3. THE THIRD KISS

THE TALE OF SEVEN KISSES (3

PROLOGUE

Daisy Walcott both loved and hated her work as a barmaid in the best Inn in Deptford. She loved it because of Kit, a young and personable playwright who was never shy when it came to lavishing her with emotionally saturated blank verse that he seemed quite able to make up as he went along. And she hated it because sometimes other men, with too much drink inside them, tried too many things on.

She was an attractive wench, and knew it. She never tired of using any reflective surface for examining her face, the prettiness of her nose and the brightness of her eyes. The trouble with being so pretty, she thought as she poured foaming ale from a jug into a mug for one of the less pleasant customers who she guessed would arrive any minute because he did every day on the dot of twelve, was men from all stations of life could see how pretty she was and want to take, maybe a breast into their hands, or touch her ample backside with rough fingers and occasionally even worse to parts too precious to mention or name even to herself, and such intrusions from most men were unwelcome.

She was contemplating her place in life when Kit Marlowe sauntered in and winked at her. That’s all he had to do, wink, and she was putty.

“A mug of foaming ale, fair wench,” he said, and grinned that grin that said he could pinch her anywhere and not hear a complaint, at least not from her. Daisy Walcott was no man hater, just a hater of common men, the sort she didn’t want to take advantage of her and her precious flesh.

Taking his mug of ale, Kit went to sit at what was becoming his usual table. He was waiting, it seemed, for friends. He often did this and those friends arrived, after which there would be much loud conversation and jesting as the ale flowed, and sometimes, if she was lucky, an off-the-cuff recital of this or that latest work.

This day, though, was going to be unlike any other.

The toff Ingram Frizer came swaggering in, and Ingram had clearly already oiled his brain with ale elsewhere, for he staggered as he went to the bar and ordered enough foaming beer to drown whatever was left of his mind. And then, almost casually, he lunged at the quietly supping Kit and plunged, without warning, a sharp and silver blade into his back, a blade that must have pierced the poet’s heart.

She screamed, of course she did, who wouldn’t? And that scream inspired the murderer to see that she had witnessed all, grab hold of her and drag her into a back yard, and use that same blade a second time because, as he rumbled into her ear moments before he struck, she’d seen too much, and anyway Kit Marlowe was dead already.

She blew a kiss towards the playwright’s spirit as it departed the bar room as she died. It was the least she could do.

THE TALE

I was sitting in the living room of my two-room flat watching Bargain Hunt on the smallest television in the neighbourhood and wondering why anyone would want to pay a small fortune for a tatty of teddy bear with the growler gone silent when there was a knock of my door. Yes, another knock!

Praying that it wasn’t Cyril from upstairs because he winked at me only yesterday, most suggestively and far too familiarly, I went to open it and almost recognised the young woman standing nervously, her hand raised in the act of making another knock.

“Well?” I asked, sounding very much like Joan Hickson’s version of Miss Marple when she was in a querulous mood.

She stared at me as if she couldn’t understand that simple monosyllabic question, so I asked her again, at greater length.

“What do you want?” I asked.

I needn’t have asked, though, because something inside me, some memory latent for so long it might not have been there at all, told me.

“Come ‘ere, misses,” she said, her accent kind of sloppy, making her sound like I would imagine a West Midlands drunken fishwife might sound. But she wasn’t one of those, I could tell. She had a decent heart. I knew that much instinctively.

“I don’t understand,” I told her, trying not to sound too fierce but, really, my patience was running thin already. I was missing Bargain Hunt, for goodness sake, and that’s one of the very few television programmes I choose to watch. Most of the time I can be found with my nose in a book, often biographies of one sort or another and sometimes intellectual examinations of the medieval up to renaissance history books with text so small my septuagenarian short sight struggles, sometimes, to make it out. But I’m inclined to want to learn, so I persist until my head aches.

“’Tis Kit,” she said, and I’m sure she was weeping because a trail of moisture was leaving a little path of relative white skin on an otherwise dusty face. I don’t wish to sound as if I was criticising her state of cleanliness, but I rather suspect a flannel with some soap and warm water would have done her no harm. But a fragment of something (was it memory?) told me that water can be cruelly cold without soap to smooth it.

“Kit?” I asked.

“Kit Marlowe as writes plays,” she said, sniffling.

And I remembered sniffling like that, behind the bar of the sometimes rowdy Inn where I served ale to thugs and the literati alike. Kit Marlowe had been one of those, the literati, and sometimes he brought Will Shakespeare with him, though it’s plain that Will could never be as famous as Kit and his pretty rhymes.

Or maybe he will be now that I recall that Kit had a knife plunged cruelly into him, straight through his back until the blade penetrated his heart.

You’ll have guessed by now that my doorstep, my door, the flight if stairs leading down from my first floor flat, everything familiar in the world, was gone and I was standing alone in the dingy back yard of an ancient inn.

Suddenly I wished Cyril was with me. Suddenly it troubled me that I was alone because, truth to tell, I was scared. Foreknowledge is a woeful thing when you’ve already felt the blade slice through you once, and I knew there and then that I was going to feel it again, because leering at me was Ingram Frizer, toff and gent, they say, and in the pay of the queen’s men, ready to dig out dissenters and send them on their way to hell before any parson can absolve them of the evil in their hearts or court of law forgive them.

I knew all that, me, who had never seen Ingram Frizer before, nor heard of his name or anything pertaining to him. But from somewhere came the certainty that this man had but the one objective, and that was to clear up after himself.

He’d killed the handsome and clever Kit Marlowe and I was the one and only witness to his wickedness, and his sort never leave witnesses breathing if they don’t have to.

He loomed up at me like the devil himself. Then he had me by one hand, such a powerful grip it might have slaughtered me unaided, and he whispered in my ear,

“Pretty Daisy Walcott, you’n seen too much an’ I’m sorry,” and I saw that knife, his blade, sharp and shiny, as it was forced towards me.

And he was gone.

Like that, without leaving a scratch on me. Just as simple and meaningless as that, leaving me in my blue denim skirt wondering whether I was alive or dead, and outside, through a window, that looked out onto the street I could see a black van with the inscription MARLOWE’S KIT on one side of its twin back doors and CHENS on the other, inviting one and all to re-equip their homes.

And, you know, I blew it a kiss. For no better reason than because I had to. Though, bless me, I didn’t know why.

© Peter Rogerson, 12.03.20