Traitor's Storm (16 page)

That night, cold and shivering with the enormity of the setback, he wrote a letter to Philip of Spain. ‘At any time,’ his quill flew over the vellum, ‘it would be remarkable; but since it is only June and since this is the cause of Our Lord, to whose care it is being entrusted, it would appear that what has just happened must be His doing, for some just reason.’

The last four words came to Medina Sidonia as an afterthought. He had been to the Escorial. He knew King Felipe. The man was half-monk himself, with a passageway that probably led to God’s right hand itself. Medina Sidonia knew, as the galloper raced south across Spain with his message, that he had already offended his king with its contents. No sense in offending his God too.

‘It was a city, Kit.’ Tom Sledd was demolishing a hunk of fresh bread in the kitchen, ‘or at least a town. I saw workshops, blacksmiths, stalls without number. Ladies and gentlemen of quality were buying there. And stews like I haven’t seen anywhere but Southwark.’

‘You must have felt at home, then.’ Marlowe had eaten earlier. ‘Tell me, this Skirrow, the man who took you there … what was it called?’

‘Mead Hole. Don’t ask me if I could find it again, because I couldn’t. Well, Skirrow
said
he was Sir George’s man. Had your letter to me with him, so he must have been.’

‘Oh, I’m sure he was,’ Marlowe said. ‘It’s just that no one’s seen him, apparently, from that day to this. Fancy looking at a body today, Tom – when you’ve finished your breakfast, of course?’

‘Well …’ The stage manager was reluctant. ‘I
do
have a stage to build.’ Tom Sledd had seen some sights in his short life, some of which could still bring him awake and sweating in the small hours of the morning and he had promised himself some time ago that he would try not to see any more.

Marlowe looked out on to the courtyard from the Great Hall to where Avis Carey was giving orders, barking and braying at a variety of smocked and jerkined labourers who ran backwards and forwards to do her bidding. ‘It looks as though Mistress Carey has that well in hand,’ he said. He picked up Tom Sledd’s hat from where he had lain it down beside him at the table and crammed it on the lad’s head. ‘Come on, Tom. Don’t tell me you’re squeamish.’ And he was gone, leaving Tom to follow reluctantly in his wake.

Matthew Compton had been a good-looking man once. Now he was an unpleasant shade of grey and lay on a hurdle in the cold of the charnel house hard by St Thomas’s Church. Tom Sledd’s experience of the dead had included the recently deceased – if men run through with his own blade could be described thus – or the decently laid out, but this was a departure from all that. He realized now what was so unsettling about the dead. They stared back at you with an unblinking gaze that never wavered. Compton’s eyes bulged in his head and above the linen collar, smeared with the clay of Walter Hunnybun’s grave, there was a clear mark of a ligature around his neck. Someone had hooked a rope around it, twisted with a stick to one side and had turned and turned it relentlessly so that the rope tightened and choked the life out of the lawyer who was not supposed to be there.

‘Any number of people saw him off at the quay.’ Marlowe’s breath snaked out in the chill of the charnel house, for all it was June and warm outside. The damp had soaked into these thick walls for so many years that winter always seemed to rule inside. ‘Apparently he was put into a rowing boat and towed to the mouth of the Medina. Half the Militia seem to have run along the bank taunting him.’ Marlowe checked the man’s clothing. His Venetians were scorched by the candles that Carey’s sergeant had tied there, but there was no sign of the candles now. The bell had gone too, the one that the same sergeant had draped around the man’s neck as they ran him off the Island. He was a centoner of the Militia, yet there was no sword, no armour, not even the scarlet sash that was his badge of rank.

‘What does an open boat do when it reaches the sea, Tom?’ Marlowe asked.

Sledd shrugged. ‘Buggered if I know. The last time I was on one it was all I could do to keep my breakfast down. I would imagine that there are quite a few obstacles out there. Skirrow kept pointing out horses and things, but I wasn’t really paying attention, what with being scared of dying and all.’

Marlowe shrugged. He had had quite a pleasant crossing but even then there had been a bumpy bit in the middle – he was almost certain that these were not the proper nautical terms, but they would suffice. ‘He would have had no sail.’ He was thinking aloud. ‘They would have given him oars, though. Carey wanted to get rid of him but I think that even he doesn’t hate lawyers enough to want to drown them wholesale.’ He picked up a cold, dead hand and turned it palm up. ‘Look, there, see – blisters.’ He put the hand back and gave it a pat. ‘Which way did he row, though, that’s the question.’

