A Tip for the Hangman

by Allison Epstein

  “Your work wasn’t entirely useless,” Cecil said. “It’s confirmed the story you told before you left. And I imagine this interruption will slow Strange’s preparations for war. Evan Lloyd and Gifford Gilbert will be held at the Tower, where I will personally ensure their sentences are carried out within the fortnight.”

  Kit kept his eyes on his boots. He thought of Gilbert’s skilled hands and brusque pride in his work, Evan’s easy smile. The three of them in Gilbert’s workshop late at night, savoring the taste of wine and the sound of their own laughter. Yes, they’d been preparing an army, weapons enough to raze a city. But Evan Lloyd, that kind man with his warm handshake and calloused palms…

  The man who would let London’s streets run with blood. Who’d caressed the barrel of a musket as if it had been a gift from kings.

  The frightened man praying in a prison cell.

  The silence stretched endlessly. Kit knew this was a test. Cecil wanted a reaction, a traitor’s desperate plea to save his Catholic friends from the rope. Kit raised his head, chin tilted boldly up, and said nothing. It had always been his job to ensure that Gifford Gilbert and Evan Lloyd would die. All he could do was try not to join them.

  At last, Cecil flicked an unconcerned hand in Kit’s direction, as if clearing a cloud of smoke. “Baines, release him.”

  Baines spluttered an incoherent protest. “Sir—”

  Cecil silenced him with a sharp raise of his eyebrows. Scowling, Baines wrenched Kit’s wrists toward him, nearly tearing Kit’s right shoulder from its joint. Kit yelped, unable to stifle it. Baines snapped open the cuffs, and Kit’s arms floated to his sides, as if they belonged to someone else. He rubbed one wrist with the opposite hand and winced. Thick rings of blisters had risen where the iron chafed against his skin.

  “Marlowe, you will maintain your position,” Cecil said. “I cannot risk replacing you with another agent at this stage in the proceedings. But from this moment, consider yourself warned.”

  He bit his lip and said nothing.

  “You will report to the Privy Council at eight o’clock Thursday,” Cecil said, “and each Thursday following, until you are informed to the contrary. I will expect detailed reports of your actions and your findings. You are expected to follow orders to the letter. No improvisation, no initiative. Behaving otherwise will be taken as proof of your disloyalty and will result in immediate consequences. Am I quite understood?”

  More surveillance. More men around every corner, Catholics and Protestants both. Cecil hadn’t dismissed the hangman. He’d told him to wait. And he still hadn’t answered the only question Kit cared about.

  “Yes, sir,” Kit said. “But you gave your word.”

  Cecil’s expression did not change, and Kit’s body flashed cold. That was it, then. Cecil had gone back on his promise. Idle words, tossed off to make sure Kit followed orders. And the moment he was across the sea, a quick note to the provost of Newgate, Get on with it then, and the scaffold would be readied for the next morning. Kit found himself praying from pure reflex, needing someone to beg favor of. Please. Let me be wrong. Let him have remembered his promise.

  Then Cecil nodded. “Thomas Watson was released from Newgate three days ago, when I received confirmation from the magistrate of Flushing of your return. You might lie as you breathe, Marlowe, but I, at least, keep my word when I give it.”

  Kit’s knees buckled. The news, after months of living with the knife to his throat, was too much to bear. He sank to one knee, bracing himself on the floor. His breath came tight, but every lungful tasted like heaven. Tom was alive. Nothing mattered beyond that. Not the way Baines looked down on him like an insect that had crawled into Westminster, not Cecil’s barely concealed sneer, nothing.

  “Thank you, sir,” Kit said quietly.

  “Thursday,” Cecil said. “Eight o’clock. Until then, you are dismissed.”

  Kit forced himself to stand. The walk out of the sun-flooded room, Cecil and Baines watching every step, seemed to stretch for miles, but he bore it with as much dignity as he could.

  The moment he passed through the door, he broke into a run toward Fleet Street.

