Across the Spectrum (53 page)

∞ ∞ ∞

This much is certain: that on the thirtieth day of May, in
the year of our Lord 1593, events transpired in a rented room in Deptford that
resulted in the corpse of a man with a knife wound in his skull, above his
right eye.

In between the certainties lie a hundred tales.

∞

“In faith,” Frizer said, in the wake of a thunderous
belch, “I could not eat a bite more.”

The light of the late afternoon sun bathed the room in a
warm glow. The three gentlemen sitting at the table had their backs to it, the
better to shade their eyes, but one man lay on a bed between the table and the
window, and he turned his face to the sun with a weary sigh.

The company of these gentlemen was grown tiresome to him.
They had met at this house before noon, to dine together in a rented room and
walk about in the garden, and here they were yet at suppertime. It was not how
he would have preferred to spend his last day of liberty.

So it came as a relief when Frizer said to the two men on
either side of him, “We must be on our way soon, I think, if we’re to reach our
destination before night.” He turned in his seat to address the man on the bed.
“Kit, go downstairs and settle with Widow Bull, would you? I’m too full to
move.”

Sitting up and brushing his hair back with one long-fingered
hand, Kit said, “You mean you’re too lazy to move. But if it gets us on the
road, then I shan’t complain. Give me your coin, and I’ll pay her.”

“Pay her yourself,” Frizer said, with another small belch.
“I am not a charitable order.”

Kit flushed. The wine had gone to his head while he lay by
the window, and it stoked his irritation with Frizer. “Coming here was your
suggestion. Left to my own devices, I would not have spent the day here to
begin with, and not in the company of these men.”

The man seated to Frizer’s right glared at him over one
shoulder. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

“It
means
, sir, that my bail has run out, I am due to
present myself once more to the Star Chamber tomorrow, and your company has
hardly been so diverting as to take my mind from that matter. I will not suffer
an overfed ass to demand that I pay for his day at the trough.”

Frizer had his back to Kit at that moment, but it did not
muffle his words enough—and perhaps the man did not mean for it to. “It’s no
less than you deserve, you damned atheist.”

Kit surged up off the bed in a fury, lurching toward Frizer.
Losing his balance, he stumbled against the other man, and his hand found the
hilt of the dagger Frizer wore at his back. He snatched it loose, not thinking
what he was doing; the wine he had drunk, the irritation with Frizer’s
penny-pinching, the fear he had lived with since his arrest by the Star
Chamber, all whirled together into a rage that made him strike at Frizer with
the blade.

It gouged the man’s scalp, and Kit cursed his poor coordination.
Frizer howled and tried to squirm free. The room was a small one, though,
mostly filled with the table, the chairs, and the bed, and with the other two
men on either side of him he had nowhere to go. Kit struck a second time,
cutting Frizer’s scalp once more, and then lost his balance again as his target
turned and began to struggle with him over the knife.

The man who holds a dagger’s hilt has the advantage, but Kit
had disadvantages besides. He was drunk; he was weary; he was half Frizer’s
size. And then the backs of his knees hit the bed and he fell, Frizer on top of
him.

The dagger stabbed into the bone above his right eye.

Ingram Frizer swore and stumbled back to his feet, staring
at what he had wrought. Blood spread silently outward from the body on the bed.

Christopher Marlowe, poet and dramatist of the English
stage, was dead.

∞

And so that the said
Ingram killed & slew Christopher Morley . . . in the defence
and saving of his own life against our peace our crown & dignity. As more
fully appears by the tenor of the Record of the Inquisition aforesaid which we
caused to come before us in our Chancery by virtue of our writ. We therefore
moved by piety have pardoned the same Ingram ffrisar the breach of our peace
which pertains to us against the said Ingram for the death above mentioned
& grant to him our firm peace . . .

—pardon issued by Elizabeth,
by the Grace of God, Queen of England,
France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith &c,
28th day of June, anno Domini 1593

This much is known of Christopher Marlowe.

