Dark Entry (31 page)

Marlowe couldn’t nod, but gurgled assent in the back of his throat.

‘The priest left his wife back at her parents’ house and ran far away, to a town where no one knew his name or what he had done and he did well. Mary died and Elizabeth came to the throne and many priests married, but he had almost forgotten he had ever had a wife. She had probably remarried, he told himself. It would be best not to meddle with her life any more. He was clever and learned quickly and soon he rose in the church. Then, one day, when he was within an inch of what he had always wanted, a bishopric, with a rich wife in the offing, he was walking along the riverbank when a woman called his name.’

‘His wife?’ Marlowe asked. They were nearly in the trees and he needed to move this narrative along.

‘Indeed, his wife. She had entered a nunnery in France as a lay sister, but was back now to care for her old father. She didn’t want anything from me. Her life of contemplation had made her happy with her lot and she would not have said a thing. But . . . I am not a trusting man, Master Machiavel, I didn’t trust her then and so I killed her. I twisted her Popish rosary around her neck until she stopped breathing and I pushed her body into the river.’

‘You say that very easily,’ Marlowe said. ‘And I notice that the young priest has become a character much closer to home.’

The knife point pricked again. ‘Don’t play with me!’ the man snarled. ‘Now –’ he glanced up briefly to the towering elms – ‘do you want to die in the middle of this wood, or on the edge?’

‘On the edge.’ Marlowe could just make out the black tower of St Stephen’s and the turreted colleges beyond. ‘But the edge facing the church. It’s where my friend is buried, after all. I would like to be near him, at a time like this.’

‘The church, Master Marlowe?’ Steane sneered. ‘Don’t tell me that you have decided to embrace religion in your last moments.’

‘God is forgiving, or so I’m told.’

The Fellow sighed. ‘I believe he is,’ he said. ‘I hope he is . . . As you wish, Master Marlowe. Walk on a little, then and I will tell the rest of the story. What I didn’t realize was that Ralph Whitingside had seen what I had done. He knew that it was me, under the darkness of that archway and he came to tell me so. He would, he said, have to speak to Goad. I brazened it out and he went off, to see that jade of his from the Swan, I expect. While he was gone, I went to his rooms and put poison in the brandy he keeps there.’

The edge of the wood was showing brighter against the dark. ‘And Henry?’

‘Ah, yes, Bromerick and that bloody journal. I was afraid that Whitingside would have written down something incriminating and Bromerick was idiot enough to show it to Michael Johns, who told me about it, hoping I could help. It was all so perfect. I arranged to meet Bromerick to discuss it. Foxglove in the ale. That was it.’

‘That was it?’ Marlowe spun round with no care for his safety. ‘That was
it
? That was my friend, not just a problem for you to do away with.’

Steane pressed him up against a tree, the knife to his throat, pressing under the angle of his jaw. ‘Do you think that the rope will hide the pricks of the knife? I hardly care if it does or not, Master Marlowe. I just want you
dead
!’ The last word echoed round and round the trees like a banshee’s wail.

‘Thirling?’ Marlowe ground out. The pain in his leg and his throat was washing over him and the loss of blood as it still ran down his leg into his boot was making everything seem faint and dreamlike. But he had to know.

‘Thirling also saw me with Eleanor. Like Whitingside, he didn’t know quite what he had seen, until that stupid village girl pinned that weed on my shoulder this morning.’ Both men paused. Could it really have only been that morning? ‘It made him realize what had been going on, but not that I had killed her. He accused me of “dalliance”. Me, a Bishop-elect. He had to die.’

Marlowe sagged suddenly at the knees and took Steane by surprise. It was enough and the younger man turned to run clear of the trees, hobbling across the uneven ground below the church wall. As he stumbled and tried to find his footing, he heard a scream behind him which turned his blood to ice. Rolling over, his arm up to defend himself, he saw Steane staggering away to his left, eyes wide with horror, arms up with palms outwards, to fend off some dreadful thing. Twisting back to see what Steane was seeing, all the scholar could make out was an indistinct white shape, moving along the churchyard wall, on a path which must meet with Steane.

