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He suddenly felt a bit of a fool. In his satchel he carried a manuscript on parchment – A True History of Dido, Queen of Carthage. He’d been scratching away at this for nearly a year, when he should have been learning his Horace and his Aristotle. Yet he was drawn to the theatre like a moth to a flame. And now the theatre had come to him, with all its magick and its fire, right here on Parker’s Piece.

He looked across to the stage, silent and deserted now under the moon, waiting for the trumpet blast that would open the theatre and release the crowds. Instinctively, he crossed to it and stood looking up at the flats, with their palace stairs and turrets and the silver birches of his own home county.

A movement caught his eye and he turned fast, making sure his back was to the woodwork. He saw the swirl of a short cloak and the flash of an earring in the half darkness. But this was no player-king, no lord of the boards. For a brief moment, he looked at a pale reflection of himself – another roisterer in doublet and cloak and carrying a satchel just like his.

‘I hope you’ve made your peace with God,’ he said in a steady, level voice.

An answer rang back. ‘Kit? Kit Marlowe – is that you?’

‘You know perfectly well, it is, Robert Greene,’ Marlowe answered. ‘But you can call me Machiavel. Or avenging angel, as you prefer.’

‘Kit!’ Greene emerged into the full glare of a brazier’s light. ‘It’s been . . . what?’ He held out a hand.

‘Nothing like long enough,’ Marlowe said, ignoring the offer of friendship. ‘But I must admit, I admire your nerve.’

‘Er . . . do you?’

Marlowe looked at the frozen smile on the man’s face. ‘You can’t have forgotten our last conversation,’ he said. ‘The one where I told you I’d cut your pocky off if I saw you again.’

‘Ah, now, Kit,’ Greene trilled, a little more falsetto than he’d hoped. ‘That was so . . . two years ago. All’s forgiven, surely? Old friends like us . . .’ He dropped his hand at last.

‘You haven’t got any friends, Robyn,’ Marlowe said. ‘What you do have is the brass neck to steal my poetry, pass it off as your own and then pretend that nothing has happened.’

‘No, no,’ Greene protested. ‘There’s been some mistake. A misunderstanding.’

‘What’s in the bag?’ Marlowe asked.

‘The . . . er . . .’ Greene seemed to have forgotten he was holding it. ‘Oh, nothing, just some college notes. I’m reading for my Master’s degree now, at St John’s.’

‘Kicked you out of Italy, did they?’ the Corpus man checked.

‘Kit . . .’

Marlowe suddenly lunged, snatching the satchel from Greene’s grasp and hauling it open.

‘You’ve got no right, you murdering bastard!’ Greene yelled and in an instant there was a dagger in his hand and he was running at Marlowe. The Corpus man feinted with his cloak and wrapped it over Greene’s head before kicking him in the backside so hard that he sprawled on the ground. Marlowe tugged the papers from Greene’s satchel and read the first page by the firelight. ‘Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,’ he said. ‘More arrant tosh, Robyn?’

Greene was scrambling upwards, looking frantically at the same time for his dagger. Nobody turned their back on Kit Marlowe when his blood was up. Marlowe was quietly turning over the pages, reading the odd line here and there. ‘At least,’ he said, ‘it seems to be
your
tosh. There’d be no point in pinching anything as bad as this.’

He stepped back. Simultaneously, he and Greene saw the dagger at Marlowe’s feet. Marlowe kicked it up and the Johnian caught it, unsure what would happen next.

‘Tell me,’ Marlowe said. ‘Did you bring this bit of nonsense to sell to Lord Strange’s Men? See if you could make a name for yourself? Oh, Robyn, really!’ and he shook his head, tutting.

‘Well,’ Greene said, petulantly. ‘What are you doing here? What’s in
your
satchel?’

‘This?’ Marlowe held it up as Greene’s pages began fluttering away on the breeze. ‘Oh, just some college notes,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’m reading for my Master’s degree now, at Corpus Christi. I’m finding the law particularly fascinating. Shame there isn’t one about pinching other people’s poetry.’ His smile vanished and he stepped closer to Greene, who licked his lips and held his dagger-point higher. ‘What did you mean, Robyn, a moment ago, when you were silly enough to lunge at me. I don’t object to the use of the word “bastard” in the right context, although I suspect my father would. No, the word that threw me was the adjective, “murdering”. Just who am I supposed to have murdered?’

But Greene was gone, leaving his opus scattered on the wind and only the piercing eyes of Kit Marlowe for memory.

