EIGHT

John Dee was taken away by Lily, fished out of her bed by Hern for the purpose, and put to bed. The magus was a magus no longer, just an old, grief-stricken man. He, who could bring the dead back to life, or at least thought he could, had said goodbye to Helene as she lay cooling in her bed. She looked even more beautiful, if possible, as she lay there, her face free of the slightest worry, her skin wiped smooth by the deep sleep of death. Only her bluing nails and lips and her stiffening fingers gave any clue that she was not just sleeping soundly.

Marlowe was curled up in a ball on the floor of the retiring room. He had come screaming out of his trance as soon as Helene fell and every fibre of his body hurt as though he had been trampled. Whatever the secret of the trick, whoever had been in control of it, Dee or Helene, or even Rose, it had never been intended to end so suddenly. The weight which had been transferred to him should have been lifted, ounce by ounce and given back to Helene, so that she gently came back to earth and he could get up and move around. When Dee and Helene were on song, it sometimes worked that the light became the heavy and so on until everyone tired of it. Dee had even used the Queen herself in the trick one night at Placentia and had almost been skewered by Sir Christopher Hatton for his pains.

Lily came to him after she had lulled Dee to sleep. Passing her hands over him, she had looked up at Balthasar, looming over the boy as he lay and whimpered in pain. ‘I’m trying my best, Balthasar,’ she said, as though he had spoken. ‘Everything inside him feels wrong to me. As if his bones are not in the right place.’

‘It was the damnedest thing, Lil,’ Balthasar said, chewing his lip. ‘She just dropped like a stone and he just came up on to his feet with such a scream that I felt my bowels turn to water. And then he dropped again and he has been like this ever since.’

Lily carried on stroking Marlowe’s back, because it seemed to ease him. ‘I gather Rose knew Mistress Dee,’ she said, somewhere between a question and a statement.

‘I gather she did,’ Balthasar said.

‘Is that why she sought you out, do you think?’ Lily said, kneading the muscle in the small of Marlowe’s back, and being rewarded by a small scream. ‘I am so sorry, Master Marlowe,’ she muttered to him, moving her hand. ‘To bring her here,’ she carried on, not looking at Balthasar.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I thought I could see into her soul, Lily, but her soul is not what I saw. I don’t know who she is or why she sought me out.’ He drew a huge trembling breath. ‘I thought . . .’

Lily got up, dusting off the front of her skirt, for all the difference it made. ‘Balthasar,’ she said, ‘any one of us would be proud . . .’

He shook her off, but not unkindly. He had often thought that if he ever took a woman, it might well be Lily. He gave her a smile, but not his usual one which was like the moon coming out from behind a cloud, tinting everything it shone on with silver. ‘I will find another rose,’ he said. ‘She can’t be the only one in the garden.’ And he walked away, leaving Lily and Marlowe to stay together through the night, until in the dawn he finally relaxed and fell asleep. Lily got up from where she had been shielding him with her body from the terrors which shook it and went back to the camp, to stir oatmeal with the women.

It took Joseph Fludd quite a while to fix his eyes on the horizon. The cold pearl of the sky stretched out beyond the breakwater where the grey surf lifted and the gulls wheeled overhead. This was only his second time out of his county of Cambridge and he felt uneasy. The sky was too big out here, the wind even more chill than at home. He had no jurisdiction here, no edge. Even the limited powers he had as Constable were denied him and he had left his tipstaff at home.

For three days he’d haunted the dockside taverns of Lynn, buying a draught of local Norfolk ale and making it last. His ultimatum from the Mayor had been clear enough and there would be no expenses. He’d toyed for a while with tethering the old nag Hobson had hired him on the waste ground beyond the church of St Margaret but he knew there would be laws against that and however his search went he would never be able to afford to replace a horse. So his money had to last and his lodgings in a lean-to behind the Grey Goose did not come cheap.

