He tried to shrug away from such a touch, too intimate and knowing to be pleasurable, but found nowhere to turn since it was everywhere, and his legs felt too tired to allow him to rise, to allow him to run.
Trembling, he knelt and wished that he would die, or else that he would, instantly, be consigned to the raw attentions of the torturers which, not feeling this soft, would yet be kinder.
The hands, the myriad hands that it felt were touching him everywhere that hand could touch, seemed to sink deeper and, through his clothes, touch his very skin.
Then the touch turned burning, hot, intemperate, and sank lower and deeper into Kit’s being, so it seemed to have captured not inconsequential flesh, but his very soul.
Like a bird trembling between the hands that would wring it, Marlowe sought to escape, but couldn’t. What’s inside cannot be escaped.
With a fearful burning upon his every limb, he collapsed to the muddy street and thought that he’d sealed an hellish bargain.
But something in him laughed, something pushed, like a rider will set spurs to a sluggish horse, something whispered within his brain, “You will rise and do my work now. Morning is nigh, and from now must you spend all night awake and doing my will, if we are to achieve our revenge over our mutual enemy.”
Scene Twenty Two
Marlowe’s lodgings -- a room larger than Will’s and better furnished, with a large bed, covered with a good coverlet. Though the room’s furnishings are minimal, and obviously designed for a room that’s no more than a pied-a-terre within London confines, yet the small writing table is polished oak, the chair before it is an armchair, carved and polished, and the trunk for clothing storage is overhung with a fine brocade cloth. On the bed, on his stomach, lies Marlowe. His clothes are tattered, and blood-stained, as are his hair, his hands and his face.
Even before Marlowe woke, a feeling of heaviness was upon him, a heaviness such as one feels when coming down with an illness or when, having slept after a great grief, one wakes to find that grief undiminished.
Awakening, opening his eyes to the bright light of day coming in through his sparkling-clean windows, changed nothing. A heavy scent of rotted flesh and spoiled meat overhung the room; Kit’s head pounded with the worst of hangover headaches, his mouth tasted like an unswept midden, and every movement of his limbs cost him an agony as though a fiend armed with a sharp dagger worked him over, pushing the tip into his skin and piercing his muscle.
No. Not a fiend with a sharp dagger, but many fiends, with myriad arms and countless daggers, all dancing around Kit and tormenting him.
Aching, Kit lay still for a while, but nothing improved. A heaviness rested upon his stomach as though hot lead had been poured, unsuspecting, down his throat in the night.
He moved not, and he hurt, and hurting he thought he might well move. Pulling himself up on his arms, enduring hellish pain along them, he rolled on his side and lifted himself on his elbow. As he rolled the cover of his bed came with him, glued by a black substance.
His head pounded and he looked as if through a dark veil.
Memories of the night before came in fits and starts, each of them hurting as much as physical movement.
Kit remembered Silver, beautiful Silver in St. Paul’s yard, and he remembered their lovemaking, though both mind and heart flinched from the memory as a man will from touching a bruised spot.
His other memories were darker, more confused. He remembered the drunk -- the monumental drunk -- he’d got with Will but from then on he wondered how much of it was real and how much the effects of wine.
He’d thought he’d seen Will go home to Silver, but had he really, or had his wine-addled brain created it, like he’d heard sailors tell that the sun will create a mirage upon the vast, unmoving ocean?
He tried to shake his head at the thought, but his head pounded so badly that he stopped.
Groaning with the effort of it, he managed to sit up. As for the other memories, the memories of the dark being who’d waged -- as far as Kit could think -- a war for Kit’s own soul, or his life or his mortal body -- Kit couldn’t think which and, indeed, couldn’t remember any of it -- those memories were confused and vague, like a dream had a long time ago and never again visited by reason during waking hours.
He essayed a smile, though his lips hurt with stretching, and told himself perforce he had believed his own plays and his judging mind beneath the waking one had brought upon him that same ill judgment of being punished for trifling with demons.
His anger now.... Kit sat on the bed, and again tried to shake his head, but stopped, as a sharp pain made it feel as if a dagger were worked into his left temple. He cradled his head in black, sticky hands, and wondered how and with what he’d got himself so befouled. He remembered the mud of the alley, the stickiness of it, but this stickiness was greater than any clay, and it had the heavy smell of the slaughter house.
The thought gagged him, his throat working against his mind and body to close, and stop all thought, all breathing, with overpowering nausea.
He must wash. Whatever it was, he would wash, and it would be gone.
Carefully, cautiously, he extended his feet over the side of the bed, and scooted slowly downward, trying to find the floor and feeling as if he should have already touched it, as if nothing, nothing were under his feet but the mouth of a deep-yawning abyss.
His anger, how quickly it had flared the night before, puzzled Kit himself still. His anger always puzzled him. Hot as hell’s own breath upon descending on Kit, it would cloud his mind and every thought. And afterwards, Kit would stand amazed at what he’d said and done within that whirlwind of fury.
