Christ, not this one. Not this
Kit heard his own voice, latin, the words of ritual. He fixes his eyes before him. Tis a good ritual. Comforting.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“Indeed, my child, you have. But fear not. Your penitence will be adequate before Heaven.”
English, and a voice he knows. Blurs, a jumble of unclarity, of time slowed beyond time. The door of the confessional slides open, Kit blinking in the light as he moves to stand. Each heartbeat distinct as enormous hands close on his wrists, implacable as iron manacles, haul him up; he tries to kick
Kit: slender, not tall, barely bearded, without yet a grown man’s shoulders. He might break nine stone after a hearty supper. Richard Baines simply lifts him off his feet like an ill-tempered child, like a spitting virago, veins bulging in Baines muscle-ribboned forearms as the black robes fall back. Baines bounces him, once, and nausea fills Kit’s throat as his shoulder rips inside like twisted cloth snagging on thorns.
“There’s our cat, Fray Xalbador. Oh, don’t like that much, do you, puss? Got your claws now.” Baines shakes Kit; white flashes occlude Kit’s vision. Hands fumble his belt as the Spaniard claims his dagger.
“Where shall we have him, Fray?”
The priest’s accented voice. “The basement, I think. Tis pity my tools are not here.”
Baines answers, “Mine are.” Baines iron rings pinch Kit’s flesh. The skin at his wrist breaks; blood trickles. He fights, but the other Kit, who watched him, already knowing that Kit curled tight and hugged himself in resignation. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.
“I’ll see him settled, wildcat!” another bounce, with a kind of a twist to it, and this time Kit screams as his shoulder pops with a sound like a drawn cork, “well, that should make him easier to manage.”
“Broken?”
“Just slipped, I think. Fetch the others, Fray Xalbador.”
This Kit chokes on pain, keening the agony as Baines twists his dislocated arm behind his back to make him march This Kit thinks “Others. This is the core. These are the names Sir Francis needs. ALL I have to do is talk my way out of this. ALL I have to do is live through this.”
That Kit wept for his own innocence. He blinked, and this Kit closes his eyes in pain and opens his eyes in pain, in a room prepared with a half-dozen torches, two braziers, and a fireplace for warmth. Dark, clean, the floor of rammed earth and the walls of mortared stone. Long tables against the walls, and Kit sees chalk, a small heap of candles, twine, and some things he can’t identify as Baines shoves him to his knees and twists his left arm behind him. He opens his mouth to argue, and Baines bends the arm higher. Not much, an inch.
Kit wheezes with pain and locks his tongue behind his teeth. And then there are men in the room, and he can’t beg if he wants to, because spiked iron fills his mouth. He did know the names of four of the other five. Easton, Carter, Saunders, Silver. The last one is a slender-hipped, broad-shouldered blond, barely a man in years, whom Kit would have eyed with some appreciation under other circumstances. Catesby, Fray Xalbador calls him, and Baines calls him Robin.
Easton, Carter, Saunders, Silver. Catesby. Richard Baines. Xalbador de Parma. Easton, Carter, Saunders, Silver I can remember that.
In the dream, the rough iron of the bridle already wears at his cheeks and nose. In the dream, the ruin of his right eye weeps blood and matter down his face. In the dream he kneels quietly at Baines feet, domesticated. ‘And rough jades mouths with stubborn bits are torn …’ History had been different, but dreams were what they were. Puke with that thing in your mouth, Kit, and you’ll die of it.
Kit strains to overhear the quiet discussion without attracting Baines attention. The Spaniard seems to be instructing the others with careful hand gestures. Kit presses at the gag in his mouth experimentally with his tongue, moans as fresh blood flows. Baines catches the iron straps around Kit’s skull in a free hand and gives it a little shake, playfully rattling the scold’s bridle, bruising Kit’s cheeks and tearing at his mouth. Baines reaches through the bars and smoothes Kit’s hair, leans down and whispers ‘Holla, ye pampered Jades of Asia, / What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?’
Catesby, the splendid blond, turns from the rest and crosses to Baines, looking down at Kit with something like dismay. He’s a bit unprepossessing. Baines laughs, petting.
