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Scene Nineteen



The street outside Will’s rented lodgings. Though it’s still night, a sliver of pink shows in the east, and the taverns are all closed and the whole street silent, save only for those stirrings of the people who tidy up after the amusement of others: tavern wenches, bear keepers, horse dealers. It is, in fact, one of the very few times when all is silent in Southwark, that short moment between the time when revelers retire and the time the day’s workers rise to do their working. Once more, Marlowe loiters beneath the sign across the street.



If Will had thought to fool Kit Marlowe, more the fool he.

Kit Marlowe thought this, but he did not feel gloating, nor victorious over Will’s low cunning or attempt at deception. Instead, facing Will’s lodgings, Will’s lodgings, where the fair Lady Silver had just opened the door to allow Will into the room, Kit felt tired, and old, and used and abused by those circumstances of time and of affection that had made the provincial of Stratford preferred above him.

He’d seen the lady clearly, as she’d opened the door and stepped out, for a brief moment, to let Will in. And he’d seen Will, too. Though too far away to see his expression, he guessed at Will’s eagerness by the way he clutched the lady’s shoulder and pulled her in.

Standing there, Kit felt as though his whole world had shattered, this time irremediably.

Will’s actions were not those of a puppet mesmerized by faerieland magic.

Kit should have killed Waggstaff while he had a chance. But he’d believed the truth of his words. He’d thought, foolishly, that Silver must have used her magic on this creature and that Will, poor clod that he was, had failed to see her, or, having seen her, to remember her.

Kit had been fooled.

Not for the first time.

Kit clenched his fist around the handle of his dagger. A thin streak of light dawned in the east, but as yet the night was dark and secret, and a cold, cold breeze picked up as if out of nowhere, bringing with it a loathsome reek, like the smell of an opened tomb.

Two houses down from where Kit stood, a door was firmly closed and, across it, a nailed board proclaimed that the tavern was a haunt of the plague and that any entering it would not only be risking contagion but breaking the law as well.

The sign over the door swung forlornly in the wind, showing a man in a blue cloak, holding an harp. The Words beneath read: The Minstrel.

The brightly painted sign coupled with the plague notice mirrored Kit’s state of mind.

He too went about well dressed and with a smile fit to attract, and yet what corruption lurked inside, and how much danger did he not pose to the unwary entering into his sphere?

The thought came again that he should have killed Will, and he knew -- in the end -- that part of what had stayed his hand had been the memory of all those he’d betrayed, all the men he’d sent to their deaths on the block and gallows: the Catholics he’d turned in over the Babington conspiracy -- which had probably been as much an invention of Walsingham’s as anything else, and his protestant, nay, his fanatic puritan friends whom he’d likewise betrayed to the inhuman arm of state religion.

A voice in him, a meek, small voice, the voice of the child who had grown up as a cobbler’s son, in the shade of the great cathedral at Canterbury, piped up to say that he’d had no choice, that had he not betrayed he would have been betrayed, his motives and reasons as certainly questioned as his companions’. And they would have found more to condemn in him than in any other, as they were about to find more now.

Because Kit Marlowe, with his mind that had ever been his one pride, and his pride in the workings of what he prided himself in thinking his excellent reason -- Kit Marlowe had always strayed too near the dangerous edge of atheism, always stepped too close to the abyss of the dangerous thought, the lonely doubt of the man who walks alone, away from the protective walls of faith.

And now Kit had taken it too far. He’d die for it.

But Silver would go on living.

Looking up at the window where the candle light winked, obscured by bodies that crossed between it and the windowpane, Kit wondered if Silver and Will were making love -- her perfect body entwined in his too-homely one, his great balding head leaning over her black silk hair, her white silk thighs.

Soon Kit would be arrested, and tried, and probably executed.

If things were allowed to go that far, he thought, if his sometime friend and patron, Thomas Walsingham didn’t kill him first, in some street corner, in some carefully faked brawl, to avoid Kit’s revealing under torture all the dealings of the Walsinghams. Dead, Kit could reveal nothing about all the times that the service of the Queen’s majesty had been more excuse than purpose, and the true purpose had lay in the lining of the Walsingham purse, the enriching of the Walsingham family.

So Kit would die. Soon. No use deceiving himself any longer.

Again, as before, when Quicksilver had dismissed him, Kit Marlowe felt sorry for this Kit, this urchin of the lower middle class who’d climbed under his own impulse and by his own power to be a scholar, and mingle with the great ones of the land. To save his own life, he had betrayed others. To save his own life, he had tainted his own soul.

But which man, being human, wouldn’t do likewise, and hold onto sweet life, while others lost theirs? Surely no one could expect more of Kit than this loyalty to his own person.

For he who doesn’t hold himself dear, who does he hold dear, and what loyalty swerves his path?

And yet now Kit would die, for this sin he had in common with all humanity, and, after his dying, Silver would go on living, and Quicksilver too, one person in two bodies, and both bodies immortal and uncorrupted, like finely wrought gold, and sweet-polished silver.

Silver would go on living, and so would Will, and through the sweet, perfumed springs, the hot, invigorating summers, they would go on loving, their bodies entwined, their souls rejoicing, while Kit moldered beneath a slab in some forgotten church, or in the dirt of a pauper’s grave, somewhere.

Silver and Will would love and live.

The thought pounded upon his mind like madness proper, and rolled along his veins with screaming fever.

It must not happen.

Kit would kill Will.

He must kill Tremblestick. If nothing else, if Kit couldn’t save his own life, then he must, he must prevent Will from living on. If Kit couldn’t have Silver, then he must prevent Will from enjoying Silver and life, and all that Kit had lost.

Clenching his teeth so hard that they ground, one upon the other like millstones, Kit imagined himself climbing the stairs, taking step by step the steps to the top, and there knocking at the door, there demanding to see Silver, there putting an end to Will’s life, in that one fell instant.

But if he climbed the steps, would Silver not intervene, and cast a veil of magic over Kit and, perhaps, make her lover invisible or all powerful?

No, Kit thought, as the wind whistled through the quiet desolate street. No. He would wait till the morrow and near the door surprise Will and kill him, making a fast measure of it.

Yet Kit remembered the way Will had fought, and he hesitated. He wasn’t so sure he could take the provincial married man from Stratford, hand to hand, in combat.

This night, at least, he’d proven himself able to defend his life, and not averse to using force to do it.

Kit remembered the blows he’d endured.

And he remembered Will in the tavern. If that hadn’t been friendly companionship, it had been a close counterfeit. Whatever Will thought, he hadn’t meant ill to Kit.

Yet Kit must kill Will. He had to kill Will Shakelance, or never have rest, in grave or meadow, in life or death. Will must stop breathing and be prevented from enjoying Silver’s favors, from which Kit was barred.

The light went out within Will’s lodgings, and Kit held breath while his hatred, like a living thing, spilled out of its tight confines, and seized hold of his soul.

Oh, for a stronger soul, a stronger body, a dark, winged, evil intensity that could seize Will and drag him down with Kit into Kit’s own pit of torment.

The smell of the graveyard became heavier around him, as the chill wind picked up. A foul taste rose in Kit’s mouth.

He felt as though a cold, furry body rubbed against his ankles.

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Framed