When Marlowe started to come to, he had no idea how long he had lain there. The sky was darker, but that could mean it had just been a few minutes; sunset didn’t last long in Fall, even across the big skies of the Fens. From long practice, he lay still while he assessed the damage. He took a deep breath. It hurt, but not enough to suggest a broken rib. He tried a cough and the result was the same. He gingerly extended one leg and then the other. Not broken, though one thigh would have the mother and father of a bruise when he checked, of that he was sure. His arms likewise. The proctors had been careful to avoid his face; they didn’t want him to be wearing the badge of their encounter around the streets. This was a loudmouth, they knew, and he probably had friends in high places. His sort always did.
He rolled onto his hands and knees and stayed there for a moment, head low, waiting for the spinning sensation to stop. As the ringing in his ears subsided, he heard footsteps approaching, breaking into a run. A hand came down on his shoulder, making him wince. Then a voice, a voice he knew.
‘Kit? Kit, is that you?’
He turned his head and a familiar and beloved face swam into view. He closed his eyes tight and then opened them. There, in the faint light from the lantern that the man had laid on the ground, was the worried face of Michael Johns, late of Cambridge, London, and anywhere else that learning was to be found.
Marlowe coughed again and struggled to his feet. He was still muzzy and he staggered against the man who had so often had his back. Johns laid a gentle arm across his shoulders and picked up his lantern. ‘Don’t try to talk,’ he said, gently. ‘My lodgings are nearby. Let’s get you there and we can find out what the damage is. Slowly, now. Slowly. You’re safe now.’ He looked left and right. ‘Whoever did this to you has gone now. In fact,’ his voice was reassuring, ‘I am sure they have been apprehended. As I came around the corner, I saw two proctors running in that direction.’ He pointed ahead. ‘They will have the miscreant in their hands by now, I’m certain. You remember how the proctors always get their man, I’m sure.’
‘Well, where the bloody hell is he?’ Philip Henslowe had not shaved this morning. He hadn’t washed either. And his breakfast was a pint of Bastard.
Will Shaxsper looked at him. ‘Are you talking about Tom?’ he asked.
‘Of course I’m talking about Tom,’ Henslowe growled. ‘Do they have this at the Curtain? The Theatre? No, only at the Rose could the stage manager disappear days before an opening. When did you see him last?’
The Warwickshire man thought fast. Today he was the Prince of Condé, cousin to the King of Navarre. He owed Marlowe a favour and the costume was rather fetching. Nobody would notice his Midlands accent – the groundlings would just assume they spoke like that in Condé. Was that a place? Shaxsper didn’t know. He wasn’t a University wit and, beyond the leafy fields of Stratford and the stews of Southwark, he didn’t have much of a clue. What he did have a clue about was that he had last seen the missing stage manager near the New Churchyard by Bedlam, keeping an eye out for the night Watch. What he also had a clue about was that digging up bodies at dead of night, with no authority whatsoever, was against the law. He couldn’t name the statute, but he knew it was all in there somewhere of the Thirty-First Something-Or-Other of Elizabeth, By the Grace of God, Etc. Etc. and it was probably a hanging offence.
‘Well?’
Shaxsper’s thought processes were never swift and Henslowe was losing patience.
‘A couple of days ago,’ Shaxsper lied. ‘Chatting to Master Sackerson.’
Henslowe threw his cup, contents and all, across the stage. It hit a flat and sprayed red all over the painted Bastille that had taken two days to build. ‘We’ve got a play to put on and Tom Sledd is talking to a bloody bear?’
Shaxsper looked affronted on Master Sackerson’s behalf. After all, he was Henslowe’s bear.
‘Morning all,’ a cheery voice called. The Duke of Anjou had arrived.
‘Good of you to call, Burbage.’ Henslowe was thundering across the stage in the opposite direction to the second greatest actor of his day.
Richard Burbage pulled a face at Shaxsper. ‘Somebody’s got his Venetians in a twist this morning,’ he muttered. ‘Where’s he off to in such a hurry?’
‘I heard that!’ Henslowe bellowed. ‘If you must know, I’m going to check whether that bloody bear has eaten my stage manager. And while we’re talking about worthless layabouts who don’t earn their keep …’
‘Were we?’ Burbage mouthed at Shaxsper, who shrugged.
‘Where in Hell is Kit Marlowe?’
Johns’s rooms in Jesus College were not palatial, but they were clean and quiet. The walk there had not reached Marlowe’s conscious memory and, had he known how gruelling it had been, he would be glad. At the end, Johns had been all but carrying him, no mean feat for a man whose heaviest load on any given day was a quill; but love and fear will always find a way. Marlowe was now reclining in the only comfortable chair, a cushion in the small of his back to ease the bruise there, a cup of warm ale within reach of his uninjured arm.
