Black Death

by M. J. Trow

  ‘I am,’ Marlowe half bowed, ‘though whether I am that Kit Marlowe depends on who you’ve been talking to.’

  ‘I’ve been talking to Dominus Greene,’ the woman said. ‘He was a University scholar, you know.’

  ‘So he kept telling me,’ Marlowe said. ‘You are?’

  ‘Not a university scholar,’ she scowled. It was an unnecessary statement, but it gave Marlowe a sense of where this woman’s loyalties lay. ‘You’d better come in.’

  Marlowe did. The ceiling was low and he had to duck as she led him along a passageway and down stone steps into a kitchen. If there was refreshment here, Marlowe was not offered any. The fire was burning sullenly under the soot-caked kettle, which was not so much singing as humming a miserable dirge.

  ‘I am Eliza Isam,’ she said, offering her visitor a chair at least. ‘Dominus Greene’s landlady.’

  ‘Charmed,’ Marlowe smiled.

  ‘We’ve got the Pestilence here in Dowgate,’ Mrs Isam said. That was the second time that Marlowe had heard that this morning.

  ‘I saw no cross on your door,’ he said; and he wouldn’t have crossed the threshold if he had. There was not much that rattled Kit Marlowe, but a slow, agonizing death from a cause no one knew; that rattled him.

  ‘Nor will you. Dr Forman says the humours are in the right balance in this house. The Pestilence holds no fears for me.’

  ‘Dr Forman?’ Marlowe had heard that name somewhere.

  ‘The plague doctor. Actually, he’s more than that.’ A smirk had spread over the hard features of Dominus Greene’s landlady, a smirk that developed into a smile. ‘He’s a magus. Understands the stars – or, as he calls them, celestial bodies. He’s ever so clever. And handsome! Ooh, he’s lovely!’ In a few sentences, the morose Mrs Isam had changed into a giggly girl, all dewy-eyed at the memory of the gorgeous Dr Forman.

  Marlowe knew all about men like him. They didn’t have to be magi to have a way with ladies of a certain age. The tragedian Ned Alleyn had cut his teeth, if that was the right phrase, on more rich widows than Marlowe could – or would – shake a stick at. Even Richard Burbage, not so handsome, not so elegant in the calf, not as slick of tongue, was rumoured to have a nice little thing going with one Mistress Quick down at Bow. She was a leaving of Shaxsper’s, or so rumour had it, but when a man was being kept in hose and a manner of other fripperies, who was counting? Marlowe toyed with bursting Mistress Isam’s bubble, but she was still glowing at his elbow and he relented.

  ‘Did the good doctor officiate at Master Greene’s passing?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, he was in the area. I knew it wasn’t the Pestilence, anyway. Dominus Greene had been ill for days but he didn’t show the signs. No black buboes. No pus. No shivering. Nothing like that.’

  ‘What signs did he show?’ Marlowe asked.

  A quizzical expression spread over the landlady’s face. ‘Was you at University with Dominus Greene?’ she asked.

  ‘Same University,’ Marlowe nodded. ‘Different college. He was at St John’s, I at Corpus Christi.’

  ‘He never spoke of you,’ the landlady said, ‘until the end, when he decided to write that letter.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Marlowe was almost afraid to ask.

  ‘Not a lot. He said you would understand his problem. You, of all people, he said. I told him he could confide in Dr Forman if he needed to clear his mind, him being in tune with the celestial bodies and all, but no, he must needs write to you and no one else, he said.’

  It was getting hard to keep this conversation under control. Mistress Isam was like some demented mayfly, darting here and there, always coming back to her magus. ‘His problem?’

  The woman shrugged. ‘He was a deep one, was Dominus Greene; you probably know that.’

  ‘We’d rather lost touch,’ Marlowe said. ‘Did he have any family?’

  ‘His wife, Doll.’ Mistress Isam’s face had resumed its scowl. Clearly, the memories of the luscious Forman had vanished, chased away by the thoughts of Greene’s erstwhile spouse. ‘She’s no better than she should be, you mark my words.’

  ‘Consider them marked,’ Marlowe said. ‘Children?’

  ‘Fortunatus. Stupid name for a snot-nosed bastard, I always thought, but it wasn’t my place to say so.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘God knows,’ Mrs Isam shrugged. ‘Dominus Greene was estranged from Doll and Fortunatus lives with her. I don’t know where.’

  ‘No one else?’ Marlowe asked.

