Black Death Read online

  The hand over her face took her completely by surprise, therefore. She had heard not a step, not a creak of a board before, suddenly, her breath was stopped. Her eyes flew open and rolled madly in her head, but whoever it was who had his hand over her mouth and nose was behind her and she could see no one. Surely, her last thought came like an explosion in her head, surely, the Lord would not come like this, violent and cruel? Her eyes strained in the darkness, then the dark was absolute, a void as wide as the sky.

  She couldn’t tell how long she had been in the darkness, but she could feel what seemed to be rain on her face. She opened her eyes eagerly; was this Heaven? She had always liked rain, liked the way it made the gardens smell fresh, like a baby’s skin. She put a hand out to feel the drops, but it wasn’t rain. It was just wetness on her cheek. Someone was splashing her with water. She spluttered and struggled to sit up, but there was a weight on her chest, holding her down. Her eyelids felt swollen and she couldn’t see, but darker against the dark of the window, she could see a shape, a heavy shape, sitting on her chest, crouching like a demon. She tried to cross herself but the demon had her wrist caught in its fist and she couldn’t move. The demon leaned down until she could feel his hot breath on her mouth.

  ‘Have you seen him yet?’ the demon grated. ‘Have you seen him?’

  Eunice shook her head as far as she was able. The pain in her throat and across her jaw was the worst she had ever felt. The demon tucked her hands under his knees and used his claws to press on her throat, her mouth, her nose. She struggled to take one last breath. Could this be a test? Did the Lord test you before he let you into Paradise? If that was the case, she would try her best to pass, but she didn’t know what the answer should be. As the blackness came upon her, she hoped this time to get it right.

  There was no water this time, no gentle, healing rain. Instead, there was a stinging slap across one cheek, then the other. Eunice gasped, forcing air into her lungs past her tortured throat. Her eyes wouldn’t open now at all. They were hot and sealed with dried tears. She felt the demon change position and again his hot breath seared her face.

  ‘Have you seen him yet? Have you seen him?’

  She couldn’t really remember, but last time she thought she had shaken her head. This time, she tried to nod, but could scarcely move. Cruel hands grabbed her shoulders and shook her violently. ‘Is that yes? Have you seen him? Did he speak? What did he say? Was his light too glorious? Tell me! Tell me!’ A vicious slap rocked her and her brain – old, tired and frail – rebelled and she finally went into a darkness which would never fade.

  NINE

  Marlowe knew better than to hide from Cecil – he knew that it simply couldn’t be done. He had become quite adept at keeping out of the way of Henslowe and all the importuning actors begging for roles, but from Cecil, no one could hide. He was at his breakfast table in Hog Lane that Monday morning, buttering the last crusts of a new loaf, when the hammering at the door alerted him to a more than usually determined visitor. He called through into the kitchen that he would answer the door and did so, still wiping buttery crumbs from his moustache.

  ‘Master Marlowe?’ Two men stood outside, between them blocking out the light. They were both well known to Marlowe and he to them but, clearly, today things were going to be kept on a formal footing.

  ‘Yes,’ Marlowe said, smiling slightly. ‘And you are?’

  This foxed both of his visitors. They had expected a bit of backchat – they knew him too well for it to be otherwise – but this was a difficult one. Finally, after some thought, the slightly larger of the two spoke. ‘It’s us, Master Marlowe, Sir Robert’s bodyguard. You know us.’ He pointed to the Sero, sed Serio woven into the pleats at his shoulder that was the Cecil motto.

  ‘Do I?’ he asked. ‘I only ask because Sir Robert’s guard know me well and yet, here you are, asking me my name.’

  The two looked at each other in confusion. ‘We were just making conversation, Master Marlowe. Being pleasant, like.’

  ‘I see. Well, in that case, come in while I finish breaking my fast, if you would be so good. Would you care for a little something? Bread? Ale? I believe there may be some posset from yesterday, if the kitchen maid hasn’t finished it up?’

  ‘Er, no thank you, Master Marlowe, kind of you to offer. Sir Robert did say that we had to bring you to him with all speed.’

