Scorpions' Nest (23 page)

‘You’ll forgive us.’ Allen put his goblet down and teased a morsel of cheese around his teeth. ‘But in your case, Marlowe, it’s rather a case of pots and kettles, isn’t it?’

‘You know I have the writ of His Holiness,’ Marlowe said, ‘and yet you didn’t tell me of Laurenticus’ . . . shall we say, extra-curricular activities.’

Allen and Skelton exchanged glances. ‘All right,’ the Master said, as if his mind were suddenly made up. ‘You’re right. When we found Laurenticus the morning after he died, it was clear to us that there had been someone in bed with him. He was a man, after all, as we all are. We all struggle…’

‘What about the ring?’ Marlowe asked.

‘It was on the bed,’ Skelton said. ‘Presumably the strumpet’s. We don’t know what became of her. Or how she could get in and out of the College with no one seeing her.’

‘You have at least confirmed one thing for us, Dominus Marlowe,’ Allen said, sitting back in his chair and resting his hands together calmly. ‘I for one, and I think Gerald also, had wondered who Laurenticus’ bedfellow might be. Gerald thought of an outsider at once; I was more inclined to wonder whether it was a member of the kitchen or household staff. Or, perhaps…’ He left a silence, hanging in the air.

Skelton looked at him askance. ‘I told you Laurenticus did not have that kind of appetite, did I not?’ he asked, triumphantly. ‘Now we know for certain. But it still does beg the question, how did she get in and out?’

‘Any one of a dozen ways,’ Marlowe said. ‘Your security is pretty lax, Bursar, considering how many secrets this place keeps. And besides, the ring is not hers.’

‘Not?’ Allen raised his head.

‘It was a man’s ring, she said,’ Marlowe told him. ‘Heavy and gold. That –’ he pointed at the sketch – ‘was worked on it.’

Skelton shrugged. ‘So, what are you saying, Marlowe? That Father Laurenticus, as well as his weakness for women, wore expensive jewellery? So what? Hair shirts belong to the saints. We are ordinary men.’

‘Indeed.’ Marlowe nodded grimly. ‘But that is no ordinary ring.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Allen asked him.

‘The double eagle,’ Marlowe said, ‘and the keys of St Peter. I’m surprised they haven’t dropped that by now. Symbol of Rome and all.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Skelton asked.

‘The eagle and key, Dr Skelton,’ Marlowe said, ‘is the coat of arms of Geneva, as I’m sure you know.’

Allen and Skelton looked at each other.

‘Geneva, gentlemen –’ he felt as though he should spell it out – ‘is the Protestant Rome. That Machiavel Calvin stole it, you will recall, some years ago. He banned our church, tore up our tracts, tortured our brethren. So, I have to ask, how did Father Laurenticus come by this little trinket – “a present from Geneva” was it? I don’t think so.’

‘It
must
have belonged to the strumpet,’ Allen persisted and looked at Skelton for backing. But the Bursar looked troubled. ‘Cat got your tongue, Gerald?’ he snapped.

‘Master…’ Skelton was trying to formulate the words, ‘Dominus Marlowe
is
from the Curia.’

Allen scowled at them both. His messenger had not returned from Rome yet and there was no definitive proof who he was. Even so, things were getting out of hand at the English College and something had to be done. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘Gerald and I had our suspicions about Laurenticus. Had them for some time, in fact.’

‘Suspicions?’ Marlowe helped himself, unbidden, to a chair.

Allen continued to look at Marlowe, watching for a sign, anything that might give him a clue as to how far he could trust this man. ‘Tell him, Gerald.’

‘For some time,’ the Bursar said, ‘snippets of information have been leaked from the College. Some of it is careless talk – you always get that. But some of it…’

‘Some of it is code,’ Allen said, finishing the sentence for him, ‘as from a projectioner to his people on the outside. Gerald here thought it was me, didn’t you, Gerald?’

The Bursar looked outraged. ‘Certainly not, Master, I…’

But Allen was chuckling, raising his hand. ‘Just joking, my old friend. Laurenticus’ ring is not proof, of course, but as soon as I saw it, I knew.’

‘And is that why he died?’ Marlowe asked. ‘The natural justice meted out to a projectioner – and a traitor to God’s word?’

‘The thought had occurred,’ Allen said, nodding. ‘The Protestants would say we’re all fanatics here. What do they call us in Richmond and Placentia? The nest of scorpions? And don’t scorpions kill their own?’

‘I’d be the first to share your view, Marlowe,’ Skelton said, ‘on security, I mean. Father Tobias is a little long in the tooth to be ever-vigilant and there
are
ways in and out other than the main gate.’

