Secret World

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Kit?’

  Marlowe turned to see Sledd looking anxiously at him.

  ‘Will is all right, isn’t he? He’s just with some lady somewhere, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ Marlowe said, with more enthusiasm than he felt. ‘You know Will. Like a bad penny. He’ll be back when he’s ready.’

  They crossed the Bridge with its rotting heads and roaring tumult, jostling with the street sellers and the bawds, the Puritans who assured them that the end of the world was nigh and men hurrying into the public jakes, untying their codpieces just in time. After that, the two walked in silence for a while and their young legs ate up the distance until they turned into the Vintry by the Cranes to arrive outside Joshua’s door. Marlowe was glad to have Sledd with him, if only to send into the vintner’s as a fresh face should he need to enter Joshua’s workshop by stealth. But no; the boards were down and men were working with lime and brush, painting the outside. Marlowe was not sure that this would be a good thing. Joshua had after all sent a man to kill him. That that man had ended up dead was not Marlowe’s fault but he wasn’t sure how much information he would be able to convey before he was run through by the furious silversmith. Motioning Sledd to stay back, he edged in through the door.

  ‘Joshua?’ he called. ‘Ithamore?’

  ‘Ithamore?’ Sledd murmured behind him. ‘What sort of name is that?’

  ‘He has an inventive mother,’ Marlowe told him over his shoulder. He raised his voice a notch. ‘Joshua!’

  The man was suddenly at his elbow. ‘No need to shout, Master Marlowe,’ he said, mildly. ‘I only have one pair of legs.’

  Marlowe flinched and the pain shot up his arm in red hot bolts. He went white and the silversmith noticed it.

  ‘You’re hurt. Of course, the fracas in Hog Lane. Do sit down until you feel better. Ithamore! A cup of water for Master Marlowe.’

  Marlowe waved the help away. ‘You seem very unconcerned, Master Joshua,’ he said, ‘bearing in mind it was your man who caused my injury.’

  Joshua spread his arms. ‘What can I do but apologize?’ he asked. ‘I thought you had wrecked my workshop.’

  ‘You could have asked,’ Marlowe pointed out.

  ‘You were not here to ask.’

  Marlowe could sense that this could go on for hours and so decided to agree to disagree. ‘Let’s put this behind us, Joshua, shall we? I have a boon to ask you and if you can do it for me, we will be even.’

  The Jew looked at him from under his brows. ‘What?’ he said, suspiciously. ‘I am not staying here, Master Marlowe. I am letting this workshop to the vintner next door. He needs to expand and it seems the ideal solution. Ithamore will become his problem, I mean, of course, apprentice, and will also be in charge of collecting the rent.’

  Marlowe looked at the man and leaned closer. ‘And be in charge of keeping the rent, too, if I know anything.’

  The silversmith smiled. ‘I have more than enough for my needs and he has nothing. So why not? I am going to live in Portugal; Lisbon, in fact. There are more of my people there, I will be among friends. I speak Portuguese of course …’

  ‘Of course you do,’ Marlowe said and smiled. ‘If you can get through the ring of Francis Drake’s siege.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Joshua swept on. ‘So I will get along famously. But –’ he rubbed his hands together – ‘what is this boon?’

  Marlowe looked behind him, checking to make sure that Sledd had his back, but the stage manager was standing in the doorway, arms folded, legs spread and although he may not be the biggest man in the Vintry at that moment, he certainly looked the most determined. Marlowe moved further into the workshop and, reaching into his doublet, drew out the two bags he had concealed there. Joshua looked on, intrigued, as he tipped out the five globes, which slid one from another until the worlds were aligned like planets in some impossible astrological prediction.

  ‘So.’ There seemed little else to say.

  ‘So.’ Marlowe folded his arms and looked down at the little gewgaws which had caused so much mayhem and misery.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Joshua picked up his favourite, the one with the lapis, the jewel an almost unimaginably deep blue, looking like a hole into another reality rather than a chip of rock.

  ‘I want you to destroy them,’ Marlowe said, simply.

  ‘Destroy them?’ The silversmith was aghast. ‘But … you have spent so much time in finding them.’

  ‘Before I knew what they were. But now that I do, I want them destroyed. By any means you like. As long as they are no longer recognizable.’

