Dark Entry (12 page)

The Black Society met that night as a sudden storm broke over the scholastic turrets of Cambridge. The rain fell like arrows, bouncing on the cobbles of Bene’t’s Lane as cloaked and hooded figures made their way in twos and threes down the steps and under the dark Norman arch of St Bene’t’s. The great and good of the ancient town of Grantabridge were meeting as their fathers and grandfathers had for generations, discussing the great civic issues of the day.

‘Have you the faintest idea what a conduit would cost?’ an exasperated voice almost screamed from inside.

‘Flemish weavers? I wouldn’t give you two groats for ’em.’

‘Well, what’s the University doing about it?’

It was this last question that reached Michael Johns’ ears. He was feeling guilty already. As the man with fewest paces to walk from Corpus Christi next door, he was virtually the last to arrive. He entered as quickly and unobtrusively as he could through the linking door on to the narrow darkness of St Bene’t’s ambulatory and padded down the twisting stone stairs.

He was not only the nearest, he was the driest. Even the Master had had to cross The Court in the sudden downpour and the old man sat, dripping, on the left of the Mayor along with the other representatives of the university in their gowns and hoods. Doctors Goad and Steane from King’s nodded to him, Gabriel Harvey of his own college cut him dead. A few of the others he knew vaguely – Rymer of Trinity, de la Pole of Jesus, the two-seat-filling bulk of Evans of Pembroke Hall. The burgesses of the town were, to a man, wringing wet, sitting steaming in their civic finery. Johns only ever saw these men at meetings of the Society. For all he knew, they lived in little presses under the stairs and only appeared for the twice-yearly slanging match that was the meeting of the Magnum Congregatio, the official Latin tag of the Black Society.

‘Good of you to call, Michael,’ Dr Norgate whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

‘Sorry, Master,’ Johns whispered back. ‘Henry Bromerick wanted a word. It was vital, he said. Wouldn’t wait.’

‘It never can with Bromerick,’ Norgate observed.

‘Gentlemen!’ the Mayor banged his gavel. ‘Can we get on with the business in hand?’

And they did.

There was no mention of the incident the day before when Dominus Marlowe of Corpus Christi College had broken the arm of Harry Rushe, labourer. Time was on Marlowe’s side as Constable Fludd, up to his eyes in the fair as he was, had not had time to put quill to parchment and process the necessary paperwork. And so Professor Johns did not, after all, have to speak for him.

Even so, the bickering went on long into the small hours of Saturday as the bickering had gone on for generations. If the university was making money out of the fair, why didn’t the university protect the town’s craftsmen from the invasion of foreigners? When were they going to provide Proctors to police the ground? And if the townspeople wanted a fair, why must it run on the Lord’s day, which was to be kept holy, the university wanted to know. The same old questions, the same old arguments echoed through the thick old walls of St Bene’t’s and down the creeping passageways of time.

Provost Goad had done well to reach the gate of King’s unaided, especially as the puddles still stood in the dimples of the gateway pavement.

‘Benjamin,’ he wheezed, pausing and stooping to catch his breath, ‘your arm a while.’

Benjamin Steane came to the rescue as he had so often before and held out a rigid arm on which the grateful provost leant. ‘Tell me,’ the old man said, ‘what you made of tonight.’

‘The usual,’ Steane said. ‘Everybody on their dignity. Everybody trying to score points off everybody else.’

‘One day –’ Goad padded forward again, refreshed – ‘we’ll rid ourselves of this Town nonsense for ever and only the University will reign supreme.’

‘Amen to that,’ Steane said.

They reached the stairs and a Proctor handed Steane a guttering candle. ‘Evening, Provost,’ he chirped, touching his cap. ‘Dr Steane.’

‘All quiet?’ Goad asked. ‘Nothing untoward?’

‘All’s well, sir.’

King’s, it had to be said, was on a knife edge after the death of Ralph Whitingside. Scholars stood whispering in clusters, Fellows eyed each other suspiciously. Sizars, without the experience of age or the cash that comes with breeding, had to be hushed for their bursts of outspokenness. No one felt safe. The Proctors themselves felt guiltiest of all. No one believed that nonsense about suicide at the inquest. Someone had sneaked into the college and murdered Ralph Whitingside. And what about the roisterer who called himself Machiavel? He could get in and out of the place like a spider. And if he could, who else might have been there before him? So the Proctors had doubled their guard, checked everybody, patrolled the grounds. They carried their cudgels now, untucked from their belts and they stopped everybody, friend and stranger.

