by M. J. Trow
The silence was almost audible. Even the logs in the grate were listening.
‘Hans,’ the Statholder whispered. ‘How could you?’
The chamberlain leapt forward, his rapier in his hand, overturning the table with a powerful kick and lungeing at the Statholder’s head. The blade bit deep into the wood as William ducked aside and Marlowe turned like a spinning top and threw his dagger which thudded into Hans’ back. He staggered, the sword gone from his grasp, trying weakly to pull the Englishman’s blade out. Marlowe caught him as he fell, blood trickling from his nose and mouth.
‘May your soul rot in Hell, Englishman,’ Hans hissed and shuddered to a convulsing heap on the floor.
The Statholder stood up and tugged the sword free as guards, alarmed by the crash of overturning furniture, clattered into the room with servants behind them. ‘I had hoped,’ he muttered to Marlowe, ‘it was merely the man’s incompetence. Now I see it all.’ He looked along the length of the chamberlain’s blade, the one that had so nearly bisected his head. ‘Three or four inches to the right,’ he said, ‘and it would have gone through my eye socket. Master Marlowe, I owe you my life or I owe it to the Egyptians. Can I ever repay that debt?’
‘This man,’ Marlowe said, ‘was he once your faithful servant?’
William looked at the chamberlain’s body as Marlowe pulled out his knife blade. ‘I believed so,’ he nodded sadly. ‘I will always believe so.’
‘Then send for the Egyptian they call Simon,’ Marlowe said.
‘Why?’ the Statholder was curious.
‘He has his own ways of comforting the dead,’ he said.
The flames guttered that night in the Egyptian camp. All around the walls of the Prinsenhof rose sheer and black, the guards patrolling the walks grunting to each other in the cold routine of their march, cloaks wrapped around their leather jacks and gleaming steel.
Kit Marlowe sat by the fire with the others, but his eyes never strayed far from the windows of the prince’s private apartments across the courtyard. Now that Hans Neudecker was dead, perhaps . . .
‘I was wrong.’ Hern’s voice was strong and commanding in the firelight. ‘You weren’t running away from anything, Master Marlowe, were you? You were running towards it. To the court of William the Silent. To a date with destiny. That was your mission.’
Marlowe looked up at him under his brows. Is that what it was? Destiny? There had already been two attempts on the life of the Statholder – Jean Jaureguy, Hans Neudecker. But there would be others. As long as William of Nassau was there, as long as he was the Netherlands, there had to be others. And would this be Marlowe’s life, then? A permanent exile from his own land, like Minshull at the Hook, with his Dutch pantaloons and Dutch clogs and Dutch cheese? Marlowe had missed Canterbury from time to time while he was at Cambridge. Now, in that strange, bitter night, he missed Cambridge too. The kind voice of Michael Johns, the prattling of Matty Parker and the good friendship of Tom Colwell; the cockroaches crawling in the Buttery; even the endless sniping of Gabriel Harvey; he missed all that. And he didn’t answer Hern.
‘Time for a story, Kit,’ Frederico said, crossing his legs over a saddle and draping an arm around Lily. Perhaps their child would have a brother or sister again one day, after all.
There was a babble of excitement from the children, who left whatever they were doing and formed a half circle around the teller of takes.
‘Give us the one about the piper and the rats,’ Brackett shouted.
‘No, no,’ Lukas sprayed. ‘The fox and the grapes.’
‘A love story,’ Lily said, looking hard at Frederico. ‘Something to warm us up on a cold night.’
‘No, no,’ Marlowe said, shaking his head. He was looking directly at Balthasar. ‘I have a new tale tonight.’
There was a chorus of oohs and aahs, real from the children, ironic from Hern and Balthasar, worried from Simon.
Marlowe waited until their noise had died down and then looked at all of them in turn, with their grubby faces and bright eyes in the flicker of the flames. ‘You may scoff –’ he smiled – ‘but I think you will enjoy it. It is a love story, a story of a journey and a cautionary tale, all rolled into one. So, lie back, my best beloved, curl up somewhere warm and soft where you can close your eyes and listen to my tale.’
