Silent Court Read online

  ‘Oh, sir.’ Topcliffe was hurt. ‘I don’t do it for the money, you know that.’

  ‘Yes.’ Walsingham nodded, frowning into the man’s bright blue eyes. ‘Yes, I know.’

  Under the grey sky, the one that Francis Throckmorton would not see again until the day the axeman sliced off his head on Tower Hill, Francis Walsingham stood by his messenger’s horse, stroking the animal’s muzzle and nose.

  ‘You can take this letter to Master Christopher Marlowe, fellow.’ He threw the horseman a purse. ‘Michelgrove, near Arundel. You will find him at the house of William Shelley. He’ll know what to do.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ And the horseman wheeled away to clatter through the barbican, making for the Bridge.

  The mist curled along the Arun that Sunday morning as the bell of St Nicholas called the faithful to church. Christopher Marlowe reached the packhorse bridge that crossed the river and looked up at the great, grey castle towering over the town. Through the frost of the morning, the good folk of Arundel were making their way in twos and threes up the hill to the church. Marlowe had received Walsingham’s letter by galloper that morning and he had it in his hand now. He looked across to where the carriage rocked to a standstill and the footmen busied themselves helping the family down.

  Catherine Shelley was a beautiful woman, tall and stately, with soft, fluttering hands and a musical voice. She nodded to Marlowe as she reached the ground and started clucking around her daughters. Jane, at twelve was already beginning to look like her mother, with a finely drawn, nervous face and slender body.

  She stood looking down at the ground, feeling gawky and awkward in a dress which was stiff and unyielding. She had begged her mother for a more grown-up dress and was regretting it already. The stiff lace collar dug into her neck and made it sore. The layers of petticoats weighed heavily on her bony hips and made her stomach ache. She felt that every move had to be planned, that to walk at all needed a momentum that she just didn’t seem to be able to gather together. And still Master Marlowe seemed not to be aware of her existence, only speaking to her to correct her Latin or Greek. She would flounce in and out of the dining hall so that he would notice her, slamming doors and dropping things, get her Cicero wrong so that he had to spend more time with her while correcting it. He filled her dreams. She was in Hell.

  Her sister Bessie, on the other hand, had no such pretensions. She loved Kit Marlowe with the undying passion of a little girl who had been ignored by everyone for most of her life, who suddenly is the recipient of smiles and hugs, no matter how absent-minded, from a man who seemed to make her mother, her sister and all of the maids blush and go weak at the knees. That both Bessie and Marlowe were equally unaware of why this should be was to their credit. He encouraged her in her pirouetting and posturing, her turning cartwheels, even if he had to constantly disentangle her from her petticoats and help her find which way was up. She declaimed what she could remember from the simplified verses he set her to learn and never walked when she could skip, never skipped when she could jump. She danced to his lute playing and sang with his songs. In spite of her constant motion, she was still a plump little thing and held hidden in her padded cheeks the secret of the greatest beauty of all the Shelley women, still to come.

  ‘Good morning, Master Marlowe.’ William Shelley was wearing his best today, his ruff well starched, his beard trimmed.

  ‘Master Shelley.’ Marlowe half bowed. He had known this man for three months and had lived in the attic room of his house for two. They had even fished the Arun together, vying with each other for the best catch of mullet. He had come to know him as well as any casual tutor could – that had been his brief from Walsingham. What Walsingham had not told Marlowe to do was to get too close to these people. It was not safe. Nor to get too close to their home life. But here he was, ravelled in the apron strings of the women, grudgingly admiring the man and beginning to regret the last two months’ work.

  ‘Bad news?’ William Shelley nodded to the parchment in Marlowe’s hand.

  ‘I may have to go back to Cambridge,’ the tutor told him, ‘sooner than I expected.’

  Shelley frowned. ‘The girls will miss you, Kit,’ he said. ‘We all will.’

