by M. J. Trow
‘Have you met him before today?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Marlowe said flatly. ‘Never.’
‘I have.’ Fludd leaned back in his chair. ‘He’s a troublemaker, Harry Rushe. Lives out by Fen Ditton with the rest of his ungodly brood. He’s broken more heads than I’ve fitted mortices.’ He smiled. ‘Looks like he met his match today, though.’
‘Are you going to lock me up or give me a gold purse?’ Marlowe folded his arms.
‘Neither,’ Fludd suddenly decided and the heavy bunch of keys he’d been toying with were scooped up and hung on a rack near his head. ‘God knows how much mayhem’s been going on at the fair while we’ve been walking here. I will be informing your master . . .’
‘Dr Norgate,’ Marlowe said, helping him. ‘Be my guest.’
‘Stay away from Rushe,’ Fludd told him, ‘and from the fair if you’ll take my advice. If I have to arrest you again, I won’t be so lenient.’
He rattled a wooden box in Marlowe’s direction. ‘For the retired constables’ benevolent fund,’ Fludd said.
Marlowe smiled and popped a handful of coins into the slot. It wasn’t very well-worn so presumably not many people looked on constables in a benevolent way. Then he held out his right hand.
‘Hmm?’ Fludd frowned. ‘Oh, yes.’ He rummaged in his Constable’s coat and hauled out the dagger. ‘Nice piece,’ he said. ‘You know if you’d killed that lout, this would have been the deodand, don’t you?’
‘I know how the law works, Master Constable. And yes, this dagger –’ he slid it back into its sheath – ‘is the most valuable possession I have. It cost more than all my books put together. That tells us a lot about the world, doesn’t it?’
‘Think yourself lucky,’ Fludd told him. ‘You chose a good day to transgress. If I hadn’t got bodies everywhere I look, I’d have shackled you tonight.’
‘Bodies?’ Marlowe asked.
‘Yes. Well, one body, to tell God’s truth. Woman. Fished out of the river yesterday.’
‘Accident?’ Marlowe knew Paradise and the Cam’s little ways. All the same, in his experience, women didn’t swim for pleasure. That was something stupid scholars did, in their cups and egging each other on. Fludd looked at him. This was official business and it was not the Corpus man’s. But something made him confide.
‘Who’s to say? She was found with a rosary tight around her neck. Of course, it could have got tangled with her clothing or the river weeds. But . . .’
‘But you don’t think so?’
‘No.’ Fludd shook his head. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘Tell me, Constable,’ Marlowe spoke softly. ‘Were there any signs on this woman’s body to show that she had been poisoned?’
‘Poisoned?’ Fludd repeated. This was really beyond his experience, but he wasn’t going to let Marlowe know that. ‘No. Why? Should there be?’
‘No reason.’ Marlowe shrugged. ‘It’s just that sudden deaths seem to be in vogue in this fair town of ours these days.’
‘Fair!’ Fludd clicked his fingers. ‘See yourself out, Master Marlowe. I have to get back,’ he said, and he dashed past, out into the dark corridor, making for the sunlight.
Marlowe clicked the heavy door to behind him and stood facing the harlot with a quizzical expression on his face. She grinned and tugged down her kirtle again, letting her ample breasts bounce free once more. Marlowe peered closer, first at one, then the other. He pulled a face. ‘No thanks,’ he said and strode away with her ‘Bastard!’ still ringing in his ears.
‘Ah, Michael.’ Dr Norgate was sipping the mulled wine he liked to take after supper in Hall, when the shadows lengthened across the Lodge in The Court. ‘Thank you for coming.’
‘Marlowe,’ Johns said.
‘I fear so. Do you have a moment?’
‘Of course, Master.’ The professor took the proffered chair and unlaced his cap, helping himself as of old to Norgate’s claret. ‘Some trouble at the fair, I understand?’
Norgate nodded. ‘I had a note from the Constable not an hour ago. Pleasant fellow. Rather more conscientious than they normally are. It seems Marley broke a man’s arm.’
Johns was appalled. ‘On what cause?’ he asked. If it was Marlowe, there had to be a cause.
‘You know what these village oafs are like, Michael.’ Norgate sighed, resting his head against the soft leather of his chair, worn to the shape of his cranium from years of pondering the Gospels. ‘It would have been a look, a word . . . a girl, even.’
