Witch Hammer (19 page)

The knot of horsemen halted a little below the ridge. Marlowe looked across at Joyce and they both stepped out of their makeshift lines and walked towards Greville’s flag. Boscastle fell into place behind his mistress and Marlowe, glancing over his shoulder, saw that Sledd was at his back. But it came as something of a surprise to see that the man they faced was not Edward Greville.

‘What do you want, lawyer?’ Joyce asked the man, sitting awkwardly on his horse, which snickered and caracoled as if it knew it had an incompetent on its back.

‘What is rightfully Sir Edward Greville’s, madam,’ he told her, ‘the movables of the manor of Clopton.’

‘He has them,’ she said, her head held high. ‘Would he steal my father’s body too?’

The lawyer looked flustered for a moment, glancing nervously at Paget. For the first time he saw the black-suited figure of Marlowe and noted that he was wearing a sword at his hip, a fancy weapon of Spanish make, its quillons curling like quicksilver. He looked like the kind of man who could handle himself in any situation, with tongue or dagger and he hoped that Paget had marked him out for his own personal attention. Just because the pale man standing in Marlowe’s ranks was holding a sword the wrong way round, Blake felt it would be a mistake to underestimate this rabble. That was William Shaxsper, if he remembered rightly, the glover’s son from Stratford.

‘If I may check the coffin, My Lady . . .’ he began.

‘You may not, sir!’ she told him flatly.

‘Master lawyer.’ Marlowe stepped closer so that he stood by Blake’s horse’s head. He reached out slowly and cradled the animal’s soft muzzle, calming it by stroking its nose and breathing gently into its nostrils. He looked up at Blake. ‘You are on Warwickshire soil, sir. And your men are armed. You realize that, in itself, is a violation.’

‘A violation?’ Blake repeated. If this upstart was going to debate the law with him, he would lose. Or at least,
should
lose. Blake played for time. ‘A violation of what?’

Marlowe spread his arms wide, letting the horse go. ‘The edict of the Lord Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘Ambrose Dudley . . .’ He could see the confusion growing in the man’s eyes. ‘You know,’ he said, leaning forward with a smile playing in the corner of his mouth, as though humouring an idiot, ‘the Earl of Warwick.’

A nervous laugh escaped Blake’s lips. ‘Come, come, sir. You’ll have to do better than that.’

Marlowe lowered his arms and closed to the horse’s head again, leaning forward. ‘That’s why he’s not here, isn’t it?’ he murmured. ‘Sir Edward. That’s why he hasn’t come himself. Doesn’t want to mix it with Ambrose.’

The lawyer straightened in the saddle, pressing down in the stirrups and was rewarded by the startled horse flicking its tail and stamping its feet. He grabbed the pommel of the saddle to regain his seat. ‘Ambrose? You are very informal, sir, for a play actor or whatever you are.’

Marlowe beckoned him closer and despite himself Blake leant forward in the saddle, still keeping a firm hold on the pommel with both hands. Paget’s horse had backed away, out of range of the lawyer’s animal’s flying hoofs. ‘I am your worst nightmare, Master lawyer. I was at Cambridge with Ambrose Dudley’s son. Oh, it’s childish I know, but I still call him Uncle Am when we’re alone.’

Blake sat upright, smiling his victory. ‘I happen to know,’ he said, smugly, ‘that Ambrose Dudley doesn’t have a . . .’

But he was too slow for Marlowe. The poet had grabbed the lawyer’s rein and hauled it round hard so that the horse’s head slewed to one side and the animal lost its footing on the slippery, tinder-dry and wind-blown grass. As it hit the ground with a thud, Blake was thrown clear, but landed badly on his shoulder and lay there, whimpering with pain.

Joyce couldn’t help herself. She burst out laughing and there was a rapturous applause from the hilltop. There were even a few smiles in the ranks of Greville’s men, because, as they had often agreed between them when speaking of the lawyer, nobody liked a lickspittle who lies for a living. Blake’s horse rolled upright and trotted away, flicking its mane, alarmed by the sudden noises. But Blake himself just sat there on the grass, nursing his dead arm to his side and feeling decidedly hard done by.

‘Keep it in!’ shouted Sledd in the time honoured tradition of actor-managers the world over. ‘With pratfalls like that you should take up the stage, Master lawyer. Do you play the tambour too?’

Paget’s sword was in his hand and he was about to spur forward to tackle Marlowe when Boscastle grabbed the halberd he had brought with him, just in case, and levelled it at the man’s face. ‘Not wise, Captain,’ he grunted. And Paget steadied the rein, holding his horse in check. He knew what weapons like that could do to a man, ripping through flesh and bone.

