The three friends sat side by side on a bench in the Swan in Bridge Street that night and, despite the ale in front of each one, no one felt too much like celebrating. Henry Bromerick in particular had difficulty swallowing, his lips purple and swollen, his teeth scraping on each other as he tried to sip his ale. The corner of one eye was red where the cat-tip had caught it and the bruise spread down his cheek in one direction and in the other disappeared into his hair. The others’ wounds were not so easy to spot, but anyone could see from the way that they sat, stiff and unmoving, that they were in great pain, hurting under the grey fustian.
‘Come along now, gents.’ The innkeeper was clearing away the debris of earlier revellers. ‘Shouldn’t you lads be on top of the world tonight?’ He glanced at Bromerick and considered qualifying his remark, but thought better of it. ‘Masters of Rhetoric, or whatever it is you do?’
Jack Wheeler had been keeper of the Swan since before these boys were born. He had seen generations of scholars come and go since the Queen was newly-crowned. In fact, as he never tired of telling everybody, he’d had the honour to present Her Majesty with a cup of his finest local brew on the occasion of her one and only visit to the town. He’d noted the Queen smiling at him but was too busy bowing low to be aware of her passing the cup to the Earl of Leicester who sniffed it and poured away its contents. Wheeler was still waiting for the letter with the lion and dragon seal which would allow him to write ‘By Appointment’ on his shingle. ‘By disappointment’ would have been more apt.
‘We got caught last night, Jack,’ Tom Colwell told him, in an admission of defeat. ‘Felt a taste of the cat.’
‘Not unlike your very own brew, Master Wheeler.’ Kit Marlowe swept in from nowhere, back in the roisterer’s doublet, remembering not to pat anybody on the back. ‘I’ll have a brandy. The same for my friends and . . .’ he looked around him, frowning. ‘Still no Ralph? Where is the toad’s harslet?’
‘Who?’ Matt Parker surfaced from under the smothering golden curls of the girl who he was, very carefully, balancing on his lap.
‘Whingside.’ Bromerick gave it his best shot, but his lips felt like blanc mange – very painful blanc mange – and he gave up.
Marlowe smiled and ruffled his hair before hauling up a footstool to sit on. ‘What Dominus Bromerick is trying to say is
Whitingside
; Ralph by Christian name. He’s not here.’
‘He wasn’t here last night either,’ Parker remembered, smiling at the girl.
The rest of the company looked at him. Had this man just received a degree from the finest university in the world, or had he not?
‘That’s King’s men for you,’ Colwell grunted. ‘He’ll have been carousing at the Cardinal’s Cap last night. Meg –’ he half-turned as best he could to the girl perched on Parker’s lap – ‘doesn’t your sister work there?’
‘She does,’ Meg told him. ‘Who’re you looking for?’
‘Ralph Whitingside,’ Marlowe said.
‘That tall bloke?’ Meg asked, unconcerned. ‘The one with the six pairs of hands?’
Marlowe smiled. ‘If you say so.’
‘He was in here last night. He . . .’ She looked up and caught the eye of Jack Wheeler. He was all for extras on the bill, but he doubted Parker could afford them. She jumped up and gave the table an ineffectual wipe with her apron. ‘I must go,’ she said, pecking Parker on the cheek. ‘His master’s voice.’
‘Last night?’ Marlowe reached out and pulled her back by the arm. ‘When?’
‘I don’t know for sure. One night’s very much like another in this business, Master Marlowe. Latish. All I know about time is that it passes.’
‘It surely does,’ Marlowe agreed, letting the girl go.
‘What’s the matter, Kit?’ Colwell asked. ‘You’ve got a faraway look on your face.’
Marlowe snapped out of it. ‘Probably nothing,’ he said. ‘But as far as Ralph Whitingside knew we were all going to graduate today. I just thought he’d be here. It’s . . . ah, that’s my girl!’ Meg had brought their drinks. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said and raised his brandy. ‘Here’s to Doctor Gabriel Harvey.’ Nobody drank. ‘May he roast in Hell!’
‘Gabriel Harvey!’ they roared and downed their drinks in one. Except Henry Bromerick, who slopped most of his over his cheek.
Meg Hawley made her way along Jesus Lane as another dawn crept over the graves of the Grey Friars. Her step was a little unsteady and her cloak dragged through the Cambridge dust as she turned the corner. She half-expected to see her sister crossing the low fields by the river, but she wasn’t there. She had probably got off early and was already snoring in her truckle bed at the farm, grateful to be off her feet after a long night.