Johns frowned. No, it wouldn’t have been a girl.
‘The Constable seems to think it is a Gown matter. He has passed it to me.’
‘And what do you intend to do about it?’
‘The man hasn’t actually taken his degree yet, Michael. He’s a chancer, this Marley. An over-reacher, if ever I saw one.’
‘He has a fine brain, Master.’ The loyal Johns always backed his scholars if he could. ‘One of the finest I’ve come across.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Norgate said, nodding. ‘No doubt, no doubt. But there’s something . . . some madness about him. I can’t define it.’
Johns chuckled. ‘No one can. I gave up trying to do that three years ago.’
Norgate’s indulgent smile vanished. ‘If you hope one day to sit in this chair, Michael,’ he said coldly, ‘you’ll have to develop more of an inner steel. Doesn’t do to get too close to the boys.’
Johns looked suitably chastened.
‘There will be a financial implication in all this. If Constable Fludd has passed the matter to us, we must act as Justice of the Peace. Marlowe’s behaviour has brought the college into disrepute. And for the second time this week.’ He peered at Johns over his spectacle rims. ‘You know, I’m not sure you should have spoken for him at that poor chap’s inquest. Gabriel told me all about it and he’s furious. It’s as well Fellows of colleges don’t duel.’
There was a silence. Michael Johns had worked at the great man’s side for years now. He knew when silence spoke volumes. ‘I’ll have to put it to the Society,’ Norgate said. ‘You’ll be Marlowe’s advocate again, I assume.’
‘If I feel it necessary, Master,’ Johns told him.
‘Oh, it will be,’ Norgate said. ‘When do we meet next?’
‘Friday, Master. After supper.’
‘Good. Oh, and get me the buttery accounts, will you? I want to see if Dominus Marley can afford the fine the Society will have to impose on him.’
A few hundred yards away from the Master’s Lodge, as the sun sank over the tracery of the colleges and a quiet darkness settled over Corpus Christi, two scholars sat in their shared room with sheaves of paper spread out on the table in front of them.
‘So there’s nothing in the letters, then, Kit?’ Tom Colwell wanted to know, lighting some candles as the daylight began to fade.
Marlowe sighed and threw the last sheet down. In the last few days, he’d gone over these again and again, hoping for some clue from the letters to a dead man.
‘This one –’ he waved the letter in the air with one hand, while reaching across for more wine – ‘is from his bailiff at Blean, whingeing about the woodland.’ He dropped the letter and rummaged for another, peering sideways over the rim of the cup, as he slurped some of Colwell’s tokay. ‘This one . . . is a final demand from his tailor, Tate of Canterbury. The others –’ and he flicked some randomly into the air, sitting back in his chair as they settled back on to Colwell’s ink-stained table top – ‘routine stuff, mostly months old. What about that?’
He was pointing to the document in front of Colwell. The scholar slumped across the strewn papers. ‘Kit,’ he said, ‘if truth be told, I’m not getting very far. It’s a sort of journal, I think. Not very flattering about any of the King’s people. Listen to this – it’s all in Latin, of course, as you’d expect from dear old Ralphie. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but did you ever meet a bigger snob?’
Marlowe laughed. Already Ralph Whitingside was levellin
g. The plaster saint whose life had been suddenly snatched from him was acquiring the reputation of an ordinary man, with foibles of his own.
‘He says,’ Colwell went on, ‘if I’ve got this right, “Goad is older than God”.’ They both guffawed. ‘And what about this – “Falconer doesn’t know his contra fagotto from his posaune.” And it’s not just King’s men, either. This is quite recent, I think. It’s nearly the last thing he wrote, judging by its position in the book. “Saw that harslet Greene the other day. Sporting an earring. Has he gone over to the other side?” What do you make of that?’
‘Greene?’ Marlowe frowned. ‘Not Robyn Greene? St John’s?’
Colwell shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Who’s he?’
‘Can’t be the one I’m thinking of,’ Marlowe said. ‘Harslet’s too mild a word. Insufferable little shit would be nearer the mark, but I’m well known for my charity. But, no, it can’t be. He went on his travels when he graduated on account of me telling him if I saw him in Cambridge again, I’d rearrange his face.’
