Crimson Rose (23 page)

‘The man was mad, of course. I mean, we’re all Protestants here, but he belongs to the Godly, that lunatic fringe. You must have come across them at Cambridge.’

‘A few,’ Marlowe said.

‘Well, it wasn’t just the Rose that Garrett was thrown out of, although that was where he was found the most. He was ejected from the Curtain too and made a thorough nuisance of himself in the stews of Southwark. London is apparently all the cities of the plain rolled into one and theatres … well. He’d have got round to you personally eventually – “the atheist Tamburlaine, the scourge of God”.’ Faunt crossed the room and picked up a pamphlet. ‘Seen this? They found dozens of them near his body. Fell out of his satchel when he was attacked.’

‘How did he die? I heard a knife.’

‘That’s right,’ Faunt said. ‘Through the heart. As clean as a whistle.’

‘Another soul who was a target,’ Marlowe said. ‘He must have made more enemies on both sides of the river than the King of Spain has ships.’

‘Oh, I’m sure he did,’ Faunt said. ‘But it’s the method, you see. Quick. Clean. Almost … scientific.’

‘I don’t follow.’ Marlowe took a sip of Rhenish and grimaced. It didn’t follow candied Pine Apple any too well.

‘If God’s Word Garrett had upset a theatre owner – Henslowe, say. If he’d annoyed a brothel keeper – well, that’s Henslowe again, isn’t it? If he’d started spouting his religious claptrap at St Paul’s Cross – in any of these situations, I’d expect some roughs to work him over. Hell, you can hire half a dozen Apprentices for the cost of that fruit you’re eating. And they’d use clubs. It would be messy, loud and not fatal. They like to leave them alive to encourage the others. No, this was neat. Orderly. And the message here is not “we’ll hurt you”. No it was “you will die”. Just like Eleanor died. Neat and quick.’

‘And I know how that was done,’ Marlowe said. ‘She was killed with a most singular weapon – well, almost singular. It is one of only two in the world. A snaphaunce.’

‘Marlowe!’ Faunt was leaning forward, his supper forgotten. ‘Are you telling me there’s a new kind of gun out there and we don’t know about it?’

‘Apparently so,’ Marlowe said, ‘judging by your reaction. It was smuggled somehow into the Rose on the afternoon in question and fired from the orchestra’s corner. The problem is that one of the two snaphaunces is safe in the Tower under the care of Sir William Waad.’

‘I think we can rule him out, somehow,’ Faunt said.

‘I agree.’ Marlowe nodded. ‘But what about the other one?’

‘Is anything known?’ Faunt asked.

‘Well, Sir William didn’t know any details, but one thing had stuck in his mind because it was so unexpected. He couldn’t work out how the man could have afforded it. It was bought by a tobacconist …’

Faunt was instantly on his feet, crossing the room in a couple of strides. He began rummaging in the pile of papers on a side table, destroying Walsingham’s careful but idiosyncratic filing system in seconds. He found a piece of parchment and slapped it with his open hand. ‘I
knew
it!’ he shouted. ‘They found a body in the Thames over a week ago. Beyond the Bridge, but it had gone in somewhere upstream. He was unidentified for a while, but now we know he was Simon Bancroft. He was a tobacconist.’

‘Was he now?’

Faunt ran his finger along the line. ‘Inquest verdict … Oh, now, that’s a surprise. Suicide.’

‘Not through money worries, it would seem. Or would it?’ Marlowe tapped his finger on his cheek.

Faunt returned to his chair, topping up Marlowe’s wine. ‘Kit,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t normally ask it of you …’

‘But could I look into the late Master Bancroft?’ Marlowe smiled. ‘And while I’m at it, get the measure of God’s Word Garrett? All in a day’s work, I suppose.’

‘You’d be doing your friend Shaxsper a favour,’ Faunt said.

Marlowe laughed. ‘Nobody has friends in the theatre, Nicholas, just rivals. You’re only as good as your last caesura.’

‘I’d offer to help,’ Faunt said, ‘but Spain … Well, I can’t say more at the moment. You’ll have the full backing of the Department, of course.’

