Traitor's Storm (17 page)

‘Nunwell?’

‘The Oglanders. It’s probably nothing.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No, no, Christopher, my dear fellow. It’s a punishing ride and night’s approaching. No offence, but you’d only be in the way. Here.’ Carey unbuckled his rapier. ‘Take my sword. Unless you want to find lodgings back in Freshwater, you’ve a long ride back to Carisbrooke. Go that way, to Chale.’ He pointed to the south-east. ‘Follow the coast. It’s an easier road.’

‘Very well, sir.’ Marlowe took the proffered sword. ‘Thank you.’ He slid the expensive weapon with its gilt curled guard into his saddle strap and watched the Captain of the Wight disappear into the darkness, his hoofbeats soon lost to the cloak of the coming night.

Marlowe watched the two men canter off in the direction of Newport and suddenly felt rather alone. Carey’s instructions, thrown over a retreating shoulder, to take the coast road to Chale and then turn left did not somehow fill him with confidence. A Governor of an island and Captain of the Militia should be a little more precise in his geographical detail, Marlowe couldn’t help thinking, but on the other hand, on an island how far wrong could he possibly go? The sun was beginning to sink below the Down which led to the Needles and as he turned his horse’s head to the east it was already clear that night would not be long in coming.

Marlowe was a city boy at heart but had spent plenty of nights out in the open for reasons nefarious and otherwise and so was not afraid of the dark. Fear of the dark, he had always believed, came from thinking that there were things at your back more scary than you were and when that thought dug itself into a man’s heart, then screaming madness would follow. He touched his dagger lightly, nestling in the small of his back, and the sword hilt at his thigh and knew that he was ready for anything the night could throw at him.

There was no moon yet and the rays of the setting sun still lit the sky behind him. The sea to his right was gleaming in golden ripples and after the wild weather of the last few days, all seemed strangely still and calm. There was a bank of cloud to the south which was picking up the rose tints of the sky, but it had billowing depths that promised – or threatened – some interesting weather in the future. All Marlowe wanted was to get back to the mansion without getting drenched, so he wished the cloud a thousand miles away and spurred his horse into a canter. While there was enough light, he could risk a faster pace; dark would come soon enough and then he would need to walk the animal. George Carey was a generous man, but even he might baulk at a horse with a broken leg. The silence was so absolute that the sound of the hoofbeats on the road sounded like thunder and the clip of the occasional flint being struck by a shoe set the poet’s teeth on edge, so after less than a mile, he slowed the animal back to a rolling amble that went very well with the silently lapping sea and the call of a seabird, out too late from its nest down on the cliff below.

As he ambled along on his horse, Marlowe let his mind wander where it would. Although his cover story of wanting inspiration for a play had been just that, a story to cover his darker purpose, he was a playwright first and foremost, a projectioner least of all. The dark around him became peopled with all manner of apparitions and he turned them over in his mind, discarding them when the image was too bizarre. The three witches outlined briefly on the hilltop he dismissed at once as being so far-fetched that not even a Rose audience at their most ale-soaked would swallow them. A beautiful woman with a face of an angel led his horse for almost a mile, her gentle hand on the bridle. Marlowe watched her treading softly alongside him, turning her head from time to time to give him a sad smile.

‘Nell?’ he said to the dark and with a spark like a bubble flown too high, the woman disappeared. Dr John Dee’s dead wife, the lovely Helene, mourned even now by all who had known her, had come to keep him company for a while and the thought gladdened him, even as he wiped away a tear.

The horse, calm until now, gave a snicker and tossed its mane. Out to sea, just beyond the gleam of the starlight that was beginning to light the waves, strange creatures gambolled, throwing up silver spray and shrieking to the sky. Marlowe shook his curls to match the horse’s flying mane and turned his mount landwards. This island truly was a haunted place and even as the thought passed through his mind, a flash of flying fire crossed his path. It dissolved into myriad points of light which flared once or twice and then went out. Risking everything, Marlowe closed his eyes and counted to ten. When he opened them, the points of light had gone, replaced by the steady lamplight of a house ahead of him, on the seaward side of the road.

Marlowe approached the low door and, leaning out of the saddle, tapped on it sharply. The voices he had heard from inside stopped at once and the dark velvet silence of the night rolled back in. His horse shook his head and the bridle jingled, but that was all. Marlowe rapped again and called out. ‘Is there any one at home?’

