All Night Awake (44 page)

“No,” Kit Marlowe said.

He didn’t know how long he’d stood in this resounding, gloomy room, facing the three men who sat at the broad table and asked the same questions, over and over. His interrogators had questioned him about his religion, his political opinions, the rumors of his homosexuality.

His legs hurt.

His questioners had gone the round twice already, all about some libel affixed to the wall of the Dutch church and signed Tamburlaine. Every time Kit had denied knowledge of it.

At twenty nine, Kit was not unacquainted with questioning. For many years, besides writing plays, he’d worked for the secret service and often been arrested on real charges proceeding from this work, and every time he’d been sprung from trouble by his superiors.

He saw no reason this time should be different. He was a slim man, of average height, who wore uncommonly well cut clothes accented his small, delicate features with a carefully shaped beard and gave his hair a reddish cast by virtue of henna dye.

He’d been born the son of a cobbler in Canterbury, and attended Cambridge on a scholarship. Though he had, for many years now, made his living from the not-so-well-regarded profession of writing for the stage, no one who saw him for the first time could fail to think him every inch a gentleman.

   
He gave the cool, appraising eye to his interrogators. All three were old, all three bearded, all three white-haired, and all spoke with that asthmatic wheeze that betrayed tiredness of breath and life. The table was the only piece of furniture in the room, or at least the only piece clearly visible.

“You’re sure you know nothing of it, though it was signed Tamburlaine?”

“Nothing, your Honor,” Kit said. He shifted his position, and adjusted his slashed velvet sleeves with absent care. “Anyone can sign that to anything.”

He knew not his questioner’s names, nor their ranks. Nothing, indeed, that could identify them, save their faces, and those he might well mistake, wreathed as they were in darkness, in this chamber insufficiently illuminated by the two few candles in the distant chandelier that depended from the penumbrous reaches of the ceiling. “I wasn’t here. I was at Scagmore, working on a poem about
Hero And Leander.
By gracious permission of Scagmore’s lord, milord Thomas Walsingham.”

At the noble name thus bandied about, all three men, at once, dipped quills into the ink wells that stood in front of them on the massive table at which they sat, and wrote upon the pieces of paper.

The scratch of the quill upon the paper echoed monstrously augmented in this room, where everything resounded and every step, every word, every breath assumed momentous volume.

Kit drew breath and heard the sound of his uneasiness ricochet off the stones and come back to him ten times increased.

His interrogators looked up, eyes alert for a sign of breaking down.

“Master Marlowe, how is it that your plays were used for this pamphlet?” The questioner on the right asked. “That your plays inspire sedition?”

This question was new, and disturbing, implying as it did that Kit was a seditious element.

“If it please your Honors,” he said, and bowed and cringed in a way he’d almost forgotten from his humble childhood as a cobbler’s son. “My plays were approved by her Majesty’s censor. I can hardly control what hot heads make of them.”

“Um,” the questioner said, and his pen scratched the paper.

How had it come to this?

Kit had been away at Scagmore, the residence of Sir Thomas Walsingham, whom it amused to keep the much admired playwright as a pet poet. He’d been working on
Hero and Leander
, which he hoped would make his name amid brainless young Lords who disdained true learning and yet despised play making as lowly. These young men liked a little tantalizing with their classical tales, and
that
Kit thought he could provide.

He’d not done anything connected with spying for six months. He’d left all that behind. His work for Robert Cecil, head of her Majesty’s secret service, had landed Kit in jail for counterfeiting, had made him a suspect of other more serious things, and had caused him to betray his conscience, to turn in men he thought were guilty of no more than a quickly whispered word, a hastily formed thought.

Kit had thought he got clear away from that. Yet, here he stood now, again in trouble with the law and again not quite sure how it had got this far.

Henry Mauder, a messenger of the queen’s chamber, had come to Scagmore and arrested Kit and led him away under police escort. To London. Here. For questioning.

Kit didn’t even know where
here
was -- having been let out of the closed carriage in front of an indifferent door, in an indifferent, dark street, then guided along unidentifiable corridors to this chamber. Was this one of London’s four common prisons?

