unnerve his inquisitors.
At the dining hall, the 120 faculty and students of Benet College habitually sat with their own kind. The dirty leaded windows filtered some of the early evening light but as it was spring, the Sizars had no need to light the candles yet.
At the far end of the hall the Master and Fellows sat at High Table on a raised platform. The four Bible Clerks, holding the most prestigious scholarships with the highest stipends, sat directly beneath the Master. The six Nicholas Bacon Scholars came next. Marlowe sat at the adjacent table with the remaining scholars, including his Parker lot. The Pensioners, all rich lads, filled out the tables in the rest of the hall. Unlike the Scholars, they paid their own commons and other expenses. Their interest in the academic life was generally marginal; their lot in life was to drink, play tennis and accumulate just enough education to return to their country seats as Justices of the Peace. Rounding out the student mix were the Sizars, poor lads who were clever enough to attend university but not meritorious enough to receive scholarships. They had to wait on their fellow students for their tuition, bed and board.
Marlowe was high-spirited and ordered up extra bottles of wine for his table. He could ill afford them but his Sizar, a first-year boy, dutifully made the entry in Marlowe’s accounts for future reckoning.
‘I suppose all of you can have a few more sips, but the lion’s share is for Master Marlowe,’ Marlowe called out to his table.
‘It sounds grand, doesn’t it? Master Marlowe!’ his friend Lewgar exclaimed. ‘By this time tomorrow I pray that I too will have passed my disputation and have received my BA. I shudder to think what will become of Old Tom if I have no degree to carry back to Norfolk.’ Lewgar still had spots on his hairless face and remained a beefy lad where most of the others were rail thin. Though Marlowe was notoriously intemperate and prone to pounding his colleagues with his sly, withering sarcasm, Lewgar had remained on his amicable side by dint of perennial self- deprecation.
From across the table, an older scholar, two years Marlowe’s senior, a serious fellow taking his MA degree, piped up, ‘Rather good show, today, Marlowe. Almost as impressive as my own final disputation.’
Marlowe raised his goblet to the man. Though he had seen him nearly every day for four years, he could honestly say he hardly knew Robert Cecil and, in fact, Cecil was one of the few men in Cambridge who intimidated him. Yes, of course, his father was Baron Burghley, the Queen’s foreign secretary and by rights the most powerful man in a land without a king, but there was more to it than that. Cecil was as strong as a plowman, as smart as any of the Bacon Scholars and as confident in his own skills as Marlowe himself.
But Marlowe was Cecil’s better in one area of endeavor and he was boozily grateful when Cecil called for him to demonstrate.
‘Go on, Master Marlowe, do us the honor of one of your verses on this, the occasion of your elevation.’
Marlowe rose and steadied himself with a hand on the table. ‘Master Cecil, I have just the passage from a small work in progress, my first stage play.’
‘Have you been dabbling, then?’ Cecil asked.
‘As his bedfellow,’ Lewgar cried, to howls of laughter, ‘I can attest that he dabbles all night long!’
‘Quiet, then,’ Cecil demanded of the table. ‘Let us hear what our man hath wrote and, if it is not to our liking, I will let a birdie fly off to Court to let our Good Lady know that her schools are in disrepair.’
Marlowe raised his arms melodramatically, waiting for his moment, and when all eyes were on him he began.
He grinned, drained the rest of his wine and sat back down, waving for the Sizar.
The diners waited for Cecil to weigh in. ‘Passable, Master Marlowe,’ he said. ‘Rather passable. My birdie will have to remain in its cage and forsake its journey to London. Who do you have giving this speech and what will you call your play?’
‘Thus sayeth Jupiter!’ Marlowe said. ‘And I am calling the play
‘Well, Marlowe, if, in three years’ time, you take your Holy Orders, the world will surely lose an eminent playwright.’
The last to leave the table were Marlowe, Cecil and Lewgar. It was growing dark and Lewgar moaned that he needed to be in bed early.
‘I hear the Fellows are not well disposed of your chances, Lewgar,’ Cecil said harshly.
‘You have heard that?’ Lewgar asked fearfully.
‘I have indeed.’
‘I mustn’t fail. My life will be over.’
‘If you cast yourself into the Cam, Thomas, I will write a poem about you,’ Marlowe said.
‘I’ll be fine, as long as I’m not given a thesis concerning mathematics. You know how appalling I am at mathematics, don’t you, Christopher?’
‘I shouldn’t worry, Thomas. Tomorrow you’ll be as drunk as me. In celebration.’
When Lewgar trundled off, Cecil rose and clapped Marlowe on the back. ‘Old Norgate will be letting you know over breakfast, but you’ll be one of Lewgar’s questioners at his disputation. I shall be another.’
Marlowe looked up quizzically. ‘Really? How very interesting.’
His Sizar came to clear away the last of the table but Marlowe sent him for more wine and ordered him to light the candles. The lad obliged. Marlowe stared into the flickering flame of the candle and let his drink-heavy head droop towards his chest. The candlestick, a plain tube of pewter, caught his attention. He’d seen it every day for four years but tonight it jogged his memory. It was very much like a candlestick he’d seen some thirteen years earlier.
His father was always angry, always muttering invectives while he worked. Seven-year-old Christopher sat by the fire, eagerly scribbling on a crossed-out, singed page from his father’s ledger book which his mother had rescued from the fire.
Pleased with himself, he looked up to see a woman at their door complaining about a job that John Marlowe had done. It was the baker’s wife, Mary Plessington. The stitching had already come undone on a recent shoe repair.
His father took the shoes mutely and when the woman was gone he cursed her out roundly.
‘Filthy hag. She most likely loosened the stitches by ramming her foot up her husband’s ass. She’s a bloody recusant, anyway. I shouldn’t even take her jobs.’
His mother, Katherine, looked up from her sewing. ‘Papist scum. Makes me want to spit on my own floor.’
The shoe shop and their front room were one and the same. His father sat at his workbench all through the day, flaying and puncturing cattle skins and complaining. The Marlowes were meant for more, he would say. It was well and good that he had elevated himself to a freeman and had been able to join the Shoemakers’ Guild with all the privileges that entailed. But he was still on a lowish rung of the middle class and he couldn’t contain his contempt for the aristocracy and anyone else doing better than himself.
‘Katherine,’ he called out. ‘See how young Christopher gets on with his learning. That’s the way to beat the bastards. With a proper education he’ll become one of them, or that’s what they’ll think. Then he’ll rise above them
