Francis Walsingham had haunted the corridors and secret corners of his home for so long, slipping on silent foot from room to room, materializing at the elbow of the gossip and spy so often that it was hard to dismiss his shade. His family were sitting, eyes wide with grief and shock, trying to warm themselves at the thin flames in the enormous grate. His widow, Ursula, was all in black, his daughter too. The clothes had come out of the press so pat, so ready for this day, it was as if they had been expecting it and, in some ways, so they had. But not like this. Not so sudden, so soon. A knife in the ribs from one of his projectioners, turned by an enemy; or a rope around the neck, pulling him down to the earth in his beloved garden, where he walked alone at dusk. But this end, this choking death in his bed, this was not what they had seen for him. Each of them, in the quiet of this house, in the quiet of their hearts, had been mourning him for years, against this day. It seemed as though the whole house wept.
It wasn’t like Christopher Marlowe to sleep in late. He left that to Tom Watson, who caroused almost for a living and had hardly seen a morning hour since he entered man’s estate. For Marlowe, sleep was an optional extra in his life, something to do when nothing else presented itself and yet this morning, he was dead to the world. He didn’t hear the hammering on the door, only stopped when Agnes flung it open, dragged from her early kitchen tasks. He didn’t hear the booted feet on the stairs, the crash as his bedroom door was flung wide. The first thing he knew was being hauled upright in his bed, the grey dawn light outlining a silhouette he knew.
He shook himself free and tweaked his shirt back into place, pushing himself upright against the head of the tester. ‘Nicholas,’ he said, trying to shake the sleep from his eyes. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘Walsingham is dead.’ The words fell like lead in the cold room.
‘What?’ Marlowe had heard full well what Faunt had said and yet somehow it didn’t really make any sense. Three simple words, but for some reason they sounded much like gibberish to him.
Faunt shook him impatiently. ‘Shake off your sleep, Kit,’ he said. ‘Sir Francis is dead. This six hours, dead.’
‘I knew he was unwell, but … dead?’ A thought suddenly struck the poet. ‘Murdered?’
Faunt stepped back, into the faint light from the window. ‘It would depend on who you ask.’
‘I’m asking you.’
‘Then … yes. Murdered.’
‘And if I ask someone else?’ Marlowe needed to have all the information at his disposal, even though he had not often found Faunt to be wrong.
Faunt crossed to the window, where the first light of a new day was creeping over the steeples and the gables. ‘The Papists will tell you it was God – their God, of course – exacting His justice at last. They’ll have the old man uttering curses with his dying breath before Satan’s emissaries dragged him off to Hell.’
Marlowe looked at Walsingham’s right-hand man and raised an eyebrow. ‘It wasn’t like that?’ he asked.
Faunt turned to him, a grim scowl on the tired face. ‘Of course it wasn’t like that,’ he said. ‘Mylles was with him, at the end.’
‘A good man, I believe,’ Marlowe remembered.
‘One of the best.’
‘And the family?’ Marlowe asked. ‘How are they taking it?’
‘Ursula’s a stoic. She’ll do her crying in private but never in front of me. Frances has lost her father as she lost her husband …’
‘Some have sorrow thrust upon them,’ Marlowe murmured.
‘And some have problems thrust upon them,’ Faunt echoed. ‘And that would be us.’
Marlowe lifted his head and squared his shoulders. ‘Us?’ he said. Faunt looked at him levelly. It had always been an uncertain world. With Walsingham gone, it was like staring into an abyss.
‘I always assumed you were us, Kit,’ he said softly. ‘In the breach, within the meaning of the Act, whatever phrase you damned playwrights want to play with.’
‘And the problem of Walsingham’s death?’
Faunt turned back to the window, watching the first draymen of the morning, scratching and coughing their way along the winding lane below. ‘If you’re thinking of the succession to Spymaster, as it were, your guess is as good as mine. The Giffords must be considered, I suppose, that bugger Anthony Bacon. I’m sure Burghley will decide eventually. In the meantime, Marlowe, it’s me. You’ll have to live with that.’
‘Let me put it another way,’ Marlowe smiled. ‘The problem of Walsingham’s murder.’