  ‘Is that what he said?’

  ‘Not in so many words, Master Marlowe, no. But he did seem to be in a bit of a state, if I’m honest. His old dad’s in a bit of a stew as well. They’re both there, waiting for you.’

  Marlowe could hardly suppress a smile to think of Lord Burghley, the Queen’s Secretary of State, being anyone’s old dad, but he supposed that, taken literally, the guard did not misspeak. ‘Lads,’ he said, throwing his cloak over his shoulder, ‘do you know if this is about last Friday?’

  ‘Friday?’ The shorter guard had a face devoid of expression. ‘Did something happen on Friday, Master Marlowe? I know it was the thirteenth, but I am not superstitious, myself.’

  Marlowe nodded. Right – well, that was something. Henslowe might be safe after all. ‘Something else, then,’ he murmured, half to himself. ‘Expect me when you see me,’ he called over his shoulder into the kitchen, and was rewarded by a vague yell. ‘I don’t know why I even say that,’ he said to the guards. ‘They hardly seem to notice I’m here anyway. Sometimes, I wonder who employs who.’

  In the kitchen, the cook looked at the kitchen maid and they both suppressed a giggle. They knew right enough who was in charge in the house in Hog Lane – and it certainly wasn’t one Master Marlowe, the Muse’s darling and ex-scholar of Corpus Christi.

  Robert Cecil knew that he didn’t measure up physically to most men, so he had learned at his nursemaid’s knee to make his presence felt in other ways. He had never bothered trying to be louder either; the bigger children could always just shout him down. So what he did was make stillness into an art form and he was practising that art when Marlowe was shown in by Cecil’s new secretary.

  Marlowe sat in his usual chair in the rabbit warren that was the Palace of Whitehall and waited for the Spymaster to take notice of him. The little man sat behind his desk like a spider on a web, still but watching, feeling every twitch of the silk, no matter how delicate and slight the movement. After a moment, he looked up.

  ‘Do sit down, Master Marlowe,’ he said, with a wintry smile.

  ‘Thank you,’ Marlowe nodded and settled back against the cushion. ‘I don’t mind if I do.’

  Cecil bent to his papers again but this morning his heart was not in his usual mind games.

  ‘I have called you in to see me, Master Marlowe, because I need someone of your … shall we say, special talents?’

  ‘I do write a mighty line,’ Marlowe conceded. ‘It’s not like you to sponsor a play, though, is it?’ His smile would not have disgraced a choirboy.

  ‘Not that special talent,’ Cecil said. Marlowe pricked up his ears. That Cecil did not take him up on this sally said far more than any words. ‘I need your skills in discovering a murderer.’

  It wasn’t often Marlowe was surprised, but he was now. ‘Surely, Sir Robert, you have men at your disposal more worthy than I …’

  ‘No false modesty, Marlowe, please. And this is not a murder which threatens the safety of the Queen, or at least, my father and I don’t think it is, so … you would seem to be the better choice.’

  ‘Your men did say your father was … upset.’

  ‘My men said too much.’

  ‘He is here, though.’

  ‘He is.’

  Marlowe was getting testy. He could tell when something was being withheld from him and it wasn’t fair for Cecil to ask him to solve a mystery when he didn’t even know what the mystery was. ‘Is he to join us?’

  ‘I think not. He is, as my men told you, upset. And there are also, as always, affairs of state.’

  Marlowe cast his mind quickly ove
r the Burghley family. Cecil’s mother was dead, he knew, his grandparents long gone to their reward. Of Burghley’s sisters he knew nothing. It could only be one person and he blenched at the thought of investigating that particular murder. ‘Is it … Thomas?’

  Cecil gave a shout of laughter. ‘I’m not sure whether my brother’s murder would upset anyone very much, Master Marlowe,’ he said. ‘No, it is someone much more important than that. It is his nursemaid. And mine. Eunice – Noo-Noo, we all called her. She was found dead in her bed yesterday morning.’

  Marlowe blinked. The thought of Burghley in hanging sleeves going for walks with his Noo-Noo was something that even his vivid imagination baulked at. He tried to come to the point. ‘She must have been a considerable age,’ he said.

