Leaving Frizer and Shaxsper to tamp down the grave and make it look as much undisturbed as was possible, Marlowe crept quietly to the gates of the churchyard and looked left and right. The Pieto gardens were silhouetted in silver; the old Roman wall, crumbled now and broken, still stood to remind the world how the city had grown. From somewhere, perhaps Fynnesburie Field, a dog was barking at the night. There was no sign of Tom Sledd and Marlowe tutted. He had sent him to watch for the Watch, not hightail it home. But he allowed the man some latitude. He was scared witless of the Pestilence himself, though he tried not to show it; Tom had a family to think of and so a little discretion over valour was allowed. Just this once.
Frizer and Shaxsper clattered up behind him, their pattens loud on the cobbles. So much for being silent as the grave.
‘Where’s Tom?’ Frizer said, loudly.
‘Sshh!’ the playwrights, real and imaginary, both turned on him and he pulled a wry face.
‘Sorry,’ he said aloud, then again, in a whisper, ‘Sorry.’
‘Keep it quiet,’ Marlowe breathed. ‘We’re not safe until we are well away from here. I think Tom must have gone home and the Watch aren’t here, so he has done us no harm. Now … no more talking. Goodnight and thank you both.’ Coins clinked into Frizer’s hand but Shaxsper’s remained empty. He decided to take it as a compliment, one artiste to another.
Keeping their beaked masks firmly pulled down over their faces, the three men parted at the crossroads, two to their beds, to sleep as best they might, Marlowe to the Strand, to the rooms of Dr John Dee, the Queen’s Magus. The streets of Shoreditch were strangely empty – Pestilence will do that to a city – and he made good time, without seeing a soul. He was almost at his destination among the great houses of the Strand that backed onto the river, when a shadow detached itself from a wall and he almost cannoned into the man who made it.
‘Good morning, Brother.’ The voice was smooth as honey, as soft as silk, and as reliable as thin ice over a bottomless lake.
‘Brother?’ Marlowe had been called a lot of things but never, until now, that.
The man turned his face sideways, a silhouette against the setting moon. The beak of the plague doctor cut the air like a scimitar.
‘Oh, I see. Brother. Yes. Good morning.’ Marlowe made to pass by but he was stopped by a surprisingly burly arm.
‘Where are you off to, Brother?’ Now the voice had steel under the silk, the honey dripped from a honed edge that could kill in a trice.
Marlowe’s hand crept to the dagger in the small of his back. ‘On my own business,’ he said, keeping his voice light.
‘May I ask your name?’ the man said, leaning in close.
Above the scent of his own herb-packed snout, Marlowe could smell other things. Asafoetida, which he recognized from his many visits to Dee’s sanctum. Attar of Roses; that would be to please the ladies, it certainly had no place in warding off the plague. And something else … something that made his nostrils wrinkle and the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He didn’t move or answer.
‘May I ask your name, sir?’
Marlowe smiled. This was better – whoever this plague doctor was, this man who smelled of death, he was getting angry and angry men were easy to beat.
‘Yes.’
The man stepped back, his eyes dark and glowering through the eyeholes of his mask. ‘What is it?’ he hissed.
Marlowe stepped back too, giving himself room to swing his blade, should it become necessary. ‘Oh, I do see now what you are asking. You don’t want to know if you can ask my name. You want to know my name.’
‘Correct.’
‘I don’t choose to give it,’ Marlowe said, making as if to step round the man, who sidestepped to match him. ‘Although, of course, should you choose to tell me yours, I may change my mind.’
The man in the mask was clearly amazed. He swept an arm down his body, as if that were answer enough. He wore a long cloak, with strange swirling letters, shooting stars and moons, picked out in silver thread against the velvet which was blacker than night. Beneath it, he wore another gown, gathered onto a yoke, which was embroidered thickly with cut-glass brilliants and hung with crystal drops so it shimmered like mercury under the last rays of the moon. The sleeves were gathered in at the wrists by crisp white linen cuffs and it didn’t take a genius to guess that this was one plague doctor who didn’t do much visiting of the poor and sick.
