Across the Spectrum

by Nagle, Pati

  “I will look for you,” Arevin said, and he would promise no more.

  Snake picked up her pony’s lead, and started across the desert.

  The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe

  Marie Brennan

  What I like about this story is that it was my first venture into the pleasures of historical fiction, and arguably helped create the Onyx Court series (even if the two aren’t directly linked). I wrote it while running the role-playing game that led to the Onyx Court books, and had a great deal of fun drilling down into the details of what happened with Marlowe’s death, then turning those details around to look at them from different angles. It’s more literary in tone than most of my stories, but I feel like the voice clicked into place very satisfyingly.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  This much is certain: that on the thirtieth day of May, in the year of our Lord 1593, events transpired in a rented room in Deptford that resulted in the corpse of a man with a knife wound in his skull, above his right eye.

  In between the certainties lie a hundred tales.

  ∞

  “In faith,” Frizer said, in the wake of a thunderous belch, “I could not eat a bite more.”

  The light of the late afternoon sun bathed the room in a warm glow. The three gentlemen sitting at the table had their backs to it, the better to shade their eyes, but one man lay on a bed between the table and the window, and he turned his face to the sun with a weary sigh.

  The company of these gentlemen was grown tiresome to him. They had met at this house before noon, to dine together in a rented room and walk about in the garden, and here they were yet at suppertime. It was not how he would have preferred to spend his last day of liberty.

  So it came as a relief when Frizer said to the two men on either side of him, “We must be on our way soon, I think, if we’re to reach our destination before night.” He turned in his seat to address the man on the bed. “Kit, go downstairs and settle with Widow Bull, would you? I’m too full to move.”

  Sitting up and brushing his hair back with one long-fingered hand, Kit said, “You mean you’re too lazy to move. But if it gets us on the road, then I shan’t complain. Give me your coin, and I’ll pay her.”

  “Pay her yourself,” Frizer said, with another small belch. “I am not a charitable order.”

  Kit flushed. The wine had gone to his head while he lay by the window, and it stoked his irritation with Frizer. “Coming here was your suggestion. Left to my own devices, I would not have spent the day here to begin with, and not in the company of these men.”

  The man seated to Frizer’s right glared at him over one shoulder. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, sir, that my bail has run out, I am due to present myself once more to the Star Chamber tomorrow, and your company has hardly been so diverting as to take my mind from that matter. I will not suffer an overfed ass to demand that I pay for his day at the trough.”

  Frizer had his back to Kit at that moment, but it did not muffle his words enough—and perhaps the man did not mean for it to. “It’s no less than you deserve, you damned atheist.”

  Kit surged up off the bed in a fury, lurching toward Frizer. Losing his balance, he stumbled against the other man, and his hand found the hilt of the dagger Frizer wore at his back. He snatched it loose, not thinking what he was doing; the wine he had drunk, the irritation with Frizer’s penny-pinching, the fear he had lived with since his arrest by the Star Chamber, all whirled together into a rage that made him strike at Frizer with the blade.

  It gouged the man’s scalp, and Kit cursed his poor coordination. Frizer howled and tried to squirm free. The room was a small one, though, mostly filled with the table, the chairs, and the bed, and with the other two men on either side of him he had nowhere to go. Kit struck a second time, cutting Frizer’s scalp once more, and then lost his balance again as his target turned and began to struggle with him over the knife.

  The man who holds a dagger’s hilt has the advantage, but Kit had disadvantages besides. He was drunk; he was weary; he was half Frizer’s size. And then the backs of his knees hit the bed and he fell, Frizer on top of him.

  The dagger stabbed into the bone above his right eye.

  Ingram Frizer swore and stumbled back to his feet, staring at what he had wrought. Blood spread silently outward from the body on the bed.

  Christopher Marlowe, poet and dramatist of the English stage, was dead.

  ∞

  And so that the said Ingram killed & slew Christopher Morley . . . in the defence and saving of his own life against our peace our crown & dignity. As more fully appears by the tenor of the Record of the Inquisition aforesaid which we caused to come before us in our Chancery by virtue of our writ. We therefore moved by piety have pardoned the same Ingram ffrisar the breach of our peace which pertains to us against the said Ingram for the death above mentioned & grant to him our firm peace . . .

