Silent Court (3 page)

He smiled at her and leaned back in his chair, with his legs spread out to the fire. ‘On one condition, Mistress Shelley,’ he said.

‘Of course.’ She knew it would not be the condition she hoped for, but she hoped for it just the same.

‘That I can have a copy. It doesn’t matter who paints it, if it is a student, not the master, but I would like one. For my rooms, you know; in Cambridge.’

She forced a smile; it was for his sweetheart, she feared. But she was a polite woman, well brought up by yeomen in Yorkshire. ‘It would be our pleasure, Kit,’ she said.

William Shelley jerked upright at the click from his study door.

‘Kit.’ He hurriedly slid the parchment he was writing on under a pile of others and propped the quill into the inkwell. ‘It’s late.’

Marlowe closed the door behind him and sat down uninvited. Shelley had never seen the man look so grim, so focused. There was an indefinable fire in his eyes.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘I had a letter today,’ Marlowe told him.

‘Yes, I know. From Cambridge. You have to go back.’

‘No,’ the tutor said. ‘Not from Cambridge.’

Shelley frowned. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘I had two letters today – the one you know about. It just had two words.’ Marlowe looked grimly at Shelley. ‘Francis Throckmorton.’

‘Who?’

‘The second letter came hard on the heels of the first. You were still at the castle; in the private chapel, no doubt. It talked of five thousand Horse, twelve thousand Foot. Pikemen, arquebusiers. I’m still in the dark about the field pieces.’

Shelley blinked, his lips dry, his heart thumping. His smile told a different story. ‘You’ve lost me,’ he said.

‘Of course –’ Marlowe stretched out his booted feet and crossed them at the ankles – ‘these are just the projected figures.’

‘Projected?’ Shelley repeated.

Suddenly, Marlowe slammed his fist down on the carved arm of the chair. He was sitting bolt upright. ‘The Duke of Guise will bring that army, those seventeen thousand men, to a landing place somewhere on the Essex coast. No doubt when the third letter arrives, it will tell me exactly where. Somewhere on the Crouch would be my guess. How many transports Guise will need, I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter.’

‘Kit…’ Shelley was blinking again, his hands outstretched in confusion.

‘Those Englishmen loyal to the Bishop of Rome will rally to Guise’s standard, march to wherever they’re holding Mary of Scots and overthrow the Queen. The Thames will run red.’

‘Stop!’ Shelley bellowed. ‘These are the ravings of a madman, sir.’

‘Indeed they are.’ Marlowe nodded. He was almost whispering.

‘And what has any of this nonsense to do with me?’

‘In the county of Sussex,’ Marlowe continued, as though reading a litany for the dead, ‘those Englishmen loyal to the Bishop of Rome include Charles Paget, Esquire, His Grace the Earl of Arundel, Sir Aymer Middleton, Roger Bantry… and William Shelley, gentleman. Husband, father.’

‘Employer of Christopher Marlowe,’ Shelley added in a low growl. ‘Spy and traitor.’

Marlowe stood up sharply. Shelley knew the man carried a dagger in the sheath in the small of his back. His eyes flickered across to his own broadsword propped in the corner. Marlowe was younger, fitter, faster. He had already given up any thought of silencing the man when the door crashed back and half a dozen armed men burst in, their swords drawn, their faces grim.

‘No,’ said Marlowe levelly. ‘Not traitor. That label belongs nearer to home.’

‘William Shelley,’ the sergeant-at-arms barked. ‘Under the powers vested in me by their Lordships of the Privy Council, I am placing you under arrest on a charge of High Treason.’

‘I trusted you with my children,’ Shelley hissed at Marlowe as they hauled him round and bound his wrists behind his back.

Marlowe closed to him. ‘And I trusted you with my country,’ he said.

‘Take him away,’ the sergeant ordered. ‘And get the women.’

‘No!’ Marlowe blocked the doorway.

‘Walsingham’s writ says the whole family,’ the sergeant snapped at him. ‘Wife, Catherine; daughters, Jane and Charlotte.’

‘Show me,’ Marlowe insisted.

The sergeant fumbled in his purse and dragged out the tatty scroll with Walsingham’s seal. Marlowe read the contents briefly by the flickering candles; then he tore it up and threw the pieces in the sergeant’s face.

‘I don’t give a rat catcher’s arse for Walsingham’s writ,’ he said. ‘Does the Privy Council make war on women and children now?’

