Dark Entry

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Ralph’s?’ Johns asked, with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘Yes. Dr Steane brought some of his things round the other day. He didn’t know who else would have them, with Ralph an orphan. Sir Roger Manwood, who was his guardian, won’t want them, I don’t expect. And now, we’ll have to sort them out from this mess.’ No one knew if Kit Marlowe was prone to depression or sorrow; his enigmatic face hid most of his feelings, unless he wanted them on show. But Johns could see that he was now at a loss. He stood up and started to pick up the clothes on the floor and pile them in one place.

  ‘Michael, you are covered in ash,’ Marlowe said. ‘Your sleeves, look, and your hands are all grey with it.’

  Johns looked down. ‘It’s hardly surprising, Kit, is it?’ he said, rather crossly. ‘Are you accusing me of making this mess?’

  Marlowe dropped his shoulders and sighed. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said, ‘but, no, of course I don’t think you did this. I think someone has been here, looking for something, something connected with the murders of Ralph and Henry.’ He looked at the professor. ‘Somebody who can pick a lock, it would seem.’

  Johns crossed the room, kicking aside tumbled bedding and put his hand on the scholar’s arm. ‘Murders?’ he said. ‘The inquests said . . .’

  ‘I know what the inquests said,’ Marlowe said. ‘The inquests are wrong. I know what the bastard who did this was looking for, too.’

  ‘You do?’ Johns said, not moving away. ‘What was that, do you think? And has he found it?’

  Marlowe smiled. ‘Ah, Professor Johns. No one can catch me that easily. I will keep my counsel on those questions if I may.’

  ‘As you wish,’ the Fellow said and went back to gathering up the ash-soaked clothes. ‘This will cost a pretty penny to launder,’ he said, changing the subject ostentatiously. ‘This bedding was only changed last quarter, I’m thinking.’

  Marlowe looked around at the devastation and nodded. ‘I’ll have to try and sweet talk the laundresses,’ he said. ‘It’s not as though I haven’t had to curry favour with them before.’

  Johns scooped up a parcel he had made by wrapping the clothes in a sheet. ‘I’ll speak to Dr Norgate,’ he said. ‘I’m sure there must be some fund or another to meet this contingency.’

  Marlowe allowed himself a quiet laugh. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘The Maud Ashenden Bequest for the Laundering of Scholars’ Clothing Besmirched with Ash in the Commission of a Burglary.’

  ‘The very one,’ Johns said, smiling. ‘Now, if you will gather up the rest, we’ll go down to the laundry and start the sweet talking, before we have to see how much money will have to change hands.’

  Marlowe did as he was told and together the two struggled down the narrow stair and across The Court to the laundry at the back of the kitchens.

  From a dark corner on the lower landing, a dark figure watched them go. The wet ash had dried to powder on his hands and in his pocket a small book made a bulge, which he would soon be swapping, he hoped, for a purse of equal volume. Sadly, as he would soon discover, his employer would not be amused to be offered a small Latin psaltery, annotated by a boy chorister in the Cathedral at Canterbury. Thus, they would both learn a lesson. The burglar would learn, as he was removed from the town for indigence, whipped at the cart’s tail, that it was unwise to annoy a powerful man. The powerful man would learn that it was unwise to send a burglar who couldn’t read Latin to steal a book.

  Joseph Fludd was miles away. His carpentry business had suffered in the last few days in favour of his constabulary duties and he had a job he had to finish in a hurry, being a new chair for the rooms of Professor Wilkes, of Jesus College. Fludd’s purse had reason to be grateful to Wilkes’s unparalleled gluttony, as he got through chairs at a rate of around three a year, each needing to be more reinforced than the last. Fludd loved his work, the sound of the lathe spinning sweetly on its spindle, the smell of the newly turned oak as the shavings flew like ribbons from the blade. Professor Wilkes needed oak these days; the softer woods buckled almost at once under his weight. Fludd hummed under his breath as the chair leg took shape under his hand. He raised the blade and stopped pedalling and the lathe slowed and stopped.

  ‘Joseph?’ Allys Fludd knew better than to speak to her husband whilst he was working the lathe. She came from a family of carpenters and knew only too well from the tales of some of her six-fingered uncles how dangerous that could be.

