The Reckoning Page 21

  He had checked the tide times and had decided to not go on board the Cormorant until the very last moment. He had been warned by the captain, employing various nautical terms he chiefly used to confuse landlubbers, not to miss the tide. His heavy purse had bought him leeway for a day, but that was all. The captain had important goods to deliver and couldn’t wait a moment longer than eight o’clock that night. But Marlowe was a fair-minded man and the eight o’clock in the morning it was going to be. But he didn’t want to give anyone a chance to let the four horsemen know that he was on board, so everything would be timed to the minute, with nothing to spare.

  As he got to the end of Butts Lane, more people were around. Dockers, in their heavy aprons and leather over their shoulders. Fishmongers, going down to the docks to meet the fishing smacks as they came in with their load of North Sea wonders. Fishwives, their wicked curved knives stuffed into their belts, heading off for a day up to their knees in herring. And the natives of Deptford, the same natives that any town has; men of law, opening up their offices. The greengrocer, laying out spring cabbage with almost reverent hands. And … Amyntas Finch.

  Marlowe was in no doubt that it was Finch. No one else had quite such powerful shoulders and there was something about the tilt of the head that was unmistakeable. Marlowe had a writer’s eye for detail, honed on the projectioner’s stone, and he never made a mistake.

  ‘Master Finch.’

  The man didn’t stop, but carried on towards the docks, swinging his left leg just a fraction further than the right, as Finch always did. Marlowe sped up a little and touched the man on the shoulder. He spun round and for a moment, Marlowe wondered if he had made a mistake, because at first glance, this man was not Amyntas Finch. The amiable, somewhat stupid features were gone under a mask of intelligence and high alert. This man had eyes like flints, darting this way and that. But that was only for a moment. In the blink of an eye, the bovine features of the assistant stage manager at the Rose were there, looming over Marlowe in their usual benign idiocy.

  ‘Master Marlowe.’ The man extended a hand. ‘How have you been keeping? We’ve missed you at the Rose.’

  ‘I’ve been … occupied.’ Marlowe kept the man’s hand in his. He had never really thought himself a man who needed company, but as he said goodbye to his old life, it was good to have a friendly face to wave to as the dock grew smaller. ‘I’m about to go … away for a while. Would you like to come and see me off?’

  ‘Er … that might be a bit awkward, Master Marlowe,’ Finch said, extricating his hand. ‘I’m on an errand, you see.’

  ‘An errand for Tom?’ Marlowe had no idea what Tom Sledd could want with anything in Deptford.

  ‘Master Henslowe.’ Finch pulled a wry face. ‘A parcel, he said. From the Low Countries. Well,’ Finch became conspiratorial, ‘with Master Henslowe, I thought perhaps I shouldn’t ask too many questions, if you understand me.’

  Marlowe laughed. It was true that Henslowe had many fingers in many pies and a parcel from abroad was perhaps best left alone. ‘What time is the ship expected?’

  ‘Oh, any moment now,’ Finch said, looking vague.

  ‘Only, it will be high tide in about a quarter of an hour and most ships are here already. Getting ready to leave, if anything. I hope you are not late for Master Henslowe’s parcel.’

  ‘It will wait,’ Finch said, and sounded less than his amiable self.

  Marlowe looked up at the big man walking alongside him. ‘I know you are fairly new at the Rose,’ he said, ‘but you must know that Henslowe doesn’t really take any messing.’

  ‘Except from you,’ Finch said, a hard edge to his voice.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose you’re right. Except from me. Look, Amyntas, I didn’t mean to annoy you. If I have, I apologize.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Master Marlowe.’ The edge was gone again. It was like walking with identical twins, who swapped sides whenever you weren’t looking. ‘You haven’t annoyed me. The parcel will wait.’

  ‘If you’re sure,’ Marlowe said. ‘But you’ll have to excuse me. I don’t have many minutes to the tide. The master of the Cormorant said he couldn’t wait six minutes past the hour and I think it must be almost there,’ he said. ‘Look,’ he pointed between two houses, ‘I can see a ship crowding on sail.’

  ‘Quite the sailor, aren’t you, Master Marlowe?’ Finch said and, grabbing his shoulder, spun him round to throw him against the wall of a house, winding him. Suddenly, all the good burghers of Deptford seemed to have gone about their business and disappeared. Marlowe was alone with what seemed to be a madman. ‘But a sailor is only half of it, isn’t it? You are also an atheist and a traitor. Marlowe, the scourge of God. And for any one of those, you have to die.’

