Crimson Rose (18 page)

‘In what way,’ Frizer asked, ‘done down?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Skeres raised his hands to Heaven. ‘I’m not getting a good feeling about this, Ing.’

‘Nor am I, Nick.’

‘Can you read?’ Greene asked them.

‘Does Master Sackerson eat hounds for breakfast?’

‘Here.’ He handed Skeres a piece of parchment. The man read it. ‘“Dr Gabriel Harvey. At the sign of the Coiled Serpent.” Is that an apt address, Master Greene?’

‘This morning, if you have time,’ Greene said. ‘He’ll be expecting you.’

‘How about the retainer?’ Frizer asked, holding out his hand.

‘Oh, yes,’ Greene said, scowling, ‘how remiss of me,’ and he threw a silver coin which Skeres caught expertly.

‘That will turn miraculously to gold when the job’s done,’ Greene said. ‘As miraculously as growing a new leg.’

He turned back to the Si Quis Door and bought an oyster from a pale-faced waif standing in the Mediterranean Aisle. He would have liked to have known what Gabriel Harvey had in mind before he hired Frizer and Skeres on his behalf, but in a way, not knowing had its advantages – he could indulge his imagination all the more.

Greene was halfway down Ludgate Hill before he found his way blocked by two burly men wearing the cross and sword of the City on their breasts. They were looking intently at him.

‘Master Greene?’ one of them asked. The playwright spun on his pattens and strode back up the hill, only to bump into two more men, wearing the same livery, blocking his path. For a moment, he toyed with ducking into Sea Coal Lane but the alley was narrow and his chance of outrunning four of them was remote. He felt a time-honoured hand on his shoulder and he was turned again. ‘I said “Master Greene?”’

The Cambridge man decided to brazen it out. By comparison with half the denizens of St Paul’s behind him, he was a paragon of virtue. ‘I am Greene,’ he said, mustering all his poise and arrogance and shrugging off the restraining hand.

‘I am Constable Harrison,’ the man said, ‘and you are under arrest.’

‘Where is your magistrate’s warrant?’ Greene asked. He’d get to the charge later.

‘Here!’ said Harrison and he drove his fist into the playwright’s face. For Greene, day became night and he slumped backwards into the arms of Harrison’s catchpoles. ‘Well, well,’ the Constable said. ‘What a coincidence. Here we are with a felon on our hands and just over there is Ludgate Gaol. Lively, now, lads. Let’s get him out of the way. Last thing we want is a riot over the heavy-handed tactics of the authorities.’

And they carried Greene away, Harrison unhooking the man’s expensive sword in case somebody hurt themselves.

Kit Marlowe’s horse clattered under the archway and up the rise to the White Tower. The ravens fluttered and croaked across the broad sweep of the grass as a Yeoman warder took the horse’s reins and let its rider pass. The seal of Dr John Dee on the parchment he carried opened doors in this bleak place that the Yeoman warder didn’t even know existed.

Marlowe flashed his warrant again at the outer door and padded down the stone steps into the Armoury. Ahead of him, astride a massive wooden destrier, sat an image of the Queen’s father, King Harry, in his armour for the tilt. The painted eyes behind the visor bars seemed to move as Marlowe watched them and he felt for all the world that he had stepped back into Dr Dee’s study, where serpents coiled and demons lurked.

‘Master Marlowe?’ He turned at the sound of his name. A square, squat man with a scarred face and wearing the livery of the Queen emerged from a side door and crossed the floor to him. Marlowe took the proffered hand. ‘William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower. To what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘You were expecting me, sir?’ Marlowe was surprised. Even in this city of rumours, the speed astonished him. He had only left John Dee a matter of hours before.

‘Look about you, sir.’ Waad smiled. ‘This is the White Tower, a royal residence. You were, just last night, in another one – Whitehall. All the residences have a means of communication. It’s done by mirrors.’ He saw the uncertainty on Marlowe’s face. ‘I could tell you how it’s done,’ he chuckled, ‘but then, of course, I’d have to kill you.’

There was something about the man that made Marlowe think perhaps he wasn’t joking.

‘How’s Francis?’ Waad asked, ushering Marlowe into a side chamber.

‘Francis?’

Waad looked at him. He’d heard all about Marlowe. The man was fire and air, a University wit and a ready blade. Had a mind like a Toledo rapier … and yet … ‘Francis Walsingham,’ Waad explained. ‘His uncle was a predecessor of mine here at the Tower.’

‘It’s a small world.’ Marlowe smiled, but he had no intention of sharing more confidences with this man than he needed to. ‘Don’t know him.’

