by M. J. Trow
‘And so she will,’ Balthasar said. ‘She will look for tall men from now on when she dispenses her favours and tall strong men are better surely than small, skinny ones. I always say dark, because I find that women in general prefer dark men to ones with carrots for hair.’ He waited for her smile.
‘But you cannot tell the future?’ she said, with a sigh.
‘I can tell the future, but you wouldn’t want to take part in that ritual,’ he told her. ‘I can call spirits to me and at a price they will tell me what you want to know. But they always tell the truth. Most people don’t want their future, they want a happy story. No one’s future is all roses and if they knew the thorns in advance, who would even bother to get up in the morning? I could tell you your future now and you could make it yours or not as you chose.’
‘What is my future, then?’ the woman said. ‘My present, and I give this information to you as a gift is that I am kept by a man of Cambridge, a rich and powerful man, who likes to hit women. His wife he will not touch, and so he hits me in her place. When we met, he told me he loved me, so in that you may well be right. For a while, he kept his needs at bay and we had a child. When she died without a breath being taken, I turned to him and he punched me in the face. And this has been his habit from then on. Tell me my future, that he is not in it, or I shall go to the banks of the Cam tonight and make my future as short as I can.’
Balthasar Gerard was a man who lived on the edge. He had his future written in stone and he would not change a moment of it, thorns and all. But sometimes even an Egyptian needs a rose or two. He leaned forward and reached for her hand. When she gave it to him, he clasped it in both his own. ‘Here is your future, then,’ he said to her.
And so he added his Rose to the company, and the three Egyptian women became four.
Kit Marlowe had had dealings with the curmudgeonly groom at Hobson’s Stables before and so he walked in prepared for the usual cut and thrust of non sequitur which seemed to be the unavoidable precursor to hiring a horse. Ignoring the poor spavined thing by the door, he walked into the fetid warmth of the building, calling for attention.
The groom lurched out of an empty stall, the sound of giggling in his wake. He was fumbling fruitlessly with the front of his hose, pulling down his groom’s smock to hide his embarrassment.
‘Please don’t trouble on my account,’ Marlowe told him. ‘I just want to hire a horse.’ He caught the man’s glance towards the door and stopped him with a raised hand. ‘Not that one,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how far I will need to ride, but certainly further than that poor thing could carry me. I need a mount that can carry me far and fast.’
An outburst of more giggling from the stall made the groom blush under his stable grime.
‘I’m sure she doesn’t mean it unkindly,’ Marlowe told the man. ‘You are clearly needed elsewhere, so let’s be quick. What do you have for me tonight?’
The groom knew Marlowe as a more than competent horseman and also, in recent times, a heavy tipper. So he was torn. ‘There’s the Wasp,’ he said, uncertainly. He didn’t usually hire out the Wasp for long loans; she was always back in the stable within the hour, led by her bruised and muddied hirer, demanding all sorts of compensation and threatening Messrs Hobson with the wrath of God.
‘The Wasp! Ideal for my purposes. But, Harry, there is a possibility I won’t be able to ride her back. I may have to send word to you as to where I have left her. Would that suit Master Hobson?’
‘Nothing much suits Master Hobson,’ the groom said. ‘You’ll have to leave a large deposit.’
Both men waited for the giggling, but the woman appeared to have fallen asleep as there was nothing from the vacant stall.
‘I have gold here,’ Marlowe said. ‘I’ll leave the full value of the mare and if she comes back to you, you are to give the money to Tom Colwell of Corpus Christi. Is that fair?’
‘Fair enough, Master Marlowe,’ Harry said, stuffing the scholar’s sovereigns into his purse. ‘Where are you off to, may I ask?’
‘East of the Sun, west of the Moon, Harry, for all I know. But I will try to return the Wasp; I know how fond you are of her. Don’t trouble yourself. I’ll saddle her myself.’
‘That’s very decent of you, Master Marlowe,’ Harry said. ‘She fetched me a nasty one the last time she was out. Constable Fludd had her for an hour or so.’
Marlowe laughed. ‘Now, that wasn’t kind, Harry, was it? Constable Fludd is no horseman, as all of Cambridge knows. What did he need a horse for?’ As they spoke, he was pulling wisps of hay from the manger at his shoulder and packing it into a net. He was pretty sure that his quarry would be equipped with horse fodder enough, but the Wasp was a picky eater and all the more bad tempered if she got hungry. Better to be safe than sorry.
