Witch Hammer Read online

  ‘I can’t get poor young Ned out of my mind,’ he bellowed in what to him was a stage whisper.

  ‘A great loss,’ Marlowe agreed.

  ‘Yes,’ Joseph sighed. ‘Especially as I am responsible.’

  Marlowe urged his horse closer so that his left leg was jammed against the cart’s side. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. Or at least as clean as you can be on the road all the time,’ Joseph said, agreeing with something only he had heard and Marlowe had to pause a moment to work out what it could be. ‘But we were talking of my terrible responsibility,’ the old man boomed.

  Marlowe could tell the best he could do in this conversation was to hop and skip along and hope to be dancing the same dance once in a while. ‘How are you responsible?’ he asked, enunciating each word like bells.

  Joseph looked backward, then forward and at one time down at the ground as he momentarily lost his balance. He hugged the Malmsey bottle to his chest for comfort. ‘I saw him last night,’ he said.

  ‘Ned?’

  ‘No, no.’ Joseph shook his head and closed his eyes. ‘His murderer.’

  ‘You did? When was this?’

  ‘Last night,’ Joseph said, wondering what sort of idiot they had writing plays these days.

  ‘Who was it?’ Marlowe could hear nothing now but his own voice rising about the thud of his own heart. People down the column were turning to look.

  ‘Well, that’s just it.’ Joseph’s face was a picture of helplessness. ‘I don’t know. It was late. I was . . . tired.’ He glanced down at the bottle. ‘It may be that I had had a spot to drink, to keep out the cold, you know, the damp ground . . . I couldn’t focus. He fell over me to start with, in the dark, between the wagons and when I asked who goes, he said, “Where’s Ned?” I told him, I said, “Over there, by the King Stone.”’

  ‘And that’s where he went?’ Marlowe asked. ‘This murderer of yours? Towards the King Stone?’

  ‘No.’ Joseph tried desperately to remember. ‘No, he went the other way, towards . . . the other way.’

  ‘What did he say, Joseph?’ Marlowe asked him, leaning in as far as horse, jolting wagon and Joseph’s breath would allow. ‘Exactly, now. Word for word.’ His heart fell as he suddenly realized that ‘word for word’ and Joseph had parted company long ago. Even so, for a moment at least, hope sprang eternal.

  Joseph had not always seen eye to eye with Ned Sledd but he had been as fond of him as the rest of Lord Strange’s Men, perhaps more so, as he could see himself in him, before the drink and age had done their dread work. So he really tried as hard as he could to remember the night before, which, as far as his memory was concerned, might just as well have been a decade ago. Joseph was waiting for the moment when distant memory was clear as day; he couldn’t remember anything at all before breakfast and that only applied until about midday. Then it was anything before dinner.

  ‘He said . . .’ His face was screwed up with the effort of remembering. ‘He said “Where’s Ned?” He might have said something else, but I didn’t catch it. People mumble these days, don’t you find? Well, anyway, I said . . .’ His eyes widened and his face reddened as it all came back to him. ‘I said, “Where would you expect a man like Ned to be? By the King Stone, of course.” Oh, God –’ and his voice rumbled deep with sorrow – ‘I sent him to his grave. I may as well have thrust that bodkin into his throat myself. And the throat, of all places! That golden voice, those syllables that soared aloft like . . . like . . .’ He glanced around for inspiration. ‘Pigeons!’ It didn’t sound right, but a swig of the bottle soon sorted that out.

  ‘No, no, Joseph.’ Marlowe patted the man’s sinewy arm. ‘It was probably just a dream. You were tired. You may have had a drink and we had all had an exciting day. The mind plays tricks. Don’t worry. We’ll find out who killed Ned. I promise.’

  And he hauled on the rein again, leaving the old man to wrestle with his demons.

  At first she had protested. Then, when he countered each of her arguments one by one, she just stood defiant and alone, looking first at Marlowe, then at Boscastle. She knew they were right. And it would only be for a short time. And Boscastle would be with her.

  ‘Would the queen want a disinherited Papist under her roof, Kit?’ she had asked him.

