Black Death Read online

  The projectioner was on his feet out of respect and he bowed. ‘Anyone who doesn’t love tobacco is a fool, my Lord … or so I’ve heard it said.’

  ‘Have you?’ Burghley sneered. ‘I should look to your company, Marlowe.’

  ‘Marlowe has some news, Father,’ Cecil said, sitting down behind his desk. ‘About Noo-Noo.’

  ‘Ah,’ Burghley poured a goblet of Rhenish and, against all probabilities, gave one to Marlowe. He didn’t do the honours in respect of his son; presumably wine, like tobacco, was bad for him. ‘I have just come from the good woman’s funeral. Quite beautiful. Parry excelled himself.’

  More than you know, thought Marlowe.

  ‘Say on.’ Burghley sat on the corner of Cecil’s desk and all but eclipsed the little man behind it.

  ‘Marlowe thinks …’ Cecil began, but Burghley held up his hand for silence.

  ‘I know he does,’ the old man said. ‘That, I assume, is why you employ him.’ He looked at the projectioner. ‘Marlowe?’

  ‘I believe that Eunice was killed by someone visiting your estate, my Lord,’ he said. ‘I understand they are legion.’

  The Queen’s Councillor nodded. ‘They are indeed. I like clever men around me, Marlowe, I see nothing wrong with that. Philosophy, ethics, geography, things of that nature.’

  ‘Politics?’ Marlowe threw in. ‘Religion?’

  ‘Ah, well, we have to tread warily there of course, in these dangerous times.’

  Marlowe couldn’t help wondering whether the times would be a little less dangerous without these two. ‘It’s the manner of Eunice’s death that I can’t fathom.’

  Burghley looked at the playwright with hauteur not unmixed with contempt. ‘Fathoming is what my son pays you to do,’ he said. ‘What, in particular, vexes you?’

  ‘There was a great deal of force used on Mistress Brown,’ Marlowe said. ‘Much more than was necessary in the case of a frail old lady.’

  ‘Lots of bruising,’ Cecil recalled.

  ‘Applied not once, but over a period of time – longer, I suspect, than it would take to actually kill her.’

  ‘Someone who enjoys pain for its own sake?’ Burghley was wondering aloud, ‘a Topcliffe, you might say.’

  The keeper of the Queen’s instruments of torture was renowned throughout Europe. He would have made short work of Eunice Brown.

  ‘Yet someone struck by remorse,’ Marlowe reasoned.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Burghley frowned.

  ‘Eunice’s chamber is not cut off from the rest of the house,’ Marlowe said. ‘Other servants’ quarters are nearby. Our murderer had to act quietly and, for his own safety, quickly. And yet, this murder was done slowly, piecemeal almost, as if the man lost his nerve in the process and had to begin again. And I’ve seen this somewhere before.’

  ‘You have?’ Cecil sat up. ‘Where?’

  ‘Cambridge, not three weeks ago. That was a drowning accident, or so it seemed. The dead man’s brother was also attacked and tells a tale of a tentative killer, who kept letting him go. There are parts of the story which seem to match that of the Hatfield killing, others of which we can never be sure.’

  ‘Never is a big word, Master Marlowe,’ Burghley said.

  ‘The murderer in Cambridge spoke. We can’t know whether the Hatfield one did the same. But even so, there are resonances. Did Eunice have any connections with Cambridge?’

  The Cecils looked at each other, shaking their heads.

  ‘Or Poppleton? The Cambridge scholar came from there.’

  ‘Where in God’s green earth is Popp … what did you call it?’

  ‘Poppleton. It’s near York.’

  ‘No, Marlowe,’ Burghley said. ‘Noo-Noo was born in Hertfordshire and came to work for us as a girl. Her mother was my wet nurse so, as you can tell, we have known her family as far back as is possible. They all lie in the churchyard at Etheldreda’s. You spoke to Dr Parry, I assume?’

  Marlowe smiled at the memory of it. ‘I did,’ he said. ‘A good man, I think.’

  ‘The best,’ Burghley assured him. ‘Could he help?’

  ‘Not at all. I suppose, my Lord, a list of visitors to Hatfield in the last week would be out of the question.’

  ‘Utterly.’ Burghley spread his arms. ‘Oh, I know I should take more care with people coming to the house. Robert is always twittering about it, aren’t you, Robert?’

