5
Late May, 1612 The Anchor Inn, Bank Street, London
'The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones.'
The disease was affecting him now, Marlowe knew. He was starting to lose feeling in his hands and feet, could not always sense the hardness of the ground under him as his feet landed and so had the prancing, high- stepping gait of the pox sufferer. The doctor had said the growths would come eventually — hard little carbuncles on his flesh that first blackened and then fell out, leaving a gaping hole behind them. They would be active around his penis, the doctor had said. He would piss like a watering can. The cures could stave off the end, but that it would end in death was inevitable. So little time. So much revenge.
The Anchor Inn was by the Clink Prison and there was little to choose between the clientele of both places. They were all lost souls. The river pirates used the Anchor as their base, as did several highwaymen. A warren of passageways allowed escape down to the river. This was a sump, a noisome gathering place where many of the conversations were in grunts, where men came to become seriously drunk in the shortest possible time and where nameless deals were struck in dark corners. Occasionally a flash of light from one of those darkest corners would reveal a jewel or a necklace being covertly shown, before being stuffed back into the stinking cloth in which it was wrapped. The women here were old before their time, cackling hags at twenty-five years. Marlowe had no pity for them. It was one of their kind that had launched the acid of the pox into his body and into his mind.
He had paid one of the boys to keep filling his tankard. A thin, small-faced creature with a great lump and a bruise on the side of his head, he seemed incapable of moving forward, favouring instead a crab-like sideways walk, his chin permanently held down into his puny chest as if to avoid a blow from any of the roaring mob that frequented the inn. His face was quite beautiful, Marlowe noted, if you cut through the grime and the swelling, the big green eyes and the high cheekbones set off surprisingly well by a mop of auburn hair. His innocence was pathetic. Well, innocence did not last, thought Kit Marlowe.
As his hand caressed the letters he remembered his failure. The porter they paid to guard The Globe theatre had been old, and sleeping off his drink. It had been easy to slit his throat while he slept — who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him? — and pleasurable to watch as he writhed and twisted down the slippery road to hell, trying vainly to scream his fear as the air whistled out through the bloody slice in his air passage. Marlowe had broken into the room as easily as he had slit the throat of the porter, leafed frantically through the hundreds of papers. These were fair copies! Not the original manuscripts he craved! Only one scabby piece worth stealing, and that in the writing of a man long dead!
Marlowe took his grief, as he had learned to do over the years, and folded it over and over until it was a small package. Then he dropped it in the furnace of his hatred and watched it catch light and burn, renewing its strength.
With hindsight, his failure to kill Shakespeare had saved him.
The man he had known as William Hall must know where the papers are, must have lied to Marlowe's spy when he said in his cups that they were stored at The Globe. His revenge would have been wonderfully byzantine, but the devil must be guarding him so that Shakespeare was still living. He would talk, again. And this time Marlowe would make sure it was the truth.
In the meantime, there were other debts to be paid. It would be too simple to kill Henry Gresham. Gresham must suffer, as Marlowe had suffered over the years. There was a most enjoyable way of achieving that end, he thought, as a grin seemed to tear his scarred face even further.
6
Late May, 1612 The Merchant's House, Trumpington, near Cambridge
'O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, With saints doth bait thy hook…'
'It stinks!' said Mannion. 'As usual, he hasn't told you half of it, and the half he hasn't told you is what'll get you killed.'
They were in the library. Gresham had had it built on when he had first bought The Merchant's House, with long windows set almost from ceiling to floor and a gallery. It was less splendid than the library at his London home, known simply as The House, but somehow it felt more like home. He loved the smoke-free sky of East Anglia and the glorious cacophony of light in its sunsets and sunrise. He loved the mist over the meadows in the morning, and the thrusting turrets of King's College Chapel, forcing themselves to dominate the Fenland on the ride from Trumpington to Cambridge. He loved his relationship with Granville College of the University of Cambridge. His college. His contribution to history. His only contribution until the arrival of Walter and Anna, his children after a lifetime when he had thought himself barren.
'Of course it stinks. Do you think I'm fool enough to believe that what Robert Cecil chooses to tell me is even half the truth?' Gresham was pacing the room. In front of him were Mannion and Jane, his council of war. Gresham had been a bastard son. He had never known his mother. The whispers had been there as long as he could remember. The fabulously wealthy but elderly banker widowed, his only child dead. The enforced guardianship of Lady Mary Keys, sister of Lady Jane Grey and victim of an imprudent marriage. There was no one left now to confirm or deny Sir Thomas Gresham's secret, the name of Henry Gresham's mother. At least the distant, cold figure of his father had taken the boy in, clothed and fed him, let him roam like a wild young puppy through the house. He was left to drag himself up in its entrails, adopted in a strange father and son relationship by Mannion, himself a boy just turned man. Mannion had been the only servant Gresham's father had trusted near him in his final days. Gresham had been a non-person, a boy with no real status, a servant yet not a servant, gentry yet not gentry. A bastard, but with noble blood. He had inherited the fabulous Gresham wealth when he was nine years old. The servants who had been there remembered the thin, wire-straight boy with round eyes gazing steadily into those of the ancient lawyer, eyes that did not flicker as the nine-year-old was told he was now one of the richest men in the country. Henry Gresham had learned very young how to withdraw into himself. He had first learned how to fight when, on his rambling through the night streets of London, street urchins had sensed the smell of money and set upon him. He had learned at times of crisis to force all other thoughts from his head, to develop a concentration of almost unnatural power and ferocity. He was showing it now, pacing like a wild beast up and down the room, almost unaware of the others in it.
'What do we actually know?' he asked, punching out the words.
It was Jane who answered. She could not keep the tension out of her voice, nor, to her regret, the fear. She knew fear was weakness, prayed that her weakness might not in some way reduce his respect for her.
'We know that whenever Cecil's entered our lives in the past, your life's been put at risk. The man's like some evil daemon, a harbinger of death, pain and suffering. He asked you to get involved in two things: these letters and the manuscripts.'
The tiny part of Gresham's brain that was always distanced from him, watching, waiting, picked up the tension and the fear in Jane's voice. A sharp pang cut across his heart. Fool! How easy for him to turn his agony of
