Cecil scowled at Kit from across the table, his face alive with disbelief. Well, life was an exercise in being proven wrong, wasn’t it? It wasn’t at all productive to develop a deep and burning dislike for a member of the Privy Council, but Kit found himself privately hoping Cecil would trip down a flight of stairs on his way out of the palace.
Kit glanced away to the lamp in the center of the table, trying to lose his fear in the shifting light. He knew the letters by heart. Any poet would remember a resonant phrase, and these carried more weight than most. But that didn’t help the terror that had permeated his blood.
“You may begin, Marlowe,” Burghley said. “Uninterrupted,” he added, darting a sharp look at Cecil, who pretended not to notice.
Kit closed his eyes. He knew this cipher now. All he had to do was read it as he knew it. “The first letter,” he began, “was from Babington to Mary Stuart.”
Cecil’s brow darkened. The waver in Kit’s voice had done nothing to challenge his first impression. Damn it, Kit was twenty-two, not sixteen. Couldn’t he keep his voice from cracking for three minutes when it mattered? But as he continued, his hesitation strengthened into confidence. It was drama. A performance. And he’d never get another audience as rapt as this.
He took Babington’s letter from his pocket and read it from the cipher without stumbling. How Babington met with a Spaniard who swore that King Philip was sympathetic and prepared to invade. How Babington sent funds to Spain, colluding with foreign forces to rescue Mary and remove Elizabeth from the throne. How six unnamed gentlemen, all Babington’s trusted friends, plotted to murder the queen, to smooth the way for Mary’s ascension. An undertaking he swore would succeed, at the hazard of all their lives. An undertaking that cast a chill through the room.
“Babington will be eliminated,” Cecil said with a wave of his hand, directing his words at Walsingham and not Kit. “But severing his head only achieves so much, with Spain involved. Did Stuart respond?”
“She did, sir,” Kit said.
Without prelude, he read the letter deciphered during the lecture at Cambridge. The second delivery came off smooth as the first, though he heard Walsingham’s dry laugh at Mary’s mention of spies and false brethren.
Finished, he hung back. The fear drained from him, leaving his body hollow and useless. It was impossible to think. He shifted his weight, breathing easily for the first time in minutes. The room’s focus was no longer on him. He’d done what he’d come to do, and in a moment, he’d be back on his way to Cambridge, basking in victory. He could bide his time for a few minutes more and see how those with power made decisions.
“Treason,” said another of the councilors, with more passion than originality. “As if the papist whore has the right.”
“Her Majesty ascended lawfully and legitimately through the Act of Succession,” Cecil said curtly. “Of course this is treason.”
Burghley ignored his son with a saint’s patience. It was like watching a wolf try to hunt with its pup nipping at its tail. “We will double the men at Sir Philip’s command at Zutphen, should the Spanish turn from the Low Countries toward us,” he said. “But for Babington and Stuart—”
“We have practices for dealing with traitors,” Cecil interrupted. “Tyburn is well equipped for a brace of them.”
Walsingham shook his head. “I appreciate your zeal,” he said, “but think practically.”
Cecil scowled. “I seldom think otherwise.”
“You suggest we wait?” said a second councilor.
The nobleman wasn’t alone in his surprise. Hesitation made no sense to Kit, not with six armed assassins to contend with. But Kit had said the piece he’d come to say. It didn’t matter what they decided to do now. Kit would return to Cambridge, spend the months before graduation properly preparing for his examinations, pass his free evenings in town with Tom, use the remainder of his pay to set up in London in just a few months. He took a long breath, rocking forward onto the balls of his feet.
“If Stuart is removed,” Walsingham said, “the Armada will be on our shores by week’s end to retaliate, an attack we are ill prepared to defend against. And any strike against Stuart will spur immediate reprisals from her conspirators.”
“I understand that,” Burghley said wearily, “but we can hardly afford to wait.”
