Silent Court (27 page)

She looked at him. ‘And where in the world is Christopher Marlowe?’ she asked.

Johns glanced at the servant.

‘Richard has my full confidence,’ she said. ‘I was about to mention Master Marlowe’s name at the gate, but you stopped me. Why was that?’

Johns walked her to a padded seat by the window and the servant, gratefully, put his parcel on its edge on the floor and rested it against his knees. ‘May I ask your business with Dominus Marlowe?’

‘That is between us, sir,’ she said, frostily.

Johns took in the woman’s dress, her clear eyes, the sweep of her hair under the lace. She was in half-mourning. That meant that she had recently lost a loved one. An educated man, he took an educated guess. ‘Accept my condolences at your loss, Mistress Shelley,’ he said, sitting opposite her. ‘Your husband?’

Her eyelids flickered. ‘The intelligences will have reached you by now,’ she said. ‘You will know that my husband suffered a traitor’s death at the hands of the headsman. Not two months since. On Tower Hill.’

‘Madam,’ Johns said. ‘Look about you. Over there is a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Behind that partition is St Augustine’s Gospel Book. It is the one the saint brought to England in the year of Our Lord 597. It may well be the oldest and the most important book in England. This is my world. I know nothing of what happens beyond these walls.’

‘You knew I had come to see Master Marlowe,’ she said, ‘before I had spoken his name. Can you read women’s minds, Professor Johns?’

The scholar laughed. Women were as much of a mystery to him as the planets that, some men said, revolved around the sun. ‘No mind-reading, I assure you. Just our little Cambridge winds. One of them lifted a corner of your servant’s sacking. He is carrying a portrait. And it is of Christopher Marlowe, to the life. The good proctors didn’t see it because they have between them the intelligence of this chair. Almost. Suffice it to say there are reasons to whisper the name of Marlowe in this university.’

‘And in Sussex,’ she added.

‘May I see?’ Johns asked.

Catherine nodded to the servant, who untied the cord that held the sacking and let it fall. He turned the framed canvas so that the subject faced them all. Kit Marlowe in paint half-smiled at them, his arms folded, his hair swept back from his face. Incised gilt buttons glittered on his slashed doublet and his double collar was edged white.

They looked at it for a long moment. There was something about the glint in the eye and the expression on the face that made Johns feel it was about to speak to him. There was an air of a breath just taken, in readiness.

‘I’m not sure that the mouth is right,’ Catherine said. ‘And I know I’ve made the chin too weak.’

‘
You
painted this, Mistress Shelley?’ Johns was impressed.

‘No,’ she said, half laughing. ‘My uncle George. George Gower. He worked from sketches I made.’

‘In Sussex?’

‘Is Kit here?’ she asked in answer to him.

‘No,’ he told her. ‘In truth, madam, I have no idea where he is.’

‘I promised him this,’ she said. ‘I told him that I would have a likeness made of him.’

‘I’m sure he will be suitably flattered,’ Johns said. Then he pointed to the top corner of the portrait. ‘This motto, here… ?’

‘It means that which feeds me destroys me.’ She blushed and looked down, remembering where she was. ‘I’m sorry. You know that already, of course. I didn’t mean to imply…’

Johns laughed. ‘Yes, you’re right. I learned Latin almost before I learned English. No,’ he said, ‘I mean why is it written there?’

‘It was something I found,’ she said, ‘shortly after I left Sussex. It was written in the margin of a poem. A poem written by Kit. A poem addressed to me.’

‘I had no idea that Kit was in Sussex,’ Johns said.

‘Neither did a lot of Catholic traitors.’ Her voice was suddenly harsh, different, cold. ‘Do you really know nothing of politics, Professor Johns?’

‘It is sometimes safer in these troubled times,’ he said, ‘to know nothing of politics. I prefer the safer way.’

She nodded, looking at Marlowe’s portrait. ‘My husband hired Kit as a tutor for our daughters. He told them stories too and sang to them. But he was really an intelligencer, an agent for Sir Francis Walsingham.’

‘Kit? The Queen’s spymaster?’ Johns mouthed.

Catherine smiled. ‘So you do know something of politics?’ she said.

‘This is Cambridge, Mistress Shelley,’ Johns reminded her, ‘not the far side of the moon. Let me see if I understand this? Kit Marlowe worked in your household in order to entrap your husband?’

