Black Death Read online

  ‘Master Marlowe?’ Another voice. Another place. But the hand hovered near the dagger all the same. A tall, courtly-looking man stood there, in Burghley’s livery with a staff of office in his hand. ‘Welcome, sir. I am James Cruikshank, His Lordship’s steward.’

  Marlowe bowed and Cruikshank did likewise. ‘His Lordship has asked me to assist you in any way that I can. Would you care to take refreshment first?’

  ‘Thank you, but I would like to see Mistress Eunice before I do.’

  Cruikshank nodded and took Marlowe’s saddlebags, passing them to a lackey who had appeared from nowhere. As the playwright surmised, Hatfield was riddled with secret passages that made a murderer’s job easy and an investigator’s a nightmare. He followed Cruikshank through a winding passageway almost devoid of light, until they came to an oak door set into solid stone. ‘This was the Lady Chapel in the old days,’ Cruikshank told him, ‘named for St Etheldreda. You’ll find Mistress Eunice in there.’

  ‘You’re not coming with me?’ Marlowe asked.

  Cruikshank blinked. He had been told by Burghley’s messenger that this man had no fear of anything on earth, except perhaps the Pestilence. Did he baulk, then, at the presence of a corpse?

  ‘I have servants to muster, sir,’ the steward explained, ‘and Lord Burghley’s mule to walk. The animal gets tetchy when His Lordship is not here.’ He bowed and left.

  As it turned out, Mistress Eunice was not alone. The sun was flitting through the stained glass of the window where the saint herself glowed in reds and blues, throwing strange colours onto the already discoloured face of the Cecils’ old nurse. Another woman sat beside her, in the weeds of mourning, a rosary in her hands which she quickly hid under her apron. She got up as Marlowe went in and bobbed a curtsey.

  ‘Madam,’ Marlowe said, ‘I am—’

  ‘I know who you are, sir,’ she said, ‘and your business. I was the Second Finder, if the law recognizes such a thing.’

  It didn’t. According to him, Burghley had been the Second Finder after the maid, and it was the maid that Marlowe needed to speak to next. This was awkward. ‘Madame,’ he said. ‘You’ll forgive me, but I need to examine Mistress Eunice. Her body.’

  The woman was horrified and clutched at her coif. ‘That would be most unseemly,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Marlowe agreed, ‘but if it will tell us how she died …?’

  The woman reflected for a moment. ‘Do what you must,’ she said, through pursed lips. ‘I shall wait outside.’

  Noo-Noo looked as old as the stone on which she lay. What had once been an altar was her resting place now, before the funeral of the next day would take her to a better place altogether. Marlowe carefully untied the cloth around her head. The woman had been dead for three days now; the stiffness of death had left her limbs and the skin was mottled, especially around the throat. Burghley had been right. There was severe bruising here where someone had held her roughly, and a scratch on her cheek below the right eye. Three thumbprints were clearly delineated amongst the yellowing bruises on the right-hand side of her face and, on the same side of her neck, the indentation of one fingernail, left too long, was repeated, like a line of punctuation down her throat. Someone – or several someones, but Marlowe doubted that – had held her face and her neck not once but many times until she had died. He checked her fingernails. They were clean and unbroken with nothing under them to say that she had fought with her killer. Noo-Noo was small and old. A child could have silenced her. And she was silent still; Marlowe could learn nothing more from her.

  Lettys was the First Finder and Marlowe found her waiting for him in the Great Hall, the reliable, solid frame of Cruikshank standing behind her.

  ‘If I may talk to Lettys alone, Master Cruikshank?’

  Everything about that idea, the steward disliked. These were his people; more, they lived under the roof of the most powerful man in England. But Burghley had spoken – Marlowe must be given his head, so there it was. He bowed curtly and withdrew.

  Marlowe sat down on a settle and patted the seat alongside him to encourage her to sit too. She perched on the edge and looked at him anxiously. She was probably twenty and had been born on the Hatfield estate. She was still in shock, twisting her fingers together in dread of this strange, dark man and the questions he was going to ask. She had seen great men coming and going to Burghley’s household all her life, but this one was different.

