Scene 10
A neighborhood in Southwark. Amid the muddy fields, the reeking, unpaved lanes, some poor houses stand, tall but graceless and looking like slums anywhere and any when—as though built by children, hastily, with the poorest materials available. Down the narrow, dark street, Kit walks, his clothes strangely out of place in this poor working neighborhood.
Kit walked blindly. The memory of the elf lady he’d once loved overpowered him—the dark lady who could also be a fair youth—took over his senses. He remembered hair of black silk and pale golden hair like moonlight overspilled through a dark night. He remembered hands now soft and small and now large and weapon-calloused. But both hands had been, alike, knowing and daring, both full of arts that humans had never learned, of pleasing vices and gentle sins, of sweetness and tempting older than any human.
Kit remembered the scent of lilac permeating all and making him drunk.
Walking, Kit found, unbidden upon his lips, the simple poem he’d written for Silver—and Quicksilver—in the too brief flowering of his youth.
“Come live with me and be my love,” he sang. “And I will give you beds of roses and a thousand fragrant posies.”
Somewhere, in the darkened upper floors of the nearby houses, someone cursed loudly.
“It’s that creature, Marlowe,” a louder, shriller female voice answered. “He’s drunk again.”
Marlowe smiled and, drunk on nothing but memory, lifted his voice that had once been famous in the Canterbury Cathedral choir, “Our fair swains will—”
A dog barked, and another, shrill voice rose from a window, far above the street, this one saying, “Oh, not again.”
“Kit, Kit, Kit.” Someone small and looking, in the distant moonlight, like little more than a dark shadow, came running down the center of the street and threw himself at Kit’s midbody.
Hit, Kit shut up, jumped back to regain his balance, and reaching forward, grabbed his small attacker around the waist.
“What is this?” he said, recognizing Imp full well, but pretending not to. “What is this? Pray, do footpads come this small?”
He lifted the squealing boy up, till Imp’s face was at a level with his. “Speak, sirrah, want you my purse?”
A small image of Kit’s own face looked at him—the grey eyes the same, cut in the same almond shape and surrounded by the same dark lashes. The child wore his hair long, tied back with a leather strap, and his clothes were much too fine for this poor area of town.
For years now, Kit had formed the habit of giving his old clothes to his landlady, Madeleine, who, with great cunning and ability, cut them down and took the best portions to make perfect clothing for Imp. So Imp wore a velvet doublet and hose in the best style of two years ago, with a fine lawn shirt whose collar showed, clean and unpatched, around his small neck.
“Ah, a well-dressed footpad,” Kit said, marking how much more the boy weighed in his hands than a month ago.
Imp would be what . . . . seven, for it had been almost eight years ago that Kit, first come to London and penniless, had succumbed to the blandishments of his landlady, then so newly a widow that the ensuing product of their brief, unloving tryst was taken by all to be her husband’s get.
By all who had no eyes, Kit thought, marveling once more that every neighbor didn’t point a finger at him and name him Imp’s father, when Imp’s paternity was written all over his son’s guileless face.
He shook the child with mock fierceness. “Tell me, rogue, are you one of these scions of nobility who go around robbing poor people for their fun?” he asked.
Imp opened his eyes very wide. As always, he seemed none too sure that Kit was joking. “I am Richard. Richard Courcy, as you well know, you fool.” He kicked his legs. “Put me down. Put me down. You were making the fool of yourself again, Kit. And you are drunk.”
It was Kit’s turn to laugh as he set the child down. “Peace, Lord Morality. I am not drunk, haven’t drunk anything since I took dinner, much too long ago. And that was but a vile ale, milord, as you would not give your dogs, and certainly not enough to make my spirits soar.” He tugged on the child’s ponytail. “It must be the joy of your presence, milord.”
Imp looked up, and frowned slightly. He had this trick of narrowing his eyes, of lowering his eyebrows upon them, while pinching his mouth in something not quite a smile.
It reminded Kit of his own mother, and of the loving, patient way in which she’d endured his childish follies.
Unlike Kit’s father, who usually made his leather strap speak and loudly, too, being convinced that sparing the strap would spoil the child.
Kit put his hand on Imp’s shoulder, very gently, almost as an apology to that other Kit long ago, who’d endured not so gentle a father.
But who had a father who acknowledged him, Kit’s conscience reminded him. A father willing to call him son, as Imp lacked.
“Mock not, Kit,” Imp said. He looked grave and something sparked in the grey eyes, something that made Kit think of tears. “Mock me not, for I must tell you something serious.”
