All Night Awake (29 page)

Tyburn Square, midday. Walking back from Will’s, Kit chances upon an execution. The gibbet is mounted midplaza. Official-looking buildings—their stone facades imposing, hem in a varied crowd of Londoners. Vendors and sightseers circulate. On the gibbet, a man stands between two executioners.

K
it stopped, staring at the gibbet.

He knew the man upon it, the condemned man.

His mind, searching, brought forth a name.

John Penry.

Kit reeled. John Penry had been arrested, of course and Kit knew he would be put to the question. But—condemned?

Around Kit, the crowd milled and swirled. A few souls watched the gibbet attentively, but most were there to see and be seen, for a meeting point, for a break in routine.

“An orange, ducks, fresh off the ship from Spain,” a woman in dark garments said. She thrust a golden fruit in front of Kit’s eyes. “A penny, no more.”

Kit sidestepped the proffered orange.

His eyes upon Penry, Kit neared the gibbet. The executioners were demanding a last speech of the prisoner, last words, a token of repentance.

Kit stared, fascinated.

But for him, Penry wouldn’t be here. But for him, Penry might be well, walking the streets, minding his own business.

How he looked, too, how much thinner than he had in his Cambridge days. And his arms hung in an odd way, within their long black sleeves.

Had Penry been broken on the wheel?

Something like remorse tore at Kit’s conscience, something like empathy knocked and hit upon his mind, with no more effect than a moth flying at a glass window.

He felt sorry for John Penry, well enough. Yet Imp must be saved.

With that thought he looked up, and chanced to meet Penry’s eyes, and in Penry’s eyes he saw a hint of recognition, a hint of gratitude.

Gratitude that, of all their Cambridge fellows, Kit had come to see Perry’s end? Did Perry think Kit had come to lend him comfort? Oh, Kit wished he could.

Something almost like a smile twisted Penry’s pale lips up, and he nodded toward Kit as he said, “God have mercy on us all. I have no more to say. God have mercy on us.”

On those words, the executioner kicked Penry’s feet out from under him.

Penry fell from the platform that supported the gibbet, and the noose tightened.

A spasm, a gasp, and a body was carrion.

A nearby church bell tolled dolefully.

Kit felt something—breath? life?—fly by. It felt like warm wind, like a sigh.

Old women rushed to the gibbet to collect pieces of hair and bits of nail, to conjure upon.

That pious Penry should be used for black magic beggared the mind.

Disgusted, heartsick, not knowing why he felt so hollow, Kit turned and walked away.

He had been forced to turn Penry in. He had been
forced
to save himself and Imp, and Penry was their only salvation.

But no matter how many times Kit repeated these words to himself as he walked amid the festive crowd, he kept hearing Penry’s earnest words,
God have mercy on us all.

Kit shivered and wished he still believed in a God of whom to ask forgiveness for what he’d had to do.

Scene 29

A narrow Elizabethan alley, dark and murky. It is nighttime and only faint lights of candles shine in some windows of the five-story buildings that loom overhead, on either side, obscuring the view of distant stars, the cloud-flecked sky. Through this alley, Kit Marlowe stumbles, looking like a somnambulist.

I
t was midnight on the clock, and Kit bumbled abroad, not sure where he was, walking the dark alleys in a restless search for something he couldn’t understand.

He felt as though some dark core of his soul had control of his body, and he were a horse that the rider impelled on and on, with fierce jabs of spurred boots.

The horse knew not where he went, nor did Kit. Only that he must go on and on, breathless and tired, longing for sleep, longing for rest, but craving . . . craving something he could not explain.

Where was he?

Nothing in the houses around him gave him a hint of his whereabouts. The houses were tall and narrow, not mean looking, and yet not great. The muck underfoot smelled no worse than it did anywhere else.

And yet, muck and mud though it was, it made Kit wish to lie down in it and sleep, he was so tired.

Stumbling he walked.

Thoughts of life as food, of living force, living strength as fodder, streamed through Kit’s mind, making him crave—crave life? Or death?

Kit thought of John Penry’s shuddering, suspended from the gallows. He trembled and licked his lips.

Impulses and thoughts for which he had no name used his body for their lair.

Ahead, on a low window, a light flourished.

Kit rushed, put his hand against the door trying it.

What would he do if he got in? Why did he wish to get in? Thoughts of biting living flesh, the longing for fresh blood upon his tongue, the need for something else—for the life that fed some power, some weakening strength. His thoughts shocked him before they were even words.

Kit pulled his hand away from the knob. What madness was this? What was happening to him?

“Soft, soft,” Kit said. “What light beyond yonder window breaks. Oh, go to sleep whoever you be, maiden or man, or child. Go to sleep, stay safe from such as me.”

His words, though whispered, caused a sound behind him—a scuffling sound, like someone faltering.

Kit turned around.

And looked into Poley’s well-meaning eyes, Poley’s calm, agreeable face.

Poley and Frizer had followed Kit again.

Kit felt no fear, not even anger. Instead he thought of Poley’s and Frizer’s lives and strength, and craved those lives like men crave food.

Kit craved killing.

Tear, slash, eat, drink the life,
Kit’s mind cajoled, and Kit recoiled at the thought.

