The Intelligencer

by Leslie Silbert

  He and Nelly Bull had laid that body on the bed and carried Marlowe out to the cart. The drug Poley had given Marlowe was strong, and he was still unconscious. Then there was just the matter of stabbing the corpse’s eye socket and pouring a bladder of pig’s blood into it.

  When Skeres and Frizer returned for the inquest, it had been easy to ensure that they’d not view the substitute body. Poley had asked the coroner if he could give his testimony out in the garden, as the room above was filled with an oppressive odor. Skeres and Frizer had eagerly followed suit.

  Thinking of Thomas Phelippes, Poley felt satisfied. This time, he had bested his longtime foe, along with thwarting the murderous demands of his own employer, Robert Cecil, sure to become England’s next secretary of state. It was a stunning triumph. His most impressive to date.

  Poley’s only regret was that neither could ever know.

  39

  WESTMINSTER,LONDON—2:48P.M., THE PRESENT DAY

  He was alive. He was a spy. He did not remember her.

  Kate was leaning against a stone pillar near New Scotland Yard’s revolving front sign. A heavy shower had broken out, and rainwater streamed from the edges of her umbrella. The sky had darkened, and she couldn’t see more than thirty yards ahead of her. How fitting, she thought.

  A ring sounded. Her cell phone.

  It was her father. She let it go. What could he say now that could make up for all he had not said?

  An armored car pulled up from the garage, and Kate saw Sergeant Colin Davies through a window.

  Turning off her phone, she walked over to meet him.

  40

  What is it now but mad Leander dares?

  —Marlowe’sHero and Leander

  THEMEDITERRANEANSEA—JUNE1593

  It was a gusty but warm spring afternoon when the skiff was lowered by rope and pulley over the starboard side of the ship. A young deckhand called Hal looked on, puzzled. TheBonaventure couldn’t be more than half a league off the Barbary Coast, home to pirates so vicious they brought tremors to the knees of each and every English sailor, whether he would admit it or not.

  Hitting the choppy waters, the skiff bounced and nearly capsized, then the two young men aboard steadied her and began to row. Straight for the enemy’s lair. Were they mad? Hal wanted to inquire of someone, but the captain had forbidden any discussion of this event. On specific orders from their ultimate master, he’d said, Sir Walter Ralegh. Anyone who breathed a word would be run through and heaved to the deep.

  Standing on the aft deck, Hal watched the little skiff shrink behind them, the heads of the two seamen now no larger than grains of sand. As they neared that faint, blurred line where the ocean meets the sky, he shook his head—with disbelief but also disappointment. He’d enjoyed their company. The smaller one, Lee Anderson, was an expert swords-man and had given him lessons, which was great fun, of course, but it was the one with the eye patch he’d truly miss. The fellow had saved his life. It was considered bad luck for sailors to know how to swim, so when a sail swung loose, knocking Hal overboard two days before, he was sure he was done for. Helpless and thrashing about, he’d been choking and spitting out his last prayers when he’d felt an arm grab him about the chest and begin hauling him to safety.

  Back on deck, a grateful Hal had asked his name. Perhaps it was the chill of the sea or the shock of danger barely averted, but the fellow seemed to have forgotten it. He’d opened his mouth to speak, then had paused, a look of confusion on his face. No words came out. So Hal had spoken for him. “Whatever it may be, I do know one thing, by God. You’re a true hero, you are. A hero.”

  “In more ways than one, you might say,” his savior had said, glancing at his friend, Lee Anderson.

  And then, to Hal’s surprise, the young man had started to laugh.

  41

  BLOOMSBURY,LONDON—3:23P.M., THE PRESENT DAY

  The dragon stood on his desk.

  “Most unusual,” the curator said, examining it through a small glass suspended from his neck. “The diamond pattern, the golden inlay…I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Ming, do you think?” Kate asked.

  The thin, balding man peered up. “The Chinese almost never embellished jade,” he said, tugging on his yellow bow tie. “Particularly not with precious stones. It might be a Mughal piece. I’ll need some time to make an assessment.

