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Scene 3




St. Paul’s Yard, the marketplace of choice for book printers and booksellers in Elizabethan England. Around the corners of the yard, houses encroach, shadowing the space and making it look like the inside of a building, lacking only the roof to be a cathedral as imposing as the one beside it. Colorful tents dot the yard proper, streaming booklets and papers like festive ornaments. Amid the tents, the well-to-do stroll in their finery and velvets, and older scholars in dull wool cloaks skulk. Along the center aisle between the tents, Marlowe walks toward the outer gate, at a clipped pace imposed by the two men who flank him.


Kit would not be scared.

Over the gallop of his heart, he ordered his hands not to clench one upon the other, as though in prayer to the God in which Kit no longer believed.

This was the second time in two days that Kit had been seized by envoys of the Queen’s council.

Only the day before, Kit had been dragged from Scagmore—his patron’s home—by one of these men, Henry Mauder, and brought to town in such a great hurry that he’d not been given the chance to change out of his indoor slippers.

Treason Abroad, a pamphlet pinned to the side of a printer’s tent, slapped in the breeze, catching Kit’s gaze as he was hurried past. The cover displayed a caricature of the King of Spain.

Yesterday Kit, who had worked covertly for the Queen’s council since his days at Cambridge, had invoked names of those he had served as a shield against those who would now arrest him. Blithely, he’d named the late Sir Francis Walsingham and Cecil, the Queen’s present secretary.

Yesterday, Kit had been let go.

But look how he’d been apprehended again today. Had those names, then, so quickly lost their power to protect him?

“What do you wish with me, milords?” Kit asked, casting his voice just so, attempting to keep it from showing shaking anxiety, attempting to keep his fear from the sure knowledge of all the men walking past, all those scholars shopping for pamphlets and books, as Kit had done so many times before.

Henry Mauder, on Kit’s left, cast Kit a brief, triumphant glare. A messenger for the Queen’s chamber, Mauder looked perpetually scared and angry in equal measure. Kit had learned there was none so dangerous as a scared man.

Kit’s mind cast about for the cause of today’s arrest. What had Henry Mauder found out? What did he know? What did he hold over Kit like the sword of Damocles, precariously suspended?

All of Kit’s sins, remembered, danced before his eyes with lewd display. He’d blasphemed and gambled and once, drunk, said a whole lot of nonsense on the subject of boys and tobacco, to see the shocked expressions in the pious faces surrounding him. Could any of these have come home to him? “Pray, pray, he said, his voice thin and dismal. “What think you I’ve done?”

Henry Mauder shrugged. “You are being taken for to answer some questions.”

A trickle of sweat ran from Kit’s forehead, past the ineffective dam of his thin, arched eyebrows, to sting in his eyes.

His captors enforced a fast step. He saw a friend passing by, a friend who was also a secret service man.

This friend who had defended Kit in street brawls and been one of the first critics of Kit’s poems now passed by Kit as though Kit didn’t exist, his gaze not answering Kit’s beckoning recognition.

So word was out among secret service people that Kit was taken, Kit thought, chilled. Word was out that Kit was lost, caught in the net of official displeasure that fished him forth from his natural element to a terrible fate.

“What questions can you have that you did not ask yesterday?” he asked the fat man at his right.

The fat man didn’t even look at Kit. Swollen and wrinkled at once, like a prune too long forgotten in sugar water, he looked unimportant. A mere secretary. A witness.

Or a nobleman in disguise?

In the secret service, one could never tell. Fair was foul and foul was fair, each thing turned from its true nature.

Henry Mauder pursed his mouth into close semblance of a chicken’s ass and tilted his head sideways. “I see, Master Marlowe,” he said, “that heavy deeds weigh upon your conscience.”

Kit’s throat seemed to close upon his breathing, and his brain felt as if it had become a single teeny drum echoing only What do they know? Out of his panic, Kit spoke blindly. “I’ll not meddle with a conscience,” he said, in reasonable imitation of his normal teasing tone. He forced his lips into a smile again. “It makes a man a coward and it fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that by chance I found. It beggars any man that keeps it. It is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavors to trust himself to live without it.”

He took a deep breath and resolved not to show fear. Like rabid dogs, justices and officers of the crown were very like to smell your fear and, smelling it, to react to it like a hungry man to meat and bread.

They were now almost through Paul’s Yard. Almost to the outer iron gate. Almost past any hope of rescue.

Passing the tent that displayed the sign of the white greyhound, where John Harrison, printer, should be indebted to Kit for many weighty purchases and many, even weightier profits, Kit found neither recognition nor interest in his plight. The printer and his apprentices glanced past Kit as if he were suddenly invisible.

It was as though Kit were a dead man already, the lid of his tomb closed upon him, cutting him off from the world and his imagined friends.

“So, you had no conscience, then, when you wrote down that Jesus was not truly God’s son, and twenty other such blasphemies, that you proclaimed while in college?” Henry frowned again, his lips contracting into their narrowest moue, his eyes no more than slits on his suspicious face.

Kit started and drew sharp breath, turning around to stare at Mauder and needing not to fake surprise. He was astonished. While Kit had been in college? Eight years ago?

