Scorpions' Nest (14 page)

Phelippes was all for going home. Marlowe agreed with him, with such alacrity that Johns had spun his head to look him in the face. In the eyes there was the look of the devil he had seen so often before, the shadow of Machiavel. He felt he should warn Phelippes, but then shrugged and decided to watch where the play might go. Marlowe encouraged him, even to the extent of asking where his pack was stowed, so that they could begin to gather his things together for the journey. Phelippes, all innocence, went so far as to thank Marlowe for his kindness. Then, like a viper, the projectioner had struck.

‘Will you be going home, Master Phelippes?’ Marlowe had asked.

Johns had stifled a smile. Here it comes, he had thought, the coup de grace.

‘Of course.’ Phelippes had been puzzled. ‘Where else would I go?’

Marlowe had raised a shoulder and an eyebrow and favoured Johns with a knowing smile. ‘I just thought that you might want to stay away from where Sir Francis Walsingham and Nicholas Faunt can easily find you,’ he said, smoothly. ‘They can be… well, they don’t always seem to understand how hard it can be in the field.’

Phelippes had leant forward into the candlelight to look into Marlowe’s eyes, but only concern for a new friend was shining there. And so, Johns and Phelippes still shared their rustling bed, waiting to be told what to do, where to go and when. He smiled and turned his head to the window and his heart skipped a beat.

Outlined against the grey of the casement, was a head, cowled in what could have been a monk’s habit, or simply a loose hood. He closed his eyes in disbelief. How could anyone have got into the room so silently? For a moment, he hoped it might be Marlowe, but in a second he could see this man was bigger, much broader in the shoulder and taller, probably by half a span. He held his breath, watching, praying that Phelippes wouldn’t give vent to one of his frightening snores or, worse, one of his ripping farts that Johns had been too embarrassed in the morning to mention. Breathing through his nose he made no sound, but trying to burrow lower into a straw palliasse proved to be louder than he had expected and the figure at the window turned.

Johns stayed as still as he dared. He closed his eyes, so the intruder couldn’t see the faint light shining on them, but then he couldn’t tell whether the man was approaching or had kept his place at the window. He was so frightened he just wanted to scream and shout out loud, to run frantically for the door, although he knew that it would probably be the death of him. Conversely, he knew that he couldn’t move a muscle should Hell itself open beside his bed. He had been turned to stone. No, to ice. But ice that made his brow sweat and his tongue burn in his throat with the need to scream.

After what seemed an hour, he felt Phelippes move beside him. He reached out with his left hand, hoping to alert him to their danger, but without startling him. Phelippes felt the touch of his hot fingers on his arm in his sleep and woke up from his usual dream of coal scuttles and yelled at the top of his lungs. Before the horrified Johns could stop him, he had jumped out of the bed over him and lunged at the figure by the window, who turned with a hissed curse, swinging his arm through the air. Phelippes dropped like a stone and the intruder ran for the door, jumping over the man’s body as he did so. Johns closed his eyes and waited for death, which didn’t come.

What came instead was a bubbling sound, a wet groaning that seemed to fill the room. Then it resolved into Phelippes’ voice.

‘Michael,’ he whispered, ‘Michael, he has cut me. Help me, help me, please.’ Then there was a thump as the code-breaker’s head hit the floor in a dead faint and Johns was himself again, a man who could fix life’s little dramas, who, if he didn’t know what to do could usually find a man who did. Getting up from the bed, he strode with what dignity he could muster, given the fact he was wearing only his shirt and went out into the narrow gallery outside their room.

‘Solomon!’ he called. ‘Aldred, come quick! Light here, and help. A ruffian has broken into your house and murder is done. Solomon!’

Things were less exciting at the English College. Although the rooms would be considered austere by many, they were palatial by the standards of the scholars at any college in Cambridge. In some of the more poorly endowed, the scholars didn’t have their own rooms, but had to lodge in houses around the town, often several to a bed. Even the dormitory in the English College would have seemed like heaven to them. The room was large and airy, with low partitions between the comfortable beds, with linen changed every term and the palliasses hung out of the window to air in the summer. The slightly more favoured scholars, those who helped in the library, those who had struck the faculty as being rather more devout – or whose fathers had deep pockets; in the end it all came to about the same – had rooms which they shared with just one other. A few, as well as temporary guests, had rooms to themselves.

