Queen's Progress Read online

  Marlowe thought for a moment. ‘John Simeon is the means to an end,’ he said. ‘He knows he can’t beat you legally over enclosures, so he’s resorted to threats. I couldn’t buy him off this morning.’

  ‘So, what do you propose?’

  ‘We buy the man who bought him,’ Marlowe said, getting up and crossing to the door. ‘Where can I find Hugh Pickering?’

  The geese honked at him as he cantered over the salt marshes, his horse’s hoofs splashing and spraying as he rode. To his left, the sea glittered in the morning sun and the fishing boats bobbed at anchor. The gulls wheeled in the cloudless blue and Marlowe told his horse, the birds and the sky, ‘It’s a glorious day. Watch Hugh Pickering spoil it.’

  The manor of Rymans lay squat and low on the edge of the harbour, its outer walls crumbled now from the days of the Roses when Squire Ryman had fortified the place against the Yorkists. Sir Hugh Pickering, its current owner, clearly had no interest in old wars – perhaps he just enjoyed creating new ones. He sat on the edge of the knot garden watching a group of children letting loose their goose-feathered arrows into straw targets.

  ‘Good shot, Peter!’ he shouted, passing Marlowe a goblet of excellent claret.

  The little boy in his velvet turned and half bowed. ‘Thank you, Grandfather,’ he called.

  ‘Peter,’ Pickering smiled at Marlowe. ‘My eldest grandson. Do you have children, Master Marlowe?’

  ‘No, Sir Hugh, except those that tumble from my quill.’

  ‘Ah, the theatre, yes. It’s all the craze now in London, I hear. Don’t get there much myself. Perhaps, one day, we’ll have a theatre of our own, right here in Chichester, eh? What do you think?’

  ‘I’d be proud to write for it,’ Marlowe smiled.

  ‘Yes, yes. Full back, Peter, right back to your ear – that’s a good lad.’ Hugh Pickering was greying now but his eyes were bright and his senses sharp. ‘But you didn’t come to talk about drama. Or to watch my grandchildren going through their paces.’

  ‘John Simeon,’ Marlowe said. The name fell like lead through the golden air and Pickering took a while to answer.

  ‘Ah,’ he said at last and put his goblet down. It was warm and mellow in the knot garden and the scent of lavender wafted in the air. ‘Not a social call, then?’

  ‘I carry the Queen’s writ, Sir Hugh,’ Marlowe explained. ‘It is not for me to take sides, but I have to consider the safety of Her Majesty.’

  ‘Look there,’ Pickering pointed to the children. Little Peter was all of seven and, if truth be told, the bow was too big for him; but he refused to be beaten and braced his back anew as the gut slapped his arm and the shaft hissed through the air. There was a thud as the straw bounced. ‘There goes another of the Queen’s enemies,’ the old man said. ‘In this corner of England, Marlowe, we follow the Queen’s edict. My grandchildren practise daily with their bows, as my children did before them. Look yonder,’ he pointed out across the low levels of the marshes to where the sea rippled and swayed. ‘Spain? France? God knows who can mount an armada against us, and Rymans will be the first place they’ll come. I don’t know how long we can hold them, but no one can say the Pickerings won’t be ready; that the Pickerings aren’t loyal.’

  ‘Forgive me, Sir Hugh,’ Marlowe said. ‘From the look of the manor house, I would have said that yours was an abode of peace, not war.’

  ‘Lady Pickering,’ Pickering muttered. ‘Agnes won’t have a weapon in the house. She tolerates the butts because she sees archery as a sport.’ He leaned in to Marlowe, whispering. ‘Agnes is of the Puritan persuasion,’ he hissed. ‘I have to tread carefully.’

  ‘I see,’ Marlowe nodded. A man prepared to mount a rebellion who was afraid of his wife? It didn’t make sense. ‘But the enclosure issue …’

  ‘Ah, that’s the shepherds,’ Pickering assured him.

  ‘The shepherds?’ Marlowe smiled wryly. ‘In my experience, they are the mildest of men, despite a handful I met on the road the other day. Give a shepherd fat lambs and good pasture, clear water and a lockram shirt and he’s content.’

  ‘And if he hasn’t got those things?’

  ‘Loses his land, you mean?’

  Pickering nodded. ‘Loses his land, his livelihood. What if the clear water isn’t his own? What if the good pasture becomes the bishop’s? What price his fat lambs then? They’ll belong to Thomas Brickley, may he rot in Hell.’