‘How can you not know who I am?’ Outrage took the place of amazement. ‘I am …’
Marlowe realized in a sudden flash of inspiration who this popinjay was. ‘Simon Forman,’ he said.
The beak swept forward and almost knocked into Marlowe’s own. ‘The great Simon Forman,’ the man hissed. ‘The greatest protection from the plague, or any other of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.’
‘Hmm. “To which flesh is heir” would make you sound rather more believable, but I do get your general drift, Master Forman. Well, I am the great, I suppose I might say, Kit Marlowe.’
‘That Kit Marlowe?’ Forman was puzzled. ‘You’re a playwright, not a plague doctor.’
‘Can a man not be both?’ Marlowe asked. ‘I daresay the theatres will be closing soon, if this Pestilence stays upon us.’ He wasn’t quite sure why, but this man was making him sound like someone posturing on a stage.
Forman struck a pose, a querying finger to his chin. He thrust out one leg and put a hand on his hip.
Marlowe smiled. Now he knew who this man reminded him of. Ned Alleyn, at his most pompous, playing some despot in overdone costume. He tapped Forman on his embroidered chest, with the tip of his dagger. ‘You must excuse me, Master Forman,’ he said. ‘I do have places to be and you are in my way.’
At the sight of the blade, Forman threw his head back and laughed. ‘Blades do not frighten me, Master Marlowe. No blade can pierce my carapace of magic.’
Marlowe cocked his head and his great, herb-packed nose made him look like an inquisitive magpie, eyeing up its dinner. How he would have loved to prove this man wrong. But he really did have places to be, and no time to explain away a dead magus on the highway. With a smile and a wave, he stepped past Forman as he stood there, still posing, and slipped down an alleyway and out of sight before the cock-of-the-walk had even noticed he had gone. As he walked, he couldn’t help wondering how long the popinjay would stand there before noticing he was alone in the Strand and without an audience. His best guess was that it would be well and truly dawn before that happened.
Marlowe was out by half an hour or so, but it was a very disgruntled magus who finally clambered into bed in Philpot Lane with his long-suffering wife, putting his cold feet into the heat of the small of her back. She grunted and shuffled further to the edge of the great feather mattress, but he followed her, keen for warmth and, if he could wake her just about enough, a little more. He had not had a good night. He could usually fool most of the people most of the time, but some of his failures were coming home to roost and he had had a rather difficult interview with a widow who had suddenly realized that rather than have Simon Forman glittering and posturing in her bedchamber, she would prefer a husband, alive and bringing home the bacon. Even the doves had let him down; when he tried to release one to depict the soul of the dear departed, it had fallen to the floor with a sullen clunk, its eye dead and glazed. The woman had had hysterics which even his special massage could not assuage – and his massage was usually very special. He lay there, mulling it over, and decided to try it out on his wife – perhaps he had lost his touch.
‘Get off me, Simon,’ she muttered, elbowing him neatly in the head. ‘Keep it for your silly widows. I’ve got to get up soon and tend to the house.’
‘But …’
‘No buts.’ She turned over and kneed him neatly where he least expected it. She heard the air leave his lungs with a tortured groan. ‘If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times. That kind of thing isn’t for a decent marriage bed. If it gets stupid women to part with money to keep bread in my children’s mouths, so be it. And with them out of London to escape the Pestilence, they cost even more. But I don’t like it, though I accept it’s your calling. But don’t think you can bring your nasty ways home with you.’
Forman was still trying to get his breath, through the red haze of pain.
‘And, while we’re on the subject, the laundry maid has been complaining again. You left a couple of dead newts in your lawn sleeves yesterday. She screamed so loud I thought she was going to be sick. You have to be more careful, you really do. It’s bad enough having to clean those gowns of yours, all those beads and furbelows. Can’t you be a proper doctor instead of all this nonsense? A clever man like you, surely …’
Forman lay in his warm feather bed and tried to block it all out. In the streets of Westminster, in the houses of the Strand and, yes, it was no exaggeration to say the palaces of Nonsuch and Placentia, he was a king, lauded and rewarded with every step. Here – here, he was nothing. What his wife’s knee hadn’t achieved, his misery completed and he lay there, limp and bruised in more ways than one. He began to drift away when he was aware of his wife’s voice getting louder and nearer to his ear.