Kit picked the child up again, carefully—Imp’s legs on either side of his waist, his hands supporting the boy. Kit did not care if Imp’s muddy shoes ruined his fine clothing.
“What, child?” he asked. This was the closest he’d ever get to calling his boy son. “What? What is so serious that you must look at me like a preacher displeased with sinners?”
“A man came by,” Imp said, and his voice trembled. “An evil man, with dark hair and a nasty face. And he told Mother that you . . . He told Mother he must speak to you, or else all was up with us.”
Tears formed in the child’s eyes.
A man with an evil smile?
Oh, curse Henry Mauder, curse the creature. He’d been scaring Imp, too. Not content with making Kit himself ill with fright for Imp’s sake, he’d frightened Imp.
Kit felt a murderous rage, such as, had Henry Mauder been to hand, Kit would gladly have broken Mauder’s skinny neck with the legs of Mauder’s clerical black hose.
Imp put his forehead against Kit’s shoulder, while Kit walked home along the darkened street.
His steps resounded, lonely, off the facades of surrounding buildings, and each whisper seemed magnified by the darkness.
“Mother says if you bring danger to us, you must go,” Imp said. “She says you’re a dangerous man and I should not let you . . .” A long silence. “She says you’re not a man like other men and that you’ve spent too much time around the theater and got confused by boys who dress like women.”
Oh, by the devils and the eternal fire, Kit thought, and tightened his hold on Imp. “Your mother is scared and knows not what she says,” he said. Which was true enough, though Madeleine had come up with this explanation long ago, to excuse Kit’s not wishing to repeat their clumsy coupling.
She could never understand that it was other arms he longed for, nor could he tell her that her love paled when compared to that of elvenkind, like coarse bread paled next to the dainties of kings.
No, he couldn’t tell her that, and Madeleine Courcy had first conjectured then decided that Kit must prefer embraces of another kind, and finally told one and all that Kit sought this illicit love in alleys and darkened places.
At first it had amused Kit who, relieved that Madeleine no longer pursued him, had taken her ready explanation for his tastes and even let her spread it, thinking that illicit dealing of this kind—rarely persecuted and mostly winked at—would mask other illicit dealing, his presence and his actions in other places as his majesty’s courier, or as a secret service man.
And then, in a way, Kit felt as though he could not deny it. In the memory of his one love there commingled Silver’s soft charms and Quicksilver’s broad back, Silver’s silken midnight hair and Quicksilver’s golden hair for which the youth of Greece would surely have risked much more than for the golden vellum.
Oh, true, it was Silver who had first attracted him, when he was young and innocent. He’d endured Quicksilver for Silver’s sake. But in small steps, so small that Kit wasn’t himself sure how he’d got there, Kit had found that he loved Quicksilver as much as Silver and, when his love affair ended, missed them both equally. And sometimes, to dull his longing, he’d taken consolation of that kind, as fleeting and unsatisfying a consolation as his encounter with Madeleine had proven—as futile and as far short of his elf love.
So, he’d not contradicted Madeleine, feeling she was justified in at least a part of her mad suspicions.
But that she’d tell Imp to be wary of Kit, as though Kit’s cravings would run to children, as though Kit could be so unnatural and accursed—that shocked Kit to his core.
“Your mother knows not what she says, Imp. I love you as though you were my own son.” His voice caught in saying the words, and it hurt, as if in speaking he had torn the skin of his throat, the restraint of his truth.
“What about the man?” Imp asked. “The man who came? Mother said he was dangerous and you are dangerous and you must give up your rooms.”
Kit shook his head, and swallowed hard. This time as other times past, the two times Kit had got arrested for being caught amid street brawls, the third time, a year ago, when Kit had been arrested for counterfeit coining undertaken as part of a project for the secret service—every time Madeleine protested and threatened to throw him out, it was but a plea for Kit’s money, maybe for Kit’s love.
His love he couldn’t give her, but money he could and aplenty.
Long ago he could have traded these threadbare lodgings, which he’d once shared with Tom Kyd, another playwright, for better lodgings in a better part of town.
Thomas Walsingham’s patronage assured Kit of that ability.
But Kit liked these lodgings, and needed to be near Imp, even if under the pretense of a renter and a family friend.
He shook his head. “Fear not, my Lord Despair. Your mother is a mother and she worries and in her worry she says who knows what.”
Imp was Kit’s well-loved son, and Kit would stay nearby and would protect him, and would ensure the boy went to university when the time came.