  ‘The Queen knows all about what it feels like to be disinherited, My Lady and she has not been under the roof of Woodstock Manor for more years than we have been alive, you and I. They say her steward there is a kindly man. He has, I am told, daughters of his own and his wife will not turn away an orphan of the storm.’

  She looked at Boscastle again and knew a male conspiracy when she saw one. He read her mind. ‘Our people will be safe enough on the road, My Lady,’ he said. ‘But you and . . . the coffin . . . will be safe in the manor house. And I shall be at your side.’

  He saw her father in her briefly, before age and sadness had taken him, a bear of a man who knew his own mind and would not be crossed. Her eyes smouldered just like his.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But only until such time as the authorities in Oxford can disperse the rabble at our heels.’

  ‘We’ll have to be quick and we’ll have to be careful,’ Marlowe said. ‘Boscastle, can you have the bier limbered by midnight at the back of the Woolsack? There’s a quiet lane that will lead you out of sight of Greville’s men. It will have to be just the two of you; more will attract notice. Can you do it?’

  Boscastle nodded. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said.

  ‘What about Master Sledd’s body?’ she asked. ‘Surely, his people . . .’

  ‘. . . would want it given a decent burial,’ Marlowe said. ‘They have nowhere to call home, no churchyard where their dead are laid. Ask the steward at Woodstock to lend some earth to a good man and make sure he is laid in it with respect. He will live forever where anyone forgets a line.’

  ‘We’ll do that,’ Joyce said. ‘And we’ll make sure he has a marker, for if his people ever pass that way.’

  ‘He’d like that,’ Marlowe said. ‘Make sure you spell it right – he was very proud of that double dee.’

  ‘Kit . . . this isn’t your way of getting rid of us, is it? You’re not abandoning us?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Once we’re in Oxford, I’ll send word to the magistrates. We’ll be back in three days at most.’

  She looked into those dark dancing eyes. ‘Three days,’ she said. ‘Or I’ll go toe to toe with Edward Greville myself.’

  The candles fluttered against their reflections in the window panes like so many moths, sending magical lights radiating around Richard Cawdray’s room. He and Simon Hayward had taken rooms at the Woolsack, anxious to have soft beds after a hard day on the road.

  ‘What do you make of it, Master Cawdray?’ Marlowe sipped his wine. ‘Scot and Ned Sledd?’

  ‘Bizarre.’ Cawdray shook his head. ‘Quite bizarre.’

  ‘He said it could be witchcraft,’ Marlowe told him.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Scot. Obviously trying to muddy the waters. He’s guilty as a pikestaff.’

  ‘What will you do with him?’

  ‘Well, tomorrow, I’ll pass him over to the town constable, if they have one. If not, we’ll take him on to Oxford. Tell me, how long have you known Simon Hayward?’

  ‘Er . . . we met on the road on our respective ways to Stratford. I do so love the theatre, you see. That’s why I particularly wanted to see Lord Strange’s Men in action. The great Ned Alleyn in particular.’

  ‘Except that the great Ned Alleyn isn’t here, of course,’ Marlowe remarked.

  ‘He’s not? I thought . . .’

  ‘If you had found us earlier, say two weeks ago, you’d have met him then. He left, though.’

  ‘Left?’ Cawdray raised an eyebrow. ‘Dramatic differences?’

  ‘Theft,’ Marlowe said, crisply. ‘He stole my play.’

  ‘The devil,’ said Cawdray. ‘No honour among thespians, eh? I
expect you’d like to run into Master Alleyn again?’

  ‘It would be an . . . experience,’ Marlowe admitted. ‘They tell me Martin is just as good, so I’m sure Alleyn’s lack won’t spoil your enjoyment when you finally get to see us in action. Shaxsper is coming along too, now he has stopped being such a hot-headed idiot. But, tell me, Master Cawdray, do you think that Reginald Scot is guilty?’

  Cawdray shrugged. ‘I would have thought the bodkin speaks for itself,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ Marlowe smiled. ‘Yes, probably. So, you’ll stay with us to Oxford?’

  ‘I wouldn’t miss it. What are you going to perform? I suppose with Master Sledd gone it will be difficult.’

  ‘We’ll send young Thomas on ahead tomorrow to look out the ground for us. We probably won’t perform in a college; they’d expect erudition, scholarship, rhetoric.’

