A man standing alone in the street turned to face them, and Kit laid eyes on Lord Strange for the first time.
By now, Kit had lived in London for a quarter of his life. He’d shared rooms and streets with powerful men of all kinds: men who pretended to gentility, who expected a full theater to fall silent and gape as they entered. Kit had always enjoyed a private laugh at these people’s expense—given what it had cost him to make London know his name, the idea that anyone owed you respect was laughable. You receive the respect you earn.
Or so Kit thought, until he first saw Lord Strange.
The man’s charisma was undeniable; even Kit, who would have dearly liked to deny it, couldn’t do it. Elegant, graceful, a native Englishman with the hooded eyes and dark flowing hair of a foreigner, Strange commanded attention. He looked nothing like Anthony Babington, except in one respect: though Kit had expected him to be older, he couldn’t be far beyond thirty. His doublet nearly blinded Kit—a rich purple no flower would have dared to sport—but he wore flashiness well.
Kit sank into an elegant bow, a far cry from his awkward attempts at Cambridge. This was the bow of a man who spent his time among people in power. One harder than most to scare. Lord Strange’s Men weren’t the only people who knew how to act, after all.
“Marlowe,” Strange said, and there was something energizing about it, to hear his own name spoken to him in that way.
“At your service, sir,” Kit said.
To his surprise, this made Lord Strange smile. “Believe it or not, Marlowe, today it isn’t your service I’m after. I’ve wanted to speak with you for some time, so I was happy to receive your request to meet. You’re at liberty for supper?”
As Kit’s usual dining plans involved a meat pie in one hand and a bedraggled copy of Ovid in the other, at liberty was putting the matter somewhat grandly. “Of course, sir.”
“Good,” Strange said. “If a conversation can ever be had over food, it should be. I know a place not far from here. Good day, Master Henslowe,” he added pointedly.
Henslowe’s mouth narrowed. “Good day, my lord,” he said. As he turned, he shot back a sharp glance that detailed how deep and protracted Kit’s suffering would be if his misbehavior caused Lord Strange to withdraw his patronage. Kit didn’t have the heart to tell him that if this meeting went as he hoped, Lord Strange would soon lose a great deal more than a theater company.
* * *
—————
As it transpired, Strange’s destination was the George Inn, a Southwark tavern that, while by no means seedy, was nonetheless several notches below the sort of place Kit imagined a member of the peerage spending his time. He watched in surprise as his patron greeted the tapsters and drawers by name without pause, before commandeering a table set slightly off from the main room by a wooden partition. Two pints of ale appeared before them almost before Kit had fully sat down.
“Yes, Robin, the usual will do nicely, thank you,” Strange said to the boy who had appeared over Kit’s shoulder. The boy bobbed his head and ducked away without a word, and Strange arched his back before taking a drink with relish Kit associated more with an apprentice than a nobleman. “It’s a relief to get away from the estate, frankly. So thank you for that, as well as for making my players the most successful in London.”
“I don’t take credit for that, sir,” Kit said, with his best approximation of modesty.
Strange laughed. “That’s not what Henslowe tells me.”
Until now, Kit had been aligning his behavior with the subservient, respectful persona he’d adopted in Mary Stuart’s service. Henslowe’s voice in the back of his head, murmuring, Don’t antagonize the money, was just as strong as Walsingham’s orders to probe the depths of Strange’s secrets. But with this remark, he felt the last of his reserve drift away. Not enough to indict himself with a thoughtless phrase—the task at hand still came before anything. But enough to imagine that, if Kit himself had come into wealth, he’d behave with it more or less like this. At least, it was pleasant to imagine he might.
“I hope you don’t pay too much mind to Henslowe,” Kit said. “The portrait you’ll get of me might be accurate, but it won’t be flattering.”
Strange shrugged and leaned back in his chair. The whole atmosphere was so reminiscent of the White Stag that Kit almost checked over his shoulder to see whether Mistress Howard wasn’t surveilling their conversation. “I pay you to butcher people onstage in verse, Marlowe,” Strange said, “not to make friends with Philip Henslowe. If that were the task, I’d have to pay you double.”
