A madman stood at the cross outside St Paul’s that Thursday, reminding anyone who cared to listen that the Pestilence had come because of the world’s wickedness, that London was the new Gomorrah and that the blackness of death was all that lay ahead. Some confused souls stood around, wide-eyed, listening. Others, dyed-in-the-wool Puritans, nodded solemnly and intoned, ‘Too true, brother’. Two members of the Watch, who had been listening to this predictable drivel for years, moved him on with prods from their halberds and threats of the Bridewell.
Marlowe had heard it all before too, but he was not at Harvey’s house in Peternoster Row that morning for lunacy, Tom Sledd’s unresolved fate notwithstanding. He was there to continue a conversation he had started in Cambridge days earlier. He was there to talk to Gabriel Harvey. The man’s hapless secretary was still carrying books, but as soon as he saw Marlowe, he remembered his handiness with a dagger and dropped the lot.
‘Is he in?’ Marlowe asked the man, who stood frozen to the spot. The playwright decided to give him another option. ‘Is he out?’
‘What in the name of God …?’ Gabriel Harvey appeared at the top of the stairs, still in his nightgown. ‘Marlowe! Do you know what time it is?’
‘Eight o’clock by Paul’s time,’ Marlowe said, cheerily. ‘Time for all good Christians to be up and about their business.’ He was already climbing the stairs. ‘And what exactly is your business these days, Dr Harvey?’
‘Marlowe, I—’
‘No,’ the playwright held up his hand, ‘Don’t tell me. Sticking your nose into other people’s business.’ He had reached the landing. ‘And you are very good at it; possibly the finest in the field.’
‘I don’t care for your attitude,’ Harvey snapped.
‘And I don’t give a flying fart what you care for,’ Marlowe said, now that he was face to face with the man. ‘I’m not Secundus Convictus now, Doctor. I am the most famous playwright in London. What are you going to do? Give me a bad review?’
Harvey was white with anger. ‘One day, you’ll dare God out of his Heaven once too often, blasphemer,’ he rasped.
Marlowe chuckled. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘whose idea was the proctors? Yours or Andrewes’s?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Harvey tried to play the innocent, but it was less than convincing.
‘All right,’ Marlowe said, leaning against the wall. ‘We’ll let that pass for now. Tell me instead why you went to see Robert Greene shortly before he died.’
‘I told you.’ Harvey had lost none of the pomposity that Marlowe remembered from his university days. ‘I was passing.’
‘Yes, but you lied, didn’t you? Men like you don’t pass Dowgate, especially when there’s Pestilence in the wind. What was the real reason? Did you bring him a comforting broth of mushrooms?’
Before Harvey could answer, Marlowe shoulder-barged the door into Harvey’s bedroom. There was a shriek and a woman was sitting up in bed, pulling her nightdress closed and gasping, open-mouthed. Harvey grabbed Marlowe’s sleeve, but the university professor-turned-critic was no match for a projectioner and he found himself kneeling on the floor, his head wrenched back with Marlowe’s fingers tangled in his hair.
‘Don’t hurt him, Master Marlowe,’ the woman found the composure to say.
‘Hastings,’ Harvey gurgled, his neck extended by Marlowe’s grip, ‘fetch a constable, for God’s sake.’
‘Hastings,’ Marlowe counter-ordered, ‘stay exactly where you are.’
The dithering secretary on the ground floor had only hopped onto his right foot. Now he hopped back onto his left. Marlowe was looking at the woman. ‘You seem to know my name, Madame,’ he said. ‘May I know yours? I assume it isn’t Mrs Harvey.’
‘You assume right,’ she said. ‘It’s Greene. Doll Greene.’
‘No better than you should be.’
There was another half-strangled gurgle from Harvey, but Doll Greene could clearly handle herself. ‘What do you mean by that?’ she snapped, checking that all was well in her frontage. Harvey’s liberality didn’t run to a four-poster bed, so she had little to cover herself with.
‘I must confess I’ve never really understood the phrase,’ Marlowe said, as if they were discussing the weather, ‘along with “buttering no parsnips” and “how’s your father?”. It was Mrs Isam’s assessment of you, however.’
‘That hypocritical bitch!’ Doll Greene hissed. ‘She’s a bawd, Master Marlowe, a keeper of brothels.’
