Queen's Progress Read online

  ‘Perhaps,’ Faunt nodded. ‘And where is everybody’s favourite stage manager exactly?’

  ‘Oh, he pops up now and then,’ Marlowe said. ‘Like the creatures he creates from his trapdoor at the Rose.’ He had no intention of sharing any more information with Nicholas Faunt than he had to. The man had been his master under Walsingham and, if truth be told, he had learned much from Secretary Faunt; but he would die rather than say so. ‘But I’m more interested in why you’ve popped up.’

  ‘I ran into Tom by chance the other day. I had some business along the Bank and there he was, coming from the Rose, stinking of glue and that moth-eaten old bear that Henslowe keeps.’

  ‘And Tom just opened his mouth and it all came tumbling out.’

  ‘Along with much else,’ Faunt yawned. ‘I know every twinge his wife is feeling with her near-confinement; exactly how he plans to stage your Tragical History of Doctor Faustus one day; oh, and that little piece that Philip Henslowe has found near the Bear Garden – the one Mrs Henslowe doesn’t know about.’

  ‘Really?’ Marlowe hadn’t known that either. ‘Henslowe? I thought he’d stopped … anyway, don’t try and deflect me, Master Faunt. I know your tricks. None of this explains why you’re here.’

  ‘There’s been a murder, Marlowe,’ Faunt said, straight-faced, ‘at Farnham.’

  ‘Murder, was it?’ Marlowe tried to play the innocent, but Faunt knew him too well for that to work.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ the former secretary shrugged, ‘but as soon as Sledd coughed, I thought to myself – Kit’s in trouble. He’s one-handed, or near as dammit. And he’s getting in too deep in troubled waters.’

  The dramatist in Marlowe ignored the mixed metaphor and repetition of words. Nicholas Faunt was not known where poets gathered; even Will Shaxsper was better than he was. ‘You know my task, then,’ he asked Faunt, ‘to prepare for the Queen’s Progress?’

  Faunt nodded. ‘Farnham, I know about. Where else is she going?’

  ‘Cowdray’s next. I’ve just come from there.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Petworth. The wizard earl.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘They’re Papists, Nicholas,’ Marlowe said grimly, ‘all of them. The Middlehams, the Brownes, the Percys. If Her Majesty had invited herself to the Vatican, she couldn’t be in more danger.’

  Faunt nodded. ‘Peculiar,’ he said. ‘You’ve told Cecil?’

  ‘Of course. I’ve yet to hear from him, but at this rate, Her Majesty will be progressing from her bedroom to her tiring room and back. At least we can keep her safe there.’

  ‘I’m more concerned about keeping you safe,’ Faunt told him.

  Marlowe smiled. ‘That’s touching, Nicholas,’ he said, ‘but, really …’

  Faunt closed to him. ‘You’ve got one pair of eyes, Marlowe,’ he told him, ‘one pair of ears and one right hand. Your enemies, I fear, have more than that. And who knows, in a little room, perhaps, or …’ he looked around him, ‘… in God’s own garden; there will be a reckoning, one day. I’m here to see that doesn’t happen. That’s all.’

  Tom Sledd was lost. He hadn’t told the others yet, but he had no idea where he was going. He corrected himself in his silent colloquy – of course he knew where he was going. He even knew where he had been. It was joining up the two which was giving him a bit of trouble. He let his reins hang loose and the horse ambled along at its own pace, nibbling from the roadside green from time to time. The lane they were currently in was so narrow that Tom, leading his little caravan, was whipped gently with the soft fronds of lady’s mantle and cow parsley. There was wild garlic in the mix as well; his horse would have breath fit to stop a clock in the morning.

  ‘Master Sledd?’ A low rumble like a distant earthquake alerted him to the fact that Leonard at the very least had begun to wonder where they were.

  ‘Leonard?’ Tom Sledd had learned a lot over the years from Philip Henslowe, and answering a question with a question was perhaps his most useful gambit.

  ‘Are we there yet?’

  ‘Nearly,’ Sledd said, brightly. ‘Just up this lane and we’ll see Petworth, I’m sure.’ He chose to ignore the gentle snort from Jack Norfolk.

  ‘Only …’

  ‘Only what, Leonard?’ Tom Sledd had a toddler at home and he might as well have brought her with him.

