Secret World Read online

  ‘That’s him,’ Henslowe said, almost hopping from foot to foot in frustration.

  ‘No, Master Henslowe, Master Sledd. I haven’t seen him today.’

  ‘And that’s it?’ Henslowe roared. ‘That’s it! You came all the way down that ladder, sprayed Master Sledd with paint, for that?’

  The man was dumbstruck. ‘You told me to come down,’ he said, mildly. ‘I said up there I hadn’t seen him.’

  Henslowe was reduced to incoherent howls and Sledd thought it was probably time to step in.

  ‘Back you go, Dick,’ he said kindly, patting the man on the arm. ‘No harm done.’ Except perhaps to his second best doublet, but it would wash. ‘Master Henslowe is a little …’

  ‘Mad?’ Dick said, edging away towards his ladder. He was dubious about climbing it with this crazy man at the bottom but he trusted Tom Sledd and so scrambled back aloft and was soon spreading the limewash over the ceiling. He could hear Henslowe below, still ranting and thought a few harsh thoughts of his own. These men, the ones with the money, they didn’t know what it was like to live from hand to mouth, never knowing where the next crust was coming from. He gave a little chuckle. He, Dick the Painter, was not short of an angel or two either. And, his day was coming. Oh, yes. And then the paint would fly.

  A large globule of limewash plummeted to the stage.

  ‘Oy!’

  ‘Sorry, Master Henslowe.’ Oh, yes, his day was coming all right.

  Nicholas Faunt took the old pilgrim’s way out of London, skirting the Forest of Blee and taking his repast at God’s House in Ospringe. Then, as the sun burned across this shoulders and on to his velvet-covered head, he clattered under the West Gate in Canterbury and slid out of the saddle.

  ‘Who goes?’ the guard challenged him, emerging from the cool shadow of the tower wall.

  ‘A friend of Her Majesty,’ Faunt said.

  ‘What colour friend?’ the man asked, looking him up and down. Faunt rummaged in his satchel and whipped free a blade that nicked the man’s nostrils. ‘Silver in a certain light,’ Faunt said. ‘Blood red in another.’

  The guard staggered backwards, howling and bleeding.

  ‘I am on the Queen’s business, lickspittle. Take me to Alice Snow.’

  Faced with officialdom on this level and faced with that officialdom’s dagger-point, the guard could not move fast enough. He slid bolts, hauled open doors, moved ladders and dripped blood all the way. Even so, he tipped the wink to a colleague pouring water over his head in an attempt to keep cool and the colleague hurried away, dripping wet, to the constable’s house by the Bull Stake.

  Alice Snow leapt to her feet at Faunt’s entrance. She was a frail-looking little thing, her eyes red with crying and there were the marks of iron fetters around her wrists and ankles.

  ‘Leave us,’ Faunt ordered and the guard was only too happy to comply. Marlowe’s money and Marlowe’s threats had bought Alice an upper room, with daylight through a solitary window high in the wall. Even so, there was no furniture and the straw on the floor was wet and soiled in one corner.

  ‘Are you him, sir?’ the girl barely breathed. ‘My executioner?’

  Faunt smiled. He took her hand. ‘I have been in my time, mistress,’ he said, ‘and may well be again. But yours? No. Master Marlowe sent me.’

  ‘Master Marlowe?’ Alice’s eyes lit up, brimming with tears as they were. ‘Is he coming back for me?’

  ‘No need, Alice,’ Faunt said. ‘I am to take you to him.’

  ‘You’re going nowhere,’ a gruff voice snarled in the doorway.

  ‘Who are you?’ Faunt asked.

  ‘John Marley, constable of Canterbury. You?’

  ‘Nicholas Faunt, Queen’s messenger.’ He took the girl by the arm and led her towards the door, but Marley still blocked it. ‘That means,’ Faunt whispered in his ear, ‘that I outrank you so far that it’s like a tree top to shit. So, if you’d be so kind as to stand aside? So kind and so sensible?’

  ‘Show me your papers,’ Marley grunted.

  This time, Faunt produced nothing but parchment from his wallet. ‘Er … you can read?’ Faunt checked.

  Marley snatched the document. He saw the Queen’s cypher and Walsingham’s and he stood aside. ‘Sir Roger Manwood shall hear of this,’ he snarled into Faunt’s right ear.

  ‘I have no doubt of it,’ Faunt said and brushed past. At the top of the stairs, he turned. ‘Just a moment,’ he said cheerily. ‘You’re Kit Marlowe’s father, aren’t you?’

