The Scar-Crow Men

by Mark Chadbourn

  ‘I think I should see the grave for myself, on the morrow,’ Will said, pouring himself another goblet of the sweet wine. ‘And while I busy myself with that task, I have a job for the two of you. Kit had a bolt-hole that few knew of, a small room in Alexander Marcheford’s lodging house not far from the Rose. Go there and find any information he might have left that would explain his death.’

  ‘But what is the plot?’ Carpenter hammered a fist on the trestle, his voice cracking with dismay. ‘To kill a pair of spies? Why go to such lengths? We kill ourselves sooner or later,’ he added with bitterness.

  ‘Trust no one, Kit said, and so we should not speak of this outside this room.’ Will tapped one finger on the table. ‘The court is already riven with factions. There are plots and counter-plots aplenty. In that unruly atmosphere, there is space for a greater plot to flourish, unseen by those charged with looking out for such dangers.’

  ‘The Unseelie Court plays a long game.’ Unblinking, the Earl watched the wavering flame, his pale skin even whiter in the light. ‘With so many of us distracted by threats within and without, this is a good time to strike.’

  ‘Nothing here makes sense! So many strands, yet we cannot weave them into any cloth. And meanwhile our fate approaches like the tide.’ Carpenter ran a hand through his long hair, his mood darkening by the moment. ‘What is happening to England?’ he added, his voice falling to a mutter. ‘Since the Armada was defeated, we have been cursed with bad luck. Walsingham dead so soon after his greatest victory. Dee exiled to the north. Spain regaining its strength and still scheming, along with most of the other nations of Europe. Papists plotting our Queen’s death within our own shores. And now this plague, eating its way through the heart of our country. We have never been at a lower ebb. Where will it end?’

  ‘They say the Fair Folk are masters of bad luck.’ Launceston’s emotionless voice added an eerie weight to his words. ‘The Enemy that has tormented us for so long was always good at souring milk and breaking apart man and wife and destroying friendships by driving a wedge into the cracks caused by human weakness. Perhaps they are the invisible hand behind all our misery.’

  Will was struck by the Earl’s words. Breaking the seal on the play, he flicked through the papers. No additions to the text leapt out at him, but he knew Kit would be more subtle than that.

  Settling into his chair, with his boots on the table, he began to read the work while Carpenter and Launceston drank and dozed. Will was soon engrossed in the hubristic story of the scholar, Faustus, who had reached the limits of his studies and decided to devote himself to magic to continue his intellectual growth. Summoning the devil Mephistophilis, he makes a pact with Lucifer: twenty-four years of life on earth with the devil as his servant, and then he must give up his soul. The ending remained ambiguous: no evidence was found of Faustus’ fate, though the implication was that Lucifer had taken him to eternal damnation.

  As he came to the end amid Carpenter’s growling snores, Will reflected on the content. His friend’s stories, like those of many writers, had more than one meaning, and what lay on the surface was not always the most important. Kit had spoken many times about how there was little difference between his work as a writer and his work as a spy – both roles required a convincing liar – and he had been sure it was one of the reasons he excelled at both, to his own self-loathing. There was a great deal in the story of Faustus that would have applied to Marlowe too, Will decided. One statement by Mephistophilis, describing hell, struck him particularly:

  Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed,

  In one self place, but where we are is hell,

  And where hell is there must we ever be.

  And to be short, when all the world dissolves,

  And every creature shall be purified,

  All places shall be hell that is not heaven.

  Hell is in the minds of everyone, Mephistophilis appeared to be saying, and not a physical location. We make our own hells, Will thought, or have them thrust upon us. He considered the thing that had taken the form of Jenny and wondered if he would see it again.

  The sheaf of papers was Marlowe’s original script, covered with blottings, scribblings, annotation and rings of dried wine. Some sections had been obliterated with furious strokes of the quill, and new lines written nearby. Mephistophilis’ description of hell was one of them, and Will wondered if Kit had changed it only recently, as matters came to light. If there were clues hidden within, it would take time to decipher them, and if he knew his friend’s mercurial mind, some clues might well be hidden in the symbolic nature of the text and the meaning might never be fully understood.

