Silent Court Read online

  Greene hardly liked to argue with Harvey in full spate, but facts were, after all, facts. ‘He’s back.’

  ‘Damn!’ Harvey thumped the door frame of The Bell.

  ‘I thought you should know.’

  Harvey sneered at the informant. Ordinarily, he’d wipe things like Robert Greene off his patten soles, but in a way the St John’s graduate was a kindred spirit. They both hated Marlowe; that gave them a certain bond.

  ‘What will you do?’ Greene asked.

  ‘Do?’ Harvey pulled himself up to his full height. ‘Perhaps it’s best you don’t know.’ He half turned, then he half turned back. ‘Watch yourself, Dominus Greene,’ he said. ‘If the Devil is loose in Cambridge, then none of us is safe.’

  There were just shadows in the Court at Corpus Christi college that night. The last roisterers had crept home under the fitful moon and the proctors had missed them again. Under the eaves in the cramped attic rooms, the sizars snored softly in their hard, narrow beds, dreaming of the Aristotle, the Plato, the Cicero and the Horace crammed into their heads day after day. The frost drew its silent pictures on the inside of their grimy windows and brought a kind of beauty to the room which the meagre belongings of the sizars could never bring. A mouse crept out, without much hope of finding anything and then froze as its ears, triangulating madly for the smallest sound, heard the soft padding of Old Tiberius, the college cat, as he made his way up the staircase at the far corner where the path wound its way into the silent churchyard of St Bene’t’s.

  A hand reached out and stroked the animal, who arched his back and purred, his tail curling upwards and his chin lifting for a tickle. Kit Marlowe crouched alongside the cat. ‘Oh, Tiberius,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll wager you say that to all the returning graduates.’ He straightened and turned to the stairway, on up past his old room, the one he had shared with the lads from Canterbury, his home for three long years.

  On the landing he fancied he heard something, but it was probably just the creak of the stair, old dry wood shifting against the ancient stone. He felt for the panelled tracery of his door and pushed gently. He couldn’t see the two men waiting for him inside. One, a taut, lean scholar, stood with his back against the wall, a dagger glinting in his right hand. The other crouched on the opposite side of the door frame, a lead-weighted cosh in his fist. There were three men by that doorway and nobody seemed to be breathing.

  ‘Hello, Tom,’ said Marlowe. ‘Hello, Matt. Aren’t we all a little old for tricks like this?’

  The other two spun into his vision, laughing and roaring, hugging him and slapping his back. ‘Kit, you whoreson zed, it really is you!’ Matthew Parker was jumping around as if his pattens were on fire. Tom Colwell held Marlowe’s shoulders squarely and peered into his face in the gloom of the unlit room. He shook his head. ‘The years have not been kind,’ he said and Marlowe threw him backwards so that he bounced off the bed.

  ‘It’s not four months since I saw you two bastards last,’ he laughed. ‘Light a candle there, Matt. Let’s see if you’ve been able to grow a beard yet.’

  They all laughed, babbling about this and that as the room glowed with candles. What old Norgate was doing with the College, how furious the proctors Lomas and Darryl were now they had no powers to punish the boys, the girl that the old Puritan, Tom Colwell, had fallen for. It all came out in a rush and tumble, washed down by the wine Tom had been saving for this occasion. He knew it would happen, that Kit Marlowe would be back; he just hadn’t known when.

  ‘How’s home?’ Matthew Parker wanted to know. ‘Does Canterbury still stand?’

  ‘Home?’ Marlowe had almost forgotten the word, the smell of the tanneries where he was born, the beer of The Star where he had carried pots and held gentlemen’s horses, the sound of his father’s hammer tapping the studs into clients’ boots. But in the one letter he’d written to these lads in the past weeks, that was where he told them he was, resting before he came back to Cambridge. He was ever a dissembler; now he had to keep his skills up to the mark, even when the boys who were boys when he was a boy were sitting and drinking with him. He smiled. ‘Home is still there. Canterbury still stands.’

  ‘Kit.’ Colwell stood up, his goblet in his hand. ‘Here’s to us, eh? The Parker Scholars back together again.’ And he drained the cup. ‘The Parker Scholars!’ Parker and Marlowe chorused and did the same.

