Secret World Read online

  But today, Francis Walsingham was at Nonsuch, the fairy palace at Cuddington where the towers shimmered in high summer like hoar frost in their whiteness. The Queen’s Spymaster felt uncomfortable here, if only because he, like his Mistress, was an unwelcome guest. In one of her increasing fits of meanness, Her Majesty had sold the great house her father had built to John, Lord Lumley, three years ago, yet she couldn’t stay away.

  ‘Whither thou goest,’ as the highfalutin Biblical and poetic phrase of the day had it, so did the Court. So a less-than-enchanted John Lumley bowed low whenever the Queen arrived and decamped to a hunting lodge in the grounds. And if the Queen was at Nonsuch, so was Walsingham. And so, after hard riding, was Nicholas Faunt.

  The golden clock in the Inner Court was chiming the hour as the projectioner swung out of the saddle and handed the reins to a groom, wearing the livery of the Queen. The sun sparkled in the fountains where living water tumbled from the gargoyle mouths of sea monsters, splashing over stone griffins’ wings to whirl and bubble in troughs of pure marble. Hercules gazed down at Faunt as he dashed for the steps and the Queen’s guards clicked to attention as he passed.

  He found Walsingham wandering in Lumley’s Italian garden, the long-suffering clerk trotting behind him like a marionette on a string.

  ‘Make this quick, Faunt. She’s planning a Progress.’ It had been a while since Her Majesty had gone a-wandering. She rode her white horse, with bells on her fingers and bells on her toes, her musicians fluting and luting behind her. Tall gentlemen in their velvets and silks carried her canopy, to shield her from sun and rain. And among those gentlemen, armed to the teeth and watchful as hawks, Walsingham’s men mingled. They might look like fops and popinjays but to a man they were trained killers, ready for any and every eventuality. For nearly twenty years now there had been a price on the head of Elizabeth Tudor. The Pope himself had given absolution in advance to any good Catholic who chose to end her days and with them, the Protestant heresy. Walsingham’s men had to watch for them and the odd maniac Puritan, or the mad atheists like Francis Kett; who knew what murderous design any of them had on the Queen?

  But the woman was maddeningly, infuriatingly optimistic. Her people loved her, she assured Walsingham, and they had a right to see her; their fine lady, their Gloriana. George Gower’s Armada portrait had said it all – the exquisite face below the flaming red hair and above all the ropes of pearls. Her hand lay on a globe, a world that belonged only to her and the galleons of Spain sank at her merest gaze.

  ‘A Progress?’ Faunt nodded briefly at the secretary who bowed while still steadying his portable writing desk.

  Walsingham bent to pick one of Lumley’s roses, then thought better of it and merely sniffed it. He sneezed loudly. ‘Nothing too exotic, apparently. You know she never goes north of Kenilworth. But you know, too, what this means?’

  Faunt knew. All leave cancelled. All projects halted. Every man jack of Walsingham’s people on high alert.

  ‘So …’ Walsingham was struggling with the inner demons of his nose that demanded he sneeze again. ‘What news of Starkey’s globe?’

  ‘Gone, Sir Francis.’

  Walsingham stopped walking. ‘Gone – like Walter Mildmay’s?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Faunt said and smiled at the memory. ‘Rather, it was given away.’

  ‘Generous man, is he, Oliver Starkey?’

  ‘You don’t know him, sir?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve met him, of course, but a long time ago. He must be a hundred. Blind as a bat.’

  ‘He has a granddaughter.’ Faunt was remembering still.

  Walsingham frowned, his Puritanical streak widening in the rose garden. ‘And the relevance of that?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s the granddaughter who is generous,’ Faunt told him, damping down the reminiscent gleam in his eye; Walsingham could read him like a book and he had no intention of going into detail. ‘She gave the gewgaw to a … friend. Robyn.’

  ‘Robyn who?’

  Faunt shrugged. ‘Just Robyn.’

  ‘Well, that narrows it down to only a few thousand men in this great country of ours. Tell me, Faunt; anything odd about Starkey? Anything I should know?’

