In which it says that you hold atheistic opinions, mock the divinity of our Lord, and read an atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh. Is this true?”
“I do not know what this can be about,” Kit said, which was true. Even in his cups, he wouldn’t be so foolish as to say such things in the presence of others. Think them, maybe, sometimes, in his dark moments. But never to say them. Nay, Kit loved Kit too well for that.
Yet someone had accused him of it. And there was the name of Sir Walter Raleigh, his friend, almost a patron. The man who’d introduced Kit to tobacco and regaled him with tales of far distant lands and argued philosophy with him, and, withal, treated base-born Kit as an equal.
Kit felt sweat drip from his hairline and race down his forehead. He shifted his foot. He’d seen plots like this before, one person pulled in on false information, to incriminate someone bigger than himself.
Cold came up through the thin soles of his indoor slippers. He’d been indoors when Henry Maunder, the trusty messenger of her Majesty’s chamber had come to arrest him in Scagmore. He’d been forced away without even the time to change clothing or shoes. And, while Kit had clothing in his chambers at London, who knew when or if he’d be allowed to go there. “I can’t remember anything like that.”
“Then why was there a paper of vile atheistic writings amid the papers of Thomas Kyd, a paper that Thomas said was your own?”
Thomas Kyd? What could poor Tom have to do with this?
“Your Honor, I don’t know what this can refer to,” Kit said, and heard his voice reverberate back to him, ten times augmented.
Had they arrested Tom? Kit couldn’t imagine Tom denouncing him otherwise.
Thomas Kyd, fellow playwright and once, about two years ago, Kit’s roommate, was a sap, a bit of an innocent. No harm in him, and no possible way he had papers with atheistic positions amid his things. Not unless it had been deliberately planted. And planted by whom and for what? The name Raleigh turned in Kit’s head again like a bloated corpse resurfacing at the top of a drowning wave.
If this were a plot against Raleigh and Kit, himself, only a means to an end, then the plot must be moved by Lord Essex, Raleigh’s rival at court and with the Queen’s favor. What could he do, and what say in such a case as this?
Between two such opponents, Kit could manage no more than the mouse trampled underfoot by two duelers, each hot for the other’s blood.
Here, two noble cocks strutted for an old hen, and Kit Marlowe would lose his life in this.
The room ran away from him, sight and sound dimming before the certain beating of his heart, loud, loud, loud in his ears.
How long would his heart be allowed to go on beating?
“Did Tom Kyd affirm this page was mine?” he asked, hearing his own voice small and distant, a squeak in that dim, hollow chamber, from which his consciousness recoiled and struggled futilely, like a baited bear that the dog has got by the nose.
Now Kit would faint. Faint like a maiden with a guilty secret, and lay his fear open to these ruthless men.
His deafening heartbeat allowed him to hear words the men said, but just barely as if both his ears were stuffed with cotton.
“Put to the rack.... Tom Kyd....” he heard. And, “Confessed that you had said many blasphemous things.” The man went on to read the blasphemous things, starting with the most blasphemous of all.
Had Kit said any of it? Maybe he had. But nothing so open, nothing so crazy as denying the divinity of Christ. Nothing that could so surely speed Kit to his death.
How much had Tom suffered before speaking? What had Kit’s amused, distant friendship cost yet this other innocent?
Kit’s mind retreated, running, down the lanes of memory, till he found what mattered, the only thing that mattered to him. His safe mental place, his untouched core.
The one person he’d ever loved, Lady Silver, resplendent in her shimmering elven robes, her skin pale, her hair perfect black silk.
For a summer, when Kit was but seventeen, she’d been his love.
He came back from the memory calmer, more at ease. Or at least more resigned.
If he couldn’t have her again, then why not die? Aye, let death come and part him from his sorrow.
And yet, a clinging strand of hope and life struggled upward. And yet, were they talking of torturing him? Or had they tortured Kyd? Poor Thomas, who’d never done anything other than room with Kit.
Poor Kit, who would be killed now, as he would have been had he refused to talk, so many years ago. Now, damned and polluted, he would be killed. And all his crimes would have been for naught. He’d not even die for his own doings. No, he’d die like the worm, speared through the hook, so the fish may be caught.
Poor cunning Kit, all his ambition betrayed, all his treasons helpless in the face of this greater noose descending about his base-born, high-aspiring neck.
From the racing river of his fear words issued, spoken in that cringing, lost voice. His father’s voice. “Your honors, I am a playwright. This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish, extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, evolutions.” As always with Kit, panic fear betrayed itself in a running of the mouth in incessant, high-sounding, little-meaning words. He tried to check the words but he couldn’t, they would go on flowing. “These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.” By an effort of will, he managed to arrest the flow, his words checking upon a deep breath, something like a ghostly sigh.
He bit his lip, and found his Cambridge diction once more, and found his balance upon his icy feet. “That’s all I am, all. Just a playwright and a poet. Nothing more. Too much for me these intrigues, too high for me these philosophical opinions. Atheist, me? I studied divinity, your honors. Would an atheist study such?”
Breathing. He needed to concentrate on breathing, and rein his racing humors into composure, before he should collapse onto the floor like a woman on a hot summer’s day.
Breathing, breathing, breathing.
“Master Topcliff, now,” the middle man said, and chuckled. “He could break a man on the rack in an instant. Or make him sweat with all his weight suspended from manacles. Or other things, some of them so secret only he knows them. Why, it is said he can cut into a man for days, and take one sense at a time from him, all without killing him, while, little by little, crippling him forever. What think you, Master Marlowe? Hard to hold
a quill, when you have no fingers, hard to write when your eyes are gone, hard to court ladies when you have lost that which makes you a man. You’d be advised, Master Marlowe, to speak now, before you’re put to the torture.”
Everything swam, and the room went black in patches, and moving, moving, all about Kit. He would stay conscious, he would. He wouldn’t disgrace himself.
But he was a poor thing when it came to physical pain. Hot to anger and as eager as any in a fight, yet Kit knew he’d prove a coward under torture, under slow, unavoidable suffering, and say anything, anything to end the slightest pain. Much less great pain such as Topcliff could inflict, the Queen’s torturer, whose skill was renowned all over London.
Kit’s mouth dry, and himself a distant thing, lost to all touch, all sound, all smell, he heard himself say, “Lord Cecil knows me well. He’ll vouch for me. Lord Cecil will.”
Before the echoes of these words died upon the thick stone walls, the distant ceiling, Kit knew he had signed his death sentence.
Cecil, if he were behind that screen, or his minions, who doubtless were there, would let Kit go now. For sure they’d let him go to seeming freedom before Kit could betray any guilty knowledge.
Oh, this court would let him go, and well enough. But only for the while and by the by. They’d let him go because Cecil would want him let go, before Kit could spill secrets that shouldn’t be spoken to the whole Privy Council.
But once they’d let him go, Kit’s days would be numbered.
He’d be a dead man, breathing and yet as dead as any corpse rotting in its coffin.
There were more ways to die than on the gallows or upon the torturer’s rack.
Scene Three
Near Stratford-upon-Avon, a clearing in Arden woods, those woods that are the last remnant of the forest that in the age of Arthur covered all of Britain. In this clearing, an ethereal palace rises, its white walls and tall columns seemingly woven of light and dream. It is the capital of the faerie realm, visible only to those humans with second sight. Within this palace, in a magnificent marble-and-gold throne room, the queen and king of faerieland sit on their golden thrones and hold court over their varied subjects. In front of them stands a centaur.
All Night Awake Page 32