Marlowe scrambled to his feet and ran round behind the man and off at an angle, to head him off at the end of the churchyard wall, but put his foot in a hole and fell heavily, a searing pain screaming up his leg to his groin. Gingerly, he eased his foot out of the hole and gently massaged his ankle. It wasn’t broken, but wouldn’t be taking him anywhere fast tonight. As he sat on the dampening grass, rubbing his leg, he realized that he had stepped in a collapsing grave, that a mouldering hand was just below the surface. Even the dead seemed to be on the murderer’s side tonight.

Steane and the white shape had disappeared. Marlowe knew the story now, but he still had to prove it. Steane’s flight would make it hard for him to carry on with his life as he had planned it, but Marlowe didn’t want him to still be drawing breath when the dawn came up. He had no time for trials and inquests; he knew how wrong they could be. He wanted to take a life for those of his friends; not an equal count, but as equal as he could make it.

Slowly and in enormous pain, he hobbled across the seemingly endless distance of the Potter’s Field and rounded the corner of the wall. Using the gravestones to support him, he limped around the uneven path, gasping as his foot accommodated the pebbles on the ground. He was almost at the eastern end of the church when he heard a drawn out whistling noise above him and he looked up to see the bulk of the flint-spattered tower looming against the stars. A strange shape was approaching, pale and getting bigger against the dark wall. Then, suddenly, with a sickening crunch which shook every synapse in his body, it landed at his feet, with a warm spatter of something which he knew could only be blood. Some self-preservation deep in his soul kept his eyes heavenward for another minute of sanity. They met the eyes of Meg Hawley, wide with terror and far away at the top of the tower. Reluctantly, he looked down and saw, spread over far too wide an area, all that remained of Benjamin Steane.

The summer sun was beating down on the oak door of the Great Hall of King’s College that Wednesday afternoon and the whole town seemed to hold its breath. There was just the faintest breeze to carry the murmur of voices drifting out through the single open window high up in the transom. There was the distant tap of a gavel, and then the doors were flung open and a mixed gaggle of people spilled out into the hot air.

‘Well, Master Machiavel.’ Sir Edward Winterton, still wearing his sling, turned to Marlowe. ‘As First Finder, what did you think of my . . . the jury’s verdict?’

Marlowe squinted up at the sun, then turned to the coroner. ‘Suicide sounded a very fair judgement to me, Sir Edward. His widow won’t like it, of course, but she would have liked it less if he had lived to stand trial.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Winterton said. ‘I try to be merciful.’ He paused and looked at a distant rooftop, pursing his lips. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Master Marlowe . . .’

‘No. I don’t think you do, Sir Edward. I think that . . . bearing in mind what I saw, and what you chose to ask me not to repeat in court, I think your verdict . . . I mean, the verdict of your jury, was very merciful indeed. And if the guilty have not been brought to justice by a human court, I should think that as a Bishop-elect he would be expecting to be judged by a higher one.’

‘Guilty of
felo de se
, you mean, of course,’ Winterton said, still keeping his eyes elsewhere.

There was a silence, then Marlowe said quietly, ‘As you wish, Sir Edward. Amongst other things, but I think as we understand each other, we can leave it there.’ He extended his right hand, then pulled back, remembering Winterton’s injury. He laid his palm gently on the man’s shoulder instead, a breach of protocol which Winterton acknowledged with a smile.

‘Take care, Master Machiavel,’ he said. ‘God go with you, if you would like him to.’

Marlowe turned to find Dee hovering behind him.

‘A reasonable verdict, taken all round, do you not agree, Master Marlowe?’ Dee said. ‘Old Gerard was right, then, in a way – foxglove is good for those who fall from high places.’

Marlowe looked closely into the man’s eyes and saw the message beneath the words: that this was the best we could expect; that Winterton had done his best to atone for the wrong verdicts on Ralph Whitingside, Eleanor Peacock and Henry Bromerick; that he and Marlowe knew more than could ever be told, out loud and in the light of day. Accordingly, Marlowe’s reply was simple. ‘Yes, Dr Dee. A reasonable verdict.’ Then he looked closer, not into the eyes but at the face. ‘But . . . you don’t look well. Have you had a shock? Are you ill?’

Dee put a hand on Marlowe’s arm and the scholar could feel it shaking. ‘Are you sure you are not a magus, Kit?’ he said, with a hollow laugh. ‘I have had a shock, yes. My manservant was waiting for me this morning when I got up. He had ridden through the night to tell me . . . well, to make the story short, Master Marlowe, my house has burned down. To its very cellars.’

