Secret World Read online

  Keeping low to the ground, he ran across the open space to the wall of St Mary Northgate and waited again, listening hard. Still nothing. The well was over in the corner of the little overgrown plot. Not many graves had markers here. The priest of St Mary was known to be a kind man, gentle and sympathetic to the mothers of dead babies, of the friends of suicides and others not welcomed in other churches. So Marlowe knew, as he sprinted across to the well on soundless feet, that he trod on the unshriven if not the unloved.

  The well was a perfect hiding place, that much was clear. The grass around it grew rank and high, new shoots of bindweed crawling up the rope blending with the old, dead tendrils of last year. Marlowe counted down from the edge the requisite number of stones and then carefully felt around the groove that time had worn in the pediment of the well. Dry mortar fell with a tiny splash into the distant water and spiders ran from his probing hand. Snail shells, grown delicate in the safety of the stones, crushed as he went by. Then, in a deeper cavity, cleaner and smoother than the rest, his fingers brushed something that was neither live nor crumbling. Taking a risk, he leaned over and used both hands to extricate it. Now was not the time for fumbling and losing Alice’s world in the water below.

  As soon as he had it in his hand, he dropped below the level of the crumbling well wall and held up his new-found treasure to the feeble light of the moon. What he held was a small circle, etched with some design he couldn’t see in the semi-dark. Feeling with his fingertips, he could detect a stone of some kind, set off-centre. It was sharp; a cut gem, he guessed. It didn’t seem like something to die for but he couldn’t judge by moonlight. Slipping it into his doublet, he checked carefully left and right and slid out of the churchyard again, leaving the dead to their thoughts of mortality.

  Joining the main roads again, he mended his pace and strode out like any Jack the lad around town. With his Colleyweston cloak and rich doublet, he looked every inch the rich reveller, out looking for what fun was to be had in Canterbury on a balmy June night. Women melted in and out of the shadows as he passed and although he gave each one a dazzling smile, he had no intention of carrying verisimilitude to the extent of actually hiring one. He wanted to get back to the light of his room to examine his prize. More than that, he wanted daylight and a strong lens – this was no ordinary gewgaw to have caused such mayhem. What had Alice said? ‘It was worth more than all the riches in the world yet known.’ He caught the swing of a skirt ahead of him and took a step out into the roadway. He did not mean to even pass the time of night with the drab who was in his path but as he passed her, he started.

  ‘Annie?’

  The woman stopped in her tracks. ‘Kit,’ she muttered. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I?’ He was amazed at her effrontery, he who had known her all his life and never yet known her obey any kind of social more. ‘I’m out for a walk. A gentleman may do that, you know, even here in Canterbury. But you? What are you doing here?’

  She sighed and stuck out one hip, her hand upon it in the old, truculent, childhood way. ‘I don’t have to tell you, Kit. You are not my master, not you or any man.’

  ‘Father might have something to say,’ her brother observed, without inflection.

  ‘I dare say he might. But what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Will it, Kit? And as the two of you don’t appear to be on speaking terms any longer … well –’ she smiled at him blithely – ‘I will be on my way.’ She took a step forward, but he had her elbow in a vice-like grip before she could move so much as an ell.

  ‘Where are you going, Anne?’ he asked, the politeness just a veneer now.

  ‘I’ll tell you where I am not going, Kit,’ she said, her chin thrust pugnaciously forward. ‘I am not going to my grave, like Joan. Little more than a child herself and dead of birthing another. As I said to you, no man is my master.’

  Marlowe picked up a pinch of her skirt between finger and thumb and rubbed it thoughtfully. ‘Silk,’ he said. ‘Are you still telling me that no man is in this story? I have never known you wear silk before, no matter what the occasion.’

  She pulled herself loose and stepped back from him, shaking her arm and he let her go. ‘Kit,’ she said, crooning, wheedling, ‘if I want to meet a man, let us say in the old churchyard of St Mary Northgate for … some reason, then why should I not?’

  ‘It’s a nice enough night for spooning,’ the playwright agreed. ‘But why there?’

  ‘It’s quiet,’ she said. ‘It was his idea, if I am honest with you, Kit. I prefer somewhere a little more comfortable, given the choice. He’s a stranger here in town and is in a lodging house.’

  Her brother raised an eyebrow.

