Charged with Bullet

by Christopher Marlowe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Gervase Wyborne had grown a beard since Rheims, which was sensible of him, and he had kept his shoes, which was not. They were French shoes, square at the toe and cut low over the instep, and there are perhaps two cobblers in London who make them so, and both are known to men who take an interest in feet. I saw the shoes before I saw the beard. He was standing at the foot of the gallery stair with his hat in his hand, reading the faces of the men who came in from the street as if he expected one of them to owe him money.

"Master Marley," he said, and then, more quietly, because he had remembered where he was, "Kit."

"Master Wyborne. You are fatter."

"I am in England," he said. "Everything in England is fatter."

I paid the gatherer for both of us. It was a penny more for the gallery and I did not grudge it, since it was not my penny. A man I will call Coxe, because that was the name he used with me and I have no reason to think he used it with anybody else, had given me three shillings that morning in a shop off Fleet Street and told me what he wanted for them. He wanted to know where Wyborne lay at night. He did not want him taken. He wanted him watched, and the men who came to him counted, and for that he needed a door; and Wyborne had been a fortnight in London and nobody had found him a door.

Nobody had thought to look for him at a play. I had. A man who has spent three years in a college where they read aloud at every meal, and come home in the teeth of the statute, wants the loudest thing in the city, and in November of that year the loudest thing in the city was mine.

✾

We had places on the second bench, a little to the left of the stage, where you see the players three-quarters on and the yard full in the face. I had chosen them. Wyborne thought I had chosen them for the view of the stage, and so I had.

"I saw the first part," he said. "Before I went over. Twice."

"Then you have paid me twice already. You need not watch this one."

"Is it as good?"

"It is louder. He conquers more of Asia and his wife dies. He has a great deal to say about it."

"And then?"

"And then he burns a book."

Wyborne turned his head. "Whose book?"

"Mahomet's."

He smiled into his beard and looked down at the yard, and I watched him decide that this was a safe thing to smile at, and I put it away in the place behind my eyes where I keep such things. A man in Wyborne's position does not smile at the burning of books because he has no opinion of it. He smiles because he has an opinion, and has found an occasion on which he may hold it in public. I meant to watch his face when the book went into the fire. I wanted to see whether he looked at the Turk's book or through it.

The yard was full by two. It was cold enough that the breath of the standers in the yard hung over them like the steam off a horse, and they stamped and cracked nuts and had the faces men have when they have paid to be frightened and are waiting to be given their money's worth. I sorted them as I always do, into those who had come for the play and those who had come for each other. A pair of prentices in blue at the rail, who had certainly seen the first part more often than Wyborne, and moved their lips with the speeches. A man in a green hat, drunk already, held up by a friend at each elbow in a companionable way. A woman near the stage with a child on her hip, a boy of four or so in a red cap, and herself so far gone with the next that she stood with her free hand pressed into the small of her back; and the crowd had left a space round her, as crowds will, a hand's breadth on every side. She was eating hazelnuts out of a twist of paper and giving the kernels to the boy one at a time.

I had been in the tiring-house that morning. I had gone to hear Ned Alleyn's new lines for the death of Zenocrate, which he had wanted lengthened, and which I had lengthened, and which he now wanted shortened again. Behind him on the wall stood four calivers in a row, borrowed for the afternoon, with somebody's muster-mark burned into the stocks, and a hired man called Rowse sat on a stool beneath them complaining that the post they tied him to for the Governor of Babylon had a nail in it. Somebody had said the borrowed pieces would make a better smoke than ours. Somebody always says that. I picked one up because it was there, and put it down because it was heavy, and went back to Alleyn and Zenocrate.

✾

I will not describe the play. I watched it as I watch all my plays, which is to say I watched the people watching it, and I heard it the way you hear a clock in a room where you are working: not at all, until it stops.

Wyborne watched it well. He laughed where he should and was quiet where he should, and when Zenocrate died he looked down at his hands, as a good many men in the gallery did, and some of the women did not trouble to. When Tamburlaine stabbed the son who would not fight, Wyborne drew in his breath through his teeth like a man who has seen fathers do worse, and I put that away too. Coxe would not want it. I wanted it.

The prentices at the rail said the lines a half-beat before the players. The man in the green hat slept on his feet between his friends and woke for the battles. The woman near the stage had finished her nuts. The boy had climbed down off her hip and stood at the very edge of the stage with his chin on the boards, where the small boys always stand, looking up at the kings of Asia from below.

In the fifth act the Governor of Babylon will not yield the town, and Tamburlaine has him hung in chains upon the walls. The walls are the gallery over the stage. They tied Rowse there to his post with the nail in it, and he said his lines about the gold hid in Limnasphaltis lake, all of it offered to save his life, which is the most honest speech in either part and the one the yard likes least. Then Alleyn said Shoot at him all at once, and four soldiers brought up the borrowed calivers and levelled them.

I was looking at Wyborne. I wanted his face ready for the book.

The noise of four pieces fired together under a roof is not one noise. It is a blow on the ears, and then a ringing, and then, a long way off, the smoke rolling out over the yard, which makes no sound and which the yard always cheers. They cheered. Then the cheer came apart in the middle, like a sheet pulled by two people from opposite ends, and somebody below me began to say no, no, no, in an ordinary voice, as if correcting a sum.

Wyborne was on his feet before I was. He went down the gallery stair with his cloak caught up in his fist, and I went after him, because it was what I was paid for, and because I would have gone in any case.

✾

The smoke still hung in the yard at the height of a man's head, so that you went into it as into a low cloud and came out of it looking at people's feet. The crowd had drawn back from the stage in a ring, as men stand back from a dog that has bitten somebody, and inside the ring were three things.