‘He didn’t say, but everyone knows he’s off after the Egyptians. He’s to make sure they leave England, or his job is forfeit.’
Marlowe nodded. Another complication for his journey would be avoiding Fludd, then. The Constable was a fine fellow in many ways, but falling in with any kind of subterfuge was probably not his strongest talent. Disguise was an option, but Marlowe was too vain to change his appearance much. He didn’t mind wearing a scholar’s fustian, but he was happier in the clothes he was wearing for the journey. And he certainly wasn’t going to shave his beard or cut his hair again, not for Francis Walsingham or the Queen herself. So he would have to avoid Fludd or face him down if he named him in the wrong company.
‘Back to your lady, Harry,’ he said, ‘before she goes off the boil.’
‘Ar, getting her to the simmer is hard enough, Master Marlowe, and more than enough for me,’ Harry said, but he turned back to the stall nonetheless. ‘You’ll find the Wasp’s bridle on the left-hand hook. Her saddle’s still on her; she was in too much of a skitterish mood when she came back for me to do much with her but wipe down her hocks with a wisp of straw. Good luck with your venture, Master Marlowe.’ He disappeared behind the partition wall. The last Kit Marlowe heard of him was his grumpy voice saying, ‘Wake up, you drab. What am I paying you for?’
With a smile at the weakness of grooms and of men in general, Marlowe went into the Wasp’s stall. She put her ears back and showed her teeth, stamping her feet impatiently in the deep litter of the stall. Marlowe ran his hand along her flank and checked her girth. As he suspected, just a touch too loose, so that the poor Constable would have yawed about like a yacht in a gale, making the horse even more skitterish, as Harry would have it, than usual. He tightened the surcingle one more notch and ran his hand under the saddle tree, checking for burrs. Harry’s sense of humour ran to the slapstick and his hatred of the constables of Cambridge ran deep. But there were no little surprises there and the mare soon calmed down at the touch of someone who knew what they were about. Her afternoon with an idiot on her back had made her testy, but she was not averse to a good gallop with a proper horseman astride her and so she consented to having the bridle fitted and she let him back her out of the stall.
As they walked down the stable, past the stalls, Marlowe heard just one remark from behind the partition where Harry was taking his ease, if that was the word.
‘Was that it?’
A groom’s life was a hard one, especially if he worked for Hobson, and on this particular day, it wasn’t particularly merry, either.
‘Good night, Harry,’ Marlowe called as he stepped out with the Wasp into the cold night air.
‘Er . . . yes, good night, Master Marlowe,’ the groom called back. ‘Good luck to your venture.’
‘Thank you, Harry,’ Marlowe said to himself. ‘I may need it.’ And with a reassuring cluck to the mare, he sprang on to her back and they clattered away through the emptying streets of Cambridge.
The Gothic turrets of King’s College were black against the purple haze of evening as he made his way north, heading for Magdalene Bridge and the road to the Fens, where he was hoping to catch up with the Egyptians. They had gone nort
h, that was the rumour and if they were bound for the fairs of Flanders, they would probably sail from Lynn.
Two men who saw him go stood in the angle of Trinity Lane, one wrapped in a roisterer’s doublet, the other in his academic robes.
‘Marlowe,’ murmured Robert Green. ‘Going on a longish journey by the baggage and hay he’s carrying.’
‘Not if he wants to remain a member of Corpus Christi College, he isn’t.’ Gabriel Harvey was furious, his jaw rigid in the cold of the late afternoon.
‘You can do something about that?’ Greene wondered.
Harvey sighed. ‘I am Assistant Master of Corpus Christi College, Dominus Greene. Were it not for the fact that you and I have a mutual bond in loathing Marlowe, I wouldn’t be seen dead talking to you. The sad fact is, however, that even I cannot just click my fingers and have the abomination sent down. What I can do is hammer nails into the man’s coffin one by one until even someone as obtusely obstinate as Dr Norgate will see sense and expel the man. Follow him. See where he goes.’
