Crimson Rose Read online

  A voice in his ear was both familiar and welcome and it wafted to him on a gust of boiled fowl. ‘So, you pay your Windlass, do you?’ it said. ‘Master Dee has not yet grasped that principle.’

  Marlowe turned and hugged the man who had crept up so silently behind him. ‘Sam!’ he said. ‘I’m so glad to find you here.’ Dee’s factotum was like a kind deed in a naughty world. Like his master, he risked the shifting opprobrium of that world from day to day. It was like that with prophecies; get it right and you’re wined and dined, sought out by the superstitious and guaranteed a grave in Westminster Abbey. Get it wrong and you weren’t guaranteed a grave at all.

  Bowes gave a lowering look at Dee, who looked away. Marlowe caught the look.

  ‘What?’ He stopped and folded his arms.

  ‘He’s off, isn’t he,’ Bowes blurted out, ‘with that Kelley? Looking to raise some angel, or some such nonsense. For a clever man, Master Marlowe, I am afraid my master is a fool.’

  Dee drew himself up and glared at Bowes from his basilisk eyes. ‘Back to the kitchen, Samuel Bowes,’ he cried, ‘or I will turn you into a toad. Not a difficult task, seeing as you are already halfway there, you loathsome thing.’

  Without a backward glance, Bowes shambled off to the kitchen, muttering under his breath. Dee turned to Marlowe and smiled.

  ‘So, Kit, as you see, nothing changes here.’ He ushered him into a room to their right, with a bright fire burning and rich draperies drawn against the night outside. The Queen’s Semper Eadem glittered on the cloth of gold fittings.

  ‘Are you really going away?’ Marlowe asked. ‘And with Edward Kelley, of all people? I don’t hear much about him that is good.’

  ‘Edward is … Well, you’re right, Kit,’ Dee said, ruefully. ‘But I must give one more chance to my work on contacting angels and Edward does seem to have a knack. Perhaps it is all trickery, I don’t know … Things aren’t the same since Nell died. I don’t seem to have the interest …’

  Marlowe was unaccountably sad. He was very fond of the old magus and was suddenly aware that he hadn’t visited him, had had no thought of him, even, for months. Even when he saw him in the theatre, with a hat pulled down over his eyes and a cloak to disguise him, even then he had not gone up into the gallery to renew his old acquaintance, to relive old times. But it had been good to know he was there.

  ‘When are you off?’

  ‘It could be tomorrow,’ the magus said. ‘It could be next week, next year or never. I can plan the tides and the winds, but one never knows with Edward. But enough of plans. Tell me what you have been doing. I have tried scrying, I will tell you truthfully, but can’t often find you. This isle is full of noises …’

  ‘You should have come to speak to me that Tuesday,’ Marlowe said with a small, sad smile. This visit had a lot of the goodbye in it.

  ‘Wednesday,’ Dee said. ‘Let’s not be sad, though, Kit. It’s good to see you and let that be an end to it.’ He peered at the playwright by the light of the candles and flickering flame. ‘What’s in the parcel?’

  ‘The reason for my late visit,’ Marlowe said. ‘It was given into my safe keeping tonight and I wanted to know what it is. And when I want to know what something is, naturally the first place I think of is wherever you are.’

  ‘Let me see,’ Dee said. ‘You are keeping it close by you, I notice. Even sitting in my room, before my fire, you keep it in your lap. Is it very precious?’

  ‘Either very precious or totally worthless,’ Marlowe said. ‘I can’t decide.’

  He handed his linen-wrapped parcel across to Dee and the old magus took it eagerly. He pulled over a small table, placed the jug in its shroud on it and unwrapped it carefully. Just before the last layer came away he looked up at Marlowe. ‘It isn’t alive, is it?’

  Marlowe shook his head, hoping he was right. Those dancing engravings had shaken him more than he cared to admit.

  The magician checked again. ‘Nor has it been alive? I have seen too many things in my life, Kit, to be easily revolted, but it is late in the night to have a limb suddenly unwrapped on my favourite table.’

  ‘No.’ This time Marlowe smiled a little. ‘No, no limbs, no rats, nothing severed or trapped. Unwrap the linen and see for yourself.’