Kit bent his knees, not knowing what he did, and crouched like an animal about to spring. His hands formed into claws, and as he watched, he swore his nails grew longer.

Something else must be happening to him, something visible in his countenance. Kit’s features must have changed, because Poley whispered softly, “Marlowe.” And Poley’s voice vibrated with trembling fear.

Kit looked up at Poley and bared his teeth, feeling a crazed hunger, a need to kill. His reason screamed at him to stop.

What loss would Poley be?
Kit told his reason.
What loss to the world?

He could not answer. But just then, as he meant to spring, someone else approached, walking stealthily along the narrow dark street.

Someone who’d been following Poley as he’d been following Kit?

This person walked with uncommon majesty, with squared shoulders, a confident stride.

It was a woman dressed in a gentlewoman’s attire.

Closer, she hesitated, her commanding walk halted. A beam of moonlight shone up on her features.

Kit saw the face on every coin, the pattern handed out for painters to draw the Queen.

The Queen.

But the woman wore a dress of dark stuff, and her hair was white and not the red of the portraits, and Kit wasn’t sure.

Within him the demand for life and strength, the hunger for the fluid substance of breath that had consumed Kit’s inner core, now changed.

It changed to a snickering joy, a happy smugness.

Kill the Queen,
the something whispered.
And the game will be won.

Kit screamed at his own thought, a muffled, strangled scream.

The woman stopped, staring at him.

She screamed at whatever she glimpsed in Kit’s features. Something within Kit sniggered.

The Queen blanched. Her hand at her throat, she stepped back. Poley half moved forward, and made as if to talk to her.

Kit stared Poley in the eye. Poley stepped back, against the wall, actually paling in his fright.

The Queen turned and ran unsteadily down the street, tottering on high heels.

Yet, Kit recoiled, sweat beading on his skin. The fight within him was similar to the fight within a starved man who wishes to fast.

Part of him wished to kill Elizabeth, wished to kill her more than he wished to draw the next breath.

Yet Kit knew what would happen if Elizabeth died here, without descendants, with no appointed successor.

The many pretenders to the throne, from Spain and France, Scotland and principiates in Germany, would fight it out for England’s Crown. When they were done, there wouldn’t be two villages in the country that would be together, belonging to the same lord.

Whence this dark need to kill her, then? Whence this craving?

His own impulse scared him. He arrested his movement with overwhelming willpower.

Scared of himself and his darkest urgings, Kit Marlowe stepped back, and back and back.

Poley, across the alley from Kit, made a strangled cry, and took to his heels as Elizabeth had, running down the alley with scarcely more grace than the aged Queen.

Kit stepped back farther. Everything in him clamored for pursuit of this strange prey.

Tear, slash, eat, drink the life.

One more breath and Kit would give in to his urges.

Horrified, he took another step back.

With a clang, he fetched up against the broad iron gate of a private backyard. The gate felt red-hot against his flesh.

Kit screamed.

His hands and his neck, unprotected, burned, as though they touched fire.

Even through Kit’s velvet suit, his lawn shirt, heat shot in continuous, searing waves.

Kit lacked the strength to move away.

The metal in the iron gate burned him like pitchforks heated by a thousand fiends in the deepest hell.

Blue light burned all around Kit, as the pain leeched away his strength and power to think.

Kit screamed as the pain shot through his every limb.

Slowly, he fell to knees that could no longer support him.

Contact with the iron gate broke.

His pain still lingering, his strength drained, he rolled on the muddy ground, screaming his torment.

When he came to an exhausted, trembling stop, covered in the foetid mud of the alley, he was soaked in sweat and weak, and his heart thumped within his chest like a prisoner begging for release.

Yet his brain was clearer than it had been in a long time.

Kit thought how strange it was that he’d wanted to kill the Queen. How strange the thought that had crossed his mind that he’d set such a careful trap for her in Deptford, and she’d just walked into him in this muddy alley.

He hadn’t set a trap for the Queen, had he?

How foolish the Queen of England. How foolish the woman who’d been so cunning and intelligent in her youth. How could she go walking alone in the dark, where anyone might kill her?

Where Kit might have killed her.

Kit didn’t mean to kill the Queen, did he?

He blinked drops of sweat from his eyes.

Poley and the Queen were nowhere in sight.

And Kit had finally fractured, he thought, finally become cleft in twain. The spy prone to secret violence and the poet enamored of beauty were now truly two, two souls fighting within the one narrow body.

“I’m for Bedlam,” Kit whispered, picking himself up from the muddy ground and surveying the damage to his suit with despair.

Yet little by little, at the back of his mind, the hunger for life resumed, stronger, harder, beating with horrific insistence against Kit’s reason.

He must have life. He must have living force. He must kill.

Tear, slash, eat, drink the life.

“Kit?” a small shadow asked from a doorway two doors down. The little shadow detached itself from the building, revealing a child with auburn hair, wearing a fine blue velvet suit.

His eyes widened in surprise and shock at Kit’s appearance. He looked up into Kit’s eyes.

“Kit?”

Scene 30

Ariel walks, dazed, along the same streets where Kit has been. Her eyes are sunk within dark circles brought on by sleeplessness, her dress rent, her whole countenance pale and pinched. She walks with a staggering, limping gait. She looks as she is, a fairy princess lost in an all-too-mortal world.