  The landlady shook her head and her lugubrious cheeks trembled, taking a few seconds longer to stop than could be considered attractive.

  ‘What about friends?’

  Mrs Isam knew that Robert Greene didn’t have a friend in the world, but it wasn’t her place to say that either. ‘There was only one cove kept hanging around. Hoity-toity he was. Giving orders like he owned the place. And me, the owner of this house since Mr Isam, God rest his soul, departed this vale of tears.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Another doctor,’ she said and her eyes briefly lit up again. ‘Oh, not like Dr Forman, of course. What was his name, now? Harbottle? Shrewsbury? Name from the Bible, that I know. Job, was it? Ezekiel? Not Nebuchadnezzar, surely? An angel …’ She pursed her lips and tapped her chin with a wrinkled finger. ‘Could it have been …’

  ‘Harvey?’ Marlowe asked. ‘Gabriel Harvey?’

  She looked at him and seemed about to shake her head again, then thought twice. ‘I believe that might be the name, yes. That, or close to it in any case. Gabriel Harvey, or close to it, yes, certainly. It might have been Azrael …’

  But Kit Marlowe had gone.

  Tom Sledd was catching a very well-deserved few minutes’ rest under a sloping piece of scenery when he was suddenly rudely awakened by some thoughtless bastard who clearly didn’t have a teething child at home kicking his ankles. He drew up his legs, turned over resolutely and squeezed his eyes shut. He had hidden from better men than whoever it was. Hell and damnation, he had hidden from Philip Henslowe, and Philip Henslowe could ferret out anything, from the smallest coin down the side of an overstuffed chair upwards.

  ‘Tom! Tom!’ Again, the kicking.

  ‘To Hell with it,’ Sledd muttered to himself and curled up even smaller.

  ‘Thomas,’ the voice sang out, sweet as a lark.

  Sledd groaned. Kit. Kit never gave up once he had started something, everyone knew that, so he would happily stand there kicking the stage manager’s ankles till Kingdom come. ‘Stop, stop, I’m coming out.’ He struggled out of his tight cocoon and emerged, blinking and covered in dusty paint smudges and cobweb. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘There was no need to get up,’ Marlowe said. ‘I just wanted to know if you had a shovel. And I don’t need that until dark, in any case.’

  Sledd’s eyes narrowed. ‘A shovel? What do you want with a shovel? You’ve never done a day’s hard labour in your life.’ Tiredness had made him testy.

  The playwright looked stricken. His eyes grew big and melancholy and Sledd felt the old guilt wash over him. If he had a groat for every time Marlowe had made him feel like shit on his shoe, he wouldn’t be skivvying for Philip Henslowe, that was certain.

  ‘Sorry, yes, I know writing is hard work.’

  Marlowe had raised a calloused right forefinger, still stained with ink, but now lowered it again, a sly smile on his lips. It was almost too easy, but still a lot of fun, to make Tom Sledd do his bidding.

  ‘What do you want a shovel for, Master Marlowe?’ Sledd sounded like a child repeating a long-learned lesson by rote.

  ‘I might need two shovels,’ he said, not really answering the question. ‘There’s a need for speed, you see.’

  Sledd leaned forward. He knew sleep had eluded him for today. If he didn’t get his forty winks before the cleaners, the scene-painters, the walking gentlemen and the rest arrived for the afternoon, he never would. ‘So … who would be wielding this shovel?’

&
nbsp; ‘These shovels.’ Marlowe could be a stickler for detail.

  ‘These shovels?’

  ‘Well, I would be one, of course.’ Marlowe struck something of a labouring man’s pose, arms akimbo and ready for anything.

  ‘And the other?’ Sledd leaned on the scenery, which shifted slightly under his weight and rather spoiled the insouciant pose. He had a rough idea what the answer might be.

  ‘Do you know,’ Marlowe said, looking up into the sky above the Rose, softly glowing with the warmth of a late September day. ‘Do you know when we last spent an evening together? A few ales in a friendly inn? Banter with the serving wench? Rolling home in the wee small hours?’ He smiled at Sledd again, using all his wiles.

  Sledd tapped his chin and looked thoughtful. ‘Never?’ he ventured.

  Marlowe was crestfallen. ‘Now, come, Tom. You know that’s not true. We have been out together, on many an adventure.’

  Sledd stepped forward, a finger jabbing at Marlowe’s chest. ‘An adventure, yes. An adventure. But I’m a married man, now, Kit. I have responsibilities. And anyhow, there is Pestilence in Dowgate.’

