“My dear man,” he said, heading back in his original direction, “I would rather fuck the devil himself than attempt to seduce you. Rest easy.”
Baines’s rough hands moved faster than Kit expected. They shot out, gripping Kit by the collar, and pinned him hard against the nearest building.
The wall thudded against the ridge of his spine, jarring his bruised ribs. Kit stifled everything but a small whimper. It hurt, but the anger was stronger. His childhood instincts flooded back, sparked by his racing pulse. He could have freed himself and given Baines a black eye to remember this bad decision by, but he remained still. Caution. Quiet. Keep his head down.
“Watch yourself.” Baines spoke low but close. Kit could see every one of his teeth. “Your life is in my hands. Your whore’s too.”
Kit narrowed his eyes. “I’ll remember that.”
Baines pushed Kit away. The back of Kit’s head cracked against the wall, stinging hard to the roots of his teeth. He winced and put a hand to his hair, feeling for blood, but said nothing. If this idiot thought Kit was a risk and a traitor and a sodomite, so be it. At the moment, Kit had broader concerns than what Richard Baines believed.
“Good night,” he said coldly, turning his back.
Thirty-Seven
The door groaned open, and a guard’s torch glared through the dark. Tom winced, his pupils contracting against the influx of light. He sat in the corner of the pit and hugged his knees close. The walls pressed against both his shoulders. His breathing rasped loud in his ears and ached his chest. God willing, the guard would be gone in a moment. The light made Tom want to vomit.
“Which one of you is Watson?” the guard said, sweeping the torch in a slow circle.
Tom shivered. Cleared his throat. The fever had begun about a week ago and had dug in its heels. Since then, he didn’t trust himself to stand. “Me,” he said.
His voice sounded awful. He hadn’t spoken in three weeks, not since Richard Baines had come and taken Kit away, leaving him alone here in the dark.
The guard turned to Tom, then strode across the pit. The light stabbed Tom’s eyes with each step. Tom knew he ought to be nervous but couldn’t dredge up the energy. After enough time waiting for death to catch up with him, it no longer seemed like the worst thing that could happen.
Keeping the torch aloft, the guard crouched beside Tom, there on the shit-reeking floor. Tom fought down a wave of nausea to look at him. No. This wasn’t a guard. Newgate’s jailers would never dare get so close to the prisoners they kept. The man’s face was rough and tanned even in the torchlight, and though he didn’t look disposed toward smiling, Tom didn’t sense cruelty in him either. Even so, Tom edged away, though his sore muscles ached from it.
“Thomas Watson?” the man said.
Tom nodded and said nothing. Newgate had robbed him of speech, of vision, of fight.
“Arthur Gregory,” the man said. “I’ve been sent by a friend to give you this.”
In his free hand, Gregory held a folded paper, like a cat suspending a mouse by the tail. Tom stared. Who would write to him here? What idiot would think a letter could solve anything? Torn between resentment and desperation, he took the page. Surrounded by the dark, the smell, the rats chattering in the corners, it was too easy to forget the man he’d been when free. A man someone would write to.
“ ‘Thank you,’ ” Gregory said, after a pause. “That’s your line, isn’t it?”
Maybe. Not until Tom knew what he’d be thanking this man for. He unfolded the letter and smoothed it against his thigh. One glance at the handwriting—urgent, slanted, as if its owner’s pen couldn’t keep up with his thoughts—and his heart shuddered, in both anticipation and anger. Even in the poor torchlight, he knew. No one else wrote like this.
I’m sorry. As if that does you any good. I’ve petitioned Cecil on your behalf. By “petitioned,” I mean “threatened with a knife to the throat.” You’ll be freed when my job is finished, he says. I will kill him for this, but not yet. Not until you’re safe.
I have no right to ask you to forgive me, and so I won’t. I won’t fall back on the old lines either, that God purifies through suffering. Even if I believed in God, which I don’t, he’d burn us as sinners if he could. Job is the rich man’s way to avoid thinking of the poor man’s pain. We suffer because the world is full of suffering. Nothing metaphysical to that.
