“Kit,” said Tom, from the front door of the boardinghouse. He hadn’t waited for Kit inside—and Kit had counted on the time scaling the stairs to pull himself together, to come up with whatever in God’s name he was supposed to say. That time was gone, and there Tom was, flinty eyes sharp, more anger coursing through him than Kit had seen in years.
“Tom, I can explain,” he began.
“Come with me,” Tom said, grabbing him by the arm and leading him back down the street. “We’re going to have a talk, you and I.”
Thirty-One
Tom clearly had a destination in mind, but Kit didn’t dare ask what it was. As Tom led him south, nearer the city proper, all he could think was that Tom was taking him to the constabulary, that he’d been exposed and was about to be arrested. The image overwhelmed him—a dark windowless cell, the moans of men bound for the scaffold—until he thought he might retch. Then Tom tugged him into Hog Lane, a scrap of rutted dirt along Spital Field that had all but been turned into a bog by the rain. It was a dirty, ill-reputed corner of the suburbs, one even Kit usually kept his distance from. And Tom’s tolerance for filthy living had always been lower than Kit’s.
Kit tugged his arm free, and Tom stopped walking at once, a darkness settling over his brows. They earned a few curses from the crowd for blocking the middle of the road, but neither of them moved.
“What is this?” Kit said.
“You’re one to ask,” Tom snarled. “I want you to tell me the truth, Kit. And I want you to tell me in public, because evidently you’re being followed at all hours and if I speak to you somewhere unprotected we’ll both most likely be killed.”
He turned his back and pushed into a tavern, a rundown public house in Hog Lane with an emblem reading “The Star and Spur” above the door. Kit hung back, alone in the dirty street. Surely Tom knew that being with Kit had never been safe. Not that first night in Tom’s Cambridge dormitory, and certainly not now.
Finally, Kit sighed and followed after. There wasn’t enough drink in the world to make this conversation bearable, but a pint couldn’t make matters worse.
Kit had never been in the Star and Spur before, but he’d been in a dozen taverns identical to it. No matter the city, Cambridge or London or Constantinople, a man could always find a drinking hole like this. The same smoking fire; the same overpriced, watered-down ale; the same thick-paned window sturdy enough to stop men from being thrown through it. Tom hadn’t chosen it for Kit’s comfort, but it gave him something to cling to nevertheless. Here, at least, he knew the rules.
The drawer, a nervous boy whose stammer was as evident in his manner as his voice, dropped two pints on the table at Tom’s order. He was called away almost at once, summoned by a raucous group of men whose faces were indistinguishable through the strained light.
Tom drank deeply and avoided Kit’s eyes; Kit did the same. The beer soothed the tattered edges of his nerves, not enough to calm him, but enough to help him think. At times like this, he could almost see what his father saw in drinking. He wiped his mouth and closed his eyes. Yes, he’d performed well for Evan, but if he couldn’t talk his way out of this, if Walsingham and Cecil’s machinations cost him Tom’s trust, then none of it was worth anything.
“You lied to me,” Tom said.
Kit drank again, as if he could ease his guilt by drowning it.
“You’re going to tell me who that man was,” Tom said. “Why he knows where you live. And then you’ll tell me why you went behind my back, when you promised you would never. After that, I’ll decide if I can forgive you.”
“Tom, I—”
“Did I ask for excuses?”
Tom’s words were low under the rumbling voices throughout the Star and Spur. It was a good place for secrets that way. Three dozen lives rattling back and forth in the room, the lines separating them faded by drink. Hiding in plain sight. Maybe Walsingham had recruited the wrong man, all those years ago in Cambridge. If Tom had been in Kit’s position, perhaps he would have thought of a better way to keep all of his masks separate.
“Walsingham’s having me do more than watch Strange from the theater,” Kit said.
Tom did not blink. “I gathered.”
“He…” There was no good way to say this, but he had to try. Reticence now would only make matters worse. “Strange has friends. You’ve just met one of them. Friends with a plan Walsingham doesn’t like.”