Beggar the fools, had they all gone mad?

He stared, his mouth hanging open, while in his mind he reviewed the riot of mad living he’d engaged in at Cambridge: the drinking, the gambling, and the carousing.

With those, like a man given weak ale after strong wine, Kit had in vain tried to rinse away his memory of his first love, his elf love.

Oh, Kit had not been so bad. He’d not stolen, nor killed, nor any other of those offenses that rightly might have brought a man to justice.

As for what he’d said . . . . What might he not have said? Those had been years of pain. Years without hope.

The memory of the elf lady, Silver, his lost love, had made Kit mad enough for anything. Even now, he shivered at the thought of Silver: dark silken hair, pale silken skin, and a mouth that tasted of new wine.

He stared at Mauder. “Who told you this?” he asked. “That I wrote any such thing?”

“Never mind who told us,” Mauder said. “We have proof enough, in a paper penned by your own hand.”

Mauder smiled wider, showing crooked teeth, yellow and savage. A wolf’s teeth, which would maul and tear. “Master Marlowe, what we have against you is right enough to see you three times hanged or disemboweled or quartered, or indeed all of them.”

Marlowe drew in a quick breath.

Unlike the boy he’d once been, who’d entered Cambridge hoping to be a minister, Kit had lost all hope of paradise beyond. Death meant nothing, save only keeping company with worms. Of his shattered faith no hope at all remained, only the fear of something worse hereafter. Doubting heaven, he kept the suspicious certainty of hell. Therefore death scared him more than it had in his young and pious days.

“Well, then,” he said, his voice sounding hollow and yet striving for a note of bravery. “Well, then, you can kill me but once.” He took off his gloves and put them on again, to give his hands some occupation. “Are we headed, then, to execution?” Even pronouncing the word made his voice tremble and he bit the inside of his cheek hard, willing pain to steady him.

Outside Paul’s Yard, just past the gate to which they hurried, he saw that a dark, boxy carriage with no markings waited. Four dark horses pulled it, driven by a black-attired coachman who might have been the devil himself.

Was this Kit’s final conveyance?

Henry Mauder looked gravely at Kit.

“We would prefer if you would do the Queen a service and reveal where you might have heard those foul heresies you then wrote down,” Henry Mauder said. “For certainly, you realize, the mouth of so dangerous a member of society must be stopped.”

The coachman descended from his perch and opened the door to a spacious but dark interior. Black seats and heavy black curtains seemed all the darker for light of the lantern suspended from the side of the carriage by iron brackets.

Kit took a step back, shying from the carriage like a nervous horse will shy from battle.

“Do you not have friends?” Henry Mauder asked. “Do you not have friends who speak such vile lies, as Christ not being divine?”

Kit could not imagine of whom they spoke. He had very few friends. He took care not to form friendships he might be forced to betray.

Mauder huffed, exasperated at Kit’s silence. “Climb on, climb on, Master Marlowe,” he said and gestured cordially to the dark maw of the carriage.

With Mauder on one side, Mauder’s silent companion on the other, Kit could no more avoid the route thus indicated than he could hide from spiteful fate. These men were not just two but a multitude. Behind them stood, arrayed, law and might. They were the crushing arm, the overreaching might of the Queen’s council.

He climbed into the carriage on trembling legs, trying to hold his head high and pretend a light step.

The two men sat together on the bench that faced his, thus both staring at him like unavoidable judges.

Mauder arched his eyebrows. “Come, come, Master Marlowe. Do you not remember? Did someone not read you an atheist lecture, that you have since then repeated to others? Was there not something called a School of the Night that mocked the teachings of the Church?”

The words fell like a strong light upon Kit’s thoughts. It seemed to him that the sounds around him receded and his head grew faint. He took a deep shuddering breath.

A School of the Night. That was what they’d been aiming for.

By the mass, they were talking about Sir Walter Raleigh. Sir Walter Raleigh, who’d befriended Kit years ago, when Kit was only a penniless student, Sir Walter Raleigh, who had enlarged Kit’s perspective of the world a hundredfold. Sir Walter Raleigh, generous enough to speak to Kit as to an equal when Kit was but a poor cobbler’s son, attending Cambridge on a scholarship.

These two men wanted Kit to denounce Sir Walter Raleigh for an atheist and thus doom him to death.

The coachman closed the carriage door, and presently, the vehicle moved. Marlowe heard the clopping of hooves on the ground, but through the dark curtains that covered the windows, he could not see where they were headed. His heart told him his destination lay in some prison’s oblivion. Cold sweat broke upon Kit’s brown.

Once before, while at Cambridge, Kit had been arrested. He’d made friends with Catholic students. At the time innocent, an ardent Protestant, in his missionary zeal he’d thought to talk them out of their grievous errors.

The council had seized him and asked him what incriminatory things he’d heard of them. Kit had refused to answer, all high-minded indignation and strong-worded pride.

But Kit’s bravery had earned him naught.

Alone, friendless, with no powerful connections, Kit had thought all lost and the pit of the grave had yawned at his feet.