  ‘Die?’ Marlowe still hoped to talk his way out of this, as he had so often before. ‘Men greater than me are atheists, after all. I could tell you the names of at least four, right here and now.’

  Finch laughed. ‘I suppose you are thinking of Lord Burghley, Robert Cecil, Lord Howard of Effingham and Baron Hunsdon. But if they are the only ones you are thinking of, Master Marlowe, then your list is woefully short. I could list so many men that it would take me through this tide and the next. No, you will not be dying because you are an atheist. Nor for any of your other crimes, which are many as you and I both know. But simply because,’ Finch shrugged, ‘you know too much about too many people. Again, almost too long a list to name, but if we stay with my four gentlemen, then that will serve.’

  ‘The four horsemen of the Apocalypse, perhaps, we could call them,’ Marlowe said. ‘It appeals to my poet’s soul.’

  ‘Your soul will be in Hell soon,’ Finch observed, as though commenting on the weather. ‘Where it belongs.’ He was leaning harder on Marlowe’s chest, his arm across just along his collarbones. The playwright could feel his bones begin to bend and he thought he could hear them creak. Soon, they would snap and his life would be over. To die in such a place, at the hands of what appeared to be a madman, seemed to be so futile that it spurred Marlowe into speech, even though he could feel his mind beginning to cloud over.

  ‘But what have I done to you?’ Marlowe asked, in a breathless grunt.

  Finch released the pressure a little. ‘What you do to other men you do to me,’ he said and leaned in again.

  ‘Please, Amyntas. Just a few more minutes.’ Marlowe was pleading for his life. ‘Let me find out why. Then I will go willingly to the Devil.’

  ‘The Devil doesn’t exist,’ Finch said. ‘If there is no God, then there is no Devil.’ He repeated it as a child would repeat its letters. Finch was not a thinker. He was a doer. And he had been told to do some dreadful things. Sometimes, alone in his bed, George Finch, sometime Amyntas, wondered whether he had made a mistake. That his grandmother may have been right and that his immortal soul might burn in everlasting Hell fire for what he had done on earth. He shook his head and Marlowe saw his weakness.

  ‘I don’t believe in God either,’ Marlowe said, ‘so Hell doesn’t frighten me. But I sometimes wonder, what if I’m wrong?’

  Finch released the pressure across his chest and grabbed his shoulders, bouncing him against the wall, at first not ungently, then harder until Marlowe’s teeth rattled. ‘No, it’s not wrong to not believe in God. God is dead. Grandma is dead.’

  Abruptly, Finch dropped his victim and the playwright fell to the ground, his head spinning. Finch turned around and around, his hands over his ears, muttering. Marlowe, looking down to minimize the giddiness started to crawl away, but the big man saw the movement and it seemed to bring him to his senses. He put a huge foot on Marlowe’s outstretched leg and pressed down. Hard.

  Marlowe looked up, squinting. ‘If I promise not to tell what I know, Amyntas,’ he said gently. ‘Would that do?’

  ‘Promise?’ Finch gave a bark of laughter. ‘What is a promise from a man like you? Master Foxe promised and look what he did. He told and told and told. He probably told you.’ The foot pressed h
arder and Marlowe jack-knifed in pain.

  ‘I hardly spoke to John Foxe. I gave him a part in the play. Then more or less straight away, he was dead.’

  ‘Killed by a whore, they say,’ Finch said. ‘The wages of sin is death.’

  ‘For someone who doesn’t believe in God, you know your Bible,’ Marlowe remarked.

  ‘I was taught my Bible,’ Finch agreed. ‘That doesn’t have to mean I believe in God.’

  Marlowe shrugged as best he could. It was an unusual view but it had some merit.

  ‘No one ever does what they promise, you see,’ Finch said. ‘Do you remember the one who was killed at Scadbury? Not the vicar one, the other.’

  ‘Roger Dalston?’

  ‘Yes, him. I daresay he broke a promise.’

  ‘You’re being very vague, Amyntas,’ Marlowe said. ‘Look, can I get up? I can’t run away, you know. I think my leg is broken.’

