by M. J. Trow
Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland stood there, in dark silhouette, the silk nightgown fluttering in the speed of his flight. ‘Murder!’ he screamed. ‘For the love of God, murder!’
Every head turned and, for a perceptible moment, no one moved.
‘Murder, I say!’
Then everything seemed to happen at once. The men, those not encumbered by a screaming woman, all ran towards the earl, who still stood as a man turned to stone. Leonard Lyttleburye, a well-trained man of Robert Cecil, despite his lumbering body and ham-like face, was the first there, having flung his blanket and Tom Sledd with it aside in one deft movement. Jack Norfolk appeared almost instantly at his side. Only Tom Sledd stayed where he was, held back by a hand on each shoulder. Glancing to his right, he saw the face he had wanted to see all day; Kit Marlowe, in the flesh. To his left, Nicholas Faunt, not so welcome but still a good man to have by you in a crisis.
‘Stay here, Tom,’ whispered the playwright. ‘Tell me what’s going on. Who are all these people? And why are they wrapped in blankets? Has there been a fire? Flood?’
‘Or murder,’ muttered Faunt. ‘But if murder, why are they all out here when the earl – it is the earl?’ Sledd nodded. ‘When the earl is still standing there, shouting it at the top of his lungs?’
‘We were … well, we were listening to a ghost story,’ Sledd explained. ‘The earl’s uncle …’
‘Guiscard?’ Faunt knew everyone.
‘Yes.’
‘Mad as a house. They all are, the Percys. But some are madder than most. And Guiscard is the maddest of the lot, by a fair margin. What was the story?’
‘He … he said his brother walked the house, looking for a soul which had met its end by violence. And then …’ Sledd could hardly believe what he was saying, even as the words tumbled out, ‘… and then, the earl ran out, shouting Murder.’ He glanced across and then goggled. ‘Is that blood on his nightgown?’
Faunt and Marlowe didn’t need to get closer to know bloodstains when they saw them and the earl’s nightshirt had a large patch just at chest level. Yet, he was clearly uninjured, judging by the way he had run out into the courtyard and the volume of his cries.
‘Something for you, Nicholas,’ Marlowe said. ‘I need to talk to Tom.’
Faunt let go of the stage manager’s shoulder with a valedictory pat. Raising his voice, he walked towards the house. ‘Make way, step aside. Thank you, everyone, back away, give the man some room. Nothing to see here.’
Nicholas Faunt was in his Heaven. And if all was not quite right with the world, it soon would be.
Tom Sledd was surprised at himself. He had always thought that he was immune to the smoke and mirrors of a theatrical performance and yet Guiscard Percy had taken him in, hook, line and sinker. He could remember little of the gathering outside around the brazier; apart from Leonard Lyttleburye, who had had his arm over his shoulders, he had no idea where anyone was, whether anyone had left, moved or spoken. All he could remember were flames and the voice, telling of unimaginable horrors.
Marlowe was disappointed but not surprised. Leonard Lyttleburye was no better, and here the playwright was surprised as well as disappointed; this man was supposed to be trained by Cecil himself, but he had been, if anything, rather more terrified than Sledd, though he refused to concede the arm over the shoulders. Jack Norfolk had not believed a word of it; ghost stories were for children in hanging sleeves, for fools who swore they saw three suns in the sky at once; if he recalled, he had curled up in his blanket and caught a few well-earned minutes of sleep.
Marlowe followed in Faunt’s footsteps, and by asking here and there amongst the muttering knots of retainers who clotted the hallway, found his way to the chamber where the murder was said to have taken place. The door was half open, its lock hanging off and the wood around splintered and raw. Through the gap, he saw three men clustered round a still form on the bed. The candlelight made a nimbus around each head and they looked like angels bending there, winging the soul to Heaven or to Hell.
Then, the spell was broken. Faunt turned to see Marlowe in the doorway and beckoned him in.
