A Prisoner in Malta

by Phillip DePoy

  “Yes.”

  Marlowe took one last look at the open door. The gap was wider, and there was a visible shadow of two figures.

  “Are there other students who might have wanted to kill Pygott?” he asked Bartholomew. “Aside from Marlowe, I mean.”

  “Dozens,” the old man answered instantly. “But why would that interest you?”

  “If I can present the true murderer to Pygott’s father,” Marlowe said a little too loudly, “that could get me my money.”

  “You catch his son’s killer,” Bartholomew concluded, “and he might pay the son’s debt.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s the right idea,” Bartholomew agreed, eyes shifting once more to the open door, “but I cannot help you. And I am late for my next class. I am leaving now, through those doors there.”

  Without another word, the professor was off in the direction of the open door. There was an all-too-obvious scuffling of feet beyond the doorway, and the figures who had been listening disappeared seconds before Bartholomew pulled the door wide and shambled into the room beyond.

  Marlowe folded his arms. Bartholomew was a riddle. Did he know more than he would say?

  He seemed unwilling to help at all, at least with spies listening in the shadows. Marlowe turned his mind to the students most affected by Pygott’s bullying.

  He knew Richard Boyle had been especially troubled. Marlowe had gone to the King’s School with him in Canterbury. Then there was Benjamin Carier, a shy, introspective man from Kent known to have Catholic leanings. They seemed a good place to start.

  Hearing the noise of approaching students behind him, Marlowe realized that another class was about to begin. He hurried out of the room through the same door that the professor had used, partly hoping to catch a glimpse of the shadows that had hidden there. The room was, however, little more than a hallway, and it opened onto a narrow path between buildings.

  Marlowe paused before leaving the small preparatory room, wondering who had hidden there, and why. But the more pressing issue, questioning his old school chum Boyle, and the Catholic sympathizer Carier, hastened him outside and onto the path.

  There were no students about in the narrow passageway. Marlowe took a small gate between two other buildings and moved quickly into the larger common yard. The sun was out, and late students were hurrying to classes. Several flew by Marlowe before he was able to stop an older one, an upperclassman, dressed in burgundy red.

  “Pardon,” he said without ceremony, “but I must find my friend Richard Boyle. It is a matter of grave urgency. Do you know where he is, what class he’s in now?”

  “Boyle?” the man asked, affronted that he’d been delayed in his forward progress. “Never heard of him.”

  With that, the man broke away and hastened toward the nearest building.

  “Boyle’s sick,” someone else called out.

  Marlowe turned to see a small man, a boy, really, with his arms filled with books, too many to carry happily.

  “Sick?” Marlowe asked.

  The overwhelmed boy lowered his voice. “With drink. He’s in his room.”

  The boy rushed away, dropping and retrieving several books as he went.

  Boyle had enough money to live on campus, in one of the finer rooms, having descended from an ancient landed family. Marlowe had been to the rooms several times, but he’d been tremendously drunk. He had to concentrate to remember a window looking out toward St. Benet’s. His back to the church’s general direction, gauging which of several windows might be Boyle’s, he took a guess and hurried into that building.

  Up a narrow set of stairs, only one flight, he was presented with several doors.

  “Boyle?” he called out softly.

  No answer.

  “Boyle!” he shouted.

  “Christ!” came the answer. “What is it?”

  Marlowe judged that the sound had come from behind the second door on his left. He stepped quickly, grabbed the handle, and thrust the door inward.

  “You are not in class,” he said plainly, before his eyes adjusted to the sight of Boyle’s room.

  The deranged disarray of the place was alarming. Marlowe feared, for a moment, that fiends had destroyed all of Boyle’s belongings. And there lay Boyle himself, sprawled out as if someone had dumped a pile of dirty laundry on his bed.

  The pile of laundry groaned, and tried to sit up.

  “What is it?” the pained voice demanded.

  “I say that you are not in class,” Marlowe repeated. “You do not take your education seriously.”

