Witch Hammer

by M. J. Trow

  There were shouts and cries from everybody.

  ‘He can’t do that!

  ‘That’s sacrilege, that is!’

  ‘The sick bastard!’

  Only Marlowe heard Nat Sawyer mutter, ‘Not really our problem, my opinion.’ He noted the reaction but said nothing. Time enough to get even with the little squirt later.

  ‘No!’ Joyce shouted. ‘No, Kit, you don’t understand. Greville’s after . . .’

  He stopped her with a finger to his lips and a raised eyebrow. ‘. . . after all, no more than a man,’ he finished for her.

  Sledd was not at all sure about this. ‘We’ve got women here, Marlowe. If there’s to be fighting . . .’

  It was a woman who spun him round. Little Liza, barely reaching to the man’s ruff. ‘Now, see here, Ned Sledd. I’ve been with you now . . . how long?’

  ‘For ever,’ Sledd groaned.

  ‘With Lord Strange for nearly two years. And with you, masterless man as you then were, for over five before that. All of us women have fetched and carried, cooked and cleaned, nursed and tended. We’ve let you have us when you can’t find a strumpet and we’ve wiped up your vomit and put you to bed when you’re any side up with drink. So –’ she wagged a finger at him – ‘don’t use us as your excuse.’

  To a man – and woman – Lord Strange’s Men burst into applause and whistles. Marlowe clapped a hand on Sledd’s shoulder. ‘I thought you told me you didn’t have a Britannia, Ned,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Well, you’ve got one now.’

  Joyce Clopton’s eyes were red and wet as the camp exploded to life around her. With Marlowe as general and Sledd his second in command, the wagons were rolled end to end to form a bulwark on the ridge in front of the Stones and each man and woman grabbed what weapons they had to hand and stood shoulder to shoulder.

  On the slope below the Rollrights, Greville’s column halted.

  ‘They mean to make a fight of it,’ their captain said, standing in the stirrups and squinting under the rim of his burgonet. He glanced across at Henry Blake sitting uncomfortably on his bay. ‘You’ll excuse me for saying this, Master Blake, but at times like these I can’t help wishing that Sir Edward was here.’

  ‘Sir Edward obviously assumed you could handle the job, Paget,’ the lawyer snapped. This was not his idea of a good time. He had found the Clopton coffers light by a considerable sum. He had put two and two together and realized that Lady Joyce had smuggled the coins and gold out. And now he was supposed to get it back. Why couldn’t Greville do it himself, or at least leave it to Paget? Blake didn’t do rough stuff.

  ‘It’s them players, Captain –’ one of the horsemen nudged his animal forward – ‘from Clopton Hall. What are we waiting for?’ And the watchers at the Stones heard the scream of steel as he drew his sword.

  ‘Reginald,’ Marlowe murmured to the man on his left. ‘Liza has made it pretty plain where Lord Strange’s Men stand in all of this . . . whatever Ned thinks of it. The Clopton people are committed, out of duty or love. But you . . . this isn’t your fight. Things could get nasty.’

  ‘My work’s not finished yet,’ Scot told him, putting his notebook now in his satchel at his side, ‘and I refuse to leave until it is.’

  Marlowe smiled. ‘Will?’ he said to Shaxsper standing to his right. ‘You’ve got a wife and children.’

  The glover-turned-Turkish-Knight stared at the column on the hill that was fanning outwards to form a battle line. ‘I also have a father,’ Shaxsper said. ‘A good man who is afraid to leave his house in Stratford because of Sir Edward Greville. I knew there’d have to be a reckoning one day. I just wasn’t expecting it to be here or now. Fighting with these odds is always madness, but let’s form up and see if we can put some method in it.’ He thumbed the edge of the Turkish Knight’s scimitar. ‘This is as dull as the play it is part of,’ he said, ruefully.

  ‘Then turn it round and use it as a bludgeon,’ Marlowe advised him. He was secretly impressed by the man. Gone was the skittish hothead afraid of Boneless and Kit with the Canstick. In his place stood the Turkish Knight, bold and resolute, his eyes calm, his scimitar at the ready, albeit upside down. But perhaps Master Shaxsper was only afraid of the shapeless things that lurked in the dark, things to terrify the soul.

