The Reckoning

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Why so miserable, Tom?’ he said, as though it was his friend who had been talking like a lost soul. ‘We have a play to put on. I had a line in my head, you know, that I really wanted to use but can’t quite get it in. I had written it to try and make that gibberish of Kyd’s a bit better and I do love it. But try as I might, I can’t make it fit. Perhaps if I play around with it a bit …’

  ‘What was it, Kit?’ Shaxsper was suddenly at his elbow. ‘Perhaps I can help.’

  Marlowe laughed and put his arm over Shaxsper’s shoulder. ‘Perhaps you can, Will,’ he said, ‘but it won’t be easy. It goes – or I should say, it went – “The play’s the thing, wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the king.” See – it worked really well for Tragedy but there’s nowhere in Edward.’

  ‘There is a king in it,’ Alleyn’s orotund vowels rolled around the half-dressed stage.

  ‘There is indeed, Ned,’ Marlowe agreed. ‘But no play to catch his conscience.’ He gave himself a shake. ‘I seem dogged by lines at the moment. I have never had such perfect recall of anything I have written as I have of Edward. So,’ and he gave Alleyn a playful punch on the arm, ‘make sure you don’t fluff your lines, Ned. Because I’ll be listening, don’t forget.’

  ‘Ha!’ Alleyn cried as though in pain.

  ‘Sorry, Ned.’ Marlowe was contrite. ‘Did I hurt you?’

  Alleyn saw Shaxsper’s eyes, wide with panic. ‘Er … perhaps a little. Gout. I do believe, a little gout.’

  Marlowe looked concerned. ‘In your arm, Ned? Is that not a little unusual? You must take care of yourself. You’re an important man, as you well know.’ The playwright turned to Sledd and the two actors slunk away.

  ‘He knows,’ Shaxsper hissed. ‘He knows, by Christ.’

  ‘How can he know?’ Alleyn whispered. ‘We haven’t written anything down, we haven’t told anyone else a thing. By the time he discovers it, it will be too late. There is only one performance.’

  Sledd and Marlowe were walking the stage, making sure there was room for all the moves, the battle and the blood.

  ‘What is the matter with those two?’ Marlowe asked, jerking his head in the direction of Shaxsper and Alleyn.

  Sledd gave them a fleeting glance. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘They are like cats on hot bricks every night, muttering and flinging themselves about like someone with St Vitus’ Dance. You’d think Alleyn would be exhausted, the way he goes on; it’s like a bawdy house up there till well gone midnight. Then he and Shaxsper whisper away until dawn for all I know. If it wasn’t for the serving wenches, I would wonder if they weren’t taking their parts a bit too seriously.’

  Marlowe smiled. ‘The day Alleyn takes any part seriously, is the day I hang up my quill, Tom,’ he said. ‘Now, are you sure this bed will take the weight?’

  Alleyn and Shaxsper crept out of the Great Hall by a side door.

  Shaxsper shook his head again. ‘It’s no good, Ned,’ he said. ‘He knows.’

  Richard Baines had never heard confession in the church of St Nicholas. That was because, to all intents and purposes, he was an Anglican priest and Papist claptrap like that had been swept away, along with wall paintings and relics and the blood and the body of Christ.

  He knelt in his secret chapel, barely large enough for him to kneel in. It was hidden behind the rood screen and the door could be locked from the inside as well as the out. Only Richard Baines had a key and it never left his person. Even when he was in bed with Audrey Walsingham, it dangled around his neck.

  ‘What’s this, Richard?’ she had asked him once as she stroked his chest and nuzzled her head into his shoulder.

  ‘The key to my soul,’ he had told her and she found the answer poetic enough in a pathetic sort of way and took her stroking down lower. Thomas had been away.

  He crossed himself in the little chapel and reached up to kiss the crucifix. He had known it would be like this. A Papist in an Anglican land was worse than a leper. They had told him so at the seminary, the scorpion’s nest as the Puritans called it, at Douai. ‘Trust to your God and your vows’ they had told him. But that was before he had met Audrey Walsingham and before he had lost the soul whose key he carried. ‘The body and blood of Christ,’ he muttered, ‘Hoc est corpus’.

