The Reckoning Read online

  ‘You were never in the navy, Nick,’ Frizer felt he had to point out.

  ‘You know that,’ Skeres acknowledged, ‘and I know that. Thankfully, Lord Burghley didn’t. He shook my hand – which may have been when the trinket became mine – and said “Thank you, my man, for what you’ve done for England.” Well, it’s no more than the truth, is it? Good God, I didn’t know they were all coming.’

  The two men slipped down from the crenellations and crossed to the other side of the wall. The outriders clattered beneath them over the drawbridge, followed by the carriages. Thomas and Audrey Walsingham were hurrying out of the house to welcome the arrivals.

  ‘There’s Burghley,’ Skeres muttered out of the corner of his mouth. ‘The ancient one. White beard.’

  ‘I know,’ Frizer said, proving how in touch he was with current affairs. ‘Who’s the midget? His jester?’

  ‘His little boy,’ Skeres said, ‘and I mean that. They say Robert Cecil is a total bastard – not in the bloodline sense of course, just in his attitude.’

  There was much bobbing, bowing and handshaking, doffing of caps and, in Audrey’s case, curtseying.

  ‘There he is,’ Skeres nudged Frizer, ‘our master himself – the Lord Chamberlain.’

  ‘Makes you proud, don’t it?’ Frizer smiled. ‘Gives you a sort of warm glow.’

  ‘Well,’ Skeres was more pragmatic, ‘if it ever came to him paying us anything it would.’

  ‘Who’s the fourth bloke?’ Frizer wanted to know.

  ‘Ah, he was there too, when I received the undying gratitude from his Lordship for my inestimable services in destroying the Armada. He’s Howard of bloody Effingham, the Lord Admiral.’

  ‘Coo.’ Frizer was impressed. ‘Say what you like about Kit Marlowe, he knows some powerful people. And they’ve all come to see his play.’

  ‘You’re right, Ing,’ Skeres nodded. ‘That’s a third of the Privy Council of this great country of ours, right there, down in the courtyard.’

  ‘If the devil cast his net, eh?’ Frizer chuckled.

  ‘You’ve got that right,’ Skeres said.

  TEN

  Kit Marlowe, playwright and poet, was the only version of the man at Scadbury that night. Audrey Walsingham might have wished to add ‘lover’ to that category, but even if he had been so inclined, there would have been no room for that. He had written plays before, of course, and had seen them performed to great acclaim. He was welcome in almost all of the great houses of England and enjoyed a level of comfort in his private dwelling that his family at home in Canterbury could only dream of. He had friends and if they didn’t outnumber his enemies, this didn’t bother him. He could number among them aristocracy, the Bishop of Winchester’s Geese, pickpockets, dons, serving men and women, actors, stage managers (just one of those) and a bear. He thought himself a lucky man indeed.

  But for now, he sat alone, in the furthest corner of the back row of seats in the Great Hall of Scadbury. The ingenuity of Amyntas Finch had provided a modest rake to the seating, so that even those at the back, filling the row beside him, had as good a view as those at the front. Chosen servants and tenants were already in place in the space between where the seats ended and the stage began. Henry Carey made sure that his own manservant sat directly in front of him; he didn’t want the Hunsdon shins to come into unplanned contact with the general hoi polloi.

  Tom Sledd had done wonders. Bearing in mind that the whole thing would have disappeared by morning, Marlowe felt that some kind of faerieland had been concocted there in the Great Hall, to tell a tale of love, loss and politics. He sighed when he thought that it would be the politics which most people would remember longest. Though as the love and loss were from a rather unusual angle, to say the least, perhaps that would also stick in their minds. It was good that Alleyn and Shaxsper seemed to have put their stupid prejudices behind them; he knew that the beauty of his words would see the thing through.

  The ramshackle band which had accompanied the procession of the Lord of Misrule had been rehearsed and rehearsed almost to the point of madness by a musical youth from the Rose. He was no actor, though he longed to be, but his perfect pitch was not something that Tom Sledd was willing to do without, so he usually got a part, in this particular play, a monk, so he could surreptitiously conduct using his wide sleeves as camouflage. They struck up now and several maids ran to and fro, extinguishing candles at the back of the room and lighting those at the front, to illuminate the stage.

