Black Death

by M. J. Trow

  That at least explained the smell and Marlowe nodded. ‘I can’t believe his fame will last, Doctor,’ he said, sensing the old man’s sadness. ‘Folk will see through him and his glitter and glamour, surely?’

  Dee nodded. ‘Of course they will,’ he agreed. ‘But until then, what harm might he do?’ He looked into the flames for a while, as if he could see clearly the death and destruction that capered in the wake of Forman’s stupidity and cupidity. Then, he clapped his hands. ‘But enough of him! Did you get what I asked?’

  Marlowe ferreted in his jerkin front and brought out the waxed packages. ‘Yes. I got clippings from the shroud.’ He handed them over one by one. ‘Some of the liquid at the bottom of the coffin.’ Dee nodded, pleased. That was the one he least expected to receive. ‘And some hair from his beard and from his head and also some nail trimmings, as you asked.’

  ‘And how did he look?’ Dee leaned forward, his eyes bright and excited. It had been a while since he had had a real puzzle to solve and he was looking forward to it. For too long he had been worrying about his finances. The Queen was not as forthcoming as she had been and her Magus was only as successful as his last prognostication. As the old girl’s years advanced, perhaps she was nearer to God and the answers to all things than John Dee would ever be. The puzzle had brought Kit Marlowe back to his door too, so he was a happy man, for once.

  Marlowe looked thoughtful. ‘He looked …’ he smiled at the thought, ‘he looked well, since you ask. Better than I have seen him look when he was still breathing. Not so anguished. Nothing like as angry. Peaceful, I suppose I would say. Yes. Peaceful and content.’

  Dee pursed his lips and pulled a parchment and a piece of charcoal out of a pocket of his voluminous gown. He crossed through a word at the top of what seemed to be a long list, then another, lower down. ‘Was he bent at all? Were his limbs displaced?’ He twisted his arms so his palms faced outwards, as examples.

  ‘No. But of course, he may have been laid out neatly before they buried him.’

  ‘True. Though sometimes, the poison will fix the limbs.’ Dee whistled soundlessly for a moment and crossed out another couple of words. ‘Bloated?’

  Marlowe shook his head.

  ‘Discoloured?’

  ‘No more than you would expect in the circumstances.’

  Dee gave him a quizzical glance. ‘Circumstances? Do you know something?’

  Marlowe laughed. ‘You are suspicious of everyone, Doctor. No, I mean the circumstances of having died and having been buried. He was …’ he shrugged. ‘A bit on the grey side. But otherwise, normal.’

  Dee nodded once. ‘I see.’ He crossed off one more word and then looked down his list and frowned. ‘I fear I must tell you, Kit, that your man may have died a natural death.’

  Marlowe sat back in his chair and looked at Dee from under his lashes. ‘I’m not usually wrong,’ he said at last.

  ‘Nor am I. But let’s do an examination or two on these interesting pieces,’ Dee shook the waxed bags in the air, ‘and see which of us is proved right, shall we?’ He levered himself up from his chair. ‘Do you want to come and watch, or could you do with some sleep? You certainly look a little …’ he leaned forward and smiled, ‘dishevelled.’

  ‘Dishevelled?’ Marlowe was horrified. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much. A little loam here,’ Dee touched his own chin. ‘Some gravestone lichen here.’ He brushed at his chest. ‘Perhaps a hint of …’

  ‘Yes, yes, you’ve said enough,’ Marlowe laughed. ‘Perhaps I might adjust my clothing and have a wash and then join you. Can that be arranged?’

  ‘A bed and water are already set for you,’ Dee told him, ushering him to the door. ‘Jane?’ he called to his wife and was rewarded by scurrying footsteps in the hall. ‘Ah, there you are, my dear.’ He looked fondly as his wife embraced his friend. ‘See Kit to his room, will you? And I will see you later. Jane will show you the way.’

  Jane Dee was years younger than her husband, a pleasant woman with a broad smile. She worried about her old man, and worried even more when a man with Kit Marlowe’s reputation came calling. What did they call him? Machiavel? The Muse’s Darling? Jane Dee’s husband was sometimes frightening enough, but Marlowe had a danger about him, a way of going that scared her. She saw beneath the curls and melting eyes to what lay beneath and it wasn’t half as pretty as the exterior.

