‘What?’ asked Marlowe.
Drake held the thing up. It was, indeed, a length of frayed, yellow-dyed string, with thinner lengths dangling from it, each of these bearing tiny knots along the lengths of them.
‘But sir,’ said Lewgar, ‘what … what is it?’
‘El Sol Dorado,’ said Drake. His small lips curved, his prominent brow bulging. ‘So the papers taken by the Sparrowhawk said. The savages in the southern Americas have no writing. The Spanish believe that this thing – they call it a quipu – is the means by which they store their records. This, so King Philip has been told, is the key to finding a city of gold in that savage land. Records of distances between places, perhaps. Guiding. As markers might.’
‘A map,’ said Marlowe, his voice tiny. ‘It is a map. Of a kind.’
‘We do not know. No Christian man can decipher such a thing. And those savages who bear us friendship say they have no understanding.’
Lewgar recalled the painting of the two savages who had been brought to London and returned so recently on Raleigh’s voyage. Raleigh knew, as Marlowe had suspected. The Queen’s favourite had lied through his teeth to them, claiming that the city of gold was a fable.
‘Does her Majesty know of this, sir?’ Lewgar’s voice trembled as he spoke.
Drake did not answer directly. Instead, he replaced the yellow thing – the quipu – in its compartment in the base of the golden man and, without help, lifted it, kicked back the lid, and sealed it back in its coffer. ‘It is commonly whispered that this thing lies now with the Mary Rose. A jest of my own devising.’ He turned to them. ‘This house I bought from the Grenville family. Sir Richard’s father went down with that old ship. Come.’ He curved a finger to them. Lewgar saw Marlowe give one last, longing looking at the coffer before he followed him back out into Drake’s outer room.
The burly little knight locked the door again before bounding over to his chair and folding himself onto it, his legs kicking out. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I think your curiosity is satisfied. I fancy I’ve shown you what you would see.’
Why? thought Lewgar.
The answer came with a jolt of horror.
Drake might easily have the pair of them silenced. He knew who they were – he knew where they lived.
As though reading his suspicion, the seated man barked laughter. ‘You needn’t think I mean to trouble you, boys.’ He said the word with scorn. ‘Rather, I think this the best means of ridding myself of you. Of sealing your lips.’ He leant forward, one elbow on a knee. ‘I said I have done me a little digging into you. I wished to know who you worked for. It wasn’t Raleigh; Raleigh came to me asking about you and your digging. And so I took the time in London to seek you out a little more.’ He looked at Lewgar. ‘You, I found easily enough. A Cambridge fellow, as you said. Corpus Christi. Absent, my friends up there wrote me, with his bedfellow.’ His gaze switched to Marlowe. ‘Christopher Marlowe.’
Lewgar felt shame feel its way up his neck. He looked at the window, where a black and red butterfly was beating its wings silently against a pane of glass.
‘And so,’ Drake went on, ‘I cast a wider net. There are, I know, creatures who haunt London on matters of intelligence. For Sir Francis Walsingham. Lord Burghley. The Earl of Leicester. Others.’ He made a vague gesture with his fingers. ‘I had good enquiries made of all of them. And then I found me something.’ The sharklike smile returned. ‘It seems that Sir Francis Walsingham knows nothing of either of you. Has never heard your names. Nor had any of the others. Yet one of Sir Francis’s creatures – Poole or Poley – did state that this Christopher Marlowe has been seeking entry into his master’s service. And has not yet found it.’ Now, Drake sat back in triumph, his lip curling. ‘You are not employed by any master. You are simply seeking to insert yourselves into a great man’s service. You are masterless men.’
Lewgar felt his mouth open. It dropped. No sound came. Turning from Drake, he saw Marlowe looking back at him. The little man’s face was sheepish, embarrassed. He removed his hat. ‘I am sorry, Thomas,’ he said.
Forgetting Drake for a second, Lewgar spluttered. ‘But – but – but you said you served a master. You – you said that – all of this, this whole enterprise – you said you served Walsingham! You said!’
‘You inferred that I served Sir Francis Walsingham.’ Marlowe looked at the floor. ‘I said I served a master. I did not say that that master knew that I served him.’
‘But you have crept away from the college – in secrecy – many times!’
Marlowe’s voice came out small. ‘Some few times. To write. To study at the playhouses.’