  Shaxsper, his bliss complete that he had an entrance long before Alleyn, walked onto the stage, a letter in his hand. Marlowe tutted a little because the Stratford oaf had still not lost the habit of walking like some kind of barnyard fowl, strutting with straight legs and nodding his head in time. Sledd had done his best with the wig, but it was almost a whole size too small and tended to look a little like a basket upended. But still. The beauty of the words would soon make men forget that Shaxsper looked like something got up to frighten crows, rather than the beautiful boy who entranced a king.

  Having strutted to the front, Shaxsper brandished his letter and in a remarkably clear voice and just a hint remaining of his unfortunate accent, he began. ‘My father is deceas’d. Come, Gaveston. And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend.’

  ‘Look up, look up,’ muttered Marlowe. ‘Let them know you’re reading that bit and the next is all you.’

  Shaxsper looked up and smiled winsomely.

  Marlowe winced a little, but it was not too bad. He reminded himself that this was not London. He could cast the part properly for London.

  ‘Ah, words that make me surfeit with delight!’ Shaxsper said, his eyes on far horizons. ‘What greater bliss can hap to Gaveston than live and be the favourite of a king! My liege, I come!’

  Marlowe’s head snapped up. My liege? What in Hell’s name was the idiot thinking? Forget your lines, by all means. Make them up if all else fails but … my liege? What second- rate playwright had Shaxsper been reading to come up with a word like that? But Gaveston was now pacing back and forth.

  ‘My knee shall bow to none but to the king. As for the multitude, that are but sparks, rak’d up in embers of their poverty – Tanti – I’ll fawn first on the wind, that glanceth at my lips, and flieth away.’

  Marlowe was now sitting upright and looking wildly from left to right. By his quick reckoning, the fool had missed out at least a dozen lines. Mighty lines! His lines! He leaned out as far as he dare and saw the little precocious lad who held the pages look desperately at the stage and thumb through what he held in his lap. This was somewhat of a relief, because it at least proved that he, the writer of the words being mangled down there, was not, as he had begun to think, as mad as a tree. Someone else had noticed too. There would be Hell to pay when he got his hands round the Warwickshire idiot’s throat, but for now, Finch’s ingenuity had him trapped, because the seats were balanced on single beams and there was no way out once everyone was seated.

  The three poor men had entered and Gaveston had got rid of them, using more or less the words Marlowe had written. The next speech was one which had kept him up for more than one fevered night, scouring his books for the right references, writing back and forth to Michael Johns, who had forgotten more than most men ever knew and who had loved Marlowe from the day they met. This speech had Johns embedded in every line and if Shaxsper changed a single word, he would …

  ‘These are not men for me,’ Shaxsper declaimed, holding out one arm in unconscious parody of Alleyn, ‘I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits, musicians, that with touching of a string may draw the pliant king which way I please.’

  Marlowe flopped back in his seat and made the whole row judder. The farmer sitting next to him turned in fury. He was having to sit through this arrant nonsense because his wife had pretensions to be a lady. If he was pitched off backwards and broke his back, that would just put the final touch to the evening from Hell and he wasn’t having any. Marlowe shrugged apologetically
and sat still. Shaxsper seemed to have found his feet, so it might all yet go well.

  ‘Music and poetry is his delight,’ Shaxsper told his audience, ‘Therefore I’ll have Italian masks by night, sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows and in the day, when he shall walk abroad, like sylvan nymphs my servants shall be clad.’

  Marlowe frowned, but pages, servants, it was an easy mistake to make.

  ‘My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns, shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay. Sometime a lovely girl in Dian’s shape, with hair that gilds the water as it glides, crownets of pearl about her naked arms and in her sportful hands an olive-tree, to hide those parts which men delight to see, shall bathe her in a spring.’

  The farmer nudged Marlowe and chuckled. ‘I like a bit of dirty talk in a play. That Master Marlowe, he knows how to tickle a fellow’s fancy.’ He turned to his wife and nudged her too. ‘You’ll be ready for a good siring tonight, Mistress, nor I’m mistaken.’

  But Master Marlowe had turned his face to the wall, and, in the corner, in the dark, made plans for revenge.

