Queen's Progress Read online

  Instinctively, Marlowe knelt by the corpse, turning the face to the wall.

  ‘Don’t touch him!’ Blanche screamed, her face red and angry and her eyes wet with tears which might even have been sorrow.

  Marlowe stood up and grabbed her shoulders. ‘Madam!’ he said, then, softer, ‘Mistress Blanche, I have experience in these matters.’

  She blinked away her tears but didn’t attempt to back away. ‘What matters?’

  Marlowe looked down at the frail body, the legs twisted at an impossible angle, the neck clearly broken. ‘Sudden death,’ he said.

  Blanche Middleham straightened, in command once again. Around the body, in the still early light of the May morning, the household had collected. Mason, her steward, stood grimly at their head, frowning at what was left of the old master. There was Cook and her women, the maids of all work and the stable lads. They were still tumbling out of their stalls, all straw and horse liniment, buckling belts and tying points.

  ‘Mason,’ Blanche said, ‘get your people about their business. Fires. Breakfast.’

  ‘Very good, m’lady.’ Mason moved among the servants, nodding, murmuring, patting the shoulders of sobbing girls and even closing the gaping mouth of a harness boy, who had never seen a dead man before.

  In the end, there were only four of them at the foot of the keep.

  ‘Mistress Blanche,’ Marlowe said, ‘If you would care to …’ He nodded in the direction of the others.

  ‘I have no intention of leaving this spot, sir,’ she said. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  Marlowe looked across at Tom Sledd, who had now joined them, sleep in his eyes and cobweb in his hair, and motioned him to check the ramparts forty feet above. The stage manager, as used as any Londoner to picking his way through pig-shit, hopped over the wicket fence and made for the spiral steps that wound their way up the nearest drum tower. While Blanche looked on, Marlowe set to work. There was blood on the sloping stones of the buttress a little above his head, dark and congealed. The old man’s skull would have hit that on his way down from the battlements, and the impact had made him bounce away to where he lay now. Marlowe checked the man’s skin – cold as the grave. His hands and feet were stiffening already in the way that dead men’s extremities do. It would spread next to his arms and legs until he was as rigid as a board. Marlowe turned the head again, gently, hearing the telltale click of a vertebra displaced. The whole of the left side of the head and face was a mass of dark blood, congealing down the neck and spattering the dingy linen of the nightshirt. Marlowe took the stiff fingers in his hands and checked the nails. Filthy, certainly, but no obvious signs of a fight. The old man was covered in bruises, but how long they had darkened his skin was impossible to tell.

  Marlowe straightened, glancing up momentarily to see Tom Sledd briefly peering down from the embrasure above.

  ‘Well?’ Blanche spoke for the first time in minutes.

  ‘How well could your grandfather move about, Mistress Blanche?’ Marlowe asked. ‘I only saw him sitting down last night – and being helped out by your servants.’

  ‘If you mean could he ride to hounds or handle a lance at the tilt; no, of course not. But he walked well enough, given time. Just from room to room.’

  ‘Why would he be in the keep at night?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘My grandfather, Master Marlowe, was in his second childhood – you cannot have helped but notice that at dinner. Sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything. As for his nocturnal ramblings, you’ll have to ask Ledbetter.’

  ‘Ledbetter?’

  ‘His man.’

  ‘Wasn’t he here?’ Marlowe asked, ‘a moment ago?’

  Blanche frowned. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t believe he was.’

  Tom Sledd had rejoined the trio by this time, shaking his head in response to Marlowe’s raised eyebrow.

  ‘Can we take him now?’ Blanche asked. ‘He should be in his chapel, at rest. I have arrangements to make.’

  ‘Of course, madam,’ Marlowe half bowed. He noticed Mason hovering under the archway that led to the Hall and the man scurried over at Blanche’s clicked fingers. ‘I shall of course recommend that Her Majesty progress elsewhere.’ He held his breath – if his guess had been correct, Mistress Blanche Middleham would not take that suggestion well.

  ‘What?’ Blanche stood stock still as if she had been pole-axed, and Marlowe gave himself a metaphorical pat on the back.

