Black Death

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Who indeed?’ Marlowe nodded. Then he stood, his mind made up, his questions answered. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he rummaged in his purse, ‘have you seen this before?’ He held up the little gem that Lettys had given him, left on a good woman’s forehead by an angel.

  Parry looked at it closely. He took it and held it up to the dying light of the vestry window. ‘A gemstone,’ he said. ‘No value, I wouldn’t think, but as you can imagine, I am no expert. What is it?’

  Marlowe took it back. ‘It’s a relic, Dr Parry,’ he said, ‘but not the type you believe in.’ And he turned to go.

  ‘Marlowe,’ Parry was on his feet too. ‘Are you going to tell anyone?’

  Marlowe looked at him. ‘About the hand of a dead woman some ancient, misguided priest of the old religion secreted away years or even centuries ago? No, Doctor, I don’t think so. Oh …’ he opened the door, ‘I’d have offered you tickets to my next work, The Massacre at Paris, but there’s no theatre to put it on in at the moment. And besides,’ he winked at the man, ‘it’s about a clique of rather nasty Catholics – and I don’t think you’d like that at all.’

  Marlowe rested that night at Hatfield, under the eaves near Burghley’s library, soaking up the culture even through the oak panelling. He went over his little chat with the vicar of Hatfield in his mind. The man, he knew, had been a Cambridge scholar, of St John’s, no less, which Robert Greene had attended. He had once run a parish in the Vintry, not a stone’s throw from Dowgate, where Robert Greene had died. And here he was again, a secret Papist, in at the death of Eunice Brown. But it didn’t fit. Nothing fitted. But he made a mental note not to overlook the vicar of Hatfield and he slept with his dagger under his pillow.

  ELEVEN

  A madman stood at the cross outside St Paul’s that Thursday, reminding anyone who cared to listen that the Pestilence had come because of the world’s wickedness, that London was the new Gomorrah and that the blackness of death was all that lay ahead. Some confused souls stood around, wide-eyed, listening. Others, dyed-in-the-wool Puritans, nodded solemnly and intoned, ‘Too true, brother’. Two members of the Watch, who had been listening to this predictable drivel for years, moved him on with prods from their halberds and threats of the Bridewell.

  Marlowe had heard it all before too, but he was not at Harvey’s house in Peternoster Row that morning for lunacy, Tom Sledd’s unresolved fate notwithstanding. He was there to continue a conversation he had started in Cambridge days earlier. He was there to talk to Gabriel Harvey. The man’s hapless secretary was still carrying books, but as soon as he saw Marlowe, he remembered his handiness with a dagger and dropped the lot.

  ‘Is he in?’ Marlowe asked the man, who stood frozen to the spot. The playwright decided to give him another option. ‘Is he out?’

  ‘What in the name of God …?’ Gabriel Harvey appeared at the top of the stairs, still in his nightgown. ‘Marlowe! Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘Eight o’clock by Paul’s time,’ Marlowe said, cheerily. ‘Time for all good Christians to be up and about their business.’ He was already climbing the stairs. ‘And what exactly is your business these days, Dr Harvey?’

  ‘Marlowe, I—’

  ‘No,’ the playwright held up his hand, ‘Don’t tell me. Sticking your nose into other people’s business.’ He had reached the landing. ‘And you are very good at it; possibly the finest in the field.’

  ‘I don’t care for your attitude,’ Harvey snapped.

  ‘And I don’t give a flying fart what you care for,’ Marlowe said, now that he was face to face with the man. ‘I’m not Secundus Convictus now, Doctor. I am the most famous playwright in London. What are you going to do? Give me a bad review?’

  Harvey was white with anger. ‘One day, you’ll dare God out of his Heaven once too often, blasphemer,’ he rasped.

  Marlowe chuckled. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘whose idea was the proctors? Yours or Andrewes’s?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Harvey tried to play the innocent, but it was less than convincing.

  ‘All right,’ Marlowe said, leaning against the wall. ‘We’ll let that pass for now. Tell me instead why you went to see Robert Greene shortly before he died.’

  ‘I told you.’ Harvey had lost none of the pomposity that Marlowe remembered from his university days. ‘I was passing.’

  ‘Yes, but you lied, didn’t you? Men like you don’t pass Dowgate, especially when there’s Pestilence in the wind. What was the real reason? Did you bring him a comforting broth of mushrooms?’

