A Tip for the Hangman by Allison Epstein

Author:Allison Epstein [Epstein, Allison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—————

He returned to London shortly before curfew, stopping only to return the horse to the untrustworthy carrier before setting off for home. Not exactly high living: he and his co-boarder, an actor and poet named Thomas Kyd, split a single room in Shoreditch, near the sprawl of Moorfields and Bethlehem Hospital. The first six weeks after Whitehall, shrieks from the hospital had infiltrated his dreams, blending with the echo of Mary’s scream to form something horrible, half nightmare and half memory. But as time went on, the dreams faded, and so did his awareness of the madmen outside the door. Proof, he supposed, that a man could get used to anything.

Thomas Kyd was lying across his bed when Kit entered, staring at the ceiling with a stymied expression. Faintly amused, Kit shrugged off his cloak and dropped down on the bed beside his co-boarder, earning himself an irritated noise in return.

“Trouble with act three still, Hieronimo?” he asked.

Kyd groaned and turned his face to the wall. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what? Sympathize?”

“Don’t be successful around me. The play’s a disaster and I can’t bear it.”

Kit shrugged, then stood and crossed to the desk where Kyd had left the abandoned wreckage of an incomplete third act. “If it soothes your pride any, I just spent an evening with my mother, who three times asked me if I’d invited my parish priest to see my plays.”

At this, Kyd sat up, shaken out of his own self-pity. “I assume you didn’t mention the priests you strangled in Malta.”

“Or the holy books we burned in Tamburlaine. Sometimes it’s best to eat quietly and say nothing.”

“For you, maybe,” Kyd said. He gestured at the pages in Kit’s hand. “Give that back. I won’t have the king of Bankside crowing over my failure.”

“I wasn’t crowing,” Kit said indignantly, but he did return the pages to the desk.

Turning away, he leaned absently against the windowsill, watching as candles illuminated the covered windows in the building opposite, one by one like a sky dotted with stars. The sprawling countryside of Kent he’d traversed that day had been beautiful, all vast fields and endless sky. But it inspired nothing in him compared to this dingy little street in north London that turned to impassable mud each time it rained, where screams were so common they faded to nothing in time.

Five years of London living had changed everything. Ciphered letters and rising armies had become an unpleasant dream that could be dismissed with the morning light, the Armada nothing but splintered wreckage at the bottom of the sea. The world wasn’t shadows and secrets anymore—it was roaring crowds, thrilling words, coin in his purse, and no one to answer to but himself. It crossed his mind, not for the first time, how little the city resembled the London he’d first entered as a student, that grim place where each street seemed to wish him gone.

Somehow, that forbidding city had become home.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.