by M. J. Trow
‘Sod of the earth,’ Manwood muttered. ‘How he ever got a Parker scholarship, I’ll never know. Get me out of here, Christopher. I feel my old trouble coming on.’ He waved to Bromerick with as much bonhomie as he could muster. ‘Hello. Must dash, Henry. I’m sure I will see you later.’
Bromerick nodded, waving enthusiastically.
‘And hopefully, that will be a full ten minutes before you see me,’ Manwood muttered, hurrying for the main gate with Marlowe. ‘So,’ he said, as they strode through the archway and on to the High Ward, ‘you call it Corpus Christi, eh? Bit Papist, isn’t it?’
‘A shade,’ Marlowe agreed.
‘Sorry.’ Manwood tapped his arm. ‘We’re all a bit on edge at the moment. Secret Jesuits everywhere. Kent’s full of ’em. I burnt two only last week.’
‘Good crowd?’ Marlowe asked.
‘Tolerable. Look . . . er . . .’ He took in Marlowe’s college robes. ‘I feel rather underdressed now. But I thought my Exchequer robes a little flashy for this place, leaving aside the uncomfortable bunching if one tries to ride in them. Even in Canterbury, somebody mistook me for Lord Burghley the other day.’
‘Never!’ Marlowe was mock-outraged on his patron’s behalf. You couldn’t help but love Sir Roger Manwood. Yes, he was the scourge of the night-prowler. Yes, he took bribes for England. Yes, he burnt heretics. But he wasn’t a bigot – Catholics and Puritans both fried on his command. They were all the same to him. But he lived at Hawe, not two miles from Marlowe’s home at the West Gate in Canterbury and he’d put the boy forward for the King’s School. The rest was history.
‘Nicholson.’ Mister Justice Manwood clicked his fingers and pointed to the horses. ‘Find somewhere to put those, will you? Then join us. Christopher’ll get the drinks in.’
That was how they’d first met, in fact. Kit Marlowe was only eight when he’d tipped half a flagon of ale over the great man’s boots in the Star. He’d expected a cuff round the ear but instead he got kindness and a lifelong friend in the passageways of power.
Soon they were all three tucking in to cakes and ale at the Kettle. Roger Manwood looked around him vaguely. ‘Nicholson. Did we not have some parcels when we set out? For Christopher.’
Nicholson reached under the table and brought out two objects, wrapped in rough cloth. He gave the larger to Marlowe. ‘Shoes, Kit,’ he said. ‘From your father. Made on your old last, so I hope your feet haven’t grown.’
‘I think not.’ Marlowe smiled. ‘What’s in the other parcel?’ He reached out for it.
‘Hmm.’ Nicholson was in a quandary. He knew from Ann that it contained hand-knitted stockings from Katherine Marlowe, Kit’s beloved mother. He also knew that Mistress Marlowe was no great fist with the needles, so from the outside there was no way to tell. Best to keep counsel. ‘Could be anything, Kit. It’s from your mother.’
‘Ah.’ Marlowe pressed it, and then shook it, holding it up to his ear. ‘Well,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘It is quite hard in places and soft in others. It is a very odd shape.’ He shook it again and then smelt it. ‘It isn’t food,’ he said and gave it one last squeeze. He looked up at the two with a broad smile. ‘It’s stockings! Look –’ and he held the parcel out – ‘that thick bit is where she turned the heel.’ He loved his mother, but with her stockings on his feet, he had no need of shoes. He tucked the parcels behind his chair. ‘Thank you for bringing these.’
Manwood had sat patiently through the procedure, a fond smile on his face. Now it was his turn. ‘Tell me about dear old Ralph . . .’
By the time the tale was told, the afternoon sun was gilding the worn oak trestles and glinting dully on the pewter ware. Marlowe had missed three lectures and Sir Roger’s gout had pinned his left leg in one position, around which the Kettle’s serving woman had to tread warily.
‘So what’s your best guess?’ the Justice asked.
Marlowe bent his head lower, staring into the dregs of his tankard. ‘Ralph Whitingside was murdered, Sir Roger. I’d stake my degree on that. The question is, how? And the next question is, who?’
Manwood sighed. ‘Indeed,’ he said, nodding. ‘The lad was my ward. Under my roof at Hawe for four years.’ He brushed away a tear, he who never dealt in sentiment. ‘I owe him.’