‘Is there any point in my asking what happened?’ Johns asked.
‘I’m not sure I really know,’ Marlowe said. ‘I imagine that Dr Andrewes may be behind it somehow, or Gabriel Harvey. Both? I don’t know.’ He turned his smile on Johns. ‘I annoy a lot of people, Michael.’
‘But, Kit, you say you had only been in Cambridge for one day!’ Johns had not forgotten Kit Marlowe, not for one lonely second, but he had forgotten how he could drive a person mad with his insouciant way of looking at things.
‘One day is plenty,’ Marlowe told him. ‘But, yes – it was clearly Andrewes or Harvey. I had come here to ask after Robert Greene …’
‘Greene?’ Johns remembered him too, but with no fondness. ‘What is he up to these days, other than stealing other men’s work?’
‘He’s up to being dead,’ Marlowe said, bluntly. ‘Poisoned, or so John Dee believes. And what Dee believes, so do I.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Johns, and men like him meant things like that, ‘but I wouldn’t have thought that Greene’s death would interest you in so far as you would come all this way,’ Johns pointed out.
‘In the normal run of things, no.’ Marlowe winced and shifted as his back stabbed him. ‘But he sent me a letter before he died.’
‘What did it say?’
‘I have it here. Could you just look inside my doublet, there? That’s right. The inside pocket.’
Johns fished out a much-folded piece of cheap parchment and handed it to Marlowe.
‘No, no,’ Marlowe waved it away. ‘You can read it, if you like.’
‘May I?’ Johns unfolded some wire spectacles from inside his gown and perched them on his ears.
‘Out loud, if you would, Michael,’ Marlowe said. ‘I can interrupt at the relevant places, then.’
Johns cleared his throat. ‘“To Christopher Marlowe, Dominus of Corpus Christi College, poet, playwright, friend to the afflicted …”’ Johns looked up at Marlowe, his eyes big and round behind the lenses. ‘That’s laying on the flattery a little, isn’t it, Kit?’ he asked. ‘I thought he hated you.’
‘He did. So that’s why I carried on reading.’ Marlowe waved a hand and Johns continued.
‘“Kit, I know we have never been friends, but you are the only man in London, nay, in the country, to whom I can write and be understood. I know someone is trying to kill me. Don’t ask me what brings such a thought into my mind. Some will tell you that I am mad, but I am not or, at least, no madder than erstwhile. But sometimes, I lose time. Sometimes but a minute or two, sometimes a day. And in that time, a demon comes to me, grinning at me and asking if I have spoken with God. I know that you will say that no one can send a demon; that demons are not at the behest of man. But this demon comes, Kit, I know he does, and he is sent by man. You know I have not been a good man, Kit. My wife has left me, my beloved Doll, and Fortunatus looks at me as if I were dead to him. My life is reduced to one room, my company to my landlady and what family she may have with her at any time. They come in droves sometimes, Kit, and all but drive me insane, with their whispering outside the door.”’
Johns broke off. ‘He is – was – just mad, Kit. He was always unbalanced, even when he was a scholar here. It was well known that he walked a razor’s edge.’
‘He wasn’t mad like this, though, Michael,’ Marlowe pointed out. ‘He was a fraud and a liar and had no morals. But this letter is that of a man frightened by his own shadow. And whatever else he was, I never knew Robert Greene to be afraid.’
‘“Kit,”’ Johns read on, ‘“I know you know all the workings of men’s minds, of how one man can make another see things that are not there. If you can stop this madness, I beg of you, although we have never been friends and never can be now – for I fear I am dying – come to my lodgings and save me if you can. Yours, in God, Robert Greene.”’ Johns let the paper drop into his lap. ‘Kit … there was nothing you could have done.’
Marlowe shrugged and looked at him levelly. ‘Nothing?’
‘He died. People die. I heard there was Pestilence in Dowgate.’
‘News travels fast.’ Marlowe was impressed.
‘News of the Pestilence travels fast. We just have to hope the news is ahead of the plague. I don’t know where I heard it …’ Johns tapped his temple to try to dislodge the memory. ‘It doesn’t matter. But could that not be the reason for his death? For his dreams, too? Because they have to be dreams, Kit. Everyone knows that demons don’t visit men like that.’ He crossed his fingers, for luck.
‘He didn’t die of the Pestilence.’
‘How do you know for sure? People lie, especially a landlady with a living to earn. Especially one with a large family.’
