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Scene Thirty



Marlowe’s room. He stands by his writing table. He has -- obviously uncaring -- pushed all his papers to the floor, in scattered confusion. In the space thus cleared, he has set an infinity of bowls, cups, spoons, and three candles. These he moves around, while muttering to himself.



The landlady had kindly let Kit have a mess of crockery for his mad scheme, without even asking what he meant to use it for. Such the foolishness of women when they craved love.

Such the foolishness of men, also. For it was craving Silver’s love that had got Kit into this mess.

And the same craving must somehow give him force to see it through.

Standing in front of his work table, Marlowe looked at the crockery, and smiled to himself. What to put in these bowls, and what to do with them?

A mad idea had formed in his brain, while the bowls and cups were fetched, that he might put his guilt to good use, and conjure the spirits of the guiltless dead, killed by him and by the wolf proper, who might well, oh, too well, serve his turn and speak where his enemy forced him to stand silent. For would the spirits not wish to denounce their murderer.

Did they not say that murder cried out of the Earth for revenge?

Kit removed his gloves, the gloves that had cost him the torments of hell to slip on, and yet that he had to slip on to avoid notice of his burned hands.

He poured water into one of the bowls, and, picking up his most stained garment, dipped it into the water, making it pinkish with the blood of the wolf’s victims.

Frowning at it, it came to Kit that though he’d shared the mind of the wolf, he remembered no spells, as such. No grand gestures, no great work involving herbs or glory hands or the noose from a hanged man’s neck, nor other repugnant ingredients. No eye of newt, no toe of bat, none of it figured in the magic of elves.

Of course, if elves were of magic made, which Kit knew elves to be, then it would be easy enough, would it not, for an elf to move magic. It stood to reason since Kit, made of flesh, found it easy enough to move his body by command of his mind.

At least, and he smiled ruefully at this thought, he’d found it easy until the recent past.

He felt the wolf sniffing at the thought, from the other side of the partition that divided them. Afraid the wolf should surprise Kit and stop Kit’s scheme before ever he started it, Kit pushed all thought of the wolf, and all thought of what he must do, out of his mind, and concentrated on the crockery, the bowls, the cups, his hands moving them, clustering bowls full of clear water around the all important one.

Not that he knew what to do with any of them, but that he thought if he had enough of a confusing profusion of them, the wolf, if he peeked out through Kit’s eyes, would find it all innocent nonsense, desperate play, the foolish attempt of an ensnared rabbit at escaping the piercing claws of the hunting falcon.

Kit pulled his sleeves up and looked at the bowl of bloodied water, sitting against the dark table.

How could Kit, mortal Kit, poor Kit who could never control his own life, control magic?

All Kit was good at was words.

And yet, magic was ever words, was it not? And if so, who better to perform magic than Kit Marlowe? Was not his work a kind of magic, making the theater goers for a moment believe in Tamburlaine, or Faustus?

Still, he wished he had something more solid, a more eminent kind of knowledge.

“Yet fain would I have a book wherein I might behold all spells and incantations, that I might raise up spirits when I please,” he whispered, and sighed. Faustus, at least, had a guide, but Kit, himself, must go traipsing, unshod and blind, into this dark, perilous country.

But.... well, if he must he must, and might as well steel his spirit to the task at hand. Because if he didn’t get help, the wolf would consume him, and soon there would be nothing, nothing at all to prevent the wolf’s victory. Except maybe Kit’s death. And Kit wasn’t ready to die. Neither in mind nor in body.

Stroking his chin with his left hand, he smelled the sweet-sickly taint of fresh blood and sighed. “Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this hand again.”


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