Traitor's Storm

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Master Marlowe, how can I make all this up to you? Will you take some wine with me? That’s my house over there.’

  It was a little early for Marlowe but the wine was excellent and the house vast, its fittings easily outshining those of George Carey up the road. It spread up Quay Street and along Sea Street, commanding an imposing view up the river. Servants bustled in and out preparing the food for the midday meal. Vaughan clearly liked to live well in all respects – all his maids were comely and Marlowe was sure that he saw at least three suckling pigs on spits before the enormous fire in the kitchen as Vaughan took him on a tour of his property. Like all men revelling in new money, he liked to flaunt it and he felt that this playwright – if such he be – would probably be impressed. As a Customs man he would no doubt see it with different eyes, but letting him see there was nothing to hide at this early stage would probably be all to the good.

  ‘This is Spanish wine,’ Marlowe said, but he could not place the origin of the silver-gilt goblet he drank from.

  ‘It is,’ Vaughan smiled. ‘Oh, I know it’s a little unpatriotic of me to stock it at the moment, with the way the political wind is blowing; but that’s the marvellous thing about trade, Master Marlowe – it is universal, isn’t it? Whoever wears the crown, whoever rides the high seas, people will always buy and sell. It’s in our blood.’

  Marlowe heard the bell of St Thomas signalling the end of another service. ‘So you worship Mammon, Master Vaughan?’

  The merchant looked outraged. ‘I am a Christian, sir, as I am sure you are. If I do not attend church today, it is because I have weightier matters on my mind.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Vaughan leaned forward in his chair. They were alone in the chamber, but it paid to be careful. ‘I will be blunt, Master Marlowe. You are sleeping under the eaves of a traitor.’

  Marlowe blinked. ‘You had better explain that, Master Vaughan,’ he said.

  ‘In pursuance of my business,’ the merchant told him, ‘I am often at sea. The Bowe rests here for the moment, given the impending news from Spain, but usually I am in Calais or Boulogne. The River Scheldt is particularly pleasing at this time of year.’

  ‘Your point?’

  ‘I hear things.’ Vaughan leaned back in his chair, sipping his wine.

  ‘Things about George Carey?’

  Vaughan nodded. ‘The man is Captain of the Wight, Marlowe,’ he said solemnly. ‘Governor, coroner, cousin to the Queen herself.’

  ‘So I understand,’ Marlowe said. ‘But …’

  ‘I have it on good authority,’ Vaughan went on, refilling the cups for them both, ‘that he is in touch with Spain.’

  ‘With Spain?’ Marlowe repeated. ‘How?’

  ‘That I don’t know,’ Vaughan conceded. ‘But not long ago a man named Hasler came to the Island.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He claimed to be a gardener – no, more than that, a designer of gardens. Claimed to have worked for the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Have you seen that so-called knot garden he planted?’

  Marlowe shrugged. ‘I am not much of a gardener myself. It looked quite … unusual, I will concede.’

  ‘You are right. He was no more a gardener than ex-Captain Page out there.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the Bowe. ‘That was a front.’

  ‘What for?’ Marlowe asked. It was not every day that Francis Walsingham’s system was exposed, but Francis Walsingham seemed to have been particularly careless in his choice of Harry Hasler.

  ‘I thought you might tell me,’ Vaughan said, smiling over his cup.

  Marlowe could fence with this man all day and he shook his head. ‘I am a playwright, Master Vaughan. Gardens and whatever skulduggery you have in mind are beyond me.’

  Vaughan let the silence fill the room. Then he said, ‘I believe he was an intelligencer, a spy.’

  ‘Really?’ Marlowe had the innocent face of an angel and he knew exactly how to use it. ‘Working for …?’

  ‘Her Majesty’s Customs.’ Vaughan had cut to the chase at last. The bonhomie had vanished and there was a sudden chill in the chamber. ‘Isn’t that who you work for?’

  Marlowe burst out laughing. ‘I didn’t know Her Majesty had any Customs,’ he said, ‘other than those of course that might stale her infinite variety.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind. What happened to … Hasler, is it?’

  Vaughan shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. He lodged around the corner from here but was last seen up at the castle. After that, no one has seen him,’ Vaughan leaned forward and patted the man’s dagger hand. ‘I suppose what I am saying is, be careful, Master Marlowe. There are things not right about George Carey. I would hate to see you come to harm.’

