Silent Court (28 page)

‘Dr Dee…’ Marlowe was as out of breath as his horse. ‘Where is he?’

‘Who’s asking?’ Boddington refused to be impressed by good horses and flashy clothes. This was St John’s College, the finest place of learning in all the fens and probably beyond.

‘Christopher Marlowe,’ the rider told him, springing out of the saddle.

The proctor was even less impressed now that the man stood at his eye level. ‘Christopher Marlowe of Corpus Christi?’ Boddington’s words dripped with contempt.

‘The same.’ Marlowe nodded.

‘The one they call Machiavel?’ Boddington said slowly, images of Hell creeping into his mind.

‘It doesn’t matter what they call me, Master Proctor,’ Marlowe said. ‘Now, do I have to smash down every door in your God-forsaken college to find Dr Dee or are you going to tell me?’

‘Kit?’ a voice made him turn.

It was Robert Greene, swallowing carefully because Kit Marlowe’s dagger point was already poking a new hole in his ruff.

‘Er… hello, Kit. What a surprise.’ Greene managed with his head seriously at an angle.

‘Still writing bad poetry, Robyn?’ Marlowe asked.

‘Well, we try, you know. Do I understand that you’re looking for Dr Dee?’

‘Robyn.’ Marlowe shipped the dagger away. ‘You and I both know that you’ve been listening to this conversation ever since I arrived, so let’s drop the all-innocence bit, shall we? What do you know?’

Robert Greene knew – or thought he did – that Kit Marlowe had sold his soul to the Devil and he knew a good deal more besides, but he realized that that was not what Marlowe meant.

‘You’re looking for the Queen’s magus?’ he checked.

Marlowe nodded. ‘And unless you want his blood on your conscience and Master Topcliffe’s rack under your arse cheeks, I suggest you tell me where I can find him.’

‘Topcliffe?’ Boddington repeated. He didn’t get out much.

‘The Queen’s rackmaster,’ Greene explained. ‘Well, if you must know, he’s in the rooms that should rightfully be mine. Off the court, in the north-west corner. You can’t miss it – there’ll be goose shit on the staircase. Dr Dee has brought his own Christmas dinner with him.’

‘Dominus Greene…’ The proctor was outraged at betrayal on this scale.

‘Go hang yourself, Master Proctor,’ Greene snapped and ran off into the Cambridge night to find Gabriel Harvey.

Two or three sizars were crossing the Court behind a college professor, struggling under the weight of his books. There were candles burning at some windows as Marlowe reached the far corner. A solitary torch guttered on the turn of the stairs and he trod as soundlessly as a cat until he reached the landing. If Dee had brought a goose, he had also brought his cook and that meant Sam Bowes too. Three rooms – two at a pinch. Unless, of course, Dee had insisted on one for the goose. He paused by the first door and pressed his ear to the black and knotted oak. Nothing. Nothing either from the second. But at the third, he heard voices – or was it one? – muffled and secret, gabbling fast and low.

The next thing he knew his head was yanked backwards by the hair and rammed forward so that the bruise raised by van Haren’s man’s thrown pot was purpled again and he was kicked forward into the room. When he scrabbled to his feet, the door had been slammed shut and he found himself staring down the bores of two wheel-lock pistols, wound and ready, one in each of the hands of Hern, the lord of the Egyptians, father of the children of the moon.

‘You will unhook your pickle stabber, Master Marlowe.’ Hern indicated the rapier. Marlowe looked across at John Dee. The man was crouching near the bed, already in his night cap and he had quill and parchment in his hand.

‘Good evening, Christopher,’ he said quietly.

‘Dr Dee.’ Marlowe nodded.

‘Now!’ Hern snapped and Marlowe unhooked the sword from its hanger and threw it on the bed.

‘And now the dagger,’ Hern said.

Marlowe held out both arms and shrugged.

‘Don’t play games with me,
Christopher
,’ Hern snarled. ‘I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know. And I’ve known all about you since I looked at your papers from Sir Francis Walsingham. I should have disposed of you much earlier. But the women liked you and you kept the children amused, so I let you live. But now, with your left hand and slowly.’ He raised his own left hand. ‘Do it, or the first ball goes through Dee’s left eye. And I’m no Jean Jaureguy; I won’t miss.’

Marlowe reached round behind him, his right hand still in the air. He caught the hilt and just for a moment toyed with sending the blade hissing through the air, as he had back in Delft what seemed like an eternity ago. But now was not the time to test which was faster – the pistol ball or the steel; not with John Dee’s life in the balance. He threw it, sheath and all, to join the sword on the bed.