‘Your late husband seemed quite content with that,’ Marlowe said. ‘Oh, my condolences, by the way.’
‘Condolences?’ she sneered. ‘If memory serves, Robyn couldn’t stand you.’
‘Your memory does serve,’ Marlowe nodded, ‘but then, he couldn’t stand old Gabriel here and you both seem to have got over that.’ He let go of Harvey’s hair and the critic-professor flopped forward, trying to ease the pain in his neck. ‘At least,’ Marlowe went on, ‘I know what Gabriel was doing in Dowgate. Picking you up, I’ll wager.’
‘I haven’t lived with Robyn for years,’ Doll said.
Harvey was on his feet again, still fuming, but trying to keep his distance from Marlowe. ‘I went to Greene’s lodgings to find out what he’d been writing. There was a rumour it was pretty libellous stuff – about me; about all of us, come to that. But somebody had beaten me to it. All his papers had gone.’
And Marlowe knew exactly where they had ended up, on the table of the Queen’s Spymaster in Whitehall. How they had got there remained something of a mystery.
There was a faint wailing sound along the landing. Marlowe looked up to see a tousle-haired blond lad, perhaps ten, yawning and scratching himself.
‘Fortunatus!’ Doll shrieked. ‘Go back to bed. The grown-ups are talking.’
The unaptly named boy yawned again, shrugged and did as he was told.
‘Gabriel,’ Doll Greene snapped at him, ‘make yourself scarce. Master Marlowe and I have things to discuss.’
Harvey opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it and marched down the stairs with as much dignity as he could gather around him, fetching the hapless Hastings a smart one around the side of the head as he passed. To Marlowe’s horror, Doll Greene was leaning forward and patting the bed beside her. As invitations went, it left a lot to be desired. He stayed where he was, with his back pressed firmly against the doorframe.
‘Could you close the door?’ she purred, loosening her nightgown front and showing an altogether different side of her than the shrieking harridan of a few moments ago.
‘I could,’ Marlowe conceded, ‘but I don’t intend to. What is it you want, Mistress Greene?’
She closed the nightgown again. All right, Robert Greene and Gabriel Harvey had fallen for her charms, but she was realist enough to realize it couldn’t happen every time. ‘I’ll be blunt,’ she said. ‘Gabriel was rooting around in Robyn’s things for any plays, poems and other trifles he could … what’s that word you University men use? Purloin. So much less criminal-sounding than steal, don’t you think? He found nothing, of course. But he left everything else there. Clothes, personal possessions, money. I can’t go and get them. Mrs Isam won’t give me the time of day. She likes Gabriel, I think, and that reprobate Simon Forman even more. But you’ve met her, haven’t you, Master Marlowe?’
‘I have,’ he nodded.
‘Well, could you pop back? Pick up whatever the poor old sod left behind, other than his winding sheet? You were always my late husband’s enemy. Will you be his friend now?’
‘I doubt there’ll be much left,’ Marlowe said. ‘Especially money.’
He looked at her, not the most appealing of women; and one with a truly dreadful taste in men. Even so, he heard himself say, ‘I’ll do what I can.’
Ingram Frizer puffed thoughtfully on his clay pipe. There was some dispute about who had brought tobacco from the New World but, whoever it was, Ingram Frizer was very grateful. For those moments in life when nothing is going right, tobacco was the only answer. Oh, and ale of course. And perhaps a hot woman or two.
‘So, where’s he gone?’ He passed the pipe to Nicholas Skeres who squinted sideways at him.
‘Who?’
‘Henslowe. Last time I saw him, he was at the front of the queue, nose to nose with Kit Marlowe outside the Palace of Whitehall.’
‘He was.’ Skeres remembered. He didn’t actually share Frizer’s love of tobacco. It was rather a noxious weed, if he was being honest. But being honest wasn’t really what Nicholas Skeres did, so he puffed away, just to be sociable, trying to forget that his eyes were watering and his throat felt as if it had been brutally skinned.
‘I heard,’ Will Kemp took the pipe from Skeres, ‘he’d discovered a long-lost auntie out on the Essex marshes somewhere. Time for family time, so to speak.’
‘Who?’ Hal Dignam was last in the line; by the time the pipe reached him, it had gone out.
