Scorpion's Nest (2012)

by Trow, M J

  ‘I am Robert Greene,’ Marlowe lied again, ‘and I have news for your ears only, my lord.’

  The old knight looked at the man. He was well mounted, dressed in the English fashion, but flashily, like a roisterer. He invited Marlowe to dismount and one of the pikemen took his horse. Another whisked the dagger from the small of his back and a third patted the sleeves of his doublet and the bulges of his Venetians. He even peered into the tops of Marlowe’s buskins and shook his head at his master.

  ‘Show me that,’ Fleury snapped, pointing to the ring.

  Marlowe passed it over. The old man squinted at it. His eyes weren’t what they had been but he wasn’t letting his people know just how bad they were. Even so he recognized the cross maline of the English College and threw it back to Marlowe.

  ‘What’s this all about, Greene?’ Fleury asked.

  ‘For your ears only, my lord,’ Marlowe reminded him.

  The old man beckoned him forward and a pikeman raised his weapon. ‘Stand to!’ Fleury barked. ‘I thank you, gentlemen, for your diligence.’ He took Marlowe’s dagger from the flunkey who held it and waved it in the stranger’s face. ‘But I was at Calais that great day we took it back from you English. My artillery crossed the frozen marshes and blasted seven kinds of shit out of your garrison there.’ He winked at Marlowe and said, ‘I haven’t lost my touch.’

  Marlowe had talked to men from the Calais garrison when he was a boy. He thought it would be impolite to remind the Sieur de Fleury that the French had outnumbered the English nearly fourteen to one. And all that was nearly thirty years ago.

  ‘Well, boy?’ the old knight squinted up into Marlowe’s face. ‘What is for my ears only?’

  ‘May I see your wine cellar, my lord? You may care to have your steward present.’

  ‘My wine cellar?’ Fleury frowned. ‘Very well. Seurat!’ he shouted at a flunkey wearing his livery. ‘Keys, please. Wine cellar.’

  The man Seurat hefted a solid-looking bunch of keys from a belt at his waist and slotted one into position in a studded door under the shade of a roofed awning. The cellar was hardly that, but it sloped away under the courtyard wall and there were enough bottles to survive the siege of Troy. If the old knight wasn’t spending much on his fortifications, he was more than making up for it with his wine bill. The steward fumbled with a tinderbox and lit a large candle.

  ‘Why are we here?’ Fleury asked.

  ‘Where is the latest consignment from Solomon Aldred?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘Over here.’ The steward took them all to a far corner.

  ‘When did these arrive?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘Last week. Thursday, I believe.’

  ‘Ten bottles?’ Marlowe needed to be sure. There was no room for error because he knew he couldn’t possibly pull this stunt again.

  ‘That’s right. Anything . . . wrong with them?’ The steward might just as well have said ‘Are they stiff with poison? Have people died in their hundreds by drinking this wine of the devil?’ But he was a professional. He tried to keep cool. ‘Have there been any . . . incidents?’

  Marlowe smiled at him, but there was no comfort in what was really just a grimace. ‘When you serve a bottle to my Lord Fleury –’ Marlowe stood between them – ‘how do you bring it to his hall?’

  ‘I don’t,’ the steward said, looking down his nose as only a Frenchman can, ‘I have people.’

  ‘These people,’ Marlowe said, lowering his voice and clutching the steward’s sleeve. ‘Are they . . . well?’

  ‘What?’ the steward frowned, stepping back a pace.

  ‘For God’s sake, man!’ The old knight exploded, turning ever more purple in the candle’s flickering light. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Marlowe turned to the man and said quietly, so close to his ear that the old warrior could feel the breath warm on his neck. ‘Do you have enemies, my lord? Those who might wish you ill?’

  The old man blinked, twitching his moustache. ‘Seurat, leave us, will you?’

  ‘My lord . . .?’

  ‘That will be all, sir,’ Fleury snapped. ‘Double up, dammit.’

  The steward bowed and, leaving the candle with Marlowe, bowed his way out of the room.

  ‘Well –’ the knight leaned back against the nearest wall – ‘that one for a start. Hates my guts.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Two of my three sons,’ the old man said. ‘Possibly all three. It’s no use pretending. I was never much of a father, but at the time I thought I’d given them everything.’

