Scorpions' Nest (12 page)

‘Master.’ Marlowe was wrong-footed again but his face didn’t betray the fact.

‘Dominus Greene.’ Allen walked towards him. ‘I thought I saw you on your way here. The lad who brought you confirmed it for me. An Englishman, in the habit of a roisterer, armed and looking for the wine cellar of the Archbishop of Rheims. And at a time when every other member of the English College except my good self is at their devotions. Nothing odd in that, is there?’

‘Merely helping out a friend,’ Marlowe explained.

‘Oh?’ Allen’s raised eyebrow said it all. ‘How so?’

‘Solomon Aldred,’ Marlowe said. ‘The vintner. He fears he may have sent His Grace the wrong consignment.’

‘And has he?’

‘All is well,’ Marlowe assured him.

‘Good of you to be so concerned about Master Aldred,’ Allen said. ‘I hadn’t the two of you down for friends.’

‘I admit,’ Marlowe said, ‘I didn’t care for the man when I first met him. But he grows on you. I was coming to the cathedral anyway…’

‘You were?’ Allen asked. ‘Why?’

‘It isn’t often you see one rose window as lovely as in this cathedral, but to have two is almost too much. I heard that at this time of the year and at this time of day the light strikes through them just right. What fairer monument to the glory of God? I had never seen it from the inside.’

‘And you still haven’t,’ Allen observed. ‘Nor will you from down here in the cellars. Shall we?’

‘Delighted,’ Marlowe said and thanked the cellarer for his understanding before walking with the black-robed Master towards another Catholic Mass. His heart was still in his mouth but the documents he had sought for so long were at least safe, for the moment, in his doublet. He mumbled the Latin chant alongside Allen as the candles flickered and threw their long shadows on the soaring pillars. And the rose windows were undeniably beautiful, so his story held up on that score. But Allen needed watching. Used as Marlowe was to the unworldly Dr Norgate, a Master who was in charge of his faculties in more than one way was something of a novelty.

It was late by the time Kit Marlowe and Solomon Aldred trudged home along the Rue des Capucins that Wednesday. The town Watch nodded at the little Englishman who had become such a fixture in the city over the recent months. They didn’t nod at Marlowe. But they watched him nonetheless; there was something in the way he carried himself, saw everything, remained silent while Aldred jabbered on in his incomprehensible babble. Marlowe was one to watch for all eternity.

Around the corner of the old convent of St Remi, Marlowe spoke for the first time. ‘You know we are not alone, Master Aldred?’ It was whispered out of the corner of his mouth in the way he had first learned as a choral scholar, chatting in the sermon, but had honed to perfection in two years of playing Francis Walsingham’s games.

‘Two of them.’ The vintner nodded without changing his tone, turning or breaking his stride. ‘By the trees. How long, would you say?’

‘Since we came through the Mars Gate, I think.’

‘That would be my guess. Let’s see what they do if we split up. Do you know the Palace of Tau?’

‘You could hardly miss it,’ Marlowe pointed out, mildly. Even if it had not been rubbing shoulders with Notre Dame, it would have stood out in any city.

‘Well, yes.’ Aldred had become a local through and through and could not help condescending just a little to the newcomer. ‘Go there, the best route is past my house, I think, from here. Then if you double back on yourself, you can end up back at my house. Hide and wait for me in that little archway across the road. I’ll go in the opposite direction from here, to the river and then double back through some little lanes I know. Wait for me for as long as it takes; my route will be longer than yours and more dangerous.’ He paused and looked Marlowe in the face, seeming to learn each feature. ‘Take care of yourself, Master Greene. We’re all on dangerous ground, wherever we are.’ He spoke in Greek, not well but with feeling. It paid to be on the safe side.

The pair separated, Aldred clattering with his brass-bound pattens on the cobbles, sending the odd spark across the stone. Marlowe slipped silently into the darkness, avoiding the moon and the occasional guttering torch-flame at street corners. He couldn’t see his shadows now and concluded they must have both gone after Aldred. Feeling a twinge of guilt, he increased his pace. Solomon Aldred was a field agent of repute, a projectioner par excellence and if it sometimes seemed that he had gone a little native, a little too absorbed in the day-to-day business of vintning, it had not slowed him up too much. Besides which, he was
very
short and therefore likely to be able to hide in places where the normal-sized followers couldn’t go.