The four of them sat side by side on the top of the wall that marked the edge of Master Sackerson’s pit. The grizzled, ancient animal looked up at them with his piggy eyes and used his long, pink tongue to lick his nose.
‘Wish I could do that,’ Kemp said, trying the same technique. ‘Might add to the repertoire.’
Frizer could do that, but seldom felt the need. ‘I don’t think you boys are taking this very seriously,’ he said, a frown creasing his forehead. ‘We were all there the other night, sticking our necks out and our heads over the parapet for the sake of theatre. And for all his fine words, old Henslowe just melted away. They’ll be watching all of us now, you mark my words.’
‘It was bloody dark,’ Kemp remonstrated with his fellow-actor, ‘and seen one torch-carrying troublemaker, seen ’em all. We’ll be all right. Oh, Henslowe’s a marked man, that’s for sure. Nice of you to dob him in, by the way, Hal, shouting out his name like that.’
‘Who?’ Dignam asked.
‘What about old Kit, though, eh?’ Skeres said. He’d been worrying about it for days. ‘Do you think he was in on it, you know, with the Whitehall nobs?’
Frizer thought for a moment. ‘Well, he’s a University wit, ain’t he?’ He was reasoning aloud. ‘Got more in common with them than us, I suppose.’
‘Yes, but his dad’s a bootmaker back in Canterbury,’ Kemp said. ‘You couldn’t get more one of us if you tried.’
‘Tried what, Will?’ Hal Dignam was trying to relight the pipe. ‘’Ere, do you think bears drink smoke?’
Will Kemp was nearest, so he did the honours, slapping Dignam around the head in time-honoured clown tradition. And it was just the sheerest of luck that he didn’t fall into the Bear Pit.
Kit Marlowe was pleasantly surprised how much time the closing of the theatres had given him. He could go where he wanted, when he wanted, without the twin demons of Sledd and Henslowe, one on each shoulder, scolding him for not attending rehearsals or not delivering a rewrite of Act III. He knew he would soon come to miss it but, for now, it was making his life rather easy. For instance, instead of dashing off to the Rose this forenoon having roused Harvey and his unlovely paramour from bed, he had time to visit John Dee, for some well-needed advice and a chance to talk through the teeming ideas which thronged his head.
Jane Dee opened the door to him with a face like thunder, swiftly overlaid with sun when she saw who it was. Looking left and right, she grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him inside.
‘Expecting someone?’ Marlowe asked, amused.
Jane Dee’s eyes rolled up in exasperation. ‘Since that idiot Simon Forman has been prancing around London in his gowns and hats, scattering frogs hither and yon, we have had nothing but trouble. Friends, even old friends, come and expect the poor doctor to cure every manner of ill, even the Pestilence, as if he would allow that in the house with the children here! But they don’t want to give him time to consult with his books and give them the right remedy, if indeed there is one. No. They want him to light a taper, caper around and, with a burst of stardust, have them cured.’ She closed in to Marlowe so their noses almost touched. ‘They bought a dead woman yesterday.’
Marlowe’s eyes widened politely. He had known John Dee have a very serious go at raising the dead before now, but thought it impolite to interrupt.
‘Stone dead, she was. You didn’t have to be much of a Magus to tell that. I had to leave the doors and windows open the rest of the day. Then, when he can’t do miracles, they shout and rave. The language sometimes!’ She finally took a deep breath and grabbed Marlowe by the shoulders and gave him loud kisses on each cheek. ‘But it isn’t one of them, it’s you and if anyone can bring a smile to the doctor’s face, Kit, you are that person. In you go. He’s in the back room, you know the way.’ And she was gone, with broom before to sweep the dust behind the door. Jane Dee probably did sit down sometimes, even sleep now and again. It was just that no one ever saw her do it.
Marlowe tapped on the door but there was no reply.
Jane, whose ears could detect every small movement that might annoy her husband, called through from the kitchen. ‘Just go in, Kit. He’s hiding.’
Marlowe put his head around the door and saw that the room was empty. It had nothing like the magic of Dee’s old house in Mortlake, with the basilisk hanging from the ceiling on a perch and mirrors catching and holding reflections from years ago or the future, depending on who looked into them. But the faint smell of sulphur was there, overlaid now though it was by Jane’s liberal applications of beeswax on the ancient furniture, made of dark bog oak as old as time and as tough as iron. The books were the same too, leaning drunkenly on a few precarious shelves or piled up on the floor. The fire burned brightly in the wide hearth and a kettle sang on the trivet, alongside a seething cauldron that always looked ready to boil over and yet somehow never did. But of John Dee, there was no sign.