  * * *

  —————

  Out of breath and faintly light-headed, Kit stood outside Tom’s Fleet Street rooms. The run had been ambitious, given that he hadn’t slept or eaten anything worth speaking of since well before the prison ship departed. But now that he found himself here, he wasn’t certain that exertion was entirely to blame for the light-headedness. He could see a sliver of light under the door, but he heard no movement from within. Perhaps the room was empty. But after so long in Newgate, where else would Tom long to go but home?

  Please, he thought, reverting to the eerie practice of praying to no one. Please. Help me do this.

  With the awful sensation of shouting into a grave, he knocked.

  A moment of silence, and then Tom opened the door.

  It was all Kit could do not to gasp. Tom looked terrible. He had lost an alarming amount of weight, leaving him swimming in a soft linen shirt that had once fit him perfectly. Deep shadows played beneath his eyes. His hair was poorly cut, and specks of blood flecked his cheek, as if he’d sat down his first day out of prison with a razor and sliced off his hair and beard with trembling hands. But least familiar of all was the set of Tom’s mouth, lips pressed tight, and the half step he drew back when he saw Kit outside his door.

  Kit felt the screws tighten in his chest. He wanted to hold Tom close and absorb his pain. Wanted to apologize for a week, a year, ten years, whatever it took to erase what had been done. Wanted to scream so the whole street would hear, Stop looking at me like that, do you think I did it on purpose, do you think I wanted this? Instead, he wrapped his arms around his chest and waited. Tom’s silence reminded Kit of churchyards.

  “You’re back,” Tom said. His voice, like the rest of him, was colder now.

  Kit nodded. “Less than an hour. I came from Westminster.” Not that Tom cared, but if Kit didn’t speak, he’d be left with nothing but the shame, and that was abject enough already. Tom should have flayed Kit’s skin from his bones with a penknife, and it would be just punishment for what he’d done.

  Tom approached until they were an arm’s length apart. It was beautifully close, and yet farther apart than they ever would have stopped before. Kit felt Tom take him in: the open sores on his wrists, the smell that had woven into his clothes after two holding cells and a prison ship. Flushing had worn him down in other ways as well, ways most men wouldn’t be able to see—but Tom had never been like most men.

  “You look like hell,” Tom said finally.

  It was so blunt, coming from this haunted, reduced version of Tom, that Kit found himself wanting to laugh and cry at the same time. Instead, he took a step nearer. Tom watched him, hesitant. It was like trying not to spook a deer.

  “Can I come in?” Kit asked.

  Tom’s time in prison had left his emotions close to the surface. Kit watched the anger pass through him, leaving its traces on every muscle. And behind the anger, something Kit couldn’t name, but that he found himself staking all his hopes on. Something that came after the anger, and stayed longer.

  “This was your fault,” Tom said. “Everything that happened to me. It was all your fault.”

  Kit nodded. “Yes.”

  “I should hate you.”

  “You should.”

  Tom’s brow lowered. “Stop agreeing with me.”

  “All right.”

  “Damn it, Kit—”

  It was stupid. He should have waited. Let Tom work out his anger, his blame, all of it justified, Kit deserved it all. But he couldn’t help himself. Months since he’d seen this man. Months of waking in the middle of the night, cold and panting, having dreamed him dead. And now Kit was in London, standing outside these sparsely furnished Fleet
Street lodgings, and here Tom was. Alive. Breathing. Kit rested his hands on Tom’s waist and pulled him close.

  Tom froze. Stunned that Kit had dared. Then Kit felt his bitterness melt, and he rested one hand on the small of Kit’s back.

  “Can I?” Kit asked.

  Tom hesitated. His lips parted, choosing between responses. To forgive, or not to. Then Tom let out a small breath, and Kit heard it in his voice, the ghost of a smile, the memory of something beautiful raised from the dead.

  “You’re impossible,” Tom murmured. And he embraced Kit, and led him inside.

  Under any other circumstances, this would have been cause for a grand reunion. Affection and lust tangled together, each hungering for the other’s body after so long away that nothing could keep them from making love, not even if the queen herself were in the next room. But it wasn’t like that now. Tom held Kit close and kissed him, slowly, gently. Then without either saying a word to the other, Kit slipped off his boots, and they climbed into Tom’s bed, still dressed, and nestled together beneath the blankets.