He was a shoemaker’s son from Canterbury who attended the
college of Corpus Christi in Cambridge, where he achieved the degree of
Bachelor of Arts. Several years later this became a Master’s degree, after the
Queen's Privy Council intervened to quash a rumour of his conversion to
Catholicism. He wrote approximately half a dozen plays, several poems, and
translations of Latin works, and made great advances in the dramatic use of
blank verse.

On the twentieth day of May, in the year of our Lord 1593,
he was arrested on a charge of atheism, then released for a short time on bail.

∞

“In faith,” Frizer said, in the wake of a thunderous
belch, “I could not eat a bite more.”

The light of the late afternoon sun bathed the room in a
warm glow. The three gentlemen sitting at the table had their backs to it, the
better to shade their eyes, but one man lay on a bed between the table and the
window, and he turned his face to the sun with an irritated sigh.

Poley ignored Frizer’s excess. Instead he said over his
shoulder to the man on the bed, “Your odds don’t look very good, Master
Marlowe.”

“Atheism and blasphemy,” Kit said in a dismissive tone.
“Kyd’s words against me won’t amount to much. And Baines was defecting to the
Catholics when we lived in Flushing together—why do you think Burghley let me
go? He knew I wasn’t the defector, whatever Baines said. But the evidence
against Baines was lacking, and so he’s free to fabricate these new accusations
against me. Now I’m an atheist, when last year I was a Catholic in the making?”

Skeres said, from the other side of Frizer, “You’re
fortunate it’s just atheism. The original version of Baines’s accusation
included sedition as well.”

“Henry Barrow and John Greenwood were hanged for that
scarcely a month gone,” Poley added, hard on the heels of Skeres’s ominous
words. “And John Penry just yesterday.”

Kit’s head had come up when Skeres mentioned sedition, but
now he lay back with a wave of one hand. “There is no proof.”

“Proof is not needed,” Skeres said. “Only confession.”

“Confession such as was extracted from your friend Kyd,”
Poley said. “And you are no more immune to the rack than he, Master Marlowe.”

The two of them passed their words back and forth as
smoothly as if they’d rehearsed in advance. Frizer remained silent, his back to
Kit, his shoulders hunched as if uncomfortable with the entire situation. The
four of them had been at it all day. The conversation periodically diverged to
other topics as they walked in the garden during the afternoon hours, but always
it returned to this: the threat against Kit.

Kit sat up and draped his arms over his knees, long-fingered
hands hanging loose. “Confession and recantation. Unpleasant, but I’d hardly be
the first man to escape execution thus.”

Poley looked at him with cold, hard eyes that would not have
been out of place in a wolf’s head. “Master Marlowe, I do not believe you
understand the true gravity of the situation.

“No one is alone in this matter. An Arianist tract was found
in Thomas Kyd’s room, which he claims you gave to him. You have not said
whether this is true or not, but in the final accounting it does not matter.
You
were named.
And you, in your turn, will name others.”

No man among them was reckless enough to speak the names
aloud, but they whispered through Kit’s mind. Henry Percy, called the “Wizard”
Earl of Northumberland. Sir George Carey, heir to the Lord Chamberlain.
Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. Sir Walter Ralegh, disgraced at Court, but
not so disgraced that he could not fall yet further.

Kit had not been so foolish as to print his thoughts on
atheism—but he had, it was true, spoken of them to those men, who lent him a
sympathetic ear. And atheism was as good as sedition, when the Queen was the
head of the Church and ruled in God’s name.

Powerful men, every one of them, who would not stand by to
see their names dragged into this incident.

“Or rather,” Poley said, continuing where he had left off
and interrupting Kit’s suddenly ominous thoughts, “you will not name others. We
are to see to that.”

And Frizer rose at last, his face grim but set, drawing from
the small of his back a dagger which had rested there all this time—a dagger
which Kit might have seized, had he thought more quickly, but the wine blinded
him to his peril until too late. He screamed and lunged off the bed, hoping
against all reason that the Widow Bull might hear and somehow intervene, but
Skeres and Poley grabbed his arms and threw him back onto the bed, and Frizer
stabbed downward with the knife.

Kit’s flailing meant Frizer missed his mark, but the blade
did its work regardless, sinking into the bone above his right eye.

