by M. J. Trow
A young girl dragged the warped timber back. She was perhaps fifteen, with clear blue eyes and light, fair hair underneath a white cap. ‘I was looking for Harry Hasler,’ Marlowe said.
‘Not here, sir,’ the girl said and tried to close the door. But Marlowe had done this before. His boot was in the way; so was his hand.
‘When are you expecting him back?’ he asked the girl.
‘Who is it, Mary?’ a rough voice called from the darkness of the kitchen.
‘No one, father,’ Mary said and again tried to close the door.
‘No one, child?’ Marlowe smiled. ‘Less than kind, lady.’
The man was at the girl’s elbow. ‘Who are you and what do you want?’ he asked.
‘I want Harry Hasler,’ Marlowe told him. ‘And my name is my business.’
‘Never heard of him.’ The man shrugged.
‘I was told he lodged here.’
‘You was told wrong.’ And this time the door did slam. Marlowe took stock of his situation. Master Martin might have misremembered the number in Quay Street, but his description of the house seemed to fit. He was about to knock again when the girl Mary appeared from a side door and beckoned him into the shadows.
‘Sir,’ she whispered, ‘I’m sorry about all this, but Father … well, he don’t like Harry … er … Master Hasler.’
‘So he is here?’ Marlowe dropped his voice to match hers, in deference to the obvious panic written over the girl’s face, even in the half light.
‘Was, sir,’ she corrected him. ‘I haven’t seen him these three weeks.’
‘Did he say where he was going?’
‘No, sir.’ Mary looked downcast. ‘He didn’t say he was going, even.’
Marlowe smiled and lifted up the girl’s chin. ‘Forgive me, Mary,’ he said, ‘but what was Harry Hasler to you?’
‘Nothing, sir.’ She sniffed defiantly. ‘He lodged at our house, that’s all. While he worked on the governor’s gardens up at the castle.’
Marlowe glanced down. He was not familiar with these things, but it did seem as though Miss Mary’s gown was a little stretched across the stomacher. ‘How long has Harry been with you?’ he asked. ‘Staying here, I mean.’
‘Ooh, about three months,’ she said. ‘Forgive me, sir, I have to go. Don’t think the worse of father. These are strange times for us all.’
‘Strange?’ Marlowe asked.
‘The Island, sir,’ Mary whispered, wide-eyed. ‘There are strange goings-on. Ghostly things, if you get my meaning.’
‘I don’t believe I do, Mary,’ he said. ‘Has your father let Master Hasler’s room yet?’
‘No, sir. In case he comes back.’ She suddenly beamed. ‘I hope he comes back.’
‘Yes.’ Marlowe nodded. ‘We all do, Mary.’ He flicked a silver coin from his purse. ‘Is there a time when your father goes out? When I can take a peek at Master Hasler’s room?’
Mary looked horrified. ‘Oh, I don’t know, sir.’ But the reflected light from the coin was dappling her face and she found it hard to look away. ‘Well, maybe tomorrow. He do go to market at cock crow.’
Marlowe flipped the coin and the girl caught it, hiding it quickly in her apron. ‘Cock crow it is, then,’ he said.
By the time Marlowe reached the castle, all was in darkness. The guard at the gate grunted something incomprehensible to him and let him through the wicket. If there were supposed to be guards on the walls after dark, they were not there now; nor was there one on George Carey’s front door.
Marlowe passed the little chapel where the body of Walter Hunnybun still lay and went on up to his rooms in the east wing. In the hallway the expensive clock obtained from Jobst Bürgi, the one that George Carey was pleased to announce to all visitors kept accurate time to the minute, read half an hour past eleven. One of the governor’s wolfhounds had been dozing on the old straw in the corner. He lifted his head briefly, whined once and went back to sleep.
It was at his own door that Marlowe felt a prickle of apprehension at the back of his neck. It was unlatched and he had not left it that way. A careless maidservant, perhaps? Perhaps, but he was taking no chances. Dark corners and shadows in Gloriana’s England were places to avoid; men died in them. He slid the blade out of its sheath and prodded the solid oak door with the tip. It opened noiselessly and he was inside, watching, waiting. There was no one there. The only conceivable hiding place was the Arras in the corner. He made no sound as he crossed the floor, the light through the lattice window illuminating his way. He felt the rough tapestry under his hand and wrenched it aside, dagger ready. Nothing.
