Scorpion's Nest (2012)

by Trow, M J

  ‘Perfectly,’ said Marlowe.

  Shaw nodded, still watching the man’s face. Then he took a deep breath as a man might leaping into the abyss and pushed the door open. The light hit Marlowe like a wall and the noise followed it. Ahead was a huge frame with mechanical arms that slid and beat out a staccato refrain. Marlowe knew now what the strange smell was. It was paper and wet ink and the glue that stationers use to bind their books.

  ‘A printing press,’ he said, as much to convince himself of the reality of this bustling workshop as anything else. ‘Dr Allen’s tracts are printed here.’

  ‘They are,’ Shaw said. ‘But that’s not its main purpose.’ He nodded at the monk scuttling past with sheaves of parchment. ‘This –’ he reached across to a finished book – ‘is its main purpose.’ And he handed the book to Marlowe.

  ‘The Rheims Bible.’ Marlowe smiled.

  ‘You’ve seen one?’

  ‘Personally, no. But I know men who have.’ He looked at Shaw. ‘Some of them are dead.’

  The librarian shook his head. ‘Is that bitch of England still burning people for following the faith?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, it’s far more subtle than that.’ Marlowe flicked through the newly inked pages and sniffed them. ‘The late Queen Mary, may God bless her, used the flames. Elizabeth works through the law.’

  ‘The law!’ Shaw almost spat his contempt.

  ‘And her minions. People like Sir Francis Walsingham.’

  ‘Ah, the spymaster.’ Shaw nodded grimly. ‘You know he’s top of the list, don’t you?’

  ‘The list?’

  ‘Parma’s list. When the invasion comes – and it will – the Duke of Parma has some very special treatment in mind for Francis Walsingham.’

  Marlowe smiled. ‘I should like to see that.’

  ‘So should we all,’ Shaw agreed. ‘The man is often in my prayers. In the meantime, we do what little we can. Printing the Bibles here is relatively safe as long as the Catholic League holds Rheims.’

  ‘And if they fail?’

  ‘Oh, ye of little faith,’ Shaw muttered, with unconscious accuracy. ‘If they fail, the English College will have to move on again. It’s not bricks and mortar that make this place, Greene, it’s our unshakeable belief.’

  ‘Amen,’ Marlowe echoed. ‘And now,’ he said, placing the Bible back on its pile, ‘Edmund Brooke.’

  Shaw sighed and ushered Marlowe out of the printing room. The heavy door killed the rattle and thud of the machine instantly and they were in the half dark again. At first, Shaw took them back the way they had come. Then he turned suddenly to his left and began to climb a tight spiral of stone steps that looked more in keeping with a castle than a town house in the heart of Rheims. Another door at the top led out onto the leads and the whole city lay at their feet, twinkling as men lit their fires and smoke began to drift upwards to wreath into the fog that was breathed out by the chilly waters of the Vesle. It was a scene to make even the happiest man feel melancholy, up here on the cold roof, whilst down below, his fellow creatures were tucking themselves up warm before their own hearths. It wasn’t just the chill that made Marlowe hug himself into his doublet against the clammy air, but a breath of his own mortality wafting softly on the back of his neck. He shook himself and turned to the librarian as the man spoke.

  ‘What do you want to know about Edmund Brooke?’ the librarian asked.

  ‘Who killed him,’ Marlowe said, simply.

  Shaw leaned forward, resting both elbows on the parapet so that he looked not unlike the grinning gargoyles on the great cathedral which dominated the skyline from almost every rooftop in Rheims. ‘God,’ he said. ‘We cannot fathom His ways.’

  Marlowe adopted the same position and smiled at the librarian. ‘In the macrocosmia, yes,’ he said. ‘But the devil is in the detail. God didn’t press a pillow over that boy’s face and hold it there until he died.’

  Shaw said nothing, just stared out over the darkling city, the muscles in his jaws flexing.

  ‘I was there, Dr Shaw,’ Marlowe reminded him. ‘As were you. Allen’s “apoplexy” won’t work here. We are discussing murder, you and I, whether we like it or not.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’ Shaw pushed himself upright from the parapet and looked at Marlowe from his full height. ‘Not one bit.’

