by M. J. Trow
Marlowe joined him at the window. It was well and truly dark by now, a series of torches flickering in the night breeze around the buttercross. ‘The heart of Chichester,’ the playwright encapsulated it.
‘Unbeliever!’ Brickley hissed, speaking, all unaware, nothing but the truth. ‘This is the heart of Chichester.’ He flung his arms around so that some of the claret spattered over the wall. ‘I am the heart of Chichester.’ He looked out of the window again. ‘What you see there is the centre of the cross, its four arms opening to the four quarters of the world.’
Marlowe rather liked that. Perhaps he could squeeze it into The Massacre at Paris, still reeling in his brain.
‘Look again,’ Brickley told him, ‘at the foot of the buttercross.’
‘Two men,’ Marlowe murmured. ‘Sitting.’
‘Waiting,’ Brickley nodded, standing alongside him.
‘For what?’ Marlowe asked. ‘Surely, the buttercross is where you could meet all of Christendom if you waited long enough.’
Brickley looked at him. ‘Doomsday,’ he said solemnly.
‘Aren’t we all?’ Marlowe smiled.
‘I’m not talking figuratively,’ Brickley said. ‘In this world, not in preparation for the next. Though it might add up to the same thing.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Marlowe said.
‘Doomsday is what Simeon calls it,’ the bishop told him. ‘A day of rage, a day of revenge. Those two out there are spies.’
Marlowe knew a thing or two about spying and couldn’t help wondering how Sir Francis Walsingham would have dealt with two of his men who carried out their work by sitting on the steps of the buttercross in the middle of the market place. ‘Really?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Everywhere, aren’t they?’
‘They are,’ Brickley growled. ‘And all because they cannot accept change. It’s for the best. Believe me, in the long term, it’s for the best. Look, there, now.’
Marlowe followed the man’s pointing finger. The two men who had been sitting, heads together, at the buttercross got up, one moving north along one street, the other south. Two other men, halberds at the slope, were strolling towards them, swinging a horn lantern.
‘That’s the Watch. They’ve orders to move them on. Anybody suspicious. But as soon as they’ve turned their backs, the bastards are back again. You’ll see. There’ll be another at the campanile and at least one more at each of the gates.’
‘Waiting for Doomsday?’ Marlowe pitched his voice low and calm; he knew paranoia when he saw it.
‘Those oafs who stopped you on the road. Did they ask you where you were from?’
‘They didn’t have to. My man, Tom Sledd, has a London accent. They picked that up straight away.’
‘Simeon’s taught them well,’ Brickley murmured, his eyes wild and bulging. ‘I tell you, it’s terrifying.’
‘I will say again, Your Grace,’ Marlowe rounded on the man, ‘in the interests of the Queen’s safety, I need to know what you are talking about. Insinuations and hints are not enough.’
Thomas Brickley looked from right to left. They were alone. Or they appeared to be alone. He crossed the room suddenly and hauled open the studded door. He put out his head and looked down the passageway in both directions. There was no one there. He closed the door again and went back to Marlowe. ‘Enclosures,’ he whispered.
‘Enclosures?’ Marlowe wasn’t afraid of the word and said it out loud.
‘Ssh! Good God, man,’ Brickley hissed. ‘Why not shout it from the rooftops?’ He did his best to calm himself. ‘You will not be surprised to know that, as bishop, I own a considerable parcel of land in these parts.’
Marlowe was not surprised. After the Queen, the Church of England owned most land in the country. ‘I’m having it enclosed, turned to crop-growing. It will provide food for my flock …’
Marlowe understood at once. ‘But it will deprive the shepherds of their flock,’ he pointed out.
‘Precisely.’ The bishop seemed unrepentant. ‘There’s no reasoning with them, of course. They cannot, it seems, understand that arable farming is the way ahead. Good God, Marlowe, we’ve found a New World; we’ve even mapped the heavens, if that is not too much of a heresy. These morons are still drowning in the medieval shit their grandfathers wallowed in. Enclosure will increase their food, their health, their strength …’
Marlowe could not help himself. ‘Your wealth,’ he added.
Brickley stopped in mid-sentence. ‘Yes, well, there it is. You’re a perceptive little sub-Master of the Revels, aren’t you? For a playwright, I mean.’
