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day before, Kit had been dragged from Scagmore—his patron’s home—by one of these men, Henry Mauder, and brought to town in such a great hurry that he’d not been given the chance to change out of his indoor slippers.
    Treason Abroad, a pamphlet pinned to the side of a printer’s tent, slapped in the breeze, catching Kit’s gaze as he was hurried past. The cover displayed a caricature of the King of Spain.
    Yesterday Kit, who had worked covertly for the Queen’s council since his days at Cambridge, had invoked names of those he had served as a shield against those who would now arrest him. Blithely, he’d named the late Sir Francis Walsingham and Cecil, the Queen’s present secretary.
    Yesterday, Kit had been let go.
    But look how he’d been apprehended again today. Had those names, then, so quickly lost their power to protect him?
    “What do you wish with me, milords?” Kit asked, casting his voice just so, attempting to keep it from showing shaking anxiety, attempting to keep his fear from the sure knowledge of all the men walking past, all those scholars shopping for pamphlets and books, as Kit had done so many times before.
    Henry Mauder, on Kit’s left, cast Kit a brief, triumphant glare. A messenger for the Queen’s chamber, Mauder looked perpetually scared and angry in equal measure. Kit had learned there was none so dangerous as a scared man.
    Kit’s mind cast about for the cause of today’s arrest. What had Henry Mauder found out? What did he know? What did he hold over Kit like the sword of Damocles, precariously suspended?
    All of Kit’s sins, remembered, danced before his eyes with lewd display. He’d blasphemed and gambled and once, drunk, said a whole lot of nonsense on the subject of boys and tobacco, to see the shocked expressions in the pious faces surrounding him. Could any of these have come home to him? “Pray, pray, he said, his voice thin and dismal. “What think you I’ve done?”
    Henry Mauder shrugged. “You are being taken for to answer some questions.”
    A trickle of sweat ran from Kit’s forehead, past the ineffective dam of his thin, arched eyebrows, to sting in his eyes.
    His captors enforced a fast step. He saw a friend passing by, a friend who was also a secret service man.
    This friend who had defended Kit in street brawls and been one of the first critics of Kit’s poems now passed by Kit as though Kit didn’t exist, his gaze not answering Kit’s beckoning recognition.
    So word was out among secret service people that Kit was taken, Kit thought, chilled. Word was out that Kit was lost, caught in the net of official displeasure that fished him forth from his natural element to a terrible fate.
    “What questions can you have that you did not ask yesterday?” he asked the fat man at his right.
    The fat man didn’t even look at Kit. Swollen and wrinkled at once, like a prune too long forgotten in sugar water, he looked unimportant. A mere secretary. A witness.
    Or a nobleman in disguise?
    In the secret service, one could never tell. Fair was foul and foul was fair, each thing turned from its true nature.
    Henry Mauder pursed his mouth into close semblance of a chicken’s ass and tilted his head sideways. “I see, Master Marlowe,” he said, “that heavy deeds weigh upon your conscience.”
    Kit’s throat seemed to close upon his breathing, and his brain felt as if it had become a single teeny drum echoing only What do they know? Out of his panic, Kit spoke blindly. “I’ll not meddle with a conscience,” he said, in reasonable imitation of his normal teasing tone. He forced his lips into a smile again. “It makes a man a coward and it fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that by chance I found. It beggars any man that keeps it. It is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavors to trust himself to live without it.”
    He took a deep breath and resolved not to show