He relaxed and lit his candle. The bed was made and turned down for him. There was a platter of bread and cheese under a cover on the sideboard, a pitcher of water and a jug of wine. And then, there were the books. Sir George Carey’s library was one of the finest in England and Marlowe had borrowed half a dozen for his bedtime reading. He had left Sir Thomas More on top of the pile and Ralph Holinshed on the bottom. Now they were the other way around, Utopia relegated and the Chronicles in pride of place. Marlowe might have put this down to an illiterate maid or manservant who, in dusting, could not tell one from the other, were it not for the papers slotted inside Holinshed’s corners.
Marlowe peered at these with the help of his candle, but he closed the door first. The papers were set out like the pages of a book but they were handwritten in a scholarly style. He read them, then read a page or two of Holinshed. They were very similar, except that the handwritten version was scurrilous: And Lord Thomas delighted in the girl’s body and would chase her through the knot garden and slap her backside bare. She would howl withal but seemed to enjoy it and never more than when the Lady Catherine held her down.
Marlowe leaned back, trying to make sense of this, but it got more lurid. The doctors found an oddity under her clothes, of the hermaphrodite kind, which meant that she would be barren all her days. It was God’s judgement. The most cryptic comment of all however was on the last page in the form of a rhyme: Three steps from door to floor, Three steps for the taking, Three steps back and three steps fore, And the whole world’s shaking.
There was nothing else, merely these random jottings, and yet they seemed to tell a story. One thing was certain; the papers had not been there when Marlowe left and now they were, teasing the projectioner’s brain, making the hairs on the back of his neck crawl. Three steps. Three steps. The words whispered in his head like the first rush of flames that were still burning people across Europe, like a dagger hissing from a sheath. He looked out of the window and saw faint points of light far away beyond the south wall of the castle. Will o’ the wisps dancing on the night air, out in the fields where the Spaniards would come.
The cocks were crowing as Kit Marlowe went back to Quay Street. A grey dawn was breaking over the sleeping town and drovers were herding their cattle to the makeshift pens around the Cross. The poet had never known a town quite like this one. Canterbury, where he had been born in the shadow of St George the Martyr, was full of bells and books and candles. The King’s School with its Dark Entry had filled his life there, along with the sound of his father’s awl and the smell of the tanneries. Cambridge had been cloistered, invaded by children for most of the year as the scholars scurried to their lectures, noses blue and red from the cold wind straight from Muscovy. And London … well, London was London. There was no city in the world like it. From the Standard in Cheap to the Smock Alleys, the Dagger, the Woolsack … Marlowe knew them all. The stench of Billingsgate and the rush and tumble of the Bridge.
But this place was different. There was a silence about it that was unnerving; a silence not of peace but of fear. It echoed through Castlehold and along Holyrood, down Croker Street and across the misty gravestones of Church Litten where the plague-dead lay.
Marlowe had borrowed a scruffy old cloak from one of Carey’s servants so that he blended rather better with people on their way to market. His own Colley-Weston was too flash for a man
nipping in to the side door of a house in Quay Street. Mary was waiting for him as she had promised and she shut the door quickly.
‘Father’s gone,’ she said. ‘But you’ll have to hurry. What is it you are looking for, sir?’
Marlowe looked at her. She was plainer by daylight but nobody’s fool, he guessed. ‘I am concerned,’ he said, ‘that something might have happened to Harry Hasler.’
Mary blinked, catching her breath. Clearly, the thought had occurred to her too. ‘How do you know him, sir?’ she asked, leading the way up the rickety stairs to the first floor.
‘In London,’ Marlowe told her. ‘We shared rooms.’ He glanced at the girl’s belly again. ‘Did you know him well?’
Mary blushed. ‘Not really, sir,’ she said, her eyes lowered and she opened a low door on the landing.
‘Thank you, Mary.’ Marlowe smiled. ‘I’ll call if I need you.’