Marlowe laughed, gently so as not to hurt his back and ribs. ‘The large family is something of a misnomer,’ he told Johns. ‘Mistress Isam has a house full of young ladies, but they are not family, if you catch my meaning.’
Johns looked blank for a moment, then blushed. ‘Oh, I see. But surely, Dominus Greene would have known that.’
‘If what I hear about him is correct, he not only knew, but took advantage of the fact. He was rambling, I am sure, in his letter. But somewhere, there is a kernel of truth in it.’
‘And you thought Harvey could help?’
‘He was the nearest that Greene had to a friend once; although I believe they had had a falling out.’
‘With friends like Harvey, a man doesn’t need any enemies,’ Johns remarked.
‘I agree.’ Marlowe knew that only too well. ‘And yet, he had at least one. The man who poisoned him.’
Johns looked at Marlowe with a steely gaze. He was not the boy who had come to Cambridge all those years ago, still wet behind the ears and with the voice of an angel. But then, Michael Johns had seen some things, heard some things that had made him less gullible too. ‘You’re very sure it was poison. You say Dr Dee says it was poison. But how do you know? Did you see him before he died?’
‘No.’
‘Before he was buried?’
‘No.’
‘Then … when?’
Marlowe shrugged and, for once, couldn’t meet his old friend’s eyes. There were people who he wouldn’t mind knowing that he had gone out at dead of night and dug up a man in a lonely churchyard. But Michael Johns was not one of them.
‘Kit … when?’
Marlowe finally lifted his head. ‘Best you don’t know.’ He carefully got up out of the chair. ‘It’s time I moved about. I’m getting stiff. I heard the choir at King’s practising Morley’s Burial yesterday. Is it for anyone special, or just to keep in trim?’
Johns knew a change of subject when he heard one and followed along obediently. ‘In himself, the poor boy wasn’t special, but he died in an accident on the river and so the college are giving him a funeral. He was also in the choir, as is his twin, who survived the accident. So, you can see, the circumstances are a little unusual. I shall be going. Every college is sending someone and I am the choice for Jesus.’
Marlowe had lost a friend to the river and, although it was what seemed a lifetime ago, he felt the pain again. ‘May I attend?’
‘The chapel is large. I will be sitting in the choir, but of course you are welcome to come. I happen to know there is no family, so someone on that side of the nave will be welcome.’
‘What time is it?’
Johns went to the window and craned out, to see the clock on the college tower. ‘If we leave now, we needn’t hurry. Are you sure you’ll be all right? The seats are not the most comfortable, as I am sure you remember.’
‘I’ll manage. If I need to, I can walk about. I’ll sit towards the back. In any case, I want to hear the Morley all the way through. They have a very promising treble in the choir.’
‘I forget your ear,’ Johns said. ‘They all sound the same to me.’ He shrugged on his gown. ‘It’s getting chilly, don’t you think?’
Marlowe laughed. ‘I had almost forgotten the wind from Muscovy,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in the caverns of London lanes for too long, perhaps.’
‘You’ll never leave London,’ Johns laughed. ‘London suits you, as you suit it.’
‘When I am an old man,’ Marlowe said, softly, ‘I will retire to Kent, back to where my bones belong. I shall plant an orchard and sit in the evening and listen to my trees grow. And when I am gone, people will sit under my trees and remember me.’
‘You don’t need an orchard to be remembered,’ Johns said, with a catch in his throat. ‘Your mighty line will live beyond any tree.’ He cleared his throat. ‘We’re getting maudlin.’
‘It’s the funeral,’ Marlowe said, following Johns to the door. ‘A funeral will do that to a man.’
The choir was perfect. The treble was sublime. The Burial had never sounded more wonderful. The dean gave a sermon which was moving in its simplicity, full of regret for a young and promising life cut short. Marlowe, who could write a pathetic line like no other, gave a small nod of recognition for another’s talent. The man’s poetry rang out in the chapel and could have made the angels weep.
The boy sitting at the far end of Marlowe’s seat was weeping too. He didn’t sob and gulp and make much of it, as many scholars were doing in the foremost seats. A girl sitting alone at the front wiped her eyes from time to time and kept looking behind her. The boy, though, sat like stone, the tears running down his cheeks and dripping from his chin, unheeded.
At the end of the service, Marlowe went over to him. ‘Can I help you?’ he said. ‘Can I take you for a drink somewhere, while you collect yourself? It was a very moving service.’ Half of Marlowe’s motivation was pity, the other was curiosity. Why was he not with the others and why was his grief so all-encompassing, not made for common show as it was with all the scholars at the front?
The lad seemed to notice his tears for the first time and wiped them away with the sleeve of his fustian. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said. ‘I think I will just go back to my rooms. Roger’s … friends … will give him a good send-off.’
