Eleventh Hour Page 14

  ‘Stop them, Scranton,’ Bess all but screamed. ‘They’ll kill each other!’

  Scranton ignored her, arms folded, watching the play of the swords. Ralegh drove Marlowe back, his attack fast and furious. The playwright scythed left and right, parrying for his life. Ralegh paused. ‘Your defence is fine,’ he conceded. ‘What is that school? Not the Italian, I’ll wager.’

  ‘The Kentish school,’ Marlowe told him, ‘with just a hint of Cambridge and the smock alleys.’ He hacked and slashed in return and it was Ralegh’s turn to pull back.

  ‘Good!’ the courtier hissed through clenched teeth, winded by the exertion of the last few passes, ‘but I prefer the School of Night.’ He tossed the rapier to his left hand and lunged. The blade tip slashed Marlowe’s arm and blood spurted in an arc, crimson spattering the whiteness of his shirt.

  ‘A hit!’ Scranton called and the two men came to the en garde again.

  ‘First blood, Marlowe,’ Ralegh said. ‘I am satisfied.’ He saluted the man, kissing his sword hilt.

  ‘But I am not,’ Marlowe growled. ‘To the finish, you said. To the finish it is.’

  He sprang to the attack again. He had to be careful now. He could use his left hand too, for his dagger, but he would never trust his sword to it. Ralegh had proved that he was deadly with either; better not give him time to use that ploy again. The steel rang in the quiet garden along the Strand. Lawyers along the road, black-caped and on their way to the Temple, smiled to themselves. Swords meant death, injury at least. The sound of coin in the morning and they loved it. Ralegh was retreating steadily now and Marlowe had turned the attack, driving him towards the apple trees, green with their new leaves. Quarte. Sixte. Quarte again. Damn. Ralegh cursed under his breath; the man was good and he’d have his work cut out now. Whoever said that age and experience would always beat youth and enthusiasm had not been thinking of a fencing bout to the death, Ralegh was certain.

  Marlowe’s point caught him high on the left shoulder and Ralegh reeled. His skin ripped like a pear; he barged forward to lock hilts with the playwright while he caught his breath and bled all over him. There was a sob from Bess Throckmorton, one that racked her body. She had to turn away; she could not bear to look. Yet, she had to look.

  ‘A hit!’ Scranton shouted. He looked as shocked as Bess. He couldn’t remember when he’d last seen his master bested on the piste. The points slid together again.

  ‘Now,’ Marlowe said, ‘match blood. Now I am satisfied.’

  ‘The Hell you are!’ Ralegh snarled. ‘It isn’t finished ’til it’s finished. En garde!’

  ‘Madame,’ Marlowe braced himself for the next pass. ‘May I at least know who it is that I am to die for this morning?’

  Bess looked at Ralegh, her face a mask of tears. He was shaking his head but she spoke anyway. ‘I am Bess Throckmorton, Her Majesty’s maid of honour. The daughter of Nicholas Throckmorton.’

  ‘I see.’ Marlowe saluted her with his sword, kissing the coiling quillons of the hilt. ‘A matter of honour, indeed.’

  Ralegh’s blade hissed past his right ear, taking a lock of hair with it. Marlowe parried and riposted suddenly, his blade probing between Ralegh’s quillons, grazing his hand. The Devon man’s boot came up, thudding into Marlowe’s ribs and the pair grappled together, hair flying, teeth bared as they wrestled. Marlowe kicked the sword out of Ralegh’s hand and the courtier scrabbled after it, lashing out with his feet in an attempt to trip the playwright up. He stumbled but didn’t fall and the blades clashed again. At close quarters, as the hilts locked for the umpteenth time, Ralegh thrust his thumb into Marlowe’s eye socket. The Canterbury man drove his head forward, his skull cracking Ralegh’s nose and he fell back hard. His vision swam, what with the tears and the concussion and his guard was down.

  ‘In the name of God!’ Scranton shouted, rushing towards Marlowe whose sword was raised.

  Ralegh had dropped to one knee. He held his sword out to the side, hauling his shirt aside with his other hand. ‘Finish it, Marlowe,’ he muttered. There was blood in his mouth and one tooth, at least, was loose.

  Marlowe was having difficulty seeing out of his gouged eye and there were at least two Great Lucifers kneeling at his feet.