  Marlowe nodded. Arundel was cold this morning, with everyone’s breath streaming out in front of them. Bessie of course was blowing on purpose, steam coming from her mouth as if she were a horse. She was stamping and prancing to complete the picture. But although it was cold, and noses were red and pinched with it, Marlowe knew it was nothing, in this soft and southern place, to the cold that would already have Cambridge in its grip. There, the wind would be a lazy wind, lazy because it bit straight through flesh and bone, rather than go round a person. No matter how many layers of clothes and piles of blankets, in winter he always went to bed cold, woke up colder still and then it just got worse all day. Here, his attic room was warm with the risen heat of many fires. He had the run of the house and it was his greatest pleasure to go down to the library at night and read by the light and the warmth of a log fire, mumbling comfortably to itself in the enormous grate. Sometimes, Catherine Shelley would join him, and would sit on the other side of the fireplace with her candle in its mirrored candlestick, stabbing at her embroidery and making polite conversation. It was a comfortable life and he realized, standing there on the packhorse bridge, that it had become too comfortable by half. Shelley’s voice broke into his thoughts.

  ‘On your way to church?’

  Marlowe half smiled in that mercurial way of his. ‘Not this morning, William. I just thought I’d wander the river for a while. Helps me think. You?’ He turned to face his employer, never forgetting for a moment why he was really here.

  ‘We’ve been invited to his Lordship’s again.’ Shelley smiled with all the bonhomie at his disposal. ‘No doubt we’ll attend divine service in the castle.’

  ‘No doubt you will.’ Marlowe smiled back and he watched them go, walking in line abreast up the hill, little Bessie leaping and pirouetting on her pattens, Jane glancing back at the black-cloaked figure at the bridge head. The church bell was still clashing and clanging and the bright cross-crosslet flag of the Howards snapped in the stiff breeze overhead.

  ‘You’re quiet tonight, Kit.’ Catherine Shelley looked up from her embroidery at the tutor. For a moment, he didn’t react, but then he raised his head and smiled gently at her.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m thinking.’ He sat himself up and rubbed his hands together. ‘What were you saying?’ He looked at her in the firelight, her candle throwing its light on to the handiwork on her lap. She tipped her head to one side and tutted softly. ‘What?’ The laugh in his voice turned her heart to water. She had been aware all day that she should store images of Master Marlowe, the tutor, the poet, away against the day. If she could only keep one, that would be it. The eyebrow raised, the mouth smiling uncertainly, the laughing word held on the air.

  ‘I hadn’t said anything,’ she said, smiling back at him, ‘except to say you are quiet tonight.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t meant to be a curmudgeon. I just have a lot of planning to do, with . . . with the journey and other things.’

  ‘Back to Cambridge? You’ll take a horse, won’t you? William has offered you a horse?’

  He shook his head. ‘That is too much. And anyway, how could I get it back to you?’

  ‘There would be no need,’ she said. ‘Let it be a gift from the girls. They will miss you so much, Kit.’ She paused and a blush crept up her neck. ‘I will miss you. You are company for me in the evenings. William is . . .’

  ‘Your husband is a busy man,’ Marlowe finished the sentence for her. ‘Often away, I know.’

  She looked at him, her head cocked on one side. ‘He is here and there, Kit, here and there.’ She looked down at her lap and twisted her hands together. ‘I want to ask you something.’

  ‘Well, I’ll answer you if I can.’ His heart beat so that he thought she must surely be able t
o hear it. In his life of ducking and weaving, of fantasy and half truth, he had never had to lie to someone so innocent before. His usual dealings were with men who would kill a queen for the sake of a pope, kill thousands for the sake of an ideal. This was different. He waited.

  ‘Can I have a portrait of you?’ The words came out in a rush. ‘The girls would like it.’

  ‘I have no portrait to give you,’ he said. He hoped the relief didn’t show on his face. Although he could dissemble with words, he was still working on keeping his emotions from view and wasn’t sure he always succeeded.

  ‘I have been . . . well, as you know, I like to sketch. I had lessons when I still lived at my father’s house, before I married William and the girls were born. My teacher is quite famous now, at Court; my Uncle George – George Gower, I don’t know whether you have heard of him . . .’ Catherine Shelley knew she was babbling, but couldn’t seem to stop.

  ‘I have heard of him, yes,’ he said. ‘You sound as though your childhood was very happy.’

  ‘Oh, it was.’ Her eyes lit up. ‘The girls and I still go sometimes back to my parents’ house. My brother has it now, of course, but we still have a suite of rooms there.’ She smiled at the recollection. ‘It’s in Yorkshire. It’s good for the girls to run free sometimes. Life is very . . .’

  ‘Confined.’ He watched her carefully. A question he had wanted to ask her had been answered. When the time came for her husband to be scooped up by Walsingham’s men, she would have a roof over her head and the girls would have somewhere to run free.