The sergeant hesitated. He hadn’t expected this. Whose side was this man on? Judas Iscariot with a conscience? Well, yes, it made some sense. He had four men at his back and Marlowe was alone. Even so, the sergeant was a man with an infinitely flexible spine. They didn’t pay him enough to take on one of Walsingham’s men. And there was something in Marlowe’s face he didn’t like.

‘Just him, then,’ the sergeant grunted. ‘But there’ll be questions asked,’ he warned Marlowe. They bundled William Shelley along the corridor to where their horses waited in the darkness of the courtyard.

Marlowe watched them go. He saw Catherine rushing across the stones in the dim light from the hall, her servants tussling with the guards. He knew there was no point in going down himself. It was all over in seconds. No one was hurt, just two ladies, consoling their weeping mistress and baffled serving men watching the knot of horsemen cantering into the darkness of the night.

TWO

R
obert Greene stood at the corner of Lion Yard that Thursday evening. The curfew hour for the University scholars had come and gone, yet they were still there, whispering and sniggering together in the shadows, scurrying from The Swan to the Brazen George and always to the Devil. It had been the same in his day, when the most exciting thing in the world was a roll in the hay with some girl and beating the proctors at their own game, shinning over college walls and sliding down roof ledges.

It was damned cold there on the edge of the marketplace, the stalls silent and deserted now, cloaked in the November dark. He stamped his feet like a sizar without money for his coal and blew on his hands. Where
was
the man? He’d said half past ten of the clock. Quite distinctly. Now it was nearly eleven and Greene decided to call it a night; he clearly wasn’t coming. He threw his cloak over his shoulder and strode over the already-frosting cobbles. Then he saw him, shoulders back, spine straight, striding over the pavements as if he owned the place.

‘Dr Harvey,’ he hissed as they met at the corner.

‘Is that you, Greene?’ Gabriel Harvey knew perfectly well who it was, but he wouldn’t give the guttersnipe the satisfaction.

‘Good evening to you, Doctor.’ Greene nodded.

‘There’s nothing conceivably good about it, Greene,’ Harvey snapped, poking his nose out to squint up at the blue-black of the Cambridge sky. ‘I left a warm fire and a hot toddy to come here. And every step I took I wondered why I did. Your note said it was urgent.’

‘It is,’ Greene assured him. ‘Er… The Bell?’ Both men looked up at the iron inn sign creaking and cracking in the wind. The clapper had long gone, spirited away by some drunken scholar on a spree, so the empty bell just clanked dully against a thick arm of withered ivy which hung from the wall. It sounded like the ghost of a dead bell, still marking the hours with no one to hear it ring.

Harvey peered in through the thick, warped panes. ‘And sit drinking with half the scholars of my college? Are you utterly out of your mind?’

‘It’s Marlowe.’ Greene blew on his frozen fingers again, hopping from foot to foot.

Greene stood upright, turning slowly to him. In the light from the inn, his face was a mask of fury. ‘Where?’

‘In Petty Cury,’ Greene whispered. ‘I saw him myself. Not two hours since. I can show you the very spot.’

‘Why?’ Harvey asked. ‘Will Machiavel have burned his cloven hoof into the cobbles? Mother of God, give me some respite from all this.’ He looked the man squarely in the face, then gripped his shoulders, shaking him. ‘You’re sure, man? The last I heard of Marlowe, he was going south with those strolling players. He let everyone know he’d done with Cambridge. Of course –’ Harvey released the man as a thought occurred to him – ‘we all know what that was about. He couldn’t cut it, the scholarship, I mean; the cut and thrust of debate. No, his Dialectic was sloppy, his Greek only so-so. I wasn’t impressed.’

Greene hardly liked to argue with Harvey in full spate, but facts were, after all, facts. ‘He’s back.’

‘Damn!’ Harvey thumped the door frame of The Bell.

‘I thought you should know.’

Harvey sneered at the informant. Ordinarily, he’d wipe things like Robert Greene off his patten soles, but in a way the St John’s graduate was a kindred spirit. They both hated Marlowe; that gave them a certain bond.

‘What will you do?’ Greene asked.

‘Do?’ Harvey pulled himself up to his full height. ‘Perhaps it’s best you don’t know.’ He half turned, then he half turned back. ‘Watch yourself, Dominus Greene,’ he said. ‘If the Devil is loose in Cambridge, then none of us is safe.’