‘What I forgot to mention,’ Marlowe said, leaning over the rocking, crying Blake, ‘is that Uncle Ambrose is on his way here, now. Lady Joyce thought you might come calling so I took the precaution of sending a messenger by my fastest horse. What did we ask for, Ned, two hundred horse?’

‘Three hundred, Kit,’ Sledd said, falling into the mood of the moment with the skill of a born ad-libber. Anyone who worked with Joseph could roll with anything that came out of anyone’s mouth. ‘But I did think that that was a
little
cheeky of you.’

Marlowe laughed. ‘What time is it, Boscastle?’ he asked the Clopton steward.

The man squinted behind him at the sun. ‘One, sir,’ he said. ‘One of the clock.’

‘Right,’ said Marlowe, muttering to himself and counting on his fingers, ‘so . . . in a little over twenty minutes, His Lordship should be here with three hundred heavily armed retainers. Yes, I know it smacks of a private army, but we can’t be too careful, can we, in these topsy-turvy days? Captain,’ he called to Paget, standing back a way now that things seemed to have taken a rather strange turn, ‘you have precisely twenty minutes to void the field. After that, I can’t be responsible for what may happen.’

Paget signalled to his lackeys and they hauled Blake to his feet before wheeling away and starting back for their own lines.

‘Kit?’ Joyce Clopton waited until the men were out of earshot. ‘That business about the Earl of Warwick . . .’

‘Begging your pardon, My Lady,’ Sledd cut in as they turned to trudge back up to the Stones. ‘That was some of the finest horse shit I’ve ever heard. Oh, beautifully done, I grant you that. But Master Blake may have been a little miffed before. Now he’s really mad. And when he stops crying, I don’t reckon our chances.’

‘Such ingratitude.’ Marlowe shook his head. ‘I buy us an extra twenty minutes
and
provide a good laugh into the bargain and you call it horse shit. Come, Lady!’ He took Joyce’s arm ostentatiously and turned his back. ‘Let’s get away from the nasty man.’ And they all laughed as they negotiated the rise. All of them except Ned Sledd. He was a man who understood that revenge was not always served cold. Sometimes it came in red heat and then it could burn anyone in its path.

Two women watched from the edge of the trees.

‘Did you see how I made that horse fall over?’ the older of the two said, smugly.

The younger one thought it had been her black thoughts that had caused it, but there was enough tension in the group to cause more so she just raised a shoulder and grunted in agreement. ‘But it was me who put his shoulder out,’ she said. ‘See?’ And she held out a forked branch, now pulled apart like a wishbone.

‘That was a very nice touch,’ the other said, patting the girl on the shoulder and grimacing to the imp that sat on her shoulder. The imp smiled back knowingly and rolled its eyes in a secret message, just between the two of them. She smiled back. She didn’t feel alone these days, not since he had come along.

They watched for a while as the lines reformed, however raggedly.

‘Will there be a fight?’ the younger one asked.

‘Hopefully.’

‘Death?’

‘And destruction. Rich pickings for us. We will get there before the ravens.’

The two rubbed their hands together and giggled cruelly.

Further back in the shadows of the trees, Merriweather sighed. What had come over the young these days? Nothing but doom and gloom. At that age she was out picking flowers at dawn to find her own true love. An eyeball held no attraction for her then or now. She shook her head and went back to the bank where her sisters were still sprawled, those whose joints would let them. No good could come of this, whatever He might say.

The twenty minutes crawled by like years and Greville’s riders showed no sign of moving on. Clearly Marlowe’s bluff hadn’t worked. Nor could he really hope that it would. Again and again in those twenty minutes, Joyce Clopton begged him to let them go, but his words were wise enough. Bedded down behind their wagons and the Stones, they stood
some
chance. On the open road, they’d be cut to pieces and Sir William Clopton’s body would be rolled into a ditch, along with that of anybody else who tried to defend it.

Besides, Marlowe knew his Caesar. Time and again he had read, in the King’s School cloisters by the Dark Entry, of how a tiny Roman cohort held a high ridge against the hordes of the Gauls. He chose to forget in that moment that the Romans were the finest infantry in the ancient world, hardened veterans who were armed to the teeth. Then he looked again at little, battling Liza with her wheel-lifting biceps under her chemise and he took heart.

‘Here they come!’ It was Thomas the lookout and in that moment Ned Sledd’s heart took wing. In his incipient panic, the lad’s voice was as high as a lark’s. Perhaps that was the answer, then. Terrify him every night before he goes on and all will yet be well.

