A Tip for the Hangman

by Allison Epstein

  “Hardly,” he said to the page. “This is from my sister.”

  Poley gave a long, lewd whistle. “A pretty boy like you has a sister? Introduce me. I’ll give her a night she won’t forget.”

  “Another word and you’ll be lucky to remember your own name,” Kit snapped.

  Not only did Kit have a sister, he had four, and a brother not yet breeched when Kit left for Cambridge. Good solid Christians, he often said, keeping the church in business. Baptisms charged by the head, after all. He didn’t want to think about them now. What he wanted was to burn the page without reading it. His eldest sister, Meg, could have written to him for any number of reasons, none of them good.

  Gregory and Poley looking on, Kit unfolded the page. There were only five words. It took no time to read them.

  Jane dead. Childbirth. Come home.

  If Gregory looked for a response, he would have a long time to wait.

  Jane. Eight years old when he’d left for Cambridge. His sister. Little Jane.

  “Well, go on,” Gregory said. “Poley, back to work. Marlowe, make your excuses to the heretic. Walsingham will call on you at Cambridge soon with next steps.”

  Jane dead. Come home.

  When Kit looked up from the page, Gregory and Poley had gone. But there were enough ghosts in the stable to take their place.

  Ten

  The cloudy sunrise gave Canterbury the feel of linen washed once too often, soft and fading to gray. Kit arrived in the dead of early morning, when the pious were already in church and the impious still abed, but the hush couldn’t mask the danger in his decision to return. When Walsingham learned of this unsanctioned detour, he’d have Kit’s head. He followed the length of High Street, keeping his distance from those he passed. There weren’t many to avoid. The occasional pilgrim or merchant brushed past, leaving soggy footprints in the snow. A pair of widows gossiping in lowered voices, a child chasing a cat with a broken tail, a…

  Kit blinked, and the fair-haired man at the end of the street became only another stranger, cloaked and booted against the cold. The man turned down Saint Margaret’s Street, out of sight. The dull ache in Kit’s chest sharpened. He closed his eyes and let himself feel the hurt.

  If it had been Tom. If he hadn’t been alone.

  But then, he wasn’t alone. He had Jane’s specter for company.

  They’d walked this direction together, he on his way to King’s School, she to the baker’s for bread, kicking pebbles along the dusty street. He’d raced her along this road, from Saint Andrew’s Church to the Bull’s Stake, his longer legs leaving her behind, though in an indulgent mood he’d let her win. Here, there, everywhere, his sister had been, and now was not.

  Thirteen. Married off before you could see her breasts, and expected to carry a child. He understood, in theory. A family with more children than it could feed had to be resourceful. Sons were apprenticed out, or sent to school if they were bright enough to manage it. If a daughter could be pushed into the arms of a husband, so much the better. But Jane. It hadn’t been theory for her.

  The kings and saints set into the cathedral’s west tower loomed overhead as he walked. Comfort, for some. Reassurance of an ever-watchful God. Reassurance for fools and the ignorant. He itched to scream, swear, anything to shake their gaze. What good did it do them, guarding the dust of a dead archbishop? Had those sainted bones ever answered a prayer? Narrowing his eyes at the church, he spat into the gutter. Let angels strike him down as a blasphemer if they cared to. If God was watching, Kit wanted to ask how he planned to answer for Jane.

  His legs knew the way from here, though it had been years since he’d traced this path. Along King Street, where the way narrowed, the bulk of the cathedral disappeared behind worn shingles and the hanging emblems of shop fronts. He saw his father’s sign from the end of the street, and he felt his feet falter. It would have been so easy to turn around, to claim the letter hadn’t reached him. But he’d come this far. After all that, to be frightened off by a building? Even this building. The shop, and the lodgings above it where Kit had grown up, had endured as the church’s carved kings had: roughened, not moved, by time. It was wedged between a tinsmith’s and a shuttered building that once housed a tailor. A wooden board covered the upstairs window, where a drunk had once sent a rock through the glass when Kit was nine. Never fixed, which he supposed he should have expected. Everything Kit hated about the place had only intensified since he’d been away: its shabbiness heightened, its harsh edges harsher. Even the smell, leather and beer and sawdust, seemed to spill from the threshold, spreading its influence into the street.

