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Scene 31




Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. Again, he lies on his bed, on his stomach, and the bed and himself are covered in blood.


Kit Marlowe didn’t startle at the way he stuck to the covers, nor at the reek of blood on his nostrils, nor at the dull ache behind his eyes, nor at the feeling that something horrible had happened the night before, something that made the world a black place and his earth a hell.

He woke with a curse upon his lips, and opened his eyes to the dull throb of headache and the grey light of an overcast day coming in through the diamond-shaped panes of his window.

Curse the world and the light and the blood, and his headache, too.

From the street below came the calls of wakening vendors, the hurried footsteps of apprentices and laborers, children’s voices raised in high, playful calls.

Kit’s head throbbed.

He rolled over slowly, bringing the blanket with him, stuck to him by a dark substance that smelled pungently of blood and that Kit didn’t even attempt to tell himself wasn’t just that.

He pulled the blanket away from his body—he appeared to have lain abed naked—and amazed himself only with how calm he felt, how collected.

Horror experienced once is horror indeed: marvelous, strange, and terrifying. Horror experienced twice is dim and dull, an occurrence expected if not welcomed.

Thus step by step do humans become used to their own sins.

Thus had he become used to the idea of betraying friends and strangers to the secret service.

He dragged himself up, out of the bed, and set his feet firmly on the floor. His clothes were by the door, in a blood-soaked heap. Another suit ruined.

Walking like a drunkard, or one only half awakened, Kit tripped to his basin, and poured in it the cool clear water from the jar, dipped his hands in it, and watched the water turn red. He realized, with a sob—caught in his throat and suffocating his emotions—that the desperate revulsion of the day before was not gone. It had turned, instead, to an aching despair.

He remembered craving life. He remembered . . . . What had he done?

All this blood, whose was it? Where had it come from?

Some knowledge, some thought, tickled at his mind, but he could no more hold it than a child’s hands can hold the fluttering butterfly.

He’d done something horrible. The darker half of his mind had committed what crimes? Oh, better die than live so.

And yet no.

All the things he’d done, to avoid death, and now he’d play the roman fool and fall upon his own dagger?

No. It was useless.

Kit was damned, and he might as well learn to live with his damnation. Indeed, he was not all that unusual. As he’d written in Faustus, Kit had for some time suspected that all on earth were in some way damned—Hell was empty and all the demons were here.

“I am in blood steeped so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go over,” he told himself reasonably, while staring at his hands, submerged in the red liquid in the white porcelain basin. “Strange things I have in head, that will to hand; which must be acted ere they may be scanned.”

He rinsed his hands with prosaic calm and, opening his window, poured the bloodied water out.

A man, passing underneath the window, jumped away and shook his fist at Kit.

What land this England was, what a place this London that a man might pour blood from his window, early morning, and draw from it no more censure than if he’d poured the nightly wastes from his chamberpot?

Bemused, Kit returned the basin atop its stand, and poured fresh water into it, then cupped his washed hands with fresh water to wash his face.

It was when his hands touched his face that he remembered clearly.

He remembered John Penry’s prayer and his death.

He remembered the dark alley and Poley’s face, and the woman behind him.

Had it really been the Queen?

Marlowe couldn’t help remembering her face, and juxtaposed on his memory of royal portraits, it looked like the same woman.

He’d long heard that the Queen, mistrusting all, her mistrust growing as she got older, often personally followed the high personages of the court, spied on them, and sometimes, attired as a peasant woman—unguarded, alone—sneaked out of her palaces and her keeps, to listen to the common people.

But that she’d spy on her own spies . . .

Kit washed his face, and watched the water run red into the basin. He’d almost attacked the Queen of England with his bare hands.

Why? He couldn’t even guess. His mind was a foggy mirror that reflected nothing to his questing reason.

His father had been right, then, when he’d told Kit that too much reading would disturb his reason. Kit almost smiled at the thought, and yet indeed, here he was covered in blood and without knowing how.

If he was not insane, then who was?

He finished the water in his jug, opened the door, and called for more.

He hoped Imp would bring it, and not Madeleine. He could not explain to Madeleine how he’d got all bloodied again. Had Imp told his mother about Kit’s state the day before?

He heard steps coming down the hallway. Heavy steps. Madeleine’s steps.

She came into the room, perfect and immaculate, in her starched apron, her impeccable white cap, and looked at him with raised eyebrows, but said nothing.

The two heavy water jars which she carried she set on the floor beside his washbasin.

“Thank you,” Kit said dismissively.

It must be fear, fear of the secret service and their revenge, that drove him insane. Well. After tonight he’d be free and safe.

He must go to Southampton House and gather from his friends anything else Will might have said to incriminate himself. He must go to Will, himself, and attempt to gather more details of his life that could be woven into a plausible conspiracy.

Though Kit couldn’t quite forget Penry’s death, nor absolve himself of that guilt, yet he must go on. His life—Imp’s life—depended on it.

This work was not so different, after all, he thought, as he poured fresh water into the basin, from the work of writing plays about events and people so long gone that all that remained of them was a vague impression, like that left by a foot on the river side, and then erased by the tide.

Now he must weave treason where there was none. Only those who died in this play would not come back again for a final song.

He washed his face, and looked up.

Madeleine stood by the door, staring at him.

Her thin lips writhed, and her eyes had a strange, tremulously tearful look.

“Yes?” He kept his voice cold, trying to prevent an outburst of Madeleine’s righteous morality.

Her plump hand searched inside her dark sleeve, and came out with a handkerchief. She touched it to her eyes.

Oh, not crying, Kit thought. Aloud he said, “Madam, I am in a great hurry. You must know—”

“It’s Richard,” Madeleine said.

“Imp?” All plots vanished from Kit’s mind. The thought of Imp brought a flinching inside, as though thoughts and memories skittered away from a raw wound.

“Imp,” Madeleine said, for the first time calling the child by that name, and taking her handkerchief to her lips, and covering her mouth with it. From beneath the handkerchief, she spoke, with a voice that trembled and fluttered. “Have you . . . have you seen Imp yet today, Kit?”

Make that two firsts, for his given name hadn’t crossed her lips in many years.

“No. I’ve not seen him. Is he ill?” Alarmed, Kit advanced toward her, hands extended, meaning to shake sense out of her.

But she backed away from him, step by step, and he remembered his gory condition, and that he was naked.

He backed away from her. “Speak, woman. What has happened to our son?”

Her eyes veiled, she sniffled her righteous sniff, and for a bare breath Kit thought she would chastise him for calling Imp his son.

She did not. Instead, she let out a sob and said, “I’ve not seen him this morning. His bed is unslept in. And all over London people are talking of animal attacks, of beasts who savage people. And you come home . . . . all over blood. I thought . . .”

Now Kit thought, too. His head spun. That feeling of dread, that curious flinching that his mind effected when he pushed the memory of last night to the fore, now seemed ominous.

The need for life force within him. The taste of blood on his tongue.

He had a vague idea of bodies: of apprentices and prostitutes, of incautious people caught out of doors and devoured.

Devoured by Kit?

“Go woman, go,” Kit yelled. And in a frenzy that mirrored more than masked his internal strife, he pulled on clothes, blindly, and rushed like a madman out of the house.

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Framed