A plan for civil war. Burning cities, raiding Protestant estates, breaking down the gates of Whitehall, and leaving the queen’s head on a spike for London to admire. There were some things Kit couldn’t bring himself to speak aloud lest he summon them into existence, like a magician pronouncing a demon’s name.
“And why are those…those friends coming to Shoreditch?” Tom murmured.
He had to say it. He had to grit his teeth and say it, and deal with the consequences as they arose.
“Because they think I’m one of them.”
Kit watched as the pieces slipped together into the mad, complete picture. Tom’s hands clenched so tightly around his beer that Kit saw the veins rise around his knuckles. It was anyone’s guess whether Tom would rather have been throttling Kit than a watered-down drink in that moment.
“That’s your game?” Tom said. Kit could hear it now, the battle it took to keep his voice low. If they’d been alone—and thank God they weren’t—Tom would have been shouting. “Play both sides of the field. Christ’s bones, Kit, do you wake up every morning and decide to put yourself in danger? At what point did you plan to tell me?”
Tom’s anger was fully justified. But it was asking a great deal to accept this kind of indignant lecture, as if he’d hammered on the doors of Whitehall and begged Sir Robert Cecil to put him back out in the field. He leaned forward until his ribs brushed the table, bracing for a fight.
“None of this was my idea,” Kit hissed. “I’m trying to stay alive. And I’m trying to keep you alive too. What part of that don’t you understand?”
“Don’t.” Tom pushed his chair back—perhaps a fistfight in a public house wasn’t out of the cards after all. “Don’t pretend this is for me, when this is all you’ve ever wanted, to be London’s hero, darting around in disguise like the Christ-damned Robin Hood of Bankside, and what did you think I was meant to do?”
“It isn’t about you,” Kit said—his ordinary speaking voice now, which given their previous circumspection felt like a full-throated yell. “If you don’t understand that, Tom, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Kit, people will hear you,” Tom hissed.
Kit began to stand, but Tom reached across the table and gripped his shoulder, trying to force him back into the chair. Kit shook him off.
“People always hear me,” he said. “You think a day goes by I’m not being listened to? Think about what that’s like, and then realize why I might want to keep a few secrets.”
Tom remained seated, his face closed. Kit so rarely saw Tom angry, he barely recognized it. Kit grew angry the way he always did, hot and wild and reckless, but Tom retreated into himself, a man chipped out of steel, every edge meant to cut.
“This isn’t what I agreed to,” Tom said.
“It is,” Kit said, and he was yelling now, he couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice. “Every minute you’ve known who I am and you haven’t turned tail and run, this is what you agreed to. Every bit of it.”
More than a few heads in the tavern turned in their direction, no doubt trying to guess what the tall man in the forest-green doublet had done to make Kit Marlowe the poet nearly upend a table to get away from him.
“All right now,” a man said, standing up from a table near the back of the room. “Hard as it is for you, try not to make a scene.”
Kit stared, anger momentarily frozen into shock. He hadn’t seen this man in years. Not since he was a student, throw
n back into the town he’d been born in, aching with guilt from his sister’s death. But one glance from those narrowed, watery blue eyes, and Kit was back in the doorway of a Canterbury shoemaker’s house, with the possessive lean of a shoulder barring his entry. Meg had told him William Bradley came to London often on business. And London was large, but it wasn’t a world to itself. Kit knew more of its haunts than he was proud of, the dimly lit shabby places a cruel man in need of a drink might go. It had only been a matter of time before he and his sister’s husband crossed paths.
Bradley wove through the tables toward Kit, one large hand taking him by the shoulder. Kit shrugged him roughly off. He felt his anger growing, uncomplicated now, eager to settle on this welcome new target.
“Don’t touch me.”
“I forgot, you don’t condescend to the likes of us,” Bradley said. “You’ll get the watch called on you, if you’re not careful.” He tried again to steer Kit out of the tavern, and again Kit threw off his grip. Kit wouldn’t be moved and directed and told what he could say and what he couldn’t. These people—Tom, Bradley, any of them—couldn’t understand what it meant to live as he had to. They never would.