  ‘Whereas . . .?’

  ‘Whereas Nat Sawyer does a particularly good sketch with a balloon and a stuffed parrot, I understand.’

  ‘Ah, comedy.’ Cawdray smiled, sipping his wine. ‘My wife’s favourite.’

  ‘Given what has happened,’ Marlowe said, ‘it’s perhaps a blessing she’s not with you.’

  He saw the man’s face darken. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not so much a blessing as a curse.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Marlowe said, suspecting that he had committed a rather major faux pas. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘My wife was taken from me, Master Marlowe,’ Cawdray said quietly, looking thoughtfully into his goblet of wine, ‘by her own hand, I fear.’

  Marlowe looked at the man. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. There was nothing else he could say in these circumstances.

  Cawdray crossed to the flame-lit window and looked down at the huddled figure of Reginald Scot curled up in the hay of the yard below and still tied to his cart. ‘She was to have had a child,’ he said, looking now at his reflection in the glass. ‘Something . . . and I don’t know what . . . turned her mind.’ He turned to Marlowe. ‘So she killed herself and her baby.’

  ‘You blame her for that?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘No.’ Cawdray shook his head. ‘I blame God, the Devil, myself . . . anyone but her. People were very kind. She drowned herself in the lake in the grounds of our house. They said she had slipped in, swooned . . . but they didn’t see the letter she left. No one did, save me.’ He laid a hand over his heart. ‘I carry it here, always.’

  Marlowe could think of nothing to say to comfort this man, whose grief was so raw it seemed to fill the room.

  ‘She had said we must fill in the lake before the baby came. So that the grounds would be safe.’ He smiled. ‘I still filled it in, you know, and sometimes, when I first wake in the morning, I am glad I did. To make it safe for the children.’ He looked up at Marlowe. ‘Most people smile at this point, Master Marlowe. They think this story has a happy ending, that I married again and filled my house with children, sons and daughters. But you say nothing.’

  ‘I am a poet,’ Marlowe said. ‘A playwright. A scholar. I know that life has more sad endings than happy ones. The tragedies get bigger audiences than the comedies. I am so very sorry for your loss.’

  ‘I wish I could find someone who I could blame, you know,’ Cawdray said, almost to himself. ‘Revenge is sweet, or so they say.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Marlowe said. ‘Perhaps I should have said: the revenge tragedies get the biggest audiences of all. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must check the prisoner before I go to bed. Goodnight, Master Cawdray.’

  ‘And to you, Master Marlowe.’

  ‘Hasn’t this gone far enough?’ Reginald Scot wanted to know. He ached in every limb and his wrists were rubbed raw by the ropes that had tied him to Martin’s wagon. His left sole had parted company with its uppers and the straw he was now sitting on was sharp and scratchy.

  ‘You are a murderer, Master Scot,’ Marlowe said loudly, keeping up the pretence as he sat down next to him. Then he added, in a whisper, ‘Sorry, Reginald, but it’s paying dividends already, our little subterfuge.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Well, no.’ Marlowe had to confess. ‘But it will. Joseph knows who killed Ned.’

  ‘He does? He doesn’t strike me as a man who knows his arse from a hole in the ground.’ Reginald Scot was not an unkind man or one who usually resorted to obscene language but he had been sorely tried and he was not in the mood to be pleasant when there was a chance to be otherwise.

  ‘A fair assessment, Reginald, I’ll give you that. I put it down to a lifetime of drink and speaking other people’s words. But it is locked in there, in whatever passes for his poor, befuddled old brain. God save us from turning into old actors, eh?’

  ‘God, Kit?’ Scot raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s an odd notion, coming from you.’

  ‘Is it?’

  Scot rested his aching back against the wagon’s wheel. It was hard but it gave him support. ‘I’ve been with you a few days now,’ he said, ‘all told. When men are afraid – as we all were at the stones – their old instincts show. Half these people are of the old religion – Shaxsper, Joyce Clopton, Boscastle and his people. They all, to a man and woman, crossed themselves in fear. But you,’ he said, ‘a scholar of Corpus Christi and a man destined for the church, as I understand it, you did not. You’ve left your God behind somewhere, haven’t you?’