  ‘What if I am?’ Marley asked, never keen to be reminded of the fact.

  ‘I’ve got a little message for you, from Kit.’

  Nobody but Nicholas Faunt was ready for what came next. The projectioner’s knee jerked up into the constable’s crotch and as he doubled up, Faunt’s fist slammed down on his head and he lay, poleaxed, on the cold stone.

  ‘Kit says “Hello”. Tell Sir Roger,’ Faunt said to the quivering guard, ‘he need not fear treatment as rough and vulgar as this. Loss of his title, lands and privileges are far more likely. Good afternoon, lickspittle.’

  And, tucking Alice Snow’s hand into the crook of his arm as though she were the most gracious of ladies, Nicholas Faunt swept out.

  Hog Lane ran like a dog’s leg north from Bishopsgate between the greens of Moorfields and Spitalfields, the windmills’ sails still in the windless air of summer and the grass a gleaming white with the spread of the tenter sheets. Dawn was gilding the gateway as Marlowe walked his horse beneath its dark arch, the portcullis rusted open over his head. For a moment, he looked at the two heads rotting on the spikes above the parapet and wondered who they were. Both men were bearded, but their skin was the colour of boiled leather now and their eyes and lips had gone, tasty morsels for the crows. Whoever they were when they were alive, they must have looked funny at Francis Walsingham or perhaps Lord Burghley and that was never a wise thing to do.

  The poet-projectioner patted his horse’s neck and let the groom take him on to the rest and comfort of his stall. Marlowe had avoided the river as he would the plague. The tide was low this early in the morning and all along the Queen’s wharves the stench was indescribable. Filthy urchins, naked from the waist down, waded up to their knees in the brown ooze, looking for scraps of anything that might keep them alive, foraging shoulder deep with questing fingers. Instead, he had cut through the Cheap, already bustling with the setting up of stalls and the cries of the street hawkers. He had paused to buy some bread and cheese and slung half a hogshead of ale over his saddle. Gallants dressed like this rarely ventured along the Cheap so early in the morning, but the stallers knew Kit Marlowe. For all his fine clothes, his Greek and his Latin, he was one of them. From Canterbury, men said, and his father was a cobbler. Nothing wrong with that.

  He was at the bottom of the outer steps in the courtyard along Hog Lane as she reached the top. For a woman who had spent the night with Tom Watson, she looked surprisingly fresh and elegant, her hood pulled forward over her face so that any unduly nosy passer-by would not recognize her.

  ‘’Morning, Eliza.’ Marlowe sketched a bow, difficult with a barrel of ale on one shoulder.

  ‘Hello, Kit,’ she replied with a smile.

  ‘How is the Studiosus this morning?’

  ‘In fine voice last night,’ she said. ‘This morning … well, all I got was a grunt. Does that give you a clue?’

  Marlowe laughed. He watched her cloak sweep the flagstones dappled by the morning sun and heard her talking to the manservant Watson paid to take her home. It was high time, he thought, as he climbed the steps, that Thomas Watson, Studiosus et Generosus, made an honest woman of that girl. And how long her father would continue to believe that nonsense of her visiting the sick three nights a week was anybody’s guess. Then, he suddenly remembered Watson’s wife and realized the problem.

  He kicked the door open and dropped the keg loudly on the table. ‘Is there a poet-musician in the house?’ he asked loudly.

 
There was a groan from the far corner.

  ‘May I take that as a “yes”, Master Watson?’

  ‘Go to Hell, Marlowe,’ a voice croaked.

  ‘I’ve been there,’ the projectioner said. ‘It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, take it from one who knows.’ He hauled back the coverlet and Watson buried his head under the pillow. ‘Hair of the dog, Tom?’

  Watson emerged like Lazarus from his cave. He wasn’t sure which was the more painful – the morning’s sun streaming in through the window or Marlowe’s hideous bonhomie. ‘What have you got?’ he asked, trying to sit up.

  Marlowe smiled. ‘A vast amount of talent. More good looks than any man has a right to own. And a coy modesty that forbids me to mention either. But, more relevant, I suspect, to your question, a quantity of Goodman’s ale.’

  Watson threw the pillow at him. ‘Just a threat, then,’ he said and watched Marlowe draw the beer. ‘Do I owe you any rent, Kit?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re square up to June,’ Marlowe told him, passing him the beaker. ‘June of last year, that is.’

  ‘What did Sir Francis want?’

