Scorpion's Nest (2012)

by Trow, M J

  Eventually, Aldred spoke. ‘Well? What does it say?’

  Phelippes smiled acidly. ‘Precisely?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Aldred’s reply was full of breathless anticipation, but the others were ready for what came next. Even so, Marlowe, over his irritation, was hard pressed to keep a straight face.

  ‘Wofnut,’ Phelippes remarked. ‘Tufurufuh, arfptun, talwul, marmsa. Seffa, vewuls, g . . . sorry, there’s a tiny bloodstain there, so I’m not sure . . . I think it’s gustufwuh, begpucl, ampnut.’ He paused. ‘Unless I miss my guess.’

  Aldred narrowed his eyes at the code-breaker and suddenly the temperature in the room seemed to drop. Marlowe almost expected to see icicles form on the edge of the table, made from the dripping ink. He knew that someone would do this one day. That someone would underestimate Aldred. He just hoped he could move fast enough to save Phelippes from another nasty stabbing. This time, the smiler with the knife would know exactly what he was aiming at.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Aldred said, ‘I think that people underestimate me. You, for example, Master Phelippes, think that I am an idiot vintner, at the beck and call of a large woman. You think that I have forgotten that I am a projectioner, in the pay of Francis Walsingham. You think I have become a Frenchman in all but blood, and that I don’t notice when I am being made fun of. That would be a very big mistake on your part, Master Phelippes.’

  Phelippes tried a smile and reached a hand out towards the little projectioner, but whether in friendship or to prevent him coming nearer, it wasn’t clear. Johns took a step behind Kit Marlowe, in his view the very best place to be when there might be violence.

  Aldred was still speaking. ‘So, I am wondering, Master Phelippes, why Sir Francis Walsingham sent me here, to sit and watch the scorpions’ nest. There are not many animals which are immune to a scorpion’s poison, Master Phelippes. The best way to live long in the company of the creatures is to be quick on your feet and watch out for the sting. Are you quick on your feet, Master Phelippes? Can you avoid a sting?’

  As Marlowe had been expecting, Aldred suddenly had a blade in his hand, a nasty-looking thing, thin as a needle and almost singing with sharpness. He doubted he would use it, but he could see from the set of the man’s shoulder that his temper was well and truly lost and in moods like this the most phlegmatic man can strike first and think later.

  ‘Do you know how many countries I have lived in, Master Phelippes, how many different people I have been? I speak more languages than you have cracked codes and am fluent in every one. I can swear in Flemish to make a sailor blush. I can order whores in Spain to do things that even they had never dreamed of. I can’t speak your dead Greek or Latin, but where would that get me? Could it save my life? I doubt it.’

  ‘Nollit ergo soliciti est, non intendit laedere,’ Marlowe said, easily, with no inflection.

  ‘Oh, but I do,’ Aldred said, looking over his shoulder at the playwright. He held his pose for a minute and then burst out laughing, sheathing his deadly needle so neatly that no one saw where it went. ‘God’s teeth, Marlowe, you shouldn’t make me laugh when I am putting my little misericorde away,’ he said. ‘I could skewer a kidney.’

  Marlowe slapped his shoulder. ‘Apologize to Master Phelippes,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t tease guests, it is very uncouth.’

  ‘He was making fun of me,’ the vintner complained. ‘He thought I didn’t know what a substitution grid looked like.’

  ‘You play the idiot a touch too well, Solomon,’ Marlowe said. ‘Sometimes I think you have forgotten yourself and believe what you tell the rest of us.’

  Phelippes still looked mutinous. ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ he said, through gritted teeth, ‘that you could have solved this code yourself?’

  ‘God, no,’ Aldred said. ‘Of course not. But that isn’t to say I don’t know one when I see it. I wouldn’t know where to begin when it comes to finding the most popular letter and what word goes where, all of that nonsense.’ He rubbed his nose and looked for a moment like a naughty schoolboy. He wasn’t sure how much further he could push Phelippes. And he wasn’t sure which of them Walsingham would value more, if push really did come to shove. ‘I know what comes in fives, though.’ He stole a look at Marlowe under his sparse lashes.

  Phelippes snorted. ‘Toes? Fingers?’

  ‘No,’ Johns said, having regained the power of speech at last. ‘Kit’s syllables. He writes his plays and poetry in iambic pentameter, with five beats to a line.’

