Secret World Read online

  Alice barely heard his pattens on the stairs but suddenly he was alongside her, kneeling down, lifting up her chin. ‘Did Mistress Benchkyne live in this one room?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she replied with a sniff. ‘It has been so always.’

  ‘Always?’ Marlowe frowned. His memory was longer than the girl’s.

  ‘For all the time I’ve been here,’ she told him. ‘Three years or more.’

  Marlowe patted her hand and went back into her mistress’s room. He had been in this position before, alone with the dead, and he felt the hair on the back of his neck crawl. It was as if Jane Benchkyne would sit up in a moment and scream at him, demand to know what he was doing in her house, so near the bed. He hated himself for what he did next, but he had to. ‘Cruelly violated’ – that was the phrase the old man had used. Was that it? Was that why Jane Benchkyne had died? He lifted her shift, sprayed with her blood and looked at her nakedness. There was no blood here, no bruising. Jane Benchkyne had never been known to go with a man. There would be signs if she had gone with one now, viciously, against her will.

  Then, something else caught his eye. Under the window, there was a linen chest, oak and deeply carved. Its lid had been forced upwards and its lock had been smashed. There were one or two blankets still inside, but pulled aside as though … He knelt down and tapped the chest’s base on the inside. It sounded hollow. He tapped each corner, one by one, shifting the woollens aside. On the last corner, there was a loud click and the floor of the chest jerked upwards, as far as the weight of the few thin blankets would allow, to reveal a space beneath it. It wasn’t large, perhaps three inches deep but it covered the whole length and width of the chest. There was nothing here nor any sign that anything had ever been here.

  ‘Alice,’ Marlowe called. ‘Will you come here?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Please,’ he added, sensing the girl’s fear. ‘There is nothing in here to frighten you. The dead are dead and don’t bother the living. I just want to ask you something.’

  She peered around the door, as if expecting to see her mistress sitting up in bed and waiting for her breakfast. Praying she would see that, perhaps. But it was not to be, for all that hard-eyed constable had said when he arrived at the house. She couldn’t see the dead woman’s ghost either, so perhaps this gentleman was right. The dead couldn’t hurt her.

  ‘Did you know about this?’ he asked her. ‘This chest has a false bottom. Did you know about it?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Alice, frowning.

  ‘She kept her bed linen here?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I washed and pressed them and put them in there. With a little crushed lavender.’

  Marlowe could smell it. He got up and took the girl back out into the passage. ‘Tell me, Alice, was the mistress expecting company last night? A visitor?’

  ‘No, sir. A solitary one, was the mistress. I never knowed anybody come here.’

  ‘All right, Alice,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Please, sir, I won’t get into trouble, will I?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ he assured her.

  She looked up into the gentle, handsome face, the dark, kind eyes, still the molasses brown of his babyhood, but molasses laced with bitter experience now. ‘Who are you, sir?’

  ‘He’s just passing through.’ John Marley was suddenly standing there, blotting out the light in the passageway. ‘On his way north.’

  Marlowe ignored him and brushed past his father into the sunlight. ‘Tom,’ he called his little brother over. ‘Can you ride?’

  ‘Tolerably well,’ the boy said, glad to be doing something at last. He had listened to his father making small talk to a stranger for the last ten minutes; ten minutes he would never get back.

  ‘Get over to Latimer’s stables. Saddle my black and take yourself on a ride. Then go to Haw and give my compliments to Sir Roger. Tell him we have a murderer on the loose.’

  The trout were leaping from the lake at Haw that evening, catching the gnats that teemed there. A copper sunset followed a golden day and the men of Kent had almost forgotten what rain felt like. Kit Marlowe was walking with Roger Manwood, the magistrate, the scourge of the night prowler, in the knot garden at Haw. He had to walk a little slower these days because the old man’s gout was getting to him and his pace was not what it once was.

