The Devil Will Come

by Glenn Cooper

  At the far end of the hall the Master and Fellows sat at High Table on a raised platform. The four Bible Clerks, holding the most prestigious scholarships with the highest stipends, sat directly beneath the Master. The six Nicholas Bacon Scholars came next. Marlowe sat at the adjacent table with the remaining scholars, including his Parker lot. The Pensioners, all rich lads, filled out the tables in the rest of the hall. Unlike the Scholars, they paid their own commons and other expenses. Their interest in the academic life was generally marginal; their lot in life was to drink, play tennis and accumulate just enough education to return to their country seats as Justices of the Peace. Rounding out the student mix were the Sizars, poor lads who were clever enough to attend university but not meritorious enough to receive scholarships. They had to wait on their fellow students for their tuition, bed and board.

  Marlowe was high-spirited and ordered up extra bottles of wine for his table. He could ill afford them but his Sizar, a first-year boy, dutifully made the entry in Marlowe’s accounts for future reckoning.

  ‘I suppose all of you can have a few more sips, but the lion’s share is for Master Marlowe,’ Marlowe called out to his table.

  ‘It sounds grand, doesn’t it? Master Marlowe!’ his friend Lewgar exclaimed. ‘By this time tomorrow I pray that I too will have passed my disputation and have received my BA. I shudder to think what will become of Old Tom if I have no degree to carry back to Norfolk.’ Lewgar still had spots on his hairless face and remained a beefy lad where most of the others were rail thin. Though Marlowe was notoriously intemperate and prone to pounding his colleagues with his sly, withering sarcasm, Lewgar had remained on his amicable side by dint of perennial self-deprecation.

  From across the table, an older scholar, two years Marlowe’s senior, a serious fellow taking his MA degree, piped up, ‘Rather good show, today, Marlowe. Almost as impressive as my own final disputation.’

  Marlowe raised his goblet to the man. Though he had seen him nearly every day for four years, he could honestly say he hardly knew Robert Cecil and, in fact, Cecil was one of the few men in Cambridge who intimidated him. Yes, of course, his father was Baron Burghley, the Queen’s foreign secretary and by rights the most powerful man in a land without a king, but there was more to it than that. Cecil was as strong as a plowman, as smart as any of the Bacon Scholars and as confident in his own skills as Marlowe himself.

  But Marlowe was Cecil’s better in one area of endeavor and he was boozily grateful when Cecil called for him to demonstrate.

  ‘Go on, Master Marlowe, do us the honor of one of your verses on this, the occasion of your elevation.’

  Marlowe rose and steadied himself with a hand on the table. ‘Master Cecil, I have just the passage from a small work in progress, my first stage play.’

  ‘Have you been dabbling, then?’ Cecil asked.

  ‘As his bedfellow,’ Lewgar cried, to howls of laughter, ‘I can attest that he dabbles all night long!’

  ‘Quiet, then,’ Cecil demanded of the table. ‘Let us hear what our man hath wrote and, if it is not to our liking, I will let a birdie fly off to Court to let our Good Lady know that her schools are in disrepair.’

  Marlowe raised his arms melodramatically, waiting for his moment, and when all eyes were on him he began.

  ‘What is’t, sweet wag, I should deny thy youth,

  Whose face reflects such pleasure to mine eyes,

  As I, exhaled with thy fire darting beams,

  Have oft driven back the horses of the night,

  Whenas they would have haled thee from my sight.

  Sit on my knee and call for thy content;

  Control proud Fate and cut the thread of Time.

  Why, are not all the gods at thy command

  And heaven and earth the bounds of thy delight?’

  He grinned, drained the rest of his wine and sat back down, waving for the Sizar.

  The diners waited for Cecil to weigh in. ‘Passable, Master Marlowe,’ he said. ‘Rather passable. My birdie will have to remain in its cage and forsake its journey to London. Who do you have giving this speech and what will you call your play?’

  ‘Thus sayeth Jupiter!’ Marlowe said. ‘And I am calling the play Dido, Queen of Carthage.’

