Eleventh Hour Read online

  Marlowe chuckled, in spite of the solemnity of the hour. ‘And we both know that the Lord put nothing in the cup, Nicholas. A man did. You want me to tell you who.’

  Faunt nodded. ‘And then, I want you to bring him before Her Majesty’s Justices,’ he said, ‘Master Topcliffe will do the rest. It’s astonishing what truths a man will divulge when he’s about to have his fingernails ripped out.’

  ‘And what lies,’ Marlowe reminded the man.

  Faunt ignored him. ‘I must be at Placentia,’ he said, tugging his doublet straight. ‘If Her Majesty finds out about Walsingham’s death before I get there, there’ll be Hell to pay.’

  ‘Hell, Nicholas?’ Marlowe turned the chased cup in his hand. ‘Do you know, in all the time we’ve known each other, I didn’t have you down for a superstitious man.’

  Faunt tapped the side of his nose. ‘For all his cynicism,’ he said, ‘Francis Walsingham was a godly man. A Puritan through and through. I’m going to miss him.’

  ‘So am I,’ Marlowe suddenly realized. He caught the look on Faunt’s face. ‘But don’t worry, I’m not going to miss his murderer.’

  ‘You can resolve that?’ Faunt asked. ‘The poison, I mean?’

  ‘No.’ Marlowe shook this head. ‘But I know a man who can.’

  Thomas Sledd was yelling at someone slung by ropes high in the ceiling of the Rose. Thomas Sledd was always yelling these days, or so it sometimes seemed. Only when he was at home with Meg and the new baby could he drop his voice and coo like any suckling dove. But cooing here wouldn’t get a show put on and, as Philip Henslowe told him every day, often several times and with additional jabs to the chest: the show must go on.

  ‘How many times do I have to remind you, you jobless idiot?’ Sledd asked rhetorically. ‘You don’t work up there without tying your tools to your belt.’ This time it had only been a leather mallet that had dropped unexpectedly at his feet, but even that would have fetched him a nasty one had it collided with the top of his head.

  A formless grumble came from above his head.

  ‘Oh, sorry, my apologies,’ Sledd said, sarcasm dripping from his lips. ‘But when I called you a jobless idiot, I was indeed telling the truth. Get down the ladder now and hand in your paintbrush. Your set-painting days are over, Peake. Painter of the Revels, my arse!’

  Again, the grumble.

  ‘I don’t believe you can actually do that,’ Sledd observed, but stepped back a couple of long strides nonetheless. He cannoned into someone standing in the wings and turned sharply, another reprimand ready.

  ‘My apologies, Tom.’ Marlowe smiled as his friend swallowed his annoyance. ‘I was in your way. Is everything going well?’

  ‘I am surrounded by idiots,’ Sledd told him. ‘Incompetents and fools.’

  ‘So, nothing too different, then,’ Marlowe said, putting an arm across the stage manager’s shoulders. ‘You know if nothing went wrong you would never rest, waiting for the other boot to fall. What this time?’ He cast his eyes up to the roof, where the grumbling was continuing unabated.

  ‘Some idiot of a scene painter dropped his resting stick thingie. Nearly hit me on the head.’

  ‘But it missed you, Tom,’ Marlowe said, grinning. ‘Look at that as the good news, not the bad. And Peake is a good scene painter. That portrait he did for the parlour scene in Linkum-Stinkum had a damned sight more life in it than any of the actors, that’s certain. Give him another chance.’

  Sledd looked mulish.

  ‘Go on, Tom. You know you want to. Tell him he can stay if he makes a portrait of Meg and the baby. Think how fine it would look above your fireplace.’ He sketched the scene in the air in front of them with the wave of his arm. ‘An heirloom in the making, if I am any judge.’

  ‘But he dropped …’

  ‘Not on purpose, Tom.’ The playwright gave the stage manager a little push. ‘Go on. I’ll wait for you here. I need a word.’

  Sledd’s eyes brightened. ‘Have you got those new pages for me?’ he said, turning as he hurried off to catch the artist, who had reached the bottom of the rickety ladder.

  ‘Hmm. That is rather what I needed a word about …’ Marlowe made a rueful face and waited as Sledd berated Peake some more, just for the look of the thing.