“I don’t suggest we wait idly,” Walsingham said. “We need information. Abroad and at home.”
Information. Kit turned away from the table, avoiding the Council’s eyes. He knew what Walsingham meant, even if the rest of the room didn’t. An early, uninformed strike would be ruinous, that was true. This wasn’t a war‚ it was a game, and they needed intelligence to stay a move ahead. So Walsingham’s spies would penetrate deeper into Mary’s confidence.
And there was one spy she already trusted.
Whatever understanding Kit fancied he’d seen in Walsingham’s black eyes, whatever faint pride or petty kindness, it didn’t change anything. The spymaster’s machine would work its course regardless. And Kit was a part of that machine now. Perhaps someday he’d be left to chart his own course, but not now.
For now, they needed him. The thought filled him with pride and left him nauseated at the same time.
Burghley tapped his fingers against the bridge of his nose, an apparent attempt to nurse a headache. With his hawkish son and the queen’s iron-willed secretary in the same room, this was likely a common affliction. “You think your spy can identify the conspirators expediently?”
Walsingham smiled, not looking at Kit. “Stuart trusts Marlowe. We can easily negotiate his return to her service. She is now in custody of Lord and Lady Rich at Chartley Manor, given the unreliable behavior of Thomas Morgan.”
Burghley nodded at Kit—the only man in the room to acknowledge Kit’s continued existence. “You will depart for Staffordshire at once, Marlowe,” he said. “We will expect your first report a week from your arrival, barring earlier necessity.”
Kit’s mouth opened, but nothing came out beyond a gust of breath. At once. He’d asked Tom to make his excuses for a week at most, and even that had him running the risk of expulsion. It was selfish, mourning the loss of a university degree with the fate of a nation in his hands, but he’d worked his whole life for this, only to see Walsingham and the Council toss it aside without a second thought.
Walsingham glanced over to Kit, and the flame in his eyes dimmed to something softer. When he turned back to Burghley, his voice was conciliatory. “Perhaps a day’s rest first. The fate of the nation doesn’t rest on one night.”
Burghley nodded. “Very well. I shall arrange for his lodgings at Whitehall this evening.”
Kit bowed his head. No one else looked at him. Nations and monarchs hung in the balance within that room, fates and condemnations dancing in the flickering lamplight. The Council had more important concerns than a spy’s personal ambitions.
The Council, finished with its business, rose in a scattered wave. With each moment, the terrible sense of import that filled the room dissipated, until it was nothing but a large room full of rich, well-dressed men, speaking in clusters of two and three, laughing at one another’s jokes. Planning business for the remainder of the afternoon. Hawking, hunting, drafting bills to be sent to Parliament, epicurean meals with diplomats from Venice or Castile. The everyday business of court.
Only Walsingham, as he moved toward the door, spared a glance at Kit. He nodded, his stern expression softened by faint creases around his eyes. “Marlowe,” he said, nodding curtly. “Good work. God be on your side when you go.”
Kit watched him leave. It was not the moment to explain that he and God had never been on each other’s sides.
Seventeen
Chartley Manor inspired a wave of antipathy in Kit the moment he saw it. It was a forbidding place: a squat, sharp-chimneyed house that almost faded into the woods
and craggy fields of Staffordshire behind. It brooded in the hazy predawn light, ringed by a stream that billowed mist across the grounds. Kit longed to turn his back on the place, but as the Council had made clear, this job had never been about what he wanted. It hadn’t been his choice to return to Mary’s service, but he would do what had been asked of him, whatever the risk, and if this was the only path open for advancement, he’d follow it as far as it would take him.
He strode to the door and pulled.
Locked.
Kit groaned and tilted his head back, looking at the foggy sky above. Of course. It was five in the morning. And this time, no one expected his arrival. The cold mist seeped through his clothes into his bones.
He knocked. Then knocked again. Then, with increasing impatience, a third time.