  The truth lies within, but seek the source of the lies without.

  What did Marlowe mean by the last part of his infuriatingly cryptic advice? Frustrated, Will retied the string.

  A sharp knock at the door made all three of them jerk alert. Launceston was at the entrance in a flash, his knife ready. ‘Who goes?’ he growled.

  ‘Will? Are you in there?’

  The pale-faced man relaxed. ‘Your assistant.’

  At Will’s nod, the Earl opened the door and a breathless Nathaniel darted in. ‘I have run all the way from the river,’ he gasped. ‘I did as you asked, and spent the evening with the watermen listening to the gossip from the city.’ He doubled up, one hand on his knee, as he caught his breath. ‘You were right to fear poor Kit’s death was not the end of it. One of Sir Robert Cecil’s advisers came across the water in such a state I thought he would pull out his hair in a fit. He demanded a horse to ride to Nonsuch immediately to tell your master the news.’

  ‘Which is?’ Will asked, growing cold.

  ‘Another spy has been murdered, and in a manner that would give a grown man nightmares.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WITH THREE SWIFT STROKES, WILL POUNDED THE HILT OF HIS rapier on the broad, iron-studded door of the deadhouse. Those sturdy stone walls had housed unclaimed bodies, and those waiting to be claimed, for centuries. Fidgeting, Carpenter cast unsettled glances along the night-dark Bread Street towards St Mary-Le-Bow churchyard. Intermittently, the scarred man pressed a scented kerchief against his nose to keep out the reek of decay which was stronger than usual on that warm night. His gaze eventually alighted on Launceston, immobile on the edge of the circle of light cast by the lantern over the door. The Earl’s pale skin glowed white in the flickering illumination.

  ‘Let us hope no watchman chooses this moment to deliver a corpse they have stumbled across in the street,’ Carpenter muttered. ‘They already believe the deadhouse to be haunted by its silent inhabitants.’

  Launceston raised one eyebrow at his sullen companion, but gave no sign that he was offended.

  ‘No more bickering this night,’ Will cautioned. ‘You two are like an old married couple.’

  Will would have had both his companions silent from the moment the three of them left Liz Longshanks’ stew, but the men had spent the entire journey across the river into London arguing about Carpenter’s woman.

  As he waited for an answer to his knock, there at death’s door, he thought of poor Kit once more. Will recalled the last time he had sat with his friend in the Mermaid, drinking beer beside the fire in the small private back room. ‘We have been the best of friends for many years now,’ Kit had said, his tone maudlin. He was hunched over his earthen pot with its silver handle and lid, staring into the murky depths of his ale. ‘Perhaps you are my only true friend.’

  ‘This business of ours does not make for easy friendships, Kit,’ Will replied. ‘But it is what it is, and we have to make the best of what we have.’

  ‘I think I am spent. You … you have your Jenny to keep you searching. Your quest for answers. But I have nothing. A few pennies here and there. Is that any reward for the sacrifices we make? The loss of all things that make life worth living? When I entered the halls of Cambridge I thought my days would be spent in writing and thought and joy. Not this.’

 
Will clapped his friend on the shoulder. ‘You are having a black day, that is all.’

  Marlowe shook his head, slopping beer drunkenly as he raised his pot to his lips. ‘Events were set in motion that night we first met, and I fear they are now coming to a head.’

  ‘Kit, I do not like to see you this way. Let me get you back to your lodgings … or at least to that bawdy-house filled with boys that you love so much.’

  Kit pushed Will’s hand away. ‘We understand each other, you and I.’ He looked at Will with raw emotion. ‘Despite all the applause that follows England’s greatest spy, I know that behind it is a tormented man, lonely and lost and at odds with the world in which he has found himself. And you know the truth of my life in the same way. Men like us need our friends, otherwise we are adrift in a stormy sea.’ Marlowe pushed back his stool and lurched to his feet. ‘Know that you have been a good friend to me, Will, and I hope that one day I can be the same to you.’