  ‘Ah, filial ingratitude.’ Marlowe shook his head.

  ‘What has this to do with Solomon Aldred’s wine?’ Fleury asked.

  ‘Possibly nothing,’ Marlowe said, ‘but we’ve had . . . hmm, let’s call it intelligence . . . at the English College. Someone is poisoning wine and sending lethal bottles to certain key people in Rheims. Dr Allen, the Archbishop. And you.’

  ‘Aldred’s a poisoner?’ Fleury was astonished. He’d always found the man rather good company, once he was able to put to one side the fact that he was an Englishman.

  ‘No, no.’ Marlowe was quick to correct him. ‘Someone has used Master Aldred’s services to commit murder, or attempt to, at least. Aldred himself is not involved.’

  ‘Poisoned wine, eh?’ Fleury was taking it all in. ‘Wait a minute, you say Dr Allen has received some? The Archbishop?’

  Marlowe nodded grimly.

  ‘Then it can’t be my boys.’ Fleury was secretly relieved. ‘They’re only on nodding terms with His Grace and they don’t know Allen at all.’

  ‘Amen,’ said Marlowe. ‘The diabolical thing, my lord, is that the poison isn’t in the wine itself.’

  ‘Not?’ Fleury frowned. ‘Then, how . . .?’

  ‘That’s why I asked your steward how he delivered it to your table.’

  ‘In the wrapping, as it comes in from Aldred’s shop,’ the old knight told him.

  ‘Mother of God!’ Marlowe crossed himself, thinking briefly how this action was getting to be frighteningly natural to him these days.

  ‘What?’ Fleury did likewise, a knee-jerk reaction.

  Marlowe closed to him and lowered his voice. He suspected the old man was at least partially deaf, but it didn’t seem quite right to yell if he was meant to be working secretly. He tried to pitch it right, so that he could still hear. ‘The poison is in the wrapping, my lord,’ he said, enunciating crisply. ‘Anyone who touches it is dead within the hour. Earlier if they put their fingers near their mouths in that time.’

  ‘Mother of God indeed!’ Fleury repeated and sketched another cross.

  ‘My lord, I would not want your health risked any more than necessary. May I check the wrappings on these bottles?’

  ‘Is that not very dangerous?’ Fleury asked, backing away.

  ‘Indeed, but I have a natural immunity to the poison.’

  ‘You do? How so?’

  Marlowe looked at him with narrowed eyes in the candlelit gloom. ‘All men from where I was brought up as a boy have it. It is something in the water, I have always been led to believe.’ He hoped his French was up to the explanation. ‘I shall still take precautions.’ Marlowe unhooked his gloves from his belt and drew them on with much solemnity. ‘I suggest that you stand well back. It has been known that the fumes alone, when the wrapping is disturbed . . .’

  Fleury backed away. ‘Um . . . look here, Greene. I don’t want to break your concentration, you know. Probably a bit of a tricky exercise, this checking and what not. I’ll just sit outside, shall I? No need for both of us to . . .?’ He looked hopefully at Marlowe, who nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘My lord,’ he said, bowing slightly, ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’ And he waited until the old man was through the door before turning back to the rack of wine.

  Nothing. There had been nothing in the wrappings of Aldred’s bottles at the Dancing Chicken and there was nothing now. Just a selection of some of the more salacious
verses from Leviticus, copied over and over in an indifferent hand, as if to improve the calligraphy. And not even, Marlowe guessed, in Father Laurenticus’ hand. Was he risking life and limb on a wild-goose chase? Assuring the Sieur de Fleury that his wine cellar was safe, he spurred his horse under the low archway and galloped Hell for leather back to town.

  The Compline bell was sounding as Christopher Marlowe ducked under the archway that led to the Archbishop’s private cellar. Behind him rose the colossal Gothic masterpiece that was Rheims cathedral and the saints of old Christendom, cold in their chiselled stone, watched him go. At the main door he had been stopped by a verger who told him the church was about to start divine service. Marlowe was very welcome to join them, but if he had just come to marvel at the architectural splendour of the place, that would be three sous, please, and could he call back. Marlowe declined both, explaining that he had urgent business on behalf of the Archbishop’s vintner and Compline or not, the mercantile bureaucracy of France could not wait. There had been a grave error. The wrappings on Solomon Aldred’s recent consignment were not finest vellum. They must be replaced, at no cost to His Grace, of course. And Master Aldred would be pleased to send the next crate free of charge.

