A Prisoner in Malta

by Phillip DePoy

“I have no idea what you’re on about,” Tom began, “but them men was lunatics, raging. The wife and me, we hid inside. But then one of them pulls me out and starts talking in English.”

  “They questioned you about me and the doctor.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you told them?”

  “What could I tell them? I says you was gone. You killed one, the rest wounded, I barely escaped with my life, and only wanted to be left alone.”

  “You told them that the coach went on to London.”

  “Oh.” Tom looked down. “Well, yes. I did that.”

  “What in the hell is going on, Marlowe?” Boyle finally demanded. “There’s more to this than the murder of that idiot Pygott or some girl you fancy.”

  “Well.” Marlowe smiled.

  And he began to wonder at once if lying, or at least avoiding the truth, was beginning to come a little too easily.

  “Then do you mind telling me,” Boyle huffed.

  “I think we should go back to the church,” Marlowe interrupted, almost to himself.

  “Back to the church?” Boyle exploded.

  “No one saw us there earlier,” Marlowe said lightly. “We’d only be students, come to pray. We need to see what’s going on there.”

  “When do I get to see Frizer?” Tom interrupted.

  “You don’t,” Marlowe snapped. “You’re coming with us. How good a farmer are you?”

  “Best in all of Cambs,” Tom said firmly, “if you want to know the truth.”

  “Then why did you throw in with Frizer?” Boyle muttered.

  “Don’t know much about farming, do you?” Tom answered Boyle. “It’s been cold hard winters for as long as I can remember. And when the snow and ice is there, it’s wind and water for sup. I told him, I told Frizer, I was out come spring. And now it’s spring, so there’s an end to it.”

  “All right.” Marlowe grinned at Tom. “Could you tell if a certain patch of grass had benefited from a feeding of blood?”

  Tom tilted his head. “I suppose I could. Fed the barley and oats with the blood of them dead chickens just before I come into town.”

  “Right, then,” said Marlowe, heading for the door, “you’re going to church before we take you back to your farm.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Outside the churchyard was quiet. Inside St. Benet’s there was a riot. Dead bodies had been found. Marlowe and his two companions stole past the door, around the building to the roses, and found the strange patch of grass.

  Tom nodded, knelt; pressed his nose against the earth. Sniffing like a hunting dog, he nodded again. Then he jammed an index finger into the dirt and scratched around. After a moment he examined his finger closely and snorted.

  “There’s been blood here all right,” he confirmed. “You can smell it.”

  “Even though it may have been spilled here almost a month ago?” Marlowe asked skeptically.

  “It’s been frost most of these mornings,” Tom answered. “That’s kept it preserved. Then there’s the flea cocoons. Fleas need blood, you see. Some clever flea family’s set up stock here. It was a good bit of blood at one time.”

  So Pygott may well have been killed on that spot. The brass button in Marlowe’s boot pocket pressed into his shin, as if insisting on finding its owner.

  “Inside,” Marlowe said softly to Boyle. “Tom, will you wait here?”

  Tom nodded and searched for a shadowy hiding place.

  Marlowe and Boyle plunged through the side door of the chapel, as if oblivious to the noise within.

  As soon as they were in, all eyes looked their way.

  Three clergy, two local constables, and several college groundkeepers filled the front part of the church. Of course, there were also five dead bodies.

  One of the clergymen rushed toward them, eyes wide.

  “No, no, no, you may not come in,” he gasped. “What do you want here?”

  “We’ve come to pray,” Boyle said innocently, glancing momentarily at Marlowe. “We’re students.”

  “What’s happened here?” Marlowe asked in mock shock, gaping at the bodies.

  “Someone has defiled our church once more!” the panicked clergyman cried.

  “Are those men dead?” Boyle asked.

  “Yes!” the man howled.

  “Did you say ‘once more’?” Marlowe asked. “This has happened here before?”

  The man lowered his voice.

  “Only several weeks ago. A student was found outside, on the ground.”