Had he really meant to kill Will Waggstick, the much-married burgher of Stratford? He couldn’t have meant it. It couldn’t be. Will was amusing, in an innocent way.
Even if he had -- and Kit’s head throbbed with ache at the very thought -- even if he had somehow contrived to seduce Silver, how would that make him Kit’s enemy?
Surely Kit could not be so foolish that he thought that an elf who’d leave him for Will wouldn’t leave him for just about any other undistinguished man out on the streets?
No. Will was not the problem. Nor was Silver. The problem was Kit and Kit’s anger, much worsened by wine.
He stood up on unsteady legs.
He’d been angry for so long that he no longer remembered at what. Maybe at the childhood companions who’d turned their back on him, when the teacher had favored him and started grooming him for the scholarship at Cambridge.
Maybe at his parents who, once it became obvious their son would attend university, treated him well enough but not the way they treated their daughters. They handled him with cold near-deference, like sparrows catering to the cuckoo in their nest.
He walked unsteadily towards his washbasin that stood on a metal stand across the room.
He’d felt anger too, he thought, at his father, too quick to consign his oldest son to the ranks of scholars and never taking the time or the interest to show Kit about his father’s own craft, that had been passed down from his grandfather and from his great-grandfather before.
Not that Kit had ever felt a great hankering towards making shoes and fitting them to the feet of the demanding gentry. Even now, thinking about such a thing as his ambition brought a low, croaking chuckle to his throat, a chuckle that resolved itself in a fit of coughing.
No, it wasn’t the mean little workshop, the unpleasant work of tanning hides, the back always bent over some piece of leather that Kit envied. Rather, it was that thing he’d never experienced -- his father’s attentive teaching of him, his father’s paying attention to him and looking upon him as a worthy successor to the name.
His father taught apprentices aplenty and, thinking of that, Kit still clenched his hands in anger.
This anger, he thought now, all this anger, that he’d carried with him almost from the cradle, he’d directed at Quicksilver, too, for so hastily dismissing Kit from his bl
iss, so blithely turning him away from paradise.
And yet, that was not the source of the anger that exploded whenever Kit was pressured and often when he drank.
Twice, he’d been involved in street brawls, where men had been killed, and once had he served time in jail for it. Yesterday, he might well have slain Will and, even if Kit could contrive to escape the many other deaths that threatened him -- the enclosing snares of his espionage work and the danger of Cecil, or Essex, or Walsingham silencing of him; even if he could escape the privy council’s enquiry and death by torture or hanging or disemboweling -- killing Will would have got Kit executed more certainly, yet, than all of them.
Kit could no longer afford to be a fool and let his anger buffet him here and there like a rudderless ship on a stormy sea.
And besides, had he ever really wanted to kill master Will?
By the clear light of the new day, Kit couldn’t find it in his heart to feel anything towards Will but calm benevolence.
Kit swallowed the sticky, evil taste in his throat.
He’d get up and clean himself and go to Will and attempt to make peace with him.
Unsteadily, he reeled to his washbasin. His landlady, ever attentive when Kit was in town, and mindful of her manners around learned scholars such as him, had set a large pitcher full of water on the dresser, beside the stand that supported the ceramic wash basin.
Kit poured water into the basin, dipped his hands in it, preparing to splash at his face.
He stopped. The water in the basin, into which he’d dipped his hands, had turned a deep, dark red, like freshly spilled blood.
Kit looked, with wide open eyes at his sleeve, caked with black the same black that had been on his hands.
Blood. How had he got himself all over blood? Had he killed Will, indeed?
No. He had not. He knew he had not.
Yet, breaking down the flimsy barrier of his mind, came a knocking of images too horrible to contemplate. Images of killing and tearing of -- with bare hands and cruel teeth taking human life, and gorging, like an animal, on the still-warm flesh.
Kit looked down at the basin, with his hands in it, and blood swirling over them, around them, all about.
His stomach wrenched within him and, before thought stayed his aching body, he ran to the window and fumbled with the latches that held the glass panels in place and pulling the panel off and setting it, any which way, on the floor, he leaned out of the window and spewed the contents of his stomach onto the street below.
An indignant shout answered the first volley, but then people beneath moved out of the way, and Kit threw up, out the open window, onto the street below, his stomach wrenched and his mouth tasting foul as never before.
At long last, the need to throw up abated, the pushing in his stomach, the gagging at his throat stopped.
Kit felt dizzy and tired and a fine dewing of sweat covered his forehead.
He looked down the brown front of the building, marked with darker, faintly red tracks where the contents of his stomach had fallen. Red wine or blood?
Kit could not tell, nor could he remember for sure what he had done.
With a sob, he retreated back inside his room, and leaned against his wall, trembling in weakness and humiliation, in fear and tiredness.
His heart beat so fast and so hard that it seemed to him to deafen him and, against the disorder of his thoughts, he could no more than interpose words, carefully pronounced, so that upon hearing them he would know what he was thinking and steady the racing horses which, like furious team dragged the unsteady chariot of his thought towards a deep abyss.
