A Tip for the Hangman

by Allison Epstein

  “All right,” he said, turning to the door. Meg put a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged her off.

  “You useless shit,” John said.

  Slowly, Kit turned back. “I’m sorry?”

  John advanced another step. The move felt familiar, a childhood echo, only now, Kit didn’t flinch. “You think you’re better than us? Look at you. Writing verses like a damned court fool, whoring about with any slut who’ll let you near her diseased cunt. I’d take my name back from you if I could, see it die rather than you carry it.”

  “Kit,” Meg said. She had, after all, seen him pull a knife on a porter with less provocation. But Kit had no desire to threaten his father. He knew an easier way to hurt him. They were alike that way.

  Instead, he laughed.

  “Your name?” he said. “Twenty years from now, when men talk about Marlowe, I promise they won’t mean you.” He turned away from John and knocked on the door, despite Meg’s protests. “Porter? We’re finished.”

  The door opened again, easier this time. Kit stepped squinting into the light. Meg hung back. He heard her murmur something to John, didn’t know what, didn’t care to. Then she followed him out. The porter shouldered the door closed and locked it with a satisfying click. Ignoring Meg’s half protests, Kit pressed a small purse into the porter’s hand. The porter opened it and gaped, dazzled by silver.

  “Have him released tomorrow, around nine,” Kit said. “He can spend today thinking things over.”

  The small fortune eroded what remained of the porter’s dedication to protocol. “As you say, sir.”

  “Well, Meg.” Kit turned to her with a smile that sat sour on his mouth. “Shall we?”

  She knew what he meant without asking.

  * * *

  —————

  Jane Moore. 18 January 1572–26 November 1585. Requiescat in pace.

  Kit crouched before the small white stone, tracing the letters with his thumb. The snow soaked through the knees of his breeches, but he paid it no mind. “It’s not even her name,” he said. The name of her murderer. They’d laid her to rest with that.

  The high hedges around Saint Andrew’s churchyard shielded the plot from the late-morning activity of High Street. White graves, barely distinct from the snow, stretched in tight rows across the narrow yard. As for living occupants, the hedged-in space boasted none but Kit and Meg. A sparrow perched on the head of an eroded angel, watching them with uninterested beady eyes. It had seen hundreds of brothers and sisters, wives and mothers and husbands traverse these gates. If it lived another year, it would see countless more.

  Meg held her cloak close. The snow dusting the grave rendered the new-tilled earth identical to the ground around it. Jane had been gone for days. It looked like years. “The parish donated the stone,” Meg said. “Said it was the least they could do.”

  “It was,” Kit said, not looking at her. “God spent less time in that church than she did.”

  “Kit, do you enjoy blaspheming in churchyards?”

  He stood, and Meg took a step back. The sparrow fluttered its discomforted feathers and took to wing, a small speck against the clouds. “She was a child, Meg. Your God has killed children in his name before, but what good does it ever do?”

  “Kit, please. People will hear.”

  He didn’t mention that they were alone in the churchyard, that only the dead could hear him. “I can’t believe you married him,” he said. The words slipped out before he committed to saying them. If his mouth left his brain time to think, he’d have stayed silent. But his mouth had never been good at doing that.

  Meg looked at him with disdain. “Why not?” she said. “You think you have the right? I haven’t seen you in years. You don’t know.”

  Kit began to protest that he did know, he knew Bradley’s faults. His arrogance, his crudeness, his quickness to anger. His willingness to punch unknown visitors on sight, even when they proved to be his brother-in-law. But he wasn’t given the chance. Meg was like their mother in that way—when she had something to say, she’d say it.

  “I know why you hate him. I live with him. I know. He’s no saint.” Meg folded her arms across her chest, hugging her elbows in opposite hands. Protecting herself, Kit thought. Against what, he didn’t know, and wouldn’t ask. “But I won’t do better. Business keeps him in London half the year. And he brings money. He takes care of us, Kit.”

  He kicked at the snow, scattering a small flurry across the grave. He takes care of us. A job that should have fallen to Kit.