  “Will you excuse me?” he then asked, reaching for his ringing phone.

  Kate and Sergeant Davies both nodded.

  Listening to the voice on the other end, the curator nodded excitedly. “Quite intrigued, you say? Oh, yes. It’s lovely.”

  Then his mouth fell open. “She wishes towhat? ” he stammered, beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead.“Today?”

  The bulletproof limousine glided to a stop before the gilded, wrought-iron gates. Two men in well-cut suits approached and conversed with the driver. A few minutes later, the heavy gates swung open, and the limo began moving across the forecourt of Buckingham Palace.

  Kate and Sergeant Davies were sitting next to each other in the backseat. “Might be a different one,” she said, turning to him. “But the letter, the chest—they’re finally making their way into the hands of a Queen Elizabeth.”

  “About time, isn’t it?”

  Author’s Note

  When I began working onThe Intelligencer, I did not intend for Marlowe to survive the Deptford killing. Such speculation about the possibility of a faked death was, to me, the province of the Marlowe-was-Shakespeare conspiracy theorists. But after a former Renaissance literature professor of mine told me his theory about Marlowe’sHero and Leander —a theory readers may remember encountering in chapter 23—I was inspired to change my mind.

  Most people consider the poem to be an incomplete fragment—the opening of a tragic tale that Marlowe never had a chance to finish, perhaps because he was working on it at the time of his death. My professor, on the other hand, suggested that Marlowe may have kept his Hero and Leander alive deliberately. He may have been playing with the conventional form of tragedy, choosing to flout the overwhelming expectation of doom for his protagonists by closing the poem before the night of the fateful storm.

  At first, I was intrigued by the possibility that Marlowe had used that literary technique, but I was not yet tempted to try the same thing with my own doomed character. I did not wish to end my Marlowe story before the night of May 30, 1593, as I was looking forward to dramatizing the still unknown events of that mysterious evening. But when I reread Marlowe’sHero and Leander some time later, it occurred to me that Marlowe might have done more than simply cut off the poem before the night of the storm in order to keep his tragic lovers alive. He might have veered from convention even more dramatically by depicting the fateful storm but changing the outcome, allowing Leander to survive his near drowning and reach the opposite shore.

  In the classical version of the story, Leander swims the Hellespont to visit Hero every night for an entire summer, then drowns when a fierce fall storm hits. Marlowe’s version dramatizes only a single crossing, but I think the poem can be read as a compressed version of the myth.

  Marlowe’sHero and Leander does, indeed, feature a storm. The quote that opens my chapter 40, “What is it now but mad Leander dares?” comes from the moment in the poem when Leander is standing at the edge of the “toiling” Hellespont, staring longingly at Hero’s tower. He then leaps in, begins to swim, and nearly drowns—“the waves about him wound, / And pull’d him to the bottom,” where he is “almost dead.” But then Neptune “heav’d him up,” “Beat down the bold waves with his triple mace,” and “swore the sea should never do him harm.” I think it possible that this wasthe storm—that Marlowe’s Leander escapes the fate of his classical counterpart.

  Looking at the poem this way inspired me to employ the same technique with my Marlowe character—to depict the moment of certain, overwhelmingly expected doom, then allow the tragic figure to survive. The fact that t
he sea god Neptune allows Leander to reach the shore gave me the idea to use a form of pseudodivine intervention inThe Intelligencer. The Tarot reader, you may recall, tells Marlowe, “Barring angelic intervention, you’ll not live to see the next moon,” and at the end of the novel, Robert Poley plays guardian angel, helping Marlowe escape Cecil’s death warrant.

  My decision to end the Marlowe story with his cheating death and heading out to sea was also inspired by his work. InDr. Faustus, shortly before the devils arrive to take the magician to hell, he wishes that he might escape damnation by disappearing into the ocean: “O soul, be chang’d into little water drops, / And fall into the Ocean, ne’er be found.” And inEdward II, when facing death, Mortimer refers to himself as “a traveler,” who “scorns the world” and “Goes to discover countries yet unknown.”

