by M. J. Trow
It didn’t quite work out that way. Henry Whetstone usually liked being Mayor of Cambridge. It gave him a chance to line his fur-edged pockets, distribute largesse to his friends and relatives, acquiring more friends and relatives in the process and it was pleasant to hear the vicar of St Mary’s ask the Lord to watch over his soul every Sunday. But that Monday morning was not usual. For three hours before he arrived at the Courthouse in St Mary’s Square, a queue of angry petitioners had been assembling in the pouring rain, getting angrier by the minute as the water splashed off their hat brims and trickled down their necks. He had their complaints in front of him now, dashed off quickly in a scribble by his harassed clerks who had borne the full wrath of the good townsfolk. Others, angrier still, were not content to leave their complaints with a clerk. They wanted to see the Mayor in person: it was disgraceful; there ought to be a law against it; there was a law against it; they hadn’t voted for the man in the first place.
‘“Disgraceful”,’ the Mayor read from piled papers in front of him. ‘“There ought to be a law against it”.’ He threw the documents down, gnawing his lip with fury as he glared at Joe Fludd. ‘What do we pay you, Fludd, to guard this town?’
Not enough, was the man’s silent answer, but he remembered what his Allys had told him and behaved himself. ‘My constabulary allowance is . . .’
‘I know what it is!’ Whetstone thundered. The jovial, red-faced merchant was anything but jovial this morning and if his face got much redder, he was liable to explode. Purple tinges were beginning to mottle his cheeks. His gout always played him up in wet weather and now this. ‘You are aware of the law regarding Egyptians?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Tell me,’ Whetstone snapped, ‘just so that we are both sure.’
‘They are to be escorted from the town or county and taken to the nearest port.’
‘And if they refuse to go?’
‘They are to be hanged, sir, without the benefit of trial.’
‘Did you hang them?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Did you escort them to the nearest port?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Did you even escort them from the town?’
‘No sir.’
‘No,’ Whetstone growled. ‘No, you let them in, gave them a stall out there.’ He pointed to the square beyond his leaded window panes. ‘You allowed them to tell fortunes, read palms, carry out conjuring tricks.’ He held up a piece of paper. ‘Margaret Walker of Cherry Hinton is convinced she will not see another summer as a result of their auguries.’ He rummaged and found another one. ‘Nicholas Coke was told he will be hanged, drawn and quartered before Lady Day. These people are worried, Fludd. Worried. And they had to pay for the privilege. Then, there’s the stealing. Apples. Eggs. Four geese. How can they lift four live geese without anybody noticing?’
Fludd had no answer.
‘Why did you let them in?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ the Constable told him. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘Making for a port, sir.’ Fludd could at least be positive about that. ‘King’s Lynn.’
‘Get yourself a good horse and follow them. I want to know exactly where these travelling people are.’ The mayor managed to make the two words sound like a particularly virulent curse and Fludd almost felt his skin crackle under the heat of it.
‘And if I catch them, sir? I have no jurisdiction outside Cambridge.’
‘That is entirely your problem, sir,’ Whetstone snapped. ‘You created this mess, you can clean it up. Oh, and, Fludd . . .’
‘Yes, sir?’ The Constable was already halfway to the door.
‘How’s the carpentry business these days?’
‘It’s doing quite well, sir, thank you.’
‘That’s good, Joseph, I’m glad. Because I think your constabulary days are over.’
Fludd closed the door carefully behind him, afraid that if he slammed it now, he would never stop slamming it, imagining the Mayor’s stupid head between the planks and the jamb. Then he squared his shoulders and went in search of a good horse.
Nicholas Faunt was waiting for Christopher Marlowe at the bottom of his staircase the next morning as the scholar spun round the final turn of the spiral, late as always, his grey fustian flying in the breeze of his passing. He nearly trod on him and brought himself up short. Faunt’s nose was blue with cold and he slouched in a huddle against the hard stone of Corpus Christi. He had ridden hard and long through the night and was not in the best of moods.
Marlowe didn’t know the man, but months at William Shelley’s house had sharpened his wits and made him circumspect.
‘Dominus Marlowe?’ Faunt stood upright.
