Gabriel Harvey occasionally carried a pomander with him as he strode through Cambridge. It was not strictly necessary around the colleges, but it was around the colleges he normally strode, attracting as much attention as he could. He hobnobbed that Wednesday afternoon with a couple of his old colleagues from Pembroke Hall and was just cutting through Trinity Street when he heard his name, hissed and secret.
‘Dr Harvey!’
He spun to allow his robes to billow wide and took a vicious sniff of the pomander.
‘I am he,’ he said.
‘Robert Greene, Doctor,’ the man said.
Nothing. Harvey continued walking.
‘Dr Harvey.’ Greene scrabbled alongside him, trying to keep up with the man’s great strides. ‘Don’t you remember? We spoke the other day. Of Kit Marlowe.’
Suddenly Harvey was all ears. He stood still and looked the man in the face. He wore no college robes, but a roisterer’s jerkin and Spanish ruff. His hair was the colour of overcooked carrots and the afternoon sun bounced off the brilliant in his left ear. Harvey’s eyes narrowed. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘You told me he read Machiavelli, which I knew. That he paid his buttery bills with the proceeds of tavern gambling, at which I had guessed. That he translates Ovid in the most obscene way possible – all right, I didn’t know that, but I wasn’t too surprised. What new libel have you come up with?’
Greene was hurt. ‘Forgive me, Dr Harvey,’ he said. ‘I was under the impression that any of those offences would cost Master Marlowe his degree.’
‘Remind me, sir,’ Harvey snapped. ‘Are you of this university?’
‘I am, sir,’ Greene told him, standing taller. ‘A graduate of St John’s.’
Harvey snorted. ‘Then who are you to tell me what constitutes a sending down?’ And he spun on his heel.
‘There is one crime,’ Greene called out, ‘for which a man can be hanged in this great country of ours.’
Harvey stopped, the pomander halfway to his nose. He turned slowly. ‘Name it,’ he said.
Greene closed to him. ‘The crime of Sodom,’ he said.
Harvey’s eyes widened and he positively swayed for a moment. There were over a hundred crimes for which a man could be hanged, but somehow, he knew the way Greene’s wind was blowing. He grabbed the man’s sleeve and pulled him around a corner, checking the lane north and south.
‘Marlowe?’ he muttered.
Greene nodded.
‘And who?’
It was Greene’s turn to check the street. ‘Ralph Whitingside, late, I understand, of King’s College.’
Harvey let go of the man’s sleeve and brushed the cheap velvet back into place. ‘I may have been hasty,’ he said. ‘What else do you understand, Dominus Greene?’
‘Marlowe and Whitingside were friends, back in Canterbury. Went to the King’s School. Played together at that tricky age when boys become men. I’m sure I don’t have to paint you a portrait, Dr Harvey.’
‘There has to be evidence,’ Harvey murmured, his mind racing. ‘Hard fact.’
‘Dig in the Potter’s Field,’ Greene shrugged.
Harvey frowned. ‘Why there?’
‘Isn’t that where they buried the late Whitingside?’
‘How would that help?’
Greene sighed. How could a man with Harvey’s academic credentials be so dim? ‘Marlowe put him there,’ he explained.
‘What? Killed him, you mean?’
Greene nodded. He barely knew Harvey at all, but he knew the man’s reputation. He wasn’t easily rattled, but the great man seemed speechless now.
‘Why?’ was all he could manage.
Greene became positively oily as he outlined the possibilities. ‘A lover’s tiff?’ he suggested. ‘A third party, as it were?’ It didn’t look as if Harvey was buying any of this so Greene tried harder. ‘I understand that Dominus Whitingside tied his points in both directions, if you get my drift.’
Harvey did. ‘Like Caesar,’ he remembered. ‘Every woman’s man and every man’s woman.’
Greene smiled. His work was done. But he hadn’t quite reeled Harvey in yet. ‘But Marlowe found him,’ the Fellow reasoned. ‘He was First Finder. At the inquest – I was there.’
Greene shook his head, chuckling. ‘The oldest ploy in the book, Dr Harvey,’ he said. ‘Perhaps he had a fit of conscience and the night terrors took him. Or there again, if he made enough song and dance about it, looked a bit hangdog, sobbed a bit – you know, manly stuff – who’d have suspected dear old Kit Marlowe?’