The three men stood up, breathing hard in the aftermath of
the brief struggle. Blood spread silently outward from the body on the bed.

“Give me your dagger,” Poley said to his companion Frizer.
“I’ll cut your scalp, and we shall say he attacked you.”

They did so, and then went for the Widow Bull, to report the
terrible news.

Christopher Marlowe, atheist and threat to those more
powerful than he, was dead.

∞

These thinges, with
many other shall by good & honest witnes be aproved to be his opinions and
Comon Speeches, and that this Marlow doth not only hould them himself, but
almost into every Company he Cometh he perswades men to Atheism willing them
not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins, and vtterly scorning both god and
his ministers as I Richard Baines will Justify & approue both by mine oth
and the testimony of many honest men, and almost al men with whome he hath
Conversed any time will testify the same, and as I think all men in Cristianity
ought to indevor that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped . . .

—statement of accusation by Richard Baines

This much is known of the persons involved.

Ingram Frizer was a servant and agent of Thomas Walsingham.
Less famous than his cousin, Sir Francis Walsingham, who had late been
Secretary of State to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, Thomas was nonetheless in
the same business as that recently-deceased cousin: the business of espionage.

Nicholas Skeres served Sir Francis as an “agent provocateur”
in the matter of the Babington Plot against the Queen’s life, and had assisted
Frizer in conning a naive young man out of his money. Robert Poley, even more
than Skeres and Frizer, had experience as Sir Francis’s spy. On that day in
Deptford, he was carrying political letters from the Netherlands to the Court,
currently in residence twelve miles away at the Palace of Nonsuch.

The house belonged to one Dame Eleanor Bull. She was a
respectable widow whose sister had connections to the Court, and she often
hired out her rooms for meetings, serving meals to those who came there.

That she provided a safe house for the Government’s spies is
purely speculation.

As for Christopher Marlowe, he had done “good service” to
Her Majesty—earning the assistance of the Privy Council, when he would have
been denied his degree—and his artistic patron was the gentleman Thomas
Walsingham.

∞

“In faith,” Frizer said, in the wake of a thunderous
belch, “I could not eat a bite more.”

The light of the late afternoon sun bathed the room in a
warm glow. The three gentlemen sitting at the table had their backs to it, the
better to shade their eyes, but one man lay on a bed between the table and the
window, and he turned his face to the sun with a worried sigh.

A knock at the door brought everyone alert, even Frizer, who
had been relaxed the entire day, in contrast to his companions’ tension. Skeres
rose and went to the door, cracking it just a sliver.

Muffled but still intelligible, the Widow Bull’s voice said,
“They’re here.”

Skeres glanced back at Frizer and jerked his head. “Come
help me.”

When the two men had left the room, the last gentleman at the
table turned in his seat to look at the bed. “Are you ready, Kit?”

The fine-boned face was drawn and weary. Kit had not rested
well these days past, since Thomas Kyd issued his accusation from the rack,
since word came that Baines was preparing worse troubles for him. Atheism,
potentially sedition; men accused of these things did not fare well.

“I imagine the rack would be more painful,” he said by way
of response to Poley, “but at the moment, it is hard to credit.”

Whatever Poley might have said to that was forestalled by
the return of Frizer and Skeres, dragging a heavy, wrapped bundle through the
door. Kit rolled smoothly to his feet as Poley went to pull the sheets from one
end of the bundle.

“God’s blood!” Kit swore when the wrappings came free, revealing
the face of a dead man. “Who is that?”

“John Penry,” Poley said. “Or should I say, Kit Marlowe.”

Kit sank back against the table, eyes still on the corpse.
The man was dark-haired, fairly slender. Not a close resemblance, as such
things went, but close enough for Poley’s words to make his skin crawl. “You
mean not just to spirit me from England. You mean to fake my death.”

“Of course.” Poley stepped aside as Frizer and Skeres,
panting from the effort of carrying the body up the stairs, began to extract it
from its wrappings. “The forces moving against you would not be satisfied if
you merely disappeared. Alive, Kit Marlowe is still a threat, and a potential
source of evidence against powerful men. Dead, no one will think on him again.”