And what will she do? Cast thee in the Tower?“It seems, if it please Your Highness, that your enemies sometimes get the gentler side of your hand than your loyal friends. My Queen.”
“It does not please me,” she said. They faced one another across the dark red pattern on the carpet, faces dim in shifting candlelight. Will forced his hands to stay smooth on his thighs and swallowed against his worry that he had overstepped. “But it is true. And thou art correct in other things as well. I am sick of politics, Master Shakespeare. I am deathly tired.”
It was an understatement. He saw it in her face, heard it in the timbre of her voice. An old woman, Queen before Will was born and–he realized with a shock–not likely to be Queen much longer. Elizabeth had been eternal. Elizabeth was England.
Elizabeth was deathly tired. Perhaps this was Baines’ goal all along,Will realized. To force her hand to kill Essex, whom she loved for all his faults. It’s broken her at last.
“Your Majesty–”
“Aye?”
“Did anyone among your servants ever love you as much as you loved him? Or did they all betray you?” Will almost clapped a hand over his mouth when the words came out, but it was too late and they were flown. He watched them hang there in the candlelight, wishing them recalled, and did not look at the stunned placidity of Elizabeth’s face.
Until she laughed. She threw back her head and roared like a sailor, one hand clutched to her breast, her eyes squinted tight and tears of mirth smearing her kohl into her ceruse. Her mouth fell so far open in her laughter that Will saw the wads or batting that padded out her cheeks where her teeth were gone. “Oh, William,” she said. “Oh, you ask the finest questions. I should have made thee my fool–”
“Your Highness, I am sorry–”
“Apologize not.” Suddenly serious, as she dabbed the corners of her eyes. She sat and thought a little while, and smiled. “I think I have been loved,” she said at last. “Aye, my Spirit loved me –Lord Burghley, to thee. And Sir Francis, for all I was very wroth with him. And my good Sir Walter; caught up in his games, but I do think his love is true. It’s these others I cannot seem to choose with any–” Her voice cracked, and she waved her hand as if to show that the word eluded her, but Will thought it wasn’t tears of laughter that showed now in her eyes. “I am Great Harry’s daughter, Master Shakespeare. Great Harry, I am not,” she said simply. “I am not my sister. I am what I am.”
“You’re England, Gloriana,” he said, and rose–against her command–and with his cane as a welcome prop he kneeled down at her feet.
Act IV, scene xxiii
Strike off their heads, and Let them preach on poles.
No doubt, such lessons they will teach the rest,
As by their preachments they will profit much
And learn obedience to their lawful king.
–Christopher Marlowe, Edward II,Act III, scene ii
Thomas Nashe was buried on the last day of July 1601, some five months after the execution of the Earl of Essex. They had been quiet months, and Kit Marlowe (or Marlin, or Merlin) had a sense that both sides were holding their breath, ·waiting for the next sally to follow the removal of Essex.
There was no question anymore that Baines would sacrifice anyone without a thought, and no supposition that he had any allies among his pawns.
Kit Marlowe (or Marlin, or Merlin) attended Nashe’s funeral in a plain brown cloak and a workman’s tunic. He stood well toward the back, his hood raised in a manner inappropriate to the heat, supplementing the illusions with which he had veiled himself. He left before the body was lowered into the grave.
He felt Will’s eyes upon him as he left the church, but Will didn’t turn to follow, and Kit thought they’d meet later in Will’s rooms, anyway. Maybe. Kit wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about Tom, thought maybe he wasn’t ready to talk about Tom. Tom who had been acerbic, witty, abrasive–and Kit’s oldest friend.
Tom, who alone among his friends Kit had managed to keep clear of the damned war with the Prometheans and its black world of espionage and sorcery and murder. Tom who should have grown old and fat and retired none the wiser, and raised up babies and perhaps named one Christofer.
Tom, who had not even died for a cause–of poison, of sorcery, of a knife in the eye–but who had died simply because he’d tripped on a paving stone and been crushed to death under the wheels of a carter’s haulage.
Kit wandered London like a homeless man, a sturdy vagrant or a tradesman out of doors. He startled a feral hound or two and smiled at a feral child, who was equally startled. Slow clouds came over one by one, but none of them promised any rain, and his cloak was stifling. His feet baked inside their boots. St. Paul’s,he thought, the churchyard where the stationers had their booths. But something drew him west instead, beyond the old cathedral, until he stood in the shadow of Newgate and then passed through. Prisoners were being loaded into a cart outside the walls of London; Kit spared them a sideways glance and barely prevented himself from stopping in his tracks.
One of the men on the cart, his hands bound with rope and his face pinched with privation, was Nicholas Skeres.
The cart lurched as one of the oxen shifted. Skeres fetched up against the rail and yet did not look up, and the milling guards largely ignored him. Kit tapped one on the arm.
“What?”
Kit showed the man a pair of silver shillings, cupped in his palm. “Those prisoners there. Where are they bound?”
The guardsman grunted and glanced over his shoulder to see if they were observed. He held out his palm, and silver jingled into it. “Bridewell,” he said. “Questioning and execution. Counterfeiters and a cutthroat or two, not that you asked.”
“No,” Kit said. “I didn’t. Thank you.” Questioning and execution.Torture and execution, more like. Kit stepped away from the guardsman and kept walking, putting a few hundred yards between himself and Newgate before an ox lowed and the rattle of the cart alerted him that the prisoners were moving. He stepped to the verge and waited.
Nick Skeres, the Little bastard. And Baines and Poley throw him to the wolves as well, and the rescue Will and I expected unforthcoming. I wonder how he outlived his usefulness.And then a softer thought, hesitant. I could do somewhat. I could find a way to rescue him. Sorcery is good for something….
Who was Christofer Marley, is that a glimpse of forgiveness I see in thee?
Kit poked it, considering, and shook his head within the mantle of his hood. No,he decided, and slid his hood down before the cart reached him, stepping forward to draw Skeres eye. The little man looked, and startled, and looked again. Kit left his hands folded tidily under the cloak and lifted his chin, meeting Skeres’ eyes, watching the condemned men pass.
There,he thought, when the press of bodies kept Skeres from turning to watch him out of sight. There was a touch of fate in that one.
Something witnessed.
Later that evening, he leaned forward on the floor before Will’s chair and gritted his teeth. He bundled his shirt in his arms and held it to his chest, covering the scar there, as Will ran cool hands that almost didn’t tremble down the length of his back. The touch itched; Kit forced himself to think of it in the same terms as that long‑ago evening, when Morgan had painstakingly stitched the wound over his eye.
“Kit, does it hurt thee?”
‘It makes me want to crawl over broken glass to escape, but no, it does not hurt me. And it may, perhaps, be better than last time.” A little,he amended, forcing himself not to cringe as Will laid his palms flat on the tops of Kit’s shoulders. A simple touch that should have been warming, and it was all he could do to permit it.