This is cruel, and you deserve to hate me, and all of it is my fault, and I will fix this. I promise.
I love you.
Tom laid the letter back against his thigh but did not stop looking at it. Damn him. That was his solution? Keep working and hope Cecil decided a promise to a penniless spy was worth something? He looked at the last, scribbled line, I love you, and winced. Whether the fever or the words made his stomach turn was anyone’s guess.
“Where did you get this?” he said.
Gregory paused, silent but intent. “You sound like death.”
“Give it time. Where did you get it?”
“I work with Marlowe. He gave it to me before he left. I haven’t a damn what it says.”
Before Kit left. He could have screamed or wept or raged, but instead Tom felt a mad laugh rising, and he made no effort to stop it. The laugh bounced and multiplied against the walls, a horde of madmen laughing with him. It spilled over into a dry, hacking cough that bent him double. “Left?” he managed finally. “What do you mean, left?”
“Cecil sent him off,” Gregory said. “I don’t know more than that.”
Of course he didn’t. Kit was never one to tell a person what he was doing. Wasn’t Tom living proof?
“You want to deliver a useful message?” he said hoarsely. “In three weeks, visit my parents near Charing Cross and tell them to claim my body.”
“No need to snap,” Gregory said. Tough as he seemed, Tom’s words had rattled him. “You have enemies, but I’m not one of them.”
Tom set the letter aside and took his head in his hands. He hadn’t spoken this much in three weeks. Alone, he’d forgotten how to speak. How to think. “Why are you doing this? Your master doesn’t care if I die. Kit said as much.”
Gregory cocked his head to the side. “You call him Kit?”
Tom nodded, though this hadn’t answered his question. He suspected Gregory’s mind circled the image of Tom’s body being dragged out of Newgate, smelling of shit and death, limbs twisted, lungs sunken with fever. It should have unnerved Tom, how easy he found it to conjure up that picture. He felt nothing, thinking of it.
“I do,” he said. “I don’t suppose your friends call you Gregory.”
The torch crackled through the silence.
“No,” Gregory said. “They don’t.” He bit the inside of his lower lip. When Gregory spoke again, he spoke with the voice of a man who had surprised himself into honesty. “I don’t turn my back on my partners. You matter to him, so you matter to me. Next time you see your Kit, you remind him of it.”
Gregory didn’t turn his back on his partners. That made one man in this world. The next time Tom saw Kit, he’d kill him. This was Kit’s fault. All of it.
“Will you be back?” Tom said.
With a small grunt of effort, Gregory pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll speak to my master for you,” he said, looking down at Tom. “Do what I can.”
“Charing Cross,” Tom said, hugging his knees again. “Remember.”
Gregory paused. Then, without speaking, he turned. The torch hissed and flickered with his movement as he vanished into the hall.
Tom looked at the letter on the filthy ground beside him. Through the dark, he heard the sound of a rat skittering somewhere nearby. Searching for food, for company, for freedom. A man with less to live for than a rat. The drip of a leak high overhead. The snap and flicker of a torch in the corridor. The murmur of men’s voices, sp
eaking to one another, to themselves, to no one.
Tom took his head in his hands again. Caring nothing for the prisoners around him, he screamed. He screamed until his throat scratched raw and his voice faltered. He screamed until he felt light-headed, until the dizziness spun into nausea and he pressed his forehead to his knees. The scream became a sob. The sob became silence.
I love you.
The rat’s claws scratched again through the darkness, nearer.
Thirty-Eight
In some ways, Kit’s work at Gilbert’s shop was ideal. It was mechanical, mindless, yet artistic. Every day, until the shrinking window of sunlight made detailed work impossible, he shaved and shaped rounds of raw pewter to roughly the weight and thickness of a shilling, then watched Gilbert’s crucible bathe the gray lump in shimmering gold. With so much at stake, it was exactly the kind of work he needed, the kind that left his mind blank and malleable as the pewter in his hands. There was calm in manual work, the same meditative state he’d entered when scrubbing floors at Sheffield. It was enough to make him wonder if he’d had the wrong end of it after all, if he weren’t better suited to life in a workshop than with a pen.
