Eleventh Hour

by M. J. Trow

  Dee was silent for a moment and then said with a chuckle, ‘Ask him, Anne, if he is Machiavel.’

  ‘Master?’

  Dee flapped again. ‘Go on, ask him.’

  From the room behind him, a female voice raised in protest could be heard above the child’s wailing.

  She turned to Marlowe and began. ‘Sir, are you Mac … Mac …’ She was puzzled. He didn’t look ill, but neither did he look at all Scottish.

  ‘Yes, Doctor,’ Marlowe said, in the same stage whisper as the others employed, ‘Yes, I am Machiavel.’

  Suddenly, the hall was full of swirling robes, snow-white beard and cries of delight. ‘Kit! Kit! Come in and meet my new darlings! I have missed you! Where have you been?’ Dee thrust the maid aside. ‘Anne! Fetch us wine. Fetch us food. Warm the second-best bed.’ He turned to Marlowe. ‘You’ll stay with us, I know.’ He glared at the maid, who spun round on the spot in confusion. ‘Go on, go on, stupid girl. Drink. Food. What are you waiting for?’

  Released from the madness, the girl ran for the kitchen door and sanity. Dee threw his arms around Marlowe and pulled him excitedly down the hall to the door which still stood wide.

  Marlowe was manhandled in and the door was pulled to behind him. He had heard that Dee had remarried, having lost his beloved Helene but he was not really ready for how different a path he had taken. Where Helene was fair as the sun through mist and as gentle as a milk-white doe, the woman who sat in the glow of the fire was all dark and spark. She had a baby over her shoulder and bounced it hard, patting its back with blows calculated to stun a less hardened child. She was ruddy of cheek and sharp of feature, but the look she bestowed on her husband could not have been more loving. She probably was a few years Marlowe’s junior, but was old in judgement; she had his measure in the time he took to walk across the room and bow deeply, reaching for her free hand to kiss it.

  ‘Master Marlowe,’ she said, with no introduction necessary. ‘I have heard so much about you I feel I know you already.’

  ‘Then you know more than I,’ Marlowe said, ‘for I often think I scarcely know myself.’

  ‘Jane,’ Dee said, flustering himself into the opposite chair from his wife and reaching out, ‘give Madimi to me and let me soothe her if I can.’

  She gave him a look with a cocked eyebrow. ‘Are you sure, John?’ she said. ‘I know she interferes with your train of thought.’

  If there was sarcasm there, Marlowe could not hear it. Although Jane and Helene could not have been more different, Dee had found another woman to love him without question. It was a skill no one would have given him credit for, but here was living proof. He stepped forward, his arms out.

  ‘May I hold her, madam?’ he said. ‘We poor bachelors have all too little to do with babies.’

  With a chuckle, Jane Dee handed over her damp and furious daughter, whose screams redoubled. ‘I will leave you, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘I will take this opportunity, John, to take a nap, if I may? Last night was a little trying, to say the least.’ She turned a dazzling smile on Marlowe and he could see why Dee had fallen in love with her. It was as if a thousand candles had burst into light in that little room.

  As she swept out, Marlowe juggled the child into a more comfortable position for them both and sat down.

  Dee raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘We poor bachelors, Christopher?’ he enquired. ‘I never had you as someone who bemoaned his single state.’

  The playwright smiled and shook his head. ‘You never know, Doctor,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I am at that peculiar age, when all men look to their futures and want to leave something of themselves behind. For every year they swell and yet they live. Now all are dead; not one remains alive.’

  ‘Not you, Kit,’ Dee said, leaning over to pat the younger man’s knee. ‘You will never die.’

  ‘A sobering thought,’ Marlowe said, bouncing the child absentmindedly in time to the doxology he sang in his head. ‘To live on when everyone you love is dead. Who would want that? Another quote, probably.’

  Dee bent his head. ‘Who indeed,’ he muttered, as if to himself. Then, he brightened. ‘You have a knack, Kit. Listen to Madimi. She is almost quiet.’

  And sure enough, the child had subsided into hiccups and was mumbling on her fist over Marlowe’s shoulder.

  ‘I do seem to have quietened her,’ the poet agreed. ‘Accidental, I assure you.’ He carried on bouncing gently and soon even the hiccups had passed and he gave the child into the eager arms of her father, whose face brightened as he looked down at his dear, his darling. ‘Madimi. It’s not a name I’ve met before.’