  Before Harvey could answer, Marlowe shoulder-barged the door into Harvey’s bedroom. There was a shriek and a woman was sitting up in bed, pulling her nightdress closed and gasping, open-mouthed. Harvey grabbed Marlowe’s sleeve, but the university professor-turned-critic was no match for a projectioner and he found himself kneeling on the floor, his head wrenched back with Marlowe’s fingers tangled in his hair.

  ‘Don’t hurt him, Master Marlowe,’ the woman found the composure to say.

  ‘Hastings,’ Harvey gurgled, his neck extended by Marlowe’s grip, ‘fetch a constable, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Hastings,’ Marlowe counter-ordered, ‘stay exactly where you are.’

  The dithering secretary on the ground floor had only hopped onto his right foot. Now he hopped back onto his left. Marlowe was looking at the woman. ‘You seem to know my name, Madame,’ he said. ‘May I know yours? I assume it isn’t Mrs Harvey.’

  ‘You assume right,’ she said. ‘It’s Greene. Doll Greene.’

  ‘No better than you should be.’

  There was another half-strangled gurgle from Harvey, but Doll Greene could clearly handle herself. ‘What do you mean by that?’ she snapped, checking that all was well in her frontage. Harvey’s liberality didn’t run to a four-poster bed, so she had little to cover herself with.

  ‘I must confess I’ve never really understood the phrase,’ Marlowe said, as if they were discussing the weather, ‘along with “buttering no parsnips” and “how’s your father?”. It was Mrs Isam’s assessment of you, however.’

  ‘That hypocritical bitch!’ Doll Greene hissed. ‘She’s a bawd, Master Marlowe, a keeper of brothels.’

  ‘Your late husband seemed quite content with that,’ Marlowe said. ‘Oh, my condolences, by the way.’

  ‘Condolences?’ she sneered. ‘If memory serves, Robyn couldn’t stand you.’

  ‘Your memory does serve,’ Marlowe nodded, ‘but then, he couldn’t stand old Gabriel here and you both seem to have got over that.’ He let go of Harvey’s hair and the critic-professor flopped forward, trying to ease the pain in his neck. ‘At least,’ Marlowe went on, ‘I know what Gabriel was doing in Dowgate. Picking you up, I’ll wager.’

  ‘I haven’t lived with Robyn for years,’ Doll said.

  Harvey was on his feet again, still fuming, but trying to keep his distance from Marlowe. ‘I went to Greene’s lodgings to find out what he’d been writing. There was a rumour it was pretty libellous stuff – about me; about all of us, come to that. But somebody had beaten me to it. All his papers had gone.’

  And Marlowe knew exactly where they had ended up, on the table of the Queen’s Spymaster in Whitehall. How they had got there remained something of a mystery.

  There was a faint wailing sound along the landing. Marlowe looked up to see a tousle-haired blond lad, perhaps ten, yawning and scratching himself.

  ‘Fortunatus!’ Doll shrieked. ‘Go back to bed. The grown-ups are talking.’

  The unaptly named boy yawned again, shrugged and did as he was told.

  ‘Gabriel,’ Doll Greene snapped at him, ‘make yourself scarce. Master Marlowe and I have things to discuss.’

  Harvey opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it and marched down the stairs with as much dignity as he could gather around him, fetching the hapless Hastings a smart one around the side of the head as he passed. To Marlowe’s horror, Doll Greene was leaning forward
and patting the bed beside her. As invitations went, it left a lot to be desired. He stayed where he was, with his back pressed firmly against the doorframe.

  ‘Could you close the door?’ she purred, loosening her nightgown front and showing an altogether different side of her than the shrieking harridan of a few moments ago.

  ‘I could,’ Marlowe conceded, ‘but I don’t intend to. What is it you want, Mistress Greene?’

  She closed the nightgown again. All right, Robert Greene and Gabriel Harvey had fallen for her charms, but she was realist enough to realize it couldn’t happen every time. ‘I’ll be blunt,’ she said. ‘Gabriel was rooting around in Robyn’s things for any plays, poems and other trifles he could … what’s that word you University men use? Purloin. So much less criminal-sounding than steal, don’t you think? He found nothing, of course. But he left everything else there. Clothes, personal possessions, money. I can’t go and get them. Mrs Isam won’t give me the time of day. She likes Gabriel, I think, and that reprobate Simon Forman even more. But you’ve met her, haven’t you, Master Marlowe?’

