The Reckoning

by M. J. Trow

  ‘What the Hell was that?’ he asked the night in general.

  All over the great house, windows were being thrown open and people were shouting and yelling unintelligibly.

  Alleyn hung his head down through the trapdoor. ‘Can you see what it is, Will?’ he asked.

  ‘No, nothing,’ Shaxsper said. ‘Get your venetians tied, Ned, and help me go and look.’

  Alleyn adjusted his voice to outrage, Level Three and boomed back at him. ‘I am fully clothed, Master Shaxsper. I would thank you to remember I am a married man.’ This pronouncement was followed by the sound of a slap and a weak chuckle from Tom Sledd. Alleyn slid down the ladder like a rat leaving a sinking ship and the two actors ran across the yard back to the house.

  EIGHT

  In the house, all was chaos. The card players had let themselves out of their room and were standing at the bottom of the stairs, controlling the crowd. Marlowe and Faunt had a natural authority and apart from the very drunk, most people were listening to them. The steward of the house had assembled his staff to one side and was marshalling them as he thought fit, the women back to the kitchen where there would be safety in numbers, and the men in serried ranks, ready for anything that could be dealt with by a wooden staff or two and a dirty look.

  ‘Did anyone here scream?’ Faunt asked. The crowd all looked at each other, shrugging and shaking their heads.

  ‘Where did it come from?’ Marlowe asked. ‘Was it upstairs? Down? Inside? Out?’

  A statuesque woman wearing a startling mask of Medusa pushed up onto her piled-up curls stepped forward. ‘It was down there,’ she pointed down a passageway to her left.

  ‘No,’ a burly man with a tiger’s face hanging below his chin said. ‘It was definitely upstairs.’

  Audrey Walsingham pushed her way to the front. ‘Sound travels very oddly in this house,’ she said. ‘It comes from having been built over many years, with additions and demolitions which most people have forgotten now. There are even secret passages, or so we have been told. No one can remember quite where they were any more. So we all need to keep quiet and see if the scream comes again.’

  Everyone breathed as quietly as they could. Marlowe was relieved to see Alleyn at the back of the crowd; his first thought, as ever, was whether he could have been responsible, as he so often was. He looked around for Tom Sledd and couldn’t see him anywhere. Catching sight of Shaxsper, he mouthed the stage manager’s name at him with a quizzical raise of an eyebrow. Shaxsper mimed sleeping and throwing up with beautiful economy of movement and Marlowe thought not for the first time what a shame it was he ever had to speak; the man’s body was far better at getting things across than ever his mouth was.

  Just as the crowd at the bottom of the sweeping stair were beginning to get restive, the scream came again, but this time followed by words. ‘Help!’ the voice cried. ‘Help! He’s dead! Oh, God, he’s dead!’

  This time it was clear where the sound had come from and the woman with the Medusa head had been right all along. The crowd split immediately into those who wouldn’t go near a cry like that if their lives depended on it and those who would rush towards any crisis, in the hope of gore and horror.

  As the thirty or so thrill-seekers ran down the passage hell for leather, a door about halfway down opened and Amyntas Finch stepped into their path. It was only with extreme presence of mind that he was able to step back and prevent himself from being trampled.

  ‘Well, this isn’t much fun,’ he said, shaking newly-fallen flakes of snow from his hair. ‘You might have waited until I had tried to find at least one person.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Amyntas,’ Marlowe said, bringing up the rear of the mob. ‘It’s nothing personal. I think something must have happened down here – there’s been screaming. Didn’t you hear it from outside?’

  The big man shrugged. ‘No. The wind’s getting up again. I couldn’t hear a thing.’

  Another scream, much louder than the first, split the air and made everyone’s ears ring. ‘Thomas!’ a woman screeched. ‘Thomas! They’ve killed him!’

  Marlowe was running through the crowd before the voice died away, pushing his way through until he came to a boot-room, damp and cold, lit only by borrowed light from the passage. Slumped in a corner was the Lord of Misrule, his scarlet face turned up to the ceiling, his white feathers trailing in his blood. His enormous codpiece sagged sadly to one side, its weight too much for the dead body which wore it. Kneeling at the man’s side, Audrey Walsingham was bent over in grief. Her costume was wet with blood at the knees and her hair was hanging loose over her face. She was still screaming, but quietly, as though she were grieving from very far away, perhaps on a distant star where dead love goes.

