Scorpion's Nest (2012)

by Trow, M J

  Solomon Aldred came out of the back room in his nightshirt, absent-mindedly scratching the small of his back. ‘What are you doing with Master Greene, Veronique?’ he asked, mildly. ‘Do put him down.’

  She turned to him in a fury, releasing Marlowe, who drew a grateful breath. ‘He was airing our scandal in the street,’ she yelled.

  ‘The door is open, sweetness,’ Aldred said, reasonably. ‘You’ve been slamming it again, haven’t you?’ He walked past the woman and his visitor and reseated it on its hinges with a practised hand. ‘You’re here to see our friends, I assume?’ he said over his shoulder to Marlowe. ‘Go on up. Master Phelippes is in Veronique’s late mother’s bed. Doctor Johns is in the best bedroom. You can’t miss them. They are both at the top of the stairs. I will be up shortly.’ He swept an explanatory hand over his déshabillé.

  Keeping a careful eye on the volatile Veronique, Marlowe squeezed between the racks of Aldred’s stock in trade and climbed the narrow stairs. The first thing he saw when his head rose above the level of the last riser was John’s head peering short-sightedly round a door.

  ‘Kit. It is you. I thought I heard your voice outside.’

  ‘Yes,’ the poet said, speaking for the first time since his near suffocation. ‘Mistress Veronique let me in.’ A master at verse, he was also the master of the understatement.

  ‘She is a very assiduous hostess,’ Johns said, without a shred of irony in his voice. ‘Come with me, we will see if Thomas is awake.’

  ‘You have a room each,’ Marlowe observed.

  ‘Thomas couldn’t sleep for his wound and I couldn’t sleep for worrying whether I might roll over and hurt him in the night. I must say, it is nice to be sleeping on my own again. Until recently, I hadn’t shared a bed since I was twelve. And then there were seven of us, so it wasn’t quite the same.’

  Marlowe thought he would let that one go.

  Johns pushed open the next door and peeped in. Then, he spoke to the occupant of the room. ‘Are we awake?’ His voice was pitched a little higher than normal and was full of sunshine and pretty flowers. At least, that was the aim of the exercise. It just came out sounding as though he was a little bit gone in the head.

  From the room, a rather testy voice replied. ‘Well, I am. I don’t know about the rest of us. Men? Are we all awake.’ There was a pause during which Marlowe moved awkwardly from one foot to the other. ‘Yes, it seems we are all awake. Do come in, Michael.’

  Johns looked back over his shoulder at Marlowe. ‘Still a bit cross grained, I fear,’ he said. ‘It must be the shock.’

  ‘Have you ever looked after anyone who has been stabbed before, Michael?’ Marlowe asked as he pushed past him into the room.

  ‘There has never seemed to be the need,’ Johns said. ‘Until recently, there haven’t been too many stabbings in my life.’

  Phelippes’ room was dark and fusty. It smelled vaguely of very old women, perfume which had faded away to leave just the civet behind and just a touch of dried urine. Overlying that was the smell of a rather angry and sweaty male, cooped up beyond the measure of his temper. Marlowe pulled back the bed hangings, wrenched back the curtains at the tiny window and threw it open to the cold morning. Fresh air flooded the room.

  Johns immediately flew to close it. ‘He’ll get a chill,’ he cried.

  Marlowe held him back. ‘He’s been knifed, Michael,’ he said. ‘And that only slightly, if what I hear is right. He should be up and about, not sprawling around in bed. Can you get up?’ he asked Phelippes.

  ‘I can if he’ll let me,’ the code-breaker said, turning round on the mattress to dangle his legs over the side. ‘It’s been like prison in here. All we need is the Queen’s Rackmaster in here and it would be complete.’

  Johns looked mortified. Marlowe took pity on him. Any wound looked deadly at the time. A spot of water and a clean bandage generally brought it down to earth a little. Johns was just an overzealous nurse. ‘He will be all right, if he’s careful,’ he reassured him. ‘Sitting in the chair will be a change and he can always go back to bed if he wants to. Thomas?’

  ‘Yes, please. Anything rather than this dreadful room.’

