Black Death

by M. J. Trow

  At the next corner, he glanced back over his shoulder. He could see the spire of All Hallows on the Wall, tall and black against the moon. He didn’t want to be too far away when the others got to the gate; he wouldn’t want them to think he had bolted for home. He strained his eyes and ears but could hear nothing, unless it was a very distant sound of earth on pine, but perhaps that was just his imagination. He turned back to look around the corner and almost swallowed his tongue. About three inches from his nose, a man’s face was peering at him in the gloom. When he could speak and his heart was back in his chest, he managed to croak out, ‘Who are you? And where in Hell did you come from?’

  The man took a step back and flung out an arm, simultaneously pointing an elegant toe. ‘I,’ he cried in ringing tones, ‘I, you oaf, am the greatest actor of the age. I, fellow, am Edward Alleyn.’

  Tom had wondered whether this frowsty fellow wandering the streets at dead of night might not be quite the full groat but now he knew for sure. Only a total lunatic would pretend to be Ned Alleyn. ‘I … see,’ Tom said, keeping his tone gentle and even, so as not to provoke the man. Only now did he remember that the dark wall bulked above his head was all that stood between him and the inmates of Bedlam, where the mad were chained to walls, and worse. How this one had got out he had no idea. Or, he thought to himself, perhaps he was trying to get in. In any event, he had to keep him quiet but, more importantly, he had to get away.

  ‘I am surprised you did not recognize me,’ the madman intoned. ‘I am loved and feted throughout this realm.’ He had a rather irritating way of rolling his ‘r’s almost to exhaustion, but it did remind the stage manager of the original and it was all he could do to suppress a smile.

  ‘Now I come to look again,’ he said, ‘I do recognize you. I don’t get to the theatre much, you see.’ Ingram Frizer wasn’t the only liar in London.

  ‘Poor wretch!’ The lunatic was heartbroken to think of Sledd’s misfortune. ‘And here we are, within a stone’s throw of the Curtain. Let me give you my Faustus! It is my most resonant role!’

  Sledd thought fast. ‘I don’t go to the theatre,’ he said, ‘because of my ears. I must have silence, you see.’

  The madman stepped back again. Much more of that and he would be far enough away for Sledd to make his escape. ‘I will be silent,’ he shouted. ‘I shall roar you as gently as any sucking dove.’

  ‘Er … thank you, Master Alleyn,’ Sledd said, ‘but even that would be too loud for my poor ears.’

  ‘Really?’ The man leaned forward, his rags hanging loose from his shoulders. ‘They are as bad as that, are they? You would be no good as an actor. You need to project!’ He shouted the last word so loudly that the echoes all but exploded. ‘The groundlings must hear every golden word from your lips, don’t forget.’ He peered at Sledd. ‘And yet, you know, I have seen you before. Are you sure you are not an actor?’

  Of all things, Sledd knew that that was true. Although he had at one time earned what his adoptive father, Ned Sledd, the actor manager, had told him was his living by acting, he knew he was hopeless at it. And, as long as the law and tradition had stood on their dignity and not allowed women on the stage, Tom had squawked his way from Mistress Gotobed to Dido, Queen of Carthage. Then, his voice had broken. ‘I am certain,’ he said, but the word was cut off as a hand went over his mouth.

  ‘That’s enough, my lad. You just come along o’ me.’

  ‘No, no, Jack,’ another voice said. ‘That’s not our boy. This’n’s too young. And …’ a face swam into view as Tom shook his head trying to get rid of the suffocating hand, ‘he don’t look half mad enough, by my reckoning.’

  The hand clutched harder. ‘That’s just their cunning, Nat. Just their cunning. They makes you think they’s normal and – bang! It’s a swede in a stocking upside the head and next thing you know is they’re all out the winder and away.’

  Nat peered closer. ‘I’m sure this isn’t ours, though,’ he said, still dubious.

  ‘Do it matter?’ Jack was pinioning Sledd’s arms behind him with his other hand. ‘Three groats old Sleford pays us for every runaway – and he don’t often ask questions. They all look alike, don’t they? Here, Nat, tie this, will you? Then this rag over his mouth. Bag over the head and we’re done. Head count all right at dawn and nothing amiss.’

