Scorpion's Nest (2012)

by Trow, M J

  A scholar turned to Greene and tried to focus, first with one eye, then another. ‘You’re quite tall,’ he said, ‘when you stand upright.’ He covered one eye to make it easier. ‘Yes, there you are. Give me a leg up and I’ll have a go at counting them.’

  Greene locked his hands and bent down. The scholar stepped into the cup of his palms and Greene hoisted him to the top of the wall. The scholar could be heard counting under his breath and Greene let him down again. The boy leant on the wall and looked down at his own fingers, straightening and bending them experimentally.

  ‘Six!’ he said, triumphantly. ‘Or twelve. Or three. They were moving about a bit. Hard to count.’ He hiccupped violently. ‘I think I’ll go first. They put you to bed when they catch you and I could do with a lie down. Anyone else coming with me?’

  The other scholars milled around, everyone trying to be at the back. Blurred and out of kilter as they were, they knew arrant nonsense when they heard it. The Proctors put you to bed all right, but the next day, on Dr Harvey’s orders, they flayed the skin off your back. Greene found himself at the front and tried to bury himself in the pack.

  ‘Nonononono,’ the first boy said who seemed to be the leader, though he couldn’t count. ‘He bought us drinks. He can’t go next. He’ll get in trouble.’ He listened to what he had said. ‘Trouble? Is that the word?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Greene, out of the corner of his mouth, trying to drum up support for the idea.

  ‘Trouble. Yes. Well, he’s bought us all drinks. We can’t get him into trouble. So, come on.’ He reached into the crowd and hauled out a couple more scholars. ‘You and you. Come with me.’ And he swung himself up the wall and was gone, still unexpectedly limber even in his cups.

  Greene began to feel old. He had been this carefree once, before bitterness and jealousy had bitten him. He gave himself a shake. He really shouldn’t drink; it always made him pensive.

  There was shouting beyond the wall and the sound of running feet. Another scholar went over and screamed that he was caught. And shouting from the Proctors confirmed it. So the ringleader’s arithmetic was a bit awry, but surely no college had more than four Proctors on guard on any one night? Another one vaulted over and this time the sound from the other side of the wall was a triumphant whoop. Quickly, the others scrambled over, not forgetting to give Greene, their sponsor, a helping hand. Soon, he was at the entrance to Marlowe’s room and was edging open the door.

  Harvey was sweeping round Corpus Christi like a new broom, but he had not yet ordered the cleaning out of the rooms of absent scholars, so Marlowe’s room was as he left it, with the addition of a few more spiders and another bloom of dust. Greene edged in, remembering his last visit and his hand twinged in memory of it. He sat down on the bed in the dark and closed his eyes, trying to put himself into Marlowe’s shoes. If he wanted to hide a manuscript, quite a bulky one, where would he put it? The mattress? No; the mattress would be turned at random intervals and it might easily be discovered. The linen press? Again, not under Marlowe’s control. It might be found by a maid or Proctor and although they probably wouldn’t be able to read it, they would more than likely take it to the College authorities as something that had been hidden and therefore likely to be scurrilous, especially in the room of Kit Marlowe.

  He needed to find a place in the room where no one would go except to hide something. It needed to be something permanent, yet movable, like a floorboard. His eyes flew open with the sheer simplicity of his idea and he was on his hands and knees in seconds. His first instinct was to get down and brush the rushes into corners and prise up the floorboards but the alcohol still in his system made him lazy and in his laziness he saw the hiding place, as though in a flash. As he sat indecisively on the floor, he saw a corner of the wainscoting which didn’t seem to fit as flush to the wall as the rest. It was outlined, almost providentially, in a moonbeam and Greene leant forward and put the tip of his dagger under one corner and pushed. With a click, the piece of wood popped out and there, just inches from his hand, was a rolled manuscript, wrapped in oiled silk and tied with a length of red cord.

  Remembering where he was, he prised the roll out with his dagger and rolled sideways, his hands and arms protecting his head, but nothing happened. Rising slowly and carefully, he took the roll and slid it into the front of his doublet and made his way out of Corpus Christi for the last time, just forbearing from cocking a snook at the darkened windows of the Master’s Lodging.