  Faunt stepped carefully around the pooling blood and gently lifted her to her feet. He put an arm around her shoulders and turned her from the body, sitting her on a simple bench along one wall. He was murmuring to her and her screams and sobs began to subside. Marlowe lit a stub of candle from one of the sconces in the passage and then turned to the people at his back and pushed and cajoled until they were the other side of the door. He approached the body as carefully as Faunt had done. That the man was dead could not be in doubt. Not only was his head at a rakish angle to the body where he had hit the wall with terrific force and slid down it, leaving a smear of horror behind him, but the pool of blood in which he lay must be almost all a human body could hold.

  Leaving Faunt to comfort Audrey Walsingham and keep her back turned to the sight of her dead love – because, in spite of what he knew, Marlowe was convinced she did love Thomas – he eased the mask off the dead man’s head.

  ‘Oh.’ Marlowe was usually more in control than to let out any kind of exclamation, but he had been dreading the sight of his dead friend’s face. But it wasn’t Thomas Walsingham under the scarlet mask. It was Roger Dalston.

  It was dawn before the chaos had calmed. James Lewknor apologized to the gentry there but he would have to take their names before they left, numbed and cold in their waiting carriages. The others he knew, the family retainers and the people of the estate, men and women who had served the Walsinghams all their lives, wet nurses who had fed little Thomas, pall-bearers who had carried his father to the vaults of St Nicholas. One by one, they paid their respects to the Master and Mistress of Scadbury and wished them, almost as an afterthought, a merry Christmas.

  As a cold dawn crept over the turrets of Scadbury, three men sat in the brown parlour around the ashes of a fire. Padraig was with them, but the dog who might have been the eyes and ears of the Night Watch, was too old to see or smell and he lay on the straw floor, snoring.

  ‘Bad business,’ Walsingham said, ‘but I’m glad you two are here.’

  Marlowe asked the question first but it was in Faunt’s mind too. ‘Is there anyone, Thomas, who would want to see you dead?’

  ‘That’s a devil of a question, Kit,’ Walsingham frowned. ‘Oh, I may have crossed the odd farmer occasionally, inadvertently annoyed a merchant or two, but … murder? No, no.’

  Faunt had a subject he needed to broach. ‘You know, Thomas, that both of us served your late cousin?’

  ‘Of course,’ Walsingham nodded, ‘and that he was the Queen’s spymaster and you two are projectioners. That’s why I’m glad you’re here.’

  ‘You never …?’ Faunt began.

  ‘Got involved in the spying game?’ Walsingham chuckled. ‘God, no; I don’t have the brains for it. I don’t really see what Audrey sees in me. I was behind the Arras when intelligence was being doled out.’

  The answer ‘owning half of Kent’ was on Marlowe’s lips, but, true to his calling, no sound came out.

  ‘What actually happened to him?’ Walsingham asked. ‘This Roger Dalston, I mean.’

  Marlowe and Faunt had viewed the body, albeit by candlelight. They had laid it on a trestle table in one of the brewhouses, stripped the dead man of his Lord of Misrule costume and had locked the door as they left. Only Marlow
e had a key and it lay inside his doublet, in the slit in the cloth alongside the stiletto dagger he had taken to wearing these days as well as the obvious one at his back.

  ‘His neck was broken,’ Marlowe said. ‘Somebody rammed his head against the wall. The blow shattered his skull and dislocated his spine. I doubt he knew what hit him.’

  ‘Would it take someone exceptionally powerful to do that?’ Walsingham asked.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Faunt said. ‘If he was pushed from the top of the little flight of steps just behind him, the weight of his own body would have done it. It could even have been a woman.’

  ‘I was less than honest a moment ago,’ Marlowe said, ‘when I asked you who might want you dead, Thomas.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that Faunt and I noticed something odd about the costume Dalston was found in.’

  ‘My costume?’ Walsingham was confused.

  ‘The leggings,’ Faunt said. ‘They were not cross-gartered.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So,’ Marlowe said, ‘the hose were put on inside out.’