  Sledd fought with all his strength but the two madhouse keepers were too much for him. He went slack in their hands and began quietly weeping inside his all-enveloping hood, with its stench of despair and fear soaked deep into the weft. The gag tasted foul in his mouth and his screams and cries for help were all in his head. Someone – his money would always be on Jack – kicked him in that head for good measure and, finally, thankfully, everything went a merciful black.

  Marlowe unsheathed his knife and quickly cut sections of the shroud according to Dee’s instructions. Then, he looked up and nodded at the other two. ‘Let’s get this good gentleman underground again, shall we?’ He covered Greene’s face with gentle hands. ‘We weren’t friends, Dominus Greene,’ he said softly to him. ‘You rarely missed a chance to do me down, to rob me when you could. But you didn’t deserve this, an early grave in a dank, dark corner.’ Shaxsper crossed himself and Frizer gave a cursory nod. After a silence, the three squared their shoulders and manoeuvred the coffin back into the earth.

  ‘We haven’t nailed him down,’ Shaxsper suddenly realized, as the earth was thudding down on the lid from their flailing shovels.

  ‘Are you afraid he’ll walk?’ Marlowe asked, drily.

  ‘No.’ Shaxsper managed a brittle laugh. ‘No, of course not. It’s just that …’

  ‘I don’t think Dominus Greene will mind a little draught,’ Marlowe said. ‘He’ll sleep just as soundly without nails as with. Sounder, perhaps, if we can avenge his death.’

  ‘Avenge? How?’

  ‘By finding out who killed him.’

  ‘Murder?’ Shaxsper patted the soil down neatly over the dead Dominus Greene.

  ‘Yes,’ Marlowe said, pulling his mask back into place. ‘Murder, most foul.’

  THREE

  Leaving Frizer and Shaxsper to tamp down the grave and make it look as much undisturbed as was possible, Marlowe crept quietly to the gates of the churchyard and looked left and right. The Pieto gardens were silhouetted in silver; the old Roman wall, crumbled now and broken, still stood to remind the world how the city had grown. From somewhere, perhaps Fynnesburie Field, a dog was barking at the night. There was no sign of Tom Sledd and Marlowe tutted. He had sent him to watch for the Watch, not hightail it home. But he allowed the man some latitude. He was scared witless of the Pestilence himself, though he tried not to show it; Tom had a family to think of and so a little discretion over valour was allowed. Just this once.

  Frizer and Shaxsper clattered up behind him, their pattens loud on the cobbles. So much for being silent as the grave.

  ‘Where’s Tom?’ Frizer said, loudly.

  ‘Sshh!’ the playwrights, real and imaginary, both turned on him and he pulled a wry face.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said aloud, then again, in a whisper, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Keep it quiet,’ Marlowe breathed. ‘We’re not safe until we are well away from here. I think Tom must have gone home and the Watch aren’t here, so he has done us no harm. Now … no more talking. Goodnight and thank you both.’ Coins clinked into Frizer’s hand but Shaxsper’s remained empty. He decided to take it as a compliment, one artiste to another.

  Keeping their beaked masks firmly pulled down over their faces, the three men parted at the crossroads, two to their beds, to sleep as best they might, Marlowe to the Strand, to the rooms of Dr John Dee, the Queen’s Magus. The streets of Shoreditch were strangely empty – Pestilence will do that to a city – and he made good time, without seeing a soul. He was almost at his destination among the great houses of the Strand that backed onto the river, when a shadow detached itself from a wall and he almost cannoned into the man who made it.
/>   ‘Good morning, Brother.’ The voice was smooth as honey, as soft as silk, and as reliable as thin ice over a bottomless lake.

  ‘Brother?’ Marlowe had been called a lot of things but never, until now, that.

  The man turned his face sideways, a silhouette against the setting moon. The beak of the plague doctor cut the air like a scimitar.

  ‘Oh, I see. Brother. Yes. Good morning.’ Marlowe made to pass by but he was stopped by a surprisingly burly arm.

  ‘Where are you off to, Brother?’ Now the voice had steel under the silk, the honey dripped from a honed edge that could kill in a trice.

