Witch Hammer Read online

  ‘And who appointed you Constable of the Stones?’ Simon Haywood wanted to know. He and Cawdray had ridden into a scene sadder than the saddest tragedy Lord Strange’s Men had ever offered to an audience. Everyone was weeping, Marlowe included, and even Scot was not dry eyed. The morning had progressed in a series of short scenes, each one more harrowing than the last, from the discovery of the body to the laying out and now Marlowe had commandeered Sledd’s wagon in an effort to create some kind of order out of the undoubted chaos. By midday, as the fierce July sun burned on to the Rollrights, the women of Strange’s Men had stripped their leader, washed his wound and laid him in a plain linen shroud, the one they usually used for the Ghost should there be one in any play they were putting on. Most of them had not stopped crying all day and even the guard, doubled now to watch Greville’s men, did so through the blur of their tears. The Player King was gone. And there was no one now to lead Lord Strange’s Men.

  ‘I have some experience in these things,’ Marlowe said. He was under the canvas awning, where the heat of the day had not yet penetrated and the only sound was the occasional snort and whinny as a horse shifted in the lines and shooed away the flies with its tail.

  ‘Have you, by God,’ said Hayward, testily. ‘I feel I should ask from what side of the bar, Master Poet, have you experienced an investigation into murder?’

  ‘If you have questions to ask me, Master Hayward,’ Marlowe said, keeping his temper in check with extreme difficulty, ‘I would ask you to wait until we can speak more privately and at more length. I had asked to speak to Master Scot, so if you please . . .’ He extended his arm, his palm outstretched to show the way to the outside world of tears and loss.

  Hayward spluttered and said, ‘You expect me to wait my turn? What are you, boy? Twenty? Twenty-one? You may be some damned hack with a pretty pen, but I own three hundred acres. You can go to the Devil.’ And he turned to leave.

  ‘I can’t make you stay,’ Marlowe called to him, ‘but if you leave, we’ll all assume the worst.’

  ‘What . . .?’ a furious Hayward spun round on him, feeling for his dagger at his back.

  Richard Cawdray stepped under the awning, dipping under its flapping edge. ‘Simon, Simon,’ he said, holding the man’s sleeve. ‘No need for all that. Master Marlowe is just trying to find out what happened to his friend. He didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘You can all go to the Devil!’ Hayward roared and strode across the grass to stand, arms folded and chin raised defiantly, at the edge of the stone circle.

  Cawdray and Marlowe watched him in silence. Then Cawdray spoke. ‘We’re all a bit on edge today, Master Marlowe. I’m sorry.’

  Marlowe nodded and Cawdray stepped out of the shadow into the sun and went to stand next to Hayward, his hand on his shoulder, his head bent to him as he spoke some words which eventually seemed to calm him.

  ‘Sorry, Kit –’ Reginald Scot popped his head around the awning – ‘you wanted to see me?’

  Marlowe held up the bodkin in his right hand. It still had traces of Sledd’s blood on it.

  ‘Ah.’ Scot’s bonhomie vanished. ‘I wondered when you’d raise that. Bit of a ticklish issue, isn’t it?’

  ‘Your weapon found embedded in the neck of a dead man?’ Marlowe murmured. ‘I’d say so, yes.’

  Scot sighed and sat down heavily, cross-legged on a props chest. ‘Shall I put my case?’ he asked.

  ‘I wish you would,’ Marlowe said.

  Scot cleared his throat, as though he were facing the Assize or the Star Chamber. ‘I didn’t know Ned Sledd, other than passing the time of day with him. Was anything stolen, from the body, I mean? Money? Trinkets?’

  ‘Not that I can tell,’ Marlowe said. ‘Would robbery have been your motive, then? I didn’t have you down for a thief.’

  ‘Nor a murderer, I hope.’ Scot’s sudden guffaw had no mirth in it. He saw that Marlowe wasn’t smiling. ‘If I had killed the man –’ Scot leaned forward, earnestly – ‘would I have been so foolish as to leave my weapon in the wound?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Marlowe said. ‘I believe I was the only one you had shown it to. Perhaps you thought I wouldn’t remember.’ He suddenly threw the bodkin to Scot who fumbled and dropped it. ‘Show me how it works,’ Marlowe ordered. ‘The last time I saw it in use it couldn’t actually have hurt anybody.’