‘Where is she?’ Hern asked.

‘Who?’ asked Dee.

‘More games, magus?’ Hern chuckled. ‘After tonight, the Queen will be looking for a new fortune teller. Strange, isn’t it? Your skills and those of my people are so alike, yet you are fêted and lauded wherever you go, sitting at the Queen’s right hand and whispering in her ear. While the children of the moon are shunned and spat at and hounded out of the civilization of men. Now –’ he held the pistol level again – ‘for the last time, Dr Dee, where is your wife?’

Dee blinked, then frowned, then looked at Marlowe. Had this mad Egyptian come back from God-knew-where to pose imponderables; to debate philosophy? And what did Hern expect to hear? That Helene was with the angels, or wandering in purgatory or stoking the fires of Hell? And why should it matter to him?

‘You see,’ Hern went on, ‘Master Marlowe here tells me you can raise the dead. All I saw at Ely was smoke and mirrors, the sort of gimcrackery my people do at fairs up and down any country you’d like to name.’

‘But you couldn’t risk it, could you?’ Marlowe asked him. ‘Just in case my story was right and Dr Dee does indeed have powers…’

‘Powers!’ Hern spat on to the straw-strewn boards at his feet. ‘A pox on those. You are a bigger fraud than any of us,’ he growled at Dee. ‘You on the other hand –’ he pointed his other pistol at Marlowe’s head – ‘can indeed turn a tale. Your death will deprive the world of that and I am truly sorry to be the instrument of such a loss. The world needs stories, Master Marlowe.’

‘I thought you didn’t believe in Dee’s powers,’ Marlowe said.

‘Oh, I don’t,’ Hern assured them both. ‘But my own are limited too. What if Dr Dee didn’t have to bring his wife back from the dead because she wasn’t dead? Because my poison hadn’t worked? People have woken up from worse sleeps than hers; look at the Statholder, for example. Lily roused him and all had thought him dead to all intents and purposes. So… it might have been so with Helene. So, I came back to finish the job.’

‘Why?’ Dee croaked. ‘Why did you have to kill my Helene, the reason for my existence, half of my soul… ?’

‘Spare us the platitudes, old man,’ Hern sneered. ‘The reason for my existence is this.’ He used his elbow to jingle the coins in his purse. ‘We children of the moon put our heads in a noose every day of our lives because of your narrow laws and Puritan small-mindedness. All that makes it worth the risk is cold cash – the only God I need.’

‘I still don’t see…’ Marlowe began.

‘Helene Dee may have been this old fool’s reason for living, but she was actually a nosy busybody. I caught her listening at the foot of her stairs to our casual chat. She overheard a secret Mass being planned by that religious maniac Simon. She had identified him from the first; she was looking at him all night. She had the look of a hedge witch, I knew it from the start and when Rose told Balthasar she knew her in her old life, I knew for certain. She had a lot to lose. She’d have told you, Dee. And you would have told the world, if only so that no one could accuse you of being a secret Catholic yourself. I make my living secreting Catholic priests around this country and the Church pays me well for it. I wasn’t going to have all that jeopardized by a careless word. Helene Dee isn’t the first I’ve had to silence and I doubt she’ll be the last. Rose, for example, will probably end her days shivering with gaol fever in some stinking cell.’

‘Is that it?’ Dee blinked in disbelief. ‘You would snuff out a life to save your purse?’

‘Life is cheap, Dr Dee,’ Hern reminded him. ‘But a good paying proposition – how many of those come along in the average lifetime? Not many, I can tell you. I have had too many years of starvation and privation to want to have them again. A well-lined purse can keep you very warm at night.’

‘What about Maria?’ Marlowe asked. ‘She is having your child any day now. I was sure when you ran that it was any one of the Egyptians but you. You seemed to love her. I couldn’t believe you would go.’

Hern shrugged. ‘What’s love got to do with it?’ he asked. ‘Maria and I have been together a long time. She has borne me a lot of children, some dead because of the lean years, some left us, some still with the troupe. She will understand.’

Marlowe, remembering the woman, struggling with her aching back, wondering what this last child bed might bring, wasn’t so sure.

Hern levelled the wheel lock at Dee and took aim. ‘I really don’t give so much as a flying fart for anyone but myself, please believe this. I will kill anyone who gets in my way. The nights are too cold as my bones get older, Master Marlowe, and if you have no wish to find out how old bones feel, then please, step in front of me and we will see how a young man dies.’