  ‘Is Cambridge ready for us, do you think?’ Parker laughed. And they drank into the night.

  There was a time when the trio in front of him would have reminded Marlowe of the three wise men, sitting on their camels in the star-led watches of the night. But that was then, when he was a carefree scholar who knew so little of the world. Now, it was different. Now, the three men in front of him that Friday morning looked more like a Court of the Inquisition.

  In the centre, looking greyer and more cobweb-wisped than he remembered him, sat Dr Robert Norgate, the Master of Corpus Christi. He was feeling his age now that November had come and he didn’t care to stray too far from the fire that crackled and spat in his study. To Norgate’s right sat Michael Johns, as good a man as ever put on a scholar’s cap and tried to din into dimmer heads the weight of his scholarship. He had never thought to see Marlowe again and was glad he had come back to the fold. There had been talk of strolling players and the London theatre. He was quietly glad that that had all been nonsense. On the Master’s left, as on the left hand of God, sat Gabriel Harvey, looking like a man staring at a dose of the plague.

  ‘I say no, Master,’ he snapped.

  Norgate turned to him, as well as his rheumatism would allow. ‘I know you do, Gabriel. Just as I know that Michael here has said yes.’ He couldn’t turn to Johns as well, so the teacher of Rhetoric had to make do with a cursory wave. ‘I –’ Norgate placed his fingers together near his pursed lips – ‘must perforce play Solomon. Again.’

  He looked at the scholar in front of him. He had heard that Marlowe was back. He had heard he had left Cambridge in a travelling player’s cart bound for London. He had heard that men called him Machiavel. He had heard he was not as other scholars. He had heard . . . but what had he not heard about Christopher Marlowe? The man had caused a riot, single-handed, in Cambridge in the summer that had just passed. He had brought the sweating sickness to the town with a single sneeze. No doubt he had kissed Christ in the garden at Gethsemane and given the apple to Eve in another garden long ago. Given time the rumours would grow to include his giving advice to God when he created the camelopard, surely a joke of creation of which only Marlowe was capable.

  But in front of him stood a graduate like any other. But not quite like any other. The man had his hair cropped short like a sizar. Norgate had heard he was a roisterer, swaggering about the town in a velvet doublet with a dagger at his back. Yet, here he was, in the drab fustian of Corpus Christi with the badge of the pelicans and lilies. Good God, he even had a book in his hand.

  ‘There have been unfortunate incidents,’ Norgate said, ‘Dominus Morley, concerning you.’

  Marlowe did not move. He had long ago given up reminding the old boy what his name really was.

  ‘You have enemies in this town, sir.’ Norgate was sure the scholar knew that already, but he would be failing in his duty should he not mention it.

  ‘What man does not, Master?’ Marlowe flashed a smile at Harvey.

  ‘If I remember right, you did not actually take your degree ceremony.’

  ‘I did not, Master. Events conspired.’

  ‘Yes.’ Norgate sighed. ‘Yes, they do tend to do that, don’t they?’ he tapped his finger ends together, sucking his teeth and wrestling with his decision. He felt Harvey tensing beside him, Johns calm and quiet at his other elbow. ‘Let me make sure I understand you, Dominus Marley,’ he went on. ‘You wish to be entered for your Master of Arts degree at Corpus Christi College in the University of Cambridge?’

  ‘I do, Master.’

  There was a silence which rang all over Corpus Chris
ti, all over Cambridge. Only the fire spat its contempt, desperately trying to influence Norgate at this crucial juncture in the old man’s life.

  ‘And if I allow you back, you will abide by the precepts of this College and the laws of Her Majesty and of God?’

  ‘I will, Master,’ Marlowe answered.

  Another eternity passed and a log shifted ominously in the grate.

  ‘Very well.’ Norgate cleared his throat. ‘,’ he said, in classical Greek. ‘Genestho, let it be so.’