The work and the idle chatter that bounced between himself and his two companions, the hiss of the crucible and the wisps of tobacco smoke shrouding the workbench—it might all have been pleasant. God help him, but he liked Evan and Gilbert. They were the kind of people he’d always longed for in Cambridge, the kind who made Bankside feel like home. Quick, irreverent working men, always ready with a joke, who judged you on what you could do and left your family’s money out of it. Put sunny-mannered Evan Lloyd up against Richard Baines’s unveiled disdain, and it was almost enough to make a man wonder.
But Kit knew their game. The money they forged would go to pay weapons dealers, purveyors of guns and powder outside the eyes of the law. The Spanish Armada of years ago had sunk into the sea without firing so much as a shot on English soldiers, and the money they coined here was resurrecting its bones, animating its soldiers, placing weapons in their hands, and shoving them toward London. He couldn’t afford to forget that. Walsingham would never have forgotten it for a second. Richard Baines never let him forget it either, catching Kit midstride and leading him into taverns and alleys and abandoned churches to wheedle reports from him. In a blink, Kit would put on the mask of a staunch Protestant soldier again, the relaxed counterfeiter left outside. Neither face quite true, neither quite a lie.
And beneath it all, the inescapable reminder that Tom was still buried underground, waiting for the noose, because of Kit.
The coining moved as slowly as Gilbert had predicted, and winter came and settled in for a long stay. Though the canal didn’t entirely freeze over, chunks of ice drifted through its ripples, and the icicles dangling from the eaves chimed like the most delicate church bells. They passed a quiet Christmas alone in Gilbert’s forge, working their way through more wine than Kit had thought possible. Darkness fell early now, until it seemed as though it had been weeks since Kit had seen the sun.
A week after Candlemas, Kit and his companions worked by candlelight in the pitch-black late afternoon, an arrangement that left Kit squinting until his head ached. It was in this hushed atmosphere—dim, intimate, faint streaks of fresh-falling snow reflected through the window—that a messenger arrived.
Kit didn’t rise to hear what the boy said. He left that to Gilbert, who conducted the exchange in rapid Dutch that even Kit, after nearly three months in Flushing, still struggled to parse. A few terse words, a slammed door, and then Gilbert was among them again, his rough features uncharacteristically alight, a long leather-wrapped package under his arm. Kit stood up, hoping his energy looked like enthusiasm and not alarm.
Evan pushed his work aside. “Good news?”
“See for yourself.” Gilbert set the package on the workbench and uncovered it, his usually stoic face triumphant.
Kit, Evan, and Gilbert looked down at the musket lying on the table, resting on its leather wrappings like a crown on a pillow. Kit’s stomach roiled, and he gripped the table to steady himself. Sharp movement felt dangerous, as if every breath might be his last.
“I sent off a purse of our first batch a few weeks back,” Gilbert said. “Our fellow from Antwerp sent this ahead as a check for quality. No one trusts anyone in this business.”
“Wise,” Evan said with a small laugh, “seeing as we’re cheating them.” He reached out one hand to stroke the barrel of the gun.
“All as planned, God be praised,” Gilbert said. He settled back into a chair, where he filled a pipe and lit it from the embers in the crucible. “Marlowe, write to Strange and let him know we’re under way. Assuming a favorable wind, what, first shipment by Ascension Day, would you say?”
“Or sooner,” Evan said. He took the musket and weighed it in his hands, testing the heft. He knew enough not to point the barrel at anyone, but it was the only thing Kit could see, that endless darkness down the mouth of the gun, shrouded in smoke from Gilbert’s pipe.
The first weapon of hundreds. Thousands. God alone knew how many. Enough to man an army, to break down London’s walls and send mercenaries streaming into the streets of Bankside by Ascension Day. Shoreditch burning, the screams from Bethlehem Hospital reaching a fever pitch, mirrored by the death cries of strangers in the street. Ned, Will, Kyd, Henslowe, the lot of them, tattered and broken corpses in a pile along the river, nosed at by dogs while behind them the Rose burned.
