Traitor's Storm (6 page)

Urry looked up from under sparse brows. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘I come up to see Sir George.’

‘He ain’t here, though,’ his brother said reasonably. ‘The Constable’s off at Mistress Sanford’s; she’s having words with her old man again. Young Joseph came and got him, noontime. He’ll be locking him up by now, it is to be hoped. Let’s go with this gentleman, our George, and get that corpse out of our stream. T’ain’t healthy nor lucky, leaving him there.’

Marlowe and the two younger Urrys looked at Harry, standing like an ox in the furrow. The crowd had melted away, including one of the diggers chosen by Marlowe. The guards stood back, at attention and waiting for what the playwright would do next. After all, he did have a letter from the Queen.

George Urry suddenly stamped both feet, and turned for the tunnel to the outside world. ‘Let’s go, then,’ he said. ‘Sooner we’re gone, sooner it’s done.’

Feeling that you could certainly not say fairer than that, Marlowe shepherded the men into line and fell into step at the rear. He was practically certain that the man in the drain would turn out to be the elusive Hasler and if so, he could get out of this asylum before too many more tides had turned. Unearthing any number of corpses would be worth it for that alone.

D
on Alonso Perez de Guzman, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, looked in the mirror that evening in May. Beyond the mirror’s foxing he saw what he had become. He was in full armour, blued and gilded by the best craftsmen in Toledo. The chains of the Fleece and of Santiago, the Moor Slayer, hung around his neck and his chin was held high by the elaborately starched ruff made lovingly for him by the nuns of the convent of Alcalar. He blinked, looking into his own watery grey eyes. He was the Captain-General of the Ocean Sea and 125 ships and 30,000 battle-hardened troops skipped to his every word. Yet he knew in his heart he was essentially a secretary, a carrier of inkwells and a sharpener of quills. He was the commander of the greatest Armada in the history of the world and he had never heard a shot fired in anger on the water before.

Men who had heard that sound now trooped on to his quarterdeck; he could hear their boots on the planking of the timbers overhead. He adjusted his sword, cleared his throat and clattered up the narrow wooden ladder. In the light of the huge poop lantern, they saluted him, their pinnaces bobbing in the dark water below the bulk of the
San Martin de Portugal
as it rode at anchor. Under their dark cloaks, Medina Sidonia’s captains had come to pay their respects in readiness for the great enterprise that was about to begin.

Alongside the commander, his right-hand men bowed to each man as he approached. Diego de Valdez was High Admiral of Spain, as arrogant a bastard as ever sailed a ship. He also had a temper shorter than a Protestant’s rosary and it did not help that the man he hated most in the world was his cousin, Don Pedro, bowing curtly to him now, as commander of the Andalusian squadron. Francisco de Bombadilla was the army man. If Valdez knew how to fight at sea, Bombadilla could fight on land; he had proved it a dozen times. It was unfortunate that the man spent most of his time fighting with officers under his command. But Medina Sidonia was under no illusions. He had lost count of the times he had written to the King, begging to be released from this command. Felipe el Prudente did not know whether to be hurt or outraged and he had returned eloquent letters in his own spidery hand, with all kinds of reasons why Medina Sidonia it had to be. In the end, out of patience at last, he had written: ‘Medina Sidonia. Be there. P.’

So that was the true purpose of Valdez and Bombadilla and everybody knew it. They were King Philip’s bloodhounds, making sure that the Captain-General of the Ocean Sea did not try to slip
his
leash.

Old Juan de Recaldé could be heard wheezing and struggling up the
San Martin
’s rope ladder. He was sixty-two and a martyr to sciatica, but he was also Medina Sidonia’s second-in-command and as brave as a lion. He would lead the Biscayan squadron to hell if he had to and come out laughing the other side. He resolutely refused the chair offered to him on the quarterdeck and leaned on the ship’s rail to ease the pain in his joints.

Alonso de Leiva had no such difficulty because he was forty years younger than the old man. His carrack
La Rata Santa Maria Encoronada
was the pride of the Genoese squadron in Philip’s fleet and it bobbed on the water across the sweep of Lisbon’s harbour. He was tall with long, golden hair, a poet of sorts and loved by his men. He bowed low before Medina Sidonia, the cross of Santiago shining against the severe black of his doublet.