  Ithamore was bouncing up and down in the doorway to the yard. His arms, always flailing to one degree or another, were positively windmilling with excitement. Joshua tried not to catch his eye but in the end could do nothing other.

  ‘Yes, Ithamore.’

  ‘Can I, can I melt them down, sir, can I?’ The boy’s face shone.

  ‘Master Marlowe and I have not yet decided on whether they will even be destroyed,’ the silversmith said solemnly.

  ‘Master Marlowe has decided,’ the playwright said. ‘Whether they are destroyed here or elsewhere is the only thing in doubt.’

  Tom Sledd was listening and smiling. When Kit Marlowe wanted something, that was what Kit Marlowe got.

  ‘If you leave them with me …’ Joshua began.

  ‘No. I want to see them destroyed. Ithamore’s furnace would be a perfect solution, as far as I can see. Prise off the jewels if you must, but beyond that, I want to see them become a puddle of molten silver before I leave this place.’

  Joshua compressed his lips and his nostrils looked pinched with tension, then, he nodded to Ithamore. ‘Blow up your fires, boy,’ he said. ‘This is your very last chance.’ Then, to Marlowe: ‘What shall we make from your silver, Master Marlowe?’

  ‘It isn’t my silver,’ he protested.

  ‘It is as much yours as anyone’s. Will you leave it up to me, once you have seen your molten puddle, of course?’

  Marlowe shrugged. ‘Once I have seen it molten, you may do with it as you will.’

  Ithamore was already outside, his bellows pumping like bees’ wings. Joshua reached for his jeweller’s pliers and, with a sigh, prised off the opal, lapis lazuli, diamonds and emerald from their settings, placing them with care on a white cloth. He looked up at Marlowe. ‘This will take some time, Master Marlowe. Would you like to take a seat?’

  ‘I’ll stay, Kit.’ Tom Sledd came into the workshop. ‘I’ve never seen molten silver before and I have a feeling I won’t get a chance again. If you have other things to do, go and do them. I promise I won’t leave here until the work is done.’

  It would mean leaving Marlowe unprotected, but without the worry of the globes, he would be Poley’s equal, injured arm or no. He nodded at Sledd. ‘I will go, then, Tom, if you don’t mind. I have a man I need to see about a weasel.’

  As he slipped out through the door, he heard Joshua say, ‘Is my English idiom letting me down, for once? Is the animal not usually a dog?’

  Sledd laughed. ‘If Kit says it is a weasel, you can be sure it is a weasel he means. He may be a poet, but when he is hunting down vermin, he doesn’t mistake the breed.’

  SEVENTEEN

  At first they were just shadows. Two of them, always at the edge of Marlowe’s vision, mingling and blending with the crowd. When he could, he stopped, pretending to be uncertain of the way. Once he knelt on one knee to buckle his boot. And each time he did, he glanced at them. They were large, armed to the teeth and he didn’t recognize either face. Poley had come looking for him before, outside the Rose. Had he sent his creatures instead, with instructions to finish his business with the Muses’ darling, the over-reacher?

  For a while he kept to the broad highway, sauntering along the Cheap moving east. He could see the spars of the galleons at the Queen’s wharves and the solid, granite squareness of the Tower. He glanced down each al
ley he came to. They were all the same – dark and narrow and the perfect place for an assassin’s knife to find a man’s ribs, slipping between and slicing his life away. His arm was not his friend today and the two men clung to him like leeches. If he quickened his pace, so did they. If he sauntered, so they slowed. If he stopped, the pair would half turn and engage each other in the kind of earnest silent conversation that the bit players used at the Rose. Henslowe’s stage directions said it all; spear-bearer shall speak unto spear-bearer.

  Marlowe ran his options through his mind. He could call a constable and claim that strange men were following him. The constable would take them all to the magistrate and it would soon be discovered that Kit Marlowe was out on bail with a possible murder charge hanging over him. He could hire a knot of apprentices, the crop-headed layabouts that loafed on street corners. All he had to do was cry ‘Clubs’ and pass a few coins among them and they would beat up the Queen if Marlowe asked them nicely. He could cut down the nearest alley, crouch behind a coster cart and stab them, one after the other, taking his chance with their greater strength, fitness and numbers. Or …

  He turned sharply at the end of Leadenhall Street. ‘May I help you, gentlemen?’ he asked.