He waited in the firelight until the rustling had stopped. Everyone had found their best positions and were comfortable after a good meal from the Statholder’s kitchen. The guards stepped more quietly as they passed, to catch a little of the story. Mothers clasped children in their laps, lovers clasped each other. Maria was tenderly propped on some sacks until her poor, tired back was relieved of the burden of Hern’s child in her belly, just for a while, just while she listened to the story.
‘My story begins,’ Marlowe said, in low tones which nevertheless could be heard in every corner of the courtyard, ‘both many years ago and yesterday. My story was old when Adam first walked in Eden and is as new as a new-laid egg still warm from the hen. My story is of a man who loved a woman, so much that he hardly dare look at her, let alone touch her.’
There was a sigh and a snuggling noise as Lily nestled closer under Frederico’s arm.
‘This woman was as beautiful as the day. Her hair was like the sun and her eyes were like two pools of molten sky. Her ears were like shells, pink and convoluted and when she stood in the window of the great house the man had given her to live in, the light shone through, just a little, at the tips and made them into lambent gold. Her form was as a fallow deer, spring was in her step and where she walked, flowers bloomed.’
‘There was never a woman like that,’ a voice called from the darkness. It sounded like Simon, and Marlowe thought it amusing that he alone knew; of all present, Simon was the one who should know that the least. But perhaps even priests were men, underneath.
‘No, there was not,’ Marlowe said. ‘The woman, to everyone else, had yellow hair, bluish eyes, sticking out ears and she was a bit heavy in the beam, a bit lacking up top here.’ And he sketched a shape with his hands. The men guffawed and the women sniffed their disapproval. The children, knowing a joke had been made, but not really understanding it, laughed as well.
‘But to the man who loved her, there was never one such in the world. He feared that another man would see her and win her away from him, so he kept her shut away in his great house, where she was quite tolerably happy. She had had a life before which had not been so comfortable and so she liked the feather beds, the big fires lit and tended by someone else and the food at regular times, with not too many burned bits and nothing that still had the fur on it.’
There was a dutiful chorus of various sounds of disgust and he let it settle down before continuing.
‘The woman had never thought herself beautiful, but when she saw herself reflected in the man’s eyes, she could see what he saw and this made her happy. They spent many hours gazing at each other, he drinking in her loveliness, she seeing a self that she had not known existed. Because what the man could see was the beauty within.’
Marlowe sought out where Lily lay in the darkness and knew she was looking at him from the reflected firelight in her eyes.
‘Then, one day, into their great house there came a pestilence that had no name and although it touched all there with a cold, cold finger, only the woman was really chilled by it. She fell into a deep sleep and nothing that could be done would warm or wake her. The man was by way of being a bit of a wizard, which perhaps I should have told you before. But he had not used his magic since he had met the woman, because she didn’t like it. The servants begged him to use it now, to bring their mistress back to life.’
There was a sob from far back in the courtyard and Marlowe could just see the dull shine of a guard’s helmet, bobbing as he wiped his nose on his sleeve.
‘For a long time he refused, but when it was clear that she would not wake up, he promised that he would do his best to work his magic, as he had so often fo
r so many people before. So he told his servants to keep their mistress safe, to keep her warm and to wet her lips every hour with honey, so that she should not starve, and every half an hour with clear spring water, so that she should not die through thirst.’
‘Did they do it?’ Starshine leaned forward and touched him on the knee. ‘She didn’t die, did she, Kit?’
Hern leaned forward and cuffed her lightly round the head. ‘Master Marlowe to you, miss,’ he said.
‘She didn’t die, did she, Master Marlowe?’ she repeated.
‘Wait and see,’ he whispered and opened his arms for her to sit on his lap. He didn’t ever see himself as a father, but any father could do far worse than Starshine. She jumped up and turned sideways in his lap, her ear against his heart, sucking her fingers for comfort.