“He’s a poet. One of their sorcerer-playmakers, a darling of Walsingham’s. Already known around Cambridge for his filthy translations of Ovid, and London for a bloody travesty of a pagan play. Aren’t you, puss?” Another little shake, a caress, and more blood. This Kit nods, biding his time, a chip of tooth working into his gum.
“Good puss. Pick of the litter. It’s distasteful.”
“Twill break their black arts.” Baines jerks his head at Fray Xalbador. “Between me and he, you’ve two priests who say it. Desperate times.”
Catesby smiles bitterly, as that Kit thought but you weren’t there. It was only the five of them. Panic. I would remember if it had been six. I would remember. This is not how it happened. Catesby had been at Rheims, arriving just as Kit took his leave forever.Kit remembered the worn sword, the good clothes, the expansive grin. But Catesby had not, could not have been in that close basement room.
He still speaks. “It doesn’t sit well. But, to the glory of God and the Holy Mother Church.”
“To the glory of God,” Baines answers. Kit doesn’t think Catesby feels the lie in the big man’s words, but Kit does. Feels it in the way his hand tightens on Kit’s tattered arm.
Does Will know how much I left from that I told him?
Which will it be, the pentangle or the circle of Solomon?
Oh, God. No. Marley, I conjure thee, awake.
The braziers smoke as they make him ready, twisted rodstock heating in each one. It’s copies of the poker with which he’d threatened Will, not the irons de Parma actually used, and I fought. I fought and they had to drag me, he goes docile and willing to Baines command. It would be easier if they would bend him over the table, like Edward, so he can’t see their faces. But they want him on his back.
That Kit remembered how he had turned his head, cursing, pulling against the agony of Baines hands, and sunk his teeth in the base of the big man’s thumb. This Kit tries, but the weight of his head presses the bands of the bridle forward, drags the barbs on the bit across the soft ridges on the roof of his mouth in a mockery of a lover’s kiss. Still, that Kit remembered the taste of Baines blood with bitter triumph, and Baines mockery as he inserted the bit.
“Now, puss, if thou’rt going to bite we’ll have to muzzle thee sooner instead of later.”
“A fair idea,” the Spaniard had answered, “to stop his pagan poetry in his mouth. It’s why I had it with my mage-tools. That and in case we laid hands on a fay after all.”
Disorientation, time out of joint. Baines, laughing at the wound on his hand as the Inquisitor fetched the bridle. “Jesu Christi, she even fights like a wench.”
They come one by one into the circle and de Parma seals them one by one within. They take turns, every expression etched on Kit like the scars on his breast, his belly, his thigh. Catesby dispassionate, Silver mocking, Easton with closed eyes and a bitten lip except in the dream, it’s Edward de Vere who rapes him, and sweet Tom Walsingham, and over them falls the shadow of vast, bright wings. He feels the power they filter through him, the cool edgy blade of a magery so different from his own visceral poetry that he has no name for it. As different as blood-tempered, cross-hilted steel is to a crown wrought of raw reddish gold and fistfuls of the gaudy jewels of Asia. And through it all, Richard Baines, hands as sure as irons pressing him to the table, a soft voice in his ear encouraging him, making a mockery of comfort, calling him kitten and puss as it bids him be brave, good puss, it will all be over soon. And he cannot even scream.
God, enough.
God didn’t seem to be listening. Again.
Consummatum est
When they release him he rolls to the floor and lies there, drools blood as fast as it fills his mouth, mumbles through the agony, amazed his tongue will shape words at all. His knees curve to his belly. His chin curves to his chest. The bloody earth of the floor clings to his bloody flank.
“You’re for the Queen’s destruction,” he rasps. The priest nods, unafraid of him. Unsurprising: Kit couldn’t stand if the roof were on fire. “We are.”
“Let me help.”
“You hate her so much? I’m not inclined to trust you right now, poet. But you’ve earned a quick garroting; I’m not an unreasonable man.”
“Was not…” He spits again, smearing at his bloody mouth with a bloodier hand. “Was not Job tested in his faith?” The priest watches, unimpressed. Kit rolls prone, whimpering as his left arm touches the floor. He shoves himself upright with his right, drags forward, more on his belly than his knees. He slumps down on the chill earth and kisses the man’s boot with his broken mouth.
“I beg you. Let me help.” It isn’t enough, and he knows it. He closes his eyes. Both of them.