  While the denouement toThe Intelligencer ’s Elizabethan story was influenced more by Marlowe’s poetry than by historical evidence, the rest is grounded in fact to the extent possible, portraying the known events from Marlowe’s final month. A poem signed “Tamburlaine” that threatened London’s immigrants with murder was, indeed, affixed to the wall of the Dutch church on London’s Broad Street on the evening of May 5, 1593. A special five-man commission—one of whom was, in fact, Thomas Phelippes—was charged with apprehending the unknown author. The commission’s men did report finding a so-called heretical document in Thomas Kyd’s lodgings, which Kyd said belonged to Marlowe. Kyd was arrested and imprisoned on May 11 or 12, 1593, and by many accounts was tortured. A warrant for Marlowe’s apprehension was issued on May 18, 1593, and he appeared before government officials two days later. A spy named Richard Baines did write an informant report, entitled “A Note Containing the Opinion of One Christopher Marly, Concerning His Damnable Judgment of Religion and Scorn of God’s Word,” which is believed to have been delivered to the Privy Council on May 27, 1593. And according to the coroner’s report, Marlowe was stabbed to death on May 30, with the inquest and funeral held two days later, on June 1. For dramatic purposes, I compressed the sense of time, so that Marlowe’s final twenty-six days feel more like one week, and I also moved the delivery of the Baines’s report forward, having it precede, rather than follow, Marlowe’s interrogation.

  Very little is known of Marlowe’s career as a spy. In fact, a letter that was sent by the Privy Council to Cambridge University in 1587, in order to squelch rumors that he was a Catholic traitor and prevent his expulsion, is the only reasonably solid evidence that he worked for the secret service. The letter itself does not survive, but the Council’s minutes describe its contents in considerable detail. Marlowe, the letter reportedly said, had no intention of defecting to the Catholic cause; rather he “had done Her Majesty good service, & deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing.” He should be given his master’s degree, the Council urged, “because it was not Her Majesty’s pleasure that anyone employed, as he had been, in matters touching the benefit of his country, should be de-famed by those that are ignorant in th’ affairs he went about.”

  As no one can say for sure what affairs Marlowe actually went about, I relied on the speculations of Renaissance historians for my descriptions of Marlowe’s previous espionage activities. For example, records do indicate that Marlowe was arrested for counterfeiting in the Netherlands in early 1592. That this incident was part of an intelligence operation is a theory put forth by Charles Nicholl in his essay, “ ‘At Middleborough’: Some Reflections on Marlowe’s Visit to the Low Countries in 1592” as well as in his wonderfully gripping nonfiction account of Marlowe’s murder,The Reckoning.

  That Marlowe was assigned to investigate England’s Muscovy Company is pure invention on my part, as is the idea that Sir Robert Cecil, one of the directors, was using company ships to deliver weapons to a Barbary pirate. These choices did not, however, come out of thin air. There is evidence that Marlowe was aware of the Muscovy Company’s illicit arms trade with Ivan the Terrible, and the general manager for the company’s London operations was, in fact, a man named Anthony Marlowe, believed to have been a distant cousin to Christopher. Muscovy men were known to have engaged in smuggling operations quite frequently. It is certainly possible that Cecil, at some point, took part.

  WhileThe Anatomy of Secrets is also a fictional invention, Francis Walsingham’s files really did go missing after his death in 1590, and they remain lost to this day. Thomas Phelippes has long been one of the top suspects. As to the contents of the manuscript, for the most part I gave imaginary solutions to unsolved Elizabethan mysteries. That Anthony Bacon was investigated on charges of sodomy in France is the one account in the fictionalAnatomy of Secrets that is widely considered to be true.

  Regarding Thomas Hariot’s use of a telescope in 1593, I took a liberty. It is not known when he constructed his first “perspective trunke,” but it is unlikely that he did so in 1593. The telescope is commonly believed to have been invented by Dutch eyeglass manufacturers in the early seventeenth century with the technology being disseminated immediately. However, in defense of this scene, Hariot published very little about his extensive scientific endeavors, and since he was an expert in optics and the intellectual equal of Galileo, it is possible that he had constructed a telescope by 1593, though highly improbable. Such an invention would have been an awfully big secret to keep.