  ‘His Grace intends to build enclosures for arable land, Sir Hugh,’ Marlowe told him, ‘for the benefit of all.’

  ‘Master Marlowe,’ Pickering laughed aloud. ‘What court did you say you were from? His Grace will take the shepherds’ lands because they cannot prove, legally, that it is theirs. Arable land, my arse! He won’t plant a pea or bean. The money’s in wool and the bishop knows it. Take my word for it, that man gives Christianity a bad name.’

  ‘So you sent for Simeon?’

  ‘I?’

  ‘There’s bad blood between you and the bishop, Sir Hugh. Will you deny it?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Pickering poured more wine for them both as the arrows flew and laughter trilled from the field. ‘Now, Peter, your sister’s not as big as you. Play the gentleman, sir, and help her.’

  ‘Yes, Grandfather,’ the boy called back, shaking his head at the girl’s incompetence.

  ‘Brickley and I go back a long way,’ Pickering said. ‘I knew what he was up to and I was all for going to law to stop him. Before I could, however, John Simeon turned up; like manna from Heaven, really.’

  ‘To take the matter before the courts?’

  ‘That was my intention, yes. But he, I believe, had other ideas.’

  ‘Rebellion,’ Marlowe said flatly.

  ‘Oh, come now, Marlowe,’ Pickering chuckled, his little eyes dancing in the sun. ‘An exaggeration, surely?’

  But Marlowe wasn’t chuckling. He wasn’t even smiling. ‘I wish it were, sir,’ he said. He was about to get round to that most ticklish of subjects, a bribe, when there were shouts and the thud of horses’ hoofs from the gateway that led to the sea, and all eyes turned that way. Tom Sledd was galloping Hell for leather up from the marshes, his horse flecked with foam.

  ‘Kit! Kit!’ he was shouting. ‘It’s started. You’d better come.’

  It was noon as Marlowe and Sledd clattered into the Pallant; the cathedral bells were calling, angry and wild, as panicky ringers hauled at the ropes, watching their backs as they did so. At the south gate, the pair had cantered through a cordon of armed men, scattering them with the speed and momentum of their ride. Curses and spit had followed them, but their backs were broad and they’d both known worse at the Rose any afternoon of the week.

  Nicholas Faunt was standing with the bishop on the leads of the cathedral roof, looking down at the circus below. The buttercross was surrounded by a mob of lockram-smocked shepherds, scythes and billhooks flashing in the sun.

  ‘We’ve locked the doors, Marlowe,’ Brickley said. ‘I don’t know what else to do.’

  Marlowe looked at the man, a jabbering wreck now that his flock had come to him in such numbers. Had the cathedral ever been that full? ‘You could give them their land back,’ the Queen’s man said, ‘in the interests of Christian charity. In the interests of staying alive.’

  ‘I haven’t taken their land,’ Brickley assured him. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then tear up your petition,’ Marlowe said. ‘Do it here. Now. As Pontius Pilate washed his hands of Christ’s blood, you must do the same with your pilfering parchment.’

  ‘Pilfering?’ Brickley snapped at him. ‘You’ve changed your tune. I am a bishop of the Church of England.’

  Marlowe faced him squarely. ‘If you don’t use your sense, Your Grace, you will be a late bishop of the Church of England. Nicholas, how goes it?’

  ‘They started massing soon after dawn,’ Faunt told him. ‘I sent Norfolk to check the town’s defences. All the gates are sealed, except …’

  ‘The one Tom and I rode thr
ough, yes. And I suspect there was method in that little piece of madness. They could have stopped us. How many, would you say?’

  ‘I counted above two hundred in the centre here. More on the town walls and gates.’

  ‘My God, my God,’ Brickley muttered, crossing himself distractedly when he wasn’t wringing his hands. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Without the Earl of Dorset and his trained bands,’ Faunt shrugged, ‘not a lot, Your Grace. There’s one good thing.’

  ‘There is?’ Tom Sledd couldn’t see it.

  ‘They’ve got no artillery.’

  Will Shaxsper couldn’t have written a worse line for one of his efforts at the Rose. Nor could his timing have been as bad. As if on cue, there was a guttural roar from the mob and men were hauling a cannon into position, surging through the throng below the cathedral.

  Brickley had gone white.

  ‘That’s a culverin,’ Faunt told him casually. ‘It weighs four thousand five hundred pounds and has a bore of five inches. It fires a seventeen-pound ball, Your Grace, and it will make matchwood of your doors here below. It won’t do your masonry much good either.’

