A Fine Madness

he outlined showed he was not above coney-catching provided the rewards were big enough. Not that he personally was involved in luring coneys into debt. That was done by what he called business associates, in other words Frizer and Skeres and others unknown. He sought funds to buy the lands and houses of victims forced to sell at knock-down prices in order to relieve the debts he had led them into. It was not quite usury so far as the law was concerned for they were not charged interest, which had a legal limit of 10 per cent. Rather, in return for a promissory note they were offered whatever sum they needed in the form of a commodity. In the case of the young man Woodleff, whom Frizer and Skeres were skinning, the commodity was guns or great iron pieces which he was told he could then sell to raise the money to pay his debt. When he came to sell, however, he would find no buyers except those who had led him into debt. They would offer a much lower price and then demand repayment in full of the promissory note. Unable to find this, his entire property would be forfeit. His kindly creditors would then offer to bail him out at a fraction of its value.

‘We have a long list of properties,’ Poley explained, ‘which we can buy cheap and sell dear, sharing the proceeds. But we need more money than we have in order to buy even at our cheap rate. The duties you collect could be used to buy them before you pass them on to the Crown. Then we sell them, repay you and you pass on your duties and keep your share of the profit. You gain and the Queen loses nothing.’

That was very like what I was trying to do anyway, albeit on my own behalf and without luring foolish young men into debt. And I was becoming well aware of the drawbacks, of the difficulty of selling or letting for the sums I had anticipated or in the time permitted. I anticipated trouble with Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer, about this so it was not hard to say no to Poley.

But I didn’t say no straight away. I tried to sound as if I were considering it. ‘Is this what you were planning with Kit Marlowe when he lost his temper with Frizer that day in Deptford?’

He shook his head, frowning. ‘That was a Dutch scheme. Property scheme. Didn’t come off. Could still, I suppose, but Marlowe had good contacts there, or said he had. Don’t have any yourself, do you?’

‘I don’t, but I know he had a bit of trouble there not long before. I’m surprised he considered going back.’

‘He wouldn’t have had to. Coining he was done for, wasn’t he? Nearly. That could be done here as well as there, so long as you’ve got the wherewithal and you grease the right palms for getting it over there.’

‘So coining was what it was about, your meeting?’

Poley didn’t like repeated direct questions. ‘That and other matters.’

If he’d been on the rack I’d have asked much more but Robert Poley was never put anywhere near the rack himself, though he saw that a few were sent to it. ‘I never thought Christopher Marlowe was serious about coining.’

‘Don’t know that he was, really. It was just a step towards alchemy for him.’

‘Alchemy?’

‘You know, turning base metal into gold. He was writing about it in one of his plays, he said, about a man who thought he’d found the secret. All bollocks, if you ask me, but he wanted to have a go, or find someone who could.’

‘That wasn’t why Frizer invited him along, surely?’

‘He had to be in Greenwich anyway, to report the Court.’

That was a typical Poley answer, the truth but not the whole truth. But he had implicitly conceded that the invitation was Frizer’s. ‘That was a funny business, that free-thinking investigation,’ I continued. ‘Where did it all come from?’

He shook his head again, this time grinning. ‘You must know about that. You sit on the Dutch Church libel commission. You know very well where it came from.’

There was almost nothing that man didn’t know. ‘Not from us, not from the commission. We’d cleared him. Whoever did it quoted from his plays, true enough, but it wasn’t him. But someone was pursuing him for free-thinking.’ I paused to see if he volunteered anything. ‘Is it someone after Ralegh? Could he be the real target? Has anyone from Essex’s circle been sniffing around?’

He shrugged. ‘No idea.’

‘There’s Skeres, of course. He’s an Essex man, isn’t he?’

‘Likes to think he is. I wouldn’t get too near Essex if I was him.’

Was his indifference natural or just a little too studied? He was so accustomed to dissembling that the act had become the man, the habit so ingrained that he concealed by habit even when there was nothing to hide. ‘So how did it happen?’

‘How did what happen?’

‘Marlowe. The fight, the killing. How did it start?’

He looked, or affected to look, as if he were struggling to recall something from the distant past. ‘Oh that, that business. Well, they were arguing, they’d been bickering all morning, rubbing each other up the wrong way. Never got on, those two, despite taking Walsingham’s bread and living under his roof.’

‘Yet Frizer had invited Marlowe to the meeting.’

‘For his Dutch contacts, not to listen to all his guff about alchemy. I’d just come from Holland, I knew the possibilities. And then there was an argument about who paid what to Widow Bull. Marlowe didn’t want to pay his full whack for the room and all because it was already set up without him. He just wanted to pay his share of the victuals. As he well should’ve, he’d drunk enough for all of us. He had a point, but him and Frizer were as mean as each other and this was just one more thing. Frizer called him a