  ‘The man dressed in the dark,’ Walsingham said. ‘We’ve all done it.’

  ‘But why would a play copyist from London put on the costume at all?’ Faunt asked. ‘And how did he get it?’

  ‘We believe,’ Marlowe said, ‘that Dalston was dressed in the costume by somebody else, after he was dead. The blood from his head merely kept draining out after the mask had been put on.’

  ‘But why …?’ None of this was making sense to Walsingham.

  ‘When did you see the costume last?’ Faunt asked.

  ‘When Audrey and I … retired.’

  ‘Retired?’ Marlowe took him up on it. ‘But Mistress Walsingham was up when the screams were heard. She was organizing the staff. Fully dressed, mask and all.’

  ‘Yes.’ Walsingham was blushing a little. ‘I don’t mean retired, as in went to sleep. I mean retired, as in went to bed, if you take my meaning.’

  The projectioners did.

  ‘When I heard the screams, the room was in darkness and Audrey had gone. I fumbled around for my costume and couldn’t find it. I … Oh, my God!’ A look of horror crossed Walsingham’s face.

  ‘What?’ Faunt asked.

  ‘Whoever killed Dalston was in our private chambers, watching, waiting. He must have stolen the costume then.’

  ‘Yes,’ Marlowe nodded, glancing at Faunt and thinking what he was thinking. ‘Yes, that must be it.’ He stood up suddenly. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you must forgive me. I have a grieving brother to talk to.’

  Peter Dalston was sitting in the library, scratching furiously with his quill, the feather in his hand darting and bobbing above the page. He didn’t look up when Marlowe came in. He didn’t look up when Marlowe sat down.

  ‘Master Dalston,’ the playwright said softly, ‘please accept our condolences. I have a brother, albeit years younger than me. I can’t imagine …’

  ‘I am very busy, Master Marlowe,’ the copyist’s voice was firm, if brittle, a nerve jumping in his jaw.

  ‘I can see that,’ Marlowe said, ‘But there’s no great urgency …’

  ‘It’s the only way I can cope,’ Dalston said, snappily. He looked at Marlowe for the first time. ‘My brother, sir, was the dearest thing in the world to me. I have no wife, no children. No family at all.’ He looked down at the scribbled pages, the curling parchment, the inkwell. ‘All I have is this. My work. Your work.’

  Marlowe leaned back in his chair. ‘I must ask you about your brother,’ he said, ‘to try and make sense of this.’

  Reluctantly, Dalston put down the quill, letting it rest for a moment on the few lines from the younger Mortimer. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘Did he have enemies?’

  ‘Enemies?’ Dalston would have laughed if his world was not drowned in tears. ‘Roger was the sweetest man,’ he said. He sniffed, recalling who knew what memories. ‘He was the thinker of the family. We were both articled to Lincoln’s Inn, but Roger was far cleverer than I. He’d have gone to the bar, for sure.’

  ‘How did you end up in the theatre?’ Marlowe asked, though perhaps ‘in the theatre’ wasn’t quite the right phrase.

  ‘We met Master Henslowe on a matter of law,’ Dalston said. ‘Business in the City. He persuaded us that creativity was a finer way of making a living than the law.’ He looked almost embarrassed. ‘And it paid better.’

  ‘So, there was no-one Roger might have crossed? No-one who bore him a grudge?’

  ‘No-one.’ Dalston was sure.

  ‘When was the last time you saw him?’ Marlowe was trying to piece together the last moments of a man’s life; it wasn’t easy.

  ‘Before the feast,’ the copyist said. ‘Roger and I are not very social people, Master Marlowe. We copy plays for people who dress up but we don’t do it ourselves. Out of respect for Master Walsingham, we took part in the procession, but we draw the line at hide and seek.’

  ‘Very wise,’ Marlowe said.

  ‘Roger had become very keen on your play, though.’

  ‘He had? I’m flattered.’

  ‘That’s the kind of man he was,’ Dalston went on. ‘He could have been called to the bar. He could … saving your presence … have become a playwright.’

  Marlowe laughed. ‘There’s nothing magic about it,’ he said, ‘a little imagination controlled by iambic pentameter.’

  ‘He was trying to summon up the courage to talk to you about it.’

