Dark Entry (6 page)

‘No parents at all as far as I can gather,’ Steane said. ‘He was a ward of court until his eighteenth birthday. He’s Lord of some scabrous little manor somewhere in Kent.’

‘Good, good. With a bit of luck, nobody’ll make too much of a fuss, then. Get along to Winterton. Have a crate or two of college beer sent round to him – the good stuff. And, Benjamin?’

Steane turned in the doorway. ‘Yes, Provost?’ he said on a sigh.

‘Softly, softly, for God’s sake!’

If the lads had been gloomy at the Swan the night before, tonight at the Brazen George was positively sepulchral. They had all drunk too many toasts to good old Ralph in their host’s finest Dutch brandy and they sat staring into their cups or the middle distance.

‘Suicide,’ Henry Bromerick was mumbling. ‘Who’d have thought it? Ralph Whitingside, suicide. I can’t get over it.’ He looked up at the others as if to find some explanation in their faces.

‘You can’t get over it because it isn’t true, Henry,’ Marlowe said. ‘If Ralph killed himself, how did he do it?’

‘Poison,’ said Tom, always the sharpest of the bunch. ‘You said yourself, Kit, stains on his clothing, his bedding. He’d have been sick.’

‘Where was the cup?’ Marlowe asked him.

‘The what?’ Matthew Parker frowned.

‘If Ralph took poison, what did he do? Swig something from a bottle? I saw no bottle in his rooms. Did he drink from a goblet, carefully wash and dry it and put it back on the sideboard? Does a man so miserable he wants to end his own life do that?’

‘There are more things in Heaven and earth . . .’ Bromerick ventured, with his vast experience of life in the King’s School, Canterbury and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

‘And one of them is murder,’ Marlowe said, nodding.

‘Wait. Wait a minute.’ Colwell held up a hand, wrestling with all that Marlowe had told them in the brief snatches of free time during the day, before Dr Lyler hit them with everything the Civil Law course had to offer. ‘You said Ralph’s door was locked. The bedder unlocked it.’

‘That’s right,’ Marlowe said.

‘So . . .’

‘So if someone killed him, they had to have a key,’ Parker chimed in. ‘So it has to be someone at King’s.’

‘It has to be someone who killed Ralph, took
his
key and locked the door, that’s all,’ Marlowe pointed out.

Silence.

‘Still,’ Colwell said. ‘To get access to Ralph’s rooms at all, you’d need to have the right connections. Christ, Kit, you had to get in by the roof.’

‘Point taken,’ Marlowe said. ‘But it was Will Latimer who told me how, in his cups at the Devil. How many more people has he told? I wouldn’t trust that man further than I could throw him. How many other college servants blab indiscreetly over their ale or on street corners? And who –’ he leaned forward so that their heads were together – ‘wanted to see Ralph Whitingside dead?’

The heads moved back and all four of them sat upright, stock still for a moment and looked at the others. Marlowe clicked his fingers for the cups to be refilled. ‘I’ve written to Roger Manwood,’ he said.

‘The scourge of the night-prowlers?’ Parker whispered. Bromerick let out a whistle through his teeth. Back in Canterbury, exhausted mothers quietened their fractious children with threats of Roger Manwood.

‘Yes,’ Colwell crowed, a look of triumph on his face already. ‘He’ll know what to do!’

Robert Greene stood cap in hand at Gabriel Harvey’s door at Corpus that Saturday morning. All Cambridge was buzzing with the story of Ralph Whitingside’s death and Greene was not the sort of man to let rumour and innuendo pass him by. He needed to be in the thick of it.

‘Dr Harvey?’ The great man had appeared at long last from behind the buttresses in The Court.

‘Who are you?’ Harvey looked him up and down. The Fellow was wearing the robes of St John’s College but his skin was dark and he appeared to be wearing an earring.

‘Robert Greene, sir. St John’s, lately back from Italy.’

‘Italy? Really. Nowhere near Rome, I trust.’

‘No, no, sir. Verona. Lucca. There was plague in Florence. We were turned back.’

Harvey was already walking. ‘Your travels are fascinating, Dominus Greene, but I am rather busy.’

‘Yes, sir, I know. On your way to the inquest on Ralph Whitingside.’

Harvey stopped in his tracks, waiting for a couple of sizars to slink past, doffing their caps to him. ‘You seem remarkably well-informed for a man –’ he pinged Greene’s earring with a fingernail – ‘so lately come from Italy.’ And he strode on.