  ‘No!’ Bess Throckmorton’s scream shook windows all along the Strand. She was suddenly at Marlowe’s side, gripping his arm and blinking through her tears; she looked into his face. ‘He is the love of my life,’ she sobbed. ‘I will give you anything.’

  He looked at her, the earnest, pleading face, beautiful even when slick with tears. Bess had cried without holding anything back and her eyes were red and swollen, her lashes clotted together and her lip trembled. She held his gaze and he crumbled. In any event, his eye hurt, his arm hurt, his legs felt like lead and his lungs were wheezing like old bellows. ‘I suspect that Sir Walter would not give me the time of day,’ he gasped.

  Ralegh laughed, losing his balance and landing on his haunches. ‘On the contrary,’ he said, through swollen lips. ‘I have all the time in the world for a man who can fight me to a standstill. But the bout’s not done. Finish it, Marlowe.’

  ‘No,’ Marlowe threw the sword down. ‘Now, it is finished.’

  Everyone in the orchard breathed a sigh of relief, not least Scranton, who clapped his hands and sent the terrified servants for water, towels and bandages.

  Bess Throckmorton looked at Marlowe and mouthed a silent ‘Thank you.’ Then she pulled up her skirts that had been dragging in the dew and marched over to the slumped frame of Ralegh. ‘As for you, Walter Ralegh,’ she actually stamped her foot. ‘I never want to see you again.’ She spun on her heel and made for the house.

  Marlowe did his best to walk normally and sat down next to Ralegh. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking at the lady’s disappearing back, ‘if I have been the unwitting cause …’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ Ralegh smiled, although the movement cost him dearly. ‘What’s today? Wednesday, is it? She’ll sulk until Friday, then I’ll turn up at Placentia suitably bandaged and her heart will melt. It’s happened before.’ He frowned at Marlowe – another expensive gesture in terms of pain, ‘but never because of another swordsman. What did you say you wanted?’

  ‘Well,’ Marlowe’s whole body was beginning to stiffen and there was no sign yet of Scranton’s ministering angels. ‘I had thought to talk poetry, one Muse to another, as it were, but something you said during the bout rather intrigued me.’

  ‘Oh, what was that?’ Ralegh extended a careful leg; he had dancer’s legs, the Queen was wont to remark, rather unsettlingly and he wanted to make sure it was all right.

  ‘Just before you broke every law in the duelling book and changed hands …’

  Ralegh chuckled and immediately wished he hadn’t. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Needs must. I had to do something desperate.’

  ‘Just before that, you mentioned the School of Night. What’s that, if I may ask?’

  An odd look flickered over Ralegh’s bruised and battered face. He looked the poet up and down and liked what he saw, except that the man was younger and no doubt handsome, should you like that kind of thing. ‘How long have you got?’ he asked.

  ‘If I may, Carter,’ Marlowe was more than a little testy the next morning. ‘A brief word?’

  ‘Master Marlowe,’ Carter looked startled. ‘If I may say so, sir, you look … terrible.’

  ‘You should see me from my side,’ the playwright muttered. He had spent a comfortable night, in fact, in Sir Walter Ralegh’s second-best bed, replete with Sir Walter Ralegh’s excellent food and more than a little mellow with Sir Walter Ralegh’s exotic wines. He had also had the most fascinating evening he could remember for a long time. He and the Devon courtier were kindred spirits, poets with fire in their blood and a longing for more than the tired old world could give them. Even so, Marlowe’s eye was bruised and swollen and blood still seeped from the gash to his forearm, when he forgot himself and moved too quickly.

>   ‘You could have something to do with that, Carter.’ Marlowe looked levelly at the man. ‘Me looking terrible, I mean.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I thought you told me Sir Walter was ready to receive visitors.’

  ‘That’s what he told me.’

  ‘He almost received the last rites. I found him in … shall we say … in a delicate position.’

  ‘Against a tree?’

  ‘What?’ Did this man see the same visions as the magus?

  ‘It is how he likes it, so I’m told,’ Carter shrugged. ‘Keeps him in touch with nature and such. Don’t suppose it does much for the lady in question.’

  ‘There are those,’ Marlowe reminded the man, ‘who say a lady is never in question. Wait a minute.’ He paused in his stride along the Strand. ‘Have you been here all night?’

  ‘Yes, sir, outside Sir Walter’s gate.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have my orders, Master Marlowe,’ Carter said straight-faced, ‘from the doctor. I can’t keep you in my sight all the time, but I’ll never be far away.’