  But what was he meant to do? Stay in Canterbury and become, what? A man stooped decades before his time. Gray hair and a hunched back from bending over the shoemaker’s bench, reeking of leather with fingers cramping around the needle. Or huddled in his own Westgate cell, tracking the days with scratches on the wall. Listening through the bars to the cathedral bells calling the faithful to the bones of a martyred saint, while not far away he rotted in a nameless crypt of his own.

  He sighed. If she’d ever left Canterbury, ever thought about the possibility of something else, she’d never accuse him. She’d understand, then. “Meg, I had to—”

  “Go to hell, Kit,” Meg said. “We all knew you’d only come back to bury us.”

  He tried to respond. Faltered. She was right. Abandoning them had been the goal all along. Why accept the scholarship to Cambridge otherwise? Why embrace Walsingham’s schemes? He looked at Jane’s headstone but thought only of dragging himself from this living grave, by education or court favor or whatever else it took.

  “Please,” Meg said, hugging her own arms tighter. “Don’t let her hear us like this.”

  The gravestone stood silent behind them. Jane Moore. 26 November.

  “She can’t hear us.” Kit’s voice was cold, toneless. A churchyard voice. “She’s dead. That’s it. Nothing after.”

  Meg’s voice hardened. “So you’re leaving again? Just like that?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll stay tonight. Mother expects it. And I need to speak to the landlord about the rent. But I’ll go tomorrow.”

  “Can I get one answer from you, if nothing else?”

  Who knew? The days when Kit could answer questions without hesitation were gone. “Ask and we’ll find out.”

  “Did you rob a convent on the way here, to pay the jailer?”

  Despite everything, he laughed. Arthur Gregory was hardly the moral equivalent of an abbess. No doubt Walsingham’s man had discovered by now that his new protégé had cut his purse on the way out of Yorkshire. Well, it served him right for treating Kit like a child. “If it’s money stolen from helpless nuns, I take it you won’t want this?”

  Meg, stunned, caught the purse he tossed her. She weighed it in her hand, judging the quantity of silver from its density. Kit smirked. Meg might deride him all she wanted, but anyone could see the money had impressed her. Had she known where it came from, she might not have been so quick to accept it, but money was money without context.

  “Take care of yourself when I’m gone,” he said. “I’ll write to Mother when I reach Cambridge.”

  If he hadn’t known Meg better, he’d have said she was almost crying. “She can’t read, Kit.”

  “No,” Kit agreed, turning. “But you can.”

  Eleven

  Kit leaned against the doorjamb, holding his mud-splattered cloak close. The pose served a dual purpose: not only did it look casual enough to mask his nerves, but it kept him upright, which he doubted his ability to achieve unaided. He’d arrived at Cambridge fifteen minutes before, coming here directly after the irate night porter had dragged him to Norgate’s office to explain himself. He hadn’t even sat down yet. Every muscle in his body screamed that this could wait, until he’d eaten, until he’d slept.

  It couldn’t, of course. He wouldn’t let it.

  The dormitory look
ed just as he remembered it, spartan and impersonal. The bare walls, the small bedstead, the desk heaped with a whirlwind of papers. And sitting with his back to the door, the only person who could give this tiny room such brilliance, turn it from cell to shrine. Tom made an irritated noise and swept up two pages from the desk. Kit, knowing Tom’s habits and the lateness of the hour, suspected they were the first draft of an essay. One not due for two weeks, most likely, but Tom was a diligent student, and his sporadic late-night productivity helped him cope with occasional bouts of insomnia. In any case, the essay wasn’t long for this world, as Tom crumpled the pages into a tight ball.

  “Aquinas, you self-righteous masochist,” he said to the book before him—Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica; Kit could just make out the title. He pitched the crumpled pages over his shoulder. They landed two feet from Kit’s boot. “Just because you drove away prostitutes with a fire iron doesn’t mean you can tear the joy from my life.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Kit said.

  Tom froze. His shoulders stiffened. At last, he turned.

