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  ‘A choir is possible, Dr Steane,’ he said. ‘But we are short on men. Some are away from Cambridge – I am thinking particularly of the two who have been rusticated for . . . unusual practices.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Steane said, nodding. ‘There was nothing proved, of course. Had there been . . .’

  ‘The Consistory Court?’ Falconer asked.

  Steane frowned at him, astonished at the man’s naivety. ‘The rope, Master organist,’ he growled. It was no more than the truth.

  ‘Then, of course,’ Falconer went on, listing his losses in the choir stalls, ‘there is poor Ralph Whitingside.’

  ‘Is that a problem?’ Steane enjoyed the services at King’s and, perhaps unusually among his colleagues, derived a deep satisfaction from the liturgy. But his ear for music was average at best and he didn’t really see what the loss of a few voices mattered, in the scheme of things.

  The two musicians were aghast. As usual, the organist was the first to recover. ‘It is a very great problem, Dr Steane. The lack of men means we will be very limited in what we can sing.’

  ‘There must be a way round it,’ Steane said. His beloved could be very testy when crossed. ‘Could someone from another college step in? Haven’t I seen Master Marlowe singing here, for example?’

  The other two faced each other, lips pursed, then Thirling nodded. ‘Marlowe would do very well. And what about a couple of the other Parker boys, to take the place of . . . well, of you know who?’

  ‘That would do very well, if it could be arranged,’ Steane said. ‘It doesn’t matter who you get, but get someone. Let me know what pieces you intend to sing and I will tell Mistress Hynde, to make sure they are something she would like.’

  ‘With deputized parts, we may not have much choice,’ Thirling said, the whip firmly back in his hand. ‘But I am sure Mistress Hynde will not be disappointed.’

  Steane nodded to the men and whirled on his heel and strode out of the room. The door slammed behind him and, with his acute musician’s hearing, Thirling waited until his footsteps had died away before adding, ‘Not by the music, at any rate.’

  And giggling like schoolboys, they joined the real ones waiting in the School beyond the wooden door.

  NINE

  That night the Parker scholars got drunk for a different reason. They sat in a tight circle in a corner of the Swan as the sun went down over Cambridge and the under-constables of Fludd’s watch patrolled the darkling streets with their lanterns and nightsticks, crying the hour across the Fenlands.

  Marlowe noticed that Meg Hawley kept her distance, always swaying away to serve other tables. Jack Wheeler himself brought their drinks and waited for payment each time. Tom Colwell did the honours; it was his turn.

  ‘So, let’s go through it again,’ Marlowe said. ‘When did you see Henry last?’

  ‘Monday morning,’ Parker told him, trying to clear his head to focus on the time and the place. ‘Dr Lyler’s class.’

  ‘How did he seem?’

  ‘Fine. He’d seemed fine throughout the weekend, if preoccupied.’

  ‘Preoccupied?’ Marlowe frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound like Henry.’ The most that had usually taxed Bromerick was which end of a pasty to start on.

  ‘Er . . . perhaps I can help there.’ Colwell looked a little sheepish.

  The others looked at him.

  ‘He was working on a section of Ralph’s journal, or whatever those cryptic ramblings are.’

  Marlowe sat upright. ‘I thought you were doing that, Tom,’ he said.

  ‘Well, yes, I was. Am. But . . . well, you weren’t here, Kit, and Henry kept pestering me to go for a drink with him. You know what he’s . . . what he was like.’

  Marlowe nodded, but the loss of Bromerick was too new, the wound too raw yet to indulge in fond reminiscences. That would come later, when they were all old men nodding by the kitchen fire and someone brought them their syllabub and spiced ale, kind to their toothless mouths.

  ‘He got on my nerves!’ Colwell snapped, slapping an open hand down on the table. ‘There, I’ve said it. He got on my nerves and I said “If you’ve nothing better to do, help me with this, for Christ’s sake”.’

  ‘And he took it with him?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘No. No, I was very careful about that. I got him to copy out a few lines. He couldn’t make any more sense of it than I could. He was thinking of seeing Johns to see if he could help. Oh, he wouldn’t have broken any confidences, of course.’

  ‘And did he?’ Marlowe asked.