Fludd was used to the cold of his native Cambridge, the unforgiving wind that crept round Petty Cury and across the bridge at Magdalen. The draughty, crumbling castle barbican that was his constabulary home above the cherry orchards had sudden cold spots of its own, when the wind currents eddied up the shafts of the old garderobes, now disused. But nothing had prepared him for Lynn in the grip of winter. Men he had drunk with the night before, narrow-eyed men with leather faces and sour looks, men who worked on the barges on the Broads and fished the sea off Brancaster Bay, spoke of this being nothing. Back in . . . and the year changed with the telling . . . the sea itself froze, with ice mountains lining the sands that stretched on forever. Birds, the gulls with their tragic cries and the curlews on the heathland, dropped dead from the sky with cold. And they had lowered their voices and closed to him when they spoke solemnly of the Jesus of Ely. The ship came in, they had told him, on a winter’s day just like this one, when the sky was lead and death moaned in the wind. No birds followed the Jesus home and no one waited on the shore to welcome her. The Jesus was not due back for a month or more from Flushing over the unforgiving North Sea; yet here she was, her sails furled and her anchor trailing. When they boarded her, still drifting in the narrows, there was not a soul on her. The charts lay on her captain’s table, bread and cheese, nibbled by the ship’s rats, scattered the crew’s quarters. Her hold was empty, though it should have been full of woollens and grain. It was the cold, the fishermen told Fludd, the ice fingers of the sea that had done for them all. And it would all be explained one day when the sea gave up her dead.

He had endured the silence, noted the nodding heads and dipped his lips again into the Norfolk ale. Fludd had waited for a suitable moment, then he raised the subject, casually. Had anyone seen any Egyptians? Those weird folk who rode piebald horses and told the future, those horse thieves and tinkers? Most had shaken their heads. One or two had told him tall tales of elsewhere in the county, how Egyptians had been hanged in Norwich not long since and one had disappeared in the market square there in a cloud of purple smoke. There were no Egyptians in the county now; the constabulary had driven them out. One thing they did well, the constabulary, the only thing the constabulary did well, was to move on Egyptians; whip them at the cart’s tail, then hang them. And what, the drinking fishermen wanted to know, was Fludd’s interest in all this? He wasn’t a Constable too, was he?

Marlowe and Balthasar Gerard sat in the kitchen of the great and silent house, trying to warm themselves on the embers of the fire. The cook was prostrate with grief and no one begrudged her that; she had known Nell since she had been brought in by Dee one wet night, soaked to the skin and filthy. It had been the cook who had wrapped her in a blanket and warmed her by the fire while Bowes and Dee had prepared a bath for her. Not usually what she would call men’s work, but they had remembered a herb or two to perfume the water and Dee had even remembered some cloths to dry the girl with. They had been the finest towels, brought from Turkey at great expense and were usually kept in the linen press against the day that the Queen might come – although the likelihood of her visit coinciding with her annual bath was not strong.

Finally, they had got through the layers of caked mud and there she was, as beautiful as the day and with a nature to match, sunny and happy almost always and if she ever felt a little cribbed, confined in her marriage to the magus, no one ever knew. She treated the cook and Bowes as if they were her friends, she treated Kelly with gentle contempt and she was the most beautiful and also the most silent hostess in London. In all, the day Dee had found her and looked beyond the mud to the jewel beneath had been the household’s happiest day. And now the saddest day had come, one which none of them had thought to see. They were all old enough to be her parents and had all thought that one day she would see them severally into their graves.

‘Did you know her well, Kit?’ Balthasar suddenly dropped into the silence.

‘Not well, no,’ he said. ‘But to see the outward Helene was to know the inner, as I have understood it. I have never asked, but I felt that the marriage was . . .’

‘I understand that kind of marriage,’ Balthasar said. ‘Many hands which are offered to me to read have been given into that kind of marriage.’

‘But they were happy, though. This household will never be the same, now she is gone. The three will be but perfect shadows in a sunshine day.’

Balthasar looked at him. ‘Is there nothing that is not a subject for your poetry, Kit? Do you keep a notebook somewhere, to write these things down as they pop into your head?’ The smile softened the phrase.

Marlowe smiled at him. ‘They just come to me, Balthasar. If they stay of their own free will then yes, you may see or hear them again. If they don’t stay – then perhaps they should not have been in my head in the first place.’

‘Like Dido Queen of Carthage and her cat?’

‘Dido has been with me for a while,’ he said. ‘I even wrote a play about her once. She didn’t have a cat, that time. But she will live on, if only in the memory of Starshine.’

‘So Helene will live on?’

‘In the memory of John Dee and all who knew her. She was a lovely woman, in every way.’

Balthasar looked from side to side and leaned forward. ‘But cannot Dr Dee . . . bring back the dead?’

‘He says so. He thinks so. I have seen . . . I’m not sure what I have seen, but I don’t think that what comes back is something I would want to have as hostess at my table, for companionship at my fireside. Death may be just a door, but it is one no one should come back through.’ He leaned back. ‘That may be just my opinion, though. What about Lily? Can she . . . ?’

‘No. She can only heal the sick, and then only sometimes. I have never personally seen her fail, but she says it has been known. Another one where the beauty is not just skin deep.’