At the stage, a single pair of hands clapped. Marlowe turned.

‘Very good,’ a voice said. ‘I’ve rarely seen a man face a dagger like that before.’

‘Who are you?’ Marlowe asked.

The player king strolled into the light. The frippery of the day had gone and he stood in his shirt and breeches, a tired look on his face. ‘I am Ned Sledd.’ He bowed extravagantly. ‘Of Lord Strange’s Men.’

Marlowe bowed likewise. ‘Christopher Marlowe,’ he said, ‘of no man’s men.’

Sledd laughed. ‘Good for you,’ he said and looked the man in the face. Then he took his arm. ‘Come, Master Marlowe, let’s sink an ale or two. And you can show me what you really have in your satchel.’

‘What the Devil is that?’ Dr Goad was lost in the academic niceties of the philosopher Ramus and the sudden braying of the trumpets across the rooftops nearly made him drop his book.

‘A play’s toward, Provost,’ Benjamin Steane told him, without looking up. The scholar’s work he was marking was particularly awful, reminding him yet again of the sore decline at Cambridge University. He’d be glad to be in his mitre at Bath and Wells, where he’d never have to see another scholar’s miserable scribbling ever again. ‘Lord Strange’s Men, I understand.’

‘Strange?’ Goad was alarmed. ‘Ferdinando Stanley, old Derby’s son?’

‘The same.’ Steane wasn’t really listening.

‘But he’s a Papist, Benjamin. A recusant. What’s the Mayor doing, letting people like that into the town?’

Steane looked up. ‘I rather think Lord Strange’s money is the same colour as everyone else’s to the Mayor,’ he said. ‘And anyway, Strange isn’t actually with them. He’s a poet himself, I believe, but he’s a patron at heart. Bit of a soft touch, I’ve heard, given to lending money to explorers and similar mountebanks. Are you going?’

‘Where?’ Goad was on his feet, peering out of the window across the Cambridge rooftops.

‘The play.’ Steane was patience itself, but he quietly wondered how much more decline there could be before someone came to take Dr Goad away.

The Provost turned to him as though he’d been speared. ‘Good God, no,’ he gasped. ‘What worries me –’ he turned again to the window – ‘is that rather a large number of our scholars seem to be on their way.’

Parker’s Piece had not seen such a throng for years. The flags were fluttering in the breeze and the apple and pastry sellers were doing a roaring trade. Half Cambridge seemed to be there, paying their admission to the large men at the makeshift gate and jostling for position.

‘How much?’

‘This had better be worth it.’

‘Do they all die in the end?’

‘Will there be any fireworks?’

The hubbub of the groundlings rose in ever growing hysteria to the tiring room behind the flats where the Fair Maid of Kent was struggling into his stomacher. ‘Buggered if I know how women wear these things,’ he complained as a dresser laced him in. ‘Good crowd, Ned?’

‘Tolerable, Thomas, tolerable.’ Ned Sledd was playing the Fair Maid’s father, complete with false grey beard and an outsize picadill.

‘Any nobs in?’

Sledd craned his neck to the far side of the stage where a row of seats had been placed for the gentry. ‘One or two,’ he said. ‘But you know they don’t make an entrance until the last minute. Have you got that bit sorted in Act Two, Scene Three yet?’

‘Think so.’ Thomas was still having problems with his fol-de-rols.

‘Tell me,’ Sledd insisted.

Thomas frowned and blurted it out. ‘Fie, my lord, whereof do you call me daughter?’

‘Wherefore should I not?’ Sledd fed him the line.

‘Go to, go to,’ Thomas scolded, without feeling. ‘We are but ladies of the night.’

‘What? Harlot, would you say?’

‘Er . . .’ Thomas was struggling already. ‘Umm . . .’

‘Come on, Thomas,’ Sledd snapped. ‘You knew this yesterday.’

‘Yes, I know . . .’

‘Two minutes of the clock, everybody,’ somebody called.

‘Um . . . never breathe it, sir.’ Thomas was on track again. ‘Lest God in his Heaven, who is the father of all . . .’

‘Father of
us
all,’ Sledd insisted.

‘All . . . us . . .’ Thomas ranted. ‘What bloody difference does it make?’

‘At a groat a line,
every
difference,’ Sledd told him. ‘I’ve lashed out a small fortune on this tour, young Thomas and I don’t want it buggered up.’ He suddenly leaped for the lad’s groin, fumbling under the placket of his skirt.

Thomas jumped and squealed.

‘Just checking,’ Sledd said. ‘Falsetto, remember. Falsetto.’