  ‘She was elderly, yes. She came to the family when she was twelve, so she is … was …’ Cecil did some quick calculations, ‘eighty-three, -four, something like that.’

  ‘And so,’ Marlowe was uncertain how to put this delicate question to a man clearly grieving. ‘Could she not have simply … died?’

  A door hidden in the panelling burst open and the Queen’s Secretary of State burst in, the hair unruly without the ubiquitous cap and the beard stained and yellow. ‘Don’t you think we have thought of that, Marlowe?’ he yelled. ‘We’re not idiots! Noo-Noo – I mean, Mistress Brown – was found dead in her bed with clear signs of foul play.’ The old man’s eyes filled with tears. ‘She had never hurt a soul, in all her life. She was devout, she was loyal … Master Marlowe, she was a woman who made the world better by being in it. And yet, someone …’ He pressed a kerchief to his mouth and signalled Cecil to continue, flopping into a chair.

  Cecil cleared his throat. ‘Mistress Brown was found by one of the maids. Since she had ceased to be a nursemaid, she had been a pensioner of the house, with a bedroom on the nursery floor, where she had spent so much of her life. She kept to her room of recent years, reading devout tracts, doing some mending, embroidery, that kind of thing. My father visited when he could, as did I when visiting Hatfield. She … she was happy, I hope, in her retirement.’

  Marlowe was touched by the devotion of the men who, between them, ran the nation. ‘What did the maid find, that makes you think of murder?’

  Burghley was in control of himself again and took up the tale. ‘I was in Hatfield myself. I try to get there when I can and it was politic that I was not in London on Friday.’

  A glance went between father and son that Marlowe didn’t miss.

  ‘The maid was hysterical. She ran out of Noo-Noo’s bedchamber and woke the whole house with her screams. I was next on the scene and it was truly dreadful. The look on her face … I have seen some sights, Master Marlowe, but she looked as if she had seen the Devil himself.’

  Marlowe had also seen some sights. He had seen people who died peacefully in their beds who looked terrified; he had seen people chased and hunted down and killed who looked as peaceful as a saint. ‘That alone is no proof of murder,’ he told them.

  ‘Alone, no, I agree,’ the Secretary of State said. ‘But her face and throat were a mass of bruises.’

  ‘That’s different.’ Marlowe knew that evil stalked the world in every place, but when it struck at an old and defenceless woman, it was evil indeed.

  ‘I do not have your expertise,’ Burghley told the playwright, with unaccustomed modesty, ‘but it seemed to me that someone had gripped her face hard, like this.’ He moved towards his son. ‘May I, Robyn?’ Cecil lifted his face up to the only man in the world he trusted. Burghley pinched the Spymaster’s nose between finger and thumb, at the same time pressing up under his chin with the heel of his hand. With the other, he gripped around his throat.

  ‘I have seen that done,’ Marlowe nodded.

  ‘Sadly, haven’t we all,’ Cecil agreed, quietly grateful that the old man had let go of him. ‘But the odd thing, Marlowe, was that this had happened not once, but several times. The bruising showed it clearly.’

  ‘Especially around the throat,’ the Secretary of State agreed. ‘The thumb marks were particularly clear.’

  ‘I assume that Mistress Brown was not unusually strong.’ Marlowe could not somehow conjure up an old lady known as Noo-Noo being built like a wrestler.

  ‘If anything, rather frail,’ Cecil confirmed.

  ‘So, there was unlikely to have been a struggle.’

  ‘Very unlikely. Also, she was in her bed, so she was taken as she slept.’ Burghley’s voice was thick with sorrow. ‘I daresay you think me a maudlin old man, Master Marlowe, but my nursemaid is the last person who had known me all my life. It was into her arms I was put on the day I was born. Her mother was my wet nurse. Now, there is no one to remember me as a child.’ He smiled wanly. ‘I did not know how lonely that would be.’

  Cecil looked at Marlowe, a question in his eyes, and Marlowe answered it.

