Secret World Read online

  How he got out of that death trap he never knew. He just ran and ran, his legs aching, his lungs pulling at every stride, until the smoke of battle left his nostrils and the din of battle became a dream, distant, remote, like a nightmare forgotten, never to recur.

  But it did recur. And St Elmo would recur for ever, in the darkness of his years. ‘Come back, you coward!’ And he saw, too, the faces of the men who had dared those ramparts with him; Joshua the Jew and Harry Bellot.

  St George’s Lane, Canterbury, England

  Saturday 23 June 1565

  He had listened to the tapping for … he didn’t know how long. He had heard that sound all his life, the hammer on the nails in his father’s workshop. He could hear a tune too, whistled by the tapper, by the big man with the huge hands who he’d been told to call ‘Papa’. He rolled over in the little wooden crib and saw the crucifix looking down at him, the strange figure of that sad man with his arms outstretched and his eyes looking toward Heaven.

  He didn’t know who the man was or what Heaven was, but he had heard his mother talk about it. It was a beautiful place far away above the clouds, where the sun always shone and no one ever cried.

  He knelt up on the straw mattress and hauled himself upright. His nightshirt had tangled itself around his legs again so he half fell on to the floor. He’d done that before, so he didn’t cry. He tottered across the room, the half-light of the early morning drawing sharp, bright lines through the room’s shutters. His sister Mary was still asleep in her cot, snoring softly. From somewhere he heard a great bell tolling, the solemn sounds of Sanctus Georgius that woke the city he lived in. But he wasn’t interested in that. He was making for something he hadn’t seen before. It was lying on the table, at his eye level. It was large and shone in a dull, brown sort of way. He reached out. It felt hard and warm, all at once, as if what it was wrapped in had once been alive and real. He used both hands, because he sensed this thing, whatever it was, was going to be heavy.

  But he wasn’t exactly ready for the weight and its impact, as he lifted it off the table, carried him downwards and back, so that first his bum and then his head hit the floor. Now, he did cry, not because of the pain or the shock, but because the thing he had just dropped was alive. Its insides ruffled and fluttered like wings as it fell, and there were small black flies, fleas, bugs in the feathers that danced in front of him, flicking past his eyes like black smuts thrown out by a new-lit fire. Mary just turned over in her bed, the noise just part of her dream, her little brother’s crying of no consequence.

  His cry brought her running, as it always did, although the tapping went on, unbroken. He looked up through his tears at the blurred face that swam in his vision. It was his mother, the beautiful lady he called Mama. She was smiling at him, wiping his cheeks, rubbing his sore head in the dark curls. She had a baby, she had told him, in her belly, but there was no sign of it yet.

  ‘Now, Kit,’ she mock-scolded him. ‘What are you doing with Master Tyndale’s Bible, eh? It’ll be a while before you need that. Come on, now.’ She picked up her son and the book in one swift, practised movement and he cuddled his face into her neck. She kissed him quickly and laid him down in his bed again, tucking him in firmly.

  ‘Would you like me to read to you, Kit?’ she asked. ‘See what the Book’s all about, eh? Would you like that?’

  Kit put the middle fingers of his left hand into his mouth, as he always did when he was tired and let his head sink into the pillow. His mama opened the book, cleared her throat and read. And as she read, he felt himself drifting through the early morning.

  ‘In the begynnynge God created heaven and erth. The erth was voyde and emptie and darcknesse was upon the depe and the spirite of god moved upon the water. Than God sayd: let there be lyghte and there was lyghte.’

  Katherine Marlowe leaned forward over the thin pages of the Bible and peered into the crib, to be met by the sleepy eyes of her son. She smiled and read on.

  ‘And God sawe the lyghte that it was good: and devyded the lyghte from the darcknesse and called the lyghte daye and the darcknesse nyghte: and so of the evenynge and mornynge was made the fyrst daye. And God sayd: let there be a fyrmament betwene the waters and let it devyde the waters a sonder. Then God made the fyrmament and parted the waters which were under the fyrmament from the waters that were above the fyrmament: And it was so.’