  Marlowe’s eyes flew open. He was quite genuinely amazed. ‘How did you know I wanted you to dig in Dowgate?’

  ‘I’m not stupid, Kit!’ Sledd was on his high horse now. ‘You get a letter from Dowgate. You come in here, stinking of half-cured hides and talking of shovels. Ergo …’ Sledd spat his Latin out proudly ‘… ergo, you’ve been to Dowgate and you want to dig something up there.’ He chuckled. ‘Probably the fellow who sent you the letter.’ He laughed again, nervously.

  Marlowe’s face was unreadable.

  Sledd suddenly felt the hairs on the back of his neck crawl. ‘No, Kit, no, I won’t do it. And neither should you. Your life is charmed, I will admit, but not to that extent. No.’ Sledd stamped his foot, a trick that always seemed to work when little Neddy did it at home. ‘No. I will not dig anyone up, not in Dowgate or anywhere else.’

  A face appeared around the flats leaning on the opposite wall.

  ‘Dig someone up? For money?’

  Marlowe and Sledd spun around. The weaselly face of Ingram Frizer wore the beam it always did when coinage was on offer. The man was a walking gentleman, in the language of the theatre. He was also, in the language of more than one magistrate, ‘a liar, a scoundrel and a rogue’. He could play all three together, if the money was right.

  ‘Just planning our next theatrical epic,’ Sledd said, unconvincingly.

  ‘Sounds a pretty simple scene,’ Frizer said. ‘Gravedigger – not a very convincing character, I wouldn’t imagine. Who could empathize with a gravedigger?’

  Another head came round the scenery, large as a moon on a midsummer night and just as round and bald.

  ‘I think I could write that scene, Tom. I can just picture it now—’

  ‘For the love of God!’ Sledd was at the end of his tether. ‘Frizer, Shaxsper, we are trying to have a private conversation here. Is there nowhere a man can go to have a quiet colloquy with a friend?’ Will Shaxsper may have been Johanna Sledd’s favourite playwright, but he wasn’t her husband’s. The man was a hanger-on of the worst water, a picker-up of other people’s trifles.

  Marlowe touched his sleeve. ‘We are on a stage, Tom,’ he pointed out. ‘Most people don’t go there for privacy.’

  ‘Even so …’ Sledd’s wind had been taken out of his sails. Frizer and Shaxsper stood there still, almost panting in their enthusiasm to be included. ‘If you want men to dig, Kit, there they stand. I refuse to help you and that’s an end to it.’ And, with as much grace as he could muster, he exited, stage left.

  The soft Fall day had given way to a night which held a tinge of frost in it. The moon was full and made the sky cold with its white, ethereal light. The skittering of night creatures sounded preternaturally loud inside the high walls of the New Churchyard and the cries of the Watchmen and late carousers along Bishopsgate Street could have been from another world. The sleepers in the graveyard made no sound. Not for them the soft susurration of blood whispering through their veins, nor the murmur of air in throat and lung. They lay, wrapped in wool or linen, their eyes far away and sunken into their heads, thinking what thoughts the dead might think, endlessly, until the final trump might sound.

  The men who walked above their sleeping heads made little sound either. Their shadows on the grass were silent, deformed by the beaks of the masks they wore. The scent of rosemary and vinegar wreathed around them, efficacious against the plague, or so men said. They swung them from side to side as they looked through the eyeholes, trying to find the man they sought, tucked up tight below the hastily removed and replaced earth and sod.

  Without a word, the man at the back of the little row of four tapped his neighbour on the shoulder and pointed to a corner of the graveyard. In the pitiless light of the moon, a newly turned mound stood out in sharp relief. He nodded his head in its direction and the men turned their steps towards it. One of them leaned over and picked a sliver of wood from the head of the grave. ‘Dominus Greene,’ he muttered. ‘Resquiat im pace.’

  ‘Close enough,’ muttered one of the others. ‘This is the one.’ He gestured and they bent their heads together, to be reminded of their task. ‘Dig quietly. Dig fast. The Pestilence is in Dowgate, don’t forget.’

  ‘Not likely to,’ muttered the man to his left and got an elbow in the ribs for his pains.

  ‘The night Watch have just passed. It will be another half an hour before they come back round again. That’s the time we have. Now – dig.’

  All four bent to their task, breathing stertorously through the herb-packed beaks. Not three feet down, a shovel hit wood and one of the diggers tutted.

