slowly. The hallway was too bright for his liking. There were night lights at each end and one in the middle. He unscrewed the bulb of the closest one and paused to count the doors. The fourth door on the Piazza side of the building corresponded, he was certain, to the fourth window. It would be better if it was unlocked but it hardly mattered. There were few locks that could slow him down for more than several seconds, especially in an old building. And worse case, with a shoulder to the frame, despite the noise, he’d have his blade through her carotid in no time and would be down the stairs before anyone raised an alarm.
This time he wouldn’t fail. He’d promised K. He’d linger just long enough to watch the blood stop spurting from her neck as her arterial pressure dropped to zero.
Sister Silvia washed her hands and shuffled slowly back into the hall. Her room was two down from Elisabetta’s. She began to blink. The hall seemed darker than before.
She stopped blinking.
There was a man standing at Elisabetta’s door.
For an infirm old woman who sang her hymns in a soft, thin voice, she let out a monumentally piercing scream.
Vani took his hand off the doorknob and coolly assessed his options. It would take ten seconds to rush the screaming nun and silence her. It would take ten seconds to breech the door and finish the job he’d come to do. It would take three seconds to abort his mission and disappear down the stairs.
He made his decision and turned the knob on Elisabetta’s door. It was locked.
Other doors began to fly open.
Nuns and novices poured into the hallway, calling to each other as Sister Silvia kept pumping out the decibels.
Elisabetta woke with a start and fumbled for her light.
More doors opened. Vani’s options shrank. He knew there was only one thing worse than failing, and that was being captured.
When Elisabetta unlocked her door and swung it open she saw a man dressed in black disappearing down the stairs.
TEN
Cambridge, England, 1584
IT WAS PALM Sunday.
It had been four long years.
Every minute of every hour of every day had led to this moment. His final public disputation.
In many ways the scholar’s life had been as arduous as a laborer’s or a tradesman’s. Six days a week, awake at five in the morning for chapel. Then breakfast and lectures on logic and philosophy. Midday meal at eleven a.m., no more than a bit of meat, bread and broth, then classes on Greek and rhetoric. For the entire groaning afternoon, the study of debate and dialectical disputation, an intellectual tennis match to train young minds. Supper was little better than dinner, then study until nine o’clock when the day was done for everyone but him. While his roommates slept, he would sit at the farthest corner of the room and write his precious verses for another hour or two. Sundays were hardly easier.
Alone, he paced the dusty floorboards outside the lecture hall in his plain black gown. Through the closed doors he could hear the audience shuffling to take its place in the gallery. A few would be supporters but most were a sneering lot who would take more pleasure in seeing him fail.
Success would mean the granting of his BA degree and automatic admittance into the MA curriculum. From there, London would be his oyster. Failure would mean an ignominious return to Canterbury and a life of obscurity.
He balled up his fists, stoking his morale.
Norgate, the Master of Benet College, tall and gaunt, opened the doors and announced, ‘Christopher Marlowe, we are ready for you.’
Four years earlier Marlowe had made his way from Canterbury to Cambridge, a journey of seventy miles and three days of begged rides on turnip wagons listening to the blather of country folk. Left by a merchant on the outskirts of town he had walked the last mile toting his rucksack. Passersby would have hardly noticed him entering the city through the Trumpington Gate, one more lad streaming into the university for the new December term.
The sixteen-year-old had to ask his way. In an alleyway beside a tavern he saw a man pissing.
‘Which way to Benet College?’ Marlowe had loudly demanded of the fellow. No ‘please, Sir,’ no ‘might you’. It wasn’t his way.
The man had swung his head around, displaying a frown that suggested an inclination to throw the young man into the mud as a reward for his impudence – as soon as he put his member away. But he’d changed his mind after looking the student up and down. Perhaps it was Marlowe’s hard, dark eyes or humorless tight lips, the curious gravity of his juvenile beard or the imperious way he carried his slight frame but the man yielded meekly and provided the information the boy had sought.
‘Cross over Penny-farthing Lane, go past St Botolph’s Church, right turn on Benet Street, into the quadrangle.’
Marlowe had nodded and soon arrived at the place that would be his home for the next six and a half years.
He’d won his position as a Parker Scholar by dint of a laudatory performance at the King’s School in Canterbury. That first day in Cambridge he’d been the last of the roommates to arrive at their assigned room at the north-west corner of the quadrangle. His fellow Parker Scholars, Robert Thexton, Thomas Lewgar and Christopher Pashley, all poor as dirt like himself, had been arranging their meager possessions and haggling over the few pieces of furniture allotted them: two beds, two chairs, a table and three stools, some chamber pots and basins. They’d stopped arguing and had taken the measure of the slender, brooding latecomer.
Marlowe hadn’t bothered with pleasantries. His stare had darted around like that of a feral animal scoping out a patch of territory. ‘I’m Marlowe. Where’s my bed?’
Lewgar, a plump boy with a spotted face had pointed at a mattress and said. ‘You’ll be sleeping with me. I trust you’ll keep your breeches on at night, Mister Marlowe.’
Marlowe had thrown his rucksack onto the mattress and managed his first smile in days, a fleeting sardonic one. ‘Of that, my man, you can be sure.’
Marlowe stood facing his questioners with his chin thrust out and his arms quietly at his sides. In four years he had grown taller by the better measure of a foot and all traces of boyishness had vanished. His beard and moustache had grown thicker and framed his longish, triangular face in a rakish way. His silky brown hair fell just short of his starched ruff. Whereas most of his contemporaries were beginning to develop the bulbous noses and prognathous jaws that would mark their later years, Marlowe’s features had remained delicate, even boyish, and he carried his good looks with an air of haughtiness.
The Master of the college was flanked by three older students taking their MA degrees, all of them with the countenance of sadists aiming to skewer their prey. Once the thesis for the disputation was given, Marlowe would verbally joust with them for four grueling hours and by supper his fate would be known.
Someone in the audience insistently cleared his throat. Marlowe turned. It was his friend, Thomas Lewgar, who would undergo the self-same ordeal the following day. Lewgar winked his encouragement. Marlowe smiled and faced his panel.
‘So, Mister Marlowe,’ the Master began. ‘Here is the final thesis subject of your baccalaureate. We wish you to consider the following and commence your disputation without delay: According to the law of God, good and evil are directly opposed to one another. You may begin.’
Marlowe could hardly suppress his delight. The corners of his mouth curled up, ever so slightly, but enough to
