It was yet twilight when I arrived at Crosby Place, still brooding upon my meeting with Poley. The steward, still after all these weeks looking somewhat askance at the raffish poet and playwright, brought me wine in the little study where I had first met Nicolas. There was a fog rising and the night air was chill. I was glad of the fire and, gazing intently at it, did not hear Rózsa come in. She dropped down beside my chair, the firelight through her hair, turning it to burnished bronze.
“You are troubled, my love?” She refilled my cup and rested her hand on my knee while I drained it, then filled it again. “You will be drunk, Kit,” she added.
“I mean to be,” I said shortly. She let her resting hand trace the muscle on the inside of my thigh, moving slowly higher. “Only, perhaps, not just yet?” she said slyly, licking her lips and smiling sideways up at me. I laughed despite myself.
“Wanton! Are you never satisfied?” She stood and pulled me to my feet, and still holding my hands, led me up the stairs to her chamber. I collapsed on the bed and let her undress me, my mind blessedly muddled from the wine I’d tossed into my empty belly. I vaguely realized that she was tying me to the bed-frame and before I could muster a protest she had done. I was tied securely but not uncomfortably, spread-eagled; I felt a shiver of alarm growing in the pit of my stomach, matched by a growing excitement, and I raised my head to try to grin at her. “What—” I started, but she, smiling dreamily, placed her fingers over my lips then trailed her hand slowly over my chin and throat, down my chest. “Trust me,” she murmured.
That night she taught me much about my body’s responses, things I would have once delighted to share with Tom. Time and again she brought me to the point, then paused to let the passion recede, only to build it again to an ever higher pitch. When she finally bestrode me, her cool body enveloping my fevered flesh, I wanted to scream with the release, and then again when her sharp teeth sank into my throat, and the familiar ecstasy drowned me.
I was roused sometime later by a discreet knock on the door and found I was free. Rózsa answered the knock and brought the delivered tray to the bed, whereupon I raised myself on one elbow and reached for the wine. She poured my glass full, then began feeding me with finger-sized strips of tender, rare roast beef and fritters of young sorrel leaves. I reached out to her, and she caught my right hand, turning it to examine the scar slashed across the wrist.
“Kit? How came you by this scar?”
“Ah. That was my rival, Greene. I’d nicked a crony of his with my dagger once upon a time, and he thought to return the favor. They caught me out, cupshotten, and Greene held my arm while Ball slashed my wrist for me. Greene never noticed that I’m left-handed—he’d meant to stop me writing for a time, to give himself a better chance.”
“They might have stopped your life.”
“Aye, that they might. They might not have stopped at one wrist but cut both, or even my throat, if not for Nashe.” I was overcome by the memory of gallant Tommy leaping into the fray without so much as a dagger, his only weapon a dead dog he’d caught up from a dung heap. “He routed them, bound my wrist, and got me to my lodgings.”
“Yes, you are fortunate in your friends.” She fell silent for a moment, then said abruptly, “Kit, we are taking Blackavar House near Deptford for the summer; will you come and stay? Over May Day?” I had already accepted Tom’s invitation for the same period, but that had been issued before the rift and I did not suppose that he would much care if I stayed away. “Yes,” I told her, “yes, I will.”
Chapter 5
Blackavar was old, very old, but recently rebuilt to more modern standards, with many glazed windows newly set into the ancient masonry. The house drowsed and glittered in the sultry late afternoon sun like a stout matron draped in diamonds. I swung myself out of the saddle, tossed the reins at the waiting groom and turned to the house. As at Crosby Place, the servants showed me into a study well supplied with books, food and drink and left me with word that the Master and Mistress would be returning soon.
I read for a time, then decided to walk in the gardens and there Rózsa found me, leaning on a wall, watching the brilliant sunset. The clouds were piled into impossible mountains and gorges, violently colored. She leaned against me, taking my hand. “It reminds me of the Carpathians, the Transylvanian Alps,” she said, her voice loud in the oppressive, still air.
“Tell me,” I said, curious about the places she had seen. “I have always wanted to travel, farther than just the Low Countries. Back to France, perhaps, but for my own pleasure, rather than dangerous business for the Queen.
No, for Walsingham, rather,” I corrected myself bitterly.