  He turned. She stood in the doorway of his workshop, holding a tankard of ale and a plate of bread and cheese on a tray. ‘Is it dinner time already?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I think this is by way of being breakfast, Joe.’ She pushed aside some shavings and put the tray down on a half-finished chair. ‘You’ve got to eat. You’ll make yourself ill.’

  ‘I do eat,’ he protested. ‘I ate . . .’ He wasn’t quite sure when.

  ‘It’s this constable nonsense,’ she said. ‘You’ve done it often enough, and that’s God’s truth. When they ask you next, just say no.’

  He took a swig of ale, looking at her over the rim of the tankard.

  ‘And don’t look at me like that either, Joseph Fludd. You can’t woo me with those eyes any more.’

  He lowered the tankard and his eyelids, his lashes lying on his cheeks like a girl’s.

  She boxed his ears, but lightly and with love. ‘Well, perhaps you can, then,’ she said. ‘But it’s because you can, Joe, that I worry about you. You can’t keep on at this rate.’

  He sat down on his working stool, putting the plate in front of him and tucking into the cheese, soft and tangy. He gestured to it, mouth full, nodding.

  ‘I know I make good cheese, Joe,’ she said. ‘And good ale. And bread. And all sorts of other food. I make good children, too.’ She tossed her head back to the house where their daughter was playing in the shavings on the kitchen floor and patted her belly where, hopefully, a healthy son lay. ‘But for all you know, I may as well not bother. Talk to me, Joe. Tell me what’s the matter.’

  He washed the cheese down with the ale and wiped his mouth. ‘I don’t know where to begin, Allys,’ he said. ‘It’s constable’s worries. It’s not for you.’

  Allys set her feet firmly apart and folded her arms. ‘I can be the judge of that, Joseph,’ she said.

  Joseph Fludd had chosen a strong woman for a wife on purpose, against his mother’s better judgement. It had paid off, more or less, over the years. But every good thing came with a price and this was it. He sighed. ‘Sit down, Allys,’ he said. ‘Don’t loom over me like that. You addle my brain.’

  She sat on a bench and waited for him to begin.

  ‘In all my years as Constable,’ he said, ‘I’ve never encountered what I have encountered in the last month. Three murders . . .’

  She laughed, rocking back and slapping her knees. ‘Three murders in a month. Joe Fludd, you need to have a think before you say things like that. You had three murders on one day of the Sturbridge Fair not two years ago.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ He had no choice but to agree. ‘But they weren’t murders. Not like these. They were stupid drunks with knives killing each other. The three murders I have got on my mind are . . . what’s the word, when it is done secretly, cunningly?’

  Allys shrugged. Either of those words would make it clear, to her mind.

  ‘Clandestine. That’s the word the scholars would use. Clandestine. Someone killed these people and did it in such a way that no one would know they had done it. Might not even say it was a murder, even.’

  ‘But the inquests . . .’

  ‘Suicide, found drowned, natural causes.’ Fludd ticked them off on his fingers. He didn’t need to burden Allys with the names, though they were all human beings once, with hopes and dreams and families of their own. Ralph Whitingside. Eleanor Peacock. Henry Bromerick.

  Allys leaned forward, hand cupped theatrically to her ear. ‘I don’t think I heard properly, Joe,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hear you say “murder” in that
list.’

  ‘No,’ Fludd sighed. ‘I know you didn’t. And that’s the problem. The suicide and natural causes were scholars from the university, different colleges. The found drowned was a woman from Royston, a nun.’

  ‘A nun?’ Allys was genuinely surprised by that. ‘Not so many of those around,’ she said. In fact, the last time she’d seen one, she was still a small child, knee deep in wood shavings in her father’s workshop. ‘Quite long odds on finding one drowned, I would think.’

  ‘Don’t mock me, Allys,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a nun is the wrong word, but she was certainly very religious. Had only been back in the county . . . the country, I should say . . . for a few days. Knew no one but her family . . .’

  ‘But?’ she said quietly. She loved her husband and didn’t mean to scoff, but he sometimes took himself too seriously.

  ‘But she had a rosary embedded in her neck.’ He fingered his own throat in reminiscence. ‘The scholars were both poisoned, or so they say.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘A scholar called Marlowe and Dr John Dee.’

  Allys’s eyes widened. Even here in Trumpington, that man’s name was a byword for all that was unholy. She wouldn’t show it, but suddenly Allys Fludd was afraid. ‘The Queen’s Magician,’ she said softly. ‘You mix in high circles these days, Joe.’

