The salary he earns through his spywork allows him to mount his first play, and over the following years, he becomes the toast of London's raucous theater scene. The ripple effects of his service to the Crown are far-reaching and leave Kit a changed man.
While observing Mary, Kit learns more than he bargained for. Kit is dispatched to the chilly manor where Mary, Queen of Scots is under house arrest, to act as a servant in her household and keep his ear to the ground for a Catholic plot to put Mary on the throne. Kit, a scholarship student without money or prospects, accepts the offer, and after his training the game is on.
Her Majesty's spies are in need of new recruits, and Kit's flexible moral compass has drawn their attention. In Kit Marlowe's last year at Cambridge, he receives an unexpected visitor: Queen Elizabeth's spymaster, who has come with an unorthodox career opportunity. Kit’s lover, Tom, accuses him of seeking out danger, but rapid-fire POV changes necessary to advance the action-packed plot prevent the reader from getting a full sense of him, and the romance passages are the stuff of bodice rippers. Epstein takes liberties with Kit’s ultimate fate (the circumstances of his murder remain disputed), but in Kit she also creates a Marlowe too all-over-the-map to be plausible. His Protestant minders track and arrest all involved, but while Kit’s treasonous friends go to the gallows, he is set free. After he is caught spying by Catholic rebels, he gets out of the jam by claiming to be a double agent working on their behalf, then travels to the Netherlands to counterfeit gold coin for the Catholic cause. Having infiltrated the household of Mary, Queen of Scots and foiling the Babington Plot, Kit has a crisis of conscience over Mary’s execution. Kit, as Marlowe is called, is rarely caught writing his “mighty line.” He’s too deep into espionage, uncovering Catholic conspiracies. Epstein’s diverting debut gallivants through Elizabethan England clutching the breeches of playwright Christopher Marlowe, here in service to the queen as a spy.
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