“Wherein you met your Tom?” she asked softly.
“Yes, and would I had not, for I fear he will be my ruin.” Lightning cracked the sky and her reply was drowned in the roll of thunder that followed. We ran for the house and I found my mood not much improved when we got there.
Nicolas awaited us in the study. “Am I the only guest?” I asked, relieved to find that, at least for the time being, I was. Rózsa questioned me about my time with Walsingham’s circle of spies and how I had come to work for them. I snorted and told them the sordid story.
“I am well out of it,” I concluded.
“But how is it that you were able to leave Walsingham’s Service so freely?” Nicolas asked, thoughtfully. “Given all you know, I should not have thought that you would be so easily let go.”
“The death of Sir Francis was a blessing for me. Cecil tries to ensnare me, but he is no Walsingham.”
“He may be worse,” Rózsa retorted. “He may embrace your Machiavel as Sir Francis did not.”
“If they wish me to spy for them they cannot kill me,” I reasoned.
“How if they only wish your silence? How better to stop your mouth than with six feet of clay?”
“Mayhap, but I do not fancy I should be quite so easy to kill, and I never supposed I’d make old bones in any case. The fiercer the flame the sooner it burns out,” I said with a shrug and a grim smile at their exchanged glances. I paced restlessly about the room and stopped short before a portrait half hidden in the shadows. It showed an androgynous dark-haired young man, dressed in a finely embroidered doublet muted by cobweb-lawn, and holding a feather fan in one languorous hand. With a start, I realized that it was Rózsa and turned a questioning look on her. She laughed, happy, it seemed, to change the subject, and told me that it had been a present for Nicolas.
“It was painted to celebrate my presentation at court. The painter claimed to have been employed by the Queen of Scots, to design her embroideries, but had fallen to traveling the country and painting portraits. Indeed, the embroidery is rather better rendered than my features!”
“You were presented as a boy?” I was fascinated.
“And danced with the queen, who told me that I was a likely lad,” Rózsa laughed, “and presented again the next night as a girl and she quite enjoyed the prank, though she claimed to have known the truth all along!” I took a candle to examine the painting more closely.
“The face is not very like,” I agreed. “Except for the eyes.” I stared at them and they stared back, ancient, knowing eyes in an adolescent face. I turned to find the originals fixed upon me, their expression no more readable than the painted ones. She smiled and changed the subject again, asking me about my plays, especially Faustus.
This naturally turned the conversation to the arcane, to Doctor Dee, and to Ralegh’s so-called School of Night, to the references I had used for the play and thence onward to superstition, the Fairy faith and other heathen religions.
“Did you know that it is the dark of the moon and that this is Walpurgis Nacht?” Rózsa said abruptly. “The people of the Empire believe that all the devils walk this night and the witches have free rein. It’s one of the great Sabbats, you know, called Beltane here in England.”
“How do you know so much about witches,” I asked idly. She turned her dark, enigmatic eyes
on me.
“That is what my parents were burned for, in Spain.”
The thunder was still exploding in cannonade overhead when I went to my chamber an hour or so later. It was only a matter of minutes before Rózsa joined me. I lay on the bed, stripped to shirt and hose and watched her undress in the flickering light of the candles. In her shirt she went to a cupboard and returned to the bed with a small, carved stone pipe and a cake of a greenish-brown substance. I admired the pipe, carved in the shape of a dragon, the bowl formed of its open jaws and its tail for the stem. She filled the pipe from the block and lit it with a taper. I sniffed. “What is it? It’s not tobacco,” I said, and watched as she held the smoke she had inhaled and then let it out slowly.
“It’s hashish, from Turkey. It’s better than tobacco,” she answered, handing the pipe to me. I had eagerly embraced and ardently loved Ralegh’s “nymph”, tobacco, but after a time I had to agree: this was better. I felt as if I were floating a few inches above the bed, as if her hands left trails of sensation across my skin, like shooting stars against the void, as she stripped away my hose and shirt. I watched dreamily as she kissed my fingers and wrist. Our eyes met and locked as she bit into the vein there. The anticipated bliss began to well in me, and my stomach knotted as I realized that it was the bite that gave the pleasure, and that she was sucking on the wound that she had made. She was drinking my blood.