And Tom. The doors of Newgate flung open, insurgents releasing their own and taking to the streets, guns shoved into the arms of the faithful. Tom, turning to run. Tom, bleeding out in a narrow alley, his face pale beneath dirt and grime, a thin trail of blood slicing from his hairline like a scar down his cheek. Better to hang than to die that way. Better the scaffold take them both.
“Marlowe?” Gilbert said, the question drifting through a haze of pipe smoke. “What in hell’s come over you?”
“Kit?” Evan set the gun aside. The sound of metal against wood grated Kit’s nerves beyond bearing.
“I’m sorry,” he said, backing toward the door. “I need some air.”
The night was cold, the streets dark, the stars pale and far away. Kit tilted his head back and let the sharp air shock him, his breath escaping in a fog. It had snowed again that afternoon, and a fresh crust of powder brushed the streets. Breathe, he told himself. Just breathe, and think about the rest when you can bear it. You’ve done what you’re meant to. All these weeks, this was what you wanted. Antwerp, Ascension Day. Send word back, and you can—
“A graceful exit,” said Richard Baines from across the street. “You plan to tell me what that was about? Or do you mean to stand there all night?”
Damn everything. Not right now. Kit couldn’t bear it right now. “Please,” he said. “I need time to…to think.”
“I’m sure you do,” Baines said, taking Kit by the arm. “If you were the kind of person I could let out of my sight, I’d let you have it. Now come on.”
Baines guided Kit down the street, toward a shuttered church they’d commandeered for hasty conversations like this one. Kit, mute and rattled, followed. It was too much to think about evading Baines. Inside, moonlight shed a silver glow through the dirty windows. A simple maritime church, wooden pews and raftered ceiling, smelling of salt, and crypt silent. Baines sat in the back pew. Kit stood in the aisle, hugging his ribs, not looking at Baines. His fingers kept picking at the fabric of his doublet. He couldn’t seem to make them stop.
“Clearly you’ve seen something,” Baines said, stretching out his legs. “I saw the boy with the package come and go. So you’d best tell me what was in it.”
“Weapons,” Kit snapped, the word like shattering glass. “What in hell did you think it would be?”
Baines frowned and sat up. “What’s wrong with you?”
What w
as wrong with him? Tom was waiting for the noose and Gilbert had begun importing guns from Antwerp, that was what was wrong with him. Why was he here, when everyone who needed him was in London, everything he’d ever cared enough to protect was across the sea and under threat from the very rebels he was arming? Kit wiped his hand down his face, grasping for calm.
“If you’ve lost your nerve—” Baines began.
“I haven’t lost my nerve,” Kit snarled. Anxiety had flashed hot into rage, and in that moment he’d have given anything for Baines to throw a punch, just to have an excuse. “I’m tired, can you understand that? Everything depends on me and I’m stretched thin and I’m tired and my friends might be dead and it’s more than I can bear sometimes—”
Baines stood up. He towered over Kit, blocking the door. “Marlowe,” he said. “Take a deep breath.”
But Kit would be damned if Richard Baines told him what to do tonight. He shouldered Baines out of the way. Baines, too surprised to resist, stood unanchored in the center of the church, like a saint struck dumb by the divine. Kit would regret that flash of temper in the morning, he knew, but for tonight the only thing he could do was to get away.
The winter air outside slapped Kit’s burning face. His lungs ached with the biting wind, but the cold was healing, purifying. He walked in the direction of the boardinghouse, but once he came to the door he kept going, following the length of the canal until he’d walked all the way to the harbor. Cold wavelets rippled in the wind, which tossed Kit’s hair like a battered flag. Across this sea, England. Across this sea, Strange and Cecil, Whitehall and rebellion.
Across this sea, home, if only he could get there.
Thirty-Nine
Kit woke early the next morning, but it took ages to drag himself from bed. There was nothing to induce him to leave the warm nest of blankets for the frozen city and its thousand dangers, not when all that awaited him was the promise of imported arms and an increasingly mistrustful Richard Baines. Still, he couldn’t delay forever. After his abrupt departure the night before, Evan and Gilbert would need reassuring. He had to be there.
A Tip for the Hangman Page 29