Witch Hammer (4 page)

‘It is a pen,’ he said.

‘In a way,’ Strange said. ‘I don’t fully understand it myself. It’s called graphite and it is an easy way to write things down when on the road. Ink and quills and the rest can be so messy, my secretary finds.’

Marlowe knew full well the ruin that an upturned bottle of ink could wreak on a shirt in a knapsack and reached out his hand for the pencil. Strange handed it back and smiled up at the man.

‘Much quicker too, I think you will find. It takes a bit of getting used to, but once you have the knack, it is much easier. My secretary says it will never replace the quill, but for these purposes it seems to be just what you need, Master Marlowe. When the point is dull, sharpen it with your penknife as you would a quill.’

‘Thank you, My Lord,’ Marlowe said. ‘A very generous gift.’

‘Loan.’ Strange was back in his account books and didn’t look up.

‘Of course.’ Marlowe bowed. ‘A loan. Thank you all the same.’

‘Martin’s over there,’ Thomas said. ‘He can help you until I have finished here. There’s paper in the wagon.’

Marlowe walked back over to where the actors were still arguing. He stood back from them for a while, then looked at Sledd, still telling the cow all about his life. Behind the main wagon he could hear sounds of the women, as usual getting the work done without fuss or bother, making the world wag as it should and taking no credit. Suddenly, he didn’t want to write a play about a queen, of Carthage or anywhere else for that matter. He wanted to write about what happens to people when their world is turned upside down, through war, famine or death. Or love. He needed to think, to get the plot straight in his mind. He veered away from the noise of the camp and wandered off back into the lane, crossing into the opposite field. He moved along the hedgerow and tucked himself under the bole of a willow, old and hollow and very private. No one would see him there, with his legs tucked in and his brown cloak over his shoulder. He leaned his head back against the spongy wood inside the hollow and looked into the far distance, eyes unfocused as his mind wandered wherever it fancied.

But Kit Marlowe was not just a playwright. Or just a scholar. He was also, though he fought against it, an intelligencer, a spy. And so his eyes never stayed unfocused for long. They wandered along the horizon, half seeing the trees, the wandering sheep, the blue sky, the few scudding clouds as they wisped past across the top of the hill opposite. Then they stopped and his head snapped up. His young eyes had seen what most would have missed; the man on the horse among the trees, a silhouette against the sky. But although there was no detail to be discerned, he knew in his bones that the man was looking down the hill at the camp below. And he knew from the set of his shoulders and the immobility of his stare that the man would follow them for as long as he need follow, until he had done whatever he was there to do.

T
he sun was already high by the time Kit Marlowe rolled out of his wagon. The women were tending a large pot of stew over the campfire and the smoke was drifting lazily across the Hertfordshire fields, snaking to the east and the cluster of villages known as the Pelhams. The pretty girl with the red hair smiled at Marlowe and he smiled back. The older ones crouched around the fire with silly grins on their faces. Now that Alleyn had gone, this newcomer was the handsomest in the company and, anyway, Alleyn was anybody’s. His smiles were usually followed by groping hands and a tumble in the hay. This one was altogether more mysterious and – unusual in theatrical circles – he was playing hard to get.

There were raised voices coming from a stand of birches where Lord Strange, Ned Sledd and Martin were standing. His Lordship was struggling to look suave while coughing and spluttering over a pipe and Sledd and Martin were actors enough to pretend it wasn’t happening.

‘All right,’ Marlowe heard Strange rasp. ‘Convince me.’

‘Oxford,’ Sledd began, delighted as always to have an audience. ‘City of dreaming spires.’

‘Isn’t that where they burned Bishop Latimer and Bishop Ridley?’ Everybody turned to the direction of the voice. Nat Sawyer didn’t really have the temperament for a comic. He’d have been better as a tragedian except that he couldn’t act nor, as Martin would be quick to point out, did he have the legs for it. Give him a pig’s bladder on a stick, a saucy-shaped vegetable and a funny hat and he lit up a theatre. But on a day-to-day basis, misery was his middle name. He did have one skill though; he crept up unbidden on conversations and was a natural for hiding behind trees.

‘What’s that got to do with the price of fish, Nat?’ Sledd rounded on him. He’d set his heart on Oxford and irrelevancies from the camp comedian he could do without.

‘Go on, Ned,’ Strange commanded. ‘We’re all agog.’