  ‘It was Veronique’s mother’s, apparently,’ Marlowe ventured.

  ‘She’s welcome to it,’ Phelippes said and, mustering as much gravitas as he could, he swept through the open door, clutching one arm to his side.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Johns asked, waspishly.

  ‘Downstairs. Anywhere.’

  ‘In your nightshirt?’ Marlowe asked, mildly.

  Phelippes looked down. ‘Perhaps not,’ he capitulated. ‘Into the other room, then. There is a table in there we can use as a desk.’ He turned to Marlowe. ‘I assume you are here about the code, rather than to ask about my health.’

  ‘A little of both, to be honest,’ Marlowe said. ‘But more the code than the health, perhaps. Have you got anywhere with it?’

  Phelippes looked at him and raised his eyes. ‘Did I explain?’ he said. ‘Did I not tell everyone that without the original text, a substitution code no matter how simple is bound to fail?’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Marlowe agreed.

  ‘Well then, why are you asking have I got anywhere with it? Where can I have got with it?’ He was beginning to look a little hectic round the eyes and Marlowe ushered him to a chair.

  ‘I understand, Thomas,’ he said. ‘I think I had just hoped that you might be familiar with the pattern of the letters. I thought that . . . I was just hoping, that was all.’ He looked very crestfallen and Phelippes relented.

  ‘There are very many codes that are being used and they are changing all the time,’ he said. ‘Some are literally codes made up for the purpose and everyone who has to read the message has a copy of the cipher. If they use it a lot, they can become very adept at it and can write it as fast as their mother tongue.’ He pulled a piece of parchment towards him, unstoppered the ink bottle, dipped his pen and began to write. After a moment, he passed the parchment to Marlowe. It contained a short line of very tiny writing.

  ‘U.I.J.T J.T B W.F.S.Z F.B.T.Z D.P.E.F.’ he read. He looked at it for a moment. ‘This is a very easy code,’ he said, smiling broadly at Phelippes and Johns.

  ‘Indeed it is,’ Phelippes agreed. ‘It is one of the simplest of all, just a letter ahead in the alphabet from the one you intend to use. As you saw, I can write that as fast as I can write English.’

  ‘Why are the letters so small?’ Marlowe asked. ‘I could hardly read them in this light and my eyes are strong.’

  Phelippes shrugged. ‘Force of habit. Codes are often left in odd places. Sometimes they are written on the edges of the pages of a book and there is little room. They can be any size. Here—’ He held out his hand for the parchment. ‘I’ll do you another.’ The room was silent except for the scratch of his pen and the tinny clink as he tapped the excess ink off against the rim of the bottle. ‘Try that one.’

  The writing was just as small, but this time, Marlowe could make nothing of it. ‘These are just shapes,’ he said, passing it back.

  Johns looked over Phelippes’ shoulder. ‘It says the same as the last one,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know?’ Marlowe said.

  ‘The letters, or shapes perhaps I should say, are spaced the same and the shapes repeat, look, here and here –’ Johns pointed – ‘like the letters do in “this” and “is”.’

  ‘Well done, Michael,’ Phelippes said.

  Marlowe was a little disgruntled. Who was the spy around here, after all? ‘That was a lucky guess,’ he said.

  ‘Most code-breaking is, in the main,’ Phelippes said. ‘Then, you see a pattern and it suddenly unravels.’ He looked up at the two men, who were looking dubious. ‘Well, it does to me, at any rate. That might be why I am Sir Francis Walsingham’s chief code-breaker.’

  ‘True.’ Marlowe laughed. ‘So, you have no clue at all as to what the piece of code I found might say?’

  ‘None.
I have looked at it and cross-referenced it with all the codes I know by heart and nothing seems to make sense. Sometimes it looks as though a word is emerging, but then it is gone again. Either I haven’t cracked it yet, or the code changes with every line. I have known codes which change with every word.’

  ‘When you say change . . .?’ Marlowe was a man of words, but not gibberish. Codes gave him a headache.

  ‘If it is a substitution code, it is made by using a book. Well, not always a book, but usually.’ He looked up at Johns. ‘Just pass me that Aristotle, would you?’