Marlowe was confused. It wasn’t like Jane to not know almost to the inch where her husband might be found. He looked round behind the door but, apart from a hook holding an old and disreputable cloak, there was nothing there. Marlowe pursed his lips and blew a puzzled breath down his nose. He must go and ask Jane.
‘No need to bother Jane,’ a voice said in his left ear and he gave a jump. ‘My word, Kit,’ Dr Dee said, stepping out from behind the door, ‘you’re nervous today. Come and sit by the fire.’
Marlowe was too old a hand to allow his friend to see how much he had been startled. The cloak, he now saw, was not a cloak at all, just Dee, face hidden, standing in the place a cloak might be expected to hang. A turn of the sleeve, a tug on a hem, he could see how it was done. A useful trick; he must try it sometime.
Dee laughed to see the thoughts going over Marlowe’s face. ‘It helps if you know the person you are hiding from,’ he said, answering the question before it was even formed. ‘Some people, and I know you will know the kind I mean, wouldn’t have seen me if I was sitting right there in the chair, as long as I kept still. Others, I could fool by simply standing in a shadow or behind the drape. But for you, I needed something a little more, a little glamour, if I can call it that.’ He sighed and stretched his arms out to the side, making the elbows crack like a matchlock. ‘I’m getting a bit old for clinging to the back of a door, though.’
‘You have lost none of your knack,’ Marlowe said. ‘I would have gone away in another minute.’
‘Jane would have had my hide,’ Dee told him. ‘She worries about me, you know. Needs to know my whereabouts. But I know it is only because she loves me.’ A look of wonder came over his face. ‘I am luckier than I deserve.’
‘We all are,’ Marlowe told him. He had known Dee in sadness and in joy and, by and large, he preferred the joy. ‘I’m here to pick over your brain in the hope that you can help me.’
Dee rubbed his hands together and led the way to where two chairs faced each other in front of the fire. October was being kind to them in London that year, but winter was knocking at the door and there was a chill in the air. The kettle whistling to itself on the hearth reminded Dee of his hostly duties. ‘A cup of my herbal mixture, Kit?’
Marlowe was uncertain. He had drunk Dee’s herbal mixture before.
‘Don’t be afraid, I have completely reconsidered the ingredients and I think you will find it very palatable.’
Marlowe looked askance. ‘Does it still have asafoetida in it?’ he asked, dubiously.
‘Not a grain. Jane hates it as well, though I confess I don’t see why. I have replaced the asafoetida with mint, the rue with rosemary, the bitter fescue with clover and with a few other changes I think you will enjoy it. Keeping with the countryside flavour, it is topped up with mead.’ He stood and wrapped a cloth around his hand to pick up the kettle. ‘Do try it. You’ll like it.’
‘Well, I will try just a small cup,’ Marlowe agreed. It certainly sounded nicer than the original recipe.
‘While I prepare it, tell me your conundrum.’
‘It is several conundra, really, but I will start with the first and main one. As you know, I have been investigating the death of Robert Greene …’
‘Have you found the miscreant yet?’
Marlowe was glad to hear that Dee at least felt that there was a miscreant. It wasn’t a view to which many subscribed. ‘As yet, no. I know who it is not, but that is not much help when the list is so long. But in visiting Cambridge, I happened to meet a boy, bereaved of his brother in what seemed to be a simple swimming accident.’
‘But you think not.’
‘I do think not, but I just don’t seem to be able to put my finger on why. The boy I met, though grieving, seemed to be very lucid and he too had been set upon when his brother was drowned. He remembers being pulled from the water and then pushed down again, repeatedly.’
‘That doesn’t – at first hearing – sound much like the death of Robert Greene,’ Dee observed, crushing some mint at the bottom of two glazed cups.
‘No, perhaps not. But then, just this Sunday morning, to be accurate, one Eunice Brown, one-time nanny to the Cecil family …’
‘Not Noo-Noo?’ Dee looked up from his chopping board.
‘You knew her?’
