by M. J. Trow
‘Who’s had the damned impertinence?’ Carey said, finding his Governor’s voice again. ‘Nobody goes in there, except …’
‘Except Master Martin.’ Marlowe finished the sentence for him. It was something playwrights felt entitled to do. He held Carey’s arm. ‘Let me go first, Sir George,’ he said.
‘What?’ the governor frowned. ‘Why?’
But Marlowe did not wait to explain. He kicked open the door and stood there, the dagger still at his back, George Carey’s second-best rapier somewhere at the bottom of the Solent.
‘Where will you run to now, bookkeeper?’ he said softly.
Martin Carey had spun round at the noise behind him. He was wearing boots and a cloak and was busy stuffing papers into a satchel. ‘Master Marlowe,’ he said. ‘You survived. Thanks be to God.’
‘Why don’t you complete the business?’ Marlowe asked him. ‘Why not cross yourself as you did over Hunnybun’s body? Why not say a pro nobis for those less lucky than I?’
‘Martin!’ George Carey was at Marlowe’s elbow. ‘You’re alive! Heaven be praised! Christopher, this is wonderful.’
‘No, Sir George,’ the projectioner said. ‘I’m afraid it’s not. There is a cuckoo in your nest.’ He leaned his exhausted back against the door frame. ‘He stands before you.’
Carey frowned. ‘What are you talking about, Marlowe?’ he said. ‘Martin, what’s he talking about?’
‘Will you tell him, Comptroller, or will I?’ Marlowe asked.
For a moment, Martin Carey dithered, looking from his uncle to the playwright and back again. Then he stood up straight. ‘Let me,’ he said with a look of contempt for them both on his face. ‘It won’t make any difference soon anyway. You saw that crescent, both of you,’ he said, eyes bright and teeth bared. ‘It’s only a matter of time now. All right, the Comendador mistimed the whole thing. Medina Sidonia sent that boy to do a man’s work. But the Captain-General of the Ocean Sea will be in the Wight by now. The rest, as they will say in the centuries ahead, will be history. I’ve been the poor relation for long enough. This time, I intend to be on the winning side.’
‘The feeble Holinshed passages,’ Marlowe said. ‘Your attempt to put your uncle here on the rack. I must confess it nearly worked. What will we find in your satchel there, Master Martin – the accounts of Carisbrooke Castle or letters from the King of Spain that will get you hanged?’
‘Oh, make no mistake, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘It is you who will feel the rope, but not before the Inquisition gets its inquisitive little hands on you. They have ways of hurting you that make Richard Topcliffe’s little toys look like babies’ soothers. Now, get out of my way.’
Marlowe barred the door and folded his arms. ‘What about the murders?’ he asked. ‘Using black propaganda against George here, helping no doubt to stir up the great and good of the Wight against him, blackening the Queen, inviting José de Medrano and his minions, all that I understand. But why kill Hunnybun, Compton and the rest? They couldn’t all have discovered your little plan, surely? A corn chandler, a draper, an inn keeper, a farmer and a lawyer?’
Martin Carey blinked. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘Now, let me go. I have places to be. Friends to meet.’ He suddenly threw his satchel at Marlowe. Normally, the projectioner would have ducked or caught it and his dagger would have been in the man’s ribs. But tonight, his reflexes were slow and his body tortured. He lost his balance and Martin was out on the wall-walk. He turned to his left, but Nicholas Faunt was walking towards him with a deadly step and Nicholas Faunt had a knife in his hand. Martin ducked to his right and George Carey faced him.
‘In the name of God, Martin,’ he growled. ‘It’s over.’ Suddenly, he was being driven back to the wall by a sword blade, the tip pricking his throat.
Martin Carey stood back, arm extended as he had been taught, and held his uncle many times removed as a spider holds a fly. He increased the pressure an extra inch and George Carey was bending backwards, out over the blackness that waited below the wall. ‘I should have done this years ago,’ Martin said. ‘All that clever stuff with letters and innuendo. Steel was the answer all along.’
‘Martin!’ The shriek made them all freeze. Avis Carey was striding along the ramparts, closing in on George and Martin from the right. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘Stay out of this, Avis, you mad old bitch. This has nothing to do with you.’
‘No, Martin,’ she said softly. ‘No, I can’t let you hurt my Georgie. Not after everything.’ Marlowe saw Martin’s arm flex and George Carey jerk back a little more. The Captain of the Wight was a fingertip’s width away from death and neither he nor Faunt would reach him in time. Only Avis could do that and she launched herself at him, taking the rapier point full in the chest as she used her weight to twist the traitor away from her brother. Before anyone could grab them, they both hurtled over the edge of a low wall and into the gaping mouth of the well below. Their screams died away in a hideous echo as they fell foot by foot, bouncing and scraping on the stones as they went. Then there was silence.