  ‘Ah.’ Scot held it aloft between them. ‘Ordinarily, when used as a pricker, no. But if you just . . .’ He pressed in a catch, hidden in the chasing on the handle. ‘It becomes just an ordinary dagger, albeit with a thin blade.’ He pressed gingerly on its tip and the blade held firm. ‘See?’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Marlowe said thoughtfully, ‘even though you had shown it to me.’

  ‘So, what are you saying?’ Sledd asked, peering at him in the wagon’s shade. ‘That I must have killed him? Look at this handle.’ He held it out towards Marlowe. ‘The catch is not obvious, but it isn’t really hidden very well either. A child could find it. I don’t see why you assume I killed Sledd.’

  ‘But it would be useful if you said you did.’

  ‘What?’ Scot frowned. Marlowe wasn’t making any sense.

  ‘From what I saw of the wound, it was driven home with some force,’ he said, ‘with the strength, I assume, of a man. Although –’ he smiled despite the grimness of the situation – ‘having seen Liza in action, I’m not so sure. But if it was a man, it could be you, Will Shaxsper, Simon Hayward or Richard Cawdray. It could be Boscastle or the lad John from Clopton.’

  ‘Well,’ Scot sighed, ‘that narrows the field.’

  ‘But there’s a problem with all of them.’ Marlowe was half talking to himself. ‘As you said, you didn’t know Sledd. Neither did they. Why kill a total stranger? And in such a risky situation? There were men on watch, high alert thanks to Edward Greville. It was a chancy thing to do.’

  ‘Sledd’s men, then,’ Scot said. ‘You, Kit Marlowe –’ he was quietly enjoying turning the tables – ‘the only other man in the camp who knew about that bodkin and where I kept it. Then there are the others. You know them better than I do. Rivalries? Jealousies? Somebody’s name higher than another on a playbill? Personally, I wouldn’t turn my back on any actor living.’ There was a pause. ‘Or dead.’

  ‘They might squabble,’ Marlowe conceded. ‘They might behave as though they would stab each other in the back given the slightest provocation, but in fact Lord Strange’s Men are as tightly knit a group of people as you would wish to meet in a day’s march. The only one without a scruple was Edward Alleyn, from what they say, but I hardly met the man.’ Marlowe’s face clouded over just at the thought of Alleyn and his purloined play. ‘But we are overlooking one other possibility, of course.’

  ‘Ah.’ Scot smiled grimly. ‘I thought you’d get around to that.’

  Marlowe looked under the canvas to where Strange’s Men sat in a circle around the shrouded body of their leader and to the King Stone beyond. ‘The spot where Ned lay last night is nearest of all to Greville’s camp. Depending on the alertness of our people, any one of them could have crept up the hill and done the business.’

  Scot was shaking his head. ‘Not with my bodkin,’ he reasoned. ‘What would be the point? It would double the risk of his being caught, having to ransack my tent first – and there was no sign of disturbance there, by the way, I checked. No.’ Scot leaned back against some flats. ‘No, that wasn’t the possibility I had in mind.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Think back,’ Scot said. ‘To Clopton and Lord Strange. The thorn through the poppet. The blade through the throat of Ned Sledd.’

  Marlowe sat upright. ‘You mean, this is witchcraft?’

  Scot shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but it may be murder in the name of witchcraft.’

  Marlowe looked at the man for long seconds. Then he leaned forward and whispered to him, ‘Play along, if only for a good actor’s sake,’ and he suddenly lashed out with both feet, thudding into Scot’s chest
and sending him crashing off the wagon. He leapt out after him and knelt beside the startled and winded hop grower, his dagger point pricking his throat. ‘This is the man who killed Ned,’ he shouted to the camp. ‘Look –’ he held up the bodkin – ‘he has admitted that this is his.’

  The company had formed themselves around the fallen Scot now, their faces dark with hatred.

  ‘Kit . . .’ Scot knew all about the mob baying for the blood of the guilty, even if the guilty were innocent. But he had never actually been on the receiving end before. He felt boots crash into his ribs and hands claw at his shirt before Liza clouted him round the head with a griddle pan.

  ‘Hang him!’ somebody shouted and they all took up the line. Only Joyce Clopton hung back. Only old Joseph was still manning the barricades, watching Greville’s camp.

  ‘No!’ Marlowe’s sword was suddenly in his hand from nowhere and he banged Liza’s pan out of her hand so that it thudded to the ground some feet away. ‘No, we’ll have no more deaths here,’ he growled, facing all of them down. ‘We’ll tie Master Scot to the cart’s tail and take him to Oxford, to the Assizes there. The authorities will hang him come Michaelmas.’

