by M. J. Trow
‘Forgive me for the interruption,’ the traveller said. ‘I just had to see that . . . thing . . . for myself. May I?’ and he held out his hand.
Marlowe passed the rough doll to him and waited.
‘I am Reginald Scot,’ he said, ‘and I have some knowledge of these things.’
Now Shaxsper was on his feet. ‘Don’t let him touch it, Kit,’ he hissed. ‘Get it back.’
‘Kit?’ Scot looked up at the taller, darker man and smiled. ‘Would that be Kit with the Canstick?’ he asked.
Shaxsper gasped. ‘Tom Tumbler,’ he said, and he crossed himself. ‘Boneless . . .’
‘And the Spoorne,’ Scot went on, still smiling, ‘the Mare, the Man in the Oak. Not forgetting the Puckle, the Firedrake, Hob Gobblin . . . oh, and Robin Goodfellow, of course.’
Shaxsper had turned quite pale. ‘Who are you?’ he whispered.
‘I told you,’ Scot said.
‘No, no.’ Shaxsper shook his head. ‘What are you?’
Scot threw the rag doll on to the table and crossed to the fireplace. He pointed to a ewer and said ‘What does a man have to do to get a drink around here?’
Shaxsper seemed frozen, rooted to the spot but Marlowe did the honours. Scot wafted the wine under his nose.
‘Checking for poison, Master Scot?’ Marlowe asked.
‘Ah,’ Scot said, wagging a finger at him, ‘the first sensible thing I’ve heard all night. Tell me, Kit with the Canstick, are you by any chance a university man?’
‘I am.’ Marlowe nodded. ‘Cambridge.’
Scot beamed. ‘Oh, bad luck. Oxford. Hart Hall.’
‘Corpus Christi, and the name is Marlowe, not Canstick. Just for the record. Although some have called me a demon.’
Scot chuckled and sipped his wine. ‘You’re the playwright,’ he said, ‘with Lord Strange’s Men.’
Marlowe nodded.
‘And you, sir?’ The hop grower looked at Shaxsper.
‘I’m a playwright, too,’ he said.
Marlowe smiled and poured more wine all round.
‘Really?’ Scot frowned. ‘How unlikely. You have the air of a burgher, sir. And local, by your accent. Here without your wife and children, I imagine.’
Shaxsper was on his feet, his quick temper, already simmering, come suddenly to the boil. ‘Have you been following me, sir?’ he shouted in Scot’s face. ‘Someone is at my back, I feel it. Is it you?’
Scot stepped back a pace and put a calming hand on Shaxsper’s chest. ‘I follow no one who is not up to no good,’ he said. ‘I assumed the wife, Master . . . Glover, is it?’ He cast a questioning glance at Marlowe.
‘The name’s Shaxsper,’ the Stratford man shouted.
‘Ah.’ Scot looked knowing and stepped back another pace. ‘You are travelling incognito. A wise move for a man running away from home.’
Shaxsper looked as though he would explode. ‘I’m not running away from anything or anyone,’ he bawled. ‘I . . .’ He suddenly seemed to run out of steam and collapsed back in his chair, all passion spent. ‘I am a glover by trade. I have a wife and three children. I come from Stratford but . . .’ He looked up at Scot with his slightly popping and divergent eyes. ‘I need to at least try to be a playwright. I need to go to London, just to find out if I am any good.’ He looked down at the floor despondently.
Scot clapped him on the back in a cheery fashion. ‘And are you any good, Master Shaxsper?’ He looked at Marlowe as he spoke, who shook his head just twice and made a rueful mouth.
Shaxsper shrugged.
‘I am a little curious,’ Marlowe said, to break the mood. ‘How did you know about the three children?’
‘I didn’t know it was three,’ Scot admitted. ‘But there is a shiny line on Master Shaxsper’s breeches about so high –’ he gestured with a downturned palm – ‘from the ground, the height of a two or three year old child’s nose. I know when my own Elizabeth was small, I bore such a badge of honour. Then, on your shoulder, another well-cleaned patch, where a baby might posset its milk after a feed. I confess I never had such a mark, leaving such moments to the wet nurse and my wife, but times have changed since then, perhaps. You are one of the new breed of men, Master Shaxsper, perhaps, who care more for their children.’
‘Twins,’ muttered Shaxsper to the floor. ‘A lot of work, twins.’
‘Well.’ Scot spread his hands and looked at Marlowe modestly. ‘I was right, but perhaps only be accident.’
