Death by Disputation (A Francis Bacon Mystery Book 2) (2 page)

“What the devil are you talking about?” Marlowe peered at him suspiciously. “Have you been drinking, so early? I’m just back from St. Andrew’s. I left ahead of the crowd. I wanted to look something up in Barty’s dictionary.”

Tom was flummoxed. How could the man stand there telling him a barefaced lie? Tom studied him for signs of — what, he didn’t know. Guilt, deception. A trembling hand, a sideways flicker of the gaze. Horns sprouting on his head, the lash of a forked tail.

All he saw was Christopher Marlowe: as tall as Tom but rangier built, like a man who walked long distances with slim provisions. He had longish chestnut hair and keen brown eyes that stared right through you. He was unshaven, but not bearded, with a thin moustache that emphasized the arc of his lips. His academic gown was frayed at the hem and his cuffs were yellowed. Junior Fellows often dressed this way inside the college, saving their good clothes for the town.

Marlowe was only twenty-three to Tom’s nineteen years, but he seemed much older. Worldlier. A man who had traveled and seen things he couldn’t talk about. Tom envied him that worldly air. He distrusted him too, though he’d only known him for a few weeks. More than anything though, for no good reason he could think of, Tom wanted Marlowe to respect him.

Marlowe accepted the scrutiny; indeed, he seemed to welcome it. He stood at Leeds’s desk, head cocked, lip curled, a challenging gleam in his eye. Unfortunately, that was his habitual pose. It didn’t necessarily indicate guilt. Tom began almost to doubt his own memory. The shock of finding a man hanging in the middle of the cockloft would surely affect him to some degree. True, he’d seen several bodies, but never one hanging like that and not in his own bedchamber. Could he have imagined seeing Marlowe rise from behind the bed?

No. He was no girl — frail, susceptible, full of fancies. He could hold his own in a fight with a range of weapons and stand his ground in a Latin disputation. Lord Burghley and Francis Bacon had entrusted him with a ticklish commission. He knew what he saw when he saw it, and what he had seen was Christopher Marlowe acting strangely at the scene of a death.

But what could he do if the man refused to admit it?

Not much. Tom scratched his short beard, thinking. Maybe Marlowe had been up there; it didn’t mean he’d tied the noose. He might as well enlist him to help with the body. “If you haven’t been upstairs, then you don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?” Marlowe flipped through a stack of loose pages on the table.

Tom watched his face closely. “Leeds is dead. He’s hanged himself.”

“You lie!” Marlowe turned to face him, eyes flashing and fists curled.

Tom was taken aback by his fury. “Why would I lie about such a thing?”

“I don’t know why
you
would do anything.” Marlowe glared at him, his hard gaze traveling from head to toe, returning Tom’s suspicious scrutiny in full measure. Then he abruptly jerked away and tromped up the steps.

Tom followed closely, hoping to catch that first reaction to the sorry sight upstairs. He noticed Marlowe was wearing his scruffy intra-college shoes. The right one had a hole the size of a penny piece in the sole. Wherever he had been while Leeds was hanging himself, he had certainly not been at the sermon.

“Ah, Barty!” Marlowe cried. He backed toward Leeds’s bed, feet scraping a trail through the rushes, and sat down. He lowered his head to his hands and murmured to himself, or to Leeds perhaps, “Thou art gone and leav’st me here alone, to dull the air with my discoursive moan.” He directed a hollow laugh at the floor.

Tom could feel the man’s grief wafting from him like a heat. It must be genuine. But then he saw him furtively kick something pink under the bed with his heel.

Marlowe was the most brilliant poet Tom — and probably all of Cambridge University and possibly the whole world — had ever known. He could make such music with his words that you lost yourself, helplessly abandoned to his enchantment. Tom had never seen him act, but rumor had it he was no slouch on the stage. He was a man of high emotion, given to sharp laughter in solemn moments, raging insults traded across a tavern table, and rare, unbalancing, flashes of sympathy. If Marlowe and Leeds had been lovers, perhaps he had come in and found Leeds hanging, as Tom had done, and simply fainted behind the bed. Shame would stop any man from confessing that.

“Let’s get him down,” Tom said softly.

Marlowe nodded and stood up, wobbling a little. “My mind’s a blur. I can’t think how this could happen. Barty would never kill himself.”

“We can’t know what was in his mind. But we’ll sort it out in time. Things will come out; pieces will come together.”

“Oh, you’re an expert in this sort of thing, are you?” Marlowe sneered.

“More than you might think.” Now was not the time for a discussion of Tom’s experience with unnatural death. “One of us should hold him while the other cuts the rope. Which do you—”

“I’ll hold him.” Marlowe walked to the body and put one hand tentatively around Leeds’s ankle. Tears glimmered in his eyes as he looked up into the swollen face. “Ah, Barty,” he whispered.

