The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits Volume 1 (The Mammoth Book Series)

by Mike Ashley

  The Bell’s front woodwork was grotesquely carved and painted with red and blue gargoyles, and a sign worth £40 creaked over the walk on a wrought-iron bracket: it bore a bell and no other mark besides, but good wine needs no bush to herald it. Through the leaded casement windows came the tapster’s cry, “Score at the bar!” When I asked the drawer, a paunchy man with nothing on his crown between him and heaven, if Dick Quiney were staying there, he gestured up the broad oak stairway.

  “In the Dolphin Chamber, master.”

  The room faced the inner court on the second floor. When I thrust open the door, Dick, with an oath, sprang for the scabbarded rapier hung over the back of his chair: forcible entry to another’s chamber has been often used for hired murder. But then he laughed.

  “Johannus Factotem! I feared my hour had come. How do you, lad?”

  “As an indifferent child of earth.”

  “What makes the handsome well-shaped player brave the plague – oho! September twenty-second tomorrow!” He laughed again, a wee quick wiry man in green hose and brown unpadded doublet. “The upstart crow, beautified with their feathers, will give them all a purge.”

  “‘Let base conceited wits admire vile things, fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses’ springs’,” I quoted. “You ought to recognize Ovid – we read him in the grammar long ago. As for the translation, I had it from Kit last spring.”

  “Still harping on Marlowe, lad? We all owe God a death.”

  “What reports have you had of the cause of his?”

  “Surely it was the plague. Gabriel Harvey’s ‘Gorgon’ says – ”

  “That’s now disputed.” Over meat I recounted all. “I fear Walsingham, but if I should be fattening the region’s kites with his – ”

  “Would you number sands and drink oceans dry? In justice – ”

  “– none of us should see salvation. Not justice, friendship: forgotten, it stings sharper than the winter wind.”

  “Pah! Marlowe was hasty as fire and deaf as the sea in his rages. You’d do him no disservice to leave his bones lie.” Then he shrugged. “But as you say, use men as they deserve and who would escape the whipping? So you’ll off to Deptford, seeking truth.”

  “I will. If you could go to Harrison’s White Greyhound – ”

  “I’ll oversee your interests.” He clapped me on the back. “Give tomorrow to gaunt ghosts the grave’s inherited, to-night there’s excellent theologicum and humming ale made with fat standing Thames water.”

  I could find no boats at Paul’s Pier; and at Queenhithe, the watermen’s gathering place of late years, were boats but no pilots. As I started for the Red Knight, a boy hailed me from the dock.

  “John Taylor, boatman’s apprentice, at your service.” Barely thirteen, he had an honest open face, curly brown hair, and sharp eyes. “Do you travel to escape the plague?”

  I sat down on the embroidered cushions in the stern of his boat. “No, I’m a journeyman to grief. Westward ho – to Deptford, lad.”

  The ebbing tide carried us towards the stone arches of London Bridge, sliding us beneath her covered arcade and crowded houses like an eel from the hand. As we passed the Tower the boy spoke suddenly.

  “Weren’t you a player in The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, at The Theatre last year?”

  “You know much of the stage for one so young,” I grunted. Yet I was pleased that he had recognized me, for all men seek fame.

  The bells of St. Saviour’s on the Surrey Side were pealing eight far behind us when Deptford docks came into view around a bend in the river, crowded with the polyglot shipping of all nations. A sailor with one eye directed me to St. Nicholas Church, the mean stone chapel not far from the docks where Anne Page had said Kit was buried.

  The rector was a stubby white-haired man, soberly dressed as befits the clergy, with his spectacles on his nose and his hose hanging on shrunken shanks.

  “Give you God’s blessings, sir.” His piping voice would have been drowned in the Sunday coughings of his congregation. “Even as the holy Stephen gave soft words to those heathens who were stoning him.”

  “Let’s talk of graves and worms and epitaphs. I want to see your register of burials for the present year.”

  “Here are many graved in the hollow ground, as was holy Lawrence after that naughty man Valerian broiled him on a slow grid.” He squeaked and gibbered like the Roman dead upon the death of Caesar, but finally laid out the great leather-covered volume I desired. “Seek only that which concerns you: sin not with the eyes. Consider Lucy of Syracuse; when complimented by a noble on her beautiful eyes, she did tear them out and hand them to him so that she might avoid immodest pride.”