  Instantly Boyle was up, dagger in hand, eyes focused, his stance firm on the floor. His hair was a wiry halo, his face smeared with grease, and his blue-and-white-striped tunic was made almost entirely of spilt food.

  “Is this serious enough for you?” he hissed.

  Marlowe merely shook his head. “Put that away.”

  Boyle blinked. He tilted his head, trying to get a better look at the face behind the beard.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “Will you sit down?” Marlowe responded.

  Boyle held his dagger steady, and scratched his backside with the other hand.

  “No,” he said slowly. “I do not believe that I will sit down. What’s your business, then? Because it’s not to hasten me to class. I’ll get my paper whether or not I go to a single lecture. And let me tell you why.”

  “No need,” Marlowe said, edging his words with boredom. “Your father’s family has land in Herefordshire and your mother gave you the diamond ring that you never remove from your hand. I know that you can purchase your degree. But you won’t, because you fear that a boyhood compatriot of yours, one Christopher Marlowe, might best you among the regions of knowledge. That is a thing you cannot abide. Ergo, you languish here, in this filth, because you must, and not because you prefer it.”

  Boyle hesitated, then lowered his dagger.

  “There is only one person I know,” he said, trying not to smile, “who uses ten words when two would do, and who thinks so highly of himself as to speak his own name in the third person: a whoreson bastard called Marlowe.”

  Marlowe nodded. “I see no reason to impugn my parents just because I’ve caught you drunk in the middle of the day.”

  “Drunk!” Boyle roared. “I’m not drunk. It’s much worse than that, I’m waking up from being drunk. I’ve a dead rat taste in my mouth, a bed full of piss, and a head so stony I can barely stand to stand.”

  “Then, as I was saying, why don’t you sit down?” Marlowe said again.

  “Right.”

  Boyle fell back on his bed. The bed nearly collapsed.

  “Where have you been?” he managed to ask Marlowe, “and what are you doing in that ridiculous getup?”

  “I have been abroad, finding a wider education than I ever could here in this place,” Marlowe began, “and I’m disguised as you see me to avoid being arrested for a murder that you committed.”

  Eyes closed, dagger across his chest as if it were a flower on a corpse, Boyle managed to mumble, “Which murder is that?”

  “Walter Pygott’s,” Marlowe answered loudly, “you know very well.”

  “Pygott?” Boyle opened his eyes. “Hang on a moment. You’re the one who killed him.”

  “No, in fact, I am not.”

  Boyle struggled to sit up once more.

  “And that is why,” he said, shaking his head to clear his brain, “you visit me here?”

  Marlowe stood very still.

  “You think I killed Walter Pygott?” Boyle growled.

  “Well,” Marlowe confessed, “you’re not my only choice. I think Carier got the worst beating of anyone on campus. I suspect him too, if that makes you feel any better.”

  “It was Carier, then,” Boyle yawned. “Pygott was caught cheating on an examination. Carier saw it. He went to Professor Bartholomew on that account, but nothing was done about it. And after that, Pygott nearly killed Carier, as you know.”


  “So you didn’t kill Pygott?”

  Boyle sighed. “I wish I had done. I hated him. What a worthless lump of flesh he was, always bullying the younger boys, picking fights and then running to his father, or worse: to Bartholomew.”

  Marlowe’s head snapped back.

  “What? Bartholomew?”

  “They were thick,” Boyle said, then belched.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Pygott was in Bartholomew’s rooms quite often,” Boyle yawned. “Crying.”

  “This is—this is very puzzling.” Marlowe stared down at the list.

  Boyle sheathed his dagger, shook his head violently for a moment, and then stood.

  “Give me a moment,” he growled. “I’ve got to wash my face. Then we’ll go to St. Benet’s.”

  “What? To church?”

  “Wait!” Boyle lumbered forward and nearly toppled his washbasin. He spent what seemed to Marlowe an eternity splashing his face with cold water and fixing his clothing.

  “Now,” Boyle said at last. “Shall we?”

  “Why on earth are we going to St. Benet’s?” Marlowe asked, irritated.

