She looked dubious still, but nodded, for the baby’s sake. ‘Anyway, I didn’t kill him. He fell . . .’
‘He fell because you hit him with a candlestick, Meg, and please, don’t interrupt.’ He held the hand she had raised and trapped it in her lap. ‘You did what I was trying to do, and so I will never tell another soul. But, one thing I have to know. Tell me how you got ahead of him up the tower. You were behind him when you ran through the gate between the yews.’
‘What?’ Meg Hawley was confused. ‘I was in the church praying for Ralph when I heard someone scrabbling at the door. I was frightened and wanted to hide from whatever it was outside. I was already halfway up the tower when he crashed in, babbling and crying, begging someone to leave him alone. That was you.’ The statement was more than half question.
‘No,’ Marlowe said, feeling the hairs begin to rise on his neck. ‘At that point, I was limping across the field. I had put my foot in . . . in a hole. I could hardly walk.’
‘Well, who was it, then?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, slowly.
‘I backed up the stairs,’ she told him, ‘and halfway up, in the bell loft, I found an old candlestick. I picked it up in case he followed me and he did. But it was not following so much as that he was also hiding from someone, the person he had been shouting at in the church.’
Everything around them had seemed to go very quiet, as though the whole town held its breath.
‘I got to the top of the tower,’ she carried on. ‘I looked over and saw you come through the gate.’ She stopped, frowning. ‘Who was it, then, in the church?’
Biting his lip, Marlowe shook his head and gestured for her to go on.
‘I heard the trapdoor slap back and Dr Steane was suddenly there with me, on the leads. He was running, running at me, with his hands out. He was screaming at me to leave him alone, which seemed a bit strange, because he was chasing me. I hit him with the candlestick. I was so scared. He . . . he . . .’ she broke down and covered her eyes.
Marlowe held her to him. He knew what had happened next. The sound that Steane had made as he hit the path would be with him for the rest of his days. He remembered Meg rushing out of the church. He remembered holding her against his chest so that she couldn’t see the broken thing on the ground. He remembered the roughness of her cloak against his cheek Her black cloak. Over a black dress.
‘I thought I’d take this opportunity to say goodbye, Michael.’ Marlowe held out his hand. The pair stood in The Court, near the buttresses that had so often hidden roistering scholars creeping back after dark.
‘Goodbye?’ Johns frowned. ‘But Kit, your degree? Your Master’s?’
Marlowe shrugged. ‘After the last few days,’ he said, ‘I’ve rather lost the taste for scholarship. But I wanted to apologize.’
‘Apologize? What for?’ Johns asked.
‘I thought it was you. When I found you in my rooms that time . . . It all seemed to fit at first.’
Johns shook his head. ‘I played my part,’ he said. ‘Giving Henry’s translation to Steane . . .’
‘You couldn’t have known,’ Marlowe said.
‘Well, then.’ Johns suddenly couldn’t find the words. ‘Look after yourself, Dominus Marlowe. If you should ever change your mind . . .’
And the pair shook hands, the roisterer scholar and the quiet man who loved him.
Tom Colwell and Matt Parker were waiting by the front gate, still in their grey fustian, still waiting for their degrees.
‘Lads -’ Marlowe spread his arms – ‘I’m away.’
‘Where to, Kit?’ Colwell asked. Corpus and Cambridge would never be the same now.
‘Who knows?’ Marlowe shrugged. ‘I have charges to answer from Edward Winterton and Gabriel Harvey. I doubt the law will let me get far. Tom,’ he said, and hugged the man, ‘you know, it wouldn’t surprise me to see you in old Norgate’s chair one day. Keep up the good work. Matty.’ He held the boy close to him as the tears welled in Parker’s eyes. Marlowe held him at arm’s length, frowning. ‘Now then,’ he scolded, ‘remember where you are, man. Your grandfather was Archbishop of Canterbury, for God’s sake.’
He turned across the flagstones. ‘When they give you your degrees, lads,’ he shouted, ‘have a swig from the auroch’s horn for me, will you?’
And he was gone, through the gates into the High Ward.
Christopher Marlowe, Secundus Convictus, Bachelor of Arts of Corpus Christi College and a scholar of the finest university in the world was travelling south through Trumpington. He left his books behind him for Colwell and Parker and had thrown, in time-honoured tradition, his grey gown into the Cam to float, like the bodies of the drowned, downstream. All he took with him were the clothes he stood up in, his roisterer’s doublet and colleyweston cloak and the swept-hilt rapier that was once Ralph Whitingside’s slung over his shoulder. The rattle and groan of carts and the lowing of oxen made him stop and stand to one side on the road.
Lord Strange’s battered company plodded past him, wagons tied with rope and clothes patched and stitched. There was no fanfare now, no clarion call and absolutely no fireworks. It would be a long time before Ned Sledd allowed any frivolous fires near his company. The seamstresses who had seemed to be anything but as they all rode into Cambridge were now quiet and actually sewing. The Fair Maid of Kent, on the lead wagon, peered at Marlowe through two black eyes and nodded to him.
‘Master Marlowe.’ The player-king stood on the last wagon in line, as his driver hauled on the oxen rein.
‘Master Sledd.’ Marlowe bowed.
‘I’m afraid your play was lost,’ the actor told him. ‘In the fire. Dido, Queen of Carthage. A shame – it had promise. Never seen a metre quite like it before. A mighty line, sir, a mighty line.’
‘These things happen,’ Marlowe said with a smile. ‘I have other plays. Other lines.’
It was the player-king’s turn to smile. ‘Come with us, then. You’re wasted in this backwater.’ He waved a dismissive arm at Cambridge, already a distant jumble of golden buildings in the evening sun. ‘Come to London, Kit. The city of gold. The city of wonder. I’m looking for a new playwright.’ He stopped and sighed. ‘And I expect others will be too, once they know Kit Marlowe’s in town.’
‘All right, but I’m not a playwright,’ Marlowe said and swung the sword on to the baggage behind Sledd before climbing up alongside it. ‘And no promises,’ he said. ‘I never make promises I can’t keep.’
‘Good enough!’ The player-king laughed and threw the man an apple.
They had bumped and rattled their way out on to the open fenland, waving to the few people who were still stage-struck enough to line their route. Marlowe had a special wave for Constable Fludd, not so much stage-struck as he stood in the door of his carpenter’s shop as making certain the players were really leaving town. He stood under the thatch of his cottage with his wife and daughter at his side and Allys Fludd waddled away, as women with child do, to feed the chickens near cock-shut time.
Soon, Cambridge was just a shapeless mass in the dying sun. Marlowe only now realized how exhausted he was and he dozed, lying on the rolls of singed curtains in the back of the cart. He was woken sharply by something nibbling at his fingers, deftly extracting the apple core that still lay there.
He sat bolt upright to see a fine black stallion pull its head away at a jerk from its rider. The man was a gentleman, in black velvet finery and he was leading another horse.
‘Dominus Marlowe?’
‘Who wants to know?’ His mother had always warned him about strange men on the road. Pity he hadn’t listened.
‘Your fellow Parker scholars would know me as Francis Hall.’ He pulled his horse alongside the wagon’s rear wheel and leaned across. ‘But it’s actually Francis Walsingham, Privy Councillor to Her Majesty, Elizabeth, by the Grace of God.’