  ‘Hmm?’ Fludd’s eyes were troubled and he crumbled a piece of bread between restless fingers.

  His wife watched him for a while and then got up, went over to him and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Joe,’ she said, smoothing his hair back from his face. ‘I can see you are worried and that worries me. Look into your murders, and when you do you will find they are a suicide, a found drowned and a natural causes. Stay away from magicians. Stay away from scholars. But mainly . . .’

  He looked up. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Eat. Your. Dinner.’

  He kissed her back and patted her backside, comforting, wide and warm. ‘Yes, my love,’ he said. ‘I promise.’ He watched her go, back into the yard with the cackling hens and the summer sun. But his eyes were thoughtful as he ate his bread and cheese.

  It was chaos at Madingley that morning, largely because the dragon that was Ursula Hynde was roaring through the house. She was a large woman, reminding John Dee of those stately merchantmen that blew in from the Channel, three-masted and full-rigged. Dee and his old friend Roger Manwood had spent the last few days studiously avoiding her, closeted deep in their host Francis Hynde’s study. But there was no comfort there today because on the bride-to-be’s orders, every door in Madingley was thrown back; every casement opened wide.

  The pair tried to have a conversation in the hall, then in the parlour, but her shrieked commands to the little knot of servants who followed her everywhere drowned out their attempts. A clerk did his best to scratch her instructions down as she hurled them out, another trying to keep pace so the man could dip his quill into the inkwell he carried for him.

  ‘Those curtains will have to go,’ she screeched in the Long Gallery.

  Francis Hynde, who had taken what he thought to be refuge on a padded windowseat behind one such hanging, stuck his head out. ‘Ursie, dearest sister,’ he said plaintively, ‘these hangings were chosen by my sainted mother and I love them dearly. They have hung here for thirty years and more.’

  ‘So have the traitors’ heads on London Bridge and it’s all the more reason for them to go,’ she snapped. She and her train swept on, nearly stamping on the Lord of Madingley’s toes. The clerk scribbled. Hynde gestured to the man and he crossed out his scribbling. Ursula Hynde stopped, peered at the paper and pointed imperiously. The clerk rescribbled, shrugged apologetically at Hynde, ducked his head and the circus moved off once more.

  Hynde looked after his sister-in-law with hatred in his heart and venom in his eyes. But discretion being the better part of valour, he withdrew his head, like a snail into its shell and went back to his book and a rather nice bottle of claret.

  The guests were to arrive any day and it was irritating beyond measure that Roger Manwood had turned up like a bad penny, expecting hospitality on a royal scale. And even more galling that he’d offered that weird old cove from Mortlake a bed for a few nights. Hynde considered charging them, then lost that thought as the claret warmed his soul and clouded his brain simultaneously.

  Dee and Manwood scuttled ahead of Ursula to Manwood’s room, but mayhem met them there. A confused dove, destined for part of the wedding service and then for a pie, flew in through the open window and was fluttering in terror around the ceiling as an equally terrified maid tried to shoo it away.

  As he did an about-turn in the doorway, Dee’s swirling cloak did little to soothe either the girl or the bird and Dee and Manwood hotfooted it down the back stairs, to the consternation of Hynde’s steward, who had an overdeveloped sense of where the nobs belonged. He backed into his room at the rear of the house and took refuge in yet more of Sir Francis’s best brandy, despite the day being still very new.

  Hurrying through the Physick Garden in their attempt to escape, Dee and Manwood eventually found the shade of a huge old oak and sank gratefully into the smooth-worn bark of the roots.

  ‘God’s wounds, that woman is unbelievable,’ grunted Manwood, peering anxiously round the bole of the tree. Despite putting some distance between themselves and the house, her hooting tones could still be heard.

  ‘You’ve even got to feel sorry for Francis,’ Dee said, rummaging in his pouch. ‘And that’s not something you’ll hear often from me. I know he’s a friend of yours, Roger, but . . .’

  Manwood held up a hand. ‘Dear boy, I’m with you all the way. He’s not the Francis Hynde I used to know. Mind like a bodkin, witty, informed. Look at him now,’ he said, and he mimed swigging from a bottle in mid-air.

  ‘Her, do you think?’ Dee asked. ‘Ursula?’ It didn’t take much of a seer to offer that interpretation.