The Captain-General clapped his hands once they were all assembled, like a schoolmaster trying to control an unruly class, and they came to order. Servants mingled with them serving goblets of the finest Spanish wine from Recaldé’s own vineyards and Medina Sidonia raised his in a toast. He was about to hold forth when a last head appeared above the quarter rail, the lion mane of Hugo de Moncada, captain of the galliasses. He hated Medina Sidonia, knew him for the over-promoted idiot he was, and could not understand why
he
was not in command.

‘Sorry I’m late, Captain-General,’ he said, not meaning a word of it and helping himself to a goblet, passing by him on a tray at that moment.

Medina Sidonia smiled at him indulgently. Keep them all sweet now, he thought to himself. They had not set sail yet and there was a long way to go. He raised his goblet. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘The enterprise of England.’

‘The enterprise of England!’ they all thundered and sipped their wine. Then, as they all fell to what they did best, bickering and sniping, a messenger arrived from His Majesty at the Escorial, addressed to the Captain-General. Medina Sidonia tore the seal quickly and read it briefly by the guttering flame of the poop lantern. He could not make it all out in that bad light, but it had something to do with the place the English called the Isle of Wight.

Marlowe and the Urrys trudged down the hill from the barbican. The going was steep here and the hawthorn hedges that lined the sunken lane closed in dark and deep. This had been the old way up to the castle in the days of Isabella de Fortibus and few people used it now. It emerged on to flat fields, enclosed for two generations. The River Medina twisted through them as a little stream, full after the constant rain.

‘Over here.’ Harry Urry led the way, striding along the path that led to the hedge. The three men were standing at the entrance to a culvert in a ditch, the grass growing over its curved brick roof. But it was not the ingeniousness of the water supply that Marlowe was looking at – it was the pair of legs sticking out of the low tunnel. The boots were good, of stout Spanish leather, and they were caked in mud.

‘Gentlemen,’ the playwright said, ‘would you do the honours?’

The Urry brothers had handled dead bodies before. Their old man had gone of the plague six years ago and while others kept well away from even the most beloved victim of the pestilence or sent for the plague doctor, remote behind his beaked mask, the Urrys had just stayed with the old man, wiping his fevered brow and patting his hand in comfort. Then they had carried him to the new graveyard at Church Litten and buried him themselves. As for them, marked for death by their proximity, they developed not a pustule, not a bubo, not so much as a sneeze and a shiver.

What had scared these two was the sheer surprise of what they had found. Men died at their work – a carelessly swung crane at the quay; a mean bull suddenly gone rogue – but they did not crawl into a culvert to do it. They screwed their courage to the sticking place and each of them grabbed a boot. The owner of those boots slid out with a strange sucking noise and then stopped. Marlowe peered up into the culvert and saw the problem. The dead man’s elbows had caught on the brickwork on both sides and his arms were stiff and rigid. He made a twirling motion behind him with his hand and the brothers turned the legs clockwise. The elbows came free and the body came loose, rushing into the ditch with an afterbirth of mud, water and loosened grass.

When the head appeared, grey eyes staring through a film of mud up at the sky, the Urrys crossed themselves. Marlowe noticed it – the old faith still had its followers this far south.

‘Do you know who this is?’ he asked.

‘Walter Hunnybun,’ Harry Urry said. ‘He owns the land yonder.’

Marlowe followed the man’s pointing finger. The Hunnybun lands stretched away over the slope of the fields where the squat tower of a church nestled in a valley.

‘His lands end here?’ Marlowe checked.

‘That’s right,’ Will Urry told him. ‘We’re standing on our land now, his’n is over the hedge.’

Marlowe paced backwards and forwards, frowning. The Urrys were still staring at the body, caps clasped to their chests. ‘So,’ the poet said. ‘He died on your side of the hedge.’

‘Did he?’ Harry Urry asked.

‘It’s easier, I would think,’ Marlowe said, ‘to push a body in head first than feet first, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I dunno,’ the farmer conceded with a shrug. ‘Sheep. That’s what I know. What are you, then, some sort of constable?’

Marlowe laughed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m some sort of playwright. But I have seen murder before.’ He crouched in the mud under the hedge and looked at the corpse of Walter Hunnybun. The man was, he guessed, forty, solidly built and well dressed. His Venetians and doublet were soaking wet from their time in the culvert and his hat, if he had been wearing one, was gone. Marlowe hauled the body over on to its face, to the sound of a swallowed gasp from Will Urry. It seemed so wrong to the man that his neighbour should have his face pressed into the mud, even though it could make no difference to him now, wherever he had gone. There was no dagger at the man’s back, no sword at his side. He had come out to meet a friend, that much was obvious, or at least someone who posed no threat. But there he had been wrong. Marlowe rolled him back.