  ‘No privacy in a lodging house. Although he was telling me this afternoon …’

  ‘Where was this?’ Marlowe didn’t see his family much, but brotherly affection could still raise its head.

  ‘Er … nowhere. I just … bumped into him and we seemed to have much in common. He was telling me, anyway, that his bedfellow is an uncouth lout who brings drabs back to the room most nights and …’ In the faint light of the street, Marlowe could tell she blushed.

  ‘Please, Annie,’ he said, holding up a hand. ‘Spare us both the detail. So, this man … Do we have a name, by the way?’

  ‘Robin.’

  ‘This Robin, he has decided to take his drab to a nice flat slab in St Mary’s churchyard.’ This was harsher than even Marlowe had intended but the words had flown unbidden into the warm June night.

  She stepped back another step as if he had spat at her. Then, she flew at him, slapping and scratching like a mad thing. ‘How dare you, Kit Marlowe?’ she hissed. ‘How dare you? I am not a drab. I am no man’s whore. What I do and where I do it and who I do it with is my business.’ Finally, her anger spent, she dropped her arms and stood there, her face, tear-streaked, turned up to his.

  ‘Oh, Annie, Annie, my little Nan,’ Marlowe murmured and drew her into his arms. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean what I said.’ This was a great admission for a man whose every word was gold. ‘Go to your Robin and do what you must.’ He could feel the loneliness and despair coming off her in waves. Living with John Marley was not something he could manage; why should he assume it was easy for her?

  ‘I don’t want to, now,’ she muttered into his shoulder and he knew, as a brother will, that she was wiping her nose on his brocade.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ he said. ‘A good cry and a fight with your brother always did put fire in your belly, Annie. Go now and use that fire on your Robin.’ He pushed her gently away from him and wiped her eyes with the corner of his cloak. ‘I hope he lives to tell the tale. Now, run, or you’ll be late.’

  ‘Kit …?’

  ‘Yes?’ He could see the old fire in her eye and wasn’t sure what was coming next.

  ‘I’m not a drab, am I?’

  ‘No, my love,’ he said, leaning in to kiss the tip of her nose. ‘Not a drab.’ And he pushed her gently in the direction of St Mary Northgate. ‘Not a drab.’

  And, turning once to wave, she walked fast, off to meet her Robin.

  ‘Not a drab,’ he muttered again. ‘Just a Marley. May Heaven save you.’ If there was such a place. And if it could.

  The Queen’s Spymaster was at Placentia that day, walking in the rose garden there. Francis Walsingham was not the man he had been. Years of guarding Her Majesty and Her Majesty’s possessions had taken their toll. He had trouble sleeping and his left eye let him down in candlelight. No sooner had his Puritan God dispersed the Armada with His wind than the Spymaster had gone down with the ague and it had taken him weeks to recover. But all that was last year. What would the year of His Lord 1589 bring? What it had already brought him, and he held it in his hands now, was The Principal Navigations, a handy little volume glowingly inscribed to Walsingham by the younger Hakluyt. All right, the man had outrageously pinched the scholarship and hard work of almost everybody, but he meant well and was a staunch clergyman to boot. Many was the
hour that Hakluyt had spent in Walsingham’s study at Barn Elms, with tall tales of the sea and the strange peoples who inhabited the lands to the far west. He usually got so carried away that he slopped his wine in all directions, pointing and gesticulating until the Spymaster didn’t know which river flowed where or even how many beans made five.

  The volume was handsome, bound in calfskin and beautifully engraved with maps and pictures of the painted people Columbus had called Indians. But that was in the days of Walsingham’s grandfather, when men believed the earth was flat. Dear old Francis Drake had stopped that nonsense of course. It took an Englishman to have the guts to sail around the world. Magellan? Never heard of him.

  Walsingham could hear Hakluyt’s words ringing in his ears: ‘We must educate these heathens, Sir Francis, the smokers of tobacco and the growers of potatoes. They must see God.’

  ‘Indeed they must, Richard,’ Walsingham had agreed, but it was odd that the would-be explorer had lighted on the two crops that would make England a fortune. Hakluyt cared nothing for that, but Walsingham did. Besides, he had his own fortune to recoup. He had lost his shirt not long ago backing the voyage of that idiot Frobisher, looking for a passage through the Ice Sea. Mountains of gold he had promised everybody and he had brought back worthless tat, shining emptiness. No, Walsingham was ever ready to invest in the untold riches of this world, but he had learned his lesson. It would have to be tangible and it would have to have a real value.