  He heard a sound beyond the door, beyond the screen. That damned snivelling curate. He waited until the footsteps died away, then he clicked the lock and stepped into the light of the chancel. He relocked the door and pulled the heavy curtain across it, tucking the key under his robes. All traces of the Papacy had gone and he stood in his severe, whitewashed church, looking every inch the severe, whitewashed Puritan.

  ‘Parkin!’ he called to the curate.

  The young man jumped, his heart in his mouth. He had no idea the vicar was there.

  ‘Master Baines,’ the lad skipped over to him.

  Baines held the boy’s narrow shoulders and looked him in the eye. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Nineteen summers, Master Baines.’

  ‘From Oxford, yes?’

  ‘Merton College, Master Baines.’

  ‘Well,’ Baines smiled, ‘we can’t have everything in this life, can we? Tell me, Parkin,’ he turned the lad around, ‘what do you see there? Over the door?’

  The curate squinted. The light was fading in the late afternoon and that part of the chancel was particularly dark.

  ‘Er … the royal arms, Master Baines,’ he said. ‘Her Majesty’s device.’

  ‘And what does it say underneath, Parkin?’ Baines asked. ‘The motto?’

  ‘Semper Eadem,’ the boy said, growing ever more uneasy at the vicar’s questions.

  Baines still had one arm around the curate’s neck and he leaned towards him, whispering in his ear. ‘And what does it mean?’ he asked.

  Parkin swallowed hard. He had been speaking and writing Latin for years now, at Merton and before that at the King’s School, Warwick. Surely, he wasn’t still being tested.

  ‘Always the same,’ he whispered back, half-expecting to feel the kiss of a flail across his buttocks if he’d got it wrong.

  ‘Always the same,’ Baines nodded, ‘but it doesn’t have to be, does it?’ he asked.

  ‘I … I don’t follow, Master Baines.’ Parkin was trying, as gently as he could, to pull away, but the priest of St Nicholas was having none of it.

  ‘Just imagine,’ Baines said, ‘for all your life – and nearly all of mine, come to that – that Jezebel has ruled England.’

  Parkin almost gasped. Jezebel? That was the Queen. And that was what Papists called her.

  ‘See it in your mind’s eye, lad,’ Baines said. ‘The lions and lilies vanish in the light of God’s glory, transformed into the lions and castles of Aragon and Asturias, Castile and Leon. The pomegranate in place of the rose, the Fleece instead of the Garter.’

  Parkin was no expert at heraldry, but he knew that Richard Baines was staring up, not at the arms of Elizabeth but of Philip of Spain. There was a strange light in the vicar’s eyes and his lips were moving with no sound.

  ‘She’s old, boy,’ Baines said suddenly, ‘the Queen. Old and decaying and corrupt. God has cast her out. And when she goes, finally, writhing and screaming into the fires of Hell, then we’ll strike. Me and my followers.’ He gripped the boy’s shoulders again, swinging him back to face him. ‘We must be ready, Parkin, for that great day, must we not?’

  ‘Um … yes,’ Parkin blurted out, his bladder suddenly unsure of itself. ‘Yes, sir. Of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Baines smiled. He patted the boy on the cheek, then placed his hand on his head and forced him to kneel. His right hand came out, on the third finger, a ring that Parkin had never seen before. Baines’s left hand was pulling the curate’s head towards him, waiting until the boy’s lips touched the gilt of the ring before he relaxed the pressure and let the boy stand up.

  ‘Now,’ Baines said, as though he were a different man, ‘lock the church, would you? God’s house should
be open always, but these are dangerous times. And there are men under Thomas Walsingham’s roof we would do well to watch. Good night to you, Parkin.’

  Henry Parkin had never really meant to become a churchman. When he was a boy at school in Warwick he had had plans to become a household name. This was the time of the self-made man, when any jack could become a master. Parkin wanted to be part of all that. He wasn’t sure at that point quite how he would achieve it, but he was sure he would be famous one day. To find himself now as a curate to a madman in a church in the middle of nowhere was something which filled him with a mixture of sorrow and blind terror. He had known that Richard Baines and he could never be friends from the moment they met. He had known that Baines was a little off-kilter when judged against the men who had trained him to be a member of the clergy. But that he was as mad as this – how could he possibly have guessed that?

