The Quick and the Dead E-Book

Emma Hinds

• Herausgeber: Bedford Square Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 531

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'Vividly told, with powerfully drawn characters, this tale of obsession and betrayal set in the dark world of Tudor alchemy will cast its spell over historical fiction fans.'Heat It is 1597 and Kit Skevy and Mariner Elgin have just robbed the wrong grave. They are young criminals in the pocket of a gang Lord named Will Twentyman, the Grave Eorl of Southwark. Mariner is the best cutpurse around, a strange Calvinist girl who dresses like a boy and is partner in crime to Kit Skevy, Southwark's best brawler who carries a secret: he cannot feel pain. When caught out in their unfortunate larceny, Kit is kidnapped by the menacing alchemist Lord Isherwood (a man who will stop at nothing to achieve his hopes for the Red Lion elixir) and his studious son, Lazarus Isherwood, with whom Kit develops a complicated intrigue. When Mariner enlists the help of a competing French alchemist, Lady Elody Blackwater, Mariner and Kit are thrust into the shadowed, political world of Tudor alchemy, testing both their friendship and their lives. It matters not who you are born to... but where you are made!

Leseprobe

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BEDFORDSQUAREPUBLISHERS.CO.UK

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

Emma Hinds

For those of us still transforming

‘The real test of knowledge is not whether it is true but whether it empowers us.’

—Francis Bacon

‘Philosophy is odious and obscure;

Both law and physic are for petty wits;

Divinity is basest of the three,

Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile:

’Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me.’

—Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

PART I: SANGUIS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

PART II: ARGENTUM VIVUM

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

PART III: IGNIS

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Praise for The Knowing

Also by Emma Hinds

About the Author

Keep Reading …

Copyright

About the Publisher

SANGUIS

PART I

‘Be careful not to take anything from the lion but the rose-coloured blood, and from the white eagle only the white gluten. Coagulate (corporify) it according to the directions given by the ancients, and you will have the tincture physicorum (The Elixir of the Red Lion). But if this is incomprehensible to you, remember that only he who desires with his whole heart will find and to him only who knocks strong enough the door shall be opened.’

—Tinctura Physica, Paracelsus

London, 1597

He who cries aloud from desolation

Chapter One

Kit is not afraid as he is tied to the whipping post at the Standard on Cheapside.

‘For stealing, the cutpurse is to be whipped until bloody,’ the sheriff calls over the assembled watchers.

Kit’s audience is a smaller crowd than usual, unsurprising given the slow and steady spread of plague out from around Fleet Prison, not five minutes from the city walls. The watching crowd is reduced to bored fishwives, a few pious-looking types and the dog catcher, paused with his stick and hoop of rope over his shoulder. Kit wonders if the sheriff pays him per dog caught or dog killed. He could kill a dog. Surely it cannot be hard. The first lash lands. It tingles. He knows from the force that pushes his face against the blood-stained post that he should scream, so he does.

‘One!’ The sheriff’s satisfied voice calls over the crowd.

The meagre crowd cheer – because why would they not? If he saw some frater or a jarkman tied to the post or pilloried, he would cheer just as much, and call them fools for being caught in their snatching and forging. There is not a spell or prayer in all of Christendom that can take the crime out of criminals, and he has been thieving since he was a sprout. So he yells when the lashes come. He remembers how Ned Alleyn screamed as Faustus was dragged down to hell and gives it his best. He makes a good enough show of it, by his reckoning.

‘A cutpurse!’ someone shouts. ‘Skin him alive!’

The sheriff seems to take that to heart. The pressure of blows across his naked back jolts his forehead into the post. Again. Again. Again. What makes other men piss themselves he just finds tedious, so to amuse himself, Kit considers how he can give the best performance of pain. Most people by this point in the process are less lusty of voice and give more whimpers, so he tries a bit of that. It is nothing to cry, really, just stare into the sun until the eyes are a little blind. At nearly twenty-one years old, he cannot grow a beard, and whilst it is certainly an annoyance, it is good at times like these, when he can squeeze out a few tears; with his young face, people might go easy on him. He ignores the thump of his head against the post and wonders what pie he might get Mariner to buy for him afterwards, if she has managed to filch a few purses during his performance. Or maybe Twentyman will take them to the Mermaid for a pint, if he is hidden in the back. Lads who take the brand for their master, they get pints.

‘Have pity!’ someone cries.

The lashes pause. The watchers are quieter now. He realises that, for a while, the only sound he has heard is the wet, gasping exertion from the round-bellied sheriff.

‘Let the lad down!’

Now he notices that a few of the fishwives are covering their eyes and shaking their heads. Only one person stares at him with the greedy expression of a sadistic cosmopolitan. She stands out, even despite her dark cloak, because nothing in London can hide Spanish satin from his thieving eye. It is strange that she is not pressing a nosegay to her face, like the finer ladies are want to do when passing down Cheapside. Those intent eyes linger upon him as he is untied and staggers. That surprises him. Perhaps his feet have gone dead standing so long in the same place. He surveys the crowd, looking for a thin face, perhaps a proud glower. He cannot see his master.

‘Kit Skevy, for being a cutpurse you have been whipped with many lashes and now you are to be branded. God save the Queen!’ The sheriff pushes him to his knees.

What a red-faced, sweaty man he is. It is a marvel, really, that he is the one who has been delivering the punishment and not receiving it for surely he looks about to die with the effort. The blacksmith stands ready. A hand in Kit’s hair, twisting his face down onto the block. He makes sure to watch carefully as the glowing brand is lowered to his temple, waiting until he hears the hiss and burn inside his own skull to scream pitifully and appropriately. Then it is done. Dragged up, tossed away, the smell of his own burnt flesh filling his nostrils as he stumbles into Mariner’s waiting arms. She is a tall woman; she catches Kit easily and holds him steady under her armpit. Such height helps her daily deception along with her cropped brown curls and boy’s clothes. Her young, rounded jawline has her frequently taken for a lad of one and twenty not the twenty-five-year-old woman she secretly is. Kit has always been envious of her dangerous face; a pink burn scar over her left eye, vivid against her light-brown skin, one eye queerly milky. When she wants to scare children she tells them she can see the devil with it and how the two of them laugh when the little ones scream, for there is delight in having a partner in perceived monstrosity. Mariner does not look like she is laughing today.

