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Authors: M. J. Trow

Tags: #16th Century, #England/Great Britain, #Fiction - Historical, #Mystery, #Tudors

Scorpions' Nest (3 page)

BOOK: Scorpions' Nest
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A few men rose to their feet, but uncertainly.

‘He can pay a fee,’ Marlowe added.

Ten more got up and there was a gentlemanly scuffle as they made their way to Greene’s end of the table.

‘I am quite well,’ the erstwhile playwright snarled. ‘Dominus Marlowe will have his fun. Ha. Ha.’ He glared at Marlowe, who smiled happily back.

‘You clearly have a problem with that hand, Greene,’ said the first fledgling doctor to reach him. ‘Here. Let me see.’ He grabbed Greene’s elbow and pulled his hand from inside his jerkin. A crude bandage emerged like a genie from a bottle, blood soaking through the rough linen. ‘Good God in Heaven, man,’ the doctor exclaimed. ‘This is no palsy. What have you done to yourself?’

Greene snatched his hand away from the man. ‘I caught it in a door,’ he said, tucking it away again. ‘An accident.’

‘Sharp edges you have on your doors, here,’ Marlowe remarked. ‘It pays to be careful in St John’s College, I can see that.’ He cocked his ear as a clock struck in the quad. ‘Hark. Time I wasn’t here. Aristotle awaits. Get well soon, Robin. I’m sure I will be seeing more of you, but perhaps if you wait for an invitation that would be best. I must be off to sharpen my door.’

The physician looked after him as he left. ‘He’s an odd one,’ he said to Greene. ‘Clever though. Have you read his Ovid?’

‘Certainly not,’ Greene snapped. ‘And I am surprised you have, seeing that you are a student of medicine. I had always assumed such as you could not read.’ And, pushing his plate savagely down the table, he strode out of the refectory.

Dr William Allen stood in the doorway high in the eaves of his home along the Rue de Venise. It was a Sunday and the bells of the cathedral were calling the faithful to prayer. But Allen would not be with them today. He crossed himself as he entered and waited until the shutters were thrown back and the windows opened. Sunlight fell sharp and unforgiving across the bed, showing the blood a dark crimson, pooling and still liquid on the floor.

The doctor was still shaking his head when he heard Gerald Skelton clearing his throat. It was always a sign the pompous idiot had a pronouncement to make and, normally, Allen didn’t give him too much rein. This morning, however, was different.

‘Well, Gerald?’ Allen looked at the man. ‘What do you make of it?’

‘We need a physician, Master,’ Skelton said. ‘Canon law is my forte. I have no experience of… this.’

‘This’ lay sprawled on the left side of the tester. It had once been Father Laurenticus, tutor in Greek at the University of Douai. Now it was a stiffened corpse with the head thrown back in a silent scream. Allen came as close as he had to and saw the nightshirt ripped and torn from half a dozen wounds across the chest and throat. The dead man’s knuckles had locked around the coverlet and his sightless eyes stared at the crucifix high on the wall to the bed’s head.

‘No.’ Allen shook his head. ‘No physician. We both know that Father Laurenticus has met his Maker. I don’t need a physician to tell us that.’

‘They have ways, Master,’ Skelton pointed out. ‘Knowledge of the humours… Galen… I understand that there are more modern views.’

Allen bent over the body as far as his rigid old frame would allow. ‘There is nothing modern about a dagger to the vitals, Gerald,’ he said, softly. Then something, a flicker in the morning sun, caught his eye. Near the dead man, on the smooth, bloodless side of the bed, lay a ring. It was gold and carried an enamel device, small and exquisitely cut. Allen took it up and held it to the light where the gold gleamed like fire in his gaze. He reached down and took the cold hand of the dead man, wrenching it free from the covers and tried the ring on his smallest finger. It fitted perfectly.

Allen sighed and pocketed the trinket. ‘That’s why no physician,’ he said. ‘Whatever happened in this room, Father Laurenticus did not die alone. Or if he did, it was not long after someone had left him. Who found the body?’

‘Er… a maidservant,’ Skelton said, only now realizing what Allen meant. ‘This is her floor.’

‘Find her.’ Allen turned away. ‘Double whatever we pay her. Then put the fear of God into her, Bursar. If she breathes a word, Hell Fire – you know, pull out all the stops. I want her mute by Matins.’

Skelton nodded.