There was
someone
there, though, leaning against the red brick of Jesus Gate. He wore his doublet open and his collar was pale against the darker skin. This wasn’t unusual. A client. Meg opened her cloak a little. All right, it was early morning and she was tired, but a groat was a groat at any time of the day or night and while she still had her looks and her youth she wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity. She had lived on the edge of this town all her life. She knew all its alleyways and dark entries like the back of her hand. Lots of places to accommodate a gentleman . . . She stopped short.
‘Oh, it’s you, Master Marlowe,’ she said, wondering again why she always called him that. The others were Matt, Tom and Henry. The poor sizars who couldn’t afford her often, or the gentlemen who’d toss her a shilling; she called them all by their first name. But Marlowe was always different. There was something dangerous, something cold, something indefinable about Marlowe, and she’d no sooner call him Christopher than fly to the moon and back, still less Kit as his friends called him.
Her heart was pounding. The first time she had seen Marlowe, three years ago now, when he came to the town, she was drawn to him and repelled at once. He was handsome, but not in an approachable way, like the boys he was with at Corpus Christi. She and he were of an age, she thought, give or take. She always felt much older than the boys in the Swan and those in the dark alleys, who fumbled and sweated and called her pet names. But Marlowe made her feel like a child; there was something timeless about him, something old looked out of his eyes. He was always friendly, always polite and she was, if not willing, then ready to take his money. Yet . . . nothing. Perhaps this was it. Perhaps this morning with the golden glow of mist was the time, and this the place.
He reached out his hand and, after only a momentary pause, she slid into the crook of his arm, ignoring the fluttering in her stomach. He held her cheek and pulled her lips close to his. She opened them, waiting, staring into those smouldering dark eyes.
‘Tell me,’ he whispered, ‘about Ralph Whitingside.’
She blinked. Frowned. The moment had gone, as they stood there in the red-brick shadow of Jesus College and the morning climbed in the east. Meg pulled away.
‘I’ve got to get home,’ she muttered. ‘My dad’ll take his belt to me.’
But he reached out again and held her tight with a powerful right hand. ‘You saw him the night before last,’ he said, taking account of the morning which was now here.
‘What of it?’ She was frightened now, staring again into those hypnotic eyes. ‘Let me go. You’re hurting me.’ She tried to wriggle free, but he held on tighter, squeezing her arm just above the elbow.
‘Ralph,’ he said softly. ‘Tell me about Ralph.’
She met his gaze for a few seconds more, before squeezing her eyelids shut. A single tear showed fat and wet along her lashes before rolling down her cheek. She spoke so low he had to lean in to hear what she said. ‘I love Ralph,’ she sighed.
He pulled back and let her go in surprise. ‘You . . . love him?’ he asked. Everyone knew that Ralph Whitingside would go off into the bushes with anything that flashed an ankle at him, and in some cases he hadn’t even needed that encouragement. Add to that the fact that Meg was well known throughout Corpus Christi and beyond as a willing girl, if the price was right, and love seemed an odd word to be hearing.
‘Yes,’ she said, rubbing at her cheek to dry her tears and looking up defiantly. ‘As soon as I saw him, I loved him. And he loved me the same. It’s just that, well, we both know there’s no future in it. He’s a gentleman, I’ve got my intended.’
Marlowe patted her arm, almost absent-mindedly. Old Ralph, eh, and a tavern girl. Could this explain where he was, why he was hiding? He looked at her and realized she was waiting for a response, but everything that was going through his mind wasn’t really for her ears. ‘Hmm, yes. Lovely story. Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight? I expect you and your intended, it was like that with him, I suppose?’
‘Not really.’ Meg’s face fell a little. ‘I’ve known Harry all my life. He lives on the farm with us all. But Ralph . . .’
He took her hand, gently. ‘I’ve known Ralph Whitingside since we were boys,’ he told her. He turned her hand over, rubbing his fingertips gently over the calloused palm. ‘We are kindred spirits, you and I, Meg of the golden hair, Meg of the Swan. You got these hands from the pots, didn’t you? Hauling casks when you still wore hanging-sleeves. Me too. I was a pot boy at the Star back home in Canterbury. I used to pass Ralph’s house on my way to work there and we’d talk. He didn’t mind I was a pot boy.’ He laughed and dropped her hand. ‘And I didn’t mind he was a gentleman’s son.’
