‘Bromerick!’ Johns shouted, then in a whisper, ‘God’s Teeth, Henry. What are you doing there?’
‘Waiting for you, sir,’ the lad told him.
Johns led the boy into the dim light of his own staircase. Bromerick was still dressed, wearing his college robes. They had been soaked to his skin when he’d talked to Johns earlier, on the professor’s way to his meeting. They had dried out as he’d paced The Court and gone back to his rooms to check the papers again.
‘Go to bed, man.’ Johns said. ‘No amount of Greek can be so pressing.’
‘Ah, but this is different, Professor,’ Bromerick told him. ‘It’s like no other Greek I’ve ever read.’
It had to be said that there was a great deal of Greek Henry Bromerick had never read, but Johns had known this young man for three years now, ever since he came as a red-faced fourteen year old from Canterbury, clutching his Parker scholarship in his hand and had lodged his name in the buttery ledger. Like all Corpus students, Bromerick had run up and down on the crisp mornings of winter, trying to get warm before the morning’s lectures in the Schools. He’d watched him praying ‘fervently’ in Chapel, with one eye open to smirk at the others, seen him grow into a man with half his heart on his sleeve.
‘How’s the back now?’ Johns asked.
‘Getting better, sir, thank you. The Master will be able to award our degrees any day now.’
Johns smiled. ‘Good. Come into the decent light and show me this Greek.’
Under the arch of the stairwell, the professor and the scholar stood head to head, reading by the candlelight guttering in the sconce on the wall. It was a slip of paper, in Bromerick’s handwriting.
‘I transcribed it,’ Bromerick said. ‘I just hope I got it right.’
‘Transcribed it from where?’ Johns asked. ‘Something obscure in the library?’
‘Not exactly, Professor.’ Bromerick looked furtively from side to side. ‘Can I trust you?’
Johns smiled. ‘You’ve attended enough logic lectures to know, Henry,’ he said, ‘that only you can answer that.’
The scholar dithered for a second. ‘Then I can,’ he decided. ‘This came from Ralph Whitingside’s rooms in King’s. The original is part of a journal of some kind. Written in Latin, Greek and Hebrew.’
‘I’m impressed,’ Johns said. ‘Glad they’re teaching them something at King’s. How did you come by it?’
Nothing.
‘Henry?’ Johns looked at the man, the kindly eyes boring into him.
‘Kit,’ Bromerick said.
‘Ah.’ For Johns, that said it all. ‘And what does Kit make of it? I didn’t see him at supper, now I think of it.’
‘Kit hasn’t seen it, at least not this bit. Tom . . . er . . . Dominus Colwell is working on the rest, but he’s drowning in it so he passed this page to me.’
‘Well, you’re right, Henry,’ the professor said, tilting the paper this way and that. ‘It isn’t like any Greek you’ve ever read. That’s because it’s not Greek. It’s a code of some kind, a cypher. Beyond me, I’m afraid.’
Bromerick looked crestfallen.
‘It’s important to you, isn’t it?’ Johns asked.
‘Kit thinks it might help explain why Ralph died,’ the scholar said.
Johns nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Leave it with me. I know someone who may be able to shed some light . . . no promises, mind.’
‘No, sir, of course not.’ Bromerick brightened.
‘Now,’ Johns said with a sigh, ‘go to bed, Henry. You have to be up again in four hours time and I not long after.’
‘Thank you, sir. Good night, sir.’ And the scholar was gone.
Marlowe was already saddled before the sun had crept over the rickety rooftops of Ware and took the road south-west. The carts increased now that he was in the south of Hertfordshire, creaking and rumbling their way to London and the Thames. By midday he was walking his gelding over the rough marsh ground near Barnet, edging his way past ponies, asses and palfreys being led to the great horse fair. Here, he knew, in his great grandfather’s day, Yorkist and Lancastrian had killed each other in the thick fog of an April morning and the great kingmaker, Earl of Warwick, had gone down to the merciless halberd blade of some anonymous foot soldier. His ghost, men said, still wandered the misty hollows near the road, looking in vain for his lost soul.
He followed the road through the boggy ground, getting ever lower and wetter until he came to the pontoon ferry, tied up at an unstable-looking quay. The ferryman was sleeping, curled up in the middle of the raft, looking in his dung-coloured clothing like something left behind by his last passenger. Marlowe coughed extravagantly and the man leapt to his feet, almost overturning his craft which, being low in the water, shipped quantities of the Thames and rocked and rolled before regaining its equilibrium.
‘Take yer somewhere, sir?’ he asked Marlowe, shading his eyes against the sunset.
Marlowe was a little nonplussed. Here he stood at the bank of a river, served by a ferry pulled across that river on a rope to one destination: the other side. And yet the ferryman seemed to be giving him an option. Marlowe could only applaud his hubris in assuming he still had freedom of choice. However, there was also a chance that the man was completely barking mad. So he kept things simple. ‘Just across to the south bank, if you would,’ he said and eased his nervous horse on to the pontoon, the animal slithering and clattering on the planks, whinnying softly in mild panic.
The ferryman reached up to take the penny which was his fee. He derived a lot of innocent amusement from these foreigners; come out of the north they did, knew nothing of the ways of London and her river. Sat up there, they did, on their horses, skitting and shying across the flow. If they just got down and stood at the animal’s head, they wouldn’t keep falling in and drowning. He sighed. He bore them no ill will and there was a lot of fuss with a drowning, but it broke the tedium of an otherwise uneventful day. He’d been First Finder eight times now; must be a record west of the Vintry.
The church of St Mary was gilded by the dying sun as Marlowe rode into Mortlake. The sleepy little town on the banks of the rushing Thames was the end of his journey and he was glad of it. His legs ached, his back ached, his shoulders ached. In fact, he was hard put to it to find any part of him that didn’t ache. He asked directions from a man at work on the riverbank with his hurdles and nets.
‘Dee?’ the man repeated in an accent Marlowe had never heard before. ‘Dr John Dee?’ And he spat volubly into the river.
‘Not a friend of yours, then?’ Marlowe sat upright in the saddle.
‘Not a friend of anybody’s,’ the eel-fisherman told him. ‘What d’you want him for?’
‘I rather think that’s my business,’ Marlowe said. ‘Will you help me or not?’
The fisherman looked Marlowe up and down, taking him in. The man was riding a good horse and he couldn’t help noticing the rapier-hilt, cold and chiselled under the horse-blanket. Then there were the eyes – dark and deep like the waters he fished every day. Best not to mess with this man.
‘A mile yonder.’ He pointed. ‘There’s a depiction of the world on his gatepost.’
Marlowe nodded and swung the horse away.
‘I hope you’re a friend of his,’ he heard the fisherman call. But he didn’t catch the rest. ‘’Cause if you are, you’re a rare breed, but it might save your life.’
SEVEN
Marlowe allowed his horse to amble from then on. The fisherman had seemed to know his geography, but Marlowe had no confidence in the distance-judging skills of someone who made his living up to his waist in water most of the time. But, a mile down the road, give or take a gnat’s whisker, he came upon a high yew hedge, pierced by a gate. The posts on either side of it carried wooden spheres, roughly hacked by an uncertain hand into depictions of the coastlines of the known world. Frobisher’s new islands were most freshly incised, and someone had tried hard to show a man being eaten by a large bear. Since this was only some three inches high and seemed to have been done with a large chisel, Marlowe had to use all of his imagination and a great deal of his acquired knowledge to guess this correctly.