Scorpion's Nest (2012)

by Trow, M J

  Phelippes clapped him on the back. ‘It’s a village still in some ways. It has still a lot of growing to do. Church property up for grabs, everywhere you look. But you’re lucky you caught me.’ A shadow passed over his face. ‘I have been ordered to France.’

  ‘Ordered?’ Johns was confused. ‘Who by?’

  ‘It’s a very long story,’ Phelippes said, ‘and in truth I shouldn’t tell you the half of it.’ He checked behind him that none of the street vendors was listening too closely. ‘But we are friends from many years back and you don’t know any intelligencers or projectioners or any of that mad crew, so I will tell you what I know.’

  ‘Intelligencers?’ Johns repeated. ‘Projectioners?’ His old friend was speaking a foreign language, right here in the streets of the Queen’s capital. But he caught the man’s look and he caught the man’s mood and assured him, ‘It will be like whispering your knowledge down a hole in the ground,’ he said. ‘Like King Midas’ barber did.’

  ‘That isn’t a good analogy,’ Phelippes pointed out, dredging out his Classical memories. ‘Didn’t the reeds tell everyone about the ass’ ears?’

  ‘Hmm,’ Johns said, smiling. ‘Perhaps not a good choice of story on my part. Well, let’s just say I am a good listener.’

  They turned up Cheapside skirting Old Jewry and Phelippes led the way down a twisting lane, which led through Leadenhall to his house, leaning at a crazy angle against its neighbour. While they walked, both men’s minds were whirring with plans. They would both need to be cunning to get what they wanted, but they both had a knack with words. It would just be a matter of whether the better man would win.

  Robert Greene put his head round the door of the Master of Corpus Christi, face already set in an expression of sycophantic approval, his eyebrows almost hidden in his hair, his mouth a rictus smile. He was glad he had prepared himself. He had rather liked the old, fusty look of Norgate’s study on the one occasion he had been in it. The very cobwebs on this side of Cambridge had a gravitas of their own. Now it was bright and plain, with hardly any comfort left. The fine paintings were gone from the walls, the thick, dusty curtains from the windows. The desk was scrubbed and the chairs were wooden with no cushions to make a visitor want to stay.

  ‘Gabriel,’ he exclaimed. ‘I just love what you’ve done in here. Very . . . now.’

  Harvey looked around, smug and pleased. ‘I rather like it,’ he said. ‘Too much clinging to the past has gone on in this room. I shall be taking Corpus Christi into the next century whether it likes it or not.’ He paused. ‘Did you speak?’ he asked, a little waspishly.

  ‘I just said “Deo volens”,’ Greene explained.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you said you were going to take the college into the next century. I just said . . . God willing.’

  Harvey had had enough of people translating for him. Did they take him for some kind of idiot? First Johns and now Greene; it was really too bad. Did they not realize he was Master-designate of this college? True, old Norgate wasn’t actually in his coffin, but he hadn’t discernibly moved for three days, so it couldn’t be long. ‘I know what it means,’ he spat. ‘I just was wondering why you said it.’

  Greene was discomfited. He and Harvey had always seen pretty much eye to eye and suddenly they were arguing. He couldn’t work out where the conversation, short though it was, had gone so wrong. He shrugged.

  ‘In my experience,’ Harvey said, his voice low and even. If an adder could speak, it would have sounded more friendly and reasonable. ‘In my experience, people only say “God willing” if they think an outcome unlikely. Do you think it is unlikely, Dominus Greene?’

  ‘Dominus Greene? Robin, surely?’ Greene felt the earth move beneath his feet.

  ‘I think not,’ Harvey said, closing his mouth with a snap. ‘I must be careful with whom I mix now I am Master of Corpus Christi.’

  Greene wondered whether it was only his imagination or whether Harvey really did change his voice to a more sonorous tone every time he used the phrase.

  ‘We’ve been friends for . . .’

  Harvey smiled a wintry smile. ‘Acquaintances, surely?’ he said and sat down at his empty desk. ‘You must excuse me, Dominus Greene,’ he said, not looking up. ‘As you can see, I have much to do.’