The fanfare began, the brass flaring in the afternoon sun as the last groundlings scuttled in under the barrier.

‘No!’ Sledd hissed from backstage. ‘Don’t close the gates on them. Jack!’ he called a minion to him. ‘Get down to those idiots taking the money.
Everybody
in. We can squeeze a few more yet.’

And Jack dashed off. The fanfare seemed to be going on for ever and that was because the gentry were still taking their places on the stage. Sir Edward Winterton had left his regalia of office as the Queen’s Coroner at home, but in every other respect, he looked resplendent. He’d even brought Lady Winterton with him – the one day of the year he’d deign to be seen in her company. She fussed around him, arranging the great sword he’d carried at Pinkie and curtsied to the Mayor and his wife, who smiled benignly. Coroner and Mayor – and Ned Sledd – knew that, technically, everybody had broken the law. The Fair Maid of Kent should have been performed in camera before the Mayor and his corporation, to check that the fare was suitable. As it was . . . well, a sunny Saturday in a Cambridge summer. What could possibly go wrong?

Three or four rows back, the Parker scholars stood elbow to elbow with other Corpus men. As was usual in the rare meetings of Town and Gown, the college fraternities tended to cluster together, the arms of Trinity, Jesus, King’s, Christ’s, Corpus and the others on their sleeves. There was the usual bit of jostling from the lads of the town and the mob from the outlying villages seemed to have come prepared. Marlowe noticed, as did Joseph Fludd on the far side of the field with his under-constables, that the Dry and Fenny Drayton men carried quarter staffs and, judging by the bulges under jerkins, not a few of the lads from the Bedford Levels were sporting cudgels that day. Fludd checked his men again – five of them. Men in the crowd? Difficult to count, but he estimated at least two hundred. And he didn’t even want to think about the women. The only woman he cared about was Allys, whom he’d told to stay at home with their daughter, their chickens and their unborn son. If things got nasty here on Parker’s Piece, at least she’d be out of it.

But Allys Fludd wasn’t out of it. She’d packed up a lunch of fresh-baked bread and good Stilton cheese and tied a flagon of milk to her bundle before setting off on the road from Trumpington, little Kate trotting beside her, babbling away with excitement. She’d never seen a play before and she had no idea her daddy had told her mummy not to come. It would be such an adventure.

The crowd clapped rapturously as the Prologue stepped forward and bowed to them.

‘Pray, gentles all,’ he bellowed as the noise subsided.

‘He don’t mean you, mate!’ a groundling yelled to the men around him.

Sir Edward Winterton tapped his foot in disgust. ‘Shh, Edward!’ his wife hissed, although the man had yet to open his mouth.

‘Good crowd!’ the Fair Maid of Kent beamed to Ned Sledd at his elbow.

The veteran player was less sure of that. ‘We’ll see,’ he muttered. On Fludd’s word, the little knot of constables broke up and took their positions at the edge of the crowd, walking softly and keeping their tipstaffs out of sight.

‘Pardon us,’ the Prologue went on. ‘Our sorry postures and our feeble antics . . .’

‘You got that right, son!’ somebody else called.

‘We come before you to present the story of Esmerelda the Fair Maid of Kent. And you shall see her played, and by her father twice betrayed.’

There was booing and hissing from the crowd. Nothing went down with country clods like a good villain. He duly stepped forward, Ned Sledd in all his Elizabethan patrician finery and a little servant scurried after him.

‘How now, sirrah,’ Sledd delivered, scanning the crowd below him. ‘Where is Esmerelda, the apple of my eye?’

An apple accordingly whizzed through the air from somewhere near the front and the crowd shrieked its approval as it bounced and caught the servant a nasty one on the kneecap.

‘Didst call, father and founder of our race?’ Thomas tripped on with a full-blown falsetto, to the catcalls and whistles of the groundlings.

Edward Winterton had had enough. He was about to get up and remind the rabble that they were letting down their fair town – it certainly didn’t look as if the Mayor was going to do it; the man seemed nailed to his chair – when a strangled cry broke from the crowd on Fludd’s side.

‘Harlot!’

Sledd spun to his prompter, hidden in the wings. ‘That’s not yet, surely?’ he hissed. ‘Not ‘til Act Two.’

‘Er . . .’ the prompter was riffling through the papers balanced on his knees, desperate to make sense of what was happening.

‘Whoredom!’ the voice shouted again, taken up by others. In the centre, a group of black-robed clerics and scholars was forcing its way towards the stage.