by Anna Castle
“Move on, you two,” Steadfast said. “Let a real opponent come in.”
“We are real opponents.” Marlowe lifted his chin and tried to stand up straight. He got it on the second try. “We are members of this university in good standing, residents of Corpus Christi and St. John’s Colleges, respectively.” He cleared his throat loudly. “Let’s try the second question: Whether happiness consists in works of virtue?” He arched his eyebrows at Tom, leaning forward with only a trace of wobble. “That’s a clever question, Tomkin. Too clever for the lad who chose plurality of worlds. Isn’t it a clever question, Nashey?”
“Very clever. Especially with young Truculence standing here, scowling that square-jawed scowl of his, underscoring the main theme.”
“Handsome Thomas Clarady, something of a rarity, doesn’t care for charity —” Marlowe broke off. “No. It’s too clever for our little Tomkin. Someone helped him with it. Not Abraham Jenney; Jenney’s an idiot. No, it must have been one of your — let’s see, what do we call them?”
The fine hairs rose on the back of Tom’s neck. Marlowe was skating too close to that delicate matter. And now more people were wandering over, forming the half circle that fronted each disputant, ready for the debates to begin. A few university men were already grinning in anticipation of a verbal brabble. The presence of Marlowe and Nashe guaranteed it would be superlatively witty. Their reputation had spread through sheets of poetry passed from hand to hand and the plays they helped stage at St. John’s College, which were attended by everyone who could squeeze into the hall.
“I’ll change the question.” Tom snatched his placard out of Marlowe’s hand. “How about whether happiness consists in clapping your cursed mouth shut before I close it for you permanently?”
“No, I don’t like that one.” Marlowe let out a loud, rumbling burp. “Whoops! Hoi, Truculence. You wouldn’t happen to have something to drink handy?”
“You’ve had more than enough, Marlowe.” Steadfast crossed his arms.
“Giving us a drink would be an act of charity,” Nashe said. “A work of virtue. But your kind doesn’t believe in charity, do they?”
“God sees our faith whether we act or not,” Steadfast said. “He doesn’t need to be bribed.”
Nashe put a thumb on either side of his head, waggled his fingers, and chanted, “If you elect to be elected, then you know you’ve been selected. But a sorry ne’er-do-well must be headed straight for hell.”
Several men in the circle laughed.
“Say, that’s not bad,” Marlowe said. “For doggerel.”
“Doggerel’s the best a wag like me can do.” Nashe bent double and shook his arse at the audience.
That won him another round of laughs.
Marlowe turned back to Tom with a snap of his graceful fingers. “I’ll bet your uncle helped you with that clever question.”
“Oh, has he an uncle?” Nashe asked.
“I do believe he does.”
“Is he anything like your uncle?”
“Very like, or so I suspect.”
“Is Marlowe’s uncle a lawyer too?” Steadfast asked Tom. “I thought his father was a shoemaker.”
“He isn’t. I mean, he is. The father, I mean.” Tom shook his head, feeling desperate. He had to get control of this situation before it went any further.
“I wish I had such an uncle.” Nashe craned his neck to scan the upper galleries. “Perhaps one will adopt me tomorrow during my disputation.”
“Not you, Nashey,” Marlowe said. “You’re a babbler.”
“Well, you’re a scribbler.”
“Now you’re quibbling,” Marlowe said.
“We’re a pair of scribbling, quibbling bibble-babblers,” Nashe replied. They giggled at each other, delighted with their drunken wit.
Tom had had enough. He grabbed Marlowe by the shoulder and turned him half around. He looked straight into his eyes and poured scorn into his voice. “I never would have pegged you for a loose-lipped bottle-sucker. I wonder what your uncle would say about it. Would he find it amusing, you barging in with your clown act when someone else’s play is on the stage?”
Marlowe’s grin stiffened. “I know when a scene has played itself out.” He turned back to Nashe. “Next question!”
“C’mon, Kit,” someone in the crowd cried. “Choose one!” Others echoed the plea.
Marlowe grinned at them and bowed. “If only I could find one commensurate with my gifts.” He picked up the last placard. “What have we here? Whether the married man is happiest?”
