License to Quill (30 page)

Marlowe studied the two for nearly an hour, but little happened. The pontiff stirred in his bed occasionally while his attendant's gaze remained unflinching. As the poet's eyes shifted from the pontiff to the sentinel, he began to notice that the priest did not seem to move at all. He drew no visible breaths, and he did not even appear to blink. After deciding that nothing would change for the entire evening, Marlowe drew away from the window and stepped back onto the palazzo. He sat on the tiled roof and took a breath while gazing over Rome. The poet raised his head as if to consult the stars for guidance, but finding none, Marlowe sighed and let his eyes fall.

But then he saw something move across his doeskin boots. The poet ran his hand over it, casting a shadow. Marlowe looked over his shoulder. There was movement in the Tower of the Winds.

The poet pushed himself up and once more climbed the tower's ledge. This time, he was a bit more impatient than he should have been, looking inside with nearly his entire body in the window.

Marlowe's mouth fell open.

The priest beside the pope had unbuttoned his cassock and let the cloth slide down his shoulders, revealing that the young man was actually a woman. A smile curled across Marlowe's lips at this revelation, but then the smile faded. Confusion washed over Marlowe's face. And then, speechlessness. Shock. Horror.

Fire danced in the woman's eyes as she ran her fingers through the dying pope's silver hair. The old man's face wrinkled with worry and his lips moved as if to scream. The woman's face, meanwhile, intensified. A seriousness fell over her. A hateful, ancient anger. The woman leaned forward and pushed the groaning man's pallid face into her breast. As the dying man's lips latched onto her, she raked her nails again and again against his scalp. Ensnaring him. Trapping him. He, delirious and mad with hunger, and she, overflowing with a deadly toxin she ingested every morning since she was a child, immunizing her. Saturating her. Corrupting her every morsel with the same poison she was now feeding into the pontiff's mouth, just as she had been doing every day for weeks. And to his predecessor.

It was a weapon unlike any wielded on the battlefield. It was Roman charity, made wicked.

Christopher Marlowe was petrified.

And then there was a din: the sound of metal tapping against glass. The tip of Marlowe's parrying dagger accidentally bumped against the window he was watching from. The woman snapped her head toward the sound; her wild eyes burning with a madness that Marlowe had seen before. It was the same look of the woman who he unmasked in Venice. Livid, the woman grabbed her bedside candle and blew it out.

Horrified, Marlowe tried to slide away without falling off his ledge. However, just before he could leap to safety, two hands came crashing through the window. The bloodied arms seized the poet and pulled him into the tower.

“NO!” Marlowe cried as his arms and legs were pierced by glass. The poet landed hard on the floor, embedding his palms with painful shards as well. Marlowe groaned and tried to stand while a deathly gasp suddenly filled the room. In need of light, the poet removed a small pouch from his pocket and threw it against the wall. The pouch exploded in a bright flash that caused one of the tower's curtains to ignite. The spy pushed himself up to see the woman atop the pope, stabbing him repeatedly with a dagger. The bare-breasted villainess screamed like a banshee with every thrust, splattering herself and Marlowe with blood. Her howls attracted the attention of every guard in the palazzo, who turned their heads to the Tower of the Winds and came running. Injured, Marlowe reached desperately for his parrying dagger, but could only find an empty sheath. The blade was gone; stolen by the woman who pulled him inside. She had just killed the pope with his weapon.

Covered in blood, the lady assassin lowered her arms and turned to Marlowe.

Amidst the spreading fire, the poet staggered onto his feet while unsheathing a throwing-knife from his boot. “Who are you?” he demanded, his blade shaking in his bleeding hand. “Why are you doing this? Tell me!”

The woman did not say a word. Instead, she lowered her head and stared deeply into the Englishman. Marlowe had used his native tongue. Her face wrinkled like a wolf's snout and she flashed her teeth like fangs, some of them still pink with carnage. The woman squeezed her stolen dagger, screamed a Celtic curse, and then tore her own throat open with her blade. Marlowe's mouth hung open while the woman's neck erupted all over her body. She then lowered her gaze, stared straight into the poet's eyes in triumph, and fell backward into the blood-soaked bed. Both she and the pope were dead; murdered by Marlowe's dagger.