She bobbed and he heard her clatter downstairs. He was not sure how much time his silver had bought him and Mary’s father could be back at any minute. Marlowe had just walked through the market, where the bulls steamed in the morning, shackled by iron to the ground. The man could be here before George Carey’s clock struck the hour. He checked the cupboard, the corners of the room. Mary kept a clean house; not so much as a cobweb. He looked under the bed; nothing. The chest in the corner was locked and he guessed that neither Mary nor her father had a key. In seconds, Marlowe’s dagger-point was nuzzling the cold metal of the lock and in a few seconds more, the lid was open and he was rummaging inside. Two shirts. A pair of Venetians. An expensive ruff. Unless gardeners were earning a lot more these days, these were not the clothes of a mechanical. Hasler would have hidden these to allay suspicion but kept them in case he had to make a fast getaway. The Sumptuary laws still meant something in the sticks. Rustics took off their caps and stepped aside when a gentleman swept past.
There were no books in the chest but there was a small pile of papers. Most of them were covered in very bad drawings of knot patterns, the plans for Carey’s castle garden. But one held the projectioner’s gaze and he took it to the small window to read it carefully in the growing light. It was a love letter. ‘Tonight,’ it said, ‘my darling one. But be careful. He knows, I am sure of it. I long for the touch of your caress, the press of your lips on mine. My heart aches for you and my loins tremble. Three steps back and three steps fore.’ There was no signature – that would be too much to hope for. But the words were there again as they had been in Marlowe’s own room the night before – the cryptic poem of the three steps.
‘Sir!’ Mary was hissing frantically at the bottom of the stairs. ‘My father!’
Marlowe shut the chest, taking the letter with him, and looked for a way out. One door, one set of stairs. He could hear the old man’s voice grumbling below. Marlowe pushed open the window as wide as it would go. He had done this dozens of times, jumping in and out of the Court at Corpus Christi in the small hours of a roistering night when the proctors were on the prowl. It was nothing. Except that he was fifteen feet above the ground and the ground was cobbled and uneven. He glanced up and down the street. There would be no hope of doing this silently. He would just have to take the leap and brazen it out.
His cloak flew out behind him as he sailed through the air and he landed well. Straightening, he stepped along the road as if it was the most natural way in the world to leave a house.
‘Another of Miss Mary’s fellers,’ grunted a passing swineherd, tapping his porkers into line ahead of him.
‘Ar.’ His mate nodded, still chewing the blade of grass he had brought with him from the West Wight three hours earlier. ‘Old Sculpe had better have a word with that girl. If she was mine, I’d put her over my knee.’
The swineherd paused. ‘I think somebody’s already done that,’ he said and they both guffawed their way to market.
Marlowe had recovered his poise by the time he reached his room at Carey’s mansion and he entered with a plan already formed in his head. Bed, a few hours’ shut-eye and then a late breakfast. His hunt for Harry Hasler could wait at least a while. Then there was the matter of a dead body in the chapel. He shrugged off his cloak and doublet and left them in a pile on the floor. At home he was rather more fastidious, but here there were servants and he was sure they would prefer to do these little tasks for him than to find themselves at a loose end. He unlaced his breeches and wriggled out of them, boots and all. If they had time on their hands, he knew that Mistress Avis would find them something to do, something much less pleasant than picking up his clothes. He pulled the shirt over his head and jumped on the bed, just for the pleasure of feeling the taught strings beneath him. Sometimes, he thought, he had grown up a little too fast. Where was the carefree boy of the Dark Entry now, splashing through the puddles at the tolling of the bell?
‘Were you brought up in a field, Master Marlowe?’
He froze in mid bounce. There was only one person in Carisbrooke who sounded like an old gate creaking when she spoke, but what was Mistress Avis Carey doing in his bed chamber? He hurriedly gathered a couple of handfuls of bedclothes over himself and sat up against the bedhead, ready for anything. Somehow, he didn’t think that Avis had the same thing in mind as the dancers he had dallied with so recently. Or at least, he hoped she hadn’t. As he hauled on the sheets, a piece of vellum slipped out – Nicholas Faunt’s warning note of the cuckoo in the nest.
