Witch Hammer (17 page)

‘Mistress,’ he said, reaching across his master’s coverlet to touch her hand. He nodded to the bread and wine. ‘I think . . . if you want . . .’

She looked up at him, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘So soon?’ she asked, her voice low.

He nodded.

She stood up and took up the sliver of bread. Boscastle slid his arm under Sir William’s neck and lifted him a little, the baronet’s head heavy on his shoulder. The man’s daughter bent over him, making the sign of the cross and muttering the benediction under her breath. She touched the crust to his lips and then, with another genuflection, put it into her own mouth and swallowed it. In the silence as she prayed, there was another long and shuddering breath from her father.

‘Quickly,’ Boscastle said. ‘Oh, mistress, the wine. Quickly.’

She snatched it up, spilling a little on the sheet in her haste and touched it to her father’s mouth. His eyes opened and he looked up at her. ‘Joyce,’ he murmured, sipped the wine, swallowed it and died.

With the rasping breathing stilled, the room seemed to ring with silence. Boscastle gently let the old head slip back on to the pillow and closed the tired eyes. He pulled the sheet up over his face, tucking it in with deft movements. Soon, he would rouse the women who would come and do all that was needed to make the old man decent for the grave.

He looked up, to offer words of comfort to Joyce Clopton. She stood there, almost as if she herself had been struck down. Tears ran down her cheeks and dripped off her chin, but she made no sound. ‘My Lady . . .’

She held out a hand, palm out, as though to ward him off. ‘No kind words, Boscastle, if you please,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could stand it.’ She backed off, away from the bed, towards the door. ‘I just can’t take another thing. He isn’t dead. He wouldn’t leave me. If I don’t see him, he isn’t dead. Don’t speak.’ Her voice rose with every strangled phrase and Boscastle instinctively moved round the bed to comfort her. But she was quicker than he was and she was out of the door before he could reach her. He stood on the landing and heard her frantic feet beat a tattoo down the wooden stairs and then the slam of a door. He moved across to the long gallery which marched the length of the house and watched her ghostly figure run like the hounds of Hell were after her across the park, until she disappeared into the elder copse at its edge.

Lord Strange’s Men spent most of the next morning arguing about what to perform. They could drop Lady Godiva for a start, because nobody in Oxford would have heard of her. Because of Thomas’s tumble in the hay, he wouldn’t make a convincing Britannia and Oxford would never allow a woman on stage even if, at this last, dying moment, Sledd could find one. Could he perhaps become Gog or Magog, Hengist or Horsa – possibly, at a pinch, King Arthur? Then, there was the whole audience dimension to consider. The townsfolk would probably accept any old nonsense as long as it had a clown, a bit of tragedy, at least one duel and fireworks. There always had to be fireworks. But the scholars? If any of the university men came along, they’d expect something altogether more highbrow. Aristophanes? Sledd had heard the name somewhere. Could Kit Marlowe help? He was a scholar. Couldn’t he knock his Dido into shape? Hadn’t he been waffling on at dinner the other day about this Tamburlaine fellow? Sledd could play him with one hand tied behind his back. He wouldn’t even have to bother with an accent; who would know how the man sounded, all this time and all those miles from when and where he had lived, because he was real, according to Marlowe.

But, all morning, Kit Marlowe had said ‘No!’

Reginald Scot sat with Marlowe near the Whispering Knights as a warm breeze from the south floated over the linen line the women had put up. The man was sitting cross-legged, scribbling furiously in his pocket book, dipping his quill into an ink pot balanced precariously on one knee.

‘Friend Shaxsper’s not half bad, is he?’ he said, nodding to the stage area where the ex-glover was going at it hammer and tongs with Martin, steel banging on steel.

‘Not like that,’ Martin said. ‘You’ve got to make it half believable, Shaxsper.’

‘Well, how then?’ Shaxsper snapped, slicing high into the air so his fencing partner had to duck.

Marlowe smiled. ‘Indeed not,’ he agreed, ‘though how he’d fare in some dark alleyway, I’m less sure.’

‘Vicious life, acting?’ Scot enquired, seeing the purple fury in Shaxsper’s face.

Marlowe looked at him and tapped his paper. ‘Not as vicious, I’ll wager, as witchcraft.’

Scot chuckled. ‘The old crone,’ he murmured, ‘the keeper of the stones.’ With other men, Scot would have had to hiss a hurried, ‘No, don’t look.’ But Marlowe had instincts of another sort and he kept his eyes on Scot’s paper.