‘Christopher Marlowe,’ he said, extending a hand to the man opposite him across the bed. ‘Doctor Windham has looked at the victim and pronounced life extinct. Sir Henry, my lord …’
‘I know Master Marlowe,’ the wizard earl said, shortly. ‘And I hope he knows that I do not need a doctor to tell me when life is extinct. Especially when it is the life of my beloved Barbara, the love of my life, my own dear one, my …’ His voice trailed away and there were tears in his eyes.
‘Yes, yes.’ Faunt knew the stories about Percy and his women. It was a dramatic end to this particular romance; as a rule, things were thrown, hearts but no bones were broken, and soon the earl would move on to his next one and only love. But murder … this was an altogether different thing. He couldn’t overlook the bloodstain on Percy’s nightgown, but that could be – and had been – explained by his clasping of his beloved to his breast when he found her. There was no sign of a wheel-lock and it was doubtful that Percy could have hidden it very carefully and still got to the courtyard to scream his loss to the sky in the time available. The blood was still wet and the body warm; this had happened in the last half an hour at the very most.
‘Who is the lady?’ Marlowe was trying to garner at least a few facts if any were available.
‘Lady Barbara Gascoigne,’ Percy replied, drawing himself up and calming down as best he could. ‘My own, my darling …’
‘Yes, yes, indeed. She looks a very Lovelly person,’ Faunt said. ‘A guest here, I assume?’
‘My guest, yes,’ Percy said. ‘I … we had had words, over the evening repast. Just before the pigeon, if memory serves. She … well, perfection though she was, sometimes she could be a little volatile. She wanted to take part in the revel, but … let’s just excuse her by saying she was young and didn’t know the Queen.’
The doctor, who had been near enough at the table to hear the argument, raised a wry eyebrow. He had brought the wizard earl kicking and screaming into the world. He had put up with his eccentricities ever since.
‘But apart from that, you were getting on well?’ Marlowe had to ask, but the fact that the earl was in the woman’s bedroom dressed in just a nightgown probably answered that question.
‘She was my own. My darling.’ But the earl sounded a little less convinced than he had earlier. ‘My one true love.’
‘Did you shoot Lady Barbara, my lord?’ Faunt asked. ‘Sorry to be so blunt, but if I don’t ask you, the coroner will.’
‘The coroner?’ The wizard earl was aghast. ‘What does the coroner have to do with it?’
The doctor pointed to the body. ‘This woman has been shot in the heart, my lord,’ he said, in reasonable tones. His bedside manner was known to have no equal and he was employing it now to the hilt. ‘I am a generous man, I hope I may say, and I will always find a natural cause for a death when I can, but a gaping wound in a person’s chest does not really give me that option. There must be an inquest into this death.’
‘But Barbara … well, she would have hated the fuss.’
The door crashed back and the men turned. The man standing there was clearly deep in drink but his wandering eyes focused on the figure on the bed.
‘Is that … is that Barbara?’ he wailed.
Percy stepped forward, forgetting the bloodstain on his nightshirt.
The newcomer stepped back, his finger pointing, trembling, at the wizard earl. ‘What bloody man is this?’ he screamed. ‘You’ve killed my Barbara!’ He lurched forward and threw himself across the foot of the bed, weeping.
Marlowe and Faunt looked a question at the doctor. Percy was trying to pull the man off the feet of the love of his life. ‘Andrew, for the love of God …’
‘His sister,’ Windham mouthed.
‘Ah.’ Marlowe was disappointed in a way. Had this been a rival for her affections, at least the
case might have been clearer.
‘I believe he has been on an … assignation … in the village.’ The doctor’s ears were keen and he had overheard that conversation over the frumenty as well.
Faunt looked around. The candles were beginning to gutter and the corpse was not going to tell them anything more. ‘I think if we all go somewhere else,’ he said, ‘it might be as well, my lord, if you take Master Gascoigne to his chamber and call his man if he has one, I would be grateful. And if you would join us in the solar when you have changed out of …’ he gestured to his own chest and the earl looked down and seemed to see the bloodstain for the first time.
‘Who are you, to order me about in my own house, under my own roof?’ the earl sputtered.
‘I am Nicholas Faunt, late secretary to Sir Francis Walsingham, may he rest in peace. But now, I work for the Queen. So I can order you about whenever and wherever I choose, my lord. Please get dressed and join us in the solar, as soon as is convenient.’
