The Eyre Affair

I took my drink.

‘I trained to be a LiteraTec,’ he said wistfully. ‘Made it to cadetship.’

‘What happened?’

‘My girlfriend was a militant Marlovian. She converted some Will-Speak machines to quote from Tamburlaine and I was implicated when she was nabbed. And that was that. Not even the military would take me.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Chris.’

‘Thursday.’

We shook hands.

‘I can only speak from experience, Chris, but I’ve been in the military and SpecOps and you should be thanking your girlfriend.’

‘I do,’ hastened Chris. ‘Every day. We’re married now and have two kids. I do this bar job in the evenings and run the Swindon branch of the Kit Marlowe Society during the day. We have almost four thousand members. Not bad for an Elizabethan forger, murderer, gambler and atheist.’

‘There are some who say he might have written the plays usually attributed to Shakespeare.’

Chris was taken aback. He was suspicious, too.

‘I’m not sure I should be discussing this with a LiteraTec.’

‘There’s no law against discussion, Chris. Who do you think we are, the thought police?’

‘No, that’s SO-2 isn’t it?’

‘But about Marlowe—?’

Chris lowered his voice.

‘Okay. I think Marlowe might have written the plays. He was undoubtedly a brilliant playwright, as Faust, Tamburlaine and Edward II would attest. He was the only person of his age who could have actually done it. Forget Bacon and Oxford; Marlowe has to be the odds-on favourite.’

‘But Marlowe was murdered in 1593,’ I replied slowly. ‘Most of the plays were written after that.’

Chris looked at me and lowered his voice.

‘Sure. If he died in the bar fight that day.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘It’s possible his death was faked.’

‘Why?’

Chris took a deep breath. This was a subject he knew something about.

‘Remember that Elizabeth was a Protestant queen. Anything like atheism or papism would deny the authority of the Protestant Church and the Queen as the head.’

‘Treason,’ I murmured. ‘A capital offence.’

‘Exactly. In April 1593 the Privy Council arrested one Thomas Kyd in connection with some anti- government pamphleteering. When his rooms were searched they revealed some atheistic writings.’

‘So?’

‘Kyd fingered Marlowe. Said Marlowe had written them two years ago when they were rooming together. Marlowe was arrested and questioned on 18 May 1593; he was freed on bail so presumably there wasn’t enough evidence to commit him for trial.’

‘What about his friendship with Walsingham?’ I asked.

‘I was coming to that. Walsingham had an influential position within the secret service; they had known each other for a number of years. With more evidence arriving daily against Marlowe, his arrest seemed inevitable. But on the morning of 30 May, Marlowe is killed in a bar brawl, apparently over an unpaid bill.’

‘Very convenient.’

‘Very. It’s my belief that Walsingham faked his friend’s death. The three men in the tavern were all in his pay. He bribed the coroner and Marlowe set up Shakespeare as the front man. Will, an impoverished actor who knew Marlowe from his days at the Shoreditch theatre, probably leaped at the chance to make some money; his career seems to have taken off as Marlowe’s ended.’

‘It’s an interesting theory. But wasn’t Venus and Adonis published a couple of months before Marlowe’s death? Earlier even than Kyd’s arrest?’

Chris coughed.

‘Good point. All I can say is that the plot must have been hatched somewhat ahead of time, or that records have been muddled.’

He paused for a moment, looked about and lowered his voice further. ‘Don’t tell the other Marlovians, but there is something else that points away from a faked death.’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘Marlowe was killed within the jurisdiction of the Queen’s coroner. There were sixteen jurors to view the supposedly switched body, and it is unlikely that the coroner could have been bribed. If I had been Walsingham I would have had Marlowe’s death faked in the boonies where coroners were more easily bought. He could have gone farther and had the body disfigured in some way to make identification impossible.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘That an equally probable theory is that Walsingham himself had Marlowe killed to stop him talking. Men say anything when tortured, and it’s likely that Marlowe had all kinds of dirt on Walsingham.’

‘What then?’ I asked. ‘How would you account for the lack of any firm evidence regarding Shakespeare’s life, his curious double existence, the fact that no one seemed to know about his literary work in Stratford?’

Chris shrugged.

‘I don’t know, Thursday. Without Marlowe there is no one else in Elizabethan London even able to write the plays.’

‘Any theories?’

‘None at all. But the Elizabethans were a funny bunch. Court intrigue, the secret service…’

‘The more things change—‘

‘My point entirely. Cheers.’

We clinked glasses and Chris wandered off to serve another customer. I played the piano for half an hour before retiring to bed. I checked with Liz but Landen hadn’t called.

27. Hades finds another manuscript

‘I had hoped that I would find a manuscript by Austen or Trollope, Thackeray, Fielding or Swift. Maybe Johnson, Wells or Conan-Doyle. Defoe would have been fun. Imagine my delight when I discovered that Charlotte Bronte’s masterpiece Jane Eyre was on show at her old home. How can fate be more fortuitous…?’

Acheron Hades. Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit

Our safety recommendations had been passed to the Bronte museum and there were five armed security guards on duty that night. They were all burly Yorkshiremen, specially chosen for this most august of duties because of their strong sense of literary pride. One stayed in the room with the manuscript, another was on guard within the building, two patrolled outside, and the fifth was in a little room with six TV screens. The guard in front of the monitors ate an egg-and-onion sandwich and kept a diligent eye on the screens. He didn’t see anything remiss on the monitors, but then Acheron’s curious powers had never been declassified below SO-9.