“That can’t be right.” Nashe grabbed it from him. “You’re too drunk to read.” He read it aloud again, ending with a blurt of laughter. He flapped the card at Tom. “This tired old dog? Then again, I remember you as a bit of a hound, catting around the town chasing anything in a light skirt.”
“That sounds more like our Tom,” Marlowe said. “Marriage is hardly his area of expertise, is it?”
Tom wasn’t sure where this was heading, but knew he wouldn’t like it. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a pair of fair-haired children worming their way to the front. The Wingfields had joined their circle.
“I’ll take that question,” a student in a tall brown hat said. “I want to argue in favor of marriage.” He reached for the placard with his outstretched hand, but his eyes were on someone in the audience.
Tom followed his gaze. Suddenly, the center of the cosmos shifted, narrowing to a single shining figure: a beautiful young woman with the round Wingfield face. Her hair was exactly the color of sunshine in June, and her eyes were one shade bluer than cornflowers. Her cheeks were as pink and dewy as new-blooming roses, and her lily-white breasts rose roundly beneath her thin partlet. She looked straight at Tom with the sweetest smile he’d ever seen curved on her strawberry lips.
“Tom,” Steadfast said, from what seemed a great echoing distance, “I’d like you to meet my sister, Abstinence.”
“Abstinence!” Marlowe crowed.
“Makes the lust grow hotter,” Nashe quipped. Then his head snapped back as Steadfast’s iron fist drove into his jaw. He stumbled against the students behind him, tripped on his gown, and fell flat on his bottom.
Laughter rose up along with applause. A light thrashing was a standard part of any Thomas Nashe comedy.
He scrabbled backward crab-wise. Steadfast stalked after him with clenched fists. Grinning students separated to give them room. Tom saw Mr. Barrow and another man — probably a master from St. John’s — angling toward the pair.
Marlowe tapped him on the shoulder. “You have an opponent here, waiting to argue your question.”
Tom turned to face him, blinking. He spared a glance at the student holding the placard, noticing that the man was tapping his foot impatiently. But Tom knew he had to stop Marlowe before the sack-sopped fool could bring his whole enterprise to ruin.
“Will you argue for the celibate life?” Marlowe asked. “I doubt you can.” He snapped his fingers again, right in Tom’s face. “I have it! You can argue whether the married woman is happiest. You know quite a bit about married women, don’t you, Tom? How to keep them happy? The chirping hen in her well-feathered nest. Only at Corpus Christi, it’s the Tom who lays the Egg twice or thrice a week.” He thrust his head forward, baring his teeth in a challenging grin. “Tell me, Tom, does she squaaaawk when you —”
Tom drove his fist straight into that sneering vizard. But Marlowe was ready for it. In the two seconds it took for Tom’s hand to travel past the poet’s ear, drawing his center of gravity behind it, he realized he’d been provoked into throwing that punch. He felt his arm being tugged forward as Marlowe’s knee rose sharply into his gut.
“That’s for Barty,” Marlowe whispered into his ear as he doubled over, air rushing out of his lungs with a grunt. He gave Tom a push, sending him staggering, and walked away.
After that? Not a chance.
Tom set his hands on his knees and took a deep breath. Then two quick steps an
d he grabbed Marlowe by the shoulder with one hand, turning him to land his fist squarely on the chin this time. They were well-matched in strength, reach, and agility. Tom’s first training had come from his father’s sailors on the ship. Those skills had been polished by a German boxing master in London. Marlowe had evidently learned to fight on the street and given his temperament, done quite a bit of it. Soon they were rolling under the arcade, onlookers leaping from their path.
Tom found himself on top, struggling to hold the kicking, thrashing Marlowe down. He leaned close and growled, “I did not kill Leeds. Get out of my way and stay out of my affairs!”
Marlowe got an arm free and pounded on Tom’s back. Tom raised his right arm, ready to strike, when a huge hand wrapped itself around his fist. Another one hooked into the collars of both gown and doublet and lifted him bodily into the air. A second constable hauled Marlowe to his feet. The beadle stood nearby, holding his mace of office. “Take these gentlemen to the Tolbooth, where they can finish their disputation in private.”