  In the shadow of the quad, a slender youth, Thomas Fineaux, still very limber for all he had drunk Robert Greene’s purse dry, smiled to himself. Tomorrow would be busy. First, he would pay his fine for being caught coming over the wall. Then he would take Lomas’ whip across his back. Then, he had one or two letters to write.

  The lad still looked green the next day when Marlowe found him. He was propped up against a stone pillar, his fustian robes wrapped around him, both to keep out the wind and to hold himself together.

  ‘Someone told me you’re Martin Camb,’ Marlowe said.

  Camb looked up and all he saw was a dark shape with a morning sun shining like a halo over wild hair and the collar of a roisterer’s doublet. ‘It’s nice to be reminded now and again.’

  Marlowe sat down next to the boy, spreading his cloak on the ground and crossing one elegant buskin over the other. ‘I’m Robert Greene,’ he said. ‘Corpus Christi.’

  The boy nodded. He wasn’t in the mood for conversation and didn’t care who knew it.

  ‘Your ingle is dead,’ Marlowe said, coming straight out with it. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Camb frowned, focusing now on the dark eyes, the soft mouth. ‘No, you’re not,’ he muttered. ‘And anyway, Edmund wasn’t my ingle, as you put it.’

  ‘No?’ Marlowe raised an eyebrow.

  ‘No!’ Camb’s response was louder than he meant it to be and he looked round, startled. Scholars were scuttling, late to lectures, across the quad. Brother Tobias scowled at him from the main gate. ‘No,’ he hissed. ‘Such things are an abomination. Our Lord Himself frowned on sodomy.’

  ‘Actually, he didn’t –’ Marlowe folded his arms – ‘if I remember my scripture.

  ‘What do you want?’ Camb asked him. He wasn’t up to rhetoric at this time of the morning, especially with an older man who knew more than he did. His head was banging, a slow and distant rhythm which nevertheless managed to drown out almost everything else and make coherent thought next to impossible. He wanted to lie down in a dark, cool room and wait until everything stayed still and the right way up, at the same time. Currently, it was either one thing or the other and the pain was so bad it reached to the ends of his hair.

  ‘Information.’ Marlowe produced a gold coin from his purse and watched it catch the light.

  ‘About what?’ Camb wanted to know.

  ‘Edmund Brooke,’ Marlowe told him and tossed the coin so that it spun in the air. Camb caught it and bit it. Marlowe smiled. ‘You didn’t learn that in the English College,’ he said.

  Camb’s face creased into a smile for the first time and he looked the better for it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘The news about Edmund came as a . . . a bit of a shock. These things take a bit of getting used to. And I must say, I’m not feeling any too well at present.’

  ‘You don’t look it, if you don’t mind my saying so,’ Marlowe said. ‘I was expecting quite an improvement on my glimpse of you last night, but if anything you look rather worse.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ Camb said, testily. ‘Please don’t be polite for my sake. I can take the truth.’

  ‘I’ll make allowances,’ Marlowe said, with a small smile. ‘How well did you know Edmund?’

  ‘Oh, you know, shadows in the night.’ He suddenly shuddered. ‘I’m seeing a lot of those at the moment.’ Marlowe took his hand. It was as cold as a stone. And the pupils of his eyes were tiny, lost in the irises of clear blue.

  Camb instinctively pulled his hand away. ‘Why do you want to know about him?�
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  ‘I have a curious nature.’ Marlowe smiled. ‘When a man is suffocated, I have a tendency to ask questions. I hope I may be forgiven.’

  ‘Suffocated?’ Camb was sitting upright, quivering in the cold of the morning. ‘The Master said it was—’

  ‘Apoplexy.’ Marlowe finished the sentence for him. ‘Yes, I know. It’s his favourite word. When did you see the Master?’

  ‘Er . . . I don’t know. Last night, I think. He was asking me questions too. Dominus Greene, I don’t understand. What’s going on?’

  Marlowe smiled at a hidden joke. ‘The Master and I,’ he said. ‘We ask the questions. Where were you when Edmund died?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know. On the town . . . somewhere.’

  ‘Are you often on the town, Master Camb?’ Marlowe looked hard into the boy’s eyes.

  Camb looked back. Were there two Robert Greenes now? He couldn’t be sure. He could keep them down to just the one if he closed one eye, but then the other one wanted to close as well and an ingrained sense of self-preservation made him want to keep both his eyes firmly on Greene. Greenes. He blinked several times and swallowed hard as the background swam out of focus. He wanted to speak up for himself, tell this interloper where to stick his inquisitive nature. ‘Often,’ he said. Not very compelling as answers went, but it was all his lips could manage.

