by M. J. Trow
‘Pipe’s out,’ he said. ‘No smoke.’
‘There is indeed no smoke without fire,’ Marlowe said shortly. He looked at Gabriell. ‘Are we away, Master Gabriell?’
The sailor got up and flexed his knees. ‘As ready as we’ll ever be,’ he said and turned to face downstream.
‘Have you got a light for my pipe?’ Daft Harry said, beckoning to Marlowe. The playwright looked at him for a long minute. The idiot was winking and grimacing wildly, tossing his head and one shoulder towards Gabriell’s back. Marlowe decided not to help him.
‘No.’ He turned his back on him and followed the sailor’s rolling gait.
‘But …’ Daft Harry dropped out of character momentarily and Gabriell spun round. ‘Oh, sir, master,’ he whined, quickly reverting. ‘Surely, for a poor …’
Marlowe waved a hand. ‘Sorry,’ he called, using his best projection, learned at the knee of the great Ned Sledd himself, ‘I don’t drink smoke. I have no tinder.’
‘Suit yourself,’ the intelligencer muttered. ‘When you’re drowned, don’t come whining to me.’ Aloud, he added, ‘Take care, then, masters all,’ and slumped back on to his stool. It might be years before another of Sir Francis’ men came by but while he waited, it wasn’t such a bad life. He got three hot meals a day from the ladies of the parish and as many hot ladies of the parish a night as he could manage. Lady Dunton looked kindly on him too. With the men away all night fishing, an idiot who had the brains and other attributes of a donkey could do quite well. He gave a little chuckle and watched the retreating playwright almost fondly.
Down at the beach, Gabriell gestured to his boat, pulled up on the sand. It looked very small, but then the journey wasn’t long.
‘How far is it to the Wight?’ he asked Gabriell.
The sailor narrowed his eyes and looked out into the widening of the River Itchen, which in turn led out to the Solent. He licked a finger and held it up and then kicked a clump of brownish, leathery seaweed. Finally he turned to Marlowe and said, ‘I have absolutely no idea. I rather hoped you might know.’
Marlowe’s dagger was at the man’s throat before another wave lapped the shore. ‘Who in hell are you?’ he said. ‘As if it’s not bad enough having to deal with an idiot far too convincing for his own good, now I have a sailor who doesn’t know his rowlocks from his arse.’
Gabriell eased his head back a fraction but the blade went with him. ‘Idiot? What idiot?’
‘Daft Harry. Do you have more than one idiot in your village?’
Gabriell held Marlowe’s wrist steady while he swallowed. ‘Daft Harry? No, he’s just the village idiot. We only have the one.’
Marlowe gathered up a handful of Gabriell’s jerkin and lifted him a little off his feet so he had to balance on tiptoe to stop the blade pricking under his chin. ‘Daft Harry is an agent of Sir Francis. As, I assume, are you, although I find it hard to credit.’
‘I am, as a matter of fact, but just as well, old chap, eh, or we would all be a bit in the soup. Are you usually this indiscreet?’ Gabriell was chancing his arm to speak like this to someone with a knife at his throat, but he had been told a lot about Marlowe and thought he could tell whether a man was a homicidal maniac or not. And this man seemed not.
Marlowe let him go suddenly and he fell into the fine sand at his feet. He felt a warm trickle on his neck and wiped it. He looked in horror at the back of his hand – he had cut him. The man had actually cut him. He felt quite ill suddenly and put his head between his knees.
‘I don’t mind being indiscreet with men I am about to skewer,’ Marlowe said, ‘but I fancy you might know more about this business than I do, so I am prepared to let you live long enough to tell me what’s going on.’
‘I don’t know that much,’ Gabriell whined. ‘I didn’t know about Daft Harry, to name just one part of my ignorance.’ He looked up, shielding his eyes from the weak sun which was struggling out through the clouds. ‘Are you certain about him?’
Marlowe inclined his head and wiped the tip of his blade on Gabriell’s shoulder before slipping it back into the sheath at his back.
‘I get a letter once a week from Nicholas Faunt. I don’t know who brings it. It is here, in my boat, every Monday at dawn. The Wight has always been somewhere they keep their eyes on. With the Back of the Wight facing France, if there aren’t spies landing, then there’s brandy. You can’t afford to take your eyes off them for a minute.’
