Silent Court (7 page)

‘What’s that you’re muttering?’ Dee asked, pulling back. He was as credulous as the next man, despite knowing every trick in the book and some others too frightening ever to write down.

‘Oh, sorry,’ she said. ‘Did I speak aloud? It was just a list of the laundry that needs to be sent to the washerwoman. I’ll be quiet. Come forward. We’ll start again.’

She repositioned her fingers and pressed lightly on her husband’s brow, the pressure making his skin go numb and a slight pain run along the sinuses of his face. She stayed like that for two minutes, counted by the second and then she let her fingers drop to her lap.

‘You were wondering,’ she said, ‘whether I have been bedded by Edward Kelly.’

Dee pushed her away, not roughly, but purposefully. ‘I do believe you really are a witch,’ he said. ‘That
was
what I was thinking.’

She sat back in her chair, made herself comfortable and reached for her knitting. She started counting stitches again and the minutes ticked by. Dee looked round the room of this rented house. It had none of the glorious eccentricity of his home in Mortlake, destroyed by fire not six months since. It had been a place of wonders, of cockatrices, of flagons of potions, of alchemists’ retorts blown of glass so thin it was scarcely there at all. It had grown around him as a caddis grows its coat, in the still pools of night when he could commune with spirits best left in the vasty deep. He missed his house and was looking for another home, perhaps not so near to neighbours who took exception to his nocturnal noises and his not inconsiderable reputation. Ely, in the county of Cambridge, had attracted him for many reasons. The cathedral was unlike any other in the country, floating like a caravel in the mists of the fens, built by the Normans with their iron coats and strange tongue. The countryside was eerie, flat as a plate with skies much bigger than they ever seemed in London. It was a country that gave a man space to breathe, to think. It also gave Dee more time to be with Helene, without the distractions of his constant calls to court. Every time the Queen needed to make a decision, she called Dee to cast a rune or plot a chart. Helene joked that Elizabeth asked Dee before she took a piss. The call had not been for so trivial a reason yet, but that day was probably not far off. Pleading a vital piece of research which would strengthen his ties with the world beyond, Dee had taken his little household off to the Fens and so here he sat, on the horns of his dilemma. Was Helene faithful to him, or not?

Eventually, he could bear it no longer. ‘And so, madam,’ he said, ‘have you?’

She looked up from her stocking, the heel now successfully turned. ‘I told you what you were thinking,’ she said. ‘I didn’t say I would tell you the answer to your question.’

‘But you must tell me,’ he said. ‘I have never asked such a question before, although you must know I trust no man with you. You are the most beautiful woman any man has ever seen. To see you must be to want you.’

‘Think of it from my point of view, then,’ she said. ‘I am the woman looking out from the tower of my beauty. There are few men who match my charms, if what you say is true. Why should the most beautiful woman in the world have anything to do with Edward Kelly, with his clipped ears? What could he offer such a one? You are a magus. He is a trickster with a silver tongue, one who mocks people’s credulity, who turns their wishes to his own advantage. I have the magus. Why would I want a fraud?’

Dee settled back in his chair. He could see into men’s hearts and see their innermost desires. He could bring men back from the dead to tell who sent them there. He could turn lead into gold… well, not that, but surely that secret was not far from his grasp now, if his calculations were correct. He looked at his wife, sitting there demure with her knitting. He decided to believe her.

She decided not to disabuse him.

‘Kit?’ Michael Johns popped his head around the scholar’s door that morning. ‘Leaving so soon?’

He took in the heavy leather haversacks, the extra rolled cloak, the provisions for the road laid out on the bed. Particularly he took in the sword with its swept hilt gleaming like mercury at the man’s hip. The grey fustian of Corpus Christi had gone and Marlowe wore a black doublet with scarlet slashes, buskins of leather and a colleyweston cloak embroidered with spiders’ webs in silver. Professor Johns would need to work for ten years to earn enough to buy all that.

Marlowe looked up at him, stuffing books into his satchel as he was. ‘For the journey,’ he said, waving a copy of Homer at his tutor.

Johns mentally listed the books the man was packing – Cicero, Aristotle, Ramus, the anarchic
Prince
of Machiavelli, the banned love poems of Ovid. ‘By day,’ he murmured, ‘Christopher Marlowe, scholar and graduate of Corpus Christi, Quartus Convictus…’ He saw Marlowe smile, ‘Sometime playwright, sometime poet. And by night…’ Johns’ smile had suddenly faded and he was deadly serious. ‘What are you by night, Kit Marlowe?’

The scholar, graduate, the playwright and poet looked up at him, then he slammed shut the last book and shipped it away in his pack. ‘Better you don’t ask, Michael,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t lie to you and I would rather not have to try.’