  Marlowe owed a lot to this man. Crusty though his exterior undoubtedly was, Roger Manwood had a heart of gold. He had put Marlowe forward for the King’s School when the lad had been a pot boy at the Star and the most he could hope to inherit was John Marley’s workshop. Made a fine shoe did John Marley, but Manwood knew there was something entirely different about his son, something special that would be wasted at the awl. And the King’s School had led on to Corpus Christi and Corpus Christi to … what?

  ‘Plays, Christopher,’ Manwood queried with a frown. ‘Plays?’

  Marlowe laughed. ‘And you had me down for the Church, Sir Roger.’

  Manwood laughed in turn. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Never that. Will it catch on, d’you think, the theatre?’ Travelling players came to Canterbury now and again but Roger Manwood didn’t go. He was old enough to remember the Mystery Plays with their Angels and their Devils and their Mouths of Hell. He hadn’t cared for them either.

  ‘I think it might, yes,’ Marlowe said. ‘There’s plenty of money to be made in London. Playgoers can’t get enough of the things.’

  ‘But is it literature, Christopher?’ the old man wanted to know. ‘Is it art?’

  ‘It’s clever,’ Marlowe said. ‘Well, some of it.’

  ‘I really must get up to London more. It’s been a while.’

  ‘I hate to raise it again,’ Marlowe said as they wove their way between Manwood’s apple trees, ‘but … Jane Benchkyne.’

  ‘Yes,’ Manwood acknowledged with a sigh. ‘Tragic. Tragic.’ It had been some hours since the younger Marley boy had galloped, lathered, into his courtyard. There had been a time when the old man would have got Nicholson to saddle his mare and he’d have galloped back with the boy, racing him along the Stour and placing a wager he would reach the bastions of the West Gate before him. But that was then. Today, Nicholson had rigged up his carriage and pair and while Cook looked after Tom Marley in the kitchen, Manwood had slung on his chain of office and found his staff from somewhere. Everything took so much longer these days.

  He had met Christopher in Water Lane and had looked at the battered body on the bed. Tomorrow he would be back in the city again, empanelling the sixteen men and true who had been the dead woman’s friends and neighbours. Not that she had many of those.

  ‘She was as mad as a tree, of course,’ he said to Marlowe. ‘You knew that?’

  Marlowe stopped. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I didn’t.’ He had not gone back home since meeting with Manwood as the magistrate had invited him back to Haw, so he’d had no chance to talk to his family about her.

  ‘Yes. She was up before me last year. Witchcraft.’

  ‘Witchcraft?’

  ‘Don’t look so horrified, dear boy. Kent is crawling with them. Oh, not as bad as Essex, of course, but then, nothing’s as bad as Essex.’

  Marlowe had read those reports too and had seen the engravings of Joan Prentice suckling her familiars Jack and Jill. They had hanged a number of women from the same beam to save time and to save the town the extra expense. ‘I assume there were no grounds,’ he said, ‘in Jane Benchkyne’s case.’

  ‘Because I didn’t hang her, you mean? Well, between you and me …’ Manwood suddenly became confidential. This was, after all, Lord Burleigh’s England – walls (and even trout lakes) had ears and anybody could be lurking behind the trunks of apple trees. ‘There was talk of familiars. A cat that talked, that sort of thing.’

  ‘A cat that talked?’ Marlowe had stopped again.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, Christopher. I had this from a particularly unreliable witness. Do you remember old Petty, kept the forge along
St Dunstan’s Street?’

  Marlowe did.

  ‘Well, he’s dead now, of course, but he hadn’t passed a sober hour for the last twenty years of his life. The talking cat came from him. Swore on holy writ that he’d seen it with his own eyes. Jane Benchkyne used to talk to the damned thing all the time.’

  ‘I used to talk to the Corpus Christi cat,’ Marlowe said. ‘Old Tiberius.’

  ‘Ah, but did he answer back?’