Marlowe had known some pretty unpleasant churchmen in his time – more unpleasant than otherwise, if truth be told and the accounting was accurate. But this man really did take the cake.
‘I won’t deny that the revenue from my new fields will increase. But I have to bear the costs, damn it – the commissioners, with their chains and rods, the court fees … Do you know how much it costs to push through an Act of Parliament?’
Marlowe smiled. ‘So that’s how they thought they knew us,’ he said. ‘Men from London carrying the Queen’s cypher. They thought we were commissioners, come to rob them of their livelihood.’
‘Precisely.’ The bishop was glad he was finally understood.
‘Can’t the mayor do something?’ Marlowe asked. ‘Other than endlessly moving on undesirables after dark?’
‘Caldecote? The man’s a mouse. And an imbecile one at that. It’s too big for him.’
‘The Lord Lieutenant, then? The Queen’s man?’
‘Sackville? The last comment he was heard to make about me was that if I was afire, he wouldn’t piss on me to put it out. I’m not holding my breath.’
‘But if it’s a matter of the Queen’s peace,’ Marlowe said, ‘personal differences must surely be set aside.’ Anyone listening to the projectioner would think that he had never stepped from the primrose path in his life.
Brickley scoffed. ‘In a perfect world,’ he said, ‘but Simeon is too clever for Sackville, Earl of Dorset or not. The man’s a lawyer.’
‘A lawyer?’
‘Gray’s Inn. Some well-meaning member of my flock went to London to petition him. And if I ever find out who it was …’ The bishop suddenly seemed to realize how he must sound. ‘… I will of course take him gently aside and explain to him, in God’s name, the error of his ways. But it is a fact, Marlowe, that Simeon is not normal. He’s as oily as a snake and is quite prepared to use violence.’
‘First, kill all the lawyers,’ Marlowe murmured, ‘before they kill you.’
‘What?’
‘Just a line all we playwrights use eventually,’ he said with a smile. ‘So, Simeon plans what … a rebellion?’
Brickley nodded, watching as the two shadowy figures crept back to the buttercross, looking up at him in his window before disappearing into the pool of inky black at its foot. ‘Doomsday,’ he whispered, ‘and I don’t know when that is.’
TEN
‘A rebellion?’ Jack Norfolk had only become one of Marlowe’s little band by default, but keeping things from him proved impossible. After all, Tom Sledd was of the company. Faunt and Marlowe were trained in the world of silence; it fitted them both like a glove. Leonard Lyttleburye said virtually nothing about anything, so all was well there. But Tom Sledd never met a secret he didn’t want to roar from the rooftops, together with clarions and drums as though announcing a play. He called that ‘telling no one’.
‘Tom mentioned it,’ Norfolk said by way of explanation to Marlowe’s enquiring look.
‘We’ve had them before.’ Faunt was helping himself to a pancake and honey in the bishop’s buttery. Clerks came and went with boxes of parchment, builders clattered past with ladders and buckets. There was always work to do in a cathedral like Chichester; after all, the thing had been there since the days of the Conqueror and it was looking a little work-worn in places.
‘Not round here, they haven’t.’ Marlowe buttered his b
read; there was nothing quite like a manchet loaf, still warm in the crust, to start the day. ‘Not in our lifetime, at any rate. Brickley’s panicking. He’s already shipped Mrs Brickley out – visiting relatives in the country, if anybody asks.’
‘Any ideas, Kit?’ Faunt popped the last of his pancake into his mouth and paused to wait for the answer before embarking on the ale.
Marlowe closed to him. Clerks and builders might not be all they seemed. ‘I’d like you to see a man called Caldecote,’ he murmured in Faunt’s ear. ‘He’s the mayor. Not very effectual, according to the bishop, but perhaps when he’s reminded who’s coming to town in a few weeks, he’ll grow himself a spine.’
Faunt nodded. He’d put the fear of God into minor officials before. ‘And you?’
‘I’m going to have a word with this Beelzebub lawyer who has Brickley quaking in his cassock.’
‘Not a place to go alone, Kit,’ Faunt advised. ‘Take Lyttleburye.’
All eyes swivelled to the man obliviously cramming his mouth with pancakes and bread.
‘No,’ Marlowe said. ‘Jack, fancy a stroll?’