  The Queen’s Imp nodded. Both men knew that Robert could twitter until Hell froze over and it would do no good.

  ‘You’d have to question every member of the Privy Council,’ Burghley went on. ‘Not a few ambassadors from every country from France to Muscovy. And every one of them has more hangers-on than I’ve books in my library. I suspect you’d grow old before you got through all of them, Marlowe, not to mention the stink you’d cause on the international relations front. We’ve got enough enemies in Europe as it is, without adding more.’

  ‘Then, for the moment, gentlemen,’ Marlowe said, getting up, ‘I can do no more. Oh, one favour, my Lord, if I may?’

  Burghley looked at the man. He had to admit, he felt a little let down. Francis Walsingham had always spoken highly of Marlowe; his own son did too, albeit through gritted teeth. But Marlowe seemed to have made no progress at all and linking the death of his dear Noo-Noo with some threadbare university scholar was a pointless exercise. ‘Name it.’ For all that, Burghley was, deep down, a kind man.

  ‘The theatres, my Lord. Rumour has it that the Pestilence is subsiding. Many of my associates rely on their stage income to live. Couldn’t the ban be lifted? The theatres be reopened?’

  ‘Dr Forman says “No”,’ Burghley said. ‘And he is the foremost authority on the damned disease that we have. Sorry, Marlowe, but there it is.’

  ‘But, Dr Dee—’

  Burghley gave a bark of laughter. ‘All very well in his day, but he is nowhere near Simon Forman.’

  Marlowe would agree with that. He could tell that he had driven that particular pig as far along the passage as it would go and knew when to stop. ‘Very well, my Lord.’ He bowed to them both and smiled when he caught sight of Cecil’s pipe stem sticking out of his Venetians. ‘I will wish you both good day.’

  In the doorway he turned. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘whatever happened to Nicholas Faunt?’

  ‘Faunt?’ Burghley repeated. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘As you know, my Lord, I worked with the man several times back in the day. I thought I saw him recently, though it may have been a trick of the light.’

  ‘Nicholas Faunt was Sir Francis Walsingham’s creature,’ Cecil said, tartly. ‘Yesterday’s man. He will never darken these doors again.’

  Marlowe smiled, bowed again and left. He had just reached the staircase when he heard the clatter of pattens behind him. Lord Burghley, his cup discarded, was scurrying to catch him.

  ‘My Lord?’ Marlowe turned to face him.

  Burghley was shifty, glancing back over his shoulder. ‘Look, Marlowe, I don’t want this noised abroad, if you get my drift?’ He was nodding in the direction of his son’s chamber. ‘But Faunt is still in my employ. Robert doesn’t like him, so I’m keeping it quiet. But men like Faunt don’t grow on trees. He has his uses.’

  ‘I’m sure he does, my Lord,’ Marlowe said.

  ‘Where did you see him? Not Hatfield, surely?’

  ‘In Bedlam,’ Marlowe said, ‘the asylum for the insane.’

  For a moment, Burghley turned pale, blinking in the half-light of the stair. ‘Yes,’ he said, slowly. ‘That would make sense.’

  And Kit Marlowe was glad of that because, at that moment, nothing else did.

  He took to the streets that skirted Whitehall and made for Charing Cross. The ancient monument looked greyer than ever now that the weak October sun had gone and the clouds had taken its place. There was the usual crowd of rough sleepers clustered at its base, the flotsam of a country ruled by the Cecils. One of them, in dark grey, but less ragged than the
others, was staring intently at Marlowe. He got up and strolled towards him, tentatively at first, then increasing his stride.

  ‘Master Marlowe!’ he greeted him.

  Marlowe stood still. There, in the less than flattering gown of a King’s scholar, stood Richard Williams, whose brother had died in the Cam not four weeks earlier. ‘Master Williams.’ Marlowe shook the lad’s hand. ‘What brings you to the Cross?’

  ‘I have not been well, Master Marlowe.’ The boy looked thin and pale. ‘After Roger … I could not settle to my studies. The Master has given me sabbatical leave; he was very understanding. So I have come to London to stay with my aunt in Clerkenwell.’

  ‘You took the North Road?’ Marlowe asked. ‘On foot?’

  ‘I did, but I accepted a lift from a tinker’s cart and ended up in Hatfield.’

  ‘Hatfield?’ Marlowe’s eyes narrowed. ‘That was out of your way.’