‘And Gerald –’ Allen turned back in the doorway – ‘get this mess cleaned up. And do it yourself. As far as the College is concerned, Father Laurenticus died of apoplexy. Called by God.’

THREE

T
he carrack took him by the next tide out of Deptford, butting through the Black Deepes and out beyond the Essex marshes where curlews called in the mists of the morning. All day he faced the wind, his hair streaming, his cloak snapping like the shrouds behind and above. The little ship veered south in the Channel Roads, the gulls wheeling in its wake. As night fell they skirted the shallows by Ponthieu. The Master was an old hand and knew these winds and currents like he knew his Paternoster. France was the old enemy but France was now at war with itself and English ships came and went unhindered.

They rounded the sweep of the headland at the second dawn and sailed in under the battered old walls of Harfleur where King Harry of blessed memory had lopped the French lilies. The Seine lay dark and brooding as its banks narrowed and the fishing smacks bobbed at anchor by a thousand little jetties and moorings. By nightfall they had reached Rouen, journey’s end, and he bade the Master farewell before setting foot on French soil. As he left the planking, he said goodbye to an old life. As he strode the quay, he began a new one.

Michael Johns was not feeling in a very chirpy mood. It was true that years of keeping his face set in a sober expression not really natural to it had made it rather difficult to tell how he was feeling, but it was not necessary to be too much of a scholar of the human condition to know that he was not happy. He stormed through Corpus Christi like an avenging angel, whipping the dust of early autumn into little eddies with his passing over the stones of the Court. He reached the door of the Master of the college and threw it open without his customary courteous tap. A man was sitting behind the desk, a slight but satisfied smile on his face. A manservant was standing by, swathed in an apron and holding a broom.

Johns met both men’s gaze and then spoke to the servant. ‘You. Get out.’ He didn’t raise his voice. It was just a remark. With a doubtful look at the Master, the man bobbed slightly and scurried from the room.

‘Can I help you, Dominus Johns?’ the Master said.

Johns looked at him for a long minute. He ignored the slur to his status. How many times in the recent years past had he longed for Dr Norgate to remember his name and those of just a few scholars? Recently, if the old man could have remembered his own name, it would have been a pleasure and a surprise. The man sitting behind his desk might have all his faculties, but he was Gabriel Harvey and that far outweighed any good points.

‘Well? I am, as you can see, a busy man.’

Johns looked around the room. ‘I can see you are. I am here to…’ He was staring into a corner, where various portraits leaned against the wall. ‘What’s that?’ He pointed. ‘Over there. What’s that?’

Harvey didn’t even bother to turn his head. ‘Old portraits. I bring in a new era, Johns. We don’t want old faces reminding us of the past, do we? This is the Year of Our Lord 1586. We must move on.’

‘Must we?’ Johns said, pushing aside a wooden box and a half-filled sack to get over to the pictures. He looked at the faces. ‘William Norgate. Matthew Parker. And… I might have known it. Christopher Marlowe.’

‘Upstart popinjay,’ Harvey said. ‘How dare he have his portrait painted? How dare Norgate hang it here?’

‘It was painted for him by someone who loved him. The Master hung it here because he liked the man’s style. It reminded him that we were all scholars once.’ He narrowed his eyes at Harvey. ‘Some better than others. It was a signal that anyone can aspire to be anything they want.’

‘What a very Christian outlook,’ Harvey said, picking up his quill, after he had quaffed his wine. ‘But as I think I mentioned, I am a busy man. Things have been allowed to slide. Have you any idea how deep in debt the college is? As you go out, please send my servant in, will you? He needs to take some things to the bonfire. And don’t you have some lecturing to do?’

‘Surely you don’t intend to burn the pictures?’ Johns was aghast.

‘They make excellent kindling. I think it must be the oil in the paint, or perhaps the pitch in the varnish or whatever it is painters use. They go up in ten-foot flames with hardly a spark being applied.’ He smiled at Johns. ‘Pictures can be so inflammatory, can’t they?’

Without a word, Johns picked up the portrait of Kit Marlowe and tucked it under one arm. He didn’t look at the dark eyes flashing in oils, the forehead broad and bold, the hair flying, the velvet-and-silk doublet the university didn’t allow any of its scholars to wear. And he didn’t need to read the words on it again. He knew them by heart.
Quod me nutrit me destruit.
That which feeds me, destroys me. And Johns in one mood might have added ‘Amen’. Then he slowly and deliberately upended the inkwell so that a thin stream of black poured onto the desk, the papers and Harvey’s left hand.