Tom looked away to give him some privacy. When he looked back, Marlowe’s expression had hardened into something more like anger. “Ready?”

He nodded and clasped the body about the hips. Tom ran a hand down the slanted rope toward the knot at the bedpost. He sliced through the penny-cord about a foot above the knot. Leeds’s body slumped into Marlowe’s arms. He lowered it gently to its feet. Tom tucked his knife into its sheath at the back of his belt and caught the body under the arms while Marlowe lifted the legs. They laid it flat upon the bed. Marlowe worked the noose free, his handsome features contorted in a grimace. He drew it over Leeds’s head and tossed it to the floor. Tom frowned down at it, its shape tugging at his memory again.

The two of them then stood side by side and gazed down at the earthly remains of Bartholomew Leeds.

“Why did he do it?” Tom asked, not expecting an answer.

Marlowe snapped, “What makes you so certain he did?” His gaze fixed on the sheet of paper lying near the foot of the bed. “What’s that?”

“A note,” Tom said. “A suicide letter. It sounds like he’d been thinking about this since —

“

“Since you moved in?”

That silenced him. Could Marlowe know about his commission from Lord Burghley? It was supposed to be an absolute secret. Had Leeds confided in him?

Marlowe read the page rapidly, pronouncing the words under his breath as he read. Then he shook the paper in Tom’s face. “Is this your idea of a joke?”

“What?”

Marlowe folded the sheet and started to tuck it into his cuff. Tom reached out and grabbed a corner. “The headmaster should see that.”

“I’ll show it to him.”

Tom knew he would do no such thing. “Better if I keep it.” He tugged; Marlowe tugged back. The paper ripped in two. Marlowe snarled. “Give me —”

The door downstairs squealed. Tom’s chambermates were back from the sermon. Marlowe stuffed his scrap of paper up his sleeve and folded his arms across his chest. He held Tom’s gaze in a stony glare as if daring him to be the first to move. Tom positioned himself in sight of the stairwell. He folded his arms and glared back.

Stalemate.

Diligence Wingfield’s voice rose from below. “Here, I’ll take your cloaks up.” He was their sizar: a student who performed menial chores in lieu of the usual college fees. His father was one of the hottest preachers in Cambridgeshire but too poor to support a second son at university. Diligence’s head rose as he mounted the stairs, his gown looped into his girdle, three cloaks across his arm. “Hallo, Tom! How’d you get back so quick?”

“Go back down, Dilly.” Tom saw Marlowe slip behind the bed curtains. Why hide from the sizar?

It distracted him. The boy darted forward. “Is that Mr. Leeds? Still abed at this hour! Aren’t you going to wake him?”

Before Tom could stop him, he had moved far enough forward to get a look at Leeds’s bloated, mottled face. He screamed and dropped his burden of cloaks. Bending nearly double, he vomited up the dregs of his breakfast into the rushes beside the bed.

Chapter Two

“Ah, Dilly,” Tom said, patting the boy on the back. He was only fifteen; he couldn’t be expected to take such sights in stride. “It’s my fault. I should have stopped you.”

“I’m all right, Tom.” Diligence turned away from the bed, wiping his mouth with the back of his trembling hand.

Tom watched him for a moment to make sure he wasn’t going to faint or throw up again, then he scooped up the dropped cloaks and tossed them onto one of the chests lined up under the eaves. Luckily, the other chambermates stayed below. They’d probably gone straight to their desks to jot the best bits of the sermon into their commonplace books before they forgot them.

He patted Dilly on the shoulder again. “Whyn’t you go down and wash your mouth out? Then see if you can find the headmaster or the chaplain. Both would be better.” He gave the boy an encouraging smile. “You can wait till they take the body away to clean up the puke.”

Diligence nodded. “Thanks, Tom.” He took a deep breath, expelled it in a sour-smelling rush, and went on down.

“You should have stopped him,” Marlowe said. “That was a little cruel.”

“You could have done it as easily as me. Why didn’t you?”

Marlowe just grinned at him, that smug, all-knowing grin that made Tom’s ears burn. He knew he should go down and speak to his chambermates and then go himself to fetch the headmaster, but he would be damned for all eternity before he would leave Marlowe alone with the body.

They didn’t have to wait long. Dr. William Eggerley, Corpus Christi’s headmaster, soon came puffing up the steep stairs. He was average in height and thin but for a round potbelly. His head was nearly bald, leading to the inevitable nickname
Old Eggy
. A man who lived among undergraduates would do better to hold on to his hair.

He was closely dogged by Simon Thorpe, a junior Fellow. Thorpe was tall but stooped, as if trying to shrink himself down to Eggerley’s height. His mousy hair was gray by nature, not by age. The only men in the college over thirty were the headmaster and the chaplain. Thorpe had sharp features with a long nose that tended to drip in damp weather, which in Cambridge was most days, what with the fens and the river.

