Scorpions' Nest (18 page)

The dimmest of candles burned in a tiny chapel whose plain white walls glistened with moisture. The solitary flame flickered on the agonized face of St Peter, spreadeagled on his cross, upside down because he was not worthy to suffer the same fate as his Lord. The Master of the English College was at his devotions before the altar with its damask cloth and crosses. Marlowe heard the door crash closed behind him and the screech of a bolt. He was aware of two burly monks taking up positions on either side of the door, arms folded, hoods forward over their heads. Marlowe recognized muscular Christianity when he saw it; he’d known it all his life, from the early days at the King’s School, Canterbury, and nothing surprised him any more. He wondered, very briefly, if either of these muscular Christians had been the one to take a slice out of Thomas Phelippes.

Allen crossed himself before the altar, turned and faced Marlowe. Then he walked over to a sedilia and sat down. Skelton stood next to him, his arms folded like the heavies at the door. ‘Doctor Skelton has noticed, Dominus Greene,’ Allen said, his ringed fingers twitching on the arm of his chair, ‘that you do not attend divine service.’

Marlowe cast a glance at the Bursar. Clearly, the man was more observant than he looked. ‘I am not a monk, Dr Allen,’ Marlowe excused himself. ‘You wouldn’t expect me to follow the Orders.’

‘The Orders, no,’ Allen conceded. ‘But Doctor Skelton tells me you don’t attend
any
service, not even Matins. And in the time you have been here, you have taken Holy Communion only once.’

‘I have been remiss,’ Marlowe agreed, ‘for which I apologize.’

‘Oh, I think you have rather more to apologize for than that, Dominus Greene,’ the Master said. ‘You see, I received a letter recently from… let’s just say a friend. In the University of Cambridge. Gerald.’

Skelton produced a sheaf of paper from his lawn sleeve and cleared his throat. ‘Dominus Robert Greene is a scholar at St John’s College, not Corpus Christi –’ he was reading by the bad light, squinting at the tiny writing, but he was clearly familiar with the contents of the letter – ‘and as I write, is very much alive and well. And residing currently here in Cambridge. I learn that he is reasonably travelled in Europe and has nonsensical ambitions to become a poet and a playwright.’

‘Nonsensical indeed,’ Marlowe said with a laugh.

‘What is the date of that missive, Doctor Skelton?’ Allen asked.

‘Eight days ago, Master,’ the Bursar told him.

‘Yet you have been with us now for sixteen,’ Allen was scowling at Marlowe. ‘I think it’s time you told us the truth, sir. I will not have lies in this College.’

‘Will you not?’ Marlowe grunted. ‘Is that why three men are dead? And why you had me followed the other night?’

Allen’s face changed not a jot in the candlelight. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘Christopher Marlowe,’ Marlowe said. ‘Scholar of Corpus Christi College.’

‘The same Christopher Marlowe you claimed to have killed?’ Allen asked. ‘The blasphemer and atheist?’

Skelton’s jaw dropped. He knew none of this but Allen was in full flow. He’d long ago skated over secrets he’d heard in the Confessional, if only for the greater good. There was no going back now.

‘Would I be here,’ Marlowe asked the Master, ‘if I were either?’

‘Then why
are
you here?’ Allen asked.

Marlowe straightened, then jerked his head in the direction of the monks at his back, ‘Gog and Magog here,’ he said. ‘Can they be trusted?’

‘Implicitly,’ Allen said with a nod.

‘Very well, then. You have a spy in your midst, Dr Allen – an intelligencer in the English College.’

‘I knew it!’ Skelton shouted, then fell abruptly silent at a wave of the Master’s hand.

‘Who is it?’ Allen asked.

Marlowe chuckled. ‘If I knew that, Master,’ he said, ‘I’d have left his head on your high altar by now.’

‘Sacrilege!’ Skelton was appalled.

‘We live in a sacrilegious age, Bursar,’ Marlowe rapped. ‘Ask friends Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin. Every other jack’s an Anabaptist. Have you all forgotten why you left England?’

‘If you weren’t telling the truth before,’ Allen said, ‘how do we know you’re telling it now?’

Marlowe frowned, then slipped his hand into his purse and noted the monks behind him edging forward. ‘Perhaps this will help. You have a lovely reading voice, Doctor Skelton. Read that to the Master.’

Skelton took the document Marlowe had passed to him. He saw the seal, the ribbon, the keys of Peter embedded deep in the wax. ‘You know the imprimatur of the Curia?’ Marlowe asked him. Skelton showed it to Allen who recognized it too and nodded. ‘Read it,’ he commanded.