  ‘Um … about Francis Kett.’ Walsingham heard a mumbled voice behind him. So engrossed had he become with Hakluyt’s Navigations that he’d forgotten his long-suffering secretary, shuffling behind him with an inkwell, quill and parchment. The Secretary’s secretary knew the great man’s proclivity for giving instant dictation wherever he was, be it rose garden or the chase.

  ‘Yes.’ Walsingham slammed the book shut. ‘Kett. Send a message to Christopher Marlowe. Try Norton Folgate first, failing that, the Rose. I want to know what he knows about our friend Kett.’

  ‘Isn’t he dead, sir?’ The secretary saw no point in putting quill to parchment unless he had to. The contraption he carried in lieu of a desk was heavy and awkward.

  ‘As a nit,’ the Spymaster confirmed, ‘but that’s not the point. Humphrey, how long have you been in my employ?’

  ‘Eight years, Sir Francis, give or take.’ The secretary beamed. Was this it? The Day? He had well and truly served his apprenticeship. Was it time for the pay rise of which he had so often dreamed?

  ‘Then you should know there is a world of difference between extinguishing a man and extinguishing an idea. Master Kett affirmed there is no God. Dangerous blasphemy, you’ll agree?’

  ‘Oh, I will, sir, I will.’ Humphrey bobbed. His financial hopes were dashed, but he still had his life and all his limbs. Best not say anything that might jeopardize either happy condition.

  ‘Kett and Marlowe overlapped for a few months at Corpus Christi. It’s likely that they met each other at some time. In any case, even if they didn’t, Marlowe’s exact contemporaries at Cambridge may have been infected by this madman’s ideology. I need names, Humphrey. See to it.’

  ‘Sir Francis,’ he said with a nod and braced his back as he swung his contraption in front of him and began to write. ‘Dearest Kit …’

  ‘Dearest Kit …’ Marlowe read the Spymaster’s letter. When Walsingham began letters like that, there was something in the wind.

  ‘Wim …’ He found his host at his loom in the workshop along the Stour, where the ducks flapped noisily in the clattering reeds of summer and Great Harry clanged his voice over cobbled Canterbury. ‘Wim, I’ve been called away.’

  Wim Grijs popped his head out of the jacquard frame, wiping his hands as his apprentice hauled him upright. ‘Back to London, Kit?’ The man’s face was running with sweat. For all the windows over the river were open, the sun was fierce again today and a weaver’s workshop was not a place to keep cool. Dust flew in the slightest breeze and the floor was ankle-deep in tight-curled wool and tangled yarn. In the courtyard outside, snorting donkeys steamed as Grijs’ people unharnessed their panniers and hauled the new yarn inside. With the cries of the men and the animals’ braying and the hum and clatter of the looms, it was like some version of Hell.

  ‘The Rose,’ Marlowe lied, dexterous as ever, dusting the weaver down. ‘I don’t know what Henslowe would do without me. Promise me, Wim, that you’ll never become a playwright.’

  ‘What?’ the weaver replied with a laugh. ‘And give up all this? Apprentices who don’t know their warp from their weft? Donkeys shitting all over my Dutch tiles? Trust me, Kit, life doesn’t get any better.’

  Marlowe laughed and gave the weaver one last pummel and was rewarded by a cloud of linty dust.

  ‘You’ll say goodbye to your mother.’ Wim was suddenly serious. ‘She worries about you.’

  ‘Mothers will.’ Marlowe nodded. He looked at the man. ‘Wim,’ he said, ‘you’ve been kindness itself over the last few days and I thank you for that. Tell me …’ He paused to find the right words. ‘You and my mother …?’

  The weaver’s hand was in the air, as though for silence. ‘Better to leave some stones unturned, Kit,’ he said softly. ‘Let’s just say she was dear to me once. She is dear to me still.’

  Marlowe nodded again, leaving the metaphorical stone where it was. ‘Say my farewells for me, Wim. Tell her … well, you’ll know what to tell her.’

  ‘Yes,’ the weaver said with a sad smile. ‘Yes, I will.’