Marlowe had got used to the faint scent of urine that the warmth of his body still released from his bed. He concentrated instead on the smell of rosemary and lavender and soon was drifting off and nearing sleep. As was his habit, he used the floating time, when he could no longer feel the bedding above or the mattress beneath but could still think clearly, to put all of his thoughts in order, then address and dismiss them one by one. He had always found that if sleep didn’t come as the last thought flew away on the wings of night, he could always add a few lines to the constant poem that he kept in his head for the purpose.

In his time at the English College, he feared he may have been sidetracked for at least a while from his primary purpose of finding the missing conspirator. His instructions from Faunt had been couched in the man’s usual roundabout way. Someone had slipped through Walsingham’s net, a friend of the conspirator Babington. Intelligence ran that he had found his way to the English College. Marlowe was to go to Rheims, find the man and then proceed as he thought fit. He knew that however he did proceed, if it didn’t suit the purposes of Sir Francis Walsingham and his own paymasters, then Marlowe would take the blame. Nobody, in the England of Gloriana, was indispensable and rotting heads jutted above London Bridge to prove it. If it did by some happy chance fit with their plans, then they would take the credit. That was how it worked and there was nothing he could do to change it. All he could hope was that when the mighty storm broke over his head in the event that he got it wrong, he would be adequately sheltered in the lee of a person more suited than he was to weather it. Sons of shoemakers were legion; university scholars ten a penny. Even titles were no absolute guarantee of safety, although titles helped.

Unfortunately, the only people he could hide behind at the moment were Solomon Aldred, a vintner with just a remaining trace of intelligencer left in him; Thomas Phelippes, a code-breaker and forger of high talent but little backbone; and lastly, Michael Johns, an innocent abroad who Marlowe would protect at whatever cost to himself. So, for that point to be adequately disposed of on his journey towards sleep, he had mentally to mark it as pending.

His secondary purpose was to avoid the razor intellect of William Allen; falling too far foul of him would mean discovery, capture and probably death. The man seemed to be everywhere and had a look in his gimlet eye that made Marlowe feel as though he stood before him naked. Not even Walsingham, not even, he would go so far as to say, his own mother, had ever made Marlowe feel so ill at ease. It was as though Allen could see into his soul, and the curtains had been down behind his eyes for so long, he had thought no one could penetrate into that secret room any longer. Nevertheless, he felt that his latest plan might solve this knotty problem. He had left Phelippes with a task to fulfil which would hopefully set his mind free to wander and possibly crack the uncrackable code as he worked his forging magic. So, that problem could be set free to flap on leathern wings into the night.

Which left him with just the murders to contend with, those annoying little circumstances that came between the tick and strike of the clock. Father Laurenticus was definitely murdered and he had access to a virtual eyewitness, should he need one, in the person of Sylvie. Mireille was easily found; in fact, he had received a merry wave from her already on two occasions, much to Solomon Aldred’s amusement. But the details of the death of Charles, late of the flat Fens of Cambridgeshire, clearly strangled by person or persons unknown, remained a secret known only to his murderer and his God. With plenty else to occupy his mind, Marlowe decided to put the problem of strange deaths to one side for now. He could pursue it if he found that his other investigations were going nowhere and he needed to mull something over to keep his wits sharp. He opened his hands and blew softly on the black feathers of that thought and it hopped from his hand, about to take flight.

Before it could even get itself above the trees, the night was shattered by a scream so shrill it scarcely seemed to go in through the ears. It went straight to the bowels, turning them to water and seemed to go on so long he could hardly believe it came from a human throat. He opened his eyes wide, telling himself that if he saw anything apart from the dim outline of his window, he was dreaming already and could comfortably ignore the dreadful sound. The predawn light outlined his window and so he let instinct take over and he leapt from his bed and hurried to the door, pausing only to grab his dagger from beneath his pillow and hold it in his right hand, blade concealed along his inner forearm, below the sleeve on his shirt.

A
t the far end of the gallery, in the dawn’s light seeping in grey fingers through the two long windows, a maid stood, her eyes wild, her hands over her mouth. The last strands of her scream filtered between her fingers but she was almost silent at last. Marlowe was at her side in an instant and touched her arm. She started, forced out of whatever Hell gripped her, and he led her away, back to his room, out of the light. He couldn’t tell the woman’s age as he sat her down on the wooden chest. She barely seemed to register him at all, just sat rocking gently, cradling her arms as if to hold herself together.

Marlowe slipped the dagger under the coverlet and knelt in front of the woman, gently uncoiling her fingers from around her arms and holding her hands down in her lap. He had seen this look before, the numbness of terror. It wasn’t a mouse that had caused that scream. It was a body. Stiff and cold.