  For the first time in months, Kit felt the muscles in his back unwind. He unclenched his jaw and sighed into the pillow, while Tom settled in with his chest against Kit’s spine. He could feel Tom’s breath, feel the stubborn pound of Tom’s heart against his own back, sense the slight pressure from each of Tom’s ribs. Tom lay one hand over Kit’s stomach, and Kit held it close, briefly raising it to press a kiss against Tom’s knuckles.

  “I shouldn’t forgive you,” Tom whispered in his ear.

  “I know.”

  “But I’ve missed you,” Tom said. His voice, soft as it was, broke over the last words. “So much. Even when I thought I might kill you, this was all I ever wanted.”

  “I love you,” Kit said, because it was the only true thing he could say.

  Tom sighed and held Kit closer, and the world shrank until it contained only this bed and the warmth of Tom’s arms. “I love you too. Don’t ever leave me again.”

  Kit smiled and closed his eyes. For the first time in God knew how long, he slept easily, and dreamed of nothing.

  Forty-One

  The trials of Evan Lloyd and Gifford Gilbert were swift, efficient, and unsurprising. Twin guilty verdicts, released promptly on each other’s heels, executions proclaimed for subsequent days within the second week of March. London greeted the news with its usual cruel joy. Hangings were a de facto public holiday. Half the city would take off work and turn out to Tyburn to watch two Catholic conspirators jerk and twitch.

  The morning of the hanging, Kit and Tom lay in bed together in Tom’s rooms near the Fleet, where Kit had moved after his return. He’d intended it to be a temporary solution until he found a place of his own, but after a week of living with Tom he couldn’t bring himself to leave. To hell with the danger. If Cecil had him executed, it wouldn’t be for this. And with dreams of Tom’s gutted corpse drifting back more nights than not, he couldn’t bear to have the length of a city between them.

  Besides, he wasn’t the only one with trouble sleeping now. Though they never spoke of it, he suspected Tom needed him close as much as he needed Tom. What had happened to them, in Flushing or in Newgate, laid a weight over their silences that was impossible to escape.

  The same weight that forced Kit to attend this hanging, when he would rather have been the one sentenced.

  Kit was still curled up with his head on Tom’s collarbone, nestled against his side. Tom had wrapped one arm around Kit’s shoulders. His other hand gently traced the ring of scars around Kit’s wrist: healing well, but still tender. Beneath the blanket, Tom’s newly angular body was warm against the wind outside, freezing even as spring drew nearer. Hard enough to leave this for any reason. If he could have shut out the world and existed only in this bed, he’d have done it.

  “Are you sure?” Tom asked.

  “I owe him that,” Kit said. “He’s going to hang because of me.”

  “He’s going to hang because he’s a traitor. That’s not because of you.”

  Kit shook his head. “You don’t know him. I have to go.”

  Tom sighed, then shifted to kiss the top of Kit’s head. “All right. But I’m coming with you.”

  God forbid. Tom, standing there at Tyburn, looking up at the scaffold that, if anything had gone wrong, would have been the last thing he ever saw. He couldn’t bear to imagine Tom anywhere near that Golgotha, the bloody boards and well-serviced ropes. “Tom, you don’t have to—”

  “I know I don’t have to,” Tom said.

  He sat up, and Kit saw the determination on Tom’s still-hollow face. Some of the color had returned to his cheeks, and Kit had seen to it that he was eating well, though his appetite had shrunk almost to nothing. He was getting better, and would be better still, given time. But being reckless, moving too fast would help no one.

  Still, Tom’s resolve didn’t waver. “You don’t have to do everything alone, Kit. Not this. I wouldn’t offer to come unless I meant it.”

  I don’t want you there, Kit tried to say. Please don’t.

  But lying to Tom had gotten them here to begin with. And he did want Tom beside him, selfish and troubling though it was. For that long, slow walk to the gallows, if nothing else.

  “All right,” Kit said. “Come on, then.”

  * * *

  —————

  London had three primary sources of entertainment: Bankside’s theaters, Southwark’s stews, and Tyburn’s executions. Kit had so far avoided the last. He dreamed of enough disemboweled men, enough women’s heads on spikes without needing to see them in daylight. He and Tom kept to the edge of the crowd, a writhing mass spilling around the scaffold, north and west of the city walls.