  But the blue-eyed man who opened the door to Kit’s knock, he was new.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  “I might ask you the same,” Kit said. He tried to slip past the man, but a firm hand pushed him back.

  “Christ, you’re from the constable. We’ll pay when we can. Now get out, or I’ll have your balls on a spit.”

  Kit ran a hand through his hair. For God’s sake. John was back in prison. As he’d told Norgate, thinking it a lie. “Let me in,” he said. “And leave my balls out of it.”

  The man tried to close the door, but Kit pushed forward. He winced as the door slammed against his shoulder, jolting pain down to his fingertips.

  “If you want me to leave,” Kit said, “it’ll take more than a door.”

  The man’s fist moved fast, but Kit moved faster. He sidestepped the blow, sending it breezing six inches from his ear. They locked eyes. Kit grinned, in a way meant to unsettle. Not thirty minutes home and here he was, his father in prison, bracing for a brawl.

  “Who’s there?”

  Kit couldn’t see the woman who’d spoken inside, but he’d know her voice anywhere.

  The man didn’t break Kit’s gaze. “Constable’s boy.”

  “Well, tell him to— Kit?”

  Five years was a long time. Margaret Marlowe had grown, as had Kit. But in every way that mattered, she hadn’t changed at all. They looked alike, she and Kit, always had. Light brown hair, upturned eyes, a delicate arch to their cheekbones. Years ago, strangers in the street would ask if they were twins.

  “You came back,” Meg said.

  “I got your letter. You still make your s’s the wrong way round.”

  She laughed and embraced Kit. When he’d left home, he’d towered over her. They stood of a height now. It felt like he’d shrunk, not like she’d grown taller.

  Noticing the man’s tight fists and Kit’s scowl, Meg gestured at Kit with unconvincing casualness. “Bill, this is my brother Christopher. Kit, William Bradley. My husband.”

  Kit knew she’d married, a year or two ago, but had never seen the man. This quick-fisted brute was her husband? Meg’s sense of humor had never been cruel, but Kit wished she were joking. “Congratulations,” he said.

  Bradley said nothing. The promise of a blow still hung between them.

  The threat wasn’t lost on Meg. “Come in,” she said. “Mother’s upstairs.”

  Kit winced, exhausted at the thought. He loved his mother. A man only got one, after all. But it was a bit much, to be hauled in front of Katherine Marlowe after all this time to account for his life and behavior. After a point, silence felt easier.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “Getting better, I think. She doesn’t talk of it much, and I don’t like to ask her. She grieves in her own way, you know.”

  No one had solicited Bradley’s opinion, but Kit suspected this had never stopped him before. “Sorry business, but it’s to be expected. Not the husband’s fault Jane couldn’t carry. She should have kept her legs together another year.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Kit had never wanted to kill a man more. Not his fault. Who else would you blame for forcing a child on Jane, barely more than a child herself? Should h
ave kept her legs together. As if that had been Jane’s idea.

  Meg gave Kit a warning look. “Come in,” she said. Bradley, after a moment’s silence, stepped aside. Thankfully, he didn’t follow them in, but pushed past Kit into the street. Toward the tavern, Kit imagined, to commiserate with his fellows over the appearance of his high-and-mighty brother-in-law. Bradley had that air about him.

  Encompassing the entire first floor, John’s workshop held the semi-sacred silence of a chapel, dust motes suspended in beams of light. Nothing had changed since Kit’s last day under this roof. He paused at his father’s bench, trailing one finger along a half-constructed sole like a coroner considering a body. He’d sworn never to set foot in this workshop again, never to look back, never to return to the life he’d dodged by a hair’s breadth. Until now, he’d kept that promise.

  He pulled his hand away. Jane, he reminded himself, as he took the stairs two at a time. Think of Jane.

  “Christopher!” said Katherine as he opened the door.