  ‘The horses need water,’ the big man pointed out. ‘Mine’s eating ramsons and it’ll be scouring like the Devil tomorrow if he eats many more.’

  Sledd turned in the saddle. ‘I didn’t have you down for a country boy, Leonard,’ he said.

  ‘My old grandsire had a stables, Master Sledd. Lyttleburye’s Livery, it was called. I used to work there, when I was a little ’un.’

  ‘Useful skill,’ Sledd muttered, privately doubting whether Leonard Lyttlebury had ever even been a little ’un. ‘Let’s keep their heads up, then, and get to the end of this lane.’

  ‘And I’m a bit peckish myself.’ A man of few words, Leonard Lyttleburye was hard to stop once he got going. ‘Are you peckish, Jack?’

  Jack Norfolk seemed to wake up for the first time. He was bringing up the rear and had not really got involved in the banalities of the conversation. He was enjoying the warm sun on his back, the birdsong, the smell of the sweet grass cropped by the horses, overlaid with a smell of … could that be garlic? ‘Sorry, Leonard,’ he said with a smile which lit up his face. ‘I wasn’t listening. What did you say?’

  ‘Are you peckish?’

  ‘I could eat.’

  ‘Well, I’m really hungry …’

  Suddenly, Lyttleburye’s horse reared, eyes rolling in his head. It took all the ex-stable boy’s skill to calm him and, when he had, all three men saw the cause. A little nutbrown creature was standing in the roadway, almost under the animal’s hoofs. It had a hand up to its toothless mouth and was snickering behind it. It was hard to tell the sex as it was wearing a shapeless garment made of sacking. It was hard to tell the age; it was certainly no spring chicken, yet seemed limber enough.

  Jack Norfolk, furthest from the creature, was first to recover. ‘Who in the name of God are you?’ he snapped. ‘You could have been killed.’

  ‘Not I,’ it said with a mad giggle. ‘I bin a-jumpin’ out at horses in this lane man and boy—’ that sorted out one dilemma, at least – ‘since ’Arry were naught but a lad.’ And there, in a few more words, so was the other.

  Tom Sledd wished with all his heart that Marlowe was with them. He would talk to this mad thing and find out all sorts of useful stuff, such as where in Hades was Petworth House. And, if not that, he would have a fine fool to put in his next play. He tried a Marlovian question, just to move the madness along. ‘That’s what you do, is it? Jump out at horses?’

  ‘I just said so, din’ I?’ The old man capered a little in the road and Lyttleburye’s horse, by now totally unnerved, jumped backwards, bringing down clods of earth from the high bank.

  ‘I mean …’ Sledd was at a loss.

  ‘I think what my friend here means,’ Norfolk spoke from the rear, ‘is this; is jumping out at horses what you do for a living?’

  The old man looked blank.

  ‘Do you, in some way, make money from jumping out at horses?’

  This earned him a withering look. ‘Are you soft in the head?’ the creature grated. ‘What money’s to be made in jumping out at horses? No, I makes what money I make from cursin’ people. It’s not much, but it’s a living. Jumping out at horses is what I does for a laugh. A jest. A joke.’

  ‘I’m going to kill him,’ Lyttlelburye rumbled. ‘Just see if I don’t.’

  This made the little old man double up and slap his knees. He was laughing so much it looked as though Lyttleburye would be spared the effort; he had turned purple and was beginning to cough.

  ‘Slap him on the back, someone,’ Jack Norfolk urged. ‘Not you, Leonard,’ he said, hurriedly; the man looked all too keen to comply. ‘Tom, slap him on the back.’<
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  Tom Sledd looked at the back in question and decided not to – it was altogether too dirt encrusted to be at all a welcome thought. But it didn’t matter; with a final ferocious hoick of phlegm into the hedgerow, the elderly prankster was himself again, wiping his eyes on a filthy sleeve.

  ‘No, I tells you why I were laughing when I jumps out at yer. I heard him, the big ’un, say he was hungry. And this ’ere’s, this ’ere’s called Hungers Lane.’ He presented the punchline as if it was the wittiest thing he had ever said, which might of course have been the case. ‘Hungers Lane. He’s hungry.’

  In the silence, an early grasshopper chirped and one of the horses tore a mouthful of green from the verge with a noise like ripping silk.

  ‘Yes.’ Sledd was stuck for any other comment. ‘I see. Can you tell us if we’re near to Petworth, at all?’

