Scorpions' Nest (6 page)

The Londoner stopped walking, careful to keep the little man in full view. ‘I don’t know where you’ve escaped from, sirrah,’ he said. He took in the man’s bag with a quick glance. ‘But whatever you’re selling, I have more than a sufficiency.’ And he was gone.

It took Aldred longer than he expected to find the northerner called Salter and he only knew him because of the song he sang to his lute and he recognized the flat vowels of the Ouse. The vintner tried again. He applauded the man’s playing politely.

‘And now the Western wind bloweth sore,’ he said, beaming. ‘That is in his chief sovereignty.’

Salter looked at him, frowning, then struck a slight discord on the lute. ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know it. Perhaps if you could hum me a few bars, I could pick it up.’

Aldred smiled, bowed and wandered away. Life was too short to talk to musicians. In desperation, he scampered up the stairs by the chapel, ducking under the beams where the organ pipes wheezed and blew. He knew this short-cut of old and soon he was out in the fresh air again, watching the sun glow on the old stone. He saw his last target lounging against a cloister pillar, arms folded, jaw set. In front of him, in the corner of the quadrangle, three monks knelt before a crucifix set into the wall. Their robes were hauled down around their waists and they were slapping knotted ropes across their backs, adding little sprays of blood to the cuts and old scars already there. Each of them was deathly pale, but no sound escaped from their gritted teeth and the flagellation had got into a ghastly rhythm.

Aldred barely noticed this. It was a daily practice in the English College, as regular as Sext or None. He smiled at the watcher by the cloisters. ‘And now the Western wind bloweth sore,’ he said, looking up to the sky, because all Englishmen talked about the weather, pretty much all the time. ‘That is in his chief sovereignty.’ He grinned sheepishly at the other man, expecting another inane rebuff.

Instead, he heard, ‘Beating the withered leaf from the tree. Sit we down here under the hill.’ The voice was not over the top, it was not quite an actor’s voice but it certainly made a better job of the lines than Aldred had heard before. The Cambridge man looked down at the vintner and continued. ‘Or, since we’re a little short of hills, how about over there?’

Aldred sighed. Even for a visit to the English College, he’d downed rather more than was strictly good for him today and he was beginning to wonder whether it was the thickness of his tongue that was letting him down.

‘Marlowe?’ he hissed, scuttling alongside the man’s longer stride.

‘Greene,’ Marlowe corrected him. ‘Robert Greene. Corpus Christi College.’

‘Ah, of course,’ the merchant said with a bob. ‘Solomon Aldred; my card.’

He passed Marlowe a crumpled piece of parchment. It read ‘Vintner to the English College. Minimum orders only.’

Marlowe slipped it into his left cuff. ‘When the strain gets too much and I have a need of a skinful, rest assured, Master Aldred, I’ll be in touch.’

Aldred dropped heavily onto the cold stone bench in the cloister’s dead corner. From any angle here, the pair could keep an eye on anyone getting too close and could change their conversation accordingly.

‘Overrated, don’t you think?’ Marlowe asked.

‘What is?’ Solomon was unpacking his samples again.

‘Spenser.’

‘Er…’

Marlowe looked at the little soak. What was Walsingham thinking? This place was too crucial to trust it to a man who took his cover too seriously. ‘The code,’ Marlowe reminded him. ‘The western wind, the withered leaf. Edmund Spenser.’

‘Is it?’ Aldred grinned. ‘Well, well. To business, Master Greene. Tipple?’ He held up a rather pleasing claret.

Marlowe shook his head.

‘You’re looking for someone.’ Aldred shrugged and swigged in one fluid movement.

Marlowe nodded. So far, so correct.

‘We’ve no idea when he arrived,’ Aldred told him.

‘Are you sure he’s here at all?’ Marlowe asked.

‘Oh, yes. He was shadowed from Deptford, on board
The Lady Liberty
on the tenth. He met someone – and don’t ask me who – at Rouen. I’m afraid we lost him for a day or two, but found him again on his way here.’

‘Who is he?’

‘No idea.’ The vintner swigged again.

Marlowe held Aldred’s drinking hand, forcing the glass from his lips so that it clinked loudly on the stone. ‘What do you mean, you’ve no idea?’ he hissed.

Aldred forced his eyes to focus. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Why are you here, exactly? Why has Sir Francis Walsingham sent you here? Have you come to kill him?’

‘If I have to,’ said Marlowe. ‘A man who plotted with Babington isn’t likely to undergo a change of heart and throw himself on the mercy of the Queen of England, when all is said and done.’