  ‘He was?’ Marlowe chuckled. ‘Am I so unapproachable?’

  Dalston was straight-faced. ‘You are a great man, sir,’ he said. ‘Roger called you the greatest playwright in the world.’

  Marlowe laughed again. ‘Possibly Canterbury,’ he said. ‘Let’s go no further than that.’

  ‘Everybody thinks so,’ Dalston told him, ‘but I think Roger found this play disturbing.’

  ‘Disturbing?’ Marlowe frowned. ‘Why?’

  ‘He didn’t say exactly,’ the copyist took up his quill again, ‘but he spoke to everybody about it, asking them what they thought.’

  ‘Everybody?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, even – and I thought him bold for this – Master Thomas himself.’

  There was a pause, the silence filled by more scratching of the quill.

  ‘Master Marlowe,’ Dalston looked up again, ‘May I see my brother? I haven’t had the chance to say a proper goodbye.’

  ‘Of course,’ Marlowe said softly. He stood up. ‘Come, Master Dalston. The Mortimers will keep.’ And he led the man away.

  ‘Changed your mind, Master Marlowe?’ Audrey Walsingham had abandoned her costume of the previous day and was wearing a simple gown of purple velvet. Although he had never even seen her, Marlowe knew that this was the colour of the Queen.

  ‘In what respect, Mistress?’ Marlowe asked. The pair faced each other in the brown parlour, Thomas having ridden out with his hounds to clear his head.

  She crossed the room and stood close to him. ‘There is only one respect,’ she said, brushing a delicate finger over the brocade of his doublet.

  ‘Madam,’ he said, carefully moving her hand away, ‘a man is dead.’

  ‘Indeed,’ she spun away from him, crossing the room again and touched one finger on the keys of her virginals. ‘Needs tuning,’ she said.

  Marlowe crossed to her and closed the lid. ‘And I need answers.’

  ‘You?’ She turned to him. ‘You are a playwright and poet, Master Marlowe. What right have you to demand anything from me? What I have I offered to you two nights ago and you refused.’

  ‘Did you kill Roger Dalston?’ he asked her flatly.

  Her eyes flashed and her hand snaked out to slap his face, but Marlowe was faster and he held it in mid-air.

  ‘It’s a simple question, Audrey,’ he said, softly, looking into her eyes. ‘A mere yes or no would do.’

  She pulled her arm a
way. ‘No, then,’ she said, arching her neck and standing tall.

  ‘Very well,’ Marlowe nodded, trying to read her cold, beautiful face. ‘Do you know who did?’

  Audrey Walsingham was not the most patient of women, but she had her pride. Part of her wanted to rip this popinjay’s eyes from his head and crush them beneath her feet, but that would be beneath her dignity.

  ‘I have no idea how many people were under my roof last night,’ she said. ‘Any one of them may have wanted the wretched man dead.’

  ‘And any one of them would want to dress him as your … husband?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me, Mistress,’ he looked hard at her, ‘when you and Thomas … “retired” as he put it …?’

  ‘Made the beast with two backs, you mean?’

  ‘Colourful,’ Marlowe nodded, ‘and a euphemism for all that.’

  ‘All right,’ she smiled. ‘Here’s another one. Thomas “occupied” me. How’s that?’

  ‘Very good,’ Marlowe smiled.

  ‘He didn’t last long. He never does.’

  ‘Where was this?’

  She sighed. This was getting very boring. ‘In our bedchamber, Master Marlowe. Would you like to see the sheets?’

  ‘No,’ Marlowe said, ‘but I’ll wager somebody did.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When Thomas had finished his “occupation”, what happened?’

  ‘He went to sleep. Men will.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘If you must know, I was not satisfied. I went in search of fulfilment.’

  ‘Went where?’

  She wagged a finger at him. ‘No, you don’t, Christopher Marlowe,’ she said. ‘You won’t catch me like that.’

  ‘While you were with Thomas, did you notice anything?’

  ‘Such as?’ Audrey raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Such as someone watching you? Waiting in the shadows?’

  ‘Watching us?’ Her eyes widened. ‘How delicious!’ She closed to him. ‘It wasn’t you, was it, Kit? Finding out what you missed the other night?’