  Greene, who had come to ask his friend if he could search Marlowe’s rooms now he seemed to have disappeared, decided now was not the time. He looked at the top of his erstwhile friend’s head, wondering how long he could keep up the pretence of reading the top of a desk without so much as a scrap of paper on it. Then, suddenly, he felt the anger surging up through him to erupt out of his mouth.

  ‘Gabriel?’

  The man looked up but didn’t speak.

  ‘I hate what you’ve done to this room. It has no gravitas, no weight of years. When you are as nebulous and pointless as you are, Gabriel, you need the borrowed trappings of men greater than you. You have thrown it away. You are –’ as his anger waned, so did his vocabulary – ‘a boil on the arse of humankind. You . . . you . . .’

  Harvey folded his arms and waited while the would-be playwright and poet searched for a deathless phrase. After a minute or so of watching Greene struggle he spoke. ‘Please close the door on your way out, Greene. And perhaps I should warn you that when you have hauled your sorry, plagiaristic, thieving self through the gates of this college, I will take steps to see that you never enter it again. The Proctors will have their instructions. Good day.’ And he bent his head to the contemplation of his empty desk again, while the motes of dust, which were all that remained of Norgate and his kind, slowly settled in the corners to be forgotten.

  FOUR

  Christopher Marlowe was settling in to his unexpectedly pleasant room, unpacking his travelling bag and putting out his few possessions. He had not been able to resist bringing paper and ink but had left the manuscript of his latest play stashed safely behind the wainscoting back at Corpus Christi. Tamburlaine, Zenocrate and the pampered jades of Asia could rest easy there. He knew that should he ever need the manuscript and be unable to go back, Michael Johns could always retrieve it for him. He still had nightmares about his Dido and had become rather more careful about his work, as Robert Greene could no doubt attest. Marlowe could not resist a wry smile whenever he thought of the overdressed hack, his hand all bound up in linen.

  The room, as well as being spacious and light, was also almost impossibly clean. There seemed to be no sign of the normal wear and tear of a recent inhabitant and yet he was sure that the English College was not so well off for rooms that this one had been empty for long. He sniffed. Rosemary; that was no great surprise, most laundresses added a sprig of rosemary to the press. He sniffed again. There was a strange smell, slightly acrid but not unpleasant, of a plant, green but sharp. He knew it and would remember it in a minute. Along with the herb smells there was a strong smell of wood shavings, as though someone had been sawing in the room, doing carpentry of some kind. But he could see no new furniture or repairs, just this overwhelming sense of clean.

  Mare’s tails! That was what he could smell. He clicked his fingers as the words came to him. The plant his mother would use to scrub the plates and any stains she might have in the kitchen. She scrubbed the big table down once a week with mare’s tails, telling the children to watch out, the crushed stalks could cut their fingers. His sister had got a cut once, he remembered, from just touching the table before his mother sluiced it down. He looked round the room and then dropped to his knees and reached gingerly into a corner with one finger. Yes, there was definitely a sharpness in the dust pushed against the wall. He got up and walked to the window, pulling a small lens out of his waistband. Yes, there were tiny fragments, sharp and fine as fairy glass twinkling on the skin. Someone had scrubbed this floor to within an inch of its life. That also explained the smell of wood; the old surface patina of many feet had been removed in places and the new wood, exposed after so long, was giving off a last breath
of sap.

  There was one last thing he had to check. He went to the foot of the bed and reached down to where the sheet was tucked under the feather mattress. He unloosed a fold and buried his face in it, inhaling. The smell was faint and underneath the rosemary and the lye but it was unmistakable. Although the linen would have been rinsed and rinsed then rinsed again any housewife would admit it was a little while before the smell of human urine would completely fade from bleached linen. It wasn’t strong enough to be noticeable, but a sensitive nose could sniff it out.

