Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (29 page)

Were they? How would they find out something like that? But however they did it they would discover that he was innocent, and that was the important thing.

“Aye,” John said. “The rack.”

“Nay!” Tom said, backing away. “Nay, I told you it's not mine. Don't—Please—”

“Whose is it, then?”

“I dont—”

“Whose?”

“A man named—named Christopher Marlowe. A playwright.”

Both men looked interested at the word “playwright.”

“And where is this man now?”

“With his patron, Thomas Walsingham.” Once the words had been spoken it was easy enough to continue. “In Kent. I don't know exactly where—I haven't seen him for months. Years, really.”

Dick picked up Tom's pen and began to write something on his piece of paper. “Kent, did you say?”

Despite himself Tom felt relieved. They would go after Christopher and leave him alone. Kit could explain the doctrinal complexities in the manuscript; he knew how to argue theology, after all. And perhaps no harm would come to him; to hear the man tell it he had been in worse situations than this one. Tom moved toward his desk, eager to return to his work.

“We'll have to take you with us, of course,” Dick said.

“What? Where?”

“To Bridewell.”

“Bridewell? But—but I've told you everything I know.”

“Have you? Torture's best for that, I've heard.”

Tom looked toward the window. He could run, escape them, hurry down the London streets and go—where? Where could he hide? But his hesitation gave the bigger man time to seize his arm and turn him roughly, then pinion both arms behind his back. The man tightened his hold, forcing Tom toward the door and outside. Tom nearly cried out in pain.

The streets were empty; nothing moved. London looked like the painted backdrop representing the city of Rome that Tom had once seen in a play. No one was there to watch his humiliation as his captors led him toward the prison; he felt grateful for that, if nothing else. Dogs nosed through the piles of garbage in the streets, and squeaking rats, bold enough now to appear in daylight, scurried on ahead of them.

The two men led him through Ludgate and down Fleet Street for a little while, then turned south, toward the river. Tom had never seen Bridewell and could not help but notice how large it was, covering nearly the same area as Paul's. Once inside his keepers turned him over to a jailer who entered his name in a book and led him into a large common room holding a dozen people. At other prisons, Tom had heard, a bribe to the jailer ensured better lodgings and plentiful food. There was less corruption here, then, but that fact did not work to his benefit. He realized, almost despairing, that that was the kind of thought a criminal would have.

A few prisoners looked up incuriously as he came in, then looked away, staring at nothing. Tom felt revulsion at the sight of them. Cutpurses and horse-thieves, he thought. And what am I? Not a criminal, though, not that. I've done nothing wrong.

The jailer left. Men and women in the blue uniform of inmates passed through the common room on their way to the tasks assigned them. From where he stood Tom could see a large courtyard, where prisoners worked at grinding corn or beating hemp. They won't have me working, then, Tom thought. Nay, I'm here for torture. He shuddered.

He found a place to sit against a wall. The wall was stained and filthy; probably countless people had rubbed against it over the years. No one spoke, either to him or to one another. One man sang a ballad until someone else threatened him with his fist. They all seemed spiritless, content to wait out the months or years they had to serve.

An hour later one of the jailers came to fetch him. Nay, not a jailer—he was too well dressed, and he carried himself like a man of authority. Someone sent from the Star Chamber, then. He went with the man without question, even allowed himself a grudging hope. They've realized the mistake they've made, he thought. They're going to let me go. The man turned a corner and went through a doorway, and Tom followed.

At first he thought that the room held only a table, and he wondered why it should be so lacking in furniture. Then he recognized the rack. He struggled but they were ready for him, both his keeper and the man who tended the machine. They forced him down and tied his legs to the foot of the table and his arms up over his head. Nothing in his life had ever made him feel so helpless, so exposed. The torturer took his place at the head of the table. Tom tried to look at him, hoping to guess by his expression what might be coming next, but they had tied him so that he could see nothing.