‘But I have information, sir,’ Greene called after him. ‘About Christopher Marlowe . . .’

Sir Edward Winterton sat in the Provost’s chair in the Great Hall of King’s College. Around him clucked his clerks, carrying ink, quills, parchment and boxes of sand, to write down, in Latin, all that transpired that morning. To his left, on the hard oak benches normally reserved for the King’s scholars, sat the sixteen men and true who would decide the issue in question – whatever happened to Ralph Whitingside?

Winterton was a fierce-looking old man at first sight, but closer to, his mild eyes gave the game away; his bark was worse than his bite. He wore his coroner’s robes today and sat beneath a furled banner of Her Majesty, the
Semper Eadem
bright in gold lettering on the blue of the scroll. He wore his collar of office with its roses and portcullises to remind everyone that he spoke for the Queen. And he wore his sword to remind everyone that he had once ridden with Lord Dudley at Pinkie, where they’d both trounced the Scots back in the days of the boy-king, Edward.

A single chair, carved, upright, lonely, stood in front of the coroner’s dais. A long way behind it, a large crowd had squeezed itself into the Hall – the Provost and Fellows of King’s, a handful of their servants and as many interested parties and ghouls as Harry VI’s great building could hold.

‘Inquisition indented,’ intoned the clerk of the court, ‘taken this day in the County of Cambridge on the second day of July in the year of Elizabeth by the grace of God of England, France and Ireland, Queen, defender of the faith etcetera twenty fifth, the year of our Lord 1583 . . .’

After the preliminaries were over, the fanfare blown and the coughing subsided, Winterton barked in his hoarse voice, ‘First witness. First Finder.’

Nobody stepped forward. People looked right and left, frowning, muttering and wondering what the delay was. In the corner, Dr Steane pushed Eliza Laurence forward, gently shooing her into that vast space around the witness chair.

‘Who is the First Finder of the body?’ Winterton roared.

‘I am,’ a clear voice called from the back.

Everybody turned and there was a babble of voices. Gabriel Harvey’s mouth fell open involuntarily as Kit Marlowe strode through the Hall and bowed to the court.

‘Who are you, sir?’ Winterton asked.

‘Christopher Marlowe, sir, Secundus Convictus of Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge.’

Winterton waved him to the chair. Marlowe looked across at Eliza and smiled. She bobbed and doubled back, grateful to slide back into anonymity again, if only for a short while.

‘You found the body, Master Marlowe?’ Winterton asked. The clerks scratched away.

‘I did, sir,’ he said. Then, to the clerks: ‘Can you spell the name? Only, my own college seems to have difficulty with . . .’

‘Marlowe!’ Another voice ended his sentence. All eyes turned to the back of the Hall.

Winterton slammed the tip of his staff of office down on the floor by his feet to order silence. ‘Who are you, sir?’ he asked.

‘I am Dr Gabriel Harvey,’ the voice called, ‘formerly Fellow of Pembroke Hall, now of Corpus Christi. What was he doing there? How did an undergraduate come to have access to the rooms of a graduate – and from a different college?’

There was hubbub in the room, until Winterton’s staff of office thudded on the woodwork again. ‘Enough!’ he thundered. ‘In my courtroom, sir,
I
ask the questions.’ He waited until the murmurings had died down. ‘Well, Master Marlowe,’ he said, fixing the man with his terrible stare. ‘Explain yourself.’

‘If I may, my lord?’ Another voice, gentler than Harvey’s and in its gentleness compelling, came from the back and a slender, robed figure emerged from the crowd.

Winterton looked exasperated. If he’d known he was in for a day like this, he’d have rolled over in bed and given the job to his deputy. ‘And who might you be, sir?’ He did his best to keep his voice under control.

‘I am Professor Michael Johns, of Corpus Christi College. I hate to call what my learned colleague Dr Harvey has to say into question, but technically, according to college statute, Master Marlowe was, as of two days ago, Dominus Marlowe.’

‘There has been no ceremony!’ Harvey countered, stung by the man’s interference.

‘Indeed not,’ Johns said quickly, ‘namely because Dominus Marlowe elected to wait until such time as he was able to go through said ceremony with his fellow Parker scholars. The statutes are on his side, Dr Harvey.’

‘Are they?’ Harvey rasped. He was standing nose to nose with Johns now, his eyes burning and his jaw flexing.

‘Apparently so.’ Winterton was determined to end this wrangling then and there. ‘And I will have the law observed, sir!’