Dee chuckled. ‘Well, not knew as such. But when Robert was just a little one – a littler one, perhaps I should say – running in his hanging sleeves in the corridors of power, Noo-Noo was never far behind. Mind you, she must have been getting on … I assume, from the context, that she is dead?’
‘Yes. Extremely.’
‘That’s a shame. She seemed a nice woman.’
‘So I believe.’ Marlowe should have known that Dee would know something unexpected. ‘She was found dead in her bed at Hatfield, murdered.’
‘Murdered?’ Dee’s eyes were wide. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to say that.’
‘Really?’
Dee bowed his head modestly. ‘Well, yes, of course I was. But not because I am unusually prescient, just that murder is almost all we ever talk about.’
Marlowe chuckled. ‘Yes, I do see that. The thing about the death of this poor old soul, this good woman, was the violence. Her face was bruised with the marks of many fingers and her throat had been gripped hard at least half a dozen times.’
‘You know as well as I do, Kit,’ Dee said, turning from the fire with two steaming cups, ‘that murdering someone by smothering or strangulation is not a simple matter of holding a person’s nose or throat for a moment or two. It can take about four minutes, as a rough rule of thumb.’
‘Odd you should say that, Doctor,’ Marlowe said, ‘I detected thumb marks on the poor woman’s neck. Is there a way, do you know, of telling one thumb from another?’
Dee laughed, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Kit. Miracles, as you know, take a little longer.’
Marlowe took the cup and sniffed it. To his surprise, it smelled quite pleasant. ‘I do understand that, Doctor,’ he said, ‘but I had never seen so many different bruises to achieve one thing before.’
‘Perhaps the murderer was weak and had to keep changing their grip. As I remember Noo-Noo, she wasn’t strong. Had she put on weight? Become a big woman to subdue?’
Marlowe shook his head and took a deep sip of the herbs. He pointed to the cup. ‘This is very nice,’ he said, his stagecraft only just managing to take the surprise from his voice. ‘She was tiny. Probably more so than when you saw her last, chasing after Master Robyn. And to me, although it was two days later, the bruises looked to be from a man’s hand. A larger woman, perhaps, but I would say a man.’ He stopped for a moment. Betty, the night attendant, was a comfortably built woman. But would she have the stomach for murder? He thought not.
Dee could always follow Marlowe’s racing thoughts, perhaps better than any man alive and he did so now. ‘So, you think that the two murders are linked, because the lad who survived the drowning remembered coming up for the third time and because poor Mistress Brown was smothered by someone without the spirit for it.’
Marlowe was disappointed. ‘Do you think that’s all it was? It seemed to me …’
Dee looked solemn. ‘I have never drowned, speaking personally, and also I have never been smothered to death. But I have spoken to many who were. And the stories are the same. The drowned ones always say their lives flash before them. I admit I have always considered that a cliché, the kind of joke the dead do dearly love to play with us. But I do believe that as the body fights for air, certain pictures impress themselves on the brain, not once, but many times. A stutter of the brain, if you will. So this lad, remembering, sees himself coming up for air more than once, when in fact, he just did it as he surfaced the one and only time.’
‘He seemed so certain.’
‘Yes,’ Dee smiled. ‘They are. And as for poor Noo-Noo, she fought, despite her age and infirmity. Perhaps the person had no stomach for it but, having started, had no recourse but to go on, because he or she would be recognized and surely accused had the woman lived.’
‘Perhaps …’ Marlowe had seen the body. He had spoken to Richard Williams. Dee had done neither. ‘One thing, though, Doctor,’ he said. ‘Richard, the drowned boy’s brother, remembered a person holding him out of the water. He couldn’t describe them, he was almost dead at that point. But he did remember him saying something, over and over.’
‘And that was?’ Despite his easy answers, Dee was intrigued.
‘He said that the voice said – he was sure it was a man – he said: “Have you seen him yet?”’
‘Did he know what that could mean?’ Dee rummaged for a piece of paper and stub of pencil in the recesses of his gown.
‘He couldn’t think. I have wondered since whether perhaps it referred to his brother, dead by this time and in the hands of the current. But I don’t see why it should.’
‘Memory is a tricky thing,’ Dee pointed out. ‘It could be something he had heard hours, if not days, before. Or when he was coming to – I assume they pulled him out of the water insensible?’
‘Yes, I believe they did.’