  The rest of the play ground on, with Alleyn and Shaxsper taking out anything that might bear reference to the actual relationship between the king and Gaveston. Alleyn even fondled a few faux-female rumps as the court whirled and gavotted through their moves. Marlowe could only grind his teeth in impotent rage, made worse by the fact that the audience seemed, by and large, to be enjoying themselves. The farmer, in particular, was turning out to be a bit of a handful and Marlowe could only assume that at home, he had little cause for bawdy enjoyment. His wife, red cheeked and phlegmatic by his side, made that assumption likely to be accurate.

  As soon as the interval was announced, with another flurry of shawms and tabors, Marlowe was on his feet, balancing precariously on the beam, bouncing with annoyance as the farmer and his wife waited patiently for others to sidle along and make their way to the brown parlour, where refreshments had been laid out.

  Marlowe tried to remain calm and listened to the conversations of others, trapped like him at the far end of lower rows.

  ‘I’m puzzled,’ said a languid voice at his knee level.

  ‘Are you, dear?’ a disinterested female voice said. ‘What about?’

  ‘Well, as I remember it,’ the first voice said, ‘and I am sure I am right, the king and Gaveston weren’t just jolly good friends.’

  ‘Oh, really, dear. Did they not like each other then?’

  ‘Umm …’

  Marlowe glanced down and saw what was clearly an educated man, with finely etched features and a keen eye, standing beside a young thing who could have been his daughter. Marlowe checked his unworthy thoughts. Perhaps she was his daughter. But ‘dear’? Possibly not.

  The older man leaned forward to speak in the girl’s ear, but Marlowe’s hearing was keen and he caught every word. ‘They were … well, they were very friendly.’

  ‘They seemed friendly, dear, yes,’ the flat voice answered. ‘They chat a lot, don’t they? I must say I couldn’t follow it all.’

  ‘No.’ The man was getting testy now. ‘I mean really friendly.’ He bent his head more and now even Marlowe’s bat-like ears couldn’t hear his words but their meaning was clear enough from the girl’s reaction.

  She turned her face up to the man’s, her cheeks a furious red, her mouth a horrified ‘O’. She narrowed her eyes and when she spoke it was with a tight voice which betokened trouble when she got him home. ‘If you ever use that language in front of me again, you loathsome creature,’ she spat, ‘that will be the end of this marriage in anything but name. I blush that you even know of such things.’ She looked him up and down with contempt. ‘Though it explains a lot which had been puzzling me.’

  Marlowe raised a sympathetic eyebrow as he met the man’s startled glance. He had expected his play to ruffle some feathers and indeed it had; it was just that the ruffling and the feathers were not what he had foreseen.

  In the room behind the stage which had been given over to costumes and waiting areas, everything was preternaturally quiet. Usually, at this point on an opening night, there would be back-slapping and excitement, with the boys playing the women getting up to all kinds of tricks just to let off steam. If a silent room could become even more silent, this one did as Marlowe entered, bringing a blast of cold air into the stuff atmosphere.

  He stood just inside the door and waited for someone to speak. Though he was without the flaming sword, he looked for all the world like Gabriel guarding the gate of Eden. It was certain that no one was going to pass until Marlowe was good and ready.

  ‘Well, Kit,’ it was, of course, Tom Sledd who broke the silence. ‘It seems to be going well. Only hearing good things from the audience.’ He tried a merry laugh but it died in his throat, a thought unborn.

  ‘Really?’ Marlowe’s lips were tight and his face was pale. ‘So far what I have heard is a farmer threatening his wife with a good seeing to and a wife who thinks her husband has a dirty mind because he was wondering if all his history teaching in the past has been wrong.’ He scanned the room and found Alleyn, trying to look nonchalant in a dark corner. ‘Has his history teaching all been wrong, Ned?’

  Alleyn looked up as though aware of Marlowe’s presence for the first time. ‘Hmm? Oh, Kit. Didn’t see you there. Sorry, what was the question?’

  ‘People seem to be confused, Ned. Any of them out there who has ever heard of Gaveston and the king seem to think that their relationship was a little closer than you and Shaxsper have been portraying it. Can this be right?’