  Finch pressed again and shook his head. ‘I didn’t hear it crack,’ he said. ‘It will just be bruised, I expect. It won’t hurt when you’re dead.’

  ‘True enough.’ Marlowe extended a hand and like a friend in the schoolyard, Finch helped him up. ‘What promise did Roger Dalston break?’ he asked.

  ‘He gave something to the priest. Something he shouldn’t have. He should have given it to me. I was supposed to get it.’

  ‘And give it to who?’

  ‘My masters. Master Faunt was meant to do it, but he didn’t.’

  ‘So … you were working with Master Faunt?’

  ‘Not with,’ Finch said, screwing up his face. ‘Master Faunt was too tricky. I like to keep things simple.’

  Marlowe was on his feet, stretching one leg, then the other, easing his aching ribs. Finch was now leaning on him. Marlowe thought this must be how it felt to be pressed to death. He had always feared hanging and the flames though he had also always suspected he would die by one or the other. He had never thought of pressing. Finch was very imaginative in his ways of hurting and killing people. Master Topcliffe had missed an able assistant when Finch went to work for the horsemen.

  ‘So you killed Dalston.’

  Finch shrugged and Marlowe’s chest screamed for air. ‘He bumped his head.’

  ‘And the vicar?’ Marlowe knew the answer.

  ‘Yes and no. I got the one who got the secrets out of the Admiral. But I didn’t get the one who stole your play.’

  ‘And the girl?’ Marlowe said softly.

  Finch moved to put his elbow in under Marlowe’s breastbone. This had been going on far too long and anyway, he had missed the tide.

  ‘Girl?’

  ‘The whore who killed Foxe?’

  Finch made his first mistake. He chuckled. ‘Oh, the girl. She was … good. It was a shame she had to …’

  But his last word would have to be with him and anything waiting for him on the other side. Marlowe’s dagger, dragged out of its sheath as he took his last deep breath, was buried in the side of Finch’s neck and, with a gasp and a sigh, the assistant stage manager was dead.

  Despite the intermittently busy streets, now mercifully quiet, Deptford was not the kind of place where anyone would make much of a dead body lying propped against the wall. The general belief of the locals was that if someone was around who could kill someone without being immediately apprehended, then that person was probably best left well alone. So Marlowe, despite having a limp and a bloodstained sleeve, was able to put some distance between him and what remained of Amyntas Finch. It occurred to Marlowe that neither George, nor Amyntas and probably not even Finch were his real names but as he had no intention of mourning him, it mattered little.

  He found himself a low wall in the shelter of a house and sat down to catch his breath. His tide had gone, but Faunt had told him that the master of the Cormorant would wait for two more before leaving without him, so there was no need to rush. It was better to present himself for his passage without looking like something dragged through a hedge backwards, so he would need to look for an inn or similar hospitable place to clean up and have a rest. His leg hurt like the Devil but it was getting easier as he used it more. What he would look like under his clothes was anybody’s guess. He was thinking he would be black and blue and that Finch would have left his mark on him everywhere. He leaned against the bricks and turned his face to the warming sun.

  ‘Kit Marlowe?’ A voice he knew broke into his near-sleep. He opened one eye and there, looking down at him with some concern was Ingram Frizer. This meant that close behind would be Nicholas Skeres and as Marlowe moved his head a little to the right, he saw that this was so. Skeres was also looking worried. Marlowe wondered whether he really looked as bad as all that and decided that he must; unless there was money to be made, these two were not usually solicitous.

  ‘You look like shit,’ Skeres observed.

  Marlowe looked ruefully at the men. So, his suspicions were correct; he really wasn’t looking in a fit state to travel. ‘I had … some trouble,’ he said.

  ‘That bloke down the road a way, was it?’ Frizer said, not overly concerned. ‘Hole in his neck. Looked a lot like that big bloke helps Tom Sledd.’

  ‘Is,’ Marlowe said.

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘Is the big bloke that helps … helped … Tom. He tried to kill me.’

  The two walking gentlemen were shocked. ‘Surely not just because you sacked him from the play?’ Skeres said.

  ‘No,’ Marlowe said. ‘That was water under the bridge. No, he tried to kill me because … Look, boys, I don’t expect you’re just wandering around here for no reason. It’s a story too long for the side of the road. Some other time, perhaps.’