‘Agreed.’ Aldred nodded. ‘Have you done this before?’ He found himself looking the man up and down, assessing his likely strength and speed.

‘Have you?’ Marlowe countered.

Aldred ignored him. ‘Look, it’s one thing to sit in Whitehall or Placentia with the spymaster, drinking his rather excellent Bordeaux and putting the Papist world to rights. It’s a bit different out here, I can tell you. Watching your back morning, noon and night, going to endless bloody masses, speaking French. You don’t know the half of it.’

‘I don’t need to know the half of it,’ Marlowe told him flatly, ‘I just need to know who I’m looking for.’

Aldred sighed. If he’d hoped for a kindred spirit or even a sympathetic ear from Walsingham’s new man, he wasn’t going to find it in Kit Marlowe. ‘Your Babington plotter is either a Londoner whose name I don’t know – big fellow, lodges over the bakery.
Or
he’s a singing idiot called Salter, from Yorkshire. What’s his real name, the one you’re after?’

‘Matthew Baxter,’ Marlowe told him, ‘and he’s not from London or Yorkshire.’

Aldred shook his head, grinning, and risked another sip. ‘Don’t you just love this business?’ he asked. He cleared his throat as a lay brother ambled past, smiling and nodding at them both. ‘Any way,’ he muttered to Marlowe as soon as the coast was clear. ‘There are complications.’

‘Oh?’

‘How are you at –’ he closed in to his man – ‘unexplained deaths?’

Marlowe shrugged. ‘I’ve seen a few,’ he said.

Aldred looked to right and left again, just in case the walls indeed had ears. Satisfied that they didn’t, he murmured, ‘Three months ago, a scholar fell out of a window. To be precise, that one up there.’ He nodded to the roof and Marlowe followed his gaze.

‘Singularly careless of him,’ he said.

‘Absolutely,’ Aldred said, nodding. ‘To the point of physically impossible.’

‘And “accident” is the official College line? The verdict of them all?’

Aldred chuckled. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘You’ll learn, Marlowe, that this place is a nest of scorpions. Don’t turn your back on anybody.’

‘I never do,’ Marlowe assured him.

‘The accident verdict first appeared the next day, courtesy of Dr Allen in one of his interminable sermons. Father Laurenticus had other ideas.’

‘Laurenticus?’

‘You’re in his room. At least, according to Brother Tobias, you are.’

‘Tobias is your eyes and ears?’ Marlowe asked. It was as well to know who was who in this place.

‘Four of them, anyway,’ Aldred told him. ‘It’s damned useful with a cover like mine.
Vino, veritas
and all that. The stuff loosens tongues better than any of Master Topcliffe’s infernal gadgets in the Tower. And the best thing is, hardly anybody remembers what they’ve told me.’

‘This scholar,’ Marlowe reminded the vintner, steering his mind back onto the subject. ‘What do we know about him?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’ Marlowe’s eyebrows were nearly in his hair with surprise. ‘You’ve let me down, Master Aldred. Tell me –’ and he lowered his voice still further – ‘you
are
a spy, aren’t you?’

‘More of a facilitator, really,’ Aldred said modestly. ‘I would never venture to claim I was an intelligencer, still less a projectioner. A humble vintner, with a twist.’

‘But even a humble vintner must know something. This is a small place. People talk.’

‘Oh, there’s always tittle tattle in the town,’ the vintner told him. ‘The boy was a secret alchemist. He was in league with Satan. They even said –’ and he paused to check behind him and to both sides once more – ‘they even said he was an illegitimate son of Pope Sixtus.’

Marlowe let out a slow whistle through his teeth. ‘Be still, my beating heart,’ he said.

‘Ah, you can mock,’ Aldred said, ‘but I tell you, Marlowe, there’s something unnatural about this place. Apart from the fact that it’s full of Papist fanatics who have all sworn to slit the throat of the Queen of England, of course.’

‘Do we know the scholar’s name?’

‘Charles, is all I know. From Westley Waterless. You might know it.’

‘I do indeed,’ Marlowe said with a nod. ‘God-awful place in the fens. I ride through it on my way to Cambridge. What was he doing here?’

‘Same as everybody else,’ Aldred said. ‘Plotting the return of the Catholic faith to England. If you mean how did he get here from Cambridge and what particular demons drove him, I haven’t the faintest idea.’

Marlowe looked up again to the sharp slope of the roof and smiled broadly as two brothers walked past, deep in liturgical conversation. ‘So,’ he said, marshalling his thoughts, ‘Charles of Westley Waterless jumps – or was pushed – from that casement. He would have hit the roof… about there… bounced or rolled down, probably hitting that gargoyle and landing… there, in the quad.’