“Mind the puke,” Tom said as they approached the bed.

“What? Ugh!” Dr. Eggerley’s nose wrinkled. He moved toward Tom, who shifted back around past him, maintaining his position. He offered Tom a grim smile. “Standing guard, eh, Clearwater? Good man.” The headmaster never got anyone’s name right. “What happened here? That boy downstairs was nearly incoherent.”

“He made no sense at all,” Thorpe said, taking up his standard position behind Old Eggy’s left elbow. He glared at Tom as if the senselessness and the disruption were his fault.

Tom told the tale of how he had come up to fetch some money and found Mr. Leeds hanging from the beam. He sketched the line of the rope in the air and pointed out the noose and the cup. He knew Marlowe was watching him, listening, weighing every word. The other men hadn’t noticed him, standing like a statue almost inside the drape of the bed curtain. Tom didn’t mention the letter or Marlowe. He knew — the whole college knew — there was friction between Marlowe and Dr. Eggerley. Oil and water in Tom’s view, but there could be more to it than mere temperament. If Leeds and Marlowe had taken advantage of the empty college to indulge themselves, that was between the two of them. Tom would not be the one to expose poor Leeds to postmortem ridicule.

Besides, he should send a full report to Bacon and get his instructions before speculating in public. Bacon might even be impressed Tom had learned at least some discretion in his six short weeks as an intelligencer.

“Suicide,” Dr. Eggerley said. “Sorrowful death made doubly tragic by certain damnation.”

“Unless he was one of the elect,” Tom said, stupidly. Both men shot him hard looks. He clapped his mouth shut.

What did he know about theology? His father was a privateer and had taught him from his earliest years that there were two kinds of religion. There’s the kind where you’re standing on the poop deck with a raging gale astern, Spanish cannons ahead, and the only thing between you and certain destruction is a prayer to God Almighty to shift the blasted wind. That’s the important kind, but it’s strictly between you and your Maker.

The other kind is where you don your Sunday best and go to church with your neighbors. That’s a matter of the proper workings of the parish, which makes it a matter of the state, which makes it the queen’s business. A sensible man worships however his monarch does and doesn’t kick up a fuss. Tom had spent enough years at the university and Gray’s Inn to know that intellectual men had more complicated ideas, but in his heart, he believed his father got it right.

“A very bad business,” Thorpe said. “And so sudden. Although, he did seem preoccupied lately. With what, we can only imagine.”

“And there, Thorpe, is the rub,” Dr. Eggerley said. “We can’t look inside a man’s soul, can we? Still, Leeds had a lot on his plate.”

“He took a lot on himself,” Thorpe said. “Too much, some might say. College bursar, his famous translation, new pupils.” He shot another glare at Tom, who shrugged, knowing Leeds had been worried about far more than college business.

Eggerley nodded. “I should have paid more heed to his state of mind. I might have been able to alleviate some of his burdens.”

“You have too many burdens yourself, sir,” Thorpe said. “The bursar is supposed to relieve you of some of your worries, not add to them by —” He pressed his thin lips together.
              By hanging himself, had he meant to say? Could he be that cold-hearted? Tom hadn’t had much to do with either Eggerley or Thorpe yet, so he had little sense of their qualities. He glanced at Marlowe, who had lived in Corpus Christi College for years. His eyes and mouth were narrowed into grim lines.

“You were much the better candidate, Thorpe.” Eggerley wagged his finger in the air. “Leeds somehow got around the other Fellows before the votes were cast. Some sort of secret influence. I don’t like that sort of thing in my college.”

“A college should vote with its head,” Thorpe said, oblivious to the pun. Tom saw a sardonic grin flash across Marlowe’s face.

“I don’t need an election to appoint an interim bursar, however. If you wouldn’t mind, Simon . . .”

“I’d be honored to assist you in any way possible.” Thorpe’s eyes glinted eagerly.

Bursaring must be lucrative or influential. Or both.

Voices sounded in the chamber below. Teaching master Abraham Jenney emerged from the stairwell. “That boy out there is telling the most appalling story.”

Eggerley nodded. “I’m afraid it’s true.” He gestured at the bed.

“Mind the puke,” Tom warned.

Jenney wrinkled his nose at the stink and grimaced at the sight of Leeds’s face and then tiptoed back to stand near the headmaster.

“Clattery here was on the spot.” Eggerley flapped a hand at Tom, who recounted his story for the newcomer.