  She nodded her head once. ‘Yes. You know us so well, Kit.’ She turned as she heard the door of her husband’s study open. He called for his steward and the man’s hurrying footsteps echoed through the hall. ‘He will have finished his business soon,’ she said, leaning forward and making Marlowe a conspirator in her plan. ‘So, quickly, Kit, can I send my sketches to Uncle George, to have a portrait made of you? For the girls?’

  He smiled at her and leaned back in his chair, with his legs spread out to the fire. ‘On one condition, Mistress Shelley,’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’ She knew it would not be the condition she hoped for, but she hoped for it just the same.

  ‘That I can have a copy. It doesn’t matter who paints it, if it is a student, not the master, but I would like one. For my rooms, you know; in Cambridge.’

  She forced a smile; it was for his sweetheart, she feared. But she was a polite woman, well brought up by yeomen in Yorkshire. ‘It would be our pleasure, Kit,’ she said.

  William Shelley jerked upright at the click from his study door.

  ‘Kit.’ He hurriedly slid the parchment he was writing on under a pile of others and propped the quill into the inkwell. ‘It’s late.’

  Marlowe closed the door behind him and sat down uninvited. Shelley had never seen the man look so grim, so focused. There was an indefinable fire in his eyes.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘I had a letter today,’ Marlowe told him.

  ‘Yes, I know. From Cambridge. You have to go back.’

  ‘No,’ the tutor said. ‘Not from Cambridge.’

  Shelley frowned. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘I had two letters today – the one you know about. It just had two words.’ Marlowe looked grimly at Shelley. ‘Francis Throckmorton.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The second letter came hard on the heels of the first. You were still at the castle; in the private chapel, no doubt. It talked of five thousand Horse, twelve thousand Foot. Pikemen, arquebusiers. I’m still in the dark about the field pieces.’

  Shelley blinked, his lips dry, his heart thumping. His smile told a different story. ‘You’ve lost me,’ he said.

  ‘Of course –’ Marlowe stretched out his booted feet and crossed them at the ankles – ‘these are just the projected figures.’

  ‘Projected?’ Shelley repeated.

  Suddenly, Marlowe slammed his fist down on the carved arm of the chair. He was sitting bolt upright. ‘The Duke of Guise will bring that army, those seventeen thousand men, to a landing place somewhere on the Essex coast. No doubt when the third letter arrives, it will tell me exactly where. Somewhere on the Crouch would be my guess. How many transports Guise will need, I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Kit . . .’ Shelley was blinking again, his hands outstretched in confusion.

  ‘Those Englishmen loyal to the Bishop of Rome will rally to Guise’s standard, march to wherever they’re holding Mary of Scots and overthrow the Queen. The Thames will run red.’

  ‘Stop!’ Shelley bellowed. ‘These are the ravings of a madman, sir.’

  ‘Indeed they are.’ Marlowe nodded. He was almost whispering.

  ‘And what has any of this nonsense to do with me?’

  ‘In the county of Sussex,’ Marlowe continued, as though reading a litany for the dead, ‘those Englishmen loyal to the Bishop of Rome include Charles Paget, Esquire, His Grace the Earl of Arundel, Sir Aymer Middleton, Roger Bantry . . . and William Shelley, gentleman. Husband, father.’

  ‘Employer of Christopher Marlowe,’ Shelley added in a low growl. ‘Spy and traitor.’

  Marlowe stood up sharply. Shelley knew the man carried a dagger in the sheath in the small of his back. His eyes flickered across to his own broadsword propped in the corner. Marlowe was younger, fitter, faster. He had already given up any thought of silencing the man when the door crashed back and half a dozen armed men burst in, their swords drawn, their faces grim.

  ‘No,’ said Marlowe levelly. ‘Not traitor. That label belongs nearer to home.’

  ‘William Shelley,’ the sergeant-at-arms barked. ‘Under the powers vested in me by their Lordships of the Privy Council, I am placing you under arrest on a charge of High Treason.’

  ‘I trusted you with my children,’ Shelley hissed at Marlowe as they hauled him round and bound his wrists behind his back.

  Marlowe closed to him. ‘And I trusted you with my country,’ he said.

  ‘Take him away,’ the sergeant ordered. ‘And get the women.’