“I don’t want trouble,” Kit said coldly. “Go your way, and I’ll go mine.”
“If only you would,” Bradley said. Kit had forgotten until that moment how tall Bradley was. “You know what lies they’re spreading now? That Will Bradley can’t do a damn thing without the king of Bankside’s say-so, that it’s your money that buys my bread. When I’m the only one who’s ever worked an honest day. You want to bring down the watch, carry on, then. Carry on to hell, and I’ll be glad to see the last of you.”
It was the last thing Kit’s already-frantic heart could take quietly. The panic of roiling civil war and Evan Lloyd’s shadow on the floor of his lodgings, of Walsingham’s muffled cry of pain, of Tom’s frozen anger, and then the broad hand closing on his shoulder, a third time trying to shove Kit out the door. Tom reached out, hoping to steer them both away from what looked increasingly like a fight. But Kit took another step forward. He wasn’t the boy he’d been the last time he’d met Bradley. He was one of Walsingham’s men. He’d watched the axe slice a woman’s neck, glittering comet-bright as it fell. He couldn’t fight Tom, couldn’t fight Cecil, couldn’t fight nameless Catholic rebels. But he could fight William Bradley. And he’d never wanted to see something break so badly.
Kit shot an arm forward and sent the nearest pint skittering across the ground. Beer spilled in a slow-moving pool around their feet. The tavern was dead silent now. Kit never turned away from Bradley, who stood there with drops of beer pattering from the soaked hem of his doublet to the floor.
“You haven’t changed, have you?” Bradley said, his voice low and cold. “Still no idea what rules apply to you. Margaret’s the same way. Stands up for you, doesn’t she? Hasn’t learned her lesson yet, but it’s one I enjoy teaching.”
“Jesus Christ, Kit, don’t—” Tom began.
But Kit’s self-control had fled the scene, leaving only the echo of Bradley’s voice and the yearning to take something between his hands and break it. Meg. Meg, with this man. And he, fifty miles away, letting this man do what he liked. And then it wasn’t Meg’s face before him anymore but Mary’s, severed head lying in a pool of blood and still screaming because that was what happened, you screamed and you screamed and nobody listened to anything but the silence after the screaming stopped, once the war had ended and there was nothing but your wide-eyed staring body in the grass, crumpled and bloodstained like the used sheets on a wedding bed…
Kit threw himself at Bradley, sending him sprawling to the ground.
His fist shattered Bradley’s smile. Teeth bit against his knuckles, blood and spit swimming against a background of darkness. Tom lunged to pull Kit back, but a man grabbed his arm and held him away, trapped in the crowd hungering for a fight.
Bradley wasn’t fit to live. A rat. Something to target, something to break. Kit felt the slick of blood against his knuckles and smelled the hall of Fotheringhay Castle, heard the creak of hanged corpses and the crunch of bone. If the rest of Walsingham’s men could kill without compunction, then he could get rid of this creature, this nothing.
The fist hit his temple before Kit saw it coming. His vision exploded into specks of gold, a shimmer of pain, and he gasped and stumbled, a fraction from falling. He’d been wrong. Bradley was larger than Kit, but that didn’t make him slower.
“I’ll send for the constable!” shouted the tavern keeper, but the crowd pushed him back. Kit had dug his own grave when he opened his mouth. It was for him to get out as he could.
Bradley caught Kit by the collar and flipped him, his back landing with a thud on the floor. His head cracked against the boards. His ears rang. Bradley was twice his size. Dizzy, he scrambled away, landing an elbow to Bradley’s face before a series of blows to his stomach doubled him over, breathless. He retched. Bradley had him flat, his fists, his boot falling, endless, he cringed and shielded his head with his hands, something exploded into his ribs and he screamed with the last of his breath. His vision pinholed down, black around the rim.
This wasn’t a fight. This was a murder.