  The old man looked from face to face, still chuckling to himself, although he could now scarcely remember why. ‘Ar. Up the lane, turns right. You’ll sees it yonder.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Jack Norfolk clicked his tongue and his horse nudged Leonard’s gelding in the quarter. ‘Leonard, give the man something for his trouble.’

  Lyttleburye clicked his tongue too and his horse moved off. ‘You give him something for his trouble,’ he growled. ‘My purse is deep but I have short arms. And in any case, he makes his money from cursing, not jumping out at horses.’

  ‘That’s true, master, very true.’ The ancient tugged on his sparse forelock as they passed. ‘Cursin’s the game if you wants to make money.’

  When Norfolk’s horse had been swallowed up by the burgeoning green of the lane, a glint came into the old man’s eye and he stood up rather straighter.

  ‘But you won’t need cursing by me, if it’s Petworth House you seek. Oh, no, my masters. You’ll be praying for a simple curse right enough, if you go there.’

  The three horsemen broke from the clinging fronds of the narrow lane with relief and turned right. None of them expected to see Petworth House when they turned the first corner and yet, there it lay, cupped in a fold in the countryside as if it had grown there, surrounded by its wall, its paddocks, its stands of woodland. The house was clearly very old and had grown bit by bit, as the Percy coffers had waxed and waned, and now it looked like a child’s toy, with turrets balanced on gatehouses, windows cut haphazardly in a gable end. And yet, it seemed to welcome them, to throw out its arms to offer them comfort and shelter from the growing heat of the day. Tom Sledd was humble in his acceptance of the congratulations of the other two, if ‘congratulations’ was the word.

  ‘Well done, Tom,’ Jack Norfolk said, slapping him on the back. ‘I really thought we were lost for a moment there.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Sledd said. ‘I was brought up in a travelling show. My sense of direction is second to none, say it myself as perhaps shouldn’t.’

  Leonard Lyttleburye was less polite. ‘Lucky,’ he murmured as he urged his horse forward with his heels. ‘There’s a stream down there, let’s get these horses down to it for a good long drink. Mine has been farting fit to beat the band since he ate those ramsons.’

  Norfolk patted the stage manager’s back again. ‘Don’t worry, Tom,’ he said. ‘I can tell he’s impressed really. He just doesn’t know how to show it.’

  Sledd fell into line behind the other horses then hung back a little; Lyttleburye might be a man of few words, but he was dead right about his horse.

  Petworth was a house to wander in, with passageways which went nowhere, stairs which suddenly took a person by surprise as they turned a corner. From every window, there was a view to tear a man’s heart from his breast, of fields shimmering in the summer sun, of coney-cropped meadow reaching into the cool of the wood. In a courtyard, maids hung acres of snow-white linen from ropes slung from eave to eave, hauling them up high in the air with wooden pulleys, white with water and age. They sounded like the flock of starlings which wheeled and twittered over the wood, mysterious under its haze of heat and distance. Tom Sledd was entranced. The wizard earl had greeted this friend of Kit Marlowe as if he was his own oldest and dearest companion and had given him the freedom of the house to plan his revel.

  Tom Sledd had no idea how lucky he was in his timing. Henry Percy was in love; nothing so very special, as he was always in love. But just now, he was in the happy reverie which all men must inhabit when the object of his love loves him back. Had the stage manager told him he must demolish the house and set fire to the ruins to please the Queen, it may well have been that the wizard earl would have simply nodded his agreement and wandered away, singing a happy tune.

  Jack Norfolk and Leonard Lyttleburye were off on errands of their own. Tom Sledd was no drama snob – or, at least, no more a drama snob than any other stage manager of the best theatre in Town who had been charged with planning a revel for the Queen – but he was happier on his own. He didn’t know what Jack Norfolk’s views on the theatre were, but Leonard had shared his general thoughts already and he had made it clear that, should Hell freeze over, even then, he, Leonard Lancelot Lyttleburye would not be seen as a groundling or anything else within a theatre, unless it was as the man tasked with burning it down. After that, there seemed little left to say on the subject.