  Alleyn smiled hopefully, looking around the room but no one would meet his eye.

  ‘Well, can it, Ned?’ Marlowe’s voice rose to a roar and even in the buffet room the length of the Great Hall away, people turned their heads.

  Alleyn looked desperately for Shaxsper. This had, after all, been all his idea. But he was nowhere to be seen. ‘I … well, that is we …’ An idea dawned deep at the back of Alleyn’s brain. It was a rare event, but he grasped the opportunity with both hands. ‘We didn’t want to upset the ladies.’ That was it. He had no details or corroborating evidence, but it seemed like a good enough excuse to him and he was an acknowledged champion when it came to making up excuses.

  ‘You didn’t want to upset the ladies.’ Marlowe spoke low and slow and with every word advanced a step into the room. Faunt, who knew all of Marlowe’s moves, stepped forward too, watching for the hand in the small of the back. It wasn’t that he cared whether Alleyn lived or died – in fact, if he had a preference, it would be for died – but in the middle of a play with a front row like they had tonight, would not be a good time.

  Alleyn’s hands fluttered. ‘Well, there are a lot of ladies in the audience.’ He pointed at Marlowe, never a good idea. ‘You yourself have just mentioned two. But mainly,’ and his expression became saintly, with eyes upturned, ‘we were thinking of our hostess. Mistress Audrey Walsingham is a lady of refined character who would be upset by such insinuations.’ He smiled and ducked his head. As far as he was concerned, that was the whole matter disposed of neatly and tied in a bow. He looked up after a minute and gave a small scream. Silently, as certain as death, Marlowe had crossed the room on soundless feet and was inches from him, a dagger in his hand.

  ‘I assume you mean the same Mistress Audrey Walsingham who you described to me as going like a mare on heat?’ Marlowe asked, reasonably. Queen Isabella sniggered and was immediately quelled by a smack round the head from Tom Sledd.

  ‘That doesn’t sound like me,’ Alleyn whined. ‘I would never be so disrespectful as to speak that way about a lady.’

  This time everyone sniggered and Marlowe let the laughter die down before he spoke. First, he sheathed his dagger and then stepped back. ‘Alleyn,’ he said, ‘you and Shaxsper, because I know you were involved, Will, so you can come out now.’ He turned and waited until Shaxsper, wig even more askew, emerged from a pile of cloaks discarded from Act I, Scene II. ‘You and S
haxsper have interfered with my play and made it into a pointless laughing stock. You have Edward the Second, possibly the most notorious homosexual this country has yet produced, patting the arses of courtiers – female only of course – and playing rough games with all and sundry with hardly a glance at Gaveston, who in actuality filled his nights and days with longing. It seems a little hard on poor old Piers, come to think of it, that he met a hideous death because he occasionally played a round or two of stoolball with the king.’

  The boys in the cast were so near to laughing they almost burst, but knew it may be the last noise they ever made, so managed to keep silent.

  ‘Will, come round where I can see you. Perhaps you will be able to explain why you did what you did.’

  Shaxsper made his way through the crowd which parted for him as though he were a leper.

  ‘Yes, Kit,’ he said. ‘I can explain.’

  ‘Excellent. Can you make a start, because we need to get on with this travesty, I suppose?’

  ‘Well …’ despite his pretensions to being a playwright, Shaxsper’s brain was not of the quickest and it was even more than usually devoid of ideas as the man stood in front of possibly the angriest person he had ever seen. The Warwickshire man said the first thing that came into his head and it was by no means his finest hour. ‘It was all his idea,’ he said, pointing with a trembling finger at Alleyn.

  The actor leapt up with more agility than he ever showed on stage. ‘Me?’ he thundered. ‘Me? It was you, you jumped-up popinjay. You didn’t want to ruin your reputation, as if you even have one! I,’ and he thumped his chest with abandon and nearly winded himself, ‘I am the greatest actor of the age and, if I may say so, probably the greatest lover also. No one would believe that I could be anything other than a red-blooded man.’ He paused for breath. All that emphasis had taken it out of him rather. ‘Whereas you, you bald-headed, spindle-shanked apology, who has ever heard of you? Or ever will, come to that.’