Scorpions' Nest (11 page)

‘It was my pleasure.’ Johns smiled into the darkness.

‘Michael…’ Phelippes was sitting up, hugging his knees. ‘I work for the Queen’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham.’

‘I think I knew that,’ Johns said.

‘And we are going to the English College, the scorpions’ nest itself. I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t. Look, if you want to go back, back to England, back to Cambridge, I will understand. Honestly, I will.’

‘The English College…’ Johns rolled the name around his tongue. ‘Dr William Allen, isn’t it? The antichrist?’

Phelippes said nothing, but nodded his head. In the dark, Johns felt the motion transmitted through the bedclothes, and assumed assent.

For a while the two men kept a thoughtful silence, then Johns sighed and said, ‘I admit that when we set off on our little adventure, I wasn’t quite expecting the Holy Inquisition.’

‘No,’ muttered Phelippes, lying back down and pulling the bedclothes around his ears, ‘no one ever does.’

A
chill October wind rippled the surface of the lake below the chateau. Christopher Marlowe checked the purse at his hip to make sure he still had the ring there, the one he’d appropriated from Gerald Skelton’s study. The pale sun shone on the whitewashed circular towers and glinted on the fleurs-de-lys wrought in gold-flecked iron above the roof. No one challenged him at the gate and he trotted on his hired horse into a wide courtyard, strewn with straw and chickens. Clearly the Sieur de Fleury had known better times. Marlowe knew the name. One of the man’s ancestors had died at Agincourt, trampled in the mud of that wet October day and it looked from the state of this place that the family fortunes had died with him. Marlowe had made enquiries around the town. Anne de Fleury was a passionate Frenchman and a Papist through and through but he was old and had quarrelled with his sons so that whenever the family met they squabbled incessantly over inheritance. Was it that, Marlowe wondered, that meant the man went in fear of his life? Perhaps not, but it was a useful thing to know.

And suddenly, he also knew why no one had challenged him at the gate. Armed men were creeping out of the shadows of the stalls that lined the courtyard. He heard the gate slam shut and lock behind him and he steadied his horse, stroking the animal’s neck and whispering to it in his best French. A dozen pikes prickled all around him and Marlowe held up Skelton’s ring so that it flashed in the cloud-shrouded sun.

‘I have a message from Dr Allen,’ Marlowe said, ‘from the English College.’

One of the pikemen spat volubly but a sharp voice barked a reprimand. A fierce old warrior in obsolete armour came waddling out of a darkened archway. He wore a tabard with the arms of Fleury embroidered on it, but the colours were pale and some of the intricate needlework was unravelling, trailing cobwebs of old glory in the eddying air of his movement.

‘What have I to do with the English College?’ the old man wanted to know. His face was almost purple and his beard snow white, along with the remnants of the hair he still had on his head.

‘You are the Sieur de Fleury?’ Marlowe didn’t trust himself completely with another country’s heraldry and it was as well to be sure.

The old man folded his arms with a rattle of metal. ‘I am Anne de Fleury,’ he said as the pikemen drew back to let him approach. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘I am Robert Greene,’ Marlowe lied again, ‘and I have news for your ears only, my lord.’

The old knight looked at the man. He was well mounted, dressed in the English fashion, but flashily, like a roisterer. He invited Marlowe to dismount and one of the pikemen took his horse. Another whisked the dagger from the small of his back and a third patted the sleeves of his doublet and the bulges of his Venetians. He even peered into the tops of Marlowe’s buskins and shook his head at his master.

‘Show me that,’ Fleury snapped, pointing to the ring.

Marlowe passed it over. The old man squinted at it. His eyes weren’t what they had been but he wasn’t letting his people know just how bad they were. Even so he recognized the cross maline of the English College and threw it back to Marlowe.

‘What’s this all about, Greene?’ Fleury asked.

‘For your ears only, my lord,’ Marlowe reminded him.

The old man beckoned him forward and a pikeman raised his weapon. ‘Stand to!’ Fleury barked. ‘I thank you, gentlemen, for your diligence.’ He took Marlowe’s dagger from the flunkey who held it and waved it in the stranger’s face. ‘But I was at Calais that great day we took it back from you English. My artillery crossed the frozen marshes and blasted seven kinds of shit out of your garrison there.’ He winked at Marlowe and said, ‘I haven’t lost my touch.’

Marlowe had talked to men from the Calais garrison when he was a boy. He thought it would be impolite to remind the Sieur de Fleury that the French had outnumbered the English nearly fourteen to one.
And
all that was nearly thirty years ago.