  Grabbing his cloak, Kit had staggered out into the night, throwing off all Will’s attempts to draw him back to the fireside. At the time, Will had put that dark mood down to the drink and the regular melancholy of the writer, but now the note of finality in his friend’s words troubled him. Had Kit foreseen his own death? And had Will ignored those warnings? Had he failed his friend when Kit needed him most? If so, he was a poor friend indeed.

  After a moment, shuffling footsteps approached from the other side of the deadhouse door. It swung open with a juddering creak to reveal the mortuary assistant, his beard unkempt, his eyes heavy-lidded. He wore only a filthy shirt and a pair of equally stained hose, the feet a dark brown. His breath had the vinegary stink of ale. His slow, drunken gaze lay on the three arrivals before he looked around for a body.

  ‘We have no deposit for you,’ Will said with authority. ‘We are here to see a body. A man, brought in this day.’

  The assistant moved his stupid eyes from Will to Carpenter and then to Launceston. After he had taken in their fine clothes, he grunted and nodded, shuffling back the way he had come.

  ‘I think he means us to follow,’ Launceston sniffed.

  In the cool entrance hall, dirty sheets lay on the worn flagstones alongside a pile of splintered boards used for transporting the bodies. Two lanterns glowed on opposing walls. The assistant took one of them and, holding it aloft, lit the way down a flight of wide stone steps. At the foot, a large cellar was divided into four rooms by arches, the stone walls black with moisture, glistening in the wavering light of candles. In each vault, large, worn trestles stood in rows. The body of a woman rested on one, her skin white and pockmarked, her neck broken. Her clothes were poor and filthy. A whore, Will guessed. A gutter ran across the centre of the stone flags where the blood and bodily fluids could be sluiced.

  ‘As cold as the grave,’ Carpenter growled uneasily, unconsciously rubbing his pink scar.

  ‘And as foul-smelling as the Fleet,’ his leader responded. ‘But we are all used to the stink of death by now.’

  Launceston hummed a jolly tune.

  The mortuary assistant led them to the farthest vault, where a heavily bloodstained shroud was draped over a body on a trestle. ‘This one?’ he grunted.

  ‘Leave us,’ Will said. ‘We would be alone with our brother in this sad hour.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be lifting the sheet,’ the assistant grunted, turning and shuffling back up the steps.

  ‘We should not be here,’ Carpenter said, a hand to his mouth. He took a step away from the trestle. ‘Why put ourselves at even greater risk of the plague?’

  ‘The Lord Mayor and the Aldermen have decreed that no plague victims should find their way into the deadhouse. They are dispatched directly to the pits for burial.’ Will eyed the rusty stains that covered the entire length of the sheet.

  ‘This business reeks of the Unseelie Court,’ the scar-faced man spat. ‘Whenever there is something that stinks of churchyards and night terrors, they are not far behind.’

  ‘They have been silent in recent times but they circle us like wolves, ready to fall upon us when we display the merest sign of weakness,’ the Earl agreed.

  Will took the edge of the sheet and hesitated, thinking of Kit beneath the filthy blanket on the floor of Mrs Bull’s lodging house.

  ‘You know the bastards are skilled at finding weaknesses and exploiting them. They see our greatest desires, our basest yearnings, and they twist them and draw them out until we follow like fools.’ Launceston’s right hand trembled in anticipation as he watched his leader holding the sheet corner.

  ‘Get on with it, then,’ Carpenter snapped, flashing a glance towards the shape under the shroud. ‘If these remains can tell us aught of this mystery, let us look and be away.’

  The Earl leaned over the trestle as if trying to see through the sheet. ‘You are abnormally squeamish, John. You are no stranger to death.’

  ‘Not in this form. Some deaths come naturally. Others are necessary. But this …’ Carpenter choked on his words as he pointed to the sodden sheet. ‘This is an abomination.’

  ‘Let us see.’ Will steeled himself and stripped back the shroud.

  Carpenter recoiled, covering his mouth in horror.

  Launceston still hovered over the trestle, bemused. ‘I think that is Gavell,’ he muttered.