Percy looked at him and flared his nostrils. Did this man not know that he had lost the only love of his life? But the Queen’s man … that made it difficult. He couldn’t see the revel happening now, anyway; Gloriana wasn’t prone to visiting houses where murder might be part of the playing. Even so, it didn’t do to annoy her more than necessary, so he retired, dragging the weeping Gascoigne with him, with as much dignity as a man in a bloodstained nightgown could muster.
Tom Sledd joined the little group in the solar and, before the earl appeared, told them a shortened version of the ghost story. Faunt nodded throughout – the facts themselves were true enough, up to the point of the ghost wandering around looking for a soul to borrow for its broken journey to Heaven. Faunt and Marlowe had seen all things in Heaven and earth and some that belonged in between, but the story of the earl’s father’s ghost did not ring true. And, even if it did – ghosts did not kill people with wheel-locks. People killed people with wheel-locks. The earl seemed to be the most likely candidate, but Tom and the doctor both swore that he was deeply in love with Barbara, though Windham conceded this was by no means rare. Her brother would only lose at her death – he was enjoying all that Petworth could offer by way of a very pleasant life, with the obvious addition of the run of the village maidens, though he made sure swiftly that they were not maidens for long. Besides, as Marlowe pointed out, he seemed to have a very strong alibi for the time of the death. Lady Barbara Gascoigne was an exacting mistress but her little lady’s maid was still prostrate with weeping at her loss; of her place, if not of her employer, and besides, she would not have been able to manage a firearm to inflict such a neat and tidy wound. In short, someone had killed Lady Barbara, and for all they had been able to find out, they might as well say it was the shade of the eighth earl and be done. For all the death had taken place in the house of a peer of the realm, there were standards. The Lord Lieutenant would call in the coroner who spoke for Her Majesty, and sixteen of the great and good of the shire would view the body, decide the deodand and give their verdict – murder by person or persons unknown.
All that was by the way, the due process of law that the state demanded. But it was not enough for Kit Marlowe. Few of the Percy household slept that night and the rumours flew with the pipistrelles from their roosts in the barns and yews. It was the ghost of the dead earl, wandering the lonely night in search of a soul. He, men said, had died by gunshot. How fitting, then, that Lady Barbara should go the same way.
A numb and uncomprehending Andrew Gascoigne sent his man galloping north to tell the family of the tragedy. He watched the horse clatter out into the first breaking of dawn’s rays. Birdsong swirled in the wake of the galloping hoofs and he wanted to silence them all – how dare they sing, when Barbara lay dead? He wanted to go back to his sister’s chamber, to the girl he had known all his life, to see her sit up, laughing, and tell him it was all a jest. But he could not bear it. It was just a shell that lay on that bed; life, breath and love had flown. There was nothing for Andrew Gascoigne there.
There was everything for Kit Marlowe. He sent away Percy’s women, who wanted to strip the girl’s body, wash it and prepare it for the grave. Working by candlelight, he paced the room. To his left, near the bed, an oak panel in the wall stood half open. Through it, Marlowe could see the earl’s chamber, the tester unslept in, the curtains thrown back. The Queen’s man went in, taking stock of what he saw. More shirts and venetians in the presses than Marlowe could wear in a year, the doublets heavy with damasked silk and rich brocade. Books of heavy, polished leather lined the shelves, their contents, in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, arcane and mysterious. Men didn’t call this man the wizard earl for nothing. Marlowe smiled; in one corner, he recognized one of the many tomes of his old friend Dr Dee, the Queen’s magus. On the table, half finished in the earl’s own hand, the semblance of a poem; a sonnet, certainly, but without the greatness that marked Marlowe. He read the words silently at first, and then out loud, the only way to make a poem sing.
‘The love that loves the light of day alone,
The eyes that shine and sparkle in the sun,
If you can break my heart and yet atone,
Then you will be my soul, my love, my one.’