‘Of course.’ Marlowe smiled. ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

‘I
f you could just tell me what you are looking for, sir.’ The old man was wringing his hands in John Garrett’s parlour. It had been the worst week of his life. He thought he had seen it all. They’d whitewashed the walls of his parish church when he was a boy and taught him to read from an English prayer book. Then they’d brought them back, the brass eagles, the wooden saints, the stained glass and priests spoke to him in Latin again – ‘
Hocus Pocus
’. Now … now he lived with the Godly and the world had turned again. The words of Master Calvin rang in his ears: ‘It is your duty to proclaim the word of God.’ And that is what the old man had done for the last twenty years. ‘I don’t know what you want.’

‘Stow you, ancient.’ Enoch Harrison was in no mood for old idiots this morning. ‘I have the High Constable’s writ. Your master is dead. We need to know why.’

‘It is God’s will, sir,’ the old man said. ‘He cares for the fall of every sparrow. We shouldn’t look more closely than that.’

‘Shouldn’t we?’ Harrison had never stood in the house of one of the Elect before. He’d moved on several of them at street corners and listened to the rubbish they spouted at Paul’s Cross. It was much as he expected though; drab, comfortless, grey and cold. ‘Has this place got a cellar?’ he asked.

The old man nodded.

‘Right. I’ll start down there. Rogers – take the attic.’

Under Constable Rogers didn’t like his job. Unlike Harrison, who relished it, and the High Constable, who did it for a living, Ben Rogers had taken it on for a year as his civic duty. He was a cordwainer really and already he missed his leather and his workbench. If anyone had told him what a full-time job being Under Constable would be, he would never have taken it on. He found the stairs and climbed to the dusty little room under the eaves. The windows were at floor level and the light flooded the floorboards but little else. Under Constable Rogers was a keen observer and he could make out a rectangular shape in the dust of the far corner.

The old man had followed Rogers up the rickety stairs. The dust testified to the fact that he hadn’t been to the top of the house in a long time. His old limbs, twisted by age, couldn’t manage it any more. But this was different. Now the old man’s master was dead – butchered, men said, in a Bear Garden – and there were headboroughs tramping all over his master’s house and him not yet in his grave.

‘What was here?’ Rogers asked him.

The old man had to squint to see what the Under Constable was talking about. ‘Er … a chest, sir,’ he said.

‘What was in it?’

‘I believe Master Garrett kept his Bibles in there, sir, his Scriptures and Notices.’

‘Notices?’

‘Sermons, sir, I suppose you’d call them.’

‘Where’s the chest now?’

‘I don’t know, sir. This was the Master’s study. I didn’t meddle.’

If truth be told – and when
was
it told in London in that year of the Queen’s grace? – Under Constable Rogers was wasted as a cordwainer. He was a perfectly competent craftsman, but he had an eye for detail, for what was amiss, especially in little rooms. If this was Garrett’s study, where were his books, his inkwells and quills? Where were his papers? The room was altogether too empty.

Rogers tapped on the linen fold cupboard. ‘Is there a key for this?’ he asked the old man.

‘The Master had it, sir. Kept it round his neck, I seem to remember.’

Rogers nodded. He’d seen the man’s corpse laid out at the Rose; stripped of his shirt and cap, a deep, dark gash marking the entrance to his heart. And the key had still been there, tied to a leather thong. He hauled out his tipstaff and smashed the wood around the lock. Much to the old man’s alarm, splinters flew everywhere and Rogers let the door swing wide. Inside the recess was a gown, coal black in keeping with the dead man’s religious persuasion and, tucked almost out of sight, a chest. It had a domed top and was covered in brass studs. Rogers dragged the chest out of the cupboard and stepped to one side to allow what light there was to fall on it. On closer inspection, Rogers could make out the words the studs spelled out. ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ he read, half aloud. This was locked too, but a quick tap with the tipstaff was all that was needed to smash off the brass lock.

Rogers squeezed his fingertips into the gap between lid and box and eased the lid up. Looking down into the box, he expected to find books, Gospels, other tokens of the Godly. Instead, he could hardly believe his eyes. There was money. So much money. He ran his fingers through it, letting the gold and silver trickle through them. There was a queen’s ransom here, more than he could make in a lifetime stitching somebody else’s leather.

‘Did you know about this?’ Rogers asked the old man.

‘No, sir,’ he told him, wide-eyed and shaking. He put out a hand to the softly glowing gold, but then withdrew it, as if he feared the coins would bite. He could hardly believe that the floorboards had borne the weight of it all.

‘What’s your name?’ Rogers asked the old man.

‘Partridge, sir. Thomas Partridge.’

‘How long have you been Master Garrett’s man, Partridge?’ Rogers said.