  He bowed as she entered and kissed her hand. In all Dee’s other houses, it had been easy enough to find his laboratory by sound and smell alone, but Marlowe allowed himself to be led off by Jane, as Dee shuffled off down the flagged passage, humming to himself and waving his little waxed packages happily in the air.

  Simon Forman was not a man who was down for long. He had woken after an hour or two to find his wife gone about her business and the house buzzing happily along, as it always did. All he had to do was bring in the money to keep it buzzing and everyone was happy. He delved into his memory for a moment, trying to remember what had made him so introspective when he got home. The widow, yes, that had been a rare failure, but … something else. What was it …? Suddenly, it all came back to him and he shrugged on his workaday robes, less sumptuous than his walking-out attire, but still with enough beads to make the laundry maid weep, and he went in search of his apprentices.

  They were where they always were, in his chamber in the shadow of the abbey, busy with retorts, mirrors, liquids and herbs, always with the background noise of the tame doves which cooed and wheeled above their heads, sometimes depositing their own very special additions to the brews below. Tanks of frogs and newts, green and slimy and pulsating with life, were along a shelf near the high window. Pots of herbs grew in even the smallest space. There was something of the countryside about Simon Forman’s laboratory, were it not for the smell of brimstone, which was the subtle underscore to it all.

  When they heard their master’s step, the apprentices sprang to attention. Forman liked to have lackeys around him, but he preferred his lackeys to be clever and so he paid wages to garner the best rather than get the sweepings of the streets for free. He even gave them a week of paid holiday a year, beyond the wildest dream of any other apprentice in the land. Indeed, they had just come back from their annual visit to their families, bearing gifts for their master according to custom; the packages lay on his desk, as always, but he knew what they contained. Two would be new editions of some arcane Greek text which he never admitted he couldn’t read. The other would be a dozen new-laid eggs and a pot of honey, much more to his taste.

  Two of his apprentices were scholars, one from Cambridge, the other from Oxford. Their natural enmity kept them keen to impress. The other was not a scholar. He was an unschooled boy from the Weald of Kent but knew more about herbs and the creatures of the wild than the other two would ever know. He had learned to read and write with lightning speed and Forman knew that, if one of the apprentices would usurp their master, it would almost certainly be him. He dressed them in garments of his own design and would have been mortified to know how much they hated wearing them. He had chosen a deep blue, almost black, which reminded him of a dark winter sky, moonless and cloudless. To enhance the effect, there were specks of cut glass scattered here and there, more at the shoulder and less at the hem. He thought it made them look just mystical enough to act as a background for his own magnificence. They thought it made them look like tarts fallen on hard times. But he paid them well and he paid them promptly, so a bit of name-calling as they went about their business was a small price to pay.

  He walked slowly past them as they lined up just inside the door. Matthias was the tallest of the three, well-made as to shoulder and calf and with a profile a Greek god would die for. His flaxen hair fell over the glittering shoulders of his gown in the style Forman favoured, in artless curls which took him half an hour at least every morning to achieve. He was the Oxford scholar and he bore it lightly. He had attended the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, though he had
n’t had a holy thought since he had been about seven. He didn’t talk much about his days among those hallowed halls where, it was whispered, Papists still held sway. He had not quite been sent down, but it had been a near-run thing. Oxford had so many things to interest a young man of frisky habits but, in the end, it had been dice which had been his downfall; not the game so much as the very substantial debts that his bad judgement had led him into. He had a pretty way with a retort, however, and could extract oil from anything that was handed to him. He had not yet managed to get blood from a stone, but there was yet time.