‘Are you not a friend?’ Marlowe asked, kindly. ‘You certainly seem upset.’
The boy looked at him and searched his face to see if he could recognize him. ‘Who are you?’
‘Christopher Marlowe. I am an alumnus of Corpus Christi, but …’
‘Christopher Marlowe the playwright?’ The boy’s eyes, the lashes clogged with tears, were wide.
‘Yes, but I—’
‘Roger would have so loved to meet you. We went to one of your plays, once, when we were in London visiting an aunt. Tamburlaine. It was wonderful. Isn’t Ned Alleyn a marvel?’ Even in his grief, the boy’s eyes shone at the memory.
‘Hmm.’ Even to be kind to the bereaved, Marlowe couldn’t agree that Alleyn was a marvel. ‘Who are you?’
‘I thought you knew. I am Richard Williams. I am Roger’s brother. His twin, actually.’
Marlowe was surprised. ‘Why are you sitting so far back?’
The boy tossed his head towards the scholars, who were still crying noisily. ‘I didn’t want to sit with them. They are just here because … well, I don’t know if you know this, but my brother drowned. As did I, nearly. It made us quite famous for a day or so. The Inquest, and so on. They weren’t Roger’s friends. Any more than that trollop sitting over there was his paramour, on any level. But you know how it is, I suppose, being in the theatre. People just want to be part of the show.’
Marlowe was impressed. Not many scholars his age would have the insight of this boy.
‘Where are my manners?’ The lad gave a final sniff. ‘I would be pleased to show you my rooms and perhaps we can share some wine, or ale or something. I … it’s a bit lonely, now. I don’t like going in by myself. I haven’t been by myself since I was born, until last week.’ The tears welled up again.
‘That would be very pleasant,’ Marlowe said. He thought about Johns, making his way out of the Choir and decided he could always find him later. ‘Lead on.’
Marlowe took note of the leather-bound tomes on the high shelf. Bale was there, along with Fortescue’s Foreste, Munster’s Cosmography and Ramus and Aristotle for good measure.
‘I’m impressed by your light reading, Master Williams.’
‘I know them off by heart, sir,’ Richard Williams said. He sat in his room with his brother’s empty bed beside him, hunched and pale as though it was the dead of winter.
‘That’s as maybe,’ Marlowe smiled. ‘But do you understand any of them?’
The boy blinked. That thought hadn’t occurred to him.
‘No Ovid,’ Marlowe said, still scanning the shelves. ‘No Machiavelli.’
‘Those volumes are banned by the university, sir.’ Williams was clearly a lad who played things by the book.
‘Indeed they are,’ Marlowe remembered. Cambridge was no freer in its thought now than it had been in his day. ‘By the way, don’t call me “sir”. My name is Marlowe.’
Williams tried a grin. It didn’t suit him.
‘This was your brother’s cupboard?’ Marlowe held open the little wooden door. ‘May I?’
The boy nodded.
It was much as Marlowe expected. More books; nothing untoward. Another fustian robe with the roses of King’s embroidered on the sleeve, a pair of pattens and two shirts. Not so much as a dagger.
‘Where are you from, Richard?’ he asked.
‘York, sir … er … Master Marlowe. Or, at least, a village nearby. Poppleton.’
‘I didn’t see your parents at the service.’
‘They’re dead, Master Marlowe,’ the boy said. ‘The sweating sickness two years ago. We just have our aunt, in London. I mean …’ his face crumpled briefly, ‘I just have my aunt in London.’
He checked the lad’s status. ‘And you are Convictus Secundus?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Church? As a career, I mean?’
‘The law. The Inns of Court. What do you know of them, Master Marlowe? Our father was a lawyer, but he never went to London.’
‘Begging your father’s pardon, Richard, I know well enough to avoid them. Men in my profession usually do.’
Williams smiled bleakly. Laughter wasn’t something that came easily to him now. It would probably take a while. The boy was … what? Sixteen? Seventeen? Without a mother, father or brother, alone in the chill winds of Cambridge, his clothes rough and lacking a mother’s care, his hair cropped short to mark his status.
Marlowe sat down next to him. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what happened to Roger.’
Williams looked long and hard into those deep, dark eyes. ‘I told you,’ he said with a shrug. ‘He drowned.’
‘Where?’
‘Paradise,’ the lad told him.
Marlowe knew it well, that stretch of the Cam that curved towards the Fens, with its innocent surface, its deadly current. Many was the hapless scholar and drunken shepherd who had missed his footing on those deceptive banks where the dog rose and honeysuckle bloomed in the summer sun.
‘You mistook the mood of the water,’ he nodded.