  ‘We cannot intrude on your grief, madam,’ Marlowe said. ‘Her Majesty will understand.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Blanche all but screamed. ‘The shame of it. If you think that mad old bastard is going to … No, sir. I will not accept it.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘There are no buts, Master Marlowe,’ Blanche snapped. ‘The Queen’s visit will go ahead as planned. You and your man there will spend however long it takes to finalize the plans and I will bring in the carpenters and builders. Never let it be said that a Middleham’s misfortune stood in the way of progress.’

  And she was gone.

  ‘Anything, Tom?’ Marlowe asked, moving away from the scene of death as Mason’s people began lifting the body onto a bier. The old man’s arms trailed over the sides and his head lolled back.

  ‘If you mean, did anybody leave a shoe behind, or a pickadil with their name on it, no. But …’

  Marlowe smiled to himself. He had been right to refuse Cecil’s offer of ten stout lads. He had Tom Sledd.

  ‘It’s five feet from the rampart walk to the top of the embrasure; four more to the merlons. Grandpa there would have had to climb five feet to throw himself off. And as for the chance of slipping by accident … well, there is no chance.’

  ‘Suicide, then?’ Marlowe murmured, out of earshot of the others, ‘five foot climb or no, while the balance of his mind was disturbed.’ That wouldn’t have surprised him at all, considering the way the old man was being treated. At the very least, he was starving to death.

  ‘Or murder, Kit,’ Tom said as they wandered away. ‘Let’s not forget that possibility.’

  ‘Let’s not,’ Marlowe nodded. He held the man’s arm and pulled him closer. ‘Look around you, Thomas,’ he said, dropping his voice to a mutter. ‘Who’s missing?’

  Tom Sledd blinked. He didn’t actually know anybody at Farnham Hall, still less who might not be there. He grinned at Marlowe. This was one of those conundrums, those little philosophized puzzles that University Wits set each other. But Tom Sledd had never been to University. His alma mater were the smock alleys of London, the Bridewell and the Clink. His tutors had been the cutpurses and the Winchester geese who robbed the unsuspecting gulls who came to town, with eyes as bulging as their purses. His professor had been Ned Sledd, actor, manager; all things to all men, but a father to the little-boy-lost with the pretty face and the fluting voice. He gave it a moment’s further thought, then shook his head. ‘Don’t know. Give up.’

  ‘One Ledbetter,’ Marlowe said. ‘The old man’s man. And, that perfect host of the genial company, Mistress Blanche’s brother, James. You would think, with his grandfather dead, the walking pustule would come running, wouldn’t you? You find the man. I’ll take the pustule.’

  No one had seen Ned Ledbetter since he had put the old man to bed the previous night. Tom Sledd found him eventually, sitting on the little wooden jetty that jutted into the lake. It was evening now and the gnats of early summer danced their galliards in the warm breeze that rustled the willows trailing the lake’s edge.

  ‘Bad business, this.’ Tom Sledd sat down beside the man. Ned Ledbetter was forty, perhaps more, with patient eyes and short-cropped hair. He wore a fustian doublet with the Middleham eagle sewn to the left sleeve. His face was drawn and pale, exuding sorrow.

  ‘Who are you?’ he frowned.

  ‘Tom Sledd.’ He held out his hand. ‘On the Queen’s business.’

  ‘Oh, the Progress.’ Ledbetter’s grip was firm. ‘Fat chance of that now.’

  ‘Yes, it’s
a pity. How long have you been in the Middlehams’ service?’

  ‘Man and boy,’ Ledbetter said. ‘Not here, though. On their estates in the North.’

  ‘And the old man?’

  ‘Sir Walter? Master Edmund appointed me to watch him, back in the day.’

  ‘Edmund is …?’

  ‘Was,’ Ledbetter corrected him, throwing a desultory stone into the darkening water and watching the ripples spread. ‘Master Edmund went of the sweating sickness … oh, must be five years ago now. His wife too.’

  ‘So Mistress Blanche is mistress now?’ Sledd liked to leave no stone unturned. Attention to detail was his middle name, as everyone at the Rose knew only too well.

  Ledbetter shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Arthur is the master here, her brother.’

  ‘I thought the brother was James.’

  ‘Ah, that’s the other brother,’ Ledbetter explained. ‘No, Arthur is the eldest of the three. Master Arthur, Mistress Blanche and Master James. And some others, along the way, died. Arthur’s away in London. The Exchange or some such.’