‘Study! Tripping a measure on the stage as a poet!’
‘And to win the recommendation of certain men. Without success.’
Drake’s laughter filled the room, long and bellowing. He slapped his knee. ‘By God,’ he said. ‘One fellow who misled another. One creeping spy who served no one and his dupe – his dupe, by God, led by a masterless donkey.’ Again, he laughed.
‘I am sorry,’ said Marlowe. His face had reddened. ‘I … I only knew that if we discovered this thing, we should not be refused entry into the service. Poley should not refuse me again.’
Lewgar only stared, lost for words.
From the beginning, Christopher Marlowe had duped him. He had been hesitant ever to contact Walsingham because he didn’t know Walsingham. He was a trickster. And Lewgar himself had been his dupe indeed.
Drake stopped laughing. He wiped at an eye, shaking his head. ‘Merriment,’ he said. ‘Much, much merriment. But enough.’ The good humour fled. ‘I showed you this thing because I would not have you seeking it out any longer. Not to … insert yourselves into the service of Sir Francis Walsingham or any man. Not to buy a spymaster’s credit or anyone else’s, do you hear me?’
Lewgar still couldn’t speak.
Marlowe, however, turned an angry face towards the old mariner. ‘You! Does the Queen know?’
Drake’s face hardened. ‘Watch how you address me. Making a man laugh does not ensure his favour.’ He and Marlowe locked gazes. Time seemed to spin out. Marlowe lost, looking away. ‘This thing – it will be locked away. It must remain locked away. Until such a time as its mysteries can be observed and understood. And then – then it shall bring her Majesty a greater return. The greatest return. It will bring our sovereign lady more than it would should it have been taken to the Royal Mint and melted down to coin. It shall bring her glory. One day. When it is understood and carried across the seas by some landward spirit. But these great matters are not for the ears of book-loving young nothings.’
Lewgar felt Marlowe stiffen at the last word, but his own thoughts were racing ahead. He tried to pull them back, to marshal them and set them in good order.
El Sol Dorado was here.
Drake had engineered the loss of the Sparrowhawk in order to secure it, letting the mariners take a share of the captured gold, which was of less value than a mysterious and indecipherable chart – for so the Spanish believed it – to a place of infinite gold.
And Queen Elizabeth had no idea.
That, as distasteful as it was, seemed to fit.
All else, all that Marlowe had dragged him through under false pretences, had been a madness.
‘So,’ said Drake, clapping his hands, ‘you know the truth. Else what else would have brought you to my little cottage today, eh?’ The brightness left his voice. ‘And now, knowing it, you have no need to jet about London asking questions about that damned unsinkable ship or what it was said to contain. Let knowledge suffice you. Attempt to make anything of that knowledge and I will see to it – I will see to it – that you both join the Sparrowhawk. And that you share her prior fate, in being occupied by Breton pirates and ridden hard before being broken apart. Do you understand me?’
Lewgar nodded. He felt Marlowe doing the same at his side.
‘Good. Good. Then, gentlemen, we are friends. Now get out of my house. And let me never se
e either of you again. Unless your fine learning instructs you how to read the knotty writing of the southern savages.’
With a flip of his heavy hand, he dismissed them.
***
‘Don’t speak to me,’ said Lewgar, attempting to force dignity in a voice he knew sounded like that of a petulant schoolboy. He strode between the outbuildings of Buckland Abbey, his horse’s reins in his hand.
Marlowe was not far behind him. ‘Do not be a mewling child, Thomas.’
Kicking up gravel, Lewgar marched onwards, determined to leave Buckland Abbey and Drake and El Sol Dorado and Christopher Marlowe behind him. He paused only to use a low wall on the edge of the property to mount, and he swung up into the saddle.
And Marlowe did the same, following. ‘Do you even know where you are going? Back to Wembury?’
Lewgar rode on. He wouldn’t do Marlowe the dignity of racing ahead. Instead, he kept up a steady trot, his back straight and his eyes ahead.
The road was wide enough.
Marlowe pulled ahead and rode beside him.
‘I can explain. Listen. I – I said I am sorry. And I am sorry. But we might be friends yet.’
Unable to resist, Lewgar twisted around. ‘Friends! I was never your friend. I have been your dupe.’