‘And out there…’ Marlowe was finishing the man’s train of thought. ‘In Rheims there are any number of Catholic zealots who would do God’s bidding at the drop of a piccadill.’

‘Indeed,’ Allen mused. ‘But what of the others?’

‘Master!’ Skelton warned.

‘It’s too late now, Gerald. The man
knows
. This lad Brooke; didn’t you say he was a thief?’

Skelton shrugged. ‘Dr Shaw thinks he has been helping himself to books, yes; selling them to the town’s stationers.’

‘What if it’s more than that?’ Allen asked.

‘I don’t follow,’ Skelton said.

Marlowe helped him out. ‘What if it wasn’t the books themselves?’

‘Go on,’ Allen said.

‘What if there was something
in
the books? A code, perhaps, that Brooke smuggled out.’

‘My God,’ Skelton muttered.

‘And there was Charles of Westley Waterless,’ Marlowe added.

‘Ah, Charles Russell.’ Allen checked him with a raised hand. ‘Now that was just a tragic, tragic case, Marlowe. I blame myself for not having seen the depths of his despair. The boy was disturbed and took his own life. We shouldn’t really have allowed him to be added to the crypt.’

‘The crypt?’ Marlowe played the innocent.

Skelton fidgeted. ‘Our dead,’ he said. ‘Those who pass over in the College. The Douai martyrs. They are all down there. Beneath the east wing.’

‘There can’t be many, surely?’ Marlowe said. ‘You haven’t been here very long. How many deaths have there been?’

‘No, no,’ Skelton said. ‘We brought our dead with us when we left Douai. We couldn’t leave them behind and all alone.’

‘I see.’ Marlowe tried to keep the surprise out of his voice. Even though he had already seen the serried ranks of the dead, it still struck him as a very odd thing to do. ‘I would like to see them,’ he said.

‘Why?’ Allen asked him.

‘Dead men sometimes tell tales,’ the projectioner explained. ‘If you listen carefully enough.’

‘Master,’ Skelton said. ‘I really don’t think…’

‘What harm can there be?’ Allen said suddenly, his mind made up. ‘Gerald, take Dominus Marlowe down, will you? Any light he can shed…’

They heard the Watch calling beyond the College walls as they crossed the quad, its stones gleaming silver in the moon. The place was asleep now except for the few revellers Marlowe guessed were still out, breaking the Master’s curfew and risking the Master’s wrath. One thing was certain: Martin Camb would not be among them. He would be lying in his bed with a ghost for company. And it was that ghost that Marlowe was looking for now. Not for the first time he pondered the questions – were there such things as ghosts? Did they haunt their last abode, forever trapped in the four walls where they died? Or did they hover, roaring their silent vow of vengeance, above their earthly corpses as they rotted?

He followed Skelton down the narrow, dark passages he had found before when Solomon Aldred had told him of the crypt. Skelton eased open the iron-ringed door and both men felt the cold, clammy blast of dead air hit them. Only a solitary blue candle lit their way as they passed the rows of bodies. Skelton crossed himself and kissed the end of the stole around his neck. The rows of bodies were held upright in their niches by bolts of iron that here, in the damp below ground, were already beginning to rust. They looked at the intruders through sunken, sightless eyes, as though wondering who it was who had come to disturb their rest. The skulls lolled to left and right where the sinews of the neck had long ago given up the uneven struggle to keep them upright. It gave them all a rather pensive air, as though they had relaxed as they pondered on deep and secret things which they only knew now they were dead.

‘Edmund Brooke,’ Skelton murmured, even his soft voice a violation in that great silence. The boy was covered in a shroud from neck to foot and his skin was already grey under the lifeless thatch of hair. Marlowe gazed at the face again, the face that had already told him all he could learn. The face of a projectioner? An intelligencer? A thief? Or just a luckless scholar, playing jack-the-lad in a world too big for him?

‘Father Laurenticus.’ Skelton had already moved on. Marlowe looked up at the corpse. For all it was hunched now, the Tutor in Greek had been a tall man, well built. Whoever had cut his throat had been powerful and, Marlowe suspected, quick. With the element of surprise, with the man muzzy with love and sleep, it had been a relatively simple matter to kill him with a single swipe. His killer would have been lucky to get a second chance.

‘Charles Russell.’ Skelton introduced Marlowe to a boy he had met before. The sinews of the spine had snapped now and the skull lay on the chest as though he had been decapitated. ‘He was a strange boy, introspective, secretive. No one really seemed to know him, he was always skulking about on his own. As a suicide, he will not be at God’s right hand, poor boy,’ he said, piously.