‘Can you stand?’ She appears oddly pale-faced for a Moorish girl out of Portugal, but she is probably hungry and twitching to get moving, especially if she is hiding snatched trinkets in her sleeves.

‘Of course.’ His feet do not seem to want to obey his desire to leave. ‘I am only tired.’

Being whipped is more exhausting that he anticipated.

‘Tired?’ Mariner stares at him, incredulous. ‘Kit, the fucker lashed you endlessly; Christ himself was not so whipped! You didn’t faint or shout as you should have—’

‘I did excellent cries, I thought.’ His voice slurs. He has no notion why. ‘Where is Twentyman? Are we for the pub?’

He watches as his best friend’s face twists into a familiar mask of contained enraged disappointment.

‘He’s not here,’ she says shortly.

Kit does not understand. What have I done this time, he thinks?

‘I am here!’

He turns his head, hoping to see the man to whom he has given more than a decade of thieving, the man he was branded for, here to congratulate him, but it is only Griffin, sooty and sweaty as always.

‘My sister sent me to help you home. I only have a few bells before rehearsal.’

Griffin manages stage craft for the Admiral’s Men. At forty-one years, he retains the height and bearing of a man who was once considered a great beauty of the stage. These days, his long blond hair runs to ratty, a once-cherubic face a little jowly and speckled with blond-grey stubble. A transformation from top billing to the wings, using alchemy tricks and secrets sailed in from distant lands to make devil smoke seep up from under the boards of the Rose. It is Kit’s favourite place to be when he is not brawling or stealing for Twentyman; crouched under the boards, helping Griffin spill magic from bottles and braziers.

‘I see she was right to send me,’ Griffin says, grasping Kit’s other arm.

Griffin’s hands are red and damp. Wet,he thinks, since he was taught to name these things, that will feel wet.

‘I am bleeding,’ he says. He cannot say he feels more because he does not. This is why he is never afraid.

The first time he spoke of it, Kit was burned. He’d been in England about three years by then; eight years old and Twentyman had sent him flying out of the door with a boot up his arse for a bad day’s stealing. Fuck off, you little whorehouse shit, his chasing shout followed Kit scuttling down Bankside to the blacksmiths. He watched the smithy boys in fascination as cold, sturdy things became glowing and fluid. Why shouldn’t he touch, when it was so bulbous and serpentine, red and writhing, pulsing with heat like a living thing? It was only after, in the sideways glances of the smith boys and Mariner’s imperfectly concealed shock that he saw his mistake.

‘Trying to broil yourself, Young Kit?’ she said.

Everyone called him Young Kit, even Mariner, his newly arrived friend from sea who was only four years older than him, for he was still small for his age. He was in the habit of using it to see what he could get away with. Griffin called that canny and Kit liked the word, just as he liked the smells of London, his stable bed at the Silver Moon and the grand cavernous space inside the playhouse. At the pike ponds behind the Rose, Mariner dipped Kit’s hand beneath the water.

‘You must be careful around the Smithy.’

‘I did not feel it.’

‘No reason to pretend, it looks dreadful.’ She touched the bubbly white skin hesitantly. It reminded Kit of the rind of fat that sometimes gathered on the top of the stew at the Silver Moon when it was too cold. ‘Does it not hurt?’

He concentrated on his senses, though sensation had never been something he was good at.

‘The water is wetter than my skin, colder than my skin but warmer still than snow. What is hurt?’ Kit put words to a truth he had known all of his short, confusing life. ‘Is it… hot? It is a little hot, the wound itself. Does it make my skin tighter and harder? It is both. Is that hurt?’

Under the water, the fish nibbled at Kit’s fingers with their smooth, enquiring mouths whilst Mariner stared at him, her one, stranger, lighter eye catching the sunlight from the water’s surface.

‘You say it does not burn or ache at all?’ Her words were slow, disbelieving, and then suddenly, fast: ‘Do you feel no pain?’

Kit did not know if it was true. Griffin had always watched him ever since he came with him from Antwerp, pulling his hands away from hot plates and thorn bushes. He had simply presumed that perhaps he had not yet done anything that qualified enough to hurt, but Mariner’s face was incredulous and her tone urgent and Kit did not know how to placate her.

‘What does pain feel like?’ he asked.

‘God’s wounds. I will have to think about it.’

Kit waited. He knew he was different; he had known it for a while. He could stand in the sun for hours without fainting or retching. He could skate on the Thames endlessly and not complain like others did when his fingertips turned blue. He watched the pain of others with interest; he had seen Twentyman cut a man’s ear off, seen the blood pour and thought it fascinating, the way men bellowed. Kit Skevy has made a study of screams but he has never screamed for anything.

‘Pain feels as if there are warning bells inside your flesh,’ she said, finally. ‘As if a great hue and cry has been taken up inside you. You know that something is very wrong because you feel the pain. The pain makes your heartbeat fast, your brow sweat, makes time move differently.’

‘How can time move differently?’

‘It moves slower or faster, as it does when you are happy or sad. You know?’

Kit nodded but he did not know. Those words; pain, hurt, burn, ache, they were lands far away Kit always expected to arrive in but never yet had. Mariner, sitting beside him with her frown and disbelief, she somehow lived there.

‘Perhaps you are made differently when it comes to pain,’ she mused. ‘Like a bear, maybe.’

They had watched bears fight, kill a dozen dogs and not go down. Kit was not certain he wanted to be a bear.

‘None could hurt Achilles,’ Kit said, nervously. ‘Griff told me the story. He was dipped in the river Styx.’

It is a wondrous and wicked thing to be magical; even then Kit knew it could take you places. To the great courts of Europe or to burn at the stake. It kept him awake sometimes, those small nightmares of what he could be. Things that later they would call him behind his back, or shout at him in a fight: a witch child, a changeling, a demon, Satan’s spawn, unholy. At the time, Kit could only think it was better than being a bear.

‘They said the same about Goliath and look what happened to him,’ Mariner said, drily. ‘It is the Lord’s doing, it is marvellous in our eyes, but no need to let it go to your head.’

