Tom’s smile was resigned, not accepting. He brushed his lips against Kit’s cheek, the tender skin that by the next day would spread into a shadowed bruise. “Don’t apologize,” he said. “It’s not like you.”
* * *
—————
The candle guttered out with a smoky sigh. Kit groaned and slumped forward onto the desk, head resting on his forearms. Faint and indistinct, the bells tolled from the courtyard. Dreading the result, he counted.
One.
Two.
Surely not past two…
Three.
Damn.
He’d been at this for hours. Once Tom fell asleep, soon after midnight, Kit had disentangled himself from the sheets, moved to the desk, and taken up the letters. He’d burned through a full candle, worked himself into a splitting headache. And still he had accomplished nothing. His primary state of being these days, it seemed.
If only Greek were as useful as Walsingham believed. Years of translating Heraclitus came up useless against the monstrosity of these letters. Kit knew Mary was clever. He hadn’t considered how that cleverness could mock him from a hundred miles away. He and Tom had built their own cipher years ago, to pass notes in Master Crawley’s dullest mathematics courses. They’d thought it unbreakable, but all they’d done was shift the entire alphabet five letters sideways. The Gordian knot of Mary’s system revealed how childish their attempt had been.
Kit leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Now the spitting candle had been silenced, he could hear Tom’s soft breathing from where he slept, burrowed against the cold in Kit’s bed. Remembering their careless caress of hours before, Kit felt his face flush in the darkness. It hadn’t been luck their first time, that flash of euphoria. Lightning striking again and again, more intoxicating each time. He’d never known anything like it.
Not that it hadn’t felt good with the girls at the White Stag, of course. Good enough, anyway. Fast. Mechanical. A lingering craving in the back of his mind that vanished the moment someone sated it. Maybe that was the way it was, he’d thought, physical and uncomplicated. I scratch your back, you scratch mine, and then we avoid each other for several days until we’ve both forgotten. What the poets found in the process to get worked up about, he’d never understood.
But that had been before Tom.
Beginning with perfection and rising higher every night, since Kit had begun to learn the tricks Tom had mastered from the start. He smiled remembering it, with more than a hint of bitterness. Who had taught Tom this dance, for that matter? How many times had Tom, embraced by tangled sheets, moaned a man’s name that wasn’t Kit’s? For a first time.
As far as distractions went, jealousy was effective, but it burned out like the candle soon enough. He reached into a drawer for another. After a few minutes’ hard effort—past three in the morning, the most menial tasks increased wildly in difficulty—a shifting light again illuminated the cipher’s taunting strokes. Perhaps he was going about this the wrong way, he thought. There were only so many symbols. How had he taught Meg to read? Language was repetition and arrangement, a framework of sounds scaffolding rhythm and meaning. Each symbol corresponded to a sound. Isolate the letters, then look for patterns. Which behaved like vowels, which grouped like consonants.
It was a puzzle. A puzzle like Greek, like the Holy Trinity, like the human heart. And damn it all if he would quit before he found the key.
Thirteen
When Tom entered the White Stag with Kit and Nick, it was packed already with the evening crowd. Working people and students alike crowded the tavern’s front room, toasting the Christmas season with cheap beer and irreverent conversation. Never mind what deals Mistress Howard’s girls made in the back rooms—those activities stopped for no man, not even Christ. The roaring fire drained the chill of the walk and melted the snow from Tom’s boots, leaving dirty puddles along the floor as they took their usual table in the corner. The tapster, knowing the trio well, had three pints on the table before Tom ordered. A group of five men near the door, thick beards and thicker tongues, culminated the final strains of a bawdy carol Christ would have blushed to hear his name inserted into. The cry for more drink followed like a coda.
It felt like London, Tom thought. Warm and close and harmlessly transgressive. It felt like home, in a way Cambridge never had.
Not that the college didn’t have its bright spots, he thought, glancing at Kit sprawled in the chair beside him. Kit didn’t notice. He was shouting good-natured blasphemies at Mistress Howard from across the taproom—their traditional form of seasonal greeting.