  “My God, what student?” Marlowe asked quickly.

  “I don’t know,” the man answered impatiently. “Father Edmund told me that he saw the body, but it was removed before he could call the authorities. And now this!”

  “How did this happen?” Boyle asked carefully.

  “No one knows.” The man lowered his voice considerably. “But these men, I think, are not Christians. They may well have been sent by the devil.”

  “They’re not Christians?” Marlowe asked, trying to get a better look at any one of the dead bodies.

  “Get those boys out of here!” another man shouted.

  Marlowe turned toward the sound of the voice. It had come from the rector, by his costume, an older man with no hair and a face as cragged as the surface of a mountain.

  Marlowe nodded and looked to Boyle, who was crossing himself and already heading for the side door.

  Back outside, Marlowe whispered Tom’s name, and Tom appeared from around the corner of the building. After a moment’s discussion it was decided that Boyle would escort Tom back to his farm, verify his whereabouts with the wife. Marlowe had already moved on to other thoughts. Boyle agreed to meet at the Pickerel that evening.

  As soon as they were gone, Marlowe strode to the hiding spot and stood as he had before. From that place he could scarcely be seen, but could see all the yard close to the door.

  He dropped to his knees and searched the grass around him, hoping to find another slip of cloth, a second button—anything to help further his investigation. After nearly a half hour’s examination, he found, stuck hard into the stones of the wall close to where he’d stood, three threads. They were nearly an inch long, and could have been from anything or anyone. They were wedged into a crack near a particular stone that stuck out. A shorter man might lean an elbow there and snag his sleeve, leaving a bit of thread.

  Head swimming, Marlowe stepped away. A bit of red cloth, a button, and three colorless threads would never tell him who the murderer was. He suddenly felt foolish and a bit lost.

  Of course he would speak with Father Edmund to confirm once and for all that Pygott had been killed on that spot where the grass grew well. Giddily Marlowe acknowledged that feeding the lawn might have been Pygott’s single redeeming act.

  The noise inside the church increased suddenly, and Marlowe judged it best to leave. Back to Bartholomew’s office; confront the old man about the killers hiding in his anteroom.

  Alas, once in the building and up the stairs to the rooms, he found that the professor had not yet arrived.

  Glancing about, Marlowe walked to the old man’s desk. He stared down at the mad array of papers, books, letters, odd objects, and crumbs. For a moment nothing caught his attention and he considered seeking out the professor in his lecture hall once more.

  Then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a small golden cylinder beneath several books.

  “Where have I seen you before?” he asked it out loud. “Or your cousin?”

  He stared at the container. It was exactly like the one Captain de Ferro had possessed onboard his ship, the one containing a message from Walsingham.

  Stifling an impulse to seize the cylinder, Marlowe instead moved to an ornately carved wooden chair close to the tall window. Stacks of books were littered around it. If he sat there he had a view of the door but his presence would be, momentarily, hidden by the dazzle of sunlight through the window. In that chair he might have a moment to think.

/>   Too many details were unexamined. First he thought to trace the path and the meaning of the Rheims-Douai Bible. It had certainly been written by conspirators at Coughton and then given to Pygott to deliver to someone at St. Benet’s. Why had it been delivered there, and not taken directly to the Catholic collaborators in London? Then, why had Frizer and his band wanted to retrieve it from the relative safety of the church? There were two significant possibilities. Someone had told Frizer to retrieve it and deliver it to Spanish agents in London, for some reason. Or Frizer, as a double agent, thought to intercept the message in the Bible and deliver it directly to Walsingham. Either way, it seemed very strange that Frizer and his lot would stumble about asking students to steal things from the church. And it was even stranger that Pygott should be killed at the exact moment he was coming out of the church with the Bible, only to be left dead in the yard with the Bible still on his person.

  Marlowe began to slowly untangle the knot.

