The next few months were the busiest in all my time serving the security of the state. Work grew before my eyes, with every day more letters, more facts to be sifted and recorded and more cipher work, the latter greatly increased thanks to Nicholas Berden. So trusted was Nicholas by the scheming émigrés in Paris that they gave him the alphabets, as we call them, the keys to their ciphers. This meant that I could find ways in that would otherwise have taken months of trial and error. It meant too that I wasted no time on nulls, meaningless symbols and figures placed to delay and confuse. And since success breeds success I could therefore decipher ever more, so creating for myself yet more to read and do. I remember particularly that winter evening when Gilbert Gifford was shown into the little private room in Whitehall Palace bearing twenty-one packets handed to him by the French ambassador for Queen Mary. They were the accumulated secret correspondence of many months which the ambassador had no way of communicating until Gilbert arrived. Naturally, they had all to be secretly opened, copied and resealed before being sent on their way, leaving me to labour at decryption. I worked days and nights on those packets.
I tell you all this, sir – sparing you much detail – so that you may understand how small a part Christopher Marlowe played in my life at that time. And I in his. I neither went to the playhouses nor sought the latest poems at the printer’s by St Paul’s. Others did – including Sir Francis – and I acknowledge now that my understanding might have been deepened by it. Indeed, Christopher himself urged me that it would enrich my soul to heed the music of words and feel the impress of other men’s minds. But work at that time consumed me entirely and though I loved to hear him speak of such matters, and of the dramas that became his life, I never sought to broaden myself as he, I now see, sought to broaden me.
Why he bothered with me I cannot say, being unable to see myself as I was then, from outside. I was fond of him, as I think he was of me, and during times together when business was not pressing he was curious to probe my mind, asking questions I had never asked myself. Despite his proclivity for violence in word or deed when he felt truth or justice were challenged – to be plain, his readiness for a fight – there was a gentleness in Christopher, a quiet and surprising perceptiveness that showed he sometimes saw through other men’s eyes more than they saw themselves.
Once, when he arrived in Whitehall Palace with letters from Holland and I procured ale and bread and we sat talking on a bench, he asked me about my own background – my mother and sisters, my father, my time at Cambridge, our business in the custom house, how I came to work for Mr Secretary. I was explaining when he put his hand on my arm. ‘Have you always been afraid, Thomas?’
I was nonplussed. ‘Afraid? Afraid of what?’
‘Of life, of everything. Of letting go of God’s hand?’
I protested I didn’t understand what he meant. I was as fearful of God as any Christian should be, but I loved Him and was faithful to Him and trusted in His mercy to be united with Him in the life to come. But even as I protested I sensed Christopher was right: I had always been afraid. I had called it Duty.
Christopher shook his head as I spoke. ‘You always speak as if you feel you were born into debt, born owing. Have you never thought that there is no need to be forever owing to your father, to Mr Secretary, to God? Do you not think that perhaps God would like you to let go of His hand, to take steps on your own and find your own way, like a mother with her toddler? There is a world beyond your duties, Thomas. A life.’
Yet he continued participating in my world, the world of duties, whenever asked. I think it interested him, not only in itself and because of its influence on affairs of state – and because of the cause – but because he liked to test himself against it. There was something unresolved in Christopher, a bundle of contradictions which I think he sought to unpick in his work for us and – judging by how he used to speak of them – in his plays. My reaction to anything I feared was to avoid it, but he rushed at it and embraced it. Or so it seemed.
His greatest fears? I cannot say, sir. He never spoke of them to me in those terms but he did once say that in his plays he confronted what in himself he could not. He said something similar about his work for us: ‘In my work for you I am an actor. I speak your lines and thereby learn what it is like to be such a man.’ Indeed, he made a small but significant contribution to the business I was describing, the plot by young Babington and his friends to murder Queen Elizabeth and put the Queen of Scots on the throne. Although he was on the periphery of this great matter, he did play small parts, twice and briefly.
The first occasion followed from the delivery to Queen Mary of Gilbert’s twenty-one packets. Gilbert, posing at our suggestion as an apothecary, journeyed to Chartley and was received by Queen Mary’s private secretary for English affairs, a man called Curll. Gilbert told the guards at