  ‘Well, that’s him told.’ The artist was making his way back up into the flies. A Painter of the Revels couldn’t afford to cross theatre managers, or the men who ran their stages. ‘Are you telling me that you haven’t got the pages? We need to get the rehearsal started today. It’s bad enough getting Alleyn and Burbage together in one room as it is. If one is ready, the other isn’t. Shaxsper isn’t worth the space he takes up, always wandering around with inky fingers and his head in the clouds. Henslowe has already cut my budget by almost half and this latest thing needs walk-on parts I just can’t afford … Kit, why do you always write for a cast of thousands when the stage isn’t more than ten paces across and my stipend won’t stretch beyond three lads and a dog?’

  ‘Tom, Tom, calm yourself. Worse things happen at sea.’

  ‘Yes, and that brings me to that wreck scene you wrote. How can I have a ship sink on stage night after night? The carpentry fees alone …’

  ‘I’ll look at that for you,’ Marlowe soothed. ‘But, Tom, I have serious news. Sir Francis Walsingham is dead.’

  Tom Sledd stopped and goggled at his friend. ‘Sir Francis Walsingham? Sir Francis Walsingham?’

  ‘The same. As far as I know, the one and only.’

  ‘But … what happened?’

  ‘The story goes that he died of apoplexy. A stroke, or so they say,’ Marlowe told him. ‘And why not? He’s had them before. He hasn’t been well for a long while.’

  Sledd waited. He could hear a ‘but’.

  ‘But … Nicholas Faunt thinks …’

  ‘Ah. Master Faunt. I did wonder whether he might come into this story.’

  ‘Faunt thinks there may have been some dirty dealing. When the Queen’s Spymaster dies, it can’t be simply death, can it?’

  ‘Sometimes it can.’ Tom Sledd had seen a lot of death in his short life and, though it was sometimes untimely, it was more often than not simple.

  ‘My mind is open, Tom,’ Marlowe said. ‘Part of me is tired of the spying, the dodging, the ducking, the suspicion. I feel it’s time I lived a simple life. Writing; perhaps even a little acting, now and again.’

  Sledd’s smile became a little fixed. Marlowe wrote like a dark angel, looked like one too, come to think of it, with his flashing eyes and his curls. His voice could charm the birds from the trees, but he acted like the bough they perched upon, whenever he stood on the wooden O. There was something about the leg and the set of his shoulders that made him look as if he had a broom up his backside. But he loved Kit Marlowe like a brother, so he said, ‘That would be wonderful, Kit. Let me know whenever you want to strut your stuff.’

  But Marlowe was in full flight. ‘But another part of me, the stronger part, knows that Faunt is right. Sir Francis was old and ill, it’s true, but this death seems wrong, somehow. I won’t rest until I have at least tried to solve the puzzle, if puzzle there proves to be.’

  There was a silence. The two were walking through the groundlings’ pit towards the door, Sledd noting automatically the mess the cleaners had missed and making a mental note to bawl someone out, on principle. Then, he couldn’t keep quiet any longer. ‘So … my pages?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sledd waited again. Whenever Marlowe used one word where a couple of dozen would do better, good news rarely followed.

  ‘I think I meant to ask … do you have my pages with you?’ He poked the front of Marlowe’s doublet, hoping for the crackle of parchment beneath, but all he got was the whisper of velvet and brocade.

  ‘Not with me, no.’ Marlowe could have been more evasive, but this was Tom Sledd and, as he knew all his tricks, the effort would be wasted.

  ‘So … they’re at home, then. Shall I send someone to get them
, perhaps?’ Hope was dying in Tom Sledd’s breast.

  ‘They are not at home, not precisely.’ Marlowe smiled, bleakly.

  ‘You haven’t written my pages, have you, Kit?’ Tom Sledd had had many disappointments in his life; one more wouldn’t hurt.

  ‘No. That is to say, I have jotted down a few ideas. But last night …’ How could he explain last night, even to Thomas Sledd, his companion of many a bumpy mile? He couldn’t even begin. ‘I left them with Tom Watson.’

  ‘Tom Watson?’

  ‘Why ever not?’ Marlowe was rarely polite either to or about Watson, but it wasn’t for others to point the finger at his house companion. ‘Wykehamist, Oxford scholar, man about several towns. His poetry can make angels weep, when he is on song.’

  Sledd stopped in his tracks, unaware of the rotting apple slowly disintegrating under his heel. ‘Indeed, my point exactly. When he is on song. Rather than on some wench he has found in some alehouse. And how often does that happen?’