Marlowe looked impressed. ‘I am very impressed, Master Scot,’ he said. ‘I am an observant man myself, but had not noticed the marks on Master Shaxsper’s clothing, except to wonder why he looked so . . . so . . .’
‘Even so,’ Scot said, and with a deprecatory cough continued with the conversation as though Shaxsper’s outburst had never happened. ‘Do I detect a hint of Kent in your voice, Master Marlowe?’
‘Canterbury.’ Marlowe smiled. ‘And call me Kit, Master Scot, do. But without the canstick, if you don’t mind. And your accent needs no magic to identify it. Maidstone, at a guess.’
‘Correct,’ Scot said, reaching out for the doll again, seeming drawn to it.
‘Look.’ Shaxsper had put up with this old boys’ act for as long as he could and the doll was making him feel very uneasy. ‘Just what the Hell is going on here?’
‘Ah, Hell,’ Scot said. ‘Very perceptive of you, Master Playwright. That’s exactly what you’re supposed to think.’
‘Whereas you think attempted murder,’ Marlowe said.
Scot did not answer. ‘May I see Lord Strange?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Marlowe told him. ‘Sir William has put an armed guard on his door.’
‘That’ll do no good,’ Shaxsper said. ‘The Devil knows no locks.’
Marlowe rested his back against the fireplace. ‘With charms I drive both sea and cloud,’ he said. ‘I make it calm and blow aloud. The viper’s jaws, the rocky stone, the force of earth congealed in one . . .’
Scot chimed in, ‘. . . I make the souls of men arise. I pull the moon out of the skies.’
Shaxsper was even more rattled now than he was before. ‘What’s that? Some spell?’
‘No, Will.’ Marlowe crossed to the man, his voice calm and kind. ‘It’s the Roman poet, Ovid. Fifteen hundred years ago he wrote of the power of witches.’ He looked into the Stratford man’s eyes. ‘It’s just a poem. It’s the sort of thing they don’t let university scholars read these days. I assume that’s true of Oxford, Master Scot?’
‘Sadly, yes. And that’s Reginald, by the way. Now, look, er . . . Will, is it?’
The glover-playwright nodded. If this man had forgotten his surname, all to the better. He didn’t like his knowledge, the way he scoffed at nature and at God.
‘The doll,’ Scot went on, ‘is the likeness of Lord Strange, I assume.’
Shaxsper nodded, and pointed vaguely to his forehead, his throat and finally his chest. The wicked thorn was still embedded in the doll in what was meant to be the location of the heart.
‘It’s just a toy,’ Scot said, ‘a piece of mysticism and nonsense, designed to frighten little children.’
‘As is Kit with the Canstick,’ said Marlowe, ‘and Boneless.’
‘And all the others,’ Scot continued. ‘Fustian. The sort of stuff you playwrights deal in.’
‘But . . . Robin Goodfellow, surely,’ Shaxsper said. ‘He’s real.’
‘Puck?’ Scot raised an eyebrow. ‘Spoiler of milk and scatterer of soot? He who can girdle the earth in forty minutes? Come on, Will. Where have you been living all your life?’
‘Here,’ Shaxsper shouted. ‘Right here in Stratford. And I’ve seen what the Devil can do. I want no more of it. I’ve a family. You can keep your plays, Kit. And Master Scot, your explanations. Lord Strange was as fit as a flea before he saw that poppet. And now Death waits in his chamber.’ He looked at them both, then snatched up his extra pair of gloves and his bundle of poetry tied with a bow and was gone.
; Marlowe refilled Scot’s goblet.
‘Does he?’ Scot asked. ‘Does Death attend Lord Strange?’
‘I’m no doctor,’ Marlowe said. ‘Sir William sent for one hours since, but the local medical men are like Master Shaxsper. They come to heal the body but fear only for our souls.’
‘And you, Kit Marlowe.’ Scot looked at him steadily. ‘Do you not fear for yours?’
Marlowe smiled and answered, ‘If there was a Devil, I’d be afraid of him. If there was a God . . .’
Scot’s mouth opened but he said nothing and Marlowe turned away to look out of the window. In the silent courtyard below, the once-flaming torches were out now, wisps of smoke rising from them like ghosts in the near-dawn. Little, creeping winds blew the ribbons fluttering around Sledd’s stage and all that was left of the orchestra were abandoned chairs at rakish angles in the grass.
