The diners waited for Cecil to weigh in. ‘Passable, Master Marlowe,’ he said. ‘Rather passable. My birdie will have to remain in its cage and forsake its journey to London. Who do you have giving this speech and what will you call your play?’
‘Thus sayeth Jupiter!’ Marlowe said. ‘And I am calling the play Dido, Queen of Carthage.’
‘Well, Marlowe, if, in three years’ time, you take your Holy Orders, the world will surely lose an eminent playwright.’
The last to leave the table were Marlowe, Cecil and Lewgar. It was growing dark and Lewgar moaned that he needed to be in bed early.
‘I hear the Fellows are not well disposed of your chances, Lewgar,’ Cecil said harshly.
‘You have heard that?’ Lewgar asked fearfully.
‘I have indeed.’
‘I mustn’t fail. My life will be over.’
‘If you cast yourself into the Cam, Thomas, I will write a poem about you,’ Marlowe said.
‘I’ll be fine, as long as I’m not given a thesis concerning mathematics. You know how appalling I am at mathematics, don’t you, Christopher?’
‘I shouldn’t worry, Thomas. Tomorrow you’ll be as drunk as me. In celebration.’
When Lewgar trundled off, Cecil rose and clapped Marlowe on the back. ‘Old Norgate will be letting you know over breakfast, but you’ll be one of Lewgar’s questioners at his disputation. I shall be another.’
Marlowe looked up quizzically. ‘Really? How very interesting.’
His Sizar came to clear away the last of the table but Marlowe sent him for more wine and ordered him to light the candles. The lad obliged. Marlowe stared into the flickering flame of the candle and let his drink-heavy head droop towards his chest. The candlestick, a plain tube of pewter, caught his attention. He’d seen it every day for four years but tonight it jogged his memory. It was very much like a candlestick he’d seen some thirteen years earlier.
His father was always angry, always muttering invectives while he worked. Seven-year-old Christopher sat by the fire, eagerly scribbling on a crossed-out, singed page from his father’s ledger book which his mother had rescued from the fire.
The sun doth shine,
The birds doth sing,
And lo the bluebird
Takes to wing.
Pleased with himself, he looked up to see a woman at their door complaining about a job that John Marlowe had done. It was the baker’s wife, Mary Plessington. The stitching had already come undone on a recent shoe repair.
His father took the shoes mutely and when the woman was gone he cursed her out roundly.
‘Filthy hag. She most likely loosened the stitches by ramming her foot up her husband’s ass. She’s a bloody recusant, anyway. I shouldn’t even take her jobs.’
His mother, Katherine, looked up from her sewing. ‘Papist scum. Makes me want to spit on my own floor.’
The shoe shop and their front room were one and the same. His father sat at his workbench all through the day, flaying and puncturing cattle skins and complaining. The Marlowes were meant for more, he would say. It was well and good that he had elevated himself to a freeman and had been able to join the Shoemakers’ Guild with all the privileges that entailed. But he was still on a lowish rung of the middle class and he couldn’t contain his contempt for the aristocracy and anyone else doing better than himself.
‘Katherine,’ he called out. ‘See how young Christopher gets on with his learning. That’s the way to beat the bastards. With a proper education he’ll become one of them, or that’s what they’ll think. Then he’ll rise above them and take a Marlowe’s rightful place on the top of the pile.’
Christopher was the only son and the oldest child now that his older sister had died of a fever. He attended the petty school at Saint George the Martyr run by the parish priest, Father Sweeting. He’d quickly learned to read from the ABC and Catechism and from the first days when the printed page made sense to him verses and rhymes had popped into his head, demanding that he write them down. They were a cheerful counterpoint to the other thoughts that bubbled in his brain, dark thoughts that had scared him when he was younger.
‘Are we different?’ he remembered asking his mother when he was five.
‘We are.’
‘Did God make us so?’
‘It’s nothing to do with God.’
‘Sometimes I get frightened.’
‘Your fears will go away,’ his mother assured him. ‘When you’re a bit older you’ll be happy you’re different, believe me.’
She’d been right. The fear faded soon enough and was replaced by something altogether marvelous, a feeling of superiority and power. By the age of seven he genuinely liked who he was and what he was becoming.
The baker’s son, Martin Plessington, was in his class at petty school. Thomas Plessington was one of the more successful merchants in Canterbury, a wealthy Protestant with five apprentices and two ovens. Martin was a heavy-boned boy on his way to being a giant like his father. Inside the school he was slow-witted but on the streets he was a bully, using his muscles for primacy.
One day, Christopher was among the last to leave school, reluctant, as always, to part with one of Father Sweeting’s books. On his way home he took his usual short cut behind the Queen’s Head Tavern and the livery stables.
To his surprise, he saw the thick legs of Martin Plessington poking from a window at the house of the stable master. Martin lowered himself to the ground, clutching something. His eyes met Christopher’s.
‘Bugger off,’ Martin hissed.
‘What do you have?’ Christopher asked boldly.
‘None of your bleeding business.’
Christopher came closer and saw it. It was a pewter candlestick adorned with an ornate Catholic cross.
‘Have you stolen that?’
‘Do you want me to thrash you?’ was the angry response.
Christopher didn’t back away. ‘I assume you mean to sell it. Unless your family are closet Papists who mean to use it in an illegal mass.’
‘Who are you calling a Papist!’ Martin said, growing red in the face. ‘The Marlowes aren’t fit to wipe a Plessington ass.’
‘Tell you what,’ Christopher said evenly. ‘If you let me see it, I’ll swear I won’t tell a soul what you’ve done.’
‘Why do you want to see it?’ the boy asked suspiciously.
‘It’s pretty, that’s why.’
Martin thought about it and handed the candlestick over. It had a heavy round base, the weight of a brick or two. Christopher inspected it closely, then looked up and down the alley. ‘Did you notice this?’ he asked.
‘What?’ Martin answered, drawing closer.
‘This.’
Christopher swung the candlestick with all the might his small frame could muster and slammed its base against Martin’s temple. With a satisfying crunch, the sound of a boot breaking through ice, the boy fell to his knees and pitched forward, blood gushing from the wound. He moved for a few seconds and went slack.
Christopher stuffed the bloody candlestick into his shirt and began dragging the lifeless body toward the stable. It was harder work than he’d imagined but he didn’t let up until he had Martin well inside. The tethered horses shifted and whinnied and tugged at their ropes.
He dropped Martin beside a pile of hay and paused to catch his breath. Then he fished inside his shirt for the candlestick. He grasped it by its base, staining his fingers red.
With one hand he opened Martin’s mouth and with the other he shoved the stick as far down his throat as it would go and watched blood well up and fill the gaping hole.
The next day, Martin’s chair at petty school was unoccupied and Father Sweeting commented prophetically that the boy had better be dead than miss a day of studies. Christopher skipped lightly home, passing by the stables again. The stable doors were shut and no one seemed to be about. When he got home his mother and father were seated at the table talking in low tones, his sisters padding about on bare feet.