‘And Rose?’

Balthasar leaned back. ‘What of her?’

‘She knew Helene, that much was clear. She knew her in her hedge witch days and she knew the trick, so Hern told me.’

‘What was the trick, do you think?’

‘I think you are asking the wrong person, Balthasar. I remember feeling very heavy and then waking up. I didn’t know that Helene was dead until this morning.’

‘It was . . . very convincing. She flew in the air. You were as heavy as lead. It wasn’t possible, and yet we all saw it.’

Marlowe looked at him. He had not known these people for long, but he knew that they had more tricks up their coloured sleeves than they would ever let him know. But the man seemed genuine enough. Rose was the fly in this ointment; she was the stranger among them but Balthasar would see only good in her until she told him with her own lips that she was a murderess. ‘What do you know of Rose?’

‘She came to me. She was distressed. I thought I could . . . no I can mend her heart and soul.’

‘You don’t think that she might have used you to get into this house?’ Marlowe suggested, gently.

‘Why would she want to? Dr Dee is the Queen’s magus. Rose is a beautiful woman and she could get into the court and find him that way.’

‘But if she wanted Helene, not the magus?’

‘Why would she want Helene?’ Balthasar was puzzled and also getting rather angry.

‘To kill her,’ a voice said from behind him.

Marlowe looked up and Balthasar turned round to see a man they didn’t know standing in the kitchen doorway. He was square and solid like the Norfolk brogue that tumbled from his lips. ‘I hope this is not an intrusion, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘My name is John Sedgrave and I am the Constable of Ely.’ He flashed a painted tipstaff at them. ‘Dr Dee’s man, Bowes, came to fetch me at first light, something about his mistress being murdered. Poisoned, it appears. There was no one at the door so I have let myself in. There are . . .’ The question lingered in his voice. ‘Egyptians in the courtyard.’ He looked Balthasar up and down. ‘And in the kitchen, I see.’

Marlowe stood up. ‘My name is Christopher Marlowe,’ he said, ‘of Corpus Christi College. Dr Dee invited this gentleman, Balthasar Gerard is his name, and his companions to the house and they remain his guests.’

‘Strange guests for a house such as this,’ Sedgrave said. ‘The law demands we hang Egyptians in the country. Does Gregory Leslie know they are here?’

‘Who is Gregory Leslie?’ Balthasar asked. ‘If I knew that, I could tell you if he knows.’

‘He doesn’t know,’ the Constable said, firmly. ‘Because if he did, you would all be hanging from trees in the orchard, and that would include your brats. Master Leslie hangs first and asks questions later.’ He gave them a twisted smile. ‘I have been here before on many an occasion, and know it to be true.’ He looked at the two. ‘My men have searched the house and we have the woman, Rose, in irons in the Great Hall.’

‘What!’ Balthasar was on his feet, fists balled at his sides.

‘Would you like to join her?’ Sedgrave asked. ‘Because if so, it is the opinion of my men that she did not plan this alone.’

‘Plan? Plan what?’ Balthasar shouted. ‘Kit. This man is an idiot. Speak to him for me before I knock his head off.’

‘Master Gerard is distraught,’ Marlowe said, leading Sedgrave further away from him. It was a difficult task, as he was at least a head taller and as broad as a barn. ‘We have only just met Rose, but I can’t imagine that she is a killer. How would she do such a thing?’

‘She is skilled in potions. One of my men recognized her. The women around here . . . well, they visit her from time to time, shall we say? She told me that she knew Mistress Dee in the old days, when their lives were very different. And now, here we find her. Mistress Dee, the wife of a powerful and rich man. Rose, living a hand to mouth existence, dependent on one man and then another. That’s a nice black eye she has, don’t you think?’ He spoke over his shoulder at Balthasar but got no reply. ‘Hmm, yes. A nice black eye. Where was I?’

‘Rose knew Helene in the old days,’ Marlowe said, helping him out. With his long experience as a student of Dr Lyler he was adept at keeping a man’s wandering mind on its path. Hebrew and Rhetoric were sometimes strange bedfellows.

‘Thank you, Master Marlowe. Yes. And so, I believe, she was jealous and poisoned her. She no doubt had a plan to usurp her position as the wife of the Queen’s magus, Dr Dee. She had powers that would interest him, just as the late Mistress Dee had.’

‘You are clutching at straws, Constable Sedgrave,’ Marlowe said. ‘Do you have knowledge of poisons?’

‘No more than the next Constable,’ Sedgrave admitted, ‘but I know when a woman is dead.’

