Crimson Rose Read online

  The last fanfare sounded and the crowd roared as the Prologue burst on to centre stage. There was no Marlowe today to be applauded, but Zenocrate took her curtsey as usual and some anonymous fellow came on as Tamburlaine. The cheering died when Burbage swept off his helmet and the fruit began to fly.

  ‘Get ’em on, Tom,’ Henslowe hissed. ‘Beginners. Quickly, man!’

  And the show began.

  Henslowe was in danger of chewing his fingernails down to his knuckles by the third scene. In a moment or two, Tamburlaine would be on as part of the action and there would be a riot. He would have to give them their money back; they’d throw him in the river; burn the Rose down … There was a commotion behind the flats and Henslowe heard the most magical, the happiest sound in the world.

  ‘Get that armour off, you snivelling pizzle! What do you think this is, some Mystery Play?’

  He heard a slap and a corresponding ‘Ow!’ and moments later, Ned Alleyn hurtled past him, buckling himself into the armour Richard Burbage had just kindly vacated. He caught Henslowe’s eye. ‘My head feels as if it’s locked in a vice, Philip,’ he said, ‘but the show must go on. We’ll have a little chat about whoever that was in my costume later.’ The trumpets sounded and Alleyn grabbed George Beaumont’s hand and the royal pair paraded round the stage, nodding to the gentry gathered there, the greatest actor careful to keep his helmet in the crook of his arm so that the audience could see that Ned Alleyn was back.

  ‘Mr Henslowe, Mr Henslowe!’ a voice hissed at the back of the stage and a scruffy sweet-meat seller was tugging at the impresario’s Venetians. ‘Now that Master Burbage is unconscious, any chance I can play third handmaiden, please?’

  TWELVE

  It was a very different Kit Marlowe who crossed the Bridge the next morning. He had left his rapier at home in the care of Windlass, who would not be drawn on the nature of his conversation with the High Constable at the theatre, and he had swapped his silk and velvet for a plain black fustian. He tucked his hair under a simple square cap and left off his pattens so that his shoes squelched in the mud.

  Under his arm he carried a pocket edition of the Geneva Bible which he’d bought in Paternoster Row that morning and he hailed his brothers and sisters along the Bridge in the way the Godly did, happy to be here, happy to be alive. He was doubly happy as he reached the gate at the southern end because above him rotted the traitors’ heads on their spikes, leather-brown in the weather with dark holes where their eyes had been, long ago trophies of the kites and rooks, some of which still spiralled overhead, still hopeful of a new titbit. Marlowe was happy because his head was not among them.

  His journey took him east, away from the Rose, Master Sackerson’s Garden and the stews of the Winchester ground, to the altogether more wholesome air of St Olave’s church. Black- and brown-robed mourners were drawn to the squat, grey building like iron filings to a magnet. They greeted each other with cries of rapture. One or two of them hugged each other with tears streaming down their faces. Pale children were dragged along too, under the clanging of the passing bell.

  Inside, the church was a spiritual wasteland. There were no pews and no rood screen, although Marlowe had long since stopped looking for those in any church in the land. No saint of gilt or plaster looked down from his niche. No brass eagle held the Bible in its outstretched wings. The smell of incense had last drifted out of St Olave’s plain-glass windows before Kit Marlowe was born and the tombs of the long departed had been smashed and removed. Ahead of him on the cold, polished stone an indented couple lay side by side, a knight and his lady, once flesh and blood, their effigies once chiselled in brass with their children kneeling below them. Now they were slight depressions in the ground, because the Godly did not approve of them.

  ‘Good afternoon, Brother!’ A cheery man with a snub nose hailed Marlowe. ‘Sad times, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marlowe solemnly. ‘Sad indeed.’

  ‘How did you know God’s Word?’ the man asked.

  Somebody left my knife in his heart, Marlowe wanted to say, but he thought it might spoil the mood of the moment. ‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘Ships that pass in the night.’

  ‘Hmm.’ The snub-nosed man nodded, extending a hand. ‘Killsin Jenkins,’ he introduced himself.

  ‘Delighted,’ said Marlowe. He knew what was coming next.

  ‘And you are …?’

  ‘Distraught, of course. I had to pay my respects.’

  ‘No,’ Jenkins chuckled. ‘I mean, your name. God …’ He suddenly caught sight of the Bible in Marlowe’s grasp, and became conspiratorial. ‘You’re not an Anabaptist, are you?’