Common born, Kit didn’t flatter himself that he rated the tower. And yet, if they thought he was part of a conspiracy, he might very well be in the tower, or in a secret chamber in some palace.

If Kit died here, would anyone ever know? What was happening in the other chambers, beyond the thick stone walls? Through walls like this, one wouldn’t hear even the desperate screams of a tortured man.

Kit’s knees felt loose under him.

The quill pen screeched over the paper, its sound slow and threatening like a distant rumble of thunder, coming closer, closer.

The man on the left lifted his head and piercing black eyes peered out, half-hidden in the shapeless flab of his face. “Um.... It says here you have been arrested for counterfeiting and uttering last year, Master Marlowe. Um....” He looked at the paper in front of him, and made a minute mark with his scratching quill. “What I’d like to know.... um.... what I’d like to know is....”

Kit drew breath and shifted his feet. This was definitely a new question and alarming, that such a thing, done in the course of his spying, should be brought up against him now. What did it mean? What was he up against?

His legs felt numb and aching. His interrogators talked and moved as if they had all the time in the world.

They were sitting down.

“What I want to know,” the man resumed, at long last. “Is why you were let go on such charges?”

Each of the questioner’s words reverberated off the far off ceiling, ricocheted from the walls, came at Kit from every direction, seemingly surrounding him.

Kit couldn’t answer the truth: that he’d been working for Sir Cecil and under his orders. True, his actions might be business Cecil would admit to and easily enough -- above board deception and blameless counterfeit in her Majesty’s service.

Or it could all have been something else, one of the many con games that Cecil and his associates ran and that, at times, blurred with their secret work, faded into it, so there was no telling where the catching of conspirators began and where the lining of Sir Cecil’s pockets ended. In that, Cecil was no different from his predecessor, Francis Walsingham.

If Kit spoke, he would be turning Cecil in, and he wouldn’t live long after that.

Kit cleared his throat. “It was judged, at the time, that I was innocent, your Honor.”

His voice echoed back to his ears, enormously distorted. The veneer of Kit’s Cambridge education quite stripped from the older, underlying working-class accent.

Kit sounded like his father, the shoemaker, cringing and apologizing to a customer for an ill-fitting shoe.

All his quick mind, his agile social climbing had gone for naught. Here he was, still the cobbler’s son from Canterbury’s narrower alleys, and facing the rope, like a base-born malefactor.

Kit let air out through his nose, an annoyed, vexed sound.

His three interrogators stopped writing and looked up at him.

He stood like a bird under the hypnotizing glare of a serpent, very still, hoping they didn’t notice his fluttering heart, his guilty mind that darted like a prisoner behind his open eyes, finding no escape.

The old men wrote for a long time. The scratch of their pens echoed in the room. Now one cleared his throat, and then another coughed, making a great show of it and retrieving from within his sleeve a lacy handkerchief to sniff into.

Kit found himself staring at their black garments. Why was black clothing equated with respectability? He’d been meant to wear just such dark, somber clothes when he’d been a student at Cambridge.

He’d complied well enough his first year, and small choice. A scholarship boy, whose father’s always meager, failing business left him with broth and bread for his supper and nothing at all for fine laces and ribbons, could do no better.

But then he’d made friends with the Lord Percy, Earl of Northumberland, a Catholic lord.

That was when Kit had first been arrested, the very first time.

Same as now he’d been taken to an unidentifiable chamber, and interrogated on suspicion of having converted to Catholicism and seeking to convert others.

Kit remembered how terrified he’d been. How he’d quaked, even more than he did now, at the thought of torture. His fear, his mindless, heart-stopping terror of the rack and the hangman’s noose had led him to talk. He’d told himself he couldn’t let his staunch protestant parents be thus shamed, to have their only son hanged for a Catholic. It would lessen his sisters’ chances at marriage and put the whole family under suspicion.

So, when the council had demanded he hand in others in exchange for letting him go, Kit had complied, spinelessly denouncing friends and acquaintances -- fervent Catholic missionaries and casual sympathizers alike.

