Perfect Shadows

chapter 4

The weeks passed into months. I wrote, I took my turns prompting rehearsals at the playhouse, even sometimes treading the boards myself, and casually bedded a few young men among the players, but more from habit than desire. I visited Scadbury frequently, but never had opportunity to speak to Tom away from Frizer’s triumphant presence. More than once I found myself regretting the prohibition upon his murder that Rózsa had pronounced that January morning.

I was an even more frequent visitor to Crosby Place, a guest of the guests of the Lord Mayor, spending many wonderful evening hours with my hosts in scholarly pursuits and hours even more wondrous alone with Rózsa in pursuits of a more earthy nature. Von Poppelau knew and seemed to approve of our coupling and I did not wish to disturb things with questions and risk losing all. Often we went out together, Rózsa dressed always as a young man, but only at night, never before twilight.

I continued working on Hero and Leander, but it was Tom’s poem and I found the delight I took in it thoroughly tarnished. About mid-April, upon returning from one of those unsatisfying visits with Tom I wrote furiously for a time, then studied my words:

Love is not full of pity, as men say,

But deaf and cruel where he means to prey.

I threw down my pen, spattering the page, and snatched up my cloak. I took the stairs two at a time and strode into the street, heading for Crosby Place.

Not far from my lodgings a shadow stepped from an alley and tugged at my arm. I jerked away and dropped a hand to the hilt of my sword, turning to face my assailant.

“My, my,” the small man said, with a supercilious grin. “Touchy, aren’t we, Kit?” I recognized Robin Poley, who had taught me the ropes of spying for Sir Francis Walsingham. I’d heard that he was back in England, working for Robert Cecil, who had gathered up the fallen reins of power when Sir Francis had died.

“I’m rather late for an appointment, Robin,” I told him, backing away. He followed.

“Your new friends, is it? Oh, I know that you think you have done with the game, sweet Kit, but be assured the game has not done with you!”

“Go away Robin! I’ll have none of it.” I started to walk and he trotted after.

“You’d do well to heed me, Marlowe,” he panted. “You think your fame or your patron or your new friends will save you? Naught can—if your old friends are forgot! I could drop many a word about how certain names found their way into Walsingham’s ear! Men have burned because of you and their friends crave bloody vengeance. Your position is perilous, Kit! You’re a known atheist, sodomite, blasphemer—”

“And you’re a known knave! Leave off, Robin!” I walked faster. As I left him scowling behind me, I recalled how I had gotten involved in what he had called “the game” several years before.

It was in London, the streets muddy with the promise of spring. I had been invited to attend upon Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s Secretary, one of the most powerful men in the country. As I waited in the anteroom, one of a large number, I gazed out of the window, startled to see a form that I thought I knew from Cambridge. But surely not: that blackmailing boy had left when his father died, and what business could he have with the Secretary? For that matter, what business had I? I brushed my nervous fears aside and resolved myself to wait.

When I was shown into the chamber some time later I gasped at the sight of the young man lounging in the window seat. Adonis, I thought to myself, or Eros, the god of Love himself. That hair, like so many strands of the finest, palest gold, skin like lilies and roses, so fine and fair that the merest touch could leave a bruise. . . .

Sir Francis cleared his throat harshly and I swiveled my gaze to the man seated behind the table, a table littered with papers, pens, and broken wax. The man himself loomed even though he was not above middle-height, and seated besides. His gown was somber, but of the finest materials and set off by a narrow ruff of peerless lace. The face, with it’s Spaniard’s coloring, was sad, but the eyes! I had seen opaque eyes like that once before, turbid and blotched, in the face of a man pulled from the River Cam, two days drowned. I shuddered slightly in spite of myself and thought that I heard a faint chuckle from the direction of the window seat. After an hour or so of intense interrogation, I was dismissed from the Secretary’s presence. Adonis, who had been introduced as Walsingham’s nephew Tom, followed and laid his tapered and ring-laden fingers upon my arm as soon as we stepped outdoors.

“Come, I will buy you some dinner. Facing my uncle is hungry work, but it can pay well,” he said, smoothing the harebell-blue velvet of his doublet, a blue, I noted dazedly, that exactly matched those large, golden-fringed eyes. I was intensely conscious that this, my newest doublet, though of wine colored velvet with a cherry-red silk lining, was sadly worn. It was ill-fitting enough to show that it had been made for someone else and that I had acquired it at second hand. My trunkhose were a poor match and my hose clumsily mended. My boots were good, though. That was one advantage to having a cobbler in the family—you always went well shod. He led me to the courtyard where my own hired hack and a blood mare stood side by side.

Within an hour we were comfortably lodged in a private room dining on the richest fare I had ever seen. Wine in abundance, flesh, fish and fowl, all cooked to perfection and liberally spiced, set off with sweetmeats and fancy breads. After the plain food and small beer of the college buttery, this seemed like heaven. “The more like heaven for the company,” I thought, unable to tear my eyes from the wanton, wayward godling before me. In the light of his sudden smile I realized I had spoken the thought aloud.

“He wishes me to spy on my fellow students, then?” I asked quickly, to cover my confusion, and found my voice already beginning to slur from the unaccustomed strength of the wine.