  ‘Well, Marlowe, if, in three years’ time, you take your Holy Orders, the world will surely lose an eminent playwright.’

  The last to leave the table were Marlowe, Cecil and Lewgar. It was growing dark and Lewgar moaned that he needed to be in bed early.

  ‘I hear the Fellows are not well disposed of your chances, Lewgar,’ Cecil said harshly.

  ‘You have heard that?’ Lewgar asked fearfully.

  ‘I have indeed.’

  ‘I mustn’t fail. My life will be over.’

  ‘If you cast yourself into the Cam, Thomas, I will write a poem about you,’ Marlowe said.

  ‘I’ll be fine, as long as I’m not given a thesis concerning mathematics. You know how appalling I am at mathematics, don’t you, Christopher?’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry, Thomas. Tomorrow you’ll be as drunk as me. In celebration.’

  When Lewgar trundled off, Cecil rose and clapped Marlowe on the back. ‘Old Norgate will be letting you know over breakfast, but you’ll be one of Lewgar’s questioners at his disputation. I shall be another.’

  Marlowe looked up quizzically. ‘Really? How very interesting.’

  His Sizar came to clear away the last of the table but Marlowe sent him for more wine and ordered him to light the candles. The lad obliged. Marlowe stared into the flickering flame of the candle and let his drink-heavy head droop towards his chest. The candlestick, a plain tube of pewter, caught his attention. He’d seen it every day for four years but tonight it jogged his memory. It was very much like a candlestick he’d seen some thirteen years earlier.

  His father was always angry, always muttering invectives while he worked. Seven-year-old Christopher sat by the fire, eagerly scribbling on a crossed-out, singed page from his father’s ledger book which his mother had rescued from the fire.

  The sun doth shine,

  The birds doth sing,

  And lo the bluebird

  Takes to wing.

  Pleased with himself, he looked up to see a woman at their door complaining about a job that John Marlowe had done. It was the baker’s wife, Mary Plessington. The stitching had already come undone on a recent shoe repair.

  His father took the shoes mutely and when the woman was gone he cursed her out roundly.

  ‘Filthy hag. She most likely loosened the stitches by ramming her foot up her husband’s ass. She’s a bloody recusant, anyway. I shouldn’t even take her jobs.’

  His mother, Katherine, looked up from her sewing. ‘Papist scum. Makes me want to spit on my own floor.’

  The shoe shop and their front room were one and the same. His father sat at his workbench all through the day, flaying and puncturing cattle skins and complaining. The Marlowes were meant for more, he would say. It was well and good that he had elevated himself to a freeman and had been able to join the Shoemakers’ Guild with all the privileges that entailed. But he was still on a lowish rung of the middle class and he couldn’t contain his contempt for the aristocracy and anyone else doing better than himself.

  ‘Katherine,’ he called out. ‘See how young Christopher gets on with his learning. That’s the way to beat the bastards. With a proper education he’ll become one of them, or that’s what they’ll think. Then he’ll rise above them and take a Marlowe’s rightful place on the top of the pile.’

  Christopher was the only son and the oldest child now that his older sister had died of a fever. He attended the petty school at Saint George the Martyr run by the parish priest, Father Sweeting. He’d quickly learned to read from the ABC and Catechism and from the first days when the printed page made sense to him verses and rhymes had popped into his head, demanding that he write them down. They were a cheerful counterpoint to the other thoughts that bubbled in his brain,
dark thoughts that had scared him when he was younger.

  ‘Are we different?’ he remembered asking his mother when he was five.

  ‘We are.’

  ‘Did God make us so?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with God.’

  ‘Sometimes I get frightened.’

  ‘Your fears will go away,’ his mother assured him. ‘When you’re a bit older you’ll be happy you’re different, believe me.’

  She’d been right. The fear faded soon enough and was replaced by something altogether marvelous, a feeling of superiority and power. By the age of seven he genuinely liked who he was and what he was becoming.

  The baker’s son, Martin Plessington, was in his class at petty school. Thomas Plessington was one of the more successful merchants in Canterbury, a wealthy Protestant with five apprentices and two ovens. Martin was a heavy-boned boy on his way to being a giant like his father. Inside the school he was slow-witted but on the streets he was a bully, using his muscles for primacy.