  Witty Tom Watson didn’t miss a trick. He had known Walsingham for longer than Marlowe, having met him in Paris not that long after the massacre there. He was a lute-player of skill, a poet after Marlowe’s own heart and an expert in the Roman law. His plays? Well, you couldn’t have everything.

  ‘He wants me to find the man who made this.’ Marlowe threw him the little globe.

  Watson rubbed his eyes and tried to focus. The ale tasted sour on his tongue, but then his tongue felt like a barber’s strop. ‘That’s pretty,’ he said, turning it over in his palm. ‘What is it?’

  Marlowe paused slightly before he sat down. ‘It’s a map, Tom,’ he said as though to the village idiot.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Watson’s head was throbbing so hard he felt sure that Marlowe could hear it too. ‘But what does it show?’

  ‘Apparently, the voyages of Francis Drake.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Watson turned the little jewel to the light and tried to look as if he knew what he was talking about. ‘I see that now. When did he get back? Eighty, was it?’

  Marlowe nodded. ‘I was at Corpus Christi then,’ he said. ‘It set the cat among the pigeons with some of the older fellows; they didn’t like the fact that a man could gad about the world like that and not get eaten by anthropophagi.’

  Watson chuckled. ‘I was working on the Sophocles then,’ he remembered, wistfully. ‘And … Betsy, I think it was. Yes, that’s right. Betsy.’ He smiled into the middle distance for a moment, then gave himself a shake and returned to the here and now. ‘I did take time to read the reports, though. These events don’t come into every lifetime, after all. A man sailing around the whole world. Marvellous! But what’s the significance of this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Marlowe said. ‘Not until I have talked to Michael Mercator, at any rate.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘He’s a map-maker, Tom,’ Marlowe patronized. ‘Look, write a madrigal or whatever it is you do. I’m going to get some breakfast. Join me? Soft quail’s eggs, thick butter, goat’s milk?’

  But Tom Watson’s head was back under the pillow again and he sounded quite muffled when he said, ‘Go to Hell, Kit Marlowe.’

  SIX

  Michael Mercator welcomed Marlowe to his rooms at the sign of the Fleece, near Paul’s churchyard, but cautiously. As a visitor to London he had, of course, seen all the sights, from the heads on the Bishopsgate parapet to the menagerie at the Tower. For much of the time he had been scowled at and jostled by the apprentices of London, who viewed any foreign visitor with ill-disguised contempt. And he had, naturally, been to the theatre called the Curtain. Sadly, he had not been to the Rose and had no idea who his visitor was – for once, Marlowe could enjoy some moments of anonymity, rare at this level of society, in this city. Because Michael Mercator was a personage, of a sort. His home was along the Rhine, so he felt at home in the watery city where the Thames cut such a swathe through the teeming thousands that filled the streets. But he still felt like a stranger, wiping the spittle off his gown, though his English was easily as good as any that could be heard anywhere in London. He was the son and grandson of map-makers who had, quite literally in his grandfather’s case, changed the world. But he wondered if, these days, there were many more lands to discover. He had come to England to curry favour with the great sailors who lived along her shores – the fact that they were self-serving men who in any other land would have been hunted down as pirates was something he was beginning to realize as time went on. Sir Francis Drake, to take the greatest example, gave him the shivers every time he thought of him. Not for nothing did the Spaniards call him El Dracque, the Dragon. And now, here was this popinjay in velvet and brocade who must surely be more than he seemed, extending his hand and smiling. He was surely the smiler with the knife.

  ‘Master Mercator,’ Marlowe said. ‘I’m not sure why, but I imagined you would be older.’

  ‘You are thinking of my grandfather, perhaps. Or my father even. They are still at home; they travel little these days, not even by the pen.’ He looked like a man who had been taken for his grandfather or father once too often. ‘My maps are more for the people than for those who can afford to pay for whole voyages to be undertaken in their name. I believe that the whole world should be able to know what … what the whole world looks like.’

  ‘A laudable aim,’ Marlowe agreed. The rooms that Mercator was living and working in were very pleasant, with large windows over Ludgate Hill, so that the bustle of London passed by in full array. The trestle was loaded with parchment and inks; pens and charcoal sticks were regimented in racks to one side. There was no sign, however, of anything to do with metalworking of any sort. Perhaps he had come to the wrong place. After all, MM was not an unusual combination of initials. They were those of Marlowe’s own sister, to name but one.