‘Where’s his house?’ he asked.

‘Yonder.’ Harry Urry pointed, but there was no building in sight.

‘He has family?’

The Urrys shook their heads. ‘Widower,’ Will said. ‘No nippers.’

‘Keeps to ’isself,’ Harry chipped in.

‘Is he … was he a farmer, like you?’

‘Not like us,’ Harry grunted. ‘I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but …’

‘But you’re going to,’ Marlowe suggested.

‘Had airs and graces, did Walter,’ Will said, not looking down at the man’s staring face as he spoke. ‘Always hobnobbing with gentry, even when he weren’t welcome.’

Harry gave him a sharp nudge. ‘You don’t know that,’ he said in an undertone.

Will was affronted. ‘Well,’ he said stubbornly. ‘’E were.’

Harry turned to Marlowe. ‘He were stuck up, Walter were,’ he said, already consigning the man to history. ‘Lickin’ the arse of Sir George.’

‘Always up at the castle,’ Will chimed in, not to be outdone.

‘That’s where we’ll take him, then,’ Marlowe said. ‘Can you lift him, gentlemen?’ He looked up the hill. ‘It’s a steep climb.’

It was. But these two were used to it, having carried more dead sheep than Marlowe had rhymed couplets, and they tossed a coin as to who would take the heavy end. Will lost and lowered himself to take the shoulders. The limbs were loosening now, the head lolling back.

And all the way up the slope, Marlowe couldn’t help noticing the biceps on both men. Either of them could have demolished Walter Hunnybun’s skull. They were First Finders; they had come across the body in the first place. But was that because they knew just where to look?

Marlowe had timed his arrival well. On the second Friday of each month, Sir George Carey, Captain of the Wight, held a lavish banquet for the great and good of his Island and the wine flowed freely and the playing of pipes and lutes was exquisite. The orchestra had come gratis, lent by the Earl of Southampton, who owed George Carey a favour. Marlowe found himself as guest of honour on the high table, the candles flooding the room with light. George Carey was an alert-looking man with large dark eyes and tightly curled hair. He was the heir to the Hunsdon estate and his father was first cousin to Her Majesty. His fingers glittered with rings as he dabbled them in the bowl between courses and an emerald sparkled in the trinket hanging from his left ear.

‘Well, we’re delighted to have you, Master Marlowe,’ he said, raising his goblet to the man. ‘As you can see, I’m trying to bring a little civilization to this arse-end of the universe, but such things take time. I’ve been trying to get young Master Nashe down here for a while, but he’s never available.’

‘Nashe?’ Marlowe raised an eyebrow.

‘The satirist and university wit.’

‘Is that what he is?’

‘Do you know him?’ Carey asked, sensing a raw nerve.

‘Intimately. He’s a skinny little fellow, gag-teeth. Got a fuse shorter than any of your calivermen, I’ll wager.’

‘You don’t like him?’

‘On the contrary, Sir George, I am very fond. All right, he is a mere lad and made the mistake of attending St John’s College in Cambridge, but we have a mutual hatred which keeps us friends. Young Tom and I both hate with a passion Dr Gabriel Harvey, also late of Cambridge. Do you know him?’

Carey shook his head.

‘That’s as it should be.’ Marlowe smiled and sipped his wine. If a courtier like George Carey had never heard of the obnoxious Harvey, then Marlowe’s work was done. He looked down the table, changing the subject. ‘Are all these gentlemen of the Wight?’

‘After a fashion,’ Carey said, flicking his fingers for a lackey to fill his goblet. ‘Over there, for example.’ The governor casually jerked his head to his right where a large man was holding forth on the current state of Carey’s Militia. ‘Henry Oglander. That man could bore a cannon. Papist, of course.’

‘Really?’

‘And it’s not a good time to be of the old faith, Marlowe, you’ll agree?’

‘Oh, indeed,’ the poet said, he who had no faith at all, unless it was in his own quill and his own dagger.

‘Over there.’ Carey nodded to his left. ‘John Vaughan, merchant.’