  ‘If you would permit me, my Lord,’ he said, ‘I could go up to Hatfield and ask questions. The servants. The tenants. If, as you say, your old nurse was beloved by all, it shouldn’t take long to run the murderer to ground. Someone will know who he is and won’t stay quiet for long. No one would shield a man who could do that to a defenceless old lady.’

  Burghley nodded and blew his nose again. ‘I will send to my man of business to make sure no one interferes with your questions, Master Marlowe. In the meantime, please excuse me, I need to go and pray for Noo-Noo’s soul.’ He turned and opened the door in the panelling, turning as he did so. ‘No candles or any popish idolatry, of course.’

  Marlowe inclined his head. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Just a simple prayer.’ Burghley cleared his throat again. ‘A simple prayer, for a simple soul.’ And the door closed softly behind him.

  There seemed to be nothing else to say. Marlowe got up and was almost out of the room when Cecil called him back.

  ‘Just because you are helping with our little family trouble, Master Marlowe, I do still want to remind you that I have not forgotten Master Henslowe’s involvement on Friday last. It isn’t over. Perhaps you would be good enough to tell him as much.’

  Marlowe bowed but this time didn’t speak. Sometimes, the least said was the soonest mended.

  ‘How are things at the Rose, then, Will?’ Hal Dignam was wringing out his pickadil now that October was here and a driving rain had added to London’s woes.

  ‘Hello, Hal.’ Shaxsper was as close to the fire as his feet could bear, a pint of ale in front of him. ‘As bad as the Curtain, I’ll wager.’

  ‘At least,’ Dignam waved to his host, miming the downing of a cup of his best, ‘we haven’t driven our stage manager mad.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Dignam looked at the Warwickshire man. ‘Well, Tom Sledd. He is still at the Rose, isn’t he?’

  ‘As much as any of us are,’ Shaxsper muttered. ‘I’m seriously thinking of going home.’

  ‘Where’s that, then?’

  ‘Stratford.’

  ‘I always thought you was from the north.’

  ‘Stratford is in the Midlands, Hal.’ This was not the first time that Shaxsper had had this conversation with a Londoner. ‘Bradford is in the north.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘You see,’ Dignam became confidential, leaning over the table and dripping rainwater into Shaxsper’s ale, ‘and I’ll come clean about this – I always thought Stratford was east London.’

  ‘That’s at Bow, Hal,’ Shaxsper sighed. No wonder this man was a clown. ‘I’m talking about “on Avon”. Different thing altogether.’

  ‘Ah, right.’ Dignam was still waving at various serving wenches, seeing as how his host was ignoring him altogether. ‘So what’s this with Tom Sledd, then?’

  ‘What?’ Like a large number of people, Will Shaxsper was easily confused by the circles of Hal Dignam’s conversation.

  ‘He’s in Bedlam. But then, I s’pose you know that.’

  ‘In Bedlam?’ Shaxsper�
��s mind was racing. The last time he had seen Tom Sledd, the stage manager had become a trifle green at the resurrection of a dead man and had gone off to watch for the Watch. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Will Kemp and I saw him, clear as day. He was as close to us as we are at this very moment.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Asked us to get him out.’

  ‘And … did you?’ Shaxsper needed to know. Closed theatres or not, men like Tom Sledd didn’t grow on trees. They were the lifeblood of the theatre, men who made the wooden O, O. In fact, so many metaphors were whirling in Shaxsper’s head, he felt he ought to lie down.

  ‘Nah,’ Dignam shrugged. ‘Well, let sleeping dogs lie, ain’t it?’

  Shaxsper grabbed the man’s shoulder. ‘But, he’s one of us, Hal!’ he bellowed. ‘Well,’ he dropped his voice because people were starting to stare, ‘not one of you, exactly, but when a man’s chained to a wall, surely we can forget little theatrical rivalries.’

  ‘Oh, he wasn’t chained,’ Dignam was at pains to explain, ‘and to be fair, I wanted to help him, but you know what a double-dyed shithouse Will Kemp is. Wanted to see the Queen of Sheba instead.’