A Tip for the Hangman

by Allison Epstein

  “Take my place for a minute,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He hopped down off the stage and jogged across the pit, ignoring Will’s protests that he couldn’t manage the prompts, he didn’t know the lines, he wasn’t the one who’d written the bloody thing.

  Saint Saviour’s was nearly visible from the Rose, its four-peaked tower clear against the gray sky of a damp afternoon. The church had once been splendid, though nothing but a shadow of that remained. It looked half naked as he entered, stripped of its finery with only whitewash and plain stone to hide behind. High windows arched over the nave, but the glass was so clouded with dirt and grime that the light spilled through in beams as if at the floor of some great sea. A lone priest stood near the altar, his bald head catching the light, though the crucifix in front of him had fallen into shadow. Each of Kit’s footsteps rang terribly through the vaulted space. Other than the priest, only a few people sat in the dim pews of the main nave, each of their heads bent in prayer.

  And one of them, he saw at the front of the church, was Anne.

  Kit felt his lungs fill with the first clear gulp of air in days. He rushed down the aisle toward her, already framing each movement as part of the story he would tell Cecil. I came down the center aisle, he’d say, I genuflected at her pew and knelt beside her, and when she broke off from her prayer, she—

  When Anne looked up, Kit drew back as if he’d sat beside a monster and not a woman. Anne’s face was narrower, her eyes rimmed with red. She looked at him like Christ on the cross, a silent dead-eyed gaze that looked down on sinners and let them assign the blame themselves. The silence seemed to last a lifetime.

  “You didn’t come last week,” he said finally.

  Her laugh made Kit think of the wind between gravestones. “No. I think you know why.”

  “Please. Tell me what’s going on. I have to know.”

  Anne looked at him one moment more, then spoke without inflection, without anger, without anything at all. “Lord Strange is dead.”

  The words didn’t make sense. They were simple enough, but they couldn’t mean what he thought they did. It wasn’t possible.

  Lord Strange was dead.

  That careless familiarity at the George Inn. The concerned frown behind a cloud of pipe smoke and shadow. Lips outlining silent prayer at a man’s death. Are you angry, Marlowe? This had always been the intention; it was always meant to end this way. But Kit felt as though Anne’s words had severed the muscles in his knees. He thought of the beads of Mary Stuart’s rosary, skittering against the floor, dropped by a nerveless hand. Another tick on the list. Another man killed because of him. Will it be me next?

  It had been. But not because of Kit.

  “How?” he breathed.

  “How?” she repeated. Her voice never rose above a murmur, but it didn’t need to. No one needed to hear her but Kit, and he could hear nothing else. She turned in the pew, her knees pointed toward him. “Poison, as you know full well.”

  Poison. Kit felt the bile rise in his throat.

  “He was at supper in Derbyshire a week past when he excused himself from table, claiming he felt ill,” Anne went on, taking savage pleasure in the way the details struck him. “Thirty minutes later, he was vomiting blood. By morning, they’d called for the undertaker. But you know how poisons are. The expensive ones work fast. And no one even notices a drop in a glass of wine. Helps to have the well-connected on your side, to get the good-quality sort.”

  Kit sat still, feeling desperately exposed, like a heretic at the stake. Strange was dead. Strange, the people’s man. Poisoned. Poison that turned breath to blood, that ate the body away from the inside. Kit’s own insides roiled with acid. His own shame might eat him alive.

  “How—”

  “What do you mean, how? You told them to do it, didn’t you?” It was the closest she’d come to raising her voice, and the vehemence didn’t last. She turned away, red-rimmed eyes trained on the cross at the head of the church.

  This was Cecil’s work; Kit knew it as surely as Anne did. Cecil had given up on Kit’s increasingly scant reports and taken matters into his own hands. He’d had Lord Strange poisoned, no doubt by an agent he’d placed within the Derbyshire household. An agent who wasn’t Kit.

  He clasped his hands until the web of his fingers ached. “I didn’t know,” he said. “They didn’t tell me anything.”