‘What about her?’ he asked.

‘What do you make of her?’ Scot asked.

Marlowe marshalled his thoughts. ‘She’s here and there,’ he said. ‘She certainly was in the company last night, because the rabbit stew didn’t seem to go round the way it should have done and there is a lot of her to feed. Ned was certainly very scared by her; his bluff act might fool some people, but it didn’t fool me, nor you, I would guess.’

Scot inclined his head in agreement.

‘She seems to have a skill at blending into the background, which for one of her size is quite incredible. I am quite good at seeing through subterfuge, and yet I find I must look at her from the tail of my eye to see her clearly at all and if she sees me looking at her even askance, she moves away.’

‘So,’ Scot asked him, ‘would you say she has magical powers?’

Marlowe chewed his lip. He had seen some things, not all of them explicable in the normal way, but taken overall, magical powers were not the kind of thing you expected to find in an ignorant old woman the size of a small cart, out in the middle of nowhere. ‘I think she knows people, and how to move them about in their own heads to suit her purposes. She can bend the unwary to her will.’

Scot looked at him and smiled. His expression was suggestive of someone whose dog has just performed the trick they had been years perfecting. ‘You are an interesting man, Master Marlowe, and one day I will find out more about you, but for now, I want to find out more of this old crone of the stones. If you questioned her about who she is and what she does here, what would she tell you, do you think?’

‘I don’t need to question her. She stays here to gull travellers out of a few paltry pence. She told Ned to put a coin for each one of us at the stone that watches.’

‘Could he work that one out?’ Scot said, leaning forward over his paper, ink dripping on to his boot.

Marlowe moved his hand aside, not out of care for the man’s attire, but for his own. ‘Ned is not stupid, Reginald,’ he said. ‘He is a little over dramatic, perhaps, and sometimes a little over zealous, but he has kept this troupe fed and watered and on the road safely these many months and a stupid man couldn’t do that. In this case, he would probably have worked it out, but he noticed Nat Sawyer behaving somewhat inappropriately for the amusement of the women. It involved a carrot and the stone with a hole in – it gave Ned all the clue he needed.’

‘Did he leave the money?’

‘He says not.’

‘But, did he leave the money?’

‘Of course. But that doesn’t make him stupid, just careful.’

Scot looked over at the rehearsal. Sledd had Martin by the throat and seemed to be trying to shake some lines into him. It was impossible at this remove to tell if it was having any effect. He turned back to Marlowe. ‘But, say for a moment, just to please me, that you had to find out something which she knew and would not tell you. How would you go about it?’

Marlowe had a persuasive tongue and rarely had to use more than that to find things out. He knew there were other methods, which he tried not to think about too much; one of those dread engines might well be his future. He shrugged.

‘Well,’ said Scot, tiring of the chase. ‘You could use one of these . . .’ He rummaged in his knapsack and pulled out a steel bodkin, five inches long with a deadly point.

‘Pretty,’ said Marlowe, drawing back a little.

‘I got it in Bamberg,’ Scot told him. ‘It’s a witch pricker.’

‘So . . . threaten the old girl with one of these and she’ll tell you anything. You might need a longer one for the lady in question, though.’

Scot smiled again. ‘That’s not exactly how it works,’ he said, and lunged at Marlowe with the pricker. The poet, sitting cross-legged almost knee to knee with Scot, had no time to react and the spike thudded into his doublet a little above the heart. He grunted with the impact and his hand was already behind his back reaching for his dagger. But there was no pain. No blood. Nothing.

‘Sorry,’ said Scot, sitting back again in the upright position and taking his bodkin with him. ‘Just proving a point, you might say. Or the lack of one.’ He pressed his finger against the bodkin’s tip and it slid up inside the hilt. ‘Ingenious, isn’t it?’

Marlowe took the thing. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said.

‘Around here,’ Scot said, ‘that’s very likely. You felt no pain, then, when I stabbed you?’

‘None,’ Marlowe said. ‘Just the pressure of the blow.’

‘And you’re not bleeding?’

Marlowe frowned and smiled at the same time. ‘Do you want me to look?’ he asked. ‘Is this another trick, Master Witch Finder?’