‘I’m glad to hear you say that, sir,’ Marlowe said.
But Manwood held up his hand. ‘Don’t pin your hopes on me, boy,’ he growled. ‘I’m an old man and I have no jurisdiction here. I’d do more harm than good. You, on the other hand . . .’
‘Sir Roger,’ Marlowe explained. ‘I’m a scholar, sir. Still on the cusp of graduation. I have no skill, no money, no power.’
Manwood looked at him and frowned. ‘I’ve heard it said the others call you Machiavel.’
‘Where did you hear that?’ Marlowe asked.
‘Never mind.’ Manwood chuckled ruefully. ‘Is it true?’
Marlowe shrugged.
‘Then live up to the bastard’s name. If I’d had Nicolo Machiavelli in my ward in Canterbury, I’d have nailed his ears to a post, cut out his entrails and fed them to my dogs in front of him. But I concede his ideas got results. You must do the same.’
Marlowe shook his head. ‘I don’t . . .’ and he felt Manwood’s iron grip on his forearm.
‘It’s July,’ the Justice said. ‘As it was some . . . what . . . eight years ago, I remember two boys playing in the river at Hawe.’
‘Sir Roger . . .’
‘One of them took a tumble, landed in the current. And the current carried him away.’
‘Sir Roger . . .’
‘The other jumped in, without a second’s thought for his own safety and dragged him from certain death. Now, what were their names? Ah, how the memory plays tricks.’
‘Sir Roger . . .’
‘What, sir?’ Manwood snapped. ‘Would you deny your Lord three times, blasphemer? Ralph Whitingside saved your life, Christopher Marlowe. Find out who ended his. You owe him that much, at least.’
The silence lay heavy between them.
‘Two questions, Christopher,’ Manwood grated. ‘How? And who?’ He took a draught from his tankard. ‘The who is your responsibility. But the how . . . I can’t help you myself, but I know a man who can. If anyone can explain Ralph’s death to you, it’s my old friend John Dee.’
‘The Queen’s Magus?’ Marlowe looked up.
Manwood nodded. ‘The same. You’ll find him at Mortlake, along the Thames. Nicholson here will get you a horse. And William?’ Manwood half turned to his man, smiling and laying a hand on his sleeve. ‘Something decent, please; not just four legs and a hole to put the hay.’
In the event, William Nicholson did Christopher Marlowe proud and Friday morning saw him trotting south over the hard-rutted road past Constable Fludd’s carpenter’s shop through Trumpington on the highway to Royston. The rains of the early summer had gone and the hemlock and bryony alongside the road bore a creamy frill from the thick dust thrown up with the passing traffic.
Marlowe’s bay gelding moved easily, hoofs raising dust at his high-carried tail. He travelled light, his blanket cloak wrapped round Ralph Whitingside’s rapier bouncing on the saddle cantle behind him. He had not ridden in a while and when he dismounted to pee behind a gorse bush, felt the muscles in his thighs like lead.
It was nearly noon as he neared the town and saw before him, plodding on the road, a funeral procession winding down the gentle hill. They had rigged a makeshift bier to a cart harness and a shaggy-coated pony plodded ahead of its sad load. A black cloth wafted occasionally in the breeze and every few yards an outrider rang a handbell for any slower traveller to clear the way. This was clearly not a cortège bound immediately for the grave and by the dust on the sombre pall Marlowe knew the party had been on the road for more than a day.
A grim-faced yeoman and his wife sat inside a carriage in front of the bier and nodded to Marlowe as he trotted past, doffing his cap in respect. This was no plague victim, he knew, since no plague victim could le
ave the town in which they died. And he never knew their names. It was Jeremiah and Jane Butler bringing their drowned kinswoman home for burial.
Marlowe reined in his horse at the market house and pressed a coin into a scruffy boy’s hand to hold the animal for him. He downed a pasty and some ale before finding the midden in the yard, and rode on, thudding under the ruined wall of the ancient priory of the Austin Friars, demolished and despoiled and taken away to provide new buildings for Royston town.
The sun was already low over the harvest fields as he clattered across the meandering Lea into the high street of Ware. Again, the ruined grey, this time of a Franciscan priory, sitting like a rotten tooth beside the town. Dogs barked, snapping at his horse’s heels as he took the rise. He dismounted in the cobbled yard of the Saracen’s Head and found the innkeeper, a surly individual who would have turned away Joseph and Mary themselves.