  ‘It was.’ Williams felt a little foolish. ‘I fell asleep in the cart and, before I knew it, I was lying in a ditch by the parish church.’

  ‘St Etheldreda’s.’ Marlowe nodded.

  ‘Do you know it?’ Williams asked.

  ‘Intimately,’ Marlowe said. ‘Tell me, Richard. When was this? When were you in Hatfield?’

  ‘Er … last week, I think. To tell you true, since Roger … I have lost all sense of time.’

  Marlowe looked at the boy. Grief and repeated immersion in water had taken its toll. But was there more to it? The boy, himself a murder victim but for the Grace of God, had been in Hatfield, when God or the Devil took Eunice Brown. ‘Come with me,’ Marlowe said. ‘You look as if you could do with a square meal. And then, we’ll get you off to Clerkenwell. Your aunt; she’s a kind woman, I hope.’

  ‘The kindest,’ Williams answered. He squared his shoulders in his ugly gown and took the first step of the rest of his life.

  Marlowe was not sorry to have a reason to visit Simon Forman, in his lair. Ever since meeting him accidentally, he had wanted to find out more. It was hard to read his face behind the mask and, surely, there was more to the man than simply conjuring, glamour and some small amphibians? His house was not hard to find. A small gaggle of importunate sufferers from various diseases, some all too apparent, others more covert, stood outside the door. A young man in a dark blue robe stood on the threshold, with a satchel at his hip. As each person moved to the head of the line, the lad put a hand on their head and presented them with a sachet from the bag; from a distance, it reminded Marlowe of nothing so much as the Mass; the benediction and the body of their Lord. He hung back until the last of the sachets had been distributed.

  The lad raised his voice so all in the line could hear. ‘The magus must be allowed time now to prepare some more tinctures,’ he said. ‘Please disperse so as to give him the peace he needs; when he knows that his beloved countrymen are suffering at his door, it interferes with his link to the all-healing powers that only he can harness.’ The small crowd shifted for a moment, but there was clearly not going to be any more healing that day, so they wandered away, in ones and twos, limping, coughing, in one case carried on a makeshift stretcher.

  When they had all gone, Marlowe approached the door and stopped the apprentice as he turned to close it.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ The voice was kindly, with a hint of country burr in it. ‘The magus must be allowed—’

  ‘Yes. I heard.’

  ‘So …’ the boy pushed the door to, but Marlowe’s foot was in it and it wouldn’t close.

  ‘I must see Master Forman.’

  ‘The magus—’

  ‘Can you say nothing else?’ Marlowe could see intelligence in the eyes, but there seemed to be no one at home. ‘I am not sick, as you can possibly tell. In fact, friends who know these things, Dr John Dee for example, tell me I am in the rudest of health and will live to be ninety. I want to see Master Forman on another matter altogether.’

  The apprentice looked doubtful. He felt a bit of a fool repeating his message again, but didn’t know what else to say.

  Marlowe put him out of his misery. ‘Look … what is your name?’

  ‘Gerard, sir.’

  ‘Gerard what? Or is it what Gerard?’

  The boy raised his eyes and again appeared to recite. ‘Until we find our calling, forenames only are all we require. Our name for using about our business will come to us when the time is right.’

  Marlowe nodded thoughtfully. ‘Hence “Forman”, I assume.’

  ‘The magus received his name in a vision, yes. And he is indeed foremost among men.’

  There was something in Gerard’s manner that made Marlowe look again. What he had taken for possible hypnotic trance, or some herbal tincture controlling him, he saw now was doubt. Something about the magus was troubling the boy and he had time enough to discover what. The garish robe was a little too big and was fraying around the sleeve. The haircut was designed to look monkish but the lad, as lads everywhere will, had brushed it forward over his ears and dampened it down with water; it couldn’t control its tendency to curl and it looked rather innocent and pleasing. Marlowe knew how to handle his curls and used them to great effect to extract information from duchess and doxy alike, but he remembered how he had felt about them when he was not yet twenty.

  ‘Well,’ he said, confidentially, ‘my name is Marlowe, but I have been called many things from Marley to Machiavel. I wonder what I should have called myself had I not kept my father’s name.’

  Gerard stepped back. ‘Christopher Marlowe?’ he said. ‘Christopher Marlowe? The poet.’

  Marlowe shrugged. ‘Amongst other things.’