  ‘No, indeed,’ Marlowe chuckled. ‘We had never been formally introduced and he was known as a bit of a stickler for etiquette.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t trust a word from old Petty.’ Manwood was hobbling on, fighting his gout every step of the way. ‘But I spoke at length with Jane. And Alice, her maidservant. Oh, just a chat, you understand. No thumbscrews or anything. Jane had gone rather peculiar – well, some women do, don’t they, at a certain age? She’d never been exactly the life and soul of Canterbury, but she sold many of her movables and lived in one room. Alice cooked and cleaned for her and she never went out. Of course, it’s the mother I blame.’

  ‘Katherine?’

  ‘Yes, well you knew her, Christopher. Lovable old besom but quite demanding, I would think. When did you see Jane last – alive, I mean?’

  ‘That would be four years ago, when her mother died. I signed the old girl’s will.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I remember. How did she seem to you then; Jane, I mean?’

  ‘Upset, naturally. She had waited on her mother hand and foot.’

  ‘Exactly. All her life. If I remember aright, the Benchkynes had no maidservant then. So Jane was doing it all. No time for nature’s natural course, you see.’ He leaned closer to Marlowe. ‘No man in her life. It sends them funny in the end.’

  ‘How, funny?’ Marlowe wanted to know.

  ‘Well, she denied the cat talked to her, but then I expected that. She laughed a lot, a sort of silly giggle about some secret joke I couldn’t understand. She kept saying – and this was odd – she kept saying she had the whole world in her hand.’

  ‘What did you take that to mean?’ Marlowe asked. ‘I know some people say witches can create storms and other disasters but … would she say such a thing if she was denying being a witch?’

  ‘Hardly, I should have thought.’ Manwood shrugged. ‘So I’m damned if I know what that was all about. As I told you, mad as a tree.’

  ‘Who brought the witchcraft charges?’ the playwright asked.

  ‘Gammer Wilson; lived over at the Greyfriars. She’s met her Maker too, of course, since then and I hope He had a stern word with her, the murderous old hag. Unless of course, she’s roasting slowly as the guest of the Dark One.’

  The pair walked on towards the house, the purple clouds merging now to blot out the dying sun that gilded the timbers and gargoyles of Haw.

  ‘You’ll stay the night, Christopher?’ the old man asked. ‘I want to know more about this new life of yours, those London streets.’

  Marlowe patted the old man’s arm. ‘They’re not made of gold, Sir Roger,’ he said, ‘as we both know. Thank you, but I must be getting back. Mother frets.’

  ‘Yes,’ Manwood said with a sigh. ‘Mothers will. I had one once, but all that was a long time ago.’

  Half of Canterbury had turned out the next day, to the extent that most people expected the Archbishop himself to be there. Sir Roger Manwood, Magistrate of Her Majesty’s County of Kent, sat in his scarlet robes of office with the roses and portcullises glittering around his shoulders. He wore his best starched ruff and his black cap of estate had been specially pressed for the occasion.

  Earlier that morning, Marlowe had quizzed his family on what they knew of the late Jane Benchkyne and they essentially told the same story that Manwood had. A sad, lonely woman, who had been driven by demons, real or imagined, to hide from the world in her one little room.

  John Marley was at the West Gate bright and early, in his capacity of Constable, staff of office in his fist and an ornate cudgel at his hip, the arms of the city bright on his cap. He stood, flanked by his two under-constables, as the great, the good and the just plain nosy of Canterbury wound their way through the little door in the tower of the West Gate. It was a Thursday and the axes and hammers of the workmen demolishing the old bridge rang out over the sun-kissed city, echoing and re-echoing around the cloisters, the closes and the ancient stones.

  ‘Thirteen hundred and nine,’ an old man had said to Marlowe as he reached the West Gate. ‘That’s when that bridge was put up. Wonder how long the new one will last, eh? Five minutes?’

  Marlowe stood at the back, partly because there were no seats in the cramped solar and partly because he wanted to see who was there. The air was already thick with the smell of the gathered humanity, the stones of the tower having baked in the sun for weeks, drying the air and driving out any freshness there might once have been. Sweat was already trickling down many a forehead and those who had room to move their arms were fanning themselves with whatever came to hand.