So, he spoke softly, to himself, like a neighbor to a brain-addled fool. “Have mercy, Jesu!--Soft! I did but dream.”
And yet, was his dream so unlikely? He remembered the dark power that had taken him, its strength dragging him to commit murder and prey like a dog upon dead bodies. Was it so unlikely a power would do that? When Kit Marlowe’s hands were full tainted already, with the blood of innocents?
How many people had Kit turned in? How many had died under torture. How many hanged? “Oh coward conscience, how do you afflict me! Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.”
He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then shuddered thinking of the red trail his sleeve had left behind. Fresh sweat sprang from his forehead, and red-tinged beads trembled before his eyes.
His heart beat so fast it might break and he wanted to run, run, run, away from himself, his tainted soul, his crimes, old and new. “What do I fear--myself? There's none else by: Kit loves Kit; that is, I am I. Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.”
He shook, and trembling walked to the basin, and, trembling, dabbed the bloody water at hands and cuffs, at face and arms, and, like a maniac possessed of fire and driven by his madness, like a horse inflamed by spurs or like a fanatic by religious mania that makes him dance upon the street he grabbed the basin in both hands, threw the blood-red water out the window, to further screaming from the passerby. Then back again, and he filled the basin anew from the tall jar. “Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why: Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?”
He rubbed his hands in this new water, which anew was made red by his touch, while his mouth spoke on, and on, in fearful rant. “Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? For any good that I myself have done unto myself? O, no! alas, I rather hate myself for hateful deeds committed by myself! I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.” He poured the now red water out, filled the basin anew.
“Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter. My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain. Perjury, perjury in the highest degree.”
The water ran out and, running to the door, he opened it. Upon first touching the iron doorknob, Kit flinched, because the thing felt red-hot, burning his palm. Why and how had this knob got hot?
He shook his head. No matter. Grabbing his blanket from the bed, he dragged it to the door, and used a tip of it to protect his hand as he opened the door.
With the door open, Kit hollered to the cool, dark interior of the house, for more water to be brought and, while waiting, paced back and forth the narrow confines of his room.
“Murder, stem murder, in the direst degree; all several sins, all used in each degree, throng to the bar, crying all, 'Guilty! guilty!' I shall despair. There is no creature loves me; and if I die, no soul shall pity me: Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself?”
He heard steps upon the stairs and, pacing still, tried to still his tongue that would not be stilled. Clenching his teeth upon his own, fearful words, yet he could hear his muffled rant, the words echoing inside his head like accusations.
“Methought the souls of all that I had murdered came to my room; and every one did threat tomorrow's vengeance on the head of Marlowe.”
The buxom goodwife appeared on the door, attired in white kirtle, white cap, and shrank fearfully, staring at Kit, but still came within, with both hands carrying her bucket of fresh water.
And Kit bowed, wondering how fearful his countenance might be, and said, “I thank you, I thank you. I got fearfully spattered. A dog run over by a cart and I was near and suffered the blemish. A dog. A dog. Thanks good Mistress, thank you for the water.”
But the woman, as if warned by presentiment that all was darker than Kit would have it be, hastened from the room, walking backwards and never once turning her back on him.
Kit followed her and closed the door. He must go to Will, right away, and assure himself Will was still alive. As for these dark coils he’d fallen into: madness or possession, guilt or anger, he’d uncoil them yet, and he would run from death, to Scotland or France or some far distant land and there live, in fearful isolation like cloistered nun, till his sins were expiated and his guilt stilled.
But first he must get clean. He removed his clothes, and, scooping clear water with his hands, th
rew it at his face, only to see it fall, again, as red as crimson blood.
Looking at his bespattered hands still filled him with nausea.
Deep from within the house, he heard steps and noises, and stopped, imagining it the constables, come for to arrest him of capital murder that yet he didn’t fully know if he’d committed.
He thought he heard a knock upon the door, but listening heard not more. “Whence is that knocking?” he said, and startled upon saying it, and, chuckling in his throat, he trembled at the sound. “How is it with me?” he said. “When every noise appalls me? What hands are here?” He lifted his hands from the basin and stared at the red stains in amazement. “Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas in incarnadine, making the green one red.”
Talking to himself, he knew himself already mad. And yet he must hence and make madness sane or else die, and thus end all reeling thought.
Scene Twenty Three
Will’s room. Will is asleep on the bed on his stomach, with Silver’s glimmering blanket sideways over him. Through the window come the pale light of morning and the sounds of a wakening street: metal banging on metal, from the forges and workshops, peddlers and merchants calling clientele and extolling the virtues of their services, carts rumbling slowly along the rutted street.
Will dreamed and knew he dreamed, but a disturbing, bottomless dream, a falling into darkness, a sleeping oppression like a scream never uttered, like the breath that, fugitive, leaves the sleeper’s mouth, and makes him gasp and beg for air and life.
In this bottomless darkness, he saw Silver, and Silver smiled at him, red, soft lips poised for grace and life and joy, white skin flushed with just a hint of pink, arms held open, in welcoming gesture.
All Night Awake Page 49