The university form of address. An insider? It seemed possible, but Faunt did not have the look of a scholar, the parchment grey skin and the fussy abstraction. He was wearing spurred boots and carried a sword.
Marlowe stepped back up two risers and his hand went automatically to the small of his back for his knife, to meet only shirt over skin; he was a scholar right at this moment and his knife was back in his room, hidden in the mattress. ‘I am Marlowe,’ he answered.
‘Nicholas Faunt.’ The man extended a gloved hand.
Marlowe took it. ‘Sir Francis Walsingham’s secretary,’ he said, with a half smile.
‘Among other things.’ Faunt looked about him. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’
Marlowe motioned up the twisting wooden stairs and led the way. He unlocked his study door and let the man in. ‘I’m sorry there’s no fire. I can offer you wine, at least.’
Faunt nodded. He crossed to the window with its thick and twisted glass and looked out on to the Court below where scholars hotfooted it from one lecture to the next. ‘Some things never change,’ he said.
‘You know this college?’ Marlowe paused in mid-pour.
‘Man and boy,’ Faunt said. ‘Old Norgate must be in his grave by now, I suppose.’
‘Possibly –’ Marlowe passed the cup to him – ‘but he was fit as a fiddle yesterday. When were you up?’
‘I took my Master’s degree in the year of Grace 1579. You were still at the King’s School in Canterbury.’
‘And doubtless you can tell me a great deal more about myself.’ Marlowe looked into the man’s blue-grey eyes.
‘Of course.’ Faunt began to run those eyes over Marlowe’s books, their leather spines cracked and fading. ‘Your father is John, he is a tanner and cobbler. Your mother is Katherine, of the Arthur family from Dover. You have an older sister, Mary . . .’
‘Had,’ Marlowe corrected him. ‘She died.’
Faunt stood corrected, but as Walsingham’s secretary he had learned to have no sympathy and so offered no condolences. ‘You were christened in the church of St George the Martyr, Christopher, the carrier of Christ.’
‘I am flattered, Master Faunt, that you should have bothered to learn so much about me . . .’
‘Don’t be,’ Faunt told him flatly, sipping the wine. ‘Despite appearances, this isn’t a social call.’
‘Walsingham sent you,’ Marlowe said, guessing. ‘About William Shelley.’
‘Shelley’s in the Tower and singing like a lark. He isn’t the problem.’
‘So who is?’ Marlowe knew it wasn’t him, or he would be dead by now, knifed silently from behind in any dark entry you cared to name.
Faunt put the goblet down. ‘You are, Dominus Marlowe. You still have uses left in you, or you would be dead by now.’
Marlowe stepped back, grimly satisfied to hear his thoughts come back to him. He had room for manoeuvre, should this secretary prove to be as slick with a blade as he was with words; the poet could recognize the type from a thousand paces, or whenever he looked in the mirror. ‘I assume this is about the women,’ he said.
‘This . . .’ Faunt bellowed, then checked himself. ‘This is about tearing up Sir Francis Walsingham’s w
arrant and taking it upon yourself to disobey orders.’
‘Is that what I did?’ Marlowe had honed his expression of hurt innocence on the grindstone of nurses, teachers and lecturers until it was well nigh perfect, big eyes peering out from behind tumbled curls and a pouting lip. Many a tab grown too big for comfort had been covertly disposed of by barmaids the length and breadth of Cambridge who could not bear to see Master Marlowe in distress. But he knew it was pointless trying it on the implacable secretary and so kept his face poker straight.
‘You know very well it is,’ Faunt snapped. ‘Sir Francis is very displeased.’
‘And so he sent you to . . . what? Smack my wrist? Slit my throat?’
Faunt hesitated for a moment, looking as if he would like to do both, one after the other and in that order.
‘Neither,’ he said. ‘Do you by any chance speak Flemish, Dominus Marlowe?’
‘As a matter of fact, I do. I may be a little rusty, but back in Canterbury, some of my best friends were the Huguenot weavers along the Stour. But, Master Faunt, you know that already or you would not have ridden so far and so hard to find me.’
