Black Death Read online

  ‘Very well. It was unexpected, I can tell you that.’ He took off his eyeglasses and polished them furiously on a corner of the bedsheet. ‘I was expecting one of the metallic poisons, mercury, that kind of thing. Taken in large enough quantities, mercury can be quite dangerous you know. My scrying mirror has enough in it to kill the whole of the Court, had I a mind.’ He blinked up at Marlowe. Perhaps he had said enough. ‘However, it was quickly obvious that it was a vegetable poison we were looking for.’

  ‘You were sure it was poison, then? From the start?’

  Dee looked surprised. ‘Did you have anything else in mind?’

  Marlowe shrugged. ‘Suffocation?’ he suggested.

  ‘No. I was sure that was not the case. No discoloration. No sign of linen fragments or feather in the exudate from the nose and mouth. No blood, either. No, it was poison, I am certain.’

  ‘What?’ Marlowe had known a good many adroit poisoners in his time and none had used the same element. It made it at once easier and more difficult to solve. Poison was not a random thing, like a dagger in the back or a cosh across the head, nor yet a wire around the throat in a dark alley. Poison was planned. Poison was administered by stealth by someone who could be three counties away before death struck. Poisoners were cruel and cold; no one poisoned in the heat of anger.

  ‘Vegetable, of that I am certain. It could have been put in his food or drink.’

  ‘I understand he had been in his room, taking very little by way of sustenance for some time before he died.’

  ‘It wouldn’t need to be much, but I take your point.’ Dee sucked his teeth and thought carefully. ‘It would need, therefore, to be something that had little or no taste. Or something that is, in itself, food.’

  ‘For example?’ Marlowe ate to live and wasn’t really that interested in food for its own sake.

  ‘Mushrooms, for instance.’ Dee got up and left the room, coming back minutes later with a book under his arm. ‘See, here, the shaggy ink cap, as the country folk know it. It is edible, though I am not that fond of mushrooms myself, so cannot tell you how good it tastes. And here, on the next page, the death cap.’ He handed the book to Marlowe, who flicked from one page to another.

  ‘They look the same.’

  ‘Precisely. Are we sure that his landlady did not make a mistake?’

  Marlowe flopped back on his pillows. ‘She didn’t strike me as a woman who would cook anything special for her lodgers. They would have what she was having, and like it, I would guess.’

  ‘In that case, if it was mushroom, it would have to be done on purpose. This is the season for them, of course. Though …’ again, Dee paused in thought, ‘I wouldn’t have thought that Dowgate was awash with mushrooms, edible or otherwise. And you wouldn’t say this lady would waste her money on bringing up delicacies from the country?’

  Marlowe laughed, remembering the mean little house. ‘No. I would say definitely not. But, are you saying it is mushroom, then?’

  ‘Not for certain. I am simply giving an example of something which would not arouse Greene’s suspicion. It could be a soporific, given in enormous doses. But then, you have the problem of the victim becoming drowsy before the full dose was taken and then waking up. And, of course, valerian and other herbs with that effect would have to be taken by the bucketload to actually kill anyone. By the way, some of the stains on the shroud were from bone broth. No poison in it, but I was puzzled.’

  ‘Apparently, Dominus Greene was in the habit of sitting in his shroud while he worked. He was obviously a messy eater as well as more than usually eccentric.’ Marlowe was beginning to feel almost sorry for the man; he cut a sad and lonely figure.

  ‘Well, that explains that, at least. I’m sorry I can’t be more precise, Kit. But I think that the poor Dominus was poisoned by a friend’s hand. A stranger coming to his room with food would be unusual, surely.’

  ‘A friend.’ Marlowe swung his legs over the side of the bed and slid to the floor. ‘Thank you, Doctor. That may be the answer we have been looking for.’

  ‘Did Robert Greene have a large circle of friends?’ Dee asked. ‘From the little I have heard, he was rather a recluse, to say the least.’

  ‘He was,’ Marlowe said, slipping on his jerkin and lacing his Venetians. ‘He was a man with rather a lot of lukewarm enemies, myself included, and one very hot friend.’

  ‘Do you know who?’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ Marlowe said. ‘And I know just where to find him; Paternoster Row, if memory serves.’

  ‘He’s gone.’ The secretary had a mouthful of quill at the time and was staggering down some stairs under a pile of books.