  ‘What happened to Sir Walter?’ Tom Sledd had made enough small talk. Time to cut to the chase.

  Ledbetter shook his head. ‘Damned if I know,’ he murmured. ‘I settled him down as usual.’

  ‘Where are his chambers?’

  ‘East wing,’ Ledbetter said. ‘Next to the dairy.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  Ledbetter frowned. ‘Why all these questions?’ he asked.

  ‘I told you.’ Sledd found a stone to throw as well. It plopped into the water and the ripples spread, as ripples and rumours will. ‘I’m here on the Queen’s business. An unexplained death …’

  ‘Unexplained?’ the manservant repeated. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘How old was Sir Walter?’ Sledd asked.

  ‘Seventy-two. Three,’ Ledbetter told him. ‘I’m not exactly sure.’

  ‘Fall over much did he, the old man?’

  ‘He could be a bit unsteady,’ Ledbetter remembered.

  ‘Unsteady enough to climb five feet onto an embrasure and slip off, having managed a spiral staircase of forty-two risers?’ Tom Sledd had counted every one of those steps that morning and even his young legs were aching by the last. ‘You see what I mean about an unexplained death?’ he said.

  ‘What are you saying?’ Ledbetter frowned. He didn’t like the way this conversation was going.

  ‘What I’m saying doesn’t matter in the scheme of things,’ the stage manager said. ‘It’s what you say that counts. Where do you sleep?’

  ‘In the East Wing; I … look, I loved that old man. The last time I saw him, he was lying half asleep in his bed. When I next saw him …’

  ‘Yes?’

  Ledbetter turned to look out over the lake. ‘When I next saw him, he was dead. At the foot of the keep wall.’

  ‘And where have you been all day?’

  ‘Here,’ Ledbetter said simply. ‘I couldn’t stand it. Everybody fussing and clucking. He was an embarrassment to them all, that’s the way of it. Mistress Blanche would have had him chained to a wall if she’d had her way. Master James would have fed him to the pigs and not turned a hair. He liked to wander the keep, the old man. Took him a while to get there, but we’d help him up; he said it reminded him of the past and gave a promise of the days to come.’

  ‘What about Master Arthur?’

  ‘He’s the only one who gave the poor old bastard the time of day. I hope Mason’s sent for him; sent him word.’

  ‘Tell me, Master Ledbetter.’ Sledd looked sideways at the man. ‘Do you mean that? That Master James wouldn’t care if old Sir Walter lived or died?’

  ‘What’s all the fuss?’ James Middleham was teasing the goshawk in the mews as daylight faded. He threw a dead chick to the bird, rattling its chains on the cross-perch, watching its prey with deadly eyes.

  ‘I can see,’ murmured Marlowe, ‘that you’re mortified by your grandfather’s death.’

  James Middleham spun to face him, his eyebrow arched. ‘We Middlehams are not known for gushing sentiment,’ he said, ‘and certainly not in the presence of a writer of plays.’

  Marlowe looked a little surprised.

  ‘Oh, yes, Marlowe. I know who you are. You may well work for the Master of the Revels but you are a common scribbler at heart. I wonder our Puritan friends haven’t burned you as an idolater.’

  ‘Well,’ Marlowe smiled, ‘it’s early days. We didn’t see you this morning, with your grandfather, I mean.’

  ‘No, I’ve been hunting.’ James Middleham watched as the hawk tore red strips from the chick’s dangling body, tiny feathers twirling, circling and falling to the floor around its perch. ‘There are priorities.’ He caught Marlowe’s look of cold disapproval. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’ll be along later to the chapel, to pay my last respects. Now, if there’s nothing else …’

  There was nothing else. Marlowe could cheerfully have felled the repellent lad, but if he was looking for a murderer – which he was – he didn’t believe that James Middleham was his man. He seemed too indifferent to bother. The candles were guttering in the little chapel of Farnham Hall that night and it was Marlowe, not James, who had come to pay his last respects. That was not quite true. Marlowe had actually come to see what else old Walter Middleham could tell him about his last walk on the battlements.

  The body lay in a shroud, tied at the neck and ankles with a linen hood to cover the ghastly wound to the old man’s head. The women who do had stripped him and washed away the blood as best they could. Herbs were placed in a neat posy in the man’s folded hands and his jaw was bound up. For someone who had fallen headlong from a battlement, he looked remarkably peaceful, his eyes closed, his lips shut fast on his Peter’s penny. A candle burned at his head and his feet. To the casual observer, Walter Middleham was just an old man who was waiting for the grave after the midwives had finished with him. Such women had helped him into the world; now they had helped him out of it.

