Authors: Siobhan Burke
“I am well out of it,” I concluded.
“But how is it that you were able to leave Walsingham’s Service
so freely?” Nicolas asked, thoughtfully. “Given all you know, I should not have
thought that you would be so easily let go.”
“The death of Sir Francis was a blessing for me. Cecil tries to
ensnare me, but he is no Walsingham.”
“He may be worse,” Rózsa retorted. “He may embrace your
Machiavel as Sir Francis did not.”
“If they wish me to spy for them they cannot kill me,” I
reasoned.
“How if they only wish your silence? How better to stop your
mouth than with six feet of clay?”
“Mayhap, but I do not fancy I should be quite so easy to kill,
and I never supposed I’d make old bones in any case. The fiercer the flame the
sooner it burns out,” I said with a shrug and a grim smile at their exchanged
glances. I paced restlessly about the room and stopped short before a portrait
half hidden in the shadows. It showed an androgynous dark-haired young man,
dressed in a finely embroidered doublet muted by cobweb-lawn, and holding a
feather fan in one languorous hand. With a start, I realized that it was Rózsa
and turned a questioning look on her. She laughed, happy, it seemed, to change
the subject, and told me that it had been a present for Nicolas.
“It was painted to celebrate my presentation at court. The
painter claimed to have been employed by the Queen of Scots, to design her
embroideries, but had fallen to traveling the country and painting portraits.
Indeed, the embroidery is rather better rendered than my features!”
“You were presented as a boy?” I was fascinated.
“And danced with the queen, who told me that I was a likely
lad,” Rózsa laughed, “and presented again the next night as a girl and she
quite enjoyed the prank, though she claimed to have known the truth all along!”
I took a candle to examine the painting more closely.
“The face is not very like,” I agreed. “Except for the eyes.” I
stared at them and they stared back, ancient, knowing eyes in an adolescent
face. I turned to find the originals fixed upon me, their expression no more
readable than the painted ones. She smiled and changed the subject again,
asking me about my plays, especially
Faustus
.
This naturally turned the conversation to the arcane, to Doctor
Dee, and to Ralegh’s so-called School of Night, to the references I had used
for the play and thence onward to superstition, the Fairy faith and other
heathen religions.
“Did you know that it is the dark of the moon and that this is
Walpurgis Nacht?” Rózsa said abruptly. “The people of the Empire believe that
all the devils walk this night and the witches have free rein. It’s one of the
great Sabbats, you know, called Beltane here in England.”
“How do you know so much about witches,” I asked idly. She
turned her dark, enigmatic eyes on me.
“That is what my parents were burned for, in Spain.”
The thunder was still exploding in cannonade overhead when I
went to my chamber an hour or so later. It was only a matter of minutes before
Rózsa joined me. I lay on the bed, stripped to shirt and hose and watched her
undress in the flickering light of the candles. In her shirt she went to a
cupboard and returned to the bed with a small, carved stone pipe and a cake of
a greenish-brown substance. I admired the pipe, carved in the shape of a
dragon, the bowl formed of its open jaws and its tail for the stem. She filled
the pipe from the block and lit it with a taper. I sniffed. “What is it? It’s
not tobacco,” I said, and watched as she held the smoke she had inhaled and
then let it out slowly.
“It’s hashish, from Turkey. It’s better than tobacco,” she
answered, handing the pipe to me. I had eagerly embraced and ardently loved
Ralegh’s “nymph”, tobacco, but after a time I had to agree: this was better. I
felt as if I were floating a few inches above the bed, as if her hands left
trails of sensation across my skin, like shooting stars against the void, as
she stripped away my hose and shirt. I watched dreamily as she kissed my
fingers and wrist. Our eyes met and locked as she bit into the vein there. The
anticipated bliss began to well in me, and my stomach knotted as I realized
that it was the bite that gave the pleasure, and that she was sucking on the
wound that she had made. She was drinking my blood.
She left my wrist then and kissed my lips. I could taste my
blood in her mouth and it excited something within me, something twisted,
corrupt, that had lurked in my soul, only hinting at its presence before, but
now forever exposed—flinging away salvation, embracing damnation, I reveled in
it and rolled over, pinning her beneath me, thrusting myself into her with a
violence that was only rivaled by her own. She scored my back with her nails,
then buried her hands in my hair, relentlessly pulling me down, pulling my head
back to expose my throat.
