by M. J. Trow
‘Tell me, Dr Dee –’ Harvey was as oily as ever – ‘have you news of Kit Marlowe? I haven’t seen him around the college recently.’
Now, John Dee was usually a reader of men’s souls. His grey eyes glittered in the firelight and the candle’s flame flared back at them in Harvey’s vision. Robert Greene was peeling an apple with his dagger, apparently unconcerned. Normally, John Dee would have read those two like a book, divined their joint intent, understood their common loathing of Marlowe. But tonight was not normal for John Dee. He had wandered Magdalene Bridge in the pouring rain, ignored the street vendors along the High Ward and had relived his youth. Thirty years ago, in the days of the stone-hearted Mary, he wore his ignorance on his sleeve, dared God out of Heaven with the best of them and had taken his life in his hands. Now he was older, sadder. Was he wiser? Perhaps not. Tonight, all he knew was that his darling Helene was dead and he desperately needed to know why. He desperately needed to talk to her, but his powers, those devils that sat on his hunched shoulders, had been washed away by rain and tears and he was alone.
So it was not the normally astute, second-guessing John Dee who answered Gabriel Harvey in The Eagle and Child that night. ‘The last I saw of Marlowe,’ he said, ‘he was riding on a cart, travelling with the Egyptians. They were bound, I think, for King’s Lynn and the Flemish coast.’
‘King’s Lynn and the Flemish coast?’ Dr Norgate’s tired old eyes fluttered up from the Ramus he was devouring. ‘Marlowe gone with the Egyptians? I can scarcely believe it.’
‘Nor I, Master.’ Gabriel Harvey was rectitude itself. ‘I was shocked. Profoundly shocked. After you gave him a fresh start, so to speak, agreed to let bygones be bygones—’
‘Gabriel,’ Norgate interrupted him. ‘I may be creeping nearer to my appointment with the Almighty, but I cannot see St Peter’s gates yet. You have no love for Christopher Marlowe and, I have noticed, seize every opportunity to blacken his name.’
‘I, Master?’ Harvey was outraged. ‘Has Dr Lyler not mentioned that Marlowe is missing from his Schools? Professor Johns?’ The name hung in the air like a poison. If there was one man in all Cambridge that Gabriel Harvey hated nearly as much as Kit Marlowe, it was Michael Johns.
Norgate hesitated. He knew what this meant. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘They have not.’
‘There is one thing more, Master –’ Harvey was getting into his stride – ‘though I hate to mention it.’
‘I’m sure you do.’ Norgate closed the heavy, leather-bound Ramus, sure that his researches would be ruined for the day now.
‘Marlowe may be involved in murder.’
Norgate turned his head as well as he could, frowning. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Dr John Dee, the magus. He it was who told me about Marlowe. The poor man’s wife died while Marlowe was under his roof. The next thing he knew, he had fled.’
‘From which you deduce . . . ?’ Norgate asked.
‘You and I, Master, were weaned in the Schools of Logic. Doyens of deduction, we. And you are right. I have no love for Dominus Marlowe. Yet I cannot believe him guilty of this . . . whatever the evidence may say.’
Gabriel Harvey rose and took his leave from the man whose job he coveted. And as he left, he heard another nail thud into the coffin of Christopher Marlowe.
Marlowe waited impatiently at the eastern gate of the Prinsenhof for Lily to arrive. He had sent a message on ahead, for the Statholder to be prepared for Lily’s visit. He had seen her heal the sick back at Ely and had a vague memory at the back of his brain of a soft and healing touch on his own damaged muscles, but was not sure what she would need in a sickbed setting. In John Dee’s house, the woman she had healed had walked to the house herself, albeit using two crutches and help from her sons. This was different. He didn’t want to put Lily off her stroke, but on the other hand, he wanted the Statholder and his wife to feel comfortable with what was about to go on. There was only a thin, a very thin line that must be trodden, and on either side of that safe line, the swamps of failure and the quicksands of disaster sucked and swirled silently, waiting for someone to put a foot wrong.