  ‘I’m not alone there,’ Marlowe was quick to admit. ‘But you have a point. I can’t imagine that Father Laurenticus would have memorized anything of mine, though.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have had to memorize it, Kit,’ Johns said. ‘He might have a copy of your translation of Ovid.’

  ‘Hardly likely, surely,’ Marlowe said. ‘My stationer tells me it has sold less than twenty copies and that at knock down prices. I don’t imagine it has reached Switzerland.’

  ‘Twenty copies?’ Aldred spluttered. ‘Kit, you surprise me. You seem to know your way about the world, but you don’t know when you are being gulled well and truly. There is hardly a man alive who doesn’t like a bit of . . .’ He had had a word in mind, but with the man himself in front of him, he was shy to use it.

  ‘Smut!’ spat Phelippes, still in a nasty temper brought on by fright.

  Marlowe looked at Johns, who smiled and shrugged. ‘He’s right, Kit. Every College Master in Cambridge has banned it, which is why it is under every pillow. When you get back to Cambridge, you should see your stationer, I think.’

  Marlowe was touched that Johns just assumed he would be going back to Cambridge, that he would be alive to go back there. There was a murderer on the loose and he was chasing him. But sometimes he worried that it might be the other way around. Nothing was quite what it seemed in this peculiar town and he wondered sometimes as he paced its streets whose footsteps he was hearing; his own, his murderer’s or just the steps of Nemesis.

  ‘I don’t remember it, you know,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you if what you have is from my book. It’s more likely to be from something in Latin, surely, or from some German thing.’

  ‘Let me see,’ Johns said. He took the scrap of parchment and held it to the light. Marlowe took it gently from his hand and turned it round ninety degrees. Johns peered again, then shook his head. He smiled at the other three. ‘My arms are too short for my eyes,’ he said, handing it to Aldred. ‘Can you read it to me, Solomon. Properly.’

  Aldred took the scrap and cleared his throat to begin. ‘Oh, hang on,’ he said. ‘There’s a letter and number outside the square. It’s . . . something one. Does that help?’

  The others shook their heads.

  ‘The first line is W, O, F, N, T. Then comes T, F, R F, H. After that . . .’

  ‘Comes R, F, P . . .’ Johns paused and moved his lips silently. ‘T, then N.’ He drew a deep breath and adopted the nasal tone which men with no dramatic ability adopt when speaking verse and putting heavy stress on some syllables, he intoned, ‘We which were Ovid’s five books now are three, for these before the rest preferreth he. If reading five thou plainst of tediousness, two ta’en away thy labour will be less.’

  ‘First elegy,’ Marlowe said, with a blush on his cheek. ‘Well done, Michael. Fancy you knowing that by heart.’

  ‘Yes,’ Aldred said. ‘Most of us have learned the naughty bits. That Elegy Three, eh? Oh, yes, I’ve got my end away to the tune of those lines well enough. Oh, yes.’

  ‘Thank you, Master Aldred,’ Phelippes said, quickly stopping him in full flow. ‘I think we have the general idea. But I still don’t see why some Catholic priest would have some dirty poems in his possession.’

  ‘Don’t forget, he wasn’t all he seemed,’ Marlowe said. ‘Although quite what he was may never really come to light. But according to his mistress, he had one thing on his mind from dusk till dawn. Perhaps he liked to have something to remind him of her from dawn till dusk.’


  Phelippes looked suitably appalled, then shrugged and turned to his desk. ‘Come, Michael,’ he said. ‘From the letters we have I already know that this is not the key. But somewhere in Master Marlowe’s dirty verses, we will find it. Do we have a copy to hand? Master Aldred?’

  ‘I lent it to a friend,’ Aldred said. ‘And then he . . . you know how these things go.’

  ‘Perhaps there are only twenty copies,’ Marlowe said, slapping him on the back.

  ‘I know it, more or less,’ Johns said. ‘It is very easy verse to learn. Well, it’s the tumpty tumpty rhythm, Kit. Sorry.’

  ‘Tumpty tumpty?’ Marlowe was appalled. ‘We’ll leave you to your ciphering, gentlemen. Shall we, Solomon?’ He opened to door and went out. ‘I believe we may have some projectioning to do. Unless you are all vintner today?’

  ‘I’m never all vintner, Master Marlowe,’ the little man said, passing him in the doorway. ‘I am never all anything.’

  Phelippes and Johns didn’t even hear them go. Johns was reciting at snail’s pace, beating time on the edge of the desk, while Phelippes compiled his charts. Sooner or later, they would get their man.

