Silent Court (2 page)

‘Well,’ Walsingham said firmly, ‘he’s unleashed his bestiality for the last time. It’s positively barbaric.’ He looked around him, the dank walls, green with mould, the corners of impenetrable black. ‘I had absolutely no idea, Francis.’

‘Where are we, sir?’ Throckmorton asked, gripping the man’s sleeve. ‘Are we near the river? I keep getting a smell…’

‘No, no,’ Walsingham explained. ‘This is the White Tower, dear boy. The river’s… er… that way.’ It took him a while to get his own bearings.

‘It’s just… the rats,’ Throckmorton whispered, his eyes wild. ‘I’ve never seen so many rats.’

Walsingham nodded, his face a mask of sympathy. He looked at Throckmorton’s crushed hand. ‘We’ll get that looked at,’ he promised. ‘Honey works wonders, I’m told. And the Queen of Scots?’

Throckmorton blinked back the tears. Then he sat upright, as far as the pain would allow him. ‘I am not a traitor, Sir Francis,’ he said solemnly.

‘My dear boy,’ Walsingham patronized. ‘Whoever said you were?’

Throckmorton tried to chuckle, but it was just a gargle in his parched throat. ‘Topcliffe, for one. Lord Burghley, apparently, for another.’

‘They just misunderstood,’ Walsingham assured him. ‘The letters they claim you wrote…’

‘I just felt sorry for the Queen, that was all.’

‘The Queen of Scots?’ Walsingham needed to be clear. There could, after all, only be one queen.

‘She’s in prison, Sir Francis,’ Throckmorton explained, as though to a village idiot. ‘I know how that feels.’

‘Indeed,’ nodded Walsingham. ‘So there was no mention of the Spanish ambassador?’

‘Who?’

‘Mendoza.’

‘Um… there may have been. I don’t remember.’

‘And nothing about… what was it again, that ridiculous notion, an invasion by the French under the Duke of Guise, linking up with English Papists?’ Walsingham was chuckling at the patent absurdity of the idea.

‘That was William Shelley’s rubbish. I warned them…’ His voice tailed away to silence.

Walsingham smiled and patted the man’s shoulder, the one that had come so close to being dislocated. ‘I must go, Francis,’ he said. ‘I’ll see that the brandy is brought to you. Get a doctor down here. Then I’ll see William Waad about your release.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s an outrage that an Englishman can be treated like this in Elizabeth’s England.’

‘Thank you, Sir Francis.’ Throckmorton was still swallowing blood.

‘Think nothing of it.’ Walsingham smiled and swung his cloak over his shoulder on his way to the steps.

Beyond the door, he accepted the goblet of brandy from Richard Topcliffe and the men drank together. ‘Your very good health, Richard.’

‘And yours, Sir Francis.’ The rackmaster grinned. ‘Any joy?’

‘Oh, yes, indeed. Never fails, does it? Nasty torturer, nice torturer routine. Good job, by the way.’

‘We like to please.’ He smiled. His assistants appeared at that moment with butter and water. ‘You won’t need those, lads. Get ’em back to the kitchens.’

‘Could I trouble you for quill and parchment, Richard?’

‘Of course.’ Topcliffe rummaged in his desk, sliding the heavy manacles and collar to one side.

‘Mrs Topcliffe well?’ Walsingham asked. ‘And the little Topcliffes?’

‘Never better, sir. Little Dickie had a touch of the croup last month.’

‘Hmm,’ Walsingham sympathized. ‘It’s this damned weather. If we had a summer this year, I don’t remember it.’ He dipped the quill and scratched a quick note on the parchment before binding it and dripping the red, molten wax from Topcliffe’s candle on to the ribbon. ‘Right,’ he sighed, hauling on the cloak. ‘I think I’ve got what I came for. Love to Mrs Topcliffe.’

‘Sir.’ The rackmaster beamed.

‘Oh, Richard, I don’t want to tell you your job; gammers and egg-sucking and so on. But work on the other hand now, there’s a good fellow. It disorients them.’

‘Very good,’ Topcliffe said, always happy to improve on his work. ‘And the rack?’

‘Er… yes, why not? Have your dinner first, dear boy. We’ve got Guise. I just need times and places for the planned invasion now. Oh and strength of the enemy, if you can. There’s a bonus in it for you.’

‘Oh, sir.’ Topcliffe was hurt. ‘I don’t do it for the money, you know that.’