He whispered unnervingly in Harvey’s ear. ‘You and I, Doctor, if we wanted to see a friend in another college, would catch him in the street or write the necessary letter for admission at an appointed hour. We would not climb over walls and rooftops and sneak into a man’s bedroom in the dead of night. It screams guilt.’
‘Yes.’ Harvey clicked his fingers. ‘Put like that, it does. It does.’
Greene stepped back, his voice louder, confident. ‘May I leave it in your capable hands then, Doctor?’ he asked.
Harvey hesitated, then shook Greene’s hands. ‘Count on it,’ he said.
‘May I offer you gentlemen a drink?’
Such a line was music to the ears of the two Parker scholars slouching in a murky corner of the Brazen George that night. Proctors Lomas and Darryl had fallen yet again for the live-piglet-in-the-cloisters routine while Colwell and Parker had slipped out of the side gate and across the churchyard. God knew where Kit was. Like all of them, he had been hit hard by the death of Henry Bromerick, but intensity was Kit Marlowe’s middle name and he was probably off on some wild goose chase of his own.
‘Er . . . thank you,’ Parker said. ‘A pint of ale, please.’
The stranger looked at Colwell.
‘The same,’ said Tom.
Men like this didn’t drift into Cambridge inns every night of the week. He wore a doublet and colleyweston cloak of deep black and his gloves were of velvet with gold thread. He placed his plumed hat on the table. Even before he’d done this, half a dozen serving wenches as well as the landlord were at his side, grovelling, curtseying, offering to do his bidding. He placed his order, having the same ale for himself and smiled at the pretty girl still hovering at his elbow.
She curtseyed, smiling. ‘Will there be anything else, sir?’ she asked.
‘Lettice!’ the landlord cut in, cuffing the girl around the ear. ‘Don’t be bothering the gentleman with all that. He’s not interested in the likes of you.’
‘On the contrary,’ the gentleman said. ‘Lettice, is it?’ He beckoned her forward and motioned the landlord away. She stuck her tongue out at the man as he scuttled around the corner, roaring orders to his minions. ‘What do you make,’ the stranger asked, ‘entertaining a gentleman?’
Lettice blushed. For all she did entertain gentlemen, she wasn’t usually asked outright so early in the evening and in the hearing of scholars. ‘Two pennies, sir,’ she said. ‘That’s for the beast with two backs. One penny for anything less.’
The stranger smiled, reaching for his purse. ‘There,’ he said. ‘There’s a month’s wages so that you don’t have to do anything with beasts.’ Her eyes widened as she saw and felt the gold in her hand.
‘Thank you, sir.’ Her voice was barely audible and she dashed around the corner before biting the coin, just to be sure. She’d hate to offend such a kind gentleman.
The kind gentleman sipped the ale. ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Not bad. And in a way why I’m here.’ He held out a hand. ‘Francis Hall,’ he said.
‘Tom Colwell,’ Colwell said. ‘This is Matthew Parker.’
‘Matthew Parker,’ Hall said, lingering in his handshake for a moment. ‘That name’s familiar.’
‘My grandfather, sir,’ Parker said. ‘Archbishop of Canterbury, not so long ago.’ It was the lad’s fate to go through this ritual. He’d probably have to do it for the rest of his life.
‘Of course, of course. A fine man. Endowed your college richly, I believe.’
‘Our . . . ?’ Colwell did his best to look inscrutable.
Hall smiled. ‘Come, gentlemen. Hide it though you might, I know the badge of the pelican and lilies. Corpus Christi College. Unique among the halls of the university, it was founded in 1350 by the Guild of Corpus Christi in response to the devastation of the Great Pestilence . . .’
‘You seem very well informed,’ Colwell said, drawing back. ‘Do you mind telling us what brings you to Cambridge?’
The stranger closed to the scholars. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said. ‘On one condition – that you tell me how you got out of college tonight.’
The Parker scholars looked at each other. What was this? Some new ploy by Norgate? A ruse by that bastard Harvey?
‘Was it the fire-in-the-library ploy?’ Hall asked, wide-eyed.
Nothing.
‘The hue-and-cry routine?’
Nothing.
‘Not the leper-at-the-gate stuff?’
Parker and Colwell looked at each other again and then burst out laughing. ‘It was the piglet-in-the-cloister,’ Parker confessed. And all three of them roared.
‘They never learn, do they?’ Hall chuckled. ‘Let me explain, gentlemen. More years ago than I care to remember, I was sitting more or less where you are.’ He looked around him. ‘The place was smaller then. Young Lettice over there wasn’t even a gleam in her father’s eye. I was at King’s.’