‘But I’m on foot,’ Greene complained. Already the echo of the Wasp’s hoof beats had died away and Marlowe could have gone on any of a dozen paths after he had ridden past. Greene could run round Cambridge and its environs for weeks and never get a sniff of him again.
Harvey rounded on the man. ‘You fancy yourself a poet, Greene. A university wit. Conjure up some spirit, why don’t you and fly through Cambridge town.’ He scowled. ‘Or, failing that, run like Hell and then report to me which way Marlowe’s going. I’ll add a little imagination to what you find and report to old Norgate. Another nail. Tap, tap.’
And he swirled away, gown flying, striding through the gathering gloom.
FIVE
Kit Marlowe didn’t know exactly where the Egyptian camp was but it wasn’t hard to trace their passage. They were not only conjurors and tumblers, they bought old rags and bones which they traded along their route with paper makers and glue renderers. Picking over the rags for anything wearable was a job for the children while the carts were on the road and many a fluttering ribbon on their clothes had come from an outworn or outgrown lady’s kirtle. Their payment for the rubbish they removed was a bright doll of paper, or a folded windmill for the children which rattled and hummed when it was blown round on its stick. It was almost like a game for Marlowe to track these tawdry leavings; out past Stow cum Quy and Lode’s Mill, through Swaffham and across the Devil’s ditch, dark and foreboding as darkness fell; and to find, at the end of the fluttering trail, the camp.
As he rode, he planned his strategy. He knew he would scarcely be able to simply blend in. Even if he had changed his clothes, he knew so little of their way of life that he could never hope to pass as one of them. He knew this much, that although their travelling nation was spread throughout the world, they were like one large family and to fail to recognize a name, an allusion to a fact known to them all would be to invite immediate exposure. So he decided that his best chance to win his way into the clan would be as a man on the run. If he threw himself on their mercy, they may take him in, if not for the love of their fellow man, for the love of the gold in his purse, for the love of angels.
Lost in thought as he was he nearly rode over the outskirts of the camp before he knew it. The dogs were the first to sense his presence, followed swiftly by the children, who swung on his stirrup leathers and led him into the centre of the camp, whether he and the Wasp wanted to go there or not. He warned them of his horse’s temperament as best he could; he didn’t know if the children could understand him as they seemed to communicate in a complex patois of their own. By the time he was at the campfire and in the presence of Hern, Gerard and the others, he had one child in front of him on his crupper; a girl, he assumed, from her long hair. All of the young of the Egyptians wore the same clothes, a pair of wide pantaloons of patchwork material and a thick coat, in this weather at least, of woollen material, fluttering ribbons at every seam. The shortest hair was to the shoulders, but it seemed that the boys had it cut to keep it at that length and they wore it quite plain. The girls’ hair, as far as he could tell, was left to grow long until it formed itself into fat plaits with ribbons threaded deeply within each ringlet. To have tried to remove the fabric would have been to unravel the hair as well. His question as to whether they ever washed was answered by the proximity of the child in front of him. The smell of wood smoke and exotic oils was almost overwhelming and he hoped that it was only the flickering torchlight that gave the impression of small creatures scurrying through the ringlets.
Five men and four women stood around the fire, the women further back in the shadows, with their faces seemingly deliberately hidden. Three of them had hair in the same style as the children; the fourth was, like himself, dressed quite richly and she shone out with cleanliness. Could it be true that they kidnapped people on their travels? But the woman didn’t seem to be shackled in any way, so he could only assume that she was there of her own free will.
One of the men stepped forward and spoke with a commanding voice in which the playwright could discern more than a touch of the theatrical.
‘My name is Hern. What business do you have here?’
Marlowe decided to go for the charming approach. After all, there were enough women present to possibly swing things in his favour if he needed more help, and he had not met a woman yet he couldn’t charm.
‘Forgive my intrusion, I had not intended to ride into your camp like this, but your lovely children –’ he clasped his passenger under the armpits and handed her down to Hern, resisting with difficulty the impulse to wipe his hands on his doublet afterwards – ‘brought me here. They are impossible to resist, the little dears.’ He looked down at Hern and saw the man’s eyebrow lift in disbelief. Looking beyond the flames, he noticed that the women were not taken in either. That they loved their children was beyond question, but that anyone else would think them anything other than gutter rats was just as certain to them all. He tried another tack.