She smiled fondly. ‘Ralph gets on with everyone,’ she said.
Marlowe nodded. ‘He saved my life once, you know. In the river, back home.’ He had that faraway look in his eyes again, the one that Colwell knew and he shook himself free of the memory; the dreadful sound of the weir crashing in his ears, the pain in his filling lungs, the grip of the slimy weed round his legs. ‘We should have graduated yesterday, the boys and I,’ Marlowe said. He didn’t have to name them. Kit Marlowe and his boys were famous in every ale house in the city. ‘We’d arranged to meet Ralph on Tuesday, but he didn’t turn up. He didn’t turn up last night either.’ He looked at her closely, narrowing his eyes. ‘Do you know why?’
‘No.’ She felt more at ease with him now, now that she knew that Master Marlowe was a pot boy. She’d only seen the scholar, the flash drinker in his doublet and colleyweston cloak, the glib talker, the gambler who always won. She hadn’t known he’d once done the same job that she now did, alone in the darkness of an inn’s vault, dragging weights that were too heavy, straining her arms until they dislocated; her left shoulder would always hang lower than her right. ‘No, he missed you,’ she told him. ‘Come in wild-looking, breath in his fist. Said he had to find you. You in particular, Master Marlowe.’
‘Did he say why?’
She shook her head. ‘I gave him a drink,’ she said, ‘and we . . . went outside.’
Marlowe nodded and flicked his hand at her. He had no need of detail. There was more to this than a fumble with a barmaid. ‘And then?’
‘He went home, I suppose, said he wasn’t feeling too well,’ she said. ‘He’ll be back in college. You’ll find him there.’
‘Yes,’ Marlowe said. ‘Yes, I suppose I will.’ And he moved away.
‘Kit,’ she said suddenly, her voice sounding too loud as she spoke his name for the first time in three years.
He half turned. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘if I hurt you.’ And he was gone, striding along Jesus Lane in the morning.
TWO
Kit Marlowe didn’t allow things like hangovers to rule his mornings. While the others lay in thein the old storehouse converted years ago for the Parker scholars in perpetuity – on their stomachs, to save their sore backs – groaning quietly to themselves, he was back in his college grey, breakfasting and planning the rest of the day. He sat on the edge of a bench, at the end of a table in the buttery, nibbling thoughtfully on a heel of bread, and toying with a mug of small beer. Several times he was spoken to, but since he gave no reply, and in fact didn’t even seem to hear the speaker, soon he was alone in a little circle of silence. Even the echo of the cavernous room seemed to stop dead at the invisible barrier around him.
‘Master Marlowe?’ A boy of about eleven stood in front of him, holding out a piece of paper.
‘Leave him alone, lad,’ one of the scholars called. ‘Machiavel is deaf today. Come and talk to us instead.’
Everyone at the table guffawed and pushed each other, pointing and grinning. Some of them weren’t much older than the boy, but they were pretending to be men of the world.
The child turned sternly to the table of louts and raised a treble voice to be heard. ‘I have a message for Master Marlowe,’ he said, firmly. ‘I was told to deliver it to no other.’ He set his mouth firmly and stood like an ox in the furrow.
The boys at the adjoining table were starting to get up and move towards the lad when suddenly Marlowe came to life. He put down his crust of bread and looked up, identifying the ringleader immediately. ‘Master Moorcock,’ he said, affably. ‘I would be pleased if you and your rabble would take your squawks elsewhere. I would like to read my message in peace.’ He smiled pleasantly at the boy. ‘Is there an answer required, do you know?’
‘I believe so, Master Marlowe,’ the boy replied, with much nodding of the head, most of it caused by the knowledge that he would not now have to return to his lodgings without his hose, black and blue from the buffeting of the Corpus Christi scholars. The stallholders in Petty Cury were used to sights like that.
‘Then trot along to the Bursar’s lodgings, there’s a good lad and get me some ink and a quill. Unless you can remember it, perhaps, if I tell you what it is.’
‘I could try and remember, Master Marlowe,’ the boy said, standing proudly, and trying to look thoroughly reliable in every respect.
Marlowe unfolded the paper and read, as best he could, the crabbed writing. He looked up at the boy. ‘This writing is appalling. Who is it from?’
‘Master Tobin, the assistant organist of King’s College,’ the lad said. ‘He said it was really important.’