  ‘Lettys,’ he spoke softly, sensing her unease, ‘it was you who first found Eunice?

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He could barely hear her.

  ‘Tell me, and I don’t want to distress you, was she peaceful? Lying on her bed?’

  Lettys blinked back the tears. Bad enough that she had seen it once. Now, because of this strange man, she had to see it twice. ‘No, sir. She looked … she looked like she had seen the Devil. Or so I imagine. I’ve never seen him myself.’ And she crossed herself, for all this was Burghley’s household and the Queen they all served was head of the Protestant church.

  ‘You’re lucky, Lettys,’ Marlowe murmured. ‘Did it seem to you that anyone had been in her room, recently, I mean, before you found her?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know, sir,’ she muttered, eyes flicking from side to side. ‘Old Eunice didn’t have no visitors as a rule, ’cept me and Betty. The master would go in when he could and of course, Master Robert – Robyn, Eunice called him – would visit. But mainly, it was me and Betty.’

  ‘Betty?’

  ‘The other maid who does for her. I have the days. Betty has the nights. We cross over at dawn. There was one thing, though.’

  ‘Oh?’ Marlowe was all ears. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Well … and I haven’t told no one this, sir, but … well, I should have, but I thought I’d be laughed at. I thought I might tell Dr Parry, but I didn’t.’

  ‘Who’s Dr Parry?’

  ‘He’s the vicar of Hatfield, sir. He holds services in the chapel sometimes. I thought he might be able to explain it, as he’s a clever man and all.’

  ‘Explain what, Lettys?’

  ‘Well, old Eunice, she was a good woman. Worshipped the Lord all her life. If anyone should go to Heaven, it’s her, sir, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m sure she has, Lettys,’ Marlowe said, soothingly.

  ‘Well … if that’s the case …’ Lettys was feeling her way, searching for the words in a situation she found alien and terrifying, all at once, ‘why was her face so stricken? If the Angel of the Lord came for her, why that? And then … then …’ the girl was clearly wrestling with something inside her, ‘what about this?’ She pulled something out from a pocket of her apron, held fast in a closed fist.

  Marlowe frowned. They were both staring at Lettys’s hand, but the girl seemed loath to open it. Gently, Marlowe prised her fingers upwards and looked at her palm. A small gemstone twinkled there, like a frozen tear. ‘Where did you find this, Lettys?’ he asked.

  ‘It was on her forehead, sir, like a star it was, shining in the early morning light. Now, I don’t believe the Devil would leave that, sir; indeed I don’t. It was an angel left that. So why was old Eunice so mortal feared? Angels are good things, ain’t they?’

  Marlowe forbore to remind her that Lucifer was once the morning star, son of the dawn, most beloved of all angels in Heaven. She didn’t need to know that if the alternative gave her comfort. ‘They are, Lettys,’ Marlowe nodded. ‘Do you mind if I keep this?’

  The maid Betty was of little help. Older than Lettys and more a no-nonsense woman of the world, she had seen and heard nothing after cock-shut when she’d bedded old Eunice down and heard her say her prayers and had gone to bed herself. It was windy that night and that bloody dog of Harry Hawkins’s hadn’t shut up until way gone midnight and Betty was going to have words with him about it; but other matters intervened, what with the old girl dying and all. The master, he was very cut up about it and she, Betty, had had to slap that stupid girl Lettys around the head a few time
s to calm her down. But Betty slept along the passage from old Eunice and she’d have heard anybody going past her door; she was sure of that. When Marlowe thanked her, walked away and turned to whisper her name, Betty was oblivious, however, so Marlowe was unconvinced. As far as he knew, a whole legion of devils could have tramped past Betty’s door and she’d have been none the wiser.

  Yes, Harry Hawkins had a dog. In fact, he had forty of them. They actually belonged to His Lordship, of course, and, not being a keen huntsman himself, he kept the pack for visiting nobs, one of whom, the Earl of Rutland, had turned up only the other day, mighty put out by the fact that Burghley wasn’t there. Not to be too put out, he had borrowed His Lordship’s pack and gone hunting anyway. None of His Lordship’s dogs ever barked after midnight and if that old besom Betty Horsemonger said they did, she was lying. Master Marlowe might want to have a word with Jem Layton, though. He formed a sort of unofficial night Watch at Hatfield. After all, His Lordship was the most powerful man in England, some said in the world. And you couldn’t be too careful.