  Both men alongside Norgate let out the breaths they had been holding for what seemed like hours. They stood up at the Master’s instigation, Johns turning to give Norgate a hand in rising from his chair. Harvey stood staring forward, wrong footed in not giving the old man a hand and in having Marlowe, reinstated, standing in front of him with an unreadable expression on his even features beneath his cropped hair. The three bowed to Marlowe, who bowed back. Johns’ bow was garnished with a smile, Norgate’s with a wince of pain. Harvey inclined his head so little it was touch and go whether it could be called a bow at all, but Marlowe was minded to be generous; his own bow was lavish and would have looked better with the velvet doublet and the colleyweston cloak, but the fustian had carried the day with Norgate, so it would serve.

  ‘Welcome back, Marley.’ Norgate extended a hand.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, and he took it. Would the man never remember his name from one sentence to the next?

  The Master shuffled out of his study with a furious Harvey in his wake. ‘Wait.’ The man suddenly spun round. ‘What’s that book, Marlowe?’ He pointed to the leather volume in the graduate’s hand.

  ‘This?’ Marlowe held it up. ‘A little something I picked up in Canterbury over the summer,’ he said. ‘Cassius Dio’s Historia Augusta. Quite a find, don’t you think? Especially in a backwater like Canterbury.’

  Harvey snorted and left the room.

  ‘What is it really?’ Johns asked.

  Marlowe smiled and passed the slim volume to him. Johns flipped the covers open and read aloud, ‘“What arms and shoulders did I touch and see, How apt her breasts were to be press’d by me! How smooth a belly under her waist saw I! How large a leg and what a lusty thigh! To leave the rest, all lik’d me passing well; I cling’d her naked body, down she fell; Judge you the rest; being tir’d she bade me kiss; Jove send me more such afternoons as this.”’ He looked at Marlowe. ‘Doesn’t sound much like Cassius Dio to me,’ he said.

  ‘Does it sound like Ovid?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘The works of Ovid are banned by this university. They corrupt young minds.’

  ‘Needs work, then?’ Marlowe winked at him.

  ‘It does.’ Johns smiled. ‘Welcome back, Kit.’

  ‘Trumpy Joe’ Fludd should have been at his lathe that Saturday morning. They’d elected him Constable again and again he had said yes, much to his Allys’s disgust, so here he was, standing like an ox in the furrow in the centre of the road that ran south to London. Behind him the smoky city of Cambridge was beginning to stir and the farmers from the neighbourhood were already on their way to market, driving their flocks of sheep and their gaggles of geese. One by one the drovers in their smocks nodded to Constable Fludd. He was a good man, they knew, straight and fair. He would count them into the town, make sure all was right at the colourful stalls, then count them back out again.

  But Fludd’s mind was not quite on his work this morning. He barely acknowledged the drovers, most of whom he’d known all his life; they had swum together in the dykes of the fens and had played football up and down the village streets. But now they were dour men driving their stock to market and he was the Constable, looking out for the children of the moon. He’d heard a whisper of their coming from old Ben the farrier who’d shod their horses at Stocking Pelham. A chapman from the south had seen their scarves fluttering along the Harcamulow Way. Yet another had heard their bells tinkling as they took the old high road to Barbraham. That was why they’d elected Fludd Constable again; he was damned good at his job and he cared.

  There had been no moon men in Cambridge since before the Queen came calling and that was when Joe Fludd was still in his hanging sleeves, stumbling his way around his father’s furniture. But he knew their reputation and he knew the law. He heard them before he saw them in the mists of the cold November morning, a tinkling of bells and a rattle of drums on the road, the singing, chanting almost, rumbling deep and low in an alien tongue he couldn’t understand. There was the groaning of wagon axles and now and then the shrill of a pipe or a girl’s voice, he couldn’t tell which, would rise sweetly above the rumble, cutting through the muffling mist. The two men with him tightened their grip on their staves as the bobbing heads came in to view, some on foot, some astride piebald ponies.

  ‘Four children on one horse,’ Nathaniel Hawkins muttered. ‘Aye, that’s them all right. Children of the moon.’ He looked at Jabez Hazel, his opposite number. ‘They say they can look into a man’s soul. Best not stare into their eyes, Jabez.’

  ‘No more will I,’ Hazel mumbled back. ‘What’ll we do, Joe?’

  Fludd flashed furious glances at them both. ‘We’ll remember we are the Cambridge Watch, gentlemen,’ he told them. ‘And while we’re not looking into their eyes, we’ll keep a very close watch on our purses, eh?’ And he smiled, raising a hand to halt the column on the road.