  ‘Where, in the name of God, did they get that?’

  ‘The Greenwich arsenal, originally,’ Faunt told him. ‘That’s where they make them. Since then, only God knows.’

  ‘Brickley!’ A voice rang out from the shouting, shifting mob. ‘Thomas Brickley!’

  All four men on the leads leaned over and looked down. John Simeon, in his crimson velvet, stood foursquare, facing the great doors, the cannon’s mouth beside him and dangerous-looking armed men at his back.

  ‘What do you want, Simeon?’ Marlowe threw back.

  ‘That snivelling wretch hiding at your elbow,’ the lawyer called back.

  ‘I think he must mean you, Your Grace,’ Faunt smiled and he hauled the bishop front and centre.

  ‘This is an outrage,’ Brickley found his voice, a hundred feet above his murderous flock. ‘You are desecrating God’s house!’

  ‘Drop your petition, Bishop,’ Simeon called. It seemed an eminently sensible solution to all of the men jostling on the ground and most of them on the cathedral roof.

  ‘And if I do?’ Brickley asked.

  ‘Then we’ll walk away,’ Simeon said. ‘Having lightened your load of the cathedral plate, of course.’

  There were roars of approval and much hilarity among the mob.

  Brickley spun to Marlowe and Faunt. ‘This is intolerable,’ he spat. ‘The enclosures are one thing, but stealing God’s artefacts …’

  ‘It’s the way of rebels, Master Bishop,’ Faunt said. The ‘Your Grace’ status seemed to have slipped.

  ‘Wat Tyler, Thomas Wyatt,’ Marlowe listed just two of them and then added a third. ‘The revolt of the North; however noble the cause, there’ll be those who are only there for the loot and the beer.’

  Brickley hesitated. His life was flashing before him and suddenly a few thousand sheep didn’t seem all that important.

  ‘If I relent on the enclosures,’ he shouted, ‘will you disperse and leave the cathedral alone?’

  ‘Gottlieb,’ Simeon shouted to a man with a linstock in his hand. The gunner had lit the fuse and two others were ramming a cannonball into the culverin’s mouth.

  ‘Ears!’ Simeon roared and the gunner touched his flame to the powder. There were sparks and a hiss and those nearest the gun scattered, their hands over their heads. There was a plopping sound, barely audible beyond the buttercross, as a handful of earth landed on the cannon’s touchhole and the flame died.

  Marlowe saw him first. Jack Norfolk had come out of nowhere, in the rough lockram of a shepherd, and a fistful of soil deftly dropped had stifled the gun. At a signal from Simeon, calloused hands grabbed him and hauled him to the ground. He disappeared under their kicks and curses.

  On the roof, Bishop Brickley felt Marlowe’s dagger blade nick his throat. ‘Simeon!’ the playwright bellowed. ‘Call your dogs off.’

  The lawyer snapped his fingers and the crowd pulled back, a dishevelled Norfolk lying battered and dusty on the ground. Marlowe raised his hand an inch or two and the bishop’s head rested at an impossible angle. ‘Now, Your Grace. You have a choice. Either you tear up the enclosure petition now or Faunt and I will throw you to them – give them someone worthier to tear apart.’

  ‘Or kick to death,’ Faunt murmured, ‘whichever you prefer.’

  For an instant, Brickley’s jaw flexed and his eyelids flickered, then he nodded and Marlowe let the blade drop.

  ‘I renounce my claim,’ the bishop shouted so that all around the buttercross could hear him. ‘I will not petition parliament for your lands. The lands will be yours …’ he glanced at Marlowe, who nodded, ‘and your heirs, in all perpetuity.’

  The blade came level again. ‘So help me God,’ Marlowe growled.

  ‘So help me God!’ Brickley almost screamed.

  There were roars of delight from the mob. They hugged each other, laughing and crying, dancing around the buttercross as the ale flowed and monsters became men again, as monsters will, given the right circumstances.

  ‘Tell him,’ Marlowe muttered. ‘Tell Simeon he can have his silver too, but he must come to the Lady Chapel, alone, to get it.’

  ‘Never!’ Brickley felt braver now that the cannon was being hauled away. He felt the ground disappear beneath his feet as Marlowe and Faunt took an arm each and hoisted him onto the wall. He was screaming hysterically. ‘The silver,’ he yelled, feeling the breeze of one hundred feet and more whistle around his knees. ‘You can have the plate, too.’