‘Think of the gate, My Lord.’ Sledd knew that the way to Strange’s heart was through his wallet. ‘Merchants, scholars, craftsmen, artisans – the place is crawling with them. Kit!’ Sledd raised his voice and beckoned the playwright over. ‘Tell His Lordship about Cambridge.’ He turned back to Strange. ‘Kit and I met in Cambridge last year.’

Marlowe raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘Do you really want me to tell Lord Strange about last year?’ he said. ‘About the . . .’

He watched the light dawn behind Sledd’s eyes as he realized that possibly it would be a huge tactical error to tell his sponsor about the riot at the Stourbridge Fair. He seemed to sniff again the smoke of burning wagons, he saw Thomas go down, straw wig awry, under a pile of tussling townsfolk intent on finding out what he had hidden under his skirts. He felt the rough hands of the Constables on his collar as they made sure he left town. In his ears rang the words ‘And stay out!’

‘No need to go into that kind of detail, Kit, there’s a good boy. Just tell Lord Strange about the pickings to be had in Oxford.’

Marlowe smiled. ‘Cambridge is a different animal, Ned,’ he said. ‘Altogether superior to the Other Place.’

‘Er . . . yes, yes, of course,’ Sledd agreed. ‘But scholars will go to the opening of an envelope, won’t they?’

‘To avoid lectures, certainly. But . . .’

Sledd was in no mood to hear ‘buts’. Strange, however, was.

‘Go on, Master Marlowe,’ he said.

‘Half your scholars are sizars,’ the scholar told him. ‘Poll men who can’t afford to eat, never mind the gate money to a travelling play. The gentlemen scholars can afford it but half of them are Puritan and would rather cut their own throats than watch a play. It all depends what you’re putting on.’

‘Sappho and Phao,’ Sledd answered proudly.

Marlowe shook his head. ‘Don’t know it,’ he said.

‘Neither does anybody else,’ said Strange. ‘John Lyly’s, isn’t it, Ned?’ He looked the man in the eyes.

‘It might be.’ Sledd shrugged.

‘There’s no might be about it, Edward Sledd,’ Strange snapped, his dark eyes flashing. ‘You lifted it from Master Lyly without his express permission or so much as a groat changing hands.’

‘Well, that’s show business.’ Sledd dismissed it.

‘Master Marlowe . . .’ Strange turned to him. ‘You’re a playwright – a university wit?’

‘I try,’ said Marlowe modestly.

‘What can you do for us? Something small scale now we’ve apparently lost Alleyn.’

Martin looked hurt, but there were enough egos already in that stand of trees. He didn’t want to let his out as well.

‘We need some love interest.’ Strange was warming to his theme. ‘Young Thomas’s got a couple more seasons in him before he’s put out to grass.’ He looked Martin up and down. ‘Handsome lead, Martin?’ he asked.

The actor beamed, delighted that his time had come.

‘No.’ Strange was already thinking better of it. ‘Ned, you’d better do that. Unless . . . Kit?’

Marlowe put up his hands and stepped back a pace, shaking his head. ‘I’m no actor, My Lord,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’m a scribbler, leave it at that.’

‘As you please. Give old Joseph a little part and keep it simple.’

‘Bless,’ chorused Sledd and Nat.

‘Now, then –’ Strange was beginning to walk about in creative mood as the sun through the trees warmed his back – ‘a bit of light entertainment. Drunken porter, Nat?’

The comic looked bitterly at him. ‘Why, marry, I’d as soon be a warmed-over crumpet on a drab’s plate at Lammas tide as a pickled herring in the barrel of a lord.’ Sawyer turned his head and spat volubly.

‘Is that a yes?’ Strange asked, looking helplessly from man to man. They all shrugged and Sawyer ignored him completely.

Marlowe came to his aid eventually. ‘I think what Nat is trying to say, My Lord, is that the drunken porter character is a little old hat.’

Strange looked a little crestfallen. ‘I’ve always rather enjoyed that bit, but it may be that you’re right. Well, I’ll leave it to you. Can you rustle something up by . . . let’s say . . . next Friday?’

Marlowe nodded. It would not be easy, but it could be done. ‘If everyone lends a hand,’ he said. ‘Copies and so on.’

‘That won’t be a problem,’ Sledd said, rubbing his hands together at the deal which seemed to be thoroughly done. ‘Plenty of scholars in Oxford, half of them, according to Marlowe, desperate for a groat.’

‘That is doubtless true,’ Strange said. ‘Except that we’re not going to Oxford. We’re going to Stratford.’