  As Marlowe made the turn in the stairs, he heard Phelippes ask, ‘By the way, Michael, how many of these Elegies are there?’

  He didn’t hear Johns’ reply but as he reached the shop doorway he did hear Phelippes’ plaintive, ‘How many!’

  FIFTEEN

  ‘He’s not there.’ Thomas Shaw was leaning on the doorframe of Peregrine Salter’s room having heard Marlowe’s knock on Abbott’s door. ‘And I’ve tried twice now.’

  ‘A sudden impulse to hear the old Middlesex vowels again, Dr Shaw?’ the projectioner asked.

  ‘Yes.’ The librarian smiled. ‘An unlovely sound, isn’t it, London? No. Ever since Edmund Brooke I confess I’ve become a little suspicious about who has my books. Master Abbott borrowed a couple when he first joined us and he hasn’t returned them since. My shelves are beginning to look a little devoid of good literature. It’s odd about Abbott. He moans about the breakfast but he never misses it. And he’s usually at Matins, too. Well, if you see him, you might tell him I’m on to him.’ He swept away down the corridor.

  It was nearly Terce and the maids would not be about their business for another hour. Besides, this was Antoinette’s floor and Marlowe knew he could do no wrong in her eyes. He tried the heavy oak door. Locked. He checked the landing, to left and right, then clicked the point of his dagger into the lock and twisted to the left. There was a jarring of metal and the door swung inwards.

  Marlowe was inside in a second. The bed had not been slept in and there was a new, unlit candle in its stick alongside it. Two books lay on the table – the possessions of Dr Shaw, no doubt. Marlowe had not sheathed his dagger. Men died in the English College and their bodies stood in the crypt, like somebody’s macabre collection, awaiting Judgement Day. He whisked the arras aside, ready for anything, but all that was beyond it was a washbasin and towels.

  He rummaged in the drawers of the press. There were two shirts and a belt, along with a pair of hose and an ornate pair of spurs. The cupboard above yielded a plumed hat and a velvet doublet, slashed and lined with silk. Marlowe slid the dagger home behind him. This made no sense. If Abbott had left of his own accord, why hadn’t he taken all his clothes with him? And why had no one seen him go? Or perhaps they had – he had yet to talk to Father Tobias, the eternal gatekeeper. But Shaw had said Abbott had missed breakfast and Matins. But the last Matins was in the small hours of the morning. Did that mean that the Furnival’s Inn man had got up and gone in the middle of the night, or had he been gone for longer than that, since yesterday, in fact? Marlowe slammed his way out of the room. He had places to be, people to see.

  ‘Not there?’ Solomon Aldred was checking the strapping on his wine cart, tugging the strips of thick leather to make sure they would hold.

  ‘Not anywhere,’ Marlowe told him. ‘I checked every nook and cranny I know – including nooks and crannies I’m guessing Abbott didn’t know. Father Tobias didn’t see him leave, but in the kingdom of the selectively blind, I fear Father Tobias is king. His horse is the key.’

  ‘His horse?’ Aldred wasn’t sure which head he had on this afternoon – the projectioner’s or the vintner’s. He wanted to be sure the train of thought was his too.

  ‘John Abbott seems inordinately fond of his horse,’ Marlowe explained, ‘on account of the inordinate amount of money he spent on it. It’s there, in the College stalls, unridden, I’d say, for days.’

  ‘In the habit of riding out, is he, Abbott?’

  Marlowe smiled. ‘I’m glad you brought that up, Master Aldred,’ he said, ‘because I’d like you to look for him.’

  ‘I barely know the man.’ The vintner shrugged before checking the hames of his own horse.

  ‘Come on, Solomon,’ Marlowe said. ‘Don’t give me that. The man’s built like a brick privy and after “how much is that?” his French is pretty non-existent. How far is he likely to get in Rheims?’

  ‘Well,’ Aldred said, screwing up his face, ‘I could put the word out, I suppose. I know a few people. It’ll cost.’

  ‘See Phelippes about that,’ Marlowe said. ‘I’ve been here too long. I’m fast running out.’

  Aldred sighed. ‘Yes, Walsingham’s slush fund doesn’t go far, does it? But, tell me, Master Marlowe. This Abbott. Why the fuss? Is he our man?’

  Marlowe looked at him. ‘He is a man, certainly,’ he said.