  Skeres and Frizer sat down companionably one on either side of Marlowe.

  ‘You do look like shit, you know,’ Frizer said, confirming Skeres’s opinion. ‘So unless you’re heading back to Scadbury to get cleaned up, you should stick with us.’

  ‘What makes you think I am at Scadbury?’ Marlowe had not really made a big thing of where he was living. He knew the theatre was essentially one big rumour mill, but was often surprised by its efficiency.

  Frizer and Skeres leaned forward so they could look at each other round him. They shrugged.

  ‘Everybody knows, I suppose,’ Skeres said. ‘I don’t think anybody was really bothered, no offence.’

  ‘I meantersay,’ Frizer offered. ‘If you’re not writing anything, well …’

  ‘There’s not much for you to do, is there?’

  Marlowe laughed and sucked in his breath as his ribs screamed in protest. He had become so used to being someone watched by what seemed like the whole world that it was hard to believe that anyone at all was totally oblivious to where he was and what he was doing. It was a relief in so many ways – perhaps when he got to Scotland he would lay low for a while, perhaps find himself a little cottage somewhere halfway up a hillside, a mountain, even – he believed they had those in Scotland – and just dream a few years away.

  ‘I’m glad no one missed me,’ he said.

  Frizer gave a coarse laugh. ‘Oh, folks missed you,’ he said. ‘All the Geese for a start. The seamstresses. That woman with the one eye, you know the one.’ He mimed someone so disfavoured that no one who had met her could surely forget her. ‘The one that brings cake on first nights. Her.’

  Marlowe looked from one to the other. There was no need for them to be quite so blunt.

  Then the walking gentlemen burst out laughing. ‘Don’t be daft,’ Skeres chortled. ‘Everybody’s walking around like a wet week without you. Talking about when you’re coming back and what not.’

  ‘When are you coming back?’ Frizer poked Marlowe in the side in his familiar gesture and the poet yelled in pain. Was there an inch that Finch had not pummelled almost to death?

  The men were on their feet, looking down in distress at Marlowe as he sat bent double, breathing hard. ‘You can’t stay here,’ Skeres said. ‘And you can’t ride nowhere, neither. Come with us. We know
this woman, Eleanor Bull, she’s called. Nice woman. A bit homely, but very pleasant. Keeps an Ordinary, don’t make too much about it, but she serves a nice bit of dinner, lets gentlemen she reckons use a few rooms to play cards, tables, things of that nature. Come with us. Eleanor’ll let you have a room to tidy up. She’ll clean your clothes for you. Do a bit of mending. Ever such a nice woman, Eleanor Bull is. You’ll like her.’

  While he was talking, the walking gentleman got Marlowe under the arms and lifted him to his feet. Their years of getting gentlemen drunk enough to not notice when they lifted their purses had made them adept at helping the incapable to walk. Marlowe didn’t object when they walked him smartly down the road a way and in through a low doorway along Deptford Strand.

  A woman bustled up to them, her apron gathered up into her hands, flour on her arms. ‘Oh, Master Frizer,’ she flustered, ‘Master Skeres. I don’t know whether I’m ready for guests today. I was just doing a bit of baking.’

  Frizer threw a friendly arm around her shoulder and gave her a casual squeeze. ‘El,’ he said, familiarly, ‘just to oblige a friend. Master Marlowe here was set upon in the street and isn’t feeling well. He could do with a rest until …’ he looked enquiringly at Marlowe, ‘… how long have you got, Master Marlowe?’

  ‘Until eight o’clock tonight,’ Marlowe said, ‘no longer. I should be away before that, really.’

  ‘Well, until this evening, let’s say,’ Frizer said. He gave the woman another squeeze. ‘Go on, El.’

  The woman shrugged him off. ‘Remember your place, Master Frizer,’ she said, loftily. ‘I’ve got relatives in high places, don’t you forget.’

  Skeres mimed a rope hanging him by pulling on his collar and crossing his eyes. ‘I’ve got relatives in high places too, El,’ he said. ‘But I don’t give myself airs. Now, be a good woman and go and get Master Marlowe some breakfast. I’m thinking he left home without any. And then, you can show us to a room where he can rest for a while before he goes to … where is it you’re going, Master Marlowe?’

  ‘A voyage,’ Marlowe said. ‘For my health.’