  Another peep, and this time the eyes, rich brown as molasses, were closed, the tear-clotted lashes drying on the boy’s cheek. For good measure, she read one more line, dropping her voice as she did so, so that the last syllables were as quiet as a breath. ‘And God called the fyrmament heaven. And so of the evenynge and morninge was made the seconde daye …’

  As she softly closed the door, the boy stirred, mumbling around his fingers, but still mostly asleep. The distant bell of St George’s was still tolling and his papa still tapped the iron into leather in his workshop and his mama’s voice, talking softly to someone out on the landing completed the comforting patchwork of sound in the little house on the corner of St George’s Lane.

  And he fell asleep.

  And he dreamed.

  TWO

  June, 1589

  The river meandered along with almost unbelievable twists and turns, sometimes almost seeming to form circles; circles in which a man may get becalmed for a lifetime of twirling, twirling, twirling round and round without cease. But just before the left and right banks must surely touch, mixing the waters of now and then, the current would pick up speed and pull the little boat in which he sat at his ease, back into the rapids and he would be off again, twisting and spinning in an eddy, then shooting off towards a duck-haunted fen.

  Dipping his head to avoid a dreaming willow, fending off the trailing fronds with a lazy hand, he missed the point at which the river widened into a broad lake, dotted with small islands, only a foot or two above the level of the still water, moss green and luscious, ripe with possibilities. The boat bumped against the edge of one and he reached out to steady himself against the little jetty, rotting and falling into the water though it was. Although the lake looked still, it was full of hidden currents and the boat rode one now, bucking him whether he would go there or no, towards the narrow channel that led to the west. The entrance was only an inch or two wider than the boat and he pulled in his hands, memories of pinched fingers and scraped knuckles of the past rising like the little fish that gaped and mouthed at the surface of the deep, green water. He had never heard fish speak before, and yet it didn’t surprise him to hear these now.

  ‘Kit! Kit! Kit, must I call all morning?’ The voice was not angry, more exasperated and he could hear the love in it.

  He focused his eyes on the here and now, dragging his gaze away from the crack in the ceiling that had been his own personal waterway of the imagination since he was a boy. It had developed a few extra tributaries over the last few years, but he still knew every meander. Looking up at it was proof, if proof were needed, that he was home again, in Canterbury, at the Bull Stake in the parish of St Andrew, under the roof of his father and mother. The big man on campus, the fêted playwright, back again in his old room, waiting to be served his breakfast by his mother and sisters, once his father was safely out of the house. Nihil mutatur – despite himself he felt the old need to show off his learning rise to the surface like scum. Nothing was more guaranteed to drive his father to foaming apoplexy, nothing more guaranteed to make his mother smile her fondest smile. And he knew he would be able to rely on his sister Dot to translate under her breath. Nothing changes.

  ‘Kit!’

  There it was. The final, single syllable that meant his breakfast would be in the dog’s bowl if he didn’t reply now. Oh, indeed, nothing changes.

  ‘Coming, madam, coming.’ The playwright rolled out of bed and walked over to the window, heavy-footed so the woman below would know he had got up. This summer was as hot as Hell and he had slept with the shutters open, with his bed-hanging thrown back and he
leaned on the sill and looked out into the garden, every bush strewn with bleaching linen. Leaning further out, he saw below him the top of his sister’s head and, in the spirit of the years that had fallen away this June morning, he reached back into the room and scooped up a handful of water from the ewer on the press and then, leaning out again, dribbled it slowly on to the chestnut hair.

  The scream was satisfying. But it sounded rather light to be his sister Dot. And his ear had not deceived him. The face that turned up to his was not Dot at all, but a stranger.

  He opened his eyes wide and, gathering his wits, apologized profusely, as prettily as only a poet can.

  ‘As thou bespatteréd by false dropped dew, Look up with flaméd face and speakst thy mind, Forgive me, I mistook another one for you, To whom I owest many a—’

  ‘Kit!’

  ‘Madam?’

  ‘Don’t you madam me!’

  The door burst open and a furious girl stood on the threshold. No one could have mistaken her for anyone but the poet’s sister. She had his sensitive mouth, his curling hair, his liquid eye. A fierce intelligence burned in her stare and he read her mind as he had been able to do since she was in her hanging sleeves. With a rueful smile, he hung briefly out of the window. The other girl was still underneath, leaning on a besom, looking up in bemusement at his sill. ‘Sorry,’ he said, giving her his best dimpling smile. ‘I am very sorry I tipped water on you. I thought you were my sister.’ He turned back into the room and sketched a bow at the girl in his doorway.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Now, will you please come down for your breakfast. Mother’s fretting.’