  It didn’t sound like an excuse, not to his ears and not to Anne’s. It sounded instead like a magistrate passing sentence. If Cecil could do this without telling him, if he could sit stoic behind that grand desk of his and take Kit’s reports while he held a stoppered bottle of hemlock in one hand and said nothing about it, then Kit was nothing to him.

  Three weeks ago, he’d have spun any excuse that could save his skin, and he wouldn’t have stopped building his wall of words until he was sure Anne believed him. But now, he had no words left. Words only did any good if someone was listening. Where before he’d been standing in a glass cage, his every action on display for both sides to scrutinize, now he stood in a windowless hallway full of locked doors, shouting in the dark to no one.

  “They didn’t tell me,” he said once more, then let the silence rush through him like fire.

  Anne still didn’t look at him. Her face might have been carved from granite. “I don’t care what they told you,” she said. “I don’t care if it was you who killed him, or who you work for, or what you are. You deserve to die, but I won’t be the one to do it. Your life isn’t worth the weight on my soul.”

  “Anne—” he began.

  “Get out of here,” Anne said, in that same low voice. “I don’t ever want to see you cross my path again. And if you come back, it will be the last thing you ever do. Make no mistake.”

  Shut out. Turned away. Pound his open palm against every locked door and no one would come to answer him. He could scream as long as his voice held, and no one would come. There was only one thing he could do, one choice that was not a choice at all.

  Without a word, Kit rose from the pew and ran.

  Forty-Four

  “Sir, don’t worry,” Ingram Frizer said, grinning from ear to ear. “Do we look like two men who would steer you wrong?”

  Based on Andrew Woodleff’s expression, Frizer knew the man would have answered yes if he’d dared. Of course, the fool was too deep in debt to risk insulting anyone. That was how you made money as a bondsman, wielding both honey and the knife. Bring debtors in with your charm, then close the door behind. Fleecing a few idiots a week in the Bull and Boar’s second-floor parlor wasn’t as lucrative as it might have been, but he was good at this, and being good at something offered its own pleasure. The right slouch, the right angle to your smile, and gamblers like this thought you could move the moon and stars. It was steady going, if slow. Find a rich mark who’d pay up, and Ingram Frizer would be made for life.

  He leaned forward, resting both elbows on the table. “Fifty pounds is no small sum, my friend,” he said. “But it’s nothing we can’t manage.”

  Beside him, Frizer’s partner Nick took copious, silent notes. An idiot and an ass, Nick was, but Frizer needed him. He himself had no head for numbers, and Nick had studied far beyond grammar school. A gentleman’s son, fallen on hard times and then fallen into Frizer’s path like a gift from God. Besides, Nick looked respectable. Barely thirty and almost handsome, with reddish-brown hair, a patchy beard, and a nose only slightly crooked. People trusted a face like that. Frizer himself, nearly six feet tall with a mane of golden hair and a flashy manner of dress that would have been flashier if not for his poverty, was all too aware of what he brought to the partnership. Nick brought a public face and an aptitude for calculation; Frizer the skill, brains, and charm.

  Frizer glanced at the figures Nick scrawled in his ledger, feigning comprehension for Woodleff’s sake, th
en resumed ignoring the whole affair. “We can lend you the fifty pounds, in sterling and commodity,” he said, “to get you through the worst of it. All we ask in return”—he nodded to Nick, who took a swift note—“is something for our effort.”

  Frizer saw a smirk cross Nick’s face, identical to the smirk currently adorning his own.

  Woodleff shifted in his chair. “What do you mean?”

  Frizer shooed away his concern. “Nothing to worry about. But my partner and I need to make a living, same as any man.”

  “That’s to say,” Nick said, “that if you fail to repay your loan by the stated date, the principal will accrue interest at a rate of—”

  “Mathematics,” Frizer interrupted, with a careless wave of his hand. “A dull business. Don’t spare it a thought. I don’t.”

  Woodleff, broke and desperate, had no choice, and Frizer knew it. He could almost taste success as Woodleff took the pen Nick offered, peering at the contract. Fifty pounds. And Lucifer himself couldn’t keep up with the diabolical schedule of interest Nick calculated, the little Cambridge devil. Those fifty pounds would swell to sixty, eighty, a hundred. Frizer could live like a king on that. He closed his eyes, imagining it.