‘Yes.’ Walsingham nodded, frowning into the man’s bright blue eyes. ‘Yes, I know.’

Under the grey sky, the one that Francis Throckmorton would not see again until the day the axeman sliced off his head on Tower Hill, Francis Walsingham stood by his messenger’s horse, stroking the animal’s muzzle and nose.

‘You can take this letter to Master Christopher Marlowe, fellow.’ He threw the horseman a purse. ‘Michelgrove, near Arundel. You will find him at the house of William Shelley. He’ll know what to do.’

‘Very good, sir.’ And the horseman wheeled away to clatter through the barbican, making for the Bridge.

The mist curled along the Arun that Sunday morning as the bell of St Nicholas called the faithful to church. Christopher Marlowe reached the packhorse bridge that crossed the river and looked up at the great, grey castle towering over the town. Through the frost of the morning, the good folk of Arundel were making their way in twos and threes up the hill to the church. Marlowe had received Walsingham’s letter by galloper that morning and he had it in his hand now. He looked across to where the carriage rocked to a standstill and the footmen busied themselves helping the family down.

Catherine Shelley was a beautiful woman, tall and stately, with soft, fluttering hands and a musical voice. She nodded to Marlowe as she reached the ground and started clucking around her daughters. Jane, at twelve was already beginning to look like her mother, with a finely drawn, nervous face and slender body.

She stood looking down at the ground, feeling gawky and awkward in a dress which was stiff and unyielding. She had begged her mother for a more grown-up dress and was regretting it already. The stiff lace collar dug into her neck and made it sore. The layers of petticoats weighed heavily on her bony hips and made her stomach ache. She felt that every move had to be planned, that to walk at all needed a momentum that she just didn’t seem to be able to gather together. And still Master Marlowe seemed not to be aware of her existence, only speaking to her to correct her Latin or Greek. She would flounce in and out of the dining hall so that he would notice her, slamming doors and dropping things, get her Cicero wrong so that he had to spend more time with her while correcting it. He filled her dreams. She was in Hell.

Her sister Bessie, on the other hand, had no such pretensions. She loved Kit Marlowe with the undying passion of a little girl who had been ignored by everyone for most of her life, who suddenly is the recipient of smiles and hugs, no matter how absent-minded, from a man who seemed to make her mother, her sister and all of the maids blush and go weak at the knees. That both Bessie and Marlowe were equally unaware of why this should be was to their credit. He encouraged her in her pirouetting and posturing, her turning cartwheels, even if he had to constantly disentangle her from her petticoats and help her find which way was up. She declaimed what she could remember from the simplified verses he set her to learn and never walked when she could skip, never skipped when she could jump. She danced to his lute playing and sang with his songs. In spite of her constant motion, she was still a plump little thing and held hidden in her padded cheeks the secret of the greatest beauty of all the Shelley women, still to come.

‘Good morning, Master Marlowe.’ William Shelley was wearing his best today, his ruff well starched, his beard trimmed.

‘Master Shelley.’ Marlowe half bowed. He had known this man for three months and had lived in the attic room of his house for two. They had even fished the Arun together, vying with each other for the best catch of mullet. He had come to know him as well as any casual tutor could – that had been his brief from Walsingham. What Walsingham had not told Marlowe to do was to get too close to these people. It was not safe. Nor to get too close to their home life. But here he was, ravelled in the apron strings of the women, grudgingly admiring the man and beginning to regret the last two months’ work.

‘Bad news?’ William Shelley nodded to the parchment in Marlowe’s hand.

‘I may have to go back to Cambridge,’ the tutor told him, ‘sooner than I expected.’

Shelley frowned. ‘The girls will miss you, Kit,’ he said. ‘We all will.’

Marlowe nodded. Arundel was cold this morning, with everyone’s breath streaming out in front of them. Bessie of course was blowing on purpose, steam coming from her mouth as if she were a horse. She was stamping and prancing to complete the picture. But although it was cold, and noses were red and pinched with it, Marlowe knew it was nothing, in this soft and southern place, to the cold that would already have Cambridge in its grip. There, the wind would be a lazy wind, lazy because it bit straight through flesh and bone, rather than go round a person. No matter how many layers of clothes and piles of blankets, in winter he always went to bed cold, woke up colder still and then it just got worse all day. Here, his attic room was warm with the risen heat of many fires. He had the run of the house and it was his greatest pleasure to go down to the library at night and read by the light and the warmth of a log fire, mumbling comfortably to itself in the enormous grate. Sometimes, Catherine Shelley would join him, and would sit on the other side of the fireplace with her candle in its mirrored candlestick, stabbing at her embroidery and making polite conversation. It was a comfortable life and he realized, standing there on the packhorse bridge, that it had become too comfortable by half. Shelley’s voice broke into his thoughts.