Chapter Seventeen
“What devil possessed you?” Tom had waited until his cellmate finished pissing and settled back into the straw before asking. He retained some shreds of courtesy, even in gaol.
“Huh?” Marlowe sounded groggy, thick-throated. He looked terrible, bleary and bedraggled, his eyes like dark hollows in the failing light.
Tom had been watching the light change, moment by moment, for the past two hours — ever since the gaoler turned the key in the lock. The constables had marched them out of Common Schools and across the High Street to the Tolbooth, where they’d sat on a bench beside three other undergraduates sporting black eyes and muddied gowns. Then they’d been herded into the courtroom, where they’d stood before the proctor in his high polished chair while he blathered on about making an example and being disgusted by wretched ingrates who failed to recognize the honor due these hallowed fiddle-etcetera-faddle . . .
The students kept their eyes on the floor. No one spoke. The proctor painted their infractions in the darkest possible terms, but Tom knew no one was ever kept more than a night or two for mere brawling, even during formal exercises. Fights were not uncommon during disputations, after all. Philosophy was serious business at a university, and tempers ran high in the spring. A full-blown riot had broken out during Tom’s freshman year. Windows were broken, respectable townspeople insulted. This was nothing.
Their fines were set, more than Tom had in his purse. When the proctor caught him counting his coins by touch, he added that he would release them only into the custody of a senior Fellow of their own college and that no one was going anywhere until the next morning.
Then the constables prodded them up a dark and winding stair. The other lads were handed off to a gaoler on the third floor. Tom and Marlowe were taken to the last cell at the very top. At least the stink was less intense up there. Marlowe kicked more than his share of the straw into a heap against one wall and flopped onto it, falling instantly into a deep sleep. Tom sat with his back against the cold stones of the rear wall, his legs stretched out before him. He was not the least bit sleepy in spite of a restless night and an eventful day.
At first he thought about nothing, or nothing much. Using Marlowe’s sprawled figure as a yardstick, he estimated their cell was about six and half feet square, barely enough for him to stretch out if he wanted to lie down. They had a few drifts of straw that had seen better days, a piss bucket, and two windows, if you counted the five-inch barred hole in the door as a window. The other was high on the west wall, unbarred and unshuttered. Who would leap from a four-story building to escape from a university gaol?
The church bells tolled three shortly after the door was locked. A band of sunlight striped down from the window, highlighting Tom’s shoes. They’d need a thorough cleaning. Poor Diligence! He’d done such a good job on them yesterday, and now his work was wasted.
Bells tolled every half hour, not all at exactly the same time. He’d never noticed the differences before. Wasn’t there some sort of committee to keep such things in order? He was fairly sure the deep-throated clong clong was Great St. Mary’s and the clear pang, pong, pang, pong was King’s College Chapel, but he couldn’t distinguish any others, not even his own college chapel, they were so blended together. He’d never realized how many bells there were in Cambridge.
He remembered when he had first come up from Dorset, back in ‘83. He’d been fifteen; it seemed like a lifetime ago. The bells had kept him awake at night, distracted him in lectures, measured out his life. At some point, he’d stopped hearing them. When did that happen? They echoed hauntingly across the waters of the Granta and between the walls of the tall stone college buildings. He should start listening to them again, while he could, before he went back down to Gray’s.
The beam of sunshine slowly tilted up the wall, like a lever pushing up the light and leaving shadows in its wake. At six o’clock, the bells broke into a mad clamor, pealing the end of the day, loud enough to wake the dead — and Christopher Marlowe.
First he snorted and twitched, then he groaned and collapsed again. Then he yawned, wrinkling his whole face, and started to stretch full length, arms over his head, when his hands and feet cracked against the rough stone walls. “Ow! Where’m —”
Tom laughed softly, enjoying the unintended comedy.
Marlowe’s eyes snapped open and he pushed himself into a sitting position, leaving a trail in the straw. He blinked at Tom like an owl with a hangover. “You.” He looked around the small cell, spotted the bucket by the door, and got to his feet to take a long, noisy piss.