  ‘Nor will you again. A child spirit. The great magus Agrippa was visited by her.’

  ‘And now she has visited you,’ Marlowe smiled.

  After a while, the doctor spoke. ‘You didn’t just come to see my new family though, did you, Kit?’ He had returned to the half-whisper which this child had imposed on the household.

  ‘No.’ It was no good trying to dissemble. ‘Sir Francis Walsingham is dead.’ There was no point in trying to break it any other way than directly.

  Dee had to swallow his cry of surprise. ‘What?’ he mouthed. ‘When? How?’

  Marlowe shrugged. ‘When? Two days ago at the eleventh hour. As to how, it depends on whom you ask,’ he said. ‘Without bothering you with all the alternatives, which couldn’t matter less, the important one is the one which Nicholas Faunt and I believe in.’

  Dee knew the answer to the question before he asked it, but asked it nonetheless. ‘Which is?’

  ‘Murder.’

  Dee looked down at the sleeping face of his daughter, still red from crying, tears dried on her velvet cheeks. Her lashes, the improbably long fringes of childhood, lay finally at rest and her mouth was a rosebud that surely could never open in an infuriated roar. Not for the first time, Dee wondered how a single world could hold something as beautiful as his daughter and as black and ugly as death and murder. ‘Apart from the fact that Faunt sees murder and mayhem behind every tree in a wood, every arras in a room, what reasons have you?’ he murmured.

  Marlowe reached beneath his chair for his travelling bag and pulled out the cup from which Francis Walsingham had taken his final drink. It was still wrapped in the cloth Faunt had snatched up in the death chamber. ‘We have this,’ he said, revealing it.

  Dee leaned forward. He was puzzled. It was a substantial cup, right enough, but scarcely heavy enough to kill even a sick man with, surely. Marlowe guessed his thoughts.

  ‘We suspect poison,’ he said and Dee leaned back again, nodding. ‘There are the lees of wine in here, dried on the side and in the bottom. I thought … we thought … that perhaps you could find out what it is.’

  Dee smiled. Of course he could find out what it was. There wasn’t a poison on earth he didn’t have in a bottle on his shelves. His study wasn’t a patch on the one he had had at Mortlake and his library – his dear, lost books – would never exist again, except in his memory and in his dreams, but still … knowledge is knowledge and that could never be smashed and burned. And he had such plans for St John’s Cross, a new study, a … but now was not the time. He held out his hand for the cup, but snatched it back. ‘Not with Madimi here,’ he said. It was not possible to be too careful. Although he was surrounded now with a loving family, Helene’s dear, dead face came to him every night in his dreams, her smile sad, bringing with her loss and longing. ‘Take it through to my workroom; it’s that door, there. A small thing, you will think it, but when I am Master of St Cross, oh,’ his eyes lit up, ‘oh the laboratory I will have!’ There, he’d said it anyway.

  Marlowe got up quietly; the sleeping Madimi had cast her spell over him too. He pushed open the door in the corner of the room and stepped into the dark. Without lighting a candle, he used the borrowed light from behind him to find the corner of the table and put the goblet down carefully. Dee was right; it was a small thing. Just a table and a few rough shelves on the wall, but it did seem to hold the s
pirit of the old Dee magic, despite being a shadow of its former self. Trying to suppress his feeling of disappointment, he softly closed the door and resumed his seat by the fire.

  In the dark workroom, up in the rafters, the stuffed cockatrice turned its head to stare through the gloom at the jewelled cup, waiting patiently on the table to divulge its secrets.

  Was there really a man there? It seemed so, but his face changed, now smiling, now scowling. He looked at Thomas Hariot first with his right eye, then with his left. Hariot crouched before his perspective trunk and touched the wheel, feeling the brass slide under his fingers. He straightened, away from the powerful lens and looked up at the night sky. There were the stars, as familiar to the mathematician as the beads on his abacus. The lights from God’s heaven? Perhaps, but it was not as simple as that and the little voice inside Hariot’s head whispered to him again, ‘Find out more. Find out more.’

