Black Death

by M. J. Trow

  ‘You should get yourself a better gatekeeper, Sir Robert,’ Marlowe said. ‘This one isn’t fit for purpose.’

  Cecil waved the man away. He had been thinking that himself for a while now. Marlowe had simply confirmed it. ‘It’s been a while, Master Marlowe,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I was hoping to see your father.’ Marlowe lounged in a chair, unbidden, ‘but he, it seems, has better gatekeepers.’

  ‘Of course he has.’ Cecil almost smiled, but strangled it at birth. ‘He is the Secretary of State, when all is said and done. Well, then, what could he do for you?’

  ‘Open the theatres,’ Marlowe said.

  ‘Well,’ Cecil’s eyes widened. ‘I should come right out with it, if I were you.’

  ‘I’m not concerned for myself, Sir Robert. I’ll get by. But I have friends at the Rose, not to mention the Curtain and the Theatre; good, honest men and women. Close the theatres and they’ll starve.’

  ‘Keep them open and they’ll die of the Pestilence,’ Cecil said. He had put down the quill he was using and was sipping from a cup of Bastard on his table. He had not offered one to Marlowe.

  ‘If that is God’s will,’ Marlowe said.

  Cecil looked up sharply, searching the man’s face for signs of sarcasm, contempt, even, but found none. He wiped a dribble of wine from his chin and thought carefully before continuing. When Marlowe mentioned God, it was wise to keep your wits about you. ‘Speaking of which,’ he said, at last, ferreting among his papers, ‘this has recently come to my attention.’ He moved a sheaf of papers in Marlowe’s general direction.

  ‘What is it?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘Various documents belonging to the late Dominus Robert Greene, of Dowgate.’

  ‘Really?’ Marlowe sat upright, intrigued. ‘And what is your interest in Greene?’

  Cecil turned puce. ‘May I remind you, Marlowe, that you work for me? In this chamber, I ask the questions.’

  ‘As you wish, Sir Robert. I was merely wondering why you would mention the man to me at all.’

  ‘You knew him, didn’t you? At Cambridge.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And since?’

  ‘I have heard of him from time to time. He was a pamphleteer latterly and wrote some appalling tosh called Alphonse, King of Aragon. I think it was supposed to be a parody of my Tamburlaine, but it flopped badly.’

  ‘As, I understand, did Master Greene. You went snooping in his lodgings.’

  ‘I spoke to his landlady,’ Marlowe said. ‘Not quite the same thing.’

  ‘Clearly not,’ Cecil said, ‘or you would not have left these behind. I assume this is you he’s writing about.’ He pointed to the first page and tapped it for emphasis. ‘The “famous gracer of tragedies”.’

  ‘I’m flattered,’ Marlowe smiled.

  ‘Don’t be,’ Cecil snapped. ‘Here, on page two. It urges you to, and I quote, “turn from diabolical atheism”. And here, “pestilent Machiavellian policy”. What does he mean, Marlowe?’

  The poet shrugged, spreading his arms wide. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘I understand from Greene’s landlady that he became unhinged towards the end. Between you and me, Sir Robert, he was never exactly balanced in the first place. Fame has been kind to me. It was not to Dominus Greene.’

  ‘His mistress was a woman whose brother is a cutpurse, it’s true.’ Cecil was reading another sheet in a different hand. ‘His wife had left him. What brought you to Dowgate?’

  ‘The man wrote me a letter shortly before he died,’ Marlowe said. ‘He believed he was being murdered.’

  ‘Murdered?’ Cecil frowned. ‘How?’

  ‘The letter didn’t say.’ Marlowe was not about to discuss with the Queen’s Spymaster the intricacies of an exhumation at dead of night, nor the post-mortem diagnosis of Dr Dee.

  ‘Your best guess, then?’ Cecil worried it like a dog with a bone. ‘Poison?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Marlowe said. ‘It’s hard to think of another method of murder which gives a man time to write a letter about it.’

  Cecil nodded, agreeing. But there were more things in heaven and earth that could kill a man than even Cecil knew. He took up his cup again and leaned back. ‘I will assume for now, Marlowe, that the allegations in Dominus Greene’s papers are the result of jealousy. For now, mind. In the meantime, stay clear of Dowgate, Master Marlowe; there’s Pestilence there.’

