by Trow, M J
They met in the blackest shadow the cathedral had to offer. Aldred was excited; he hadn’t trailed anyone in years and was looking forward to resurrecting old skills. He knew he was a little shorter in wind these days, as he had always been of limb, but age and cunning were on his side against the youth and inexperience of Peregrine Salter.
‘It is Salter I am after, Kit, isn’t it?’ he asked for the hundredth time.
For the hundredth time, Marlowe patiently told him that this was not necessarily the case. ‘Solomon, please listen. I have told four people that Sylvie knows who the murderer is. For all I know, those four could well have told four more, who could have told four more . . . ad infinitum. Do you see what I am getting at? We are looking for anyone creeping out of the College tonight.’
‘Come on, Kit,’ Aldred said. ‘The place leaks like an old sieve. We could end up running all over town.’
‘I think that the gates will be secure tonight, Solomon,’ Marlowe told him. ‘Father Tobias won’t be much of a gatekeeper for many nights, but I think that he will have been reminded of his duties this afternoon and so anyone coming out of the College will be our man.’
‘Salter.’
‘Solomon . . .’
‘Just joking, Kit,’ Aldred said, hurriedly, having seen the projectioner’s right arm slip behind his back. Their nerves were on edge; not only did they have to catch a killer, but also keep Sylvie safe. ‘I will take the back gate, you take the front. Anyone who comes out, we follow. Even if they don’t seem to be going in the right direction. We are dealing with someone here who is cunning, cruel and desperate.’
‘Right,’ Marlowe said, withdrawing his hand and using it to clap Aldred on the back. ‘And, Solomon . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘No heroics. Just keep Sylvie safe. Don’t tackle our man unless she is in danger. Just keep him in sight and, if possible, stop him from getting back in to the College.’
‘Yes, Kit. And the same goes for you, does it?’
‘Very likely,’ Marlowe agreed, slipping from the shadow. ‘See you tomorrow.’
‘Deo volens,’ Aldred murmured.
‘Very likely,’ Marlowe repeated and disappeared round a buttress. After a moment, Aldred followed on soundless feet. The playwright had already disappeared into the rabbit warren of streets.
Solomon Aldred had trailed men before. He’d sometimes lost them, sometimes been given a bloody nose for his pains when someone he was following had doubled back round a blind corner and given him a smack. It was all in a night’s work when you were in the pay, however intermittently, of Francis Walsingham. But this night was particularly foggy, Fall blurring into winter as December drew near and the mists came creeping up from the Vesle and past the quays into the labyrinth of alleyways that men called Rheims.
All there was to do now was wait. It was no night for a man to be waiting outside in the dark. The cold was the seeping kind, that crept into your clothes and drove out every ounce of heat the body in them had stored against the day. The first thing to go was the soles of the feet, with only thin, soft leather to ensure a silent tread between the skin and the slick stone. Aldred could feel his feet becoming numb and eased them one by one, wanting to stamp, but unable to make even the slightest noise. He knew that the front door of the College had a little wicket in it, for use at night. He also knew it had a squeak, so he relied on that to alert him, as he wrapped his cloak around his face to avoid the flash of an eyeball or a tooth giving him away in the dim light. It seemed like hours before he heard it, then he had just a few seconds to unwrap himself from the wool and slide away after his quarry.
The brazen bastard. He was just walking out, bold as brass, yet there was still something furtive in his movements. Aldred couldn’t make him out, especially as he’d had to dodge backwards into the shadows to avoid being seen. He was a large man, certainly, with a satchel under his arm and a hooded cloak billowing out behind him. His buskins clattered on the cobbles as he ducked under the archway into the Rue de Lyon and on across the square. He skirted the outer precincts of the great cathedral, dwarfed, as all men were, by its Gothic magnificence. Vespers would be tolling soon, and the black shadows would flicker with movement as the faithful made their way for their evening meeting with the Almighty. But this man wasn’t going there. And neither was the one who followed him.