I could feel her sharp teeth entering the vein. The depravity of
it forced my climax and I nearly blacked out. Only dimly conscious, I felt her
slip from me and return a minute later with a goblet of ruby-red Venetian
glass, a dragon entwined about its stem. It was filled to brimming with a dark
liquid. “I would not have thee die. I could not endure to lose thee a second
time,” she said, inexplicably, and handed me the glass. As I raised it to my
lips I saw the rapidly closing cut she had made on her wrist and knew that the
glass held blood, her blood. I drained it, savoring the odd, bittersweet taste,
then cast it aside and our eyes locked again as I took her hand, placed the cut
to my lips, and drew the living blood from her as she shivered against me. I
took no more than a few swallows before a lethargy overcame me and I slept.
It was late afternoon when I woke, alone, and drew the curtains
against the painfully bright sunlight pouring into the room. My wrist bore only
a faint bruising where she had bitten me, as did my throat when I had checked
the mirror, but my back looked and felt as if I had been flogged. Hissing with
the pain, I eased a shirt over the bloody welts, pulled on my hose and slops,
and went downstairs. The servants once more brought me meat and drink and told
me that my hosts would return at sunset.
I sat in the study and thought about the preceding night. The
hashish had released my inhibitions, revealing the darkest side of my nature, a
side that I had always suppressed, but that was now rampantly free. When I
thought of last night I felt no disgust or revulsion, only a tainted
fascination and it was the taint itself, I realized, that was so seductive. I
passed the rest of the time until sunset reading and laughing over Rózsa’s
brazen and pithy translations of that ribald Roman poet Catullus.
I spent a few days there, and the nights together with Rózsa
were a pleasure so intense I thought I’d die of it. Twice more we engaged in
our sanguinary rite, leaving me feeling a little weak, but also possessed of
vastly heightened senses and an almost hectic excitement. Though I could never
tire of the company, I soon wearied of the country life and felt the pull of
the city, of London. I left early on the morning of the eighth, but the
playhouses had been ordered closed due to plague and I found I had rather too
much time on my hands.
One night at the Anchor, Thomas Kyd approached me, his inky
fingers working nervously, twisting a pewter mourning ring around and around.
We had worked in a shared chamber some time before, but found that our natures
were not suited to such close quarters. Thomas was sober and earnest, taking in
work as a copyist or scrivener to keep himself fed. Sarcasm and irony were
largely lost on him and he read no Latin or Greek, but depended on the
translations of others, all of which served to make him the butt of many jokes
among the University wits.
I was playing cards with four or five others and waited for
Thomas to come to his point, but in vain. He just sat with his calflike eyes
fixed on me and sipped the small beer that I paid for, watching the card-play
without comment. I was drinking wine liberally laced with aquavitae and was
already more than a little drunk. I soon grew bored and impatient—I found his
sedate temperance irritating at the best of times, and now every twist of that
cheap ring seemed to wind me tighter and tighter.
“Christ’s Cock, Thomas, will you come to the point?” I snarled,
my impatience somewhat mitigated by the evident horror my impiety induced in
Kyd. “Surely you remember Christ’s cock, Thomas—it could crow three times in a
single night!” Drunken laughter rocked the room and almost drowned out Kyd’s
reply.
“You’d best take care, Marlowe. What if someone—important—
should hear you?” Kyd murmured, with a furtive glance around.
“What do you want, Thomas?” Patiently exasperated.
“I need some money, not much, just a small sum until Friday.
I’ll begetting paid then and—what?”
“I said, I’ll buy your hat. A new one, is it not? You have
execrable taste in clothing, Tom, and you always had,” I was laughing, almost
overcome by my own drunken humor. My companions exchanged glances and several
bystanders moved closer, closing in to watch the kill.
“Why would you want it,” Kyd asked sullenly, “if it’s so
execrable?”
“Why, it looks just like a piss-pot, Thomas, and I’ll use it so.
