by Trow, M J
‘Quite.’ Aldred took his first proper swig of the morning and shuddered as the burgundy hit his tonsils. ‘But even without her support, Johns would have won the day. A determined bugger, isn’t he? For a scholar, I mean? I refused at first, but he dashed off into the night and found a patrolling Watchman. I sent Veronique for a doctor.’
‘This doctor,’ Marlowe said. ‘Can he be trusted?’
‘Of course not,’ Aldred snorted. ‘He’s a doctor. But Johns paid him over the odds so he’ll keep his mouth shut for a while.’
‘What about the Watch?’
‘Apparently Johns had the very devil of a job to get him to come along at all. He took one look at Phelippes and then at Johns, said “Lovers’ tiff?” and shrugged. I slipped him a couple of bottles and sent him on his way. Waste of space!’
‘So that leaves you, Solomon,’ Marlowe said, leaning closer. ‘Have you received such a visitor before?’
‘Never,’ Aldred told him. ‘Oh, I’ve had the odd run in with an aggrieved customer. Some nonsense about spoiled brandy and a watered-down Bordeaux – all rubbish, of course. But a thief in the night? No, never. There isn’t a thief in Rheims who would risk meeting Veronique in the dark, I shouldn’t think.’
‘A thief?’ Marlowe frowned. ‘What was taken?’
‘Nothing,’ Aldred told him. ‘At least I don’t think so. Johns and Phelippes must have disturbed him. I checked the other rooms; nothing amiss there.’
Both men fell silent.
‘A groat for your thoughts, Kit Marlowe,’ the vintner said after a while.
Marlowe laughed. ‘You can have my thoughts freely, Master Aldred,’ he said. ‘Though you might have to pay for my poetry and plays.’ He looked at the man. He was far from ideal, but at this hour, between Lauds and Prime, he was all Marlowe had. And he’d have to do. ‘I was sent to find a fugitive,’ he said. ‘One Matthew Baxter, one of Babington’s plotters. You tell me he’s here, under an assumed name, at the English College.’
‘The scorpions’ nest,’ Aldred reminded him.
Marlowe nodded. ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘And the scorpions are killing each other in that nest. There was another one last night.’
‘What?’ Aldred sat up, slopping his drink.
‘A scholar, name of Brooke. Nice lad. I had dinner in his company on one of my first nights here.’
‘Another one for the crypt.’ Aldred nodded, topping up his spilled drink.
‘This one was suffocated,’ Marlowe told him. ‘Probably with the pillow he lay on.’
Aldred frowned. ‘A scholar. Didn’t he sleep in a dormitory?’
Marlowe shook his head. ‘A shared room,’ he said.
‘And his ingle?’
‘No sign.’ Marlowe sighed. ‘As missing as any pattern I can see – or rather can’t see – in this whole wretched business. Three men are dead by my reckoning. Charles, hanged and thrown from an upstairs window. Father Laurenticus, stabbed to death in his bed. And now Brooke . . .’
‘Two scholars and a tutor,’ Aldred said, thinking out loud. ‘Any connection between them? Other than the English College, I mean?’
‘None that I can work out yet.’ A sudden thought occurred to him. ‘What time did the intruder attack Phelippes?’ he asked Aldred.
‘Two, three of the clock,’ the vintner guessed. ‘Why?’
Marlowe sighed. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s all spinning in my head, Solomon, like St Catherine’s wheel. Could the man who tried to kill Phelippes also succeed with Edmund Brooke? Could he have got into the English College from here in time?’
‘The journey is possible,’ the vintner said. ‘But get into the College? That’s impossible after cock-shut time. In fact, it’s impossible at any hour. There are only two gates and they’re both guarded night and day . . .’ It was his turn to be visited by a sudden thought. ‘Then, how . . .?’
‘Did a mild-mannered Cambridge professor covered in blood get past the guard to bring me your little piece of news this morning?’ Marlowe smiled, nodding. ‘That is a very good question, Master Aldred. I wish I had an answer.’
TEN
They were whispering among themselves that afternoon as Marlowe turned the corner. Ahead of him, scattering as they heard his boots clattering on the cobbles, a knot of scholars went about their business. This was the second time that day that Marlowe had had to break through a cordon of ghouls and he hoped it wasn’t for the same reason as in the morning.