  Marlowe tucked the sheet back in and wandered to the window, standing away from the glass so that he could see and not be seen. Down in the street, he could see the good burghers of Rheims scurrying to and fro like everybody else, in search of a sou. His friend from earlier, the lay sister of last night’s Vespers, was pacing her beat from corner to corner. She was even prettier in the day than in the night. But did she never sleep? He got the distinct impression that he saw the same face more often than he should in the people passing beneath the window, but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t travelled widely but he had noticed when in the Low Countries that there did seem to be a face of the place. It was true in Cambridge as well, a certain fenny pinched look around the eyes and nose. Perhaps that was all he was seeing here – a face of the Marne; the look of the Catholic League. He glanced round the room again, then shrugged. If there was any more for this room to tell him, it would tell him in its own good time.

  Gerald Skelton was used to being at everyone’s beck and call. He didn’t feel comfortable with nothing to do and his next lecture wasn’t until the afternoon, so he stood at the window, tapping one finger on the sill and whistling through his teeth. His was a well-oiled machine and his team of clerks were meticulous with the paperwork. William Allen sat at his desk, a quill in his hand and a tortured expression on his face.

  ‘Gerald,’ he said at last. ‘Could you either stop that infernal whistling or the tapping? In fact, I would deem it a personal favour if you would stop doing both.’

  Skelton didn’t turn round, but he was silent. Only someone with the razor-sharp hearing of the Master of the English College could have heard the tiny hum from the man’s throat, the hum of a tone-deaf bee down a mine.

  ‘And the humming. In fact, all small and irritating noises, if you would be so good.’ A small drop of ink fell noiselessly from the tip of his quill, sending minute splashes over the work in hand. Allen was a patient man, by and large, but he had been writing this particular piece of prose for some time and it was important to be accurate. His writing was tiny, neat and even the splashes offended his sense of neatness and what was right. ‘Gerald,’ he said, reaching for the sand to try and minimize the damage. ‘Please. Could you go elsewhere? Or, perhaps, as I must now wait until this ink is dry to see if I can rescue this document, perhaps you would like to tell me what the matter is?’

  Skelton didn’t turn, but in the blessed silence Allen could almost hear the turning of his brain.

  ‘Well?’ The Master put down his pen and leaned forward on his desk, his hands calmly folded in front of him, his expression patient.

  In a fractured, clumsy bound, Skelton was across the room and in the chair facing the desk. ‘It’s that new man. Greene. I don’t like him.’

  ‘No? I find him quite an attractive kind of personality. Many depths, I believe, which we can plumb before he leaves us.’

  ‘Bad things live in the depths,’ Skelton said. ‘Sea monsters.’ He sketched something ghastly and tentacled with manic hands. ‘Creatures of the pit.’ His eyes burned and he leaned forward. ‘Why did he come here, all unannounced? Why have we never heard of him? Our world is a small one; we should have heard of him. Most of our guests come with letters of introduction.’

  ‘Perhaps he has only recently decided that he wants to walk our path,’ Allen said, soothingly. ‘It isn’t for everyone. And he is very young.’

  ‘And you have put him in Father Laurenticus’ room. Is that wise?’

  ‘It’s the only one we have. If Father Laurenticus had not . . . died –’ there was the smallest moue of distaste in the word, which described better than any medical treatise what the maid had found that day, what Allen and Skelton had seen – ‘we would have had to put him in the dormitory and something tells me that Dominus Greene is not a dormitory sort of man.’

  ‘But what if he finds . . . anything.’ Skelton had only to close his eyes to be back in that room, that blood-soaked bed, the sprays on the curtains, windows and wall.

  ‘The room has been thoroughly scrubbed,’ Allen said. ‘Do try to calm down, Gerald. You are supposed to be our Bursar, looking after us, making sure the English College runs smoothly. If we start to rush about just because someone is killed . . .’

  Skelton was speechless. ‘Someone is killed?’ he said, trying to keep his voice down. ‘Someone is killed, Master? It isn’t as if this is the first incident of . . .’

  ‘Murder,’ the Master supplied blandly.

  ‘Yes. Of that.’

  ‘Is there another instance? Do tell me what.’ Allen was carefully wiping his quill-nib.

  ‘Master! You can’t have forgotten the hanging?’

  The Master flung a dismissive hand towards the man. ‘A student was trying to climb out of the window, hell bent on pleasure and quite literally so as it turned out. That was scarcely murder. You might say it was God’s judgement.’