Skelton unrolled the parchment and began. ‘To Our Well Beloved Son in Christ, Dr William Allen.’ He was reading in perfect Latin. ‘Greeting. By these precepts know that our son Christopher Marlowe has Our Dispensation to investigate the English College now at Rheims in Our belief that the antichrist is abroad in your cloisters. It is Our wish that you extend him every assistance to root out the Devil in your midst. May the Lord be with you in this time of Our trials, etcetera, etcetera…’ His voice trailed away.

Allen glanced at the document. ‘There’s no signature,’ he said.

‘You know as well as I do –’ Marlowe folded his arms – ‘His Holiness only uses his quill on letters close. You and I, sadly, do not command such status.’

Allen wasn’t looking at the paper any more, just at Marlowe. ‘Top left,’ he said to Skelton. ‘The initials there…’

Skelton squinted at it, turning it towards the light. ‘ACG,’ he said. ‘GC.’

There was a silence. Both men looked at Marlowe. ‘Alessandro Castel Giovanni,’ he said with a sigh, ‘Gran Cardinale. When I was in His Eminence’s palace last, I had the honour to dance with his daughter.’

Skelton tutted and rolled his eyes.

‘Now, Gerald.’ Allen smiled. ‘Who are we to judge?’

‘When the Curia finally sees sense and makes you a Cardinal, Master—’

Allen cut the man short. ‘What do you need, Dominus Marlowe?’

‘To find the Devil in your midst,’ Master,’ Marlowe answered. ‘And I must be allowed to do that in my own way. I won’t get very far if I’m prostrate in the chapel morning, noon and night.’ He glanced at the monks behind him. ‘Or, if I’m followed on an evening. My inquiries may well take me beyond the College walls.’

‘You won’t be hindered,’ Allen told him. ‘Gerald, I want you to give every assistance to Dominus Marlowe.’

‘No, no,’ Marlowe said hurriedly. Being marked out for special attention would not get him very far in his quest. ‘Something tells me I’ll get further as the runagate Robert Greene, failed poet and playwright than as a Papal Nuncio. People will be off their guard. Don’t change your treatment of me in the slightest, please, either of you. I must maintain anonymity at all costs. Doctor Skelton, please feel free to carry on hating my guts as publicly as you wish.’

Allen considered it for a moment, then nodded. ‘
Genistho
,’ he said in Greek. ‘Let it be so.’

Skelton half bowed, an ironic smile on his lips. Nothing would please him better than to continue to hate Marlowe. The projectioner heard the bolts slide back behind him and the heavy door creak open. He crossed himself before the altar and waited for the Papal letters to be returned. They weren’t. Instead, Allen slipped them into his sleeve. Marlowe bowed and made his way, groping for the stairs. Now, urgency quickened his steps. He had perhaps two weeks before Allen sent his messengers to Rome and before they got back, bearing the message that His Eminence the Gran Cardinale Alessandro Castel Giovanni didn’t know Kit Marlowe from a hole in the ground.

Robert Greene had a plan. He had had plans before when trying to gain entry into Kit Marlowe’s erstwhile rooms, but he had every confidence that this one would actually work. He had tried walking in boldly. He had tried creeping in and hiding, waiting for dark. This time, he would use a subterfuge as clever as a Trojan horse, and hopefully as successful. He knew the very place along the wall where the scholars crept in after hours. He knew the Proctors lay in wait for them but also knew that there were more scholars than Proctors. If he could insinuate himself in the crowd, climbing over the wall and into the tree at the right point, he could avoid the Proctors and be up the stairs in a trice. He might have to buy said scholars a few drinks first, to gain their confidence, but all should be well.

The first flaw in his plan was that he had severely underestimated the capacity for alcohol of the typical Corpus Christi scholar. His purse was deeper than theirs, but even so they had almost bled him dry by the time they all wandered, arms around each others’ shoulders, singing snatches of catches down Bene’t Street towards the crumbling wall of the College. Lomas and his cohort didn’t even bother to conceal themselves. The smoke from their pipes drifted over the wall and they could be heard talking together from out in the street.

A scholar turned to Greene and tried to focus, first with one eye, then another. ‘You’re quite tall,’ he said, ‘when you stand upright.’ He covered one eye to make it easier. ‘Yes, there you are. Give me a leg up and I’ll have a go at counting them.’