  ‘I have,’ he nodded.

  ‘Well, could you pop back? Pick up whatever the poor old sod left behind, other than his winding sheet? You were always my late husband’s enemy. Will you be his friend now?’

  ‘I doubt there’ll be much left,’ Marlowe said. ‘Especially money.’

  He looked at her, not the most appealing of women; and one with a truly dreadful taste in men. Even so, he heard himself say, ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  Ingram Frizer puffed thoughtfully on his clay pipe. There was some dispute about who had brought tobacco from the New World but, whoever it was, Ingram Frizer was very grateful. For those moments in life when nothing is going right, tobacco was the only answer. Oh, and ale of course. And perhaps a hot woman or two.

  ‘So, where’s he gone?’ He passed the pipe to Nicholas Skeres who squinted sideways at him.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Henslowe. Last time I saw him, he was at the front of the queue, nose to nose with Kit Marlowe outside the Palace of Whitehall.’

  ‘He was.’ Skeres remembered. He didn’t actually share Frizer’s love of tobacco. It was rather a noxious weed, if he was being honest. But being honest wasn’t really what Nicholas Skeres did, so he puffed away, just to be sociable, trying to forget that his eyes were watering and his throat felt as if it had been brutally skinned.

  ‘I heard,’ Will Kemp took the pipe from Skeres, ‘he’d discovered a long-lost auntie out on the Essex marshes somewhere. Time for family time, so to speak.’

  ‘Who?’ Hal Dignam was last in the line; by the time the pipe reached him, it had gone out.

  The four of them sat side by side on the top of the wall that marked the edge of Master Sackerson’s pit. The grizzled, ancient animal looked up at them with his piggy eyes and used his long, pink tongue to lick his nose.

  ‘Wish I could do that,’ Kemp said, trying the same technique. ‘Might add to the repertoire.’

  Frizer could do that, but seldom felt the need. ‘I don’t think you boys are taking this very seriously,’ he said, a frown creasing his forehead. ‘We were all there the other night, sticking our necks out and our heads over the parapet for the sake of theatre. And for all his fine words, old Henslowe just melted away. They’ll be watching all of us now, you mark my words.’

  ‘It was bloody dark,’ Kemp remonstrated with his fellow-actor, ‘and seen one torch-carrying troublemaker, seen ’em all. We’ll be all right. Oh, Henslowe’s a marked man, that’s for sure. Nice of you to dob him in, by the way, Hal, shouting out his name like that.’

  ‘Who?’ Dignam asked.

  ‘What about old Kit, though, eh?’ Skeres said. He’d been worrying about it for days. ‘Do you think he was in on it, you know, with the Whitehall nobs?’

  Frizer thought for a moment. ‘Well, he’s a University wit, ain’t he?’ He was reasoning aloud. ‘Got more in common with them than us, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, but his dad’s a bootmaker back in Canterbury,’ Kemp said. ‘You couldn’t get more one of us if you tried.’

  ‘Tried what, Will?’ Hal Dignam was trying to relight the pipe. ‘’Ere, do you think bears drink smoke?’

  Will Kemp was nearest, so he did the honours, slapping Dignam around the head in time-honoured clown tradition. And it was just the sheerest of luck that he didn’t fall into the Bear Pit.

  Kit Marlowe was pleasantly surprised how much time the closing of the theatres had given him. He could go where he wanted, when he wanted, without the twin demons of Sledd and Henslowe, one on each shoulder, scolding him for not attending rehearsals or not delivering a rewrite of Act III. He knew he would soon come to miss it but, for now, it was making his life rather easy. For instance, instead of dashing off to the Rose this forenoon having roused Harvey and his unlovely paramour from bed, he had time to visit John Dee, for some well-needed advice and a chance to talk through the teeming ideas which thronged his head.

  Jane Dee opened the door to him with a face like thunder, swiftly overlaid with sun when she saw who it was. Looking left and right, she grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him inside.

  ‘Expecting someone?’ Marlowe asked, amused.