Kit did not consider it marvellous. The world was full of people feeling; pain and time and sweat and heartbreak. Kit was burdened with being outside of all of it; curious, and alone. So Kit learned to play the part of pain, to hide the secret of his strangeness deep behind cries and moans and coughs. Sometimes he would test it, with things that caused great discomfort to others. He nearly drowned twice in the Thames, has fought many fevers and even more brawls. Nothing changes. His friends have kept his secret but his reputation as the oddest boy in Southwark has only grown. Even now, dripping blood through the city, he can sense it: those who saw him whipped watching him and the attention in their eyes curdling from sympathy to suspicion the longer he stays upright.

‘Curse you, Skevy, you damned wretch!’ a little boy yells to them as they press down through St Paul’s square to the river. ‘My master had a crown on you swooning!’

For the last four years he’s been Twentyman’s prize brawler. He’s a whole head shorter than Twentyman’s other lads and even Mariner but when he gets hit, he never stays down. There’s always use for a lad who is as small as a robin and fights like a badger, so says Twentyman, and there are always people who scorn him for rising, over and over, as if all of Southwark waits for the day he does not. He cannot imagine it. Not even now, with slow steps that barely drag towards the bridge, Kit Skevy finds it hard to believe he can die, for surely, if he were to die, he might feel pain eventually?

‘You need to be careful,’ says Mariner, his arm slung over her shoulders as they weave their way through a flock of sheep crossing the bridge.

‘Why should I?’ Kit’s words are a slurry of mumbles. He’s been branded and whipped and he’s still headed home for trouble. Mariner steps on his toe when he’s looking down so that he’ll see it. He looks up at her steadily.

‘Ouch,’ he says.

‘Pushing yourself as close to your death as you can manage will not make you feel it,’ she says curtly. ‘All it will do is kill you eventually.’

Kit wonders how it is that a girl like Mariner, raised in the navy and coarse as fucking mud, always knows how to put words to the worst urges of his heart.

‘We all die.’ Kit’s feet stumble underneath him. He does feel very, very sleepy. ‘Better surely not to feel it. Better to feel nothing at all.’

‘Despair is a sin.’

‘So are all the delightful things,’ Griffin says and Kit smiles. They say in the Silver Moon that Griffin had a famous atheist lover, the poet Marlowe, dead these four years. They say other things too, that Griffin picked up more than his vices, infected with Marlowe’s deadly unbelief. If it’s true, then it’s an ague Kit seems to have been born with.

‘Is hell?’ Mariner glares at them both. She is the oddest confluence of things, a dark girl in a city of pale faces, a woman in boy’s clothing, full of a sailor’s superstitions but also raised a reformer. She amuses and exasperates him in equal measure every day.

‘Where we are is hell, and where hell is, there must we ever be,’ Griffin says.

‘Southwark?’ says she, and Griffin laughs. An awkward trio, they stumble under Traitor’s Gate. All of Southwark is stretched out in front of them, cramped and sweaty under the summertime pall of Winchester House, its tall chimneys belching smoke out into the yellow air. These are the streets where the unwanted of London make their living; odd travellers from distant lands like Mariner, players born in the shadow of the tower like Griffin, or orphans from Belgian whorehouses, washed up in the city where anyone can be anything, like Kit. The great families of London, the Howards, the Sidneys, the Walsinghams, the Raleighs, they rotate distantly around the star of the crown, soar on each other’s wings and plummet or rise on their names and fortune. In Southwark, it is different. Here, you scrabble your way up from nothing; come from the country, come from the north, from wars and trades, with no family to catch you and a deadly fall below. Marlowe from Canterbury, Spenser from Smithfield, sons of cobblers and cloth makers rising up on rickety ladders made of grammar schools and English bibles. It is in Kit’s bones, this impatient striving to make coin, to carve out a life, to leave something better than the little he started with in this patch of houses built on Thames mud. It’s been sixteen years since Griffin brought him from Antwerp and when Kit once asked him who he was born to he only said this: It matters not who you are born to but where you are made. On days like these, bloody and beaten, he wonders what good it is to have this secret gift of painlessness if this is all he is? Kit Skevy is Southwark made, a brawler and a thief, and sometimes he worries that this is all he will ever be.

He who is in emptiness

Chapter Two

Bankside belongs to Will Twentyman. Kit’s home has been anywhere he rules, the dusty road from the Silver Moon, Squire Kay’s tavern where the bells of St Olaf ring over wherry men and wool traders east of the river, down along the Thames westward to the red painted whore’s door of Twentyman’s best brothel, the Cardinal’s Hat. Then on to the bear-baiting pits where Kit fights bare-knuckled and bloody, and beyond it, his favourite place in the world, the Rose Theatre. Squire Kay (so called for a jest in her youth that no one now dares recount) is currently standing fierce and alert, in the doorway of the Silver Moon. Everyone in Southwark jokes she must be a royal bastard with all that milky skin, those robust curves and flaming Tudor hair. It is true that there is often less of landlady and more of monarch in the way she governs her tavern and the urchins that call it home but, at thirty-nine years old, Griffin assures Kit that his little sister has always been imperious.

‘You’re late,’ she scowls. ‘I worried.’

Squire Kay brushes the curls back from his new brand for inspection. The close-to smell of her is reassuring; sweat and ale and the dandelion soap she uses on her ferocious red hair.

‘Well, it won’t make you any uglier.’ She pets him fondly. He has always been odd to look at; gingery curls as tight as a sheep’s, one blue eye, one green, and the darkest freckles all over that Squire Kay always says looks like he has stood next a cartwheel on a muddy day. Customers at the Moon make fun of him, saying his mother must have been a whore twenty times over to get a child so ugly. He does not mind, he is grown; he has no need of parents but a sweeter master would do.

‘Skevy!’