  He looked the same, Kit thought, as Tom stood up from the desk. His fair hair still caught the candlelight like gold. His gray eyes still mirrored the room’s shadows. Even his expression—that blend of pleasure, surprise, and exasperation Kit was so often on the receiving end of—even that was the same. Of course it was. Kit had been gone a matter of weeks. How much could a person change? Plenty—he himself was living proof. But Tom was the same. That same silence Kit couldn’t interpret. The same unspoken questions thickening the air.

  “When did you get back?” Tom asked.

  “Just now,” Kit said. He closed the door as he entered, kicking the corpse of Tom’s essay aside. Rambling seemed preferable to this frightening silence. “What’s that about prostitutes and fire irons? And here I was, worrying you’d become a monk without me to corrupt you.”

  “I’m not cut out for monastic life, you’ll find,” Tom said.

  Kit’s fists clenched tight enough to flash white knuckles through the skin. He’d never been this petrified, not even in Mary’s service, but he couldn’t afford to miss this chance. The risk of his new life made that clear. If he didn’t ask the question, he’d spend every day wondering what would have happened if he had.

  “Tom,” he said—a good start, but God knew where he meant to go from there. He put his hands in his pockets, took them out, interlaced his fingers behind his back, released them. What did people do with their hands at times like this? “Can we talk?”

  Tom leaned back against the desk. “Aren’t we?”

  “That’s not what I mean.” He swore. “I want you to be honest with me.” Was that his voice? That couldn’t have been his voice. His voice didn’t sound like that.

  “Always,” Tom said. His smile faded. Kit didn’t know how to read what replaced it.

  “Do you…I mean, have you ever…when you said…did you want…”

  Words. How did they work? And he called himself a poet.

  Tom pushed himself off the desk toward Kit. His movements were graceful, but underneath that uncertain. Kit, in a rush of daring, took the last step forward until his right hip nudged Tom’s left. They had been this close before—no boundaries in a college as small as Corpus Christi, and neither of them had ever taken an especially puritanical position on how much space God’s creatures were meant to keep between them. But they’d never been this close on purpose. It thrilled and terrified him in the same breath.

  “Tom, if you don’t, I wouldn’t…”

  “For God’s sake, Kit.” Tom’s voice was soft. He was smiling again. “Shut up. Yes.”

  Forget his own verses. Kit never wanted any kind of poetry but this. The poetry of Tom’s fingers against his skin. The poetry of breath catching in his throat. The poetry of a yes.

  Tom brushed a strand of hair from Kit’s forehead, then cupped his cheek in one palm. Without meaning to, Kit leaned into the touch. Hungry. He was so hungry for this. To be held this way, wanted this way. By Tom. No point denying that now.

  When Tom kissed him, he was almost too startled to believe it.

  Kit had kissed and been kissed before, but never like this. At first, Tom’s kiss was gentle, chaste even. Leaving the door open for a misinterpretation of Kit’s pathetic stammering, a pull back, averted eyes and a mumbled apology. An apology Kit did not want. He pulled Tom closer, one hand weaving into his hair, and slipped his tongue between Tom’s lips. Tom pressed back, his breath and his body together a sigh. His hips fit perfectly against Kit’s, firm and warm and real. His breath in Kit’s lungs was heaven.

  The room around them disappeared. Nothing existed but Tom. His body was so warm, the taste of him intoxicating. Kit couldn’t breathe. It hardly seemed possible.

  When at last they pulled away, Kit’s fingers slid down from Tom’s shoulder to close on his hand.

  “How long?” Tom asked.

  Kit stared. As if between the two of them, Kit’s feelings had ever been the subtle ones. “I don’t know,” he said. “Five weeks. Five years. Forever. Does it matter?”

  Tom eased Kit’s cloak away, tossed it over the chair. “No,” he said. “You’re right. It doesn’t.”

  Kit shivered, but not from cold. “So,” he said.

  Tom laughed, a laugh that harbored a thousand suggestions. “Seeing as you’re back,” he said, his smile broadening, “what would you say to a proper welcome?”

  What would Kit say to that?

  Nothing at all.