  The Constable counted sixteen, but half of these were children, all of them with tattered clothes and patches, streaming with bright ribbons of taffeta and silk. They wore broad-brimmed hats heavy with feathers stolen from countless farmyards to the south – goose quills and pheasant’s plumes nodded there with the downy fluff of chickens and ducks. The leading traveller hauled on his rein and signalled the column to halt. He barked something incomprehensible to the man at his elbow and slid out of the saddle. At that signal all the riders dismounted and the children scuttled forward to scamper in their rags around Jabez Hazel, laughing and holding out their grimy hands.

  ‘I am Constable Fludd of the Cambridge Watch,’ Fludd told the men. ‘Who are you and what brings you to this town?’

  ‘We are the travelling people.’ The leader doffed his hat, bowing low. ‘The offspring of Ptolemy, lately come from the lands of the East.’

  ‘Egyptians!’ Hawkins spat, narrowly missing a child who poked his tongue out at him.

  ‘What is your name?’ Fludd asked the leader.

  ‘Men call me Hern,’ he answered, replacing his hat.

  ‘The hunter?’ Fludd frowned.

  ‘I hunt if I must,’ Hern told him. ‘But not with gentry riding to hounds with their hawks and boarspears. I hunt in the courts and alleyways.’

  ‘You are counterfeiters –’ Fludd stood his ground – ‘using great subtle and crafty means to deceive people.’

  Hern threw his head back and roared with laughter. ‘You know your law, Master Constable,’ he said. ‘But so do I. Can you do no better than quote the Act of the late King Henry, God rest his soul? Tut, tut, sir, you are behind the times. Your charge is to drive us out of your town, take us roped and tarred to the nearest ship and if we go not, you are to hang us, sir.’

  Fludd blinked and licked his lips. He hadn’t expected this. This Egyptian, with his hard, flinty eyes, his twisted mouth and curious patterns of speech knew the law all right and was inviting Fludd to move against him. Behind him the children were pulling his men’s breeches and tugging at their doublet points. ‘Stand fast!’ he bellowed at the constables, knowing how rattled they were.

  As Fludd stood there, undecided as to what to do, Hern stepped forward and with the speed and smoothness of a snake, took Fludd’s right hand in his. ‘You are a carpenter,’ he said. ‘And you have two children; a daughter and a son. The girl is well grown and a joy to you. The boy is but a baby yet; what is he now, two months, three?’

  Fludd’s mouth popped open.

  ‘It’s a trick, Joe,’ Hawkins growled.

  ‘Our Lord was
a carpenter,’ Hern said, still looking Fludd in the face, as if into his soul.

  ‘Egyptians aren’t Christians!’ Hazel blurted out. ‘You worship the Devil.’

  Hern’s eyes flashed to him. ‘You have two children, Master Fludd,’ he said softly. ‘A boy and girl. Beware your wife is not brought to childbed again. She will not survive it.’

  Fludd felt the muscles in his jaw flexing, his heart pounding, but Hawkins wasn’t going to let any of it go. ‘How many children have I got, Egyptian?’ he asked.

  Hern let Fludd’s hand go and turned to his horse. He patted the animal’s soft muzzle and whispered in its ear. The horse snorted, shaking its ears free and began pawing the hard, rutted ground. Once, twice, three times the hoof clashed on the furrow.

  ‘Your wife has had three children,’ Hern said, then he turned to Hawkins, ‘and not one of them is yours.’

  The travellers roared with laughter and Hawkins yelled at the children who scampered away.

  ‘It is market day, Master Constable,’ Hern said. ‘All we ask is that you let us set up a stall in your town square that we may sell our wares.’ He clicked his fingers and the scampering children stood stock still, their faces solemn, their eyes staring. ‘Then I may feed my children.’

  Fludd stood blinking again, trying to take in the bizarre and motley crew in front of him, the painted wagons and the swarthy men, the dappled horses and the fluttering flags. And above all, the suddenly silent children, like sentinels in the morning.

  ‘One day,’ he said, as though waking from a spell. ‘One stall. My men and I will be watching. And if you’re not gone by cock-shut time, Hern the Egyptian, I’ll hang you myself, while your children look on.’