  Colwell shrugged. ‘Both of us had spent days in your granddad’s library, Matt, consulting every damned oracle we could find. Nothing. I know where the pillars of Hercules are now and what an elephant looks like. I even have a vague grasp of some of Euclid’s nonsense, but that stuff . . . I haven’t a clue. Was he particularly bright, Kit? Ralph, I mean; you knew him better than we did.’

  ‘He was bright, yes,’ Marlowe said. ‘Bright but devious. Brighter than you, Tom? I don’t know.’

  ‘How did you get on with Dee?’ Parker asked Marlowe. ‘You haven’t told us.’

  Nor would he. As long as he lived, Kit Marlowe would not tell anyone what happened in that churchyard.

  ‘He thinks Henry was poisoned,’ he said. ‘He knows he was. As was Ralph.’

  The boys looked at him. It was Colwell who found his voice first. ‘What’s going on, Kit?’ he asked.

  Marlowe leant his head towards them. ‘Somebody’s killing us, lads. The other Parker scholars have moved on, left the university. And the new batch hasn’t arrived yet. Now Henry’s gone, it’s just us three.’

  ‘But Ralph,’ Parker protested. ‘Ralph wasn’t a Parker scholar. He just happened to come from Canterbury.’

  ‘To be precise, Matt,’ Marlowe reminded him, ‘he came from Chartham. We’re not talking about the Parker scholarships here. We’re not even talking about Canterbury.’

  Matt and Tom exchanged glances. ‘What, then?’ Tom asked.

  ‘The King’s School,’ Marlowe said. ‘That’s the common link. Whatever is going on, King’s is at the heart of it.’

  ‘God’s teeth!’ Marlowe slammed into the little room in The Court at Corpus a little after noon. The midday bell had not rung and only a few starving sizars wandered the grounds, looking longingly at the Great Hall where the cauldrons of stew were bubbling in the buttery next door.

  ‘Kit, I should really give you this,’ Parker said, almost apologizing. He passed his room-mate a note.

  ‘What is it?’ Marlowe snapped.

  ‘A letter from Professor Johns. He says if you miss one more lecture . . .’

  ‘I’ll be damned to all eternity; yes, I know,’ he said, and he threw the paper out of the window.

  ‘I told him you were at Henry’s inquest,’ Colwell explained. ‘It’s not like Johns to get shitty.’

  ‘He’s got his job to do, I suppose,’ Parker mumbled. When all was said and done, his grandfather had been Archbishop of Canterbury; you didn’t get more jobsworth than that, and Matt was part-establishment already.

  ‘Do you bastards want to hear this or not?’ Marlowe hissed. He looked at them both. Were these the Parker scholars? The lads he’d gone to school with? Spent three years in lectures with? Caroused away the night? And here they were, with one of their number dead in the charnel house and they were sympathizing with the dilemma of the domini. It defied belief.

  ‘Sorry, Kit,’ Colwell muttered. ‘Of course. Murder by person or persons unknown?’

  Marlowe looked at him.

  ‘Surely not death by his own hand?’ Parker blurted out.

  Marlowe cocked his head to one side. ‘Act of God,’ he said.

  The lads looked at each other. ‘Natural causes.’ Colwell couldn’t believe his own voice even as he said it.

  The Chapel bell called the Scholars to luncheon and they heard the kerfuffle on the stairs outside as dozens of feet made for the Great Hall. None of the three was in a mood to eat,
but Marlowe made for the door.

  ‘I couldn’t eat a damned thing,’ Parker said, surprised by his friend’s speed.

  ‘Neither could I,’ Marlowe told him and Colwell and Parker looked at each other as they watched Marlowe tuck his dagger under his college robe before he nodded at them both and left.

  Sir Edward Winterton’s carriage was creaking through the busy throng over Magdalene Bridge that afternoon. Marlowe had not spoken to the coroner at Bromerick’s inquest earlier in the day. He had expressed no surprise that Colwell and Parker had not been called because that was not how the law ran. A grubby stallholder, reeking of tallow, had been the First Finder and he mumbled his evidence with constant prodding to speak up from the coroner’s clerk. Constable Fludd told the court what he had found and Winterton had told the jury to deliver their verdict of accidental death. Justice, along with Marlowe, had already left the building at a trot.