For a long moment, Harvey hovered. From the tension twanging through his body like a bowstring, he looked for all the world as if he were about to strike Johns down. Then he looked at Marlowe, sitting quietly with his back to them both. ‘You, sir,’ he snapped at him, ‘are a disgrace to Corpus Christi and to this university. Not even in your robes.’

‘Indeed not.’ Marlowe stood up, spinning on his heel to face Harvey. ‘Any more than I was when I found Ralph Whitingside’s body. I had no wish to dishonour the name of Corpus Christi then and I have no wish to dishonour it now.’ He smiled and that smile made Harvey spin away, striding for the door.

‘Make a note of that man’s name,’ Winterton instructed his clerks, still pointing at Harvey’s retreating figure. ‘Contempt of court. He shall be fined five shillings. Now –’ he cleared his throat as Johns bowed to him before resuming his seat and Marlowe took the witness chair again – ‘for the benefit of the court’ – he nodded to the jury – ‘some of you gentlemen are not of the University, so it behoves me to explain. As an undergraduate, this witness had no automatic right of entry to another scholar’s rooms. As a graduate, that is different . . .’ The coroner leaned forward in his seat. ‘Although I fail to see, Dominus Marlowe, why you didn’t just walk in through the front door . . .’

Marlowe smiled. ‘Old habits, my lord,’ he said, ‘and the front gates were locked.’

There was a ripple of laughter from the younger members of the crowd, which Winterton chose to let go for the moment.

‘You went to Ralph Whitingside’s rooms,’ the coroner established. ‘Why?’

‘Ralph Whitingside was an old friend of mine, my lord. We met regularly, for academic discussion and contemplation.’

Henry Bromerick, several rows back, nudged Tom Colwell, who in turn hushed him.

‘I had not seen Ralph for three days and had expected him to help my friends and me celebrate our graduation.’

‘I see,’ Winterton said. ‘And where was this celebration to take place?’

‘Oh, forgive me, sir.’ Marlowe opened his dark eyes wide. ‘I am much afraid I am unacquainted with the hostelries of the town.’

It was Tom Colwell’s turn to stifle a guffaw, stuffing part of his sleeve in his mouth.

‘Very well.’ Winterton was prepared to take this young man at face value for the moment. ‘What did you find, First Finder?’

Marlowe told it all. Or at least the all he wanted the court to know. What he could not do, or would not do, in that house of strangers, was to talk of the smell in the chamber, the dead eyes of his friend. Neither would he tell them of the reason for a reckoning in a small room because, as yet, he didn’t know it. And the letters and the curious little book. Eliza Laurence hadn’t seen him take them and there was no one else to know they had gone.

There were no other witnesses who had seen anything. Eliza was dragged back out to that lonely place to sit in that accursed chair. She took the oath with a trembling hand and a shaking voice and swore on the Bible that she acknowledged was her crutch and comfort; but she could not look Sir Edward Winterton in the face and in the end, the kindly Dr Steane spoke for her, annoying though the coroner found it.

‘Mistress Laurence is a simple soul, my lord,’ Steane said. ‘I have talked to her at some length and she is in awe of your honour’s greatness . . .’

Winterton rolled his eyes.

‘. . . she was told by Master Whitingside that he would be away and that she was to clean his room against his return on the day that she – and Master Marlowe – found him.’

‘Except that he had been nowhere?’ the coroner asked.

‘Who is to say, my lord?’ Steane replied. The question was rhetorical.

‘Quite so. The man who called himself Machiavel.’ Winterton threw one last question at her, bypassing Steane in the process. ‘Do you see him in this court?’

Eliza Laurence shrank back in the chair, tucking her chin as far into her coif as it would go. Her hands were knotted in her lap but somehow she wrenched her sweating fingers apart and pointed to the far wall where Marlowe lolled with his arms folded. Murmurs filled the court.

The rest was mere formality, demanded by Sir Edward Winterton who was a stickler for such things. Dr Goad, the Provost, confirmed that Ralph Whitingside had presented himself at the college shortly after Christmas Day in the year of our Lord 1578. He offered to show the Court the ledgers if it so wished. Whitingside had matriculated Bachelor of Arts three years later and was now studying for his Masters degree. It was generally assumed that he would enter the church, but on receiving his inheritance some two years ago, that seemed less likely. His interests? Hebrew, obviously; Rhetoric; the Discourses. The old man had frowned as he recited this – what a curious question for the coroner to ask. Had the man no academic leanings at all?