The Scar-Crow Men

others lead.’

‘We deserve our chance at happiness, like any other man or woman,’ said Carpenter, jabbing a finger at his friend.

Launceston remained unsettlingly calm. ‘You are not like other men. How many have slit a throat, skewered a heart, hanged, strangled, eviscerated, and lopped off limbs? How many-’

‘Be still.’ The scarred man seethed, long-held resentments bubbling to the surface until he could contain them no longer. ‘For five years now, I have tried to hold your demons in check. That hellish fever! When I see the light in your eyes, my heart is crushed with despair, for I know that I will soon be dragging you away from some drunken man, or some doxy, or a lady of the court even. Boys. Priests. Merchants. Sailors. When your dagger is gripped so that your knuckles are white, I know the madness is upon you.’

‘I know.’ His pale face blank, the Earl glanced around, half listening.

‘I have seen blood … so much innocent blood.’ The bleak memories tumbled over themselves. ‘That poor girl near the Tower. That butcher …’ The scarred man shook his head. ‘I could not tell him from his wares.’

With mounting desperation, Carpenter saw Launceston eyeing another stagehand dragging a box towards the tiring house, and knew his companion saw only the pulse of blood in the artery, the shape of the skull in the cheekbones, the gleam of organs revealed to air.

‘But they all lived, John. You saved them all. And you have saved me,’ the Earl murmured.

Carpenter felt desolate. Out of friendship, he had stepped in to keep Launceston from destroying himself without realizing the true price he would have to pay. That act had consumed his life, his every thought; watching, cautioning, knowing that if he ever failed, his conscience would be scarred by the death of an innocent. Launceston’s burden had become his burden, and he could bear it no more. Yet, God help me, I have to. For if not me, who?

The Earl continued to watch the stagehand, unaware of his friend’s turmoil.

So much sacrifice and it was not even noticed. His rage now gone, Carpenter could not meet Launceston’s eye. ‘No more, Robert. I am spent.’

‘Then what is to become of me?’

Carpenter heard no emotion in the Earl’s voice, no regret or self-pity, only a baffled child trying to make sense of a parent’s decision. With an exhausted sigh, he replied, ‘You will find a way, Robert. All that I have done has taken its toll on me, but it is meaningless to you. You are broken inside. You need no one. You survive. The rest of us … we need friends, warmth, love.’

‘It means a great deal to me,’ the sallow man said in the same neutral tone he used when choosing wine or beer with his meal.

The spy looked his companion in the eye, and gave a weary smile and nod. ‘Of course. Now, let us find answers and put Will’s mind at rest.’

Slipping backstage to the tiring house, the two men found the players putting on their make-up and costumes. One man wore ram’s horns, his eyes ringed in black beneath cruel eyebrows. ‘You,’ Carpenter demanded, pointing. ‘What are you?’

‘The devil. Mephistophilis,’ the ferociously made-up man stuttered. ‘Who are you?’

‘Quiet, you common-kissing bum-bailey.’ Carpenter grabbed the devil by the undershirt. ‘I would know about the man who puts words in your mouth.’

‘Kit Marlowe?’

‘The same. He was here earlier?’

The player nodded, futilely looking for support from his fellows.

Launceston leaned in to the unsettled man and whispered in his ear, ‘What are you hiding from us?’

‘Nothing, truly. Master Marlowe was eager to make some final changes, that is all. It is not unusual. He places great weight upon small detail. But … but he was not himself.’

‘How so?’

‘He slipped into the Rose in cloak and hood and revealed his presence to us only at the last.’

Launceston and Carpenter exchanged a look. ‘What small details did he attend to?’ the scarred agent asked. ‘Show us.’

Reluctantly, the player led the two spies to the side of the stage. Keeping out of sight of the audience in the yard, the man in the devil’s costume indicated a magic circle painted in red on the stage. ‘Master Marlowe insisted on changes to yon design. New symbols etched around the outside of the circle. The marks already there served their purpose, in my opinion, but who can divine the mind of a great man like Christopher Marlowe?’

The Earl studied the markings. ‘The playwright came here in a manner that suggests he did not want to draw attention to himself,’ the pale-faced spy mused. ‘Yet all he did was alter a few scribblings on the boards? Do you take us for fools?’

The player recoiled from Launceston’s unwavering stare. ‘No, please stay your hand! I cannot pretend to look into his mind. Never had I seen him in such a mood. When I encountered him backstage, I took such fright. His eyes were wide with terror, his face so drained of blood he looked like a ghost. As if he feared the devil himself was at his back.’

CHAPTER THREE

‘Where are you, Coz? What threat did you uncover?’ Will muttered, unable to throw off his black mood of foreboding. From the wooden rail, he watched the garishly dressed players step on to the stage from the wings. The final golden sunlight of that May day shafted through the opening in the thatched roof, and he could smell the rose gardens that gave the theatre its name, and hear the evening birdsong in the awed silence.

In the shadowed upper galleries and in the sunlit yard, the audience stood rapt, unreadable behind their masks. Standing in the sunbeam centre-stage, a fat man with a bushy white beard and long white hair threw his arms wide and began to declaim in a dreamlike cadence. Will drifted with the words.

‘ Whereby whole cities have escap’d the plague,

And thousand desperate maladies been cur’d?

Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man.

Couldst thou make men to live eternally,

Or, being dead, raise them to life again … ’

In the warmth of the evening, Will’s thoughts moved back in time, inexorably, to his love, Jenny, stolen from him that hot summer day as she made her way across the cornfield on the edge of the Forest of Arden. There one moment, gone the next. Taken by the eternal Enemy, the Unseelie Court, before his very eyes, to a fate the spy could barely bring himself to consider. His hand unconsciously went to Jenny’s locket which he always wore next to his skin, a symbol of his hope that one day he could put the terrible mystery to rest — for good or ill — and find some kind of peace.

Nathaniel appeared at Will’s elbow, gripped by the scene on stage where a grotesque devil towered over the protagonist Faustus. Men surreptitiously crossed themselves, women averted their gaze. The plague had made everyone more fearful of hell’s torments. Another of the perverse tortures in which Kit revelled, Will mused: promise the great and the good entertainment, and then make them afraid for their mortal souls.

‘The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. This is a troubling play,’ Nathaniel noted. ‘Men selling their souls to the devil. Is this truly a subject for entertainment? I have never seen the like before. It could drive women mad. And men too, for that matter.’

Will watched the heavily bearded Faustus stalk the stage, demonstrating his arrogance to the audience. ‘Kit always has something of import to say in his work. I fear this one may be more personal than his others, however.’ Will had been concerned about his friend’s state of mind in recent days. The work they did had been eating away at Marlowe for years, but in the last few weeks the playwright had been taking time away from the people he knew. Though all writers were prone to black moods, Kit’s spirits had never been darker.

‘These players are not as good as Edward Alleyn’s men. They bark their lines as if they hail fellow sots outside a stew,’ Nathaniel commented dismissively.

Will listened to the colourfully attired player boom his lines to reach the back of the audience. ‘There are few