  ‘So, let me understand you: Ralegh expressly told you he’d be expecting me.’

  ‘Expressly,’ Carter said.

  ‘Odd, that.’

  Carter stopped and faced the man. ‘What Ralegh says and what Ralegh does is as different from white king to black bishop. It’s his way and you’re lucky to walk away from it. Tell me, are we any nearer to who killed Sir Francis Walsingham?’

  Marlowe sighed. ‘Not this side of the second coming,’ he said.

  The carriage jolted to a halt in the busy throng along Candlewick Street. Nicholas Faunt would have ignored it, but he saw the Queen’s arms of ‘Semper eadem’ emblazoned on the door and he stopped walking. The coachman touched his cap, steadying the whinnying greys in their harness, bracing his feet on the board.

  Faunt looked inside as the door swung open. He climbed aboard and sat opposite the carriage’s single occupant. ‘I don’t usually accept lifts from strange men,’ he said, with no expression, ‘but in your case, Sir Robert, I’ll make an exception.’

  ‘Damn good of you, Faunt,’ the new Spymaster tapped the roof with his silver cane top and the greys lurched forward. ‘Going my way?’

  ‘That very much depends on where you’re going,’ Faunt said. He didn’t like Robert Cecil. The man had robbed him of the Spymaster’s job and was treading on toes in all directions. A pity the nurse who had dropped him as a child hadn’t done a more final job.

  ‘Quo vadis?’ Cecil was looking out of the window as the carriage swung right along Fish Street, making for the bridge. He answered his own question before Faunt could so much as open his mouth. ‘You’re going to the Rose. Marlowe’s new play. So am I.’

  ‘I hadn’t you down for a playgoer,’ Faunt arched an eyebrow.

  ‘Oh, I’m not. Our Puritan friends see them as inventions of the Devil, don’t they? Cesspits of filth and lewd behaviour. Well, that’s pushing it a bit, don’t you think? Even so, I always bring a dozen handkerchiefs to wipe the seat down, just in case. No, it’s just that this particular one is written by Marlowe.’

  Faunt looked at the broad sweep of the forehead, the shrewd mouth, the rheumy hazel eyes. ‘You do know he’s on our side, don’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Is he?’ Cecil counted. ‘I envy you, Faunt. How comforting it must be to be so certain, so assured. Look there,’ he pointed out of the window as the river slipped by, the ships bobbing black on the silver sparkle of the water. ‘The heads.’

  Faunt looked. Three of them jutted above the stone parapet, their hair blowing in the wind, their jaws all but rotted through. He couldn’t hear the teeth rattling this far below, what with the creak of the wheels and the snorting of the horses, the hiss of the water speeding past the bridge stanchions, but he knew the eyes had long gone, prizes for the ravens of the Tower.

  ‘James Morgan,’ Cecil said wistfully. ‘George Barnard. Roger Talbot.’

  ‘I know,’ Faunt said. ‘I put two of them there, in a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cecil sighed. ‘No one doubts your ability, Faunt. Sir Francis always spoke most highly of you. My point is that those three were certain once, assured. Certain we wouldn’t discover their treason, assured in their loyalty to the anti-Christ. And yet, look at them now.’

  ‘But Marlowe—’

  ‘Is an overreacher,’ Cecil cut in. ‘They say he sups with the Devil.’

  Faunt laughed. ‘Then I hope Belzebub is using a long spoon. Marlowe is a playwright,’ he said. ‘He will sup with whoever buys his verses. Or pays to see them on the boards.’

  Cecil sighed again. ‘All right,’ he muttered. ‘I can take a hint. Your seat at the Rose is on me.’

  ‘So, how come you’re a knight, again?’ Ingram Frizer hissed in the darkness of the wings.

  ‘Superior bearing, I suppose,’ Nicholas Skeres shrugged, remembering to hold his chin high. Whoever had made his costume had skimped on the hemming and the stiffened hessian was as sharp as a knife. He looked down at his friend, bending with care. ‘That’s why you’re a carpenter.’

  ‘That Henslowe’s a bloody idiot. Couldn’t cast a shadow, he couldn’t.’

  ‘Ssshh!’ Tom Sledd’s irritated command brought an instant silence to the wings.