Liar, thought Waad. He knew Walsingham had recruited Marlowe at Cambridge and, once recruited by Walsingham, you stayed recruited. But each man, Intelligencer or not, had his reasons and found his own way in the world. If Marlowe chose not to know the Queen’s Spymaster, so be it. ‘So,’ Waad poured a goblet of finest claret and passed it to his visitor, ‘to your purpose.’

‘A snaphaunce,’ Marlowe told him. ‘Dr Dee tells me your Armoury has the only one in England.’

‘Ah,’ Waad became confidential. ‘Not for sale, I’m afraid.’

‘I don’t want to buy it,’ Marlowe told him. ‘Merely to look at it. Handle it, perhaps.’

Waad sucked his teeth. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘it does come under the
Res Novae
category.’

‘
Res Novae
?’ Marlowe queried.

Oh dear, thought Waad. This wasn’t going well at all. Perhaps this wasn’t the real Kit Marlowe. ‘New things,’ he translated. ‘In Latin.’

Marlowe smiled and said, ‘
Nouveauté
,
νεʹα πραʹγματα
,
nieuwe dingen
… I understand it, Sir William. I just don’t know what it means.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Waad beamed. ‘Yes, of course. Quite. Well, here at the Armoury we are constantly experimenting with new gadgets. Bristle letters. Aqua Fortis.’ He clapped a hand over his own mouth. ‘There!’ he scolded himself. ‘I’ve said too much already. Please forget what I’ve just said. State secrets. National treasures. That sort of thing.’

‘The snaphaunce?’

‘Yes.’ Waad clicked his fingers, glad to be moving on. ‘You’ll have to sign the book, of course.’

‘Of course.’ Marlowe took the proffered quill and wrote his name in the large ledger open on Waad’s desk. He quickly read down the other names on the page, but there were none that he recognized. Waad led him through a small door that all but disappeared in a book case and took Marlowe along a narrow, dark passageway lit by small, high barred windows and a solitary taper burning at the far end. Here was another door and Waad unlocked it before stepping inside.

‘Look at nothing around the walls,’ Waad warned him. ‘This –’ he hauled a gun from a rack – ‘is the weapon you seek.’

‘So this is a snaphaunce.’ Marlowe weighted it, cocked it, saw at once the pecking bird of the mechanism.

‘It is. They say,’ Waad dropped his voice and closed in so his chin was almost on Marlowe’s shoulder, ‘that the Dons have a similar device they call a
miquelet
.’ He stepped back and spoke more normally. ‘So you see why we need to develop this as soon as we can. What is your interest, exactly?’

From what Walsingham had told Waad of Kit Marlowe, he wasn’t likely to be spying for the Spaniards, but this was a dangerous, topsy-turvy, brave new world and who could be sure of anyone or anything in it?

‘This gun could have been used to kill a woman in the Rose Theatre, Sir William.’ Marlowe looked at the lieutenant and saw that the avid gleam that lit everyone’s eye when gruesome murder was abroad was in his now. ‘I see you know of it.’

‘
This
gun?’ Waad took it back from Marlowe. ‘Impossible. It has never left the building.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘Absolutely. Only a handful of people know about it. And you are only the third person to handle it.’

‘You, I presume,’ he said, ‘are the first. Who is the second?’

‘No, Marlowe,’ Waad corrected him. ‘I am the second. The first is the man who made it.’ There was a pause. ‘Of course …’

‘Yes?’ Marlowe looked the man in the face. Something was not right.

‘There is a second snaphaunce.’

‘There is?’

‘The man who made it, in fact made two. A brace for Her Majesty.’

‘And the other one?’

Waad cleared his throat and put the gun back on its rack. ‘The other one was bought by private treaty, before I could prevent it.’

‘By whom?’ Marlowe was surprised that after all the subterfuge and secrecy, there was another gun like this, possibly, by now, dozens, on the streets of London. Not to mention in the hands of any enemy who cared to invest a little gold.

Waad shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

Marlowe rounded on him. ‘Sir William …’

‘As God is my judge,’ Waad blurted out, not liking the look in Marlowe’s eye at all. ‘All I can tell you is what I heard. It’s gossip, so it may be wrong.’

‘Try me,’ Marlowe said, coldly.

‘Yes, well, when I heard this, it stuck in my mind as being rather odd. Why this man should want such a weapon, but also how he could afford it. I know that men of his profession are doing well at the moment, but …’

‘The gossip, Master Waad, if you please.’ Marlowe took a step closer and Waad put up a restraining hand.