“Can the three magi expect nothing better from you than shit beer, mistress?” he called, gesturing with his pint at Tom and Nick.
Mistress Howard rolled her eyes. “It’s a broad definition of wisdom, Marlowe, if they’re calling you a wise man,” she said, though not without affection.
“Wise enough to know piss when I taste it,” Kit said, and drank. “Even Christ wouldn’t forgive this sin against ale.”
Tom shoved Kit in the shoulder. “Let her be.”
Kit grinned, that wicked, untrustworthy smile that robbed Tom of his ability to think straight. “It could be worse,” he said. “I could be telling her the truth about the Virgin Birth.”
Tom and Nick groaned. They’d both heard that theory before. But surely even Kit wasn’t stupid enough to shout in a crowded tavern that the Virgin Mary had fucked a Nazarene stable boy and paid the Archangel Gabriel to cover it up.
Surely.
The fellows of Corpus Christi would rail against their being in the tavern that evening at all, Tom knew, blasphemy or no. Cambridge approached the season the same way it approached everything: with sobriety and austerity. Services had been lengthened and sermons intensified until Tom was convinced he spent more time in church than out of it. But this was the only proper way to celebrate, he thought. Self-affliction and piety belonged to Good Friday or Lent. December belonged to the taverns.
And Tom hadn’t seen Kit relax in ages. Not since that man visited him in the library—the one Kit wouldn’t explain, the one Tom hadn’t forgotten. Not since he’d started spending every waking moment studying, or whatever he did with the papers he whisked out of sight when Tom entered the room. But secrets, like prayer, could wait until after the holiday.
“Have you turned highwayman as well as blasphemer, Kit?” Nick asked. He leaned his chair on two legs, resting its back against the smoke-stained wall.
Kit blinked. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t know how else you’d come into money, beyond robbery. I mean, look at you.” Nick made an ornate gesture with his left hand, illustrating Kit’s general presence. “Never known you to dress like a lord.”
Kit took a terse sip of ale. “I have aspirations.”
Tom picked at a hangnail, tearing thoughtless until the blood came. Nick always brought it back to money, though Tom bent over backward to avoid speaking of it. Their first week at Cambridge, he and Kit had each unintentionally scandalized the other with careless references to the homes they’d left. Tom mentioned his private fencing tutor; Kit alluded to going without food so his sisters could eat. After that, it seemed easier never to bring it up.
Still, Nick was right: Kit’s shabbiness had faded. The change hadn’t been ostentatious: a pair of boots without a hole in the heel, breeches that fit in all the places breeches were supposed to fit—though Tom would admit to no one why he’d noticed this. Yes, the cut of Kit’s emerald linen shirt was fashionable enough to turn heads, but what of it? Who was he to grudge Kit’s having something new for once, especially when he wore it so well?
“Nick, this coming year, I mean to find you a hobby,” Tom said. “Anything to keep you out of other people’s business.”
Kit shot Tom a grateful smile, though he spoke to Nick. “I hear carpentry is rewarding,” he s
aid. “Christ wasn’t much good, but if mankind is made in God’s image surely you can manage a stool.”
After years listening to Kit’s ever-escalating dervish of blasphemy, Tom saw no reason to address this latest scandal. Not given Nick’s inability to go an hour without being an ass. At least Kit kept his voice down.
“When do you leave for London, Tom?” Kit asked, before draining his pint.
Tom bit his lower lip to tamp down a smile. Kit, not on speaking terms with his father, would pass Christmas at Cambridge as always. Which was why Tom had written to his mother earlier that week, claiming he had too much work to countenance coming home. She might not speak to him for months, but it was worth it for the chance to tell Kit.
“I thought I’d stay here, actually,” he said. He let his foot brush across Kit’s under the table and hid his smile as Kit shivered. God. He’d stay at Cambridge for the rest of his life, if only for that shameless pleasure. He’d never met anyone as susceptible to flirtation as Kit—nor, for that matter, as good at giving it back.
“Madmen, the pair of you,” Nick said. Tom only half listened. Kit’s knee now rested against his thigh, as if by accident, making it damn hard to concentrate. “First light, I’m off to London, like any rational person.”