Marlowe changed tack. ‘How could Rose know we were coming here?’

‘We?’ The Constable was on the word like a cobra striking home. ‘We? Are you one of these Egyptians, then?’ He looked him up and down and saw only a rich young man in fancy clothes. These scholars were above their station, these days.

‘I am proud to be travelling with Master Hern and his band, yes,’ Marlowe said, standing straight and unconsciously pulling at his clothes to tidy himself up.

The Constable looked him up and down. ‘Well, that is of course a decision for yourself to make, sir,’ he said, strangling the language in his attempt to keep things formal. ‘But to return to the matter to hand, you know nothing of this Rose, not even her other name or where she comes from or any fact about her. Is that not so?’ He turned to face Balthasar.

The Egyptian faced him but did not speak.

‘Is that not so, Master Gerard?’ he repeated, still polite.

‘It is so,’ Balthasar muttered, his eyes on the ground. He turned to the fire and poked around in the ashes, lost in his own thoughts. Marlowe expected more from the man, a token resistance if nothing else, but there was nothing else. Perhaps knowing the future had made him fatalistic.

‘Master Marlowe,’ Sedgrave said, ‘I must tell you that we have found some things in this house which have disturbed us, but I have been told that they belong to Dr Dee, so unless you have reason to suppose that he killed his wife . . .’

‘Dr Dee adores his wife. He would die for her.’

‘As I thought. The woman, Rose, had herbs in her possession which she refuses to identify. She knew Mistress Dee. She is a stranger to you all and to this household. As far as I can tell, she is the only suspect in this crime.’

‘What about Edward Kelly?’ Marlowe said. ‘He is a criminal and he was here.’

‘Edward Kelly? Is he with your band?’

‘No. He is a . . . not a friend, an acquaintance, an old acquaintance of the doctor.’ Marlowe, thinking on his feet, did not want to make too much of the link between Dee and Kelly, with his clipped ears.

‘We have not spoken to a Kelly.’

‘He was sleeping in the stable,’ Marlowe said.

‘Not so much of a friend, or even an acquaintance, then,’ Sedgrave said. ‘The stable is where charity cases are put in houses such as this.’

‘It is a very long story,’ Marlowe said, ‘and I don’t know the half of it. But Edward Kelly is your man. I would stake my life on it.’ He raised his finger in the air, excitedly remembering something. ‘I remember seeing Helene looking out through the doorway, staring at Kelly. She seemed nervous all evening.’

‘Was he the only one in sight?’

‘Well, no . . . the others were out there, too.’ Marlowe was not naturally truthful, but this man seemed to create an aura in which the truth was the only language spoken.

‘Including Rose?’

‘Yes.’ There was no other answer. The poet heard Balthasar’s grunt behind him.

‘And was Master Kelly in the room when Mistress Dee died?’

‘No.’

‘We believe the poison to have been very quick in its action, whatever it was, as she complained of no pain; there were no signs but sudden death. It must have been given to her within minutes of her dying and Rose, by her own admission, was standing nearest. So, I am sorry, but unless you can produce this Kelly, Master Marlowe, I will have to take Rose back to the town. I have no choice.’ He turned to Balthasar. ‘I am sorry, Master Gerard. It gives me no pleasure.’

Balthasar shrugged his shoulders, but did not turn round.

‘Would you like to come and say goodbye?’

The man shook his head.

‘In that case, we will be away. Good morning to you, gentlemen. And, Master Gerard?’

‘Yes?’ the man muttered.

‘Please get your people on the road as soon as you can. Master Leslie is not the only man in these parts who thinks trees look better with an Egyptian or two decorating the branches.’

‘Thank you for your advice,’ Marlowe said, ushering him out. ‘I don’t think we will be lingering. Dr Dee needs to mourn in his own way, and I suspect that is quietly.’

‘Master Marlowe,’ said Sedgrave, ‘if you will take my advice, you will leave these people. They can only bring you trouble.’

‘I like trouble,’ Marlowe said. ‘But thank you for your concern, Master Sedgrave.’

‘It’s no trouble to me, sir,’ he said and touched a finger to his cap. ‘Mind how you go.’

Marlowe went in search of Dee, the cook and Bowes to tell them that the camp was packed up and that they were leaving. The house was as silent as the grave and with the big oak doors shut tight little sound filtered through from outside. He crept quietly up the curving stair and found the three of them surrounding Helene’s bed. She lay as though carved from marble, a look of total peace on her face. Dee sat at one side, with a hand gently cupped over one of hers where it lay on the embroidered counterpane. On the other side, the cook and Bowes were a little more restrained and did not venture to touch her, but the cook’s face was bloated with weeping and Bowes looked as though he was made of oak. He certainly didn’t seem to notice the tear that crept down his cheek.