  Dorothy was at that awkward age – but what age is not awkward in a sister? She was sixteen, an old maid in some peoples’ eyes. Her big sister Joan had married John Moore, a shoemaker, when she was twelve. And she had died in childbed a year later.

  ‘Don’t let her bully you, Kit.’ Margaret was in a hurry. She swept past the stairs into the hall carrying a tray of bread with a pot of honey. She was Marlowe’s little sister too, but there was barely a child-carrying between them and she always saw herself as his twin. But she had no time for her wayward brother today. She was promised to John Jordan the tailor; and the tailor was going up in the world. She was proud of Kit, of course, but London? The stage? All that was a world away from reality.

  Dorothy was following Marlowe down the stairs, prodding him in the arse with her toe until he flung both arms back and lifted her off her feet so that he carried her pig-a-back for the last five stairs and swung her unceremoniously down to the rushes. She squealed and yelled at him, ‘Rakebell!’ and instantly clapped her hand to her mouth.

  ‘I heard that, Dorothy Marley,’ her mother’s voice called from the kitchen, but she was not scolding. It was lovely to have her boy back again and to hear her children laughing. The sun was warming the herb garden beyond the back door, filling the air with the sharp smell of rosemary and the bitterness of rue. The new maid was mopping the flagstones, the cloth slapping and spraying water as she swayed from side to side.

  ‘Tom!’ Katherine Marlowe popped her head out of the door and her youngest child came running out of the jakes, blushing as he realized his hose were still untied and the maid was looking at him. As he got to the house, Anne fetched him a sharp one around the head. If there was ever a middle child, it was Anne Marley. She had inherited her father’s looks and her father’s disposition. Most of Canterbury hated her.

  ‘Now then, Anne,’ Marlowe wagged a finger at her. ‘Pick on somebody your own size.’

  She laughed and threw her arms around him. Her big brother, home at last. They had heard such things about him. How he had dared God out of Heaven with Tamburlaine. How grown men wept at the passing of Dido. People queued for hours in the rain and snow to watch his plays at the Rose and Ned Alleyn himself demanded to play the leads, no matter what the play.

  ‘What’s he like?’ Anne flounced around the table and plonked herself down next to Marlowe.

  ‘Who?’ Kit smiled up at his mother as she poured the breakfast ale for him.

  ‘Ned Alleyn.’

  ‘Who?’ Marlowe looked blank until Anne hit him with her napkin. She had been asleep last night when Kit arrived and had not seen his face for years. In that time, all his siblings had grown. Margaret had been a woman in all but name before he left for Cambridge, but since he’d seen any of them last, they had all grown up, even little Tom whose doublet didn’t quite fit him any more.

  ‘You wouldn’t like him, Annie,’ Marlowe said with a frown, shaking his head. ‘He’s ugly. And not much more than four feet tall.’

  ‘You liar!’ Anne shrieked and leapt in to tickle her brother, who fought her off manfully with the wooden trencher his mother had placed in front of him, waiting for his food.

  ‘What’s next, Kit?’ Dorothy asked him, resting her chin on her hand and gazing into his eyes. Until little Tom had come along, he had been the only boy in the family. It gave him an air of safety and comfort that not even the Cambridge whips or the daggers of London’s roaring boys could ever take away.

  ‘Well,’ he said, his face solemn. ‘It’s only the vaguest of ideas as yet, but the next play is going to be about a girl. She’ll have to be played by a boy, of course, but that’s the way of it. She’s bossy and somebody’s kid sister. There’s another sister …’ he said louder so that Margaret could hear, ‘and she’s mooning over some local oaf who stitches for a living …’

  ‘And the father?’ a gruff voice asked. John Marley clattered his way over the cobbles in the kitchen beyond the open door.

  Marlowe smiled, nodded but did not turn his head. ‘Good morning, Father,’ he said.