  “Carier is a devout man,” Boyle mumbled, heading for the door. “He prays every morning about this time. Likes to make a show of it. We’ll look for him there first because I’m certain that’s where he is.”

  Marlowe followed Boyle out into the hall and down the stairs. The building was fairly quiet and their boots clattered on the stone steps.

  In no time at all they were out of the building and across the lawn, headed toward St. Benet’s. The tower of the church loomed above the yard. The Saxon archway that connected that tower to the rest of the church seemed cold.

  Marlowe had a strange sense of foreboding as they drew nearer the spot where Pygott had been killed. As they came to the front door of the chapel, a sense of impending danger provoked him to pull his dagger from its sheath and keep it discreetly by his side.

  Boyle led the way. He pushed through the heavy wooden door. It creaked, the hinges complaining. The oddly darkened chapel was illuminated only by the light through the high, clear windows; no candles were lit. There was a single figure, on his knees, close to the stone slab altar near the spiral staircase, apparently praying.

  “Carier?” Boyle whispered loudly.

  The man did not move.

  “It’s Boyle. And Marlowe.”

  Instantly Marlowe wished he could retrieve his name from the air, silence it from being heard.

  A second later the praying man stood. He was dressed in some sort of an azure uniform and thick black gloves, crowned with an Arabic headdress. He drew his rapier. In that same second, three men in similar dress charged down the spiral staircase.

  Marlowe’s rapier was out and his dagger in hand and held high as he looked about wildly for the best defensive position.

  Boyle, too, had a blade in each hand, and he was turning, trying to keep his eyes on everything at once.

  Two more men rushed into the chapel from the tower entrance. Marlowe and Boyle found themselves surrounded.

  “Were these men lying in wait for us?” Marlowe whispered.

  “How could they have known we were coming?” Boyle muttered, mostly to himself.

  Marlowe suddenly realized the answer.

  “They saw me talking to Bartholomew in his classroom,” Marlowe muttered. “They were hiding in the side room. They followed me to your place, overheard what we said. I’ve been an idiot.”

  “Who are they?” Boyle asked.

  “I believe they’re agents of the Pope.”

  Boyle seemed to wake up at that suggestion.

  “Ah,” he said, and then he smiled. “Well. Only five.”

  “Yes,” Marlowe said. “Shouldn’t take us long to dispatch them.”

  “Agreed,” Boyle boomed. “Listen, would you mind very much if we had breakfast after we’ve killed these men? I really need something to eat.”

  “I know just the place.”

  As they had been talking, they’d backed toward the corner opposite the spiral stairs. The uniformed men were positioning themselves, moving slowly, without speaking a word. Each had a rapier and a dagger.

  As they began to close in, Marlowe saw that their eyes were dim, rimmed in red. These men were under the spell of hashish.

  Marlowe’s heart beat faster. The attackers would be unpredictable, fearless, and largely insensate. They would be much harder to fight than ordinary opponents.

  “Their eyes,” he whispered to Boyle.

  “I see,” Boyle responded nervously.

  Without warning, Marlowe began to sing very loudly.

  “Oh, western wind, when will thou blow that the small rain down can rain?”

  Boyle seemed to understand immediately, and joined in.

  “Christ that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again!”

  Boyle spread his arms wide, as if he were entertaining on the stage.

  The odd gambit worked. The uniformed men, momentarily confused, had stopped advancing.

  Marlowe used that moment to fly forward, his rapier leading the way. He jumped high, his cassock roiling around him, and thrust the point of his sword directly into the nearest man’s midsection. The man blinked, trying to comprehend what had just happened, looked down, saw blood, and roared. Marlowe landed hard on the stone floor.

  The assassin grabbed Marlowe’s rapier with a gloved hand, pulled the point out from its target, and swiped at Marlowe with his dagger, still clutching Marlowe’s sword.

  At that same moment, another of the uniformed men appeared near Marlowe’s right shoulder. He loomed ominously, rapier and dagger in hand.

  Marlowe thrust his blade again. It slipped through the first man’s grip and drove deeper into the man’s stomach, this time nearly going through to the other side, out the man’s back just below his rib cage.