‘Couldn’t you?’ Johns asked. He had known this man for over three years, ever since he had come as a gauche pot boy from the King’s School in Canterbury, a chorister and the son of a cobbler. And very quickly, Johns had realized that there was a fine brain there and a deadly, indefinable something that drew men to Kit Marlowe. In his own way, his quiet, scholastic way, Michael Johns loved Kit Marlowe. But who knew who or what Kit Marlowe loved? His eyes were shadows that afternoon, dark voids that gave nothing away. He didn’t answer Johns’ question directly.

‘Let’s just say I have business overseas.’

‘Overseas?’ Johns frowned. He didn’t like the sound of that. ‘Can you be more specific?’

Marlowe shook his head.

‘How long will you be gone?’

‘I shan’t be gone,’ Marlowe said and watched confusion cloud the older man’s face. ‘In fact –’ he hauled his saddle bags on to his shoulder – ‘I was just on my way to see you. Parker and Colwell have a purse to spend in the Buttery in my name. As far as the records show, it will look as if I have never left Cambridge. That just leaves you.’

‘Me?’

‘You and Dr Lyler,’ Marlowe said. ‘I have lectures with no one else until the end of the Lenten Term. Lyler, saving your colleague’s professionalism, won’t notice if I’m there or not. Colwell and Parker will string him along with more excuses than you’ve had college suppers. Which just leaves you…’

Johns held up his hand. ‘Kit, I will not be party to subterfuge. If you are not there to say “adsum” at my lectures, I am bound to say so. You will not get your Master’s degree.’

Marlowe looked levelly at the man, one of the very few he would trust with his life. ‘So be it.’ He shrugged.

‘Can you at least tell me…’ John’s voice rose.

Marlowe spun back to him, already halfway through the door. ‘Are you a patriot, Professor Johns?’ he asked. ‘Do you love your Queen?’

Johns was nonplussed. In all their discussions in the Schools, in Rhetoric and Dialectic, Marlowe had never asked him that or anything like it. Johns was only thirty-five, yet the world he knew was spinning away from him already. He knew suddenly how Doctor Norgate felt every day, with something that yesterday seemed as fixed as the firmament flying off the surface of his world. He opened his mouth but nothing came out.

‘Let’s just say –’ Marlowe’s voice was softer now – ‘I am away on the Queen’s business. Let that be enough. And, Michael, let it also be enough that you are the only person in this world who knows that, apart from the one who sends me.’

He clapped a fond hand to his teacher’s shoulder and brushed past him to the stairway and the outside world. Johns watched from the window as Marlowe strode away into the closing light of the cold November afternoon. He saw him greet his old King’s scholar friends, Parker and Colwell, drab beside him in their college grey as sparrows are to a flashing magpie. He hugged each one in turn and was gone, under the archway, out of the Court, his footsteps echoing into silence.

FOUR

N
athaniel Hawkins wasn’t happy with any of this. ‘Sort it out,’ Trumpy Joe had said to him as if it were leading a bullock to pasture. But this was murder and Nathaniel Hawkins was out of his depth.

He looked at Jabez Hazel, his fellow Constable of the Watch, trudging through the Trumpington mud alongside him, their breath smouldering on the air like the smoke at stubble-burning time. The mud had a crisp top to it, ice which wouldn’t carry a duck, and it gave a crackle to their steps that reminded them that winter was well and truly here.

‘Didn’t he say where he was going, Jabe?’ he asked.

Hazel shook his head. ‘Not a word, Nat,’ the younger man grunted. ‘But he was making for the north.’

Hawkins shook his head. ‘It’s not like Joe,’ he muttered, listening to his staff clatter on the frozen ruts at the edge of the road, where the ice was harder and unyielding. ‘Going off like that. Maybe we should ask Allys.’

‘We will,’ Hazel told him. ‘But we’ve got a job to do first. Is that it? Left of the road?’

The smoke drifted up from the chimney of a cottage, old thatch dark and damp in the grey of the afternoon. A cart with an ox in the harness stood sentinel outside and a knot of villagers stood whispering in a huddle. The priest of Trumpington saw the constables and crossed to them.

‘Master Hawkins, Master Hazel.’ The man nodded to each. ‘Has Constable Fludd sent you?’

‘He has, Vicar,’ Hawkins told him, ‘in a manner of speaking.’

Both men had pulled off their caps in the priest’s presence and stood a little sheepishly. They’d seen death before, even violent death with its blood and its suddenness. A knife flashing in anger outside in the street after men had been drinking all night, a cudgel against a skull too thin to withstand the blow; the usual free-for-all at the Stourbridge Fair; these they understood. But clandestine murder left them uneasy and without Fludd they were rudderless.