‘Ah.’ Faunt hauled up the goblet from his doublet. Its silver inlay gleamed in the light from Marlowe’s candle and flashed as Faunt threw it on to the bed. ‘This is your Holy Grail,’ he said. ‘If I’m right, it’s a poisoned chalice. Will you take it up?’
Marlowe hesitated. He had been given impossible tasks by Walsingham before, often via Faunt. But this one made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. He reached forward, lifted the cup and sniffed it. Fortified wine, certainly. Herbs of some kind. But something else; something an old man, ill and careless, might have missed. Walsingham, who had been so careful all his life, may have blinked at last. The cold, grey eyes that missed nothing for so long, just might have missed this; the dark phial in the liquid, the bringer of sleep.
‘Why have you brought this to me?’ he asked.
Faunt looked at him. ‘You have a knack for these things,’ he said. ‘A nose for treachery – and I mean that in the nicest possible way. I want to know what was in that cup and who put it there. But you’ll have to tread softly. There are a few thousand Papists in this great country of ours, not to mention those over the seas, who wanted Walsingham dead. I can hear the bells of joy ringing now, can’t you? In Madrid and Rome and Rheims. The ways of the Lord are strange, Marlowe; we both know that.’
Marlowe chuckled, in spite of the solemnity of the hour. ‘And we both know that the Lord put nothing in the cup, Nicholas. A man did. You want me to tell you who.’
Faunt nodded. ‘And then, I want you to bring him before Her Majesty’s Justices,’ he said, ‘Master Topcliffe will do the rest. It’s astonishing what truths a man will divulge when he’s about to have his fingernails ripped out.’
‘And what lies,’ Marlowe reminded the man.
Faunt ignored him. ‘I must be at Placentia,’ he said, tugging his doublet straight. ‘If Her Majesty finds out about Walsingham’s death before I get there, there’ll be Hell to pay.’
‘Hell, Nicholas?’ Marlowe turned the chased cup in his hand. ‘Do you know, in all the time we’ve known each other, I didn’t have you down for a superstitious man.’
Faunt tapped the side of his nose. ‘For all his cynicism,’ he said, ‘Francis Walsingham was a godly man. A Puritan through and through. I’m going to miss him.’
‘So am I,’ Marlowe suddenly realized. He caught the look on Faunt’s face. ‘But don’t worry, I’m not going to miss his murderer.’
‘You can resolve that?’ Faunt asked. ‘The poison, I mean?’
‘No.’ Marlowe shook this head. ‘But I know a man who can.’
Thomas Sledd was yelling at someone slung by ropes high in the ceiling of the Rose. Thomas Sledd was always yelling these days, or so it sometimes seemed. Only when he was at home with Meg and the new baby could he drop his voice and coo like any suckling dove. But cooing here wouldn’t get a show put on and, as Philip Henslowe told him every day, often several times and with additional jabs to the chest: the show must go on.
‘How many times do I have to remind you, you jobless idiot?’ Sledd asked rhetorically. ‘You don’t work up there without tying your tools to your belt.’ This time it had only been a leather mallet that had dropped unexpectedly at his feet, but even that would have fetched him a nasty one had it collided with the top of his head.
A formless grumble came from above his head.
‘Oh, sorry, my apologies,’ Sledd said, sarcasm dripping from his lips. ‘But when I called you a jobless idiot, I was indeed telling the truth. Get down the ladder now and hand in your paintbrush. Your set-painting days are over, Peake. Painter of the Revels, my arse!’
Again, the grumble.
‘I don’t believe you can actually do that,’ Sledd observed, but stepped back a couple of long strides nonetheless. He cannoned into someone standing in the wings and turned sharply, another reprimand ready.
‘My apologies, Tom.’ Marlowe smiled as his friend swallowed his annoyance. ‘I was in your way. Is everything going well?’
‘I am surrounded by idiots,’ Sledd told him. ‘Incompetents and fools.’
‘So, nothing too different, then,’ Marlowe said, putting an arm across the stage manager’s shoulders. ‘You know if nothing went wrong you would never rest, waiting for the other boot to fall. What this time?’ He cast his eyes up to the roof, where the grumbling was continuing unabated.