Steane took the Provost to his rooms on the first floor, the little annexe that stretched out over the Lodge proper where Goad entertained his guests. At the door, the old man looked left and right before he said softly, ‘How was Winterton, by the way? I assume since his preposterous verdict at the inquest, he saw our point of view?’

‘Our point of view, Provost?’ Steane repeated. For so brilliant an intellectual, Benjamin Steane could be positively obtuse.

‘That nothing must sully the honour of the college, Provost-elect.’

Steane took a step backwards.

Goad chuckled. ‘Don’t tell me you still think Whitingside was murdered?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ Steane told him, ‘but I just don’t see him as a suicide. It wasn’t that that surprised me.’

Goad peered at his second-in-command in the candle’s half-light. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘The Provost-elect bit. Well, I haven’t spoken to the Fellows or Convocation yet, but I think you can assume that all that is a mere formality.’

‘Well, I am flattered, Provost, nay, touched even. But . . .’

‘But?’ Goad’s face contorted. He could think of a dozen men, half of them now dead, who would have killed for a chair at King’s, let alone the Provost’s.

‘Sir, I think I should tell you that I have been called to the purple.’

Goad’s eyes widened. ‘A bishopric?’ he mouthed. ‘Where?’

‘Bath and Wells, probably. Winchester if I’m lucky.’

‘My dear boy.’ Goad’s smile was frozen. ‘I had no idea.’

‘You know the Archbishop, Provost?’ Steane said.

‘John Whitgift?’ Goad almost spat. ‘Yes, I do. Jonian, wasn’t he?’

‘No. He was a Fellow of Peterhouse. But I mean he’s the sort who plays his cards close to his chest. Should he ever play cards, of course, as I’m sure he doesn’t. So I was not allowed to divulge.’

‘Even to me?’ Goad gave his lieutenant his most withering look.

Steane spread out his arms and shrugged. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said and was left in the pitch blackness as the Provost took the candle from him and slammed the door. Waiting there while his eyes acclimatized to the dark, he decided that in the circumstances, it was probably best if he saved the news of his impending marriage for another day.

It was a mind-numbed Professor Johns who bid the Master goodnight a little before the old Corpus clock clanged the hour of two. The roisterers were home and even Lomas and Darryl had shambled off to their beds to be ready for the Chapel bell and the advent of another Corpus day.

The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started and the warm night air had dried the grass and emptied the puddles. Johns watched as Dr Norgate’s tired old frame vanished into the shadows of the Master’s Lodge. He saw his candle light flicker halfway up the stairs, then at the top and across the landing. He half turned and collided with a shrouded figure lurking in the shrubbery.

‘Bromerick!’ Johns shouted, then in a whisper, ‘God’s Teeth, Henry. What are you doing there?’

‘Waiting for you, sir,’ the lad told him.

Johns led the boy into the dim light of his own staircase. Bromerick was still dressed, wearing his college robes. They had been soaked to his skin when he’d talked to Johns earlier, on the professor’s way to his meeting. They had dried out as he’d paced The Court and gone back to his rooms to check the papers again.

‘Go to bed, man.’ Johns said. ‘No amount of Greek can be so pressing.’

‘Ah, but this is different, Professor,’ Bromerick told him. ‘It’s like no other Greek I’ve ever read.’

It had to be said that there was a great deal of Greek Henry Bromerick had never read, but Johns had known this young man for three years now, ever since he came as a red-faced fourteen year old from Canterbury, clutching his Parker scholarship in his hand and had lodged his name in the buttery ledger. Like all Corpus students, Bromerick had run up and down on the crisp mornings of winter, trying to get warm before the morning’s lectures in the Schools. He’d watched him praying ‘fervently’ in Chapel, with one eye open to smirk at the others, seen him grow into a man with half his heart on his sleeve.

‘How’s the back now?’ Johns asked.

‘Getting better, sir, thank you. The Master will be able to award our degrees any day now.’

Johns smiled. ‘Good. Come into the decent light and show me this Greek.’

Under the arch of the stairwell, the professor and the scholar stood head to head, reading by the candlelight guttering in the sconce on the wall. It was a slip of paper, in Bromerick’s handwriting.

