The Conscience of the King

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The river by Deptford was stained a dark red-brown. The slaughterhouses were at work. They cut channels in the hard floors to take the blood of the slaughtered animals and feed it out to the waiting Thames. The river was foul enough anyway, carrying all London's sludge with it, and on killing days the blood, shit and piss of the terrified beasts stained it an even deeper brown. The noise of the animals, sensing their own death and the death of their kind, was terrible, shrieks and roars that could have come from the mouth of Hell. However deep they dug the channels, the blood seemed to splash against the timbers of the walls and rot them quicker than the wettest winter.

'I will decide when it is time.' Marlowe flung himself on the window seat. Christopher Marlowe. Kit Marlowe. The greatest, the first and the finest dramatist in England. His extravagantly slashed black velvet doublet was stained, elbows rubbed to a matt sheen where they had rested on tables in so many taverns.

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