“Is this manuscript yours?” the man from the Star Chamber asked from somewhere near his feet.

“Nay, I told you—”

He gasped. A sharp pain traveled along his arms and legs. At first he could not grasp what had happened to him, and then he realized that the torturer had moved the wheel a little.

“Is it yours?”

“Nay.” Another turn of the wheel. “It's not! I've said—”

“Whose is it then?”

“I told you—”

The wheel turned again. His body felt on fire. Flames licked at his joints. Each point of agony was a star; he had grown huge, as vast as the crystalline sphere of the heavens.

“—it's Christopher's, not mine,” he said. Had they even heard him? It was difficult to speak against the pain, to make his voice carry from such a vast height.

Another turn. Red-hot wires connected each of the stars burning in his joints. “Do you think us fools, then?” the questioner said. “Why should we accept your story as true? How do we know you shared a room with anyone?”

The torturer worked the wheel again. Tom collapsed inward, into a tight shell of pain smaller than a man's hand: He could barely hear the questions. “Whose is it?”

It's Christopher's, he said, or thought he said. Christopher was the one responsible for the pain that coursed through his body, that sang in every joint. The atheist, the blasphemer: they should summon the man and punish him for all his sins, punish him as Tom was being punished. And if they didn't he would see to it himself that the other man suffered. God's justice would be done.

“It's Christopher's!” Tom cried. “He's the one you want, not I!” Then he fainted.

The summons to appear before the Star Chamber did not worry Christopher overmuch. He had been called in front of various authorities in the past and had managed to talk himself out of worse situations. More troublesome, perhaps, was the idea of going to London during the plague season, but that could not be helped. He made his farewells to Thomas Walsingham's household and rode to London with Henry Maunder, the man who had delivered the warrant for his arrest.

They arrived in London by midafternoon, too late for that day's meeting of the Star Chamber. He and Maunder parted company and he was left to his own devices. He wandered through London with no goal in mind and found it deserted, the playhouses closed, Paul's abandoned, the taverns empty.

Hungry now, he made his way toward Cheapside, passing along the way three or four houses with quarantine notices posted on their doors. Best get this business over with and go back to Kent, he thought. London's no place for the living these days.

A few stalls on Cheapside had remained open and he bought a meat pie and a bottle of ale. He had nearly finished eating when he heard whistling somewhere behind him, an eerie sound in the empty street.

He turned. Will Ryder stood there, improbably dressed in a black cloak and tall black hat topped with a black plume. “Will!” he said, embracing the other man.

They stepped back, each regarding the other. Will looked thinner, less stocky, and had golden freckles across the bridge of his nose. His foolish hat had been knocked into the mud of the street.

Will smiled; that at least hadn't changed. He looked very pleased, very certain of his welcome, and at that Christopher remembered where the man had been for almost a year.

“I hear you've turned Papist,” he said, and immediately regretted the coldness in his voice.

“Nay,” Will said. “I was curious about them, nothing more. Come, let's not talk theology just yet. Shall we go to my house?”

Christopher followed the other man, his pulse quickening, content for the moment to lay all questions aside. In the cold manor they embraced again, more forcefully now. Christopher undid the other man's cloak. “You've lost your hat,” he said softly.

“I know,” Will said.

Their lovemaking was hurried, almost desperate, as if each thought the other in danger of disappearing once more. Later they did it again, slowly and languidly, then lay in Will's bed and talked. “Why did you go to Rheims?” Christopher asked.

“I went—because of you, I think.”

“Because of me!”

“Aye. You probably don't know how you appeared to me. Here you were, a poet, a playwright, a true spy, not a dabbler like myself—I began to think that there was nothing you hadn't done. And then I remembered the scornful way you spoke of the Catholics, and I thought that there at last was a place you hadn't been. It took me three days in Rheims to discover that you had been there too. I felt that you were mocking me—that even in your absence you mocked me.”