It was only as he was reaching Aldred’s front door that Marlowe paused. He squeezed himself into the shadows on the opposite side of the street and watched for a while, letting his eyes settle into using the available light. Was it a trick of the dark, or was the door ajar? There were no lights in the building and even if Aldred had somehow got back first, he couldn’t see him leaving the door open even for a moment, given the circumstances.

He slid his dagger from its sheath nestled in the small of his back and slipped across the street, watching like a cat for small movements in the shadows. There was nobody. No footfalls, no drunken curses, farts or shouts to mask a secret foe’s approach. It was the open door that bothered him more than his shadows now. Aldred would have snuffed the candle as he left, but he would also have closed the door; if he wasn’t thinking like a projectioner, he would have been thinking like a vintner and a bottle stolen was a bottle that would make him no profit.

Marlowe pushed the door open with his foot, gently, so that the hinges didn’t creak. The waft of old wine hit him like a wall and he saw a head bob up, black and hatless, against the far window. It flashed for a second only but it was enough and Marlowe drove his left elbow hard against the open door. It thudded on something solid behind it and the groan of pain and the grunt of an exhaled breath told him he’d guessed right. It was a reception committee. He spun round the door and hauled the groaning figure in front of him, jerking the man’s arm painfully up behind his back and holding his blade across his throat.

‘You, by the window,’ he shouted in French. ‘Identify yourself!’

‘Friend!’ came the nearly hysterical reply.

‘What the Hell’s going on?’ It was Solomon Aldred’s voice, calling through the doorway from the street. ‘Marlowe, is that you?’ There was the whisper of a flint being struck and candle light warmed the room. In front of the window, standing behind a stack of wine crates, stood a scholarly-looking man with a wheel-lock pistol in his hand.

‘Kit Marlowe,’ Aldred said, crossing the room and removing the gun from the other man’s fist, ‘meet Thomas Phelippes, who should not, I might add, be allowed to play with things like this.’ He waved the pistol rather aimlessly in the air and everyone ducked slightly, by instinct. Aldred half turned and looked towards Marlowe, still tensed behind his captive. ‘I must admit that I don’t know the gentleman whose throat you were about to slit.’

Marlowe spun the man round so that he was facing him.

‘Hello, Kit,’ he said.

Marlowe stood there, gaping like an idiot. Then he recovered himself and, with an expansive gesture, introduced the man to Aldred. ‘Master Aldred,’ he said, ‘please meet Professor Michael Johns, of Cambridge University.’

‘
Late
of Cambridge University,’ Johns corrected him, adjusting his clothing after his mild rough housing.

‘Ah,’ Aldred said calmly, lighting more candles. ‘If you two are going to have a little reunion, do it in your own time. We have more pressing business. Marlowe, the door, if you please. You might have to give it a shove; it tends to jump its hinges when roughly handled. We don’t want half of Rheims knowing all about the Queen’s business.’

Robert Greene had dressed and prepared with care. He had learned a lot since his last encounter with Marlowe and his little box of tricks and he was armed with a chisel, a clamp and his right hand was squeezed into a gauntlet he had prised from a tomb in St Mary’s on his way from his rooms to Corpus Christi. He had learned his lesson with the Proctors and had watched carefully to find their Achilles’ heel. They were always on their guard, but they were slightly less wary at shift change and it was then that he had managed to get through the gate. He was wearing a fustian gown, to blend both with the mass of scholars and the dark and he felt that he would succeed this time in finding Marlowe’s manuscript, wherever it might be hidden.

In a scurrying half crouch, he had made it in the twilight to the doorway that led to Marlowe’s stair and was now crouched beneath a straggling rosemary bush which leaned damply on the wall. He had been quite comfortable for the first hour, as the final scholars had come and gone, in chatting groups or alone. He had leant his back against the wall and braced his knees to take his weight and had at first happily thought he could stay like that all night if need be. Then he had felt a strange sensation across his face and in brushing off the source of it had crushed a large and juicy spider against his upper lip. He had jumped with the horror of it and had not been without cramping pains here or there since. The rosemary smell, which had been so enticing to begin with, now began to cloy and with the smell of the dead arachnid overlaid on it, was beginning to turn his stomach more than somewhat. Finally, he knew his moment had come.