  Faunt knew exactly what the Spymaster meant. The old man was a member of a Papist society, albeit rather retired. He had the finger of John the Baptist under a glass dome in his house. He had the hand of John the Baptist painted on his portrait. And his granddaughter was a whore, albeit a beautiful one who gave her wares for free. Faunt could smell one of Walsingham’s fires crackling into life. ‘Nothing, sir,’ he assured his master. ‘The Starkeys are as loyal a family as you could wish to meet.’

  ‘How did he come by the globe in the first place?’

  ‘A present from Drake, sir. He invested in the circumnavigation.’ At least this part could be the truth and Faunt did prefer to keep a little kernel of that rare commodity in his tales if he could; it made them easier to remember afterwards.

  ‘I also invested,’ Walsingham said with a frown, ‘but I didn’t get one of those. Who’s next on that wretched list?’

  ‘Charles Angleton, Sir Francis.’ Faunt had committed Joshua’s names to memory. ‘He’s a merchant in the City.’

  ‘All right. Pay him a call and find out what he knows. But that’s the last of it. This whole thing is a wild goose chase. And I have more pressing matters.’

  ‘Any news of Marlowe, Sir Francis?’ Faunt asked.

  ‘Not yet. But I’ve a feeling he’s chasing shadows too.’

  In his room under the eaves, Kit Marlowe waited until the last light of the August day had gone. There was the palest of moons, a crescent that slit the purple curtain of the night. He eased himself out of bed and hauled on his doublet, fastening the dagger at his back. He had spent the day familiarizing himself with the house. He had wandered the knot garden, rundown and tatty, its once-intricate designs a tangle of weeds. He had seen the harvesters in the golden fields that sloped to the sea, their scythes flashing against the dusty stalks, the ears bouncing on the hard ground as the blades sent them tumbling. Women scurried along behind them, building stooks of armfuls of corn and behind them came the gleaners, the old and the young, squealing toddlers and toothless gammers, picking through the furrows for the grain and short stalks left behind. By the time they burned the stubble, there would be not a grain to be found; the funeral pyre of another year would drift over the world, promising the Fall and the decay of all things.

  Marlowe knew the stables where Micah was sleeping and hoped he slept the sleep of the just. What Marlowe did not need tonight was a man with the strength of ten who would wake at the merest whisper of the wind. He had counted three maidservants and knew that they slept under the eaves like him, but in the far wing of the house. He had heard mention of a steward, Barnet, but he had seen no men other than Morton and his ox-like lackey. Stewards usually had reasonably well-appointed quarters, not far from the kitchen and always on the ground floor. During the day, by a combination of observance and casual conversation, he had found out that Leonard Morton’s chamber lay at the front, over the main door with its crumbling archway.

  There was no Mistress Morton. The sorrowful owner of Ness End had explained that she had gone in childbed years before, her child with her, and no one had taken her place. Marlowe padded along the passageway, passing the leaded windows as quickly as he could and keeping to the shadows. He half-turned to watch the white ghost of a barn owl glide over the garden, hunting for its supper. Tonight he was a hunter too. He could have explained to Morton his mission, tried to explain the mystery of the globes that a woman he knew had died for, but Kit Marlowe was a shrewd judge of men. Morton might understand. He might even sympathize. But he would not part with the jewel, not even for a Queen’s messenger, not even for a moment.

  Marlowe reached the head of the stairwell where portraits of older Mortons glared down at him from their shabby, once-gilded frames. Who was this stranger in their midst? This thief in t
he night. The thought had been bothering the projectioner-poet for some time. If Leonard Morton hung the globe on a bedpost or laid it down on a press, all well and good. But if it was still around his neck …

  But Marlowe had no more time to wrestle with the problem because he heard a sound in the darkness behind him. There was a hiss he knew all too well – the sound of a sword blade slicing through air. He staggered back and the weapon missed. At the other end of it, a middle-aged man stood there. He was fully dressed and had a murderous look in his eye. Walsingham’s man had done this before, facing a rapier with a dagger, and he knew it was an unequal contest. If the rapier was in the hands of someone like Nicholas Faunt or even Ned Alleyn when his blood was up, it was suicide. And Marlowe had no idea who this man was. He retreated slowly down the stairs, his dagger still sheathed at his back, his hand sliding down the smooth oak of the banisters. He expected Micah to come crashing through the house like a rampaging bull. At the very least he expected his host to be standing there, demanding to know what was going on. Instead, the swordsman was advancing as slowly as Marlowe was retreating, like the slow practice passes at a fencing school, his blade tip glittering in the soft light.

