Scorpion's Nest (2012)

by Trow, M J

  ‘I didn’t catch your name,’ the landlord said as they got to the bottom step and he snapped a tinder flint and set it to a candle in a waxy sconce on the wall.

  ‘Baillet,’ Marlowe told him. ‘Comptroller of Wines.’

  ‘For which district?’ the landlord frowned at the medallion Marlowe flashed at him in the half light.

  ‘This one,’ said Marlowe, as though to the village idiot.

  ‘You’re not from round here.’ The landlord was not convinced.

  ‘Of course not,’ Marlowe said. ‘What would be the point? You know how this works, surely? Monsieur . . . er . . .?’

  ‘Detrail,’ the landlord said. ‘How what works?’

  Marlowe shook his head sadly, tutting. ‘It pains me to admit it, Monsieur Detrail –’ he was praying his French participles were holding up – ‘on this saint’s day of all days . . .’

  ‘I’ve got a licence, you know,’ Detrail was anxious to assure him, ‘from the Archbishop himself.’

  ‘No, no.’ Marlowe raised his hand to calm the man. ‘You miss my point. On this most holy of days, it is my miserable duty to inform you that there has, of late, been a certain . . . shall we say, malfeasance . . . in the Department of the Comptroller of Wines.’

  ‘Tell me it isn’t so!’ said Detrail flatly, watching Marlowe as he used the landlord’s lantern to check the neatly laid bottles of wine in his cellar.

  ‘That’s why they’ve appointed me,’ Marlowe said with the minimum of lip movement. If you’re going to be a conspirator, it’s important to make sure that the person you’re talking to is willing to join you. Detrail seemed to have the necessary credentials. ‘The last Comptroller . . .’

  ‘Lafontine.’

  ‘The same.’ Marlowe nodded. ‘On the take.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ grunted Detrail.

  ‘To that end, moi –’ Marlowe stressed the word – ‘an out of towner, so to speak. No preformed . . . shall we say, bad habits.’

  ‘Look . . .’ Detrail held Marlowe’s arm as he continued his search. ‘I hope you’re not implying any impropriety on my part . . .’

  ‘My dear fellow.’ Marlowe stopped and held the lantern under the man’s nose so that he took a step back. ‘Certainly not. No, we’re interested in a man called Solomon Aldred. Know him?’

  ‘I might.’ Detrail was still being careful.

  ‘Englishman, isn’t he?’ Marlowe hit just the right note of contempt.

  ‘Yes, he is.’ Detrail began to warm to this man. He hadn’t been truly happy when the English College moved in, lock, stock and barrel, a few years back. The bastards were taking over the place. And they never left tips.

  ‘Can you show me his latest consignment?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘Why, yes,’ Detrail said, leading the man by the arm. ‘Over here.’

  Marlowe looked at the bottles. All of them were wrapped in paper. ‘Which are the newest?’ he asked.

  ‘Can’t you tell?’ Detrail frowned. What sort of Comptroller of Wines were they sending these days?

  ‘I had hoped for your cooperation, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Do you know how many hostelries I have to check today?’ He looked at the man, a strange expression on his face. ‘You are cooperating?’ he asked.

  ‘The last two rows,’ Detrail told him sulkily.

  ‘And since the Feast of the Blessed Virgin’s Birth?’

  ‘Um . . .’ Detrail ran his finger over the bottles. ‘Those five.’

  ‘Have you sold any?’

  ‘Not yet,’ the landlord said. ‘Of course, it will be a different story come cock-shut time tonight. I don’t ever remember it so busy. Which is by way of reminding you politely, Monsieur Comptroller, that I must get back upstairs. So –’ he pulled a plug-remover from his apron pocket, –‘want to try some?’

  ‘No, thank you. It’s the packaging I’m interested in.’

  ‘The packaging?’ Detrail was incredulous.

  ‘You don’t think we Comptrollers of Wines just go round the country getting pissed, do you, Monsieur Detrail? We can’t afford to get drunk, any more than a landlord can. It’s a fine art, I can tell you, Wine Comptrolling. I served a seven-year apprenticeship in bottle labelling alone.’

  Detrail, who had not spent a sober day for more than fifteen years, looked abashed but stood his ground, plug-remover still held aloft.