  He waited until Marlowe got up.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘the theatres will remain closed. Good morning.’

  ‘What was it called, then,’ Ned Alleyn had to ask, ‘this drivel of Greene’s?’

  ‘Luckily, the stationer who had it in his possession didn’t know I could read upside down,’ Marlowe said, without a blush at the lie. ‘It was called A Groatsworth of Wit.’

  The three men burst out laughing and Alleyn clicked his fingers for a refill of ale. Maiden Lane was not jammed to the gunnels with theatregoers but the taverns were full of theatre men drowning their sorrows, so the flocks of Winchester Geese pestering them with their wares were still busy.

  ‘I am a “mad and scoffing poet” apparently,’ Marlowe went on.

  ‘There must have been something about me, surely?’ Alleyn frowned. ‘After all, he did ask me to play in The Tragical Reign of Selenius and I left him in no uncertainty where he could put all those copies of the rubbish.’

  ‘Not that I saw, Ned,’ Marlowe said; then, ever the diplomat, ‘it must have been on the back of the sheet. You’re there, though, Will.’

  ‘Am I?’ the Warwickshire man was actually astonished. After all, he’d only written the First Part of Henry VI and he’d had a lot of help with that.

  ‘He uses the phrase “Shake-scene”, whatever that means, and refers to you as “the upstart crow”.’

  More laughter. This time from only Marlowe and Alleyn. Shaxsper was too busy bridling. ‘Upstart crow?’ he repeated, crimson with fury. ‘Upstart crow? If Dominus Greene had wanted to bring in the bird world, I’d have thought … I don’t know … Swan of Avon would have done the trick.’

  And Marlowe and Alleyn laughed again, until Shaxsper got up and left in a huff.

  SEVEN

  Tom Sledd was taking his exercise, round and round and round. For a change, he sometimes went widdershins, until he got giddy. Finally, he slumped against the wall, next to the incarcerated poet, who was reading back through his work and making the occasional change, accompanied by a quiet ‘Tut’.

  ‘How can you bear this?’ Sledd asked his neighbour.

  ‘Hmm?’ The poet held up a finger for quiet. He was checking his metre. With a nod to himself, he turned to Sledd, marking his place with an inky finger. ‘Bear what?’

  Sledd spread his arms and rolled his eyes. ‘This,’ he said. ‘The smell. The noise. The …’ he nodded to a couple across the room, who had been making the beast with two backs, relentlessly, lovelessly, for hours now and showed no sign of stopping. He had no word for what they were doing. ‘That.’

  The poet smiled softly and laid a hand on Sledd’s arm. It was the first human contact other than thoughtless blows that he had received since coming to this awful place and he felt a tear crawl down his cheek. ‘I am not given to handing out advice,’ the poet said, ‘except what you need to survive in here. This is something you may not be able to do but, if you can, it will keep you sane, if sane you are.’

  Sledd leaned forward. That was just what he needed, something to tell him he was sane, because sometimes, he was beginning to wonder. ‘I’ll do anything,’ he said. ‘Anything I can.’

  ‘Then, try this,’ the poet said. ‘Close your eyes. Lean your head back on the wall. Feel the wall, hard against your head. Think of nothing but that wall. Then, when you have a mind as empty as it can be, when all the sounds, the smells, the fears have gone away, put back into your mind some happy things.’ The poet’s eyes snapped open and pierced Tom Sledd where he sat. ‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘on any account
think of your old life. That will surely send you mad. Think of something else, something of your imagination. Hmm …’ He looked the stage manager up and down. ‘When you were a lad, did you dream of being a knight? A knight in armour?’

  Sledd looked at the man kindly. They had clearly had very different childhoods. All Tom could remember dreaming of was where his next meal was coming from and whether they would be tenting or sleeping under the wagon with the dogs. But the poet meant well, so he nodded.

  ‘Well, there you are then,’ the man said, with his gentle smile. ‘I would put it in verse, because I just can’t help myself. You might want to conjure up pictures. But the main thing is, fill your mind with it and the rest will fade away.’

  Sledd looked doubtful. The couple across the way were still keeping to their own rhythm, the woman to his right was picking over a plate of cockroaches which she was keeping for a feast for later. How could anything block this out?

