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Scene 33




The alley where Imp’s body lies. It’s undisturbed, abandoned in this isolated spot. Kit runs in, looking bedraggled, and drops to his knees on the mud.


The memory of the night past had guided him here, fogged and twisted though it was. He knew he’d gone down one road and then the other, and there it was the alley where he’d walked, the very gate he’d touched.

Though his steps shied away from it, he went into the alley, step by step, each step pushed against the instinct to stop.

His mind slid sideways away from full recollection, yet he knew this mud, these buildings. He remembered the hunger and the need, and the hot blood upon his tongue.

Imp’s body lay in the mud that his dried blood had turned glossy black.

The boy might have been asleep, save only for his rent and tattered suit and the undeniable fact that the body had been gutted.

And yet Kit felt nothing. Nothing at all.

He advanced, step on step, sure this was a nightmare, sure it must soon end.

A high, keening scream of someone nearby disturbed him. He wished it would stop and looked around for the screamer.

But his throat hurt, raw and aching, and he realized that he was screaming.

He checked his scream on a deep sigh and in that sigh he heard his own grief and was shocked by it. A half-startled sob followed the sigh. Kit pressed his fist to his half-open mouth, surprised that such a sound should come from it.

He stood over Imp’s body and met the sightless gaze of those grey eyes. Imp looked puzzled in death. As if he could not understand this visitation.

Kit’s knees went slack. He sank to the mud of the alley. He reached gingerly, and lifted Imp’s rigid, cold hand.

Only yesterday the child had come to him. Only yesterday. Kit’s mind remembered, with remorseless clarity, Imp standing in this alley, saying, “Kit, you were late coming home. Kit, you promised you’d tell me a story.”

And instead, what had Kit given him?

Kit stared, in dim-witted incomprehension, at the dead child. How could Kit have done this? How could he? What evil lurked in him? How dark was that dark side of his soul? How could Kit’s nature have separated so—the poet and the spy thus divided?

And how could Imp be caught in Kit’s internal struggle?

Only yesterday, the child had been alive, Kit told himself, as though by telling himself this he could turn back the clock and undo the damage. Alive, he’d been and now he was dead, and this transformation was too sudden and too final.

How could such a thing as life be lost forever in such a moment?

He held the cold little hand in both of his, and wished it warm and moving.

“No, no, no life!” he whispered. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and you no breath at all?”

The glazed grey eyes stared at him but saw him not.

“You’ll come no more. Never, never, never, never!”

From outside the alley, just steps away, came the sounds of the city, the cries of fish sellers, a woman’s high, sweet laughter, a man’s hurried steps.

How could life go on like this? How could no one notice that Imp was dead? Kit trembled with the force of the grief and guilt that rose, battling, within him.

“Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stone: Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so that heaven’s vault should crack,” Kit said. “Look, how he stares at me and all unmeaning. He stares at me as he so often did, those grey eyes so reproachful and so knowing. Well did he know and well should he have reproached. Look what my keeping from the right hand the deeds of the left has wrought. Look.”

Steps had entered the alley and approached.

“Marlowe? Kit?” Will Shakespeare stopped steps away from Kit. “I heard your voice and I—”

“Oh.”

Kit saw Will’s worn boots through his tear-distorted vision, and glanced upward, and up and up and up, at Will’s face.

How Shakespeare had blanched. How shocked he looked. Or how surprised, as though he thought Kit insane.

And well he might.

“What grief was here?” Will asked hesitantly.

Kit held Imp’s hand and caressed it.

“My poor fool is dead. He’s gone forever,” Kit said. “I know when one is dead and when one lives. He’s dead as earth.”

Will’s well-meaning face looked like something carved in marble and worn down by time. He looked with horror on the scene before him. “But dead how? How did the child die?”

Kit shook his head. Hot tears ran scalding down his face and his throat tasted bitter with salt.

How had Imp died? How could Kit explain such horror to Will, the good burgher of Stratford-upon-Avon?

“Murder, stem murder, in the direst degree,” Kit told Will’s impassive face. “All several sins, all used in each degree, throng to the bar, crying all, Guilty! guilty! I shall despair. There is no creature loves me; and if I die, no soul shall pity me: Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself?”

“But you’d never have done any such a thing,” Will said. “Your guilt is misplaced, your grief distorts all. Who was this child?”

“It is mine only son!” Kit said, and as tears multiplied upon his face, he stroked Imp’s blood-soaked hair. “Ah, boy, if any life be left in thee, throw up thine eye! See, see what showers arise, blown with the windy tempest of my heart, upon thy death, that kills mine eye and heart.”

“Courage,” Will said. “Courage. You’ll get other children.”