“Oh no…” the poet realized as the entire room filled with flame.

The Torrino began to thunder as papal guards raced up its spiral staircase.
“Proteggete il papa! Assassini!”

Realizing he was in trouble, Marlowe jumped straight out the window that he had been pulled through.

*   *   *

A modest donation was all it took for Roberto to pass his evening in the Pantheon, the one building from ancient Rome still in use in the city. Specifically, as a tomb.

The senator was paying his respects to Raffaello when the tolling of church bells filled the chamber. With his prayer interrupted, Roberto crossed himself and turned around. He walked across the temple's magnificently tiled marble floor with only a few candles burning. He stepped directly under the starlit oculus 142 feet above him in the center of the temple's dome. The constellations Draco and Hercules loomed above him, and Roberto was curious what fortunes they portended. The senator stood tall and homed his eyes through the church's open doors, past its Numidian marble cantons and sixteen Egyptian granite columns. His hands were at his sides, and his pulse was steady. In his mind, he imagined it would take a younger man like Marlowe about five minutes to run from the Quirinale to the Pantheon. Maybe ten minutes if he got lost.

Instead, an exhausted Marlowe came staggering through its doors only seconds later. It took the pope's guards several minutes to sound the alarm during his escape.

“Roberto!” Marlowe gasped, limping forward. “The pope is dead! A woman killed him! A mad witch! I saw her!”

The senator used all his strength to obscure his euphoria.

“Roberto, they're after me!” Marlowe pleaded, the pope's blood still staining his face. “They think I did it! I'm injured! You have to help me!”

The wounded poet reached out with dripping palms and blood-splattered boots. Footsteps were approaching. Behind him, a host of guards and papal soldiers descended upon the Piazza della Rotonda from all directions.

Marlowe looked over his shoulder to his bloodied footprints and then snapped his head back to Roberto. “They've followed me!” he cried. “They're here! I am a dead man! Please do something!”

The senator waited until the guards were inside the Pantheon.

“Assassino!”
the first guard shouted.
“È
un assassino! Uccidetelo!”

Roberto smirked. The soldier's choice of words could not have been more appropriate.

The senator grabbed the priest by his garbs and yanked him forward, ripping the buttons off his cassock so that his bare chest was exposed.

Marlowe looked down at Roberto's hands and then back to the senator's eyes in horror.

The man who bested Walsingham plunged a dagger beneath the Jesuit's robes. “Send Walsingham my regards.” Blood splattered over both men, and the great Christopher Marlowe fell lifelessly.

Marlowe was dead. Again.

 

Chapter XXXI

“He's Dead?”

The conspirators nodded. “Murdered in his bed,” said Robert Catesby. “The Italians are already calling him Papa Lampo. The ‘Lightning Pope.'”

“He flew in and out like lightning,” Jack Wright snickered from behind his pewter cup.

Shakespeare rubbed his beard in worry, but it was all an act. Thomas Walsingham had already briefed him on Pope Leo's murder. “Do we know who killed him?”

The intoxicated conspirators set their angry eyes on Guy Fawkes, among them several new recruits: Jack Wright's younger brother Christopher, Thomas Wintour's older brother Robert, Catesby's servant Thomas Bates, and Robert Keyes, an indebted but honest good-for-nothing. “A man was found fleeing the grounds,” said Fawkes, “but—”

“A man?” the bard interrupted. That much had not been disclosed to him. “Who was he?”

“We don't know. They killed him, but…”

Fawkes wavered, and then took a loud gulp from his March beer—potent stuff.

“But what?”

Thomas Percy angrily stomped his boot. “A heathen witch was found on the pope's body! Her throat had been sliced like a sow's,” he slurred.

“We don't know she was a witch,” Fawkes countered. “She could have been a prostitute. Or a nun.”

The sweaty man shook his head. “No. You told us she was wearing priest's robes. I hope you burn in Hell for what you've gotten us into, Guido!”

“Fie, fie!” chided Catesby, the only sober man in the group. “There will be no more of that.”