  Marlowe sighed, taking stock of the situation. Not for the first time in his life he wondered whether perhaps he had made a mistake to let someone have the advantage of him. But, he reasoned, he was still here to tell the tale, so either his mistakes had been few or his luck inordinate. He decided to plough ahead. ‘I have heard it said,’ he murmured, ‘that if you want to know how a man died, you should look at how he lived. What do you know about the late Edmund Brooke, Dr Shaw? How did he live, would you say?’

  ‘I know precious little, I’m afraid.’ He caught Marlowe’s look. ‘I shut him up at dinner because like all scholars he had the habit of opening his mouth a little too wide. You were new then, Greene; I knew nothing about you.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now, I have revealed to you my inner sanctum. And I don’t do that to everybody. I pride myself on being a judge of men. The secrets of the English College are safe with you, I’m sure.’

  ‘Not all its secrets, Doctor,’ Marlowe said. ‘There are some that are denied to all of us.’

  Shaw fell silent, thinking. Then he turned again to the parapet and the city. Stars were peeping in the patches of clear sky, winking silently on and off as wisps of mist drifted over the streets and houses, as if there were no strife in the world. No Catholics. No Protestants. Just the eternal motion of the Heavens presiding over all. ‘Brooke may have been a thief,’ he said. He blew out a breath, and with it any indecision he had felt over sharing what he knew with the man at his side. ‘It’s nothing I can prove. It’s just that a number of volumes have been disappearing recently. Nothing as obvious as The Chronicles of course, but lesser works, valuable in their own right. Always after Master Brooke had been working in the library.’

  ‘So the volume in his room . . .?’

  ‘Was not one he should have had,’ Shaw admitted. ‘I try to be charitable, Dominus Greene, but even I have to admit that some men are just naturally light-fingered.’

  ‘How would Brooke have disposed of these books?’ Marlowe asked. ‘There was nothing in his room, except . . .’

  Shaw looked at Marlowe in the gathering gloom. ‘Except what?’

  Marlowe smiled to himself. It was all falling into place. ‘Except a little hidey-hole about so big.’ He held up his hands to sketch a box shape in the air and then realized it was almost too dark to see. ‘About the size where a book might fit. It was in the floor of his wardrobe.’

  Shaw nodded. He wasn’t surprised. ‘There are a number of stationers in the town, booksellers by another name,’ he said. ‘Any of them would have made a killing out of the lad . . .’ His voice tailed away as he realized what he had said.

  A chapel bell began tolling from the quad away over the gabled roof behind the pair.

  ‘Vespers,’ said Shaw. ‘Shall we?’ He gestured with his arm towards the little door back onto the winding stair.

  ‘You go,’ said Marlowe. ‘I have other business tonight, Dr Shaw. And thank you.’

  ‘For what?’ the librarian asked.

  ‘Your honesty,’ Marlowe told him. ‘Your openness.’

  ‘There’s a quicker way down,’ Shaw said. ‘If you go that way and down the steps at the end you’ll find yourself in the quad, just behind the main gate.’

  Marlowe nodded and took his leave. At the bottom of the spiral steps he was out into the night air and nearly collided with a scholar leaning against a stone pillar. The lad looked pale and ill in his fustian and he mumbled something to Marlowe before he turned away to vomit in the shadows.

  ELEVEN

  Marlowe was studying the latest tract from Dr Allen that evening when he heard the rap at his bedroom door. He placed his da
gger within easy reach and called, ‘Yes?’

  Gerald Skelton stood in the doorway, a grim look on his face. ‘Dominus Greene.’ He nodded to him. ‘The Master would like a word. Now, please.’

  Marlowe looked at the calibrated candle. ‘It’s late, Doctor,’ he purred. ‘Can’t it wait?’

  ‘No, Dominus Greene.’ Skelton was firm. ‘It can’t.’

  Marlowe closed the pamphlet and snuffed out the candle, gesturing to Skelton to lead the way. They padded up a staircase and along a gallery decorated with the martyrdom of Catholic saints, heads lying on pavements, executioners’ swords crimson with holy blood. At the end, they turned sharp left and began a descent into darkness. Marlowe hadn’t been this way before. The warm wood of the galleries had been replaced by the cold, damp stone of northern France and they were turning a tight spiral on the worn steps. Skelton carried the candle but knew his way instinctively and Marlowe was expected to follow suit. At the bottom, the Bursar swept around a pillar to his right and tapped on an oak door straight ahead. There was a muffled response and Skelton opened the door with a rattle of iron.