  Johns reached onto the shelf where the remains of his once proud personal library stood, trying hard to keep each other upright. He took one very thumbed and travel-worn volume down and passed it across but Phelippes did not take it.

  ‘Better yet, choose a line at random. Er . . . I suppose you would prefer it if I didn’t write in the book.’

  Johns snatched it back and held it between both palms, eyes wide.

  ‘I thought not. Well, read me a line then, any line at random but from the top or the bottom of a page.’

  Johns flicked carefully through and then paused. ‘This is in English, you know.’

  Phelippes sighed. ‘Don’t let’s be purists, Michael. I am just making a point here.’

  Johns resumed his flicking, and then said, ‘All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion and desire.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Phelippes said, scribbling.

  ‘That’s odd,’ said Marlowe. ‘I had remembered that in a completely different order.’

  ‘So had I,’ Phelippes said, not looking up. ‘That’s why it is important to use a book. Now, look at this. If Michael was not so careful with his books, I would have written this in his copy, but I think it is clear enough.’

  Marlowe took the page from him and saw that he had now written out the Aristotelian quotation and above it, but only on some letters, he had written the alphabet. Then, below, he had written a short sentence.

  ‘Why have you only put letters above some words?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘Because each letter of the alphabet needs a different one as a substitution,’ Phelippes explained. ‘So, you will see at once that A equals A and B equals L. Then the next L is missed out and C equals H. D and E equal U and M respectively, but then we miss the A out because we have already used it and so F equals N. Do you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ Marlowe said, a smile spreading over his face. ‘Yes, I do see. So, you can use this as often as you like, making superimpositions on every page or even every sentence if you want to.’

  ‘Yes,’ Phelippes said, getting excited with the joy of teaching. Then, he sagged. ‘So you also see, I hope, that even something as simple as a superimposition code is impossible without the original text.’

  Marlowe handed him the parchment back. ‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘I have a few ideas. I have made some kind of friend of the librarian at the English College.’

  ‘Just has the one book, does he, in his library?’ Phelippes asked, snappily.

  Marlowe shook his head, though the question was rhetorical only.

  ‘In that case, unless you like the man, don’t worry about making him a friend.’ Phelippes threw down his pen. ‘We have to face facts, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘It will be as well that this code is not important to the safety of our realm, because I won’t be able to crack it. Not with what I’ve got.’

  ‘A stab wound to the chest,’ Johns broke in. ‘You’re exhausting yourself. You should be in bed.’

  ‘Lord, give me strength,’ Phelippes said, pushing himself away from the table. ‘Kit, go and find me the book the code comes from and you will have your murderer in hours.’

  ‘Murderer?’ Marlowe looked confused. ‘I thought we assumed this code was to do with the Babington conspiracy.’

  ‘Yes?’ Phelippes looked at him as a teacher might look at a favourite pupil newly proved to be an idiot; more in sorrow than in anger.

  ‘Well . . . I know murder is part of the case against –’ habit made him look behind him – ‘the Queen of Scots, but, still . . .’

  Phelippes looked at Johns, who shrugged. ‘We had assumed that the person murdering the English College one by one was also our plotter. Is this not the case?’

  Marlowe had been so wary of putting two and two together and making five that he suddenly realized he may actually have been coming up with three instead. ‘I may have been missing the nose on my face,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back, gentlemen, with a text if possible.’ He reached over and patted Phelippes’ shoulder, but gently. ‘We will crack this code, if I die in the attempt.’

  The two men watched him go. They both knew he never said anything he didn’t mean, but one had his head full of the text and the other of the dying as the sound of his boots died away on the stairs.

  THIRTEEN

  Marlowe sensed that someone was there even before he opened the door. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled and instinctively his hand was behind him, resting on the dagger hilt. He twisted the knurled knob quickly and kicked the door open; if someone was behind it he’d have a ringing head by now and probably double vision too.

  In the event there was no one behind the door, just Peregrine Salter sitting in Marlowe’s chair at Marlowe’s desk.

  ‘Good morning,’ the Yorkshireman chirped. ‘I hope you don’t mind. The door was unlocked.’