  ‘And when Edmund died?’ Marlowe persisted. He felt almost sorry for the lad; his headache proclaimed itself in his furrowed brow and tight neck and shoulder muscles. He would have screamed with the pain, but for the pain it would have caused. Marlowe forced himself to be firm with him. ‘Be specific, Martin. And be accurate. Your life may depend upon it.’

  ‘Um . . . I left the College . . . let’s see, it would have been after Vespers. It’s easier to slip out when people are still moving. Once we’re abed and it’s lights out, there are creaking floor boards and marauding cats . . . Tread on a cat’s tail and you can wake the College in seconds, from the gate to the attics.’

  Marlowe nodded. It could have been him talking not so long ago as he crept out of the Court at Corpus Christi, making for the Brazen Head or the Eagle. He felt a sudden pang of homesickness for his room, his familiar walks. He shook himself out of it. ‘Was anyone with you?’

  ‘God, no. There used to be, of course, but now Drs Allen and Skelton have put the fear of God into the scholars. What does our Lord say about wine, Dominus Greene? You seem to know your scriptures.’

  Marlowe shrugged. ‘I know he turned water into the stuff,’ he said. ‘And His Father had some quite useful tasting advice, red, yellow, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Camb prodded the air with his finger. ‘So I don’t see the Master’s objection.’

  ‘So, you went out after Vespers,’ Marlowe said, bringing the lad back to the night in question. ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Er . . . the Casque d’Argent. It’s on the Rue Vervain. About half a mile away.’

  ‘Did you meet anyone there?’ Marlowe asked. ‘Anyone who could vouch for you?’

  ‘No one from the College, if that’s what you mean. I take a few twists and turns before choosing where to drink. Less likely to get caught that way.’

  Again, the wave of homesickness for the little back lanes of Cambridge swept over Marlowe, like a sheet of iced water from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. He could almost smell the waft of stale ale that would envelop him as he pushed open the door of the Eagle. He could taste the smoke-filled air of the private room at the back of the Devil.

  Camb was still speaking. ‘A few locals were there, of course. I’ve drunk with them before, but they don’t know my name. Least said, soonest mended. The English College exerts a powerful sway on this town.’

  ‘But you know their names, surely,’ Marlowe said. ‘Just to say hello.’

  ‘Jacques was there,’ Camb said, then furrowed his brow. ‘Or was that last week . . .? Pierre was definitely there, because he had borrowed money from Louis and . . . no, it wasn’t Pierre, it was definitely Jacques . . .’

  Marlowe wished that Camb would think inside his head, but he could see that the lad had the kind of memory that peopled the air around him with detail and he could see them, perhaps not clearly, but through a haze. Ask him to do his remembering quietly and there would be no remembering at all.

  Finally, he came to a decision and turned to Marlowe triumphantly. ‘Jacques,’ he announced. ‘Mireille—’

  ‘Mireille?’ Marlowe stopped him. ‘The harlot who haunts this place?’

  ‘Does she?’ Camb asked. ‘I don’t know. I can’t afford her. From there I went to . . . La Pucelle, was it? Yes, La Pucelle. Bit of a Hell-hole, really. They were playing lansquenet. I remember I was losing . . .’

  ‘And?’

  Camb shrugged. ‘I was drinking.’

  Marlowe’s temper was suddenly at the end of its rope. He grabbed Camb’s hand and twisted it behind his back, pinning him under the weight of his body. ‘I’m spending too much time on you, scholar,’ he hissed into his ear. ‘Stop all of this drunken reminiscence nonsense. Your room-mate, if we can properly call him that. Your ingle. The love of your life if you want to give it that gloss, whatever he was to you, Edmund Brooke is dead. So let’s have it, the story of your wandering last night. What happened at La Pucelle, if that is where you were and not hiding somewhere in the College, with Edmund Brooke’s last breath still damp on your hands?’

  Camb went limp under Marlowe’s weight, one hand trapped in the projectioner’s vice-like grip, the other hopelessly tangled in his robe where he had tucked it to keep it warm. ‘I don’t know. I blacked out. I had the horrors of drink on me.’

