Mid-November, and the Accession Day festivities, found me living in my own house for the first time since my renascence. I had moved into the old manor at Chelsey, taking the loups-garous Jehan, Sylvie, and Sylvie’s mother Sylvana to run the house, with Nicolas as my keeper.
I had approached Nicolas with the idea of my own premises soon after my violent encounter with Geoffrey, and had been both startled and pleased when he deeded the manor over to me, with the proviso that one or another of my elders would stay near me at all times. Some time before he had informed me, as soon as I had healed enough to comprehend it, that a sum of money had been settled on me, and we had agreed that he would continue to manage it. I learned that I had a considerable income.
I had never had more than a few pounds to my name before, and was quite happy with these arrangements. I enjoyed being a gentleman of affluent means, and not having to buckle under the vagaries of public taste just to scratch out a meager living with my pen. I might not remember very much about my previous life, but the degradation poverty wreaked on it echoed still.
I shook myself fully awake and began to dress in the soft twilight afternoon. I still prowled the dark London streets, often lingering in the inns and taverns I had frequented while alive, sitting in the shadows and listening to the habitual wrangling of the players, almost always with Jehan along as watchdog.
The familiar surroundings enticed more memories from my cloudy past, memories that led me to the conclusion that I had been more than a little cruel, most malicious, and quite reprehensible while alive, but I shrugged this judgment aside. It was very easy to pronounce on someone, from the outside, but not at all easy to discern the truth within. The truth was that I would do whatever I had to now to stay alive just as I had done then. Only the means had changed.
Oh, I was no longer quite so brash and turbulent, that afternoon in Deptford had cured me of much of that, and the powers and abilities of my new estate far eclipsed the fleeting pleasures of defiant poses and furious disputes, even if I had had the wit remaining to so indulge myself. I was sitting in a dark corner of the Anchor musing upon this, when I was startled to hear my name spat out as if it were a swear word.
“Marlowe! That bombastic brabbler! What a pity he’s not here to see what a true poet can do with the drama—” A general round of laughter drowned the snarling voice.
“How now, Jimmy, did Kind Kit lampoon one of your youthful efforts before he went and got himself spitted?” The one called Jimmy growled an unintelligible reply to the laughing question.
“Come now, friends, the man is dead. Let him rest, if he can,” another suggested.
“You’re a deal too kind, Will. He was no friend to you!”
“And a worse yet to himself,” the one called Will retorted, brushing the hair back from his high forehead. “Yes, he had a viper’s tongue, and vicious temperament, but who was left to pay the reckoning but himself? Henslowe rejected your new piece, did he, Jimmy? Come, let us look at it, and see what we may do,” and resting his arm comfortingly across the angry man’s shoulders he led him from the room.
I may well have parodied something that the fretful Jimmy had written. Anyone I could think of had fallen victim to my spleen those last few weeks of my life, but I doubted that many had taken it so to heart. A rueful smile curled my lips as I belatedly recognized the man, Will, who had scooped up my fallen crown, writing some of the most popular plays in London. I felt resentment flare at the thought, but suppressed it. What had happened to me had nothing to do with Warwickshire’s Will, the sweetest-tempered of men, and deserving of patronage, not obloquy.
Jimmy Dighton, on the other hand, was a third-rate scribbler, presuming on his sister’s lightskirted affaires d’amour to gain patronage. I wondered if Will stood in need of money; the devil knew that most poets and play-writers did. I’d have to look into it, another time.
A few nights later I was riding alone, for once, back from an evening’s entertainment at Ralegh’s Durham house.