Aldred nearly broke his ankle spinning fast to hide behind an archway. His target had stopped, looking from right to left and listening. Aldred had tried to time his steps to the rhythm of the man but that wasn’t easy when he was so much shorter in the leg than his quarry. In the murky light there was always one cobble that gave you away, one stone that slipped. The man tapped on a low door twice and waited. Aldred knew the street he was in but the particular house meant nothing to him. He saw the light fill the street as the door opened. There were muttered words, then the door closed and the street was in darkness again.
Kit Marlowe was pressed to the stonework of a warehouse opposite the back wall of the English College. He was sure of one exit; he had used it himself when he had been up on the leads with Shaw, but he was almost certain there was at least one more. There was no way of watching the fourth side of the building – Aldred needed to be in his position to see the front door and couldn’t alter that – but from where he stood, he could see the other side and the back. Surely, from here he would be able to get his man. He tucked his hands under his armpits for warmth and sank his chin on his chest, breathing long, slow breaths, deep down in his abdomen, just like his old choirmaster had taught him to do.
Time slowed down, but his attention was high. It needed to be; right at the very end of the building, almost on that blind fourth corner, a window went up and a figure, dark against the dark, slipped out of it like black quicksilver and slid away, straight up the hill, straight towards Sylvie. He knew there was no time to waste, so, throwing caution to the winds, he ran in the shadow of the warehouse until he reached the end of the College wall. The light from a window picked out a glint of metal in the road and Marlowe slowed a pace to peer at it. Tiny caltraps littered the road and if he had run through them it would be the last running he would do for a while. Whoever this man was, he was indeed cunning, cruel and desperate. He looked up the hill to see the man he sought disappear around a corner. He gathered himself like a greyhound in the slips and gave chase.
The projectioner-cum-vintner checked his weapons. There were at least two men in that house, that house that was nowhere near the hovel where the harlot Sylvie lived. Perhaps she was inside, however. Perhaps this was a house of assignation and the killer he was hunting knew that. Perhaps, even now, the girl was in mortal danger, her throat naked to the knife. Aldred had a soft spot where women were concerned, Veronique notwithstanding, and his gallantry ruled his head now. Any sensible projectioner would have marked the place out, gone back in broad daylight, used a subterfuge of some kind to gain admittance. But Aldred had long ago stopped being a sensible projectioner; there were those who said he had stopped being a projectioner at all.
He found a window to one side of the house. It looked to be large enough for a grand entrance. The man he had been following had his back to him and he couldn’t, in the candlelight, make out who it was. Another man stood sideways to them both. He appeared to be handing something to his visitor. Aldred could wait no longer. He grabbed the lintel with both hands and, lifting himself off the ground, launched himself, lashing out with both feet so that he crashed through glass and splintered wood and collapsed onto the floor.
In a second, he was back on his feet, trying to preserve anything that may have been left of his dignity. His rapier was in one hand, his dagger in the other. And he blinked at the others, who just stood there, blinking back at him.
‘Dr Shaw,’ Aldred said.
‘You’re the vintner, aren’t you?’ Shaw said, pulling his hood back for the first time that night. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’
‘I might ask t
he same of you,’ Aldred said, adjusting his grip on his weapons, to be better prepared. This man was an unknown quantity; he could do anything at any moment.
‘If you must know,’ Shaw said with a sigh, ‘I am buying this book from Monsieur de la Grange here. The Bursar’s purse strings are kept as tight as a goat’s arse and he’d never let me run to this.’ He held up de la Grange’s volume lovingly, running his hands over the worn leather. ‘Chronica Turcica,’ he said triumphantly. ‘I’ll wager not even the Parker Library in Cambridge has one of these.’
‘And you’re buying this . . .?’ Aldred was trying to make sense of it all.
‘Clandestinely, I admit,’ Shaw said. ‘On my reckoning for Dr Skelton, it will appear as glue, hides and thread. And in a way, it is, although the ingredients were separate many years ago. As for Monsieur de la Grange, secrecy suits him too. If his many creditors, currently happy enough to be so, knew that he was selling off his books to make ends meet, they would be on him like wolves. Now, would you put those blades away and explain why a vintner should give a tinker’s damn about all this.’