  ‘Well, off you bugger, then.’ Marlowe shooed the landlord away. ‘I know how busy you are and I can manage. Just leave the lantern.’

  ‘Er . . .’

  The door at the head of the stairs crashed open and a frantic female voice called down. ‘Bertrand, what the bloody Hell are you doing? It’s a madhouse up here.’

  ‘Madame Detrail?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘Uh,’ the landlord grunted. ‘You’ve met her, have you? I’d better get back. Will you be all right?’

  ‘Of course.’ Marlowe smiled, promising himself he’d have to plant a grateful kiss on the cheek of Madame Detrail on his way out.

  Nothing. The papers wrapped around Aldred’s bottles were indeed from the English College but they were rough plans for a new fountain to be built in the grounds and had no obvious link with Father Laurenticus at all. He thanked a harassed-looking Detrail on his way out, assured him that all was in order, took one look at Madame Detrail and decided not to kiss her after all, before vanishing into the jostling crowd.

  Proctor Lomas was on day duty. It wasn’t his favourite time to work, as it meant spending time with Mistress Lomas at home. The many little Lomases also made his life difficult and it seemed to him that each and every one could measure their existence back to a stint on day duty. His wife was no beauty, sad to say, but she had always been a dutiful wife, he couldn’t fault her that way. He sighed and scanned the faces of the scholars as they streamed past him on their way into college after their noon-time break. Wait a minute; that face didn’t belong and not only did it not belong in that crowd, it actually did belong to Robert Greene.

  As a rule, Lomas, like all his proctorial kind, had no jurisdiction over the graduates, who were a law unto themselves. Neither had he any jurisdiction over scholars of other colleges. But Gabriel Harvey had taken the time to send a special message to the Lodge, with a very specific description of Greene at the bottom, with strict instructions to prevent him by any means at the Proctors’ disposal, stopping only short of the man’s actual death, to enter the College precincts. There was anyway an ancient rule that prevented graduates of one College entering another, but this was largely ignored, though Lomas tried to keep it when he had the time. An edict from the Master Designate was a different matter though, and he stepped forward.

  ‘Dominus Greene!’ Lomas lent his not inconsiderable lung power to the general hullabaloo. To do the man credit, he didn’t even flinch. ‘Dominus Greene,’ Lomas shouted again, even louder. ‘I must have a word with you, sir, if I may.’

  Greene still carried on, wedged in the press of scholars.

  Lomas could see he had no option and stepped into the throng which parted, out of sheer habit, to let him through. ‘Dominus Greene,’ he said, hauling his quarry to one side. ‘I have instructions not to let you through.’

  Greene looked at Lomas blankly. ‘I haf no iddya wot you mee-an,’ he said, in a hopeless parody of a scholar of vaguely foreign extraction. Greene had travelled in Europe but he’d never done much there other than shout loudly in English. Had any of the locals shouted back at him, he would have been appalled. For this reason, his accent was modelled on a Spanish potman in the Eagle and Child, whom Lomas actually knew quite well.

  The Proctor was pulling him towards the gate of the college as he spoke, more in anger than in sorrow. ‘I’m sorry that you take me for a fool, Dominus Greene,’ he said, through clenched teeth, ‘I would have saved you the ignominy of this, but you give me no choice,’ and, turning him round on the last word, planted his large, flat Proctor’s foot on the graduate’s backside and propelled him into the street. It had
not been Lomas’ intention that Greene should fall flat in a puddle at the feet of some sizars of St John’s, whose lives Greene did his best to make miserable. But sometimes the Lord gives these little pleasures by the way and the Proctor returned to his post a happier man.

  ‘Are you . . . all right with this, Michael?’ Thomas Phelippes’ voice sounded oddly muffled in the darkness of the bedchamber.

  ‘Yes,’ Johns said, at his elbow, a little surprised at the question. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Well,’ the code-breaker said, ‘I mean . . . sharing a bed. I haven’t done this since my university days.’