‘Oh, bad luck,’ Parker blurted out. And all three roared again.
‘Now it’s your turn,’ Colwell said, suddenly serious. ‘Your reason for being in Cambridge. Not to walk down memory lane, surely?’
‘Ah, no,’ Hall said with a smile. ‘And yet the memories do come flooding back. I remember one bitterly cold winter . . .’ He saw the steel in Colwell’s eye and changed tack. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Do you know the name Walter Ralegh?’
The scholars didn’t.
‘Well, he is a West Country gentleman, highly thought of at Court. He’s Her Majesty’s Controller of Wines and he’s passing through Cambridge on Friday as part of a royal commission.’ He leaned forward, tapping his tankard. ‘Hence my sampling of the local brew. I’ve been sent on ahead to plough the furrow, as it were.’ He sat back upright. ‘And it’s not at all bad. Walter will be pleased.’
He motioned the landlord over for a second round. ‘Now, gentlemen.’ He smiled broadly. ‘Have either of you heard of a scholar called Christopher Marlowe?’
TEN
The evening was darkling into night as Marlowe bounced up his stair to the Parker scholars’ rooms. The Discourses had gone well, he had enjoyed his dinner in College, and he now looked forward to a few hours of quiet reflection on his own, as he had just seen Parker and Colwell release a piglet in preparation for an evening at the Brazen George.
He wriggled the key into the reluctant lock and was just beginning to lose his temper with it when he realized it was already open. He would have some words to say to Colwell and Parker when he saw them next; no doubt, having taken delivery of the piglet, all other thoughts left their heads. He just hoped the piglet hadn’t been in the room too long. He pushed the door open and went in, throwing his cap in the general direction of the settle in the dark and shrugging off his gown. He threw himself on to his bed and laced his fingers behind his head. He loved people and people watching. A sonnet was forming in his head as he lay there, based on the turn of a pretty neck he had been admiring over dinner. He tried a few lines, declaimed to the dark.
‘Come live with me and be my love;
And we will all the pleasures prove . . .’
‘Nice, Dominus Marlowe. Very nicely put, although I think perhaps that second line needs work – it is an eye rhyme, after all. Ovid wouldn’t approve.’
The voice, quietly coming from a dark corner of the room, brought Marlowe to his feet in a second and over to the window in two more, as he tugged the curtain aside to bring the twilight’s faint glow into the room. There was a candle stub on the window sill and with trembling fingers he manipulated the tinderbox to give more light.
The owner of the voice sat in silence while he did this; there was no movement, no threat of violence, no hiss of steel being drawn from a sheath. Marlowe’s recent brush with John Dee had left him understandably a little more nervous than was his usual nature, but even so his hand only trembled a little as he turned to see who had spoken.
‘Professor Johns?’ He was amazed to see his tutor sitting there. But more amazing still was the state of the room. Clothes were strewn everywhere, papers lay in drifts over the scholars’ beds. The ashes of the last fire of spring had been raked from the grate and had mixed with the rushes on the floor to give, with the careless addition of some stale small beer, an unlovely mat of grey slurry in front of the fire.
‘Hello, Dominus Marlowe. I see you are surprised to see me,’ the Fellow said, smiling. ‘I, on the other hand, am surprised to see how you live.’ His fastidious fingers picked up a pad of soggy paper and let it drop with a small thunk.
‘I am also surprised, Michael,’ Marlowe said. ‘I would never say we were tidy, in fact the bedders have complained often, especially about poor Bromerick’s personal habits, but we don’t live like
this
.’ He looked around, helplessly. ‘I don’t know where to start.’ He picked up some papers and tidied them into a pile, but then had nowhere to put them, as the table was smeared with the same grey goo that lay in front of the grate.
Johns took pity on him. ‘I admit, Dominus,’ he said, ‘that I had come to speak to you about your lamentable attendance at my lectures lately, as well as those of my colleagues. I felt guilty enough about letting myself in and when I saw the state of the room I concluded that you probably have enough troubles as it is.’
Marlowe looked around, still disbelieving. ‘Who could have done this?’ he asked. ‘We hadn’t even packed poor Henry’s things away to give to his parents when they get here, if they come. What will they think when they see his clothes covered in ashes and beer like this?’ He picked over a pile of stockings and shirts. ‘I can’t even tell which are his. To make things worse, some of these things are Ralph’s.’