  One day, Christopher was among the last to leave school, reluctant, as always, to part with one of Father Sweeting’s books. On his way home he took his usual short cut behind the Queen’s Head Tavern and the livery stables.

  To his surprise, he saw the thick legs of Martin Plessington poking from a window at the house of the stable master. Martin lowered himself to the ground, clutching something. His eyes met Christopher’s.

  ‘Bugger off,’ Martin hissed.

  ‘What do you have?’ Christopher asked boldly.

  ‘None of your bleeding business.’

  Christopher came closer and saw it. It was a pewter candlestick adorned with an ornate Catholic cross.

  ‘Have you stolen that?’

  ‘Do you want me to thrash you?’ was the angry response.

  Christopher didn’t back away. ‘I assume you mean to sell it. Unless your family are closet Papists who mean to use it in an illegal mass.’

  ‘Who are you calling a Papist!’ Martin said, growing red in the face. ‘The Marlowes aren’t fit to wipe a Plessington ass.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Christopher said evenly. ‘If you let me see it, I’ll swear I won’t tell a soul what you’ve done.’

  ‘Why do you want to see it?’ the boy asked suspiciously.

  ‘It’s pretty, that’s why.’

  Martin thought about it and handed the candlestick over. It had a heavy round base, the weight of a brick or two. Christopher inspected it closely, then looked up and down the alley. ‘Did you notice this?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ Martin answered, drawing closer.

  ‘This.’

  Christopher swung the candlestick with all the might his small frame could muster and slammed its base against Martin’s temple. With a satisfying crunch, the sound of a boot breaking through ice, the boy fell to his knees and pitched forward, blood gushing from the wound. He moved for a few seconds and went slack.

  Christopher stuffed the bloody candlestick into his shirt and began dragging the lifeless body toward the stable. It was harder work than he’d imagined but he didn’t let up until he had Martin well inside. The tethered horses shifted and whinnied and tugged at their ropes.

  He dropped Martin beside a pile of hay and paused to catch his breath. Then he fished inside his shirt for the candlestick. He grasped it by its base, staining his fingers red.

  With one hand he opened Martin’s mouth and with the other he shoved the stick as far down his throat as it would go and watched blood well up and fill the gaping hole.

  The next day, Martin’s chair at petty school was unoccupied and Father Sweeting commented prophetically that the boy had better be dead than miss a day of studies. Christopher skipped lightly home, passing by the stables again. The stable doors were shut and no one seemed to be about. When he got home his mother and father were seated at the table talking in low tones, his sisters padding about on bare feet.

  ‘Did you hear?’ his father said to him. ‘Did you hear about Martin Plessington?’

  Christopher shook his head.

  ‘Dead,’ his father said, starkly. ‘His head stoved in and a Catholic candlestick down his gullet. People are saying the Papists done it, killed a Protestant lad. They’re saying they’ll be trouble in Canterbury for sure. A right civil war. There’s talk of a couple of recusant boys already done in by Protestant gangs. What do you say about that?’

  Christopher had nothing to say.

  His mother piped up, ‘You wore your good shirt today. I found your other one balled up between your mattress and the wall.’ She reached down between her legs and produced it. ‘There’s blood on it.’

  ‘Did you have anything to do with this?’ his father demanded. ‘Tell the truth.’

  Christopher smiled, showing the gap of his missing milk teeth. He actually puffed out his chest and said, ‘I did it. I killed him. I hope there is a war.’

  His father rose slowly and stretched to his full height, towering over the seven-year-old. His lips quivered. ‘Good lad,’ he finally said. ‘I’m right proud of you. There’re dead Catholics today because of you and more to come, I reckon. You’re a credit. A credit to the Marlowe bloodlines.’

  ELEVEN

  ELISABETTA’S FIRST INSTINCT was to call her father but what would that accomplish beyond rousing him from his bed and upsetting him no end? Micaela, she knew, was on hospital duty. She called Zazo instead. He arrived half an hour after the Polizia and sat with Elisabetta in the kitchen while she waited to be interviewed by an officer.