‘Well, boy?’ the old knight squinted up into Marlowe’s face. ‘What is for my ears only?’

‘May I see your wine cellar, my lord? You may care to have your steward present.’

‘My wine cellar?’ Fleury frowned. ‘Very well. Seurat!’ he shouted at a flunkey wearing his livery. ‘Keys, please. Wine cellar.’

The man Seurat hefted a solid-looking bunch of keys from a belt at his waist and slotted one into position in a studded door under the shade of a roofed awning. The cellar was hardly that, but it sloped away under the courtyard wall and there were enough bottles to survive the siege of Troy. If the old knight wasn’t spending much on his fortifications, he was more than making up for it with his wine bill. The steward fumbled with a tinderbox and lit a large candle.

‘Why are we here?’ Fleury asked.

‘Where is the latest consignment from Solomon Aldred?’ Marlowe asked.

‘Over here.’ The steward took them all to a far corner.

‘When did these arrive?’ Marlowe asked.

‘Last week. Thursday, I believe.’

‘Ten bottles?’ Marlowe needed to be sure. There was no room for error because he knew he couldn’t possibly pull this stunt again.

‘That’s right. Anything… wrong with them?’ The steward might just as well have said ‘Are they stiff with poison? Have people died in their hundreds by drinking this wine of the devil?’ But he was a professional. He tried to keep cool. ‘Have there been any… incidents?’

Marlowe smiled at him, but there was no comfort in what was really just a grimace. ‘When you serve a bottle to my Lord Fleury –’ Marlowe stood between them – ‘how do you bring it to his hall?’

‘I don’t,’ the steward said, looking down his nose as only a Frenchman can, ‘I have people.’

‘These people,’ Marlowe said, lowering his voice and clutching the steward’s sleeve. ‘Are they… well?’

‘What?’ the steward frowned, stepping back a pace.

‘For God’s sake, man!’ The old knight exploded, turning ever more purple in the candle’s flickering light. ‘What are you talking about?’

Marlowe turned to the man and said quietly, so close to his ear that the old warrior could feel the breath warm on his neck. ‘Do you have enemies, my lord? Those who might wish you ill?’

The old man blinked, twitching his moustache. ‘Seurat, leave us, will you?’

‘My lord…?’

‘That will be all, sir,’ Fleury snapped. ‘Double up, dammit.’

The steward bowed and, leaving the candle with Marlowe, bowed his way out of the room.

‘Well –’ the knight leaned back against the nearest wall – ‘that one for a start. Hates my guts.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘Two of my three sons,’ the old man said. ‘Possibly all three. It’s no use pretending. I was never much of a father, but at the time I thought I’d given them everything.’

‘Ah, filial ingratitude.’ Marlowe shook his head.

‘What has this to do with Solomon Aldred’s wine?’ Fleury asked.

‘Possibly nothing,’ Marlowe said, ‘but we’ve had… hmm, let’s call it intelligence… at the English College. Someone is poisoning wine and sending lethal bottles to certain key people in Rheims. Dr Allen, the Archbishop. And you.’

‘Aldred’s a poisoner?’ Fleury was astonished. He’d always found the man rather good company, once he was able to put to one side the fact that he was an Englishman.

‘No, no.’ Marlowe was quick to correct him. ‘Someone has used Master Aldred’s services to commit murder, or attempt to, at least. Aldred himself is not involved.’

‘Poisoned wine, eh?’ Fleury was taking it all in. ‘Wait a minute, you say Dr Allen has received some? The Archbishop?’

Marlowe nodded grimly.

‘Then it can’t be my boys.’ Fleury was secretly relieved. ‘They’re only on nodding terms with His Grace and they don’t know Allen at all.’

‘Amen,’ said Marlowe. ‘The diabolical thing, my lord, is that the poison isn’t in the wine itself.’

‘Not?’ Fleury frowned. ‘Then, how…?’

‘That’s why I asked your steward how he delivered it to your table.’

‘In the wrapping, as it comes in from Aldred’s shop,’ the old knight told him.

‘Mother of God!’ Marlowe crossed himself, thinking briefly how this action was getting to be frighteningly natural to him these days.

‘What?’ Fleury did likewise, a knee-jerk reaction.