  As if he had called her from the vasty deep, Ursula Hynde’s voice was suddenly very near. They cowered behind their tree.

  ‘Do you call that a ha-ha?’ she bellowed. ‘It’s a wonder my dear brother-in-law isn’t a laughing stock the length and breadth of the county. But there again, perhaps he is. Dig it wider. Deeper.’ There was a pause. ‘And five feet further from the house.’ In the silence that followed, the men could hear, above the petrified beating of their own hearts, the whistling of the breath in her nostrils. ‘Well?’ she yelled. ‘Get a spade, man. Don’t just stand there!’ It was all Dee and Manwood, married men of some standing and used to jumping to it, could do to stay hidden.

  ‘Is Francis making all these changes?’ Dee asked.

  ‘I hardly think so,’ Manwood said. ‘But, as you implied just now, she is the sister-in-law from Hell and the poor chap does seem to have taken to the bottle. But this chap she’s marrying – Steane, is it? Blind, is he? Deaf? Desperate?’

  Dee shrugged. ‘This is no more my neck of the woods than it is yours, Roger. I only came because of Marlowe.’

  ‘Yes.’ Manwood became serious. ‘You and I both. That’s what I want to talk to you about. What are you doing, man?’

  Dee had been occupied for the last few minutes stuffing dried herbs into a clay bowl with a stem attached. He now thoroughly alarmed the Justice of the Peace by striking a flint to a tinder and setting fire to the herbs.

  ‘Do you drink smoke?’ Dee asked him.

  ‘Do I what?’

  Dee inhaled fiercely at the narrow end of the stem and proceeded to blow smoke rings to the bright-green leaves overhead.

  ‘Good God!’ Manwood looked horrified.

  There was a distant cry of, ‘Look lively, you, man, there. That tree appears to be on fire. It will ruin the outlook if it burns down. See to it.’

  ‘Now see what you’ve done,’ Manwood whispered, and Dee lowered his pipe. Running footsteps over the grass alerted them to the approach of a gardener who appeared around the tree, carrying a skin of water. The two men shushed him franticall
y and he retraced his steps, eyes wide. They gave him a minute to get away and strained their ears for more shrieks, but all seemed quiet for the moment.

  Dee raised the burning herbs to his mouth again, and puffed, looking at Manwood over that hook of a nose. ‘This is all the rage in London. Canterbury isn’t exactly a distant star, Roger. I can’t believe the craze hasn’t caught on there.’

  ‘Craze indeed.’ Manwood was still staring at the contraption in Dee’s hand. ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘It calms the intellect,’ Dee said. ‘Sharpens the wits and focuses the mind. This is the tobacco plant – from Virginia in the New World. John Hawkins brought it back, ooh, twenty years ago now. I have Penn’s and Lobel’s herbal at home, but their drawings leave a lot to be desired, I’m afraid.’ He puffed slowly, savouring the smoke. ‘Francis Drake thinks it might be a curative.’

  ‘What for?’ Manwood asked.

  ‘Oh, toothache. Worms, lockjaw, migraine. Umm . . . the plague, of course, cancer, labour pains. And bad breath.’

  ‘All those?’ Manwood was staggered.

  ‘None of them, dear boy.’ Dee shook his head. ‘That’s just what Francis Drake thinks. And off the deck of a ship, the man’s an idiot. Care to try?’

  Tentatively, Manwood took the pipe and put it to his mouth. ‘What do I do now,’ he asked, a trifle indistinctly.

  ‘Breathe in, man,’ Dee said. ‘Deep as you can.’

  Manwood did so and immediately wished he hadn’t, coughing, spluttering and sneezing all at the same time.

  ‘Stop that sneezing!’ came a distant screech. ‘I will not have my wedding day marred by illness of any kind. Find the source of the pestilence and have it removed.’ There were no running feet this time and the men relaxed against the warm bark of the oak.

  ‘God’s breath,’ Manwood finally managed to wheeze.

  Dee chuckled. ‘I’m not sure whether it’s God’s or the Devil’s,’ he said. ‘It’s an acquired taste, perhaps.’

  ‘Acquired is the right word,’ gasped Manwood, passing the pipe back. ‘And I have no intention of acquiring it.’ He wiped his mouth and eyes, trying to focus again in the hot July morning sun.