The sun had reached its zenith now, surprisingly warm for October, and on a sudden breeze Marlowe realized what had drawn the scholars’ attention. Puffs of smoke were wafting from the stable yard, but they were few, deliberate and not the harbingers of some conflagration. A grey gelding was standing on three legs in the courtyard while the fourth was held up by a blacksmith, nailing the newly forged metal to its hoof. The animal waited patiently for the procedure to be carried out, only the occasional flick of its tail marking his impatience.
Sitting on a bale of straw with his back to the wall sat the surly Londoner Solomon Aldred had told Marlowe about. He had arrived recently enough for him to possibly be the man the projectioner had been sent by Walsingham to find. But he was not surly this afternoon. There was a pipe in his hand and he was blowing smoke rings to the sky. A flagon of ale lay on the straw beside him and he seemed content with the world.
‘A fine animal,’ Marlowe said by way of greeting. ‘We haven’t met.’ He extended his hand. ‘Robert Greene.’
‘John Abbot,’ the Londoner said, catching it. The grip was firm, the eyes wary. He was giving nothing away.
‘Yours?’ Marlowe sat himself down and nodded to the horse.
‘Bought him yesterday,’ Abbot told him. ‘I thought the London horse swindlers were a tough lot, but here in Rheims . . . Let’s say they saw me coming.’
‘You didn’t bring your own horse over?’ Marlowe asked. ‘From home, I mean?’
‘Not worth the cost,’ Abbot said. ‘And anyway, I wasn’t sure what sort of welcome I’d get. You?’
‘Ship to Rouen. Upriver from there. Is this your first time in the English College?’
‘My first and my last,’ Abbot grunted.
Marlowe looked surprised. ‘Dr Allen’s welcome not to your liking?’ he asked.
‘Oh, there’s nothing wrong with Allen,’ Abbot said. ‘It’s just that the place is just so damned . . . well, foreign, isn’t it? I mean, the English College. I thought I’d find tobacco, ale, pigs’ trotters, jellied eels.’
‘Instead of which?’
‘God knows.’ Abbot shrugged. ‘Things with eyes in. Horse. And snails. I mean, is that natural, Greene? Is it?’
Marlowe smiled at the man. ‘You seem to be coping.’ He pointed to the pipe and the ale.
‘Ah, the last of my personal stash. I’d offer you some of both, but . . . well, replenishment might be a little tricky.’
‘Where are you from?’ Marlowe asked. He didn’t expect a rush of confession from the man but the slow chip-chip at the outer shell might yield something.
‘Just north of the city wall,’ Abbot told him. ‘The White Chapel. St Mary Matfelon. Know it?’
Marlowe shook his head. ‘I’m from Cambridge, myself,’ he said. ‘Corpus Christi College.’
‘Ah.’ Abbot nodded, taking a selfish swig from the pitcher. ‘I’m a Furnival’s Inn man, of sorts.’
‘Of sorts?’
‘Never finished the course. Thought I was cut out to be a lawyer, then discovered I couldn’t stand the buggers. Oh, don’t misunderstand me. I’m as grasping and cut-throat as the next serjeant-at-law but they’re so bloody arrogant, aren’t they? Always quoting some damn law from the sixteenth of Edward I and expecting that to have some bearing on the state of things today.’
Marlowe sighed, leaning back against the wall in a postural echo of the Furnival’s Inn man. ‘Don’t get me started on the state of things today.’
Abbot looked at him quizzically. Was it the ale
or was there, sitting next to him, a fellow traveller in this vale of tears? ‘You know England’s finished, don’t you?’ he said in a half whisper.
Marlowe looked at the blacksmith still working with the horse and wondered how much English he knew. He decided to play dumb. ‘How so?’ he asked.
‘Parma and Guise.’ Abbot spread his arms, for all the world like the alien Frenchmen he now lived among. ‘They’ll carve England up between them. I can just see Philip of Spain now, sitting like a steaming turd on Elizabeth’s chair.’
‘Do I assume you don’t altogether approve of the king of Spain, Master Abbot?’
‘Well, there’s the problem, Greene,’ Abbot said, swigging again. ‘You hit the nail on the head. Because of Henry VIII and his damned Great Matter; because the lad he fathered had a spine of jelly and died before he’d finished shitting yellow; because various lords listened to the ravings of the Reformers and set up a Godless church, you and I have a problem, don’t we?’