  No persuasion, no hesitation. The pressure of Tom’s hands against his shoulders, the taste of his lips, his smile. Kit thought his chest would burst. Nothing had ever compared to this before. He would never, never be able to stop.

  Tom moved fast, confident. He stripped Kit of his shirt, then his breeches—awkward and inconvenient, as it ever was, why was clothing such a damned nuisance? Fingers mastered buttons, flung aside fabric, and still Tom’s eager, impatient hands caressed him, explored him, woke his body from a long sleep. Tom pushed him backward, onto the bed. Kit gasped, having forgotten how strong Tom was, having forgotten how deeply he liked that strength.

  Tom shucked off his own breeches as he straddled Kit’s hips—preoccupied with Kit, his own clothes seemed to have slipped his notice until now. He glowed, bared chest and strong thighs perfect in the candlelight. Tom kissed him again, and Kit felt pulled up toward him like a plant to the light. Kit heard himself whimper; God, it was pathetic, hadn’t he possessed dignity at one point, some sort of self-respect?

  Undressed and unapologetic, Kit pulled back for a moment, just to look at Tom. Every curve and line and inch, everything he’d imagined under cover of darkness, a hundred times more beautiful for being real. Tom was real. And smiling, that smile, impossibly broad, shot through with a spark of mischief.

  “Is something wrong?” Tom asked, smile dipping at Kit’s hesitation.

  Wrong? This? “It’s not fair,” he said. “For you to be this perfect. How dare you.”

  Tom laughed and kissed him again. Kit hummed into Tom’s lips, a hum that Tom escalated to a moan with a slow roll of his hips, but Kit couldn’t bring himself to be embarrassed, or to spare a thought for the dormitory’s paper-thin walls.

  There was only this. Only them. This feeling, a low, warm expansion, relief at some great weight tumbling from his chest. Their bodies crushed together, lips and chest and hips and legs, a shameless tangle, impossibly close, impractically perfect. The trembling lightness of knowing that for once, doubt didn’t matter. That nothing else would ever make as much sense.

  Nothing more natural. Nothing more honest.

  The peak of it, deep, shocking, rising, felt like Kit left his own body, like the ocean rippled in his veins, like he had swallowed the stars.

  He collapsed back, breathless.

  Tom wasn’t l
ong behind. He lay beside Kit, breathing hard, the shadow of a laugh in the exhale, the sweet mist of sweat dampening his skin. The candlelight and its shadows were wondrous, Kit thought. Tom’s body looked like a statue, gilded in shifting bronze. To hell with any other muse. This would do. He could have gone on lying there forever, curled in the curve of Tom’s side, feeling Tom’s heartbeat against his own ear, pulsing with the life of him.

  Several minutes passed before Tom spoke, voice dry with understatement. “Well. Here we are.”

  Kit laughed, unable to help it. Everything seemed funnier now. “Here we are indeed. Christ. I’ll write sonnets in honor of your cock.”

  Tom made a derisive noise and shoved Kit off him. “Highest of all poets, you.”

  “It’s not fair, keeping your talent a secret. All of England deserves to know.” He adopted a grandiose tone and traced a one-armed arc before them, illustrating the title page of an imagined volume. “Watson and Marlowe, inheritors of the cult of Venus and Adonis, or, I mean, I suppose Adonis and Adonis, if you want to be anatomical—”

  “Shut up, you.” Tom kissed him to ensure it.

  If every order to keep silent came with a kiss like that, Kit would happily never speak again.

  “And you, my dear poet, were magical for a first time,” Tom said, when they lay again side by side. He brushed one hand against Kit’s forehead, sweeping away a renegade strand of hair. It had grown longer in the time Kit had been away. The tacked-on clause, that for a first time, snagged in Kit’s ear, but the thrill of Tom’s touch kept him from lingering on it.

  “As I say,” Kit said. “Anyone who doesn’t love tobacco and boys is a fool.”

  “Do you say that?” Tom asked, eyebrows raised.

  “I fully intend to start.”

  Tom laughed. “Mind who you say it to.”