‘Some idiot of a scene painter dropped his resting stick thingie. Nearly hit me on the head.’
‘But it missed you, Tom,’ Marlowe said, grinning. ‘Look at that as the good news, not the bad. And Peake is a good scene painter. That portrait he did for the parlour scene in Linkum-Stinkum had a damned sight more life in it than any of the actors, that’s certain. Give him another chance.’
Sledd looked mulish.
‘Go on, Tom. You know you want to. Tell him he can stay if he makes a portrait of Meg and the baby. Think how fine it would look above your fireplace.’ He sketched the scene in the air in front of them with the wave of his arm. ‘An heirloom in the making, if I am any judge.’
‘But he dropped …’
‘Not on purpose, Tom.’ The playwright gave the stage manager a little push. ‘Go on. I’ll wait for you here. I need a word.’
Sledd’s eyes brightened. ‘Have you got those new pages for me?’ he said, turning as he hurried off to catch the artist, who had reached the bottom of the rickety ladder.
‘Hmm. That is rather what I needed a word about …’ Marlowe made a rueful face and waited as Sledd berated Peake some more, just for the look of the thing.
‘Well, that’s him told.’ The artist was making his way back up into the flies. A Painter of the Revels couldn’t afford to cross theatre managers, or the men who ran their stages. ‘Are you telling me that you haven’t got the pages? We need to get the rehearsal started today. It’s bad enough getting Alleyn and Burbage together in one room as it is. If one is ready, the other isn’t. Shaxsper isn’t worth the space he takes up, always wandering around with inky fingers and his head in the clouds. Henslowe has already cut my budget by almost half and this latest thing needs walk-on parts I just can’t afford … Kit, why do you always write for a cast of thousands when the stage isn’t more than ten paces across and my stipend won’t stretch beyond three lads and a dog?’
‘Tom, Tom, calm yourself. Worse things happen at sea.’
‘Yes, and that brings me to that wreck scene you wrote. How can I have a ship sink on stage night after night? The carpentry fees alone …’
‘I’ll look at that for you,’ Marlowe soothed. ‘But, Tom, I have serious news. Sir Francis Walsingham is dead.’
Tom Sledd stopped and goggled at his friend. ‘Sir Francis Walsingham? Sir Francis Walsingham?’
‘The same. As far as I know, the one and only.’
‘But … what happened?’
‘The story goes that he died of apoplexy. A stroke, or so they say,’ Marlowe told him. ‘And why not? He’s had them before. He hasn’t been well for a long while.’
Sledd waited. He could hear a ‘but’.
‘But … Nicholas Faunt thinks …’
‘Ah. Master Faunt. I did wonder whether he might come into this story.’
‘Faunt thinks there may have been some dirty dealing. When the Queen’s Spymaster dies, it can’t be simply death, can it?’
‘Sometimes it can.’ Tom Sledd had seen a lot of death in his short life and, though it was sometimes untimely, it was more often than not simple.
‘My mind is open, Tom,’ Marlowe said. ‘Part of me is tired of the spying, the dodging, the ducking, the suspicion. I feel it’s time I lived a simple life. Writing; perhaps even a little acting, now and again.’
Sledd’s smile became a little fixed. Marlowe wrote like a dark angel, looked like one too, come to think of it, with his flashing eyes and his curls. His voice could charm the birds from the trees, but he acted like the bough they perched upon, whenever he stood on the wooden O. There was something about the leg and the set of his shoulders that made him look as if he had a broom up his backside. But he loved Kit Marlowe like a brother, so he said, ‘That would be wonderful, Kit. Let me know whenever you want to strut your stuff.’
But Marlowe was in full flight. ‘But another part of me, the stronger part, knows that Faunt is right. Sir Francis was old and ill, it’s true, but this death seems wrong, somehow. I won’t rest until I have at least tried to solve the puzzle, if puzzle there proves to be.’
There was a silence. The two were walking through the groundlings’ pit towards the door, Sledd noting automatically the mess the cleaners had missed and making a mental note to bawl someone out, on principle. Then, he couldn’t keep quiet any longer. ‘So … my pages?’