  Throughout the historical chapters, I tried to make the details as authentic as possible. The laments Robert Poley overhears at Marlowe’s funeral, for example, were taken from poetry written about Marlowe shortly after his death. Poleywas given a diamond by Anthony Babington, one of the young Catholic conspirators he helped send to the gallows when he was working as an agent provocateur in the 1580s. Poley’s employer, Robert Cecil, did keep exotic birds from the East as pets, and he was, in fact, one of the chief sponsors of Walter Ralegh’s Guiana voyage. He is believed to have contributed the bulk of the sixty thousand pounds Ralegh eventually raised. Regarding the Puritan preacher who grabbed Marlowe’s arm in chapter 22, pamphlets warning readers against intellectual curiosity were in wide circulation at the time, and the image of Icarus plunging from the heavens was a common feature. And though Thomas Hariot left few records behind, evidence does indicate that he conducted many experiments to explore the nature of rainbows.

  As a final note, I would like to say a few words about the real Christopher Marlowe. The mysteries surrounding the life and death of this controversial figure have been subjects of hot debate for centuries. Most of the historical records pertaining to his character, behavior, and beliefs convey the dubious statements of paid informants, literary rivals, and a victim of torture, and as Kate and Medina’s conversation in chapter 25 makes clear, the royal coroner’s account of his death is a very questionable document, depicting a highly implausible scenario. The facts, though tantalizing, are also open to multiple interpretations. That he appears to have worked for the secret service does not tell us he was a patriot of any kind; he may have been motivated solely by a desire for money and adventure. That he faced charges of atheism says very little about what his actual religious beliefs may have been; more often than not, such accusations were a political tool used to discredit an enemy. To be sure, his plays hint at a strong religious skepticism and suggest a profound disdain for his culture’s orthodoxies. They also depict such savage violence and cruelty that many view Marlowe as having been mean-spirited and heartless. However, his plays were most certainly influenced by the competing needs to shock, titillate, and captivate jaded theatergoers in a bloody age; intrigue patrons; survive censorship; and perhaps enhance his pose as a political dissident. Using them to get a handle on the real Marlowe is a tricky enterprise.

  Many Renaissance scholars believe that Marlowe was what we would now call homosexual—a term, as well as a concept, that did not exist at the time. Though no one can say for sure, based upon the homoerotic themes and imagery scattered throughout his poetry and plays, I would imagine he enjoyed both sexes, if not just males. InHero and Lea
nder, for example, it is actually “lusty” Neptune who instigates Leander’s near drowning. Neptune pulls Leander to the seafloor because he thinks the dashing lad is Jove’s immortal boy-toy Ganymede and heaves him backup only when he realizes that Leander is an almost-dead human. I decided to leave the question of Marlowe’s sexuality out of this book, for the most part, because in the few days I was portraying, I wanted to focus on his final intelligence assignment and literary endeavor. Readers may, however, remember that in chapter 12, my fictional Marlowe had a brief flash of disappointment when he learns that the fair Lee Anderson is actually a girl.

  As Marlowe the man is and perhaps always will be an enigma, it should come as no surprise that there are as many different fictional versions of his life and death as there are people who’ve written them. There will undoubtedly be more. But which is the most accurate, we may never know. Several documents came to light this century that added to his murky, fragmented biography, and perhaps more are yet to come. Even so, it is very likely that what happened on May 30, 1593, in that Deptford room will remain a mystery forever.

  Acknowledgments

  Above all, I would like to thank my literary agent and adored friend, Joanna Pulcini, and my wonderful editor, Greer Hendricks, for believing inThe Intelligencer before most of it was written. Their vision, infectious enthusiasm, and unflagging support truly made it happen.

  I am enormously grateful to everyone at Atria Books for championing this book with faith, patience, and style, especially Judith Curr, who loved it from the beginning. Many thanks also to Suzanne O’Neill, as well as to the outstanding art department, sales force, and publicity team.