The door is kicked open and there he is, Will Twentyman, with all the look of a man freshly dug out of the grave. Sallow, yellowing preserved skin, teeth too big for his mouth, muddy hair clasping the back of his head in thin drabs. He is barely forty but his unfortunate countenance suits his ominous moniker: the Grave Eorl of Southwark. It’s a title earned by selling corpses, among other things. Kit’s master is an Upright Man who sees a weakness or a need and meets it. He sees fat country purses in the city, he assembles an army of Southwark thieves to cut them. He hears of hot-blooded young gentry, looking for gritty amusement and saucy girls, he runs fist fights fights and the most lucrative whorehouse south of the river. Kit has been assured that there is an ugly iteration of his master in every city in the world, a king of rats in every rat pile, and even if it is risky to live under such a man, he is more likely to live under him than die under him. Yet Twentyman has no kindness for those he employs and only rewards those he finds useful. Now, with that cadaverous unforgiving gaze upon him, Kit has the discomforting feeling of not being useful.

‘Twenty-nine lashes, they say. You could not endure for thirty?’ his master snaps. ‘There was money laid against you, lad!’

‘If you had come and watched you might have told me so.’ Kit wants to sound defiant but he is doleful and loathes it.

‘What good does it do me to come and watch my prize brawler swoon for the whip?’

‘What was he to do?’ says Mariner. ‘Politely ask to be tied back up?’

‘Who asked you?’ Twentyman glares at Mariner. The bitterest of contention simmers between them, as always. Twentyman thinks her a shrew, but Mariner steals her own weight in coin, so his distaste never brews too sour. He switches his glare back to Kit: ‘Did you cry?’

‘The sun was in my eyes.’

‘Can’t blame the lad for crying when flogged, Will,’ Griffin says, winking at Kit, who tries not to smile because Twentyman detests Griffin. Older lads swear up and down they were childhood friends, the only relic being that Griffin is the one person in all of Southwark who still calls Twentyman by his first name. Rumour is, not even his mother does. She calls him Twenny. When Kit is being humiliated by his master in front of other lads, it’s this insipid, twittering nickname that he remembers.

‘Can he fight?’ Twentyman turns to Ezra, standing in the doorway behind him. Ezra Prophet should have been born a prince. His dark skin is smooth and he keeps his black hair and beard short, both heavy with speckled grey. He tells no one his true age, but Kit reckons him to be fifty at least. The stories around him are legend; he was Bishop Bonner’s Worthy Moor, he was a Spanish general in the Armada who swam to England, he confirms or denies none of it but he is married to Squire Kay, manages the brawls and ledgers of Twentyman and has the best handwriting on Bankside. He gives Kit a quick, reassuring smile whilst looking over his back.

‘Sorry, Young Kit, it’ll need stitching. You’ll be no good for the next few days.’

‘To the barber surgeon with you!’ Twentyman aims a kick at Mariner and she glares at him, making a lewd gesture behind his back before walking down the street towards the butchers. ‘I’ll not pay for your stitches, Skevy, it’s coming out of your takings.’

‘I’ll pay for it,’ Griffin says.

‘Oh, course you will,’ Twentyman sneers. ‘Which of your alchemists have you been sucking for it?’

‘You don’t object to my friends when they buy from you,’ says Griffin.

The kind of men of science and alchemists who want to buy corpses from the Grave Eorl are the kind of people Griffin knows; buying his equipment and ingredients for stage craft from their odd little stalls up on the bridge. Consequently, Griffin is one of the few people in London who makes money off Twentyman, a compensatory cut for introducing clients, and the Grave Eorl despises nothing else more.

‘I need brook no objection to their coin.’ Twentyman spits at Griffin’s feet. ‘I’ll not let a heretic use my arse for play, unlike your bloody Marlowe—’

‘Griffin, you’ll be needed.’ Squire Kay’s voice is sharp, cutting quickly through. ‘At the Rose.’

Griffin and Twentyman stare at one another. There’s a shiver of a moment when Kit thinks Griffin might punch him but then it is gone, a sail falling with no wind. Griffin’s shoulders stay the same, mouth still clenched, but the vivid flash of violence behind the eyes retreats. Kit tries not to be annoyed for Griffin is a kind man and if Kit has family Griffin is part of it, but this flaccid slump in the face of a challenge makes the edges of his respect curdle. As soon as Griffin has strolled away, green cap jaunty and uncaring in the sunshine, Twentyman grabs Kit’s collar, baring his blackened teeth. His breath smells of onions, raw and sharp.

‘You were caught and branded and you cannot even do that right. You are useless, Skevy.’

Twenny, Kit thinks. At least I am not called Twenny. His master gives him a round slap, disappearing back inside and shouting over his shoulder:

‘You’ll fight two days hence or I’ll send you back to fucking Antwerp, no matter whose bastard you are.’

‘Am I a bastard? Twentyman says so,’ Kit asks, later that day. He is stitched and watching Griffin roll a cannonball across the heavens of the Rose to create the effect of thunder. Griffin pauses, legs crouched around the iron, a frog with red hands splayed atop it.

‘It is possible. When I found you, you were motherless and fatherless.’

This is the part of the story that never changes. Griffin found Kit in a whorehouse whilst he was living in Antwerp at barely twenty years old. For Kit, there are no memories of that house of women or his first four years. There is only the memory of Griffin, taking him aboard a ship and then, the sticky taste of the odorous London air.

‘You know Will only talks to start fights,’ says Griffin. ‘Pay it no mind.’

Kit helps him lower the swevel down through the designated hole towards the stage floor below. Tonight, Griffin will set a firecracker off at the bottom of the wire and up, up, up it will shoot, illuminating the stage in a flash of lightning as hell is opened to swallow Faustus. It is Kit’s favourite part.

‘Why do you let him talk to you like that? Say that Marlowe used you so?’ Kit watches the familiar flinch and retreat that happens every time Griffin’s dead lover is mentioned. It is hard to look at him when his face crumples this way, so Kit turns to rolling firecracker papers into cones. He does not think there is a better smell than gunpowder, whispering of tricks and enchantment.

‘Why not?’ Griffin’s mouth is soft, wry, but the lines around his eyes are sorrowful. ‘Even when he lived, they said such things. It is a refrain without end.’

Kit says nothing. He has read every play Griffin has ever put in front of him, and Kit has an uncanny memory, so he is more than literate; he is learned. He’s absorbed over and over the romantic notion of the agonising desire. It is curious to him, he who has never been in love nor felt pain, that the two things should be so regularly paired together. He’s had dalliances, plenty of them, girls and boys, and they’ve mostly been pleasurable but Kit knows it is incomparable. There is a haunting to Griffin that Kit finds simultaneously baffling and repellent.