  His mother looked paler than he remembered. Thinner, too, as she rose from the edge of the bed and took Kit in her arms. Her shoulder blades protruded beneath her dress like wings. Kit patted his mother on the back, itching for release. His proper name would have been intolerable from anyone but her, from whom it merely grated. Try explaining to her that Christopher, the name of a saint and a shoemaker’s son, no longer had anything to do with who he was.

  She brushed a hand against his hair. “I knew you’d come back.”

  It took a true master of rhetoric to make the phrase I knew you’d come back sound like I couldn’t be more surprised you’re here. In that regard, Katherine Marlowe rivaled Cicero.

  “Of course I—”

  A torrent of words beat back the rest of his sentence. His mother had stored up five years of questions, and she’d be damned if she didn’t ask them. “Look at you, half wasted away. Can’t you take care of yourself? Up all hours squinting at books, I’m sure, forgetting to eat, you’ll catch your death. And what’s taken you so long, Christopher, doesn’t a degree take three years? Don’t tell me you’ve turned vagrant.”

  Kit laughed. He’d never had an actual defense against his mother’s accusations of vagrancy before. Was this what responsible sons felt like all the time? “I’m six months from a master’s, Mother.”

  “Oh?” she said, just left of impressed. “That’s something. You ought to tell the master from King’s, what was his name?”

  “Gresshop?”

  “That’s the one. He always liked you.”

  She had always been like this. His mother had the same amount of mothering to give, regardless of how many children she spread it across. That was how her grief for a lost child manifested, in a tremendous wave of concern for the ones who remained. He’d welcomed it, once, when he was small. Her sudden flashes of affection after tracing the path to the churchyard every few years, the family shrinking by inches. Mary, Kit’s older sister, dead of fever before his fifth birthday. Thomas, a little squalling thing, lived barely long enough for baptism. Stephen, her name for the unchristened boy who was two days dying. And now Jane.

  The difference, now, was that someone could be blamed for Jane.

  Meg laid a hand on Kit’s shoulder, cutting between him and Katherine. “Mother, he should go. Before the day gets on.”

  “You’re right.” Katherine sighed. “Best get that over with. They’ll listen to him.”

  Kit winced. Of course. In this world, sons existed to serve their fathers. Financially. Spiritually. In his case, legally. As if Kit had the time. At least in Westgate prison, John Marlowe couldn’t cause trouble. Well, if they wanted Kit to play savior, he would play it. Anything to leave this ghost-filled house where his mother spoke to a boy who didn’t exist and his still-sleeping younger siblings, if he woke them, wouldn’t remember his name.

  “Come with me, Meg?” he asked.

  She smiled. The weight in his chest didn’t lift so much as shift sideways. He’d do it; it had always been his responsibility, and no one else was as good at it as he was. But he wouldn’t do it alone.

  The bells sounded half past as he and Meg left the house. Day had broken, and sunlight cast a glimmer against the muddy snow. Kit walked half a step ahead.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if once we found him at morning prayer instead of prison?” Meg said, lengthening her steps to catch up.

  “I’d be less surprised to see him burning down the church than praying in it,” he said, then he sighed at Meg’s frown. “A flaming pox on the Trinity, Meg, I’m joking.” Somehow Kit’s near-professional skill at swearing did not reassure her.

  After they’d walked for a few minutes, the prison rose up at the end of High Street. Its two cylindrical towers were notched with crenellations from its time as a defensive outpost, and narrow windows pockmarked the walls: egress for an arrow or the barrel of a gun, but nothing wider. Between the towers, the city gates stood wide, welcoming travelers on the road from London. Westgate, a prison built into an open door. The irony couldn’t have been lost on its residents.

  When Kit pounded a fist against the prison’s side door, the shutter behind the barred window pulled back. The pointed face of a porter peered out with a nervous air ill-suited to his profession. He glared at Kit, who gave him a smooth smile in return.

  “I’ll be seeing John Marlowe,” Kit said. He almost laughed at Meg’s surprise. His voice had leapt up a register, the voice of a privileged gentleman who could make the world jump with a word. She should get used to that. Cambridge had taught him plenty, including how to act.