‘On your way to church?’

Marlowe half smiled in that mercurial way of his. ‘Not this morning, William. I just thought I’d wander the river for a while. Helps me think. You?’ He turned to face his employer, never forgetting for a moment why he was really here.

‘We’ve been invited to his Lordship’s again.’ Shelley smiled with all the bonhomie at his disposal. ‘No doubt we’ll attend divine service in the castle.’

‘No doubt you will.’ Marlowe smiled back and he watched them go, walking in line abreast up the hill, little Bessie leaping and pirouetting on her pattens, Jane glancing back at the black-cloaked figure at the bridge head. The church bell was still clashing and clanging and the bright cross-crosslet flag of the Howards snapped in the stiff breeze overhead.

‘You’re quiet tonight, Kit.’ Catherine Shelley looked up from her embroidery at the tutor. For a moment, he didn’t react, but then he raised his head and smiled gently at her.

‘I’m sorry. I’m thinking.’ He sat himself up and rubbed his hands together. ‘What were you saying?’ He looked at her in the firelight, her candle throwing its light on to the handiwork on her lap. She tipped her head to one side and tutted softly. ‘What?’ The laugh in his voice turned her heart to water. She had been aware all day that she should store images of Master Marlowe, the tutor, the poet, away against the day. If she could only keep one, that would be it. The eyebrow raised, the mouth smiling uncertainly, the laughing word held on the air.

‘I hadn’t said anything,’ she said, smiling back at him, ‘except to say you are quiet tonight.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t meant to be a curmudgeon. I just have a lot of planning to do, with… with the journey and other things.’

‘Back to Cambridge? You’ll take a horse, won’t you? William has offered you a horse?’

He shook his head. ‘That is too much. And anyway, how could I get it back to you?’

‘There would be no need,’ she said. ‘Let it be a gift from the girls. They will miss you so much, Kit.’ She paused and a blush crept up her neck. ‘I will miss you. You are company for me in the evenings. William is…’

‘Your husband is a busy man,’ Marlowe finished the sentence for her. ‘Often away, I know.’

She looked at him, her head cocked on one side. ‘He is here and there, Kit, here and there.’ She looked down at her lap and twisted her hands together. ‘I want to ask you something.’

‘Well, I’ll answer you if I can.’ His heart beat so that he thought she must surely be able to hear it. In his life of ducking and weaving, of fantasy and half truth, he had never had to lie to someone so innocent before. His usual dealings were with men who would kill a queen for the sake of a pope, kill thousands for the sake of an ideal. This was different. He waited.

‘Can I have a portrait of you?’ The words came out in a rush. ‘The girls would like it.’

‘I have no portrait to give you,’ he said. He hoped the relief didn’t show on his face. Although he could dissemble with words, he was still working on keeping his emotions from view and wasn’t sure he always succeeded.

‘I have been… well, as you know, I like to sketch. I had lessons when I still lived at my father’s house, before I married William and the girls were born. My teacher is quite famous now, at Court; my Uncle George – George Gower, I don’t know whether you have heard of him…’ Catherine Shelley knew she was babbling, but couldn’t seem to stop.

‘I have heard of him, yes,’ he said. ‘You sound as though your childhood was very happy.’

‘Oh, it was.’ Her eyes lit up. ‘The girls and I still go sometimes back to my parents’ house. My brother has it now, of course, but we still have a suite of rooms there.’ She smiled at the recollection. ‘It’s in Yorkshire. It’s good for the girls to run free sometimes. Life is very…’

‘Confined.’ He watched her carefully. A question he had wanted to ask her had been answered. When the time came for her husband to be scooped up by Walsingham’s men, she would have a roof over her head and the girls would have somewhere to run free.

She nodded her head once. ‘Yes. You know us so well, Kit.’ She turned as she heard the door of her husband’s study open. He called for his steward and the man’s hurrying footsteps echoed through the hall. ‘He will have finished his business soon,’ she said, leaning forward and making Marlowe a conspirator in her plan. ‘So, quickly, Kit, can I send my sketches to Uncle George, to have a portrait made of you? For the girls?’