The man in the green hat was sitting on the ground with both hands pressed to the side of his head and blood coming out between the fingers, and his friends stood over him telling him he was not hurt.

The boy in the red cap lay at the foot of the stage where he had been standing. I will say nothing of him except that there was nothing to be done, and that everyone who looked at him knew it in the same instant and looked away, to the third thing, because the third thing was still breathing.

She lay on her side in the trodden earth with her knees drawn up as far as her belly would let them come. The ball had gone into her under the arm. Her mouth moved and she was not looking at anything.

Wyborne went down on his knees beside her in the dirt in his good French shoes. He took her hand. Women from the yard knelt too, and loosened her bodice, and sent for water nobody brought, and called her by a name that was not hers, since none of them knew it. Wyborne put his face down by hers and spoke into her ear. Nobody minded him. He was a gentleman with a beard who had come down out of the gallery, and grief gives such men a licence in a crowd.

I stood over him because there was nowhere else to stand. That is how I saw his right hand. He had let go of her fingers, and the hand moved, low down against the stuff of her skirt where the women's backs hid it from the yard: up, and down, and across, very small, the way you make the sign when you are not supposed to be making it at all. I could not hear the words. I did not need to. I had heard them at Rheims every morning of four months, and I watched his lips shape them now as you watch a man across a room say a name you know. Si capax es. If you are able. Ego te absolvo.

Then he looked up and saw where I was standing.

There is a moment, which I have met more than once since, when a man understands that he has been seen doing the one thing in the world he must not be seen doing; and in that moment he does not look at your face. He looks at your hands, to see whether they have begun to move. Wyborne looked at my hands. Then he looked at my face, and what he found there I cannot tell you, because I was not choosing what to put there. Something in him settled. He had knelt beside me at Rheims. He thought he knew whose I was.

"She has nobody," he said. "Say a prayer for her, Kit."

"I will."

It was the only promise I made that afternoon, and I kept it, after my fashion.

✾

The players had come to the edge of the stage. Alleyn stood among them still in Tamburlaine's crown and the coat with the copper lace, his sword in his hand, and he did not seem to know he was holding it. Behind him the hired man whose piece had swerved had laid it on the boards very carefully, as if it might go off again, and stepped back from it, and kept stepping back until he stood against the hangings. Up on the walls Rowse hung in his chains at the post with the nail in it, quite unhurt, and nobody had thought to let him down. He was looking at the yard with his mouth open. He was the one man in the house who had been aimed at.

The constable came, and then more men than were wanted, and the yard began to empty at the doors in the way a yard empties when it would rather not be asked anything. Wyborne got up off his knees. Somebody had found a cloak to put over her. He stood brushing the earth from his hose with the flat of his hand, and then gave it up.

"I am behind the Bell in Holborn," he said to me. "There is a cutler's with a green door. Ask for Master Hall."

It was the door. It was what I had been given three shillings for. He gave it me as you give a friend your hand, because he believed he had just shown me everything else, and that a man who has seen everything may be trusted with an address.

"I will come," I said.

He went out by the yard door with the crowd. I stood by the stage and watched him go, and saw that in that press nobody looked at his shoes.

✾

Coxe's shop smelled of ink and size. He sold paper and pens and almanacs and a little sealing-wax, and I never once saw anybody buy anything there. He had heard about the playhouse. Everybody had heard. There were already two accounts of it going about the city, one in which the player had done it of malice and one in which it was a judgement, and Coxe, who had a mind like a well-kept drawer, cared for neither.

"You were in the yard," he said.

"I was."

"With him."

"With him and three hundred others."

"And?"

I gave him the cutler's with the green door behind the Bell in Holborn, and the name of Hall. He wrote it down. He was pleased; he has a way of being pleased that consists in blotting the ink twice. Then he looked up with the pen still in his hand.

"And what did he do? When it happened?"

"He knelt by the woman," I said. "As others did. He held her hand until she died. Then he got up and told me where he lodged."

Coxe looked at me for some time. He is not a stupid man. He knew, as I knew, that there are two kinds of thing a man may carry into that shop: the kind that tells you where to watch, and the kind that ends the watching. The first is worth three shillings. The second is worth a rope, and somebody must swear to it. He knew where I had been in the years before, and for whom, and that I knew what a priest's hands do in the presence of the dying. I watched him think of asking. I watched him remember that a question asked in that shop is a question somebody must afterwards answer on paper.

He counted three shillings onto the board. Then, after a moment, he counted out a fourth, and pushed it across with one finger, and did not say what it was for, and I did not ask.

✾

Two days after, I went out to the playhouse in the morning. The yard had been raked, and fresh earth thrown down at the foot of the stage, darker than the rest, and a gatherer was treading it in with his heels. The players were on the stage in their own clothes going through the fifth act, because Alleyn would not have it cut. He said that if the Governor of Babylon were not shot the yard would think the company afraid, and the yard would be right, and a company the yard thinks afraid plays to empty benches.

The borrowed calivers had gone back to whoever owned them. In their place the company had two old pieces of its own with the locks struck off, so that they could not have fired if all the powder in the Tower had been poured down them. I had looked into both barrels the night before, with a candle, before anybody asked me to.

Rowse was tied to his post on the walls again. Somebody had drawn the nail. He said his gold in Limnasphaltis lake, and Alleyn said Shoot at him all at once, and the two hired men in their shirts brought up the empty pieces and levelled them, and one of them said ha with his mouth, for the noise.

Rowse flinched, up there in his chains. They took the scene four times that morning and he flinched at every one, and on the fourth Alleyn did not give the next line but stood looking down into the yard, and none of us told him to go on.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Christophorō Marlōvō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Christopher Marlowe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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