‘You met in Flanders?’

It’s the kind thing to do, he knows, to let people speak of their losses. Kit’s childhood was punctuated by Griffin’s absence back overseas; taught to write by sending letters to Flushing.

‘Aye, in eighty-five. When Walsingham died in ninety, I was cut loose like so many, but not Christopher. He was kept on for espionage.’

‘You? A spirit?’

These are the things that are said of Marlowe: poet, player, atheist, sodomite, spy. Kit stares at Griffin, his long dirty-blond hair tied back behind his head in that same old green ribbon, his slowly receding hairline. He’s never seen anyone who looks less the part.

‘Everyone did.’ Griffin shrugs away a dangerous past with a tip of his shoulders. Old Walsingham took advantage of every Englishman abroad, it seemed.

‘Did you bring back secrets?’

‘Only one.’ Griffin reaches into his shirt and pulls out a small vial of black liquid on a length of leather string. ‘It’s a great alchemy formula, so they said. Everlasting fire. It was an impotent recipe, as it turns out, burned no more than five minutes. I’ve tried my hand at replicating it, over the years.’

‘You could sell it to some puffer.’ Kit rolls the glass between his fingers, watching the way the black liquid moves in the vial, sluggish and creeping against the sides.

Griffin drops the leather strap around Kit’s neck.

‘You have it. Hold it against your disappointment in me, that I did not knock Will’s head off as you hoped.’

‘There’s always tomorrow,’ Kit tries to joke but Griffin only shakes his head slowly, heavily.

‘We are not all bred for defiance, Young Kit.’

Kit waits in the silence of this omission of Griffin’s failure but nothing comes. He’s been hoping for years that Griffin will put in a good word for him with Mister Henslowe so he can buy an apprenticeship into the Admiral’s Men. Griffin has not done it. The older he grows, the more his disappointment in Griffin is a wet cloak, weighing him down.

‘I want to be bred for stage craft,’ Kit says. ‘Like you.’

Perhaps Griffin senses something of Kit’s true thoughts, because he reaches over and squeezes Kit’s hand.

‘Be better,’ Griffin says.

Two days hence and Kit is fighting for Twentyman rather than being shipped back to Antwerp.

‘They are holding, only just,’ Ezra says, checking his stitches as Kit leans his arms on the fencing and spits blood and, unfortunately, a tooth chip onto his boots. Nearby, Kit watches as Twentyman gloats and bribes in a merry dance around the ring under the summer stars. There is nothing like the smell of a fist fight in June. ‘Maybe punch less frequently and more effectively.’

‘Do you not think I always try to do that?’

‘Kit! Ezra!’ He turns towards Mariner’s voice. She is elbowing her way through men, indistinguishable from the other short-haired beardless lads around her except that her eyes are wide with fear. ‘You must come, it’s Griffin! There’s fire!’

Fire. The most dreaded word in all of London. Kit runs, imagining the Rose ablaze, her boards and magic consumed into nothing, but it’s Griffin’s lodgings near the Cardinal’s Hat they run to. Smoke is billowing out of Griffin’s windows and in front of it, Squire Kay screams for water to be fetched, someone, do something! As rolls of thunderous black fog and smoke leech under the door. The smell is sharp and acrid, worse than the stink of sulphur and gunpowder. Others are coughing, unable to get near, but Kit is only struggling to see since it is so very dense. Yet as he blinks through it he realises there is no flame.

‘It’s not fire!’ he yells.

‘One of his experiments gone wrong?’ Mariner shouts back.

‘He’s inside!’ Squire Kay sobs, clinging to Ezra’s arm. ‘He must be hurt, the door is locked!’

‘A backed-up chimney, I’ll warrant! Come on, Young Kit!’ Ezra shouts and whilst Mariner holds up Squire Kay, they set their boots to it. Again and again, again and again, other men may stop kicking but Kit does not need to stop and finally, the door splinters away from the lock. He cannot see anything; the blackness of the smoke immediately consumes them both and Ezra is turned back, coughing and retching. Kit pushes in, stumbling blindly into the two rooms, navigating by touch rather than sight but nothing seems to be dimming it and all the windows are shuttered. Flutterings of panic begin in his gut because Griffin only ever locks himself away for his most dangerous of experiments, the kind that kill a man.

‘Griffin!’ he shouts, fumbling his fingers on the latches, flinging the shutters open, charcoal-tasting urgency filming his mouth. The thunderous black clouds of smoke are starting to clear, revealing a truly devastated room, chairs upturned, papers rifled, as if Griffin fought his way away from whatever horror he accidentally unleashed. Then there is a body on the floor. Kit’s first thought is relief. This man laid out so haphazardly cannot be Griffin, he thinks, he is surely too small and crunched, frail and broken. Then Ezra steps into the room, bearing a pitch and tow torch.

‘Oh, Griff,’ he says.

The pitiless light illuminates that favourite forest green doublet, the worn velvet that thinned at the elbows, that long hair tied back just so, the same green ribbon. There is an ugly grey spittle around his mouth, evidence of lungs blackened, a throat grey with smoke, choking the breath away. Kit moves closer, all sound and voice lost to his ears as he crawls under the lingering smoke to touch Griffin’s face. He has seen many dead people, but nothing like this, the extravagant absurdity of vacancy in such familiar lips and eyebrows. Come back, he thinks. Then he remembers that neither he nor Griffin believe that there is anywhere else to come back from. Still he thinks it, compulsively, mind so numb to all else: Come back to me.

‘Away, Kit, the constables are here.’ Mariner is pulling him to his feet.

For the first time Kit feels time stretch, for suddenly they are outside and Squire Kay is there, crumbling to pieces, a grasping, bellowing thing and Kit does not understand. How can he be out here when he is still on the floor with Griffin, his cheek absorbing the last warmth of his dead heart? Then it happens, thundering through him at last: pain.