Marlowe closed to him and lowered his voice. He suspected the old man was at least partially deaf, but it didn’t seem quite right to yell if he was meant to be working secretly. He tried to pitch it right, so that he could still hear. ‘The poison is in the wrapping, my lord,’ he said, enunciating crisply. ‘Anyone who touches it is dead within the hour. Earlier if they put their fingers near their mouths in that time.’

‘Mother of God indeed!’ Fleury repeated and sketched another cross.

‘My lord, I would not want your health risked any more than necessary. May I check the wrappings on these bottles?’

‘Is that not very dangerous?’ Fleury asked, backing away.

‘Indeed, but I have a natural immunity to the poison.’

‘You do? How so?’

Marlowe looked at him with narrowed eyes in the candlelit gloom. ‘All men from where I was brought up as a boy have it. It is something in the water, I have always been led to believe.’ He hoped his French was up to the explanation. ‘I shall still take precautions.’ Marlowe unhooked his gloves from his belt and drew them on with much solemnity. ‘I suggest that you stand well back. It has been known that the fumes alone, when the wrapping is disturbed…’

Fleury backed away. ‘Um… look here, Greene. I don’t want to break your concentration, you know. Probably a bit of a tricky exercise, this checking and what not. I’ll just sit outside, shall I? No need for both of us to…?’ He looked hopefully at Marlowe, who nodded enthusiastically.

‘My lord,’ he said, bowing slightly, ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’ And he waited until the old man was through the door before turning back to the rack of wine.

Nothing. There had been nothing in the wrappings of Aldred’s bottles at the Dancing Chicken and there was nothing now. Just a selection of some of the more salacious verses from Leviticus, copied over and over in an indifferent hand, as if to improve the calligraphy. And not even, Marlowe guessed, in Father Laurenticus’ hand. Was he risking life and limb on a wild-goose chase? Assuring the Sieur de Fleury that his wine cellar was safe, he spurred his horse under the low archway and galloped Hell for leather back to town.

The Compline bell was sounding as Christopher Marlowe ducked under the archway that led to the Archbishop’s private cellar. Behind him rose the colossal Gothic masterpiece that was Rheims cathedral and the saints of old Christendom, cold in their chiselled stone, watched him go. At the main door he had been stopped by a verger who told him the church was about to start divine service. Marlowe was very welcome to join them, but if he had just come to marvel at the architectural splendour of the place, that would be three sous, please, and could he call back. Marlowe declined both, explaining that he had urgent business on behalf of the Archbishop’s vintner and Compline or not, the mercantile bureaucracy of France could not wait. There had been a grave error. The wrappings on Solomon Aldred’s recent consignment were not finest vellum. They must be replaced, at no cost to His Grace, of course. And Master Aldred would be pleased to send the next crate free of charge.

A choirboy led Marlowe through a labyrinth of stone paths, through wicket gates without number. The lad’s surplice billowed out behind him like a race-built galleon under full sail. Not long ago, this could have been Marlowe himself, hurrying to the cathedral at Canterbury under the shadow of the Dark Entry on his way from school. He smiled to himself at the water that had flowed under the bridge since then, by way of the Stour, the Cam, the Thames and Seine and now the Vesle; water that ran dark and deadly; water in which bodies floated.

The boy showed him into yet another cellar and he told his story to yet another cellar-keeper. The monk seemed easier to hoodwink that either the landlord Detrail or the steward Seurat and Marlowe was soon reading the wine wrappings by a flickering candle. The sixth bottle made his heart thump, but his face didn’t move. Small, spidery letters, in blocks. They didn’t seem to form words but were simply a jumble of squiggles. A Mohammedan would take them for gibberish, but Mohammedans didn’t work for Francis Walsingham and Marlowe recognized their importance at once. He shook his head, tutting, collected up the sheets and stuffed them into his doublet. Bottles seven and eight were wrapped in St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians and he made a great show of feeling the parchment between his fingers, sniffing the dry ink as if to make doubly sure.

‘Thank God,’ he muttered to the cellarer monk. ‘Only one bottle contaminated. I cannot apologize enough. I will be back by Matins with Master Aldred’s free crate
and
the correct wrapping for bottle six.’ He caught the bemused look on the cellarer’s face. ‘Look, I feel very bad about this,’ Marlowe said, preparing to leave. ‘Is there a priest free? For confession, I mean?’

‘Will I do?’

Marlowe turned at the stentorian voice behind him. Framed in the archway with the torches of the cathedral precinct behind him stood Dr Allen. Marlowe felt himself transported back to his boyhood for the second time in half an hour and had to fight down an urge to lick his palm and flatten his unruly hair.