Scorpions' Nest (2 page)

Dark is not always dark.

‘G
ood morning, Betsy.’ Kit Marlowe was in merry mood as he bounced up the last few steps into the Buttery at St John’s College, ducking under the archway with its rose and portcullis, there just to remind everyone who was patron of the place these days. ‘A fine morning, so late in the summer. It’s lease has, after all, too short a date, wouldn’t you say?’

Betsy was in a quandary. Kit Marlowe was the darling of every maid from scullery upwards throughout all the colleges in Cambridge, but their masters were not always so taken with his charms. Someone, a penny-pinching Bursar, had worked out how much he cost the university, breaking his fast and taking his luncheons and suppers wherever he thought fit and, by some quirk of possibly inaccurate mathematics, had brought forth a figure similar to the complete upkeep of the menagerie at the Tower. It was suggested gently by some kinder souls that surely even the mercurial Master Marlowe didn’t eat as much as even one very small lion, but the damage was done. He was to be forbidden entry to any refectory but his own and, even there, he was to pay his reckoning at the end of every week, rather than never.

‘Oh, Master Marlowe…’ Betsy began, thinking hard but none too fast. ‘You can’t go in there, because…’

He stood, mellow sunlight filled with golden dust motes sparkling around the aureole of his hair. ‘Because?’ He cocked an eyebrow.

Betsy, caught on her back foot, could think of nothing. She shrugged. ‘Fresh eggs today, Master Marlowe,’ she said. ‘Fresh sent in from Cherry Hinton. You’ll get one if you’re quick.’

Marlowe leant out of his sunbeam to put a friendly arm around the girl’s shoulders. ‘You look after me so well, Betsy,’ he said, smiling. ‘This is my very favourite place to eat in the whole university.’ He paused, taking in the bright reds and blues of the stained glass and the fierce-looking Masters of generations gone by who frowned at him from their gilded frames. ‘Possibly, in the whole world.’

Betsy grimaced, but happily and pushed him off. ‘Go on with you, Master Marlowe,’ she said, a laugh in her voice. ‘But don’t say I let you pass. I could lose my position if they find it was me.’

‘My lips are sealed,’ he said and turned to the door. ‘Oh, one thing, though. Is Master Greene here yet?’

‘I haven’t seen him,’ Betsy said. ‘And glad not to have. Nasty, posturing thing he is.’

‘He is, he is, indeed he is,’ carolled Marlowe, swinging round the doorpost and into the hall. The fun was still to come, then.

Sir Francis Walsingham stood in the shadows of the awning that had been strung across the frontage of the merchant’s house on the edge of St Giles’ Fields. This ought to have been a great day for him but the boil on his neck was infected and bleeding and his whole body ached. The sun was shining on the iron helmets of Her Majesty’s guard and the bells of the city were crying out their joy. Her Majesty’s enemies would meet their God today. He had delivered the great Queen – not for the first time – and her people had turned out in their thousands to see the murdering bastards turned off.

All the way from Tower Hill they had been spat at and kicked as they struggled on their hurdles, the ropes that lashed them to the timbers cutting into their wrists and ankles. Each of the seven bore the marks of the Rackmaster. Chideock Tichborne was barely conscious; Henry Dunne couldn’t see out of his right eye; every bone in the hand of the chameleon-like James Ballard was broken. Now they had reached the open space of St Giles, they were hauled up from the ground and their wrists tied behind their backs. The crowd surged forward, threatening to break the cordon of steel that the Lord Mayor had set up.

The bells were still pealing – Paul’s, St Giles’, St Magnus’, St Mary’s – drowning out the charges of conspiracy levelled against each of them by the Lieutenant of the Tower. The crowd had nothing but contempt for all of them, but there was only one they had come to see turned off. Anthony Babington took his place on the high scaffold first. The Rackmaster had knocked out three of his teeth and his once-handsome face was a mask of blood. The Queen for whom he was about to die had captivated him as a child when he had seen her walking with the Earl of Shrewsbury, a prisoner even then. He had not even known she was a queen, let alone the queen of a whole country, the Queen of Scots. She was a gentle-faced little woman, dressed in black, with crisp white at her throat. She had held out her little dog for him to stroke, had smiled her quiet smile and he had given his heart to her, in that childish, romantic way that some men have. Now he would give his head.