He gave a cough. Somehow, his mouth had gone very dry. ‘Mistress Carey,’ he croaked. ‘How do you do?’
‘I asked you a question,’ the woman snapped.
‘Erm, no, I was not brought up in a field.’ He could tell that sticking to the bare facts would get him further with this woman than most of her kind. ‘My mother was very strict, as mothers of sons go.’
‘Then why did you drop your clothes on the floor? A gentleman does not behave in such a manner unless he is in drink. Are you in drink, Master Marlowe?’
‘No.’ He was on firmer ground now. ‘No, Mistress Carey. I am certainly not in drink.’
‘Then,’ the woman was nothing if not persistent, ‘are you waiting for an assignation?’ She peered through the gloom. ‘I understand from my sister-in-law and her friends that you attract them in that way. Have you made some arrangement with one of those drabs? Is that what excites you to such ungentlemanly behaviour?’
‘No, no, I must reassure you, Mistress Carey.’ Marlowe gave a wriggle that released another couple of yards of linen to use as a cover and he felt all the better for it. ‘I am here as Sir George’s guest, and I would not dream of abusing his trust.’
She sat back and looked at him long and hard. He could practically feel her gaze sizzle on the sheets. A smell of airing laundry filled the air and he was reminded for the second time in as many minutes of his mother. Her voice when it came was softer than usual and she sounded a little surprised.
‘I believe you, Master Marlowe. I do not take you for a dissembler.’
Pressed against the headboard of the bed, Marlowe almost felt himself blush. For a projectioner, this had to be the highest accolade. He bowed slightly. ‘Thank you, Mistress Carey,’ he said. There was a silence and then he asked, ‘What are you doing in my chamber, if I may ask?’
She looked him up and down as if he were the lowliest kitchen boy. ‘You were not in your chamber, Master Marlowe,’ she said, as if that explained everything.
He paused again. He knew the answer to his next question, but posed it anyway. ‘How did you know?’
‘How did I know what?’ Avis Carey’s voice was just as carrying as ever.
‘That I wasn’t here. Did you come and look for me for some reason?’
‘I did look round the door, yes,’ she said. ‘I look round everyone’s door at some time in the night. Sometimes twice.’ She gave a delicate shudder but her solid flesh did not take the hint and there was not even a flicker of an eyebrow. ‘I see some things, Master Marlowe, that it would be better not spoken of.’
Marlowe gave a slow nod. A peeping Thomasina, if he were any judge. He clutched the sheet a little closer. ‘I see. I didn’t mean to distress you, Mistress Carey. I had business in town.’
She leaned forward and hissed at him. ‘Business. Business, Master Marlowe. I can only imagine what your business might be.’ She wiped her mouth where her venom had caused her to spit.
‘No, Mistress Carey, please do not misunderstand me.’ Marlowe had faced ravening mobs, men armed in all kinds of subtle ways, but this woman, with her single thought in her head, was scaring him far more than any one of the other threats had had the power to do. ‘I was … I was arranging for a message to be sent to London. To bring my stage manager down to the Wight. Sir George has asked me to put on an entertainment.’ He looked up under his lashes. ‘I rather think he was thinking of asking you to do something.’
It was hard to tell what she was thinking, but at least she had stopped hissing at him, so hope could at least creep out of hiding, if not spring eternal.
‘I sent a letter with a ship.’ He was on shaky ground here. She was a local woman who probably knew all kinds of things relating to seafaring and the tides and the only thing he knew about water was that it could drown a man. ‘I had to … catch the tide.’
She looked at him and then clapped her hands down, one on each knee with a sound of a small explosion. ‘Master Marlowe,’ she said, and he heard rather than saw a smile. ‘You have gladdened my heart. It has been too long since anyone did anything to make my Georgie happy. Only I care for his welfare; only I am on constant watch to keep him safe.’
‘When do you sleep, Mistress Carey?’ He had to know if the woman ever closed her eyes. Otherwise he would need to grow two more of his own, in the back of his head.
‘I nap.’ Her mouth closed like Skeffington’s Gyves, that nasty little contraption they kept in the Tower, just in case.