Scorpion's Nest (2012)

by Trow, M J

  ‘I couldn’t help noticing . . .’ Brooke paused now that the stew had taken the edge off his hunger. ‘You’re armed.’ He nodded at the cold hilt of Marlowe’s dagger.

  ‘Most men are,’ he told him, ‘beyond the confines of this place. And perhaps even here.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Brooke shook his head, taking a huge swig of the wine. Marlowe ignored the hovering servant and took the silver ewer, topping up the scholar’s glass, ‘No. No one goes armed here. By order of the Master. Only guests like you.’

  ‘Are there many guests like me?’ Marlowe asked. It was a more loaded question than the boy knew.

  ‘A constant stream,’ Brooke said, ‘whenever that Godless Church of England persecutes our people. But it won’t be long now.’

  ‘What won’t?’ Marlowe held his wine up to the light as if the talk he was making was the smallest thing in the world. Hundreds of tiny candles seemed to dance in its depths and he seemed to be doing nothing more important than counting them as they winked and sparked.

  Brooke looked a little taken aback. ‘Until we make our great return, of course. Oh, I’m not privy to such discussions but there are moves afoot. The Duke of Guise, they say, is ready with twenty thousand men to invade England. The Duke of Parma has more. And he’s the best soldier in Europe.’

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ Marlowe said.

  ‘And that’s not all . . .’

  But Brooke’s sentence was cut short by the dinner guest on Marlowe’s right.

  He leaned around Marlowe, with a deprecatory gesture and said sharply

  Marlowe’s Greek, thanks to the unstinting efforts of Doctors Johns and Lyler was excellent and it was difficult to look uncomprehending. He took a large mouthful of stew and smiled brightly at each man. The scholar had been told to shut up in no uncertain terms and that road looked closed. The boy had turned pale and watched as the steward took both his plate and his glass away.

  Marlowe saw that a hand was being held out, he assumed in friendship, although the recent exchange made him feel that this was by no means genuine. ‘Thomas Shaw,’ the man said, ‘I’m the College Librarian.’ The man was huge, utterly the wrong build for a man closeted away with books. He looked as though one touch of his ham-like hand would cause the more fragile tomes to disintegrate to powder.

  ‘Robert Greene.’ Marlowe took the proffered hand and shook it.

  ‘Ah, the Cambridge man. How does the Master’s table compare with your old college fare?’

  ‘It outshines it –’ Marlowe raised his glass – ‘as day is to night.’

  A huge platter of pickled vegetables appeared at Marlowe’s right shoulder. He didn’t recognize much of the contents, although Nat Sawyer of Lord Strange’s Men would have made much comedic play with the large white one in the middle. Shaw sensed his difficulty. ‘Artichokes –’ he pointed – ‘cauliflower. The big one in the middle is chicory. It doesn’t matter which you choose. They all have a kick like a mule. We had to stop them sending in the horseradish; poor old Father Bernard almost died one night when he absent-mindedly took a large bite. God knows what cook soaks it all in. But, as long as you are reasonably circumspect, I guarantee you’ll like it.’

  Marlowe sampled some on his spoon. The librarian was right; it was a taste explosion, although it did burn rather on the way down. However, he could appreciate the skill that must have gone into its preparation.

  ‘Which college?’ Shaw asked, helping himself to twice the amount Marlowe had. ‘In Cambridge, I mean.’

  ‘Corpus Christi,’ he told him.

  ‘Ah, the Parker Library.’ Shaw beamed.

  ‘You know it?’ Marlowe topped up the man’s glass from the decanter to his left.

  ‘Sadly, no,’ Shaw said, ‘but I know of it. I’m an Oxford man myself; Merton. I’m ashamed to say we had nothing like Parker’s books. Tell me, is it true that the fellows of Gonville and Caius go to Corpus Christi every year to check if the old boy’s books are still there?’

  ‘They do,’ Marlowe told him. ‘At the Library Feast in August. Archbishop Parker’s birthday.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you knew Parker personally? I mean, you’d be too young.’

  ‘He died when I was nine, I believe. But I can see his portrait in Hall now. A kind face, I always thought.’

