The Reckoning Read online

  The organ struck up as Baines hurtled down the aisle, cassock flying. He nodded briefly to Thomas and Audrey Walsingham, blinked at Lewknor and ignored everybody else. There was Parkin, he realized, at the front, sitting alone with nobody behind him. Good. Actually, not good. Why wasn’t the man officiating? He should have started the service by now, not be sitting there like one of the congregation.

  Baines took a deep breath to clear his head of the wicked thoughts that always entered it when he saw Audrey Walsingham. Try as he might, he could only see her sitting there naked, even when, as today, she was swathed in a fur-lined cape to keep out the cold. The thoughts that swirled in his brain when he saw Thomas were less pleasant; sedition rarely is. He turned, fixing a beatific smile on the congregation and the grin froze on his lips.

  ‘Mother of God!’ he shouted and had to clench his fist to stop himself from making the sign of the cross. Now that he was facing Parkin, he could see that the lad was dead, his face drained of blood and his eyes half closed. There was a cake of black blood around his nose and lips and his hands were fixed like claws on the edge of the pew.

  There was a scream and Henry Parkin flopped sideways, freed from his upright position by the actions of the sidesman who was sitting behind him.

  ‘He’s dead!’ somebody shouted. ‘The curate’s dead!’

  Before Baines had a chance to do or say anything, Thomas Walsingham was on his feet, shouting orders, keeping as calm as possible. ‘Lewknor,’ he muttered to his steward. ‘Marlowe and Faunt. Get them here at the double.’

  ‘Seen one of these before, Kit?’ Faunt asked. In his hand lay the weapon that had killed Henry Parkin, a murderous iron shaft nearly a foot long that had been rammed through the oak of the pew behind him and right through his scrawny chest.

  ‘I don’t believe I have,’ Marlowe said.

  ‘It’s a marlin spike, common among sailors.’

  ‘Is it now?’ Marlowe was looking at the body. Henry Parkin was lying on the floor of the nave. Baines had raved for several minutes that this was God’s house and a sacrilege to search a body under that roof, but the Walsinghams steered him away and the congregation vanished, with mutterings and asides, to let Faunt and Marlowe get on with their work.

  The body, naked now except for his linen drawers, was unmarked apart for the wound. It was black with dried blood, on back and chest, and the blood had trickled down to pool on the pew seat and soak into the curate’s cassock.

  ‘When, would you say?’ Faunt asked.

  ‘Last night,’ Marlowe said, lifting the lad’s right arm. ‘The rigor of death is still partly there. I’d say he died before midnight.’

  Faunt stood up, weighing the blood-encrusted spike in his hand. He looked along the length of the nave, crouched behind the front pew, sat where the murderer must have sat. He poked the spike through the hole, itself still dark with blood that had streaked out to right and left along the grain. He eased it forward, then slammed hard, his fist hitting the woodwork.

  ‘What do we know about this lad?’ he asked Marlowe.

  The playwright stood up, leaving the curate staring sightlessly at the vaulted roof. ‘As of now, nothing,’ he said, ‘but that’s two murders in nine days, Nicholas. According to Thomas Walsingham, nothing ever happens at Scadbury.’

  ‘Is there a charnel house?’ Faunt asked.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Marlowe said. ‘We’ll put him in the dairy, with Dalston. Thank God it’s chilly at this time of the year.’

  ‘I understand that Thomas has arranged for Peter to take his brother home for burial and is paying for the funeral,’ Faunt said.

  ‘He has. He’s a kind man, Thomas Walsingham.’

  ‘Or a murderer,’ Faunt said. He was not the sentimental type. ‘So I’ll start with him. Can you see Baines?’

  ‘In my worst nightmares,’ said Marlowe.

  ‘Yes, I hold the advowson,’ Thomas Walsingham was grooming his horse. He had people for that, but he liked to keep in touch with his animals. Padraig had ambled out to the stables, about as far as his old legs would carry him these days. ‘So I appointed Parkin. Seemed a nice lad. Bit of a mother’s boy, perhaps. I can’t say I knew him. You’d have to ask Baines.’

  And Nicholas Faunt had people for that.

  ‘Thomas Walsingham owns the advowson,’ Baines said to Marlowe. He was polishing the church silver. Normally, that would be done by the verger but the poor man was so shocked by the outrage committed in the church that he had gone home to lie down. ‘So, he appointed Parkin. I didn’t meet him until after the deed was done.’