  ‘So would I, Master Vaughan,’ Marlowe said. He finished his wine. ‘And now, I must thank you and be on my way.’

  ‘Of course.’ Vaughan stood up with him. ‘Shall I have a few bottles of Bastard sent to you at the castle?’

  ‘That’s kind,’ Marlowe said. ‘But I’d prefer a little Rumney if you have any.’

  ‘Aha,’ Vaughan chuckled. ‘I like a man who knows his wines. Because he is a man to trust.’

  Tom Sledd was glad to be back in action, if only to take his mind off his chin. He popped dutifully into the chapel of St Nicholas for morning service, just in case Sir George Carey was a stickler for the recusancy fines, and then got on with it. His stage manager’s eye had worked out that the best place for a Masque was in the courtyard outside the governor’s mansion. They could set up raked seats on three sides like galleries at the Rose and use Sir George’s front door for exits and entrances. They could hang lanterns in the trees because it would be a novelty to stage the piece at night. The carriages of the nobs in the audience could be brought through and left on the Militia ground below the keep and the groundlings would have a chance to marvel at the architecture of the governor’s mansion should the Masque have any boring bits. Not, Sledd told himself quickly, that there would be any of those, because this one would be written by Christopher Marlowe, the Muse’s darling. There would not be a dry eye in the castle.

  Sledd had been introduced to Lady Elizabeth Carey that morning and her eyes had burned through him. Tom Sledd had always found conquests easy and he read a very easy one in the smile of Bet Carey. But Tom Sledd also knew his place. His Johanna was neither here nor there, but the fact that she was actually there and not in the Wight made life easier for him. No, Tom Sledd’s problem was the social chasm that yawned between him and the Careys. Climbing on to a lady like that took breeding or at least a fatter purse than a stage manager possessed. All the same, he worked with more of a spring in his step that day as he saw her in the upstairs windows smiling down at him.

  It was Avis Carey who proved equal to the hour and Sledd wondered if he might engage her back at the Rose. Assuming, that was, that an angry mob of disappointed theatre goers had not even now burned the place down. Assuming that Philip Henslowe had not already given Tom Sledd his marching orders in absentia. The stage manager stretched ropes and jotted down figures on his vellum pad with his treasured pencil, just a short stub now but a gift from Kit Marlowe, so he would use it to its last stroke. Avis hauled and dragged timbers into place at his bidding, smiling at the boy but in a completely different way from her sister-in-law. Two labourers were carrying the wood for the platform from the storehouse, but Avis casually lifted their load, lifting three to their two and standing to attention like a militiaman with the thickest pike in the world while Sledd noted the alignments.

  ‘Do you really need all this timber, Master Sledd?’ Martin Carey asked. He was following the man around with a vellum pad of his own, his quill scratching over the surface as a lackey bobbed behind him with an open inkwell. Tom Sledd stopped and looked at him. ‘I am stage manager at the Rose, Master Martin,’ he said. ‘I do know what I am doing.’

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ Ma
rtin said. ‘But I have to watch the pennies, sir. Sir George is not made of money.’

  ‘Tosh and fiddlesticks, Martin!’ Avis scolded, tucking another beam under her arm. ‘This was Georgie’s idea and it’s a good one. Cut this boy a little slack.’

  ‘I don’t know what slack is.’ Martin scowled at his aunt several times removed. ‘And I have people to cut things. I am a Comptroller. I do the sums.’ He walked over to Avis who looked him squarely in the eye. ‘I’m surprised at you, Avis,’ he whispered, pretending he was out of Sledd’s earshot. ‘I always thought you were of the Puritan persuasion. Are you really happy with this play nonsense?’

  ‘It’s not a play, it’s a Masque,’ she explained as though Martin Carey were the castle idiot. ‘Something different altogether. Besides,’ she suddenly became a snob, ‘all the best people have them performed at their houses nowadays. To have one specially composed by Christopher Marlowe is a particular honour. Thomas,’ she called to the lad, ‘where are you going to put the orchestra?’

  Martin Carey groaned. He should have realized. A Masque meant music and music meant money. Bandoras, orpharions, virginals, citterns, shawms and sackbuts, they all added up to one thing in Martin’s view: expense. A brief thought rushed through Martin’s mind, trailing money-saving opportunities like a comet leads its tail, but he dismissed it instantly. Sir George Carey’s band of three fife players and a drum would not constitute an orchestra, no matter how forgiving the audience. And what with the rumours from Spain, there was no chance that the Earl of Southampton would be lending his men any time soon. He sighed. He really would have to tackle George about it.