But giving his head was a euphemism Francis Walsingham had engineered. He watched from his secret corner, almost on a level with the scaffold as the executioner showed Babington the tools of his dubious trade, gleaming wickedly on a blanket of velvet. Sam Bull was hardly the most elegant gentleman on Walsingham’s pay roll but he knew his job. His thick neck was covered in strips of black leather that hung from the hideous mask that covered his face. Both Bull and his master knew that the crowd’s mood could turn in these moments on a groat and many was the common hangman chased out of town by an ungrateful mob bent on tearing him apart. To that end, the mask. To that end, the pay – half now, half when the job was done.

Babington scorned the services of the Puritan priest at his elbow. He would have made a speech to the crowd but, at a signal from Walsingham, the drums and tabors struck up and the man’s last words were drowned out. Bull squinted across to the balcony where he knew Walsingham stood. He saw the huge ruff, the black robes, the cold, glittering eyes and he saw the man nod. The hangman grabbed Babington’s hair and hauled him backwards, looping the hemp noose over his head in seconds and hauling on the rope.

Anthony Babington, gentleman, somebody’s husband, somebody’s son and graduate of Lincoln’s Inn, was given a bird’s eye view of the city as he twirled at the rope’s end. As his eyes bulged and the veins stood out on his forehead, he saw the dead stone walls of the Tower that had been his recent home, the merchant ships riding at anchor on the Queen’s wharves, the cluster of church steeples and the smoke rising from a thousand homes. As he twisted in a desperate attempt to take the appalling pain away from his throat and chest, he saw the ancient walls and the golden fields stretching away to the north, the harvest done. The sky was just darkening for him and his lungs were threatening to burst when Sam Bull cut the rope. Babington’s feet hit the planks with a thud, followed by another as his body followed. The air rushed into his lungs as the hangman loosened the rope, screaming past his tortured throat in a sound audible across the crowd, a sound never to be forgotten by any man jack of them there that day. The crowd roared as he dragged the half-conscious conspirator across the scaffold floor and kicked his legs apart.

‘Now!’ he grunted to the four men, masked like him, standing at the gallows stairs. The drums thundered and the tabors rattled as each man knelt beside Babington, each taking hold of a fist or a foot nearest to where he knelt.

Bull looked across at Walsingham again. And again the Secretary nodded. The billhook rustled as it left the velvet and then it was slicing through the shirt and skin of Anthony Babington, biting deep into his sternum and into the soft and vital tissue below. Blood sprayed the hangman’s hands and arms and dripped through the boards of the scaffold into the dark recess below. Soldiers stood here with halberds at the level, their spikes pointing outward at the crowd. Walsingham didn’t want Anthony Babington to die a martyr or any misguided soul waiting below to catch the man’s blood in a phial and add it to the superstitious claptrap of the Roman church.

By the time Babington’s body had stopped twitching, the crowd had fallen silent. So had the drums and tabors. Only the wild bells still rang out, music to Walsingham’s ears.

‘One down, six to go,’ a voice murmured in the ear of the Secretary.

Walsingham turned as best he could, given the pain he was in. He knew the voice and understood the intrusion. ‘Not exactly, Nicholas,’ he said.

Nicholas Faunt raised an eyebrow. He had wondered for a while whether he’d be able to get through the rank-smelling multitude in time to witness the passing of this present danger. But he was in time, especially as it was Sam Bull’s next customer, the slippery Father Ballard, he’d come to see dispatched. Babington was a simplistic fool, a knight-errant born out of time. Men had followed him because of his rank not because of his brain. Men like Ballard were a different proposition. If he hadn’t known better, Faunt would have thought that Ballard served the Devil. He saw the disquiet on his master’s face and took the slip of paper from his hand.

‘What do you read there?’ Walsingham asked.

Faunt looked at the document. ‘Today’s bill of entertainment,’ he said. ‘Babington, Ballard, Tichborne…’ He was reading the list of the damned.

‘Turn over,’ Walsingham told him as he watched the four men throw Babington’s ripped and mutilated body into a coffin, prior to its being quartered.

‘Tomorrow’s delights,’ Faunt said. ‘Habington, Tilney, Jones… I don’t see…’

Walsingham fished inside his doublet and pulled out another piece of paper. This was parchment, good-quality vellum and on it were a series of ciphers and squiggles so small he could barely make them out in the shade of the awning.

‘This is Phelippes’ nonsense,’ Faunt said, dismissing it. ‘You know I can’t make head nor tail of it, Sir Francis.’

Walsingham took it back from him. ‘That’s why we’ve got Phelippes. You have fourteen names on your paper,’ he said, ‘conspirators against Her Majesty, men guilty of treason to the crown. One of them has died today – six will follow later. Tomorrow, the next seven will join them. And we’ll all sleep easier in our beds by cock-shut time.’