‘But you’re not a bad husband, by and large and you are certainly a good provider. So as long as you’re quick and pull my nightdress down when you’re finished, you may have a go at me.’
Opening his eyes just a little, he turned his head. His wife was lying on her back, her head averted and her fists clenched at her side. Her nightclothes were bunched up under her chin and her knees were splayed wide. Her lax stomach folded almost down to her pudenda, which, even in the half-light, was uninviting. He swallowed hard and thought fast. Giving vent to an almighty snore, he fell back on the pillows and was soon, quite genuinely, asleep.
His tap at the door was answered instantly. John Dee had been waiting on the settle in his hall since before dawn and now the morning was well advanced. ‘Kit,’ he breathed. ‘I thought … well, I don’t know quite what I thought, but I had expected you long before this.’
The Queen’s Magus was nudging sixty, but his body and mind were as agile as ever – and if Kit Marlowe needed access to his vast store of knowledge, well, that was all to the good.
‘My apologies.’ Marlowe swept off his grey cloak and threw it down on the settle, following Dee into the kitchen where the best fire was burning. ‘My plans have had a tendency to go awry since we spoke last. I suppose asking a stage manager, a would-be playwright and a walking gentleman to help me in the exhumation was my first mistake, but I was in a hurry and they were what came to hand. Then, I met Simon Forman on the way here – do you know him?’
Dee turned and spat neatly onto the fire. ‘Sadly for me, I do. He considers himself a magus, though he is but a conjuror. The oaf was apprenticed to a merchant whose stock-in-trade was herbal remedies. Somehow, he smarmed around the authorities and got himself a place at Magdalen – Oxford, of course, not the real one. He specialized in medicine and astronomy but had to leave. There was some trouble with the bedders, by all accounts. He got to Utrecht, but for about ten years now he has been pretending to be a doctor. He hangs his shingle in Philpot Lane.’
‘So what was he doing in the Strand, I wonder?’
‘Those sleeves of his hide all manner of things,’ Dee went on, ‘though he uses his hands cleverly, I will concede that. The rumour has it that he fills them with doves and frogs and all manner of livestock every day, so he can amaze people as he goes about his business. Before the next morning, he empties out their poor, dead bodies, if he hasn’t had the need to release them. He’ll have been fawning around the more idiot of the wenches down the road, I’ll wager.’
That at least explained the smell and Marlowe nodded. ‘I can’t believe his fame will last, Doctor,’ he said, sensing the old man’s sadness. ‘Folk will see through him and his glitter and glamour, surely?’
Dee nodded. ‘Of course they will,’ he agreed. ‘But until then, what harm might he do?’ He looked into the flames for a while, as if he could see clearly the death and destruction that capered in the wake of Forman’s stupidity and cupidity. Then, he clapped his hands. ‘But enough of him! Did you get what I asked?’
Marlowe ferreted in his jerkin front and brought out the waxed packages. ‘Yes. I got clippings from the shroud.’ He handed them over one by one. ‘Some of the liquid at the bottom of the coffin.’ Dee nodded, pleased. That was the one he least expected to receive. ‘And some hair from his beard and from his head and also some nail trimmings, as you asked.’
‘And how did he look?’ Dee leaned forward, his eyes bright and excited. It had been a while since he had had a real puzzle to solve and he was looking forward to it. For too long he had been worrying about his finances. The Queen was not as forthcoming as she had been and her Magus was only as successful as his last prognostication. As the old girl’s years advanced, perhaps she was nearer to God and the answers to all things than John Dee would ever be. The puzzle had brought Kit Marlowe back to his door too, so he was a happy man, for once.
Marlowe looked thoughtful. ‘He looked …’ he smiled at the thought, ‘he looked well, since you ask. Better than I have seen him look when he was still breathing. Not so anguished. Nothing like as angry. Peaceful, I suppose I would say. Yes. Peaceful and content.’