He ate alone in a corner of the inn, tucked away from the nightly roisterers loud with their ale and their women and retired to bed early, battling with the straw palliasse and scratching in response to the bugs that were the bane of any traveller’s life.
The Black Society met that night as a sudden storm broke over the scholastic turrets of Cambridge. The rain fell like arrows, bouncing on the cobbles of Bene’t’s Lane as cloaked and hooded figures made their way in twos and threes down the steps and under the dark Norman arch of St Bene’t’s. The great and good of the ancient town of Grantabridge were meeting as their fathers and grandfathers had for generations, discussing the great civic issues of the day.
‘Have you the faintest idea what a conduit would cost?’ an exasperated voice almost screamed from inside.
‘Flemish weavers? I wouldn’t give you two groats for ’em.’
‘Well, what’s the University doing about it?’
It was this last question that reached Michael Johns’ ears. He was feeling guilty already. As the man with fewest paces to walk from Corpus Christi next door, he was virtually the last to arrive. He entered as quickly and unobtrusively as he could through the linking door on to the narrow darkness of St Bene’t’s ambulatory and padded down the twisting stone stairs.
He was not only the nearest, he was the driest. Even the Master had had to cross The Court in the sudden downpour and the old man sat, dripping, on the left of the Mayor along with the other representatives of the university in their gowns and hoods. Doctors Goad and Steane from King’s nodded to him, Gabriel Harvey of his own college cut him dead. A few of the others he knew vaguely – Rymer of Trinity, de la Pole of Jesus, the two-seat-filling bulk of Evans of Pembroke Hall. The burgesses of the town were, to a man, wringing wet, sitting steaming in their civic finery. Johns only ever saw these men at meetings of the Society. For all he knew, they lived in little presses under the stairs and only appeared for the twice-yearly slanging match that was the meeting of the Magnum Congregatio, the official Latin tag of the Black Society.
‘Good of you to call, Michael,’ Dr Norgate whispered out of the corner of his mouth.
‘Sorry, Master,’ Johns whispered back. ‘Henry Bromerick wanted a word. It was vital, he said. Wouldn’t wait.’
‘It never can with Bromerick,’ Norgate observed.
‘Gentlemen!’ the Mayor banged his gavel. ‘Can we get on with the business in hand?’
And they did.
There was no mention of the incident the day before when Dominus Marlowe of Corpus Christi College had broken the arm of Harry Rushe, labourer. Time was on Marlowe’s side as Constable Fludd, up to his eyes in the fair as he was, had not had time to put quill to parchment and process the necessary paperwork. And so Professor Johns did not, after all, have to speak for him.
Even so, the bickering went on long into the small hours of Saturday as the bickering had gone on for generations. If the university was making money out of the fair, why didn’t the university protect the town’s craftsmen from the invasion of foreigners? When were they going to provide Proctors to police the ground? And if the townspeople wanted a fair, why must it run on the Lord’s day, which was to be kept holy, the university wanted to know. The same old questions, the same old arguments echoed through the thick old walls of St Bene’t’s and down the creeping passageways of time.
Provost Goad had done well to reach the gate of King’s unaided, especially as the puddles still stood in the dimples of the gateway pavement.
‘Benjamin,’ he wheezed, pausing and stooping to catch his breath, ‘your arm a while.’
Benjamin Steane came to the rescue as he had so often before and held out a rigid arm on which the grateful provost leant. ‘Tell me,’ the old man said, ‘what you made of tonight.’
‘The usual,’ Steane said. ‘Everybody on their dignity. Everybody trying to score points off everybody else.’
‘One day –’ Goad padded forward again, refreshed – ‘we’ll rid ourselves of this Town nonsense for ever and only the University will reign supreme.’
‘Amen to that,’ Steane said.
They reached the stairs and a Proctor handed Steane a guttering candle. ‘Evening, Provost,’ he chirped, touching his cap. ‘Dr Steane.’
‘All quiet?’ Goad asked. ‘Nothing untoward?’
‘All’s well, sir.’