A tap on his arm brought him back to the here and now. He looked down and there was Lily, but a Lily in a new mirror, a clean Lily. A scented Lily for sure. He smiled to see her and looked her up and down, nodding. She was still, in essence, the same. Although the coin he had given her was large enough, she had not been able to dress herself from the skin out, so she had wisely chosen to deal with the most obvious problems with her dress. Not that they were problems to her; her clothes had taken years to get to the state of near perfection they were in, but she realized that her hair and general level of grime was something that non-Egyptians might find it hard to understand. So she had had her hair washed with fine herbs and dried before the fire in a friendly inn. It glowed tawny in the light from the guards’ brazier as it tumbled down her back, held off her face by two tortoiseshell combs. Her face was glowing, not with lead or rouge, but just with the youth that was under the grime all the time, helped by a frugal diet and the wind in her face as they moved from place to place. She had trimmed her rags in places and had clean white lace at her throat, and her cloak, though not new, was clean and warm.
‘Lily!’ he said, with genuine pleasure. ‘I would hardly have known you. You are beautiful.’
She looked at him sadly. ‘Master Marlowe,’ she said. ‘Like everyone, you believe beauty to be skin deep. I am just the same Lily that woke this morning, covered in dirt, and when the dirt has gathered again, and this cloak is covered with mud and mire, I will be that same Lily again.’ She smiled at him and at that moment, they each knew they had a new friend, come what may. ‘Shall we go in? I am nervous, and waiting out here is making me shake with cold. I don’t want them to think I shiver from fear.’
‘There is nothing to fear, Lily,’ he said. ‘Do you have all you need?’
She held up a bag she had concealed under her cloak. ‘All I need is in here,’ she said, tapping her temple, ‘but all that others need is in here.’ And she raised her bag.
‘Let’s go, then, and heal a prince,’ Marlowe said and, arm in arm, they entered the Prinsenhof’s eastern gate.
The Princess Charlotte was waiting for them at the foot of the stairs that led to the Statholder’s suite of rooms. She looked Lily up and down, then turned and led them up to the next floor. She opened the door and there, on the bed, Marlowe got his first glimpse of the leader of the Dutch. He was almost the same colour as the linen sheets he was lying on, and there was a bandage around his head. His hands lay limply by his sides, palms down and the pillows behind his head and back were not tousled and crumpled as they would be behind someone who was merely asleep; they were as smooth as if they had been ironed in place and no one had touched them since. The man’s face was as smooth as his pillows. Marlowe felt Lily flinch at his side.
The Statholder’s wife walked quickly through the room and climbed the single step of the dais that surrounded his bed. She smoothed his forehead and kissed his unresponding cheek. ‘William,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘Some people are here to see if they can help you. To see if you can be brought back to us.’ She straightened up, with her hand still on his forehead, still looking down into his face. ‘Lieveling, let’s see if you can come back to us, shall we?’ There was a tiny splash as a tear met the starched linen of his sheet, but that was the only sound from the bed. The princess came back to the two in the doorway.
Marlowe reached for her hand, and squeezed it. ‘We will do our best, Highness,’ he said. ‘But, you do know that it might not work?’
‘Nothing else has worked,’ she said. ‘Why should this?’
Again, there was the flinch from Lily.
‘Someone must believe,’ she said. ‘I cannot work against the stars. Do you have children, madam?’
‘Six,’ the princess said. ‘All girls. They miss their father.’ She sighed and passed a hand, almost transparent with fatigue,
across her brow. ‘As do I.’
‘Then go to them,’ Lily said. ‘Gather them around you, all your girls. Ask them to bring into their minds their favourite day with their father, whether it was hawking, or reading, or walking or riding. Tell them to take that picture and enclose it in a globe, blown from the thinnest glass.’ As she spoke, she moved her hands in the air, sketching the globe. ‘Tell them to wrap the globe in the brightest colour they can imagine. Not red; that is for death in our company. Blue, or gold, or springtime green. Wrap the globe in the cloth and then throw it in the air.’ She likened her actions to the words. ‘And when the cloth comes fluttering down, empty, then their father will be well.’ She stood to one side to let the woman pass. ‘You will do it, madam, won’t you?’ she called after her.