“Horrible.” Jenney sighed heavily. He was a man of average height with a pasty face, a pudgy figure, and short dark hair curling tightly under his ears. His clothing was always correct in every particular, neither too rich nor too plain. He had a turned-up nose that tended to flare under pressure of strong feelings, making him look like an angry pig. “Leeds should have stuck to his theological studies and not gone delving so deeply into that pagan Latin literature. Roman funeral orations are an unwholesome topic. Some of them make suicide seem an almost honorable act.”

That was plausible, very plausible. Tom had forgotten about Leeds’s book, a translation of some dusty Roman senator’s essays. Funeral orations did sound like a dispiriting theme. He shot Jenney a grateful look. He would include that in his report. Francis Bacon probably knew all the Roman funeral orations by heart. He would understand the connection better than Tom.

Eggerley said, “You may well be right. That cursed book is at the bottom of this.”

“That book should be banned,” Thorpe said, forgetting it would never be finished.

Jenney blinked his beady eyes at the others. “Still, it hardly seems credible. Leeds, of all people! He had the best fellowship in the college and that nice living at Hadleigh to look forward to. Very well endowed and in the gift of the Earl of Orford, no less. He was set for life.”

The name
Orford
sounded familiar, but Tom couldn’t place it. Had the earl chosen Leeds specifically for his nonconforming views? Another tidbit for Bacon, who would doubtless know precisely where Lord Orford stood on matters political.

“Who will get his fellowship?” Jenney asked.

“That’s a good question,” Eggerley said. “Everyone will want it. We’ll have to schedule a vote.” He and Thorpe exchanged thoughtful looks.

Jenney sniffed. “The body should be laid out properly in the chapel. Shall I go hurry the chaplain along?”

“Thank you, Jensen,” Eggerley said. “And have someone fetch the coroner, won’t you? We should observe the proper procedures, even though the situation looks quite clear.”

“Suicide, caused by a superfluity of strain and melancholy works,” Thorpe said.

Tom repeated the utterance under his breath to memorize it for his report. Thorpe might be a sniveling toady, but his summation was spot on the mark.

Jenney was crowded going down the stairs by John Barrow coming up, who started talking before he reached the top. “What’s this I hear about Bartholomew Leeds? My boys are all in an uproar. Poor Diligence Wingfield is in tears.”

Mr. Barrow was the most popular teaching Fellow in the college. He had six boys in his own set of chambers and supervised the four who lived on the ground floor beneath Leeds’s set. He had a broad freckled face with curly red hair and warm hazel eyes. He took an acute interest in everything that happened in the college, especially anything that might affect his boys.

He strode past Eggerley and Thorpe with a raised eyebrow and steered straight for the bed as if he needed the proof of his own eyes to believe what he’d heard.

“Mind the puke,” Tom said.

He stepped back gingerly and noticed Tom for the first time. “What happened here, Clarady? Are you the one that found him?”

Tom told his tale again, making more of a performance out it. Something about Mr. Barrow made you want to impress him. He acted out his initial shock, drawing the line where the rope had hung with both arms spread wide, then exhibiting the noose, now lying on the floor, with a flourish. He glanced past the headboard to see how Marlowe was taking it. He was gone. He must have slipped out while the senior men were talking together.

Barrow pointed at the knot around the bedpost. “You ought to take that down. I’ll do it, if it bothers you, and clear away the other bits of rope.”

“Thank you, Mr. Barrow, but the worst is over. We should leave it for the coroner to see. I’ll make sure everything is set to rights after they take the body away.”

Barrow studied him with concern in his eyes, making sure. Then he nodded. “Good man. If any of your chums are feeling uneasy tonight, they can squeeze in with my crew. Always room for a few more. There’s no shame in wanting company after a thing like this.” He turned to leave.

Eggerley caught his sleeve. “Spread the word, will you, Barley? We don’t need anyone else up here now except the chaplain and the coroner.”

Barrow nodded. “I’ll put Steadfast at the door downstairs.” Steadfast Wingfield was one of his older students and brother to Diligence.

Dr. Eggerley sighed after Barrow left and granted Tom a weary smile, as if they had shared a great labor. He spoke to Thorpe. “Tell the butler to put dinner back half an hour. And ask the stableman to saddle my horse. I’d best ride to Westminster to inform the chancellor without delay. It wouldn’t do for him to hear about this from anyone else.”

Tom heard the word
chancellor
with a jolt. The Chancellor of Cambridge University was William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the queen’s closest advisor, and thus the man most responsible for maintaining the queen’s peace. When Leeds wrote to him in January to warn him about the trouble brewing among the Puritans, Burghley decided to send an intelligencer to investigate the situation. He appointed his nephew, Francis Bacon, as spymaster; Bacon recruited Tom.

Bacon expected daily reports, but so far, Tom had had little to offer. Now everything had changed. He’d better get busy writing. It wouldn’t do him or Bacon any good if Dr. Eggerley were the first to deliver the news.