She left my wrist then and kissed my lips. I could taste my blood in her mouth and it excited something within me, something twisted, corrupt, that had lurked in my soul, only hinting at its presence before, but now forever exposed—flinging away salvation, embracing damnation, I reveled in it and rolled over, pinning her beneath me, thrusting myself into her with a violence that was only rivaled by her own. She scored my back with her nails, then buried her hands in my hair, relentlessly pulling me down, pulling my head back to expose my throat.
I could feel her sharp teeth entering the vein. The depravity of it forced my climax and I nearly blacked out. Only dimly conscious, I felt her slip from me and return a minute later with a goblet of ruby-red Venetian glass, a dragon entwined about its stem. It was filled to brimming with a dark liquid. “I would not have thee die. I could not endure to lose thee a second time,” she said, inexplicably, and handed me the glass. As I raised it to my lips I saw the rapidly closing cut she had made on her wrist and knew that the glass held blood, her blood. I drained it, savoring the odd, bittersweet taste, then cast it aside and our eyes locked again as I took her hand, placed the cut to my lips, and drew the living blood from her as she shivered against me. I took no more than a few swallows before a lethargy overcame me and I slept.
It was late afternoon when I woke, alone, and drew the curtains against the painfully bright sunlight pouring into the room. My wrist bore only a faint bruising where she had bitten me, as did my throat when I had checked the mirror, but my back looked and felt as if I had been flogged. Hissing with the pain, I eased a shirt over the bloody welts, pulled on my hose and slops, and went downstairs. The servants once more brought me meat and drink and told me that my hosts would return at sunset.
I sat in the study and thought about the preceding night. The hashish had released my inhibitions, revealing the darkest side of my nature, a side that I had always suppressed, but that was now rampantly free. When I thought of last night I felt no disgust or revulsion, only a tainted fascination and it was the taint itself, I realized, that was so seductive. I passed the rest of the time until sunset reading and laughing over Rózsa’s brazen and pithy translations of that ribald Roman poet Catullus.
I spent a few days there, and the nights together with Rózsa were a pleasure so intense I thought I’d die of it. Twice more we engaged in our sanguinary rite, leaving me feeling a little weak, but also possessed of vastly heightened senses and an almost hectic excitement. Though I could never tire of the company, I soon wearied of the country life and felt the pull of the city, of London. I left early on the morning of the eighth, but the playhouses had been ordered closed due to plague and I found I had rather too much time on my hands.
One night at the Anchor, Thomas Kyd approached me, his inky fingers working nervously, twisting a pewter mourning ring around and around. We had worked in a shared chamber some time before, but found that our natures were not suited to such close quarters. Thomas was sober and earnest, taking in work as a copyist or scrivener to keep himself fed. Sarcasm and irony were largely lost on him and he read no Latin or Greek, but depended on the translations of others, all of which served to make him the butt of many jokes among the University wits.
I was playing cards with four or five others and waited for Thomas to come to his point, but in vain. He just sat with his calflike eyes fixed on me and sipped the small beer that I paid for, watching the card-play without comment. I was drinking wine liberally laced with aquavitae and was already more than a little drunk. I soon grew bored and impatient—I found his sedate temperance irritating at the best of times, and now every twist of that cheap ring seemed to wind me tighter and tighter.
“Christ’s Cock, Thomas, will you come to the point?” I snarled, my impatience somewhat mitigated by the evident horror my impiety induced in Kyd. “Surely you remember Christ’s cock, Thomas—it could crow three times in a single night!” Drunken laughter rocked the room and almost drowned out Kyd’s reply.
“You’d best take care, Marlowe. What if someone—important— should hear you?” Kyd murmured, with a furtive glance around.
“What do you want, Thomas?” Patiently exasperated.
“I need some money, not much, just a small sum until Friday. I’ll begetting paid then and—what?”
“I said, I’ll buy your hat. A new one, is it not? You have execrable taste in clothing, Tom, and you always had,” I was laughing, almost overcome by my own drunken humor. My companions exchanged glances and several bystanders moved closer, closing in to watch the kill.
“Why would you want it,” Kyd asked sullenly, “if it’s so execrable?”