  After Baines had swept out on a flurry of cassock and a faint whiff of incense, Parkin sat a while. The church was simple, just how he liked it. He had been told by parishioners, the older ones, the ones who remembered other times than these, that under the whitewash there were beautiful paintings, of the saints in heaven and Christ in majesty. In general, Parkin disapproved of that kind of thing but a part of him that craved beauty and ornament wished they were still there. Then, as he went through the church blowing out candles and preparing it for its night of slumber, well deserved after all the Christmas services, he could have looked up and sought comfort from the gentle face of his Redeemer. As it was, all he could do was scuttle down the nave like a rodent with a fox on its trail.

  Outside, the cold air calmed him. There was frost in the air and no sign yet of spring. His grandmother, back in his village of Honiley, deep in the Warwickshire fields, had always said that she could smell spring on the day after the midwinter solstice. His mother had told him that the old lady was a little touched in the head, but even so, he always lifted his nose in the air to smell the spring as soon as Christmas was over. But all he could smell tonight was his own rank sweat, pooled cold and clammy under his arms and down his back after his encounter with Richard Baines. Men like Baines always got their comeuppance. The trick here would be to make sure he didn’t get his as well, by mere proximity. He gave himself a shake. He must tell someone and he must tell someone now.

  As he entered the big house through the back door as was his habit, he stopped to think for a moment. It was no good going in to see Master Walsingham with a half-baked reiteration of what had gone on with Baines. The man was after all the chaplain to the house and was more likely to be believed than he was. He would lose his position. His parents would be so disappointed. Then he shrugged and knocked on Lewknor’s door. Disappointment and a living son was probably better than pride and a pile of ashes to bury.

  The steward opened the door and smiled. Like most people in the house he had a soft spot for the curate, saddled with Richard Baines day and night. ‘Master Henry,’ he said, opening his door wide. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘I need to see Master Walsingham, urgently, Master Lewknor, if that is possible,’ he said, not going in.

  ‘I don’t know whether … why don’t you go to the brown parlour? That’s where I saw him last.’ People didn’t stand on ceremony at Scadbury.

  ‘Is that all right?’ Parkin was humble, as always. ‘I don’t want to bother him, but … well, I do need to see him.’

  ‘He’ll be happy to see you, I’m sure,’ the steward said. ‘If he’s not there, come back and we’ll see if we can find him for you.’

  Parkin trotted along the passageway and up a small flight of stairs. If it wasn’t for Richard Baines, Scadbury would be a good place to live. He let his mind wander, pictured himself as the vicar of Chislehurst, growing old in the living, a brood of children and a comfortable wife under the roof of a nice country benefice. He reached the door of the brown parlour and tapped, listening with his ear against the thick planks.

  It was hard to tell, but he thought he heard someone call ‘Enter’ so he did. Sitting in front of a roaring fire, Padraig’s head in her lap, sat Audrey Walsingham. Her head was turned to see who was knocking and Parkin thought he had never seen her looking more beautiful.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mistress Walsingham,’ he stammered, ‘I was looking for …’ now, here was a difficulty. He had heard the rumours, but he had no option but to say ‘your husband’, which he knew could not be true.

  She laughed and patted the seat of the padded couch beside her. ‘He’s out checking on the hounds,’ she said, pleasantly. ‘He’ll be hours once he starts talking to the kennel master. Come and tell me all about it; you look worried.’

  Parkin had heard veiled comments about how Mistress Walsingham ate men for breakfast but he had not really quite understood the allusion. The fire did look very inviting though and he missed his dogs at home, so Padraig was also a draw. As if pulled on wires, he went in and sat down.

  ‘Now, then, Master … Parkin, isn’t it? Henry, if I remember correctly?’

  Parkin was delighted and amazed. That the legendary beauty who ruled Scadbury and its master should know his name was beyond his wildest dreams. He tore his eyes away from her face and looked down at his fingers, lacing and unlacing in his lap.