  Centre-stage, Ned Alleyn as Barabbas was having trouble with his daughter Abigail. She wasn’t obsequious enough for Alleyn’s liking and anyway, her voice kept dipping to that of a tenor. Monstrous as his ego was, he had leapt at the chance to play the lead in Marlowe’s latest, but he hadn’t reckoned on having to be so old. A slight peppering of silver at the temples was one thing; going on stage as grey as a badger did nothing for his god-like looks. He longed to be Tamburlaine again.

  ‘No, Abigail,’ Frizer and Skeres heard Alleyn thunder, with rather more fire than the scene merited. ‘Things past recovery are hardly cured with exclamations. Be silent, daughter …’

  ‘He really doesn’t like her, does he?’ Skeres observed out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Er … you do know she’s a man, don’t you, Nick?’ Frizer felt he ought to ask.

  ‘Of course I do,’ Skeres said, ducking out of sight to avoid Tom Sledd’s wrathful stare. He rested against the woodwork, making the streets of Valletta wobble a little. ‘So, where are we with Marlowe, then? What do we tell His Nibs?’

  ‘Well,’ Frizer closed to him, ignoring the play for a moment. ‘First, he goes to Blackfriars …’

  ‘… where he meets up with that old tutor of his, that cove from Cambridge. Michaels.’

  ‘Johns.’

  ‘Like I said, that’s him.’

  ‘Then … if memory serves, he makes for Petworth.’

  Skeres had a sudden thought. ‘Hey, he will cover the cost of those horses, won’t he? Only, they don’t come cheap, you know.’

  ‘Yes, he’s good for it.’

  ‘And while Marlowe’s there—’

  ‘He plays tennis.’

  ‘Never mind that. What about the crossbow thing, eh? I nearly shat myself.’

  ‘Whoever it was wasn’t aiming at you, Nick,’ Frizer pointed out, one eye on the action.

  ‘No, but all the same …’

  ‘Then we goes to that foreigner’s place …’

  ‘Out of which Marlowe shot like all the devils in Hell were on his tail.’

  ‘That cove of his, Carter. He didn’t give much away, did he?’

  ‘Bugger me sideways.’ Frizer was looking past the actors now, into the dusk of the theatre. ‘He’s here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Him.’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Are you two actually in this play or not?’ Tom Sledd hissed in Skeres’ ear. ‘Only this is Act Two, Scene Two and that’s the bloody Senate House out there. See.’ He shook the sheaf of papers in his hand. ‘It says, if you can read, “Ferneze, Martin del Bosco, knights and officers. Get out there and be a bloody knight, for God’s sake.’

>   Skeres scuttled on to the stage, notably lagging behind the others. He stood there, open-mouthed. Rehearsals had been different. All sorts of people had been coming and going, walking across the O, chatting. Musicians had been warming up, with hautboys and sackbuts. Ned Alleyn had been signing autographs and showing a whole gaggle of Winchester geese his extensive repertoire, often in broad daylight in the open. But this! This was different. Four hundred faces faced him. Eight hundred eyes, give or take, burned into his soul. Ferneze and Martin del Bosco were in earnest conversation, but nobody was looking at them, or listening to them. Instead, they were all looking at Nicholas Skeres, waiting for his one line.

  So frozen was he that he didn’t see the aged woman in the groundling mob near the stage nudge a large man standing next to her. She was beaming broadly. ‘That’s my Nick, that is,’ everyone but Skeres heard her say.

  Marlowe and Tom Sledd leaned against the wall of the Bear Pit, a flagon of wine between them. The silence after the roar of the crowd was almost a living thing and even Master Sackerson’s usual evening snufflings had abated to just the occasional snort as he fell momentarily asleep over his dinner.

  ‘So,’ Sledd finally said.

  ‘So, indeed, Tom,’ Marlowe agreed, leaning over for more wine.

  ‘They liked it, I think.’

  ‘They seemed to, certainly.’

  The two looked into the middle distance, at the sun just going down between the chimney pots. Audiences were hard to read. Some who had seemed in raptures had then gone home and told all of their friends to go and roll in dung rather than go to the latest at the Rose. Other audiences, which had seemed to be crammed with Puritan killjoys scowling in silence, had subsequently run through the streets yelling the Rose’s wares. You really could not tell. So it was useless to speculate. And yet …

  ‘It was a full house, at any rate,’ Sledd said. ‘I see Faunt was there.’