‘I rather hoped that the Constable would after all come in person.’ Henry Mildmay was scanning the road that led from the town but it was deserted at that time of day.

‘He was called away, sir,’ Hazel volunteered, ‘sudden, like. Left it to us.’

Mildmay’s raised eyebrow said it all. He’d baptized Jabez Hazel and laid his father and mother in the little churchyard where Gammer Harris would soon lie. But now she lay in the dark little hovel she’d called home, unwashed and unblessed. The priest pushed past the villagers who nodded at the constables, and leaned on the low door. He felt his feet dip into the greasy mud at the entrance and steadied himself against the beam. There had been no fresh straw on this floor for weeks and the room was acrid with smoke. There were just the two rooms, the one in which the three men now stood, with its single table and two chairs, and another off to the left, where a solitary candle now guttered and a low crooning seemed to drift with the fire smoke.

‘Who’s there?’ the priest called, frowning. That was no Christian hymn he heard and it frightened him. The low wail stopped and Mildmay pushed the door back.

Nathaniel Hawkins caught his breath and Jabez Hazel, for all he swore to himself that he wouldn’t, turned aside to heave his dinner all over the floor. There was that sickly smell of death, of blood, of the end of all things, and Hawkins and Mildmay found themselves staring down at a body on the bed. It was that body that held Hawkins’ gaze. It was naked, glistening with warm water and there were blood-soaked cloths around it, like a baby in swaddling bands. Hawkins couldn’t look directly at the head, because the head had been hacked down the centre. A mass of black blood and grey brains and white bone disfigured the features of the woman who had once been Gammer Harris.

But it wasn’t the dead woman that Henry Mildmay watched. He was scowling at the shadowy figure in the corner, ‘Mother Moleseed?’ he said. ‘Is that you?’

A crone of indefinable years hobbled into the half light, tugging on her cap. ‘Your worship, Reverend Mildmay,’ she lisped.

‘What are you doing here?’ the vicar wanted to know.

‘Preparing the dead, sir. You know that. I lays ’em out, sir, as I have for many a long year. And my mammy before me.’

‘What were you singing?’ Mildmay asked her.

‘Just an old tune, sir,’ she said, mopping the blood where it had seeped on to the headboard.

‘There are tunes for the dead,’ Mildmay reminded her, ‘God’s tunes. My tunes. I shall do the singing for Ann Harris when the time comes.’

Jabez Hazel had come into the room again, but how long he’d be able to stay was anybody’s guess.

‘Take her out, Jabe,’ Hawkins whispered. ‘Mistress Moleseed, is it? Take her outside. The vicar and I will cope in here.’

‘But I have my work.’ Mother Moleseed’s reedy voice rose higher as she attempted to stand her ground. ‘It’s not right to leave a woman like that… not in front of men.’

‘We all came naked into the world, mother,’ Mildmay reminded her, ‘and it is how, one day, we’ll stand before the Lord.’

Hazel took the woman by the arm. He knew Mother Moleseed. He’d known her since he was a boy, bouncing on the hay cart at harvest time and scrumping apples from the squire’s orchard. She’d caught him once and put the evil eye on him, or so he’d thought. He hadn’t slept for a week and was careful to say his paternoster with more than usual fervour for a while.

‘I know you, sonny…’ she peered up at him with a toothless grimace and his heart sank.

Nathaniel Hawkins had watched Joseph Fludd do this, the two of them alone with the dead. He hadn’t known what Fludd was doing, so he knew even less what to do now. ‘Everything you see, Nat,’ Fludd had told him. ‘Say it out loud. It will help you remember at the coroner’s court.’

‘Her head’s been cleaved,’ he heard himself say as Mildmay wandered the room, muttering his prayers for the dead, closing his eyes and making the sign of the cross. ‘But with what? Axe? Billhook? Sword?’

Nathaniel Hawkins knew what an axe could do. He’d watched Joe Fludd many a long day, hacking his way through oak and elm to fashion his carpentry for the great and good of Cambridge. He’d watched the bark bite and the chips fly and listened to the thud as the iron blade hit home. He knew what a billhook could do too. Old Jem Harris was a hedger, he used one of those all his life – and he had two fingers less on his left hand to prove it. But a sword? Hawkins had never owned a sword. If he saved all his life to buy one, he’d be in his box before he could; the box Joe Fludd would make for him one day. Could a sword do this? A broadsword might. Or one of those hand-and-a-halfs he’d heard the Germans carried. But who would old Gammer Harris know who owned a sword?