No one said his body would become wrong, and small, that he would be sure he must be out of it, immediately, because there is an enormous yawning stretch of anguish inside his chest that he must outrun. He has seen the hearts of bulls on market day, lumpy and firm, with no secret places to hide, yet perhaps the heart of man is made differently to hold such hideous, invisible forces. He is fighting Mariner without noticing, her arms wrapped tight around him, and he hears a voice chanting; no, no, no, no! Is it him, his mouth? Is it his knees that buckle under him, uncaring of the horse shit, and his hands that dig into the mud, wanting to push down and back into the past? He has been a fool to be curious of pain, a fool his whole life, for he would rather be dead or buried alive or have his legs severed than this monstrous, drowning sensation. He knows he must find a way to breathe through it, fucking breathe, Skevy, but there is not enough air in the sky. As he wheezes at the indifferent stars above, there is the lightest flicker of something else, a distant robin’s wing brushing against his mind. Despite thinking himself loveless and painless all this time, something inside reminds him: This is not the first time. I have felt this before.

She of many repetitions

Chapter Three

Mariner Elgin’s world is pockets. When she was young it was wind, how it filled the sails, the speed at which it blew and how far it would take her. But she has lived in Southwark in the service of the worst man alive for thirteen years and the world is pockets. As Griffin’s coffin is lowered into the damp earth she cannot help but eye the purses on display. Players are notoriously poor, but Mister Henslowe is here and his purse fair bulges. Beside her, Kit shifts, as the voice of the priest intones, the declarations of the holy gospel spoken over the plain board coffin:

‘… And he shall come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead. And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the lord and giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father and from the Son…’

These words are not for Griffin, the man she once heard describe the sacraments as having been better delivered in a tobacco pipe. Some of the players are sniffling, particularly the young lad who plays the heroines in the Admiral’s Men. He has a face like a kicked dog but can cry like a virgin, so said Griffin. It seems to Mariner that those professing the least despair are the ones carrying it heaviest. There is Ezra, standing stoically with an arm around his wife, but Mariner knows all of Ezra’s expressions. The way his face dimples under the left corner of his mouth is a repressed sob. Beside him, tucked under his arm is Squire Kay, eyes dry and hard. Her grief is turning her to a statue so brittle that one kind touch will break her, and in her hands she holds the items they pulled from Griffin’s purse. Mariner is the one who cut it from the body, of course, thinking his sister would want it before the burial. A few shillings, a loose button, a folded letter so worn the creases were soft cuts in the paper. Mariner looked at it because who wouldn’t, but it was written in a lilting script too elegant for her to easily read. A few couplets, an M at the bottom in lieu of signature. Marlowe, she presumed, some of his terrible poetry for Griffin to treasure. Mariner would rather be left nothing than verses, but looking at the way Squire Kay clutches the paper and the button, she might as well be gripping Griffin’s own collar, holding him out of the grave, rather than cradling the banal remnants of his life. Mariner wonders what would be left of her. She fiddles in her pockets; a groat and a pie crust. The priest is finishing:

‘… I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come, amen…’

Mariner doesn’t mean to, but she thinks of her uncle Elgin’s grave, somewhere deep at the bottom of the ocean. She has often thought that it is a long way to be resurrected from on the day of judgement. How much heavenly power will be needed to pluck Elgin from the deep, dark ocean floor with cockles on his eyes? She has been brought up under the teachings of Calvin to believe in the predestination of souls; Elgin’s eternal path has been laid out before even the creation of the world; hers too. She knows it is supposed to be a comfort to the saved, the immutable justice of God, but Mariner only feels a discomforting prickle at the back of her neck, the sensation of being caught. To be known by God is only a relief to those who live unashamed and, besides, it is hard to believe anything south of the river is part of God’s holy ordinance.

‘Amen,’ she still says, even after all these years. It’s the hope, tender and flimsy, that gets her every time. Perhaps my little sinful life will be enough for paradise. Perhaps.

‘Come on, enough praying.’ Kit is dry-eyed but pale behind his absurd freckles. He is still weakened in the lungs from too much smoke and, on top of that, made stranger with grief. He is lopsided now; something has been cut off him. She has spent many long years watching Kit Skevy, fearing what his carelessness will do to his body. She has never before had to fear for his mind. ‘Time for drinking.’

‘What’s on your face, lad? Jam?’ There is a sailor leaning against the bar of the Silver Moon, watching Mariner as she collects pints. Griffin died at the very tail end of June. A week has passed since the funeral, the month has turned, but still Kit is wanting to drink as if Kent is running out of hops.

‘A burn at sea.’

Mariner had been still a small child when a fire at sea had stolen away her parents, aunt and cousin to a terrible death on the journey between Lisbon and Edinburgh. Only she and her uncle Elgin had survived, both plucked from the flaming wreckage by a privateer. Uncle Elgin had been a ship’s surgeon; he’d helped Mariner survive terrible burns over much of her body. Even though she had healed well everywhere visible, a patch of polished, hairless skin remains over her left eyebrow. Her sight is worse out of that eye, clouded, but she makes up for it with better hearing than most.

‘Oh aye?’ The sailor leans forward. ‘You still in service, lad?’

‘No.’

By the time Mariner was old enough to be breeched, Elgin decided she may as well live life as ship boy with him than be sent to her mother’s family in Portugal. So Elgin had hidden her lack of a pecker with baggy clothes and called her a boy and she had been happy, content with Elgin and the wide, wild sea. Until everything went horribly wrong and Elgin left her with Twentyman, eight years later.

The sailor gives her an appraising look.

‘You’re dark for an Englishman, aren’t you?’

‘Been here thirteen years.’

‘Aye, but been here from where?’ he says and Mariner walks past him, but not before she hears him mutter: ‘Spanish bastard.’

War with Spain has not made Mariner’s life easy. In fact, she’d appreciate it if King Philip would fuck off back to Madrid and stop building his armada in Catalonia, which the sailors all rumour to be three hundred sails strong and set for England.

‘All right, cock-less?’ A shoulder bone, bumping her arm deliberately too hard, jostling ale onto her wrists. It’s one of Twentyman’s boys who always has a look halfway between derision and desire. ‘Who’s that for?’

‘Not you.’

She jerks her head to where Kit is sitting, casually using a dinner knife to carve an apricot. It is helpful to have a best friend who can look so effortlessly threatening whilst eating. The boy grimaces and Mariner moves on, but she hears his voice following her as he comments to a friend: ‘If Twentyman didn’t favour her so, I’d make her feel her cunt all the way to her arse.’