  The door opened, and Woodleff dropped the pen like a poisonous snake. Frizer jumped up, hand traveling to the knife at his hip. Leaning against the doorjamb, Robert Poley regarded the trio with the barest hint of a smile.

  Frizer’s hand did not leave his hip. He might still stab this man before the day was out.

  It had been nearly a decade since Robert Poley first crossed his path, back when Frizer made his living in the illegal boxing matches that kept money flowing in Southwark. He’d been a sure bet back then, penniless and twenty-two and happy enough to adjust the shape of another man’s nose if it put food in his belly another night. He’d made Poley a comfortable sum the night they’d met, knocking out a fellow against five-to-one odds, and since then they’d struck up an occasional partnership. Frizer knew Poley’s business. From time to time, he’d delivered messages and carefully balanced threats to one of Poley’s enemies: a skill he’d honed over the years, and one he was well paid for. But that didn’t mean he was happy to see the man, or that satisfied smirk, or the panic in Andrew Woodleff’s eyes.

  “Apologies, Ingram,” Poley drawled. “I didn’t realize you had company.”

  “What are you doing here?” Frizer said.

  Woodleff glanced from Frizer to Poley, then back to Frizer. “Gentlemen,” he stammered. “I’ve just remembered an appointment I need to keep.”

  In his haste to descend the stairs, he knocked against the scullery maid, who stood out of breath on the landing.

  “I told him, Master Frizer, I said you weren’t to be disturbed, but he wouldn’t—”

  Frizer’s chest flamed with anger. He flung one arm wide, finger quivering toward the door. “Out.”

  The maid dropped a curtsey and beat a hasty retreat. Frizer slammed the door behind her. Poley stood not two feet away, that half smile firmly in place.

  “God’s death, Poley,” Frizer said. He shoved Poley in the chest with both hands, to insult rather than injure. “We had him for fifty pounds. Fifty pounds and half his estate. You couldn’t have waited ten minutes?”

  “Ingram, don’t think I’m not sympathetic,” Poley said. “It’s just that, speaking as your friend, I don’t care.”

  “We aren’t friends, Poley.” Frizer flung himself back into the chair, still seething. Fifty pounds. Christ on high. No matter what Poley wanted, it wouldn’t pay fifty pounds. “You don’t have friends.”

  “No,” Poley said. “That’s true, I don’t.”

  This preening peacock. The audacity of him. “Can’t you take care of yourself for an hour at a go?” Frizer snarled. “You need a whipping boy for a scrape you got yourself in, look somewhere else. I’m not yours to come when you call.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Ingram,” Poley said. “I’m not here for you.” And to Frizer’s total shock, Poley shifted in his chair to face Nick.

  Nick gaped. It was the second time in recent memory his expression had mirrored Frizer’s exactly. “Me?” Nick said.

  “You,” Poley said smoothly. “Robert Poley, by the by. An occasional associate of your partner here, though it seems he hasn’t mentioned me.”

  Nick stared. It reinforced Frizer’s belief that his partner, though excellent with compound interest, was not terribly bright. “How did you know my—”

  Poley swept over and sat in Woodleff’s recently abandoned chair. “Knowing things is my profession. And it’s not every day we find a genuine Cambridge graduate in our midst,” he added, taking a savage sort of pleasure in Nick’s shock. “Not your lot’s usual social sphere. I understand it was the gambling debts that ruined you?”

  Nick flushed to his hairline and said nothing.

  Poley smirked. “I thought as much. I think the Cambridge term for your new profession is ‘cruel irony.’ ”

  Frizer pressed a fist to his mouth, folding the other arm across his chest. It was Poley all over, this playing with men’s fears, but that didn’t make it less irritating. Nick quaked to the worn soles of his boots. He wasn’t cut out for this. Frizer was. He felt at home with the criminals and mountebanks roaming Bankside and the Strand, men who had killed and would kill again. It felt more honest than working for Cecil. Cruel as cats, the queen’s agents, toying with their prey before they broke its neck. It had never been Frizer’s way. Say what you wanted, take it with your fists, and be done.