  ‘Are you Christopher Marlowe?’ one of them wanted to know.

  The poet-projectioner had no time for quips now and was in no mood for clever answers. ‘I am,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ said the other one. ‘Sir Francis Walsingham would like a word.’

  The Queen’s Spymaster looked ashen and old. The once black beard and hair that had made Her Majesty call him her Moor was flecked with grey and his eyes watered in the early evening sun. Behind him, that same sun sparkled on the waters of the river that rushed and roared past Traitor’s Gate. Walsingham liked the Tower least of all his many meeting places. And he longed to be in his bed at Barn Elms or at least dozing in his chair at Seething Lane.

  Kit Marlowe had told him all he knew of the story of the killing stones, how drenched in blood they were and what Drake was up to. He knew that Walter Mildmay would not be surprised. Martin Frobisher would be delighted and many was the courtier, nobleman and seadog who would say something like ‘I told you so’ should the story ever come out.

  ‘So now you’re looking for Robert Poley?’ Walsingham leaned back in his chair, his fingers clasped over his Privy Councillor’s chain of office.

  ‘I am,’ Marlowe said. ‘Harry Bellot didn’t enquire closely enough into Poley’s methods and for that he paid with his life. Poley is still at large.’

  ‘Yes,’ Walsingham said with a sigh. He pushed his chair back and got up, crossing to the window. ‘And there he will remain.’

  ‘What?’ Marlowe sat upright. He must have misheard. Or perhaps the Spymaster was more ill than he thought and had not followed Marlowe’s story after all.

  ‘Robert Poley is one of us, Kit,’ the man said softly. ‘A Queen’s messenger, a projectioner.’

  ‘He’s a murderer,’ Marlowe countered.

  ‘Which of us is not?’ Walsingham asked. ‘There is blood on your hands, Kit Marlowe, as there is on Nicholas Faunt’s and Robert Poley’s … and mine. We live in a naughty world and nobody’s virtue is over-nice. I was in Paris when the streets ran with blood in the Massacre. Women, children, babies. Do you have babies, Marlowe?’

  ‘You know I don’t,’ the playwright said.

  ‘I do. Most of my people do. Is it for them that we knife our enemies in dark places? To keep them safe? Do we do it because the Queen commands? Because the Jezebel of England clicks her fingers?’

  Silence answered him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Walsingham went on. ‘But Poley is just doing what we all do.’

  ‘No, Sir Francis, you’re wrong,’ Marlowe grated. ‘Robyn Poley killed for gain, for greed. If Harry Bellot chose the wrong man for his particular job, then you, just as surely, have chosen the wrong one for yours.’

  Walsingham spun to face his man. There was a time when Kit Marlowe might have died for an insult like that. But the years had intervened and the time was not right. There had been enough killing over the stones, the globes with their silver seas. He looked Marlowe full in the face. ‘If I have chosen wrongly,’ he said, ‘then that is my burden to bear. I forbid you, Marlowe, to go anywhere near Robert Poley. For once in your life, let this thing go and do as you are told.’

  Marlowe stood up. He had no words for the Spymaster, nothing he could find in his heart. Jane Benchkyne, Jack Barnet, Harry Bellot, all of them stood with Kit Marlowe, looking with contempt at the Queen’s Moor, who had kept her and England safe for so long. Marlowe spun on his heel and was gone.

  Walsingham reached down once the door was closed and rang a little bell. His long-suffering secretary scuttled in, the portable desk strapped to him, as always.

  ‘Take a letter to Poley, Humphrey. Tell him he’s to get himself to the Low Countries by the earliest ship. And to stay there until he hears from me.’

  And Humphrey licked his quill-tip, dipped it into the ink and formed the words, ‘Dear Robyn …’

  Kit Marlowe was not a happy man and so his feet took him as if worked by automata towards the only place he truly felt at home in the whole world. He had a play to rescue, if nothing more. And another one was boiling in his brain; he just needed a few more threads to pull it all together, to make it live. ‘After all,’ he said to Master Sackerson as he stopped to drop off a bun coaxed from a stall holder at the bottom of Rose Alley for the purpose, ‘all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’

  ‘I like the sound of that.’