Dee pursed his lips and pulled a parchment and a piece of charcoal out of a pocket of his voluminous gown. He crossed through a word at the top of what seemed to be a long list, then another, lower down. ‘Was he bent at all? Were his limbs displaced?’ He twisted his arms so his palms faced outwards, as examples.
‘No. But of course, he may have been laid out neatly before they buried him.’
‘True. Though sometimes, the poison will fix the limbs.’ Dee whistled soundlessly for a moment and crossed out another couple of words. ‘Bloated?’
Marlowe shook his head.
‘Discoloured?’
‘No more than you would expect in the circumstances.’
Dee gave him a quizzical glance. ‘Circumstances? Do you know something?’
Marlowe laughed. ‘You are suspicious of everyone, Doctor. No, I mean the circumstances of having died and having been buried. He was …’ he shrugged. ‘A bit on the grey side. But otherwise, normal.’
Dee nodded once. ‘I see.’ He crossed off one more word and then looked down his list and frowned. ‘I fear I must tell you, Kit, that your man may have died a natural death.’
Marlowe sat back in his chair and looked at Dee from under his lashes. ‘I’m not usually wrong,’ he said at last.
‘Nor am I. But let’s do an examination or two on these interesting pieces,’ Dee shook the waxed bags in the air, ‘and see which of us is proved right, shall we?’ He levered himself up from his chair. ‘Do you want to come and watch, or could you do with some sleep? You certainly look a little …’ he leaned forward and smiled, ‘dishevelled.’
‘Dishevelled?’ Marlowe was horrified. ‘In what way?’
‘Oh, nothing much. A little loam here,’ Dee touched his own chin. ‘Some gravestone lichen here.’ He brushed at his chest. ‘Perhaps a hint of …’
‘Yes, yes, you’ve said enough,’ Marlowe laughed. ‘Perhaps I might adjust my clothing and have a wash and then join you. Can that be arranged?’
‘A bed and water are already set for you,’ Dee told him, ushering him to the door. ‘Jane?’ he called to his wife and was rewarded by scurrying footsteps in the hall. ‘Ah, there you are, my dear.’ He looked fondly as his wife embraced his friend. ‘See Kit to his room, will you? And I will see you later. Jane will show you the way.’
Jane Dee was years younger than her husband, a pleasant woman with a broad smile. She worried about her old man, and worried even more when a man with Kit Marlowe’s reputation came calling. What did they call him? Machiavel? The Muse’s Darling? Jane Dee’s husband was sometimes frightening enough, but Marlowe had a danger about him, a way of going that scared her. She saw beneath the curls and melting eyes to what lay beneath and it wasn’t half as pretty as the exterior.
He bowed as she entered and kissed her hand. In all Dee’s other houses, it had been easy enough to find his laboratory by sound and smell alone, but Marlowe allowed himself to be led off by Jane, as Dee shuffled off down the flagged passage, humming to himself and waving his little waxed packages happily in the air.
Simon Forman was not a man who was down for long. He had woken after an hour or two to find his wife gone about her business and the house buzzing happily along, as it always did. All he had to do was bring in the money to keep it buzzing and everyone was happy. He delved into his memory for a moment, trying to remember what had made him so introspective when he got home. The widow, yes, that had been a rare failure, but … something else. What was it …? Suddenly, it all came back to him and he shrugged on his workaday robes, less sumptuous than his walking-out attire, but still with enough beads to make the laundry maid weep, and he went in search of his apprentices.
They were where they always were, in his chamber in the shadow of the abbey, busy with retorts, mirrors, liquids and herbs, always with the background noise of the tame doves which cooed and wheeled above their heads, sometimes depositing their own very special additions to the brews below. Tanks of frogs and newts, green and slimy and pulsating with life, were along a shelf near the high window. Pots of herbs grew in even the smallest space. There was something of the countryside about Simon Forman’s laboratory, were it not for the smell of brimstone, which was the subtle underscore to it all.