Marlowe walked softly up behind Dee and placed a gentle hand on the man’s shoulder. Whenever they met, there seemed to be loss and this time it was very great. Even for Marlowe, there were no words.

Dee reached up with his free hand and patted Marlowe’s. ‘Isn’t she beautiful, Christopher?’ he said, almost in a whisper, the tears making his voice thick. ‘Did you ever see anything so lovely?’

All Marlowe could think was that the living Helene, with her mischievous face and ready smile was more beautiful by far, but to say that would be to finish the old man by the bed. ‘She is beautiful,’ he said. ‘She is fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.’

‘Poetry, Kit?’ Dee said, with a faint pressure on his hand.

‘It’s all I have to give you,’ Marlowe said, ‘and her.’

‘Make her immortal,’ Dee said. ‘One day when you have time, sit in a sweet garden and bring her back to life for me, with your words. In the meantime, I will try to keep some warmth in her, just for a little while. She always hated to be cold.’

His hand dropped from Marlowe’s and he joined it to the other, holding Helene’s hand, keeping her warm. Because when she was completely cold, men would come to encase her in oak and bury her and he wasn’t ready for that yet. He would never be ready, but he would allow it.

‘Goodbye, Kit. Safe journey to you all.’

‘I’ll see you again,’ Marlowe said, ‘and I will show you Helene’s immortality.’

‘When you have time.’

‘Yes. When I have time.’

The camp had been made late and lazy. There were no fires and the Egyptians were sleeping tumbled together in the wagons, wrapped up in their cloaks and each other to beat the chill. They had not bothered to erect the yurt; time was pressing, they were tired and the death of Helene and the arrest of Rose had plunged them all into a low mood. Marlowe found himself sharing the wagon not just with the various livestock from his first night, but also Simon, who took up more than his fair share of room and had a tendency to mutter in his sleep. At least the parrot was quiet once it had a cloth over its wicker cage. The monkey, at the furthest extent of its leash, was pressed up against Marlowe’s back, where he exuded enough warmth to pay for the inconvenience of the fleas and the smell.

At the edge of the huddle of wagons, the horses stood quietly, too cold to toss their manes, just intent on huddling together for as much warmth as they could muster. The blankets over their backs were something, but the frost coloured their breath silver as they waited for dawn. The dogs had slunk into the wagons one by one and were twitching in their sleep amongst the children.

Only one pair of eyes was watching the road from Ely, watching for followers, flannel-footed and evil. There was no reason to believe that all the trouble had been left behind the doors of Dee’s grieving house and it was not possible to be too careful. But the soft hoof-beats which finally broke the silence of the night came from the other way, from the Fens and the coast and the heaving North Sea. The rider was not making an effort to be quiet, he was almost asleep in the saddle and the horse had settled into an uneven walk, with one loose shoe giving a double clip to every clop.

The watcher in the hedge peered closer in the starlight and drew back as the rider came closer. It was Trumpy Joe Fludd, on his way back to Cambridge, empty-handed and despondent. His head lolled and every fourth nod woke him sufficiently to stop him falling from the saddle. His empty purse was at his belt and his empty future as Constable reached ahead of him on the curve of the frosty road. He didn’t look to left or right and so he never saw his quarry sleeping on the other side of the hedge. So, like two galliasses passing in thick fog, oars muffled and sails hanging slack, the Egyptians and Joseph Fludd met and parted for one final time.

‘Who are these people, Hern?’ Bracket wanted to know as the Egyptian caravanserai rattled into the little seaside town.

‘Fishing folk.’ Hern turned to the boy on the wagon beside him. ‘Ship-men who cross to Holland and France. I expect . . . what? Ten purses from you and Tomaso. Twelve would be better.’

‘Why twelve, Hern?’

‘You’ll need that many to match one taken in London. They’re poor. Take Starshine with you. Get her to limp a little, turn in her feet. And only go for couples. The men won’t soften like their wives and the wives won’t be carrying any money.’

The smoke drifted lazily up from the chimneys of Lynn, made the King’s since Lord Harry’s day.

‘Drums!’ called Hern. ‘Music!’

And the sleepy, stunned caravanserai thumped into life, the women shrilling and the children cartwheeling in the road, streaming their bright ribbons into the sky.