Faunt looked sternly at the man, then guffawed, slapping Marlowe’s shoulder. ‘I like you, Kit,’ he said. ‘And Sir Francis has a little job for you.’
‘Indeed?’
Faunt crossed from the window, mechanically checking the door. He leant his back against the studded wood, arms folded. ‘What do you know about the Prince of Nassau?’ he asked.
Marlowe poured more wine for them both and passed the goblet to Faunt. ‘Statholder of the Netherlands,’ he said, ‘leader of the rebels against the overlordship of Philip of Spain. They say he has outlandish ideas. Every Jack’s as good as his master, that sort of thing. Men call him William the Silent.’
‘He’s a marked man.’ Faunt sipped his wine.
‘A Protestant leader in a Catholic country? Of course he is.’
‘But it’s more imminent than that. He’d been relying on the Duke of Alençon to front his cause, but that’s fallen apart now, largely because Alençon is an utter shit. That leaves the Statholder somewhat exposed. There have been attempts on his life already. He’s had to move his court to Delft.’
‘I don’t see . . .’
‘Walsingham wants a man to watch Nassau’s back.’ Faunt finished the draught. ‘You.’
‘Me?’ Marlowe laughed and shook his head. ‘You’ve read me wrongly, Master Faunt. I am a scholar . . .’
What happened next was a blur of velvet, leather and steel. There was a dagger in Faunt’s right hand and it sliced in a vicious arc towards Marlowe’s throat, but the scholar was faster and he hurled his wine in Faunt’s face and kicked the blade aside. The next thing the secretary knew he was biting the wood of the door with his arm rammed painfully up behind his back.
‘Scholar, my arse!’ he mumbled against the oak and slowly Marlowe released his grip.
Faunt tugged down his doublet and straightened his ruff, realizing only now that his lip was bleeding where Marlowe had banged his head on the door. ‘I believe I’ve made my point,’ he said, clearing his throat and looking for his hat. ‘Yes, you,’ he repeated, ‘and next time I won’t give you any leeway at all.’
Marlowe recovered the man’s dagger from where it had bounced under the table and, tossing it in the air, handed it to Faunt hilt first.
‘How will you get there?’ the secretary asked.
‘By ship to the Hook,’ Marlowe told him. ‘Thereafter we shall see.’
‘You can’t just turn up at William the Silent’s court,’ Faunt said. ‘There’ll be watchers on the roads. The whole place from Antwerp to the Zuyder Zee will be crawling with Spaniards. How’s your Spanish?’
‘Non-existent,’ said Marlowe.
‘You can’t go as a tutor. It worked with Shelley, but Nassau has his own people. An Englishman would stick out like a sore thumb.’
‘If he has his own people, why am I going at all?’ Marlowe asked.
‘I didn’t say they were any good.’ Faunt wobbled his goblet for a refill, still dabbing at his swollen lip. ‘In fact, I’m appalled how lax Nassau’s court is. People coming and going all over the place. His headquarters is in some bloody converted nunnery so it’s about as safe as a snake pit. You’re some sort of playmaker, aren’t you? Mummer or something?’
‘Something.’ Marlowe nodded.
‘There’s a troupe of Egyptians recently passed through this town of yours, making for the coast.’
‘Are they?’
‘They are. Find them, Dominus Marlowe. Join them. And get to Delft before Hell opens up.’
THREE
Allys Fludd knew better than to try to talk her husband out of doing his constabulary duties, but that didn’t stop her. She stood at the stirrup of his hired horse and held on with one hand, her baby cradled in the crook of her elbow and little Kate hanging on to her skirts.
‘Joe,’ she said. ‘If you would only tell me where you are going. When you’ll be back. You have that cabinet half finished in your workshop and it will be me who has to explain when it isn’t ready.’
Fludd was not a natural horseman and having someone hanging on to one stirrup didn’t make him feel any more secure in his seat. He had asked at Hobson’s stables in Trinity Lane for their fastest horse and he was already feeling that may have been a serious mistake, as the stupid animal caracoled round and round as soon as it felt his grip on the rein tighten even slightly. Fludd was afraid that the animal’s flicking hooves would kick his daughter into the middle of next week, but he was also afraid that he would fall off and look as much of an idiot as he felt.