“
I
mocked you? You were the one who told me in such a superior fashion to use those outlandish Italian forks.”

“Nay, I didn't!”

“What do you mean, you didn't? Of course you did.”

“I don't remember.”

“You did. What were they like, the Papists? Do the monks still lie with the nuns as they did when I was there?”

“Nay, don't jeer like that. They're serious about their religion in a way that we've lost, I think. And there's a lot of good in them. We hear about the bad they do, but I wonder—I wonder how many of those stories are true.”

“Most of them, I would think.”

“I don't think so.”

Could Will be right? The other man seemed so certain, and his old superior manner had returned, as if Christopher were an erring pupil. But what did it matter what Will thought of him? Yet he found to his surprise that he was anxious for Will's good opinion.

“Why did you come back?” he asked.

“My father sent for me. He'd disowned me after I went to Rheims—Geoffrey was quick to tell him what I'd done. But when I came back to England he wrote and asked to see me. He's in London on business. But what brings you to the city? You're the last person I expected to meet.”

Christopher told him about the summons from the Star Chamber, what little information Henry Maunder had given him, making light of it so that Will wouldn't worry. Then, realizing only at that moment how good it was to confide in someone, he recounted all that had happened in the months since they had seen each other, his falling out with Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene's death and the final confession he had made.

“And this other man, Chettle—he never apologized?” Will asked.

“Nay. All of London waits to see if I'll repent. You have no idea how trying it can be.”

“And will you?”

“Nay,” he said.

The light began to fade from the windows. Will's room, invariably cold, grew chilly, and he moved closer to the other man. Will drifted off to sleep; he had always been an easy sleeper. Christopher stayed awake and thought about the Star Chamber meeting tomorrow, worrying over what he might say. A nuisance, but then if it hadn't been for the summons to London he would not have seen Will.

He must have slept, because two thoughts came together in his dreams and woke him, his heart pounding. At least one of the Catholic conspirators had never been found, the man whose voice had sounded familiar. And Will had gone to the Catholics in Rheims.

He lay still and listened to Will's soft, even breathing. He had not known how much he cared for the man. Nay, he was done with mysteries. He had all the answers he needed.

The faces of the judges of the Star Chamber looked grave, impassive, and Christopher took that as a good sign; they hadn't made up their minds to condemn him just yet. Some of them he recognized: Archbishop Whitgift, dressed all in black, and his secretary, Abraham Hartwell; the Cecils, Lord Burghley and his son Robert. Burghley was a portly man who seemed a little pompous; Robert Cecil, the hunchback, was thinner and fragile-looking, with fine cheekbones and a languid courtier's expression. To his left sat the Earl of Derby, and Christopher felt pleased to see him; his son, Lord Strange, patronized the acting company that had performed several of his plays. He didn't recognize the three other men, but they made no move to introduce themselves.

Henry Maunder, the man who had come to arrest him, had said only that blasphemous papers had been found in Thomas Kyd's room, and that Kyd had told the Star Chamber the papers were Christopher's. He could not remember leaving any manuscripts with Kyd but he supposed that that didn't mean he hadn't. He wondered what the Chamber had found, what they had thought important enough to bring him to London in a plague season.

“Do you recognize this manuscript?” Archbishop Whitgift asked.

He took the papers Hartwell held out to him. Someone had written on them: “Vile heretical conceits denying the deity of Jesus Christ our Savior found among the papers of Thos Kyd, prisoner,” and another hand had added: “Which he affirmeth he had from Marlowe.”

He looked from that to the manuscript itself, and when he did so he nearly laughed in relief. If poor Tom Kyd had known anything at all about theology and been able to argue a little he would not have needed to drag anyone else into this business; the thing was nearly as safe as the Geneva Bible. He had been fortunate, very fortunate, that this was all they had found.

“Aye,” he said.

Robert Cecil made a note on a piece of paper in front of him. “Is it yours?” Whitgift asked.