  She clutched her robe to her chest. ‘I’m sorry I disturbed you. You’re so busy.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Zazo said. He was out of uniform, wearing jeans and a sweater. ‘Did you call Papa?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. So the guy was at your door?’

  ‘That’s what Sister Silvia said.’

  ‘Did you get a look at him?’

  ‘Only his back.’

  ‘It was probably an addict looking for some cash.’ Zazo said. ‘And too brain-dead to realize he was breaking into a convent. I’ve been unhappy that there’s no alarm system here.’

  ‘There’s never the money for that sort of thing, and anyway …’

  ‘Yeah, God protects,’ he finished derisively. ‘I know the man who’s in charge here, Inspector Leone. Let me speak to him.’

  Elisabetta’s upper lip quivered. ‘Zazo, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’

  ‘I know you’re upset. I’ll be right back.’

  Leone was a gruff, unpopular fellow nearing retirement. Back in Zazo’s day there’d been no love lost between them and Zazo could say with confidence that he hadn’t thought about the man once since leaving the force.

  ‘I remember you,’ Leone said when Zazo approached him in the residence hall. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘One of the nuns is my sister.’

  ‘You’re at the Vatican, right?’ Leone said it with button-pushing derision.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘That’s a good place for you.’

  In his years of working with the Swiss Guards, Zazo had learned the art of restraint. He drew on it and let the remark pass. ‘So what do you have?’

  ‘The guy cut a hole in a ground-floor window at the back and let himself in. The Mother Superior is checking through the classrooms and offices on the first two floors but so far there’s nothing missing. He was standing in front of one of the residence rooms when one of the nuns on her way back from the toilet saw him and started screaming her head off. He ran away and probably made his way out a rear door.’

  ‘It was my sister’s room.’

  Leone shrugged. ‘It had to be someone’s. Who knows what he wanted? Maybe he was a thief, maybe a rapist, maybe a junkie. Whatever he was it’s a good thing he never got to her. We’ll do our interviews, dust for prints, check the CCTV footage from surrounding buildings. You remember the drill, right, Celestino?’

  ‘I’m still a police officer,’ Zazo spat back.


  ‘Sure you are.’

  Elisabetta was sipping at her coffee when Zazo returned. Nuns were busying themselves providing hot drinks for the officers. With so many men on the scene, some of the women, out of modesty, had gone back to their rooms and changed into their habits. ‘You don’t look so good,’ he told her with the bluntness of a brother.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What did you mean when you said you had a bad feeling?’

  ‘There was something about that man.’

  ‘I thought you only saw his back.’

  ‘I know. That’s why it’s only a feeling.’ She whispered now. ‘I know it sounds crazy but I think it was the same man who attacked me that night.’

  Zazo accepted a cup of coffee from one of the sisters. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It does sound crazy. I think you’re having some kind of post-trauma psychological reaction. That’s all.’

  ‘There’s more than that to it, Zazo. There’s more that I should tell you.’

  ‘Whenever you want to talk,’ he said.

  Elizabetta looked scared. ‘Now.’

  She took him back to her room. Zazo sprawled on her unmade bed and she sat on her reading chair and began by delivering a preamble. She knew that she had no authority to tell him these things but she felt compelled to do so. She demanded an oath of secrecy from him as her brother, as a policeman and as a Vatican employee.

  Zazo agreed and listened in rapt attention as his sister told him everything about her work as a student, her flashes of memory about her attacker’s spine, the skeletons of St Callixtus, the old man in Ulm, his tattoos, the Marlowe play.

  There was a knock on her partially open door. One of the nuns told her the police were ready for her.

  ‘You’re not going to tell them anything about this, are you?’ Zazo asked.

  ‘Of course not.’

  He got off the bed and said gravely, ‘I don’t think it’s safe for you to stay here any longer.’

  When he was awoken Krek’s head was still thick from the good brandy he’d drunk earlier. Alone in his big bed he answered the phone testily, ‘Yes?’