All Night Awake Read Online Free PDF Page B

fear. Like rabid dogs, justices and officers of the crown were very like to smell your fear and, smelling it, to react to it like a hungry man to meat and bread.
    They were now almost through Paul’s Yard. Almost to the outer iron gate. Almost past any hope of rescue.
    Passing the tent that displayed the sign of the white greyhound, where John Harrison, printer, should be indebted to Kit for many weighty purchases and many, even weightier profits, Kit found neither recognition nor interest in his plight. The printer and his apprentices glanced past Kit as if he were suddenly invisible.
    It was as though Kit were a dead man already, the lid of his tomb closed upon him, cutting him off from the world and his imagined friends.
    “So, you had no conscience, then, when you wrote down that Jesus was not truly God’s son, and twenty other such blasphemies, that you proclaimed while in college?” Henry frowned again, his lips contracting into their narrowest moue, his eyes no more than slits on his suspicious face.
    Kit started and drew sharp breath, turning around to stare at Mauder and needing not to fake surprise. He was astonished. While Kit had been in college? Eight years ago?
    Beggar the fools, had they all gone mad?
    He stared, his mouth hanging open, while in his mind he reviewed the riot of mad living he’d engaged in at Cambridge: the drinking, the gambling, and the carousing.
    With those, like a man given weak ale after strong wine, Kit had in vain tried to rinse away his memory of his first love, his elf love.
    Oh, Kit had not been so bad. He’d not stolen, nor killed, nor any other of those offenses that rightly might have brought a man to justice.
    As for what he’d said . . . . What might he not have said? Those had been years of pain. Years without hope.
    The memory of the elf lady, Silver, his lost love, had made Kit mad enough for anything. Even now, he shivered at the thought of Silver: dark silken hair, pale silken skin, and a mouth that tasted of new wine.
    He stared at Mauder. “Who told you this?” he asked. “That I wrote any such thing?”
    “Never mind who told us,” Mauder said. “We have proof enough, in a paper penned by your own hand.”
    Mauder smiled wider, showing crooked teeth, yellow and savage. A wolf’s teeth, which would maul and tear. “Master Marlowe, what we have against you is right enough to see you three times hanged or disemboweled or quartered, or indeed all of them.”
    Marlowe drew in a quick breath.
    Unlike the boy he’d once been, who’d entered Cambridge hoping to be a minister, Kit had lost all hope of paradise beyond. Death meant nothing, save only keeping company with worms. Of his shattered faith no hope at all remained, only the fear of something worse hereafter. Doubting heaven, he kept the suspicious certainty of hell. Therefore death scared him more than it had in his young and pious days.
    “Well, then,” he said, his voice sounding hollow and yet striving for a note of bravery. “Well, then, you can kill me but once.” He took off his gloves and put them on again, to give his hands some occupation. “Are we headed, then, to execution?” Even pronouncing the word made his voice tremble and he bit the inside of his cheek hard, willing pain to steady him.
    Outside Paul’s Yard, just past the gate to which they hurried, he saw that a dark, boxy carriage with no markings waited. Four dark horses pulled it, driven by a black-attired coachman who might have been the devil himself.
    Was this Kit’s final conveyance?
    Henry Mauder looked gravely at Kit.
    “We would prefer if you would do the Queen a service and reveal where you might have heard those foul heresies you then wrote down,” Henry Mauder said. “For certainly, you realize, the mouth of so dangerous a member of society must be stopped.”
    The coachman descended from his perch and opened the door to a spacious but dark interior. Black seats and heavy black curtains seemed all the darker for