  There were mutinous mutterings, but there was no fight left in Strange’s Men and Marlowe knew he had won the day. As they manhandled Scot to the furthest wagon and lashed his wrists together in front of him and then to the rear running board, Marlowe knew he had bought himself a few days.

  ‘So, sisters,’ the keeper of the Stones reported back to the women waiting in the trees, ‘they have gone at last.’

  There was an awkward shuffling of broken-down boots and finally Merriweather spoke for them all. ‘Did you . . . help the man at the King Stone, sister?’

  The fat woman’s eyes narrowed further in their puffy sockets. ‘Help?’ she hissed.

  ‘Help him . . . move on?’ Merriweather persisted. She had personally never killed anyone, but she knew people who had. Nice people, who just had their reasons.

  ‘No, I most certainly did not!’ the fat woman snapped. ‘He would be the last one I would want rid of. He was a credulous man but with no malice in him. There were plenty in that camp that deserved that fate before him.’

  The blind woman stepped forward. ‘I could smell bitterness and anger,’ she said. ‘There was one in that number who smelled like an ants’ nest when the spade strikes it. If any living man did this, it was that one.’

  ‘And which one was it, sister?’ the youngest one of the party asked.

  ‘You may not have noticed, sister,’ the blind one said, her voice dripping honey over the vinegar, ‘but I don’t happen to have any eyes.’ There was a silence. Then, she added, more kindly, ‘But I would know him if we met again. By his stench.’

  FOURTEEN

  It had been a difficult conversation but Joyce Clopton had eventually agreed to let them carry the body of Ned Sledd on her father’s bier, in her father’s coffin, on a bed of more gold and silver than the actor-manager could have hoped to earn in a lifetime.

  They travelled at walking pace, the back riders changing every now and then to keep watch on Greville’s men who followed them at a wary distance. Kit Marlowe was no general, but he knew how vulnerable their little column was on the open road without the wagons as a barricade and without Ned Sledd to lead them. Simon Hayward knew the ground well and suggested they keep to the main highway with its villages and its people. All day the sun was bright in the cloudless blue and summer had at last come to the Cotswolds. That Hayward and Cawdray were still of the party had come as a surprise to everyone, not least the men themselves. Hayward was intent on making sure that no one tried to pin the murder on him in his absence. Cawdray was still waiting to see his play and it would take more than a dead actor-manager to stop him.

  Marlowe trotted up and down the line, pulling his horse in alongside one wagon, dismounting to amble with those on foot, talking all the time and, although they didn’t know it, asking key questions. Martin was driving Sledd’s wagon, dragging the quickly exhausted Reginald Scot in his dust as they rattled through Chipping Norton with its mellow, yellow houses and on through the gentle dip of the Glyne Valley. The grey stones of the Hoar barrow stared down at them, as if wondering why they had been so mad as to leave the shelter of the Rollrights, their sister stones to the north-west.

  Smocked labourers in their fields saw them go and tugged off their caps to mark the passing of a funeral on the road. And the rooks, black against the sun, bickered and fought in the tall elms. Thomas sat hunched on the second wagon’s tail, surrounded by costumes and women who patted him. The tears were tumbling down his cheeks still as Marlowe rode alongside. For seconds together, the lad could put aside his loss and then it would sweep across him brand new and searing, all over again. He knew he would get used to it one day, but he knew it would be no day soon.

  ‘He was the best of us, Kit,’ the boy said, ‘The Player King. We shan’t see his like again.’

  Marlowe nodded.

  ‘And the worst of it is, it’s all my fault.’ He buried his head in his hands.

  Liza yanked him hard around the neck, her idea of a cuddle. ‘I keep telling him, Master Marlowe, but he don’t listen.’

  ‘How is it your fault, Thomas?’ the poet asked.

  ‘I was asleep,’ Thomas shouted as if God Himself did not know. ‘I was on guard duty and I fell asleep. Any of those bastards from Greville’s camp could have slipped past me in the dark.’

  ‘But Scot’s confessed, Thomas,’ Marlowe lied.

  The boy frowned up through his tears. ‘Has he?’ he asked.

  Marlowe shrugged. ‘As good as.’

  Thomas shook his head. ‘Makes no sense,’ he said, trying to rationalize it. ‘What had Scot got against Ned? You don’t kill a man for no reason.’

