‘He sang fairly,’ Goad suddenly remembered, ‘had a fine tenor voice when he joined us, from the King’s School, Canterbury. Er . . . you’d have to ask Richard Thirling, my choirmaster, for more.’
Winterton pursed his lips. He’d never heard of a man killed for his voice before. This whole thing was an irrelevance. It was mid-afternoon before the procedure came to an end. The coroner outlined the evidence for the benefit of the jury and asked them if they needed to retire. They didn’t.
‘Your task,’ Winterton told them in time-honoured fashion, ‘is to decide how, when, where and by what means the deceased came to his death.’ He paused, secretly enjoying, as he always did, his moment in God’s light. ‘But if you’ll take my advice, you will find that, in a moment of madness, Ralph Whitingside took his own life.’
The murmurs in the hall grew to a mutinous rumble. There was nothing in anything anyone had heard to lead to such a conclusion. The Parker scholars looked at Winterton, at each other. They hadn’t known Whitingside like Marlowe had, such was the age gap among former schoolboys. But Kit didn’t believe it. And if Kit didn’t believe it, it wasn’t so. There was so much shouting that the jury’s foreman could barely agree with the coroner that that was, indeed, the verdict of them all.
Winterton rammed his staff down for silence and the usher proclaimed, with all solemnity, that the business of the court was over. He commended Ralph Whitingside’s lost soul to God and called for three cheers for Her Majesty. Everybody responded lustily. Everybody except Christopher Marlowe.
‘Machiavel,’ Winterton called to him as the crowd shuffled out into the sunlight of King’s quadrangle.
Marlowe turned to him. ‘Sir?’
The coroner stepped down from the dais, slowly passing his staff and chain of office to his clerks. Now, he was stripped of his role and stood toe to toe with Marlowe, man to man.
‘You don’t approve of the Court’s findings?’ he asked.
‘You were wrong,’ Marlowe told him.
‘The Court was wrong,’ Winterton said.
Marlowe half turned, as if to leave. ‘You are Sir Edward Winterton,’ he said softly. ‘A Queen’s Coroner, knight of the shire. You own half of Cambridgeshire –’ he pointed to where the jury had sat – ‘and half those men, too, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Winterton started. ‘You insolent young puppy,’ he snarled. ‘Do you accuse me of jury tampering?’
Marlowe looked at him. ‘They are serving men, tapsters, petty bookkeepers and Bible readers. If you told them the moon was made of cheese, they’d believe it. They’d walk into the fire for people like you. It’s the way of it and it always has been. But it still doesn’t make it right.’
‘And what of you, Master Machiavel?’ Winterton asked, calmer now. ‘Who will you walk into the fire for?’
Marlowe smiled. ‘When I know that, Master Coroner,’ he said, tapping the man lightly on his fur-edged robe, ‘I shall be sure to let you know.’
FOUR
There is no good time to bury a man of just twenty-two summers, but that night, in its moonless dark, was as good as any other. The lingering warmth of the summer day had gone, but the dew had not yet come as the flickering lights of the dark lanterns began to gather in the lee of the wrong side of the churchyard wall. Whispered voices greeted each other as Ralph Whitingside’s friends came together to say goodbye.
The gravedigger’s cleared throat sounded as loud as a trumpet blast in the sibilant near silence. Then, he spoke, in the normal voice of one to whom death and decay is a normal stock in trade. ‘I’ll just leave you gentlemen to your business, then.’
‘Thank you, my man.’ Dr Steane, also no stranger to gravesides, was dismissive.
‘I’ll have my payment before I go,’ the man said, not unkindly, but merely speaking as someone who had often had trouble, after his necessary deed was done, in extracting the coins from the suddenly parsimonious bereaved. There was too much work in digging the body back up, and what other recourse did a man in his line of work who had not been paid have?
Marlowe’s voice sounded, low and respectful to Whitingside, a reminder to the others. ‘Thank you for your work, Master Harkness. Here is your fee, and a little for a drink to warm you tonight.’
