setting his back to the wall, his hand dropping to the dagger on his belt. I stayed seated on the table, hands carefully kept away from my own weapons. I had loved Tom, offered my heart, and to be so spurned, to be compared to a prostitute offering my body in exchange for patronage—but Tom was still a boy, for all he was a year older than I. I started to speak, to apologize, but Tom interrupted me.
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand it, but I have responsibilities to my family. I must marry now, I must beget an heir and I must not be involved in scandal. But then how could you understand? When have you ever been responsible? When have you ever been anything but malicious? Malicious, lascivious, and base! Base-born and base in nature!” His voice had been rising steadily in volume and he screamed the final words.
“You’ve played that card too often, Tommy,” I said coldly. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.” I lied; it still hurt, but I would be racked before admitting it.
He leant towards me, resting his delicate hands on the table. The harebell-blue of his eyes paled to treacherous ice and his voice dropped into a menacing whisper. “You talk too freely and far too much, Kit. I will not have you prating about us, do you understand? Court your own destruction if you must, but do not think to drag me down with you. It never happened, never! I was your patron, nothing more.”
Red mist swirled in my sight and I heard my words as if spoken by another. “You! When were you ever anything but a boy? A petty, pretty, spiteful, irresponsible boy! You, responsible to your family? Hah! That would make a cat laugh! You could not wait to corrupt me, to add me to your collection, but took me straight from your uncle’s office! Now, now, you come to me, boy! My boy!” I beckoned and Tom shook his head, but he came to me, step by unwilling step. I grasped his expensive bone-lace ruff in both hands and twisted it, drawing him into a kiss while I choked him. I could taste his tears; felt him fighting for breath, his feeble tugs at my relentless hands. Still I held him, until he gave a little whimper deep in his throat, no longer fighting the kiss, no longer fighting me, and then I released him, shoving him away from me. He stumbled back against the wall, pawing at his throat. I became aware of a pounding on the door and voices. Numbly I went to open it, turning back at the threshold to look at Tom.
“I came here to try to mend our differences—what a hope! It is you that never cared, always relying on someone else to do your dirty work for you. You could not so much as tell me honestly that it was over, you must needs force a new quarrel, goad me into a fury, to make the fault mine,” I said with dull disgust and unbolted the door. It flew violently open and barely missed striking me. I staggered back as Frizer thundered into the room and grabbed me by the arm.
“The villain has hurt you, Master,” he bellowed. I drew my dagger and he unhanded me with a speed that was almost comical. Though the mark of the slap was clearly visible on his fair skin and his ruff a ruin at his bruised throat, Tom shook his head. “No, no. He was just leaving. Let him go,” he said hoarsely.
“Well, no, I think not,” Frizer gloated. “Someone has come for him.”
A nondescript and soberly dressed stranger entered as I leant close to Frizer. “I was dissuaded from cutting your throat not so long ago, Ingram,” I hissed, my words low-pitched but perfectly audible. “Be sure that I will not be so cheated again.” Frizer glared at me with mixed hatred and exultation as the stranger stood forward.
“Christopher Marlowe?” I stepped forward. “I arrest you in the Queen’s name,” he said.
There was a gasp from Tom and the room seemed to fade before my eyes. My thoughts filled with images of my stay in Newgate Prison a few years before; the stinking rooms, the galling weight of the manacles on my wrists, the unnatural, halting steps produced by the leg-irons. I stalked up to Tom who quailed back against the wall. “I’ll not go back to prison, Tom. See to it,” I told him,