I need to piss and I’d as lief not leave the table just now,” I said blandly,
indicating the cards before me. The room exploded into coarse laughter and his
face flamed. “Come now, what d’you say? I’ll give you a shilling for it. That’s
a handsome price for a piss-pot, you can’t say fairer than that!” I drawled.
Kyd shoved himself away, stumbling to the door, half-blind with
tears of humiliation. I felt suddenly tired and heartily ashamed of myself for
wasting my wit in such a coarse and puerile way. Pushing myself away from the
table, I called out after him, but he only stiffened and kept going. I caught
him just inside the door. “Come, Horatio,” I said, nicknaming him for one of
his characters as Nashe had often named me “Tamburlaine”. “Come now, and
forgive me. You know ’twas only the drink.” He cursed softly, but took the half
crown I pressed into his hand, the last gold coin I had in my purse. He left
without a word, but with a backward glance that spoke volumes. He hated me,
that glance said, hated having to ask me for money, hated being made the butt
of my vicious humor, and if ever he could do me an ill turn, he’d not hesitate.
Ignoring the gibes of my companions, I returned to the table. Both the game and
the company had lost their savor.
Bored with inaction, I spent my days amusing myself by living up
to Marston’s sarcastic sobriquet ”Kind Kit”, writing poisonous satires on the
works of rival poets and playwrights, and circulating them where they would
fall under the eyes of their targets.
I made the rounds of the taverns by night, drank too much,
argued my unorthodox opinions a bit too glibly, and certainly, by hindsight,
far too recklessly. Blasphemies designed merely to shock and disgust my
listeners spilled from my lips, I picked fights and started brawls, and through
all I thought of Rózsa. Several times I almost returned to Blackavar, but I
held back, keeping that as a last resort. I heard that Thomas Kyd had been
arrested, and shrugged. It was most likely for debt, I thought and if the fool
had been too fastidious to use the money I had given him, then to hell with
him.
About mid-month a letter arrived from Tom, asking me to visit
him at my earliest convenience. Let him dangle for once, I thought and
purposely waited several days before riding to Scadbury, to arrive on the
afternoon of the seventeenth. The house was filled with people and though Tom
must have seen me in the throng, he never acknowledged my presence. By the
morning of the nineteenth I was furious. I had started drinking as soon as I
woke, but I was not yet drunk when I accosted Tom in the gallery that morning,
catching his arm and swinging him about. “I would speak with thee,” I hissed,
my anger barely controlled, my fingers digging into his flesh through the heavy
velvet of his doublet.
“Not now, Marlowe, and not here,” Tom answered petulantly,
ignoring my familiarity. “Anon.” He tried to pull away but I tightened my grip.
“Yes now,” I insisted. “Find us someplace private or I shall
have my say here and now. You won’t like it.” I had retained my rank as
dominant partner in our personal relationship, more by my own nature than Tom’s
intent, and his resistance crumbled. He motioned to a nearby room used for the
estate’s accounting and I bolted the door behind us. Tom seated himself behind
the table, caught up a large book of accounts and began studying it
assiduously. After a moment I strolled over and took the ledger from him,
handing it back right-way up; he had the grace to blush and lay it down.
“Why did you call me here if you only meant to abuse and ignore
me?” I asked softly, seating myself on the corner of the table. “Do you mean to
punish me? For what? For refusing to be the debauched pawn you and Frizer
would make of me?” My voice was hoarse with emotion. Tom’s eyes flashed.
“No! Do not dredge that up again—it’s past and done. No,” he
said, his lips curling with disgust, “I want to know about that foreign drab
you’ve been swiving! I’ve heard she’s a bawd and that the von Popple knave is
her pimp. What do you pay her, Kit? Less, I warrant, than I paid you! Or does
she pay you? It must be a pretty price indeed to keep
you
between a
woman’s legs—” his tirade cut off as I slapped him smartly across the cheek. I
raised my hand for a second blow, but Tom leapt to his feet, knocking over his
heavy chair and setting his back to the wall, his hand dropping to the dagger
on his belt. I stayed seated on the table, hands carefully kept away from my
own weapons. I had
loved
Tom, offered my heart, and to be so spurned, to
be compared to a prostitute offering my body in exchange for patronage—but Tom
was still a boy, for all he was a year older than I. I started to speak, to
apologize, but Tom interrupted me.