“Let me know if there’s too much butchering, sir,” Kit said. “I’m afraid pastoral comedy has never been my strong suit.” Walsingham would have been bursting with impatience if he could see Kit’s tactics—to say nothing of how Cecil would have responded—but with this man, Kit was certain, the indirect and convivial route would be by far the more effective. Besides, what he said was true: the only shepherd he’d ever written about had killed a dozen kings.
“Too much?” Strange repeated. “Don’t be absurd. It’s what the people want, any fool can see that. That’s the trick to getting ahead, Marlowe. Listen to the people and give them what they want.”
He glanced at Robin with an appreciative smile as the boy returned with a roast capon, browned skin steaming over a bed of roasted root vegetables. The boy glowed with pleasure at the acknowledgment before skittering back into the kitchen at a shout from the cook. Strange took up the knife and carved the capon expertly, transferring a piece to Kit’s plate before taking his own. It was, frankly, remarkable. Kit had expected Strange to be another Babington. He’d never met a nobleman like this, who served poets before serving himself.
“What do you think they want, then, sir?” Kit asked, stabbing at a quartered parsnip as casually as though Strange were Ned Alleyn, and the George Inn the Mermaid Tavern.
Strange glanced over his shoulder, though with the partition and the ambient noise of the front room there was precious little risk of their being overheard. Perhaps that wasn’t the point at all—rather, to signal to Kit that what was said next would be worth listening to. “Tell me something,” he said. “I’ve seen your plays, and there’s something in them I’ve never seen from another poet. Are you angry, Marlowe?”
Kit wrapped both hands around his pint, appetite suddenly gone. Was he?
If Strange had asked the question while Kit was writing Edward II, he’d have said no, not in the slightest. He’d have said London was everything he’d dreamed, that he was free and successful and exactly where he wanted to be. But in this Southwark tavern, plagued by the memory of Sir Robert Cecil’s terse orders, he knew the truth, and the truth was that he’d been angry every day of his life for seven years. Ever since Arthur Gregory first showed him the sketch of the woman he was meant to betray to her death. His hands the ones covered in blood, so that a queen who would never even speak to him might wield power beyond imagination. Might conquer the world while Kit fought for a cut of his own profits, to spend an uninterrupted hour with the man he loved, to stay alive in a world where he could trust no one.
Yes, Kit was angry. And there was something intoxicating about admitting it.
“It’s hard not to be,” Kit said. “If the world gave me a reason not to be angry, I’d happily take it.”
Strange nodded, seemingly pleased with Kit’s answer. “That’s all the people want, in my experience,” he said. “A reason not to be angry. Or, failing that, a sense that their anger can have some effect. That it matters.”
Priests strangled by freed slaves. Twenty young women beheaded and spiked on the gates of a besieged city. The king’s triumphant procession into his sacred city, drawn not by an ass but by six bridled captives, each man burning with shame, frothing at the mouth with pride. Anger that achieved something more than a scream in the middle of the night, more than a gesture int
o the dark. Kit imagined Mary Stuart sitting in the empty chair beside him, the black-marble eyes of Catherine of Siena gazing through the back of his head. Strange couldn’t have given Kit a better explanation of his own plays if he’d tried.
“Surely it’s not our place to be angry, sir,” Kit said. He methodically drained away the honest emotion he’d allowed himself to feel, mentally chastising himself for it. He was a spy. A spy could not allow himself to be seen so clearly, not by a man like this. “Or it’s not my place. It’s the way the world is. Men like me, we don’t change that.”
Strange looked at him searchingly. From the other side of the partition, the sound of men in warm conversation, the clink of knives against plates, a call for more ale. The sounds of men like Kit, men beneath notice, without influence. Men who, perhaps, harbored unspoken anger in their breasts too.
“The world is one thing,” Strange murmured. “But surely every man has the right to look after his own soul?”