  ‘I wondered if it could be you,’ Gerard said. ‘But so many people copy your hair, your clothes …’

  Marlowe found that fact slightly disturbing. He had never noticed although, now he came to think of it, Shaxsper had been doing strange things with his thinning locks of late.

  ‘Your plays …’ Gerard found he was stage-struck. ‘So wise. The poetry …’

  ‘Yes. Thank you. Er … Gerard, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Gerard, I would like to meet your master, but first, can we walk a little? Do you have to be back inside? Report on the size of the crowd, that kind of thing.’ It was the kind of thing that Henslowe did all the time, people running hither and thither, telling him how many groundlings, how many gallants, and so how much his coffers would benefit. And, in their own ways, Forman and Henslowe were but two cheeks of one arse.

  Gerard took an anxious look behind him into the dark interior of the house. ‘I can spare a little time,’ he said. A walk with Kit Marlowe – who wouldn’t spare a little time for that?

  ‘There is an alehouse just down the lane – you are allowed ale, I assume?’

  The apprentice bridled. ‘I am allowed anything. We all are. We are not slaves, you know, Master Marlowe, we are apprentices. Full apprentices.’

  Marlowe nodded his apology. ‘Then come this way,’ he said. ‘The ale is fresh and the serving wenches clean. Who could ask for more?’

  The shakes came upon him a little before noon. The sky over Bedlam was an opaque grey, spitting with rain. For weeks now, Tom Sledd had struggled to live in this place. The grey gruel kept him alive and fleas and lice were his constant companions. He could hear the bell of All Hallows on the Wall tolling, for a midday funeral was his guess. There were never any christenings or weddings, nothing for a fast, happy peal of bells, just the solemn tocsin.

  Tom Sledd wasn’t really of a miserable disposition, but his weeks in this circle of Hell had all but broken him. All he could remember of the outside world was Robert Greene in his coffin, the worms lining up to eat him, the odd crow circling overhead. And Greene’s coffin became, in his mind, Sledd’s coffin. He was in it, yet walking behind it, all at the same time. Six men were carrying their solemn load – Kit Marlowe, Will Shaxsper, Philip Henslowe, Richard Burbage, Ned Alleyn and Will Kemp. But they weren’t solemn. Kemp was whirling his damned pig’s b
ladder over his head. Alleyn and Burbage were trying to outshout each other with the mighty pentameter of Kit Marlowe. The playwrights were reading out competing prologues of plays, their voices rising in crescendo. Henslowe was counting his money, flinging gold coins into the coffin to lie with Sledd. The wreck who was once stage manager at the Rose huddled his knees under his chin and sobbed.

  It was a while before he felt the fingers fiddling at his belt, the one he had been toying with using to hang himself with if this madness went on for much longer. A large man was leaning against him, trying to get at the purse which still dangled, empty, from his belt. Sledd frowned, wiping the tears from his eyes and trying to focus. He recognized the man as one who seemed to spend most of his time humping the younger women against the far wall. He had been listening to his grunts and their cries for weeks now.

  ‘Get away!’ Sledd shoved him but he was too heavy to move.

  ‘Got any cake?’ the man asked, though clearly his real target was altogether rounder and made of silver.

  ‘Cake?’ Sledd repeated. ‘No, I haven’t. Just the slops we all get, same as you. Keep your hands off me.’

  ‘As you wish,’ the man grumbled. He half turned, then turned back. ‘Pax vobiscum, my son,’ he said, and burst out laughing before rolling away.

  ‘Got him,’ a dark voice said in his other ear. Sledd spun round to see the poet looking at him, a smile on his face. ‘I knew it could only be a matter of time. And I knew it would be you who solved the riddle for me.’

  ‘Bugger off,’ Sledd said. He was exhausted. He knew the poet would not try to rob him and he hadn’t the strength to shout at this man.

  ‘When I want provant,’ the poet declaimed softly, still smiling, ‘with Humphrey I sup, and when benighted, I repose in Paul’s with waking souls, yet never am affrighted.’

  ‘All right,’ Sledd sighed, ‘you’re a bloody beggar, cadging meals at Duke Humphrey’s tomb and doing Paul’s walk. I know.’

  ‘You don’t know your arse from your elbow, Tom Sledd.’

  Sledd blinked. ‘What?’ he said. The poet’s voice had changed, his eyes no longer rolled from time to time in his head. His gaze was level. And strangely familiar.