Mariner doesn’t turn back. It matters not what’s between your legs if you can cut off what’s between theirs, so Kit says. She pushes the ale towards him.

‘To Griffin,’ she says.

Kit’s face crumbles in a way Mariner has never seen before. She presses a hand against his chest, because that was where it hurt most after Elgin was gone and Kit does take a steadying breath, looking down at her hand in slight curiosity.

‘It is where the heart is,’ Mariner says softly. ‘It is broken.’

Kit shakes his head and frowns into his ale.

‘It does not feel broken. Rather that everything is out of order, as if the world is… dislocated.’

Mariner remembers it well. When Elgin was killed in askirmish a year after he left her at the Silver Moon, she felt that same sense of pure displacement Kit describes; the universe walking at a pace she could no longer match. Elgin had left a high debt with Twentyman, who, in payment, had ‘apprenticed her’ under him like the other lads.

‘You look as a lad and you’ll work as a lad, for no one else will have you, will they? Not unless you dress pretty and bend over. Will you do that?’ When Mariner had shaken her head, Twentyman had looked victorious. ‘So you are mine now. Forever.’

She has never relocated herself, not truly, or fallen back in step with the world. At least with Kit, she has someone walking in a similarly unique rhythm.

‘It would be better if I left.’ Kit looks sullenly around the tavern. ‘Maybe I should go abroad. Learn more stage craft in Paris or Antwerp, like Griffin did.’

Mariner feels a twinge of fear. She does not like her life particularly, but Kit is the thing that makes it bearable.

‘Have you been tupping a Lord you’ve not yet happened to mention?’ She sips her ale. ‘How else would you buy out?’

Like many of the poor young people of London, the only chance of advancement is apprenticeship, a master who provides a roof and vittels and a chance to learn a trade. Twentyman is technically a guildsman of the Innholders but he never pays to make any of his thieves, whores, brawlers, forgers and grave robbers free guildsmen. Like Mariner, Kit was put under Twentyman’s care against debt. The debt, as Mariner understands it, was simply that Griffin wanted him kept at the Silver Moon with his sister rather than kicked to the street and, in lieu of paying for a room, Kit was put to service. To be free, he needs to be bought out by another master. It happens now and again. Twentyman is a horror but he has no royal patron or great lord protecting him from the noose; he cannot afford to murder every young delinquent thinking about defecting to another master. Instead, Twentyman bets on their criminal pasts disinclining honourable merchants. A lad like Kit, branded a thief, doesn’t stand a chance of a buyout, he would have to settle the debt himself to be free. Someone like Mariner has even less chance, for who, as Twentyman loves to remind her, has a use for a woman who runs around as a boy?

‘I don’t know,’ Kit says glumly. ‘I could go on the roads.’

Mariner pauses, her ale cup held against her teeth. A masterless man is a vagrant. Such people are worse off than they are, worse than the blind beggars; punished brutally by the law and given no charity.

‘Aye, to get put in the Fleet or given another set of lashes, oh, you’d look fetching with a matching vagrant brand, right here.’ She presses her thumb into his unblemished cheek. He bats her hand away.

‘Only if I am caught. You could cut pretty purses in Paris. Or Venice.’

The notion of being out from Twentyman fills her with a warm, pleasant glow but bolting is an awful risk. Others have tried before. Someone usually drags them back. Fleeing lads get beaten, lasses get broken in again at the Hat. Examples, all. Have I not fed and watered you? Twentyman always preaches. What of loyalty? What of love? Still, if Kit runs, will she run with him?

‘Do you have a cock?’ The question interrupts her, a leering lad propping himself lopsided against their table.

‘Why? Can you not find your own?’ Mariner says. There’s a gaggle of lads behind him; they all laugh loudly, clearly in their cups. They are city apprentices, over the river for a night of trouble.

‘Show us your teats!’ one of them shouts.

‘Aye, show us.’ The leering lad leans closer. His breath stinks, that unpleasant faecal quality of too much ale over too long a time. ‘We hear it has pretty duckies under its boy clothes.’

It. A descriptor that irritates Mariner no end. She’s never understood why she’s less of a woman for wanting all the things a cock brings.

‘Fuck off.’ Mariner shoves the lad’s forearm, a quick jab, that sends him sprawling clumsily to the floor. His friends laugh and slap their knees, enjoying their Southwark entertainment.

‘Harpy, I’ll show you!’

In a fluid movement, Mariner and Kit are on their feet; Mariner’s whipped out her knife and set it against the boy’s throat before he can reach into his pockets and make good on his threat. She enjoys the frightened widening of his eyes, his flinches as Kit deftly lays out one of his friends, rushing to help.

‘Empty your pockets,’ Mariner says. ‘On the table there now, nice and quick.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Mariner sees Twentyman standing in the stairwell, watching with amusement.

‘You can’t do this!’ the lad shouts. He looks around as if he expects help. The wherrymen don’t even raise their eyes from their glasses and Twentyman’s boys look on impassively, more interested in seeing if she’ll falter than if he’ll survive.

‘Barely anything on him, drunk his pay away,’ Kit says, dipping his hands into the pockets of the boy, stiff with fear.

‘Such a shame.’ Mariner pulls her knife away and kicks him deftly in the balls. ‘Look at that. You do have a cock.’

The boy staggers away. He’s not made for this type of fight. His kind brawl in packs. He’ll shuffle back across the river, tail between his legs.

‘How much?’ Twentyman saunters over. Kit hands it over and Twentyman counts it out. Three pence, a groat and a half groat, nine pence in all. Twentyman slips it into his purse. He nods at Mariner’s knife. ‘Could you not have got them all?’

‘Thought you’d want some fun for yourself,’ she says.

He snorts and walks away without even giving them a penny for their trouble. Others would grumble. Not Mariner. She lives for the indifference of this man. The punishment he holds over her, every day of her life, is much worse. The very first time she failed a job for him, lost a purse she’d cut at Smithfield’s, he’d spoken words Mariner can never forget.