  ‘You didn’t approve the appointment?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Baines snapped. ‘Forgive me, Master Marlowe, we’re all a little on edge this morning, for obvious reasons. No, it was just that Parkin was a little … shall we say, distant. Not one of us.’

  ‘Us?’ Marlowe took him up on it.

  ‘Of the Church,’ Baines said, spitting apologetically on a chalice and buffing it with a cloth. ‘I suspect he probably regretted his calling.’

  ‘Did you object to that?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘It’s not unusual in a curate,’ Baines sneered. ‘They’re mostly glorified serving men these days. No backbone.’

  ‘The marlin spike missed Parkin’s backbone by an inch,’ Marlowe said, ‘the ribs too. Whoever killed him knew exactly what he was doing.’

  ‘Marlin spike?’ Either Baines was an actor the Rose would die for, or he had no idea what that was.

  ‘The murder weapon. When it comes to the inquest, it’ll be the deodand, the earthly value of the thing which commits the crime.’

  ‘I know what a deodand is, Marlowe. I went to Cambridge too, you know. A wonder our paths never crossed.’

  ‘Perhaps they did,’ Marlowe said. He had forgotten all about the Eagle and Child.

  ‘Perhaps so,’ Baines smiled. ‘If you’re trying to find out who killed my curate,’ he said, ‘you could do no better than to try Mistress Walsingham.’

  ‘He said what?’ Audrey Walsingham put down her crewel work and rammed home her needle with a force which surprised Marlowe.

  ‘That you may be able to help us with our enquiries.’

  ‘Us?’ Audrey was as arch as ever this afternoon.

  ‘Faunt and me.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she smiled. ‘You and he are something dark in the Whitehall passageways of power, aren’t you? I keep forgetting that. What did Baines mean, do you think? I mean, what were you discussing when he said I could help you?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Marlowe said. ‘I was, of course, discussing the death of Henry Parkin and he just told me to see you.’ The mistress of Scadbury had not invited him to sit, so he compromised by perching on the arm of a chair in the brown parlour.

  ‘Well, for a start,’ she said, taking up the sewing again, ‘you know he’s mad, don’t you? You were there in the Misrule procession. You saw how he stopped Thomas at the lych-gate.’

  ‘I did,’ Marlowe said, ‘and he was right, by his standards.’

  ‘His standards?’ Audrey all but spat. ‘He doesn’t know the meaning of the word. However …’ she made a few stitches, dragging out her sentence to give it maximum dramatic value. Marlowe all but applauded; if half the actors at the Rose had her timing, he would be in Heaven. ‘The curate did come to see me, as a matter of fact, hours before he died.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘He wanted Thomas, but Thomas as always, was elsewhere. He told me … you might want to sit down properly, Master Marlowe, while I tell you this.’

  Marlowe slid down into the chair and sat, all attention.

  ‘He told me the most extraordinary story … about Baines, that is.’

  The moon crept out from the clouds and lit the moat at Scadbury. The winter days were only just lengthening and there was a chill in the air. But it would take more than a chill to deter old Gammer Gosworthy. She had been walking this way, past the old mill and the butt
s, on her way to church for the best part of eighty years now and if tonight, her third leg, of polished beech, clacked alongside her, then so be it.

  Her dead lay in the churchyard as the Gosworthys had lain for generations. Three of her babies were buried there and her husband, the good-for-almost-nothing. She remembered as if it were yesterday the Sunday of her wedding. She had simpered at the church porch and pretended she was a virgin, with her chestnut hair hanging free and garlanded with ears of corn. And she had gone to confession, always, whoever ruled England and whatever prayer book was the order of the day. She was a young mother when bluff king Hal had broken with Rome, already a grandmother and alone when the Jezebel had set up her evil church. Nothing would stop Gammer Gosworthy from going to confession; as long, of course, as there was a priest to hear it.

  Kit Marlowe knew all about the Gammer Gosworthys of this world. For the last ten years he had rooted out Papists, not because he had any hatred for them, but because they disturbed the peace of the realm and because, well, there were so many reasons why. He watched the old girl as he had watched others. She’d waited until dark and was looking around her to make sure she wasn’t being followed. She stopped every now and then, listening for footsteps that were not her own. But she never saw Kit Marlowe and she didn’t hear him either.