‘All my life, sir. I worked on his father’s estates in the country before he saw the light.’

‘Saw the light?’

‘Of God’s bounty, sir. The Master – that’s Master Garrett’s father, I mean – gave away all he had to serve the Lord.’

‘Gave it all away?’ Rogers repeated. ‘So what’s all this, then?’

‘As God is my judge, sir, I have no idea.’

‘What did your master actually
do
, Partridge? When he wasn’t screaming at people in theatres, that is?’

‘He was a guildsman, sir, of the Haberdasher’s Company.’

‘Lot of money in that, is there?’ Rogers asked, still stroking and fondling the coins. ‘In haberdashery?’

Partridge came closer to look at the contents of the chest. ‘I didn’t know there was this much money in the world, sir, and that’s a fact.’

Rogers rocked back on his heels. None of this made sense. Garrett’s house may have been new to him, but it was no more than he expected of the Godly. The furnishings were scant and worn, the plaster peeling in the corners, where the damp had penetrated. Draughts whistled past every door jamb and rattled loose window panes as the sneaky spring wind came in from the south-west. Old Partridge didn’t look as if he had had a square meal in years and his clothes were older even than he was.

‘What was he going to do with this, do you know?’

‘As I told you, sir, I didn’t know it existed until now. The Master did say he would leave money in his will for sermons to be read in his name.’

‘How many sermons?’

‘Four or five,’ the old man told him, with a shrug.

Rogers knew that was a pittance in the scheme of things.

‘Of course …’ Partridge had suddenly remembered something.

‘Yes?’ Rogers looked at him.

‘Well, the Master had a dream, sir. He wanted to quit London. Pandemonium, he called it, the gateway to Hell. He’d read that Captain Frobisher has found a new land – Terra Incognita, it’s called. It is a land of purity, sir, all ice and snow, the colour of innocence. He and the Brethren often talked of it. A brave new world, he called it. A chance to begin again in a new-found land, where there are no theatres, no drink, no cut-purses or bawdy houses. A place a man can walk and talk with God.’

Rogers nodded. ‘But in the real world,’ he said, ‘such paradises would, I think, cost a fortune to set up.’ He looked at the heap of coins. ‘
This
fortune.’

‘Rogers!’ he heard Harrison call from the floor below. ‘Anything?’

‘Up here, sir,’ the Under Constable said. He moved closer to Partridge. ‘What becomes of you now, old man?’ he asked.

Partridge shrugged. ‘I am a Masterless man, sir. The Brethren will take over the house and give it to another of their number to live in. Once we have interred the Master, my duty is done.’

Rogers came to a split-second decision. He grabbed two handfuls of coins and stuffed them into the pocket at the front of the old man’s apron. ‘Find yourself that new land,’ he whispered quietly. ‘That Terra Incognita. The Master would have wanted it.’

Enoch Harrison’s head popped up through the floor space. There had been a movement he hadn’t quite caught. Had Rogers just slipped something to the serving man? He couldn’t be sure. But a second later his eyes were elsewhere. They focussed on God’s Word Garrett’s chest and they lit up.

It took the High Constable’s clerk nearly three hours to count all the money from John Garrett’s chest. That was because Sam Renton was meticulous and he did it three times, as was the High Constable’s order whenever it came to money.

‘Tell me again.’ Hugh Thynne was puffing on his pipe in the low-ceilinged room over the stables.

Enoch Harrison sat facing him. He’d been on his feet since just after dawn and wasn’t feeling at one with the world. He knew the High Constable of old and knew that Thynne would want every one of Garrett’s pennies accounted for. That was why he had helped himself to a third of it. As soon as Rogers and the old man had gone, Harrison had been on his knees scooping handfuls of coins out of the Puritan’s chest and into his purse and wallets. He waited until the pair had left the building before he moved, for fear of clinking too loudly with his booty. It was safe now, stashed under the eaves of his house in the lee of the Crutched Friars, hard by Goodman’s Fields.

‘Nothing to tell.’ He shrugged. ‘The old serving man told Rogers that the Presician had this dream, of setting up some sort of kingdom of the Godly. The only problem is he wanted to do it in some Godless land, far away.’

‘Did the old man say where the money came from?’

Harrison shook his head. ‘Claimed never to have seen it before.’

‘And you believed him?’

‘’Course I didn’t. If I’d had my way I’d have kicked the old bastard down the stairs and trod on his fingers until he came clean. But Rogers was there.’