  ‘I’ve heard him described as the Pope of Lambeth,’ Shaw said with a chuckle. ‘Odd, that, in an Archbishop of Canterbury of a bastard church.’

  Marlowe tapped the side of his nose. ‘Man on the inside,’ he lied.

  ‘Really?’ Shaw’s eyes widened. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘I must say,’ Marlowe said, topping up his own glass, ‘you live in some style here. May I see your library?’

  ‘Whenever you like,’ Shaw said. ‘It’s across the gallery from here. After Compline, I’d be delighted to show you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Marlowe clicked his glass against the librarian’s, sealing the deal. ‘I’m in Father Laurenticus’ room.’

  ‘Are you?’ There was hardly a pause before Shaw’s answer.

  ‘I understand he died.’ Marlowe picked at the plate of candied orange rind placed between them.

  ‘He did.’ Shaw nodded, suddenly sober, suddenly withdrawn. ‘Sad. Very sad.’

  ‘An elderly gentleman?’

  ‘No, indeed.’ Shaw sighed. ‘In his prime, in fact.’

  ‘Really?’ Marlowe flicked the napkin off his left shoulder and wiped his mouth. ‘What was the cause, I wonder?’

  Shaw looked at the man, this dark newcomer with the bright doublet, the easy manner and, he suspected, an excellent command of Ancient Greek. ‘He stopped breathing, Dominus Greene,’ he said, ‘as one day we all must.’ He crossed himself and pushed back his chair. ‘But not, yet, Oh Lord, not yet.’

  Marlowe crossed himself also, the movement still feeling clumsy after many years disuse. ‘Amen,’ he murmured, and picked up another fragment of candied peel. ‘Amen to that.’

  But Kit Marlowe did not go to Shaw’s library after Compline. Instead, he stayed over the cheeseboard to survey the ground, test the waters, whatever analogy he had once wrestled with in the Discourses at Cambridge. Shaw he’d met and Father Tobias. The Master and his shadow, Skelton, seemed beyond his reach tonight, hemmed in as they were by serious-looking priests with earnest faces. The lad, Brooke, had vanished into the crowd of scholars and Marlowe shook his head to realize that, from his high vantage point of top table and twenty-two summers, all scholars were beginning to look alike.

  ‘Robert Greene.’ He shook the hand of a roisterer, dressed not unlike himself, who had slid along the bench to sit by him.

  ‘Peregrine Salter,’ the man said, smiling. ‘I haven’t seen you before, Master Greene.’ Unless Marlowe missed his guess, this was Aldred’s lute-playing Yorkshireman.

  ‘Newly arrived,’ Marlowe said, beaming. ‘You?’

  ‘I’ve been here a couple of weeks,’ Salter told him. ‘It’s good to be among friends, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, indubitably.’ Marlowe nodded, surrounded, as he was, by enemies. ‘You’ve heard the news, I suppose, from London, I mean?’

  Salter paused with his wine glass in hand. ‘No. What news?’

  ‘The Queen . . .’

  ‘The Jezebel?’ Salter was all ears.

  ‘No.’ Marlowe frowned. ‘The Queen. Of Scots.’

  ‘Master Greene . . .’ Salter sighed. ‘I am not ashamed to admit, in this august company, that I am of the old religion. I am a Catholic.’ He suddenly stood a head taller. ‘But I am also an Englishman. Religion and politics do not go hand in hand with me, sir. I would sooner cut off my right hand than see that Frenchwoman on the throne of England.’