Dee looked up at Marlowe. ‘Christopher,’ he said. ‘My life is a burden to me without Helene. Let him kill me. He can’t kill us both at one moment. Use my death to get away. Find the proctor. Get the constables. Don’t let Helene be unavenged.’

‘She needs no avenging, Dee,’ Hern snapped. ‘I know she lives yet. For the last time, Doctor –
where is your wife
?’

‘Behind you!’ Marlowe hissed.

It was the oldest trick in the book, but Hern didn’t know the Cambridge winds on college stairways and Marlowe did. The creak of the timbers made Hern turn, just for a second and Marlowe threw himself forward. A wheel lock crashed in the half darkness and Dee’s desk and Dee’s candles went flying. Two men struggled on the floor, wrestling desperately for the remaining gun with its single shot. Each time the muzzle moved in the grappling hands, Dee threw himself sideways, first left, then right. Then the muzzle disappeared as Marlowe forced Hern’s fist down to his chest. Locked together as they were, the explosion made them both jump and lie still.

Blood trickled out from the lifeless figure and crept over the straw.

Professor Michael Johns looked at his reflection in his window pane. In the glass it looked for all the world as though Kit Marlowe was at his shoulder, his portrait misty in the shadows across the room. He had hung the picture up to keep it safe, or so the story would go should anyone ask him, but it was already both a comfort and an irritant to his soul. The chapel bell at Corpus Christi was tolling the faithful and the not-so-faithful to prayer, but he wouldn’t be going to the morning service today. And probably no other day. Not in this chapel. He checked the leather on the beautiful volume of Bale’s Acts of the English Votaries. Michael Johns didn’t approve of bribes, although he acknowledged that they were how the world turned. He was due that morning to explain to Dr Norgate why he had not mentioned the sudden disappearance of Kit Marlowe, Quartus Convictus of Corpus Christi College in the University of Cambridge. So either Bale’s hideously expensive book would buy Johns a second chance to keep the post he loved or it would be a magnanimous farewell present for the Master. He hefted the thick volume up under his arm a little more securely as he reached for the rail of the stairs with his other hand.

The feel of the worn wood under his palm, the touch of the stair under his foot, the smell of the cool stone, the leather book, the paper, the humanity; the slow peal of the bell, the sound of the scurrying feet of the scholars, the whisper of their fustian gowns; the sudden shaft of thin sunlight through a small and dusty window of the stairs, the dead fly caught in a cobweb which had been there, unreachable high up in the rafters since he had been a scholar himself – all of this moved him so much suddenly that tears smeared his eyes and he could hardly go on. To lose all this, even the dead fly, would surely break his heart.

He shook his head to clear away the tears. ‘Kit, Kit, Kit,’ he muttered, and continued up the stairs.

‘What did you say your name was again?’ Dr Norgate peered over his spectacles at the sorry-looking huddle in front of him.

‘Kelly,’ the man said. ‘Edward Kelly. Personal friend and private secretary to Dr John Dee, late of this college and the Queen’s magus.’

Norgate frowned and swept off his glasses. ‘I have no doubt that Dr Dee is the Queen’s magus,’ he said. ‘But he is not, not has he ever been, to my knowledge, a member of this college.’

Kelly blinked. Since Ely and the disastrous night when Helene Dee died, he had been living on his wits. Nothing amiss there – it was what the man had done all his life – but Edward Kelly was staring forty in the face and perhaps, just perhaps, his old touch wasn’t quite what it was. He’d been run out of Ely by the Constable and his dogs. He had been set upon by angry fishermen at King’s Lynn who had accused him of cheating at cards.
Him
. Edward Kelly. Personal and private secretary to the Queen’s magus. Just because a man had clipped ears, it didn’t mean he was a bad person, but for some reason everyone seemed to think that he was some sort of confidence trickster. What ever had happened to Christian charity? That’s what he wanted to know.

‘Are you trying to tell me that John Dee lied to me? That he was never a member of St John’s College?’ Kelly was outraged. He hated it when people lied to him.

‘No, indeed I am not,’ Norgate said, winding his spectacles over his ears again with the intention of continuing his interrupted studies. ‘I believe that Dr Dee is a very well-respected member of that institution.’

Kelly thought for a moment. What was the man saying? Then he worked it out. ‘Tell me the truth, you old fool!’ Kelly snapped at the man sitting in front of him, so smug in his gold tassels, surrounded by his parchment and his inkwells. ‘Is this or is this not St John’s College?’