Witch Hammer Page 24

  Cawdray was only momentarily stunned and was on his feet and lunging at Marlowe in one fluid movement. He was at the advantage in that he knew of Marlowe’s injury and played on it, chopping at it with the side of his hand and banging that arm down on the table. Alleyn was still dead to the world and would be no help and Marlowe was faint with the pain. He managed to strike a few useful blows; if he survived this, the bruises would be a good piece of information to give to the Constable. Without them, Cawdray could blend into the crowd and might never be found again. And as a killer of at least three people, he had to be found, or Marlowe and Alleyn would have to watch their backs for ever.

  Marlowe fell back against the chair, which gave way under him, throwing him on to the ground, trapped between the table and the fireplace and the door, ajar since Cawdray had crept in what seemed like hours before. Cawdray loomed over him, his dagger gripped so tightly that Marlowe could see his knuckles white in the growing daylight in the window.

  ‘I really do like you, Kit,’ Cawdray said, regretfully. ‘And I would have let you live, if you hadn’t fought me like this. If you had just listened, I might have spared you, but I know now I can’t leave you alive. For some reason, you seem to think what I have done, what I still plan to do, is wrong in some fashion. I had decided from our chats that you were a man of the world.’

  ‘It isn’t the world which interests me,’ Marlowe said, ‘so much as the people in it. And when one of them goes around killing indiscriminately . . .’

  ‘Not indiscriminate,’ Cawdray protested.

  ‘Ned Sledd?’ Marlowe asked. He knew there was no point in discussing Cawdray’s wife. Her husband had dismissed her as a human being long ago.

  Cawdray shrugged and raised the knife. ‘A tragedy of errors,’ he said. Then, he half turned towards the door, eyebrows raised in surprise. A thin trickle of blood oozed out of his mouth and he fell first to his knees and then on to his side, knocking over the chair as he went. Marlowe struggled to his feet and looked round the door, not knowing quite what he would find. He didn’t believe in witches, not as such, but he was tired, the light was bad. If a demon in full fig had stood there, he would have not been in the least surprised.

  ‘Thomas?’

  ‘Hello, Kit,’ the boy said. ‘Someone seems to have killed Master Cawdray.’

  ‘Indeed they do, Thomas. Fortunately, I don’t see anyone with any blood on them.’

  ‘Except you, Kit. You’re bleeding.’ Thomas pointed to Marlowe’s arm, where blood was seeping through the sleeve.

  ‘That’s my blood, Thomas, as you well know.’ Marlowe was speaking gently. The boy was trembling from head to foot and his teeth would soon be chattering. Killing someone will do that to a person.

  ‘I . . . I . . .’ With an effort he pulled himself together a little. ‘Before I took the girls’ parts, Kit, I used to be a tumbler. Did you know that?’

  ‘No, Thomas. I don’t think you ever told me that.’

  ‘I used to be the one they throw, you know, the little boy. I used to be dressed in all sorts of things, sometimes they put me in a ball and I would come out at the end. Other times, I was dressed like a cat, or a dog. It was fun, then.’ His voice caught and he coughed before he carried on. ‘Then, when I got a bit bigger, Ned – he ran a tumbling troupe before he took to plays – Ned asked me if I wanted an act of my own. So he taught me how to juggle. I’m a bit rusty now, but at one time I could keep eight things in the air. I used to juggle all sorts. Eggs. Clubs. Knives.’

  Marlowe looked at him shrewdly, but let him carry on at his own speed.

  ‘Then, I started practising in private, something of my own. Till I was good, you know. Then, I showed Ned my act and he let me do it for the audience. They liked it.’

  ‘What was the act, Thomas?’ Marlowe asked, although he already knew.

  ‘I was a knife thrower.’

  The poet put an arm around the boy’s shoulders and held him tight. ‘Why don’t we walk and talk? It isn’t very tidy in here, is it? What with the bodies and suchlike?’

  ‘No.’ Thomas let himself be guided to the head of the stairs. He turned to Marlowe. ‘I followed you, Kit. I didn’t want you getting yourself into trouble. Not over a play. It’s never worth it.’

  ‘We’ll agree to differ on that one, Thomas. But it was a kind thought.’

  ‘Then, I followed you here. I saw you fall over on the path and I could tell you were tired. I thought you might need a bit of help with Ned Alleyn. He’s a coward, but a tricky bastard.’

  ‘Well, no differing there.’ Marlowe smiled at the boy.

  ‘You seemed to be coping on your own, so I slipped into a dark corner on the landing and waited to see what would happen. I loved that girl’s voice you did, by the way. Can you teach me how to do it?’

  ‘Of course.’ Thomas was wittering to keep from the moment of truth, Marlowe knew that, and so let him witter on.