“Spy? My sweet Kit—I may call you Kit, may I not? How dramatic you are! No, of course not, but if you should happen to hear anything that he should know—for the safety of the Queen and the realm, well, he would see that you did not lose by it. Why, he often employs me to deliver messages for him, between London and Paris. You must come with me to Paris, one day, sweet, sweet, Kit. My uncle said that you were . . . like me. . . .” the voice, grown husky, trailed off, and in the sinking light of the candles Tom leant towards me, shoving the table out of the way, reaching out his hand, but shyly, giving me every chance to pull back in the case that his uncle had been misinformed. But he had not been, the desire was there in my eyes, in my ragged breathing, unquestionably rising in my groin, and I saw Tom make his decision. I could read it in his eyes, in the slight nod of his head. He allowed our lips to brush, then turned his head, as if in shame, and all the while his shameless hand was threading its way into the intricacies of my clothing.

It was a fine line to draw, a knife’s edge to walk, but Tom was a practiced player, and a novice such as I stood no chance against him. Soon I had been teased into a state close to madness, as he provoked the dominance verging on violence that his own needs demanded. Later, sweat-soaked and sated, still entwined together, he developed in detail what would be required of me in Walsingham’s service and the rewards I could expect.

It meant a new life for me. I traveled to Paris and to Rheims, traveled into danger to gather names of those Catholics who spoke of returning to England, of working to return England to the Catholic fold, and also those who whispered of the Queen of Scots. Until now I had been largely untouched by the religious fervor that swirled through the University, and I told myself that it mattered little to me what happened to the men whose names I so callously dropped into the Secretary’s ear, men whose trust I abused. What mattered was the coin in my pocket, the food in my stomach, and the fine clothing on my back.

I had my portrait painted. I looked every inch the gentleman, I thought, in my new slashed doublet, made new for me and trimmed with gilt buttons, my falling band and cuffs of cobweb lawn, my left hand tucked carefully away to hide my ink-stained fingers. But when the painter, had asked me for a motto to inscribe the work, I had found myself unable to stop laughing, laughter tinged with hysteria. “Quod me nutrit me destruit!” I had gasped: That which feeds me, destroys me. And then later, standing before the Masters, resplendent in my new affluence, to be told that my degree was to be withheld from me, on the grounds that I was one of these selfsame religious maniacs with whom I had associated only upon Walsingham’s request! It was not to be borne! Within two months I had, by the Council’s own demand, been granted my degree. I spurned the expected Holy Orders (a fine divine I would make!) and took London by storm with my play Tamburlaine.

It was yet twilight when I arrived at Crosby Place, still brooding upon my meeting with Poley. The steward, still after all these weeks looking somewhat askance at the raffish poet and playwright, brought me wine in the little study where I had first met Nicolas. There was a fog rising and the night air was chill. I was glad of the fire and, gazing intently at it, did not hear Rózsa come in. She dropped down beside my chair, the firelight through her hair, turning it to burnished bronze.

“You are troubled, my love?” She refilled my cup and rested her hand on my knee while I drained it, then filled it again. “You will be drunk, Kit,” she added.

“I mean to be,” I said shortly. She let her resting hand trace the muscle on the inside of my thigh, moving slowly higher. “Only, perhaps, not just yet?” she said slyly, licking her lips and smiling sideways up at me. I laughed despite myself.

“Wanton! Are you never satisfied?” She stood and pulled me to my feet, and still holding my hands, led me up the stairs to her chamber. I collapsed on the bed and let her undress me, my mind blessedly muddled from the wine I’d tossed into my empty belly. I vaguely realized that she was tying me to the bed-frame and before I could muster a protest she had done. I was tied securely but not uncomfortably, spread-eagled; I felt a shiver of alarm growing in the pit of my stomach, matched by a growing excitement, and I raised my head to try to grin at her. “What—” I started, but she, smiling dreamily, placed her fingers over my lips then trailed her hand slowly over my chin and throat, down my chest. “Trust me,” she murmured.

That night she taught me much about my body’s responses, things I would have once delighted to share with Tom. Time and again she brought me to the point, then paused to let the passion recede, only to build it again to an ever higher pitch. When she finally bestrode me, her cool body enveloping my fevered flesh, I wanted to scream with the release, and then again when her sharp teeth sank into my throat, and the familiar ecstasy drowned me.

I was roused sometime later by a discreet knock on the door and found I was free. Rózsa answered the knock and brought the delivered tray to the bed, whereupon I raised myself on one elbow and reached for the wine. She poured my glass full, then began feeding me with finger-sized strips of tender, rare roast beef and fritters of young sorrel leaves. I reached out to her, and she caught my right hand, turning it to examine the scar slashed across the wrist.

“Kit? How came you by this scar?”

“Ah. That was my rival, Greene. I’d nicked a crony of his with my dagger once upon a time, and he thought to return the favor. They caught me out, cupshotten, and Greene held my arm while Ball slashed my wrist for me. Greene never noticed that I’m left-handed—he’d meant to stop me writing for a time, to give himself a better chance.”

“They might have stopped your life.”

“Aye, that they might. They might not have stopped at one wrist but cut both, or even my throat, if not for Nashe.” I was overcome by the memory of gallant Tommy leaping into the fray without so much as a dagger, his only weapon a dead dog he’d caught up from a dung heap. “He routed them, bound my wrist, and got me to my lodgings.”

“Yes, you are fortunate in your friends.” She fell silent for a moment, then said abruptly, “Kit, we are taking Blackavar House near Deptford for the summer; will you come and stay? Over May Day?” I had already accepted Tom’s invitation for the same period, but that had been issued before the rift and I did not suppose that he would much care if I stayed away. “Yes,” I told her, “yes, I will.”