Norfolk smiled. ‘Seen one rebel, seen them all,’ he shrugged.
It was already hot in the large house along the Priory Lane, mangy dogs trying to find somewhere to lie in the shade. A little clerk, scratching himself through his fustian, was trying to make his quill work on the sluggish parchment. The ink had gone thick and sludgy and in that respect was almost an equal for his brain. A drowsy fly ricocheted from the windowpane to the fireplace and back again. The whole house seemed half asleep and happy to be so.
‘Master Simeon’s residence?’ Marlowe swept in, the hem of his swirling Colleyweston cloak knocking over the clerk’s inkwell.
‘You can’t just barge in,’ the clerk blurted out, jumping to his feet and trying to stem the glutinous tide of ink over his papers.
‘Yes, I can,’ Marlowe called back to him.
‘Do you have an appointment?’ the little man shrilled.
‘No,’ Norfolk told him flatly, and followed Marlowe into the inner sanctum.
John Simeon wore the unfashionable haircut of the Lower Rhine, a fringe of dark hair above his eyebrows. His doublet alone could have fed a shepherd and his family for a year.
‘Oh dear,’ he frowned at the pair. ‘You’ve upset William as well as his ink. The poor lamb won’t be fit to live with all day.’
‘Not our concern, I’m afraid,’ Marlowe said.
‘What is?’ Simeon put down his quill and rested with both hands on the table.
‘Enclosures,’ Marlowe told him. ‘Specifically, the bishop’s.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Simeon smiled. Brickley had been right about him. Oily indeed. Then the smile turned to a frown. ‘I know you, don’t I?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you Christopher Marlowe?’
‘I am,’ the playwright admitted.
‘Yes. Yes. Machiavel.’
‘Some men call me that,’ Marlowe nodded.
‘I saw you at the Rose … God, it must be two years ago. Your Tamburlaine. Masterly. Masterly.’ Simeon got up. ‘Allow me to shake your hand, sir.’
Marlowe kept his hands at his side. ‘Flattered though I am, Master Simeon, this is not a social call.’
‘No.’ The lawyer’s smile vanished, as if snuffed out. ‘No, I don’t suppose it is. Old Brickley been bending your ear, has he?’ He gestured to the seats and Norfolk was about to accept when Marlowe cut him short.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘We would rather stand.’
Simeon thought for a moment. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what a playwright is doing interceding for a bishop. A playwright who, if the gossip is to be believed, has about as much in common with the Church of England as white knight to black pawn.’
‘You shouldn’t believe gossip, Master Simeon,’ Marlowe said, folding his arms. ‘The gossip around Chichester, for instance, is that you intend to lead a rebellion against the bishop.’
‘I do?’ Simeon raised an eyebrow.
‘And a rebellion against the bishop is a rebellion against the Queen, whose man, like it or not, Thomas Brickley is. That’s where I come in.’
‘You do?’
‘I do. I am here from the office of the Master of the Revels to arrange the Queen’s Progress. And I appear to have stumbled into a war.’
‘Oh, I think war is too strong a word,’ the lawyer smiled.
‘I can fence all day with you, sir,’ Marlowe told him. ‘We both of us use words as playthings in our different ways. But this is not the wooden O. Nor is it the court of chancery. Time for plain speaking.’
‘Very well.’ Simeon leaned back in his chair, rocking back and forth on the back legs which cracked in protest. ‘You first.’
Marlowe lifted a heavy purse from his belt and dropped it onto Simeon’s table.
The lawyer didn’t move, but liked the sound of the thud. ‘Weighty.’
‘We both know that every man has his price,’ Marlowe said. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Well, now,’ Simeon smiled and let the front legs of his chair crash back to the floor. He reached forward and pulled the purse towards him, slowly undoing the straps and revealing the silver coins inside. ‘I’ll need to have William work on my expenses. I doubt His Grace could afford me and this,’ he pushed the purse back towards Marlowe, ‘would barely cover the cost of my clerk’s ink.’
‘You don’t come cheap.’ Jack Norfolk spoke for the first time.
‘That’s right,’ Simeon nodded. ‘I don’t.’
There was a silence.