The princess didn’t turn, but with one hand over her eyes and the other flapping as if to ward off demons, she ran down the landing and disappeared up a stair in the corner.
‘Does that work?’ Marlowe asked the girl.
‘Does what work?’ Lily asked, striding forward, already delving in her bag.
‘That globe. The cloth.’
‘Let me tell you just one thing,’ Lily said, turning to face him, at the foot of the Statholder’s bed. ‘I have never known it work without the globe, so why would I dispense with it now, at this most delicate time? Usually, it is the sick one who imagines the globe, and he puts his sickness in it. But who knows – it may work this way.’ She shrugged. ‘Why should it not?’
Marlowe stepped forward another pace and she stopped him with a gesture. ‘Not so near, Master Marlowe. Things are not always pretty at the bedside of the sick and I may need you with a strong stomach later. Stay back. Stay back.’
‘May I sit down?’ he asked.
‘By all means. But no nearer the bed than you are.’ She turned to him. ‘Do you know the Statholder?’
For a split second, Marlowe felt his heart thump. ‘Nearer the bed.’ That was almost Balthasar’s phrase for the place where Christopher Marlowe would die. Then he checked himself and answered the girl’s question. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He has been unconscious since we came to Delft.’
‘Why are we helping him, then?’ she said, still busy laying out her herbs and cloths.
‘He is on our side,’ Marlowe said, knowing as he spoke that the Egyptians had no side to be on.
‘The English side?’ she asked.
‘The side which doesn’t want Philip of Spain and his Inquisition to sweep across the land carrying all before it. If the Low Countries fall, who will be next? Soon the Egyptians will have nowhere to go.’
Lily looked into the blank face of William the Silent. ‘Sickness and sleep have wiped almost everything from his face,’ she said. ‘I doubt that even Balthasar could read anything from this page. But his wife seems a good woman and in my experience a man is seldom bad if a good woman loves him.’
‘Your experience?’ Marlowe said. ‘How old are you, Lily.’
‘This time, I am seventeen,’ she said. ‘But if you number all my years on earth, many hundreds.’ She stepped down from the bed and walked over to where Marlowe sat on a couch by the window, lit from behind by the frost light. ‘You are young,’ she said, ‘in these years and all years. But, you have great wisdom, Hern says. He says you will come again, or all is waste.’ She pressed a finger lightly between Marlowe’s eyes and ran it down his nose, over his lips and down to the point of his chin. ‘Now, be quiet, and let me heal this man, if I can.’
Marlowe tried to concentrate, but as he had found in Ely, Lily’s hands were everywhere over the length of the Statholder’s body. She took hardly any notice of his heavily bandaged head and it was hard not to cry out to her that the bullet had entered his brain and not his gut. She placed coloured stones, about the size of pigeons’ eggs, at intervals down his body and on the covers between his legs. She dipped a bunch of herbs in water from a flask and sprayed it over him, concentrating on his face this time. The man didn’t even flinch. Then, she walked down to his feet and held out her hands so her arms were straight from her body. She put the right hand over the left and leaned down, arms still straight, until her left palm was about an inch away from the coverlet of the bed. Muttering quietly to herself, she moved very slowly up the bed, with her hands always the same few inches above the Statholder. When she reached the head, she hovered her hands over the man’s face. She appeared to be pressing down hard, but against an irresistible force, because although the sinews in her elbows and wrists stood out clearly, she could not touch the living flesh beneath her palm. Then, as though he had struck her from below, her hands flew up over her head and she toppled over on her back, falling off the dais and landing with a crash on the floor.
Marlowe leaped from his seat and ran to the bed head. He instinctively leaned over Lily first; she was the one he knew was living. Of the Statholder he was still not sure.
The crash of her fall had brought people running. Hans Neudecker was first through the door and stood appalled at the sight of a dishevelled girl lying on her back near the bedside of his Master. Marlowe he knew, but could not work out quite what was going on; Charlotte had kept this attempt at healing from him. Hans was one of the pragmatic Dutchmen who had made Edward Kelly’s life so difficult and would not understand.