  A choirboy led Marlowe through a labyrinth of stone paths, through wicket gates without number. The lad’s surplice billowed out behind him like a race-built galleon under full sail. Not long ago, this could have been Marlowe himself, hurrying to the cathedral at Canterbury under the shadow of the Dark Entry on his way from school. He smiled to himself at the water that had flowed under the bridge since then, by way of the Stour, the Cam, the Thames and Seine and now the Vesle; water that ran dark and deadly; water in which bodies floated.

  The boy showed him into yet another cellar and he told his story to yet another cellar-keeper. The monk seemed easier to hoodwink that either the landlord Detrail or the steward Seurat and Marlowe was soon reading the wine wrappings by a flickering candle. The sixth bottle made his heart thump, but his face didn’t move. Small, spidery letters, in blocks. They didn’t seem to form words but were simply a jumble of squiggles. A Mohammedan would take them for gibberish, but Mohammedans didn’t work for Francis Walsingham and Marlowe recognized their importance at once. He shook his head, tutting, collected up the sheets and stuffed them into his doublet. Bottles seven and eight were wrapped in St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians and he made a great show of feeling the parchment between his fingers, sniffing the dry ink as if to make doubly sure.

  ‘Thank God,’ he muttered to the cellarer monk. ‘Only one bottle contaminated. I cannot apologize enough. I will be back by Matins with Master Aldred’s free crate and the correct wrapping for bottle six.’ He caught the bemused look on the cellarer’s face. ‘Look, I feel very bad about this,’ Marlowe said, preparing to leave. ‘Is there a priest free? For confession, I mean?’

  ‘Will I do?’

  Marlowe turned at the stentorian voice behind him. Framed in the archway with the torches of the cathedral precinct behind him stood Dr Allen. Marlowe felt himself transported back to his boyhood for the second time in half an hour and had to fight down an urge to lick his palm and flatten his unruly hair.

  ‘Master.’ Marlowe was wrong-footed again but his face didn’t betray the fact.

  ‘Dominus Greene.’ Allen walked towards him. ‘I thought I saw you on your way here. The lad who brought you confirmed it for me. An Englishman, in the habit of a roisterer, armed and looking for the wine cellar of the Archbishop of Rheims. And at a time when every other member of the English College except my good self is at their devotions. Nothing odd in that, is there?’

  ‘Merely helping out a friend,’ Marlowe explained.

  ‘Oh?’ Allen’s raised eyebrow said it all. ‘How so?’

  ‘Solomon Aldred,’ Marlowe said. ‘The vintner. He fears he may have sent His Grace the wrong consignment.’

  ‘And has he?’

  ‘All is well,’ Marlowe assured him.

  ‘Good of you to be so concerned about Master Aldred,’ Allen said. ‘I hadn’t the two of you down for friends.’

  ‘I admit,’ Marlowe said, ‘I didn’t care for the man when I first met him. But he grows on you. I was coming to the cathedral anyway . . .’

  ‘You were?’ Allen asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘It isn’t often you see one rose window as lovely as in this cathedral, but to have two is almost too much. I heard that at this time of the year and at this time of day the light strikes through them just right. What fairer monument to the glory of God? I had never seen it from the inside.’

  ‘And you still haven’t,’ Allen observed. ‘Nor will you from down here in the cellars. Shall we?’

  ‘Delighted,’ Marlowe said and thanked the cellarer for his understanding before walking with the black-robed Master towards another Catholic Mass. His heart was still in his mouth but the documents he had sought for so long were at least safe, for the moment, in his doublet. He mumbled the Latin chant alongside Allen as the candles flickered and threw their long shadows on the soaring pillars. And the rose windows were undeniably beautiful, so his story held up on that score. But Allen needed watching. Used as Marlowe was to the unworldly Dr Norgate, a Master who was in charge of his faculties in more than one way was something of a novelty.

  It was late by the time Kit Marlowe and Solomon Aldred trudged home along the Rue des Capucins that Wednesday. The town Watch nodded at the little Englishman who had become such a fixture in the city over the recent months. They didn’t nod at Marlowe. But they watched him nonetheless; there was something in the way he carried himself, saw everything, remained silent while Aldred jabbered on in his incomprehensible babble. Marlowe was one to watch for all eternity.