Marlowe, Sledd and Scot stood alongside Joyce and her Clopton people. Will Shaxsper, who had sensibly used the past few moments exchanging parries and ripostes with Martin, rested his chin on a wagon edge and watched them come on, images of his browbeaten father and his uncomprehending, horrified wife flashing in his brain. Boscastle, with his recent experience of those men counted twenty, all of them armed, all of them mounted. Obviously Greville had not expected much resistance from the ragbag little column that left Clopton with their forlorn load and he thought twenty should cover it. Boscastle had three good men besides himself. In Lord Strange’s company there was Sledd, Martin, Nat and the lad, Thomas, who could probably handle themselves. Oh, and that frightening little woman with the shoulders. Marlowe was a given. So too, probably, was Scot. And Will Shaxsper, the glover’s son, might make a decent fist of it. Old Joseph was struggling to buckle on some ancient armour from the props wagon and it was already getting the better of him.

He saw Lady Joyce cross herself. And Will Shaxsper too. Kit Marlowe did not. And neither did Reginald Scot.

Marlowe noticed that Henry Blake was not advancing with the cavalry line. He sat some hundreds of yards back, his right hand tucked into his gown.

‘They’ve got no guns at least,’ Sledd grunted to him.

‘No, but we have,’ Marlowe suddenly shouted.

‘Kit?’ Sledd instinctively dashed after him as he rolled away from the makeshift barricade. ‘Kit? What are you doing?’

‘The gunpowder, Ned,’ Marlowe yelled. ‘The fireworks. Ever seen a horse that can stand still for them?’

Sledd slapped the man’s shoulder. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ he asked.

Marlowe looked at him straight faced and said, ‘You’ve led a very sheltered life, Ned,’ and the two men set to, hauling their firing piece into place, Sledd frantically wrestling with the tinder box while Marlowe rammed the linstock into the ground.

‘Too high, too high!’ Sledd shouted, ‘it’ll frighten our horses too and they’ll trample the camp.’

Marlowe wrenched the linstock lower, clawing at the metal frame until his fingers bled. The noise behind them told both men they were too late as the thud of horses on the hillside grew deafening and the shouts and curses of Paget’s men rained in on their ears. Nat Sawyer just happened to be running backwards as he took the first blow from the flat of a sword, as its owner dragged it from its scabbard. The comedian had always been a believer in the power of timing to get the laugh and this time it had saved his life. The blade slapped him round the head and he pitched backwards off the wagon. It was the best stage dive he’d ever done but there was no appreciative audience to applaud him, just armoured riders with their blood up hurtling against the wagons of Lord Strange’s Men. Sawyer landed under the wagon, his head ringing and opened one eye cautiously. With no one to see him or pass judgement except his own conscience, which had been dead for years, he crawled away further into the darkness of the barricade and waited for it all to be over. You’ve done your bit, Natty, he thought to himself.

Boscastle still had his halberd in his grip and he poked upwards, catching a horseman in his chest and wrenching the weapon round to slice the tendons of the man’s arm. He screamed as he left the saddle and rolled in the Rollright dust.

Joyce snatched up the fallen man’s sword and stood defiantly, waiting for her turn. Three horsemen leapt the wagons together in the centre, somehow holding their seats as the animal’s hoofs clipped the flats. Props and scenery crashed to the ground and Martin was hacking about him with St George’s sword. Will Shaxsper was with him, the stage enmity of Christendom and Islam forgotten as they traded blows with the milling riders.

‘Forget it!’ Sledd roared at Marlowe. The moment for terrifying the enemy had gone and now it was every man for himself. Little Liza had leapt upwards and was hanging around a horseman’s neck, taking vicious bites out of his right ear as he tried to fling her off. John and another of the Clopton lads had floored another horseman and were busily kicking him into unconsciousness by the Whispering Knights.

Sledd was doing his best to protect his wagons with their precious cargo of stage paraphernalia. Thomas had dragged Liza’s quarry out of his saddle and now just stood back while she proceeded to haul the man about the arena by his hair, calling him names only some of which were familiar to the boy. Marlowe made for Paget, his rapier flashing as he thrust for the man’s doublet. Paget wheeled his horse and parried for his life. He felt a stinging pain as Marlowe banged the fancy quillons off Paget’s sword and he saw in disbelieving horror one of his fingers fly with them. He was about to pull back to try and regroup his isolated horsemen when a horn rang out, shivering through the cries of horses and men.