Thirty-Two
Tom’s sightline shifted through a lattice of arms and shoulders. Kit was hidden by bodies, but Tom heard him cry out, heard the thud of blow after blow. Heard his own heart roaring in his ears. He should have known. Hadn’t he said it himself, that nowhere was safe? The entire city was a trap now, dangers around every corner. It didn’t matter who this man was, whether he was one of Lord Strange’s men who’d found out Kit’s true allegiance or one of the queen’s spies who thought Kit had gone turncoat. Both sides were deadly now, and a single mistake could spell death.
There was no time to think that through. No time for anything. Five minutes ago he’d have punched Kit in the throat himself, but the sound of Kit’s whimper from within the tangle of bodies shut everything else out.
Kit was right. By loving him, Tom had chosen this. He hadn’t known he was choosing it, but he had. And once Tom Watson chose something, he saw it through.
His mind was blank, his body decisive. He shoved through the crowd to the open air at the center. The blade of his knife, long enough for a sword, shone through the half-light.
Bradley paused. Beside him, Kit lay crumpled on the floor, head cradled in his arms. Each breath caught with a whimper, loud against the silence, like a gutted dog. Conscious, if barely. Bradley’s knuckles glistened with blood. Kit’s blood. Tom had never wanted to hurt someone so deeply in his life.
“If you fight him,” Tom said, “you fight me.” Though his chest tightened, his hand did not shake. The gift of a swordsman. Eternal balance.
Bradley scoffed. “You think I give a fuck about you? Go your way, boy.”
Action erased Tom’s fear. The confidence of doing what he had to, of knowing there was nothing else he could have done. “Unless you’re afraid, sir?” he said. The taunt of that sir, cold and sharp as the knife.
Bradley looked Tom over. Sizing him up, Tom knew, and not liking what he found. Tom was taller than Kit, and stronger, knife aside. But a man with blood on his hands couldn’t choose his enemies. The tavern blurred, Tom’s vision sharpening on his opponent as Bradley drew his own knife from his belt. The shimmering, white-hot silence between the challenge and the lunge.
Bradley hesitated.
Tom struck.
The room’s silence broke into panic. Someone screamed. Tom couldn’t understand the words. Wasn’t listening. His tutor had taught him to fight like a gentleman, but hate made him forget all of it. This wasn’t swordplay, this was knife work, the hot-blooded challenge of back alleys where death, not honor, was the final prize. Bradley leapt back from Tom’s first thrust, slashed out in an unplanned, unpracticed flail. Tom felt mad energy rising in him and shifted his
grip. Played it loose. Danced back, letting Bradley exhaust himself. Bradley was all blunt force and determination, but Tom was quicksilver fast.
Watch the knife, he thought, cycling the words over and again. Never take your eye off the knife.
He’d forgotten Bradley’s feet.
A kick swept Tom’s legs from under him. He stumbled, catching himself against the circle of men. Unbalanced, but keeping his grip tight on the hilt. Bradley didn’t waste his advantage. He caught Tom by the collar. Close enough to see the blood cracking on his knuckles. Bradley pulled back, blade flashing in the low light.
That was his mistake.
Tom cut forward and up, slicing the knife between Bradley’s ribs.
Easy as goring a rabbit. Steel cut so well through flesh. It should have been more difficult than that.
Blood stained Bradley’s shirt, spreading outward in scarlet ripples. His knife fell from nerveless fingers to the floor. Steel echoed loud against wood. Tom could hear Bradley’s breathing, thick and filtered through blood bubbling in his throat.
Tom’s father had told him once that the dying were thought to see the future. Through the scrim between this world and the next, they could prophesy the ends of the living and see the realm of the dead. But Bradley didn’t look wise. He didn’t look inspired. More than anything, as he sank back onto the floor, his blood staining Tom’s blade, he looked surprised.
And then if he’d seen anything to tell, it was too late.
Tom wiped his bloodied hands across his breeches. The energy drained from him in a single breath. All he wanted was to wash his hands. The smell of blood was intolerable. He’d killed a man, yes, but protecting Kit was protecting the crown. No one would have expected him to do less.
An innocent man, he thought dully, wouldn’t spend so much energy counting the reasons he was innocent.
A Tip for the Hangman Page 25