  The poet closed his eyes and spoke in a singsong voice to the air. ‘With a host of furious fancies whereof I am commander, with a burning spear and a horse of air, to the wilderness I wander. By a knight of ghosts and shadows I summoned am to tourney. Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end; methinks it is no journey.’

  Sledd felt a tingle go up his spine. He closed his eyes and pressed the back of his head to the wall. He felt the heavy armour wrap itself around his limbs and the crested helm bowed his head with its weight. The warmth of the horse between his thighs was tangible. The smell of herbs and bright, cold water stung his nostrils as he wandered along, waiting for a call from a man of ghosts and shadows. The mad cacophony fell away and he hefted his lance under his arm, looking for battle.

  Beside him, the poet smiled and turned again to his manuscript. If he could keep just one man sane in this insanity, his life was not, after all, in vain.

  There was no sign of the plague the next morning as Kit Marlowe padded along Knightrider Street. He could see the toppled tower of St Paul’s to his right and the ruins of Baynard’s castle to his left, its curtain wall shored up by the wooden hovels of the dispossessed. If the Pestilence didn’t strike there in a day or so, it would be a miracle.

  At the sign of the kettle, Marlowe dashed under an archway and found himself in a maze of passages, each darker and more menacing than the last. The sun never shone here and rats scuttled in and out of the gutters that sloped down towards the river.

  ‘Mistress Jackman?’ Marlowe had left his Colleyweston at home today and had put on his second-best doublet. If it wasn’t exactly possible to blend with the inhabitants of this abyss, at least he wouldn’t stand out like too much of a sore thumb.

  The girl was probably twenty, but years in these alleyways had hardened her features and it was too early in the morning for her to have dressed in her finery, breasts above her stomacher rouged and powdered. ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘I was a friend of Robert Greene,’ Marlowe told her.

  ‘Robyn?’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Nah, he didn’t have no friends.’

  Perspicacious one, this, Marlowe thought. ‘Plenty of enemies, though,’ he said.

  She tilted her head. She’d never seen this man before, with his dark eyes that burned into whatever passed for a soul in her. ‘Some,’ she agreed. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to know who killed him,’ Marlowe said, watching her face for any sign at all. He saw nothing.

  ‘That’s not the sort of question you ask around here, pizzle.’ A rough voice made him turn. A huge man stood there with a pickadil hat perched on the back of his head.

  Marlowe smiled. ‘You must be Billy Jackman,’ he said, ‘this good lady’s brother.’

  ‘Good lady?’ Jackman grunted, grinning at the girl. ‘Somebody’s been saying nice things about you, Fan.’

  ‘Stow it, Billy,’ she growled, looking under her eyelashes at him. ‘I’ll have you know—’

  But Jackman wasn’t interested in Fanny’s pride. He was staring at Marlowe. ‘Who are you?’ he growled. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘My name is Marlowe,’ he said, ‘and I want the truth.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘The murder of Robert Greene.’

  Brother and sister looked at each other. ‘What makes you think he was murdered?’ Jackman asked.

  ‘A lot of things,’ Marlowe said, ‘none of which need concern you, friend.’

  ‘I ain’t your friend, pizzle,’ Jackman hissed, his lips curling. ‘Now, bugger off to wherever you’ve come from and leave honest folk alone.’

  ‘If there were some honest folk here, I’d be delighted,’ Marlowe said.

  Jackman checked himself, frowning. ‘Are you saying we ain’t honest?’

  ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘The Pope?’ Jackman was finding the constantly changing subject a little hard to follow. Usually, his vocabulary was based around violence, sex and money, heavy on the violence. ‘What are you? A bloody Papist?’

  ‘My religion is my own business,’ Marlowe said. ‘Did you know Dominus Greene?’

  ‘Dominus Greene? Dominus Greene?’ Jackman mimicked Marlowe, then spat onto the cobbles. ‘Stuck up, he was. Always spouting poetry …’

  ‘Somebody else’s, I’ll be bound,’ Marlowe smiled.

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that. It’s all bollocks, that stuff. This theatre rubbish. What did Greene call himself, Fan? A University wit? What a load of bollocks!’

  ‘Oh, leave him alone, Billy,’ Fanny whined. ‘He was all right, was Robyn. All right, he had a bit of a smell under his nose, but he did right by me. And I tell you what, Billy, he taught me some stuff, some stuff to bring me up in the world, save me having to work for a living at Mrs Isam’s, that’s for sure. De mort you is nigh hill nice I bone um, he’d say right now, wouldn’t he, Master Marlowe? Don’t speak ill of the dead.’