She nodded. ‘Who was in league with Francis Throckmorton, the Spanish ambassador, the Queen of Scots and God knows who else. Their purpose was to overthrow Elizabeth and place the Scots woman on the throne. Treason and sacrilege.’

‘But… your husband…’ Johns was at a loss.

‘Was living a lie, Professor,’ she said. ‘All our life together, I had no idea. While I attended the Anglican Church and took the sacrament, he was taking the Mass, in Latin, usually in Lord Howard’s private chapel in Arundel Castle. He was plotting with renegades and fanatics and murderers…’ She caught the look on his face and stopped. ‘Understand this, Professor Johns,’ she said. ‘Like you, I don’t care a fig for politics, whose prayer book we use, who sits on the throne. But what I do care for is my family – my girls – and, once upon a time, my husband. He lied to me, lied to us all and put my girls in terrible danger. Kit Marlowe did not betray him, he saved us. We are safe in Yorkshire now, because of him.’

There was a silence, then she stood up. ‘Professor, I thank you for your offer of luncheon, but Richard and I must be away. If ever Kit Marlowe returns to Cambridge, you will see that he gets this, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’ He stood up with her and bowed to kiss her hand before seeing them both out.

At the gate she stopped and looked at Johns. ‘Tell Kit I’ll always remember him,’ she said, ‘and especially the last lines of the sonnet he wrote. “And this I leave you; this, a single thought – A love; a fond old age; a silent court.” I know what that means now.’

The watery sun was filtering through the clouds as Kit Marlowe stepped ashore on the flat beaches of Norfolk. The sea beggars didn’t usually bother with fishing boats, but they’d lost the
Antelope
in the fog and van Haren’s men were determined to have
something
for their trouble. And van Haren, for all his rough, light-fingered ways had a great respect for the Statholder. He’d willingly signed the Articles of War at William’s insistence and even, in accordance with that, had a minister on board his ship (at least he would once he’d sprung the man from gaol in Altmark) and he allowed, still in accordance with that, no one on board his ship except those of good fame and good name – which is why he’d taken Marlowe on board in the first place.

Van Haren was happy to take Marlowe to England, but not exactly into the port of King’s Lynn, for obvious reasons. The Queen’s writ extended to Dover but nowhere else and van Haren was not a man to take too many chances. The prospect of years in an English prison had almost no appeal for him whatsoever.

On the beach, the North Sea rippling around his boots and wearing the doublet van Haren had graciously returned to him ‘for old time’s sake’, Marlowe took his leave of the beggars of the sea. He handed his former gaoler a purse of coin which van Haren had handed back to him only minutes earlier.

‘That’s for the journey.’ He smiled.

Van Haren smiled too but he wasn’t ready for what happened next. Marlowe’s right arm swung back and his fist crashed into the Dutchman’s mouth. He sprawled on to the wet sand, a large gap where his front teeth used to be.

‘And that’s for bedding my mother.’ Marlowe smiled again, turning away. ‘Look after yourself, sea beggar.’

‘I knew you weren’t mine!’ van Haren called after him, trying to cope without his teeth. ‘Any son of mine would have ducked before the pot struck home.’

‘Well, I’m looking for Master Dee, too!’ Gregory Leslie was not best pleased with the young idiot who had come galloping through his knot garden that morning, spraying plants and clods of earth in all directions.

‘Who are you, sir?’ the young idiot asked him.

Leslie turned a vicious shade of purple and toyed for a moment with dashing to find his sword. But scurrying away at one’s own front door rather than answer a simple question from a whippersnapper dressed as a Dutchman, albeit rather a salt-stained one, seemed rather beneath his dignity.

‘I
own
this house, sir.’ He spat as his womenfolk and a clutch of servants looked on. ‘My grandfather built it and I shall probably die in it. That is if Master Dee has left one stone safely upon another. What do you want him for?’

‘That’s my business.’ Marlowe caught up the reins again. It was clear that Leslie was not hiding the man anywhere.

‘Who did you say you were, again?’ Leslie demanded.

‘Christopher Marlowe.’ And when that achieved no response at all, he leaned forward in the saddle. ‘I work for Sir Francis Walsingham.’

