by Louise Welsh
‘It’s hard to light upon beginnings. Months ago, when the theatres first closed, I found myself in difficulties.’
He hesitated.
‘What kind of difficulties?’
‘The usual kind. Some men came to my assistance.’
‘They lent you money?’ Blaize nodded. ‘For love?’
He laughed.
‘The days when my love could bring an income are long past. No, I was to make their investment grow, though I needed it to live. When the time came to repay, I found myself without even the principal.’
‘And no plan?’
‘I thought perhaps the old man,’ he wiped his face. ‘I thought perhaps he would help. The sum he advanced was too small.’
‘So you killed him?’
‘No! Yes.’ He shook his head. ‘Not straight away. This all happened months ago, before you departed for Walsingham’s.’
‘So even then there were plots against me?’
His sigh hung in the air.
‘I met them to ask for time. I knew that as soon as the Plague lifted I would have a means to make money. But they gave me a beating, threatened my life, then offered me a way out.’
‘Your life for mine.’
‘It wasn’t so simple. They represented powerful men. They told me that if I thought of a way to bring you before the Council then these men would free me of my debt.’ Blaize’s voice grew querulous. ‘You’d abandoned me to the Plague and the city. I did as they asked to save my skin, trusting you to shake yourself free. You have before.’
I shook my head in wonder. He had killed Kyd, Grizzle and me, for a bag of gold.
‘I would have given you money.’
‘Money and contempt.’
There was a loathing in his voice I hadn’t heard before. A realisation dawned.
‘It wasn’t just the money,’ I whispered. ‘You wrote those notes. I knew you jealous but I never guessed the depths of your envy. You hate me.’
Blaize shook his head.
‘You took my love and warped it. Laughed at my literary works. Introduced me as one of the finest actors in London, never the finest. Played tricks on me. Made me step through Hell’s mouth then gave the magician’s role to another, leaving me to play the servant once again. You cast me in the role of murderer and so I became one.’ He dropped his head. ‘But hate has fled now that we’re equals.’
I looked at his blood-spattered form hunched against the wall and laughed.
‘Some Faustian King you’d make. You’re a half-rate actor and a no-rate poet. A scurvy cove who kills old men for effect. You leave your little notes to add more theatre to the chase, but also because you needed me to find you. To be your audience, admire you in the role of killer, when all the time you’re just the hired helper of a hired hand. I’ll kill you with as much regret as I’d kill an insect. You’ve never been my equal, never will be.’
A spasm crossed Blaize’s face, but he managed to grin through it.
‘The dead are equal.’
I leaned in close, scored another cut across his face and hissed, ‘The dead are dead.’
Blaize shuddered in pain, then forced a laugh.
‘You always had a way with words. So you mean to kill me?’
‘Do you doubt it?’
‘No.’ My lost friend shook his head. ‘You and I have reached our final act.’
‘My final act will be to kill you.’
He leered, his grin shining wolfishly in the dark. It was a look I’d loved and I struck out once more with my sword hoping to slash it from his face. Blaize screamed and put his hand to the flap of flesh hanging from his cheek. He whispered, ‘One last kiss and I’ll save you a task, dead man.’
And shoved his bloodied self against me, his lips scraping my brow. I slammed him into the wall and Blaize’s wild laughter rang through the deserted hallway.
‘Now, or I’ll do it for you.’
I watched as he unfastened the bodice, dropping the dress to the floor, standing before me in only his britches, exposing the chest I had lain on, the dark hair that tangled across his breast, then trailed like an arrow to his navel and below. Desire caught me unawares. My fingers tingled with the anticipation of touch. But the thought of Kyd and Grizzle stayed me. I watched as Blaize pulled out his dagger and turned its cut-throat blade upon himself. Looked on as he winced at its contact, not in pain but at the iciness of the metal against skin that would soon feel nothing. He hesitated.
‘We travelled far together. Will you hold my hand at the start of this journey?’
And I spat on him.
‘Even if we meet in Hell I’ll damn you.’
A tear leaked down his cheek. He wiped it away and pressed the knife further, wincing. He saw how it must be done and turned to face the wall, preparing to dash himself against it and fall on his blade, Roman style. I looked away. Heard Blaize take a deep breath, that blew into a warrior yell, then felt a rush of air as his body charged towards me and he turned, knife in hand, lunging at my throat. But I had known him long times and had my own blade waiting. I ducked his move, then caught him close, sticking my knife deep into his belly. His eyes rolled back to meet my gaze.
‘You were never Tamburlaine,’ I told him, ‘just a half-rate actor. No match for fear or fatal steel.’
I held Blaize to me for what seemed like an age, feeling his gasps fade into sighs, twisting the dagger slowly, until I realised the heat of his breath was gone and let the body crumple to the ground, softening his descent though I knew he could feel no more pain. My comrade lay broken at my feet, his face a bloody mess, but his eyes the same deep brown I’d loved. I turned my back and walked away, scraping my sword down the wall of the staircase in a rattle that couldn’t drown the silence.