‘In that case, it is explained, surely.’ Dee drained his cup with a smack of the lips. ‘He heard his rescuers asking if anyone had seen the twin.’ He put his cup down smartly on the hearth and the subject seemed to be closed.
Marlowe was still not convinced. He had been so near to making a link. ‘It’s a shame that we can’t ask Eunice Brown what she heard,’ he said, only half seriously.
Dee’s eyes lit up. ‘But we can!’ he said, jumping up. Then his face fell. ‘We don’t have anything to guide our quest, though, do we? Nothing she had worn or owned. Even touched.’
Marlowe smiled. ‘Yes, we do,’ he said. He put his hand inside his doublet and pulled out a square of silk, a kerchief his mother had sent him as a gift, years ago, which he had always treasured. He unwrapped it and there, sparkling in the firelight, was the angel’s tear.
Dee looked at it dubiously. ‘What is it? It doesn’t look like anything Eunice Brown would own.’
‘She didn’t. The First Finder found it on her forehead. She thinks it was left by an angel, to show that Eunice Brown had gone to Heaven.’
Dee took it up carefully between finger and thumb. ‘That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Even for you, Kit, it would be nice to think we would go to Heaven, escorted there on soft wings. But no, in this case, our First Finder is wrong. This is nothing more or less than a glass bead. Even so, if it was on the dead woman’s skin for a while …’
‘Some hours, I should say. She was cold when they found her.’
‘Then, despite the fact that it has been in other hands, then …’ Dee looked up, eyes sparkling. ‘Shall we try?’
Marlowe doubted that the dead, particularly this dead, who was hopefully in the arms of her Redeemer, as she had always wished, could help, but anything was worth a try. ‘What can I do to help?’
‘Well, you can curb your scepticism, Kit, if you would.’
Marlowe looked wounded.
‘Don’t look at me like that. I know you believe in nothing you can’t see and touch. But the other world is never far away and, with luck, I can bring it here today.’
‘Do we need to wait for midnight or anything like that?’ Marlowe had seen Dee about his business before and a strange and wonderful business it was. But never by daylight.
‘No, no. I have found it works at any time of day, if the spirits are willing. If you could just check to see where Jane is, I will get some things gathered together.’
‘Jane doesn’t approve, then?’
Dee sighed. ‘Sadly, no. But I will prevail, I know. Just put your head around the kitchen door. If she is cooking, we will have at least an hour.’
Marlowe made his way into the flagged kitchen, where Jane Dee held undoubted sway. She had a cook, who spent most of her time sulking in the corner while her mistress turned out pastries as light as air and sweetmeats for which men would sell their soul. Today she was embroiled, almost literally, in the making of a great pie, to feed the entire household. She looked up, brushing a damp frond of hair from her forehead with the back of a sweaty hand.
‘Do you need something, Kit?’ she asked, her natural sweet nature only just managing to mask the testiness beneath.
‘I just wondered if you would like to join us,’ he said, pleasantly. ‘But you look a little—’
‘Busy. Yes.’ Her look said it all. Men!
‘I’ll go and tell the doctor, shall I?’
‘Mmm.’ She was concentrating on her pie.
Marlowe closed the door of Dee’s sanctum behind him firmly. ‘She’s making a pie,’ he reported.
‘That will keep her busy,’ Dee said, happily. ‘It’s almost a religion with her, the Thursday pie.’ He swept a hand over the table in the middle of the room. ‘I have simplified my methods from what you may be used to. I don’t use cockerel’s blood any more, as you can see. I have found a dried mushroom which has almost exactly the same composition. I still use the sulphur, of course.’ He gave a little chuckle at the thought that any conjuring could take place without it.
Marlowe clicked his tongue. The very thought!
‘I shall have to burn a feather in a moment, but Jane won’t smell that in the kitchen. Then I do need to recite an incantation, so I would be grateful if you could hold that book for me. And lastly, put the little bead on that mirror in the centre … yes, just there.’ Dee arranged his table to his liking and then pinched his eyeglasses onto his nose.
In other hands, the summoning would be a farce. But as Dee intoned the words in an arcane tongue – along with the smell of the burning feather and the sulphur, and the glint of the tiny bead, which seemed to draw all the light from the room and concentrate it there, on the mirror – the shade of Eunice Brown was almost palpable in the room. She wasn’t visible, but Marlowe could smell the scent of lavender and old lady rising above that of the burning. There was a sigh which set the candles guttering.