‘So . . . you weren’t on your way to see Sylvie?’ Aldred felt he had to check.
‘Who?’ Shaw frowned. ‘No, I wasn’t.’ And he glanced at the de la Grange. ‘Unless, François, there’s something about you I may have missed.’
‘Nothing that you need worry about, Thomas,’ de la Grange said, chuckling. ‘And of course, Monsieur Aldred didn’t miss a single pane of my window. No doubt he intends to pay for the damage before he leaves.’
Aldred stepped over the sill, turning back and peering in from outside. ‘I’ll take it off your bill,’ he said. ‘Terms strictly one day from receipt, Monsieur de la Grange, if you please.’ And, crunching over broken glass, he stalked off into the mist.
Marlowe stopped, confused. He had been sure that the man he followed would make straight for Sylvie’s room, but he didn’t remember the lanes he was running through from his walk with Mireille. It could be that she had been trying to confuse him, or possibly that was the purpose of this circuitous route they were taking now. He decided to stay on his man’s tail and see where that led. As long as he wasn’t a decoy, sent to confuse him, all would be well. And surely, a decoy would take him further from Sylvie’s room. They must be within a street or so of it by now, even though they were approaching from another direction. He set off again, anxious not to lose his man.
As he sped off, staying in the shadows, running on his toes so that his heels, though soft, would make no ring on the cobbles and give him away, a man peeled himself out of the shadow of a doorway. With his hat pulled over his eyes and his cloak wrapped around him, the only pale part of him was around his eyes and they gave nothing away. He watched Marlowe turn the next corner and then was off, the hound chasing the hare; or was it two hounds in pursuit of the same quarry?
Unaware of his pursuer, Marlowe put his head down and ran. His breath was coming like acid into his lungs and down his side he felt the pain of a stabbing stitch. He began to think that Aldred must be right; only Salter, or the missing Abbott, could beat his pace. The other men were older, unfit, used to spending their days behind desks or seated at ease at high table, eating the fat of the land. But then again, the man he followed had kept an equal pace, whereas he had been forced to stop and start, running twice as fast just to keep up. An open mind; that was the important thing.
Around the next corner, he skidded to a halt and nearly fell, his fingers brushing the greasy cobbles in the entrance to the yard. The man from the English College was silhouetted in the doorway of Sylvie’s room, lit by the candle burning there. Marlowe heard him call out.
‘Est-ce que tu fais ce soir l’enterprise?’
Now there was a man who had never visited a prostitute before. The formal request was not what any girl making a living on the street would recognize. Usually it was a grunt and a quick jump, money on the table and out of the door before your britches were laced. Some men didn’t even bother with unlacing, just hauling out what was necessary to do the business and expecting the girl to do the same. He quickened his pace and was flattened against the wall outside the door in a wink.
‘Madame?’ he heard the low voice call. ‘Madame?’ There was a susurration of heavy fabric as the curtain was drawn aside. ‘Madame?’ The wheedling voice was much fainter now and Marlowe sensed rather than heard the swish of metal on metal as the man drew his dagger, to plunge it over and over and over into the shape on the bed.
‘Bitch!’ Ah, now, that was loud enough for anyone to hear. Even Sylvie and Mireille, in their little room under the eaves across the courtyard probably heard it. Certainly, Marlowe’s pursuer heard it, hidden in the darkness of the entry to the yard. He stepped forward a pace, keeping the same distance between him and the projectioner until he stepped into the room. Then the second hound in the chase moved up to take his place, flattened against the wall outside the low door.
The curtain quivered and a dark shape stepped through, the dagger still in its hand. The head was hanging low under its monk’s hood and the shoulders were sagging. But only for a moment. At the sound of Marlowe’s clearing of the throat, they squared for battle and the blade came up to point ahead, exactly at his throat.
Marlowe blinked, then collected himself. ‘Well,’ he said, as though the tip of a blade was not a pace away from killing him where he stood. ‘I had not expected you, Dr Skelton.’
Skelton laughed, a sudden, harsh sound in the tiny room. ‘May I ask why not?’ he said.