  He crossed the room to where the trunk stood, angled to the stars, pointing at the moon. The latest letter from Tycho Brahe at Hven intrigued him, but it gave no answers. The Dane was as in the dark as he was and just as careful. Knowledge is power; they all knew that. But this knowledge, the secrets of the night, was far more than that. This knowledge could get a man killed.

  There was a knock at the door. Three, in fact, followed by a pause, then a fourth. That was the knock of the magus, of the doctor, but Thomas Hariot was a careful man. It was late. Would the doctor have ridden this far to see him, at this hour? He snapped shut the trunk’s lens cover and hauled the heavy brocade over it, just in case.

  ‘Quis?’ Hariot’s Latin was as simple to him as his English. He could have used Algonquin, but that would have been pretentious.

  ‘Ego,’ came the muffled answer.

  The mathematician unlocked the door and a messenger stood there, cloaked against the night, a letter in his hand.

  ‘Carter,’ he nodded, taking it.

  ‘Master Hariot.’ The man half bowed.

  ‘Where, exactly?’ Hariot asked.

  ‘Durham House, sir.’

  Hariot looked down at the doctor’s seal. ‘I’ll be there,’ he said.

  The April sun was already high by the time the party reached the high ground. Ralegh, as always, was first to the hilltop – if only because Ralegh was who he was and he was always first everywhere. He reined in the bay gelding with its straw-velvet livery and patted the animal’s neck. Through the boughs of the elms, quickening now with the season, he saw London lying below him, straddling the river, a silver slash across the land. Paul’s looked grey and solid, its spire lopped by the lightning. Ships without number cluttered the Queen’s Wharves, their spars like hedgehogs bristling against the pearl of the morning. Every time he saw a race-built galleon, Walter Ralegh’s heart leaped. He saw leafy Roanoke again and the copper-coloured heathens whose home it once was. He saw the stockade of raw-cut timbers, smelt the fragrance of the pine. All the magic, all the wonder of the New World that he had helped carve from the Old.

  The hawk on his wrist twisted its jessed head, looking at him with blind eyes. Its claws, like black steel against the leather of his gauntlet, tightened and flexed as its wings fluttered. The bird smelled blood. It heard, as Ralegh could not, the beat of wings in the air, the rustle of feathers in the high wood. One movement from Ralegh, with the hood gone and the arm flung free and it would be away, soaring through the air like a musket ball, faster than the eye could follow, to crash and thud into the quarry, the hapless turtle-dove flying homeward to its nest. The dogs smelled it too – the scent of death in the morning. They yapped and snarled around the horses’ hoofs as Ralegh’s party joined him, panting with exertion after the long chase up Shooter’s Hill. The hounds’ patient eyes belied their tongues, lolling on the ground as they sniffed and snorted. Their heads came up and they watched the sky, waiting for the command from their lord.

  But the command never came. A horseman was galloping up from the heather, sending clouds of dust as he rode. The black speck billowed and sharpened into a messenger, his cloak flying, the haunches of his horse flecked with foam.

  ‘Steady,’ Ralegh spoke softly to his hawk and his horse, both animals reacting instantly to the thud that beat a tattoo on the ground.

  ‘My lord!’ The messenger doffed his hat as he reined in, as blown as his horse. He handed Ralegh a letter, with a seal the huntsman knew well.

  ‘How touching,’ Ralegh smiled, steadying the hawk that flapped and squawked at this unwarranted intrusion. ‘Thank you, Carter. A letter from the doctor. And here’s me, feeling as fit as a flea.’

  He was sure his heart would break. But then it had broken before. Never before like this, however. His Lucilla had filled his thoughts now for so long, he had forgotten everything else. He heard her laughter in his bridle bells, saw her smile in the rays of the sun, heard, even here in his library, the swish of her satin gown. But now she was gone. A letter had come, in her elegant hand. She loved him, she said, as a brother, as a friend. It was all her father’s fault. Her father had chosen a husband for her long ago, when she was still in her hanging sleeves. She had no choice in this. It was the way of the world, at least for people of their class. ‘Dearest, dearest Henry,’ she had written. ‘It is for the best.’