‘And yet, here you are,’ Marlowe said sardonically, ‘up the Itchen without, it seems, a paddle.’
‘My boat is ready to take to the water,’ Gabriell said huffily. ‘I could be landing on the Wight in, ooh …’
Marlowe kicked the boat dismissively. ‘Can you sail this?’ he asked.
Gabriell looked him up and down. ‘I hope you don’t think that I lied to Master Faunt,’ he said. ‘He placed me here as a sailor, and sailor I am.’
Marlowe narrowed his eyes and felt again for the dagger in the small of his back.
Gabriell shook his head. ‘No, no, I am afraid I don’t know how to sail this boat,’ he said, scrabbling backwards in the sand. ‘But,’ he rolled over on to his hands and knees and got up, ‘I do know about what is going on in the Wight. I commit every letter to memory each week and then burn it. I remember them all. What would you like to know?’
Marlowe had a finely developed sense of his own well-being and had no intention of getting into a boat with this man, but on the other hand he did need to know as much as could be gleaned about the situation over the water. He took a step forward, matched by one of Gabriell’s going back.
‘Stand still, Master Gabriell. I won’t prick you again, you can be sure. But we must find someone here to sail us across to the Wight. Surely, not everyone in your village works for Sir Francis. Think, man.’
‘There are any number of sailors,’ Gabriell said, ‘but they go out at night. They say to fish, and their boats do come back laden down. But whether it is with fish or more valuable cargo, I couldn’t say.’
‘I know I have asked this before,’ he said patiently, ‘but is it true that you are an agent of the Crown?’
‘Why do you ask, Master Marlowe?’
‘Because you don’t seem to be able to see further than the end of your nose.’
‘If I were to capture every smuggler,’ the man said reasonably, ‘there wouldn’t be a man left out of gaol on the whole of the southern coast and I would get nothing else done. As it is, I talk to some of the men, about what they do on the Island. They think I have a rich lover somewhere nearby to keep me clothed and fed. Otherwise, how would I live?’
‘Do you?’
‘Live?’ Gabriell was confused.
‘Have a rich lover?’
The man blushed to the roots of his hair and opened his mouth, though he had no reply that would pass muster.
‘There is no need to explain to me,’ Marlowe said. ‘Needs must when the Devil drives and I know Sir Francis can be tardy when it comes to sending your dues.’ He stepped forward quickly and put his arm around the man’s shoulder before he could back away. ‘Master Gabriell, we are on the same side. Shall we just find a quiet rock or two, out of the drizzle and we can sit and take our ease. Do you have some food in that sack?’
Gabriell nodded.
‘Well, that’s splendid. We can sit over here and you can tell me all about the Wight. And then, I will go back into the village, say you have fooled me over my fare across to the other side and someone will pity me for an idiot and will think the more of you for your cunning. How does that sound?’
‘You’re a good man, Master Marlowe,’ the intelligencer said. ‘A good man and a kind one.’
‘If you say so,’ Marlowe said. ‘But for now, tell me what you know.’
Gabriel Gabriell did not know much more than could be found in the average Almanac. The Captain of the Wight, who was Governor too, was George Carey, kinsman to the Queen. The best ale was to be found in the King’s Town
of Brading, but Newport, the chief town, was awash with rabid Puritans who had banned Sunday trading, cards, dice and skittles. The locals spoke a peculiar dialect and Gabriel had heard, though he was not sure he believed it, that in the west of the Island there were Anthropophagi, headless men with their faces on their chests. Oh, and the place was haunted.
Marlowe had settled himself at the man’s feet, ready to be enlightened, but now rose with a sigh, brushed the sand from his Venetians, removed a crab from a crease in his boot and walked across to the mouth of the river to await a boat to the Wight.
Richard Turvey was captain at Cowes Castle and he did not suffer fools gladly – least of all that idiot Norris whose estate lay across the broad estuary of the Medina from his. He trained his shiny new telescope on the little skiff that was bobbing its way below the cannon on his walls and could make out a single passenger. He believed he was possibly the only man in England to own one of these marvels of modern science. Certainly, he was the only man in the Wight who did.
‘What do you make of that, Stanley?’ he asked, passing the glass to his lieutenant.