  ‘Anywhere in particular?’ Marlowe asked. The house in Paternoster Row had four floors, linked by creaking stairs and the secretary was glad to reach the ground and put the books down. He took the quill out of his mouth and peered at Marlowe. ‘Who did you say you were?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Marlowe said. ‘I was enquiring after Dr Harvey.’

  The secretary produced a pair of spectacles from his gown and attached them to his rather beaky nose, making much play with winding the side pieces around his protuberant ears. He looked up at Marlowe, squinting. ‘You’ll forgive me,’ he said, ‘if I make the point that this conversation is going in circles.’

  Marlowe gripped the man by his narrow shoulders. ‘Let’s get it on a straighter path, then,’ he smiled, icily. ‘Where has Dr Harvey gone?’

  ‘I cannot give out information of that sort,’ the secretary shook himself free and wriggled his shoulders to settle his clothing.

  ‘Really?’ Marlowe frowned. ‘What a pity.’ It was the work of a second to flick the dagger from its sheath in the small of his back and the blade’s tip was tickling the secretary’s throat.

  ‘Cambridge,’ the man spluttered, afraid to move. ‘Pembroke Hall. He’s staying with the Master, Dr Andrewes.’

  ‘There, now,’ Marlowe beamed. ‘That wasn’t so hard, was it? When did he leave?’

  ‘Yesterday,’ the secretary said, through clenched teeth. He knew he had a tendency towards a rather wobbly Adam’s apple and he couldn’t be too careful.

  ‘By the North Road?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ In the nick of time, the secretary stopped an incipient nod.

  Marlowe stepped back and the dagger had vanished. He nodded at the man, whose nose was dribbling, and turned to the door, the one that led out to the weak sunshine of Paternoster Row.

  ‘Who shall I say was calling, sir?’ the secretary managed.

  ‘Machiavel,’ Marlowe said without turning. ‘But I’ll see Harvey before you do.’

  It had been nine long years since Kit Marlowe had seen the spires of Cambridge and there had been a lot of Granta water under Magdalen Bridge since then. The university term had just begun and the town, from the old castle to Trumpington, was crawling with scholars in their grey fustian, carrying weighty tomes of leather and vellum, their fingers blue already with cheap ink, their linen beginning to grow as grey as their gowns, their hair wispy, without their mothers’ care.

  For old times’ sake, the playwright sampled the ale at the Eagle and Child and looked across the narrow, cobbled lane to Benet College, the Corpus Christi which had been his home for nearly seven years. And what an apprenticeship that had been. He still felt the blood run cold in his veins at the memory of it, pushing against the bitter winds in the court; the winds that blew, men said, from Muscovy, without so much as a hillock to slow their passage or to warm their savage breath. He felt the whips of the proctors, their bone-ended thongs slicing through the skin of his back and shoulders. One man only had shown him kindness – Michael Johns, tutor in Hebrew. Where was he now? Where were any of them? They had all but vanished, the men who were boys when he was a boy. Matthew Parker would be in a rich incumbency somewhere, dining out on the fact that his grandfather had been the Archbishop of Canterbury. Henry Bromerick wouldn’t have gone into the Church, though old Dr Norgate, the time-honoured
Master of Corpus in Marlowe’s day, had assumed they all would. The law perhaps? Yes, he was certainly stupid enough. And Tom Colwell? Now, Tom Colwell, Marlowe knew about. He had gone of the sweating sickness not long after he left Cambridge. Already, the ranks of the golden lads were thinning.

  He remembered other things too. That slippery bastard Robert Greene toadying up to him, watching over his shoulder as Marlowe rewrote Ovid, trying out the mighty line that one day would make his name. Greene was a stranger to iambic pentameter, not to mention plot and character, and he knew that Marlowe could help him with that. What could be easier, Greene had thought, than to creep into Corpus Christi one dark night and steal the outpourings of a greater man?

  And who had helped him in this? Marlowe remembered him, too, only too well; Dr Gabriel Harvey, the dubious don who had hated Marlowe from the start. He had pretensions, did Gabriel Harvey. And he recognized a threat when he saw one. He had made it his personal business to do Marlowe down. The son of a cobbler had no place in Cambridge at all. Why not unleash Greene to carry out his mischief and use Harvey’s undoubted power if Marlowe complained?