  “I search for only one name – that of Christopher Marlowe.”

  “Marlowe? Why, a very devil, that man, a player and – ”

  “Churlish priest! Kit will be singing when you lie howling! And why have you written only: First June, 1593, Christopher Marlowe slain by Francis Archer. No word of his monument or epitaph.”

  The old cleric, ruffled by my words, chirped like a magpie. “His bones lie tombless, with no rememberance over them.”

  “But he had high friends! Why, after a violent death, was he given such an unworthy burial?”

  “Squire Walsingham himself so ordered.” Animosity faded from his whizzled walnut face in the hope of vicarious scandal. “Surely his death was a simple tavern brawl? It was so accepted by William Danby, Coroner to the Royal Household, who held the inquest since Her Gracious Highness was lying at Kew.”

  “The Queen’s Coroner would not be corrupt,” I said brusquely. But could he be misled? “Now take me to Kit’s grave.”

  In an unmarked oblong of sunken earth in the churchyard, under a plane tree, was Kit, safely stowed with flowers growing from his eyes. I felt the salt tears trickling down my own face.

  “Even as St. Nicholas once restored to life through God’s grace three boys who had been pickled in a salting-rub for bacon, so may we gather honey from the weed and make a moral of this devil Marlowe. The dead are as but pictures – and only children fear painted devils – but Marlowe was so evil that God struck him down in the midst of sin.”

  “Pah!” I burst out angrily, dashing away my unmanly tears. “Your preaching leaves an evil taste like easel! Speak only from the pulpit, father – play the fool only in your own house.”

  “My Father’s House! In His House are many mansions, but none – ”

  I left his querulous anger behind to search for Eleanor Bull’s tavern. Walsingham might have ordered just such a hurried obscure funeral if Kit had died of the plague; but then why had the burial record shown him slain by Francis Archer? And why had Anne Page given me Ingram Frizer as Kit’s killer? Had her tale been more matter and less art than it had seemed? Perhaps Eleanor Bull would have the answers.

  Playbills were tattered on the notice-post beside the door and Dame Eleanor would have made a good comic character upon the stage herself: a round-faced jolly woman with a bawdy tongue and a nose that had been thrust into more than one tankard of stout, by its color. She wore a fine scarlet robe with a white hood.

  “Give you good morrow, sir.”

  “Good morrow, dame. Would you join me in a cup of wine?”

  “By your leave, right gladly, sir.” She preceded me up the narrow stairs, panting her remarks over her shoulder in beery lack of breath. “I get few . . . phew . . . other than seafarers here. Rough lot they be, much . . . phew . . . given to profanity.” She opened a door, dug me slyly in the ribs as I passed. “La! If I but lodge a lonely gentlewoman or two who live honestly by their needlework, straightway it’s claimed I keep a bawdy house!”

  I laughed and ordered a pint of white wine each. It was a pleasant chamber overlooking an enclosed garden; the ceiling was oak and a couch was pushed back against the cheap arras showing Richard Crookback and Catesby on Bosworth Field. A fireplace pierced one wall.

  “Tell me, mistress: did a man named Christopher Marlowe
meet an untimely end in your house some months ago?”

  “You knew Marlowe, in truth?” She regarded me shrewdly. “For all his abusing of God’s patience and the King’s English with quaint curses, he was a man women’d run through fire for. Lord, Lord, master, he was ever a wanton! I’ll never laugh as I did in that man’s company.”

  I kept my voice casual. “A brawl over a wench, wasn’t it? And the fellow who killed him – Francis Archer?”

  “La!” She jingled the keys on her silver-embroidered sash. “You must have seen the decayed cleric of St. Nicholas Church – he can scarce root the garden with his shaking fingers, let alone write right a stranger’s name. Ingram Frizer was the man who shuffled Kit off.”

  “I would be pleased to hear an account of it.”

  “Heaven forgive him and all of us, I say; he died in this very room, on that very couch. God’s blood, I don’t know what he was doing in such company, as Nick Skeres is a cutpurse and Frizer a swindler for all his pious talk; but all three were living at Scadbury Park and once spied together for the Privy Council. Rob Poley, another of the same, arrived on a spent horse in the afternoon, and two hours later the fight started. By the time I had run up here, Kit was already flat upon the couch, stabbed through the skull above the right eye.”