‘I’m not a witch finder,’ Scot said grimly. ‘And yes, what men call witchcraft is entirely trickery. It’s an illusion. Smoke and mirrors. Let me paint you a different picture. Imagine the crone under interrogation. She’s stripped naked, bound hand and foot. She can’t move, but she can see, and she can feel. If I were a witch finder, I’d ask her about her familiars: her cat, her dog, even the lice that crawl in her hair. Did the Devil send them? Does she suckle them? And if so, from where? Where is the Devil’s mark, the witch’s tit? Her own nipples? No, they once gave milk, but not blood. A mole then, like Lord Strange’s, but somewhere on the body, hidden under her clothing. But nothing is hidden now, remember? She’s naked, shamed and ridiculed and exposed to the gaze of men. I find such a mole. I tell her that if that is the Devil’s mark, she will feel no pain as I prick her. There will be no blood. And lo . . .’ This time, Scot jabbed the bodkin into his own chest. He looked at Marlowe and made the sign of the cross. ‘The Devil is in you, mother. Look, look, how you did not cry out; how you do not bleed.’

He glanced across at the old woman for the first time, stirring her cooking pot on a fire built behind the Whispering Knights and singing softly to herself. ‘Irrefutable evidence of damned witchcraft,’ Scot said, ‘and they’d hang her for it. Can you see her, Kit, her wretched old body creaking in the wind?’

But Kit Marlowe wasn’t looking at the miserable old woman of Scot’s imagination, twirling at the rope’s end. He was squinting into the sun, trying to make out what was causing the flashes of light on the slope of the hill to the north. The flashes were bright, halting, intermittent and below them, in the heat of the July day, Marlowe could just make out a horseman. The horseman he had thought was Nicholas Faunt when they were on their way to Clopton.

‘What’s that, Reginald?’ he asked. ‘Those lights flashing over there?’

Scot half turned and focused his eyes through the heat haze, watching as the lights flickered once more and vanished. ‘That’s Meon Hill, laddie. Better you don’t ask.’

T
he golden day had gone, leaving a sky of purple and amber, like the bars across a fire in a cottage home. All day, Sledd had put his cast through their paces. St George, the Dragon and the Turkish Knight it would be and Kit Marlowe had rustled up a quick prologue to give the whole thing a bit of a lift.

Will Shaxsper read it tolerably well, despite endless suggestions on how it could be improved. Old Joseph was ready to kill for the part, standing at Shaxsper’s side and reading over his shoulder like some drunken echo.

‘“Now see the rolling hills of golden thread,

Now see great England’s heroes stand,

St George of red cross fame; a knight apart

The greatest knight of all this sacred land.” Deathless, dear boy.’ Joseph was in raptures. ‘A mighty line indeed.’

Marlowe cringed. It was far from his best and, to be fair, his mind was on other things than iambic pentameter. But with Oxford beckoning in two days time, it would have to do. He was lolling against a wagon wheel idly strumming a lute to some half-forgotten tune when Thomas shouted from the elder stand to the north, ‘Riders coming. Our way. To the north-east.’

Sledd and Scot were on their feet first, crossing to the stones and the road that lay beyond. Martin was with them, then Shaxsper and the others.

‘Kit,’ Sledd called to him. ‘You’d better come and see this.’

A little procession was winding its way up the slope of the hill towards them, torches guttering in the breeze. The watchers at the stones heard the thud of the horses’ feet and the creak of a wagon.

‘It’s a funeral,’ said Thomas, trying to make out the details.

‘And it’s coming our way,’ said Shaxsper, crossing himself out of habit.

The horse at the head of the solemn procession was ridden by a lady, trailing black weeds of mourning, fluttering gently in the currents of cooling evening air. By the horse’s head and carrying a torch, a tall, sombre-looking fellow, wearing an old sword, kept even pace with the ambling animal. Behind them was a bier on wheels, draped with a flag that Marlowe knew. ‘Those are the Clopton arms,’ he said, ‘and that is Sir William Clopton’s funeral cortège.’

The others stood rooted to the spot, but Marlowe dashed between the stones and ran down the hill towards them. The lead horse halted, snorting and tossing its black-bridled head.

‘My Lady.’ Marlowe bowed. Joyce Clopton sat sidesaddle, her face pale in the half moonlight against her sepulchral black.

‘Kit,’ she said quietly. ‘Oh, Kit!’ And he helped her down, cradling her in his arms as Boscastle steadied the horse. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, all the pain of her upturned world trickling down her cheeks. ‘I had nowhere else to go.’