  Along the ridge, where the Clopton people stood, Boscastle was at the front, his old sword drawn, his legs apart as though to balance its weight. Next to him stood Lady Joyce, unarmed and silent, watching as a knot of horsemen broke away from the formation below and came trotting up the hill towards them. Next to her, young John gripped the halberd he’d brought with him from Clopton Hall, just in case, the smooth wood of the handle strangely comforting to him, as if the house itself was with him in spirit, protecting him as it always had.

  The knot of horsemen halted a little below the ridge. Marlowe looked across at Joyce and they both stepped out of their makeshift lines and walked towards Greville’s flag. Boscastle fell into place behind his mistress and Marlowe, glancing over his shoulder, saw that Sledd was at his back. But it came as something of a surprise to see that the man they faced was not Edward Greville.

  ‘What do you want, lawyer?’ Joyce asked the man, sitting awkwardly on his horse, which snickered and caracoled as if it knew it had an incompetent on its back.

  ‘What is rightfully Sir Edward Greville’s, madam,’ he told her, ‘the movables of the manor of Clopton.’

  ‘He has them,’ she said, her head held high. ‘Would he steal my father’s body too?’

  The lawyer looked flustered for a moment, glancing nervously at Paget. For the first time he saw the black-suited figure of Marlowe and noted that he was wearing a sword at his hip, a fancy weapon of Spanish make, its quillons curling like quicksilver. He looked like the kind of man who could handle himself in any situation, with tongue or dagger and he hoped that Paget had marked him out for his own personal attention. Just because the pale man standing in Marlowe’s ranks was holding a sword the wrong way round, Blake felt it would be a mistake to underestimate this rabble. That was William Shaxsper, if he remembered rightly, the glover’s son from Stratford.

  ‘If I may check the coffin, My Lady . . .’ he began.

  ‘You may not, sir!’ she told him flatly.

  ‘Master lawyer.’ Marlowe stepped closer so that he stood by Blake’s horse’s head. He reached out slowly and cradled the animal’s soft muzzle, calming it by stroking its nose and breathing gently into its nostrils. He looked up at Blake. ‘You are on Warwickshire soil, sir. And your men are armed. You realize that, in itself, is a violation.’

  ‘A violation?’ Blake repeated. If this upstart was going to debate the law with him, he would lose. Or at least, should lose. Blake played for time. ‘A violation of what?’

  Marlowe spread his arms wide, letting the horse go. ‘The edict of the Lord Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘Ambrose Dudley . . .’ He could see the confusion growing in the man’s eyes. ‘You know,’ he said, leaning forward with a smile playing in the corner of his mouth, as though humouring an idiot, ‘the Earl of Warwick.’

  A nervous laugh escaped Blake’s lips. ‘Come, come, sir. You’ll have to do better than that.’

  Marlowe lowered his arms and closed to the horse’s head again, leaning forward. ‘That’s why he’s not here, isn’t it?’ he murmured. ‘Sir Edward. That’s why he hasn’t come himself. Doesn’t want to mix it with Ambrose.’

  The lawyer straightened in the saddle, pressing down in the stirrups and was rewarded by the startled horse flicking its tail and stamping its feet. He grabbed the pommel of the saddle to regain his seat. ‘Ambrose? You are very informal, sir, for a play actor or whatever you are.’

  Marlowe beckoned him closer and despite himself Blake leant forward in the saddle, still keeping a firm hold on the pommel with both hands. Paget’s horse had backed away, out of range of the lawyer’s animal’s flying hoofs. ‘I am your worst nightmare, Master lawyer. I was at Cambridge with Ambrose Dudley’s son. Oh, it�
��s childish I know, but I still call him Uncle Am when we’re alone.’

  Blake sat upright, smiling his victory. ‘I happen to know,’ he said, smugly, ‘that Ambrose Dudley doesn’t have a . . .’

  But he was too slow for Marlowe. The poet had grabbed the lawyer’s rein and hauled it round hard so that the horse’s head slewed to one side and the animal lost its footing on the slippery, tinder-dry and wind-blown grass. As it hit the ground with a thud, Blake was thrown clear, but landed badly on his shoulder and lay there, whimpering with pain.