  He watched them now, the scholars of this new generation. Had he ever been that young? Here he was, a Master of Arts of the greatest university in the world, and not yet thirty. Where had the years gone? He downed his ale and said a silent farewell to the Eagle and Child. Enough of yesterday. A man must live for today. And Pembroke Hall called.

  The College of Valence Mary was the smallest in Cambridge and the third oldest. It nestled, grey and medieval, along Trumpington Street, its Gothic gatehouse adorned with ogee arches and the arms of Pembroke, the scarlet martlets on the blue and silver field. There were proctors lurking there, as there were at the gate of every college, waiting to catch the tardy scholar, late for dinner or in his cups. Kit Marlowe was neither of these things; nor was he a scholar in the current sense. But the proctors stopped him anyway.

  ‘Can we help you, sir?’ one of them asked. He had the shaved head and thick neck of a fairground wrestler and it sounded as though the word ‘sir’ cost him dear.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Marlowe said, breezily.

  But the second man blocked his path. ‘What my brother-proctor means,’ he said softly, ‘is that you cannot merely walk into a college of the university, without so much as a by-your-leave.’ This man was half the size of his colleague, wizened and bent from years of peering round corners and listening at keyholes. His hands were white and gnarled, his legs bowed. He looked as if he couldn’t blow the froth off a frumenty yet, of the two, he was by far the more frightening. He had the look of a man who would stop at nothing when it came to doing what he thought was right. No matter how wrong that might be.

  ‘As a matter of fact, as an alumnus of this university, that is exactly what I can do.’

  ‘Oh?’ The first proctor loomed behind the second. ‘Which college?’

  ‘Corpus Christi. In Dr Norgate’s time.’

  The proctors exchanged glances. ‘Never heard of him,’ the smaller one said.

  ‘Your loss, pizzle,’ Marlowe shrugged. ‘Now, are you gentlemen going to let me pass or am I to tell Dr Andrewes the reason for my lateness?’

  The proctors shifted uneasily. ‘You’ve got an appointment?’ the shaven-headed one growled.

  ‘I have. As of …’ Marlowe waited for the college clock to strike, ‘Now. Good morning gentlemen,’ and he was already striding across the court.

  ‘Good God!’ Gabriel Harvey was looking out of Lancelot Andrewes’s leaded window onto the courtyard below. ‘I don’t believe it!’ His London fashions looked out of place in this scholar’s sanctum, and, truth be told, his ruff was killing him.

  ‘What is it, Gabriel?’ Andrewes had given up waiting for his steward. The buffoon never answered the Master’s bell; he would have to go. So the Master was reduced to pouring his own wine. He passed a cup to Harvey.

  ‘Either your Rhenish is particularly powerful stuff, or that is Christopher Marlowe.’

  ‘What is Christopher Marlowe?’ The Master was busy mopping up the spilled wine. It wasn’t as simple a job as it at first appeared.

  ‘There. Crossing the quad.’

  ‘I asked what, not where.’ The Master had a tendency to literalness which drove even those who liked him to distraction.

  Harvey turned to his friend, keeping his voice level. He was, after all, this man’s guest. It hurt him to even think it, but how could anyone not have heard of Christopher Marlowe, for good or ill? ‘He’s an ex-scholar of Corpus. Although for the life of me, I don’t know how he ever reached that status. I remember, when we were both here permanently, as it were, there was some kerfuffle over his Masters degree.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Andrewes dredged his memory. ‘Didn’t the Privy Council intervene on his behalf? He has some powerful friends, does young Marlowe.’

  ‘He’s a string-puller, that’s for sure. The question is, what’s he doing here?’

  There was a rap at the door, short, sharp, that brooked no waiting.

  ‘Attempting to gain entry, I shouldn’t be at all surprised.’ Andrewes bent his gentle, innocent gaze on Harvey, who managed to stay smiling, though only just. ‘Come in.’

  The door swung open, oiled by the sweat of generations of fearful scholars oozing past its hinges.

  ‘Dr Andrewes?’ Marlowe bowed; not the casual, rakish gush of London and the Court, but the formal bob of a Convictus Secundus to a Master that no man forgets.

  ‘I am Lancelot Andrewes,’ the Master agreed. ‘Who are you?’

  Marlowe took in the man. He was shorter than Harvey, older and with greying hair. His scholarship was renowned, his Puritanism legendary. The plain white collar and the black doublet spoke volumes. ‘Dr Harvey will have told you who I am,’ he said, ‘watching me cross the quad as he did. I apologize for barging in, relatively unannounced, Master, but it is Dr Harvey to whom I wish to speak.’