‘Allys,’ he begged. ‘Please let go and let me get on. The sooner I’m gone, the sooner I’m back and the cabinet can be finished and this mad animal can be back in the stables and all will be back to normal.’
‘Normal, Joseph Fludd, normal? And what is normal here, may I ask?’ Before he could even part his lips, she answered her own question. ‘I’ll tell you what’s normal. You, chasing off after all and sundry, players, murderers, scholars. When you became Constable for the first time,’ she said, with heavy emphasis, ‘you promised me it was just for a while. You promised me it would only be once. You promised me that it was just a matter of gathering up the drunken men of the town and putting them in the castle to sober up. You said there would be no mixing with the Colleges, no . . .’ With every new thought, she shook the stirrup from side to side and it was obvious to Fludd that she was wishing it was his neck. The effect might be the same; the skittish, highly bred horse was on a knife edge and one more shake would break the fragile bond of her final wit and she would be off possibly never to come back to earth.
‘Please, Allys,’ he said, jogging and jigging in the saddle and hopelessly grabbing the reins. ‘Please, stop that or I will be thrown. If you want me dead, then carry on; if you want me alive, and I assume you do, then please, step away from the horse.’
Allys Fludd came out of the tunnel of her own temper and looked up, to find herself staring into the rolling eye of the half-mad mare. She let go of the stirrup and stood back. Slowly, the animal calmed down and Fludd began to half enjoy the feeling of being astride so much elegant horseflesh. He sat high above his family, and waited for his wife to be as calm as his ride. When the hectic spots of anger had faded from her cheek, he began to explain. He had only got as far as his dressing down by the Mayor when a sudden commotion down the road set the horse off again and before he could say another word, he was flat on his back on the verge, one foot still in a stirrup and, by some miracle, the reins still in his hand.
‘Constable Fludd, Constable Fludd, come quick.’
The voice was quite clear, although its owner was nowhere in sight. Allys rushed into the house to put the baby in its crib and set its little sister to watch over it, then came back out to disentangle her fallen husband, who was twisting on the ground like a landed trout, trying to avoid the flailing hooves. He was making
an eerie crowing sound as he tried to force some air back into his empty lungs until, with a superhuman effort, he managed to breathe again.
‘Who in Hell’s name is that?’ he grated to Allys. ‘He could have killed me.’
Allys, having freed his foot, turned round to face the newcomer. It was true that she herself had been berating her husband moments before, but now that someone else was putting him at risk, she was like a wildcat defending her young. The man now visible round the corner of the lane was well known to her and she walked up to him and swung a mighty slap around his head which made his ears ring. Taken off guard, he fell to his knees.
‘Are you some kind of idiot, Robert Scoggins, to go round the countryside shouting like that. Look at my husband!’ Allys pointed a dramatic finger to where the Constable still lay in the dirt. ‘He could have broken his back.’
The man looked from horse to man and back again. ‘Why is he riding the Wasp?’ he said. ‘Nobody ever hires her, everyone knows that.’
Allys looked at him with narrowed eyes. ‘That has nothing to do with it,’ she said. ‘It was your shouting and hallooing from miles away that made her skittish; Joe was doing well enough until you came up the lane behaving like a fool.’
‘No.’ Robert Scoggins shook his head. ‘The Wasp is a mad ’un. Old Hobson only keeps her for loaning to any idiot that’s fool . . . enough . . .’ His voice trailed away. Joe Fludd’s wife had been boxing his ears since they were children together but then he suddenly remembered why he was there. ‘Gammer Harris’s been murdered!’ he said, raising his voice again as the news seemed to warrant. ‘Lying stiff and cold and all blood bespattered and beaten in her own kitchen. And no sign of old Harris, her husband. You know, the hedger. We reckon he be dead, lying in his own blood somewhere we haven’t found him yet. It’ll be the Egyptians, now that’s for sure.’
Fludd raised himself up on one elbow. ‘Robert Scoggins,’ he said severely. ‘This won’t be the first time you’ve come shouting up the lane with some tale that wasn’t true.’