The secret service had told Kit it would go ill with him unless he spied on those who attended upon the Lord Percy at his house, and reported any plots they might contrive. And Kit, scared, defenseless, had complied.

If it had ended there, then Kit’s conscience, though wounded, might still have been salved and rebuilt, his self-love managing to make him believe he was no great traitor, but only a desperate man.

However, the cunning Sir Francis Walsingham, then the chief of her majesty’s secret service, had rewarded Kit generously for the information so unwillingly provided.

Then had Kit known himself the equal of Judas, the kissing cousin of the creeping assassin, who, under cover of a fair smile, sheaths his dagger in his friend’s bosom.

Knowing himself thus, as such a low creature, how could Kit have stopped from giving further information? Indeed, how could he have demurred at any crime, hesitated before any bald-faced treason?

The honest man can say that he is honest and to his honesty sacrifice much. But the traitorous coward has no virtue, save the virtue of drawing breath, and for that virtue he will do anything.

So had Kit Marlowe gone on living, like a tree that looks sound and whole outside, though the worm has long since consumed the inside and nothing but dark rot and ash remains for its support. So had Kit Marlowe gone on living, aye, and enjoyed life.

The silver pieces from his treason had lined his pockets well. Aye, and bought him new lining and new pockets, too, these splendid clothes of velvet and silk he’d worn ever since, and a limner to paint Kit’s fine portrait, that hung still in Cambridge buttery hall.

“Master Marlowe, we have a paper here... yes, a paper....” The middle interrogator lifted and rustled a sheet with some minute writing. “In which it says that you hold atheistic opinions, mock the divinity of our Lord, and read an atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh. Is this true?”

“I do not know what this can be about,” Kit said, which was true. Even in his cups, he wouldn’t be so foolish as to say such things in the presence of others. Think them, maybe, sometimes, in his dark moments. But never to say them. Nay, Kit loved Kit too well for that.

Yet someone had accused him of it. And there was the name of Sir Walter Raleigh, his friend, almost a patron. The man who’d introduced Kit to tobacco and regaled him with tales of far distant lands and argued philosophy with him, and, withal, treated base-born Kit as an equal.

Kit felt sweat drip from his hairline and race down his forehead. He shifted his foot. He’d seen plots like this before, one person pulled in on false information, to incriminate someone bigger than himself.

Cold came up through the thin soles of his indoor slippers. He’d been indoors when Henry Maunder, the trusty messenger of her Majesty’s chamber had come to arrest him in Scagmore. He’d been forced away without even the time to change clothing or shoes. And, while Kit had clothing in his chambers at London, who knew when or if he’d be allowed to go there. “I can’t remember anything like that.”

“Then why was there a paper of vile atheistic writings amid the papers of Thomas Kyd, a paper that Thomas said was your own?”

Thomas Kyd? What could poor Tom have to do with this?

“Your Honor, I don’t know what this can refer to,” Kit said, and heard his voice reverberate back to him, ten times augmented.

Had they arrested Tom? Kit couldn’t imagine Tom denouncing him otherwise.

Thomas Kyd, fellow playwright and once, about two years ago, Kit’s roommate, was a sap, a bit of an innocent. No harm in him, and no possible way he had papers with atheistic positions amid his things. Not unless it had been deliberately planted. And planted by whom and for what? The name Raleigh turned in Kit’s head again like a bloated corpse resurfacing at the top of a drowning wave.

If this were a plot against Raleigh and Kit, himself, only a means to an end, then the plot must be moved by Lord Essex, Raleigh’s rival at court and with the Queen’s favor. What could he do, and what say in such a case as this?

Between two such opponents, Kit could manage no more than the mouse trampled underfoot by two duelers, each hot for the other’s blood.

Here, two noble cocks strutted for an old hen, and Kit Marlowe would lose his life in this.

The room ran away from him, sight and sound dimming before the certain beating of his heart, loud, loud, loud in his ears.

How long would his heart be allowed to go on beating?

“Did Tom Kyd affirm this page was mine?” he asked, hearing his own voice small and distant, a squeak in that dim, hollow chamber, from which his consciousness recoiled and struggled futilely, like a baited bear that the dog has got by the nose.