The door flung open, and Kit danced back in alarm from Anne Cooper standing in the doorway. Her hair hung loose and messy to her shoulders, and a woolen shawl the size of a blanket was draped over her nightgown. He must have woken her, he supposed. But the violence in her glare was too fierce to have been caused only by frustrated sleep.
Kit raised his hands and drew back another step. “Jesus Christ, Anne, I’m not trying to rob the house.”
“Where in hell did you go?” she snapped, shoving him hard in the chest. He stumbled back, overbalanced and taken by surprise. “You reckless piece of shit.”
“What—”
Anne didn’t look like someone in the mood to argue. She looked more in the mood to cut him a second mouth. But she hadn’t sent him away, and nothing mattered but that. They stood alone now on a long stone path sweeping from the house to the stream. Anne shut the door behind them and deepened her glare. As she closed the distance between them, the tail of her shawl brushed his arm, though their proximity was not in the least intimate.
“I thought you were dead,” she hissed.
Kit blinked. It was touching that she’d missed him, but this did seem like jumping to conclusions. “What?”
“You disappear, in the middle of the night, without a word,” Anne said, her voice still deathly low. “And when Beton asks what’s become of you, that snake Poley pipes up straightaway with some cock-and-bull nonsense about a family matter, looking proud of himself as anything. With who that man is, what am I meant to think except that he slit your throat in a ditch?”
Words failed Kit. What was he supposed to say to that? It was a quarter past five in the morning, he’d been riding almost nonstop since the day before, and Mary’s maidservant seemed to know more about the members of Walsingham’s spy network than he did. And if she knew so much, what was to say she didn’t know about him? Why else pull him aside if she didn’t already know he had Mary’s worst interests at heart?
The idea appeared fully formed in Kit’s head, like someone else had thought it. He could kill Anne right now. Easily. Didn’t need weapons to do it. If Anne had found him out, if she knew he worked for Walsingham, there was no other way. She stood alone, unarmed, in front of a sleeping house. Nothing simpler. One quick decision could save his life. How fragile the human body was. It could be done in seconds.
He closed his hands into slow fists, considering.
Kit blinked, nausea rising. Was this who he was now? The kind of man Walsingham made him? A man who would kill to save himself?
No. Kit’s weapons were words. His mind frightened him, the ease with which it had leapt to violence, but he could still say no to himself, if to no one else. He could still spin this to his advantage. She hadn’t said she knew. He could still play the idiot, act his heart out. It was all he’d ever done, and he’d done it well enough until now.
“What do you mean, who he is?” he said. He lowered his voice, as though the mist might contain any number of listening ears. “Anne, what do you know?”
Anne shoved him again, causing him to stumble farther back. The grass gave a damp sigh under his feet. “By the Virgin, Kit, open your eyes. Whitehall sent Poley here to report on the Lady Mary. You know as well as I do how much they hate people who believe like us.”
Kit’s lips parted slightly, letting out a small breath. It was the best he could do, with words out of reach. His mind had given up on speech, as it whirled to reconfigure thoughts and fears and memories to fit this new picture. People who believe like us. Anne wasn’t involved in Walsingham’s schemes. She was a Catholic. And, somehow, she thought Kit was, too.
How could she think that? He’d given her no reason to believe—
Oh.
He almost wanted to laugh, it was so stupid.
Oh, he had.
What had he said, trying to convince her he was there to serve Mary? When saints aren’t protected, you wouldn’t believe the terrible ways they can die. He’d praised Mary like a seminarian doing devotion. Laughed off any attempt to pray from an English Bible. Made—ah, Jesus, he really had, hadn’t he—made stupid jokes about the Eucharist, tobacco, and transubstantiation. He couldn’t have been a more convincing papist if he’d done it on purpose.
All right. This was a complication, but not one he couldn’t handle. Kit had always needed to play fast and dangerous to win, and if Anne had latched on to a false idea of his religious sympathies that made her trust him, he saw no reason to disabuse her of it. Confidence and recklessness were two sides of the same coin. One only became the other if you failed.