  ‘Tell me about Francis Kett.’ The Queen’s Spymaster leaned back on the Turkish ottoman that had cost him a fortune. It lent an exotic touch to his otherwise drab little office at the Queen’s palace of Whitehall.

  For the most fleeting of moments, Marlowe was back in the Cambridge of his University days, when he was Secundus Convictus standing on Parker’s Piece with his grey-gowned fellows listening to the ravings of a madman. That was nine years ago, but he could recall as though it were yesterday Kett’s words echoing around the colleges. ‘And what was Moses,’ he heard the dead man say, ‘if he was not a conjuror, a fairground charlatan performing cheap tricks to amuse the children? It took the man forty years to find the Promised Land that you and I could reach in as many days.’

  ‘What’s there to tell?’ Marlowe asked, sampling the Spymaster’s excellent Rhenish. ‘I’ve heard he’s dead.’

  Walsingham leaned towards his projectioner, his smile twisted in the candlelight. ‘And I’ve heard that Machiavel has flown over the Alps. What’s that to do with the state of the nation?’

  Marlowe paused, then laughed. ‘Machiavel is dead,’ he said. ‘Silly boys called me that when I was a silly boy myself. My salad days, when I was green in judgement.’

  ‘But that’s precisely the point,’ Walsingham said. ‘It is the greenness of scholars that parasites like Kett prey upon. Who stood with you on Parker’s Piece? Whose heads were turned by his atheist drivel?’

  Marlowe looked hard at the man. Walsingham was his bread and butter. Certainly, the scribbling of plays barely kept a roof over his head, toast of London though he may be. But if the Spymaster was asking Marlowe to betray his friends … that was a step too far.

  ‘I remember Dr Norgate was there,’ he recalled with a smile. ‘God rest his soul. Yes, I know what you’re thinking; Master of Corpus Christi, an atheist? Whatever next?’

  ‘Don’t trifle with me, sir,’ Walsingham snapped. ‘Never forget, scribbler, you are eminently expendable, Muses’ darling or no. There are plenty more where you came from; the line behind you stretches on to the crack of doom and beyond, believe you me.’

  ‘Sir Francis.’ Marlowe put down his goblet and leaned forward so that their noses almost touched. ‘You are asking me to betray friends I loved.’ He leaned back. ‘Or faces I barely remember. Either way, you’ll get no names from me. If I remember aright, we went along to laugh at Kett, not to listen to him. There were those of us who poked the wretches in the madh
ouse too – and paid a fortune to see the three-headed lady on Midsummer Common. Kett was nothing more than entertainment.’

  For a moment, silence filled the rooms of the Queen’s Spymaster, then Marlowe broke it. ‘No, if it’s a real atheist you’re after, you should look to Giordano Bruno.’

  ‘The priest of the sun?’ Walsingham looked grave.

  ‘The same. I heard him in Oxford a while back. He told us he had pierced the air and penetrated the sky, travelled among the stars and overpassed the margins of this world.’

  ‘Gobbledegook, surely?’ Walsingham frowned.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Marlowe replied with a smile. ‘But not bad imagery. I might use it myself one day.’

  The door crashed back and a large man stood there, his boots and gown travel-stained, his ruff awry and his face scarlet.

  Walsingham was on his feet. ‘Walter?’ he frowned, taking in the man’s ragged appearance. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’

  ‘I’ve been robbed, Francis. Here, in the Queen’s England.’

  ‘Here?’ Walsingham was puzzled.

  ‘Well, not here exactly, no. At my place. St Albans.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’ Walsingham dithered a little before offering the traveller a chair and a draught of Rhenish.

  The newcomer looked Marlowe up and down, then turned to Walsingham. ‘Who’s this?’ he asked. Marlowe was unimpressed. Clearly St Albans was not the place to go if one required manners and good breeding. The man was an oaf.

  ‘Oh, forgive me,’ Walsingham said, extending a hand. ‘Marlowe was just leaving.’

  ‘Marlowe?’ The stranger downed his wine in one and held it out to Walsingham for a refill. ‘Aren’t you the playwright fella?’

  ‘I’ve had some modest success in that quarter.’ Marlowe half-bowed. ‘Master …?’

  ‘This is Sir Walter Mildmay, Marlowe. You know – the Chancellor of the Exchequer.’ Marlowe smiled and nodded. At least that explained the manners. Walsingham looked pained – things were not going too well today.