All Night Awake Read Free Page B

write my poem for Walsingham and get my money there. I would be finishing my poem even now at the lord’s home of Scagmore, had not urgent business called me to London yesterday.” He sighed and grinned. “Be gone with you. When I have my play, I’ll come searching.”
    The playhouse owner patted Marlowe on the shoulder, as if acknowledging a joke or thanking Marlowe for a favor.
    “But pray what did you think of my poem?” Will asked. His voice, strangled and small, did not carry very far and missed Philip Henslowe altogether, as the theater owner turned his back and disappeared amid the throng.
    “He didn’t listen to your poem,” Marlowe said and smiled at Will as though this too were droll.
    Will’s stomach twisted in hunger. Did Marlowe not understand that this was Will’s very life in the balance of the theater owner’s attention?
    “They never do. Why would you wish him to? They know nothing of poetry, the unfeeling philistines. Theater owners listen only to the soft tinkling of coins, the whisper of gold.” Marlowe adjusted the gilded fringe on his gloves, and bent upon Will a look of disarming honesty. “No, do yourself better, friend. Write a long poem. Know you the classics?”
    Will’s mouth went dry again. Marlowe, who had translated Ovid’s Amores , asked if Will knew the classics. Even the Amores , Will had read in translation. “I have little Latin and small Greek,” he stammered.
    “Well, then, enough, I say. Write yourself a long poem, say on the subject of Venus and Adonis, and have the lovers disport in the glades of Arcadia and any nobleman will give you coin for it. What, with your clever punning style . . .”
    “But my lodging—” Will started, intending to explain that he was already overdue in paying for that and must make some coin or perish.
    “Your lodging is not convenient to gentlemen’s abodes?” Marlowe asked.
    Will shook his head. “I lodge in Shoreditch, at Hog’s Lane,” he said. “Over the Bonefoy hatters there, and I—”
    He would have said more: that he owed money to his landlord, that soon he would be turned out, that he hadn’t eaten in a whole day, that he knew no noblemen, no one who might help. He might so far have forgotten himself as to ask for the help of this stranger, of this crowned, gilded king of poets. And Will less than a peasant
    But before he could speak, two men emerged from the crowd, like wrathful gods from stormy waters, pushing aside money changers, ballad makers, and smirking, tightly corseted bawds.
    The men flanked Marlowe, one on either side.
    Will stepped away from them.
    Somberly dressed, in black with no adornments, the two men looked like Puritans.
    They were not the sort of men that Will expected to see with a playwright.
    Marlowe looked at one, then the other. His whole face contracted, aged, soured, as if he’d tasted bitter gall.
    One of the men had narrow-faced, thin looks that reminded Will of a rat in a house with a fast cat. The other one was round, but old, his face wrinkled and his chin sporting only a dismal growth of beard, like grass striving to thrive on poisoned land.
    Will expected Marlowe to dismiss them or make fun of them.
    Instead, Marlowe turned to face them and gave them his full attention and a weary look. He bowed to each one in turn. “Gentlemen?”
    “If you would come with us,” the small one said, his voice echoing with an incongruous boom.
    Marlowe smiled, an oddly forced smile that lacked the mobility of his amusement and the malicious quickness of his teasing. It looked like the grin of a death mask, like the drawn lips and vacant eyes of a final rictus.
    Funny how, when people died like that, their neighbors said they’d gone to their reward smiling. Will would never believe it again.
    Marlowe bowed as a statue might bow, all stiff poise and graceful dignity. “I am, as always, at the council’s disposal, am I not?”
    The three of them walked off, the two men on either side, hemming