‘No.’ Williams was suddenly sure, his eye clear and his voice steady. ‘No. Roger and I were water-babies. We were swimming in the Ouse before we left our hanging sleeves. There was more to it.’
‘What?’ Marlowe waited.
‘I don’t remember.’ Suddenly, the boy who would be a lawyer was a child again, not looking Marlowe in the eye, squirming on the bed as though the mouth of Hell was opening up before him.
‘Try,’ Marlowe said softly. ‘You were on the banks of the Cam, you and Roger. When was this? A week ago?’
Williams nodded. ‘Thursday. Our half-day. The Master gives us leave.’
‘And you went swimming?’
‘Yes. It will be too cold, soon, so we thought …’ the lad looked down and knotted his hands together, ‘we thought it would be the last one for a while.’ The enormity of it all was sweeping over him yet again and his voice faltered and stopped.
Marlowe knew at this point it was important to be workmanlike, though he could feel the boy’s pain. ‘Just the two of you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right. You’re on the bank at Paradise. Was anyone else there?’
Williams looked up, remembering. ‘No … yes.’
Marlowe waited, but there was no more detail to come. ‘Yes or no, Master Williams?’
‘I … I didn’t tell them at the Inquest,’ the boy muttered, the weight of the thing heavy on his heart.
‘What? What didn’t you tell them?’ Marlowe was like a dog with a bone. But the last thing he wanted to do was to frighten the lad still further. He sensed that with one slip, one step in the wrong direction, he could lose him.
Richard Williams frowned, trying to concentrate, trying to remember. ‘Roger went in first,’ he said. ‘I was … this sounds ridiculous … I was having trouble with my pattens. Couldn’t get them off. Roger called out it was cold … something like that … then he swam a little way …’
‘Go on.’
‘I heard a splash. Well, a series of splashes. There are tall reeds where we were and I couldn’t see Roger. He was splashing around, I suppose. It had to be him. That’s when I saw him.’
Marlowe tensed. ‘Saw who?’ he asked. ‘Roger?’
‘No. No. Someone else. Tall – no, not tall, but he loomed over me as I bent over. Dark. He had the sun at his back, shining directly into my eyes. He grabbed me, by the arms. I struggled. Then, I was under the water.’ The boy began to shudder, his mouth hanging open. He fell forward against Marlowe who caught him and held him tight. ‘Oh, Lord,’ Williams went on in a croaked whisper, ‘I felt the pain of drowning, Master Marlowe. Such a noise in my ears. Such a pain in my chest. I went down, twice, three times. I don’t know. Each time I went under, it all began again. Blackness. Deep, impenetrable blackness. I wanted to die, God help me.’
Marlowe felt the boy’s tears soaking into his doublet and he patted his shoulder and stroked his hair until the lad felt well enough to sit up again. Williams wiped his eyes with his sleeve and went on, ‘How long I was in the water, I don’t know. When I woke up, I was on the bank again, with shepherds fussing round me. They may have saved my life. But Roger … Roger was gone. They found his body later that day, floating downstream.’
‘Roger, the strong swimmer?’ Marlowe had to check.
‘Yes,’ Williams said, sniffing back the tears. ‘A better one than I, that’s for sure.’
‘This man,’ Marlowe said, ‘the dark one, who loomed over you with the sun behind him. Was there anything else about him that you remember? Did he speak?’
Williams blinked, trying to focus his tortured mind. ‘Yes,’ he said as the memory came back to him in a flash. Yes. He said … he said, not once, but twice, more than that even, over and over. “Have you seen him yet?” he said. “Have you seen him?”’
Marlowe frowned. ‘Do you know what he meant?’ he asked.
Williams shook his head. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ he said.
‘Is this wise, Kit?’ Johns knew his man. There was a wildness about Marlowe. He would walk through the fire just to prove he could and cut cards with the Devil at the end of it.
Marlowe looked at his old tutor and smiled. ‘Is what wise, Professor?’ he asked.
‘What you’re planning to do,’ Johns said. ‘You may have a broken rib for all you know, not to mention the blow to your head.’
‘I’ve had worse,’ Marlowe said, ‘but there are some things that have to be answered.’
‘You couldn’t take it to law, I suppose? Find a constable? A magistrate?’
Marlowe laughed and shook his head. ‘Don’t find me again, Michael,’ he said, clapping a hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘Whatever happens. You’ve already chanced your arm by doing what you’ve done. Keep out of it now.’
Johns opened his mouth to say something but he couldn’t find the words. The path that Marlowe had taken since the days of Corpus Christi was dark and winding. Probably, the poet-playwright was right; better he should travel it alone.