  ‘At the moment,’ Mercator went on, ‘my maps are still out of the reach of the man in the street. But I am working on processes – still very secret, I am afraid, Master Marlowe, by which I can create maps in almost any medium. Parchment. Paper. Silver. Gold—’

  ‘It is your silver maps I am here about,’ Marlowe cut in. As a theatre man these days, he knew someone who liked the sound of their own voice when he met one.

  Mercator looked shifty and slid the papers on his trestle together into an untidy heap, turning them over so that only the charcoal-stained back page was uppermost. ‘Oh?’ As an attempt to sound unconcerned, it was a very dismal failure.

  ‘Yes.’ Marlowe rummaged in the breast of his jerkin. ‘I have one here.’ And he brought out the little chamois pouch he had taken to using to protect the globe.

  Mercator’s eyes popped. ‘Where did you get that?’ he asked, breathlessly.

  ‘I am afraid I can’t tell you that,’ Marlowe said. ‘I was going to ask you if this was your work, but I see from your face that it is. Can you tell me something about it? Why it was made? When and for whom?’

  Mercator had control of himself now and prefaced his next remark with a small cough and a condescending smile. ‘Oh, you Englishmen! You always think you can guess what a person is thinking. I did not say that this was my work. I was merely … overcome with its beauty. I asked where you got it so that, well, so that I too could purchase one.’ He smiled again and twisted round to look out of the window, as if the whole conversation was of no importance.

  Marlowe tossed the globe up and down in his hand a few times, as though playing Jacks. ‘It’s not really that beautiful,’ he said. ‘In fact –’ he peered at it, leaning on Mercator’s shoulder to reach the light – ‘it’s a bit of a rough little devil. Just here, look …’

  Mercator spun round. ‘How dare you criticize my … oh ho, Master Marlowe,’ he said, shaking his finger. ‘I see what you are at. You tricked me and cleverly too. Yes, this is my design. Not my workmanship, though. I would love to be able to work in
silver like this, but –’ he spread his hands ruefully – ‘these are not artisan’s fingers.’ He looked at Marlowe, challenge in every line of his face.

  ‘I didn’t mean to trap you, Master Mercator,’ Marlowe said, putting the globe back into the confines of his jerkin. ‘But it is important that I know who owned this globe and why it was made.’

  ‘It was made to a commission,’ Mercator said. ‘I can say no more.’

  ‘Francis Drake’s commission?’ Marlowe asked, blandly.

  Mercator stepped back and looked mutinous. ‘If you know that, why are you here asking me? The next thing we know, it will be … what are they called? Skeffington’s Gyves? The Sister of the Duke of Exeter?’

  ‘Daughter.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Daughter. The Duke of Exeter’s Daughter. But I don’t think it will come to torture machines.’

  Mercator came close to Marlowe, so close that the playwright could feel the map-maker’s breath hot on his face. ‘That, Master Marlowe, is what they all say. Your Queen’s England is not a place for the faint-hearted. Papists go in fear of their lives. But I, for myself, will say no more, as a God-fearing Protestant. The man who made the globe, and I do not say for who, remember that, is Joshua the Silversmith. You will find him in the Vintry. Now, Master Marlowe, I must ask you to leave. I have work to do.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Master Mercator,’ Marlowe said, backing away. ‘I will certainly visit … Joshua, you say?’

  ‘In the Vintry, yes.’

  ‘I’ll wish you good day, then.’ Mercator seemed to have no more to add to the conversation, so Marlowe let himself out, down the vertiginous stairs to the street. He paused beneath the overhanging window for a moment, weighing up the best way to go, then turned left. Cutting across St Paul’s churchyard would cut a few moments off the journey and suddenly, moments seemed to matter.

  Up in his window, Mercator watched him go. Then he called for his manservant. ‘Johannes! Johannes! Pack our things. We’re leaving.’

  Joshua’s quarters were not as palatial as Mercator’s and here the smell was not of paper and ink but the clean, sharp smell of metal, solder and charcoal. A fierce fire could be seen out in the yard, adding to the heat of the day and a downtrodden-looking lad was watching a crucible balanced on a tripod over the flames. He wore huge leather gauntlets which reached to well above his elbows and a mask over his face, also leather, with a mica window let into it. He seemed lost in his gloomy, underwater world as he peered out through the dim lens and Marlowe decided not to disturb him. There was something about his grim grasp on the crucible’s handle that spoke of a man on his last chance to get it right; it wouldn’t be fair to go near. Marlowe looked around for someone else who may be able to help him in his search for the jeweller who had made Mercator’s design live in metal and precious stone.