  George Carey was in his solar that night, pacing with a stately tread and one hand on his hip. The other was holding a piece of parchment that had been scribbled on by Christopher Marlowe. He cleared his throat and declaimed in his best Governor’s voice, ‘“And here, the Isle doth dance and shine, So far beyond this wit of mine, Encased in silver of the sea, A haven and a home to me. May sun shine on her all her days, And God above protect her ways, And ’ere the world be clothed in night, Send Heaven down to warm the Wight.”’

  There was a knock at the solar door and Carey crossed to it in one and a half strides. ‘Christopher, my boy!’ The Governor clapped the man on the back. ‘This opening of the Masque. Superb! “May sun shine on her all her days.” Immortal. No wonder men speak so highly of you.’

  Marlowe chuckled. ‘It’s not my usual style,’ he said. ‘It’s not even iambic pentameter. The feet are all over the place.’

  ‘I don’t care, I don’t care. It’s riveting. Shall I give you my rendition of it now? See if you think it’s all right? Trinity was many years ago, I fear.’

  ‘I understood you wanted to talk to me about the late Matthew Compton, Sir George.’

  ‘Did I? Oh, yes, of course.’ Carey put the script down. Frivolity left his face and he was the Captain of the Wight again, with cares weighing him down.

  ‘I don’t see how I can help,’ Marlowe said, accepting the governor’s offer of a seat.

  ‘Martin tells me you were useful in the Hunnybun business,’ Carey said, pouring a stiff claret for them both. The candles glittered in Sir George’s eye and in Sir George’s windows. Outside them, torches guttered in the June breeze. Tom Sledd had had them placed there so that the unwary did not kick over his stage foundations.

  ‘I have seen sudden death before,’ Marlowe conceded.

  ‘So have I,’ Carey said. ‘But that’s because I am the bloody coroner, to add to my woes. Difficult to say, in this instance, who the First Finder was. The sexton, blind as a bat? That miserable old Puritan of a vicar? Me? It’s complicated.’

  ‘Suppose you tell me about the deceased,’ Marlowe suggested.

  ‘Well, he was a lawyer, Marlowe,’ Carey explained, as though that said it all.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I won’t tolerate them in my Island. It’s that simple. The damnable fellow posed as a gentleman of private means – you’d be amazed how many such people retire here. They claim the sea air does them good. Well, he introduced himself to me and we got on like a house on fire. I even made the man a centoner in the Militia.’

  ‘And what is your objection to lawyers, exactly?’ Marlowe wondered.

  ‘I’m not a naive man, Christopher. I realize we need laws and that we need people to enforce them. But that’s not what a lawyer does, is it? They batten on to honest folks, bleed them dry with their obscene charges. No, the Wight is better off without them, believe me.’

  ‘So you sent him packing?’

  ‘I did. At our last muster on the Down. Made such a thorough spectacle of the man I was sure he would never show his face here again.’

  ‘I don’t think he intended to show his face, Sir George,’ Marlowe murmured.

  Carey was silent for a moment. ‘Such men must make a lot of enemies,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure they do.’ Marlowe nodded, mentally adding that George Carey must be at the top of the list. ‘Where is his body now?’

  ‘In the charnel house alongside St Thomas’s,’ the governor told him. ‘I can arrange for you to take a look, if you like, in the morning.’

  The storm hit hard that night, driving the white horses of the spray crashing into the rocks around La Coruňa. The Duke of Medina Sidonia’s San Martin and thirty-five of the ships of the Captain-General of the Ocean Sea had already reached a safe haven in the harbour. But the huge vessels of the Levant Squadron, Juan de Recaldé’s Biscayans, the hulks and the galleases, still wallowed out to sea, water washing their decks and their canvas threatening to tear itself to pieces in the wind. Sailors hauled sail in the total darkness since the torches had all blown out and they clattered and slid their way along the decks, making sure the guns were secured and trying to keep the powder dry. No one was shinning up the rigging on a night like this and in the hold, thousands of men who did not know the sea lay crammed like herring in a kreel, fingering their rosaries and listening to the urgent prayers of their priests.