  Marlowe carefully checked the old man’s arms and legs. The body was limp now, the stiffness of death having left him, and in the candlelight the bruising of lividity looked black and evil, as if the old man’s frame were rotting already on its way to Hell. He could have been grabbed by the forearm and the ankle, swung across brawny shoulders and hurled to his death. Alternatively, he could have been hoisted onto the slippery wall of the embrasure and simply pushed. In any case, after his rough handling of the night before, when he was dragged from his platter, greasy and hungry, any bruising that was there would not help a jot.

  A faint footfall behind him made the man turn, his hand already on the dagger hilt in the small of his back.

  ‘Mistress Blanche.’ Marlowe relaxed and bowed.

  ‘You know, don’t you?’ she said. She was wearing her cloak fastened at the neck with a sprig of rosemary pinned to the front. She threw back her hood and looked at him.

  ‘What do I know?’ he asked her.

  She looked at him, the candlelight dancing in the darkness of his eyes. ‘That we Middlehams are of the old faith. And that Grandfather killed himself.’

  Marlowe had no need to look around the chapel for confirmation. There was an ivory crucifix on the far wall and incense smouldered in a niche in the corner, smothering the smell of the herbs on the old man’s breast and at his granddaughter’s throat. Saints, painted in ochre and sage, glowered from the walls. There was no Puritan whitewash here, no cold harshness of the Presbyterian, the Calvinist or the Lutheran. Even the middle way of Elizabeth’s Church of England had never got much further than the porch.

  ‘Do I know that?’ he asked.

  She closed to him. ‘Master Marlowe,’ she said, her face and voice softer than he had seen and heard so far. ‘We live in dangerous times. Should Lord Burghley hear of this—’

  ‘Then the Queen would not come calling,’ he finished the sentence for her.

  ‘And I care nothing for that,’ she said. ‘This mor
ning, I pretended that it would be a shameful thing; the reputation of the Middlehams and so on.’

  ‘Whereas …?’

  ‘Whereas,’ she sighed, annoyed that this man was making her spell it out, ‘in reality, we cannot betray our faith. We have too much to lose. The Almighty has fixed His canon against self-slaughter.’ She looked down at the sunken yellowness of the old man on his slab. ‘I don’t know if Grandfather’s soul has found its way to Heaven with that stigma – I pray that it has. But for those of us who are left, we must wander for ever in Purgatory, the darkest of the limbos. To admit the old man’s sin to the world would be too much. Master Marlowe …’ She moved closer so that their eyes shone in the same candle glow and her hand was resting on his chest, ‘… can this secret be ours, at least until the Queen has come and gone? Perhaps even for ever?’

  He looked at her, the earnest pleading in the eyes, the sorrow he had not seen before etched onto her face.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

  The next morning, Marlowe and Sledd went their separate ways. The playwright-projectioner had written a note for Robert Cecil and waxed it with the Queen’s cypher. He told Blanche Middleham that the stage manager had gone in search of timber for his staging of the masque and had watched him canter away along the ridge of land to the east, bound for Whitehall and the Queen’s imp.

  ‘You will be mourning your grandfather,’ Marlowe had said to her as he steadied the packhorse in the courtyard, ‘and arranging his funeral. In the meantime …’

  FOUR

  In the meantime, Marlowe trotted southeast in the sunshine, the dust of his horse’s hoofs trailing along behind him as he crossed the Devil’s Jumps and negotiated the tricky path across the Punchbowl. The way was strewn with gorse bushes, needle-sharp among the pines, and the packhorse stumbled more than once on the stones of the road. Other than the sound that the animals made, the Punchbowl lay bathed in silence, mute testimony to Satan’s handiwork that had gouged the land in some long-ago duel with God. It was noon before Marlowe rested, swinging down from the saddle and stretching his legs. In the distance, above the trees of Houndown Wood, he saw the gibbet creaking in the breeze and the crows circling it before swooping down to peck at the leather skin of the rotting wretch trapped in the iron frame. Another lost soul who had fallen foul of the Cecils.