  No one was fazed by the immaculate Queen’s English. All three of them knew that Marlowe could have delivered it in Latin or Greek – even Hebrew, at a pinch. Andrewes looked the man up and down. ‘Do I take it, Master Marlowe,’ he said, ‘that as an ex-alumnus of Corpus, you did not take the cloth?’

  ‘There is cloth and cloth,’ Marlowe smiled. ‘These simple sleeves will answer my calling. No, I did not take the cloth in the sense that you mean.’

  Lancelot Andrewes was not a kind man at heart and many were the things which riled him; one of them stood before him now. He narrowed his eyes and put down his goblet. ‘You are a playwright, sir,’ he hissed. It was all coming back to him now. ‘A writer of fornication who fabricates for the delight of the unwashed. All Cambridge knows my views on the theatre.’

  Marlowe chuckled. ‘So does the Master of the Revels. And Her Majesty, I am told.’ He clicked his tongue and shook his head. ‘Enjoy your time here, Dr Andrewes. There’ll be no advancement for you beyond this.’

  ‘How dare you!’ Andrewes bellowed, his face and neck purple with rage. Marlowe looked on with interest – it was always a revelation to see a mild man come to the boil. He thought that the citizens of Pompeii had probably seen something not unlike this when the top blew off Vesuvius, all those years ago.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lancelot,’ Harvey intervened. ‘My visit here has caused us both embarrassment. On behalf of Master Marlowe, I apologize.’

  ‘I do my own apologizing, Doctor,’ Marlowe said, ‘as and when it becomes necessary.’

  ‘May we use your library, Lancelot?’ Harvey asked. ‘Master Marlowe clearly wants a word in private.’

  ‘Private or public,’ Marlowe said. ‘It makes no difference to me.’

  ‘Make it public, then,’ Andrewes said. ‘Let’s all hear what this popinjay has to say.’

  Harvey said nothing, so Marlowe crossed to the window and leaned forward, resting his elbows on one of the Master’s spartan chairs. ‘Robert Greene,’ he said.

  Andrewes looked blank.

  ‘W
hat of him?’ Harvey asked.

  Marlowe looked at the man. He was greyer than when they had last met, this arrogant Fellow of the university who had set himself up as a critic of critics. His face had a permanent sneer, born of showing contempt for the talents of men who were far greater than he was himself.

  ‘He is dead, Dr Harvey,’ Marlowe said simply, ‘as you well know.’

  ‘A tragedy.’ Harvey leaned against the oak panelling, folding his arms. ‘A pity he never wrote one. Or anything else of note, come to that.’

  Marlowe stood up. ‘He deserves better at your hands, Doctor,’ he said.

  Harvey roared with laughter. ‘You couldn’t stand the man, Marlowe. He used to try to steal your fire; fumbling efforts, if memory serves. There was a time when you’d have cut your throat.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t have poisoned him,’ Marlowe said softly.

  ‘Poison?’ Harvey blinked. ‘Greene died of a surfeit of pickled herring and …’ he chuckled at the cup in his hand, ‘Rhenish wine.’

  ‘And you know this because …?’

  ‘I went there!’ Harvey said. He saw Andrewes looking at him, but he had said too much to backtrack now. ‘To his foul lodgings in Dowgate. Spoke to that trollop of a landlady.’

  ‘Why?’ Marlowe asked.

  It was a while before Harvey answered. ‘I once had a certain respect for Dominus Greene,’ he said finally. ‘Scholar of St John’s, after all.’

  Andrewes nodded approvingly. It wasn’t Pembroke Hall, but it wasn’t at all bad.

  ‘When did you see him last?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘I saw his corpse, Marlowe, lying on his bed in a shroud.’

  ‘You just happened to be passing?’ The playwright would not let it go.

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘There is the Pestilence in Dowgate, Dr Harvey. Are you telling us that you would risk all that to visit the body of a man you had lost touch with?’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you anything,’ Harvey blurted out. ‘This is not the Inquisition and you are no Torquemada. Lancelot, this man has tried my patience long enough. Not content with reading the filth of Ovid when he was a scholar here, he has become Machiavel; dabbling in the occult, sleeping with the Devil himself, I shouldn’t wonder. And here he is, accusing me of … what, Marlowe? Murder?’