  ‘I know why you’re here,’ the man said. He was whispering.

  ‘Do you?’ Marlowe whispered too.

  ‘It’s been a long time.’

  Marlowe frowned. There was a cross purpose here, unless all men at Ness End Hall were as limited as Micah the ox. ‘Has it?’ Perhaps he could humour the man.

  ‘Years,’ the swordsman said. ‘I forget how many. But I’ve been waiting all this time.’

  Marlowe had reached the first landing now, where the stairs fell away to his left into the darkness of the great hall. He looked beyond the sword to the man carrying it. He was … what … fifty or so and he had a bunch of keys at his waist. ‘You are the steward here,’ Marlowe guessed, his voice still low. ‘Barrett?’

  ‘Barnet,’ the steward snapped. ‘And don’t pretend you don’t know. He sent you, didn’t he?’

  ‘He?’ Marlowe was descending the last stairs now and once on the flat he knew this madman would strike.

  ‘Don’t play games,’ Barnet hissed. ‘Oh, you may indeed be the Queen’s man, but you are here because of Oliver Starkey.’

  ‘Oliver Starkey?’ Marlowe played for time. A name from Joshua’s list, whispered at him in the dark of this stairwell of all places, was beyond the bounds of coincidence. Marlowe had more than one problem before him now; the first was how to find out what this man knew, the second, how to live to make use of the knowledge.

  ‘Yes. Oliver Starkey. Do you think me slow-witted?’ Barnet seemed to relent a little as Marlowe reached the ground level and his blade tip dropped. ‘It was all so long ago. Could he not have forgiven and forgotten?’

  Marlowe stood still. It was time to stop retreating. This nonsense had gone on long enough. ‘Forgotten what, Master Barnet?’ The sword hissed forward in a deadly lunge. Marlowe’s entire body still ached from his collision with Micah and he was slow on the turn. He heard the rip of his doublet and a clatter as a button was hacked off and dropped to the floor. He spun sideways, grabbing Barnet’s sword-arm with one hand and bringing the other down hard on his wrist. The rapier fell, clattering on the flagstones and Marlowe twisted the man’s arm up behind his back, forcing him down on to his knees.

  ‘Now,’ he said, letting his voice grow a little louder, ‘suppose you tell me what all this is about?’ He hauled the man up and frogmarched him across the hall and into the kitchen. The place was only lit by the dying embers of the fire in the huge grate, where black pans hung from the racks in the chimney space. Marlowe pushed his man into a chair and stood behind him, his dagger blade horizontally across Barnet’s throat.

  ‘Get on with it,’ the steward hissed, his eyes closed tight, waiting for the inevitable, the slice across the windpipe which would send his lifeblood spraying across the chopping block in front of him. Marlowe could not have chosen a better place for his work.

  ‘If I’d wanted to kill you,’ the playwright said, ‘I could have done it on the stairs. Your wrist action –’ he sheathed the dagger – ‘definitely needs work.’

  Barnet was astonished. His would-be assassin had disarmed himself and was suddenly sitting cross-legged on the block in front of him like some goblin in the woods. ‘You haven’t come to kill me?’

  ‘No.’ Marlowe smiled.

  ‘Starkey didn’t send you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And Starkey didn’t tell the Queen about me?’

  ‘What is there to tell?’

  The silence that followed was ended by a laugh from the steward. Marlowe knew relief when he heard it.

  ‘My God,’ Barnet said. ‘I thought … as soon as I heard you were here on the Queen’s business, I thought … oh, it’s been years. In here …’ He tapped his head. Then he tapped his heart, and continued, ‘And in here. Wherever we keep our souls, Master Marlowe.’

  ‘And your soul is troubled, Master Barnet?’

  ‘That it is,’ the steward said.

  ‘Why?’ Marlowe asked, the globe and his purpose for being abroad tonight momentarily forgotten. ‘And what is Oliver Starkey to you?’

  ‘Oliver Starkey,’ Barnet said with a sigh, ‘is a knight of St John.’

  ‘The Hospitallers.’ Marlowe didn’t want to give anything away until he knew what the link between the two men might be.

  ‘They were once called that, yes. He commanded the English contingent at St Elmo.’