  ‘No!’ Marlowe blocked the doorway.

  ‘Walsingham’s writ says the whole family,’ the sergeant snapped at him. ‘Wife, Catherine; daughters, Jane and Charlotte.’

  ‘Show me,’ Marlowe insisted.

  The sergeant fumbled in his purse and dragged out the tatty scroll with Walsingham’s seal. Marlowe read the contents briefly by the flickering candles; then he tore it up and threw the pieces in the sergeant’s face.

  ‘I don’t give a rat catcher’s arse for Walsingham’s writ,’ he said. ‘Does the Privy Council make war on women and children now?’

  The sergeant hesitated. He hadn’t expected this. Whose side was this man on? Judas Iscariot with a conscience? Well, yes, it made some sense. He had four men at his back and Marlowe was alone. Even so, the sergeant was a man with an infinitely flexible spine. They didn’t pay him enough to take on one of Walsingham’s men. And there was something in Marlowe’s face he didn’t like.

  ‘Just him, then,’ the sergeant grunted. ‘But there’ll be questions asked,’ he warned Marlowe. They bundled William Shelley along the corridor to where their horses waited in the darkness of the courtyard.

  Marlowe watched them go. He saw Catherine rushing across the stones in the dim light from the hall, her servants tussling with the guards. He knew there was no point in going down himself. It was all over in seconds. No one was hurt, just two ladies, consoling their weeping mistress and baffled serving men watching the knot of horsemen cantering into the darkness of the night.

  TWO

  Robert Greene stood at the corner of Lion Yard that Thursday evening. The curfew hour for the University scholars had come and gone, yet they were still there, whispering and sniggering together in the shadows, scurrying from The Swan to the Brazen George and always to the Devil. It had been the same in his day, when the most exciting thing in the world was a roll in th
e hay with some girl and beating the proctors at their own game, shinning over college walls and sliding down roof ledges.

  It was damned cold there on the edge of the marketplace, the stalls silent and deserted now, cloaked in the November dark. He stamped his feet like a sizar without money for his coal and blew on his hands. Where was the man? He’d said half past ten of the clock. Quite distinctly. Now it was nearly eleven and Greene decided to call it a night; he clearly wasn’t coming. He threw his cloak over his shoulder and strode over the already-frosting cobbles. Then he saw him, shoulders back, spine straight, striding over the pavements as if he owned the place.

  ‘Dr Harvey,’ he hissed as they met at the corner.

  ‘Is that you, Greene?’ Gabriel Harvey knew perfectly well who it was, but he wouldn’t give the guttersnipe the satisfaction.

  ‘Good evening to you, Doctor.’ Greene nodded.

  ‘There’s nothing conceivably good about it, Greene,’ Harvey snapped, poking his nose out to squint up at the blue-black of the Cambridge sky. ‘I left a warm fire and a hot toddy to come here. And every step I took I wondered why I did. Your note said it was urgent.’

  ‘It is,’ Greene assured him. ‘Er . . . The Bell?’ Both men looked up at the iron inn sign creaking and cracking in the wind. The clapper had long gone, spirited away by some drunken scholar on a spree, so the empty bell just clanked dully against a thick arm of withered ivy which hung from the wall. It sounded like the ghost of a dead bell, still marking the hours with no one to hear it ring.

  Harvey peered in through the thick, warped panes. ‘And sit drinking with half the scholars of my college? Are you utterly out of your mind?’

  ‘It’s Marlowe.’ Greene blew on his frozen fingers again, hopping from foot to foot.

  Greene stood upright, turning slowly to him. In the light from the inn, his face was a mask of fury. ‘Where?’

  ‘In Petty Cury,’ Greene whispered. ‘I saw him myself. Not two hours since. I can show you the very spot.’

  ‘Why?’ Harvey asked. ‘Will Machiavel have burned his cloven hoof into the cobbles? Mother of God, give me some respite from all this.’ He looked the man squarely in the face, then gripped his shoulders, shaking him. ‘You’re sure, man? The last I heard of Marlowe, he was going south with those strolling players. He let everyone know he’d done with Cambridge. Of course –’ Harvey released the man as a thought occurred to him – ‘we all know what that was about. He couldn’t cut it, the scholarship, I mean; the cut and thrust of debate. No, his Dialectic was sloppy, his Greek only so-so. I wasn’t impressed.’