  “Wasn’t Frizer charged when the guard arrived?”

  “Right speedily: but the others backed his story that Kit, who was lying drunk upon the couch, had attacked him through an argument over the score. Frizer was watching Skeres and Poley at backgammon, when Kit suddenly leaped up cursing, seized Frizer’s own knife from its shoulder sheath, and started stabbing him in the face. Frizer got free, they scuffled, Kit fell on the knife.” She shrugged. “The inquest was the first of June; by the twenty-eighth Frizer’d been pardoned by the Queen and was back at Scadbury Park in the Squire’s pay.”

  I sat down on the couch, muscles crawling. Kit had been as strong and agile as myself from the tumbling and fencing at which all players excel; and even in a drunken rage would the creator of haughty Tamburlaine and proud Faustus stab from behind? The room seemed to darken; four dim figures strained in the dusk, Kit’s arms jerked back, feet thrust cunningly between his, a cry – silence – murder.

  I looked up at Eleanor Bull. “Do you believe their story?”

  “I’ll not put my finger in the fire.” But then her gaze faltered; her thumb ring glinted as she clutched the arras. She turned suddenly, face distorted. “La! I’ll speak of it though hell itself forbid me! It was I who saw him fumble at his doublet, and smile upon his fingers, and cry out ‘God! God! God!’ It was I who felt his legs and found them cold as any stone. And it is I who now declare that here was cruel murder done!”

  Her words brought me to my feet. “Then I’m for Scadbury Park to pluck this bloody villain’s beard and blow it in his face!”

  She cast her bulk before me, arms outstretched. “Oh, master, that sword which clanks so bravely against your flank will be poor steel against the viper you seek to rouse. These other swashers – la! Three such antics together don’t make a man. Skeres is white-livered and red-faced; Frizer has a killing tongue and a quiet sword; and Poley’s few good words match as few good deeds. But Squire Thomas! Cross him to learn that one may smile and smile and be a villain.”

  “I’m committed to one with true cause for weeping. Go I must.”

  “Then take one of my horses – and my prayers with you.”

  After a few miles of gently rolling downs whose nestled farmers’ cots reminded me of my own Warwickshire, I came to Chislehurst. Beyond a mile of forest was Manor Park Road curving gently up through open orchards to the moated main house of Scadbury Manor, a sprawling tile-roofed timber building over two-hundred years old.

  I was led through the vast unceiled central hall to the library, which was furnished in chestnut panels. His books showed the Squire’s deep interest in the arts: Holinshed’s Chronicles; Halle’s Union; Plutarch’s Lives; Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia, chief flower of English letters. These were bound in leather and set on the shelves with their gilt-edged leaves facing out to show the gold clasps and jewelled studs. On the other shelves were rolled and piled manuscripts – Diana Enamorada, Menaechmi – which I was examining when a low melancholy voice addressed me from the doorway.

  “Who asks for Walsingham with Marlowe’s name also on his lips?”

  He looked the knight that he so ardently sought to be, elegant as a bridegroom and trimly dressed in silken doublet, velvet hose, and scarlet cloak. His voice was like his thrice-gilt rapier in its velvet scabbard: silk with steel beneath. Lengthened by a pointed beard and framed in coiling hair, his face had the cruel features of a Titus or a Caesar: Roman nose, pale appraising eyes, well-shaped disdainful lips. A face to attract and repel in an instant.

  “A poor player who begs true detail of Marlowe’s quick end.”

  He advanced leisurely into the room, giving his snuff-box to his nose. “Your clothes make your rude birth and ruder profession obvious. I knew Marlowe slightly and sponsored his serious work – not the plays, of course. But why ask me about his death when the plague – ”

  “I had it from An – from a mutual friend that he was slain, not by plague, but in a Deptford tavern brawl by your man Ingram Frizer.”

  “Did you now? And this gossip – the trollop Anne Page?”

  “No,” I retorted quickly, “Tom Kyd in Newgate Gaol.”