  When the grey morning dawned, the sea beyond the harbour looked like a battlefield. It was as though El Draque himself had sailed among them, driving in on the Devil’s wind to crush the Armada of Spain. Medina Sidonia trotted along the beach with his staff and his keen-eyed sailors. They had an impossible job – to see what was not there. To identify which ships had not found the gentle lee of Coruňa. Not for nothing did men call this place Finisterre, the end of the world. There was timber everywhere, drifting wood that had once been, perhaps, the San Nicolas Prodaneli or La Concepcion de Zubelzu – there was no way of telling. He did not need his comptroller to give him the final tally – twenty-eight ships of the line had vanished without trace, the artillery train and some six thousand souls. They may not be lost forever but Medina Sidonia had no way of calculating that.

  That night, cold and shivering with the enormity of the setback, he wrote a letter to Philip of Spain. ‘At any time,’ his quill flew over the vellum, ‘it would be remarkable; but since it is only June and since this is the cause of Our Lord, to whose care it is being entrusted, it would appear that what has just happened must be His doing, for some just reason.’

  The last four words came to Medina Sidonia as an afterthought. He had been to the Escorial. He knew King Felipe. The man was half-monk himself, with a passageway that probably led to God’s right hand itself. Medina Sidonia knew, as the galloper raced south across Spain with his message, that he had already offended his king with its contents. No sense in offending his God too.

  ‘It was a city, Kit.’ Tom Sledd was demolishing a hunk of fresh bread in the kitchen, ‘or at least a town. I saw workshops, blacksmiths, stalls without number. Ladies and gentlemen of quality were buying there. And stews like I haven’t seen anywhere but Southwark.’

  ‘You must have felt at home, then.’ Marlowe had eaten earlier. ‘Tell me, this Skirrow, the man who took you there … what was it called?’

  ‘Mead Hole. Don’t ask
me if I could find it again, because I couldn’t. Well, Skirrow said he was Sir George’s man. Had your letter to me with him, so he must have been.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he was,’ Marlowe said. ‘It’s just that no one’s seen him, apparently, from that day to this. Fancy looking at a body today, Tom – when you’ve finished your breakfast, of course?’

  ‘Well …’ The stage manager was reluctant. ‘I do have a stage to build.’ Tom Sledd had seen some sights in his short life, some of which could still bring him awake and sweating in the small hours of the morning and he had promised himself some time ago that he would try not to see any more.

  Marlowe looked out on to the courtyard from the Great Hall to where Avis Carey was giving orders, barking and braying at a variety of smocked and jerkined labourers who ran backwards and forwards to do her bidding. ‘It looks as though Mistress Carey has that well in hand,’ he said. He picked up Tom Sledd’s hat from where he had lain it down beside him at the table and crammed it on the lad’s head. ‘Come on, Tom. Don’t tell me you’re squeamish.’ And he was gone, leaving Tom to follow reluctantly in his wake.

  Matthew Compton had been a good-looking man once. Now he was an unpleasant shade of grey and lay on a hurdle in the cold of the charnel house hard by St Thomas’s Church. Tom Sledd’s experience of the dead had included the recently deceased – if men run through with his own blade could be described thus – or the decently laid out, but this was a departure from all that. He realized now what was so unsettling about the dead. They stared back at you with an unblinking gaze that never wavered. Compton’s eyes bulged in his head and above the linen collar, smeared with the clay of Walter Hunnybun’s grave, there was a clear mark of a ligature around his neck. Someone had hooked a rope around it, twisted with a stick to one side and had turned and turned it relentlessly so that the rope tightened and choked the life out of the lawyer who was not supposed to be there.

  ‘Any number of people saw him off at the quay.’ Marlowe’s breath snaked out in the chill of the charnel house, for all it was June and warm outside. The damp had soaked into these thick walls for so many years that winter always seemed to rule inside. ‘Apparently he was put into a rowing boat and towed to the mouth of the Medina. Half the Militia seem to have run along the bank taunting him.’ Marlowe checked the man’s clothing. His Venetians were scorched by the candles that Carey’s sergeant had tied there, but there was no sign of the candles now. The bell had gone too, the one that the same sergeant had draped around the man’s neck as they ran him off the Island. He was a centoner of the Militia, yet there was no sword, no armour, not even the scarlet sash that was his badge of rank.