‘You’ve come a long way from Maidstone to watch a masque,’ Marlowe commented after a while.
There was another pause and then Scot gave a low chuckle. ‘I had heard that there were good fishermen in Canterbury,’ he said. Marlowe turned from the window with a smile, and a cocked and questioning eyebrow. Scot could see that he was going to have to tell the man a few more facts. ‘No, you’ve guessed aright. The masque would have been an hour’s relaxation, nothing more. I’m a hop grower, seeking to introduce the plant into this leafy county.’
Marlowe leaned back on the sill, his back resting on the window transom and looked out again on to the dark court. ‘And I’m the Pope’s arse wiper,’ he said to the night. He turned his head to Scot. ‘Try again.’
Scot gave him a look of surprised innocence which fooled nobody. He hauled a leather-bound book from his knapsack. ‘Here’s proof,’ he said. ‘My Hoppe Platform. Not bad, though I do say it myself.’
Marlowe looked at it and thumbed the pages. ‘What about the other book you carry?’ he asked.
‘How did you . . .?’ Scot didn’t like to be surprised by any man, especially one from Canterbury and Cambridge. But he complied anyway and pulled out a much older volume, the leather scarred and worn. It was in Latin.
‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ Marlowe said, reading the title aloud. ‘The hammer of the witches.’
‘Do you know it?’ Scot asked.
‘I know of it,’ Marlowe told him. ‘Rather like Ovid, it’s not exactly on the reading list at Corpus Christi.’
‘It should be,’ Scot told him. ‘If only to remind us all of the vicious nonsense spouted by the Papist church.’
Marlowe frowned. ‘I didn’t have you down for a Puritan, Reginald.’
‘Oh, I’m not. Until I see what wicked rubbish leads to in Christ’s kingdom. The tortures. The murders. I’ve seen things in Germany, Kit . . .’ His voice trailed away. He cleared his throat. ‘I am in Warwickshire researching for the next edition of my latest book. A Discovery of Witchcraft, it’s called. It came out last year, but it wasn’t really ready, to my mind. The publishers have promised to put in my new material, when they print more.’
‘It’s a good title.’ Marlowe nodded, although, good title or not, he doubted the next printing would ever happen. He had dealt with publishers himself and knew them for a tricky bunch. ‘But why Warwickshire?’
‘Place is riddled with it. Or rather, the fear of it.’
‘You don’t believe it, then?’
‘Of course not.’ Scot snorted. ‘Will Shaxsper does.’
Marlowe chuckled. ‘He has small children,’ he said. ‘Probably frightens them to sleep with tales of things that go bump in the night and got a bit carried away by his own imagination.’
‘Oh, there are witches, all right.’ Scot was warming to his theme. ‘Poor, deluded souls who seek an explanation for the great cruelty of this world with the supernatural. None of it’s real. And all of it’s condoned by the church of Rome.’
‘And the Church of Elizabeth, as I understand it. Chelmsford?’
‘What do you know of Chelmsford?’ Scot asked. ‘You couldn’t have been much more than a tot in your hanging sleeves.’
‘It was still the talk of the Cambridge taverns when I was there.’
‘Yes,’ growled Scot, ‘Mother Waterhouse and her talking cat. You couldn’t make it up.’
Marlowe turned to face the man. ‘The doll is real,’ he said and snatched it up. ‘In the likeness of Lord Strange. The velvet doublet, the square-cut collar, the mole on his forehead.’
‘So?’
‘What does Will Shaxsper believe?’
Scot sat on the settle and crossed his legs. ‘He believes that the poppet is Lord Strange. That the doll was made by malefica, a black witch.’ He looked at the image in Marlowe’s hand. ‘It is ripped across the belly. Is that where Lord Strange’s trouble is?’
Marlowe nodded. ‘He complained of pains there, yes, as we carried him to his bed.’
‘Because he is a believer, too.’ Scot shrugged. ‘Such nonsense can only work if you believe in it. Ovid’s Greek witches could pull down the moon. Ours can kill Lord Strange.’
‘And in the real world?’
‘Not my department,’ Scot said, getting up and collecting both his books. He paused. ‘But I’ve got a feeling it’s yours.’ He tucked the books away and extended a hand. ‘It has been an education, Kit,’ he said.
‘Likewise, Reginald.’ Marlowe shook it. ‘Are you for the road?’
‘Yes, I’m making for Meon Hill.’
‘Meon Hill?’