‘What am I looking at, sir?’
‘The skiff, man.’ Turvey was not known for his patience and he was already beginning to wonder what Stanley was actually for.
‘Gentleman,’ Stanley murmured, twisting the brass this way and that. ‘Roisterer, I shouldn’t wonder. He must have more money than sense to pay old Ben’s price for a crossing. He wouldn’t be one to give him any money off the fare for him being a light load.’
Turvey chuckled and nodded. ‘No sword, though,’ he said ruminatively.
Stanley waited until the boat had rocked past. ‘Can’t see one. Flash cloak, though. Londoner, I’d say.’
‘Would you?’ Turvey snatched back the telescope. He knew perfectly well the man had never been north of Salisbury in his life. ‘Would you really? Well, one thing’s for certain – Jimmy Norris won’t have seen him.’
Captain James Norris was furious. He had told old Winchcliffe to take that oak down more often than Dick Turvey had made a fool of himself at the old Leet Court. The boughs were not coming into leaf yet in this wet, late spring, but the trunk was exactly blocking Norris’s view of the skiff bobbing down the river. He took his job seriously. He was lord of East Cowes, the guardian of the river mouth and he watched everybody who sailed in – especially now, in these dark days. There were beacons on the high land of the Wight along the ridge that snaked like a coiling serpent from Yarmouth to the Bembridge Ledge. The parish guns had been hauled out of storage and the cobwebs brushed off them. Militiamen marched and countermarched on St George’s Down. There were rumours … and James Norris was drowning in rumours. The man in the skiff, what was he? Mid-twenties, perhaps. Flash dress. Soldier? Too well dressed for a scholar. Anyway, the Wight was crawling with apothecaries and comptrollers. There simply was not room for any more.
He called down from the battlements. ‘Cransford!’
‘Sir?’ The sergeant-at-arms popped his head up from the jakes.
‘Skiff coming past. Get yourself to the quay and find out who that is.’
‘Now, who the hell is that?’ John Vaughan was sitting on the quarter deck of the Bowe that afternoon, an open ledger on the table in front of him. Ahead of him, trimming sail as it took the last bend in the river, a little skiff was wending its way towards the quay. Vaughan blotted the page and closed the ledger. The passenger in the skiff did not look like a member of the Privy Council, but it paid to be careful.
‘Benjie!’ Vaughan called down into the hold. ‘Probably not a Comptroller of Wines and Spices, but let’s pretend he is, shall we? Call it a drill.’ He flicked out the expensive timepiece that had reached his hands from the Scheldt. ‘I’m timing you.’
There was a thunderous roll as Benjie set to work below decks, hauling barrels, spreading canvas and tying intricate knots. He had done this so often, he could almost do it in his sleep. Up on the deck, John Vaughan watched the skiff slide under his stern, vanish for a moment, then reappear. The helmsman was throwing his rope and the quaymen caught it, turning the rough hemp around the iron stanchions and holding it fast. The single passenger clambered out, his legs wobbling a bit at first, and he strode away up the hill, past the huge house of John Vaughan, the one that was so large it counted in the town’s tax records as two.
Kit Marlowe was glad to be on dry land again. Ahead of him stretched a smoky little town with gabled houses that jostled each other along Quay Street. There was a huge house to his right, new and opulent, clearly the home of a well-appointed gentleman. Beyond that and to the left, the Bridewell loomed grey and grim. Gnarled old hands groped out between the bars at street level and myriad voices called out to him: ‘Alms, master. Help us. For the love of God.’ There was only so much help Kit Marlowe had to give, for the love of God or anyone else. Even if he had thrown a coin or two through the bars, the inmates would have torn each other apart trying to get to them and keep them. He could see a church ahead, its spire tall above the rickety rooftops. This must be St Thomas’s, if Gabriell had told him true, where the former Lord of the Island lay in his alabaster armour with his rapier at his side.
The man had gone of the plague not six years before and Kit Marlowe had a dread of the plague. As a boy he had seen it, the grey bodies piled on carts clattering over the cobbles of Canterbury on their way to a pit, which, in his child’s eye, had been Hell, the Abyss itself. Marlowe turned into the High Street with its workshops and awnings, its inns and its stables. If it was Spain’s plan to land here, as some men said, there would be rich pickings indeed.