  Joyce couldn’t help herself. She burst out laughing and there was a rapturous applause from the hilltop. There were even a few smiles in the ranks of Greville’s men, because, as they had often agreed between them when speaking of the lawyer, nobody liked a lickspittle who lies for a living. Blake’s horse rolled upright and trotted away, flicking its mane, alarmed by the sudden noises. But Blake himself just sat there on the grass, nursing his dead arm to his side and feeling decidedly hard done by.

  ‘Keep it in!’ shouted Sledd in the time honoured tradition of actor-managers the world over. ‘With pratfalls like that you should take up the stage, Master lawyer. Do you play the tambour too?’

  Paget’s sword was in his hand and he was about to spur forward to tackle Marlowe when Boscastle grabbed the halberd he had brought with him, just in case, and levelled it at the man’s face. ‘Not wise, Captain,’ he grunted. And Paget steadied the rein, holding his horse in check. He knew what weapons like that could do to a man, ripping through flesh and bone.

  ‘What I forgot to mention,’ Marlowe said, leaning over the rocking, crying Blake, ‘is that Uncle Ambrose is on his way here, now. Lady Joyce thought you might come calling so I took the precaution of sending a messenger by my fastest horse. What did we ask for, Ned, two hundred horse?’

  ‘Three hundred, Kit,’ Sledd said, falling into the mood of the moment with the skill of a born ad-libber. Anyone who worked with Joseph could roll with anything that came out of anyone’s mouth. ‘But I did think that that was a little cheeky of you.’

  Marlowe laughed. ‘What time is it, Boscastle?’ he asked the Clopton steward.

  The man squinted behind him at the sun. ‘One, sir,’ he said. ‘One of the clock.’

  ‘Right,’ said Marlowe, muttering to himself and counting on his fingers, ‘so . . . in a little over twenty minutes, His Lordship should be here with three hundred heavily armed retainers. Yes, I know it smacks of a private army, but we can’t be too careful, can we, in these topsy-turvy days? Captain,’ he called to Paget, standing back a way now that things seemed to have taken a rather strange turn, ‘you have precisely twenty minutes to void the field. After that, I can’t be responsible for what may happen.’

  Paget signalled to his lackeys and they hauled Blake to his feet before wheeling away and starting back for their own lines.

  ‘Kit?’ Joyce Clopton waited until the men were out of earshot. ‘That business about the Earl of Warwick . . .’

  ‘Begging your pardon, My Lady,’ Sledd cut in as they turned to trudge back up to the Stones. ‘That was some of the finest horse shit I’ve ever heard. Oh, beautifully done, I grant you that. But Master Blake may have been a little miffed before. Now he’s really mad. And when he stops crying, I don’t reckon our chances.’

  ‘Such ingratitude.’ Marlowe shook his head. ‘I buy us an extra twenty minutes and provide a good laugh into the bargain and you call it horse shit. Come, Lady!’ He took Joyce’s arm ostentatiously and turned his back. ‘Let’s get away from the nasty man.’ And they all laughed as they negotiated the rise. All of them except Ned Sledd. He was a man who understood that revenge was not always served cold. Sometimes it came in red heat and then it could burn anyone in its path.

  Two women watched from the edge of the trees.

  ‘Did you see how I made that horse fall over?’ the older of the two said, smugly.

  The younger one thought it had been her black thoughts that had caused it, but there was enough tension in the group to cause more so she just raised a shoulder and grunted in agreement. ‘But it was me who put his shoulder out,’ she said. ‘See?’ And she held out a forked branch, now pulled apart like a wishbone.

  ‘That was a very nice touch,’ the other said, patting the girl on the shoulder and grimacing to the imp that sat on her shoulder. The imp smiled back knowingly and rolled its eyes in a secret message, just between the two of them. She smiled back. She didn’t feel alone these days, not since he had come along.

  They watched for a while as the lines reformed, however raggedly.

  ‘Will there be a fight?’ the younger one asked.

  ‘Hopefully.’

  ‘Death?’

  ‘And destruction. Rich pickings for us. We will get there before the ravens.’

  The two rubbed their hands together and giggled cruelly.

  Further back in the shadows of the trees, Merriweather sighed. What had come over the young these days? Nothing but doom and gloom. At that age she was out picking flowers at dawn to find her own true love. An eyeball held no attraction for her then or now. She shook her head and went back to the bank where her sisters were still sprawled, those whose joints would let them. No good could come of this, whatever He might say.