‘A tobacconist,’ he said. ‘He was a tobacconist.’

‘The Coiled Serpent?’ Ingram Frizer was not at all sure that he knew where it was. He knew most inns in the entire city of London, but not all went by the name on their sign. For all he knew, the Coiled Serpent could be one of his regular watering holes. He never looked above his head; opportunity and danger lay below, where the people were.

‘Yes, Ing,’ Skeres reminded him. ‘It’s down the Bailey. You know the one. Does meals. Lets out rooms. More of an ordinary than an inn.’ Frizer shook his head. ‘Landlord won’t allow swearing in the place. A bit of a Bible thumper.’

The light dawned on Frizer’s rather weasel-like face. ‘I
do
know it, now you say that,’ he said. ‘I’ve often thought that keeping an inn was a strange calling for someone like that.’

‘There’s a lot of wine in the Bible, or so he says. In any event, I know where it is; are we going there now?’

‘Why not?’ Frizer said. ‘The sooner we go and see this lunatic, the sooner the money is in our pockets.’

‘But I still don’t see what he wants us to do. “Done down” – what is that supposed to mean?’

‘Did he say “gunned down”, perhaps?’ Frizer said. ‘In that case, it could be difficult, as we don’t have a gun.’

Skeres thought for a moment, then said, ‘No. He definitely said “done”. He wants us to be … unpleasant about this man, Marlowe. This playwright. I suppose we could go and say nasty things in his play.’

‘We’ll be shouted down. Everyone loves this play that’s on.
Tamburlaine
. We’ll have to do better than that.’

‘Is he married? We could tell his wife he has a woman on the side.’

Frizer pulled a face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘These are players. The surprise is when they
haven’t
got a woman on the side. Ned Alleyn is a legend, they say, in the bedroom.’

Skeres shrugged. ‘I don’t know, then. Perhaps this Harvey will have some ideas. Come on,’ he tugged at Frizer’s sleeve, ‘it’s down here, the Coiled Serpent.’ The pair jostled their way along Giltspur Street, with the old Grey Friars to their left and old Rahere’s Hospital of St Bartholomew at their backs.

The inn sign swung in the morning breeze, rather faded and tattered. ‘Oh.’ Frizer looked up at it. ‘A coiled
serpent
. I don’t think I had ever noticed it before. Terrible carving.’

‘What did you think it was?’ Skeres asked, pushing the door open.

Frizer looked up once more and followed his colleague inside. He shook his head. ‘I have no idea,’ he muttered.

Skeres was asking for Harvey. The grey-faced skivvy pointed up the stairs. The two men were about halfway up before she remembered her instructions. Her shriek went through them like an ice-cold knife in the back of the neck.

‘Master Harveee!’ It sounded like something a farmer might use to attract his pigs. ‘Master Harveeee! Two gennlemen to see yer.’

Gabriel Harvey’s face around the edge of the door was as startled as theirs. ‘I apologize, gentlemen,’ he said in a low voice, holding his head. ‘She never seems to learn. It goes right through me,’ he pointed to his temple, ‘here.’

Frizer nodded. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘What a delightful girl.’

‘I am only here until my own house is ready, you understand,’ Harvey was quick to point out. ‘It’s along the Strand. Rather large. Rather imposing. But, may I ask to whom I have the pleasure of speaking?’

Skeres silently rearranged the words in his head, to see what he had just been asked. ‘Ingram Frizer,’ he said, pointing to the other man, ‘and I am Nicholas Skeres. We met a … friend of yours today in St Paul’s. He said you may have a …’

Before he could finish his sentence, Harvey had hooked a finger into the front of his doublet and pulled him inside. Frizer nipped in quickly before the door was slammed in his face.

‘Please,’ Harvey hissed. ‘Please, be careful. No one must know what I have planned.’

Skeres gave Frizer a meaningful look. So, murder was afoot, then. All that nonsense of ‘doing someone down’ was all so much double talk. This was going to cost.

‘I think I can make myself clear, gentlemen, in very few and succinct sentences. You look like men of the world.’

Frizer and Skeres exchanged satisfied glances. They certainly
felt
like men of the world. It was nice to have their suspicions borne out by a stranger.

‘So,’ Harvey continued, ‘you know how annoying it is when you find that someone else in your area of endeavour is fêted when you yourself are doomed to be ignored.’

They weren’t quite so clear about that, but they were being paid, so they nodded. Or should they have shaken? The strange man with the rather mad eyes and flecks of foam at the corners of his mouth seemed content with nods, so they nodded some more.