The Devil Will Come

Tigellinus thought for a moment and before stamping off he delivered a line from the Aeneid, a biting, sarcastic send-off. ‘Is it such a wretched thing to die?’

Nero sputtered as his courtiers fled and the dining hall emptied. He managed to compose himself enough to rasp a few orders to those who remained. He wanted a fleet prepared at Ostia to take him to Alexandria. In the meanwhile he’d leave his Golden House that very night. It was too large to defend every entrance and he was feeling vulnerable there. The walled Servilian Gardens across the Tiber were more secure. Nero threw gold at any of his Praetorian and German cohorts who would flee with him but most of them deserted on the spot.

‘Where’s Sporus?’ he ranted to Epaphroditus. ‘Bring him to me!’

Epaphroditus found him in the kitchens, speaking to a man at a rear door by the herb garden. The man disappeared into the night.

‘Who was that?’ Epaphroditus asked.

‘Just a friend,’ Sporus pouted.

‘You have but one man to attend to, wretch,’ Epaphroditus said, ‘and he commands you.’

As Nero and his small entourage made their way across the Tiber, the majority of the Senate marched to the Praetorian barracks, declared Nero an enemy of the state, and gave their allegiance to Galba. Nero’s German Cohorts were ordered to stand down.

It was after midnight when Nero and Sporus finally bedded down for the night in Nero’s chamber at the Servilian Gardens.

Nero suddenly sat bolt upright.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ Sporus asked wearily.

‘Something’s wrong,’ Nero announced, leaping up and calling for Epaphroditus. The man confirmed Nero’s fears. The imperial bodyguard had melted away.

Nero bolted hysterically from the villa to the riverbank and when it appeared that he might fling himself into the dark waters one of his few remaining friends, the freedman Phaon, suggested they flee to his own villa a few kilometers to the north. Some horses were found and Epaphroditus dressed Nero in an old cloak and a farmer’s hat since their route led directly past a Praetorian barracks. His last entourage was small indeed: Phaon, Epaphroditus and Sporus.

It was a harrowing final journey for an emperor. He held a handkerchief over his face to conceal his identity as they journeyed along the well-traveled road. As they passed a farmer and his mule, Nero’s horse lurched, forcing him to use both hands to steady the beast. When he lowered his handkerchief the farmer, who had once been a soldier, recognized him and cried, ‘Hail, Caesar! How could they declare you an enemy of the state?’

Nero said nothing and rode on.

They reached Phaon’s villa where Nero collapsed on a couch. ‘What do they do to an enemy of the state?’ he asked.

‘The punishment is the ancient one,’ Phaon said miserably, rummaging for a flask of wine.

‘And what is that?’ Nero cried.

‘It is a degrading fate, Caesar,’ Epaphroditus informed him. ‘The executioners strip their victim naked, hold his head down with a wooden fork and then flog him to death with rods.’

Nero began to whimper.

Horses were coming.

Nero panicked, grabbed a dagger and put it to his throat but then let it drop from his limp hand and clatter to the floor.

‘Will no one help me?’ he pleaded.

Epaphroditus retrieved the dagger and held it to Nero’s throat again, its tip just indenting the soft pink flesh.

‘Make sure my body is burned,’ Nero whimpered. ‘I want no one to see what I am.’

‘Yes, Caesar,’ Epaphroditus answered.

Nero looked at the fresco on Phaon’s ceiling. It depicted a seated woman playing a lyre. ‘What a great artist dies with me,’ he whispered.

‘I can’t do it,’ Epaphroditus said, his hand wavering.

Sporus was hovering behind him. The boy, who had been held down and castrated and then buggered for years, took hold of the dagger handle.

‘I can,’ he said, thrusting the blade through one side of Nero’s neck and clean out the other.

And as Epaphroditus knelt numbly beside his master’s body, Sporus turned and left the chamber alone, fingering the medallion in his pocket which had been given to him by the man in the herb garden.

It was a chi-rho symbol, a fine one, rendered in gold.

‘I am a Christian now,’ Sporus said out loud. ‘And I have rid Rome of this monster.’

London, 1593

It was an unseasonably warm May and the Mermaid tavern was sweltering. The tavern smelled of stale and fresh ale, old and new piss and a sickly miasma of sweat.

Marlowe was bone weary and mightily peeved that he wasn’t getting drunk as quickly as he would have liked. Seated at a long crowded table, he raged at the landlord about watered ale but the burly server ignored him and let him seethe.

‘I shall take my business elsewhere,’ he bellowed to no one in particular. ‘The ale is better in Holland.’

He knew Dutch beer well.

He’d spent much of the past year in the stinking port city of Flushing doing the double and triple dealings at which he had become so adept. Walsingham was dead, nigh on three years now, and Marlowe had a new master, Robert Cecil, who had continued to play on his father, Lord Burghley, for connections with the Queen. Cecil had successfully wheedled himself into Walsingham’s position as Secretary of State and chief spymaster. Robert Poley, Cecil’s loyal toad who willingly shuttled in and out of dank prisons to maintain his cover as a Catholic sympathizer, was put in charge of all Her Majesty’s agents in the Low Countries.

Marlowe often found his covert duties petty but they paid well – better than the theatre – and afforded him time to write plays to further the agenda that he admired: chaos, confusion and calamity. Burghley was infirm and not long for this world. The elderly John Dee had become dotty and the Queen had put him out to pasture as Warden of Christ’s College in Manchester. Robert Cecil was primed to become the most powerful Lemures in England and Marlowe was his man. He would ride his coat-tails to new heights of fame, wealth and power. He felt altogether deserving; he’d paid his dues.

He’d lived in a stinking room in the port city of Flushing, drunk Dutch beer in the inns and taverns, gathered intelligence masquerading as a Catholic supporter, counterfeited coins by day with a ring of conspirators and found the time to write for a few hours most nights.

And following his triumph with Faustus, each of his new plays had been well received. The Jew of Malta was next, then the historical drama Edward II, then Hero and Leander and finally The Massacre at Paris, which Pembroke’s Men had performed months earlier.

Never content and always striving, Marlowe found much to irritate him. He lived like a pauper compared with someone like Cecil. They were of the same stock, same education, similar intellect, but Cecil had a Burghley for a father and Marlowe’s father was a shoemaker. And on the literary side, he now had a formidable rival. A young actor and writer from Stratford-upon-Avon had burst upon the London scene with a play called Henry VI, which had debuted a year earlier with astounding financial success. William Shakespeare also lived in Shoreditch. They saw each other frequently at the Rose Theatre and local taverns where they circled one another warily like two bucks ready to charge at one another and bang antlers.

The only true pleasure in Marlowe’s life was Thomas Kyd, his great love, whom he’d persuaded to share a room in Norton Folgate.

He shouted for another flask of ale, insisting that it should come from a new barrel, and went to empty his bladder in the ditch behind the tavern.

There, in the shadows as was his wont, was Robert Poley.

‘Poley!’ Marlowe yelled at his black outline. ‘Is that you? Do you ever come into the light? You’re like the shades of Hades, lurking, lurking, always lurking.’

‘I’ll show myself well enough if you buy me a drink,’ Poley said.