‘Madame,’ he said softly in his best French. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

Slowly, as though waking from a dream, the maid’s eyes began to focus. She saw the handsome young man in front of her, but not the concern on his face. She saw the bed, the crucifix on the far wall, the curtains and the sideboard. And suddenly, she knew where she was. This was Father Laurenticus’ room. Her eyes widened again and her mouth opened to scream as she half rose. Marlowe recognized the signs and held her down with one hand while clamping the other over her mouth.

‘No,’ he said firmly, beyond the whisper he had used so far. Then he softened. ‘It’s all right,’ he soothed, stroking her wild hair under the cap. ‘You’re safe here. Nothing can hurt you here.’

‘Oh, Monsieur…’ she tried to speak but her voice trailed away. The man had no idea.
Everything
could hurt her here.

‘What is it?’ he asked her. ‘What did you see?’

She looked at him, blinking back tears, understanding what was happening for the first time before time had frozen and the only noise she could hear was the thump of her own heart and the blood rushing in her ears.

‘The boy,’ she said. ‘The scholar. Edmund…’ and she turned to the door, as if expecting the lad to be standing there, smiling at her in his grey fustian.

Marlowe lifted up the woman’s chin, to force her eyes to focus on his. ‘I will see to it,’ he said. ‘What is your name?’

‘Antoinette,’ she said.

‘Antoinette,’ Marlowe repeated. ‘I will see to it. Where do I go? The end room?’

She nodded quickly. All her adult life she had worked in this house, long before the English came and she knew its stairs and landings like the lines of her own palm. Yet, one by one, these rooms were closing down to her, becoming places she didn’t want to go. First, Father Laurenticus’; now this, the end room along the gallery.

‘Antoinette,’ Marlowe said, catching the woman’s attention again, ‘I am going along to that room.’

‘Oh, Monsieur,’ she said, startled.

‘It’s all right.’ He smiled at her reassuringly and slipped the dagger out from its hiding place. ‘You see, I am not alone. Antoinette, I want you to stay here. I am going to lock the door, so that you will be safe. Do you have keys of your own?’

She nodded, lifting up her jingling chatelaine, hung with keys of all sizes.

‘I shan’t be long,’ he said and, stooping, kissed her softly on the forehead. He checked her as he closed the door behind him. Antoinette sat rocking again on the chest, and her arms circled her body and she hugged herself. If only to protect herself from the ghost of Father Laurenticus. She could almost feel his eyes on her from the darkest corner of the room and sensed the rustle of a monk’s robe as he shifted position in the shadows.

Out in the gallery, all Hell was breaking loose. Scholars in nightshirts were crowding the confined space, each of them trying to see into the end room.

‘Make way,’ Marlowe shouted and one by one they fell back, especially as the man held a dagger in his hand.

The end room was typical of the attic accommodation in the English College. There was a single window, its tiny panes closed against the rawness of the October dawn and two wooden beds wedged together under the sharp slope of the eaves. Marlowe took one look at the body on the furthest bed and turned, ushering the ghouls out of the room. ‘Someone wake the Master,’ he said before closing the door. He knew he didn’t have much time before Allen arrived to close down Marlowe’s particular line of enquiry.

Edmund Brooke lay on his back in his nightshirt. His lips were blue and tightly pursed and his eyes stared at the ceiling. Marlowe looked closely at those eyes, sunken and glazed as they were. There were tiny red spots in the whites and a similar rash over the cheeks and nose. He bent closer, as if to catch a last whisper of breath from the dead man and smelt the heavy aroma of wine. No doubt Solomon Aldred could have identified the vineyard. The bed itself was pulled about, the sheets pulled this way and that and the pillow was hanging half on the bed, with just one crumpled end looking as though it had been thrust under the lad’s head after he was dead. The bed alongside was cold and virtually undisturbed. There was a Bible on the side table, open to a page of St Peter and another tome lying beneath it. Marlowe threw open the door of the makeshift cupboard and took in quickly what was there. A cassock, two or three shirts, two pairs of clogs, old and worn. Nothing that hadn’t been hanging in his own humble wardrobe in Corpus Christi until recently. He was just closing the door when a shaft of weak light from the window fell on something on the cupboard floor. He opened the door again and rummaged under the clogs. It was a loose board, its end jutting proud of the surface as though it had been recently lifted. He prised it up again, easing the wood with his dagger point. It was a hole, perhaps a foot square and it was empty. Whatever had been there once was not there now.