  The dimmest of candles burned in a tiny chapel whose plain white walls glistened with moisture. The solitary flame flickered on the agonized face of St Peter, spreadeagled on his cross, upside down because he was not worthy to suffer the same fate as his Lord. The Master of the English College was at his devotions before the altar with its damask cloth and crosses. Marlowe heard the door crash closed behind him and the screech of a bolt. He was aware of two burly monks taking up positions on either side of the door, arms folded, hoods forward over their heads. Marlowe recognized muscular Christianity when he saw it; he’d known it all his life, from the early days at the King’s School, Canterbury, and nothing surprised him any more. He wondered, very briefly, if either of these muscular Christians had been the one to take a slice out of Thomas Phelippes.

  Allen crossed himself before the altar, turned and faced Marlowe. Then he walked over to a sedilia and sat down. Skelton stood next to him, his arms folded like the heavies at the door. ‘Doctor Skelton has noticed, Dominus Greene,’ Allen said, his ringed fingers twitching on the arm of his chair, ‘that you do not attend divine service.’

  Marlowe cast a glance at the Bursar. Clearly, the man was more observant than he looked. ‘I am not a monk, Dr Allen,’ Marlowe excused himself. ‘You wouldn’t expect me to follow the Orders.’

  ‘The Orders, no,’ Allen conceded. ‘But Doctor Skelton tells me you don’t attend any service, not even Matins. And in the time you have been here, you have taken Holy Communion only once.’

  ‘I have been remiss,’ Marlowe agreed, ‘for which I apologize.’

  ‘Oh, I think you have rather more to apologize for than that, Dominus Greene,’ the Master said. ‘You see, I received a letter recently from . . . let’s just say a friend. In the University of Cambridge. Gerald.’

  Skelton produced a sheaf of paper from his lawn sleeve and cleared his throat. ‘Dominus Robert Greene is a scholar at St John’s College, not Corpus Christi –’ he was reading by the bad light, squinting at the tiny writing, but he was clearly familiar with the contents of the letter – ‘and as I write, is very much alive and well. And residing currently here in Cambridge. I learn that he is reasonably travelled in Europe and has nonsensical ambitions to become a poet and a playwright.’

  ‘Nonsensical indeed,’ Marlowe said with a laugh.

  ‘What is the date of that missive, Doctor Skelton?’ Allen asked.

  ‘Eight days ago, Master,’ the Bursar told him.

  ‘Yet you have been with us now for sixteen,’ Allen was scowling at Marlowe. ‘I think it’s time you told us the truth, sir. I will not have lies in this College.’

  ‘Will you not?’ Marlowe grunted. ‘Is that why three men are dead? And why you had me followed the other night?’

  Allen’s face changed not a jot in the candlelight. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  ‘Christopher Marlowe,’ Marlowe said. ‘Scholar of Corpus Christi College.’

  ‘The same Christopher Marlowe you claimed to have killed?’ Allen asked. ‘The blasphemer and atheist?’

  Skelton’s jaw dropped. He knew none of this but Allen was in full flow. He’d long ago skated over secrets he’d heard in the Confessional, if only for the greater good. There was no going back now.

  ‘Would I be here,’ Marlowe asked the Master, ‘if I were either?’

  ‘Then why are you here?’ Allen asked.

  Marlowe straightened, then jerked his head in the direction of the monks at his back, ‘Gog and Magog here,’ he said. ‘Can they be trusted?’

  ‘Implicitly,’ Allen said with a nod.

  ‘Very well, then. You have a spy in your midst, Dr Allen – an intelligencer in the English College.’

  ‘I knew it!’ Skelton shouted, then fell abruptly silent at a wave of the Master’s hand.

  ‘Who is it?’ Allen asked.

  Marlowe chuckled. ‘If I knew that, Master,’ he said, ‘I’d have left his head on your high altar by now.’

  ‘Sacrilege!’ Skelton was appalled.

  ‘We live in a sacrilegious age, Bursar,’ Marlowe rapped. ‘Ask friends Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin. Every other jack’s an Anabaptist. Have you all forgotten why you left England?’

  ‘If you weren’t telling the truth before,’ Allen said, ‘how do we know you’re telling it now?’

  Marlowe frowned, then slipped his hand into his purse and noted the monks behind him edging forward. ‘Perhaps this will help. You have a lovely reading voice, Doctor Skelton. Read that to the Master.’