*
Last night I received a summons to a house in Deptford. There I will be held to accounts, which cannot be squared. Life is frail and I may die today. But Tamburlaine knows no fear. My candles are done, the sky glows red and it looks as if the day is drenched in blood. I finish this account and prepare for battle in the sureness that life is the only prize worth having and the knowledge that there are worse fates than damnation. If these are the last words I write, let them be,
A Curse on Man and God.
Christopher Marlowe
30th May 1593
Christopher Marlowe was knifed to death at a house in Deptford, on the evening of Wednesday 30th May, 1593.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The death of Christopher Marlowe is a mystery which will never be solved. History has bequeathed us a tantalising framework of facts – the Elizabethans were as prolific as the Stasi when it came to official documents. Yet the facts can’t tell us the full tale and historians’ theories on Marlowe’s death are ultimately well informed, meticulously researched speculation .
The debate is not confined to historians. Type Christopher Marlowe Death into any Internet search engine and you’ll raise thousands of websites and chat rooms devoted to the poet’s demise. American coroners debate the nature of his wounds, conspiracy theorists think his death a ruse designed to cover escape and believe Marlowe the author of Shakespeare’s better plays. It’s cheering that a mystery, which was a source of conjecture and rumours in the 1590s, still exercises so many 21st-century minds.
Thomas Beard in his Theatre of God’s Judgement (1597), a series of obituaries relishing God’s revenge on wayward individuals, has no doubt that Marlowe’s atheism was the cause of his untimely end. Beard alleges that Marlowe’s hand was grabbed by his opponent in a knife fight, and the blade forced into the poet’s own eye. A scenario that pleases Beard no end.
‘… hee compelled his own hand which had written those blasphemies to be the instrument to punish him, and that in his brain which had devised the same … hee euen cursed and blasphemed to his last gaspe, and togither with his breath an oth flew out his mouth …’1
Another theory is that a serving man, a rival of Marlowe’s ‘in his lewde loue’, ad
ministered the blow.2
According to the official inquest, Christopher Marlowe, Ingram Frizer, Robert Poley and Nicholas Skeres were companions in a day-long drinking and feasting session which was reaching its close by six that evening. Witness accounts have Marlowe reclining on a bed. The other three still at table, Frizer sandwiched himself between Poley and Skeres with his back towards Marlowe. The poet and Frizer began arguing about who was to pay the bill. Marlowe, suffused by anger at some statement of Frizer’s, leapt from the bed, grabbing a knife from his opponent’s belt, attacking and wounding him in the head. Frizer, wedged between the two other men and in fear of his life, struggled with Marlowe, eventually managing to gain control of the knife, and struck Marlowe a mortal wound over his right eye, penetrating his brain and killing him instantly.
The coroner’s jury accepted the killer’s claims of self-defence, supported by witnesses Poley and Skeres, the evidence of his own superficial head wounds, and the fact that he didn’t abscond. So Marlowe’s killer was awarded a pardon.
The flaws in the jury’s decision have been well established, notably by Charles Nicholl.3 Ingram Frizer, Robert Poley and Nicholas Skeres are variously con men, extortioners, double agents, fences and international spies. They have connections with the murkier fringes of Elizabethan politics, are well known to Marlowe’s patron, and factions of the Privy Council and the underworld of more than one city. The keeper of Marshalsea prison said of Poley: ‘He will beguile you of your wife or of your life.’4 The official account rests on the unreliable testimony of three rogues and is therefore unsafe. We know that Marlowe died at a house in Deptford. We know the date of his death and the three men present. We know the nature of the wound that killed him. Everything else is educated guesswork, or in this author’s case, a fiction.
1 Quoted in The Nonesuch Press, Hotson, J. Leslie and G. L. Kittredge, Death of Christopher Marlowe , p.11 (1925)
2 Meres, Frances, Palladis Tamia (1598), Ibid.
3 Quoted in Nicholl, Charles, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe , Vintage, 2002.
4 Ibid.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The responsibility for any inaccuracies within this text lies entirely with me. There are, however, several sources whose help should be acknowledged. Invaluable histories included Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning (Vintage, 2002), Peter Blayney’s The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard (Bibliographical Society of America, 1990) and Leslie Hotson’s Death of Christopher Marlowe (The Nonesuch Press, 1925). The inspiration for a novella starring Christopher Marlowe came from a commission by Jamie Byng of Canongate Books. The National Library of Scotland’s Robert Louis Stevenson Award and the Hôtel Chevillon in Grez-sur-Loing gave me valuable peace and space in which to begin this narative. My agent David Miller, editor Judy Moir and the novelists Graeme Williamson and Zoë Strachan were each a source of support, advice and suggestions, the best of which I probably ignored, but would have been lost without.
Louise Welsh
(2004)
About the Author
LOUISE WELSH has published a wide range of short stories and articles. Her debut novel – The Cutting Room – was a bestseller in the UK and has already sold into sixteen languages. She was chosen as one of Britain’s Best First Novelists of 2002 by the Guardian and won the Saltire First Book of the Year award and The Crime Writers’ Association Creasey Dagger for the best first crime novel. For several years she worked as a dealer in second-hand, out-of-print and antiquarian books. She lives in Glasgow.
By the same author
The Cutting Room
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2004
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books
Copyright © Louise Welsh, 2004
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 694 8
www.meetatthegate.com