  ‘Three feet,’ he said, dismissively. ‘Skimpy.’

  ‘I suspect the sexton was busy,’ Marlowe said, straightening up and pushing his mask back to wipe his sweating face. He gestured around them to all the new mounds, black in the moonlight amongst the grassy beds of the longer dead. ‘But he did us a favour, that’s for sure.’ He pulled his mask back on and his voice became muffled again. ‘Now, lads, shovels to each corner, like we planned. And … heave.’

  The coffin sprang out of the ground as though it were on springs. With a deft twist of the shovels, it was rested across the corners of the grave. It had been a hasty job, that was obvious. The nails were proud of the deal planks of the lid in several places and, halfway along one side, a wisp of linen shroud had been trapped in the undertaker’s haste to get the man nailed in and underground. Marlowe put the edge of his shovel under one corner of the lid and turned it sharply. With a crack and a scream of tearing timber, the planks sprang free and the men leaned in, pushing their masks up onto their foreheads to better see what was revealed. Their motives varied. Frizer was a ghoul, always had been, since a lad, when he had plucked the wings from flies just to see what they might do. Dead men’s faces had a fascination for him. Shaxsper never turned down an opportunity to gather experiences for the plays he knew he could write one day. Tom Sledd didn’t want to, but just couldn’t help himself. When Marlowe said ‘Dig’, Tom just asked, ‘How deep?’

  Marlowe knew what he was looking for. He had spent the afternoon with John Dee, who had wanted to come with them, but had been dissuaded – he would say, prevented – by his wife, the redoubtable Jane. Marlowe, Dee said, was to look for swelling, discolouration, twisting of the body, bared teeth and a host of other symptoms which would invade his sleep for weeks to come. He was to cut away portions of the shroud carefully. Dee had been his usual matter-of-fact self. When a man raised the dead for a living, doing it with a shovel held no terrors for him.

  ‘Near the anus, the mouth and the organs of generation, my boy,’ he had said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Where things seep, you know.’

  Marlowe knew.

  The men stood back to let the moon shine down and illuminate the scene. The shroud was spattered with stains. Marlowe cut them away and stowed them in a pouch he
had brought for the purpose. He cut the cord gathering the shroud over the scholar’s head and let the linen fall away. The face he revealed was peaceful. No one could ever have accused Robert Greene in life of being handsome, but there was now a certain nobility in his features, a sense that he had come willingly to the end of a road which had given him no pleasure in its travelling.

  ‘No buboes, then,’ Frizer said, pragmatic to the last, poking a finger into Greene’s armpits.

  ‘He didn’t die of the plague,’ Marlowe reminded him.

  ‘Everybody says that, though, don’t they?’ the walking gentleman said. ‘Nobody wants the neighbours to know what their folks died of. How’re you going to sell their clothes for a good price then?’

  Shaxsper and Sledd shrugged. The man had a point.

  Marlowe looked at the moon. It had moved a fair way across the sky already, silver frosting the rooftops beyond the churchyard walls. The Watch would soon be back. ‘Will,’ he said. ‘Use this cloth to sop up some of the …’ wordsmith though he was, he was stuck for the proper term ‘… stuff at the bottom of the coffin. Put it in this waxed bag.’

  Shaxsper looked as though he might vomit, but controlled himself enough to manage a nod.

  ‘Frizer,’ he passed across another waxed paper. ‘Trim his beard, his hair, his nails and put them in here.’

  Frizer was unfazed. He would have happily sopped up anything without demur, but trimming a dead man’s beard was no trouble to him either.

  ‘Tom …’ Marlowe looked up to where Sledd stood at the head of the grave, his eyes big and frightened in his dead white face and his conscience, for once, gave him pause. ‘Tom, go and check for the Watch, there’s a good man. I can do the rest of what is needed here.’

  Tom Sledd was no coward, but sometimes a man should take any small favours that come his way. He edged round the grave and walked as quickly as he could without running to the gate. He knew that if once he broke into even a trot, he would just run and run until he was home and under the covers with his lovely Johanna.

  He crept on silent feet along Bishopsgate Street, in the direction from which he knew the Watch would come, south from the Vintry, across the Moor Field. Every few steps he stopped and listened for the tramp of booted feet and the hum of quiet conversation. He kept his eyes peeled for the dim light of the hooded lantern that he knew the Watch always carried at the slope. But so far, so good – nothing.