The Master looked down at the wriggle of ink. ‘
Abdico
,’ he read. ‘παραιτομαι.
Rwy’n ymddiswyddo
.’

Johns gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘From your varied accents, I feel I perhaps must translate for you,’ he said. ‘I resign. I resign. I resign. Have it in any language you will.’ He turned to leave and then stopped and spoke over his shoulder. ‘Would you like me to tell your servant to bring some soap and hot water with him when he comes back in?’

He closed the door behind him sharply. As it closed, so Harvey’s inkwell spun across the room, trailing the last of its contents, to crash against the wood. He had seen the devil in his chamber for one last time.

The river Vesle murmured in its banks as he crossed the little bridge. This was Rheims, the place of coronation of so many kings of France and the black bulk of the great Gothic cathedral loomed over the city now that night was falling. As the candles were lit in the high houses and the squatters’ tents, knots of ragged children crowded around him, their hands outstretched for money or food, their trill voices babbling in the curious dialect of the Marne. One or two of them tried to touch his sword, his Colleyweston cloak, but a tap from his gloved hand or a flash from his dark eyes made them think again, to recoil until they felt a little braver.

He climbed the cobbled hill that wound below the old city wall and saw in the flickering half-light the name he was looking for – the Rue de Venise. Instinctively he checked behind him and hauled his knapsack higher on his shoulder, releasing his sword arm as he vanished into the blackness, the dark that is never really dark. A cat scurried away from him, belly to the cobbles, tail trailing and a couple of drunks collided with him as he looked for the door he had come so far to find. They smelt of the cheap cider of Normandy and they bounced away from him with a mutter of oaths.

‘I wouldn’t go in there,’ a soft voice said from the shadows. The dialect was heavy, but his French was up to it and he half turned at the wicket gate.

‘Why ever not?’ he asked.

A harlot stepped out into the half-light. It was difficult to tell her age under the hood she wore but there was no mistaking her calling. A thin chemise was tied at her breasts with a single bow, a bow that could be undone by a client in a second. She closed to him, taking in the long hair, the sensitive mouth, the smouldering eyes. ‘Men die in there,’ she told him.

He removed her fingers from the points of his doublet. ‘Men die everywhere,’ he told her with a smile. ‘And that’s not why I’m here.’

She looked at him, pouting, trying to weigh up the measure of this newcomer, the one who spoke awkward French with an accent she hadn’t heard before. ‘Know why I’m here?’ she challenged him.

He smiled again. ‘Of course,’ he said, not taking his eyes off her as he rapped with his gloved fist on the studded door at his back. He cocked his head to listen to the bells clanging beyond the building’s facade. ‘That’s Vespers,’ he said. ‘You’re a lay sister come to pay your devotions.’

For a moment she just stared at him, then she threw back her head and shrieked with laughter. She rested her hands on her hips and let him see her breasts wobble. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m a lay sister, all right. And talking of paying…’

The wicket in the great door squealed open and a little priest stood there, a skullcap on his head and a lantern in his hand. He took one look at the girl and scowled. ‘Be off with you, Jezebel!’ he snapped. ‘Why don’t you leave clean-living men alone?’ She flicked her thumb off her front teeth at him, turned smartly and threw her cloak up to wave her naked backside at him. The little priest crossed himself and ushered the newcomer inside, slamming and bolting the wicket as they heard a string of blasphemies echoing along the Rue de Venise.

In the quiet of the courtyard where torches were already flickering against ancient stones, the priest looked up at the stranger. ‘You
are
a clean-living man?’ he checked.

‘They don’t come any cleaner,’ the newcomer said. ‘This
is
the English College?’

‘It is.’ The old man lapsed into English, clearly not his native tongue, but he sensed the traveller would welcome it. ‘I am Brother Tobias. You are…?’

‘Robert Greene,’ the young man told him. ‘From Cambridge. And I have need of a priest.’

Brother Tobias squinted in the lantern light. There was something about this man that unnerved him. He was armed to the teeth for one thing, with sword and dagger and dressed like the roisterers of the town Tobias would usually cross the street to avoid. There was a coldness about him, a chill that was beyond the gentle breeze of the Michaelmas night. If this man needed a priest, he would rather not be the priest in question. There were bigger fish in the collegiate pond and he led Greene across the moonlit quadrangle in search of one.

BOOK: Scorpions' Nest
10.35Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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