‘You’re the only lass I let run in the streets with my boys. That’s because Elgin told me you were a boy sailor and you’ve a sharp eye and most of the time, you are worth it. For you have the softest tread and the quickest fingers in the city but when the sun sets, you’re still a lass.’ His eyes had drifted impassively over her legs in her hose, her body in her tunic, as if none of it mattered and she was naked in front of him. ‘Maybe you would be better use to me elsewhere.’

Elsewhere was on her back in the Cardinal’s Hat. She can talk back to Twentyman all she wants, she can act the part of the brash boy and bet on her own usefulness to him, but with each passing day, year on year, Mariner feels his eyes on her legs and hidden breasts. The scales are being weighed. She is still boyish enough to look at, thank Christ, but she is twenty-five years old now. She has no chance of another future, and one particularly vindictive day, Will Twentyman will put her out for a whore. For this reason, amongst others, there is no one she hates more in the wide world.

‘C’mon,’ Kit says, and she follows him out the back of the pub and into the darkness. ‘Look.’

Kit opens his hand. There, in the centre of his palm is a sixpence. Mariner stares at it, shining silver and swallowing moonlight, glorious and stolen.

‘This is how we buy out,’ Kit says quietly. ‘You in?’

Mariner carefully picks up the coin, warm and sweaty and pilfered from a cut intended for Twentyman, turning it in her fingers as she looks at Kit’s questioning face, that same curiosity he had on the day they first spoke. She had been down in the cellar of the Silver Moon, standing on a board laid on top of a broken barrel hoop, making it tilt from side to side. He stared at her for a few moments and then climbed up beside her, mirroring her quiet oscillation. At first, she thought it was a mean-spirited mockery, but then she saw the concentration in his odd eyes. After a few moments of silence, he spoke.

‘Why are we doing this?’

She had not known what to do with Kit’s soft inquisitiveness. After years of trusting boys, she had been launched into a world where she was suddenly other. A girl. Now boys were full of cruelty towards her.

‘I feel odd when it’s all steady.’ The nausea was persistent in that first year. When she lay down at night, she felt as if the whole world was rocking on the high surf of the stars.

‘You’re a sailor?’

Mariner fought back sorrow and sickness and closed her eyes. If she swayed in just the right way, she could imagine the creak of timbers on the water and pretend that, yes, she was still a sailor.

‘Not anymore.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m a girl.’ Mariner could not help the bile in her voice. The distaste. It was only one thing about her and yet it had made all the difference.

‘Are you?’ Kit looked at her with nothing but mild interest and then shrugged. Mariner still thinks it is the kindest response she has ever had. ‘Does that make you bad at it?’

‘No. It fucking doesn’t.’

Kit looked at her, those odd, ugly eyes very bright.

‘Then I guess they are idiots,’ he said. His face split into a sharp, nasty smile but there was something victorious in it. At that moment, Mariner knew she wanted Kit Skevy on her side.

This is what she finds herself thinking as she looks at the coin stolen from her master. There is no path back to the wide open sea for her whilst she is tethered to the Grave Eorl and she wants no part of life in London without her best friend. Whatever the ordinance of God above, it is better to have Kit Skevy on her side than be without him. So she nods and slips the silver sixpence into her pocket.

He whose name is Flame

Chapter Four

‘That’s the signal,’ Kit says. A lamp turns off in the window of a small hut across the way. It’s where the grave keeper stays and his boy has been bribed handsomely, both to give signal and dig shallow. Tonight, Twentyman has them robbing graves and making delivery of the unfortunate corpse to the medicine man, apothecary or alchemist on the Southwark wharf. Such men will pay good coin for bodies that aren’t criminals, since that is all the law allows, and it doesn’t seem that the loss of Griffin and his connections has slowed the Grave Eorl’s trade. It’s been six weeks since Griffin’s death and Kit has bent his will to one thing and one thing only: getting out.

He’s won every fight, he’s nearly cut as many purses as Mariner and whenever he can, he’s been quietly skimming from the top. He knows it’s a risky game, but he doesn’t care. Twentyman is glorying in Griffin’s death and their grief, never wasting a moment to tell Squire Kay of her feckless brother or taunt Kit of his worthlessness: You’re nothing, you’re nobody, Griffin was a fool to ever put bread in your hand and clothes on your back, you’re just a whore’s son, a bastard brought from Antwerp—

‘I’m the best you’ve fucking got,’ Kit said the other day, and Twentyman pinned his ear to the wall with a knife. That’s the thing about Twentyman, he never fights fair.

‘Your pervert of a protector’s dead, you little arsehole,’ he said. ‘You’re nothing but a freakish means to a richer end. I bet he fucked you too.’

He notices the looks from the lads more, the sideways sneers and lingering, hateful glances when they eat supper in the corner of the Silver Moon each night. London is getting worse for Mariner by the day as the British fleet prepares to intercept the Spanish at Ferrol. She’s a Spanish defector, they say, she deserves to be strung up; he was the fuck toy of a player, nothing better than a whore. No amount of casual fist fights in the alleyways keep their names out of everyone’s mouths.

‘Well, which one?’ Mariner picks up the shovels they have hidden under potato sacking by the gate.

‘Freshly dug by the back wall, facing south.’

They move quietly across the pauper’s field of Crossbones cemetery, the place where the poor of Southwark, the dead and diseased and the Winchester geese plucked and buried, lie. The turn from July to August has brought with it wet weather and the earth is boggy, the grave markers sliding and the poor souls buried too shallow rising. Paintings of the last judgement are brought to life in the thick mud; a rotted elbow or row of teeth.

‘Don’t you find it strange that the client desires a specific body?’ Mariner whispers. ‘What unholy things could they be doing with it?’

‘They can have the corpse of Anne Boleyn as long as I get paid.’

Kit finds it difficult to care. After over a decade of wondering if he would feel death at all, he believes he is suffocating in Southwark. Kit’s own body is rejecting the air in it, refusing to settle into a safety that used to be easy. In the choice between rotting forever under Twentyman and the noose, he knows what he would take. Mariner gives him an exasperated look.

‘Why can you not fear hell, like other men?’ she says. ‘They are much easier to deter.’

‘Everyone goes to hell these days. At least it is bound to be interesting.’

Kit has already dug his shovel into the wet ground, dislodging fresh dirt and stones on his way to the coffin. Mariner stares anxiously down at the grave. Kit stops and gives her a look.