  Marlowe’s hand crept to the dagger in the small of his back. ‘On my own business,’ he said, keeping his voice light.

  ‘May I ask your name?’ the man said, leaning in close.

  Above the scent of his own herb-packed snout, Marlowe could smell other things. Asafoetida, which he recognized from his many visits to Dee’s sanctum. Attar of Roses; that would be to please the ladies, it certainly had no place in warding off the plague. And something else … something that made his nostrils wrinkle and the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He didn’t move or answer.

  ‘May I ask your name, sir?’

  Marlowe smiled. This was better – whoever this plague doctor was, this man who smelled of death, he was getting angry and angry men were easy to beat.

  ‘Yes.’

  The man stepped back, his eyes dark and glowering through the eyeholes of his mask. ‘What is it?’ he hissed.

  Marlowe stepped back too, giving himself room to swing his blade, should it become necessary. ‘Oh, I do see now what you are asking. You don’t want to know if you can ask my name. You want to know my name.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘I don’t choose to give it,’ Marlowe said, making as if to step round the man, who sidestepped to match him. ‘Although, of course, should you choose to tell me yours, I may change my mind.’

  The man in the mask was clearly amazed. He swept an arm down his body, as if that were answer enough. He wore a long cloak, with strange swirling letters, shooting stars and moons, picked out in silver thread against the velvet which was blacker than night. Beneath it, he wore another gown, gathered onto a yoke, which was embroidered thickly with cut-glass brilliants and hung with crystal drops so it shimmered like mercury under the last rays of the moon. The sleeves were gathered in at the wrists by crisp white linen cuffs and it didn’t take a genius to guess that this was one plague doctor who didn’t do much visiting of the poor and sick.

  ‘How can you not know who I am?’ Outrage took the place of amazement. ‘I am …’

  Marlowe realized in a sudden flash of inspiration who this popinjay was. ‘Simon Forman,’ he said.

  The beak swept forward and almost knocked into Marlowe’s own. ‘The great Simon Forman,’ the man hissed. ‘The greatest protection from the plague, or any other of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.’

  ‘Hmm. “To which flesh is heir” would make you sound rather more believable, but I do get your general drift, Master Forman. Well, I am the great, I suppose I might say, Kit Marlowe.’

  ‘That Kit Marlowe?’ Forman was puzzled. ‘You’re a playwright, not a plague doctor.’

  ‘Can a man not be both?’ Marlowe asked. ‘I daresay the theatres will be closing soon, if this Pestilence stays upon us.’ He wasn’t quite sure why, but this man was making him sound like someone posturing on a stage.

  Forman struck a pose, a querying finger to his chin. He thrust out one leg and put a hand on his hip.

  Marlowe smiled. Now he knew who this man reminded him of. Ned Alleyn, at his most pompous, playing some despot in overdone costume. He tapped Forman on his embroidered chest, with the tip of his dagger. ‘You must excuse me, Master Forman,’ he said. ‘I do have places to be and you are in my way.’

  At the sight of the blade, Forman threw his head back and laughed. ‘Blades do not frighten me, Master Marlowe. No blade can pierce my carapace of magic.’

  Marlowe cocked his head and his great, herb-packed nose made him look like an inquisitive magpie, eyeing up its dinner. How he would have loved to prove this man wrong. But he really did have places to be, and no time to explain away a dead magus on the highway. With a smile and a wave, he stepped past Forman as he stood there, still posing, and slipped down an alleyway and out of sight before the cock-of-the-walk had even noticed he had gone. As he walked, he couldn’t help wondering how long the popinjay would stand there before noticing he was alone in the Strand and without an audience. His best guess was that it would be well and truly dawn before that happened.

  Marlowe was out by half an hour or so, but it was a very disgruntled magus who finally clambered into bed in Philpot Lane with his long-suffering wife, putting his cold feet into the heat of the small of her back. She grunted and shuffled further to the edge of the great feather mattress, but he followed her, keen for warmth and, if he could wake her just about enough, a little more. He had not had a good night. He could usually fool most of the people most of the time, but some of his failures were coming home to roost and he had had a rather difficult interview with a widow who had suddenly realized that rather than have Simon Forman glittering and posturing in her bedchamber, she would prefer a husband, alive and bringing home the bacon. Even the doves had let him down; when he tried to release one to depict the soul of the dear departed, it had fallen to the floor with a sullen clunk, its eye dead and glazed. The woman had had hysterics which even his special massage could not assuage – and his massage was usually very special. He lay there, mulling it over, and decided to try it out on his wife – perhaps he had lost his touch.