  For the best! Henry forced himself upright, off the ottoman that lay in the corner and crossed to his books. Hariot probably had some arcane method of counting them by eye. There were nearly two thousand of them here at Petworth, but there was only one he wanted tonight: a book of Ovid’s poetry, translated by one Christopher Marlowe. Owning two thousand books was one thing; finding any one of them was something entirely different. Please God, let the new librarian make sense of these shelves soon. He slid the steps nearer and climbed. There it was, the slim volume on the … Damn! His fingers hooked on the wrong spine and a heavier tome altogether crashed to the floor. It thudded on to the priceless Persian, the corner digging a gouge into the deep, silk pile and it lay there open, tantalizing.

  A more ordinary man would have picked it up, straightened the pages, put the book back. But he was no ordinary man. He was Henry Percy, the ninth Earl of Northumberland, for God’s sake. Men called him the wizard earl and there was a reason for that. He opened the page, deliberately not looking at the book’s title. The colours of the rainbow lay there on the vellum, the myriad light of reds and blues, oranges and greens and the cause of the curve against the darkness of clouds.

  Henry Percy smiled, but it was not an easy smile. Nothing happened for nothing. He had been looking for Ovid, via Marlowe and he had found Alhazen, the old Arab, a book he had forgotten he owned. He felt a shiver, as though the rain of that magic bow was falling on his shoulders, chilling him to the marrow.

  ‘My lord?’

  Percy dropped the book again and noted that this time it landed closed on the carpet. ‘Who are you?’ He controlled his stammer, if only because he had not had time to worry about framing his words.

  ‘Carter, my lord. From the doctor.’

  ‘The doctor?’ Percy took the outstretched letter and nodded. He felt the skin of his head crawl. So that was it. The book. The page. The rainbow. Nothing was for nothing. There was a purpose to it all.

  ‘Thank you, Carter,’ the earl said. ‘See my man for your trouble. Some coin. Food at least. And rest.’

  Carter was affronted. ‘Thank you, sir, I have no need of that. I have others to see.’

  ‘Others?’ Percy blinked, already opening the letter. ‘Oh, yes. Yes, of course.’

  The world looked strange through the eye-slits of a visor. The lists twisted and arced between the blackness and tents reeled, their colours blurring now red, now white. He wasn’t watching any of this. He was focused on that shield, his target at the far end. His opponent was a bigger man, heavier and taller and better horsed. But what did they say? The bigger they are, the harder they fall? He hoped so.

  The helmet was still a problem. He’d had the straps adjusted, but the beavor rode u
p, pushing his chin too high and restricting his vision. The pauldron re-panelling had worked well, though, freeing his arm, and he brought down the oak lance as his horse kicked off with its hind hoofs. He felt it snick into place on the iron rest and braced his back. Instinctively, he straightened his legs ready for the impact. He had won before; he had lost before. Once he had been unconscious for two days and that silly old priest had been fussing around him, with bell, book and candle – a little too anxious, it seemed to him, to issue the last rites.

  He knew the horror stories; how Henri of France had gone down on what was supposed to be a sporting occasion, a holiday. How the lance had smashed through the eye-slits of the visor, into his eye, into his brain. And not only had Henri bled to death that day, but his country had been drained of blood for thirty years because of it. His opponent had been aiming for the shield, as all jousters did. But the lie of the ground, the mole-hill, the jitteriness of an inexperienced horse; any and all of that could mean that the lance tip could go anywhere. Into a man’s brain. Into a man’s soul.

  The noise was deafening now inside the steel, the rising thud of the horses’ hoofs as they reached the gallop. He saw his lance tip come into line with the shield – Edward Dymoke’s shield, the champion of all England, its lions snarling in the sun. Only a practice bout, he kept telling himself as the moment came. Nothing to die for here. He felt the thud hit his left shoulder, saw his lance tip bounce uselessly off Dymoke’s shield. His horse jerked to the right, carrying him away from the barrier, wheeling as he gripped the reins for dear life. His lance had gone from his grasp and for one long, horrifying moment, he couldn’t breathe, the air punched from his lungs. His left arm was still hooked under the shield but the sloping wood had all but shattered and a splinter had embedded itself into his thigh, just beyond the rim of the cuisse. It wasn’t bleeding yet, but it would when he wrenched the wood out.

  He saw Dymoke reining in at the far end of the field, wheeling his horse to face him again. But he saw a second horseman, unarmoured, alone, cantering across the tilt field into his view. He threw up his visor and breathed again, letting the precious air fill his lungs.