  ‘Christopher,’ the shoemaker said as he nodded back and sat down heavily at the head of the table, opposite his eldest son.

  ‘Isn’t it nice, John?’ Katherine beamed. ‘Kit coming to see us like this?’

  ‘Lovely,’ the man said, but he wasn’t smiling. ‘How are you, lad?’ He looked across the table to where his wife stood, her hands tucked behind the bodice of her apron. ‘Manchet?’ He held up a hunk of bread. ‘Since when did we have manchet bread for breakfast?’ He looked at his son and snorted. ‘Oh.’

  ‘I am well, Father, thank you,’ Marlowe said, ignoring the exchange. ‘And you?’

  ‘Well,’ John said and shrugged as though he had last seen his son yesterday and not four years ago.

  ‘What’s this play called, Kit?’ Anne asked, tucking in to her bread and butter, a smear of honey transferring itself to her cheek.

  Dorothy looked at her as one might a pet lamb. ‘It’s not real, Annie,’ she said, and Annie, eighteen though she was, stuck her tongue out at the girl. What was it about the proximity of John Marley that brought out the worst in people?

  Little Tom was suddenly on his feet. ‘That’s Great Harry,’ he said when he heard the bell toll. He still had a mouthful of bread. ‘Choir practice. I’ll be late.’

  ‘Choir practice?’ Marlowe smiled. ‘Tom, I didn’t know you were a chorister. That takes me back. May I come along?’ The playwright choirboy was on his feet already. His little brother looked at him. He had only been four when his big brother had gone away to Cambridge. He didn’t know what that was or where or how far. But his mama had told him of other brothers and sisters – of Mary, of the little boy they had never named, of his namesake Thomas – they had all gone to Heaven; and for all he knew that was where Kit had gone too. But here he was, larger than life, with his flash velvet doublet and Venetians, his buckled buskins. Tom had not seen the dagger, with its elaborate curled hilt, because Marlowe had hidden it in his valise rather than alarm his mother and prompt too many questions. John Marley had carried a knife all his life, but that was a shoemaker’s blade, short and single-edged, not the murderous weapon constantly at his son’s back.

  ‘All right,’ the boy said, uncertainly. ‘Do you remember the way?’

  Kit Marlowe smiled. ‘In my sleep,’ he said
.

  And they were gone, after they’d both given their mother a kiss.

  ‘Did you see that?’ John grunted, breaking into a warm crust of bread. ‘Didn’t so much as get up when his father came into the room.’ He tutted and shook his head.

  Katherine Marley was barely listening, because something else had disturbed her more. ‘He didn’t say Grace either,’ she murmured.

  Nicholas Faunt sat his chestnut mount under the spreading arms of the oak. He was hot and sticky in his velvet and brocade. Before him, the motte of Norwich castle rose steeply to the grey keep at the top, square and forbidding. The sun was high and the crowd was becoming impatient. Faunt appreciated the cool under the branches and would appreciate it more soon enough when those faggots were lit.

  ‘We do God’s work this day, Master Faunt.’ The bishop smiled at his men’s handiwork. In the ditch in front of them, dry and rubbish-filled in this hottest of summers, a stake had been driven into the iron-hard ground and faggots of brushwood had been thrown against its base. Edward Scambler was a stickler for how things should be done. When he’d been Bishop of Peterborough, he’d earned a reputation for it and here, at Norwich, he continued that.

  Faunt looked at the man and nodded. For more years than he cared to remember Faunt had been watching the back of the man who watched the Queen. Faunt was Sir Francis Walsingham’s left-hand man and he kept to the shadows. He had been watching Francis Kett too for months now and knew him to be a madman. But Kett was also a scholar, a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and he was an atheist, a blasphemer who denied the existence of God and the Trinity. And God alone knew how many young men he had corrupted in the University along the Cam with his rubbish.

  Even so, Nicholas Faunt didn’t like the glint in the bishop’s eye. He didn’t like fanatics of any persuasion, not Papists, not Puritans, not, for that matter, Bishops of Norwich. They were all equally dangerous in his eyes. The solemn bell from the cathedral rang out across the expectant city. All Norwich held its breath as the Devil’s disciple was led past the Strangers’ Hall and through the Maddermarket, spat at, kicked and punched all the way.