  Marlowe had heard ‘de mortuis nihil nisi bonum’ pronounced better, but never with so much feeling and his opinion of the girl rose.

  Billy Jackman spat again. ‘Did right by you? What, you mean he didn’t knock you up? Couldn’t get it up, more like. Stuck up …’

  ‘Do I take it you weren’t overfond of Dominus Greene, Master Jackman?’

  ‘Overfond, my arse!’ Jackman looked at Marlowe with his piggy eyes hard with hatred. ‘Look, are you going, or what?’

  Marlowe spread his arms. ‘What,’ he said. ‘At least until I have some answers.’

  There was the ring of steel as Jackman whipped his dagger from the sheath at his back. Marlowe stepped back, his own knife in his hand.

  ‘Come on, boys!’ Fanny Jackman tried to appeal to the men’s better natures. But, glancing at their faces, she knew that they didn’t have any.

  ‘This is not worth dying for, Master Jackman,’ Marlowe warned.

  ‘I was just going to say the same thing to you.’ Jackman lunged, but Marlowe was faster. He caught the wrist and swung it upwards, driving the blade into the man’s jerkin and arm. Blood spurted over the leather and linen and Marlowe swung the man round to force him to the ground.

  ‘Never, ever,’ Marlowe held his blade to Jackman’s throat, gripping his hair with the other. The pickadil had gone. ‘Never, ever try that move with a man who knows what he is doing,’ he hissed. ‘It can get you killed.’ He hauled the man to his feet by his hair and shoved him forward, his knee in his back. The cutpurse turned, clutching his ripped arm, but still looking for a fight.

  ‘Oh, go and get yourself cleaned up, Billy,’ Fanny said. ‘Master Marlowe and I are going to have a little chat.’

  Simon Forman was in a quandary. He had advised against closing the theatres and he couldn’t in all conscience believe it was wrong to do so. But he had noticed a falling off of calls for his expertise lately and he couldn’t help but wonder whether preventative advice was really the way to make a living. Perhaps letting everyone mix hugger-mugger might be the better option. He, of course, and so by extension, his apprentices, would
never succumb to the Pestilence. He wore his mask – copied now by every charlatan in London – stuffed with his special herbal mixture. He cast runes and sat in a pentangle every night, divining by the position of the stars the best amulets to wear the following day to keep him safe. He washed in water of the Nile and the Jordan – some may have considered he was hedging his bets, but his answer was always simple. He was alive. Many others were not. Ergo, whatever he was doing, he was going to keep right on doing it.

  His wife was a thorn in his side and he was working on that. Whatever herbs he used for himself, Timothy, Matthias and Gerard, not to mention his more deep-pocketed clients, he gave to his wife as well. Indeed, she insisted upon it. But he made certain special changes to her mixture; for instance, he never gave her asafoetida and always added a nice dose of ransons instead. And yet, the harridan was still alive. It was a puzzle, but not one he had time for this morning.

  Decked out in his best robes, newts, frogs and doves stowed safely in his sleeves, Forman burst through the door of his laboratory like an avenging angel. One day, he knew, he would catch his apprentices in some misdeed or other, but today was not that day. As always, they were standing to attention at their trestles, work well in hand, their hated robes clean and neat and a newly herb-stuffed mask slung across each shoulder. Forman hadn’t prepared anything to say, so he made do with walking around, hands clasped behind his back, examining minutely everything on each table. He had to take care that none of the boys ever discovered that, actually, he knew far less than they did. For all he knew, they could be making soup, yet he trusted them to be working hard to find whatever it was they sought. Gerard, he knew, only used natural things; things that grew in wayside and hedgerow. Although he had tried to persuade the lad to forage in darker places, graveyards, under gibbets, he had never succeeded. Wholesomeness was Gerard’s middle name. Matthias and Timothy were different – he knew that they each had a dark side. Eventually, one would eclipse the other and then it would probably be a fight to the death. If it were to be physical, Matthias would win hands down. Cerebral – it was too close to be able to predict, even with all the crystal balls and scrying glasses in the world. The trick would be to not be standing too close when it happened.