King’s, it had to be said, was on a knife edge after the death of Ralph Whitingside. Scholars stood whispering in clusters, Fellows eyed each other suspiciously. Sizars, without the experience of age or the cash that comes with breeding, had to be hushed for their bursts of outspokenness. No one felt safe. The Proctors themselves felt guiltiest of all. No one believed that nonsense about suicide at the inquest. Someone had sneaked into the college and murdered Ralph Whitingside. And what about the roisterer who called himself Machiavel? He could get in and out of the place like a spider. And if he could, who else might have been there before him? So the Proctors had doubled their guard, checked everybody, patrolled the grounds. They carried their cudgels now, untucked from their belts and they stopped everybody, friend and stranger.
Steane took the Provost to his rooms on the first floor, the little annexe that stretched out over the Lodge proper where Goad entertained his guests. At the door, the old man looked left and right before he said softly, ‘How was Winterton, by the way? I assume since his preposterous verdict at the inquest, he saw our point of view?’
‘Our point of view, Provost?’ Steane repeated. For so brilliant an intellectual, Benjamin Steane could be positively obtuse.
‘That nothing must sully the honour of the college, Provost-elect.’
Steane took a step backwards.
Goad chuckled. ‘Don’t tell me you still think Whitingside was murdered?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ Steane told him, ‘but I just don’t see him as a suicide. It wasn’t that that surprised me.’
Goad peered at his second-in-command in the candle’s half-light. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘The Provost-elect bit. Well, I haven’t spoken to the Fellows or Convocation yet, but I think you can assume that all that is a mere formality.’
‘Well, I am flattered, Provost, nay, touched even. But . . .’
‘But?’ Goad’s face contorted. He could think of a dozen men, half of them now dead, who would have killed for a chair at King’s, let alone the Provost’s.
‘Sir, I think I should tell you that I have been called to the purple.’
Goad’s eyes widened. ‘A bishopric?’ he mouthed. ‘Where?’
‘Bath and Wells, probably. Winchester if I’m lucky.’
‘My dear boy.’ Goad’s smile was frozen. ‘I had no idea.’
‘You know the Archbishop, Provost?’ Steane said.
‘John Whitgift?’ Goad almost spat. ‘Yes, I do. Jonian, wasn’t he?’
‘No. He was a Fellow of Peterhouse. But I mean he’s the sort who plays his cards close to his chest. Should he ever play cards, of course, as I’m sure he doesn’t. So I was not allowed to divulge.’
‘Even to me?’ Goad gave his lieutenant his m
ost withering look.
Steane spread out his arms and shrugged. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said and was left in the pitch blackness as the Provost took the candle from him and slammed the door. Waiting there while his eyes acclimatized to the dark, he decided that in the circumstances, it was probably best if he saved the news of his impending marriage for another day.
It was a mind-numbed Professor Johns who bid the Master goodnight a little before the old Corpus clock clanged the hour of two. The roisterers were home and even Lomas and Darryl had shambled off to their beds to be ready for the Chapel bell and the advent of another Corpus day.
The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started and the warm night air had dried the grass and emptied the puddles. Johns watched as Dr Norgate’s tired old frame vanished into the shadows of the Master’s Lodge. He saw his candle light flicker halfway up the stairs, then at the top and across the landing. He half turned and collided with a shrouded figure lurking in the shrubbery.
‘Bromerick!’ Johns shouted, then in a whisper, ‘God’s Teeth, Henry. What are you doing there?’
‘Waiting for you, sir,’ the lad told him.
Johns led the boy into the dim light of his own staircase. Bromerick was still dressed, wearing his college robes. They had been soaked to his skin when he’d talked to Johns earlier, on the professor’s way to his meeting. They had dried out as he’d paced The Court and gone back to his rooms to check the papers again.
‘Go to bed, man.’ Johns said. ‘No amount of Greek can be so pressing.’
‘Ah, but this is different, Professor,’ Bromerick told him. ‘It’s like no other Greek I’ve ever read.’
It had to be said that there was a great deal of Greek Henry Bromerick had never read, but Johns had known this young man for three years now, ever since he came as a red-faced fourteen year old from Canterbury, clutching his Parker scholarship in his hand and had lodged his name in the buttery ledger. Like all Corpus students, Bromerick had run up and down on the crisp mornings of winter, trying to get warm before the morning’s lectures in the Schools. He’d watched him praying ‘fervently’ in Chapel, with one eye open to smirk at the others, seen him grow into a man with half his heart on his sleeve.