‘Every day, the servants did as he told them and every day the beautiful woman lay as the dead, except that she was just slightly warmer than the air in the room and she breathed slowly, so slowly that it could hardly be seen. A flutter at the side of her neck told them that the blood was still in her body, but she was as pale as ice, and so still. While she lay there, the man travelled the world. He needed certain things and they were not to be found in the grounds of his great house.’
‘What did he need?’ Maria said, completely ravelled up in the story, her back forgotten.
‘He needed ten things,’ Marlowe said. ‘He needed a kiss from a girl with flaxen hair, given freely as the moon turned blue. He needed a thread from the robe which Christ had worn when he took his last supper. He needed an eyelash from a frog, a feather from the wing of a wandering albatross, the last breath of a man who had never spoken a blasphemy, the spittle of an albino bat.’ He looked at Brackett, still wound round by his snake, both of them basking in the heat of the fire. ‘How many is that?’
‘Six,’ Brackett said. ‘You need four more.’
‘Not I,’ Marlowe said. ‘This man, the wizard needs four more. He needed a stone from the head of a toad, he needed the first catkin of spring and the last leaf of autumn from the hazel tree that grows out of the wall of the innermost temple in the Hagia Sofia in Constantinople. And finally, he needed the blessing of his mother, in her grave the last forty years.’
‘Impossible,’ grunted Ernesto in the dark.
‘Impossible you say and you would be right. He knew that only one of these things was the magic one, but he didn’t know which one. So he travelled the world and time to get them all and after many adventures was back at the bedside of his beloved, his beautiful wife.’
He paused to listen to the clicking silence of the courtyard and felt the thrill of having an audience in the very palm of his hand. Eventually, as he had intended, someone could no longer bear it.
‘And did she come back to life?’ Eloise said.
‘Oh, yes,’ Marlowe said, with a cold smile. ‘She came back to life and told him all he ever needed to know, about how the dead live and what it was that sent them to the dead place where she had been. She knew everything and told it to the magician, the wizard, her husband.’ He finished with a flourish and said, ‘There. Did you enjoy that story?’
‘It has an odd ending,’ Maria said. ‘Does it have a moral?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Marlowe said. ‘It has several. One is that you shouldn’t believe the opinion of your own eyes. Just because it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck it still might not be a duck when the wizard gets to work on it. And the other is . . . it’s late and we should all be in bed.’ He stood up, with Starshine in his arms. ‘Whose is she, exactly?’ he asked, holding her out to the assembled Egyptians.
‘I’ll take her,’ Lily said. ‘Thank you for the story, Master Marlowe.’
‘You’re welcome, Lily,’ he said. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But you don’t need to know that – you are beautiful right through.’ He touched her cheek and Frederico pulled her to him, jealously. If there was one thing Christopher Marlowe was good at, it was making men jealous.
THIRTEEN
To prepare a trap was one thing. To see it work was another. Kit Marlowe didn’t sleep that night. He was taking a gamble, but then, all his life had been a gamble. He was staking it all on the reputation of John Dee, on the man’s ability to raise the dead. He heard the old convent clock strike one, echoed by the chimes of the Nieu Kirke and the Old Kirke moments later. Time, like everything else in South Holland, was only approximate.
He would have heard the clocks strike two but there was a sudden alarm from the south walls, harsh shouts and the crash of an arquebus, its smoke drifting along the ramparts.
‘Where?’ he heard the shouted question in Flemish.
‘South-west,’ came the reply. ‘One figure. Running.’
‘Where to?’ the question was peppered with the rattle of boot studs on cobbles and the clicking of matchlocks.
‘Ely,’ Marlowe muttered to himself.
‘Who is it?’ one guard asked another.
‘The murderer of Helene Dee,’ Marlowe smiled quietly. It was time he was gone too.