  —pardon issued by Elizabeth,

  by the Grace of God, Queen of England,

  France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith &c,

  28th day of June, anno Domini 1593

  This much is known of Christopher Marlowe.

  He was a shoemaker’s son from Canterbury who attended the college of Corpus Christi in Cambridge, where he achieved the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Several years later this became a Master’s degree, after the Queen's Privy Council intervened to quash a rumour of his conversion to Catholicism. He wrote approximately half a dozen plays, several poems, and translations of Latin works, and made great advances in the dramatic use of blank verse.

  On the twentieth day of May, in the year of our Lord 1593, he was arrested on a charge of atheism, then released for a short time on bail.

  ∞

  “In faith,” Frizer said, in the wake of a thunderous belch, “I could not eat a bite more.”

  The light of the late afternoon sun bathed the room in a warm glow. The three gentlemen sitting at the table had their backs to it, the better to shade their eyes, but one man lay on a bed between the table and the window, and he turned his face to the sun with an irritated sigh.

  Poley ignored Frizer’s excess. Instead he said over his shoulder to the man on the bed, “Your odds don’t look very good, Master Marlowe.”

  “Atheism and blasphemy,” Kit said in a dismissive tone. “Kyd’s words against me won’t amount to much. And Baines was defecting to the Catholics when we lived in Flushing together—why do you think Burghley let me go? He knew I wasn’t the defector, whatever Baines said. But the evidence against Baines was lacking, and so he’s free to fabricate these new accusations against me. Now I’m an atheist, when last year I was a Catholic in the making?”

  Skeres said, from the other side of Frizer, “You’re fortunate it’s just atheism. The original version of Baines’s accusation included sedition as well.”

  “Henry Barrow and John Greenwood were hanged for that scarcely a month gone,” Poley added, hard on the heels of Skeres’s ominous words. “And John Penry just yesterday.”

  Kit’s head had come up when Skeres mentioned sedition, but now he lay back with a wave of one hand. “There is no proof.”

  “Proof is not needed,” Skeres said. “Only confession.”

  “Confession such as was extracted from your friend Kyd,” Poley said. “And you are no more immune to the rack than he, Master Marlowe.”

  The two of them passed their words back and forth as smoothly as if they’d rehearsed in advance. Frizer remained silent, his back to Kit, his shoulders hunched as if uncomfortable with the entire situation. The four of them had been at it all day. The conversation periodically diverged to other topics as they walked in the garden during the afternoon hours, but always it returned to this: the threat against Kit.

  Kit sat up and draped his arms over his knees, long-fingered hands hanging loose. “Confession and recantation. Unpleasant, but I’d hardly be the first man to escape execution thus.”

  Poley looked at him
with cold, hard eyes that would not have been out of place in a wolf’s head. “Master Marlowe, I do not believe you understand the true gravity of the situation.

  “No one is alone in this matter. An Arianist tract was found in Thomas Kyd’s room, which he claims you gave to him. You have not said whether this is true or not, but in the final accounting it does not matter. You were named. And you, in your turn, will name others.”

  No man among them was reckless enough to speak the names aloud, but they whispered through Kit’s mind. Henry Percy, called the “Wizard” Earl of Northumberland. Sir George Carey, heir to the Lord Chamberlain. Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. Sir Walter Ralegh, disgraced at Court, but not so disgraced that he could not fall yet further.

  Kit had not been so foolish as to print his thoughts on atheism—but he had, it was true, spoken of them to those men, who lent him a sympathetic ear. And atheism was as good as sedition, when the Queen was the head of the Church and ruled in God’s name.

  Powerful men, every one of them, who would not stand by to see their names dragged into this incident.

  “Or rather,” Poley said, continuing where he had left off and interrupting Kit’s suddenly ominous thoughts, “you will not name others. We are to see to that.”