‘You’ve spoken plainly,’ the lawyer said. ‘There’s an eloquence about money that appeals to me. Let me answer you with a riddle. “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”’
‘John Ball’s sermon,’ Marlowe said. ‘The Peasants’ Revolt.’
‘You know it,’ Simeon laughed. ‘I am impressed, Master Marlowe, even for the author of Tamburlaine. Would you like to explain it, for the benefit of your man here?’
Marlowe looked at Norfolk. He knew nothing of the man’s background, but he had brought him into this and it was as well that he knew all the facts. ‘John Ball,’ he began, ‘was a leader of the Peasants’ Revolt.’
‘They marched from Blackheath,’ Norfolk chimed in, with a straight face, ‘on London, complaining about the cost of foreign wars, the Statute of Labourers. When was that? Over a century ago.’
The lawyer nodded his respect to Norfolk, who didn’t meet his eye. Marlowe was neither impressed nor surprised; for all he knew, Norfolk could be Master of a University somewhere, travelling incognito. Had he had to put coin on the table to support his thoughts, it would have gone on the section that said ‘brought up quite genteelly in straitened circumstances and thrown on the world when grown enough to fend for himself.’ And just knowing a little history didn’t change that view.
‘Ball’s message was simple,’ Simeon said. ‘In the days of the Creation, there were no lords and masters, no serfs and slaves.’
‘Look around you, lawyer,’ Marlowe said. ‘There are no serfs or slaves now, either. Ball was a madman, but his wishes have come to pass.’
‘Spare me the civics lesson,’ Simeon sneered. ‘We have lords and masters aplenty, children who die in rat-infested hovels while the bishop and his ilk dine on roast swan and pick their teeth with pure gold.’
‘So what do you intend to do?’ Marlowe asked.
‘Right a wrong,’ Simeon said. ‘Strike a blow for justice. Today, the bishop’s enclosures in Chichester. Tomorrow … who knows?’
‘Ball’s rebellion failed,’ Norfolk said, ‘if memory serves. His rabble pulled down the palace of the Savoy and then ran into the immoveable wall that was the government of England.’
‘Well, well,’ Simeon smiled, ‘you do know your history. John Ball’s rebellion failed because he was a dreamer, with visions of the Second Coming and help from the Lord.’
‘And that’s not you at all, is it, Master S
imeon?’ Marlowe said.
‘No, it’s not; any more than it is you, Master Machiavel. “Moses was but a conjuror – and Christ and John the Baptist were bedfellows.” Sound familiar?’
Marlowe’s face showed no emotion at all. ‘You can quote Tamburlaine all you like,’ he said, ‘and Barabas too. Even Dr Faustus, if you find a theatre troupe brave enough to put it on. But don’t misquote me, Master Simeon, I beg of you.’
‘You didn’t say those things?’
‘Never.’
‘But you believe them.’ Simeon would not let it go. ‘You and I, Master Marlowe, we’re men of the world. I’ve called what’s coming to Chichester Doomsday because of the superstitious simplicity of the oafs for whom I speak. We know there’s no such thing, no God to wreak his vengeance. Only man. Weak, corrupt, vengeful.’ He stood up. ‘The bishop’s days are numbered,’ he said, and he threw the purse at Marlowe who caught it expertly. ‘Now, get out.’
The question was – who to send? Neither Tom Sledd nor Jack Norfolk had the necessary gravitas to make enquiries in the Inns of Court – they wouldn’t get past the gates. Nicholas Faunt was his own man and went his own way; Marlowe couldn’t send him. Neither could he go himself, with the Queen’s cypher as his passport. That left Leonard Lyttleburye. True, he was an oaf, given to strange non-sequiturs in his speech and his reason; but he was Robert Cecil’s man and that would have to be enough. Accordingly, he trotted out later that day, bound for London with instructions to find whatever dirt he could on John Simeon.
‘Pickering,’ the bishop said after a moment’s reflection. ‘Hugh Pickering.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘The man who would have engaged Simeon,’ Brickley threw his arms wide. ‘Wasn’t that what you asked?’
‘I mean, what is the man’s status, Your Grace,’ Marlowe said.
‘Oh, I see, well, he’s the foremost landowner around here, after me, of course. We’ve never seen eye to eye. He had his own creature lined up for my job before I got it. That put his nose out of joint and it’s been downhill ever since then. Why?’