  ‘He slept alone last night, I know this to be true.’ Marlowe could spin a lie and leave no trace, but even as he spoke he knew this one would never pass muster.

  ‘Tom Watson hasn’t slept alone since he was fourteen – at least by his own boasting – and I see no reason to disbelieve him,’ Sledd said. ‘And I doubt last night was any different. And anyway, I heard he’s … what do the authorities call them? “One of the strangers that go not to church”?’ He sighed and clapped the playwright on the back. ‘But I know you must do what you must, Kit. Sir Francis deserves your attention more than we poor mummers.’ He looked up at Marlowe under his lashes, to see if there was even a slight slick of remorse on the man’s face, but there was none. ‘Does Master Watson even know that he has the lines to attend to?’

  Marlowe smiled a rueful smile. He knew his Toms, both Sledd and Watson, and knew therefore that something would work itself out, somehow. ‘I left my notes on the kitchen table. Agnes will give them to Tom, when he wakes.’

  Tom Sledd barked a laugh that had no humour in it. ‘Does he know Will Shaxsper will write them if he doesn’t?’ he asked.

  Marlowe stepped back in admiration but, unlike the stage manager, did not end up with a boot smeared with discarded fruit. ‘Thomas Sledd,’ he said, laughing. ‘We will make a Machiavel of you yet! Send to Norton Folgate with that news and I can guarantee you will have your pages before nightfall. Now, I really must be away. For one thing, that urchin you employ will have sold my horse if I don’t get back to him soon. And for another, I need to get to Dr Dee in Winchester and it is a good ride away yet.’

  Tom Sledd dearly loved magic. He tried sleight of hand for himself whenever he got a moment alone, but the flights of butterflies and birds of which he dreamed always turned into damp paper in his hands. ‘Dr Dee? Why there?’

  ‘If there is a puzzle to be solved, there is no better place to begin, surely? And there is a puzzle, Tom. A puzzle I owe it to Sir Francis to solve. So,’ he clapped the man on the back, ‘I’m off. Send your message to Tom Watson and I’ll be back before first night.’ He rummaged in his purse and came out with a guinea between his finger and thumb. ‘Don’t tell Henslowe, but take this. Buy yourself a couple of walking gentlemen; people my stage a little.’

  Sledd gaped but didn’t say no.

  As Marlowe slid through the wicket in the great door of the Rose, he heard the theatre owner’s Stepney vowels from above.

  ‘Don’t tell Henslowe what? Tom? Tom! Don’t tell Henslowe what?’

  Marlowe smiled and pulled the door gently closed. It was good to think that, whatever else was ill with the world, there would always be Sledd and Henslowe.

  THREE

  If the nights were still cold in this late-coming spring, the days were warm and the sun shone on Marlowe’s back as he set off for the west. Winchester beckoned with its pile of grey masonry. The choirboy in Marlowe was never far from the surface, though he would die rather than admit it and he hummed under his breath the soaring Tallis of his youth. Half his life had gone by since his voice had broken but, in his head, he could still soar to C above middle C without having to draw a breath. The miles were eaten up under his horse’s hoofs on the Portsmouth road and, before the sun began to sink low enough to shine into his westering eyes, Winchester’s water meadows were alongside his path and the ancient almshouses of St John’s Cross were before him, early lamps shining in their windows.

  Marlowe had found out easily enough that Dee and his little family had holed up in Hampshire after his return from exile in Germany and, with a little more digging, that he was in Winchester. The rumour flew that the Queen’s magus sought retirement from the world, to become the Master of St John’s and watch the Heavens for signs of God. But precisely which house currently housed the Dees was a question too far even for him. But there were only twelve almshouses, to be sure, so it would be, at the worst, a process of elimination. He knocked on the first door, the one at the right-hand end of the row. After a long pause, it creaked open but, to Marlowe’s discomfiture, there was no one there; perhaps, he reminded himself, he shouldn’t be surprised at that; he may have happened upon Dee’s house at first try.

  ‘Doctor?’ he said. ‘Dr Dee?’

  ‘There be no doctor here,’ a crabby voice said, from around the level of his waist. He looked down, into the malevolent eye of a very, very old man, dressed in grey fustian with a Piccadill set rakishly on his matted hair.