  Throckmorton was in league with Catholic forces in Spain. They hoped to replace the true Queen with her Scots cousin Mary. That would restore the papist church in England. Throckmorton and John Pygott and other cohorts had a plan: assassinate the Queen, foment rebellion from within, and attack England from without. Setting all else aside for the moment, a part of that plot had been outlined in a communication hidden in the Rheims-Douai Bible. That missive had been given to Pygott, an oblivious dupe, to deliver to someone at St. Benet’s in Cambridge before being taken to London. To whom? And why?

  Was it possible that the Bible’s message could be, in fact, a code within a code? Marlowe realized that he had found the message quite easily, as Frances had said. Others would be able to accomplish that as well. Perhaps the message had been delivered to a conspirator at St. Benet’s for further coding. Who would that conspirator be? Another possibility was that the message had never been intended for London at all, that there was someone in Cambridge who would receive the information. For what purpose? A third supposition: the message was a trick, as he’d thought when he’d first translated it.

  Marlowe’s brain continued to roil; he hit on the most devious possibility of all: Pygott had been sent to retrieve the Bible and was killed by the same people in a deliberate attempt to have the Bible discovered, the message decoded, and the plot to kill the Queen seemingly discovered. Which would mean that the plot as outlined in the message was a decoy, a feint within a feint.

  But what possible advantage could there be in making it appear as if Marlowe had murdered Pygott? Was that a part of the plan, an improvisation once Pygott was dead, a concerted effort to eliminate Marlowe from the picture entirely?

  Marlowe twisted in his chair. It was too much, too confused. No mind could create such a vast and devious map of deception.

  He bit his lower lip, and started over.

  “What if this were my play?” he said aloud. “Why would I have written the scenes this way?”

  In order to have a satisfying conclusion, he posited, a play must have tension and in order to create that tension, a certain amount of misdirection must be employed. That way the ending was a surprise, and the release of the tension was satisfying. How many of these events were misdirection, and how many were genuine intentions?

  What if he were writing a play called The Murder of Pygott and the Assassination of a Queen? How would it go? And wouldn’t there have to be a better title for it than that?

  In any case, it would begin with a young student, lately come to college in Cambridge. He would be taken away by an old friend. He would travel over the seas. He would rescue a wonderful woman. He would be accused of a murder he did not commit. He would be forced to solve that murder.

  Suddenly Marlowe’s head snapped back.

  He thought of how quickly Frances had recovered from her time in the Maltese prison, and torture at the hands of an Inquisitor. Also her subsequent behavior belied the proposition that she would ever need anyone’s help, or need rescue of any sort. Perhaps that was a part of the misdirection.

  If I were Kyd, Marlowe thought, I would compose the first act as a test of our young hero’s mettle. Both Lopez and Frances had hinted that they were observing me during the course of the rescue from Malta. Had all of that been a ruse?

  No. Frances had truly been taken by the Spanish and held in the Maltese prison. But Lopez could have gone by himself, could have gone to his cohorts on that island more easily without Marlowe. Marlowe had been taken along as an unknowing apprentice.

  Marlowe supposed for a moment that he might be a pawn in a much larger and more confusing pageant. He was being tested for service to the Queen at the same time as he was being diverted from that service by opposite forces—Spanish and Catholic. If that were the case, then Lopez had been murdered to stop Marlowe from being completely initiated into Walsingham’s legions, and Pygott’s corpse had been laid at his feet to eliminate him from the equation entirely.

  Before he could go any further with his thoughts, Marlowe heard a rustling sound close to him in the room.

  Twisting in his chair, he jumped up and pulled his rapier, only to come face-to-face with a very startled Professor Bartholomew.

  “Christ in heaven!” Bartholomew swore, dropping several of the books he’d had cradled in his arms.

  “Ah, Professor,” Marlowe said calmly. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  He put away his sword and stood silently.

  Bartholomew stared back for a moment, and then grunted.

  “Help me pick up these books, then,” he said, bending over with some effort.