  Sir Roger Manwood called the crowd to order, swore in his jurymen and the inquest began. Whoever had smashed the skull of Jane Benchkyne had got in to her house, killed her, stolen whatever he could find and had gone without a trace being left behind. No one had heard the dead woman’s screams. No one had seen a shadowy figure near the house. The killer was like a will o’ the wisp and Canterbury had plenty of those, hovering over the riverbanks and fields to the south and mingling with the corpse lights in the churchyards.

  Alice was there, as First Finder and she sat on the chair in the middle of the hall, looking small and afraid. Roger Manwood did his best to soothe her, talking quietly, nodding, smiling, trying to put the terrified girl at her ease. But she knew, as well as anyone there, that his gaze was the one that sent men to the gallows, as surely as the basilisk turned them to stone. Tearfully, wringing her hands in her apron and darting furtive glances at the jurymen, all of whom she knew by name, she told her story of how she had found her mistress’s body early the day before and how the kind Master Marley, the son of the constable, had helped her. Master Marley senior, standing beside Manwood on the dais, was less than impressed.

  When he had finished his questions, the magistrate leaned back in his carved chair and said, in a loud voice, ‘Cui bono?’

  Marlowe knew what that meant. It had been the common cry of the great lawyer Cicero in the days of ancient Rome. But this was Canterbury now, and beyond the handful of lawyers and the churchmen, Latin was beginning to fade from the land.

  ‘Who benefits?’ Manwood translated for the benefit of the jury and the mob. ‘Is there a will?’

  ‘There is, my lord.’ John Marley pulled a folded parchment from his tunic and handed it to the magistrate.

  Marlowe couldn’t believe it. There had been no such document in the dead woman’s room in Water Lane when he got there; nor anywhere in the house, as far as he knew. His father must have found it and helped himself before he arrived. Manwood broke the wax seal from its ribbon and read the contents. Then he cleared his throat and read aloud, ‘I, Jane Benchkyne, of the Parish of St Andrew in the city of Canterbury, being of sound mind …’ Here he paused, and then continued, ‘… and body do hereby leave all my worldly goods including my house in Water Lane, and the movables thereof, with the whole world to Alice Snow, my maidservant.’

  Murmurs ran like the ripples of a rising tide around the courtroom. John Marley slammed the butt of his staff to the floor to restore silence.

  ‘This is most irregular,’ a voice sailed clear and true over the heads of the court and all eyes turned to the speaker.

  ‘What is irregular, Master Marley?’ John Marley asked, scowling at his upstart son.

  ‘The reading of private correspondence in a public place such as this,’ he said, unperturbed.

  ‘Enough, sir!’ Manwood roared. ‘I will decide what is regular and irregular in my own courtroom. Constable –’ he half-turned to Marley senior – ‘take t
his woman and place her under lock and key here in the West Gate. She is to have no visitors until such time as I can examine her further.’

  The under-constable lifted Alice bodily out of her chair. The look on her face said it all. She didn’t know what was happening to her and looked around for help. There was none.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Manwood said as he turned to the jury. ‘The appearance of this document changes everything. There is clear implication here of the potential guilt of this woman. We’ll sort out the Deodand later. In the meantime, Master Foreman, I invite you to deliver your verdict.’

  The foreman looked as nonplussed as Alice who had vanished with the under-constable through a side door. He struggled to his feet, looking backwards and forwards between the magistrate and his fellow jurors. ‘Er … we, the jury, find that Jane Benchkyne of the parish of St Andrew in the city of Canterbury … met her death through the malice aforethought of Alice Snow, of the same parish.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Marlowe shouted and moved forward as though to address the court.

  ‘Got all that?’ Manwood ignored him, muttering to the clerk, scribbling furiously away at his elbow. The man nodded, crossing t’s and dotting i’s with a scratchy pen and his tongue tucked firmly into the corner of his mouth to help him concentrate.

  ‘The court is adjourned, Master Constable,’ the magistrate said and Marley bellowed out the announcement, slamming his staff to the ground again.