  ‘If that’s true,’ Marlowe said, ‘then Scot is a liar and the killer has to be one of us.’

  He watched Thomas’s face change, darken with the realization of it. ‘No,’ he said, sniffing. ‘That’s not possible. We all loved Ned.’ He looked around as if waiting for someone to challenge that statement. No one did. And he buried his face in his hands again, missing the man who had taken him in as a child, taught him to curtsy and how to wear a stomacher and farthingale. Greater love has no actor-manager.

  Marlowe reached out an arm and patted the boy. ‘Look after him, Liza,’ he said and hauled his rein back so that the wagons rolled past and he turned the animal to amble with the riders at the back of the column.

  ‘Damned hot, Marlowe,’ Hayward grunted, trying to ease his ruff. ‘Look, I’m sorry about earlier, at the camp, I mean. We’re all a bit on edge.’

  Marlowe nodded. ‘Think nothing of it, Master Hayward. I never thanked you properly for riding to our rescue like that. Happy coincidence, wasn’t it?’

  Hayward reined in and his horse halted. Marlowe did the same. ‘All right,’ Hayward said, ‘let’s have this out in the open once and for all. How long have you been with Strange’s Men?’

  ‘About two weeks,’ Marlowe told him.

  ‘And before that?’

  Marlowe turned his animal’s head and the pair rode on again. ‘Before that I was a scholar at Cambridge.’

  ‘So you don’t really know Strange?’

  ‘No. I never met the man until two weeks ago. The troupe was on its way to Stratford and I came upon them on the road. I had met Sledd before, in Cambridge last year.’

  ‘Sledd handled the finances, did he?’ Hayward asked.

  ‘I really don’t know.’ Marlowe frowned. ‘From what I saw, that might have been Lord Strange himself.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hayward growled. ‘What do you make of that, Marlowe?’

  ‘Of what, Master Hayward?’

  ‘Come, come, sir.’ Hayward eased his stiff neck from its position, watching the riders in the distance. ‘You’re a university man and I assume you weren’t born yesterday. First the troupe’s sponsor is taken peculiar and then the troupe’s leade
r is murdered. If I didn’t know better, I’d say somebody had it in for Lord Strange’s Men, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Greville’s not with them.’ Will Shaxsper was certain. He was at the rear of the column that afternoon as they trotted past Glympton with its little church and cluster of thatched roofs.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Marlowe said with a nod. ‘I wonder how Captain Paget is feeling now he can’t pick his nose so easily.’

  ‘Was it one of them, do you think, Kit?’ Shaxsper asked. ‘One of Greville’s people who killed Sledd?’

  ‘If you look carefully ahead, Will,’ Marlowe said, humouring the man, ‘you’ll see a certain Reginald Scot tied at the cart’s tail. His bodkin was found in Sledd’s throat, after all.’

  ‘You don’t believe that, do you, Kit?’ Shaxsper asked. ‘I mean, it’s so obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘Do you play cards, Will?’ Marlowe asked. ‘Cent? Lansquenet?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Shaxsper said.

  ‘The double bluff.’ Marlowe tapped the side of his nose. ‘Scot leaves his obvious weapon for us to find, so that we’ll think just what you think. “Too obvious.” It must be somebody else.’

  ‘Murder will out,’ Shaxsper said grimly. ‘Beware the smiler with the knife.’

  ‘That’s rather good.’ Marlowe smiled. ‘Chaucer, isn’t it?’ Marlowe had passed too many clandestine quotes off as his own to be fooled by one as obvious as that one.

  ‘Umm . . . is it?’ Shaxsper asked, all hurt innocence, inwardly furious that Marlowe had his measure.

  ‘It is.’ Marlowe tapped the man’s elbow. ‘If you’re going to be a success in London, Will,’ he warned him, ‘don’t be a borrower – or a lender if it comes to that. Write your own stuff, there’s a good boy.’

  ‘Joseph.’ Marlowe had to raise his voice over the rumble and rattle of the wagon. ‘How goes it?’

  The tragedian of Lord Strange’s Men was in his element, three sheets to the wind on some of the choice Malmsey that Boscastle had smuggled out of Clopton Hall. The fruit of the vine had always made old Joseph lachrymose, but this evening, as the sun’s shadows lengthened ahead of them on the road as they wound through the cornfields to Woodstock, he was positively awash in tears.