‘North,’ Sledd said after a moment’s thought. ‘Away from this place.’

‘You would think so, wouldn’t you?’ Marlowe mused. ‘But I think you’re wrong, for two reasons. The first is that the coast of the mainland is a long way for a man unused to rowing and, as you say, there are obstacles out there, though for the life of me I can’t see where the horses come in. The second is that he is a man of some wealth. He has clothes, books, valuables. And he’s told to go. Now. At once. No ceremony. So …’

Sledd was with him. ‘So he doubles back,’ he said, clicking his fingers, ‘to pick up his stuff.’

Marlowe nodded. ‘Let’s have a look at Holyrood Street,’ he said.

Matthew Compton’s house along Holyrood Street was locked and bolted so while Tom Sledd stood whistling and picking his nose on what passed for a pavement, Kit Marlowe broke in. Two clicks of his dagger point and all the secrets of the late lamented lawyer were revealed. Well, not quite all. While Sledd ransacked, very carefully, the downstairs rooms, Marlowe went to work on the upper storey. There was a chest, its lid open, its contents the wardrobe of an officer of the Militia. There was a useful-looking rapier, a wheel-lock pistol, a burgonet and breastplate, a pair of spurs. A pile of books teetered precariously in a corner. They had once stood, Marlowe could tell by the slight impressions in the dust, on a shelf on the wall. They were law books, learned tomes leather-bound and all bore the same legend on the fly: ‘Ex Libris Matthew Compton’. A pair of boots stood on their own in the far corner and a cloak and hat still hung from a peg.

The bed was cold. He smelled the pillows. Civet. Either Master Compton was not as other Benchers of Lincoln’s Inn or … And the ‘or’ came to him in a moment. There was a long, dark hair on the pillow and a yellowish stain on the satin. The lawyer had been entertaining a lady friend and not that long before he died. The books, the boots, the cloak and hat, all looked as if Compton had been about to leave and take them with him.

Marlowe knelt on the hard boards and looked under the tester. Cobwebs and not a little dust, but nothing … He almost missed it at first because it was half hidden by the chamber pot. It was a piece of parchment. More than that, it was a note, written in an untidy hand and in haste. It read: ‘Church Litten. Midnight. I must see you again, dearer than life.’

Dearer than life
. That was a good line. He might be able to use that somewhere. This was not the same hand as the letter he had found in Harry Hasler’s room in Quay Street, but letters were fluttering around this Island like the flags of the Armada, somewhere out to sea.

‘Anything up there, Kit?’ he heard Tom Sledd call. ‘There’s bugger all down here.’

‘Nothing much, Tom,’ Marlowe said. ‘Nothing much,’ and he tucked the letter into his doublet.

G
eorge Carey’s bay was saddled and waiting alongside Tom Sledd’s makeshift orchestra pit by midday and the Captain of the Wight was surprised to find a second animal tethered alongside, the black he had bought from William Oglander, of Nunwell. On its back sat Christopher Marlowe, the poet and university wit.

‘Mind if I tag along, Sir George?’ the playwright asked. He was dressed for the road with his Colley-Weston slung over his shoulder and Tom Sledd’s shapeless Picadill on his head.

‘Er … no,’ Carey said, waiting until the groom had held his knee and hoisted him into the saddle. ‘Are you sure you can keep up? It’s a long ride to the West Wight.’

‘I’ll manage,’ Marlowe said. ‘I’m nearing completion of ideas for my play, but I must get the feel of your Island beyond its centre. Mead Hole, I understand, is well worth a visit.’

‘Mead Hole?’ Carey scowled. ‘Stay wide of that place, Christopher. Anyway, we’re not going that way. We’re bound for the Needles. Are you armed?’

‘My dagger,’ Marlowe said.

‘All right.’ Carey took up the reins in his gloved hands. ‘I have my trusty rapier and a brace of wheel-locks. Stay with me and you should be all right. But I warn you, we’re riding into the West Wight.’

‘Where the anthropophagi live, I understand.’ Marlowe smiled. ‘The headless men with their faces on their chests.’

Carey looked at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. ‘The anthropophagi?’ he said. ‘In the West Wight, they’ll be the least of our worries, believe me.’ And he hauled his rein and clattered away under the arch of the barbican, Marlowe behind him. The last thing the poet heard was Avis Carey’s dulcet roar as she clapped her hands and ordered the set builders back to work.