‘At least two blows –’ Aldred was following the man’s thinking – ‘perhaps to the head.’

‘Did you see the body?’ Marlowe asked.

‘No,’ Aldred told him. ‘By the time my weekly visit was due, Scholar Charles was with his Maker. Or at least in the vault. Want to see him?’

‘What?’

‘Hm, intriguing, isn’t it? And not for the faint hearted. Every scholar of the College who passes over is placed in the catacombs, a little south west of where we’re sitting now. It’s a little tradition they had when the College was at Douai. It took Allen months to find a suitable building here, with deep enough foundations. The rumour is that he had to pay a small fortune. He brought all the bodies with him, or at least the most recent. Something to do with keeping the Papal flame. It’s beyond me.’

‘How do I get there?’

‘You don’t.’ Aldred wafted the last of the brandy under his nose. ‘Members of the College only. I only know
of
it. I’ve never been there.’

‘Aren’t I a member of the College?’ Marlowe asked, a little indignantly.

Aldred guffawed, then stifled the noise with a swig. ‘Let me see. You’ve probably told Allen a cock-and-bull story about why you’re here and you kneel down inside while they spout the bell, book and candle nonsense and you think you’re a member of the College?’ Aldred looked hard at the man. ‘You really haven’t done this before, have you? Allen didn’t come down with the last manna from heaven, boy,’ he said. ‘He was dodging Lutherans and Calvinists while you were still in your hanging sleeves. He’ll be checking out your story.’

‘I know,’ Marlowe said.

‘And he’ll test you. Not once. But again and again. Count on it.’

‘I will,’ Marlowe assured him.

‘Well, sir…’ Aldred was suddenly on his feet and Marlowe looked across to his right to see Gerald Skelton and the Master walking in their direction. ‘If I can’t tempt you with the finest claret south of the Seine, I’ll trouble you no further.’

‘We are not famed for our wines in Cambridge, vintner,’ Marlowe said with a frown, ‘but I know a good one doesn’t usually taste
of
the Seine,’ and he pointed ostentatiously to the bottles Aldred was stuffing back into his bag. Doctors Allen and Skelton walked past in a waft of incense and a flap of black wool. When they were far enough away, Marlowe caught up with the retreating Aldred. ‘You said death
s
. Unexplained death
s
. Plural.’

‘Did I?’ Aldred smiled. ‘Oh, yes. So I did. One more, anyway.’

‘Who?’ Marlowe asked him.

‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? Father Laurenticus. You’re sleeping in his bed.’

The little room under the tiles was never brightly lit. In the depths of winter, with the sun low in the sky, a fragile grey beam sometimes just managed to percolate through the cobwebby skylight and touch a corner of the ceiling. In early autumn, the sunshine was just a golden glow reflected into the room from some distant cupola. But even that was not brightening the room today. The thin curtain was drawn across the window and the huddled shape on the bed had, in any event, its face turned to the wall.

The door latch rose slowly, with just a faint click to alert anyone who cared that there was someone creeping into the room. In the gloom, the thin figure wrapped in a cloak could have been a boy, woman or child. It sat on the bed, and gently stroked the shoulder of the huddling body, not speaking, just rubbing up, down, round; up, down, round to the time of the beat of a broken heart. After a while, the intruder heaved a sigh, then spoke.

‘Sylvie.’ The stroking became a gentle shake, still loving, but firm. ‘Sylvie, sit up now and speak to me. You have been like this for far too long.’ The figure muttered and shook its shoulder like a petulant child. ‘That’s no good, Sylvie. You’ll die if you don’t eat and drink and
don’t
say you don’t care. Of course you care. Come on now, sit up.’

The girl got off the bed and reached up to draw back the frowsty curtain. The sunlight bouncing off happier roofs glowed into the room. The golden motes danced in it like faeries.

‘Come, now, Sylvie. The afternoon is at its height. It is so beautiful out there.’

There was still no movement from the bed and the girl lost her temper and stamped her foot.

‘I can’t go on like this any longer, Sylvie. I am working day and night to try and make enough money for both of us. I fell asleep under poor old Beausales the baker last night. He didn’t seem to mind. I’m not sure he even noticed, to be honest, but he is a simple soul.’ She sighed. ‘Not everyone would be so understanding, Sylvie. He paid me and gave me a loaf of bread. Some men would beat a girl who did that to them. Beausales, he knows he is hung like a mule. Other men are not so confident in their prowess.’ She kicked the bed and screamed. ‘Sylvie!’