‘One hundred and sixty feet,’ George Carey whispered in horror, half his family gone before his eyes. He looked up at Marlowe and Faunt, black and still against the night sky. They closed to the Captain of the Wight and between them helped him down the uneven steps. Bet was waiting there, uncomprehending. ‘I heard a scream,’ she said, staring at her husband’s white face. She looked at Marlowe, who shook his head.
‘Look after your husband, my lady,’ he said. ‘It has been a long, long day.’
Bet put an arm around George Carey’s waist and he leaned on her. They could hear him whispering to her as she led him away. ‘Avis, Bet. She just … Avis.’ She leaned round, raising a hand to his face and the watching projectioners knew she was wiping away a tear.
Tom Sledd poked his head around a flat leaning against a wall of the courtyard. ‘Kit?’ he said. ‘What’s going on? Where’s Avis?’
‘Mistress Carey is dead, Tom,’ Marlowe said gently. ‘She … can I tell you the details later? I must have a drink and for choice a lie down.’
‘Dead?’ Sledd could hardly believe it. Down in the courtyard, Avis had finished her song and then had suddenly leapt to her feet, looking up to the keep above her head. She had turned to Tom, telling him curtly to stay where he was. ‘She just ran off,’ he told them. ‘Said it was family business.’
‘It was indeed,’ Marlowe said. ‘She saved her brother’s life.’
‘Ah.’ Tom Sledd folded his arms and fell into step behind the others as they made for the front door of the mansion. ‘She decided to lay it on the Lord after all.’
George Carey stood on the top step of his entrance way looking every bit the master of the Island. At his side stood the beautiful and notorious Elizabeth Carey, dressed in black but with real diamonds on a net over her hair. Her nipples peeped just a little over the edge of her bodice and as she offered her hand to the departing men, they could see that there was just the slightest touch of rouge. She nodded to Tom Sledd, lingered over retrieving her hand from Nicholas Faunt and pressed Marlowe’s to her bosom, so that for the rest of the day it smelled of civet.
Sir George Carey came down the steps and he walked with them over to where their horses waited. ‘Don’t mind Bet,’ he said to Faunt.
Faunt blustered. ‘I have no idea what …’
Carey caught him a buffet around the shoulder. ‘Don’t think I didn’t know what you and she were up to the … No, let me get this right. It wasn’t the last time we were at court, was it? No, I think it was the time before that.’
Sledd and Marlowe exchanged sardonic glances, as Faunt tried to look innocent. ‘Sir George, I assure you …’
‘Oh, Master Faunt,’ said George Carey. ‘Don’t insult my wife by claiming not to remember. She’s a very memorable woman, I can vouch for that.’
Sledd found his voice. The secret he shared with Avis Carey and her God
was weighing on his mind. ‘Excuse me, Sir George,’ he said, uncertainly. ‘Do you know about … about …?’
Carey looked at him with the whole gulf of station between them, but they had stared death in the face together and he thought he could afford to be generous. Besides, Avis had been fond of the lad. ‘Yes, yes, Sledd,’ he said. ‘I would have had to be blind and deaf not to, wouldn’t you say? And of course you mustn’t forget –’ and he pulled the three closer together and dropped his voice a notch – ‘Ann Oglander’s last three are the living spit of me.’ He turned his head so that they saw him in profile. ‘Got the nose.’
‘Oglander?’ Marlowe asked.
‘Hmm,’ Sir George conceded. ‘An urgent matter at Nunwell. Yes, Master Marlowe.’
The grooms came round from the horses’ heads and gave the three a knee up into the saddle.
‘Keep safe,’ Bet Carey called. ‘Come back and see us soon.’
The three rode together out of Portsmouth with its guns trained on the sea, away from the Island whose spell had held them, and on along the road to the north-east. Two days later, south of the river where the spire of St Mary Overie stood tall over the stews of Southwark, came the parting of the ways.
‘Well, Kit.’ Faunt sat his roan in the shadow of the church. ‘Until the next time.’ He extended his hand.
Marlowe smiled. ‘One day,’ he promised, ‘I’ll tell you about Harry Hasler.’
Faunt’s eyes narrowed. ‘One day I’ll listen to you,’ he said and he made for the Bridge.
‘What do you do for that man, Kit?’ Tom Sledd asked.
The playwright looked at him. ‘It’s better you don’t know,’ he said. ‘Wait a minute.’ He stood in the stirrups and looked to his left. ‘Unless I’m much mistaken, that’s the roof of the Rose over there. Shall we?’