  Marlowe estimated it would take time for Winterton to leave the inquest. He had papers to read over and sign and a jury to dismiss and thank in time-honoured tradition before he wound his way home and Marlowe knew that his home was across Magdalene Bridge. The traffic was always heavy here, with the carriers’ carts rumbling south over the Cam on their way to London and the skiffs bumping each other as the river folk got on with their precarious existence. A man on foot, especially a man with a knife and a mission, could easily see what the hold-up was and could outpace the fastest wagon on the road.

  Edward Winterton was just letting his eyelids droop to begin a short nap before luncheon when he felt a thud alongside him and a Corpus Christi Scholar sat there, staring at him. Winterton sat bolt upright and opened his mouth to cry out but Marlowe was faster and his dagger-blade tickled the roots of the man’s beard.

  ‘One thing I’ve noticed about gentlemen’s carriages like yours, Sir Edward, is that the driver has no view of the interior. Your man is no doubt efficient with the reins and whip but crafty devil that I am, I nipped in on his blind side. He doesn’t know I’m here. So if I were to slit your throat and hop off just over the bridge, nobody would be any the wiser, would they? Least of all Trumpy Joe Fludd. And some other idiot of a coroner would probably say it was an “Act of God”. Poor old Sir Edward! He was trimming his beard in his carriage one day when he slipped. What a calamity!’

  Winterton turned his head as best he could. ‘I can only conclude, Master Machiavel, that you are mad.’

  ‘Depend upon it.’ Marlowe nodded. ‘But only nor’ by nor’west!’ He slipped the knife back in its sheath in his sleeve. ‘Tell me, in the name of all that’s holy, how you can instruct the jury to record the death of Henry Bromerick as accidental.’

  ‘Are you saying I don’t know my job, sir? You have just pulled a dagger on one of Her Majesty’s coroners, threatened his life. For that alone I could have you thrown out of the university and into a cell from which I doubt even one with your barefaced gall would ever escape.’

  ‘Henry Bromerick had bright green vomit,’ Marlowe said, ignoring the threat.

  ‘Of course,’ Winterton agreed. ‘The man was clearly ill.’

  ‘The man was clearly poisoned, Sir Edward. As was Ralph Whitingside.’

  ‘Whitingside?’

  ‘The King’s man at whose inquest we first met. You remembered me as Machiavel. Why can’t you remember the name of my friend?’

  ‘I remember it perfectly well, but why does everyone always think that the inquest in which they are interested is the only inquest in the world. I have sat on more than a few since your friend’s, Master Marlowe. A sad case of a drowned woman affected me deeply. Her sister was distraught. Crying. I hate a woman crying, it influences the jury. That family also were intent that it must be foul play. But I was merciful,’ Winterton said smoothly. ‘I decided to instruct the jury for a “found drowned”. Suicide would have unhinged the poor woman entirely. But, tell me, Master Marlowe; people have a habit of dying around you. Why is that, I wonder?’

  ‘So do I, Sir Edward. Both of these men were my friends. And both were given draughts of tincture of foxglove to drink.’

  ‘Foxglove?’ Winterton blinked. ‘I heard nothing of foxgloves. How the Devil do you come up with that?’

  Now was not the time to involve Dee or the Devil, so Marlowe said, ‘Never mind. The fact is that that is what killed them both.’

  ‘Whitingside was different,’ Winterton said.

  ‘In what way?’ Marlowe asked as the carriage lurched forward to edge a few more paces before coming to a standstill.

  ‘I received a . . . deputation, shall we call it, on the morning of the inquest.’

  ‘A deputation?’ Marlowe frowned. ‘From whom?’

  ‘I cannot say.’

  ‘Sir Edward . . .’ Marlowe straightened up, his hand going to his sleeve.

  ‘Don’t try to frighten me, sir, with your all-too-ready dagger. I fought at Pinkie. Had a halberd in my ribs that still gives me gyp all these years later.’

  ‘I am not trying to frighten you, Sir Edward,’ Marlowe said softly. ‘Just to remind you of your office. You speak for the Queen here, sir. And I’d like to think you speak for justice.’

  Winterton paused for a moment, trying once again to see what lay behind the calm, unruffled, unfathomable face. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I had a deputation from King’s College. Dr Benjamin Steane, to be exact. Do you know him?’

  Marlowe nodded. ‘I do. What did he want?’

  ‘He wanted to retain the honour of the college,’ the coroner told him.