But Kit shook his head. How could he explain to Will that love of elven kind had cleft him from humans, that spying had separated him from reason, that his multitudinous treasons, multiplied, had turned him into this thing—this divided thing, a half of which had just killed the one love the other had to live for.

Looking up at Will through the distorting veil of tears, Kit wailed, “Oh, can’st thou minister to a mind diseased?”

But Will only shook his head and, practical and kind, put his hands on Kit’s arms, helped him rise. “Get up,” he said. “Get up. We must take the body to his mother, must give him Christian burial.”

And covering Imp with his doublet, blocking the sight of those piteous open, surprised eyes, Will made as if to pick up the child.

“No,” Kit said. “No. I must do it. For he is my son, and the burden no burden.”

How strange that now, when it was too late, he could recognize Imp and call him son.

Lifting Imp, Kit felt hot tears roll down his cheeks. “Alack. Poor Madeleine. Harsh she is, but she deserved not such a blow. And I bring her this grief. And yet I love myself. Wherefore? For any good that I myself have done unto myself? O, no! Alas, I rather hate myself for hateful deeds committed by myself! I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.

“Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter. My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain. Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree.”

Will gave him a piteous look, no doubt thinking that Kit raved from his grief.

Kit could not explain it. Oh, yes, it was grief and mourning, but it was guilt, yet stronger than both and well deserved.

Kit had feared so much and dared so much, he’d got involved in so many schemes and deceptions. He’d flaunted his meager knowledge, he’d braved hell itself, in betraying others for his son’s sake.

And now, watch how from his own corruption his son’s death had bloomed like a rank flower from an abominable stalk.

His gloved hand stroking at Imp’s auburn hair, Kit felt his tears renew and spoke louder, as though to drown out the cold, implacable voice within his brain. “O, pity, God, this miserable age! What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly, erroneous, mutinous and unnatural, this deadly age daily doth beget! Oh boy, thy father gave thee life too rashly and hath bereft thee of thy life too soon!”

Grief washed over Kit’s mind, bringing with it thoughts and images that might be unconnected, but that in his heart seemed to fit with this most mournful occasion.

Kit remembered his childhood in his father’s small workshop: his clumsiness with the leathers and needles, the easy gallop of his mind in school.

He remembered the masters who had praised him, the neighbors who had envied him, the father who had scolded him for daring his mind to stray beneath the bonds of decent piety.

He remembered his scholarship and how hard he’d worked for his masters at Cambridge. He remembered his plays and what acclamation they brought, the recognition and the wild bouts of drinking and discussing poetry with the fashionable youth and other poets in the Mermaid.

And Kit had spied, and Kit had betrayed, and Kit had turned himself from what he was so that like a sleeve made of coarse stuff but lined with satin, he’d turned himself inside out to become something that he was not: a spy and a dandy, a knower of lies, a friend of corrupt aristocracy.

And through all this like a thread of gold in the base stuff of Kit’s heart, Imp had run. Imp’s innocence, his simple trust.

From the moment of Imp’s birth, from the moment that Kit had beheld his own face sculpted small in another soul’s possession, Kit had done everything for his son’s sake.

The love Kit’s father had denied Kit and that natural pride that did stem from having begotten his like and his successor, all that he had invested in Imp’s skipping grace, Imp’s quick mind, his irreverent wit, his daring ways.

And all for this. Bloodied meat in the mud of an alley. Nothing more.

Carrying the child, he walked slowly across London streets.

His appearance and bloodied face and hands made passerby recoil, but he noticed not.

He would go, like one on penance.

If another had done this, then Kit would have killed the other.

Yet, he himself had done it though he remembered it not, or only as through a glass darkly—the darker, secretive half of him was a murderer—and upon that must Kit take revenge.

At the door to his lodgings he hesitated, delaying the moment of grieving Madeleine, and almost laughed at his own scruples.

How considerate of others he had grown, now that there was so little to consider. He saw Will standing by, Will looking at him. Will had followed him here, and would follow him further.

Will, whom Kit had sought to implicate in his own treasons, in his dark plots. Will, who would have died, as surely as John Penry, to keep Kit and Imp safe.

Only there was nothing to keep safe anymore.

The motor of the world had come to a stop, and in this halt, by the sudden clarity of his grief, Kit realized that there was nothing left anymore, and no reason to tie Will, who was also a father, to the ill-fated coils of his fallen plan.

Kit put his bloodied hand out and surrounded Will’s wrist with his cold fingers. “Leave me now, friend, leave me now.”

Will said something of which the word “Deptford” emerged.

Remembering his plan and recoiling from it, Kit shook his head. “There’s nothing to go to Deptford for now,” he said. “Pray, friend, Will, stay away from it. Even if . . . . Even if I should, myself, entreat you. Do not go there.”

And leaving Will amazed on the doorstep, Kit turned and went in to discharge his fell duty.

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Framed