Where his actions had not, his fear made him a traitor. He had given the names of those students who, in the heat of theological argument, had admitted their beliefs to him. He’d betrayed their dreams, their hopes, their not-quite plots.

He’d watched his friends die on the gallows, and he felt happy enough to have escaped. Since then had the secret service men known his limits and had tapped them again and again, sending him to parties where he would listen for the traitorous joke, the incautious remark, watch for the impolitic friendships.

Thus had Kit been seduced to working for the Crown and that first misstep, caused by fear and rewarded with gold, had gained him other secret offices till Kit’s conscience, blunted like an ill-used knife, troubled him no more, or only a little sometimes, late at night, when the ghosts of betrayed friends seemed to gather round his solitary bed.

And yet, Kit must have felt put upon. Something in him, some secret stirring, must have censored him.

Six months ago, when Thomas Walsingham, an old schoolfellow newly ascended to family honors, had offered Kit lavish patronage, Kit had shed the coils of secret like a snake that sheds its skin. He’d told Cecil he was done with it. From that moment on, he’d be a poet. A poet, nothing more.

And yet, the business would not leave Kit be. Like a sleeper returning to the same nightmare, Kit now found himself at the starting point of all his treasons. They wanted him to denounce a friend again. They wanted him to denounce Raleigh.

He looked from one man to the other and found nothing encouraging in those countenances.

This must be a plot of Essex’s, Kit thought. Essex was Raleigh’s rival for the Queen’s attention and her affections.

Two noble cocks strutted for an aging hen, and Kit would be caught in the middle of their bloody fight.

If Kit denounced Raleigh, the council would let Kit go. But if Essex’s plot failed, Raleigh could avenge himself on Kit in a more terrible way than Essex could, for Raleigh was an imaginative man, as Essex was not.

And besides, even Kit’s ill-awakened conscience yet rebelled from his being called again to the office of traitor.

He took a deep breath. “If I’m guilty of atheism, then it’s my own guilt,” he said. “I will name no other.”

Mauder chuckled. “A fine stand, Master Marlowe. A fine stand.” He grinned, showing yellowed teeth.

The carriage smelled of wet wool and sweat.

The curtains were closed. An oil lamp fixed on a bracket lit the carriage and gave off a greasy, burnt smell.

Mauder rapped on the wood near his head, and the carriage slowed to a funeral pace.

“Have you heard of Master Topcliff?” Mauder asked. “Master Topcliff, now.” Mauder shook his head and smiled with admiration. “He’s the Queen’s own torturer and he can 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 confess now, before you’re put to the torture, while you might yet walk away free.”

Kit felt cold, yet sweat dripped down his back and soaked through his fine velvet suit. He smelled it, rank and sharp.

He could see himself, a shapeless cripple, crawling on the filthy street, a begging bowl clutched between his few remaining teeth. Alms for the cripple. What good then his wit, his fine grey eyes, his Cambridge education?

He shivered.

Removing his right glove, he clenched both hands tight upon it, as if by squeezing it he could throttle his vile tormentors. “I have nothing to confess that could be said after torture—or before,” Kit said. He meant it as a courageous scream, but instead his voice echoed the cringing, begging tones of his cobbler father.

To Kit’s surprise, Henry Mauder sat back as though conceding the point.

“It was at your lodgings that they told us you’d gone to Paul’s,” Mauder said softly.

“At my lodgings?”

Into Kit’s mind, unbidden, came an image of the modest house where he lodged in Southwark and, with it, an image of Imp, whose real name was Richard.

Save that Imp was barely seven and that his hair yet retained a natural trace of red without need for the artifice of henna, it could have been Kit’s own face. And a good reason for that, as Kit had long suspected that Imp, the son of Kit’s landlady, was the result of his desperate attempt to put off paying his rent long ago. A miraculous result of so base an act.

These men would have asked Imp where Kit was. That was sure, or they’d never have found Kit. Only Imp always knew or cared where Kit went.

Henry smiled, showing his bent teeth. “That is a fine boy your landlady has, Master Marlowe.”

Kit flinched. Imp was Kit’s religion. At the innocent’s foot he worshiped and for that small creature had he such hopes that they beggared heaven.

Kit wished Imp away from these unhallowed plots and trembled to know him so close to them, so near the sprung trap.

“A fine boy. A shame if something were to happen to him, but a high-spirited boy might do such things—steal an apple, say—as would render him fit only to be hanged,” Mauder said.

Kit’s hands trembled. He’d sacrifice anything, anyone, give anything up. Anyone but Imp.

In his life, he’d loved but twice. The first time, when he’d been barely more than a boy himself and he’d fallen in love with a dark-haired elven maiden. And the second time—quite a different love—Imp, the result of Kit’s pleasing sin.

Yet Marlowe could not betray Raleigh. Raleigh was powerful and rich enough to take revenge and to avenge himself on Imp as well as Kit.

Kit’s head felt as dizzy as if he had worked long on a hot summer’s day. Snapes lay on either side of him. He took a deep breath. It did not steady him.

“Are you ready to talk now, Master Marlowe?” Henry Mauder asked, his gaze steady upon Kit. “Are you ready to talk and tell us who taught you vile disrespect of religion?”

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