Scot tapped the side of his nose. ‘There are more witches under Meon Hill than trees in a forest, so I’m told.’ He paused in the doorway. ‘And you know, Kit, rather like Master Shaxsper, I believe everything I’m told.’
TEN
No one. Absolutely no one was to come to Lord Strange that night, and the two armed men on his door were there to see that Sir William Clopton’s orders were carried out. If Marlowe had been Kit with the Canstick, he would have drifted like candle smoke through the keyhole. If he’d been Boneless, he’d have shifted his shape and slid under the door. As it was, he was Kit Marlowe and he dropped heavy coins into the men’s purses while they studiously looked the other way.
Ferdinando Stanley lay like a corpse on the high tester bed, bedecked with the brocaded Clopton arms. He who travelled with no servants desperately needed one now. Ned Sledd and Nat Sawyer had stripped the man of his day clothes and wrapped him in a nightshirt tied to the neck. But no one, not even Ned and certainly not Nat had the nerve to spend the night in that pain-wracked room. After all, they were troupers and both of them had a stage to de-rig and musicians to pay off. Gate money had to be returned and the gunpowder carefully moved out of harm’s way.
Joyce Clopton had offered to stay with the shivering, rambling lord, but her father wouldn’t hear of it and she was shooed away. The casement had been locked, the door bolted on the outside and the guards placed. Marlowe checked the window, its sill sickly smelling with fennel. He checked the fireplace, black and empty. On the table alongside the bed lay a goblet of water, which he sniffed and tasted briefly on the tip of his tongue and a Bible, black and comforting in Latin and Greek.
The candle was burnt down to a stub and there was a winding sheet of wax pinning it to the table. The room was full of the small noises that a man makes even when he is unconscious, tiny clickings of tongue on palate, a sibilance of air in the nose. These noises were always present, but there was something about a death chamber which made them louder, echoing in the silence between each laboured breath. Picking up the candle, Marlowe dressed its wick to make it burn more brightly in its last minutes and peeled back the coverlet to see what a dying man could tell him, though he had no powers of speech.
Strange’s breathing was laboured and his colour ghastly. His eyes were half open but he seemed to see nothing. He had clearly not moved since he had been put to bed and Marlowe felt the man’s wrist to find a pulse. It was there, but barely and the playwright covered the man up again and sat in a corner, wait
ing for the dawn to bring the room to life with its dove-light.
The crowing of the cock made Lord Strange stir. He opened his eyes wide and Marlowe was sitting on the bed beside him, holding his outstretched hand and cradling the patient’s head.
‘Marlowe,’ Strange mumbled, trying to make his tongue work. ‘Marlowe, is that you?’
‘It is, My Lord,’ Marlowe said, standing up and releasing the man’s hand. ‘Welcome back.’
Strange frowned up at him and struggled into a sitting position. ‘Oh, Kit,’ he whispered, his voice rasping and harsh, ‘I have spent such a night.’ He gasped in memory of it. ‘I saw her, Kit.’ He clawed at the playwright’s sleeve. ‘The woman with no eyes. I saw her again. Here at the Hall.’
‘When was this?’ Marlowe asked.
Strange seemed nonplussed by the question. ‘I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘Was it . . . before . . . or . . . was it a dream?’ Suddenly, he sat bolt upright, his arms rigid in front of him, his fists tightly balling up the coverlet, his knuckles white. ‘The poppet,’ he hissed, through clenched teeth. ‘The poppet with my face.’
‘A doll, My Lord,’ Marlowe said softly, patting the man’s hand. ‘A child’s toy, nothing more.’
Strange looked at him. ‘It was a Devil’s doll,’ he said as though the weight of the world lay on him. ‘Put there by a witch. And a thorn was through my heart. Help me up, Kit. I must go home, while I still can.’
‘Sir –’ Marlowe studied the struggling lord – ‘You are not well enough . . .’
‘Help me or not, as you will,’ Strange barked and coughed with the effort of raising his voice. ‘But with or without you, I’m going home. If I’m to die, I’ll do it in my own bed.’
The camp that had been building over the last few days broke up the next morning. The canvas and the ropes came down and the braziers were stashed away.
‘Well, that’s it,’ Sledd said, hands on hips. ‘The party’s well and truly over. Oxford it is.’
‘What about His Lordship?’ Thomas asked. He wasn’t sure Sledd was still talking him to him now that his balls had dropped and he was staring Other Employment in the face.