  The crowd. He’d spent so much time fearing the hanging that he’d never stopped to think of the people surrounding it. But Kit had seen crowds like this before—recognized some of the faces from it, calling to one another, laughing as though it were any public holiday. He knew these people: the same people he saw five afternoons a week at the Rose. There, they’d flocked to Bankside and spent their meager pay to see Tamburlaine slaughter Saracens and women and Moors, Barabas the Jew boiled alive, Lightborn the assassin leaving Edward and his lover writhing in blood and smoke.

  Was this any different? He’d always thought it was. The people want to believe their anger is worth something, Strange had said. But did they? Kit wrote death to purge it from his mind; London watched death for the theater of it. They’d revel in real death like poetry, and when they left, life would wash the blood from them like rain, and they would return to their work, to peace.

  He would never see these people the same way again. He should have known this about them long ago. He might have done everything differently if he had.

  Tom glanced at Kit, then, without speaking, took his hand, pressing it tight. In a crowd like this, no one cared anything for them. They could risk it. Tom’s skeletal hand was warm and steady, slowing Kit’s trembling.

  When a pair of guards brought Evan Lloyd to the scaffold, Kit gripped Tom’s hand so hard he saw Tom wince.

  After weeks in English custody, Evan barely resembled himself. Tall as a free man, he had shrunk in prison, bent and battered, moving so gingerly it made Kit nauseated to think about it. His fair hair was lank and dirty, and the shadow of a beard discolored his hollow cheek. He looked down at his feet. Kit couldn’t see his eyes. Wide and innocent, those warm eyes, those easy jests, that kind laughter. The extended hand in the underground chamber in Strange’s library, helping Kit to his feet. The country boy and his calloused hands.

  They stood far enough away that Kit couldn’t hear the executioner, which was only half a blessing. Kit already knew the accusations. He knew the sentence. He knew everything.

  The hangman circled Evan’s neck with the noose, and only then did Evan look up. Kit’s heart
shuddered. Evan’s eyes flashed, bright and daring, with a fanaticism Kit knew. The same swirling danger that had flamed through Mary Stuart. The ferocity of a man who had seen death and no longer cared. It would have been easier, Kit thought, if prison had broken Evan. If Kit hadn’t seen the saint trapped within him break free in fire. He hardly recognized this man. Cecil had turned a man Kit knew—a workingman, a friend—into something frightening.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” Evan said, chin up and bold. His voice was not loud, but it carried straight across the years, to Mary in the shadow of the axe.

  Kit swayed, an inch from fainting. Tom took him by the shoulder, keeping him steady. “Kit, let’s go,” he said. “You don’t have to—”

  Kit shook his head, and his vision cleared. His jaw ached from clenching. “Not yet,” he said.

  Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, had been allowed to finish the prayer. Evan Lloyd, nobody from nowhere, was not extended the courtesy. The noose tightened on the word sinners, and the platform dropped, and the body shuddered, a wild macabre dance, a trembling.

  Kit, damned forever as a coward, could not look. He turned away, Tom’s hand on his shoulder, to the crowd.

  He saw the man at once, as if he’d been meant to. The usual florid doublets and cloaks were gone—out of place for the occasion—but even in muted black he was a man who would draw Kit’s eye anywhere. He looked up at the scaffold, his sensitive lips moving in the clear cadence of prayer. Eyes locked on the body, which would still be twitching from the rope, some minutes yet in dying.

  Of course. Lord Strange wouldn’t abandon his followers without the last rites of their faith. In his mind, his revolution was for men like Lloyd as much as for his own gain. If it had been Kit hanged in Strange’s service, his patron would have stood here just the same, speaking the same prayer for Kit’s soul.

  As the body on the scaffold stilled to a shiver, then to a slow revolving sway, Strange turned away, and his eyes locked on Kit’s. It wasn’t hate, what Kit saw in those eyes. But it was an order, one he didn’t dare countermand. He had to speak to Strange. Had to explain, or try to. If Cecil and Baines thought he’d betrayed their cause, Strange had twice as much reason to think so.