‘Yes.’
Sledd waited again. Whenever Marlowe used one word where a couple of dozen would do better, good news rarely followed.
‘I think I meant to ask … do you have my pages with you?’ He poked the front of Marlowe’s doublet, hoping for the crackle of parchment beneath, but all he got was the whisper of velvet and brocade.
‘Not with me, no.’ Marlowe could have been more evasive, but this was Tom Sledd and, as he knew all his tricks, the effort would be wasted.
‘So … they’re at home, then. Shall I send someone to get them, perhaps?’ Hope was dying in Tom Sledd’s breast.
‘They are not at home, not precisely.’ Marlowe smiled, bleakly.
‘You haven’t written my pages, have you, Kit?’ Tom Sledd had had many disappointments in his life; one more wouldn’t hurt.
‘No. That is to say, I have jotted down a few ideas. But last night …’ How could he explain last night, even to Thomas Sledd, his companion of many a bumpy mile? He couldn’t even begin. ‘I left them with Tom Watson.’
‘Tom Watson?’
‘Why ever not?’ Marlowe was rarely polite either to or about Watson, but it wasn’t for others to point the finger at his house companion. ‘Wykehamist, Oxford scholar, man about several towns. His poetry can make angels weep, when he is on song.’
Sledd stopped in his tracks, unaware of the rotting apple slowly disintegrating under his heel. ‘Indeed, my point exactly. When he is on song. Rather than on some wench he has found in some alehouse. And how often does that happen?’
‘He slept alone last night, I know this to be true.’ Marlowe could spin a lie and leave no trace, but even as he spoke he knew this one would never pass muster.
‘Tom Watson hasn’t slept alone since he was fourteen – at least by his own boasting – and I see no reason to disbelieve him,’ Sledd said. ‘And I doubt last night was any different. And anyway, I heard he’s … what do the authorities call them? “One of the strangers that go not to church”?’ He sighed and clapped the playwright on the back. ‘But I know you must do what you must, Kit. Sir Francis deserves your attention more than we poor mummers.’ He looked up at Marlowe under his lashes, to see if there was even a slight slick of remorse on the man’s face, but there was none. ‘Does Master Watson even know that he has the lines to attend to?’
Marlowe smiled a rueful smile. He knew his Toms, both Sledd and Watson, and knew therefore that something would work itself out, somehow. ‘I left my notes on the kitchen table. Agnes will give them to Tom, when he wakes.’
Tom Sledd barked a laugh that had no humour in it. ‘Does he know Will Shaxsper will write them if he doesn’t?’ he asked.
Marlowe stepped back in admiration but, unlike the stage manager, did not end up with a boot smeared with discarded fruit. ‘Thomas Sledd,’ he said, laughing. ‘We will make a Machiavel of you yet! Send to Norton Folgate with that news and I can guarantee you will have your pages before nightfall. Now, I really must be away. For one thing, that urchin you employ will have sold my horse if I don’t get back to him soon. And for another, I need to get to Dr Dee in Winchester and it is a good ride away yet.’
Tom Sledd dearly loved magic. He tried sleight of hand for himself whenever he got a moment alone, but the flights of butterflies and birds of which he dreamed always turned into damp paper in his hands. ‘Dr Dee? Why there?’
‘If there is a puzzle to be solved, there is no better place to begin, surely? And there is a puzzle, Tom. A puzzle I owe it to Sir Francis to solve. So,’ he clapped the man on the back, ‘I’m off. Send your message to Tom Watson and I’ll be back before first night.’ He rummaged in his purse and came out with a guinea between his finger and thumb. ‘Don’t tell Henslowe, but take this. Buy yourself a couple of walking gentlemen; people my stage a little.’
Sledd gaped but didn’t say no.
As Marlowe slid through the wicket in the great door of the Rose, he heard the theatre owner’s Stepney vowels from above.
‘Don’t tell Henslowe what? Tom? Tom! Don’t tell Henslowe what?’
Marlowe smiled and pulled the door gently closed. It was good to think that, whatever else was ill with the world, there would always be Sledd and Henslowe.