  Dee let the final layer fall away and the jug was revealed in the glow of the guttering candles and the fire. He sat back in his chair and looked at it, cocking his head as a blackbird does to get a bead on a worm. He foraged in his gown and brought out his spectacles, which he pinched on to his nose, then he leaned forward again. He moved the jug so he could see all sides, but Marlowe noticed that he did it by pulling on the linen, not by touching the jug itself. After what seemed like a lifetime, the alchemist spoke.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ he asked, almost in a whisper.

  ‘Hmm,’ Marlowe said. ‘Now you’ve asked me. I got it in a house in Blackfriars, but whether it belongs there or not is a moot point. Not even the lady of the house was sure. Apparently, it comes and goes.’

  ‘Comes and goes?’ Dee unpinched his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. ‘What, by itself?’

  ‘Its … owner, as I suppose we must call her now, didn’t seem to know. She has only just come to her inheritance and, as she remembers it, sometimes the jug is on its shelf, sometimes it is not. But as for it moving by itself, I should tell you, before you suspect angels, that when I took it down, there were finger marks in the dust around it. Apart from that, there were rings in the dust, where it had clearly been gone, then come back, then gone again; different thicknesses of dust, building up in its absence.’ He looked eagerly at Dee, who was still sitting upright, almost leaning away from the jug. ‘So, what can you tell me?’

  ‘I can tell you that your lady friend in Blackfriars should change her maidservant.’

  Marlowe inclined his head with a small smile. ‘About the jug. What can you tell me about the jug?’

  Dee steepled his fingers and tapped his chin with the topmost spire. ‘I have never seen this jug before,’ he said. ‘Let’s establish that first. But I have seen pictures of it, although they don’t do it justice by any means.’

  ‘Pictures? Where? Do you mean it is included on someone’s portrait? We can find out who it belongs to, perhaps.’

  ‘Oh, I know who it belongs to – to whom it once belonged, at least. The Knights Templar.’ Dee leaned back, content that he would have shocked Marlowe into silence and indeed he had. He leaned forward and pointed, but still seemed unwilling to touch the metal itself. ‘These heads on the corners, they represent Baphomet, the Devil. The … images on the sides show some of the rather less acceptable rituals that we hear about in relation to the Templars.’ He looked up at Marlowe. ‘Do they seem to move to you? Hmm?’

  Marlowe moistened his lips, which seemed to have become very dry all of a sudden. ‘Yes, they do, sometimes. I thought it might be because of the candlelight. I haven’t seen it in the day.’

  ‘I think night is the natural habitat of this thing,’ Dee said. He picked up the corners of the linen and, gathering them up, tied them together over the mouth of the jug. Now it looked even more like a shroud than ever. He picked it up using the loose fabric and carried it across the room to a large oaken cupboard, black with age. A coiled snake on the top had let its tail drop down across the door, as it dozed in its evening torpor. He chose a key from the bunch at his waist and unlocked it. Flicking the serpent’s tail aside and without opening the door more than was necessary, he slipped it inside and then locked the door again, muttering to himself as he did so.

  Marlowe had twisted in his seat to watch him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t catch what you said.’

  Dee sat back down again and settled his robes. ‘Just a little binding spell, dear boy. Nothing to worry yourself about. Could you just go to the door and give Sam a call? I could do with some brandy; would you like to join me?’

  It was true that the old man did look pale and his hand shook a little. Ma
rlowe went to the door and opened it, to find Sam Bowes standing outside, a flask in one hand, two glasses in the other. Without speaking, he handed them to Marlowe and then padded silently away. Marlowe took the drink back to the little table and was about to put them down when Dee waved him away, over to the larger trestle in the centre of the room.

  ‘Call me superstitious if you like,’ he said to Marlowe, ‘but I would rather we didn’t use this table for a while.’

  The playwright paused in the pouring of the brandy. ‘That bad?’ he asked, with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘Probably not,’ Dee said. ‘But sometimes I prefer to be careful. I have attracted too much attention in the angelic spheres already. The jug could be the undoing of years of work. As soon as it is light tomorrow, I will be taking it to somewhere it can do no harm.’

  ‘That could be awkward,’ Marlowe said, handing him his glass. ‘It doesn’t belong to me …’

  ‘Nor to your little friend in Blackfriars,’ Dee said, waspishly. ‘It isn’t like you to be so easily led, Kit.’