‘I have had a little . . . altercation with the Constable back in Cambridge,’ he said. ‘It would be quite a good idea for me to leave the city for a while and I heard from a friend that travelling with you might be a good way of covering my tracks.’
Hern stepped forward and grasped the Wasp’s snaffle rein. ‘We know the Constable and he is on our trail too. Hiding with us will get you nowhere but the nearest lock-up, Master . . .’
On the ride, Marlowe had already decided to keep his own name. Only once had he tried to use another and it had brought nothing but grief; he had constantly failed to answer to it and his signature was different every time he tried to use the damned thing. Also, he feared he might bump in to people he knew and it was best to keep the complications of that eventuality to a minimum.
‘Marlowe,’ he said. ‘Christopher Marlowe. But you can call me Kit.’
‘I don’t think we will be getting to the stage of calling you anything, Master Marlowe,’ Hern said, evenly. ‘We don’t take in waifs and strays.’ And here he stared at one of the other men for a heartbeat or two, but he got the stare back, measure for measure. ‘We are called in our language a caravanserai, but that does not mean that anyone can join us as they will. If you are indeed running from the Constable, your best course would be to go wherever we are not.’
Marlowe had not expected this to be so difficult. ‘I write poetry,’ he said. ‘Plays and stories. With a little preparation, perhaps you can learn some and add it to the shows you give.’
‘Shows? We give no shows,’ Hern said. ‘Surely you know that that kind of thing is forbidden.’
Marlowe heaved a sigh and played his last card. Reaching into one of his saddlebags he extracted a purse, not his heaviest, but quite tempting, nevertheless. ‘I have gold,’ he said, jingling the sovereigns, ‘and it will be yours if I can travel with you to the coast and maybe beyond.’
A glance flicked between the men and a tacit agreement was reached. Hern stepped forward and reached
for the bag of money. ‘Welcome to our band, Master Marlowe,’ he said. ‘Is the horse yours?’
‘To all intents and purposes.’
‘An answer I understand and applaud,’ Hern said. ‘Come with me and I will introduce you.’ The children lined up in a ragged queue, laughing and nudging. ‘Not you scarecrows,’ Hern said, giving the nearest of them a flick round the back of the head. ‘Even your mothers can hardly remember your given names and I’m sure I can’t. Keep your hands out of Master Marlowe’s bags, now, or you’ll answer to me. Now, Master Marlowe, this is Balthasar Gerard, our soothsayer. A precious man in our band; if you want to know your future, speak to him. He will tell you what you want to know.’ A gale of laughter from the soothsayer greeted the remark and Marlowe’s hand was clasped in both of his. He felt the man’s fingers stray to his wrist, where the blood pulsed near the surface. Other fingers felt his fingertips and his palm, all as quick and as light as a butterfly’s kiss.
‘Hello, Dominus Marlowe,’ Gerard said, and passed him ceremoniously to the man on his right. ‘This is Simon. As I remember, he is Greek, is that right, Simon?’
‘Portuguese,’ the man replied, in a heavy accent. ‘As you know only too well, Balthasar. But, for giving me an opportunity to lie, obrigado. May I introduce you, Master Marlowe, to my friend Frederico, from Italy.’
‘Austria,’ the man protested, laughing, and so Marlowe was passed round the band, where no one was quite who they seemed. The women soon melted away and the smell of spices swept over the camp as the evening meal got under way. Marlowe could see how a man could disappear in the company of these people; he had only been there half an hour and he was already none too sure who he was himself. The only question was; were any of them Egyptians at all? They might all be spies like him and no one would be any the wiser.
He decided to put aside the cares of espionage for the evening and eat their food and drink their wine and try not to lose too much at cards. He was usually on the winning side when he played with Colwell and Parker, but these men cheated for a living; he would have to keep the bets small and his wits about him, he could see. Although they were so dirty that the original colour of their hair and clothes were anybody’s guess, although they were so far on the other side of the law that it was out of sight over the horizon, although they could not tell the truth if their lives depended on it, Kit Marlowe felt oddly at home with this motley crew and ate his supper with relish – but being careful not to ask what the meat might be, for fear of the answer. If it was chicken, he didn’t want to know whose; if it wasn’t chicken . . .
