Scorpions' Nest (20 page)

But it was another girl who caught his attention tonight and she was very much flesh and blood. Mireille was flirting with La Pucelle’s clientele in a far corner, half hidden by the joists that held up the low roof and she suddenly found herself whisked away by a dark Englishman in a scarlet doublet.

‘You,’ she said with a smile when she realized who it was. ‘Had a change of heart, have we?’ She squeezed herself against him.

‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘Tell me about Martin Camb.’

‘Who?’ Marlowe’s French wasn’t bad, but she had never heard the name.

‘The lad from the English College,’ he explained. ‘Likes a drink. Out of his depth.’

‘Don’t know him,’ she said with a shrug. ‘We get lots of the English boys in here. And some of the men. And I’m not here all the time, you know. I have a living to earn. You are lucky to have caught me.’

Marlowe could recognize hedging when he heard it. ‘This one hangs out at the Casque d’Argent. You were there with him two nights ago.’

‘With him?’ Mireille was becoming bored with this conversation. ‘I don’t think so. He couldn’t afford me.’

‘“With” can mean a lot of things in this language, it seems,’ Marlowe said. His eyes were everywhere but on the girl. This was a rough crowd; he could recognize the types in any inn on either side of the Channel. They watched him too, noting the expensive clothes, the purse that bulged at his hip. A sheep for shearing. ‘And it’s my guess you followed him here.’

‘What if I did?’ she asked.

Now he looked her full in the face for the first time. ‘Unless you do what you do for love,’ he said, ‘I can’t imagine what Master Camb had that would interest you. You have already told me he couldn’t afford you. Had you asked him?’

She shrugged an expressive shoulder. ‘He’s a scholar. He’s got no money.’

‘But you did follow him,’ Marlowe insisted.

She broke away from him and stood with her hands on her hips, breasts jutting in the half light. ‘So what if I like breaking in the young ones for nothing now and again? Life should not all be work. Perhaps you might like to think on that, sometime.’

‘
J’ai affaires à vous en dehors
,’ a gruff voice snarled in his ear. He half turned to face an ox of a man who also had his hands on his hips. It was defiance of a different kind.

‘I can’t imagine what business we might have together, sirrah,’ Marlowe said.

Mireille shrieked with laughter. ‘It’s a phrase we have around here, Englishman,’ she said. ‘Business outside means David here intends to skewer you like a chicken.’

Marlowe smiled. ‘Does he now? Well, Mireille, thank you for the explanation, but I’d rather play cards.’

‘Cards?’ David scoffed. ‘I hadn’t got you down for a coward, Englishman. A popinjay, yes.
And
you’re bothering Mireille here.’

‘Yes,’ Marlowe mused. ‘I probably am.’ He looked up at David, half a head taller and twice as broad. ‘A friend of mine,’ he said to him, ‘an English scholar called Martin Camb.’

‘What of him?’ David asked.

‘He was here two nights ago, playing cards. Lansquenet. Did he play with you?’

David chuckled and glanced back to his companions around a table. ‘He might have done.’

‘You fleeced him,’ Marlowe said, ‘to the tune of fifty blancs.’

‘Fifty be buggered,’ David grunted. ‘Twenty at best…’

Marlowe smiled, the smile of a basilisk on a rock. ‘Twenty it is, then,’ he said and brushed past the Frenchman to sit at his table. ‘I’d like a chance to win it back.’

David turned. ‘You’re sitting in my seat, Englishman,’ he growled.

‘Am I?’ Marlowe expressed amazement. ‘Well, I won’t be here long. Just long enough to relieve you of your twenty blancs.’

David looked at his companions. Each of them was grinning at him, willing him to flatten the popinjay. David couldn’t disappoint them. He raised a massive arm.

‘Outside!’ the landlord’s voice roared over the din. ‘I won’t have my tables buckled. Take it outside.’

Marlowe stood up. He wasn’t smiling now. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Since you… David… have called me out
and
effectively chosen the time and place, I believe I have the right to choose the weapons.’

‘Choose away,’ the Frenchman grinned and the next second he was face down on the table, Marlowe’s dagger tip sticking in his ear. The card players had leapt back, the landlord’s chairs crashing in all directions and they formed a half circle, facing the pair. There was no noise now and the whole of La Pucelle seemed frozen, all eyes turned to Marlowe, everyone wondering what he would do next.