  ‘Easily led?’ Marlowe was stung by the tone. ‘By whom?’

  ‘By some little trull who takes her fee in goods, rather than cold, hard cash.’

  ‘It isn’t like that at all,’ Marlowe said, on his dignity. ‘She is a cog in a wheel of an investigation of murder, if you must know. I was just …’

  ‘Murder, is it? I am not surprised. The person who owns that jug is not likely to survive. Even if no one is looking for the jug, bad luck will follow it wherever it goes.’

  ‘Bad luck? You might say it was bad luck for its owner when she was shot in the throat at my play.’ Marlowe was not superstitious and often laughed at the actors and stage helpers at the Rose, who were constantly crossing their fingers and indeed themselves for the slightest reason. When a magpie had flown in one afternoon in the early run of his first Tamburlaine, one of the orchestra had fainted with fright.

  Dee nodded and slapped his hands down on the arms of his chair. ‘So, that is why you are here. I said to Sam, I said you would not be able to leave that alone.’

  Marlowe laughed to see Dee come out of his superstitious fright. He looked himself again. ‘Will Shaxsper has been accused of the murder, and I don’t believe he did it.’

  ‘Will Shaxsper? Never heard of him.’

  Marlowe shook his curls and said, with a smile, ‘Don’t ever let him hear you say that. He aims to be the most famous man in London one day. Or at least the most famous man in Rose Alley.’

  ‘Well, I wish him good luck with that, anyway,’ Dee said. ‘But if you are investigating murder at the Rose, why were you in Blackfriars? Tell me about it.’

  ‘Shaxsper was in the execution squad, towards the end of the play. He fired and it was a real charge, not the fake one he was expecting. I looked in the scenery and found this.’ He ferreted in his purse and brought out the lead shot that Tom Sledd had prised out of the wall. ‘But then, I worked out that he could not have shot the woman, not without turning to his right and firing into the crowd and, of course, everyone would have seen him do that, and no one did. So, Tom Sledd and I – Tom is the stage manager at the Rose – Tom and I worked out that the shot had come from the orchestra, and then we found this –’ he held out the second ball on the palm of his hand – ‘up in the gallery, where it passed through Eleanor Merchant’s throat.’

  Dee looked at the lead balls in Marlowe’s hand. ‘They are different,’ he said. ‘Which one went through her throat?’ Marlowe pointed. ‘This looks to me as though it came from … But it can’t be, unless …’

  ‘Dr Dee …’ Marlowe sat back as patiently as he knew how. The old man always talked in riddles, and that was part of his charm, but it was also infuriating. Every hour Marlowe wasted was one that put him nearer to that scaffold, slowly twirling in the wind at the end of a rope, alongside Will Shaxsper.

  The magus held up his hand, twisting the lead shot in his fingers. He held it up to the candlelight, sniffed it, bit it, threw it into the air to catch it with a slick flourish which still spellbound his audiences after all these years.

  ‘How’s your Flemish?’ the old man asked.

  Kit Marlowe had grown up with the Huguenot weavers in their gabled houses along the Stour in his boyhood Canterbury. They spoke it almost to the rhythm of their high warp looms and the lilt stayed with him. ‘Passable,’ he said.

  ‘Snaphaunce,’ Dee said, chuckling as Marlowe frowned.

  ‘Sounds like … like “pecking bird”,’ the playwright said. ‘That can’t be right.’

  ‘Oh, but it can. Go to the top of the class, Dominus Marlowe. It describes the mechanism of a new kind of gun. The cock holds a piece of flint which is released by the trigger to strike the frizzen, a piece of steel which sends sparks into the priming pan and … there you have it. A ball – this ball – flies through the air until it finds a home.’

  ‘A new kind of gun.’ Marlowe was still frowning, assimilating it all. ‘Not a wheel-lock, then?’

  ‘Pah!’ Dee threw the lead ball back to the playwright. ‘By comparison with this, wheel-locks will be as the sticks and stones of the Ancient Britons. Believe me, Kit, there’s a terrible new age coming to the battlefield and I don’t want to be around to see it.’

  ‘Where can I find one of these guns?’

  ‘You can’t,’ Dee told him flatly. ‘As far as I know there is only one of its kind in London. In the country, even.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘The Tower, Kit,’ Dee smiled. ‘It’s in Her Majesty’s Armoury.’