  The twenty minutes crawled by like years and Greville’s riders showed no sign of moving on. Clearly Marlowe’s bluff hadn’t worked. Nor could he really hope that it would. Again and again in those twenty minutes, Joyce Clopton begged him to let them go, but his words were wise enough. Bedded down behind their wagons and the Stones, they stood some chance. On the open road, they’d be cut to pieces and Sir William Clopton’s body would be rolled into a ditch, along with that of anybody else who tried to defend it.

  Besides, Marlowe knew his Caesar. Time and again he had read, in the King’s School cloisters by the Dark Entry, of how a tiny Roman cohort held a high ridge against the hordes of the Gauls. He chose to forget in that moment that the Romans were the finest infantry in the ancient world, hardened veterans who were armed to the teeth. Then he looked again at little, battling Liza with her wheel-lifting biceps under her chemise and he took heart.

  ‘Here they come!’ It was Thomas the lookout and in that moment Ned Sledd’s heart took wing. In his incipient panic, the lad’s voice was as high as a lark’s. Perhaps that was the answer, then. Terrify him every night before he goes on and all will yet be well.

  Marlowe, Sledd and Scot stood alongside Joyce and her Clopton people. Will Shaxsper, who had sensibly used the past few moments exchanging parries and ripostes with Martin, rested his chin on a wagon edge and watched them come on, images of his browbeaten father and his uncomprehending, horrified wife flashing in his brain. Boscastle, with his recent experience of those men counted twenty, all of them armed, all of them mounted. Obviously Greville had not expected much resistance from the ragbag little column that left Clopton with their forlorn load and he thought twenty should cover it. Boscastle had three good men besides himself. In Lord Strange’s company there was Sledd, Martin, Nat and the lad, Thomas, who could probably handle themselves. Oh, and that frightening little woman with the shoulders. Marlowe was a given. So too, probably, was Scot. And Will Shaxsper, the glover’s son, might make a decent fist of it. Old Joseph was struggling to buckle on some ancient armour from the props wagon and it was already getting the better of him.

  He saw Lady Joyce cross herself. And Will Shaxsper too. Kit Marlowe did not. And neither did Reginald Scot.

  Marlowe noticed that Henry Blake was not advancing with the cavalry line. He sat some hundreds of yards back, his right hand tucked into his gown.

  ‘They’ve got no guns at least,’ Sledd grunted to him.

  ‘No, but we have,’ Marlowe suddenly shouted.

  ‘Kit?’ Sledd instinctively dashed after him as he rolled away from the makeshift barricade. ‘Kit? What are you doing?’

  ‘The gunpowder, Ned,’ Marlowe yelled. ‘The fireworks. Ever seen a horse that c
an stand still for them?’

  Sledd slapped the man’s shoulder. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ he asked.

  Marlowe looked at him straight faced and said, ‘You’ve led a very sheltered life, Ned,’ and the two men set to, hauling their firing piece into place, Sledd frantically wrestling with the tinder box while Marlowe rammed the linstock into the ground.

  ‘Too high, too high!’ Sledd shouted, ‘it’ll frighten our horses too and they’ll trample the camp.’

  Marlowe wrenched the linstock lower, clawing at the metal frame until his fingers bled. The noise behind them told both men they were too late as the thud of horses on the hillside grew deafening and the shouts and curses of Paget’s men rained in on their ears. Nat Sawyer just happened to be running backwards as he took the first blow from the flat of a sword, as its owner dragged it from its scabbard. The comedian had always been a believer in the power of timing to get the laugh and this time it had saved his life. The blade slapped him round the head and he pitched backwards off the wagon. It was the best stage dive he’d ever done but there was no appreciative audience to applaud him, just armoured riders with their blood up hurtling against the wagons of Lord Strange’s Men. Sawyer landed under the wagon, his head ringing and opened one eye cautiously. With no one to see him or pass judgement except his own conscience, which had been dead for years, he crawled away further into the darkness of the barricade and waited for it all to be over. You’ve done your bit, Natty, he thought to himself.

  Boscastle still had his halberd in his grip and he poked upwards, catching a horseman in his chest and wrenching the weapon round to slice the tendons of the man’s arm. He screamed as he left the saddle and rolled in the Rollright dust.