  ‘No, I mean, is he the bloke we’re after, conspirator and killer?’

  ‘What makes you think they’re one and the same?’ Marlowe asked him.

  And Solomon Aldred shook his head. Today, he was definitely a vintner.

  ‘Dominus Greene.’ Father Tobias stood in the playwright’s doorway, looking for all the world like the gatekeeper to some faerie world. Marlowe had not seen him other than hooded and girdled, his robe sometimes caught up in the rope around his middle, to keep it out of the mud if the day had been wet. Now, he stood there, his hood thrown back, his white hair a nimbus around his head, with the light behind him. ‘There is a boy here –’ and he reached to one side and dragged an urchin into view by the ear – ‘who says he has something for you from the vintner. But since he doesn’t seem to have a bottle about him, I assume it must be a reckoning.’ He clapped a hand over both of the boy’s abused ears and mouthed over his head, ‘Don’t let him rook you, Dominus Greene. The man is not to be trusted.’

  Marlowe unwound himself from his bed, where he had been resting with a book, a brief interlude from his usual frantic scurry through life. ‘I have bought no wine from Master Aldred,’ he reassured the old man who was simultaneously releasing the boy’s head from his iron grip while the lad still had some feeling in his ears. The child staggered slightly, then righted himself, tipping his head experimentally from side to side, as though emptying water from a jug.

  ‘Then this boy is up to no good,’ Father Tobias rumbled, reaching for a lobe to tug.

  ‘Let me find out what the lad is after, Father Tobias,’ Marlowe said, ‘and if his purpose is indeed nefarious, I will bring him straight to you for a good, sound whipping. Does that seem like a bargain to you?’

  The old monk looked dubious, but wandered off down the passageway regardless, looking back every few steps to see that the lad was not stuffing the College silver down his ragged britches.

  ‘Thank you, Monsieur,’ the boy piped in an uncertain treble. ‘He is mad, that one. My friends and I make sure we use the back gate if we wish to enter the College.’

  Marlowe couldn’t resist a smile. He had known that there was at least one other way into the English College from the street, and now it seemed there were even more. But still, a projectioner is a projectioner, and there was a puzzle here. ‘Why do you want to come into the College?’ he asked.

  ‘Some of us have sisters who work here, or aunts. If they work in the kitchens, there are good pickings to be had
. If we can save our mothers having to feed us a plate or two, it is worth running the gauntlet of the Old One.’

  ‘And the ones who don’t have sisters and aunts?’ Marlowe probed.

  The boy ducked his head. ‘There is money to be made, Monsieur, if you don’t mind how you make it.’ There was a heavy silence. ‘For myself, I have two sisters in the College. Both in the kitchens. And my father, he has a stable. We are not poor. I do not need the money.’

  Marlowe realized he had touched a raw nerve, but it was nothing he hadn’t expected. A College full of men sworn to celibacy was bound to hold a few who found it too much for their willpower. And some had strange tastes; not everyone was as straightforward in their requirements as Father Laurenticus. ‘I can see you don’t,’ he said, looking down into the boy’s anxious eyes. ‘What have you got for me, then? Something from Master Aldred, is it?’

  ‘He said to bring it straight to you and you would give me five blancs.’ The boy looked hopeful, but not sanguine; he had learned through bitter experience that any promises of money made by Solomon Aldred were unlikely to come true.

  ‘I’m sure we can do better business than that,’ Marlowe said, ferreting out a gold coin from the purse at his hip. ‘Now, what do you have for me from Master Aldred?’

  The boy reached into his jerkin and brought out a piece of paper, folded and folded then folded again. It was held closed by a dab of red wax, with the imprint of Phelippes’ ring on it; a knot being cut in two by a sword. Marlowe could hardly contain his excitement and also his amazement. For the code-breaker to have an answer this soon was almost unbelievable. He took it from the boy with studied casualness, twirling it in his fingers as if he didn’t care if he ever got round to opening it or not. He spun the coin in the boy’s direction. The lad had it in his hand and was halfway down the corridor almost before it had left the projectioner’s fingers. Marlowe turned into his room, shut the door and sat down at his table, turning the parchment wax up, ready to break it open. Then he stopped, went back to the door and turned the key. He pulled the curtains across the window and lit the candle. He almost felt as though he should mark this moment somehow. The end to the puzzle of where Babington’s man had gone, or the answer to who had killed Laurenticus and the others; either or both could be inside this small parcel.