‘Charity indeed!’ Colwell chuckled. ‘The rest of it is pretty cryptic Latin, some Greek, even a little Hebrew, but it’s odd. Upside down? I can’t make it out.’ He threw the book down. ‘Fancy an ale at the Cap, Kit? I’m parched.’
‘Not tonight, Tom,’ Marlowe said, reaching across for the diary. ‘I’m going to curl up with a not-very-good book. How are your stripes now, by the way?’
‘Mending.’ Colwell winced as he stood up. ‘You shouldn’t have reminded me.’
‘If you see that tow-rag Bromerick on your travels –’ Marlowe threw himself back on his bed, arranging the candle so he could read – ‘you might remind him he owes me last week’s buttery bill. And as for Parker . . .’ He was suddenly serious. ‘Well, watch out for Matty Parker, Tom. You know his ways.’
‘I do!’ Colwell nodded and made for the passageway and another near nightly game of cat and mouse with Lomas and Darryl. When would these bloody stripes heal? Once they had, everybody would take a quaff from the college silver, thank the Master, the Chancellor, the college cat and actually get a degree. After that . . . well, what Tom Colwell assumed Lomas and Darryl could do was certainly illegal and probably anatomically impossible.
SIX
The next morning Kit Marlowe woke with the superior feeling of being the only person in the room who had not drunk too much cheap ale. The other Parker scholars were whimpering in their cubicles as the reality of morning began to bite. The dawn chorus which had awoken Marlowe had not been the light twittering of the swallows returning to the eaves above his window; it had been the internal rumblings and crashings of his room-mates’ bowels and he had the choice of getting out into God’s fresh air, or stifling in second-hand alcohol and the shrimp pie sold by an unscrupulous pieman on the corner of Slaughter Yard.
Full of new milk and stewed apple from the buttery, he went humming a catch under his breath, up the stair to his room. As he turned the second corner, he sensed rather than heard the presence of someone on the landing. For one of the other scholars to be abroad and moving would have been a miracle by St Bibiana of a high level. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was no longer required reading, but Marlowe read by instinct anything no longer smiled upon by authority and was familiar with the saints’ areas of expertise from the toes to the top of the head. No one who knew the Parker boys would have come up so early.
He reached the landing in two more bounds and, as he turned the final bend, saw Benjamin Steane, standing quietly outside the door, a rough bag at his feet and, leaning against the wall, a swept-hilt rapier, looking somehow lonely without a belt and body to support it.
‘Dr Steane,’ Marlowe said. ‘What brings you here so early?’
The Fellow of King’s jumped and put a hand to his chest. ‘Master Marlowe,’ he said, gasping. ‘I didn’t hear you come up the stairs. You must walk like a cat.’
Marlowe lifted each foot in turn, showing Steane his hob nails. ‘I don’t think so, Dr Steane,’ he said. ‘Perhaps your mind was elsewhere.’
‘Perhaps, perhaps. But, to the reason I am here; I came to give you such things of Master Whitingside’s which I thought his friends might like to have. Some books, some clothes. His sword. It was all I could find worth removing. Except the bed, perhaps, which anyway is college property.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ Marlowe said, opening the bag and peering in. ‘But, can we move away from the door? My friends are inside . . . sleeping.’ He looked at the man, still standing almost pressed against the door. ‘Dr Steane? Are you feeling quite well? I must have badly startled you – I am so sorry. I’m sure the lads wouldn’t mind if you come in and sit down for a while.’
The clergyman gave him a wan smile. ‘I do feel a little faint, Master Marlowe. If I could come and sit down, that would be kind.’
Marlowe took out his key and, turning it with a dry shriek that must have been torture to the ears and heads inside, pushed the door open, calling, ‘Lads, we have a visitor. Make yourselves decent, if you please.’
He looked back over his shoulder at Steane, who looked paler than ever in the effluvium that oozed round the door.
Marlowe sniffed and grimaced. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Steane. It’s the shrimp pie. We all know not to buy it, but somehow . . .’