  He crept behind her into the church of St Nicholas where the curate had died only the day before. He saw her bob in front of the altar, then vanish behind the rood screen. He heard the familiar knock on the door, the three raps for the Trinity and the soft intoning of the priest. He pressed himself against the Arras in the chancel and waited.

  The old girl had not led a particularly virtuous life but her opportunities for sin were rarer these days and she was not long. Marlowe waited until the clack of her stick died away, then he slid out of the shadows and behind the screen. There was a little door, almost hidden by another Arras and he rapped out the Trinity.

  ‘Forgive me, Father,’ he said, ‘for I have sinned.’

  The door swung open to reveal Richard Baines, in his Papist robes, a rosary in his hands. He took one look at Marlowe and his mouth hung open.

  ‘But then,’ said Marlowe, in the awkward silence, ‘so have you.’

  ‘And you left him alive?’ Faunt was incredulous. ‘A Papist and a traitor. And you didn’t slit his throat right there and then?’

  ‘In the church, Nicholas?’ Marlowe chuckled. ‘What an appalling suggestion.’

  ‘Unmasking Papists and traitors is what we do for a living, Kit,’ Faunt said, ‘or had you forgotten?’

  ‘You, maybe,’ Marlowe smiled, ‘but as Robert Cecil made it crystal clear to me only two days ago, my projectioner days are over. He dispensed with my services. I’m out.’

  ‘So was I, from him,’ Faunt said, ‘but they can’t let us go, believe me. No, it was a huge mistake for Burghley to give his little boy the spymaster job. He just isn’t up to it. One of the others’ll take you up, you’ll see. Hunsdon, Hatton, perhaps even the Queen herself. She loves a pretty face but even if you were ugly as sin, they can’t afford to let men like you go.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time, Nicholas,’ Marlowe said. ‘I’ve been thinking more about poetry these days. Hero and Leander perhaps. For that I need peace and quiet – here at Scadbury, if Thomas will have me. But first …’

  ‘First?’

  ‘First, Nicholas, I have a play to put on.’

  ‘Kit?’ Faunt looked alarmed.

  ‘You didn’t think that I was going to listen to anything the four horsemen said, did you? Not in the sense of doing what I was told.’

  ‘Is this wise, Marlowe?’ Faunt was suddenly serious. ‘You could be very much out of your depth.’

  ‘I’ve swum the Stour, the Cam, the Thames and even the Solent – or at least part of it. What’s next? The Styx?’

  ‘Is Baines our man, then?’ Faunt asked. ‘For the murder of Parkin, I mean?’

  ‘No, Faunt,’ Marlowe was serious too. ‘But the blade through the back, the clever, neat way it was done. Whoever killed Henry Parkin killed John Foxe too – and it’s my guess, Moll and Roger Dalston. The question is why.’

  Faunt leaned back in his chair. ‘If we have the answer to that,’ he said, ‘we’ll have the “who” in the palms of our hands.’

  ‘Master Walsingham …’ Marlowe put his head round the door of the brown parlour and saw the master of Scadbury communing with his favourite hound. Padraig’s eyes were dim these days, but he knew his master’s voice and had his chin on the man’s knee as he scratched the top of the scruffy head.

  Walsingham turned around, carefully, so as to not disturb the old dog. ‘Kit! Come in, come in.’

  Marlowe took a seat to one side of the fire. The Yule log from the game of Dun is in the Mire had long gone and a new half-tree was blazing merrily.

  ‘You’re very formal,’ Walsingham remarked.

  Marlowe looked into the flames and smiled. ‘I always am when I have a favour to ask,’ he said.

  Walsingham raised his eyebrows. ‘Another? And I thought you had just used my house to put on a play. A play, might I say, that brought a good proportion of the Privy Council through my doors.’ He smiled to take the sting out of his words. ‘I’m not sure I can afford you, Kit.’

  Marlowe could read most men, even those who sought to hide their thoughts, but Thomas Walsingham he could read like the simplest hornbook primer. ‘So, you don’t want to wait to hear what it is, then?’ he said. ‘The answer’s yes.’

  Walsingham frowned. ‘Did I say that?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think I said that.’

  ‘Not with your words, no,’ Marlowe said with a smile. ‘But the rest of you did. I’ll ask you anyway. Might I stay on here at Scadbury? I have a poem bubbling in my head and I need to get it down on paper before it boils away and the steam is lost for ever.’

  ‘Kit,’ Walsingham said, pushing the dog gently off his knee. He reached for his tobacco pouch and offered it across. ‘What sort of poem is it?’