It needed work. But could there be a clue here? When had Percy written that, and was it about Barbara at all? If so, had she broken the earl’s heart and not atoned? Had she rebuffed him, turned him down, and had he killed her in jealous rage? And if the ‘eyes’ of the sonnet were not Barbara’s, but another’s, had she discovered the earl’s duplicity and did a row between them lead to murder?
Marlowe returned to the scene of the crime. The earl’s chamber connected with Barbara’s via the secret panel in the wall. Most country houses had such hidden ways, gifts for the Jesuits who prayed privately with Papist families unwilling to break, as their country had long ago, with Rome. He looked at the dead woman’s face. It was peaceful, the eyes closed, the lips pursed just a little, as though to deliver a kiss. Hating the moment, he lifted Barbara’s shift. There was a bloody hole just below the left breast that would have smashed the lung and heart below it. The blood, congealed now and turning black in the candlelight, had sprayed outward and upward. Gently, he turned her over. There was no wound to her back; the ball was still inside her.
‘Anything?’ Nicholas Faunt’s voice made Marlowe turn and he laid the corpse back in its position.
‘Tell me about the lock,’ Marlowe said, nodding in the direction of the door. ‘You got here first.’
‘I did,’ Faunt nodded. ‘That was curious. The door was locked.’
‘You broke it?’
Faunt drew his dagger and tossed it in the air. ‘Needs must,’ he said.
‘So, only Percy had access,’ Marlowe reasoned, ‘through the panel. There’s no other way in.’
‘Not that I can see.’ Faunt was routinely tapping the oak-panelled walls. Nothing gave under his fingers, nothing sounded hollow. The few candles in the room burned straight and true; no draught gave away a hidden room. He shrugged and turned back to Marlowe. ‘Looks bad for His Grace.’
‘Looks too bad,’ Marlowe nodded. ‘What do you make of this?’ He passed Faunt a miniature portrait which had lain on the cabinet beside the bed.
‘Percy,’ Faunt squinted at in in the candle flame, carrying it across to the window to see if the burgeoning dawn could give him a better light. ‘It looks like one of Hilliard’s.’
‘Not one of his best,’ Marlowe said. Even men of Hilliard’s undoubted talents were presumably allowed the occasional off-day. The wizard earl lay on his side in the painting’s foreground, his head supported by the right arm, the left hand holding a lace handkerchief. His gloves lay nearby, together with a book. Behind him, dwarfing the earl, tall trees rose to the sky out of a walled garden and a curious globe hung like a balance from the branches, counter-weighted with a single word.
‘Tanti,’ Faunt read it, translating in his head. ‘So great, so little.’
‘Applies to us all, doesn’t it,’ Marlowe said, half to himself, ‘in the scheme of things?’
‘No time to get philosophical, Kit,’ Faunt said. ‘A woman is dead. That intrigued me, though.’ He was pointing to a divan in the corner and to a large tabby cat curled up on it, fast asleep.
‘Did it?’ Marlowe asked. ‘Why?’
‘The animal was here when we broke in. It hasn’t moved.’
Marlowe knew cats. Nine lives they may have, but they were infinitely more magical than that. Many had been the hours he had spent poring over Aristotle at Corpus Christi with Tiberius, the college cat, snoring contentedly in his lap. He crossed to this one and ruffled its fur. The cat lifted its head and yawned at him, whiskers pointing forward and teeth bared momentarily in the candle flame. It extended its front feet and spread its toes, showing its claws as a reminder to touch not the cat. Marlowe stroked its fur back into position and gave it a final pat, at which it tucked its nose back under its flank and went back to sleep.
‘The curious case of the cat in the night-time,’ Marlowe murmured.
‘Does that tell us anything?’ Faunt asked. He was a dog man, through and through.
‘Of course not,’ Marlowe said. ‘The animal’s probably deaf. The only one who can tell us anything is the heir of the Percys. Shall we?’
NINE
For the umpteenth time, as the great house came to life all around them and the gossip started again, Marlowe told the Earl of Northumberland to focus on what had happened. One of the men in that book-encrusted study was a peer of the realm; the other, a shoemaker’s son. But murder had made them equals. Murder was like that.