  Marlowe smiled. ‘Along with your friends the witches.’

  ‘Ah, no,’ Scot said, stony-faced. ‘They are no friends of mine. Tell me, Kit, what’s the date?’

  ‘The date? I don’t know. The twenty-ninth, I think. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Lammas,’ Scot said. ‘Lammastide.’

  ‘August the first,’ Marlowe said.

  ‘Shaxsper and company are of the old religion,’ Scot said, ‘but . . . my friends the witches, as you put it . . . are of an older faith still. They worship the horned god.’

  ‘The Devil,’ Marlowe said.

  ‘The Devil, Satan, the Great Beast, Prince of Darkness. He has many names. And below him there are sixty-six infernal princes, each of whom command six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six legions of Hell. Each legion has six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six demons. Add that lot together and you have half the population of the world. Saint Athenius once wrote “The air is filled with demons”. They are all around us, Kit.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe any of this claptrap.’

  ‘Hocus pocus,’ Scot said, ‘the rubbish the witches chant. But what is that but hoc est corpus, this is the body of Christ, which all Christians chant every Sunday at communion? Just because we don’t believe it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.’

  Marlowe was impressed by this man who, bloody and sore, could still ride his hobby horse. ‘So, what are you saying?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m saying that, come what may, I must be back at the Rollrights by Lammastide. To the witches, it is Lugnasadh, one of their great ceremonies. They dance widdershins, sky clad under the moon and prostrate themselves before their horned god.’

  ‘And you want to see it?’ Marlowe nodded. The scholar in him appreciated how important it was to get things right. Sometimes, only personal research would do and this was not a thing to find in a library. Even though he had known some very strange librarians in his time.

  ‘If you remember,’ Scot said, ‘I went to Meon Hill for a new chapter to add to my book. That’s why I was there. Although I admit the arrival of your troupe rather –’ he shook his bound wrists – ‘altered the direction of my life.’

  ‘Why were you at Clopton?’ Marlowe asked him. ‘What has Clopton to do with your horned god?’

  Scot looked at the man sitting cross-legged opposite him. ‘I thought I might find him there,’ he said.

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘No. But I found his handiwork. Lord Strange.’

  Marlowe nodded. ‘The poppet.’

  ‘The poison poured into the man’s goblet by someone working in the Clopton kitchens. The Maiden
.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Maiden is the creature of the horned god. She is at once his skivvy and lover. At the Sabbat at Lugnasadh she will be the first to feel him inside her and to receive his seed which, so they say, is as cold as ice.’

  ‘Do you know who she is?’

  Scot shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but we’ll find out if we go back to the Rollrights. That is their holy place and the coven will have been gathering for weeks now, preparing for their diabolical ceremony, for the sacrifice. They will have ridden there on toads and black horses and broomsticks.’

  ‘An arresting sight on the road, I would imagine.’

  ‘Indeed it would be. They also imagine that they stand ten feet tall and can fly over hedges and ditches, steeples if the fancy takes them. It’s the hemlock talking, of course. They rub it into the skin and it causes hallucinations. It’s very real to them.’

  ‘Sometimes your hops can have the same result,’ Marlowe said with a smile. ‘I’ve seen scholars in Cambridge who thought they could jump the river from a standing start.’

  ‘Any successes?’

  ‘Not as yet.’

  ‘And so it is with witches. Even when witnesses swear to them that they have not moved, they have an answer for it, that their god has closed their eyes, that kind of thing.’ He sighed. ‘It makes them very difficult to research properly. That’s why I want to see their Sabbat. And it’s up to you, Kit, whether I can be there or not. Given that I’m here on a charge of murder concocted by you.’

  ‘There are ways around that,’ Marlowe said.

  ‘Oh? What?’ And Scot flinched as Marlowe’s dagger scythed through the air and its razor edge sliced through the hemp around his wrists.

  Scot knelt up, willing his numb feet to obey his brain and chafing his painful wrists with fingers that scarcely worked. ‘Thanks for that. What now? Do I just vanish?’

  ‘This Sabbat of yours,’ Marlowe said. ‘How many will be there?’

  ‘Thirteen, of course,’ Scot told him. ‘It is a black parody of Our Lord and his disciples. Twelve and one.’