  ‘Master Sackerson,’ Marlowe said, severely, ‘you must work on your diction. I scarcely saw your lips move.’

  ‘Don’t play the idiot, Marlowe,’ the man behind him said. ‘You know it’s me. Turn around. I won’t talk to the back of your head.’

  ‘No.’ The poet was adamant. ‘I refuse to turn around. If I do, I will know whether you are a real, living man or a demon in human form. Before I turn around, I can pretend what I like. I can make you into the living man, which it may surprise you, I would very much prefer. If I turn around, you become a demon, with your face dripping from the bones of your skull, the very worms that devour you peering from your eye sockets, your lips become … Oh, what am I talking about?’ He spun round and took the newcomer by the shoulders. ‘Welcome home, Will. Where in the name of all that’s dramatic have you been?’

  ‘Just back up to Stratford for a while. I like to see the children when I can.’

  ‘And your wife.’

  Shaxsper’s eyes opened wide. ‘Indeed, yes,’ he added hurriedly. ‘And of course my wife.’ He smiled nervously. He always dreaded that his Anne would visit London one day and that everyone would discover that she was not the harridan he painted her but just a rather nice woman from Warwickshire, with more patience with her wandering husband than he had any right to expect. He rather liked her, if truth be told, but a man had dreams and sometimes people got left behind. ‘Dear Anne,’ he said.

  Marlowe looked at him and saw the same cloud of homesickness hovering at the back of the man’s eyes. But it was true what they said, you could never go back. Not really. But a man could always try. ‘How are the children?’

  Shaxsper’s eyes lit up. ‘Hamnet grows very strong and handsome. He has his mother’s looks, for which I hope he will be grateful some day. The girls do well.’ Marlowe knew that Shaxsper the father would have happily regaled him for hours, so he called upon Shakespeare the playwright. He had no wish to sit here on Master Sackerson’s wall all the day listening to nursery tales. ‘They’ve been wondering where you were.’

  ‘Who has?’ Shaxsper looked puzzled.

  Marlowe tossed his head in the direction of the Rose. ‘In there. Tom, Ned Alleyn. Henslowe.’ He dropped his voice dramatically on the final name. ‘All your adoring fanatics.’

  ‘Well, they knew where I was,’ Shaxsper said, exasperated. Why was it that these t
heatre types always had to make such a drama about everything?

  ‘They are not diviners, Will,’ Marlowe pointed out. ‘If someone seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth and they are not in their lodgings or those of … certain other people … then what can they think but the worst?’

  ‘The worst?’ Shaxsper’s voice rose to a shriek. ‘Do you mean they thought me dead?’

  Marlowe reminded himself that it was not Shaxsper’s fault that Robert Poley had decided to take his name in vain, but even so, most of his comment stood. A man should not just walk away, having delivered himself of a play, and not expect to be missed. ‘It was the play, you see, Will …’

  ‘Yes!’ Shaxsper’s face lit up. ‘How has it been going? I know I can’t expect any payments from Master Henslowe yet, it is early days and I know costs must be covered first but …’ He grasped Marlowe’s arm, unerringly squeezing just above the knife wound. He was so excited to be reminded of his play that he didn’t notice how the man went pale. ‘Kit, you have been in this position so often, that of the writer of a play that draws the crowds, makes grown men weep, makes the earth shake, the seas boil.’ He pulled himself up with a small and self-deprecating laugh. ‘Well, perhaps not all of those. But grown men weep, I’ve seen that. How does it feel, Kit?’

  Marlowe was perched on the curly poll of a quandary between the curving horns of a dilemma. Yes, he had been in the position of celebrated playwright, not once but several times. That Shaxsper believed himself to now be similarly placed, was something that could not be ignored – the man would discover his mistake very soon. The rotting vegetables were beginning to pile up in the gutters around the Rose. Even the most lowly of the staff were tired of picking them over for anything edible and they were simply swept into the street after each performance. He would discover that he, Marlowe, was on his way to the Rose to fulfil his promise to everyone there that he would do his best to rescue the debacle that was Henry VI.