Imp would be a great philosopher, a great master, greater than his father by that much as Kit was than his cobbler sire.
“What about the man with the teeth like a wolf?” Imp asked, and sitting up straight, held his two fingers in front of his mouth, as prefiguring cruel fangs.
“Teeth like a wolf, had he?” Kit laughed, thinking of Henry Mauder. “I rather thought him more like a dog who craves a bone and has none. A wolf’s teeth would be like this.” Giving low growls, Kit pretended to ravage Imp’s shoulder.
The child smelled of herbs and rosewater.
It made Kit wish he could be a child again, running free in the abandoned orchards of the monastery in Canterbury. It would almost be worth enduring again his father’s beatings for that.
Imp laughed loudly as Kit, who’d kept walking, carrying the child, arrived at the door to his lodgings.
Before he could open it, the door was thrown open, by Madeleine Courcy.
Imp’s mother had never been beautiful. Or never since Kit had known her.
At least ten years older than Kit, when he had met her she had already shown a severe face, a closed, hardened expression, probably acquired from living for years under the thumb of a ponderous Puritan husband.
One beautiful feature she’d had then which had drawn Kit like a magnet. Her waist-long hair had been midnight black and silky, so that if Kit put his face in it, he could pretend to himself that this was his love, the elf lady Silver.
But Madeleine’s hair had coarsened and turned white and her figure, once good enough to pretend it might be Silver’s, had thickened, leaving her with an immense, shapeless bosom that overshadowed a body where no waist emphasized the broader hips.
“What is this?” she asked in the sharp French accent she hadn’t lost after fifteen years in England. “What is this? You debauch my son? Why is he not abed?”
Kit swallowed. Lifting Imp, Kit handed him to Imp’s mother. “He came to meet me,” Kit said, feeling like he’d committed some crime. “He came to meet me, and I brought him back.”
Madeleine’s black eyes, which he’d never been able to convince himself were just like Silver’s shiny metallic ones, narrowed and looked at him with unabated suspicion.
She took her child in her arms, and pushed Imp’s face against her shoulder, as if to cover his eyes.
Kit cleared his throat. “I hear you’ve had an unpleasant visit.”
“One? We’ve had them all day and they haven’t ceased yet,” Madeleine said, and compressed her lips as she glared at Kit. “It is time you should be quitting your rooms, Master Marlowe. You pay me not enough to endure the thread of constant feet, the suspicions of countless officers, the danger to my child. If my husband were alive, he’d have thrown you out long ago.”
If her husband were alive, likely Imp would never have existed, and Kit would have no reason to be here.
“Nothing will happen to Imp, madam,” he said. “And as for paying you, tell me how much you want, and like enough, I can find it.”
She glared at him over Imp’s shoulder.
Imp turned to look back at Kit, his pale little face anxious and drawn, visibly resenting the harsh words flying around him.
Kit remembered when he was very young and his parents argued, how it made him hide under the bed, how it made him wish he could stop existing.
Later, when he’d been scarcely older than Imp, he’d stood in front of his mother, protecting her from his father’s rages.
Madeleine opened her mouth and Kit drew breath, ready to counter imputations and insinuations, fearing she’d air, in front of Imp, what she thought she knew of Kit’s interests and amusements.
But instead, her mouth, which had learned her severity too early to be able to soften now, said, “His name is Richard, and I wish you’d stop calling him the name of a kind of demon. His name is Richard, after my sainted husband, his father.”
And as if she could rewrite Imp’s origins with her short words, she turned her back on Kit and vanished, down the long narrow hallway, to where her room and Imp’s lay.
Kit sighed and took his way up the stairs, to his own rented room.
That night, carefully watched, Imp would never dare climb the stairs in the dark and beg Kit for a story, as he did almost nightly.
So, Kit had time to plot the snare that would catch Essex and hold him at bay and thus allow Kit and Imp to go free.
First he must make sure Will voiced treacherous opinions and had contacts beyond his sphere with noblemen in Essex’s field.
Then it remained for Kit to invent a goal for this conspiracy—killing the Queen would always serve. Everyone feared the death of the childless monarch. It had become a national nightmare. And then Kit would denounce Will.
He paused for a moment, staring at the ceiling over his bed, remembering Will’s innocent look, his effusive gratitude.
How could Kit ensnare such a lamb?
He closed his eyes.
It must be.
If the noose thus designed to keep Imp alive and safe must catch in it that poor fool, Will Shakespeare, then so be it.
For one Imp, would Kit sacrifice the world.