  ‘Get off me, Simon,’ she muttered, elbowing him neatly in the head. ‘Keep it for your silly widows. I’ve got to get up soon and tend to the house.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘No buts.’ She turned over and kneed him neatly where he least expected it. She heard the air leave his lungs with a tortured groan. ‘If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times. That kind of thing isn’t for a decent marriage bed. If it gets stupid women to part with money to keep bread in my children’s mouths, so be it. And with them out of London to escape the Pestilence, they cost even more. But I don’t like it, though I accept it’s your calling. But don’t think you can bring your nasty ways home with you.’

  Forman was still trying to get his breath, through the red haze of pain.

  ‘And, while we’re on the subject, the laundry maid has been complaining again. You left a couple of dead newts in your lawn sleeves yesterday. She screamed so loud I thought she was going to be sick. You have to be more careful, you really do. It’s bad enough having to clean those gowns of yours, all those beads and furbelows. Can’t you be a proper doctor instead of all this nonsense? A clever man like you, surely …’

  Forman lay in his warm feather bed and tried to block it all out. In the streets of Westminster, in the houses of the Strand and, yes, it was no exaggeration to say the palaces of Nonsuch and Placentia, he was a king, lauded and rewarded with every step. Here – here, he was nothing. What his wife’s knee hadn’t achieved, his misery completed and he lay there, limp and bruised in more ways than one. He began to drift away when he was aware of his wife’s voice getting louder and nearer to his ear.

  ‘But you’re not a bad husband, by and large and you are certainly a good provider. So as long as you’re quick and pull my nightdress down when you’re finished, you may have a go at me.’

  Opening his eyes just a little, he turned his head. His wife was lying on her back, her head averted and her fists clenched at her side. Her nightclothes were bunched up under her chin and her knees were splayed wide. Her lax stomach folded almost down to her pudenda, which, even in the half-light, was uninviting. He swallowed hard and thought fast. Giving vent to an almighty snore, he fell back on the pillows and was soon, quite genuinely, asleep.

  His tap at the door was answered instantly. Joh
n Dee had been waiting on the settle in his hall since before dawn and now the morning was well advanced. ‘Kit,’ he breathed. ‘I thought … well, I don’t know quite what I thought, but I had expected you long before this.’

  The Queen’s Magus was nudging sixty, but his body and mind were as agile as ever – and if Kit Marlowe needed access to his vast store of knowledge, well, that was all to the good.

  ‘My apologies.’ Marlowe swept off his grey cloak and threw it down on the settle, following Dee into the kitchen where the best fire was burning. ‘My plans have had a tendency to go awry since we spoke last. I suppose asking a stage manager, a would-be playwright and a walking gentleman to help me in the exhumation was my first mistake, but I was in a hurry and they were what came to hand. Then, I met Simon Forman on the way here – do you know him?’

  Dee turned and spat neatly onto the fire. ‘Sadly for me, I do. He considers himself a magus, though he is but a conjuror. The oaf was apprenticed to a merchant whose stock-in-trade was herbal remedies. Somehow, he smarmed around the authorities and got himself a place at Magdalen – Oxford, of course, not the real one. He specialized in medicine and astronomy but had to leave. There was some trouble with the bedders, by all accounts. He got to Utrecht, but for about ten years now he has been pretending to be a doctor. He hangs his shingle in Philpot Lane.’

  ‘So what was he doing in the Strand, I wonder?’

  ‘Those sleeves of his hide all manner of things,’ Dee went on, ‘though he uses his hands cleverly, I will concede that. The rumour has it that he fills them with doves and frogs and all manner of livestock every day, so he can amaze people as he goes about his business. Before the next morning, he empties out their poor, dead bodies, if he hasn’t had the need to release them. He’ll have been fawning around the more idiot of the wenches down the road, I’ll wager.’