“You wanted an army, I got you an army,” Guy Fawkes growled.

“An army of hell-spawn she-beasts!”

“You couldn't recruit your own mother.”

Percy's pockmarked face twisted. “Why, you … miserable…”

“Brothers,
please
!” Robert Catesby leaped up from the barrel he was sitting on. “Have we not been through enough rows already? Do I have to knock your heads together to remind you that we are a confederacy?”

“I am sorry, Robert, but…” Tom Wintour needed another drink to continue. “It is beginning to sound like this entire endeavor—”

“Utter one more syllable and I will dig your heart out with this cup,” Percy snapped.

Threatened, Tom looked to his cousin for defense, but the sergeant-at-arms was preoccupied with his tankard. “No one quits,” Jack Wright grumbled. The swordsman greedily downed some more March beer.

An uncomfortable silence fell over the assembly for reasons other than their unpleasant location. Instead of the fashionable Duck and Drake or the comfortable Catherine Wheel, the conspirators' backdrop had changed to a musty, torchlit basement that more closely resembled a catacomb. It was an enormous undercroft half a mile upstream from the Strand, and it once served as a royal kitchen for the Palace of Westminster. The conspirators rented the empty space on Lady Day, March 25, from the same John Whynniard who leased them their prior property. The Keeper of the King's Wardrobe was happy to get rid of this place: it was dank, moldy, and had noxious air with little light. Its floors were caked with centuries of dirt, its one door opened directly into the reeking Thames, and its many crevices were a breeding ground for all sorts of vermin. It was a nauseating, suffocating place, but the conspirators prized it for one reason. The wooden boards above its twelve stone pillars happened to be the first floor of the House of Lords.

The men were sitting, drinking, and scheming directly under Parliament.

“So, why did you bring me here?” asked the playwright.

The nine conspirators looked up from their cups.

“Because recent events make your contribution to our enterprise more important than ever,” declared Catesby. “If the cunning folk have betrayed us—”

“Of course they have!” Percy cried. “The bloody heathens.”

“
Assuming
they have,” Catesby continued, “then they have simultaneously deprived us of our greatest allies. The Medici are lost to us. The French, the Spanish, the Church … no one will support us after what happened in Rome. We are on our own now, which means whatever chance we have of building an army rests on your shoulders. We
need
your play to rally the people behind us when it premieres.”

The playwright nodded. “I will continue to do my part, and I promise that it will be finished on time.”

“There are also the cunning folk to contend with,” Guy Fawkes reminded.

“Don't you even think of going back to them for help!” shot Percy.

“That's not what I meant.” Fawkes's bloodshot eyes shifted back to the bard. “Will, you remember when we first told you about their involvement?”

Shakespeare nodded. “Of course. At the inn.”

“You said you would increase their role in our drama. That you would give them more prominence.”

“Did you do that?” Catesby inquired.

The bard looked over the drunk, desperate men. “Yes, I did. I said I would.”

Guy Fawkes glared. “Then you must eliminate them.”

Shakespeare raised his eyebrows. “Strike them from my writing?”

“Yes.”

“No!” Percy countered. “Don't you dare do such a thing!”

“Tom…” Robert pleaded. “What are you—”

“Quiet!” The sweaty man snapped his head to the playwright. “Shakespeare, I want you to paint these pagan mystics as the infernal demons they are! Use every power at your disposal. Make the people of London want to murder every last one of them!”

Percy's companions were stunned. “That is actually a—
urrrt
—good idea,” Fawkes acknowledged with a burp.

“Of course it's a good idea! It's what we should have done from the beginning! Kill them all!”

“Hear, hear!” the conspirators applauded in Thomas Percy's imagination. He raised his drink and accepted their praise even though the table had been quiet.

But then an unlikely party reentered the conversation: “Perhaps now is the time for us to do something about that.”

All eyes turned to Jack Wright. “What was that?” asked Catesby.

“These witches know what we look like, and I am assuming they know both of your names.” The swordsman pointed his gloved finger to Catesby and Fawkes. “How do we know they are not going to betray us to the government? One word from them and all our heads will end up on London Bridge.”