It was a tired Nicholas Faunt who clattered under the archway into Her Majesty’s Palace of Whitehall. A guard in the Queen’s livery held his horse while he forced his aching legs to carry him up the stairs to the first floor and then along the passageway. The Spymaster sat with his spectacles on his nose and a glass of Bastard on the table beside him.
‘Ah, Faunt.’ He reached over and poured a second glass. Back to the surname. That was good. ‘You’ve heard the news?’
‘There were rumours all the way up, sir,’ he said. ‘Good and bad. I half expected the Duke of Medina Sidonia to be sitting where you are tonight and a very different flag over the gateway.’
‘God breathed, Faunt,’ Walsingham smiled, ‘and his enemies were scattered.’
‘They were?’
‘All the way along the south coast in the teeth of contrary winds. Oh, there were a few clashes – Drake, Frobisher, Hawkins, the Lord Admiral, of course – they did their bit. We shall say, when the reckoning comes, that our guns drove them off. They will say it was God’s will. They’re being washed up all around the coast. If it was really their intention to join up with the Duke of Parma, they can’t do it now.’
‘You won’t be needing this, then?’ Faunt said, pulling a piece of parchment from his doublet. ‘It’s a speech I asked Marlowe to write for the Queen; you know, to stir the troops.’
‘Ah, well, no, actually.’ Walsingham took it from him. ‘Her Majesty is still at Tilbury with Leicester’s army. They don’t know what we do, yet.’ The Spymaster’s mind was racing. ‘A good move, don’t you think? We’ll put her in armour, on a white horse naturally, and get her riding up and down, spouting this.’ He read it quickly. ‘Oh, yes, capital stuff. Excellent.’
‘Er … that’s my bit, there,’ Faunt was keen to point out. ‘That “body of a weak and feeble woman” bit.’
‘Of course it is, Faunt,’ Walsingham patronized. ‘But it’s this bit that counts – “I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a King of England too.” She’ll love it. Pure Marlowe! Marvellous!’
Marlowe and Sledd paused at the bottom of Maiden Lane. The flares were lit all along the roadside and sellers of new milk, gingerbread and apples were all calling their wares. The musky smell of Master Sackerson came to them in waves.
‘Well, Tom,’ Marlowe said. ‘Home.’
Tom Sledd hung back. ‘I don’t know, Kit,’ he said. ‘I left without saying goodbye. They probably don’t want me. Johanna won’t want me. She’ll have found someone else, I expect. Henslowe, he won’t want me …’
‘Tom Sledd?’ A head was suddenly thrust out of a window high in the eaves of the Rose. ‘Tom Sledd? Is that you? Get yourself up here this minute. There’s work to be done. Master Kyd is back from his travels and has some changes he thinks will improve his play.’ Philip Henslowe’s smile could have lit the street, without the flares. He forced an arm out and waved imperiously. ‘Come on. Come on.’
Marlowe smiled down as the stage manager slid off his horse and ran up the hill and disappeared inside the theatre. The playwright dismounted too and walked the horses in the same direction, careful to keep on the other side of the road from the Bear Pit. The bear upset the horses; the horses upset the bear.
He hitched the horses to the rail outside the side entrance and pushed open the door. The smell hit him at once. The pig, of course; slightly rotting vegetables … he sniffed … make-up … very old costumes, not washed since the Rose was built and probably even long before that. Tobacco. Fresh smoke. He turned round and there, sitting on the front bench in the gallery, was Will Shaxsper.
‘Will! How has it been here without me?’ Marlowe asked.
‘Have you been gone? I haven’t noticed.’ Shaxsper looked as dejected as always and just a touch balder.
Marlowe leaned on the rail and looked up at the man.
‘Women trouble?’ It was a fair guess.
‘Writer’s block.’
‘Oh, you’ve decided to try the writing again, then? In that case …’ Marlowe turned and pulled his satchel round so he could rummage in its contents. ‘Perhaps these notes might help. Something I had some thoughts on while I was away in the south. An island. A terrible storm. Very strange people. Anyway, see what you think.’
Shaxsper leaned towards the light and flicked through the pages. ‘Hmm,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘Prospero. Caliban. Ariel …’ He looked up. ‘Oh, God, Kit! Not a song!’
Marlowe shrugged and grinned a rueful grin.
‘Well.’ Shaxsper had a sudden thought. ‘How much do you want for this?’
Marlowe spread his arms. ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? Are you sure?’
‘It’s yours.’ He turned to walk away. ‘I call it “The Storm” by the way.’ He made for the stairs where he could already hear Sledd and Henslowe in furious argument about the cost of lumber.
Shaxsper called to him and he turned back. ‘Yes, Will?’
‘You don’t mind if I change the title, do you, Kit?’