  The crowd roared again, some of them turning to march on the cathedral, but Simeon held them back. ‘We’ve got what we came for, lads,’ he said. ‘Mustn’t be greedy.’ He looked up at the turrets overhead and doffed an imaginary cap. ‘Master Marlowe.’ He bowed. ‘It’s been a pleasure working with you.’

  ‘If I see you again, Simeon,’ Marlowe called, ‘the pleasure will be all mine.’

  The bishop, still pale, still quaking, gripped the stonework as if it would crumble any instant. ‘Damn you, Marlowe,’ he muttered, his face a livid mask of anger.

  ‘I’ve been damned by the Church before,’ Marlowe said. ‘Now get below and sort out the enclosure paperwork. I’ll be checking it later. Tom,’ he motioned Sledd to his side, ‘see that the bishop finds his own chapterhouse, will you, then get Jack Norfolk in. He’ll probably need an apothecary.’ He glanced down to where the hero of the hour – once again – was limping his way towards the cathedral, jostled by the peasants he passed.

  ‘Did you catch that gunner’s name?’ Faunt murmured to Marlowe when they’d gone.

  ‘Gottlieb,’ Marlowe nodded. ‘German.’

  ‘So was the gun. It no more came from Greenwich than you do. Now, tell me, Kit Marlowe, how a handful of shepherds have access to foreign ordnance and professionals to fire it.’

  ‘That all depends,’ Marlowe said, only now sheathing his dagger, ‘on who John Simeon is really working for.’

  For a man who had looked death in the face, Jack Norfolk had come through miraculously unscathed. He had a split lip and a bruised temple and, in the scuffle, he had twisted his ankle. Other than that, he seemed well. Even so he was more than ready for his bed in the almoner’s house that night, wedged next to Tom Sledd though he was. The mayor’s Watch patrolled the buttercross, their torches flickering in the darkness. But there was no one to move on. The shadowy figures who had been drifting through Chichester’s streets for weeks now were in their hovels in the countryside, nestling with their wives and soothing their fractious babies. Some slept with their flocks, having long ago given up the notion the Bible had given them, that one night, they might catch a glimpse of an angel of the Lord, clothed in glory.

  So Jack Norfolk did not hear Leonard Lyttleburye’s horse clatter over the ancient flagstones not long after cockshut. He didn’t hear him climb the creaking stairs to Marlowe’s apartments and he certainly di
dn’t hear the brief, whispered conversation that followed.

  ‘Waste of time, Master Marlowe,’ the giant straightened until he felt his back click after so long in the saddle. ‘I checked every Inn of Court, under Sir Robert’s sign, of course. The odd thing is that nobody has ever heard of anyone called John Simeon. Many people called John, but none with a name even close to Simeon; the closest match was John Salmon, but he’s dead. There was a Simeon Levelle and a Simon Smythe …’

  Marlowe was shaking his head. ‘You did well, Leonard,’ he said. ‘It isn’t odd that he isn’t on the lists. No, it isn’t odd at all.’

  ELEVEN

  The travellers slept late the following morning; in one way or another, they had all had an eventful night. Norfolk, black and blue, lay as still as possible for as long as possible once he awoke, trying each limb separately, to see if any of them might still be in working order. Lyttleburye, the stable lad still there beneath the many extra pounds of flesh, had not suffered unduly from his ride, although he would prefer not to be in the saddle for a day or so, given his own choice in the matter. Tom Sledd had slept the sleep of a stage manager without a bad deed on his conscience. Marlowe and Faunt had both lain awake, plotting their plots and hoping they would see the morning at least one step ahead of any miscreant; and indeed, of each other.

  Leonard Lyttleburye was out of luck. With the breakfast platters came a message, sent by galloper from London. Sir Robert Cecil would be pleased to see Christopher Marlowe in his office at his earliest convenience. The final words were struck through with an angry quill. Sir Robert Cecil would in fact be pleased to see Christopher Marlowe in his office as fast as a fast horse could carry him; and if this did not happen, Sir Robert Cecil would not be pleased at all. This was also struck through and at the bottom of the by now rather ravaged looking parchment, was the legend, ‘Marlowe. Get here now. C.’

  Marlowe read his missive with surprising calm. Most people, summoned by Robert Cecil, were on a horse and down the road while the dropped paper was still twirling in the air, but Marlowe was made of sterner stuff. He carefully buttered his bread and added honey, not too much, so it all ran off, not too little so that it disappeared, but just the right amount; he would be needing his strength. He finished his ale, and only when he had finished did he lean back and address his little band.