  ‘Then, Master Cawdray came up the stairs. He didn’t close the door quite to, so I pushed it a little, every now and then when you weren’t looking, until soon I was in the room almost, in the shadow. I . . . heard what he said about Ned.’ He turned his face to Marlowe, and it was wet with tears. ‘He shouldn’t have killed Ned Sledd, Kit. Ned was the nearest I ever had to a father. My own one . . . well, I only know I have one because I couldn’t have been born otherwise. Ned . . . Ned was . . .’ And his voice broke down altogether. He buried his head in Marlowe’s chest and cried as though his heart was breaking.

  Which it was.

  NINETEEN

  He hated to admit it. But he had to admit it. The ale they served in the Eagle and Child wasn’t up to Cambridge standards, but it wasn’t bad. He sat with his back to the oak panels watching the scholars who in turn watched the door for the proctors who prowled the town. For a while, Cambridge came back to him, like a ghost; the wind that whistled around Petty Cury; the grinning gargoyle outside the Devil; the Gothic splendour of King’s and the soaring notes in the chapel there – notes that had come from his own throat and his own heart. Should he, even now, go back?

  ‘Can I buy you a drink, Kit Marlowe?’ A voice with a Warwickshire accent brought him back to the here and now.

  ‘You can, William Shakespeare,’ he said, and waved to the serving girl with the blonde hair and the bouncing breasts. The serving girls of Oxford had more time for their customers with Ned Alleyn laid up in bed with severe injuries to almost everywhere.

  ‘No, just Will Shaxsper,’ Shaxsper said. ‘The glover from Stratford.’ He scraped back a stool and sat down. ‘I thought you’d be at Brasenose, watching your play.’

  Marlowe looked at him. ‘I thought you’d be at Brasenose watching my play.’

  ‘To be honest, Kit –’ Shaxsper waited as the foaming jugs were placed in front of them – ‘I’ve learned a lot over the last couple of weeks. Most of it from you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ve learned that the playwright’s life is not for me. When I was at home, surrounded by gloves and wool and bailiffs’ writs and the ghastly Hathaways—’

  ‘Hathaways?’

  ‘My in-laws.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘When all that was going on, the theatre was all I thought of. The wooden O, the strutting players. It was all so magic.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now, I’m not so sure. Now, Anne and the children seem . . . well . . .’

  ‘Family?’ Marlowe suggested.

  ‘Exactly. Let’s face it, Kit, I’m never going to be Christopher Marlowe, am I? Who’d pay to see a play written by somebody who had to change his name to be recognized? The nearest I’d get to a theatre is holding the horses of the gentlemen in the audience. No thank you.’ He shook his head and raised his tankard. ‘The gloving trade,’ was the toast he proposed.

  ‘The gloving trade.’ Marlowe raised his cup too, but with his left hand because of the pain still in his right.

  Shaxsper stood up and extended a hand. Marlo
we stood up too and gripped it, less heartily perhaps than he might have done a day or two ago. ‘Will we meet again, do you think?’ Shaxsper asked.

  ‘I’d put money on it.’ Marlowe smiled. ‘You’re not a bad writer, William Shakespeare.’ He looked into the eyes, diverging slightly as always. He looked at the receding hair, the heavy chin. ‘Perhaps one day you’ll be as good as me.’

  And they laughed together before Shaxsper strode to the door. ‘If you’re ever in Stratford on the Avon,’ he said, ‘and you’re in need of a new pair of gloves, you know where to find me.’ He winked solemnly. ‘I’m sure we can sort out some kind of discount.’ And he was gone, into the Oxford night.

  Marlowe sat down heavily and wished he hadn’t. Something sharp was sticking through the wooden partition at his back and he didn’t have to turn round to know what it was.

  ‘Lord Strange sends his regards,’ a familiar voice said. ‘So does Sir Francis Walsingham.’

  ‘Is that your dagger in the small of my back, Nicholas?’ Marlowe asked. ‘Or are you simply pleased to see me?’

  A smiling Nicholas Faunt coiled around the partition and took up Shaxsper’s stool, the dagger already sheathed and a goblet of wine on the table between them. ‘You’ll be pleased to know,’ he said, sipping slowly, ‘that Ferdinando is in the best of health. The Yorkshire air, he says. That and vomiting whatever poison he took out of his system. Even so, he says it will be a while before he ventures out with his troupe again. But what news of you? Anything eventful happen while I’ve been gone?’

  Marlowe looked into the cold, grey eyes of the projectioner, the man of a thousand secrets. He opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind. ‘No,’ he said, sampling his ale. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  ‘I hear Ned Sledd is dead.’

  ‘Tragic accident.’

  ‘And Alleyn. I met him once, you know. A bit of a poseur, or so he struck me at any rate. Badly beaten, or so I’m told.’

  ‘Yes, by almost everybody. Edward Alleyn always was an accident waiting to happen,’ Marlowe told him shortly.

  Faunt smiled his thin-lipped smile. ‘So. What now, Kit Marlowe? Cambridge? Canterbury? London? In the end –’ and he closed to his man – ‘all roads lead to Rome, don’t they? Do you intend to travel one of them?’