The wind was blowing from the south-west, unseasonably strong for this time of year, and long before they reached Calbourne with its water mill and hissing geese, Kit Marlowe owed Tom Sledd a new hat. The original was tumbling away across the high ridge of the land the pair were cantering over. The miller of Calbourne had all his family paraded, from his eldest, a stout lad who might be useful in the Militia in a month or two, to a little girl, all curls and snot, who sheltered behind her mother at the hugeness of the horses that snorted and pawed the ground in front of her.

Caps came off at Shalcombe too and there were three hearty cheers for the governor, God bless him. Then the riders were trotting out along the road that led to Freshwater, the forest of Brighstone dark and gloomy on the sloping ground that led to the sea. All along this stretch, Marlowe noticed that Carey’s eyes rarely left the sea. He was as concerned now as he had been that second day of Marlowe’s visit, striding his ramparts. He reined in and pointed. ‘That’s Catherine’s Race,’ he said, ‘and beyond that, Catherine’s Deeps.’ He caught the mystified look on Marlowe’s face. ‘Oh, yes, it looks calm enough today, doesn’t it, for all the whitecaps. But that’s a graveyard you see there, Christopher. Dead men still in their ships’ holds, full fathom five and feeding the fishes. Freshwater’s over the next rise. We’ll eat there.’

Edmund Burley joined the travellers at Freshwater. He was captain of the castle at Yarmouth, one of those fortresses built as a precaution in the days of King Harry of blessed memory. He was a large and jolly man who proceeded to eat and drink Carey and Marlowe under the table, much to the delight of the innkeeper of the Crown, whose establishment nestled in the lea of the church.

‘Are you ready, Edmund?’ George Carey asked as the three men were preparing for the road. ‘For what’s coming, I mean?’

‘Readier than most,’ Burley replied, swigging the last of his ale. He looked at Marlowe. ‘The dons will land in one of four places, Master Marlowe. The least likely is Sandown Bay. The bastard French tried that in my dear old dad’s day and got a bloody nose there, for all the beach is shallow. This side of the Island they’ll try here, at Freshwater, at Brighstone and at Chale. The problem with all those is the Race and the Deeps. That’s our secret weapon. It’ll destroy Philip’s ships faster than the guns of that old pizzle the Lord Admiral … Oh, begging yer pardon, George. Forgot he’s your cousin.’

Carey waved the insult aside. With Spain knocking at his gate he had better things to do than antagonize his captains.

‘Course.’ Edmund Burley timed his parting shot to perfection. ‘If the bastards land in all four places at once, then we’re buggered.’ And all George Carey could do was scowl at the beaming idiot. He had never understood what made Edmund Burley so damned cheerful.

All day Carey and Marlowe had ridden past the beacons, tall masts dotted along the ridge that formed the Island’s spine, with ladders lashed to them and iron fire baskets crowning their tops. The faggots lay ready, roped under canvas to keep them dry. Each beacon was actually a pair. As Carey explained, one light meant a state of emergency: ‘Handle your pike.’ Two flames guttering side by side meant something like ‘Prepare to meet your God’. At Freshwater, on the chalky slopes above the bay and again on the promontory men called the Needles, where the white rocks stood sentinel above the roaring surf, there were three. There were three likewise, Carey explained, at the eastern forelands on the high ground of Culver, by Bembridge Ledge. That overlooked the shallow beach that Captain Burley had mentioned. There was a fort there too, Carey had said, but he had no faith that it would hold the Spaniards long.

All that day Marlowe had talked to George Carey, dropped snippets of information, watched the man’s reaction. Everyone hated him; Marlowe knew that already. Only Carey’s sister and perhaps his wife supported the man. He had no children and no friends. The gentlemen of the Wight and their ladies had no qualms about eating and drinking the man out of house and home at one of his parties. And everyone today had been the epitome of respectful tenants. And yet, something was not quite right about the Carey household and Marlowe was not going merely by the word of John Vaughan. It was something he had noticed himself. Something to do with missing gardeners and murdered lawyers and farmers dead in their own fields.

‘Captain! Captain!’ a voice was calling from the road and a solitary horseman was lashing his mount across the tussocks of grass cropped short by the sheep. Carey swung his bay away from the beacons and took the salute of the galloper. Marlowe could not catch much of it, because the wind was rising again and the ridge was exposed. The horseman saluted again and spurred back.

‘Marlowe.’ Carey walked his horse over to the man. ‘I’ve been called away. Some trouble at Nunwell.’