  ‘Perish the thought!’ Marlowe shuddered.

  ‘Well.’ Jenkins looked around him to make sure the coast was clear. ‘You can’t be too careful, can you? There was a whole nest of them in Aldgate a couple of years ago. Let the side down, don’t they? Oh, they were hanged, of course, but that’s not the point.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘No, what the unGodly don’t realize is that we are not an identical mass – and I hate using the “m” word, even in this context. What is it they call us? Puritans? Well, it takes all sorts, Brother, it takes all sorts. We are actually fifty shades of grey when all is said and done.’

  ‘You and God’s Word were close?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘Lord, no.’ Jenkins leaned in closer, talking out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Couldn’t stand the man.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.

  ‘Er …?’ Marlowe wanted to be sure he understood the sign.

  ‘Exactly,’ Jenkins said. ‘Mammon. Oh, we all have to live, Brother. I, for instance, am a girdler, from a long line of girdlers. I live comfortably, but I have a wife and six children to feed. God’s Word had no one but himself and old Partridge over there. And I happen to know he paid the man a pittance. No,’ he shook his head, looking at Partridge, ‘not worth all those tears, old man.’

  Marlowe frowned, warming to his part. ‘Isn’t that a little unkind, Brother?’ he asked. ‘Fifty shades we may be, but we are all brothers here, cast in the image of the Father.’

  ‘Hallelujah,’ a voice echoed his sentiments. ‘Praise ye the Lord. Good God!’

  Marlowe thrust out his hand to the newcomer. ‘Martin Marprelate,’ the playwright said.

  The newcomer blinked. His mouth was open and he seemed a little on the simple side. ‘Um … Philip Henslowe,’ he said.

  ‘Killsin Jenkins,’ the other man added his hand too. ‘Praise ye the Lord, indeed. Are you a friend?’

  ‘Er …’

  ‘Killsin.’ Marlowe smiled. ‘Will you excuse us? Don’t you think Master Henslowe looks a little pale? He’s overcome, as we all are. A little fresh air. That would be best. We’ll be back anon.’

  Jenkins bowed his head and clutched Marlowe’s arm. ‘You are a true Christian, Master Marprelate,’ he said. ‘Walking in the steps of the Lord. Hallelujah.’

  ‘Hallelujah!’ Marlowe agreed, and left, towing Henslowe behind him into the churchyard where the dead kept their secrets. ‘Kit!’ the man hissed when they were clear of the Godly. ‘What the Hell’s going on? Martin Marprelate? What’s all that about?’

  ‘I was about to ask you the same thing,’ Marlowe whispered, watching the last of the Elect disappear inside the church. ‘You might at least have dressed the part.’ He flicked Henslowe’s ostentatious lace, the stuff he’d just bought on the strength of Tamburlaine.

  ‘I’m not pretending to be one of these misfits,’ Henslowe blurted out, then regained his composure. ‘I just came to find out if there was any chance of anybody here suing me. After all, it was my Bear Garden wall they found him on.’

  ‘Yes, and it was my dagger that kept him there,’ Marlowe said. ‘For your information, I am trying to find out why. Or I would have been if you hadn’t put your great pattens into it all.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Henslowe muttered. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Marlowe untucked
the heavy Bible from under his arm. ‘Here. I’m going back in there and I’m tired of carrying this about.’ He tapped the leather and passed it to Henslowe. ‘Let me know your views on this.’ He winked. ‘I think it could catch on.’

  So Martin Marprelate returned to the flock that Wednesday afternoon. He joined in with a vengeance, testifying with all the others but drawing the line at rolling on the ground as some of them did. For all they were there to see him off, nobody had a good word to say for God’s Word Garrett. Nobody except a little old man who had known him since he was a boy. And even he had to concede that latterly, God’s Word had come into a great deal of money, which the constables had appropriated. He hadn’t a clue where that had come from. Neither did he tell Marlowe where some of it had gone. Into every rain a little life must fall.