The man mumbled his thanks. It wasn’t many men who would bother to find out his name, to treat him like a human being. His was not a trade that brought him many friends; in a crowded churchyard, he was often digging among the bones of the not long dead, and this grave had been no different. In the unconsecrated ground on the wrong side of the churchyard wall, reserved for suicides and babies who died unbaptised or perhaps even before they breathed, space was short and the graves unmarked. Only the unevenness of the ground bore silent testimony to their number, the Granta dead. The gravedigger was glad of the dark. That way, the mourners wouldn’t see the little flecks of bone in the mound of earth off to one side. He’d found a skull once, whole and grinning; even he had needed his extra drink that night. He touched his cap to Marlowe and melted away. By morning, the grave would be level again and after a few weeks of summer growing, the weeds would have masked the place where Ralph Whitingside lay, one among many.
Steane looked around at the knot of mourners, each face lit dimly from below by their lanterns. No one had come from King’s apart from him, no friends, no Fellows, no Provost. Pitching his voice low now that the gravedigger had gone, he said, ‘Thank you for coming, gentlemen. I am only sorry that this service has to take place in these circumstances.’
Marlowe spoke for them all. ‘Thank you for offering to conduct it for us, Dr Steane. It’s not every churchman . . .’
Steane held up a hand. ‘Think nothing of it, Dominus Marlowe,’ he said. ‘Ralph Whitingside was a devout member of the choir of King’s College and I think I owe him this much.’
‘Or any man who is not a suicide,’ said Henry Bromerick bitterly. ‘This should be happening in the light of day, with a proper ceremony.’ He stifled a sob.
‘This should not be happening at all,’ Marlowe corrected him. ‘But as it is, shall we continue, Dr Steane?’ He glanced over his shoulder into the dark under the trees. ‘Some of us need to get to our beds. It will get chilly soon, towards dawn.’
Steane nodded and bowed his head, waiting a while as the others adopted their chosen attitude of prayer. By an unspoken common consent, they had all put out their lanterns and so Steane’s voice spoke from total darkness. ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.’ The familiar words rolled out and brought some comfort to the friends gathered around the grave. ‘The Lord be with you.’
‘And with thy spirit.’ The words echoed off the wall and trees, giving the impression of other mourners grouped behind in the dark. Tom Colwell pressed closer to the others; he was at the back of the group and felt chill mortality laying a hand on his shoulder.
‘Let us pray.’ Steane didn’t need to see the prayer book to say the words. He had been saying them now for thirty years and more and sometimes hardly heard himself speaking them. The circumstances of this burial were not something he was familiar with – churchmen were seldom at the burial of a suicide – but he had offered to do this, and he would do it properly, or not at all. But even so, part of his mind was jumping on ahead. There would be no reading, that much was clear. But he didn’t feel it was a funeral service without a psalm. He needn’t have worried. As he concluded the opening prayer for the dead man, two sweet voices lifted up to his left.
‘Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord; O Lord, hear my voice.’ Marlowe and Colwell intoned the words of the one hundred and thirtieth psalm, known as
De Profundis
.
Old habits die hard and Parker and Bromerick took up the decani response. ‘Oh let thine ears consider well; the voice of my complaint.’
Steane felt a tremor pass through him. These voices, raised to God in this bleak place where no organ wheezed and groaned reminded him of how he had felt when he first entered the Church; before the whole thing had become something to organize and manipulate. He was brought back to the dark present by a shuffling noise over to his left and he remembered why they were here. Two parish paupers, earning a sorely-needed farthing, carried the linen-wrapped body of Ralph Whitingside on a hurdle, the bier stored in the church being beyond the pale for him, and placed it on the ground at the side of the grave. The last verse of the psalm died away into silence and then, loud enough so everyone could hear it, there was the sound of weeping from the trees. Only Marlowe knew for sure who it was and, taking their lead from him, no one moved towards the noise, but let the poor soul mourn alone.
Making the sign of the cross as so few men did these days, Steane bowed his head and spoke the words of committal over the dead man’s body. The paupers, with minimal ceremony, heaved the body into the grave, which, being shallow, took him with hardly a sound. Then, to Marlowe’s surprise, Steane spoke again.
‘O God, whose blessed Son was buried in a Sepulchre in the garden, bless, we pray, this grave and grant that he whose body is to be buried here may dwell with Christ in Paradise, and may come to thy Heavenly Kingdom, through thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.’