  ‘But, Master—’

  A rap on the door made Skelton turn as if the door were the gate of Hell and Satan himself was knocking.

  ‘Come in,’ the Master said, putting a quietening hand up to Skelton, who shrank into his chair.

  The door opened just a little and a cheery face peeped round. Its owner was either very small or was crouching as the top of the unruly hair was only just over five foot from the floor.

  ‘Ah, Master Aldred!’ cried the Master of the English College. ‘Come in, come in. Dr Skelton was just going, were you not, Gerald?’

  Skelton got up sulkily and edged past the little man in the doorway without speaking. Bursar of the English College he may have been but what Master Aldred had to sell only the Master handled.

  ‘Gerald is feeling unwell,’ Allen said with a smile. Solomon Aldred put down the bag he was carrying with a satisfying clink. ‘Now, what have you for me today?’

  The vintner liked to arrive in the mid-morning, spend time sampling his wares with his old friend the Master, popping in to genuflect with a solemn face and supple knees at Sext and then partake of the top table’s luncheon before making his excuses before there was more praying at None. Today, though, was different. He slipped a particularly fine brandy to Brother Tobias and they downed a few before the old man told him of the newest arrivals. There was a surly fellow from London who kept to himself in his room over the bakehouse. There was the gentleman from somewhere in the north if Brother Tobias was any judge, who went by the name of Salter and there was a Cambridge scholar called Greene, who had asked to see a priest urgently. Things must be bad indeed in England, Tobias nodded, anything but soberly after his third glass, if the current flood of the Old Faithful was anything to go by. The College was running out of space to put them all.

  Aldred padded around the cloisters where earnest young priests sat gilding their vellum as though there were no such thing as a printing press. He caught sight of the surly fellow from London. He knew him by his clothes – rough fustian no Frenchman would be seen dead in and he smiled at him as he brushed past.

  ‘And now the Western wind bloweth sore,’ he said softly.

  The Londoner scowled at him. ‘What?’

  ‘That is in his chief sovereignty,’ Aldred assured him.

  The Londoner stopped walking, careful to keep the little man in full view. ‘I don’t know where you’ve escaped from, sirrah,’ he said. He took in the man’s bag with a quick glance. ‘But whatever you’re selling, I have more than a sufficiency.’ And he was gone.

  It took
Aldred longer than he expected to find the northerner called Salter and he only knew him because of the song he sang to his lute and he recognized the flat vowels of the Ouse. The vintner tried again. He applauded the man’s playing politely.

  ‘And now the Western wind bloweth sore,’ he said, beaming. ‘That is in his chief sovereignty.’

  Salter looked at him, frowning, then struck a slight discord on the lute. ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know it. Perhaps if you could hum me a few bars, I could pick it up.’

  Aldred smiled, bowed and wandered away. Life was too short to talk to musicians. In desperation, he scampered up the stairs by the chapel, ducking under the beams where the organ pipes wheezed and blew. He knew this short-cut of old and soon he was out in the fresh air again, watching the sun glow on the old stone. He saw his last target lounging against a cloister pillar, arms folded, jaw set. In front of him, in the corner of the quadrangle, three monks knelt before a crucifix set into the wall. Their robes were hauled down around their waists and they were slapping knotted ropes across their backs, adding little sprays of blood to the cuts and old scars already there. Each of them was deathly pale, but no sound escaped from their gritted teeth and the flagellation had got into a ghastly rhythm.

  Aldred barely noticed this. It was a daily practice in the English College, as regular as Sext or None. He smiled at the watcher by the cloisters. ‘And now the Western wind bloweth sore,’ he said, looking up to the sky, because all Englishmen talked about the weather, pretty much all the time. ‘That is in his chief sovereignty.’ He grinned sheepishly at the other man, expecting another inane rebuff.

  Instead, he heard, ‘Beating the withered leaf from the tree. Sit we down here under the hill.’ The voice was not over the top, it was not quite an actor’s voice but it certainly made a better job of the lines than Aldred had heard before. The Cambridge man looked down at the vintner and continued. ‘Or, since we’re a little short of hills, how about over there?’