And there it was. A backward way of expressing the creed—Luther himself couldn’t have put it better. Strange could have passed the sentiment off as pure Protestantism, if anyone in the George Inn was listening with an ear to theological orthodoxy. But Kit knew what his patron meant. Look after his own soul by turning to the doctrine that would send it closest to heaven, its incense and holy relics and feast days of saints. Kit should have felt triumph. He’d guided Strange around every conversational bend until they arrived here, the one place Walsingham and Cecil needed him to be. From here, the task was simple. Why, then, the rancid taste rising in his mouth, as though the words he was about to speak next had spoiled?
Perhaps, he thought, it was because the crown’s justifications had never touched his heart quite the way Strange’s had.
“Would to God every man did,” Kit said, steadying himself with a long drink of ale. “You wouldn’t think that would be a radical proposition.”
Strange nodded. He didn’t take his eyes off the capon, but Kit felt the man’s energy shift. Had he pushed it too far? Had that word, radical, had that been too obvious? It had been years since Kit had tried to extract information like this, and while the theater had been its own sort of practice, he felt the pit of his stomach drop at the thought that he couldn’t play the part anymore, that years of London living had robbed him of his touch.
Then Strange looked up, and Kit caught the tail end of the emotion his patron had been trying to hide. It wasn’t distrust.
It was hope.
“True enough,” Strange said, “and all the more reason not to say too much here. Privacy is one thing, but it’s not the same as solitude. If you were to come by my estate, perhaps next week, we might discuss further.”
Kit’s mouth tasted metallic now, as if he had swallowed gunpowder. He clenched one fist until the nails carved into his palm, but when he spoke, his voice was clear. “I’d like that very much, sir. I think we might have a great deal to talk about.”
Strange smiled. “I think we might. Now, enough of this. We have business to discuss.”
As though a spell had been lifted, Kit felt the noise of the tavern crash over him, the usual melodies of Southwark. Shouts, curses, laughter, rage. Not far off, Ned Alleyn, rising from the dead to take his bows as Edward. The city hadn’t felt so vast or so loud since his first day in London, when every voice called its own damnation, when every hand grasped for his throat.
“Do we, sir?”
“Of course.” Strange raised his pint in a toast that seemed only half ironic. “This play, Marlowe. My God. After Malta, I thought you couldn’t startle me more, but clearly your well of ways to kill people never runs dry.”
Twenty-Nine
The entrance of Strange’s manor felt like a cloister, with its vaulted ceilings and symmetrical lines of arched windows. The agonizing quiet strengthened the impression, broken only by the muted drumming of raindrops outside. Kit’s boots left tiny mirrors of water along the stone floor. The invitation from Lord Strange’s man had been precise: Strange’s Derbyshire estate, three o’clock. And yet Kit had been alone in this hall for upward of fifteen minutes, waiting to be seen. He clasped his hands behind his back and tilted his head to the ceiling, feigning interest in the rafters. A good spy was never bored. Never agitated. Nerves and impatience were for the theater, not this.
There were a hundred reasons Strange might be late. Perhaps he’d gotten waylaid by business, whatever sort of affairs went into running an estate of this size. Perhaps it entertained him to have his social inferiors cool their heels in the entrance hall, regardless of the affability he’d shown at the George Inn. Perhaps he’d brought Kit here to ambush him, suspecting his game, and an assassin stood just around the corner, waiting for Kit to venture in undefended—
“Marlowe,” said Strange, striding down the hall. “Excellent.”
No more thinking like that. There was a thin line between caution and delusion, and it wouldn’t do to cross it. Kit intended to bow, but Strange extended a hand instead, and Kit shook it as though they were business partners on equal footing. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”
“You can’t interrupt if I invited you,” Strange said. “This way.”
Bracing himself for the worst, Kit followed.
It wasn’t Kit’s first time in an aristocrat’s home, but those manors had all doubled as prisons. Mary’s decor had been muted as a nunnery, but Strange clearly found himself under no such compunction. Each room they passed seemed as grand as Whitehall, gold-threaded carpets and priceless portraits adorning even the plainest surfaces. Kit saw his patron’s touch on every inch of it, that natural gravitation toward the bright and gaudy. At last, Strange led Kit into a room on the left—his private library.