  ‘You haven’t heard the last of this!’ A furious Robert Greene was thrown out of Ludgate Gaol with as little ceremony as he had been thrown in. Passers-by looked at him oddly because to see anyone emerging from those grim, grey walls was a rarity. He tried to compose himself as he strode towards the Fleet Ditch, tying his doublet points and adjusting his codpiece. His hat and Collyweston cloak had disappeared in the prison yard, bartered in exchange for food. Every minute of the time he had served, he regretted having given his last groat to those charlatans Frizer and Skeres. Had he hung on to that, he might have lived quite royally in Ludgate.

  So now Robert Greene had another score to settle. And yet again, it was with Kit Marlowe. He straightened his shoulders as he trudged along Fleet Street, moving west. He was Dominus Greene, for God’s sake, a Cambridge graduate. All right, he had no sword at the moment and no dagger, but he still had the … Oh, bugger! He felt his left earlobe for the gold-mounted pearl that hung there. Except it didn’t. He ran through his mind the various people who might have taken it. There was the Tom O’Bedlam who dribbled all over him and peed on his pattens. There was the harlot with the big teeth who was willing to let him have a little on account, against the day when Master Greene, poet and playwright, would be out again, earning some money. There was the Presician who tried to convert him and prayed for his soul. Any one of them could have taken the pearl. It couldn’t have been Big Robbie from the border town of Berwick – he’d have taken Greene’s ear as well.

  All right, so Robert Greene had no sword, no dagger and no ear-ring, but what he did have kept him going as he argued with the guards at Temple Bar was his burning hatred for Kit Marlowe. Praise for the man still rang in his ears. At every corner, he heard the name. It was Marlowe this and Marlowe that. Tamburlaine. Tamburlaine. Tamburlaine. Had everyone in London been to see that bloody play? By the time he got to Gabriel Harvey at the sign of the Coiled Serpent, Greene was incandescent.

  ‘That bastard Marlowe had me arrested!’ he screamed, waving his arms in imitation of a windmill. ‘He sprang Shakespeare from the Clink and gave my name. Mine!’

  Harvey looked up from his brain pie, dusted the pastry crumbs from his fingers and smiled. ‘Good morning, Robyn,’ he said.

  Robyn? Greene stood there open-mouthed. The smell of Ludgate still clung to him and he didn’t even know if his lodgings in the Vintry were still available, should he wish to wash any of it off. Robyn? Gabriel Harvey was using his pet name again. What was going on? Had the world gone quietly mad while Greene was inside?

  ‘I can’t see anything good about it,’ he fumed, dragging up a stool, uninvited, and sitting down.

  ‘Ah.’ Harvey was still smiling. ‘Have a brain pie? No? They’re a speciality of the house.’ He looked down at the half-eaten food on his plate with affection. ‘It takes the brains of six capons just to make one bite, you know.’ He licked his thumb and used it to pick up crumbs of pastry, which he transferred to his mouth. ‘Lovely.’ He looked up at Greene. ‘Sorry, I digress. You can see nothing good, because you’ve been away. I heard.’

  ‘Well, then …’

  ‘Well, it’s not all doom and gloom, dear boy, not by a goose feather. You see, there’s a warrant out for Marlowe’s arrest.’

  ‘There is?’ Greene’s scowl turned to a smile. ‘For impersonating me? Marvellous.’

  ‘No, not for that, Robert. Kit Marlowe is wanted for murder.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘It’s all thanks to those two rascals you found, Robyn. Skeres and Frizer. I’ll stake my huge reputation on it.’

  ‘What … you mean … Marlowe didn’t do it?’

  ‘Whether he did or not is utterly immaterial, dear boy. I wanted his name smeared the length and breadth of London and that, these two have achieved. How they did it is of course no concern to me.’

  ‘So he’ll hang, then?’ Greene enthused, his eyes gleaming.

  ‘Well, when they catch him, yes,’ Harvey said. ‘And I’ve been thinking about that, wrestling with my conscience, so to speak.’

  ‘Who won?’ Greene grinned.

  Harvey ignored him. ‘I didn’t want Marlowe hurt. I mean, I’m a scholar, an academic, I don’t do all that physical stuff. But then, I thought, wait a minute. This isn’t actually my problem, is it? Marlowe’s got himself into deep water and if he was nudged a little by friends Frizer and Skeres … Well, that, as Richard Hakluyt would say, is Africa.’

  ‘So … it was all too pat, after all?’

  ‘Sir?’ Jack Windlass wasn’t often startled, but the sudden strike of the flint surprised him. He hadn’t seen Marlowe sitting in the fireside nook in complete darkness.