  And Frizer rose at last, his face grim but set, drawing from the small of his back a dagger which had rested there all this time—a dagger which Kit might have seized, had he thought more quickly, but the wine blinded him to his peril until too late. He screamed and lunged off the bed, hoping against all reason that the Widow Bull might hear and somehow intervene, but Skeres and Poley grabbed his arms and threw him back onto the bed, and Frizer stabbed downward with the knife.

  Kit’s flailing meant Frizer missed his mark, but the blade did its work regardless, sinking into the bone above his right eye.

  The three men stood up, breathing hard in the aftermath of the brief struggle. Blood spread silently outward from the body on the bed.

  “Give me your dagger,” Poley said to his companion Frizer. “I’ll cut your scalp, and we shall say he attacked you.”

  They did so, and then went for the Widow Bull, to report the terrible news.

  Christopher Marlowe, atheist and threat to those more powerful than he, was dead.

  ∞

  These thinges, with many other shall by good & honest witnes be aproved to be his opinions and Comon Speeches, and that this Marlow doth not only hould them himself, but almost into every Company he Cometh he perswades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins, and vtterly scorning both god and his ministers as I Richard Baines will Justify & approue both by mine oth and the testimony of many honest men, and almost al men with whome he hath Conversed any time will testify the same, and as I think all men in Cristianity ought to indevor that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped . . .

  —statement of accusation by Richard Baines

  This much is known of the persons involved.

  Ingram Frizer was a servant and agent of Thomas Walsingham. Less famous than his cousin, Sir Francis Walsingham, who had late been Secretary of State to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, Thomas was nonetheless in the same business as that recently-deceased cousin: the business of espionage.

  Nicholas Skeres served Sir Francis as an “agent provocateur” in the matter of the Babington Plot against the Queen’s life, and had assisted Frizer in conning a naive young man out of his money. Robert Poley, even more than Skeres and Frizer, had experience as Sir Francis’s spy. On that day in Deptford, he was carrying political letters from the Netherlands to the Court, currently in residence twelve miles away at the Palace of Nonsuch.

  The house belonged to one Dame Eleanor Bull. She was a respectable widow whose sister had connections to the Court, and she often hired out her rooms for meetings, serving meals to those who came there.

  That she provided a safe house for the Government’s spies is purely speculation.

  As for Christopher Marlowe, he had done “good service” to Her Majesty—earning the assistance of the Privy Council, when he would have been denied his degree—and his artistic patron was the gentleman Thomas Walsingham.

  ∞

  “In faith,” Frizer said, in the wake of a thunderous belch, “I could not eat a bite more.”

  The light of the late afternoon sun bathed the room in a warm glow. The three gentlemen sitting at the table had their backs to it, the better to shade their eyes, but one man lay on a bed between the table and the window, and he turned his face to the sun with a worried sigh.

  A knock at the door brought everyone alert, even Frizer, who had been relaxed the entire day, in contrast to his companions’ tension. Skeres rose and went to the door, cracking it just a sliver.

  Muffled but still intelligible, the Widow Bull’s voice said, “They’re here.”

  Skeres glanced back at Frizer and jerked his head. “Come help me.”

  When the two men had left the room, the last gentleman at the table turned in his seat to look at the bed. “Are you ready, Kit?”

  The fine-boned face was drawn and weary. Kit had not rested well these days past, since Thomas Kyd issued his accusation from the rack, since word came that Baines was preparing worse troubles for him. Atheism, potentially sedition; men accused of these things did not fare well.

  “I imagine the rack would be more painful,” he said by way of response to Poley, “but at the moment, it is hard to credit.”

  Whatever Poley might have said to that was forestalled by the return of Frizer and Skeres, dragging a heavy, wrapped bundle through the door. Kit rolled smoothly to his feet as Poley went to pull the sheets from one end of the bundle.

  “God’s blood!” Kit swore when the wrappings came free, revealing the face of a dead man. “Who is that?”

  “John Penry,” Poley said. “Or should I say, Kit Marlowe.”

  Kit sank back against the table, eyes still on the corpse. The man was dark-haired, fairly slender. Not a close resemblance, as such things went, but close enough for Poley’s words to make his skin crawl. “You mean not just to spirit me from England. You mean to fake my death.”