Marlowe was appalled. The house, although he had been often disoriented in its labyrinthine corridors, had been a marvellous world of exotic things, sights and smells that he knew he would now never experience again. ‘How did it happen?’

Dee drew him to one side. ‘Do you know a quiet inn?’ he asked.

‘We could go to the Swan,’ Marlowe offered. ‘I need to speak to Meg if I can. She will find us a quiet corner, if there is one to be had.’

Dee nodded and the two walked through the afternoon streets, through market stalls, miraculously restored, through geese and sheep being herded by their new owners to their fate. It seemed nobody had hanged the Mayor after all. Neither man spoke, each being busy with his own thoughts, until they were ensconced with an ale each in a quiet corner of the inn, with the back of their settle turned out into the room, for added privacy.

‘How did it happen?’ Marlowe repeated. ‘Is everyone well? Helene . . . your servants?’

‘Everyone got out. They are staying at one of my other properties in London, just a small house, but all of my papers, my potions . . . everything has gone. Many of the things I work with are rather easily ignited; the place went up like a torch, or so I’m told.’ The magus slumped on his seat.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ Marlowe said. ‘But, you haven’t told me; how did it happen?’

Dee closed to him. ‘That’s the thing,’ he said. ‘I have started the rumour, which will be all over England before the summer is done, that an angry mob overpowered my grooms and put torches to the house.’ He looked up briefly. ‘I have a reputation to keep up; people must be afraid of me, if only slightly, otherwise I am just a magician, doing tricks for a meal and a bed.’

Marlowe smiled. As a conjuror of a different sort, playing people and words off against one another to keep ahead of the game of life, he understood. But he still didn’t know what had happened. He opened his mouth to ask again, but Dee raised a hand to forestall him.

‘You must promise not to tell a soul.’

‘I promise.’ And Kit Marlowe kept his promises.

Dee stared at him for a long minute. ‘Do you promise not to put me into one of your plays, even?’

‘I don’t write plays,’ Marlowe said. ‘I am a poet, at best. I saw what happened to Lord Strange’s Men. A theatrical life is not for me.’

Dee knew what his showstone had told him about Marlowe and shrugged. He had less faith in it now that it had not foretold the fire. He drew a deep breath. ‘It was the cook,’ he said, baldly. ‘And her perpetual toast.’

‘Toast can’t burn a house down, surely?’ Marlowe sat back. It seemed unlikely.

‘No, it can’t,’ Dee agreed. ‘But a candle can if the manservant who should have been watching the house to make sure that if the curtain was blown into the room because the window was left open and touched the flame and caught alight was put out straight away was having toast.’ He gasped at the end of his mammoth sentence which had been punctuated by ticking each brick in the wall off on his fingers.

‘Ah. I can see how it happened now.’

‘The curtain in question then flapped in the wind against a particularly fine stuffed vulture which was hanging from the ceiling. The moss with which it was stuffed caught fire and before they knew it . . . the beams were alight and in a matter of hours, the house was gone.’

There seemed nothing to say, so Marlowe sipped his ale and kept quiet.

Then Dee brightened up, however falsely. ‘To get back to the inquest, though, Kit. There seemed to me to be . . . a lot missing from your testimony.’

‘A little. Possibly a little.’

Dee waited patiently.

‘There was . . .’ Marlowe weighed his words and began again. ‘When I broke away from Steane, at the edge of the wood, something frightened him, so that he ran towards the church.’

‘Did you see what it was?’

Marlowe could picture it quite clearly in his mind; a nebulous white shape, which had risen from the ground over Ralph Whitingside’s grave and had skimmed along the boundary wall, heading for the gate into the churchyard proper. It must have reached it a second at most after Steane had disappeared into the blackness beyond the yews. If it had a face, he had not seen it. ‘It was . . .’ he sketched a helpless shape in the air. ‘It was white,’ he said, finally. ‘That’s all I can say.’

Dee slapped his knee and made the ale jump in the jug. ‘I knew it,’ he almost shouted. Then he remembered the need for secrecy. ‘I knew it,’ he repeated, in a whisper this time. ‘It was the soul of Ralph Whitingside. I
knew
that I should have completed that banishment rite, hedge priest or no hedge priest.’