  ‘My university days have only just ended,’ Johns reminded him. ‘And such was the popularity of Corpus Christi I didn’t actually have my own bedroom until . . . what? Six years ago, I suppose. You don’t snore, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Phelippes muttered. He had never had a chance to find anyone who would be able to tell him. All the way from Deptford Walsingham’s code-breaker had felt awkward about all this. Give him a twist of lemon, a roll of parchment, a scattering of ciphers, numbers, letters and there was no one in Gloriana’s realm to touch him. But here, in an alien land . . . and a Papist land, too. Nicholas Faunt had said it was vital. Solomon Aldred had discovered something at the English College. A code. He could make neither head nor tail of it. Faunt had asked him to send it but the intelligencer-turned-wine-merchant had had to admit he didn’t actually have it any more. Not on his person. Not per se. So if the mountain could not go to Mahound, Mahound must make his way through France’s mountains to Rheims.

  Not that Faunt had been at all helpful. He had given Phelippes an alias – Thomas Webb, a collector of objets d’art for the Earl of Southampton, on a buying trip across Europe. But as to lethal gadgets balanced on door-tops, drinks and food laced with poisons, dagger-carrying ruffians on the road, Faunt had not said a word. And now Phelippes had compounded the problem by dragging Johns along as his eyes, his ears and, if needs be, his strong-arm man. All in all, it wasn’t the most sensible of choices. Johns was an academic through and through. He never carried a weapon, not of any kind and he looked as though a strong wind would blow him over. Phelippes hoped, but not with much conviction, that he might turn out to be one of those wiry types, who looked weak but had enormous strength when pushed. Now was perhaps not the time to risk squeezing one of his biceps.

  ‘Michael?’

  Johns sighed. ‘Yes, Thomas.’ He had the patience of any one of the saints to whom he no longer prayed, but the last few days – and more especially, nights – had become a bit of a trial. He had come to realize that the happy-go-lucky lad who had struggled through Aristotle and Ramus with him in the Schools had changed. He was introverted, given to sudden bursts of verbal diarrhoea and he seemed afraid of his shadow.

  ‘I haven’t been honest with you,’ the code-breaker said.

  ‘If you’re going to talk cryptically about intelligencers and projectioners again, it’ll be my turn to start snoring loudly.’

  ‘You can’t just ignore it, Michael,’ Phelippes snapped. ‘Wrapped in swaddling bands in Cambridge, you’ve no idea. This is the real world. It’s not about syntax and Dialectics and Discourses. You know there’s a full-blown war coming, don’t you?’

  Johns took the slur on the chin and twisted round to punch his meagre pillow into something more comfortable. Propping himself up, he resigned himself to a long night. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Time for honesty. Your turn.’

  There was a pause while Phelippes fiddled with the hem of the sheet. He played for time, tweaking the covers straight and smoothing the worn coverlet. Eventually, he found his words. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said.

  The next thing he knew, John’s pillow was bouncing off his face, threatening to knock him out of bed. Perhaps Phelippes had miscalculated John’s right arm.

  ‘Then go to sleep!’ the ex-Corpus man shouted. He suddenly remembered where they were, in a flea-ridden inn on the arse of humanity somewhere near the Seine. The walls were thin and he wasn’t comfortable speaking English. He lapsed into Greek. ‘Unless of course, you want to hear my confession – and not in any Papist way, I assure you.’

  ‘Confess what?’ Phelippes meekly passed Johns’ pillow back to him.

  ‘The real reason I came along with you,’ Johns said quietly, settling back and interlocking his fingers across his chest.

  ‘I thought it was for old times’ sake.’ Phelippes said.

  ‘It’s because I’m terrified,’ he told him.

  Phelippes was amazed. He had never thought of himself as someone who could help a terrified person. In fact, he spent most of the time being pretty terrified himself, of shadows, odd sounds, people he knew, people he didn’t know, his servants, Walsingham, Faunt . . . the list was endless. He was beginning to find himself being rather frightened by everyday objects such as bread and coal scuttles, but he had that more or less under control most of the time. Walsingham and Faunt he knew were reasonable fears, but the rest were surely not normal. Especially the bread thing. So he lifted himself up on one elbow and peered in the dark at the man who was looking to him for protection from whatever scared him.

  ‘What are you terrified of?’ he asked. He hoped Johns would say ‘Bread’ but he thought that was perhaps just his own special nightmare.