  ‘Mistress Walsingham,’ he said, keeping his eyes down, ‘I have just had a disturbing incident with Master Baines in the church.’

  ‘Really?’ Audrey Walsingham was genuinely surprised. Her thoughts were always focussed on when she could get the next man into bed and she thought she was a good judge of people in that respect. Richard had always seemed so … enthusiastic. ‘Do you mean he … well, did he touch you?’

  Parkin’s eyes flew up to meet hers. ‘No,’ he said, quickly, ‘No, nothing like that.’ He had heard the rumours about his superior and Mistress Walsingham and although he largely dismissed them, he was a great believer in no smoke without fire. ‘Much worse. He …’ suddenly, what had happened in the church seemed less clear; could he have imagined it? He shook himself. He must do what he had come here to do, whatever the consequences. ‘He … seemed to be telling me that he was planning the overthrow of the Queen.’

  Audrey Walsingham’s eyebrows all but disappeared into her hair. ‘Richard?’ she said. ‘Really, Master Parkin, I think you must have misunderstood.’

  Henry Parkin was young. He was inexperienced. But he also knew that in this room, though he lagged behind in cunning, he was streets ahead when it came to basic intelligence. ‘I am sorry to argue with you, Mistress Walsingham,’ he said, firmly. ‘But it is hard to mistake someone calling the Queen a Jezebel for something else. He spoke of Spain. He spoke of the Queen writhing in the fires of Hell.’ He leaned forward. ‘Mistress Walsingham; he’s mad. For certain, he’s mad.’

  ‘Richard can have quite strong views,’ Audrey Walsingham said. ‘Sometimes he gets carried away, perhaps. I still think you misunderstood. I will speak to him. And meanwhile – I would prefer you not to speak of this to anyone else, Henry. Can you promise me that, please?’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Henry?’

  Parkin was not sure how this interview had gone. He had told his tale and so it was off his chest, but … would anything be done? Would Baines be allowed to stay and plot his overthrow of the Queen? Indeed, was he even plotting the overthrow of the Queen or was he simply madder than a hare in March? He stood up and Audrey extended her hand. He bent over it and could scarcely suppress a shudder, as he remembered Baines’s hand thrust out for him to venerate his ring. He looked up and found her eyes boring into him.

  ‘Henry?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Yes, Mistress Walsingham,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

  ‘Good. Please close the door as you leave.’

  And that, Henry knew, was simply that.

  Frizer and Skeres were lolling on Scadbury’s battlements during their break from rehearsals the next morning. Had this been the Rose, there would have been a gaggle of Winchester Ge
ese on hand to warm their cockles and an inn within a walking gentleman’s distance which offered cheap ale to those of the thespian persuasion. There would even had been an old bear to torment. As it was, although Scadbury was elegant and spacious and the stables warm and comfortable, the place generally lacked the cosmopolitan atmosphere of London’s finest theatres and the pair were reduced to sharing a pipe.

  ‘Hello,’ Skeres, with his height advantage, could see the road beyond the bend.

  ‘What?’ Frizer’s view was momentarily lost in smoke.

  ‘Carriages,’ Skeres said. ‘Two of ’em. And …’ he was frowning, trying to focus over the distance, ‘I count twelve outriders.’

  Frizer strained himself to catch the view. His partner-in-crime was right. The gallopers were actually trotting, helmets gleaming in the weak winter sun and cloaks snapping behind them in the wind. The noise was of creaking wheels, jingling bits and clattering hoofs and it came to them clearly on the cold air.

  ‘It’s the Queen!’ Frizer shouted, dropping his pipe when he clapped his hands together.

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Skeres scowled. ‘Look at that banner. See the motto – Sero sed Sero? That’s Burghley, that is.’

  ‘What’s that mean, then?’

  ‘I dunno. Have to ask Marlowe – he’s supposed to be the scholar. I only know it ’cos I once came into possession of a little trinket belonging to Lord Burghley.’

  ‘You never told me that,’ Frizer said.

  ‘You never asked,’ Skeres countered. ‘No, he was giving them away to the poor cripples of Her Majesty’s navy soon after the Armada.’