More than you know, thought Marlowe, but he’d learned long ago that men in full flight let things slip. Let the man rant on. ‘We either accept the Jezebel, in which case we have broken our faith with God and the Holy Father. Or we stay loyal to Rome and accept whatever damned foreigner shouts loudest for the throne of England. The Queen of Scots is the nearest Catholic we have to home grown.’
‘Ah.’ Marlowe nodded sagely, closing his eyes as he breathed in Abbot’s smoke. ‘And her cause is lost.’
‘Lost?’ Abbot repeated. ‘In what way?’
Marlowe opened his eyes, sat bolt upright and looked at the man. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘You must have left London before it happened. Anthony Babington and his friends. All dead. Butchered to make an anti-Roman holiday.’
‘By whose authority?’ Abbot bellowed, startling his horse and making the blacksmith curse colourfully in a patois Marlowe was glad he didn’t fully understand.
‘The Queen’s.’ Marlowe shrugged. ‘The Jezebel’s, I mean. They say she stayed her hand on the second day of executions and let the hangman actually hang them first, to spare them the pain of the rest.’
Abbot snorted. ‘That’s damned good of her,’ he said, leaning his back against the wall again.
The horse, spooked out of his previous somnolence, whickered and snorted in reply. The blacksmith, who had been stretching the job out to make it seem worth his inflated price, gave a final ringing tap on the last nail and put the leg down. Marlowe could see this little interlude was drawing to a close. Abbot stood and tapped out his pipe against the wall, the smouldering ashes hissing in the damp straw. The projectioner had to be quick. He sighed. ‘All too late for my friend Chideock, I fear,’ he said.
‘Who?’ Abbot asked him.
Marlowe looked askance. ‘Chideock Tichborne,’ he said. ‘One of the so-called conspirators. Did you know him?’
Abbot shrugged. ‘I meet a lot of people,’ he said. Suddenly he stiffened. ‘Is that why you’re here, Greene?’ he asked. ‘On the run from Walsingham?’
Marlowe sighed again. ‘You might say that,’ he said.
Before Abbot could ask for any clarification, the blacksmith appeared at his elbow, the horse’s reins in one hand, his hammer in the other.
‘M’sieur,’ he said. ‘The shoe is mended.’
‘What?’ Abbot said, looking him up and down as though he had never seen him before. ‘I can’t really be doing with these country types, Greene. It isn’t the French I was taught, at any rate. What does he say?’
‘I think he is just saying that the shoe is fixed,’ Marlowe said. He had to agree that the man spoke with the accent of another region, but it wasn’t so thick that Abbot couldn’t understand it. Any gentleman who had studied at Furnival’s Inn could manage this much French.
‘Tell him to send me the bill,’ Abbot said, reaching for the reins.
Marlowe passed on the message, with some trepidation. The blacksmith looked a pleasant enough man but the gleaming muscles and the rather firm set of his mouth made Marlowe suspect that the tether he was on was not long.
The man looked at Marlowe, from his great height. ‘Tell the M’sieur,’ he said, enunciating clearly, ‘that though I come from the country, I am not stupid. If he wants his horse, he will pay me for my work. We arranged the price before I even lit my fire.’
Marlowe dutifully translated, adding, for good measure, some advice about the possible consequences of taking on a man a head taller and twice as broad, with muscles where Abbot didn’t even have fat.
The Londoner flicked his fingers in the blacksmith’s direction. ‘Tell him to send the bill, I said,’ he snarled. ‘And I will pay it when I am good and ready.’
This time, Marlowe didn’t have to translate. The blacksmith picked up Abbot and tossed him across the yard, where he came to a skidding halt just on the edge of the hot fire the man had used to heat his iron. Then, he wrapped the reins once more round his hand and led the horse out of the yard and down the road.
‘Greene!’ Abbot screamed, rising up on one elbow. ‘Greene! As an Englishman, stop him. He’s got my horse.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Marlowe said, watching the man go.
‘Has he let it go, then?’ he said, getting up and beating out a smouldering ember on his sleeve.
‘No,’ said one of the scholars, who had been watching with interest. ‘He is leading it down the road, back to his forge, if I remember where it is correctly.’
‘Then . . .?’ Abbot was puzzled.
‘What I meant,’ Marlowe said, tired of the arrogant fool, ‘What I meant was that he has his horse, until you pay your bill. We’re not in London now, Abbot. We are ambassadors for our country, and I think paying up is what Englishmen do.’