  Marlowe looked into the lad’s eyes again and saw the pain. ‘No, you didn’t, Martin,’ he said, releasing him. ‘Somebody doctored your wine. Not very subtly, either.’ He cast his mind back to Dr John Dee, who could send someone to sleep for as long as he wanted, although his claim of a thousand years had always struck Marlowe as overblown. How could he know? When they woke up, and Marlowe had witnessed it, they felt as though they had just dropped off for a second, no headache, no gripes, no nothing. Certainly, Dee’s potions would never leave anyone in a state like this. The lad could have died. But he needed to check. ‘Are you sure you have never felt like this before?’

  ‘I have had bad heads,’ he said, ‘but never like this. I feel as though my skull has turned to glass.’

  Marlowe nodded and patted the boy’s shoulder. ‘Do something for me, Master Camb.’ He got up suddenly and straightened his cloak. ‘Stay away from the Casque d’Argent.’ He tossed him another coin. ‘To cover your losses,’ he said, in explanation, ‘and to remind you to stay away from La Pucelle as well. Use the change to buy some candles for your friend. Will you do that for me?’

  Camb nodded. ‘Wait,’ he said, trying to get up and failing. ‘Dominus Greene, who did it? Who suffocated Edmund?’

  ‘Suffocated?’ Marlowe frowned. ‘That was apoplexy, lad. You must have been drinking again.’

  TWELVE

  Walsingham hated Hatfield. The house itself was all right, and so too was the little church of St Ethelfreda’s that sat squatly on the slope of its churchyard. It was actually getting there he hated. The roads of Hertfordshire were appalling and now that November was here with its creeping fogs and frosty nights, the iron-hard ruts of those roads jolted him around so that he resembled a dangled puppet and ached in every limb.

  Burghley’s finest claret only mollified him a little. Even his roast swan failed to hit the spot. Why, oh why, couldn’t the Chief Secretary have stayed in London?

  ‘So that’s it, then?’ Burghley asked him when the servants had retired for the night and the two Privy Councillors sat before the dying fire with only the Cecil hounds for company. ‘That’s the view of all of them?’

  Walsingham shuffled the documents he had scattered on the side table. ‘You’ve read it yourself, my lord,’ he said. ‘Twenty peers of the real
m and forty knights of the shire want the Scottish bitch dead. We’ve done our bit.’

  Burghley stared at the firelight dancing in his crystal glass and turned as a burnt-out log fell in the grate, like a burning kingdom put to the sword and the flame. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The queen was allowed no counsel and given no jury. Small wonder we found her guilty.’

  ‘Careful,’ Walsingham warned with a smile on his lips. ‘You’re beginning to sound like Christopher Hatton.’

  ‘God forbid,’ Burghley growled. ‘But tell me, Francis, Councillor to Councillor, did we do right?’

  Walsingham shrugged. ‘You have Her Majesty’s letter?’ he asked.

  Burghley sighed. ‘I have.’

  ‘What did it say? Remind me.’

  Burghley knew every word by heart. He knew he would never forget a syllable, as long as he lived. ‘“Let the wicked murderess know her vile deserts compel these orders”, ’ he quoted. ‘“Upon the examination and trial of the cause . . .”’ His voice tailed away as he shook his head.

  Walsingham finished the sentence for him, ‘“You shall by verdict find the said Queen guilty of the crime she stands charged with.” Rest easy, my lord, our mistress herself is judge, jury and executioner.’

  ‘Executioner?’ Burghley laughed. ‘That I doubt. When will that petition be presented to her?’

  ‘Next Tuesday,’ Walsingham told him, ‘at Richmond.’

  Burghley nodded. ‘She’ll hedge,’ he said. ‘She’ll whine about being on a stage and in the limelight. “Who shall cast the first stone” et cetera, et cetera. She’ll probably play the sex card too – frail womanhood and so on: even now, if Mary confesses, I will counsel my God to spare her life.’

  It was one of the best impressions of the Queen Walsingham had ever heard and the fact that it bordered on treason didn’t faze him one bit. It was the sort of conversation that he’d had with himself on many an occasion. Looking at Burghley now was like looking into a glass. ‘Will she do it, do you think?’ he asked the Chief Secretary. ‘Will she sign Mary’s death warrant?’