‘That is not quite true,’ Marlowe corrected himself. ‘I had you on my list, but you were not at the top. I hadn’t had you down for a passionate man.’
‘What has passion to do with it?’ Skelton said, edging his foot a fraction nearer and with it the tip of his blade. His eyes flickered to Marlowe’s right hand. ‘Please hold your hand – both hands, perhaps, for safety’s sake – out to your sides. Now, without bringing your hands in more than you must, put your hands on your head.’
Marlowe did so. ‘This must look very foolish, Dr Skelton,’ he said.
‘There is no one to see, sadly for you,’ Skelton said. ‘And if it prevents you from stabbing me, you may wear a daisy in your arse for all I care.’
‘Arse, Dr Skelton? I had no idea you could be so very Rabelaisian.’
‘If I can’t sound like a Catholic monk around here, Dominus Marlowe, which of us can? I spend my life being polite, pedantic, all the things that go with the life of a Bursar. Surely, as I am about to slice your throat open, you will allow me a little latitude?’
‘You can curse till God covers His ears,’ Marlowe told him. ‘I wasn’t criticizing, simply remarking that such language is not like you.’
‘But you don’t know what is like me, do you, Dominus Marlowe?’ he asked, his tongue almost dripping with acid as he crept another inch forward. ‘No one knows what is like me, even William Allen, who has known me all my adult life. William, who travels the world, Rome, London, Canterbury – although mostly Rome lately, I confess – who dresses like a roisterer when he is away from the College. William, who has a wife somewhere. Oh, yes, you may look surprised. He wasn’t always as you see him now. And often, about three times a year, he hears her siren call and off he goes. He comes back like the cat that has had the cream.’
‘And yet, you didn’t kill the Master, Dr Skelton.’
‘Ah, Dominus Marlowe. You misspoke. You mean, I haven’t killed him yet.’
Marlowe edged towards the door, just by the thickness of a hair, but Skelton saw and moved forward twice as far.
‘Don’t hurry to get to the door, Dominus Marlowe. I have promised myself a little indulgence, if you will excuse the word. Because I am going to kill you soon, I am going to tell you everything I have done. A confession, if you will. I can’t say that my soul hangs heavy, but it is good for a man sometimes to do a little stocktaking, a little balance sheet of the good and evil he has done. We have until you reach the doo
r. So if you want to know everything before you die, move slowly.’
‘Your balance sheet is rather heavy on one side,’ Marlowe said, mildly. ‘I know mine is a very patchy sort of thing and sometimes it is hard to tell whether things are white or black.’
‘I have never done an evil thing,’ Skelton announced proudly.
Marlowe gestured with his head towards the room beyond the curtain. ‘You stabbed at what you thought was Sylvie quite frenziedly,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Skelton replied, with the air of an injured schoolboy found with his hand in the sugar jar, ‘but it wasn’t her, was it? It was her pillows.’
‘You meant it to be her, though,’ the projectioner pointed out. ‘It might not have been her, even. It could have been some poor, innocent . . .’
Skelton waved the blade at him and stepped half a pace closer. ‘An innocent customer, were you about to say? An innocent customer? Coming here with lust in his heart, spending money that should have been putting bread into the mouths of his children? Innocent! I think not.’ He spat on the floor, spittle trailing from his mouth to his shoulder. He wiped it away with his free hand.
‘So, no one is innocent.’
‘Of course not. We are born in sin.’ Skelton looked infinitely smug and took a step forward, matched by Marlowe by a backwards pace.
‘You decided to clean sin from the English College?’ It was a simple question, but Skelton laughed when he heard it.
‘Yes, let’s just say I decided to clean sin from the English College, shall we?’ he said. ‘That’s all we have time for before you reach the door. In fact –’ he glanced around him – ‘this room is very small. I’m not sure we have time for all of the English College, even. So, we’ll leave out my mother, my tutors – technically only three of them, the fourth was an accident on the stairs, these things happen – and the first few at the College. Let’s go straight to Leonard Skirrell. You have met him, in a manner of speaking.’
‘Stabbed in the heart.’ Marlowe remembered the dark stain on the priest’s chest.