  ‘Just a poem.’

  Walsingham was looking down, packing his pipe, but the question hung in the air.

  ‘A love poem, then. I just feel the need to write it down and here … I feel that here, the words will flow.’

  Walsingham looked serious. He had a face that was made for smiles, but now, he had a look of his cousin about him. ‘Are you in love with someone, Kit?’ he asked.

  Marlowe shook his head. ‘No one in particular, Thomas. Words, perhaps. Music a close second. All my friends, some just memories now, sadly. But in love? No.’

  ‘Not Audrey, for instance?’ Walsingham was embarrassed now and looked down at his pipe, scowling as if it had offended him.

  ‘Audrey? Good God, no!’ As soon as he had spoken, Marlowe realized how that must sound and went on, ‘Not that she isn’t lovely, Thomas, because she is. But she’s your …’ as always and in common with everyone else, he stuck on the word.

  ‘Exactly!’ Walsingham flung out his arm and a burning wad of tobacco fell on Padraig’s flank and made the animal yelp. ‘Exactly,’ he repeated, beating out the small fire. ‘It’s always the same. “Oh, Master Walsingham, your …” No one knows what to call her. And I have no call on her. She could go tomorrow and I couldn’t stop her.’

  ‘Thomas,’ Marlowe said, hurriedly, ‘she loves you. If you could have heard her when she thought you were dead, you wouldn’t even wonder. She does love you.’ He smiled. ‘I write poetry. I know these things.’

  Walsingham sucked at his pipe, bringing it back to life. ‘Pass me that twig, there, off the fire, will you?’ he said, to try to change the subject. ‘My pipe is going out.’

  ‘There you are, you see,’ Marlowe said, not passing him the light. ‘You’re the same with your pipe as you are with women. Your pipe is burning perfectly well, but you want to relight it. The woman who, may I say, should already be your wife, loves you but you think she doesn’t. You have no confidence in yourself, Thomas, that’s your
trouble.’

  ‘You’ve changed the subject,’ Walsingham observed, watching the smoke rise to the ceiling.

  ‘I don’t believe I have. You asked me about Audrey and then …’

  Walsingham chuckled. ‘As always, you have the better of me. But … if you aren’t in love with Audrey, then who?’

  ‘I told you.’ Marlowe spread his arms wide, without setting fire to the dog. ‘No one.’

  Walsingham shrugged. ‘If you say so. But,’ and he leaned forward, ‘if you want to tell me, it will go with me to the grave.’

  ‘Thomas!’ Marlowe used the tone he used to actors. ‘I am not in love. Now, will you let me stay, or not?’

  ‘Of course you can,’ the master of Scadbury laughed. ‘With how many people this time, if I may ask? Just so the kitchens know how many carcases to get in.’

  ‘Just me,’ Marlowe said. ‘The others are packing to leave as we speak. Most of them went a day or so ago. Didn’t you notice?’

  Walsingham looked around him. ‘I did think it had gone a bit quiet,’ he said. ‘Home for Twelfth Night, eh? London is very festive at Twelfth Night. I used to enjoy that more than Christmas, when I was a boy.’

  ‘Let’s go up for the night,’ Marlowe offered, without too much enthusiasm. ‘Tom Kyd is gone from Hog Lane, now. I have plenty of room for guests.’

  ‘That’s a kind offer, Kit. And any other time, I would take you up on it. But …’ he leaned over and beckoned Marlowe nearer, ‘between you and me, Audrey has been a lot more …’ he cast his eyes up to the ceiling and fought to find the right word, ‘… come-to-ish of the last few nights. She hasn’t always been, I must say. Perhaps,’ and he smoothed his moustache and beard ruminatively, ‘perhaps she has come to enjoy the pleasures of the marriage bed, if I can use that phrase in this context. I think before that she was … well, afraid of my rampant manhood.’

  Marlowe, rarely stuck for words, was stuck, for the second time in one conversation. To make time to think, he knocked out his pipe on the hearth and cleaned it with a twig before stowing it in his bosom. ‘She probably is,’ he said at last. Then, smiling up at his friend, who sat, glowing with love and pride. ‘That will be it. Well done, Thomas, for schooling her at last.’ He stood up, brushing threads of tobacco from his front, ‘I must be away to see off the last of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. And then, if you don’t mind, I will retire to my chamber and make a start on my poem.’