  Marlowe looked down and spoke more clearly. ‘I am looking for Dr John Dee,’ he said. ‘The Queen’s magus. I believe—’

  ‘No business of mine what you believe, sonny,’ the man said and spat with terrifying accuracy on the flagstone just by the playwright’s right foot. ‘But I tell ye, there be no doctor here.’ He made to close the door, but Marlowe leaned on it and prevented him as easily as he would a child.

  ‘I see that he doesn’t live here,’ he said. As soon as he had seen the simple room beyond the door, the fireplace with one stool beside it and a truckle bed, its doors open ready for the impending night, he had known that. ‘But I wondered if you could tell me where he does live.’

  ‘I tell ye …’

  A coin was suddenly in Marlowe’s fingers, catching the last rays of the dying sun.

  ‘… that the doctor, he do live up that way.’ A gnarled finger came around the door and pointed along the row. ‘You do go along here, then follow the wall until you come to the tumbledown bit.’ The old man stopped to clear his throat, limbering up for another spectacular expectoration, but Marlowe was ready for him this time and stepped smartly to the left. ‘You go along through the breach and he do live in the house there, under the trees.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Marlowe said and allowed the old creature to snatch the coin. ‘I’m very grateful.’

  ‘We been expecting you, or your like, at any road,’ the pensioner said, closing the door.

  Again, Marlowe was too quick for him. ‘Expecting me? How so?’

  The door relented by just a crack and the eye measured him from crown to toes. ‘Well, some fellow me lad, no better nor he should be. ’Tis only common sense the doctor he can’t be the feyther.’

  ‘Feather?’ Even as he spoke, Marlowe knew this conversation could only get more complicated than he had time for.

  The old man straightened his cap and looked up at Marlowe. Speaking slowly, as though to an imbecile, he said, ‘Fey-ther. Of the babby. ’Tis certain sure the doctor be too old for that. Some young blood from up Lunnon, that’s what we reckon, did do the business with Mistress Jane.’ A horrible noise rose from the ancient throat and Marlowe realized the man was laughing. ‘And I reckon, ’tis you. Got the itch agen, have ye? Well, she been brought be bed these six weeks ’n more, so perhaps she be itchin’ too. I should run along, sonny, ’twere I you, see your babby and give her a good …’ This time, a cough seized him and seemed reluctant to let go. Marlowe took advantage of the break in the narrative to make his escape. He couldn’t help a chuckle as he
walked his horse along the wall and through the breach. Unlike the pensioner, he didn’t doubt that Dee could well be the father of the child. He had means for all kinds of miracles and he wouldn’t even have had to break a sweat. He walked towards the lights of the house under the trees, congratulations already on his lips.

  He rapped on the door and listened intently for signs of life from within, but there was nothing. He counted to twenty and rapped again and this time was rewarded by hurrying footsteps. The door was wrenched open and a red-faced woman appeared silhouetted against the light, a frantic finger to her lip.

  ‘For the Lord’s sake,’ she hissed, ‘stop that racket. We have only just this minute got the baby off to sleep. That one, she has the devil in her if I’m a judge; she does nothing but scream from morning to night. So hush, master, hush.’

  Marlowe bit his lip to show his remorse and that he intended to be as quiet as a mouse. He leaned in and whispered to the maidservant. ‘I’m here to see the doctor.’

  The maid looked up appreciatively at the curve of his cheek and lip, the bright sparkle of his dark eye, the curl of his hair. She breathed in the clean smell of leather and horse, of wind and weather; it made a change from baby posset and damp napkin. He didn’t look ailing, but the doctor had made it plain – if anyone comes asking to see him, she must be sure to let them know that he wasn’t that kind of doctor. She was to say what she said now to Marlowe. ‘The master is not a doctor of physick, sir.’

  ‘I don’t need a doctor,’ Marlowe said with a smile. ‘I need the doctor, Dr Dee.’

  A door squealed open down the hall and a head peered out. With it came the sound of a screaming infant. Above the squalling, a voice Marlowe knew asked, ‘Who is that, Anne?’

  The girl turned with a bob. ‘It’s a gentleman asking after a doctor, sir,’ she said, in a voice made husky by long whispering.

  Dee flapped with his hand. ‘Have you told him …?’

  ‘Yes, master,’ she said. ‘He says he doesn’t want a doctor, he wants the doctor.’