Kit let out a long, low whistle. The room was a treasure trove. Shelves packed full lined each wall, the spines of Tacitus and Cicero and Montaigne crammed shoulder to shoulder, even stacked atop one another when shelf space ran thin. The fellows of Cambridge would have sold their souls for such a library, Kit thought; he himself would certainly have bent a few laws to get one. Clustered candles glowed on low tables between the room’s armchairs, giving the dark wood a warm golden undertone. Against the windows—the only break in the shelves—raindrops left comet-like tails down the glass.
“Do you like it?” Strange said, smiling.
Kit laughed. “My God. It’s incredible. I hope it’s all right if I quit London and live here instead.”
Strange’s smile held steady, but there was something more to it now, something Kit couldn’t quite follow. “You’re more than welcome to use it anytime you like,” he said. “But the books aren’t what I wanted to show you.”
He crouched to the floor, where a corner of the bearskin rug had been flipped askew. Strange slipped two fingers into a crack between the boards and lifted. A full square of floor rose on a hinge, revealing a black hole in which Kit could make out the top of a ladder.
God’s death. A priest hole. This was the fanciful nonsense he’d imagined when Walsingham recruited him at Cambridge. Secret rooms for Catholics to hide in when the queen’s soldiers led raids. And here one was, in this ludicrously respectable Derbyshire library. He’d known, before, what he was getting into. And yet it had never felt so real, so potentially deadly, as it did now, staring into that gaping hole in the floor, close and cold and forbidding as the mouth of a grave. Innocent men didn’t need places to hide.
“You’ll forgive the inconvenience,” Strange said, gesturing toward the priest hole as if it were a stack of unwashed dishes. “My guests and I err on the side of caution.”
Kit cleared his throat. “Very wise,” he said. “You want me to—”
“If you don’t mind. You can close the door behind you.”
Strange climbed down the ladder, disappearing into the dark as easily as slipping into a bath. Kit was left alo
ne, staring down after him.
This was what Walsingham and Cecil wanted. Sending Kit into this lion’s mouth, and God only knew if the teeth would close over him. Kit’s palms itched with sweat; he wiped them on the thighs of his breeches. He could still turn back to London, back to his cut-rate lodgings in Shoreditch and his half-finished play about the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. He could present the broken cipher to Walsingham and remove himself from the rest of the work, and let Lord Strange make what he would of Kit’s sudden cowardice.
He could, but he wouldn’t. Everything Walsingham needed rose from this secret room, and no one but Kit could get it. Ignoring the tightness in his chest, Kit stepped down the ladder, then turned the door on its hinge above him. The wood settled into place, and so did the darkness.
Kit’s heart echoed in the thick silence. It reminded him of the dream that had haunted him since Northampton, not the sound of Mary’s scream but the other one, of being buried alive, the dark funereal and final. Too disoriented to climb, he hung there at the top, feeling his breath quicken. He forced it to slow, counting each inhale for four and each exhale for six. After a moment, he heard the hiss of flame catching. A faint glow rose five feet below.
He dropped down into a stone room, eight feet square. Its ceiling was low—Kit was short, but he still felt the stone close above his head. Poorly lit, only a flickering circle from the stubs of two candles in sconces in the wall. Strange was there, of course, but he wasn’t alone. A woman stood next to him, though Kit could barely make out her face in the poor light. Heart pounding, he took a step forward, the beginning of a greeting on his tongue.
Then he felt a hand grip his hair, jerking his head back. The cold flash of a knife pressed against his exposed throat.
He hadn’t seen or heard the man behind him. Still couldn’t, didn’t dare to turn his head. Whoever it was, his knife hand was perfectly steady. Kit bit his lip, feeling his rapid pulse against the blade. So this was how he died. Surrounded by rebels, in the dark, under the earth, alone. How long would it take them, in London, to notice?
A Tip for the Hangman Page 22