  The next in line was the Cambridge scholar, Timothy. He only reached Matthias’s shoulder and was little and weaselly generally, with very scant dark hair and a tendency to sniff. Surprisingly, he did rather better with the ladies of the district than Matthias did, having spied often on his master when the great magus was practising his massage on widows far and wide. He had not found it a hard technique to master and, once he had used his clever words to get close enough, there was never any demur from the girl in question. He was dishonest, not too keen on washing his hands no matter how unpleasant the experiment he had been engaged in and, generally, Forman passed over him with as much speed as was civil. He had also gone to Trinity – the real one, as he constantly called it, though it predated Matthias’s alma mater by less than a decade. Extraction was not his skill. He wanted to deconstruct everything that crossed his path until he found that tiny spark that made it unique of and to itself. Only Forman could see that Timothy was as dark and weaselly inside as without – but the man had his uses and so he let him stay.

  The country boy, Gerard, was Forman’s pride and joy. His own sons were young yet but he knew that, when they grew, he wanted them to be like this. Gerard’s frank, open face was smattered with freckles even after two years in London, mostly closeted in the distillery making tinctures from all the herbs he grew. He could make any plant flourish just by making a hole in soil with his thumb and then sticking it in, with a prayer and a gentle pat such as a mother will give to a sleeping child. The plant would grow, Forman always thought, just to please Gerard, because when he was upset a cloud would pass across his face and it would seem that God was crying to see his distress. In height, he came between the scholars and was neatly made, being neither skinny nor stout. He wore his gown as though he loved wearing it and indeed, of the three, he hated it least. He had had fourteen years of hand-me-downs, often from his sisters, so to have clothes that were his own was still a pleasure he cherished. He smiled at Forman and said good morning, with the soft burr of a true Man of Kent.

  Forman stepped back from his apprentices and opened his arms in a distant embrace. ‘Gentlemen,’ he beamed. ‘A new dawn. A new day.’ He raised his arms and they all smiled and tried to look enthusiastic. Only Gerard managed it to any convincing extent. ‘Sadly, we had a loss last night. Master Templeton, despite our best efforts, succumbed to the Pestilence and his wife …’

  ‘Widow,’ Timothy, who had a literal turn of mind, corrected him.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, widow … has not taken it well. I tried to comfort her …’ Timothy looked at his shoes and smirked ‘… but it is perhaps too soon. However, we will not forget her in her time of sorrow. Matthias.’ The apprentice perked up and adopted the look of a man eager to please at any price. ‘Make a note to go and visit the dear, good woman in … shall we say one week? Yes. One week.’

  Matthias went over to a desk in the corner and jotted something down.

  ‘But …’ Forman’s scowl became positively Saturnine. ‘On my way home from the sad home of Mistress Templeton, I met a man. A man wearing the mask of a plague doctor.’

  The apprentices were stuck for an appropriate response. The city was full of men dressed like plague doctors. It was the employment of choice at the moment. As long as you chose your patients well and didn’t actually go near anyone with plague, there was big money to be made. Eventually, Gerard, who hated anyone to not get an answer, even when they hadn’t strictly asked a question, spoke. ‘Who was it, Master?’

  ‘A good question, Gerard. A very good question.’ The great magus hitched his gown up on his shoulders and leaned forward. ‘Now, boys, I want to tell you that I will not be angry whatever answer you give to my next question. What I want is honesty, no more, no less. Have you ever been to the theatre?’

  The apprentices shuffled their feet. Of course they had been to the theatre. When the theatre was prohibited in no uncertain terms, as it was early in their indentures, it obviously became much more tempting than it otherwise would be. They had seen plays so sublime they would make their way back to their lodgings with wings on their feet; these were usually written by one Christopher Marlowe, though the spelling on the playbills varied widely. They had seen plays so appalling they had been funny and they had rolled home holding their sides; Ralph Roister Doister was always good for a laugh. And they had seen a play by Will Shaxsper. But admitting as much to Forman was another thing altogether. Matthias looked at Timothy. Timothy looked at Gerard, who had nowhere to hide.

  ‘I have been to the theatre, Master,’ he said, looking the magus squarely in the eye.

  Forman nodded. ‘I am glad to see that I have one honest apprentice,’ he said, smiling grimly. ‘Do you know a playwright named Christopher Marlowe?’

  ‘I know his work,’ the country boy acknowledged.

  ‘But him. Have you ever seen him?’