  The porter, too, seemed shaken, but he recovered. “Not without the provost’s approval you won’t, boy.”

  Kit’s smile didn’t waver. He dipped into his pocket and procured a scrap of paper, which he held aloft between two fingers. “I think you’ll find everything’s in order.”

  The porter squinted and cursed, unable to read the page through the small window. Meg’s surprise turned to suspicion. Not without reason.

  The page was blank.

  Kit turned his head and winked, so only Meg could see. Trust me, said the wink. After Sheffield, a ruse like this was a grammar-school game. Sure enough, he heard the harried jangle of keys as the porter flung the door open.

  “I’ll need to—”

  All right, Kit thought, drawing his knife from his boot.

  The porter went silent, the point of Kit’s blade now pressed between his ribs. Meg’s eyes widened. Built small like their mother, Kit knew he wasn’t imposing, but a knife could make any man look six feet tall. His hand held steady, and his smile broadened.

  “Now,” he said, “I think you were about to invite us inside.”

  “Right away, sir.” The porter edged back into the prison, Kit and Meg following. If only Kit had tried that as a child. Think of the time he could have saved. Sir, even. Quite a promotion over boy. As they followed the porter through the narrow halls, Meg made a point of not looking at Kit.

  The porter stopped near the end of the hall. He indicated a wooden door identical to those on either side. “I can give you ten minutes, sir. More would cost me my job.” He cringed, fearing Kit’s displeasure.

  It was curious, seeing men cringe before him for a change. Kit didn’t mind it. “We’ll only need five.” He reached into his pocket and produced a shilling, which he flipped in a neat arc to the stunned porter. Meg’s eyebrows rose. Unexpected confidence was one thing, unexpected capital quite another. Well, she’d do better not to ask questions. The porter inserted a key into the lock and, with a well-placed shoulder, forced the door open.

  The room lacked light to see clearly, but Kit’s memory of the space remained intact. The brick-and-mortar walls, the wooden board of a bed, the shallow dirt pit prisoners used as a privy. Kit would have thought one visit to a room reeking of another man’s s
hit would be enough incentive to avoid repeat arrest. He swallowed a retch as the door closed behind them.

  “Father.” Meg’s voice echoed off the stone. “It’s Meg and Kit.”

  “Let me see you,” said their father from inside.

  Against his better judgment, Kit stepped toward the shaft of light filtered through the window. As his vision adjusted, John became clearer, seated in the corner with arms looped around his shins. Kit crouched so they were eye to eye, like a hunter inspecting a kill.

  Was this the man he’d feared since childhood? This tall man folded in half, dark eyes sunken, beard matted? The slanted light caught new strands of gray in John’s hair, making his bruised cheek and split lip look ridiculous. He was nearly fifty now. Kit hadn’t considered that. He’d thought John ageless. The man who’d given him two legacies: a name of no value and a driving need to escape. No giant now. Only an old man in a cage.

  John stood up. He wavered on unsteady legs but braced himself against the wall. Kit rose in one easy motion. He didn’t move to help his father.

  “What are you doing here?” John said. He still sounded drunk. Was that possible? “Thought you were too good for us now.”

  More than he knew. “I can go, if you like.”

  “Right.” John stepped forward. Kit still had to look up to meet his eye. All he’d done, all he might still do, and he’d never be taller than his father. “Go. Leave. You’ve never been good for anything else.”

  Without asking, Kit knew how John found himself in prison. Sitting at his usual table in the back of the Griffin, throwing back pint after pint. A toast to Jane’s memory, though after an hour he wouldn’t have remembered his own name, let alone his daughter’s. Rage rising as the drink did. With his bookish son off at university, John would have had to find someone else to vent his anger on. By the looks of the split lip, that someone hadn’t borne it with the submission Kit used to. A better Christian might have sympathized. Kit didn’t have energy for that. Saint Christopher would bear any burden on his shoulders, but Kit had never aspired to canonization.