The moon was silver on the vennen, a lace of water like a vast spider’s web on the blackness of the night. Marlowe had slipped over the wall of the Prinsenhof in the confusion of whoever had gone before him and crept along the alleyways where the Night Watch rarely watched or even thought of going. Even so, there had been the odd moment. At the Milk Cross he had stumbled over a sleeping vagrant and the dogs had barked at him as he ran for the Malt Market and the Customs House. In daylight, he would have found the Wasp or, failing that, stolen a horse and ridden for the coast – it was the fastest way to go. But at night, it was different. All Holland lay on the rim of the sea, flat and vulnerable and one false step could see a man drown in the choking weed of the fenlands, the cold and lonely vennen. Men had gone that way in Cambridgeshire and Marlowe had no time to swim his way out of trouble. Not that swimming would come into it. In the freezing temperatures of the Low Countries on the eve of Christmas, the water would freeze a man’s marrow long before he could even try to strike out for dry land.
So he had hired a boat and a boatman. He gave the startled sleeper a choice. He could accept his gelder or he could accept the point of Marlowe’s dagger. It was a better choice than old Hobson ever gave anybody and the man was soon bending his back against the oars with Marlowe roaring him on in his best Flemish.
It was nearly dawn as the pair reached the Hook. All the way there, along the canals and dykes that all looked identical in the dark, Marlowe cursed himself that he had not checked the beds of the Egyptians before he left. His tale had pricked the conscience of one of them, that was certain and his killer had to be a man. No woman, not even the mercurial Lily and certainly not the encumbered Maria, could climb the walls of the Prinsenhof and drop safely to the other side wearing the heavy skirts that all the Egyptian women did. But which man? Frederico the fire-eater, who seemed so simple and yet was not? Simon the strong man, the secret Papist who brought the Mass to the desperate and abandoned? Balthasar the soothsayer, who knew Edward Kelly and had loved Rose but not saved her and saw things that other men could not? Or was it Hern, the lord of the Egyptians, who led them all across a wilderness of fear and mistrust on their journeying through the wild?
Marlowe threw his coin to the boatman who would go home grumbling, telling everyone how he was set upon by five, no, six big ruffians and how he had fought them all off in defence of his little boat. Holland was full of heroes. Marlowe hoisted his sword over his shoulder and ran through the streets, lighter now in the frosty dawn, the cobbles like glass with ice which melted as his boots struck sparks from them. The wharfs were already flickering into life as surly men were hurling barrels into place and lighting their braziers against the cold of another bitter December dawn. He reached the Customs House as the town clock clanged six. Damn. The place was bolted and barred and he rattled the locks pointlessly.
‘What’s your hurry?’ a voice croaked under an awning to his left.
‘I want a ship,’ Marlowe said. ‘To England.’
A solid-looking man in the flannels of a seafarer emerged with a pewter pot in his hand and blinked at him.
‘Is the tide right?’ Marlowe asked, hoping his Flemish was making sense.
‘Oh, yes,’ the man said. ‘The tide’s right, all right.’
‘Well, then . . .’
‘Well, then you’ve missed her.’ The man spat volubly on to the cobbles. ‘The Antelope. She’s just left.’ He pointed out to the flat darkness of the sea where a single streak of light slashed through the fleeing night clouds and showed, for an instant, the spars and sails of the Antelope making nor’-nor’-west for the Wash.
‘Was there an Egyptian on board?’ Marlowe asked.
‘A what?’ the man frowned. For the first time, he took in the foreigner in front of him. He wore Dutch clothes, expensive. And he was armed to the teeth. But there was no retinue, no man, no horse. And there were such strange people abroad in the fens these days.
‘Never mind,’ said Marlowe, absently, already planning what to do next.
‘There was only one passenger, though.’ The man spat again, clearly having his old lung trouble in the winter morning.
‘What did he look like?’ Marlowe asked.
‘Didn’t see him,’ the man croaked. ‘It being dark and all. But he was in a hurry. Had to get to England fast, he told the Master. Matter of life and death, he said it was.’
‘Death, anyway,’ Marlowe muttered. Then, ‘Do you have a boat, sir?’
The man frowned, then looked horrified, then retreated into the shadows.