  “Of course.” Poley stepped aside as Frizer and Skeres, panting from the effort of carrying the body up the stairs, began to extract it from its wrappings. “The forces moving against you would not be satisfied if you merely disappeared. Alive, Kit Marlowe is still a threat, and a potential source of evidence against powerful men. Dead, no one will think on him again.”

  Poley’s blunt words staggered Kit. He gripped the edges of the table to keep himself steady. The rack would be more painful, yes—he kept that well in mind. But he did not wish to be forgotten. He would almost dare imprisonment and execution, rather than the world’s disregard.

  “This isn’t going to work,” he said desperately, as Penry’s body rolled clear of the winding sheet. “He’s been dead for some time.”

  “One day.” Skeres paused to brush his hair clear of his eyes. “Hanged at St. Thomas-a-Watering yesterday—for sedition, as it happens. Look upon your potential fate, Master Marlowe.”

  Kit ignored the jibe. “Yes, exactly. Hanged.” He gestured at the livid bruising around Penry’s neck. “What are you doing to do, say I accidentally strangled myself in the bedsheets?”

  As if to say yes, Frizer and Skeres began to maneuver the corpse onto the bed. Poley said, “It’s taken care of. We’re within the verge; the Queen is at Nonsuch still. That means the Coroner of the Queen’s Household must be involved, and we have secured Danby’s assistance. How do you think we obtained Penry’s body? Danby will keep the county coroner out of it, and ensure no one examines the body too closely.”

  Secured Danby’s assistance. For the first time, Kit began to appreciate just how far the conspiracy to save his life stretched. Was the Queen herself involved? He would never be fool enough to ask, nor arrogant enough to assume it.

  But he knew full well that, in the final accounting, this had little to
do with saving his life. Even his patron, Thomas Walsingham, would not go to such lengths merely to preserve one scribbler of poetry. All of this was happening because of the threat to men more powerful than he. His survival was a gift, in remembrance of the services he had done Her Majesty’s government.

  A gift he would not spurn, though its price wounded his heart. And, in truth, his pride.

  “Your clothes, Master Marlowe,” Poley said, and setting his jaw to hide the pain he felt, Kit began to strip. Skeres and Frizer wrestled the corpse into his garments, while he put on those Poley provided.

  When the dressing was done, Frizer drew his dagger and looked at Poley uncertainly.

  “The face,” Poley said. “On Danby’s orders. He can show the face to be identified and examined, without showing the throat.”

  Frizer looked ill, but turned back to the body on the bed. He leaned over, dagger in hand, set the point against Penry’s dead skin, and thrust.

  Kit, watching this happen, gave a bark of disbelieving laughter. “You cretin—you might have stabbed him in the eye, at least. But above the eye? That wouldn’t even kill a man, not right away, not a wound that shallow. You—”

  “Do it yourself, if you’re so eager to aid,” Frizer snarled, shoving the blade in Kit’s general direction.

  Poley intercepted it, taking the weapon from Frizer’s hand. “Skeres, there’s a jug of pig’s blood in the corner. Pour it onto the face and the sheets. Frizer, hold still. It needs to look like he attacked you. We’ll say there was an argument over the bill.” Without waiting for a response, he struck Frizer twice over the head with the dagger, cutting his scalp, causing the man to yelp in sudden anger.

  Kit had sagged down into one of the chairs as his companions went about faking his death with callous efficiency. John Penry now had his clothes, his name. Blood spread silently outward from the body on the bed.

  Christopher Marlowe, poet, atheist, and agent to Her Majesty’s government, was dead.

  Or so the world must believe.

  ∞

  . . . & after supper the said Ingram & Christopher Morley were in speech & uttered one to the other divers malicious words for the reason that they could not be at one nor agree about the payment of the sum of pence, that is, le recknynge, there; & the said Christoper Morley was then lying upon a bed in the room where they supped, & moved with anger against the said Ingram Frizer upon the words as spoken between them [. . .] in which affray the same Ingram could not get away from the said Christopher Morley; and so it befell in the affray that the said Ingram, in defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of 12d. gave the said Christopher then & there a mortal wound over his right eye of the depth of two inches & the width of one inch; of which mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher Morley then & there instantly died . . .