“Well, of course,” Kit said. He was a man with a hundred faces. Even as his knee pressed against Tom’s thigh, steadily driving him mad, Kit’s voice went cold. “Your father the alderman will have a rich Christmas. Paid for by the poor he’s robbed.”
Tom kicked Kit under the table. For God’s sake, he thought, taking a long drink. Nick was an ass, and his father was worse. But if there was ever a time for goodwill and drink and not picking hopeless fights, it was now.
Nick, to Tom’s surprise, ignored Kit. This likely wasn’t a decision to turn the other cheek. His attention was occupied by one of the tavern’s whores, a short blond woman who seemed underwhelmed by his attentions. Nick pressed a gold coin into her palm as she passed. “An angel for an angel, darling,” he said with a wink. “Merry Christmas.”
The line didn’t impress Tom; it impressed the woman still less. But in her business as in most, an angel was nothing to sneeze at. She smiled and pocketed the coin, a silent promise to return when she could. Tom half hoped she’d bolt with it, to teach Nick a lesson.
Nick thumped his empty pint on the table and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The snow continued falling through the window behind him, a silent arabesque filtered and muted through the smudged glass. “God, the moment I get out of this backwater for good,” he said to no one in particular.
Kit laughed. “Tired of being around people cleverer than you?”
Nick’s glare wished Kit dead. They were exactly the same, in some ways. If a dog took a shit in the street, they’d both take it as a personal insult. It was like being surrounded by children. “No,” Nick said. “Tired of country beggars who fake blasphemy to shock their way into a whore’s skirts.”
The table’s mood took a turn. Tom reached a hand to stop Kit, who had begun to stand. Don’t you dare, he thought. Kit glanced over, then nodded. He coiled back into his chair, though his air of a snake about to strike didn’t fade.
Nick’s jaw tightened. He’d had his heart set on a fight, Tom could tell, and would get it one way or another. “Then again,” he said, and he turned not just his eyes but his whole head to Tom. “Maybe you’re not after the whores.”
Tom’s reflexes were excellent. He’d studied fencing for almost ten years—that had to be worth something. But he never had a devil’s chance of stopping Kit. It took half a second. The chair fell to the floor as Kit shot to his feet, pulled back, and punched Nick in the face as hard as he could. Nick yelped and fell, landing on the ground with a thud that silenced the rest of the room. Blood seeped through his fingers from his shattered nose.
Tom stared at Kit, who stood with tense shoulders and clenched fists. Kit watched Nick with a coldness Tom had seen only once before, the first time he’d asked about Kit’s father. Kit looked down at Nick like a high priest passing judgment, then turned and stalked out into the snow.
Tom’s hands shook. Kit couldn’t have made it clearer he was fucking Tom if he’d invited Nick to watch.
Mistress Howard pushed through the startled crowd toward them, men parting before her. Moses might have split the Red Sea, but a tavern keeper on the prowl required no divine intervention to carve a path. Behind her, Nick’s whore poked her head out of the kitchen, a pint in one hand and the other over her mouth to hide her laughter.
The matron didn’t wait to reach their table before unleashing her tirade. “I run a respectable house,” she said. “I won’t have any commotion. Do you hear me, Skeres?”
Nick rose to his knees, still holding a hand to his nose. His eyes watered, diluting the blood. “Not to worry,” he said, his voice unsteady. “Our commotion’s just left.”
Tom had to hand it to him. Even bleeding from the face, Nick could still be an ass when it pleased him.
Mistress Howard swept away, muttering something about youths and deviants. As she left, a dull murmur of conversation trickled back into the room. Men were punched in the face every day in places like this. If the single blow wouldn’t evolve into something more exciting, Cambridge’s tavern crowd had more pressing business to attend to. Drink, for instance.
Nick sagged down into the chair, tilting his head back and pinching the bridge of his nose. Even from this angle, Tom could see it had begun to swell and jutted out awkwardly. Broken, for certain. He couldn’t claim the emotion filling him was sympathy.