‘I own we are no Damon and Pythias, but–’
‘Ay, as that – that pirate – said – I’ve been your dupe. Led by a donkey. Why, Marlowe? Why did you bring me from Cambridge? Why?’ He scowled, quoting the little man himself, the words he’d thrown at Bess. ‘And be honest, be truthful. I shall know if you lie to me.’
Marlowe slumped in his saddle. ‘I … I told you once that a man was shaped by experience and will. I wished to give you experience and see if I might direct your will.’
‘You little beast,’ said Lewgar. ‘You wished a puppet, not a friend.’
‘But I never meant … it was only that … from the moment I found you spying on me, I felt that you had a spirit in you which you denied. I wished to see you unloose it.’ At this, Lewgar froze. It was true enough. But it was no excuse. Pathetically, Marlowe added, in a small voice, ‘you can have my share of the gold. It was the finding I sought, not the ending. Gold was never my reward. I have told you before: I find words and deeds greater than gold.’
‘I have no wish for gold.’
‘You – you have forgiven Bess for cozening you,’ said Marlowe.
‘What?’
‘I saw how you brought her up to the house. Protected her in the bedchamber up there. You have forgiven her. What I did – it – you would not even have known of it but for Drake. With what we had discovered, I might have found my way to be recommended to Walsingham. By Poley or any agent.’
‘You are a creeping nothing,’ said Lewgar.
‘I am not nothing.’
His tone forced Lewgar to turn again. It was hard. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘No. And I mean to be something. I asked you once – when we were in that goal – I asked you what you wished to be. You never asked me. I, Thomas, wish to be something. To be something and live well, as other men seek to do. Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu. And … I had to lie a little … mislead a friend a little … to climb towards it.’
‘Lie a little,’ echoed Lewgar, looking to the unwinding, sun-dappled road ahead. ‘To get a place in the great spymaster’s service.’
‘Poley – none of them will accept reports of papist students at Cambridge. They have their own agents already watching such creatures. But the discovery of lost gold. Lost gold which the Spanish king seeks. That would have opened many doors. I might … I might have become something.’
Lewgar turned again to look at him. ‘You are a child, Kit Marlowe,’ he said. ‘A child.’
‘I am sorry.’ To Lewgar’s horror, tears stood out in the little man’s eyes. ‘I am a nothing. But not always. Not forever.’
Lewgar pouted, feeling himself the man of the pair. He twisted his tongue in cheek, as the horse plodded blithely beneath him. ‘Perhaps,’ he said at length, ‘you might turn to the sea. Become a pirate, like yonder rich knight. For that is all Sir Francis Drake is. A pirate.’
‘Ay,’ said Marlowe. ‘So the Spanish have found.’
In spite of himself, Lewgar laughed – just one, clipped burst. Marlowe, he saw, was not laughing. He was only smiling his perpetual, childish smile.
And then an idea struck him.
Howton was dead. Howton, who was in the employ of the Spanish and appeared to have betrayed even them. And Howton had a fine house somewhere in London – Thames Street, he thought Marlowe had said. In that house, there must be papers, letters: a treasure trove to a spymaster. There would be words greater than gold indeed. He shook his reins, raising dust, speeding the horse’s hooves.
‘Where are you going?’ shouted Marlowe.
Into the summer air, Lewgar shouted back, ‘to make friends with the lady you say I’ve forgiven. And to find a greater treasure trove for the security of the realm. Come follow me, if you will!’
Author’s Note
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) is well known to history as one of the leading lights of the English Renaissance stage. He has also gained posthumous infamy due to the unusual circumstances of his death, at which were present men known to be involved in the Elizabethan intelligence service (Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley). The official lines is that he was fatally stabbed in an altercation over the reckoning (or bill) for the meal served in the house in Deptford. At the time of his death, Marlowe had been under investigation for alleged atheistic and heretical statements.
However, his apparent involvement with the murky world of espionage goes back a lot further than the 1590s. During his time as a Master’s student at Cambridge, biographer David Riggs has notes his lengthy, unexplained absences: ‘he missed most of autumn 1584, came back in early December, but was gone for the last three weeks of January. He remained in residence until Easter, went away again, and returned for the first half of the summer term.’ Indeed, there was a pattern of Marlowe disappearing from the college around Easter each year of his postgraduate degree. These absences have never been explained. However, when it came time to graduate in 1587, questions were raised about rumours that he sought to go to the Jesuit College at Rheims. The Privy Council intervened, saying that he had been engaged in affairs touching the benefit of the realm.