The two women squatted in the coppiced trees and watched as the men walked away, Sledd and Strange still in animated discussion, Marlowe and Martin, heads together already planning the play, Sawyer on his own, as always.

‘I like the look of the small one,’ one said to the other. ‘He has evil in his soul.’

‘When evil is already there, where is the fun?’ the other asked. ‘The work is done already when the soul is already black.’

‘True, true, sister, but fun is not the object. Garnering another soul for the Dark One is what we are about, isn’t it?’ She spat, but unlike Sawyer’s random expectoration, she took a butterfly out of the air without even seeming to take aim. ‘They are packing up to leave so we must be quick, if we are to have him.’

‘There will be others,’ the other pointed out.

‘But he is so ripe for the taking,’ the other one whined. ‘I want him.’

The other, older, wiser, forced both eyes to focus on her companion. Her glare was brief, as the left-hand one flew back into the corner, where it usually dwelt. ‘Margaret,’ she said, curtly, ‘we can’t always get what we want, can we?’

The other looked puzzled. ‘I thought that all this –’ she swept an arm down across them both, taking in their rags, damp and mildewed – ‘was all so that we could have other things we want. I would rather live in a nice warm cottage, if I told the truth, rather than in a ditch, but the Dark One doesn’t want us living in houses, so I am always told. So I live in a ditch. Now, just because I want the little one’s soul, because I want to take him into the Night and play with him just a little, you say I can’t.’ Her last words rose to a high pitched scream, which set the hairs standing on the backs of all necks in the camp.

Nat Sawyer shuddered and turned to old Joseph. ‘A goose just walked over my grave.’

‘Eh?’ Joseph’s hearing was going, but even he had heard that scream.

The old woman turned to the young one and pointed a crabbed finger at her, right between the eyes. ‘Well,’ she croaked, ‘you can’t have him. If I’m any judge, his soul hasn’t been his to give these many years. We must go now, at any rate. We have places to be and the road is hard and long.’

‘There is the broomstick, sister, the cat, the winged horse.’

The old woman shook her head. These youngsters had much to learn, about what was and what was not. Hemlock was all very fine and dandy, but it didn’t eat up the miles like plain shoe leather. She gathered up her bag, full of herbs and nameless things. ‘Let’s just walk, sister, this time. I have much to teach you on the road.’

‘Where?’ Thomas winced as the wagon jolted on the hard-rutted roads of summer.

‘Stratford,’ Nat told him, munching an apple as if it was poison. ‘Stands on the Avon. Gateway to Hell.’

‘You been there?’ Thomas asked.

‘Yes,’ said Nat, ‘but it was a long time ago.’

Thomas looked ahead at the first wagon where Ned Sledd sat on the board with Marlowe, declaiming as he went. He looked behind at the third wagon, groaning with flats and drapes and fluttering costumes. ‘I thought we were going to Oxford.’

‘His Lordship’s got other ideas.’

Thomas saw His Lordship in the far distance, his dappled grey caracoling as he criss-crossed the road. ‘Ah.’ The lad who played the ladies held up a hand from the reins. ‘I know what they call that. It’s called “Noblesse Oblige”. Only bit of French I know.’

‘Good for you,’ Nat muttered.

They drove in silence for a while.

‘So where are we going, then – exactly, I mean?’ Thomas asked.

‘Some country house or other. Place called Clopton, on the edge of Stratford. Some old mate of His Lordship. He owes him a favour, apparently. God, I hate private house shows.’

‘Oh, I dunno,’ Thomas said brightly. ‘You get a bed of sorts. A roof over your head. Decent food, probably. And who knows?’ He nudged Sawyer in the ribs. ‘Bit of slap and tickle with the serving wenches, eh?’

‘Oh, yes,’ the comic grunted. ‘Wonderful. And then it’s: “Tell me something funny, Nat.” “Say something funny.” “Do that funny falling over thing, Nat.” Why do they always want me to be funny? There’s nothing funny about being a comedian, take it from me.’

Marlowe saw it first, riding on the first wagon with Sledd. All afternoon, Lord Strange had led the rattling, groaning wagons, starting his horse in this direction, then that. But now, far in the distance, His Lordship had stopped. He sat motionless in the saddle for a while at a point where the road crossed the marshes and the tall reeds stood still and silent to his left. Sledd had stopped declaiming now and was concentrating on driving the horses, clucking and clicking softly to them every now and again as they plodded on.

Suddenly, Strange’s grey shied and whinnied, swerving to the right and throwing her rider. His Lordship hit the dusty ground with a thud and he lay there, ominously still.