  Jane Dee’s eyes rolled up in exasperation. ‘Since that idiot Simon Forman has been prancing around London in his gowns and hats, scattering frogs hither and yon, we have had nothing but trouble. Friends, even old friends, come and expect the poor doctor to cure every manner of ill, even the Pestilence, as if he would allow that in the house with the children here! But they don’t want to give him time to consult with his books and give them the right remedy, if indeed there is one. No. They want him to light a taper, caper around and, with a burst of stardust, have them cured.’ She closed in to Marlowe so their noses almost touched. ‘They bought a dead woman yesterday.’

  Marlowe’s eyes widened politely. He had known John Dee have a very serious go at raising the dead before now, but thought it impolite to interrupt.

  ‘Stone dead, she was. You didn’t have to be much of a Magus to tell that. I had to leave the doors and windows open the rest of the day. Then, when he can’t do miracles, they shout and rave. The language sometimes!’ She finally took a deep breath and grabbed Marlowe by the shoulders and gave him loud kisses on each cheek. ‘But it isn’t one of them, it’s you and if anyone can bring a smile to the doctor’s face, Kit, you are that person. In you go. He’s in the back room, you know the way.’ And she was gone, with broom before to sweep the dust behind the door. Jane Dee probably did sit down sometimes, even sleep now and again. It was just that no one ever saw her do it.

  Marlowe tapped on the door but there was no reply.

  Jane, whose ears could detect every small movement that might annoy her husband, called through from the kitchen. ‘Just go in, Kit. He’s hiding.’

  Marlowe put his head around the door and saw that the room was empty. It had nothing like the magic of Dee’s old house in Mortlake, with the basilisk hanging from the ceiling on a perch and mirrors catching and holding reflections from years ago or the future, depending on who looked into them. But the faint smell of sulphur was there, overlaid now though it was by Jane’s liberal applications of beeswax on the ancient furniture, made of dark bog oak as old as time and as tough as iron. The books were the same too, leaning drunkenly on a few precarious shelves or piled up on the floor. The fire burned brightly in the wide hearth and a kettle sang on the trivet, alongside a seething cauldron that always looked ready to boil over and yet somehow never did. But of John Dee, there was no sign.

  Marlowe was confused. It wasn’t like Jane to not know almost to the inch where her husband might be found. He looked round behind the door but, apart from a hook holding an old and disreputable cloak, there was nothing there. Marlowe pursed his lips and blew a puzzled breath down his nose. He must go and ask Jane.

  ‘No need to bother Jane,’ a voice said in his left ear and he gave a jump. ‘My word, Kit,’ D
r Dee said, stepping out from behind the door, ‘you’re nervous today. Come and sit by the fire.’

  Marlowe was too old a hand to allow his friend to see how much he had been startled. The cloak, he now saw, was not a cloak at all, just Dee, face hidden, standing in the place a cloak might be expected to hang. A turn of the sleeve, a tug on a hem, he could see how it was done. A useful trick; he must try it sometime.

  Dee laughed to see the thoughts going over Marlowe’s face. ‘It helps if you know the person you are hiding from,’ he said, answering the question before it was even formed. ‘Some people, and I know you will know the kind I mean, wouldn’t have seen me if I was sitting right there in the chair, as long as I kept still. Others, I could fool by simply standing in a shadow or behind the drape. But for you, I needed something a little more, a little glamour, if I can call it that.’ He sighed and stretched his arms out to the side, making the elbows crack like a matchlock. ‘I’m getting a bit old for clinging to the back of a door, though.’

  ‘You have lost none of your knack,’ Marlowe said. ‘I would have gone away in another minute.’

  ‘Jane would have had my hide,’ Dee told him. ‘She worries about me, you know. Needs to know my whereabouts. But I know it is only because she loves me.’ A look of wonder came over his face. ‘I am luckier than I deserve.’

  ‘We all are,’ Marlowe told him. He had known Dee in sadness and in joy and, by and large, he preferred the joy. ‘I’m here to pick over your brain in the hope that you can help me.’

  Dee rubbed his hands together and led the way to where two chairs faced each other in front of the fire. October was being kind to them in London that year, but winter was knocking at the door and there was a chill in the air. The kettle whistling to itself on the hearth reminded Dee of his hostly duties. ‘A cup of my herbal mixture, Kit?’

  Marlowe was uncertain. He had drunk Dee’s herbal mixture before.