  ‘Is it now?’ Marlowe was thinking. And Dee could read his mind.

  ‘So …’ he said, smiling, ‘you’ve solved your little murder.’ And he leaned forward, knowing full well that these walls had ears, whispering, ‘It’s the Queen of England, by the grace of God.’

  Marlowe allowed the old man a little time to chuckle, then asked, ‘How do I get in to the Tower?’

  ‘Easily enough,’ Dee assured him. ‘Indeed, I am amazed you have not been there already. It is getting out that is more difficult.’

  ‘I mean, to see the armourer.’

  ‘Pass me that parchment and my quill,’ Dee said. ‘And the ink. It should be in that upturned rat’s skull, over there.’

  Marlowe passed it across with a grimace. ‘Any reason for the skull? It isn’t even properly watertight.’ Ink had dripped everywhere, across the surface of the table and had soaked into some rare-looking incunabula, piled haphazardly next to a charger on which a piece of pie and an orange had begun to fuse together with a fascinating mould.

  ‘Just for the look of the thing, my dear boy. Just for the look of the thing.’ Dee scratched at the parchment and then waved it in the air to dry it. ‘This should get you in. And out.’ He dripped some wax on the fold and pressed his ring on it.

  Marlowe took it and put it away in his doublet. ‘Do you know everyone?’ he asked.

  Dee thought for a moment, and then answered. ‘Not everyone, just everyone who needs knowing.’ He stopped speaking and looked fondly at the young man opposite. Kit Marlowe was all things to all men; when men spoke his lines, people listened. When he spoke them for himself, they listened harder. When he moved, there was almost a hint of burning tin on the air, the taste of lighting on open ground. But to John Dee, he was just a boy who, once upon a time, had sat beside his dead wife and promised to make Helene live again with his words. As if, for once, he had read the magus’s mind, Marlowe spoke, low and soft.

  ‘Helene was beautiful,’ he said. ‘“She is fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.”’

  ‘You remembered!’ The old man looked up, with tears in his eyes.

  ‘No one will forget her while you live,’ Marlowe said, standing up and shrugging on his cloak. ‘And, when I have time, I will write such a play that will mean no one will forget her, not even when we are both gone, you and I.’

  Dee stood up and hugged the playwright, patting his back,
reluctant to let him go. ‘When you have time, Kit,’ he said.

  ‘When I have time.’

  EIGHT

  ‘And I tell you he’s not here!’ an exasperated Thomas Sledd was all but screaming at the High Constable who stood in the centre of the Rose’s stage like an ox in the furrow.

  ‘What’s all this fuss?’ Philip Henslowe clattered down the stairs from his counting house. ‘High Constable.’ He half bowed. ‘I’m afraid we’re full for this afternoon. Perhaps you could come back in August.’

  The last time Philip Henslowe had met Hugh Thynne, the owner of the Rose had been more circumspect, as soon as he realized who Hugh Thynne was. But Philip Henslowe had made rather a lot of money since then and he could probably buy the High Constable three times over by now. That fact made him a little cavalier.

  ‘I’m looking for the actor William Shakespeare,’ Thynne told him flatly.

  ‘I keep telling the High Constable.’ Sledd sighed. ‘He was of this company. Now he’s in the Clink.’

  ‘He’s not in the Clink!’ Thynne lost his temper at last, roaring at the boy-actor-turned-stage-manager. ‘He was released from the Clink by one Robert Greene … Do you know him, either of you?’

  ‘No,’ both men chorused and, for once, it was half true. Henslowe had met the crawler once and didn’t like him. To Thomas Sledd, Greene was one of those groatsworths who hung around theatres like grey miasma hung around graveyards.

  ‘Search it,’ Thynne barked to his catchpoles. ‘Every nook. Every cranny. And get under this!’ He thumped his right foot down on the stage so that the floorboards jumped and the dust flew.

  ‘Just a minute …’ Henslowe stopped them. ‘Where’s your warrant?’

  Thynne turned to the man and fixed him with his basilisk stare. ‘My warrant, apple-squire? Can you be serious?’

  ‘Apple-squire?’ Henslowe spluttered. Tom Sledd had to wander away rather than burst out laughing. ‘Apple-squire?’ So outraged was Henslowe that he had to repeat it.