  He sneered and rang a small silver bell. “A quick eye and open ear such as yours often make gaol smell of home; and your tongue runs so roundly that it may soon run your head from your irreverent shoulders. But perhaps even the meanly born can honour friendship.”

  The man who entered was easily recognized as Nicholas Skeres: he was indeed beet-nosed and capon-bellied, and when he learned of my errand he advanced bellowing as if I would melt like suet in the sun.

  “Why, you nosey mummer, Kit was a bawcock and a heart of gold! Why, were he among us now, I’d kiss his dirty toe, I would; for well I loved the lovely bully.” He laughed coarsely. “Of course now he’s at supper with the worms; but here’s Frizer to set you right.”

  Ingram Frizer had a churchwarden’s face but the eye of a man who sleeps little at night. His mouth was an O and his eyes were to heaven, and he aped the cleric’s true piety as ill as the odious prattler replacing the well-graced actor upon the stage.

  “Poor Marlowe,” he intoned unctuously. “He left this life as one who had been studied in his death. Here am I, watching backgammon; there is Kit, upon the couch. He leaps up, seizes my knife – ” He moved, and the deadly blade whose hilt was visible over his left shoulder darted out like a serpent’s tongue to slash the dancing dustmotes. “He strikes me twice in the face, I pull loose, we grapple, he slips . . . sheathed in his brain. I pluck away the steel, kiss the gash yawning so bloodily on his brow. He smiles a last brave time, takes my hand in feeble grip – but his soul is fled to the Eternal Father.”

  “Satisfied now, Mars of malcontents?”

  “Just one more question, Squire.” As my profession is counterfeit emotion, my tone matched Frizer’s for buttery sorrow. “Then I will take my leave.”

  “Nothing will I more readily give you.”

  “Why did Poley, fresh from the Hague as from the seacoasts of Bohemia, come hurriedly that day to Dame Eleanor’s tavern?”

  “Question my actions, player, and you’ll yield the crows a pudding!” Poley advanced from the shadows; huge, silent-moving, dark and sensual of face, his eyes falcon-fierce and his nose bent aside as if seeking the smell of death. His arms were thick and his chest a brine-barrel beneath his stained leather doublet.

  Squire Thomas’s sad disdainful smile fluttered beneath his new-reaped moustache like a dove about the cote. “He was just come from Holland. Where better than a tavern to wash away the dust of travel?”

  “What of Baines’s indictment of Kit that was sure to embarrass you and the others of Raleigh’s Circle if it came to court?
You had learned of it only the night before; this had nothing to do with Poley’s despatch to the tavern on that day?”

  His face went ashen, his lips bloodless; his pale eyes flashed and his voice shook with suppressed rage. “Divine my downfall, you little better thing than earth, and you may find yourself beneath it!” With an effort he controlled his emotion. “Apes and actors, they say, should have their brains removed and given to the dog for a New Year’s gift.”

  He held up a detaining hand. “Soft, you – a word or two before you go. I have done the state some service and they know it. Beware! You said Tom Kyd gave you the news of Marlowe’s death, then prattled details only Anne Page could have told you. No murder have I done – yet she spreads her scandals. Seek her out in secret and you will feel that the very cobbles beneath your feet do prate to me your whereabouts.”

  Such a man bestrides my narrow world like a Colossus; yet was he more fully man than I?

  “You despise me for my birth, Walsingham; yet nature cannot choose its origin. Blood will have blood if blood has been let, and murder will out for all your saying.”

  But I didn’t feel safe until good English oak was between us.

  Ten had struck before I arrived, in defiance of Squire Thomas, at St. Paul’s Cathedral Church. During the hours of worship the shrill cries of the hawkers and the shouts of the roistering Paul’s Men compete among the arches with the chants of the choir; but then only my boots echoed upon the stones of Paul’s Walk, the great central nave.

  I loosened my sword, for one may as easily have his throat cut in the church as elsewhere. When a slight figure in homespun darted from behind a pillar, I recognized Anne Page’s eyes glowing beneath the coarse grey mantle just before my steel cleared the sheath.

  “You come most carefully upon your hour, player. Tell me, quickly, what did you learn?” Present fears forgotten, we patrolled the nave in measured steps. When I had finished she cried: “Oh, smiling damned villain! From this time shall my thoughts be only bloody!”