  ‘Yes,’ Marlowe said with a nod. ‘Unusual around here, isn’t it?’ He checked his books. Allen’s treatise was open to the page at which he’d last read it. The level in his wine decanter seemed the same. His colleyweston cloak still hung behind the door. He crossed to his cupboard and checked the corner. His sword was still there, oiled and ready in its scabbard.

  ‘Master Greene, I’ll come to the point. I’m worried.’

  ‘You are?’ Marlowe closed the door. ‘There are priests a-plenty here to hear your confession, Master Salter.’

  ‘Hah!’ Salter scoffed. ‘You’d expect that, I suppose, at a seminary. No, it’s not a priest I need; it’s some answers.’

  Marlowe opened the decanter and poured them both a drink. ‘If memory serves,’ he said, ‘you’ve been here longer than I have. What can I know that you don’t?’

  ‘A-hah!’ Salter took the glass and raised it in salutation. ‘But you’re not quite what you seem, are you, Master Greene?’

  Marlowe suppressed a smile. No man could walk a tightrope like his for long and perhaps his moment had come. ‘Really?’ he frowned. ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘I’ve been watching you,’ Salter said. ‘You’re looking for somebody.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ Marlowe sighed. ‘Someone to walk this vale of tears with us.’

  ‘Well, you won’t find her here.’ Salter laughed. ‘You’ve probably noticed the English College is singularly short of women.’

  ‘What makes you think I was talking about a woman?’ Marlowe sat on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Oh . . .’ Salter was momentarily nonplussed. ‘Oh, I see.’

  Marlowe smiled. ‘No, I don’t think you do. Tell me, Master Salter, since you have been at the College, how many people have died?’

  ‘Precisely!’ Salter jabbed the air with a triumphant finger. ‘My point exactly. Oh, we all know the Lord takes away as he pleases and who are we to deny it . . . but this? Well, it’s odd.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Salter was about to launch into what he knew, but he checked himself. ‘No,’ he said. ‘First – you. Am I right? Are you what you seem?’

  ‘That very much depends on what I seem.’ Marlowe could fence with this man all day.

  Salter looked him up and down. ‘If I didn’t know better,’ he said, softly, ‘I’d say you were a sworder. A professional killer.’

  ‘Tsk, tsk.’ Marlowe shook his head. ‘My dear, white-haired old mother would be horrified to think that her little boy . . .’

  Th
ere was a silence between them, each of them deciding which way to jump next.

  ‘But you’re right –’ Marlowe blinked first and felt Salter tense, as if he might be next to feel his knife between his ribs – ‘and you’re wrong. My name is not Greene, it’s Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe. The Curia sent me.’

  ‘Rome?’ Salter was impressed.

  ‘I carry His Holiness’ writ.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m still not sure you do,’ Marlowe said. ‘You’re right that things here are not as they seem. Murder is being done.’

  ‘Murder?’ Salter paused in mid swig and crossed himself.

  ‘Three men have died – two scholars and a tutor. Two of them at least were taken since you’ve been here, Master Salter.’

  The Yorkshireman’s eyes narrowed. ‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ he said flatly.

  ‘That,’ Marlowe said, ‘is what they all say. Did you know Father Laurenticus?’

  ‘I met him once,’ Salter admitted. ‘I can’t say I formed any real opinion of him.’

  ‘What about Edmund Brooke?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The scholar who was found dead in his bed the night before last.’

  ‘Was that his name? I’m afraid I don’t have much to do with the scholars.’

  ‘Too juvenile? That’s a little condescending, don’t you think, Master Salter? A few years ago you and I were scholars ourselves, though in my case at least, not much like these lads.’

  ‘No, no, it’s not that. As you say, Master Marlowe, we were seventeen ourselves once and not too long since. No, I’m not a university wit. I was educated privately. At home.’

  ‘By a Jesuit,’ Marlowe remarked, without inflection.

  Salter laughed. ‘Holy Mother of God, is it that obvious?’

  ‘It’s difficult to be educated at home in the true faith these days without a Jesuit. I hope you had a suitable hole for him to skip back to when anyone knocked at the door.’

  ‘As I was going up the stair,’ Salter said, ‘I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d go away.’ And he tapped the side of his nose.