  Marlowe moved quickly, picked up most of the books, and helped the old man to his desk.

  Bartholomew sat. Marlowe stood.

  “First,” Marlowe began before the professor could completely compose himself, “tell me who was hiding in the anteroom of your lecture hall. They were Catholic agents?”

  “What?” Bartholomew rocked forward.

  Marlowe glanced down at the professor’s desk.

  “And that cylinder there,” he said, “the golden one—I’ve seen its like before. Explain it.”

  Bartholomew hesitated, not breathing, and then sat back.

  “It’s from Walsingham. Frances and I both told you I was acquainted with her father.”

  “But you did not tell me your part in all of this,” Marlowe said. “It’s clear to me now that you are his assign.”

  “Because of this cylinder?” Bartholomew did his best to voice his incredulity. “If you were in my class I would give you low marks for such a leap of cognition.”

  “Instinct is a great matter with me,” Marlowe responded. “When I see such an obvious clue as that golden container, I fear I know all too well what it means.”

  Bartholomew glanced toward the container once more.

  “Well,” he sighed, “worldly men have such miserable, mad, mistaking eyes. I leave such simple interpretations to youth.”

  “That is not an answer,” Marlowe told the old man, smiling.

  “No. It is not.”

  After a moment of silence, Marlowe resumed the conversation, as it was apparent that Bartholomew would not.

  “What about the men who tried to kill me in St. Benet’s just now?”

  The old man’s face changed instantly. For the first time in Marlowe’s memory, the demeanor was one of utter confusion.

  “What are you saying?” Bartholomew stammered. “What men in St. Benet’s?”

  The professor had no idea what Marlowe was talking about.

  So Marlowe took a few moments to relate the events at the church, omitting the more recent encounter with Tom.

  “Remarkable,” Bartholomew responded when Marlowe was finished. “You and Boyle stood against five? And five of that sort? Genuinely laudable.”

  “Thank you,” Marlowe snapped dismissively, “but if you didn’t have anything to do with them, who did? The men who were spying on us from the anteroom?”

  “Let me address that first,” Bartholom
ew said uncomfortably. “That was President Cole. He’s taken to watching my lectures and jotting down notes. He is a Puritan, and they mean nothing but harm to our nation. That is why I spoke to you as I did. Mark my word, these men will one day attempt to overtake our government, our entire way of life. And more specifically, Cole is likely to be the ruination of this institution!”

  Marlowe exhaled, and felt the ache of disappointment. What he had taken to be some significant part in a vast plot was, in fact, nothing more than academic infighting. Cole hated Bartholomew. Bartholomew hated Cole. That was as far as it went.

  “I see,” he said to Bartholomew. “Then neither you nor Cole set those men upon us in the chapel.”

  “You went from my classroom directly to Boyle’s rooms?” Bartholomew asked. “And thence to St. Benet’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” Bartholomew asked.

  “To see another student, Carier,” Marlowe answered. “Boyle thought he would be there because he prays every morning.”

  “Carier,” Bartholomew said to himself. “Yes, he hated Pygott. But if you went directly from Boyle’s rooms to the church … not much time for assassins to hide there.”

  “I’ve been trying to puzzle it out myself,” Marlowe admitted.

  The old man nodded for a moment, then opened his eyes.

  “Unless, of course,” he said, “those men were not intended for you.”

  Marlowe threw his head back. “Christ!” he whispered.

  “You and Boyle stumbled onto someone else’s execution!”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Once Bartholomew made his pronouncement, it seemed ridiculously obvious.

  “Those men didn’t follow us to the church.” Marlowe leaned against the professor’s desk before he thought better of it. “They were already there—for someone else.”

  “The question is,” Bartholomew went on, “for whom?”

  “Carier?” Marlowe wondered. “Could they have had the same information that Boyle did, that he prayed there every morning at that time?”

  “But why Carier?” Bartholomew asked, his brow furrowed.

  Marlowe stared at the old man.