‘What is going on here?’ he bellowed, his stentorian voice echoing round the simple chamber. ‘Who is that woman?’
The doors behind him crashed back as Charlotte, followed by her children, came into the room, also alerted by the noise. ‘Do not shout so, Hans,’ she said mildly. ‘This was all my idea.’
Hans turned round in confusion. ‘Madam . . .’ he began, but broke off as the children rushed past him, climbing on to the bed at the foot.
‘Papa!’ little Emilia cried. ‘Papa has woken up.’ She turned to her mother, beaming all over her face. ‘You said he would, and he has.’
‘We threw the globe up, Papa,’ said another.
‘Mine went highest,’ said her sister, giving her a push.
‘Hush, children, hush.’ Charlotte wasn’t scolding them. She just needed the quiet to drink in her husband, sitting up with a puzzled smile on his face. ‘Don’t hug Papa so hard. He is still not well.’
Marlowe looked up from Lily, who was beginning to rouse herself. From his vantage point on the floor, details were difficult, but one thing was in no doubt. William of Nassau, known as the Silent, was pushing himself in to a seated position in the bed, with his children clustered round him. He looked over their heads to his wife.
‘Lieveling,’ she mouthed silently to him. ‘Welcome back.’
Marlowe, with his playmaker’s sense of timing, knew when a quiet exit was called for and, helping Lily to his feet, he crept round the walls of the bedroom and slipped with the girl, still woozy from the effort, down the stairs and back out through the eastern gate.
‘And so, the little princess, trailing light, lived happily ever after.’ Marlowe’s voice tailed away as little Emilia’s head flopped back on her pillow for the umpteenth time. He patted her starfish hand and tucked the covers around her ears before tiptoeing from the room. The candle still glowed because this little princess was afraid of the dark, the dark that had nearly claimed her papa. Marlowe nodded to the nursery maid sitting by the embers of the fire and made for the door.
Here, the bandage still on his head, stood the lion of Nassau himself, a curious half-smile on his face. ‘It seems my Emilia has a new favourite to tell her bedtime stories.’
‘I do my best, Highness,’ Marlowe said. ‘But I think she finds my Flemish rather funny.’
William patted the man’s shoulder. ‘It’s not many royal bodyguards who tell bedtime stories to the children of their charges.’ He walked with Marlowe to his oak-panelled study and poured them both a goblet of Geneva spirit. If truth were told, it was not one of Marlowe’s favourite drinks, but the Statholder and most of Zeeland seemed to live on it, so it must suffice.
‘Quit
e.’ William the Statholder seemed to read his mind, but more prosaically read his face as the gin hit home. ‘I’d rather some good Spanish wine, too, Christopher, but it’s treason to say so in these unnatural times.’
‘Does Emilia know her mother is unwell?’ Marlowe asked. He had no children of his own, but he had been brought up surrounded by girls and knew how their minds worked.
‘She is sleeping –’ William told him the state of things – ‘as her papa was sleeping for a time. That is what I have told Emilia. Her dear mama got very tired nursing and now it is her turn to sleep. She will soon be well enough to make us a whole family again, perhaps.’
‘Could Lily help her?’ Marlowe asked.
‘She might, but for now things are very delicate in my household, Christopher, and perhaps we can leave the miracles to come once in a while, rather than all together. The children must not be allowed to think, the people must not be allowed to think that if there is a problem it can be mended with some muttered rubric and some stones.’
‘But, it worked for you.’ Marlowe was not an Egyptian, and yet he was; he didn’t like to hear Lily being denigrated by the man who she saved.
‘There is gossip in the palace,’ the Statholder said, ‘that my wife is a witch who arranged for one of her coven to come and save me. If she is miraculously healed, then the call for her burning will not be long in coming. I will not put my Charlotte in the way of such gossip. Let her sleep. God will save her or He will not, as He wishes.’
Marlowe sighed, but bowed to the Statholder’s wishes. ‘In my country,’ he said, ‘the Egyptians are known as the children of the moon.’