After a few seconds, a voice, from its sound coming from a mouth pressed against the door, said, ‘Who is’t?’

‘My name is Kit Marlowe,’ the poet said, trying to sound friendly. ‘I think I may have lost my way. Can you tell me where I am?’

There was a storm of whispering from the other side of the door and then a voice, elderly and female from the sound of it, called out. ‘If’n you be Kit, us don’t want ee here. Begone, back to where you be from.’

‘Marlowe is my name,’ he said, beginning to get a little testy. After all, to get back to where he was from was just what he wanted to do. ‘Marlowe. Christopher Marlowe. The playwright.’ He was about to add that he was a friend of George Carey but that might have earned him a pitchfork through his throat.

There was shuffling from the other side of the door and the sound of someone falling heavily. Then the ancient female spoke again. ‘You did say your name was Kit?’

‘That’s what some call me, yes.’

‘Ar, your dark master.’

‘I have no master … wait a minute.’ It was all coming back to him now. He had not been in touch with Reginald Scot for a while but he wished he had him here now. What that man didn’t know about witchcraft was not worth knowing. And he had talked of a familiar, what was the creature’s name …? ‘Are you thinking of Kit with the Canstick, by any chance? Mother,’ he added, for good measure.

The answer was a shriek.

‘I am not …’ Marlowe leant his head against the eaves above the door and cursed volubly under his breath. ‘Goodnight to the house,’ he sighed. ‘I will ask directions elsewhere.’

As he was turning his horse back to the road, the door flew open and a clod of something he hoped was earth flew past his ear, spraying wetness as it went.

‘Get hence, foul fiend!’ a cracked voice screamed. ‘Get hence, back to the pit of …’ A racking cough took the rest of the diatribe and the crone hobbled back into the ramshackle house, muttering between hacks.

‘Yes, yes,’ Marlowe said to himself. ‘Whatever you say, you mad old bat.’ He pressed his heels into the horse’s sides and cantered off towards the next light showing in the gloom ahead.

This time he dismounted and looped the horse’s reins over a handy fence. He left Carey’s rapier with it, but his dagger was at his back. He walked up to the door and rapped smartly with his knuckles. This time there would be no shilly-shallying about with names. Just directions to Carisbrooke and make it snappy. The door opened a crack and a blast of warmth and a babble of voices came with the narrow beam of light.

‘Good evening to you,’ he said, in what he hoped was a suitably friendly and yokel-flavoured greeting. ‘I was wondering if you could tell me how to get to Carisbrooke Castle from here?’

The door shut and a voice asked a question, to be met with a gale of raucous laughter.

The door creaked open again and the same voice repeated the answer which had proved most popular with the crowd. ‘They do say,’ there was a spluttering snigger, ‘they do say that to get to Carisbrooke Castle, they ’oodn’t start from here.’ The laughter roared out again. ‘Us’d start from up the road aways.’

Marlowe clenched his fist and took a deep breath. ‘But always assuming that I was not up the road aways, but had got myself lost here, then how can I get to Carisbrooke Castle?’

The voice gave a cough and a blast of ale came through the door.

‘Sorry, sir,’ the man said. ‘I shouldn’t mock them as are lost out in these mazy roads at dead of night. No moon nor glim to light his way. You just goes on down the road … you do be come from Brook, do you?’

‘I … think so. I came from the west.’

‘Ar. Well, you carries on down the road aways and you come to an inn.’

‘Isn’t this an inn?’ Marlowe asked. It had all the ingredients: heat, light, loud men and the stench of tobacco and ale.

‘Lord no, matey. No inn, this.’ The speaker closed the door to a touch and spoke over his shoulder. ‘The stranger do think this is an inn,’ he cried. The laughter this time made the little window to the side of the door rattle in its frame. ‘No, sir,’ the man recovered himself eventually and carried on. ‘The inn be down the road aways. But she be shut. Not much fer drinking, down here, we b’ain’t. Sir?’ A grizzled head stuck out from the door and looked both ways. ‘Sir?’

But Christopher Marlowe had gone, up the road aways.