  Around another corner, Sledd came upon the most beautiful room, with windows all along one side and an enormous fireplace, with the Percy arms bitten deep into the ancient stone. The windows had, here and there, fragments of a once-magnificent design, now reduced to the odd hand, foot, halo and word in Latin, enigmatic in its single state. ‘Poenitet’, the panes exhorted. ‘Pacem’. And, the wizard earl’s current favourite, ‘Adorant me’. The windowsill was low and worn at one end, the wood of the architrave made smooth by the backs of many Percys, dreaming there as their acres unrolled beneath them. The stage manager couldn’t help himself; he sat down, the sill almost moulding itself to his rear. He leaned back and looked out at the scene. There was Leonard, wandering through the herb garden, trailing a hand across the lavender and rosemary. Sledd couldn’t help but chuckle; who would have thought that Lyttleburye had a sensitive side? And there was Jack Norfolk, sitting on the edge of a carp pond, further away from the house, towards the road which led to the village. He was staring into the water as into a scrying glass. The languid air of Petworth and its love-struck lord seemed to have got under everyone’s skin this afternoon. A fly buzzed somewhere in the room, blundering every now and then against the diamond panes. Then, it was further away, then further still, and Tom Sledd slept in the sun, like a cat.

  When Tom Sledd woke, the sun had moved round and he was sitting in shadow, warm still with the memory of noon. The house which had been so still was now a hive of industry, with men carrying tables and maids strewing fresh rushes on the floor. The stage manager stretched and got up from his seat, hoping that by acting naturally he could just merge with the background, his nap unnoticed.

  ‘Sleep well, Master Sledd?’ a soft voice asked.

  He jumped a mile and spun round. A woman stood there, Tom’s age or perhaps a little less. She wasn’t beautiful exactly, but there was something about her face which made men want to look at it and nothing else, preferably for the rest of their lives. She smiled at him and he relaxed. ‘I was … I was just resting my eyes. It helps me think,’ he said, trying to keep the truculent whine from his voice.

  ‘Of course. I knew that.’ She stepped forward and linked her arm through his. ‘I am Barbara Gascoigne, Master Sledd. More correctly Lady Barbara Gascoigne, but please, don’t trouble yourself over that. I want us to be friends. But more especially, Master Sledd, I want to be part of your revel.’

  He looked down at her in consternation. He had heard, of course, that the ladies of the house often took part in revels for the Queen, but he would not presume to plan anything to involve them. If they insisted, of course, that was another thing. But old habits died hard. ‘Lady Barbara,’ he said, thinking on his feet, ‘I’m not sure if …’


  She stamped a perfectly shod foot and dropped his arm. ‘If you are about to say, Master Sledd,’ she said, with steel suddenly in her voice, ‘that Henry won’t allow it, then to that I say simply, fiddlesticks. I want to be in the revel, and you must write me a part.’

  ‘I do no writing, Lady Barbara,’ Sledd protested. ‘Master Marlowe will be doing any writing that goes on. I make the sets, arrange for the costumes, the music, that kind of thing.’

  ‘So …’ her eyes flickered around the room, ‘where is Master Marlowe? I must speak with him.’

  ‘He will be here shortly, I believe,’ Tom said. In fact, he had half expected to find him there when he had arrived; the master of fire and air often kept to a schedule that would tax Dr Dee himself. ‘I’m sure he would be delighted to …’

  Suddenly, a shadow, both real and metaphorical, filled the room. The wizard earl loomed at them through the gathering twilight and swept down the long space between them and the door with seven league strides. ‘Barbara,’ he said, his voice rather high and tight. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

  With a bright smile, she moved away from Sledd and into the arms of her lover. Outside, in the world, in the court, they had to be careful, but here at Petworth there was no need for such caution. ‘Henry,’ she breathed, reaching up for a kiss. ‘I have been looking for you too. Where were you? Not in your nasty laboratory, I hope. Nor with your silly books.’ She tapped him on the chest with an ivory finger, no harder than the beat of a butterfly wing. ‘You will wear out your brain with all this thinking. Look,’ she said, and traced between his eyes with the forefinger of the other hand, so she had to turn to face him, pressing herself against him, ‘you’re getting lines on your Lovelly face.’

  The couple were practically giving off steam and, although none of the staff seemed to notice, going about their business as they were, Tom Sledd felt very superfluous indeed and, sliding one careful foot behind him and then the other, made for the door and the peace and quiet of his room, where he could splash his face with cold water before going to find Norfolk and Lyttleburye.