  “What do you want?” Nick asked. It came out like a whine, which caused him to flush deeper.

  “Information,” Poley said simply, folding one leg over the other.

  “What kind of information?” Frizer said, trying to take charge before this turned sour. Nick couldn’t tell a matter of royal intelligence from a Bankside bearbaiting. God’s bones, Frizer barely trusted Nick to speak to marks, let alone this.

  But Nick silenced Frizer with a curt gesture. He looked braver than Frizer had ever seen him, though admittedly the bar wasn’t high. “You’ll pay for that information?”

  Poley grinned. “Of course.”

  “Then ask away.”

  Anxiety did not make Frizer agreeable. “You’ll pay us fifty pounds, will you, for what you’ve—”

  “Ingram,” Poley said, “for once in your life, be quiet and listen.” He slouched in his chair, one arm draped over the back. “Right, Nick. To it, then. Do you know a man named Christopher Marlowe?”

  Frizer frowned. Marlowe? Christ. So Poley was running after poets now. From the queen of Scotland to the prince of Bankside. How the mighty fall.

  Nick laughed, half surprise and half amusement. “Kit? Hell. Yes, I knew him.”

  “You do?” Frizer said, rounding to stare at Nick.

  Nick pursed his lips. “I know people who aren’t you, Ingram.”

  Irritated, Frizer waved a hand, gesturing for Poley to continue. What did it matter, if Nick knew more about the world than Frizer thought? He could hardly have known less.

  “I wonder if you know how Marlowe leans,” Poley said, nodding at Nick.

  “Leans?”

  “Politically. Religiously. Socially. Anything you like.”

  A good job no one ever approached Nick Skeres for a career in intelligence. His thoughts played clear in his eyes. Nick knew Marlowe, though God knew how. Schoolmates, maybe—Marlowe was said to be a Cambridge man—though it sounded like “friends” would be stretching matters. And Nick knew something that could hurt him. Frizer saw the moment Nick decided he didn’t care. He could follow the thoughts as if they were his own. Marlowe, lording his poetic celebrity over London, while Nick scraped out half a living as a bondsman in the suburbs. In some cases, betrayal made good business sense. Frizer had worked hard to teach Nick that less
on.

  “We never discussed politics,” Nick said, “but he was reckless, wild, even then. Nothing seemed to matter to him.”

  Poley nodded. “Hasn’t changed much, I see. Still dancing his way out of choosing a side.”

  Nick looked between Poley and Frizer. “Side?”

  Poley laughed as if Nick had told a clever joke. “Your old school friend Marlowe is one of the queen’s best spies, Nick. And your business partner here has been helping me with the rougher parts of that work for years.”

  The idea that Christopher Marlowe might be a spy for the queen was a shock to Frizer, but nothing like the thunderclap it seemed to be for Nick. He wasn’t sure which revelation surprised Nick more: that a rogue like Marlowe could be trusted with state secrets, or that a petty criminal like Frizer could. But Nick recovered fast. The next words out of his mouth were confident, as if he’d belonged in this world all his life.

  “If you’re asking if I think he’d betray the crown, I’m certain he would.”

  Poley folded his hands, resting them on his taut belly. “And what makes you think that?”

  “He’s a liar and an atheist and a thief,” Nick said with a laugh, as if he’d waited years to say it. “Do you trust a man like that to know right from wrong?”

  Frizer saw hunger flash in Poley’s eyes and knew at once where it came from. Atheism was a heavy charge. Valuable leverage, if a man without scruples could get his hands on it.

  “You’re certain?” Poley said.

  Nick’s congealed bitterness had started to flow. He leaned forward, gesturing broadly as if drunk. He couldn’t seem to stop talking. “He told me Christ and John the Evangelist fucked each other six ways to Sunday after the Last Supper. That while Joseph was out whoring in Nazareth, the Virgin Mary met a neighbor’s cock and not the Holy Spirit. Shall I go on?”

  Poley raised a finger. He snatched Nick’s ledger and flipped to a new page, on which he began to scribble, blotting lines across the grid. “Say that again,” he said. “Christ and John the Evangelist?”