  ‘He wanted you to lie for him.’

  ‘That’s rather strong,’ Winterton protested. ‘And he made no such request. He merely wondered whether it was possible to play the whole thing down, brush as much as possible under the rushes, as it were.’

  ‘Which led to the suicide verdict and a burial in unhallowed ground.’

  Winterton looked at him. ‘You don’t strike me as the kind of man who cares where anyone is buried.’

  ‘You may be right, Sir Edward,’ Marlowe said. ‘All places are alike and every earth is fit for burial. But I owe Ralph Whitingside more than that.’ He tipped his cap. ‘Many thanks for the lift, but I fear I am going in the wrong direction. Good day.’ And he jumped down from the carriage, vanishing instantly into the throng of scholars and tradesmen over Magdalene Bridge.

  It was a little after two on a cloudless Cambridge day that Christopher Marlowe found Benjamin Steane. He was on his way via the St Catherine’s entrance, striding across the quad at King’s with his robes billowing out on the breeze.

  ‘Dr Steane?’ Marlowe hailed. ‘A word?’ And he doffed his hat.

  ‘Dominus Marlowe.’ Steane nodded back. ‘Will this take long? I have Discourses to deliver.’

  ‘Sir Edward Winterton,’ Marlowe said.

  ‘Ah.’ Steane looked a little shamefaced. ‘What did he tell you?’ The quad of King’s College was hardly the place for a private conversation, but Marlowe was in no mood to wait for a better time or place.

  ‘That you came to see him,’ the Corpus man said. ‘That you leaned on him in the case of Ralph Whitingside.’

  ‘Leaned . . .’ Steane was outraged. ‘That’s rather strong, Marlowe.’

  ‘Is it, sir? If you preferred something weaker, you should not have gone to the coroner.’

  Steane stood for a moment, gnawing his lip. Then he clapped Marlowe on the shoulder. ‘Look around you, lad,’ he said, beaming. ‘What do you see?’

  Marlowe looked, as he had so often, at the huge Gothic chapel of King’s, dwarfing every building in sight. He saw the midday sun dancing on the warm grey stone and the shadows of the gargoyles short on the trampled grass. ‘King’s,’ he said.

  Steane smiled. ‘Ah, Master Marlowe. Where is the poet in you? I see an idea, a dream. The finest – and, saving your own dear college – the best in Cambridge. Ever been to Oxford?’

  Marlowe had not and shook his head.

  ‘An average place,’ Ste
ane said, scowling. ‘A tradesman’s town, full of meanness of spirit. Here in the Fens we are at the cutting edge of scholarship – and of religion. Mark my words, Marlowe, what happens in Cambridge today happens in the rest of the world tomorrow.’

  ‘And what has this to do with Ralph Whitingside?’ Marlowe was unimpressed.

  Steane checked that no one was in earshot and he led Marlowe into the corner of the quad, far enough away from any staircase entrance for no one to be able to hear them. ‘In this great country of ours,’ he murmured, ‘we are all bought and paid for. All – every one of us – somebody’s man. At the moment, I am the Provost’s.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Dr Goad has lived most of his life in these hallowed halls,’ he said. ‘Not, like you and me, a handful of years. It would kill him if the honour of King’s were to be impugned.’

  ‘So he sent you to Winterton?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘Let’s just say, he made a . . . suggestion.’ Steane groped for his words. ‘And before you go haring off to the Provost like the bull at a gate you are, hear me out.’

  Marlowe stayed put.

  ‘Bad enough that Whitingside died in the college. But that murder should be involved . . . Better the world thinks it is self-slaughter. Less fuss. Less finger-pointing at King’s and all it stands for. Everyone looking at everyone else, looking for the skull beneath the skin.’

  Marlowe was still unimpressed and Steane knew that he was. ‘For what it’s worth,’ the King’s man said, ‘I happen to think you’re right.’

  Marlowe looked at him. ‘What are you saying?’ he asked.

  ‘Whitingside was murdered. But I have no idea how or by whom.’

  ‘I have an idea how, Dr Steane,’ Marlowe said. ‘As to by whom . . .’

  They were both suddenly aware of a figure hovering near them, on the flagstones to Steane’s left. Marlowe glanced across and recognized Will Latimer, Whitingside’s servant, standing there, cap in hand.