A drunk stumbled out of the Castle Inn and collided with Marlowe. The playwright projectioner steadied himself and let him fall gently to the mud of the street. He was a militiaman by the look of his clothing, with the rose of Hampshire sewn to his sleeve. Marlowe smiled grimly to himself. Yes, if the Spaniards came, people like this man would soon see off the Duke of Parma’s veterans.
Clear of the town, he took the hill towards the castle. He could see the river sparkling to his left and men drilling on the high, bare ground beyond that. He stood and watched them for a while, pikemen going through their drills and archers aiming at the butts on the lower slopes. But there was not a caliverman in sight and, without guns, the men of the Wight might just as well wave at the Spaniards and throw a welcome party for them.
It was the drum towers he saw first, new, smooth-surfaced turrets below their flagged roofs, above the rough Medieval stone. Briefly they reminded him of the Westgate at home in Canterbury, where his old dad had done time for crossing the powers that be. Guards wearing the Queen’s livery stood carelessly at the gates. The huge oak doors were open and women with laundry baskets strapped to donkeys were wandering in and out. For a while, Marlowe thought he might be able to walk straight in, but then two halberds clashed across his face.
‘Name?’ one of the guards asked him.
‘Christopher Marlowe.’
‘What’s your business?’ the other guard wanted to know.
‘That’s my business,’ Marlowe said.
‘Oh, a comedian,’ the first guard smirked.
‘Comedian, tragedian, poet.’ Marlowe smiled. ‘What you will.’
‘What you talking about?’ the second guard asked him.
‘That rose on your tunic,’ Marlowe said, flicking a parchment scroll from his purse. ‘Look.’ He pointed to it. ‘There’s a similar one. Can you read, thick knarre?’
‘Of course,’ said the guard, somewhat affronted.
‘Then read the signature.’
The guard did. His eyes widened and his halberd slid over his other half’s, back to upright. ‘Elizabeth R’ he had read through the scrolls and curls. ‘What is your pleasure, sir?’ he asked.
The other guard stood to attention too, careful not to make any more eye contact with the newcomer.
‘I have business with the Governor,’ Marlowe said. ‘Don’t worry.’ He swept past th
em under the shadow of the murder holes. ‘I can find my own way.’
FOUR
From the shadow of the gatehouse, Marlowe turned left and found himself almost on the step of a house, so new he almost expected the plaster still to be wet. The timbers were full of sap and were swelling and moving in the damp air and there were signs that ongoing repairs were constantly in progress. Despite this, the house was magnificent and he stepped back to admire it while he waited for his rap on the knocker to be answered. He was looking up at the roof gables and smiling at the faces carved there by a craftsman with a ready wit and time on his hands. A slight cough attracted his attention and he jumped slightly and looked at the doorway.
A woman stood there, looking at him from under a heavy brow. Her clothes were magnificent, but the front of her gown was covered by a sacking apron and her face was coarse and looked unwashed. Her hair was pulled severely back from her face under a cap and she carried a single white lily in one hand. When he didn’t speak at once, she leaned forward, her free hand on the door and snapped, ‘Yes?’
Marlowe was adept at charming women – and men too, for that matter, if they could help him in a quest. But he could tell from the outset that this woman was not put on earth to be charmed by him or any other man. Even so, he could scarcely help going through the motions, so he put down his bag and swept a low bow. ‘Mistress,’ he said, ‘I have come to stay in the house of Governor Carey as his Writer in Residence.’
She made as though to shut the door. ‘Thank you,’ she said sharply, her voice deeper than Marlowe’s own. ‘My brother can write. And should he need more writing than he can manage, he has a secretary. Good day, sir.’ And with that, she shut the door.
Marlowe felt that it had not gone well. He looked to his right and saw some old buildings, sagging on their foundations, but topped with newer structures in wood, with steps running up against the old stone walls. There seemed to be no one about but he must at least look. The woman had looked as though she would stop at nothing to prevent writers taking up residence. He listened carefully and could hear distant shouts from the training ground beyond the castle wall and the snick of a spade on a flint from what he took to be the kitchen gardens, over in a sheltered corner, beyond what appeared to be a chapel. He was not usually indecisive, but he had been thrown from his purpose and had to rethink.