The Conscience of the King

The disease was affecting him now, Marlowe knew. He was starting to lose feeling in his hands and feet, could not always sense the hardness of the ground under him as his feet landed and so had the prancing, high-stepping gait of the pox sufferer. The doctor had said the growths would come eventually — hard little carbuncles on his flesh that first blackened and then fell out, leaving a gaping hole behind them. They would be active around his penis, the doctor had said. He would piss like a watering can. The cures could stave off the end, but that it would end in death was inevitable. So little time. So much revenge.

The Anchor Inn was by the Clink Prison and there was little to choose between the clientele of both places. They were all lost souls. The river pirates used the Anchor as their base, as did several highwaymen. A warren of passageways allowed escape down to the river. This was a sump, a noisome gathering place where many of the conversations were in grunts, where men came to become seriously drunk in the shortest possible time and where nameless deals were struck in dark corners. Occasionally a flash of light from one of those darkest corners would reveal a jewel or a necklace being covertly shown, before being stuffed back into the stinking cloth in which it was wrapped. The women here were old before their time, cackling hags at twenty-five years. Marlowe had no pity for them. It was one of their kind that had launched the acid of the pox into his body and into his mind.

He had paid one of the boys to keep filling his tankard. A thin, small-faced creature with a great lump and a bruise on the side of his head, he seemed incapable of moving forward, favouring instead a crab-like sideways walk, his chin permanently held down into his puny chest as if to avoid a blow from any of the roaring mob that frequented the inn. His face was quite beautiful, Marlowe noted, if you cut through the grime and the swelling, the big green eyes and the high cheekbones set off surprisingly well by a mop of auburn hair. His innocence was pathetic. Well, innocence did not last, thought Kit Marlowe.

As his hand caressed the letters he remembered his failure. The porter they paid to guard The Globe theatre had been old, and sleeping off his drink. It had been easy to slit his throat while he slept — who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him? — and pleasurable to watch as he writhed and twisted down the slippery road to hell, trying vainly to scream his fear as the air whistled out through the bloody slice in his air passage. Marlowe had broken into the room as easily as he had slit the throat of the porter, leafed frantically through the hundreds of papers. These were fair copies! Not the original manuscripts he craved! Only one scabby piece worth stealing, and that in the writing of a man long dead!

Marlowe took his grief, as he had learned to do over the years, and folded it over and over until it was a small package. Then he dropped it in the furnace of his hatred and watched it catch light and burn, renewing its strength.

With hindsight, his failure to kill Shakespeare had saved him.

The man he had known as William Hall must know where the papers are, must have lied to Marlowe's spy when he said in his cups that they were stored at The Globe. His revenge would have been wonderfully byzantine, but the devil must be guarding him so that Shakespeare was still living. He would talk, again. And this time Marlowe would make sure it was the truth.

In the meantime, there were other debts to be paid. It would be too simple to kill Henry Gresham. Gresham must suffer, as Marlowe had suffered over the years. There was a most enjoyable way of achieving that end, he thought, as a grin seemed to tear his scarred face even further.