He edged out from behind his rosemary bush, swathed in cobwebs, crusted with stone flaking from the old wall and as stiff as a board. He walked on unsteady legs, the calves aching from what seemed like hours in the same, unnatural position. Leaning on the wall and the door jamb for support he insinuated himself into the dark of the small lobby at the foot of the stair and stood for a while in the shadows, catching his breath and calming himself down. He breathed in and out slowly through his nose, counting each breath to make them even. He had found that he needed to calm himself down like this more and more lately, as the obsession with finding Marlowe’s manuscript had grown and grown, excluding all else, including his own weak muse.

He had reached a count of eight on the exhaled breath when a voice quietly spoke in his ear.

‘Dominus Greene,’ said Proctor Lomas in the happy tone of a man once more on night duty. ‘I believe that I have already told you that you are not allowed on College premises.’ He grabbed at the man’s fustian robe at the shoulder, preparing to haul him away, but was left with just the fabric dangling in his huge fist. He looked down, puzzled, at the inert body of Robert Greene, fainted dead away at his feet. He was sorry that the whole thing had been so easy and, sighing, picked the St John’s man up as though he were a child and flung him over his shoulder.

Reaching the gate, he was about to fling the scholar down on the cobbles, but a rare spark of humanity stayed his hand. Instead, he leant him against the wall, with his legs outstretched and the gown over his head. Anonymity thus preserved, Robert Greene twitched and slept his way through the remainder of the night, his hand cold inside its iron glove, clutching and swatting at phantom spiders, grown as big as Kit Marlowe, and just as tricky.

A
ldred had reached down four glasses by instinct and was prying the stopper from a bottle of wine before the men had found seats on crates and sacks in his shop. He explained in a low voice that the ‘little’ woman was not a heavy sleeper and she would be rather raucous in her discontent should they wake her. She slept in a truckle bed in the room at the back and so the shop was by far the safest place for their talk, if they wanted to avoid a broom across their backs. Marlowe, who had met the lady and Phelippes and Johns, both equipped with good imaginations, complied happily and soon they were assembled in the light from the candles round the room.

After the excitement of their meeting, the men were all a little uncertain how to begin. Johns was the first to speak.

‘You have a nice shop here, Master Aldred,’ he said, in a conversational tone. ‘Does it do well?’

‘It’s a living,’ Aldred said, shrugging a shoulder. ‘I have some very loyal customers.’

Marlowe looked around the circle and his heart sank. This should have been a meeting of Francis Walsingham’s top men, but instead the group seemed to consist of a vintner, a lecturer, a strange academic and a playwright. Perhaps Walsingham and Faunt knew what they were doing, but if so, he wasn’t quite sure what that might be. He coughed discreetly and brought the meeting to something resembling order.

‘Would it perhaps be better if we bent our minds to what we are here for, instead of pleasantries?’ he asked.

Aldred drew himself up a notch. ‘As the senior man here,’ he said, testily, ‘I think I should direct this meeting.’

‘You may be older, Aldred,’ Phelippes said, ‘but I am the expert called in specially. This should be my meeting.’

‘Do you know anything about Rheims?’ Aldred said, sweet reason overlaying the venom.

‘Do you?’ Phelippes asked. ‘We may be strangers here, but we found your house straight away, while you two were playing hide and seek. We didn’t need much skill to break in.’

‘I just leaned against the door,’ Johns said, proudly, smiling round the group. ‘It gave way.’

‘It does that,’ Aldred said. ‘It was just a lucky push. So, as I was saying…’

‘As
I
was saying—’ Phelippes broke in before being interrupted himself.

‘What in the name of Sant’ Remi and all the Saints in Heaven,’ came a screech from the back room, ‘is going on out there? Solomon, have you taken leave of your senses? You know I need my beauty sleep. Be quiet, or you will feel my broom across your backs!’

The men fell silent. Aldred looked round beseechingly and then called, ‘Sorry, my little turtle dove. I just have a friend or two out here for a chat. I’ll be coming in to bed soon, precious heart.’ He frantically tapped his finger on his lips, praying for silence.

‘Madame Aldred?’ Phelippes mouthed.