This is generally accepted as evidence that he had been involved in intelligence work of some kind. Interestingly, his roommate, Thomas Lewgar, joined him in these absences from 1585. Almost nothing is known about Lewgar, save that he was probably – but not certainly – the son of the vicar of Wymondham. Their relationship – and their adventures in the story – are entirely fictional. David Riggs’ The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004: Faber and Faber) was, however, essential reading, not only in tracing Marlowe’s college years but in presenting the Elizabethan spy network as a ring of chancers: men who would hazard themselves trying to break in and gain a place in ‘the service’, no matter the dangers.
Chief amongst Marlowe’s verifiable accomplishments, of course, are his plays. I’ve had the pleasure of teaching them at undergraduate level and have found that students continue to enjoy, in particular, his Doctor Faustus (which suggests his interest in the occult); his The Jew of Malta (which revolves around greed, and at the end of which the villainous Barabas falls victim his own trap: a trapdoor under which he’s hidden a boiling cauldron); and The Massacre at Paris (which indicates an interest on Marlowe’s part in mob mentality). Marlowe suffered a violent death, following a life of staged violence. He is an extremely interesting figure, who seems to have inspired adoration and denigration in his lifetime. His plays remain worth reading and tend to be more accessible than the better known Shakespeare’s (if you find an edition which translates the Latin!).
Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe retains its place in history, though Drake’s own reputation has undergone sign
ificant reassessment in recent years. No longer is he heralded as an adventurous English hero (as exemplified by Terence Morgan in 1961’s television series, Sir Francis Drake); rather, he is accepted more as a pirate with a record of barbaric acts (notably the abandonment of a female passenger, the captured slave Maria, left pregnant either by Drake or one of his crew on a South Pacific island ‘to take her adventure’). The Sparrowhawk is fictional, though it is based loosely on the Golden Hind’s sister ship, the Elizabeth. What would become the circumnavigation began well enough, with the voyagers capturing Portuguese ships and their valuable cargoes. However, bad weather soon began to take its toll. The Elizabeth defected homeward following the loss of each of the other members of the little fleet (including the captured Mary). It thus missed out on Drake’s capture of the treasure-laden Nuestra Señora de la Concepción (thereafter nicknamed the Cacafuego, or ‘fire-shitter’), as well as the rest of the famous voyage. I would heartily recommend Derek Wilson’s The Circumnavigators: A History (2003: Robinson). For a fictional take on the famous voyage, as seen through the eyes of Maria, Nikki Marmery’s On Wilder Seas: The Woman on the Golden Hind (2020: Legend Press) is a must read. Interestingly, written accounts of Drake’s voyage were not published until long after it: his voyages were officially classified as ‘the Queen’s secrets of the realm’ (in other words, his piratical activities were not to be given official license).
The novel’s other knight, Elizabeth’s favourite Sir Walter Raleigh, is well treated biographically in Mathew Lyons’ The Favourite (2011: Constable). It does, however, cover only Raleigh’s time during Elizabeth’s reign. A marvellous fictional take on his whole life (including the old dog he became) can be found in R. N. Norris’s Fortune’s Hand: The Triumph and Tragedy of Walter Raleigh (2020: Sharpe Books). The once mighty favourite fell from grace under James I and was only released from the Tower in the 1610s, on the strength of claims that he could discover vast quantities of gold in the Americas. He sailed across the Atlantic to do just that, failed, and, after an altercation with the Spanish (prohibited under the terms of his conditional release from confinement) he returned home to his execution. The lure of gold was one which captivated Raleigh and he truly believed in his ability to find the mythical El Dorado. He was not alone. Stories of lost cities of gold – and of course they were just garbled stories – enticed and continue to entice mystery hunters. I’d recommend Bill Yenne’s Cities of Gold: Obsession, Quixotic Quests, and Fantastic New World Wealth (2021: Pen & Sword) and C. Gregory Crampton’s ‘The Myth of El Dorado’ (1951: The Historian). The history of Raleigh’s colonisation efforts – and a gripping, page-turning nonfiction overview of all things nautical in the period – can be found in Giles Milton’s Big Chief Elizabeth: How England's Adventurers Gambled and Won the New World (John Murray: 2001).
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