‘I understand, Master Marlowe. It is a favourite with King’s scholars too, I fear. Early service can be very trying in the choir stalls.’ With another smile and a slight push with his foot at the sack on the floor, Steane turned for the stairs. ‘I will leave the scholars to their . . . to their . . .’ Try though he might, he remained completely lost for words and settled for changing the subject. ‘There didn’t seem to be much in Master Whitingside’s rooms.’
‘It was good of you to look,’ Marlowe said, from the doorway. ‘It can’t have been pleasant in there.’
‘Indeed not, Master Marlowe, as you know only too well. But his bedder, Mistress Laurence, did the job for me. A sterling woman.’
‘Indeed,’ Marlowe said, turning to go into the room, swinging the bag with some difficulty over one shoulder and picking up the sword by the hilt. ‘Nice sword, Dr Steane. Are you sure this –’ he shrugged the shoulder under the sack and lifted the sword higher – ‘should not be going back to his estate?’
From halfway down the stairs, Steane said, ‘His estate is big enough, Master Marlowe. As it is, I believe there is some confusion over who inherits. Master Whitingside was a ward himself before he was eighteen, I understand, and there is only a very distant cousin who is still to be contacted. So, please –’ Steane pointed to the sack – ‘divide the books, read and enjoy them and wear the clothes. I am sure that is what Master Whitingside would have wanted.’ And he disappeared around the turn in the stairs and was gone.
Marlowe was in the buttery again later that day. It was between lectures and he was still wrestling with the intricacies of Ralph Whitingside’s journal. Against that the Civil Law as droned about by Dr Lyler had few attractions. But if Marlowe would not go to the law, the law would come to him.
He heard the clatter of hoofs in The Court and saw through the wobbling distortion of the glass two horses, lathered with sweat, one rider helping the other out of the saddle. He recognized them at once and throwing his buttered crust to Henry Bromerick, who looked at it with still-queasy distaste, he dashed outside.
‘Sir Roger!’ he shouted, bowing extravagantly in front of the older of the riders. Roger Manwood was a great bear of a man with heavy jowls and a broken nose – no one dared ask him how he got it.
‘Christopher, my boy!’ Roger Manwood held out his arms and clasped the scholar to him. ‘Let me look at you.’ He held him at arms’ length. ‘You’ve lost weight.’ He patted Marlowe’s chest. ‘They’re not feeding you properly.’
‘I get by, sir.’ Marlowe laughed.
‘You know Nicholson.’ It was a statement of fact.
Marlowe nodded to Manwood’s servant. ‘William,’ he said.
‘Master Marlowe.’ Nicholson grinned. He had the surly scowl of many Kentishmen, but he’d go to the rack for Sir Roger Manwood. He liked the lad well enough, but he liked his sister Ann even better and wasn’t sure how young Christopher would take to that bit of information. Better keep it under his codpiece for the moment.
‘Have you ridden through the day?’ Marlowe asked Manwood.
‘And half the bloody night,’ Manwood said. ‘The roads up here are appalling, Christopher.’
Marlowe laughed. ‘Wait till you try the beer.’
‘I’m staying with Francis Hynde at Madingley Hall tonight, and perhaps for a day or two. Unless he’s lost his impeccable taste since I saw him last, his cellar’s the best in Cambridge, if not all the Fenlands.’ he looked around him, struggling to adjust his belt and rapier. ‘So, this is Bene’t College.’
‘We call it Corpus Christi nowadays, sir,’ Marlowe said. ‘I’d show you my room, but it’s probably full of people like Colwell and Parker by now and I fear we won’t all get in.’
Manwood had vague memories of the boys from back home, but, seen one Parker scholar, seen them all, really. ‘Is there an ordinary nearby? I’m famished.’
‘The Copper Kettle does a very good pastry, Sir Roger. Unfortunately . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, it’s quite expensive. We poor scholars . . .’
‘Nonsense. This is on me. Er . . .’ he felt his purse. ‘Well, not me exactly. I seem to have left my other purse at home. Nicholson?’
The servant sighed. He’d been here before.
‘Hoo-hoo, Sir Roger!’ A voice called from the buttery doorway.
Manwood dipped his head away from the sound and scowled. ‘Oh, Lord. Tell me that’s not the Bromerick boy.’ Not all Parker scholars looked the same, he suddenly realized.
‘Henry, sir,’ Marlowe said. ‘Salt of the earth.’