When they heard their master’s step, the apprentices sprang to attention. Forman liked to have lackeys around him, but he preferred his lackeys to be clever and so he paid wages to garner the best rather than get the sweepings of the streets for free. He even gave them a week of paid holiday a year, beyond the wildest dream of any other apprentice in the land. Indeed, they had just come back from their annual visit to their families, bearing gifts for their master according to custom; the packages lay on his desk, as always, but he knew what they contained. Two would be new editions of some arcane Greek text which he never admitted he couldn’t read. The other would be a dozen new-laid eggs and a pot of honey, much more to his taste.
Two of his apprentices were scholars, one from Cambridge, the other from Oxford. Their natural enmity kept them keen to impress. The other was not a scholar. He was an unschooled boy from the Weald of Kent but knew more about herbs and the creatures of the wild than the other two would ever know. He had learned to read and write with lightning speed and Forman knew that, if one of the apprentices would usurp their master, it would almost certainly be him. He dressed them in garments of his own design and would have been mortified to know how much they hated wearing them. He had chosen a deep blue, almost black, which reminded him of a dark winter sky, moonless and cloudless. To enhance the effect, there were specks of cut glass scattered here and there, more at the shoulder and less at the hem. He thought it made them look just mystical enough to act as a background for his own magnificence. They thought it made them look like tarts fallen on hard times. But he paid them well and he paid them promptly, so a bit of name-calling as they went about their business was a small price to pay.
He walked slowly past them as they lined up just inside the door. Matthias was the tallest of the three, well-made as to shoulder and calf and with a profile a Greek god would die for. His flaxen hair fell over the glittering shoulders of his gown in the style Forman favoured, in artless curls which took him half an hour at least every morning to achieve. He was the Oxford scholar and he bore it lightly. He had attended the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, though he hadn’t had a holy thought since he had been about seven. He didn’t talk much about his days among those hallowed halls where, it was whispered, Papists still held sway. He had not quite been sent down, but it had been a near-run thing. Oxford had so many things to interest a young man of frisky habits but, in the end, it had been dice which had been his downfall; not the game so much as the very substantial debts that his bad judgement had led him into. He had a pretty way with a retort, however, and could extract oil from anything that was handed to him. He had not yet managed to get blood from a stone, but there was yet time.
The next in line was the Cambridge scholar, Timothy. He only reached Matthias’s shoulder and was little and weaselly generally, with very scant dark hair and a tendency to sniff. Surprisingly, he did rather better with the ladies of the district than Matthias did, having spied often on his master when the great magus was practising his massage on widows far and wide. He had not found it a hard technique to master and, once he had used his clever words to get close enough, there was never any demur from the girl in question. He was dishonest, not too keen on washing his hands no matter how unpleasant the experiment he had been engaged in and, generally, Forman passed over him with as much speed as was civil. He had also gone to Trinity – the real one, as he constantly called it, though it predated Matthias’s alma mater by less than a decade. Extraction was not his skill. He wanted to deconstruct everything that crossed his path until he found that tiny spark that made it unique of and to itself. Only Forman could see that Timothy was as dark and weaselly inside as without – but the man had his uses and so he let him stay.
The country boy, Gerard, was Forman’s pride and joy. His own sons were young yet but he knew that, when they grew, he wanted them to be like this. Gerard’s frank, open face was smattered with freckles even after two years in London, mostly closeted in the distillery making tinctures from all the herbs he grew. He could make any plant flourish just by making a hole in soil with his thumb and then sticking it in, with a prayer and a gentle pat such as a mother will give to a sleeping child. The plant would grow, Forman always thought, just to please Gerard, because when he was upset a cloud would pass across his face and it would seem that God was crying to see his distress. In height, he came between the scholars and was neatly made, being neither skinny nor stout. He wore his gown as though he loved wearing it and indeed, of the three, he hated it least. He had had fourteen years of hand-me-downs, often from his sisters, so to have clothes that were his own was still a pleasure he cherished. He smiled at Forman and said good morning, with the soft burr of a true Man of Kent.