  The corpse was almost unrecognizable as the man who gambled away his meagre earnings in the inns of Bankside. Where two brown eyes had been were now black holes. The straw-coloured hair still stood up in tufts on the head, but the skin of the face, neck and torso had been carefully removed to reveal the oozing, red musculature beneath.

  ‘Why, this is the work of a master,’ the Earl breathed. He hovered for a long moment, seemingly oblivious to the meaty smell coming off the body. In a slow examination, he moved around the torso, his nose a hand’s-width from the flesh. ‘See here, and here,’ he whispered. ‘The merest knife cuts. The skin has been removed with great skill. This is no butcher’s work.’ His brow furrowed and he looked up. ‘The curious knife you described, the one wielded by your masked attacker. Could it have been designed for this?’ He waved a hand across the sticky corpse.

  ‘I would say’, Will mused, ‘that it would have been perfectly designed for this task.’ He had a sudden vision of himself lying upon the trestle.

  ‘What is the point?’ Carpenter’s voice was almost a shriek. ‘Kill a man and be done with it, but why take time to flay him, unless you have lost your wits?’

  ‘Why, indeed?’ Will rubbed his thumb and forefinger thoughtfully on his chin-hair. He felt a wave of compassion. Gavell was by no description a good man, but he deserved a better ending than this.

  ‘Wait, what is this?’ the Earl mused. He indicated black streaks smudged across several areas of the raw flesh. Examining them for a moment, he shook his head and moved on. Finally he stood back, his breath short. ‘This may simply be a work of art, like one of Marlowe’s plays. The same attention to detail. The same loving care.’

  Will stared into Gavell’s empty eye sockets for a long moment, allowing the detail of the murder to settle on him, and then he said, ‘No. Two spies dead. An attempt on the life of a third. I cannot believe that it is by chance. Turn the body over.’

  ‘God’s wounds!’ Carpenter cursed. ‘Leave the poor sod be.’

  ‘If this is a plot, we must divine its nature from whatever we have to hand,’ Will stressed. ‘Turn him over.’

  Muttering oaths under his breath, the scar-faced man kept his eyes averted as he gripped the sticky shoulders. Launceston took the ankles without a second thought, and together they eased the body off the puddle of congealing blood with a low, sucking sound. Carpenter grimaced.

  Gavell’s grisly remains clunked face down on to the trestle. Will pointed to a mark carved into the muscle of the dead man’s back: a circle, bisected at the compass points with short lines, and with a square at its centre.

  ‘From this we can surmise that Gavell was not simply dispatched because o
f the work he did,’ he said. ‘This is not a crude murder. There is thought and meaning in this design.’

  ‘But what does it mean?’ the Earl asked.

  Circling the trestle slowly, Will ignored the question and reflected on the matter at hand. ‘Is someone attempting to kill the spies of England, one by one?’ he said thoughtfully. ‘And if so, to what purpose? Our lives already have little value and we are easily replaced.’

  ‘Because of what we know?’ Carpenter suggested.

  ‘And what do we know?’ Will paused as a notion struck him. ‘We know a matter of the greatest importance: the existence of the Unseelie Court. It is a secret held only by the Queen herself, the Privy Council, and we spies under the command of Sir Robert Cecil. It is considered too terrible to be discussed beyond that small group. Even Essex has not been allowed to tell his men, which must leave him greatly aggrieved, for his spies can never be effective without that knowledge.’ Pondering, Will began to walk around the table once more.

  ‘Yes.’ Launceston’s eyes were like lamps in the half-light. ‘For if all the spies who knew of the Enemy were killed, who could ever stop them?’

  Coming to a halt, Will leaned against the damp stone wall and folded his arms. ‘Which raises one other troubling matter. Everyone in England recognizes the work I do as a spy. But who knew Gavell participated in these dark arts?’

  Will took another look at the raw, red body. ‘I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that we should heed Master Marlowe in these matters,’ he said quietly, ‘and seek a solution ourselves. Our lives may depend on it.’

  ‘Surely you do not suspect Cecil?’ Carpenter exclaimed. ‘Or any in our greater circle?’ He turned his back on the corpse and looked towards the steps, as if planning his exit.