“Get that set,” Tom said, turning toward the door.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Tom, not you too.”
Tom ignored him. He snatched up his cloak and pushed out of the tavern, letting the door bang in the wind. The snow had worsened while they’d been inside. He squinted, struggling to see, but there was no one there. Only a trail of fast-disappearing footprints that began in the warm circle of light spilling from the White Stag and continued into the shadows.
Damn him, Tom thought. He eased into a loping run, following the tracks. What had he been thinking?
But Kit hadn’t been thinking, of course. And if he didn’t start, he’d give them both away.
It was hard to remember, sometimes, that Kit had never done this before. His militant blasphemy and bitter wit were as London as they came, but he’d grown up in a small country town where the cathedral’s rhythm directed life’s movements. Not as many opportunities to experiment as in the city. True, most of Tom’s liaisons had unfolded in London’s seedier public houses, and cost him a fair amount of money in the bargain. But at least he’d learned when to keep a straight face and be silent.
Finally, Tom spotted him: a fast-walking figure at the corner of Magdalene Street, the light from a nearby brewer’s catching the copper in his light brown hair. Tom lengthened his stride to catch up.
“Kit,” he said, laying a hand on his shoulder.
Kit whirled around, and for a moment Tom thought he would end up with a broken nose of his own. There was a wild, unsettled panic in Kit, one that disappeared or was covered up as Tom raised his hands, palms spread wide. In the snow-thinned light, Kit looked very pale.
“I won’t say I didn’t enjoy that,” Tom said, lowering his hands. “But you shouldn’t have done it.”
Kit sighed and looked down. “I know. But he…”
Tom glanced over his shoulder. In snow like this, the street was deserted. Good. With one hand, he raised Kit’s chin to meet his eyes, letting his hand linger near the fading bruise on Kit’s jaw. For a moment, Kit stopped breathing. The snow settled gently in his hair, dusting him with white. Tom’s hand moved to Kit’s shoulder, pulling him closer. It never failed to surprise him how confident he felt, touching Kit, being near him. Had he been this way with the others and noticed it on
ly now? He doubted it.
“It’s just an insult,” Tom said. “He doesn’t mean anything by it. But if you give him reason to believe it, he will.”
Kit paused. Tom didn’t trust that pause.
“Unless you have other things on your mind,” Tom said.
“No,” Kit said without blinking. “There’s nothing else.”
Tom sighed. This man. This handsome, clever man who made Tom’s life worth living, and who couldn’t tell him the truth if his life depended on it. “You’re a terrible liar,” he said.
Kit laughed. “The worst,” he agreed. “It’s a good thing I never lie.”
Damn him. A moment before, Tom had been determined to make Kit see the importance of being subtle. All it took was one laugh, one flash of the smile that did the strangest things to Tom’s self-control. And now, look. All he could think of was how much he’d rather see Kit’s new clothes on his floor. He could press Kit for answers later. They had the whole week, from Christmas to the new year. For now…
“Tell you what,” Tom said. Compensating for Kit’s recklessness with added caution, he glanced back over his shoulder. The street remained deserted. Nothing but the swirling snow, shielding their conversation. “Why don’t we go back to my room and prove Nick right?”
Kit started and stopped three separate sentences. Helpless, he grinned, which Tom chose to read as a yes.
Two people in Cambridge, at least, were entitled to a merry Christmas.
Fourteen
By Christmas Eve, most scholars had left Cambridge for home. The chapel stood nearly empty at vespers, the hollowed-out carcass of some leviathan with empty pews for ribs. The rector’s voice echoed and multiplied into a resonant host of a hundred voices preaching the same gospel. The dusky light through the high windows bleached the pews as gray as the snow-covered grounds.
Kit slouched against the chapel’s back pew with the other poor scholars who, whatever else they’d learned at Cambridge, had learned their place. Those with money sat closer to God, those without grasped what they could from the back. Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Just as well, Kit thought—theirs was decidedly not the Kingdom of Earth. But then, when Christ spoke of the poor, he hadn’t meant people who coped with poverty like Kit did.
A Tip for the Hangman Page 11