Leslie paused, but he would not be rattled by a whippersnapper on his own doorstep. It had been his father’s stance at times of trouble and it would be good enough for him and for his sons. Things didn’t change fast in the world of Gregory Leslie. ‘So, you work for Sir Francis, do you?’ The use of the more familiar title should have made the youth blench. Youths used to blench in Gregory Leslie’s young days; what was the world coming to? But there wasn’t the slightest sign that he was at all discomfited. ‘Do you work for Dee too?’

‘No,’ Marlowe said. ‘I work
with
him.’

‘In that case,’ Leslie drew himself up to his full height, ‘I shall send my bill to Walsingham. Do you
know
what Dee has done to my Great Hall? Rings of fire damage all over my three-hundred-year-old table. Two tapestries burned beyond repair. And all manner of stuffed creatures hidden all over the house are still giving my wife the vapours. She may never recover.’

‘Do you know where Dr Dee went?’ Marlowe had to ask.

‘If I knew that I’d have sent my bailiffs after him. The man, apart from everything else, owes me three months’ rent. Bailiffs?’ He had just realized what he had said. ‘Damn it, sir, I’d send my hounds!’ And he turned and marched indoors, his family and servants clucking around him.

Marlowe took the reins more firmly in his hands. Then he noticed a servant in Leslie’s livery hovering by the hedgerow that led to the stables. The man was winking at him, beckoning him as subtly as he could. He turned the bay into the shadow of the east wing and leaned low in the saddle.

‘I know where’s gone, sir,’ the man hissed.

‘Where?’ Marlowe asked.

The footman dithered, hopping from foot to foot with the cold and the hope of his time not being wasted. Marlowe threw him a groat from his purse. For all van Haren had returned it to him intact, it was considerably emptier than when he had left Cambridge.

‘He was going back to his Alma Mater, sir.’ The man nodded wisely. ‘Perhaps you know where Master Dee’s mother lives, sir, but I can’t help you any further, because I don’t. I was just surprised to hear the old besom was still alive, but there you are…’

Marlowe snatched at the snaffle and the bay wheeled round.

‘There’s been another man here today,’ the servant said, still hissing in case his master heard. Marlowe reined in.

‘Who?’ he asked.

‘An Egyptian,’ the servant said. ‘One of them as was here while Master Dee was here. You was here as well, sir.’

Leslie had not left his staff to run the house in his absence. Dee would not pay the going rate plus a perfectly reasonable fifty per cent for out of pocket expenses and other considerations, so he had housed them in the lodge and halved their wages. They were now having to pay the price of having allowed Dee to play havoc inside a house they were no longer living in. Leslie was a hard master and a hard man. The footman was only sorry that his information was not to his master’s detriment; he had heard that the country was lousy with spies anxious to find out all they could about nobs who were no better than they should be. But never mind, he would know a spy when he saw one, and then old skinflint Leslie had better watch out.

‘Yes, I was,’ Marlowe said. ‘So tell me, man, which one of the others was here? Who was it?’ He was leaning down so far that he was eyeball to eyeball with the man. ‘Who?’

‘I dunno their names, sir,’ the man said. ‘’Cept Lily. I learned her name all right. Got lovely healing hands, ain’t she, that Lily?’

‘Indeed she has.’ Marlowe nodded. The man’s information had been helpful, but how he could not tell the difference between the men of the Egyptian band, Marlowe could not imagine. Balthasar with his crop of blond curls was as different from the saturnine Frederico as it was possible to be. And, taking the eldest to the youngest, there must be forty years between them. But, forewarned was forearmed, even if he didn’t know who the warning was about and he spurred away into the morning.

FOURTEEN

H
e took the road south across the fens that marked the Bedford Level, his cloak flying out behind him and his face low over the bay’s neck. The animal was not as fast as the Wasp, left behind in Delft, but she was steadier and by cock-shut time Kit Marlowe was clattering over Magdalene Bridge past the twinkling lights of the colleges and the skiffs bobbing on the river.

Leslie’s man had told Marlowe where John Dee had gone. And he was under no illusion that he would not have also told the Egyptian. Any man’s coin was the same as far as the footman was concerned. Marlowe’s only hope was that the Egyptian would not know Cambridge like he did. Despite the tides in the North Sea, despite the false start with the sea beggars, despite the Mass, he might yet make it in time.

He clattered into the gateway of St John’s College where the Yales of Beaufort battled for the king’s shield in the gilded stone over the arch.

‘Whoa!’ A startled Proctor Boddington scuttled out of his lodge door and grabbed his bridle. ‘What brings you so late to college, sir?’