  It turned out that Jem Layton couldn’t be careful at all. Much of his time as commander of the Hatfield night Watch was spent dressing up in burgonet, breast and back. The four men who served as his company couldn’t hit a barn door with their matchlocks and His Lordship only paid them because he was too nice not to and their presence had made the late Lady Burghley feel secure, even though she was a better shot than they were. No, there’d been nothing untoward going on at Hatfield the night old Eunice had breathed her last. It was her time, wasn’t it? Jem Layton had no time himself for all this hysteria, with lions whelping in the streets. The sanctimonious old trout should have gone years ago. Jem had never liked her. He didn’t like the vicar, either, so maybe Master Marlowe might want to talk to him.

  He did, but not before he had talked to everybody else. The staff were utterly loyal to the Cecils; there could be no question of that. To each other now, that was a different matter. Even so, Marlowe could discern nothing murderous in any of them. It was just the usual griping of any group of people forced to work together by circumstance. You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your fellow-servants.

  What concerned Marlowe more was the steady stream of visitors and hangers-on who were constantly in and out of Hatfield. The Muse’s darling was horrified that none of them was a playwright or a poet or even a musician. And he remembered that, almost uniquely among the Privy Council, Lord Burghley did not have his own theatrical troupe to entertain Her Majesty. What Burghley went for were scholars, men like himself who spoke Latin, Greek and Hebrew and who read Cicero for laughs. The Earl of Rutland had arrived on the day that Burghley had left for London, distraught over the loss of his old nurse. The earl had brought ten or twenty hangers-on with him, all ambitious as the Devil and no doubt strangers to scruple. Days earlier, a team of acrobats had arrived but Cruikshank had given them their marching orders. There were lawyers, physicians, supplicants, merchants, knights of the shire, all traipsing over Hatfield as if they owned the place. There was simply no way to account for all of them.

  So it was an exhausted projectioner-playwright who pushed open the vestry door of St Etheldreda as night fell.

  ‘Dr Parry?’

  ‘That’s me.’ A large, florid, almost cherubic man was folding away his chasuble. ‘Ah, aren’t you Christopher Marlowe?’

  ‘I am.’ Marlowe was impressed and suspicious, all at once. It was not for the first time.

  ‘And I’m not him, by the way.’

  ‘Him?’ The vicar had lost him already.

  ‘The Doctor Parry who is chaplain to Her Majesty. That’s my cousin, somewhere down the line.’

  ‘How do you know me?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘The Muse’s darling? Come, come, Master Marlowe, no false modesty. You are the greatest playwright in England.’

  ‘Have you seen anything of mine?’ Marlowe had long ago stopped blushing at flattery like that.

  ‘Dido,’ Parry began counting on his fingers. ‘Tamburlaine. The Jew, of course. And, if memory serves, there was more than a little of you in Henry VI, Shakespeare’s effort.’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly comment,’ Marlowe smiled.

  ‘Faustus, now,’ Parry closed to him, ‘I’ve heard that is something special. If you dared God out of his Heaven with Tamburlaine, what have you done with Faustus? I’ve yet to see it.’

  ‘No one has seen it,’ Marlowe told him, ‘except for a select few.’

  ‘Then there’s hope?’ The vicar’s eyes shone.

  ‘Not while Master Tilney is Master of the Revels and there is a “y” in the day.’

  ‘Shame,’ the vicar frowned, ‘a great shame. May I say what an honour it is to have you at St Ethedreda’s?’

  ‘Gracious, Dr Parry,’ Marlowe bowed. ‘Thank you.’ He took in the heavy brass crucifix on the vestry wall, in marked contrast to the whitewashed simplicity of the nave. ‘You have a beautiful church.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Parry smiled. ‘It has stood here, holding the poor parishioners of Hatfield in its hand, since the thirteenth century.’

  ‘When the Pope ruled.’