There were just shadows in the Court at Corpus Christi college that night. The last roisterers had crept home under the fitful moon and the proctors had missed them again. Under the eaves in the cramped attic rooms, the sizars snored softly in their hard, narrow beds, dreaming of the Aristotle, the Plato, the Cicero and the Horace crammed into their heads day after day. The frost drew its silent pictures on the inside of their grimy windows and brought a kind of beauty to the room which the meagre belongings of the sizars could never bring. A mouse crept out, without much hope of finding anything and then froze as its ears, triangulating madly for the smallest sound, heard the soft padding of Old Tiberius, the college cat, as he made his way up the staircase at the far corner where the path wound its way into the silent churchyard of St Bene’t’s.

A hand reached out and stroked the animal, who arched his back and purred, his tail curling upwards and his chin lifting for a tickle. Kit Marlowe crouched alongside the cat. ‘Oh, Tiberius,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll wager you say that to all the returning graduates.’ He straightened and turned to the stairway, on up past his old room, the one he had shared with the lads from Canterbury, his home for three long years.

On the landing he fancied he heard something, but it was probably just the creak of the stair, old dry wood shifting against the ancient stone. He felt for the panelled tracery of his door and pushed gently. He couldn’t see the two men waiting for him inside. One, a taut, lean scholar, stood with his back against the wall, a dagger glinting in his right hand. The other crouched on the opposite side of the door frame, a lead-weighted cosh in his fist. There were three men by that doorway and nobody seemed to be breathing.

‘Hello, Tom,’ said Marlowe. ‘Hello, Matt. Aren’t we all a little old for tricks like this?’

The other two spun into his vision, laughing and roaring, hugging him and slapping his back. ‘Kit, you whoreson zed, it really is you!’ Matthew Parker was jumping around as if his pattens were on fire. Tom Colwell held Marlowe’s shoulders squarely and peered into his face in the gloom of the unlit room. He shook his head. ‘The years have not been kind,’ he said and Marlowe threw him backwards so that he bounced off the bed.

‘It’s not four months since I saw you two bastards last,’ he laughed. ‘Light a candle there, Matt. Let’s see if you’ve been able to grow a beard yet.’

They all laughed, babbling about this and that as the room glowed with candles. What old Norgate was doing with the College, how furious the proctors Lomas and Darryl were now they had no powers to punish the boys, the girl that the old Puritan, Tom Colwell, had fallen for. It all came out in a rush and tumble, washed down by the wine Tom had been saving for this occasion. He knew it would happen, that Kit Marlowe would be back; he just hadn’t known when.

‘How’s home?’ Matthew Parker wanted to know. ‘Does Canterbury still stand?’

‘Home?’ Marlowe had almost forgotten the word, the smell of the tanneries where he was born, the beer of The Star where he had carried pots and held gentlemen’s horses, the sound of his father’s hammer tapping the studs into clients’ boots. But in the one letter he’d written to these lads in the past weeks, that was where he told them he was, resting before he came back to Cambridge. He was ever a dissembler; now he had to keep his skills up to the mark, even when the boys who were boys when he was a boy were sitting and drinking with him. He smiled. ‘Home is still there. Canterbury still stands.’

‘Kit.’ Colwell stood up, his goblet in his hand. ‘Here’s to us, eh? The Parker Scholars back together again.’ And he drained the cup. ‘The Parker Scholars!’ Parker and Marlowe chorused and did the same.

‘Is Cambridge ready for us, do you think?’ Parker laughed. And they drank into the night.

There was a time when the trio in front of him would have reminded Marlowe of the three wise men, sitting on their camels in the star-led watches of the night. But that was then, when he was a carefree scholar who knew so little of the world. Now, it was different. Now, the three men in front of him that Friday morning looked more like a Court of the Inquisition.

In the centre, looking greyer and more cobweb-wisped than he remembered him, sat Dr Robert Norgate, the Master of Corpus Christi. He was feeling his age now that November had come and he didn’t care to stray too far from the fire that crackled and spat in his study. To Norgate’s right sat Michael Johns, as good a man as ever put on a scholar’s cap and tried to din into dimmer heads the weight of his scholarship. He had never thought to see Marlowe again and was glad he had come back to the fold. There had been talk of strolling players and the London theatre. He was quietly glad that that had all been nonsense. On the Master’s left, as on the left hand of God, sat Gabriel Harvey, looking like a man staring at a dose of the plague.

‘I say no, Master,’ he snapped.

Norgate turned to him, as well as his rheumatism would allow. ‘I know you do, Gabriel. Just as I know that Michael here has said yes.’ He couldn’t turn to Johns as well, so the teacher of Rhetoric had to make do with a cursory wave. ‘I –’ Norgate placed his fingers together near his pursed lips – ‘must perforce play Solomon. Again.’