  There was only one man breathing in the darkness of the vault. The darkness that wasn’t totally dark. A solitary candle with a red glass around it quivered in the draught from the world above. It had taken Marlowe over an hour to find this place and he’d had to dodge the faithful attending vigil in the incense-
laden chapel overhead. The faint scent of amber and frankincense clung to his clothing; in his case, the odour of the unsanctified. There were niches at intervals in the recessed archways where the spiders crawled in their twilight world. The dead watched him through sightless eyes, hunched on the iron pegs that held their bones. Each corpse wore a simple robe with a cheap crucifix around the neck. On the longest dead, the robes were rags, crisp with age in this airless tomb and the bones glowed an eerie white. He made his way, feeling each one, to the far wall. Here the bodies were fresher, flesh on the bones still filling out the clothes. He struck his tinder flint and lit his candle, holding it up to each face. A cadaver seemed to be mocking him, the jaw hanging open in a hollow laugh, the eyes dark, dry and sunk back into the sockets, the skin brown as vellum and just as dry. The nearest body to the door on this wall of the catacombs had been a young man. His hair was plastered on the left side with dark brown flakes Marlowe knew was blood. He felt through the black robe, patting the chest under the crucifix. One arm, the left, appeared to be broken. It hung lower than the right and as he squeezed the soapy flesh he felt the bones move under his fingers. A broken arm and a blow to the head. As if the man had fallen from a great height. This must be Charles of Westley Waterless, dead these three weeks. But as Marlowe’s candle crept higher in the faint breeze, he knew it was neither of these wounds that had killed him. The boy’s eyes were hollows, the pupils all but gone and a thick layer of brick dust coated his hair and eyelashes. His tongue, black and purple, protruded through his teeth and his head jutted awkwardly to one side. This poor shattered thing had not been buried here with all the panoply of death which the Catholic Church had in its armoury. This body had been carried down here, probably on a hurdle, and propped unceremoniously up in this niche until time disarticulated the bones so that they could be shovelled up and put higher up in the smaller niches in the wall, where he would be forgotten. A weeping mother in Westley Waterless would remember him, then she would die and he would be no more. Just a whispering ghost across the fenlands.

  Marlowe peeled back the robe’s hood and saw the tell-tale mark of a hanging. There was a dark purple line across the throat and up to the ear on the left side. Gently, he patted the dead boy’s cheek and the head lolled to the left with a click.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he heard a voice call. He snuffed out his candle and stood stock still in the darkness. He blessed his velvet clothes, silent as the grave without a rustle to betray him. The call came again, first in Latin, then in Greek, then in French. For a split second, Marlowe toyed with trying to pass himself off as one of the dead, the company of the catacombs all around him. Immediately, he knew how hopeless it was. He was too bright of eye, too quick of breath. And his clothes were wrong. The flicker of a candle was moving towards him in the vault, someone coming in a hurry on padding footfalls.

  He felt for the dagger hilt at his back. He would have achieved nothing if he had to leave the English College like this, a fugitive on the run from the place that was a refuge for fugitives. On the other hand, he had no excuse, no reason to be here in the dark with the dead. ‘I lost my way’ sounded hopelessly inadequate even as the words formed in his mind.

  The candlelight flickered once in his direction, then doubled back on itself and a black figure was crossing to the far arm of the vault’s cross. Marlowe saw his chance and ran for the stone steps that led to the light. He didn’t look back and didn’t stop running until he had reached the room that had once belonged to a dead man.

  In the middle of the night, Marlowe lay back on the fat feather mattress which had once borne the imprint of Father Laurenticus. He breathed in gently, trying to detect any hint of death in the bed, but there was nothing; just the faint memory of the bleaching and scrubbing. He didn’t quite know why he thought the bed was the scene of the man’s death. He had had no clue as to what had happened. For all he knew, the man had dropped dead in the street; but if that was the case, why was this room so very, very clean? He was tired, the meal had been heavy and the wine generous, even for his strong head, but every time he closed his eyes, he saw the rotting dead in line abreast and every time he breathed in, there was the faint sweet odour of incense and corruption in his nostrils. He tossed and turned and decided to try to wait for the dawn, if sleep would not come. The clocks of Rheims chimed the hours, quarters, halves and it seemed every minute in between. None of them seemed to agree and their constant tintinnabulation didn’t help his attempts to sleep. In the end, he bowed to the inevitable, got up quietly, dressed and slipped out of the College, by the wicket gate that led to the East. A walk in the predawn light might clear his mind enough to let him catch some sleep. He had had some of his best nights wrapped up in a cloak propped up against a tree somewhere with a mighty line thundering in his head, so he went in search of a quiet, grassy corner.

  He finally found a welcoming tree, with roots straggling above ground almost making a chair for the wandering insomniac, growing on the bank of the Vesle as it meandered through the town. He wrapped his cloak over his head and round his body, then curled himself into the welcoming arms of the tree. He tuned his hearing to the rattle of the water over the stones and was just drifting off to sleep at last when he heard a sound which had him awake again at once. It was a slither of silk and a gentle breath and it was very close to his left ear. He was too wrapped up to reach his dagger from where he sat but before he could jump up, a hand was on his chest and a quiet voice spoke.

  ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’

  He turned his head and found himself almost nose to nose with the lady of uncertain virtue, the self-proclaimed lay sister who had accosted him outside the English College on his arrival.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have. You’re at that English College, the one on Venise Street.’ She subsided in a cloud of cheap perfume at his side and leaned against him. ‘Are you feeling more friendly now?’

  ‘I’m always friendly,’ Marlowe pointed out reasonably, ‘except to those who give me cause.’

  ‘But not friendly,’ she said. ‘Not friendly for my purposes.’

  ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Not that kind of friendly.’

  She examined his face by the light of the growing dawn. ‘You’re a handsome one, though, aren’t you?’ She squeezed his thigh, just above the knee. ‘Fit and strong.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, politely. He had never been one to judge ladies who earned their living by their best features. This one seemed more intelligent than most and she was certainly pretty enough. But it had always been his belief that anything that could in the best of circumstances be had for free, should not be sold. ‘I just . . . don’t.’

  She tossed her head. ‘Ha! English College. What will we do with you, eh?’ She settled herself more comfortably and he was glad of the warmth of her down one side. The year was a little old for sleeping out, especially near the cool of running water. ‘As it happens,’ she said, ‘I’m not sorry. I have been on my . . . feet for days and nights now, without pause. My friend who works shifts with me has been ill.’

  Marlowe tensed to move away. ‘Ill?’ He hadn’t heard of any pestilence in the town, but it paid to be careful.

  ‘No, no.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘Nothing a man could catch. She has been in her bed with melancholy. Her man has died.’

  Marlowe was confused. Had he misjudged this girl? Sleep was beginning to dull his brain and he said nothing.

  She gave a harsh laugh. ‘Because we sell what we have doesn’t mean we don’t have those who love us,’ she said, curtly. ‘In these times, we are not all harlots by nature. Sylvie is one who is not. She wants a man, a house, some babies, roses round the door. I pray to the Holy Mother that one day she will have them all. But for now, she has tied her wagon to the wrong star.’

  ‘He couldn’t help dying, poor man,’ Marlowe said. Sympathy would cost him nothing and although her perfume wasn’t subtle, it was better than the lingering stench of decay. And anyway, he liked her p
anache.

  ‘None of us can help that, when our time has come,’ she said, and he felt rather than saw her sketch the sign of the cross on her breast. ‘This one, though, he could probably have helped having his throat cut from ear to ear.’

  Marlowe pricked up his ears. He had no idea how many throats were cut on an average day in Rheims, but his guess would be not many. He also had no reason to suppose she spoke of Father Laurenticus, but his instincts were awakened, nonetheless. He kept his head and tried to keep the interest from his voice. ‘That must have been terrible for her. Did she witness it?’

  The girl sighed wetly in his ear. ‘She was at home, covered in blood when I came in that night. I was early, because I had had a . . . shall we say a generous man.’

  ‘You stole his purse.’

  ‘If you say so.’ She dug him in the ribs with a hard finger. ‘I only work to live. If I make more than I might expect, I don’t spend more time on my back than I must. So, I was early, so we came in almost together. She was undressing in the room we share and trying to wipe away the blood. She was covered in it, drenched. It was clotting in her hair. Her shift was stuck to her body with it. I have never seen such a horrible sight. At first, I thought the blood must be hers and I couldn’t work out how she could still live.’ She was facing forward, watching the silver lights of dawn on the water. She had begun her story, she was unburdening herself for the first time and nothing but her own death now would stop her.

  ‘She was breathing so strangely, with drawn-in gasps and sobs like a person on their deathbed. It took me an hour to get her clean and then another to calm her down. She had been with her man in his bed, curled in his arms.’ She paused and looked at Marlowe. ‘You may not believe what I tell you now and I don’t believe it myself, not completely. But Sylvie thinks it is true, and it keeps her as sane as she will ever be again, so I will tell it as I heard it.’

  ‘The best way,’ he assured her and she settled back to her tale.