  Around the corner of the old convent of St Remi, Marlowe spoke for the first time. ‘You know we are not alone, Master Aldred?’ It was whispered out of the corner of his mouth in the way he had first learned as a choral scholar, chatting in the sermon, but had honed to perfection in two years of playing Francis Walsingham’s games.

  ‘Two of them.’ The vintner nodded without changing his tone, turning or breaking his stride. ‘By the trees. How long, would you say?’

  ‘Since we came through the Mars Gate, I think.’

  ‘That would be my guess. Let’s see what they do if we split up. Do you know the Palace of Tau?’

  ‘You could hardly miss it,’ Marlowe pointed out, mildly. Even if it had not been rubbing shoulders with Notre Dame, it would have stood out in any city.

  ‘Well, yes.’ Aldred had become a local through and through and could not help condescending just a little to the newcomer. ‘Go there, the best route is past my house, I think, from here. Then if you double back on yourself, you can end up back at my house. Hide and wait for me in that little archway across the road. I’ll go in the opposite direction from here, to the river and then double back through some little lanes I know. Wait for me for as long as it takes; my route will be longer than yours and more dangerous.’ He paused and looked Marlowe in the face, seeming to learn each feature. ‘Take care of yourself, Master Greene. We’re all on dangerous ground, wherever we are.’ He spoke in Greek, not well but with feeling. It paid to be on the safe side.

  The pair separated, Aldred clattering with his brass-bound pattens on the cobbles, sending the odd spark across the stone. Marlowe slipped silently into the darkness, avoiding the moon and the occasional guttering torch-flame at street corners. He couldn’t see his shadows now and concluded they must have both gone after Aldred. Feeling a twinge of guilt, he increased his pace. Solomon Aldred was a field agent of repute, a projectioner par excellence and if it sometimes seemed that he had gone a little native, a little too absorbed in the day-to-day business of vintning, it had not slowed him up too much. Besides which, he was very short and therefore likely to be able to hide in places where the normal-sized followers couldn’t go.

  It was only as he was reaching Aldred’s front door that Marlowe paused. He squeeze
d himself into the shadows on the opposite side of the street and watched for a while, letting his eyes settle into using the available light. Was it a trick of the dark, or was the door ajar? There were no lights in the building and even if Aldred had somehow got back first, he couldn’t see him leaving the door open even for a moment, given the circumstances.

  He slid his dagger from its sheath nestled in the small of his back and slipped across the street, watching like a cat for small movements in the shadows. There was nobody. No footfalls, no drunken curses, farts or shouts to mask a secret foe’s approach. It was the open door that bothered him more than his shadows now. Aldred would have snuffed the candle as he left, but he would also have closed the door; if he wasn’t thinking like a projectioner, he would have been thinking like a vintner and a bottle stolen was a bottle that would make him no profit.

  Marlowe pushed the door open with his foot, gently, so that the hinges didn’t creak. The waft of old wine hit him like a wall and he saw a head bob up, black and hatless, against the far window. It flashed for a second only but it was enough and Marlowe drove his left elbow hard against the open door. It thudded on something solid behind it and the groan of pain and the grunt of an exhaled breath told him he’d guessed right. It was a reception committee. He spun round the door and hauled the groaning figure in front of him, jerking the man’s arm painfully up behind his back and holding his blade across his throat.

  ‘You, by the window,’ he shouted in French. ‘Identify yourself!’

  ‘Friend!’ came the nearly hysterical reply.

  ‘What the Hell’s going on?’ It was Solomon Aldred’s voice, calling through the doorway from the street. ‘Marlowe, is that you?’ There was the whisper of a flint being struck and candle light warmed the room. In front of the window, standing behind a stack of wine crates, stood a scholarly-looking man with a wheel-lock pistol in his hand.

  ‘Kit Marlowe,’ Aldred said, crossing the room and removing the gun from the other man’s fist, ‘meet Thomas Phelippes, who should not, I might add, be allowed to play with things like this.’ He waved the pistol rather aimlessly in the air and everyone ducked slightly, by instinct. Aldred half turned and looked towards Marlowe, still tensed behind his captive. ‘I must admit that I don’t know the gentleman whose throat you were about to slit.’