‘Eunice?’ Dee asked. ‘Eunice Brown? Is that you?’
Marlowe knew it was vital to ask the question outright, otherwise a demon could come uninvited. There was no sound, but the air seemed to give its assent. There was a brief gust of warmth, infused again with lavender.
‘She’s here,’ Marlowe whispered and Dee nodded, almost imperceptibly. He knew that the spirits of the devout could be easily scared off.
‘Eunice,’ Dee said gently, ‘we are here to help you. We want to find out who murdered you.’
The air shimmered and the smell of lavender faded. An enormous crash filled their ears but nothing they could see had fallen over. Even so, they could have sworn that the floor vibrated with the shock of it. The two men froze, waiting for Jane to explode through the door, but no one came.
Dee raised his face to the ceiling and whispered, ‘Eunice. Eunice. If you are there, tap once.’
There wasn’t a sound; even the slight sizzling from the burning feather was silent now. Marlowe breathed in and could smell no lavender. The spirit echo that had possibly been Eunice Brown had gone.
After a few moments, Dee dropped his shoulders and sighed. ‘She isn’t here, Kit. But she was, I think?’ He looked eager.
‘She was,’ Marlowe agreed, against his better judgement. He found proof of the afterlife difficult to come to terms with these days; if there was an afterlife, might there not also be a God? He smiled to himself – he must be getting old, seeing both sides of an argument. Being certain was perhaps a young man’s game.
‘I’m sorry, Kit,’ Dee said, tidying up his paraphernalia. ‘I had hoped for more.’
‘Lettys would be happy,’ Marlowe told him.
‘Lettuce?’ Dee had never considered the feelings of vegetables. It was bad enough that little Madinia was beginning to ask why the lambs bleated so piteously when they were passing Smithfield; if vegetables had to be considered too, it would be the end of him.
‘Lettys. The First Finder. She was anxious that Eunice had gone to Heaven.’
‘I don’t think we proved that,’ Dee said, honestly.
‘It would be enough for Lettys,’ Marlowe assured him. He looked down at the scorched table and put Eunice Brown from his mind. There was nothing else he could do for her or Roger Williams or even Robert Greene, for now. But there was one other thing he needed to ask before he went.
‘What else did you want to ask?’ Dee said, flopping back down in his chair.
‘How do you do that?’ Marlowe asked him.
‘What?’ Dee looked beatific.
‘Know what I am going to say?’
‘Practice,’ Dee said, simply. ‘That and listening and remembering. Some day, I will find I have remembered too much and that will be the death of me. But until then, I never forget what has been said – it’s a blessing and a curse.’ His eyes clouded over and Marlowe knew he was remembering his Helene.
Marlowe tried him at his own game. ‘Can you speak to Cecil and get him to lift the closing of the theatres?’ Boldness was the way.
‘I can speak to Cecil,’ Dee said. ‘I can also ask him to lift the closure. But it won’t get the theatres reopened, I fear. Cecil speaks to me because the Queen would wish it. We have had our ups and downs, Gloriana and I, but she is too afraid of what she fears I might do to throw me to the wolves. And so, I am tolerated, no more.’
‘But surely, he would listen to you. Your science …?’
‘Is second to none, of course it is. But for now, no advice counts unless it drips from the oily tongue of Simon Forman.’
‘Forman?’ Marlowe laughed. ‘But they must know him for a charlatan, surely?’
‘A charlatan. A rogue. But, sadly, for the moment, a fashionable charlatan and rogue. Go and see him, but make sure you take a heavy purse. They say he doesn’t speak to his wife unless she pays him. Were I her, I wouldn’t pay, but there’s no accounting for taste. Do you know where to find him?’
Marlowe thought for a moment. ‘Westminster, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. Just get to the west wall of the abbey and then follow your nose – the smell of dead newt is almost unmistakeable.’
Marlowe remembered it – it seemed an age since they had resurrected Robert Greene, however briefly; it would be an experience to meet the magus in his own house. It was a pity that he would have to stay polite – playing with charlatans was something he relished, but with a job to do as important as reopening the theatres, he would need his most honeyed words. He would just need to take care that they didn’t choke him. But first, he had to tell Noo-Noo’s boys some sad news.