There was a muttered ‘amen’ from the small congregation. The paupers, standing off to one side, pushed back their ragged hoods and exchanged puzzled looks in the dark. They had stood here often enough, but had never heard that bit before. Nor had Marlowe.
‘I didn’t know that it was normal to consecrate a suicide’s grave,’ he said quietly to Steane as they walked away from the graveside, trying not to hear the gritty sound of the spades cutting into the pile of earth beside Ralph Whitingside’s last bed.
Steane picked his way in the dark over the tussocky grass and took a moment to reply and to compose his voice. He had been unusually moved by this service, by the voices singing the psalm, by the crying in the trees. He cleared his throat. ‘It seemed the least I could do,’ he said, and forged ahead, to where his horse cropped the grass at the edge of the lane.
Marlowe was thoughtful. So someone else didn’t believe Whitingside was a suicide. He was now more determined than ever to solve this mystery; as friend and First Finder (or near enough) it could almost be said to be his duty. He turned and waited for his friends, who were fiddling with their lanterns, passing the flame from one to the other, trying to banish the dark as Steane’s horse clattered into the distance.
‘Come on, my lads,’ he said, with what sounded for all the world like genuine enthusiasm. ‘Let’s go and see if we can find an inn with a light showing. I think we all need a drink, in Ralph’s memory, don’t you?’
And, arm in arm, the Parker scholars moved off into the dark, taking a little world of flickering light with them.
At the grave, the paupers had done their job, patting down the earth with the flat of their spades and had gone. A pale shape detached itself from the trees and crept close to the churchyard wall. Meg Hawley stood, wrapped in her dusty summer cloak, looking down at the bare earth for a moment then, with a low moan, sank to the ground and lay, as though alongside the man beneath the soil, with her arm outstretched above him as though, too late, to protect him from his enemies.
The Cam winds on for ever. It twists, dark and green, with its clawing weed through the mellow stone of the colleges, gliding past the wherries and fondling the trailing willows that added their tears to the water.
Beyond Magdelene Bridge, where the flat lands to the east gave way to Sturminster Common, it widens and shallows and thick sedge hangs over it, shielding the banks from the noonday sun. It was here that Nicholas Drew dozed that scorching Sunday. He’d never been much of a church goer, but to avoid the recusancy fees, he’d gone along to St Bene’t’s as usual, resenting anew that those stuck up bastards from Corpus Christi College used
his
church as if it were their own. Along with most of the Town, he despised the poll-shaven scholars with their books and their serious frowns. Most of all, he hated their hypocrisy. The same men who cut him dead in
his
church of a Sunday morning, shoulder barged him off
his
pavements on Sunday night and drank in
his
inn, talking loudly in Latin with some private joke at his expense.
But the cloudless blue consoled him. All his life he’d known this river, making his meagre living by ferrying the University from one side to the other or punting them up stream and down. He knew the river’s moods, the dark waters of winter where the rain pitted the surface, the stagnant hollows where the ice lay under the bitter wind. And this time of year was Drew’s favourite, when the water was warming up and the fish flew slick and silver in the flickering lights and shadows of the shallows.
His line trailed in the water and his rod was wedged in his usual niche on the bank. He lay back on the soft moss, chewing the end of a newly pulled grass stalk, sweet as honey. He tilted his ferryman’s cap over his eyes. No more work today. No more church. You’re nearer to God by a river than anywhere . . .
There was a tug on the line and before Drew could scramble up to haul in his wriggling, terrified catch, the line and rod jerked out of the bank and splashed into the river. Shit! Had old Nick hooked a Leviathan here in the sparkling waters of the Cam?
His line had tangled in something floating by the far bank. Whatever it was had been meandering midstream and now veered away from him. No surprises there. The current did that along this stretch, the river-bit everybody called Paradise. The surprise was the bundle itself. At first, as he scrambled to his feet and followed it, it looked like a pile of rags, waterlogged cloth tossed from a market stall in Petty Cury. But Drew’s line was still caught in it and his rod was floating faster now, out of his reach. He knew the currents here. They were fickle and unpredictable, the river bed uneven and shelved. Men had died here, reaching Paradise twice as their lives came to an end.