  The man grunted, but seemed otherwise unmoved as Marlowe withdrew his sword.

  The second man, the one to Marlowe’s right, attacked with a sudden ferocity. Marlowe barely had time to pivot and deflect the second man’s dagger with his forearm. The dagger cut into the cloth of the cassock but did little other damage.

  Marlowe leapt backward, sucked in a breath, and attempted to disarm the second man, thrusting and then swirling his own rapier. The second man parried and took a step forward. Marlowe twisted, stabbed the first man again. That man had not moved, and was bleeding profusely.

  The second man took advantage of Marlowe’s momentary distraction to thrust his rapier at Marlowe’s chest. Fortune and ill-fitting clothing saved Marlow again: the second man’s rapier pierced the garment but not the man.

  Without thinking, Marlowe dove to the floor, hit on his side, and rolled like a log toward the first man, toppling him in the direction of the second. Before either of the assassins could recover, Marlowe was on his feet again. He stabbed the bleeding man a fourth time, and, at last, that man went down. The second man ignored his compatriot and cocked his arm, suddenly sending his knife hurtling toward Marlowe’s face.

  Marlowe fended off the point of the missile by crossing his sword and knife in front of his face. The flying dagger hit Marlowe’s hand, nicked it, but did little other damage.

  Instantly Marlowe spread his arms, dagger and rapier out, and snarled, smiling.

  Just as he was about to leap again, a gun went off.

  Glancing over his shoulder he saw that Boyle had shot one of the assassins in the face. Another lay close by, stabbed through the heart, his breast a fountain of blood.

  Unfortunately the effort had taken its toll on Boyle. He was red-faced, winded, and nearly done in. And there was a third man headed his way.

  Marlowe returned his attention to the man closest to him just as that man thrust his blade, with the force of his entire body, directly toward Marlowe’s heart. Marlowe only had time to squirm sideways, but his attacker had so expected to make contact that he was thrown off balance. Marlowe saw
that and used it. He kicked the man’s shin as hard as he could, then brought the hilt of his rapier down onto the back of the man’s neck.

  The man went sprawling, belly down, onto the hard gray floor of the church.

  Instantly pouncing, Marlowe planted his boot in the small of the downed man’s back, knocking the wind out of him, and flew to Boyle’s side.

  Boyle was gasping for breath, trying to speak.

  “It’s all right,” Marlowe began.

  “My pistol,” Boyle whispered. “It has a second barrel. If the ball has not fallen out…”

  Marlowe saw the weapon on the floor, glanced toward the last standing assassin, and nodded.

  With a single motion he feigned forward with his rapier in the direction of the assassin, but dipped the point of his blade low at the last possible minute, managing to snare the pistol by its trigger grip. Flipping it high, the gun soared into the air. The assassin glanced up at it. When he did, Marlowe threw his dagger. The dagger caught the man in his throat, and stayed there. The man gurgled a vague complaint, and then dropped to the floor just as Marlowe caught the pistol and whirled in the direction of the fallen man, the one whose back Marlowe had stepped on. That man was rallying, had gotten to his knees. Marlowe cocked the pistol, aimed, and fired. Alas, the flint did not ignite, and there was no telling if the ball was still in the barrel.

  The assassin was on his feet in the next second, vacant-eyed and hulking.

  Boyle sucked in a deep breath.

  “Right,” he said to Marlowe. “Shall we?”

  As one they both exploded forward, rapiers ahead of them, and before the last assassin knew what was happening, Boyle and Marlowe had both stabbed him in the heart. He fell backward, dead before his head cracked on the floor.

  Boyle was doubled in half and dripping with sweat.

  Marlowe leaned heavily on one foot.

  “This bleeding cassock,” he growled. “It’s like fighting in swaddling clothes.”

  “I hate my pistol,” Boyle managed to say, still unable to straighten up.

  “Yes,” Marlowe agreed. “So do I. Now. Breakfast, did you say?”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Marlowe and Boyle sat in the public room at the Pickerel, backs to the wall. Boyle looked sick. Marlowe was angry.