‘Well, then…’

Walsingham turned to his man. ‘Except we won’t, Nicholas. We won’t. This is one letter I didn’t get Phelippes to forge.’ He slipped the parchment away again. ‘It’s one we intercepted from the Queen of Scots and it mentions one name not on that list of yours.’ He looked his man fully in the face, the eyes cold, the skin grey and drawn. ‘Matthew Baxter, The fifteenth man. One of the fish has wriggled through the net.’

Faunt nodded grimly. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘So you want me to…’

Walsingham turned back to the entertainment as Father James Ballard stood on the gallows with a rope around his neck and a prayer on his lips and the crowd was baying once again. ‘I want you to find Kit Marlowe,’ he said.

‘Marlowe?’ Faunt looked at the man he had served faithfully for more years than he cared to remember.

‘You have someone else in mind?’ Walsingham asked him.

‘That depends what’s involved.’ Faunt scanned the baying crowd below, looking for any faces he knew.

Walsingham turned to face the projectioner, a man who might one day wear the chain of office that he himself wore. ‘Nicholas,’ he said softly, ‘we are a conspirator short. I thought I made that clear.’

‘Indeed, Sir Francis, but…’

‘And where would a Catholic conspirator run, Nicholas, knowing the hounds of Hell were after him?’

‘Anywhere out of England,’ Faunt said. He knew as he said it that he had left the options rather wide. Walsingham was obviously looking for an answer smaller than the rest of the world.

‘Oh, come, Master Faunt,’ Walsingham tutted, smiling. ‘I thought more highly of you. Where would a Catholic conspirator run who still wished to be of service to the Catholic cause? Where is the one place in the world where an English Papist can lose himself?’

Reality dawned on Faunt. ‘The English College,’ he said, a little too loudly perhaps and checked himself. ‘The Rue de Venise.’

‘The English College.’ Walsingham nodded. ‘Late of Douai, now in Rheims. A nest of scorpions devoted to the cause, the cradle of every Jesuit assassin we’ve found in this country these fifteen years.’

‘But Marlowe?’ Faunt came back at him. ‘That fiasco with the Stadtholder…’

‘William the Silent was a marked man, Nicholas, we both know that. He had death written all over him. Marlowe kept the man alive for months longer than I, for one, expected.’

Walsingham looked at Faunt, head cocked on one side, but carefully, to spare his neck. He could see his man was not convinced.

‘And Marlowe is a new face on the road,’ he continued. ‘Dr Allen won’t know him or what to make of him, and that gives Marlowe an edge… unless, of course, Nicholas, you’d care to go yourself?’

Nicholas Faunt had tangled with Dr William Allen, Master of the English College, before. He’d rather sup with the Devil. He favoured his paymaster with a small smile and a nod of acquiescence. ‘Marlowe it is,’ he said.

The noise of dozens of scholars and tutors breaking their fast had settled to a dull roar when Robert Greene slid into a seat at the end of one long table, worn smooth by the years. He held one hand protectively inside his jerkin and flinched if anyone came too near or made a sudden movement. He kept his eyes down on his plate and ate like an animal, nervously and urgently, afraid that at any moment a lion might leap out at it and grab it by the throat. A movement across the table made him glance up quickly, taking in the view from beneath his brow. It wasn’t a lion, but it was the next best thing.

‘Good morning, Robin,’ Marlowe said with a bright smile. ‘You’re quiet this morning. Not feeling well?’

‘I feel perfectly well, Dominus Marlowe, if you please.’ A ghost of the old, confrontational Greene emerged from the shrinking shell. ‘Why are you here? I understood you were to keep to your own college Buttery.’ He paused for effect and then said loudly, ‘That’s Corpus Christi.’

Marlowe waved the suggestion off with a flourish of a hand. ‘A serving suggestion merely, Robin. I’m here to see you, as a matter of fact, and I wasn’t sure where else to find you. You are as slippery as an eel these days.’ Greene didn’t speak, but continued to peck away at his oatmeal. ‘Busy writing, I expect,’ Marlowe ventured. Greene shrugged, but with just one shoulder. ‘Wonderful new play, I wouldn’t be surprised.’ Marlowe dipped his head to come into Greene’s eyeline. ‘I said, a new play, Robin? Is that why you are cradling your hand? Writer’s palsy, perhaps?’ He straightened up and looked around the room then cleared his throat. ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ he called. ‘Of medicine, that is. Dominus Greene has a painful hand here that needs attention.’