‘Not where I come from!’ snapped Abbot, making for the road in hot pursuit of his mount.
‘No, indeed,’ Marlowe said to himself. ‘Wherever that might be, Master Abbot.’
The Book of Days lay open at the dawning of the world on the lectern in Thomas Shaw’s library. The whole room was clothed in books, their leather spines gleaming with a loving polish and the evening sun lent them a glow of their own, melting into gold.
‘The only one of its kind in existence.’ Shaw had slid in through a side entrance, his buskins gone now and soft sandals in their place.
Marlowe nodded, tracing the illuminated letters with his fingers. ‘Magnificent,’ he said. Then he snapped himself out of the scholar’s worship of ink and the written word and smiled at the librarian. ‘Rather belatedly,’ he said, ‘I have accepted your invitation to a tour of your library. Though now, I believe, we have other matters to discuss.’
‘We do?’ Shaw raised an eyebrow.
‘The lad Brooke, Dr Shaw,’ Marlowe said. ‘Not ten hours dead. I seem to remember at my first dinner you didn’t want him talking to me.’
‘Tristan and Isolde,’ Shaw said, patting the spine of a huge tome as he led Marlowe past it.
The projectioner knew a changed subject when he heard one and for now played along. ‘A singularly secular book for the English College,’ he observed.
Shaw chuckled. ‘Don’t let Gerald Skelton know it’s here,’ he said. ‘He’d burn it.’
‘Really? This book must have cost a fortune. I know it would pain the Bursar of my college in Cambridge to destroy something as valuable as this.’
‘As a rule, I am sure Dr Skelton would be at one with your Bursar,’ Shaw agreed. ‘He is a bit of a spoon counter, is Gerald. But he is also a Puritan. Oh, not in the literal sense, of course.’ He had noticed Marlowe’s swiftly assumed expression of alarm. ‘Ah –’ his fingers found another volume – ‘The Chronicles of Eden.’ He hauled it from the shelf and laid it down on a counter. ‘The 1321 edition.’
Marlowe was impressed. Doctor Johns had once told him that no copies of this book existed. ‘Tell me, Dr Shaw,’ he said. ‘Do you lend such manuscripts to the scholars? If I remember my Cambridge days, we were always pretty careless with our text
s.’
‘Some things we lend out, yes,’ Shaw told him. ‘But not, you can imagine, this. Look –’ he pointed to a ripped hole in the leather of The Chronicles’ corner – ‘a reminder it was once chained. From the Monastery of Melk, on the Danube. Before that, it was owned, I understand, by a Doge of Venice. No, this one never leaves this room.’
‘And the book you picked up in Edmund Brooke’s room?’ Marlowe asked.
Shaw turned to face him. ‘You are persistent, Dominus Greene,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you that. It was a copy, if you must know, of the Iliad, not strictly on Master Brooke’s reading list. I don’t know what he was doing with it.’
‘It is a rattling good yarn,’ Marlowe suggested. ‘Must make a change from regular reading. Why did you make a point of taking it back?’
‘The librarian in me, I suppose,’ Shaw said. ‘See a book where it shouldn’t be, pick it up.’
‘About Master Brooke . . .’
Shaw held up his hand. ‘All in good time,’ he said. ‘First, I want to show you something.’
He motioned Marlowe to follow him through the side door he had entered by. Was there no end to the labyrinthine twists in this place? ‘Watch your footing.’ Shaw’s voice echoed as he led the projectioner through a narrow dark passageway that twisted now to the left, then to the right. Little torches flickered in their iron brackets at intervals along the rough walls, giving just enough light to be a guide, but not enough so you could truly say you could see your hand in front of your face. A few in the sequence had gone out, and then the dark was almost complete. Clearly, this was not a part of the College where men walked often and there was a curious smell that Marlowe couldn’t place.
They came to a door and here Shaw stopped and placed a warning hand on Marlowe’s chest. He looked at him hard in what light there was. ‘Do you believe in God, the Father and the Son?’ he asked.
Marlowe nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘And in the primacy of the Holy Father and the Church of Rome?’
‘Is there any other?’ Marlowe asked, wide-eyed.
‘Ah,’ Shaw half growled. ‘If only. What you will see behind this door, Dominus Greene, is a secret of a very special kind. It is a secret known only to a very few in this College. And it must remain a secret. Do you understand?’