  The smile froze on the vicar’s face. ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘But I’ll wager you didn’t come to talk about ecclesiastical architecture – or ancient history.’ He offered Marlowe a seat.

  ‘Eunice Brown,’ the playwright said.

  ‘Ah yes, poor Eunice. Tragic. Tragic.’

  ‘You know she was murdered, Dr Parry?’

  ‘Surely not!’ The vicar looked askance.

  ‘You visited the body?’

  ‘I was called in, yes. Administered the last rites.’

  ‘In Latin?’

  ‘No.’ Parry grew frosty. ‘In the Queen’s broad English. Why do you ask?’

  Marlowe chuckled. ‘St Etheldreda,’ he said, leaning back and cradling one knee, ‘your patron saint. She was a princess of East Anglia who wanted to be a nun. Unfortunately, her father had other ideas and she was forced into marriage. When her husband died three years later she fled to a convent in Ely. Her father was the persistent type, however, and he insisted she marry again – Ecgfrith this time, Prince of Northumbria.’

  ‘I really don’t see—’

  ‘She ran away again. Etheldreda was clearly as determined as her dear papa. This time she put on a hair shirt next to her skin and spent the rest of her life praying every night, all night.’

  ‘Fascinating, Master Marlowe.’ Parry was smiling again. ‘And largely accurate. But I assure you, I didn’t choose the name of the church. Neither do I espouse the miracles with which she is associated.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ Marlowe asked. ‘Then why … this?’ He lunged for the little altar to his left and hauled off the cloth.

  ‘Sacrilege!’ Parry screamed, but Marlowe hadn’t started yet. He drove his right boot into the wooden panel between the carved ogee arches and a box fell out. Before Parry could leave his seat, screaming as he was, Marlowe had wrenched open the lid and held up the desiccated hand lying there.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said levelly, looking Parry straight in the eye, ‘am I shaking the hand of a saint?’

  ‘I …’ Parry’s shoulders slumped. Denials now seemed pointless, but he tried anyway. ‘I didn’t know that was there,’ he said. ‘Churches all over the country must be full of them, foul relics of superstitious Papist claptrap.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Marlowe told him, ‘and well done to be able to recite the mantra by the way – “Foul relics. Papist claptrap” – excellent Puritan rhetoric, isn’t it? And I’d be prepared to believe you, were it not for the polished appearance of this reliquary,’ he kicked it with his foot, ‘and the ease with which the lid opened. This has been handled regularly, recently and – I am prepared to wager – by you.’

  It was all over for Parry. He could feel the flames licking around his feet already. And him, the parish priest of Hatfield. ‘What … what are you going to do?’ he asked. ‘And
please … put that back.’ He was talking about the saint’s relic. Marlowe tossed the hand into the box and sat down again.

  ‘Tell me about Eunice,’ he said.

  Parry sighed. ‘Eunice was one of my parishioners,’ he said. ‘My real parishioners, that is.’ His voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘The old religion, Marlowe. The real religion. I administered the last rites in Latin, as Eunice would have wished.’

  Marlowe nodded. ‘Does Burghley know?’ he asked. ‘Cecil?’

  ‘God, no!’ Parry was horrified. ‘A stauncher pair of Puritans I’ve yet to meet. And before you ask, my cousin, the Queen’s chaplain, knows nothing of this either. Perish the thought.’

  Marlowe looked at the man. For much of his adult life, at least since he had met Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s estimable former Spymaster, he had been hunting Papists – and finding them, too, very often in the most unlikely places. It came easily to him. But today, he was hunting a murderer. ‘Is that why you killed her, Dr Parry?’ he asked. ‘Eunice? Everybody I’ve spoken to called her a good woman, devout, Christian to her fingertips. Were you afraid she’d finger you, inadvertently, at her end? That she’d send someone to find her Catholic Father as she faced her Doom? That nice, accommodating Father Parry, who had always been there for her, at secret Masses without number?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Parry said, shaking his head. There were tears in his eyes. ‘Oh, I won’t pretend I’ve never considered her doing that. She wouldn’t have meant any harm, of course, but when a soul’s time comes, who knows what truths spill from the mouth?’