Forman stepped back from his apprentices and opened his arms in a distant embrace. ‘Gentlemen,’ he beamed. ‘A new dawn. A new day.’ He raised his arms and they all smiled and tried to look enthusiastic. Only Gerard managed it to any convincing extent. ‘Sadly, we had a loss last night. Master Templeton, despite our best efforts, succumbed to the Pestilence and his wife …’
‘Widow,’ Timothy, who had a literal turn of mind, corrected him.
‘Yes, yes, of course, widow … has not taken it well. I tried to comfort her …’ Timothy looked at his shoes and smirked ‘… but it is perhaps too soon. However, we will not forget her in her time of sorrow. Matthias.’ The apprentice perked up and adopted the look of a man eager to please at any price. ‘Make a note to go and visit the dear, good woman in … shall we say one week? Yes. One week.’
Matthias went over to a desk in the corner and jotted something down.
‘But …’ Forman’s scowl became positively Saturnine. ‘On my way home from the sad home of Mistress Templeton, I met a man. A man wearing the mask of a plague doctor.’
The apprentices were stuck for an appropriate response. The city was full of men dressed like plague doctors. It was the employment of choice at the moment. As long as you chose your patients well and didn’t actually go near anyone with plague, there was big money to be made. Eventually, Gerard, who hated anyone to not get an answer, even when they hadn’t strictly asked a question, spoke. ‘Who was it, Master?’
‘A good question, Gerard. A very good question.’ The great magus hitched his gown up on his shoulders and leaned forward. ‘Now, boys, I want to tell you that I will not be angry whatever answer you give to my next question. What I want is honesty, no more, no less. Have you ever been to the theatre?’
The apprentices shuffled their feet. Of course they had been to the theatre. When the theatre was prohibited in no uncertain terms, as it was early in their indentures, it obviously became much more tempting than it otherwise would be. They had seen plays so sublime they would make their way back to their lodgings with wings on their feet; these were usually written by one Christopher Marlowe, though the spelling on the playbills varied widely. They had seen plays so appalling they had been funny and they had rolled home holding their sides; Ralph Roister Doister was always good for a laugh. And they had seen a play by Will Shaxsper. But admitting as much to Forman was another thing altogether. Matthias looked at Timothy. Timothy looked at Gerard, who had nowhere to hide.
‘I have been to the theatre, Master,’ he said, looking the magus squarely in the eye.
Forman nodded. ‘I am glad to see that I have one honest apprentice,’ he said, smiling grimly. ‘Do you know a playwright named Christopher Marlowe?’
‘I know his work,’ the country boy acknowledged.
‘But him. Have you ever seen him?’
‘Once, when I went to see one of his plays, he was at the apron, watching and making notes. He rewrites all the time, men say. He seeks perfection.’
Timothy was aghast. ‘There is no perfection but God,’ he blurted out. The others looked at him. Religion was rare within these walls. ‘Or … at least …’ he blustered, ‘so they say.’
‘Well, anyhow,’ Gerard picked up his tale with a sideways glance at his flustered colleague, ‘I suppose therefore you can say I have seen him.’
‘About so high,’ Forman held up a hand, ‘curls,’ and he sketched them round his own close-cropped head. ‘A rather handy man with a dagger.’
‘So far, that sounds like me,’ Matthias laughed.
Gerard grinned and nodded. ‘And like Master Marlowe, too,’ he said.
‘Then it may well have been him,’ Forman said. ‘Why would he be dressed like a plague doctor? He has no medical training, has he?’
‘Who has?’ Timothy muttered in his throat, but fortunately no one heard him.
‘I don’t see how he would have had the time,’ Gerard said, continuing in his role as theatre aficionado. ‘He can’t be more than the middle twenties and he came straight to London from Cambridge.’ He looked at their stunned faces. They had not known that he was quite such an expert in the theatre and its people. ‘Or so men say.’
Forman looked at Matthias. ‘Make a note,’ he said.
‘What note, Master?’ he asked, stepping over to the desk and dipping the pen.
‘Just a note,’ Forman said, low and level. ‘A note not to overlook Master Marlowe.’