  ‘St Elmo?’

  ‘Malta. We were besieged there by those bastard Turks. Oh, it was years ago.’

  ‘1565.’ Marlowe nodded. ‘I was barely in hanging sleeves.’

  Barnet snorted. ‘I was a soldier of fortune. I was a young man then and I wanted to see the world.’

  ‘And all you saw was St Elmo?’

  ‘That bloody fortress on its bloody rock. It was hopeless. We were outnumbered, four, five to one. I stood it for as long as I could, but one day … well –’ there were tears in the man’s eyes – ‘one day I broke. The Turks were pouring in through the gate, with murder in their hearts. Black faces, black hearts. I thought to myself, “Why am I here? What’s this all about?” I didn’t want to die, Master Marlowe, not in some foreign land under a Papist flag.’

  ‘So you ran?’

  ‘I did. My friends, Harry and the rest, they stayed. But I ran and as I ran, I heard Sir Oliver yelling at me. “Come back, you coward,” he said. “Stand and fight like a man.”’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  Barnet sighed and shook his head. ‘I swam for it. Found a fishing boat and lay in it all that day and half the next. Then I rowed away, out into the sea roads, away from that cursed island. Don’t ask me how, with a torn arm.’

  Marlowe smiled again. ‘That explains your wrist action,’ he said.

  Barnet smiled too, in spite of himself. ‘That and the years,’ he said. ‘You never forget the moves, but you do get rusty. Ever since that day I’ve heard that man’s voice in my head, echoing and re-echoing down the years. “Come back, you coward.” I did a bit of this, a bit of that, always watching my back, jumping at the click of a door. At first I thought they’d all died, all the defenders of St Elmo. But when news came through that it was a victory, that the Knights had held Malta, I thought – I still think – I am a marked man. That Sir Oliver would come looking for me himself. Or at least report me to the authorities. Hiding out here in this wilderness was my best chance.’

  There was a sudden crash somewhere in the Hall, beyond the kitchen.

  ‘The strongroom!’ Barnet was on his feet, dashing across the flagstones and scuttling across the hall, snatching up his fallen sword as he went. Marlowe followed him. ‘Someone’s breaking in,’ he heard the steward shout and saw him disappear up the stairs to his right, along the landing towards the maids’ rooms. He whipped his dagger free and gave chase. Ahead of him was a window, blank in th
e early morning grey light and it was a dead end. To Marlowe’s right, another passage ran the length of the east wing and startled maids popped their heads out of doors.

  ‘Stay there!’ Marlowe shouted at them and took the passage to the left.

  There was utter darkness here. And silence now. This must have been the way Barnet had gone, but there was no sound. Then he saw him, on a half-floor above, silhouetted against a window. ‘Barnet,’ Marlowe called. ‘Anything?’

  The man just stood there, his sword still in his hand, the blade tip trailing the floor. There was a gurgling sound and as Marlowe reached him and Barnet half-stumbled into the light, he could see that the steward’s throat had been cut and dark blood was oozing over his shirt and doublet, his left hand, pressed to his neck, doing nothing to staunch the flow.

  Marlowe caught Barnet as his knees buckled and the playwright cradled the dying man’s head. There was a crash, a splintering of glass and Marlowe was on his feet again, following the sound and bursting into a darkened room. The window, glass and frame, had gone. He peered out to see a running figure, his left leg dragging as he limped over the cobbles where he had landed badly. Shouts of ‘stop, thief!’ seemed superfluous as the figure grabbed his horse’s reins and swung into the saddle. Marlowe watched transfixed as the horseman clattered for the gate to be confronted by the huge figure of Micah, stumbling half-awake out of the stable. The horseman batted him aside and the ox went down with a groan.

  ‘Jack!’

  Marlowe turned back to the landing. Leonard Morton knelt there, his wooden staff abandoned at his side. His hands were red and sticky with the blood of his steward.

  ‘Oh, Jack!’

  Barnet’s eyes fluttered and his chest heaved one last time as his self-imposed life sentence finally came to an end.

  TEN

  He limped into the alleyway that ran by Queen’s Hythe to the river. Drunks lurched past him on their way home, clattering over the cobbles damp with early morning dew. He saw the spars of the galleons black against the coming dawn. He tapped on the door three times, then once: the appointed signal.