“Why, it looks just like a piss-pot, Thomas, and I’ll use it so. I need to piss and I’d as lief not leave the table just now,” I said blandly, indicating the cards before me. The room exploded into coarse laughter and his face flamed. “Come now, what d’you say? I’ll give you a shilling for it. That’s a handsome price for a piss-pot, you can’t say fairer than that!” I drawled.
Kyd shoved himself away, stumbling to the door, half-blind with tears of humiliation. I felt suddenly tired and heartily ashamed of myself for wasting my wit in such a coarse and puerile way. Pushing myself away from the table, I called out after him, but he only stiffened and kept going. I caught him just inside the door. “Come, Horatio,” I said, nicknaming him for one of his characters as Nashe had often named me “Tamburlaine”. “Come now, and forgive me. You know ’twas only the drink.” He cursed softly, but took the half crown I pressed into his hand, the last gold coin I had in my purse. He left without a word, but with a backward glance that spoke volumes. He hated me, that glance said, hated having to ask me for money, hated being made the butt of my vicious humor, and if ever he could do me an ill turn, he’d not hesitate. Ignoring the gibes of my companions, I returned to the table. Both the game and the company had lost their savor.
Bored with inaction, I spent my days amusing myself by living up to Marston’s sarcastic sobriquet ”Kind Kit”, writing poisonous satires on the works of rival poets and playwrights, and circulating them where they would fall under the eyes of their targets.
I made the rounds of the taverns by night, drank too much, argued my unorthodox opinions a bit too glibly, and certainly, by hindsight, far too recklessly. Blasphemies designed merely to shock and disgust my listeners spilled from my lips, I picked fights and started brawls, and through all I thought of Rózsa. Several times I almost returned to Blackavar, but I held back, keeping that as a last resort. I heard that Thomas Kyd had been arrested, and shrugged. It was most likely for debt, I thought and
if the fool had been too fastidious to use the money I had given him, then to hell with him.
About mid-month a letter arrived from Tom, asking me to visit him at my earliest convenience. Let him dangle for once, I thought and purposely waited several days before riding to Scadbury, to arrive on the afternoon of the seventeenth. The house was filled with people and though Tom must have seen me in the throng, he never acknowledged my presence. By the morning of the nineteenth I was furious. I had started drinking as soon as I woke, but I was not yet drunk when I accosted Tom in the gallery that morning, catching his arm and swinging him about. “I would speak with thee,” I hissed, my anger barely controlled, my fingers digging into his flesh through the heavy velvet of his doublet.
“Not now, Marlowe, and not here,” Tom answered petulantly, ignoring my familiarity. “Anon.” He tried to pull away but I tightened my grip.
“Yes now,” I insisted. “Find us someplace private or I shall have my say here and now. You won’t like it.” I had retained my rank as dominant partner in our personal relationship, more by my own nature than Tom’s intent, and his resistance crumbled. He motioned to a nearby room used for the estate’s accounting and I bolted the door behind us. Tom seated himself behind the table, caught up a large book of accounts and began studying it assiduously. After a moment I strolled over and took the ledger from him, handing it back right-way up; he had the grace to blush and lay it down.
“Why did you call me here if you only meant to abuse and ignore me?” I asked softly, seating myself on the corner of the table. “Do you mean to punish me? For what? For refusing to be the debauched pawn you and Frizer would make of me?” My voice was hoarse with emotion. Tom’s eyes flashed.
“No! Do not dredge that up again—it’s past and done. No,” he said, his lips curling with disgust, “I want to know about that foreign drab you’ve been swiving! I’ve heard she’s a bawd and that the von Popple knave is her pimp. What do you pay her, Kit? Less, I warrant, than I paid you! Or does she pay you? It must be a pretty price indeed to keep you between a woman’s legs—” his tirade cut off as I slapped him smartly across the cheek. I raised my hand for a second blow, but Tom leapt to his feet, knocking over his heavy chair and setting his back to the wall, his hand dropping to the dagger on his belt. I stayed seated on the table, hands carefully kept away from my own weapons. I had loved Tom, offered my heart, and to be so spurned, to be compared to a prostitute offering my body in exchange for patronage—but Tom was still a boy, for all he was a year older than I. I started to speak, to apologize, but Tom interrupted me.
Perfect Shadows Page 4