Marlowe was glad all over again to be done with God and the cruelty done in his name. Something – and he never knew for certain what – made him pass to the body in the next niche. He lifted a corner of the shroud that covered him. The skin was still there, like the old parchment covers on the books in Shaw’s library and there was a black stain over the chest as though the man’s heart had burst. It was a stain Marlowe had seen before.

‘Who was this?’ he asked.

‘That?’ Skelton replaced the shroud’s corner as a matter of respect. ‘That was Leonard Skirrel. He was a poor priest of Herefordshire until the Protestants drove him out. His soul is with the saints, I trust.’

‘Amen,’ said Marlowe.

‘F
ound your horse, then?’ Marlowe was in the College Buttery that morning as John Abbott arrived with his mug of ale and dish of oatmeal.

‘Horse, my arse!’ The Furnival’s Inn man was not in the best of moods. ‘What is it about these bloody Frenchmen?’ he wanted to know. ‘Are they all crooks?’

‘Probably,’ Marlowe said with a chuckle. He watched the man toying with his porridge, pushing the lumps about disconsolately. ‘Starting to miss it, are you? The White Chapel? St Mary Matfelon?’

Abbott growled, ‘Yes, I suppose I am. I didn’t think I would. I can’t go back, of course.’

‘Which of us can?’ Marlowe nodded. ‘Until the great day.’

Abbott frowned at him, then suddenly remembered. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Walsingham’s after you, isn’t he?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ Marlowe said. ‘Who’s after you?’ He wasn’t looking the man in the face and carried on tucking into his oatmeal, lovingly prepared, lumplessly, by Antoinette on her breakfast duties. He even had a golden curl of honey bedded gently into its creamy top. He threw out the question casually, as though he had asked Abbott to pass the salt.

‘What makes you think anybody’s after me?’ the Londoner asked, somewhat put out.

Marlowe paused in mid-spoonful. ‘Look around you,’ he said. Abbott did. Scholars cramming their food as if their lives depended on it. Tutors muttering in corners. Priests counting their rosaries. ‘Somebody’s after all these men,’ Marlowe said. ‘This place is the last bastion of English sanity, but it’s also full of edgy, dangerous souls.’

Abbott shrugged. ‘I don’t see it.’

‘Edmund Brooke,’ Marlowe murmured. ‘Father Laurenticus. Charles Russell.’

‘Who are they?’ The Furnival’s Inn man was momentarily thrown. And now, Marlowe could throw in a new name.

‘Leonard Skirrel,’ he said.

‘I’m none the wiser.’ Abbott got back to his trencher.

‘Edmund and Charles were scholars here,’ Marlowe told him. ‘At the College. Father Laurenticus was on the staff; taught Greek. Leonard Skirrel was a priest from Hereford. That’s all I know about him.’

‘Wait a minute…’ Abbott’s head snapped up. ‘Brooke was the lad who died, wasn’t he? Apoplexy?’

‘Apoplexy, my arse,’ Marlowe smiled. ‘Charles Russell was hanged. Edmund Brooke was suffocated. Laurenticus had his throat cut. And the priest of Hereford? Stabbed would be my guess.’

Marlowe had Abbott’s full attention now. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked. His question had been too loud and faces turned towards him. He dropped his head and started eating for England, lumps and all.

Marlowe closed to him. ‘Murder is going on, Master Abbott,’ he said. He leaned back, crossing his ankles as he relaxed. ‘Now, tell me,’ he said. ‘Why can’t you go back, exactly?’

But there was no answer because Abbott had snatched up his trencher and was gone.

If there was one thing Francis Walsingham hated more than trotting along England’s rutted roads in winter, it was sitting freezing in a barge down the Thames. The Queen was travelling downriver to her palace of Placentia at Greenwich. News had come that the Earl of Leicester was in the sea roads off Essex and making for the estuary. Elizabeth wanted to be there to meet him.

‘Will she kiss him or box his ears, do you think?’ Nicholas Faunt was at Walsingham’s elbow, as ever, as the oars groaned in their rowlocks and the scarlet-clad oarsmen bent their backs. He was looking ahead to the first barge in the little convoy, the arms of England fluttering above the crimson canopy.

‘None of your damned business, Faunt!’ Walsingham snapped. The cold of November was chilling his bones to the marrow. ‘Remember where you are,’ he growled. ‘
And
whose badge you wear.’

‘Sir Francis.’ Faunt bowed extravagantly. If you couldn’t tease England’s spymaster now and again, what was the point of it all?