So much for the bells.
The smell of fresh urine overpowered the weaker smells of mold and dust and ratshit. At least his cellmate was a healthy young man and not some poxy old sot living under a bridge.
“You know,” Tom mused, “if rats drank piss and ate shit, gaols wouldn’t be half so bad. Cramped and musty, but not foul.”
“And if the walls were made of cheese, we could feed ourselves and free ourselves at a swallow.” Marlowe ran a hand through his hair and came up with a fistful of straw. “Is that what you’ve been thinking about all afternoon?”
“I’ve been thinking about many things. Foremost at the moment is what devil possessed you to pick a fight with me in the Common Schools? You’ve been following me around and getting up my nose for weeks. If you wanted to fight me, couldn’t you choose a nice quiet lane somewhere?”
“Ah. Well, I was drunk.” He grinned, lads together. Tom didn’t grin back. Then he shrugged, perhaps a shade apologetically. “We started early. End of term, Easter coming up. I won’t be seeing old Nashey for a while. I got to talking about Barty. I guess we drank a little too much.”
Tom made a rude noise.
“All right, more than a little. Then Nashe got the bright idea of going to Schools to heckle the disputants, to cheer me up. But when I saw you standing there, all puffed and pleased with yourself, with that frenetical Puritan at your side, it made my blood boil. You’ve obviously given up on finding Barty’s murderer.”
“That’s not exactly the way things are,” Tom said, but not without sympathy.
Marlowe’s voice was laden with grief. How would Tom feel if someone snuck in while he was sleeping and killed one of his friends? Ben — or worse, Trumpet? He couldn’t bear it, not for a minute, not even as an exercise of the imagination. The actual deed would drive him mad, crazed with vengeful fury that could only be slaked by strangling the killer with his own bare hands. Or better, pounding him bloody with his fists and then delivering him to the sheriff so he could have the acid pleasure of watching him hang.
Failing that, he’d probably strike out at whoever was handiest. “I’m surprised you waited so long.”
A soft laugh: apology tendered and accepted, both ways. “I’m a patient man,” Marlowe said.
“But why me? I’m the only one who believes he didn’t hang himself.”
“Barty died becau
se of you.”
“No,” Tom said. “For the last time, I did not —”
“I know you didn’t kill him personally.” Marlowe kicked his straw around a bit and sat down. “That wouldn’t make sense, would it? You come here out of the blue with your ridiculous story of the penitent privateer and move in to a sudden vacancy in Barty’s rooms. What happened to Edward Crawley, by the way? Nothing nasty, I hope.”
“He went down to Middle Temple, I think,” Tom said. “Neither nasty nor interesting.”
“Convenient though. A place was arranged for you, by your uncle. Or your uncle’s master?”
Tom shrugged. “Think whatever you want.”
“I always do,” Marlowe said. Was it possible to hear a sardonic smile? It had grown too dark to see his face.
He went on, his voice soft but somehow resonant. “Barty told me about the day you first showed up. A rainy afternoon, he remembered. You strode into the hall, booted and saddle-weary, water dripping from your cloak, damp curls peeking out from under your hat. Enter the handsome stranger; all heads turn to admire. I imagine you looked around the hall in that smiling, open-faced way you have, ready to be liked, wondering where the fun could be found.”
“Sounds about right.” Tom refused to be baited. “Where were you, come to think of it? Term had already started. I was a few days late, thanks to the weather.”
“I was elsewhere. I have a family too, you know. A father, a mother. Two sisters.”
“So you were in Canterbury?”
“Many men spend New Year’s at home.”
Tom laughed. “All right, don’t tell me.” He hadn’t expected a straight answer. He’d learned a great deal from Marlowe about how to answer questions without supplying a scrap of information. “It’s a kind of artistry, isn’t it?”
“Tradecraft, more precisely. Takes practice. Although I like to think there’s artistry in the way I do it.” Marlowe cleared his throat. “I’m parched. But let’s return to your story. Barty told me you settled right in and studied hard. He was pleased with you, as a student.”