The inn appeared to be closed. Not just for tonight, but forever if the smashed windows and board roughly nailed across the door was anything to judge by. But there was a road, heading inland just alongside one wall and so Marlowe took it, as the only option. He had gauged as well as he could how far he had come and he thought he was probably more or less due south of Newport, so as long as he kept going that way, he should soon see something he recognized. The road down here was little more than a track but his horse was a sure-footed creature and he left it to its own devices. A sea mist was curling up from the beach, its stealthy tendrils twisting round the horse’s hooves and swirling in little spirals as it stepped carefully along the rutted road. Marlowe looked to his left and saw a gate standing open in a rough wall, enclosing a churchyard. The graves were flat and the land was higher so he urged the horse through the gate. Up higher he would be free of the mist and also he might be able to see more lights ahead. Although dwellings had not served him well so far, if he went from hamlet to hamlet, at least he would not be riding off into the wilds or, worse, off a cliff.

The horse dug its hooves into the moss inside the gate and turned its head, desperately trying to get back to the rough roadway.

Marlowe kicked the black in the ribs and urged him on. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘They’re all dead here. Safer than the people we’ve met so far on this ride, wouldn’t you say? On, on.’ And he pressed with his knees again and dug in his heels. The black stepped forward gingerly as if every step was agony, rolling his eyes, his ears back flat to his head. Marlowe bent over the horse’s neck, patting and stroking him, murmuring in his ear to encourage him on. They took the broad path round the church, to reach what Marlowe was sure was higher ground to the north, and came out on a flat area, dotted with table tombs. Marlowe had never seen a churchyard quite like it. Either only rich people died here, or the poor were buried elsewhere. There were no standing memorials or even any flat to the ground. All around, spread randomly over the space, were once splendid tombs, white in the starlight. The mist was only a ground covering here, lapping at the edges of the slabs of stone where they disappeared into the rabbit-cropped grass.

With his back to the dark flint-pocked wall of the church, Marlowe looked north and could see a few faint lights. So far so good. He pulled on the rein to turn his horse’s head, but the animal was now completely spooked and wouldn’t move an inch. The playwright patted the animal’s neck and eventually he felt the tight muscles begin to soften and the horse began its turn. Then it was Marlowe’s turn to be transfixed. Right in front of him, over an empty sward, the top of one of the tombs was very slowly turning. The noise was only slight but it chilled his blood. It was the creak of stone on stone, as the fragments of shell embedded in each piece scratched and ground at each other. It was the cold sound of night, the chink of spade on grit as the gravedigger did his lonely work. The horse gave a nervous whicker and the stone stopped turning for a moment, as if the ghoul beneath was wary of warm-blooded creatures breathing above its head. Then, when no other sound came, the relentless slide of the tomb top carried on. Slowly, slowly, like a glacier calving in Greenland in the Ice Sea at the top of the world, the slab slid on until it finally toppled to the ground at one end, biting into the turf. Marlowe let out his breath in a long silent exhalation and then waited, with empty lungs, for what was to follow.

He had just time to see a cadaverous hand grip the edge of the tomb when the horse, its nerves finally broken, sprang from the shadow of the church and careered down the slope, taking the churchyard wall in one bound. Horse and rider had passed the next two hamlets before either of them dared stop. Marlowe’s heart had stopped thumping by the time they reached the plain below the castle and he could see the torches on the battlements. By the time they clattered in under the gatehouse, even the cold sweat had dried on his brow and no one would have known he had seen the dead rise that night.

The house was asleep when Kit Marlowe crept up to his bedchamber, his boots tucked under his arm and a hand outstretched to feel his way. He had forgotten how dark the countryside could be, away from the bustling streets with the torches on busy corners and stalls selling every conceivable edible thing and some it was best not to think too carefully about. He reached his door without encountering anyone and slipped inside gratefully. Presumably, the crisis at Nunwell had been averted and Sir George Carey was sleeping the sleep of the just in his room just along the gallery.

The maidservant had been into the room at dusk and pulled the heavy curtains across the windows and the room was totally dark, but Marlowe had been in the mansion for enough nights now to know exactly where the bed was and that was all he wanted. He slipped off his Venetians and his doublet and crawled into the bed from the footboard, sinking against the pillows gratefully. After a moment, he pulled back the covers and put his cold legs down inside the crisp linen sheets. He turned his head and sighed. When he was really rich, when this spying and dodging and watching his back was all over, when he could finally do exactly as he wanted, he would have a crisp new bed every night of the year. He let himself fall asleep.