  ‘The world,’ Johns whispered. ‘You were right, Thomas. The swaddling bands of Cambridge as you put it. That old midwife life has just cut me free of them. I don’t remember how that really felt, to know the draughts creeping along your skin, to feel the hot blast of a fire, the ice of a morning wash, a rough towel over your face. But I’m facing it again. All of it, just like the first time.’

  He turned to his old friend in the stillness of their room, hearing the straw crackle in the mattress, the string creak under the mattress, the floorboards shift under the bed.

  ‘That’s why I came. To have someone with me I can trust. I’ve used you.’

  Phelippes laughed, a short and brittle snort really. ‘No more,’ he said, ‘than I’ve used you. Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Walloon and Persian. I speak them all. Or rather, I read them, write them, decipher them, work them out. Remember what happened at Rouen the other day?’

  Johns did. ‘You didn’t hear the dock-keeper,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I heard him all right. And I knew exactly what to say in reply. It’s just that when I opened my mouth, nothing came out. You did my talking for me.’

  ‘It was my pleasure.’ Johns smiled into the darkness.

  ‘Michael . . .’ Phelippes was sitting up, hugging his knees. ‘I work for the Queen’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham.’

  ‘I think I knew that,’ Johns said.

  ‘And we are going to the English College, the scorpions’ nest itself. I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t. Look, if you want to go back, back to England, back to Cambridge, I will understand. Honestly, I will.’

  ‘The English College . . .’ Johns rolled the name around his tongue. ‘Dr William Allen, isn’t it? The antichrist?’

  Phelippes said nothing, but nodded his head. In the dark, Johns felt the motion transmitted through the bedclothes, and assumed assent.

  For a while the two men kept a thoughtful silence, then Johns sighed and said, ‘I admit that when we set off on our little adventure, I wasn’t quite expecting the Holy Inquisition.’

  ‘No,’ muttered Phelippes, lying back down and pulling the bedclothes around his ears, ‘no one ever does.’

  SEVEN

  Achill October wind rippled the surface of the lake below the chateau. Christopher Marlowe checked the purse at his hip to make sure he still had the ring there, the one he’d appropriated from Gerald Skelton’s study. The pale sun shone on the whitewashed circular towers and glinted on the fleurs-de-lys wrought in gold-flecked iron above the roof. No one challenged him at the gate and he trotted on his hired horse into a wide courtyard, strewn with straw and chickens. Clearly
the Sieur de Fleury had known better times. Marlowe knew the name. One of the man’s ancestors had died at Agincourt, trampled in the mud of that wet October day and it looked from the state of this place that the family fortunes had died with him. Marlowe had made enquiries around the town. Anne de Fleury was a passionate Frenchman and a Papist through and through but he was old and had quarrelled with his sons so that whenever the family met they squabbled incessantly over inheritance. Was it that, Marlowe wondered, that meant the man went in fear of his life? Perhaps not, but it was a useful thing to know.

  And suddenly, he also knew why no one had challenged him at the gate. Armed men were creeping out of the shadows of the stalls that lined the courtyard. He heard the gate slam shut and lock behind him and he steadied his horse, stroking the animal’s neck and whispering to it in his best French. A dozen pikes prickled all around him and Marlowe held up Skelton’s ring so that it flashed in the cloud-shrouded sun.

  ‘I have a message from Dr Allen,’ Marlowe said, ‘from the English College.’

  One of the pikemen spat volubly but a sharp voice barked a reprimand. A fierce old warrior in obsolete armour came waddling out of a darkened archway. He wore a tabard with the arms of Fleury embroidered on it, but the colours were pale and some of the intricate needlework was unravelling, trailing cobwebs of old glory in the eddying air of his movement.

  ‘What have I to do with the English College?’ the old man wanted to know. His face was almost purple and his beard snow white, along with the remnants of the hair he still had on his head.

  ‘You are the Sieur de Fleury?’ Marlowe didn’t trust himself completely with another country’s heraldry and it was as well to be sure.

  The old man folded his arms with a rattle of metal. ‘I am Anne de Fleury,’ he said as the pikemen drew back to let him approach. ‘Who wants to know?’