‘I know,’ said Marlowe, holding the big Frenchman down with an iron grip on his neck. ‘I can see why you are amused,’ he said to the card players, some of whom, the ones who wanted to see David get his comeuppance, were grinning broadly. ‘It
does
look silly, doesn’t it, to see a man with a knife stuck in his ear? But we all know, don’t we – especially you, David – one tiny bit more pressure from me and this dagger tip goes straight into what passes in that skull of yours for a brain.’

The silence was deep enough to hurt the ears, even the ones with no dagger in them. David hardly dared breathe. Marlowe lowered his head and whispered past the blade, ‘Now, I am only going to ask this once. What did you lace Martin Camb’s drink with while you were taking his last blancs?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the Frenchman hissed as clearly as he could with a mouth full of tabletop.

‘Stop!’ a female voice shattered the silence and Marlowe’s flexing elbow held firm. Mireille crossed the floor to the pair and looked into Marlowe’s face. What she saw there terrified her but she went on anyway. ‘I’ll tell you what you need to know. David’s telling the truth. He’s not involved.’

Marlowe blinked for the first time in minutes. He kept the dagger point in place and half straightened, fumbling in David’s purse. He grabbed a handful of coins and counted out twenty blancs by the guttering candles. The rest he threw on the floor. Then he jerked the knife back and kicked the Frenchman’s legs away so that he thudded heavily to the ground.

‘Now,’ he said to Mireille, grabbing her arm and keeping the dagger at arm’s length in front of him, backing to the door, ‘I have business with
you
outside.’

The silence was shattered again, this time by laughing, clapping and whistling. The last Marlowe saw of David was his companions hauling him upright and slapping his shoulders. The popinjay and the harlot were gone into the night.

This wasn’t a part of the city that Marlowe knew at all. They skirted the river once, then climbed the hill. The Watch, leaning on their halberds as the bells of the cathedral called the hour, saw them go and said nothing. They all knew Mireille and half of them had had her. One or two of her customers hailed her, but took one look at Marlowe and decided against engaging her services tonight.

‘What is he to you?’ Marlowe asked her after minutes of trudging in silence. ‘David?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Except he’s a Frenchman.’ She cast him a glance under her eyelashes. ‘Saving your presence. I thought you might have killed him.’

‘There’s no “might” about it,’ Marlowe said. ‘Where are we going?’

‘I hope you don’t mind if I don’t give you the address,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want you finding it again.’

‘I hope I won’t have to,’ he muttered.

Mireille suddenly ducked under an awning to her right and she led Marlowe under a low archway. They were in a dingy courtyard where no torches guttered and Marlowe kept his hand on his dagger hilt. She pushed open a small door and closed it once Marlowe was inside. She lit a candle and he took in the room. There was a bed, a chair and a table and a pale mark on the wall where a crucifix had once looked down on the scene.

There was a rhythmic grunting coming from the next room, behind the mark of the cross.

‘She won’t be long,’ Mireille said. ‘Wine?’

Marlowe shook his head and leaned back against the far wall. From here he could take in the door, the little window and whoever might come hurtling out through the curtain that screened the other room. The grunting came to abrupt end and there was a long sigh that ended in a curse. Mireille busied herself hanging her cloak on a hook and a burly rough pushed through the curtain, tying up his points. He threw a glance at Mireille and made to brush past her, but the girl stood in front of him, blocking the door, with her hand out.

‘Get lost!’ the lout snarled. ‘She’s damaged goods, that one. Like shagging a door.’ And he pushed Mireille aside.

‘You!’ Marlowe shouted, kicking himself away from the wall and standing with his hand still behind his back. ‘Pay the lady what you owe.’

The oaf hadn’t taken in the dark figure in the shadows but he did now and the sight made him reconsider. ‘How much?’ he growled.

‘The usual,’ Mireille said. ‘Five blancs.’

The man fumbled in his purse.

‘Make it ten,’ said Marlowe. ‘Or next time you won’t be shagging a door; you’ll be lying on one.’

The client hesitated, then threw a stash of coins onto the table and was gone. Mireille picked up each one, weighed it, bit it and then stashed them away in her bodice, laughing. ‘You should do this for a living,’ she said.

He half smiled and let the dagger hilt go. ‘You couldn’t afford me,’ he said.

A pale face peered around the curtain, a frail elfin child in a thin chemise. She looked ill and much older than her years.