“If we have a chance to complete the wreaking in London,” Baines says, over the sound of the well-pump he works to wash his hands, “it would help to use the same vessel. Even more if he were willing, of course. Although mayhap our little catamite liked it, considering his tastes. Did you like it, puss?” He crouches beside Kit almost congenially, and tousles the poet’s blood-mattedhair with clean, wet fingers. A look passes between Baines and de Parma that Kit does not understand, does not wish to understand.
De Parma turns away. “Then let him live.”
This Kit covers his face with the hand he can move, curling like an inchworm at the touch, and that Kit finally managed to wake, whimpering, clinging to a pillow wet with sweat and red with the blood from his bitten tongue.
“God in Hell,” he said under his breath, checking guiltily through the darkness to be sure Murchaud still slept.
Kit rolled against the Prince-consort and buried his face in Murchaud’s hair until his gorge settled and his heartbeat slowed.
A nightmare. Nothing but Queen Mab running her chariot over your neck. He’d lived. And three weeks later he had stood in front of Sir Francis Walsingham, his arm still useless in a sling, and reported that the Queen’s enemies were resorting to sorcery and had fully infiltrated Essex’s service. And that he, Kit, had engineered a connection to one of them and the guise of a double agent. He’d worked shoulder to shoulder with Baines, ostensibly as a turncoat on the Walsinghams like Baines himself until 1592, in Flushing, where he had somehow slipped and given away the game and Baines had nearly gotten him hanged for counterfeiting. The only thing that had kept him sane those five years was the knowledge that one day he would look Richard Baines in the eye as a hangman slipped a noose around his neck. And the determination that nothing, nothing that had happened at Rheims would change Kit Marley. And what a fabulous lie that was, sweet Christofer. Because he had walked away from his chance at Baines in London, so terrified of the man he couldn’t have looked him in the eye if it meant his salvation.
Murchaud smelled of clean sweat and violets. Kit lay against him in the darkness and tried without success to chase the reek of frankincense from his lungs.
Act II, scene xvi
O absence! what a torment wouldst thou prove …
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 39
October, 1597
I should have burned this letter. I should write no more. I know now I’m writing not to thee, but to myself. Still I imagine I might see thee again. But I am a poet, & poets are liars, as Ben Jonson—you would have hated Ben, sweet Kit—reminded me over supper at the Mermaid yesterday. Still, I’ve managed to hold my peace a year. Perhaps I am learning independence after all. That was what sent thee back to Faerie so hastily, wasn’t it, my friend? The worry that Tom & I wouldn’t stand alone. Thou wert probably right. There is the usual news, fair & foul. Mary & Robin are well. Robin tall as a weed, & Mary we’ve found work as a seamstress with the lord Chamberlain’s Men. We’re the lord Chamberlain’s Men again, George Carey lord Hunsdon has taken his father’s old place in the wake of Cobham’s death, God rest his eternal soul, merrily, & in a place where entertainments are shown daily, much may it chafe him. Oh, Kit, the litany of the dead grows long. The gossip might as well grow on trees. Gabriel Spencer, who I mentioned when I wrote you last, killed a man in a duel before Christmas. And he and Ben Jonson were arrested in July. Ben says Spencer’s a secret Catholic, not that that means overmuch, but it doesn’t ease my suspicions that he’s Promethean. James Burbage died in February; Richard & his brother Cuthbert head the company now. We had to tour last summer, & next summer again likely. There’s lease trouble with the Theatre: we shall have to relocate & though they have purchased the indoor theatre at Blackfriars (the one that was used by Chapman’s boy company, from whence so many of our apprentices on the common stage did come) a lawsuit by the neighbors there keeps us from using it. I suspect Baines. Or Oxford, more likely. Not that there’s a blade’s width between them. Annie bought me only the second-biggest house in Stratford, after all: she’s moved the whole family therein. My father was awarded arms in London last fall. Life seems to go on most merrily, & yet I find nothing in it to put my teeth in. Perhaps because I have lost one or two. Ned Alleyn has left playing, for good he says, & truly he has everything a man could want from it. I think he finds the modern masques & satires as wearying as I do, & misses thy pen & thy wit, sweet Christofer. Truly, he & thee were a match. Half the new satires have no play behind them but a series of jibes. Or perhaps I am old & out of fashion. Although my plays do very well. I include my Midsummer Night’s Dream, a foul copy, forgive me on the thought it might amuse thy mistress a little. Thou shalt judge if it is fit for her eyes. Thou wilt however be amused to know Ned’s still wearing that cross and since mine encounter with the Devil claiming he appeared at Faustus (I had heard the story but never credited it) September last, I’m inclined to wear one of mine own. The other news is not so cheerful. Thou wilt however laugh, I can see thee laughing to know that Her Majesty clouted Essex alongside the head recently when Essex turned his back on her. She created your old patron, the lord Admiral, Earl of Nottingham after Cadiz, & Essex was outraged that he, the Queen’s favorite, should be passed over. Burghley says he nearly drew his sword on the Queen, & the lord Admiral, now Nottingham pinned him to the floor before he could clear the scabbard, thus saving Essex’s life. Pity. My Richard II has been pirated, & I recognize the draft of the manuscript I circulated through mine old patron Southampton & his friends. I shall not make that mistake again. Sleeping, waking, heart beating or cold in earth, tis all the same. I’ve no taste for anything of late but putting words on paper. Kemp claims I must have taken a pox, I have so little will for sport. Mary’s a relief. The plays go well. I write better when I’m unhappy. There’s comfort in that of a sort. I fear I am growing old. Four & a half years ago I was young, Kit. The age most men are when they marry. My career ahead of me, London bright, Gloriana strong. Thou wert alive, & we were rivals and chambermates. The poetry we were going to write, each of us outdoing the other!
Now I am famous & a gentleman with a fine house. Edmund my brother is with us in London now: he said he could not bear to stay in Stratford. He’s a hired man with another company not with the Chamberlain’s, he said he wished to make his own way & I cannot grudge it &
Well. I’ll leave this on the mantel tonight, again, and again you will not take it. Nay, enough. More later, perhaps. As the spirit moves me.
The place on the Mermaid’s weathered door where a hand might rest to make it open was refined smooth and fair, the wood so oiled with the grease of men’s palms that it retained a fine polish although its sea-blue paint was worn into the grain.
Will found the spot and pushed, holding it wide to let little Mary slip through before him. A few ragged voices greeted them, rising from an enclave of players in the corner by the fire,
half under the gallery. The October afternoon was gone chilly as the sun slipped behind a layer of overcast unlikely to bring desperately needed rain. Mary headed for the publican as Burbage waved Will to a cluster of benches maintained by the other Wills, Sly and Kemp, along with the amiable, red-goateed playmender John Fletcher, whose unbuttoned red doublet made him look like a fashion-conscious demon, and Kit’s old collaborator Thomas Nashe with his ridiculous curls.
Will limped close enough to speak in a normal tone.
“Wills. Jack, Tom, Richard.” They embraced and kissed him before he sat, which eased Will’s sore heart. He hadn’t the spleen to be angry when they treated him like Italian glass; it was, he knew, a measure of their love.
“A spare crowd tonight. Tom, you’re neither in the country nor in jail.” It had been a play called The Isle of Dogs that had seen Nashe flee London before he could be locked away on suspicion of sedition; Will glanced around the Mermaid for its second author, Ben Jonson. These satirists sailed very close to the wind. Admirable but the wind changed frequently.
“Not jailed, and drinking to it. Chapman claims he’s close to ending his revisions on Master Marley’s Hero, and he’ll be along when tis finished.” Fletcher’s eyes sparkled above his freckled cheeks, a comment on the likeliness of that.
Nashe snorted into his wine. “Kit’s four years dead. I think he would have had the poem finished in a month at most”
“Chapman has to be sure he’s eradicated all the bawdy bits. It takes a while to find them all, it being Kit’s work,” Will replied, dropping into a chair as laughter rose around him. He waited for the pause, and filled it to an approving roar, “and for George, longer than most. Where’s the bricklayer, Tom?]
Nashe tapped a pipe out on the edge of the table and twisted a knife in its clay bowl. “Ben? Still jailed.”
“No one stood his bail?”
Burbage, stretching until his shoulders cracked. “Henslowe loaned him four pound to eat on.”
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