Greene locked his hands and bent down. The scholar stepped into the cup of his palms and Greene hoisted him to the top of the wall. The scholar could be heard counting under his breath and Greene let him down again. The boy leant on the wall and looked down at his own fingers, straightening and bending them experimentally.

‘Six!’ he said, triumphantly. ‘Or twelve. Or three. They were moving about a bit. Hard to count.’ He hiccupped violently. ‘I think I’ll go first. They put you to bed when they catch you and I could do with a lie down. Anyone else coming with me?’

The other scholars milled around, everyone trying to be at the back. Blurred and out of kilter as they were, they knew arrant nonsense when they heard it. The Proctors put you to bed all right, but the next day, on Dr Harvey’s orders, they flayed the skin off your back. Greene found himself at the front and tried to bury himself in the pack.

‘Nonononono,’ the first boy said who seemed to be the leader, though he couldn’t count. ‘He bought us drinks. He can’t go next. He’ll get in trouble.’ He listened to what he had said. ‘Trouble? Is that the word?’

‘Yes,’ said Greene, out of the corner of his mouth, trying to drum up support for the idea.

‘Trouble. Yes. Well, he’s bought us all drinks. We can’t get him into trouble. So, come on.’ He reached into the crowd and hauled out a couple more scholars. ‘You and you. Come with me.’ And he swung himself up the wall and was gone, still unexpectedly limber even in his cups.

Greene began to feel old. He had been this carefree once, before bitterness and jealousy had bitten him. He gave himself a shake. He really shouldn’t drink; it always made him pensive.

There was shouting beyond the wall and the sound of running feet. Another scholar went over and screamed that he was caught. And shouting from the Proctors confirmed it. So the ringleader’s arithmetic was a bit awry, but surely no college had more than four Proctors on guard on any one night? Another one vaulted over and this time the sound from the other side of the wall was a triumphant whoop. Quickly, the others scrambled over, not forgetting to give Greene, their sponsor, a helping hand. Soon, he was at the entrance to Marlowe’s room and was edging open the door.

Harvey was sweeping round Corpus Christi like a new broom, but he had not yet ordered the cleaning out of the rooms of absent scholars, so Marlowe’s room was as he left it, with the addition of a few more spiders and another bloom of dust. Greene edged in, remembering his last visit and his hand twinged in memory of it. He sat down on the bed in the dark and closed his eyes, trying to put himself into Marlowe’s shoes. If he wanted to hide a manuscript, quite a bulky one, where would he put it? The mattress? No; the mattress would be turned at random intervals and it might easily be discovered. The linen press? Again, not under Marlowe’s control. It might be found by a maid or Proctor and although they probably wouldn’t be able to read it, they would more than likely take it to the College authorities as something that had been hidden and therefore likely to be scurrilous, especially in the room of Kit Marlowe.

He needed to find a place in the room where no one would go except to hide something. It needed to be something permanent, yet movable, like a floorboard. His eyes flew open with the sheer simplicity of his idea and he was on his hands and knees in seconds. His first instinct was to get down and brush the rushes into corners and prise up the floorboards but the alcohol still in his system made him lazy and in his laziness he saw the hiding place, as though in a flash. As he sat indecisively on the floor, he saw a corner of the wainscoting which didn’t seem to fit as flush to the wall as the rest. It was outlined, almost providentially, in a moonbeam and Greene leant forward and put the tip of his dagger under one corner and pushed. With a click, the piece of wood popped out and there, just inches from his hand, was a rolled manuscript, wrapped in oiled silk and tied with a length of red cord.

Remembering where he was, he prised the roll out with his dagger and rolled sideways, his hands and arms protecting his head, but nothing happened. Rising slowly and carefully, he took the roll and slid it into the front of his doublet and made his way out of Corpus Christi for the last time, just forbearing from cocking a snook at the darkened windows of the Master’s Lodging.

In the shadow of the quad, a slender youth, Thomas Fineaux, still very limber for all he had drunk Robert Greene’s purse dry, smiled to himself. Tomorrow would be busy. First, he would pay his fine for being caught coming over the wall. Then he would take Lomas’ whip across his back. Then, he had one or two letters to write.

The lad still looked green the next day when Marlowe found him. He was propped up against a stone pillar, his fustian robes wrapped around him, both to keep out the wind and to hold himself together.

‘Someone told me you’re Martin Camb,’ Marlowe said.

Camb looked up and all he saw was a dark shape with a morning sun shining like a halo over wild hair and the collar of a roisterer’s doublet. ‘It’s nice to be reminded now and again.’