‘Did he hurt you?’ Mireille asked, teasing the girl’s hair away from her face and tucking it behind her ears.

She shook her head.

‘Monsieur Greene.’ Mireille put her arm around the girl and pulled her further out into the room. ‘This is Sylvie. This gentleman is from the English College, Sylvie. He wants to ask you some questions.’

Sylvie’s eyes widened and then her lids drooped again. She lifted her chemise and moved back towards the bedroom. ‘No,’ Marlowe said and took her gently by the hand. ‘My name is Robert Greene. And I really do want to ask you some questions.’ He sat her down by the table. ‘Where’s that wine you spoke of, Mireille?’

Sylvie was a strange girl and Marlowe couldn’t really fathom her. He’d known harlots of all shapes and sizes in his time, from All Hallows in Canterbury to Petty Cury in Cambridge. On his fleeting visits to take ship from London he’d seen the Bishop of Winchester’s ‘geese’ flaunting their wares as far east as Deptford Strand. But he’d never met a whore like Sylvie. She seemed ethereal, like a faerie, not quite of this world. When she’d told him all she knew and wandered out into the night again in search of another five blancs, Mireille had sensed Marlowe’s curiosity and told him all she intended to. ‘What’s the matter, Monsieur. Never seen a French girl with a broken heart before?’

It may have been doubly broken now, or at least bruised with guilt, because in her own way, the girl Sylvie had contributed to the death of Edmund Brooke. On the night the boy died she had been approached by someone she didn’t know. Or perhaps she did. There had been something about his voice that she couldn’t quite place, but his face was in darkness. He’d met her at the Porte des Cappuchins and had kept well back in the shadows. He had given her gold and told her he wanted her to help him play a trick on a friend. The friend was a scholar from the English College and he would be somewhere in the Strangers’ Quarter soon after Vespers. He described the boy. He wouldn’t be wearing his college robes but he had clear blue eyes and a thatch of auburn hair. His name was Martin and he was partial to a hand or two of cards, not to mention wine.

And the man in the shadows had handed her a glass phial and told her to pour its contents into young Martin’s beaker.

‘It won’t kill him, will it, Monsieur?’ the girl had asked.

‘God save you, no,’ the man had said, laughing. ‘Just put him to sleep for a while. And it may put him off the demon drink for a while too. Now, be off with you.’

Marlowe had asked her how old the man sounded, but Sylvie didn’t know. Her usual experience of men was when they were lying down and they all sounded the same then. She had found the lad the man had described at the Casque d’Argent after what seemed like forever and got friendly with him. She sat on his lap while he groped her and lost ever more money in La Pucelle. Primero, Gleek, Laugh and Lie Down, Lansquenet – it didn’t matter what the game was, Martin lost them all. It came as no surprise to Sylvie – David and his cronies fleeced somebody every night. Martin just happened to be their current target.

When he was well into his cups, the girl wound her arm around his neck and drove her tongue into his mouth, as French girls do. With her spare hand, she sprinkled the contents of the glass phial into his drink and snatched up another to drink the boy’s health.

‘Your deal, Englishman,’ David had said, as if he was doing the lad a favour by taking his money. How much more Martin could have remembered, Sylvie didn’t know. Whatever the stuff in the phial was, it had acted quickly, because the carousing scholar suddenly slumped sideways and toppled off his stool onto the floor. That was the last Sylvie had seen of him.

‘Is he all right, Monsieur?’ she had asked Marlowe. ‘I meant him no harm. He was a sweet boy.’

‘He still is, Mam’selle,’ Marlowe assured her. ‘He still is.’

Marlowe had wanted to ask Sylvie more questions. About Laurenticus, the tutor of Greek in whose bed she had lain so happily; whose throat had been cut alongside her. But now, he sensed, was not the time. And the next time, he’d learn more when Mireille was not there, listening to every word.

Marlowe had meant to go and see Johns and Phelippes that night, but it was late and he was tired. Veronique was also a strict landlady and would not be pleased to be woken at this hour. Aldred preferred her sleeping too, as she tended to turn her back resolutely when she dropped off and he could pursue his own thoughts and nightly habits without being called on to do his duty. Marlowe could hardly suppress a smile when he thought of how Faunt would react to a description of Aldred’s life in Rheims. He would have him recalled quick as winking and would reassign him somewhere out of harm’s way. Veronique would be desolate, at least for a while.