“I understand,” Kit said. “Anne, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you myself. It truly was a family disaster. My sister…Her death was sudden, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I didn’t mean to make you worry.”
Anne bit her lip, then touched his shoulder with grim sympathy. The anger had faded, replaced now only by this soft, dark wariness. It was enough to make him hate himself. He’d used Jane as leverage. Wielding one death to bring about another. Now his damnation was complete, and yet no fire and brimstone rained from above. Christ, like the Florentines, must subscribe to the policy of the ends justifying the means.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know what that’s like. But you have to understand you can’t take risks like that. Nothing’s safe here.”
“I know,” Kit said. “Will Mary take me back?”
Anne glanced back toward the house. Its windows remained dark, its doorways silent. No one to overhear this conversation, two servants whispering in the morning mist. “I think so,” she said. “The Council halved her staff again. If you’re willing to serve, she can’t send you away. But she was livid when you disappeared. You’ll need to tell her why. And if you can mention you saw to it that your sister received a proper funeral mass, that will help you.”
Kit nodded. “I can do that.”
Anne turned back toward the door. “Just watch yourself, Kit.”
He smiled. “I always do,” he said, stepping out of the mist into the manor. He looked back just long enough to see the first splash of sunrise above the trees, scattering sparks along the river, before the door closed behind him.
Eighteen
Master Robert Norgate sat at the large oak table in one of the college’s offices, fighting his irritation with deep, steadying breaths. Around him in varying degrees of intransigence sat the four Corpus Christi professors jointly in charge of the college’s administrative affairs. Haywood, professor of sciences. Crawley, mathematics. Dryden, philosophy. And Seymour, poetics. Four messengers bearing calamity, Norgate mused, thinking wryly of Revelation.
Avoiding the fellows’ eyes, he focused on the solemn portrait of Master Emeritus Thomas Aldrich on the opposite wall. Norgate’s immediate predecessor, stately and untroubled, was flanked by another ancient master on the left, a silver crucifix on the right. A good man, Aldrich. Norgate wondered if he’d ever had to endure the likes of this. But of course he had. The portrait’s unperturbed appearance was a trick of the gilt frame, the dark wood behind. Every master of Corpus Christi College had been dragged into m
eetings like this against his will. Though, Norgate consented, perhaps not exactly like this.
“Sir, I appreciate your position,” Haywood said. “But I don’t think we have any choice.”
“Review Marlowe’s record,” Norgate said, still looking at Aldrich’s portrait, “and you’ll see we have a multitude of choices.”
“Robert,” Crawley said. Norgate looked to him with frank astonishment. God as his witness, he’d never given Crawley permission to use his Christian name. “You know I admire your commitment to the poor scholars.”
Admiration was an odd way of putting it, Norgate thought, petitioning the Lord for strength. At every convocation of the head council for the past five years, Crawley had argued for Marlowe’s expulsion, citing his “unjustifiable expense on the college.” It was a wonder he hadn’t had the boy assassinated by now, to prove a point about economics.
“But if now isn’t the time to revisit his eligibility for funding,” Crawley went on, “I can’t fathom what is. You have no idea where the boy’s gone, and it’s the second time in recent months he’s taken off into the night. He’s missed examinations, he’s a terror in the lecture hall, and the college is still responsible for financing his costs when he does deign to appear—”
“By which you mean,” Norgate cut in, “that if Marlowe were to pay his own way, you’d overlook it. It certainly seems to have been your approach to truant behavior in the past.”
Crawley took a breath, fueling what looked to be a righteous tirade. Norgate pressed his lips together. This might go on for hours. But to his surprise, Seymour cut Crawley off before he could begin.
“Gentlemen,” the poetics fellow said with a faint smile. “I respect your ethical devotion, truly I do. But Marlowe’s circumstances are, I think, somewhat unusual?”
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