‘I transcribed it,’ Bromerick said. ‘I just hope I got it right.’

‘Transcribed it from where?’ Johns asked. ‘Something obscure in the library?’

‘Not exactly, Professor.’ Bromerick looked furtively from side to side. ‘Can I trust you?’

Johns smiled. ‘You’ve attended enough logic lectures to know, Henry,’ he said, ‘that only you can answer that.’

The scholar dithered for a second. ‘Then I can,’ he decided. ‘This came from Ralph Whitingside’s rooms in King’s. The original is part of a journal of some kind. Written in Latin, Greek and Hebrew.’

‘I’m impressed,’ Johns said. ‘Glad they’re teaching them something at King’s. How did you come by it?’

Nothing.

‘Henry?’ Johns looked at the man, the kindly eyes boring into him.

‘Kit,’ Bromerick said.

‘Ah.’ For Johns, that said it all. ‘And what does Kit make of it? I didn’t see him at supper, now I think of it.’

‘Kit hasn’t seen it, at least not this bit. Tom . . . er . . . Dominus Colwell is working on the rest, but he’s drowning in it so he passed this page to me.’

‘Well, you’re right, Henry,’ the professor said, tilting the paper this way and that. ‘It isn’t like any Greek you’ve ever read. That’s because it’s not Greek. It’s a code of some kind, a cypher. Beyond me, I’m afraid.’

Bromerick looked crestfallen.

‘It’s important to you, isn’t it?’ Johns asked.

‘Kit thinks it might help explain why Ralph died,’ the scholar said.

Johns nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Leave it with me. I know someone who may be able to shed some light . . . no promises, mind.’

‘No, sir, of course not.’ Bromerick brightened.

‘Now,’ Johns said with a sigh, ‘go to bed, Henry. You have to be up again in four hours time and I not long after.’

‘Thank you, sir. Good night, sir.’ And the scholar was gone.

Marlowe was already saddled before the sun had crept over the rickety rooftops of Ware and took the road south-west. The carts increased now that he was in the south of Hertfordshire, creaking and rumbling their way to London and the Thames. By midday he was walking his gelding over the rough marsh ground near Barnet, edging his way past ponies, asses and palfreys being led to the great horse fair. Here, he knew, in his great grandfather’s day, Yorkist and Lancastrian had killed each other in the thick fog of an April morning and the great kingmaker, Earl of Warwick, had gone down to the merciless halberd blade of some anonymous foot soldier. His ghost, men said, still wandered the misty hollows near the road, looking in vain for his lost soul.

He followed the road through the boggy ground, getting ever lower and wetter until he came to the pontoon ferry, tied up at an unstable-looking quay. The ferryman was sleeping, curled up in the middle of the raft, looking in his dung-coloured clothing like something left behind by his last passenger. Marlowe coughed extravagantly and the man leapt to his feet, almost overturning his craft which, being low in the water, shipped quantities of the Thames and rocked and rolled before regaining its equilibrium.

‘Take yer somewhere, sir?’ he asked Marlowe, shading his eyes against the sunset.

Marlowe was a little nonplussed. Here he stood at the bank of a river, served by a ferry pulled across that river on a rope to one destination: the other side. And yet the ferryman seemed to be giving him an option. Marlowe could only applaud his hubris in assuming he still had freedom of choice. However, there was also a chance that the man was completely barking mad. So he kept things simple. ‘Just across to the south bank, if you would,’ he said and eased his nervous horse on to the pontoon, the animal slithering and clattering on the planks, whinnying softly in mild panic.

The ferryman reached up to take the penny which was his fee. He derived a lot of innocent amusement from these foreigners; come out of the north they did, knew nothing of the ways of London and her river. Sat up there, they did, on their horses, skitting and shying across the flow. If they just got down and stood at the animal’s head, they wouldn’t keep falling in and drowning. He sighed. He bore them no ill will and there was a lot of fuss with a drowning, but it broke the tedium of an otherwise uneventful day. He’d been First Finder eight times now; must be a record west of the Vintry.

The church of St Mary was gilded by the dying sun as Marlowe rode into Mortlake. The sleepy little town on the banks of the rushing Thames was the end of his journey and he was glad of it. His legs ached, his back ached, his shoulders ached. In fact, he was hard put to it to find any part of him that didn’t ache. He asked directions from a man at work on the riverbank with his hurdles and nets.