  The playwright chuckled. ‘Don’t give me that wide-eyed look, Windlass.’

  ‘I don’t follow,’ Windlass said as Marlowe lit one candle, then a second.

  ‘You do a mean shin of beef, Jack,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Windlass half-bobbed.

  ‘And from what I hear from Will Shaxsper, you’re very handy with a lead cosh.’

  ‘Lucky strike.’ Windlass shrugged.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Marlowe sank back into his chair. ‘But there’s nothing lucky about deflecting the High Constable, is there?’

  ‘No.’ Windlass was shaking his head. ‘No, you’ve lost me.’

  ‘He was at the Rose,’ Marlowe reminded him, ‘on his way, I suspect, to arrest me. Until you had a word. Then he left. I know he’d seen me, so what could you have said that made him leave? “No, High Constable, that fellow over there just looks like Kit Marlowe.” Or “Don’t bother him now, sir, he’s a little busy.” Perhaps it was “But my master is such a nice man, sir, and a genius. Let him off just this once. Ah, go on!” None of this sounds quite right, does it, Jack? And as I said, it was all too pat – you being a masterless man at the very time I was looking for a servant and you bumping into me in Paternoster Row that day. So.’ He folded his arms. ‘Time for the truth, I think.’

  Windlass knew when the game was up. He pulled the badge from his doublet and flicked it to reveal the coat of arms on the back. Marlowe nodded. ‘Burghley,’ he said, grimly. ‘What is it that you do, exactly? Apart from shin of beef, that is?’

  ‘Whatever’s needed, Master Marlowe,’ Windlass said, sitting opposite him. ‘I am paid to watch your back.’

  ‘Gratifying,’ said Marlowe, ‘if unnecessary.’

  ‘Ah.’ Windlass wagged a finger at him. ‘That’s what they all say. John Winthrop said something similar before the Dons got him. And of course, Hector Moncrieff dispensed with my services the day before they found what was left of him in Damnation Alley. And I don’t want to think about Peter Hopton …’

  ‘If this is a list of your previous “gentlemen”, Windlass, it’s not exactly impressing me. If I remember you had a character from a Henry Goring.’

  ‘Also known as Nicholas Faunt.’ Windlass smiled. ‘And please note that disasters only befell my gentlemen when I was variously unavailable. As long as I’m around …’

  ‘As long as you’re around,’ Marlowe interrupted, ‘you may as well help me dispense with this bottle of claret and talk me through a murder or two.’

 
; Windlass smiled and wrestled with the bung before pouring the burgundy liquid into goblets. ‘I don’t usually do murders, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Glad to hear it. Indulge me, however. Eleanor Merchant. Where did she die?’

  ‘At the Rose, sir.’

  Marlowe nodded. ‘Shot – and not by accident – by a temporary replacement among the orchestra. We can rule out Shaxsper. Our killer had to be someone who knew Tamburlaine well enough to know there was an execution scene involving guns.’

  ‘Someone with a theatrical bent?’ Windlass hazarded.

  ‘Don’t get me started,’ Marlowe muttered. ‘Yes, it could have been any member of the cast, although most of them were on stage at the time and highly visible. Backstage crew? Possibly. The truth is that all plays are read in advance – censored, if you will – by the Master of Revels.’

  ‘Sir Edmund Tilney,’ Windlass enthused. ‘I always had him down as a wrong ’un.’

  ‘Then there are the compositors and printers.’

  ‘Sneaky lot. Those apprentices aren’t called Devils for nothing.’ Windlass nodded. Marlowe was starting to list half of London.

  ‘And of course, a lot of them go upstairs.’

  ‘Upstairs, sir?’

  ‘To Walsingham, even Burghley himself, looking for anything Papist, blasphemous, unpatriotic. Everybody has servants – saving your presence, Jack – who have friends, wives, sweethearts. It’s quite conceivable rather a lot of people knew there were guns in Tamburlaine. Will was just a convenient idiot.’ He looked at Windlass. ‘But since it turns out we’re in the same business you and I, safety-of-the-realm-wise, what do we know about Eleanor?’

  ‘She ran a safe house,’ Windlass said. ‘In Blackfriars.’

  ‘A safe house where the disaffected paid visits, men of dubious reputation, men on the run, double agents … Men perhaps with murder in their hearts.’