  ‘Once, when I went to see one of his plays, he was at the apron, watching and making notes. He rewrites all the time, men say. He seeks perfection.’

  Timothy was aghast. ‘There is no perfection but God,’ he blurted out. The others looked at him. Religion was rare within these walls. ‘Or … at least …’ he blustered, ‘so they say.’

  ‘Well, anyhow,’ Gerard picked up his tale with a sideways glance at his flustered colleague, ‘I suppose therefore you can say I have seen him.’

  ‘About so high,’ Forman held up a hand, ‘curls,’ and he sketched them round his own close-cropped head. ‘A rather handy man with a dagger.’

  ‘So far, that sounds like me,’ Matthias laughed.

  Gerard grinned and nodded. ‘And like Master Marlowe, too,’ he said.

  ‘Then it may well have been him,’ Forman said. ‘Why would he be dressed like a plague doctor? He has no medical training, has he?’

  ‘Who has?’ Timothy muttered in his throat, but fortunately no one heard him.

  ‘I don’t see how he would have had the time,’ Gerard said, continuing in his role as theatre aficionado. ‘He can’t be more than the middle twenties and he came straight to London from Cambridge.’ He looked at their stunned faces. They had not known that he was quite such an expert in the theatre and its people. ‘Or so men say.’

  Forman looked at Matthias. ‘Make a note,’ he said.

  ‘What note, Master?’ he asked, stepping over to the desk and dipping the pen.

  ‘Just a note,’ Forman said, low and level. ‘A note not to overlook Master Marlowe.’

  FOUR

  Marlowe was still asleep in John Dee’s second-best bed when the magus came trotting in, all smiles. He stood and watched the playwright sleeping. He loved and worried about the man in equal measure. Children had come late to the magician and, before they had come, had been Kit. He slept as though he hadn’t a care in the world, which Dee knew to be untrue. But if there was one place he felt safe, it was under Dee’s roof and so he lay on his back, one arm curved above his head, the other flung out across the empty side of the bed. With his eyes closed and his face turned to the faint rays of the sun coming through the lattice, he looked hardly half of his twenty-eight summers. After a moment, as if he felt the gaze touch his cheek, the man stretched and opened his eyes, treacle-brown and unfathomable, letting himself wake slowly, an indulgence he rarely allowed himself.

  ‘Doctor,’ he said, with a slight nod and laced his fingers together behind his head.

  ‘Playwright,’ Dee
returned, before hitching himself up onto the foot of the bed and unfolding a paper he had had tucked up his sleeve.

  It was an old joke, if joke it was, but it made them both smile.

  ‘Do you have an answer for me?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘I do. And I don’t.’

  ‘Very enigmatic.’

  Dee looked down his nose and crossed his eyes slightly. ‘I find enigmatic goes down well with the customers,’ he smiled. ‘I like to keep in practice.’

  Marlowe looked fondly at the old man. ‘You don’t do yourself justice,’ he said, hitching himself up in the bed and rearranging the pillows at his back. ‘You need no tricks to do what you do. You are no Simon Forman nor Edward Kelly.’

  ‘Thank you.’ A shadow passed over Dee’s face. There had been many who had sought to usurp him and some had almost succeeded, the charlatan Kelly among them. His house in Mortlake had been burned down. His beloved Helene had been murdered. And yet, here he was, still. And here he would remain.

  ‘And, so …?’ Marlowe lifted a quizzical eyebrow.

  Dee cleared his throat and shook out his paper. He settled his wire-framed spectacles on the end of his nose and began to read, in a rather high-pitched and rapid style. ‘I was made cognizant of the death of one Robert Greene, of Kyroun Lane in the County of—’

  Marlowe held up a hand. ‘Stop. Stop,’ he said. ‘This is not the Coroner’s Inquest. There is no First Finder here. Just tell me what you found.’

  Dee took a deep breath but was forestalled.

  ‘In your own words, please. Don’t read. Just tell.’

  Dee looked a little crestfallen but nonetheless put away his paper. ‘As you wish.’ He looked a little wistfully at Marlowe. ‘Shall I tell you about my tests?’

  ‘Perhaps later. For now, just tell me what you found.’