But Greene was gone, leaving his opus scattered on the wind and only the piercing eyes of Kit Marlowe for memory.
At the stage, a single pair of hands clapped. Marlowe turned.
‘Very good,’ a voice said. ‘I’ve rarely seen a man face a dagger like that before.’
‘Who are you?’ Marlowe asked.
The player king strolled into the light. The frippery of the day had gone and he stood in his shirt and breeches, a tired look on his face. ‘I am Ned Sledd.’ He bowed extravagantly. ‘Of Lord Strange’s Men.’
Marlowe bowed likewise. ‘Christopher Marlowe,’ he said, ‘of no man’s men.’
Sledd laughed. ‘Good for you,’ he said and looked the man in the face. Then he took his arm. ‘Come, Master Marlowe, let’s sink an ale or two. And you can show me what you really have in your satchel.’
‘What the Devil is that?’ Dr Goad was lost in the academic niceties of the philosopher Ramus and the sudden braying of the trumpets across the rooftops nearly made him drop his book.
‘A play’s toward, Provost,’ Benjamin Steane told him, without looking up. The scholar’s work he was marking was particularly awful, reminding him yet again of the sore decline at Cambridge University. He’d be glad to be in his mitre at Bath and Wells, where he’d never have to see another scholar’s miserable scribbling ever again. ‘Lord Strange’s Men, I understand.’
‘Strange?’ Goad was alarmed. ‘Ferdinando Stanley, old Derby’s son?’
‘The same.’ Steane wasn’t really listening.
‘But he’s a Papist, Benjamin. A recusant. What’s the Mayor doing, letting people like that into the town?’
Steane looked up. ‘I rather think Lord Strange’s money is the same colour as everyone else’s to the Mayor,’ he said. ‘And anyway, Strange isn’t actually with them. He’s a poet himself, I believe, but he’s a patron at heart. Bit of a soft touch, I’ve heard, given to lending money to explorers and similar mountebanks. Are you going?’
‘Where?’ Goad was on his feet, peering out of the window across the Cambridge rooftops.
‘The play.’ Steane was patience itself, but he quietly wondered how much more decline there could be before someone came to take Dr Goad away.
The Provost turned to him as though he’d been speared. ‘Good God, no,’ he gasped. ‘What worries me -’ he turned again to the window – ‘is that rather a large number of our scholars seem to be on their way.’
Parker’s Piece had not seen such a throng for years. The flags were fluttering in the breeze and the apple and pastry sellers were doing a roaring trade. Half Cambridge seemed to be there, paying their admission to the large men at the makeshift gate and jostling for position.
‘How much?’
‘This had better be worth it.’
‘Do they all die in the end?’
‘Will there be any fireworks?’
The hubbub of the groundlings rose in ever growing hysteria to the tiring room behind the flats where the Fair Maid of Kent was struggling into his stomacher. ‘Buggered if I know how women wear these things,’ he complained as a dresser laced him in. ‘Good crowd, Ned?’
‘Tolerable, Thomas, tolerable.’ Ned Sledd was playing the Fair Maid’s father, complete with false grey beard and an outsize picadill.
‘Any nobs in?’
Sledd craned his neck to the far side of the stage where a row of seats had been placed for the gentry. ‘One or two,’ he said. ‘But you know they don’t make an entrance until the last minute. Have you got that bit sorted in Act Two, Scene Three yet?’
‘Think so.’ Thomas was still having problems with his fol-de-rols.
‘Tell me,’ Sledd insisted.
Thomas frowned and blurted it out. ‘Fie, my lord, whereof do you call me daughter?’
‘Wherefore should I not?’ Sledd fed him the line.
‘Go to, go to,’ Thomas scolded, without feeling. ‘We are but ladies of the night.’
‘What? Harlot, would you say?’
‘Er . . .’ Thomas was struggling already. ‘Umm . . .’
‘Come on, Thomas,’ Sledd snapped. ‘You knew this yesterday.’
‘Yes, I know . . .’
‘Two minutes of the clock, everybody,’ somebody called.
‘Um . . . never breathe it, sir.’ Thomas was on track again. ‘Lest God in his Heaven, who is the father of all . . .’
‘Father of us all,’ Sledd insisted.
‘All . . . us . . .’ Thomas ranted. ‘What bloody difference does it make?’
‘At a groat a line, every difference,’ Sledd told him. ‘I’ve lashed out a small fortune on this tour, young Thomas and I don’t want it buggered up.’ He suddenly leaped for the lad’s groin, fumbling under the placket of his skirt.
Thomas jumped and squealed.
‘Just checking,’ Sledd said. ‘Falsetto, remember. Falsetto.’
The fanfare began, the brass flaring in the afternoon sun as the last groundlings scuttled in under the barrier.
‘No!’ Sledd hissed from backstage. ‘Don’t close the gates on them. Jack!’ he called a minion to him. ‘Get down to those idiots taking the money. Everybody in. We can squeeze a few more yet.’
And Jack dashed off. The fanfare seemed to be going on for ever and that was because the gentry were still taking their places on the stage. Sir Edward Winterton had left his regalia of office as the Queen’s Coroner at home, but in every other respect, he looked resplendent. He’d even brought Lady Winterton with him – the one day of the year he’d deign to be seen in her company. She fussed around him, arranging the great sword he’d carried at Pinkie and curtsied to the Mayor and his wife, who smiled benignly. Coroner and Mayor – and Ned Sledd – knew that, technically, everybody had broken the law. The Fair Maid of Kent should have been performed in camera before the Mayor and his corporation, to check that the fare was suitable. As it was . . . well, a sunny Saturday in a Cambridge summer. What could possibly go wrong?
Three or four rows back, the Parker scholars stood elbow to elbow with other Corpus men. As was usual in the rare meetings of Town and Gown, the college fraternities tended to cluster together, the arms of Trinity, Jesus, King’s, Christ’s, Corpus and the others on their sleeves. There was the usual bit of jostling from the lads of the town and the mob from the outlying villages seemed to have come prepared. Marlowe noticed, as did Joseph Fludd on the far side of the field with his under-constables, that the Dry and Fenny Drayton men carried quarter staffs and, judging by the bulges under jerkins, not a few of the lads from the Bedford Levels were sporting cudgels that day. Fludd checked his men again – five of them. Men in the crowd? Difficult to count, but he estimated at least two hundred. And he didn’t even want to think about the women. The only woman he cared about was Allys, whom he’d told to stay at home with their daughter, their chickens and their unborn son. If things got nasty here on Parker’s Piece, at least she’d be out of it.
But Allys Fludd wasn’t out of it. She’d packed up a lunch of fresh-baked bread and good Stilton cheese and tied a flagon of milk to her bundle before setting off on the road from Trumpington, little Kate trotting beside her, babbling away with excitement. She’d never seen a play before and she had no idea her daddy had told her mummy not to come. It would be such an adventure.
The crowd clapped rapturously as the Prologue stepped forward and bowed to them.
‘Pray, gentles all,’ he bellowed as the noise subsided.