  Skelton took the document Marlowe had passed to him. He saw the seal, the ribbon, the keys of Peter embedded deep in the wax. ‘You know the imprimatur of the Curia?’ Marlowe asked him. Skelton showed it to Allen who recognized it too and nodded. ‘Read it,’ he commanded.

  Skelton unrolled the parchment and began. ‘To Our Well Beloved Son in Christ, Dr William Allen.’ He was reading in perfect Latin. ‘Greeting. By these precepts know that our son Christopher Marlowe has Our Dispensation to investigate the English College now at Rheims in Our belief that the antichrist is abroad in your cloisters. It is Our wish that you extend him every assistance to root out the Devil in your midst. May the Lord be with you in this time of Our trials, etcetera, etcetera . . .’ His voice trailed away.

  Allen glanced at the document. ‘There’s no signature,’ he said.

  ‘You know as well as I do –’ Marlowe folded his arms – ‘His Holiness only uses his quill on letters close. You and I, sadly, do not command such status.’

  Allen wasn’t looking at the paper any more, just at Marlowe. ‘Top left,’ he said to Skelton. ‘The initials there . . .’

  Skelton squinted at it, turning it towards the light. ‘ACG,’ he said. ‘GC.’

  There was a silence. Both men looked at Marlowe. ‘Alessandro Castel Giovanni,’ he said with a sigh, ‘Gran Cardinale. When I was in His Eminence’s palace last, I had the honour to dance with his daughter.’

  Skelton tutted and rolled his eyes.

  ‘Now, Gerald.’ Allen smiled. ‘Who are we to judge?’

  ‘When the Curia finally sees sense and makes you a Cardinal, Master—’

  Allen cut the man short. ‘What do you need, Dominus Marlowe?’

  ‘To find the Devil in your midst,’ Master,’ Marlowe answered. ‘And I must be allowed to do that in my own way. I won’t get very far if I’m prostrate in the chapel morning, noon and night.’ He glanced at the monks behind him. ‘Or, if I’m followed on an evening. My inquiries may well take me beyond the College walls.’

  ‘You won’t be hindered,’ Allen told him. ‘Gerald, I want you to give every assistance to Dominus Marlowe.’

  ‘No, no,’ Marlowe said hurriedly. Being marked out for special attention would not get him very far in his quest. ‘Something tells me I’ll get further as the runagate Robert Greene, failed poet and playwright than as a Papal Nuncio. People will
be off their guard. Don’t change your treatment of me in the slightest, please, either of you. I must maintain anonymity at all costs. Doctor Skelton, please feel free to carry on hating my guts as publicly as you wish.’

  Allen considered it for a moment, then nodded. ‘Genistho,’ he said in Greek. ‘Let it be so.’

  Skelton half bowed, an ironic smile on his lips. Nothing would please him better than to continue to hate Marlowe. The projectioner heard the bolts slide back behind him and the heavy door creak open. He crossed himself before the altar and waited for the Papal letters to be returned. They weren’t. Instead, Allen slipped them into his sleeve. Marlowe bowed and made his way, groping for the stairs. Now, urgency quickened his steps. He had perhaps two weeks before Allen sent his messengers to Rome and before they got back, bearing the message that His Eminence the Gran Cardinale Alessandro Castel Giovanni didn’t know Kit Marlowe from a hole in the ground.

  Robert Greene had a plan. He had had plans before when trying to gain entry into Kit Marlowe’s erstwhile rooms, but he had every confidence that this one would actually work. He had tried walking in boldly. He had tried creeping in and hiding, waiting for dark. This time, he would use a subterfuge as clever as a Trojan horse, and hopefully as successful. He knew the very place along the wall where the scholars crept in after hours. He knew the Proctors lay in wait for them but also knew that there were more scholars than Proctors. If he could insinuate himself in the crowd, climbing over the wall and into the tree at the right point, he could avoid the Proctors and be up the stairs in a trice. He might have to buy said scholars a few drinks first, to gain their confidence, but all should be well.

  The first flaw in his plan was that he had severely underestimated the capacity for alcohol of the typical Corpus Christi scholar. His purse was deeper than theirs, but even so they had almost bled him dry by the time they all wandered, arms around each others’ shoulders, singing snatches of catches down Bene’t Street towards the crumbling wall of the College. Lomas and his cohort didn’t even bother to conceal themselves. The smoke from their pipes drifted over the wall and they could be heard talking together from out in the street.