M. Trow - Dark Entry

Eliza Laurence had been a bedder since before Christopher Marlowe was born. She’d come all the way from Royston as a girl, walking barefoot with her father who got an ostler’s job, courtesy of the university. She knew these stairs like the back of her hand, every twist and turn. She bobbed before all the scholars, whatever their rank and had never spoken to the Master or the Fellows in her life. But then, she’d never drunk a pint of beer, or missed the Sabbath or seen the sea. And she’d never seen anything like what she saw lying in the guttering candle flame on the bed in Ralph Whitingside’s room. She would have screamed, but couldn’t.

And that was because Christopher Marlowe had placed his hand tightly over her mouth.

Marlowe closed the door with the hand that wasn’t steadying Eliza Laurence. He led her, weeping, into the next chamber and sat her down.

‘I am a friend,’ he said quietly. ‘I mean you no harm.’

She blinked up at him through her tears. ‘Oh, sir, what can have happened? Is it the plague?’

He shook his head.

‘The sweating sickness?’ she suggested, trying to make sense of what she’d seen in the next room. ‘My old mother went of that years ago. It strikes you down like God’s own hand.’

A hand had struck down Ralph Whitingside, certainly, but Marlowe wasn’t sure God had much to do with it. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.

‘Eliza, sir.’

‘You’re a college bedder?’

‘Yessir.’ Her eyes were wet in the guttering light of her candle, still wobbling in the clasped hands in her lap.

‘Do you usually go into scholar’s rooms in the early hours?’

‘No, sir!’ The woman, for all her shock, was outraged. ‘I had my instructions.’

‘From Master Whitingside?’

She nodded. ‘He told me to clean his rooms this morning, sir. He was to be away, sudden like, but would be back by today. Well, I’ve got three staircases to do, sir, so I had to start early. It’ll be breakfast for the scholars soon.’

Marlowe looked at the sky through Whitingside’s leaded panes. There was just a blush of pink on the horizon. Eliza was right. ‘When did he tell you this?’ he asked her. ‘When did you see Master Whitingside last?’

‘Oooh.’ She pursed her lips, secretly glad that she had something to think about other than the corpse beyond the oak-clad wall. ‘Tuesday, sir. It was Tuesday, because that was the day Dr Falconer was took funny.’

‘Took funny?’ Marlowe repeated. ‘That would be Dr Falconer, the organist?’

‘That’s right, sir. He has these turns. Master Whitingside, he laughs . . . laughed at him, saying it’s God striking the wicked.’ Eliza suddenly went rigid and pale in the candlelight. ‘Should he have done that, sir?’ she asked Marlowe. ‘Master Whitingside, should he have taken the Lord’s name in vain?’

Marlowe patted her arm. ‘We don’t know these things, Eliza,’ he said. ‘I must look to Master Whitingside. Will you be all right here for a while? You’ll wait for me?’

‘Let me keep the candle, sir,’ she blurted out, suddenly afraid of the dark.

‘Of course,’ he said and fumbled in the half light until he found another one and leant to her, to touch its wick to her trembling flame.

Ralph Whitingside lay in his own filth on the bed, the candle flames dancing on the hollows of his cheeks and eyes. Kit Marlowe had seen dead men before, but none like this. Whitingside was half-dressed, his hose and boots in place, the points of his shirt tied but his doublet open, one sleeve dangling on the floor, as if he had died putting it on. There were dark stains over his chest and shirt, pooling in the tumbled bed covers. The smell was overpowering, sickly and sweet, like Death itself.

Marlowe steeled himself and held the candle to the dead man’s face. Whitingside’s mouth was open, his sunken eyes dull and dried out with sightlessly staring at the ceiling above him. The pupils were tiny and dark circles were spreading outwards over his cheeks. A bubble of saliva across his mouth flashed silver in Marlowe’s flame, then burst and was gone in a second, dried up by its slight heat. For all the world, it seemed as though the dead man spoke. But there was no sound, no breath. The time for talking with Ralph Whitingside was truly past.

The Corpus man felt the King’s man’s chest, arms and legs. The body was cold as the grave. Nothing seemed broken and there was no blood. Yet when he stood back and widened the candle’s all-seeing arc, he realized that the room showed signs of a struggle. A chair had been overturned, the rugs on the floor had been kicked into untidy folds and the contents of the chamber pot, dark like the stains on the bed, had been spilled on the boards.

He knew he would not be allowed in these rooms again, so he must act fast. He checked Whitingside’s wardrobe, his travelling chest, his presses. Clothes that befitted a man who was about to take his place on life’s stage – starched linen, pomandered velvet, pattens for his brocaded shoes. In the corner stood a swept-hilt rapier of Spanish design, its quillons curling like quicksilver in the candle’s flame. That alone would have paid some poor sizar to stay in Cambridge half a lifetime – and given him the run of the buttery in any college in the university.

Marlowe went back to the parlour where Mistress Laurence still sat, trembling, welded to her seat more by shock than Marlowe’s injunction. She barely noticed as he swept past and only came to as she heard him rummaging through Whitingside’s shelves of books.

‘What are you looking for, sir?’ she asked.

Aristotle and Ramus? Marlowe mused to himself as he read the spines of the dead man’s library. No. Virgil and Ovid. Better, but hardly anything incriminating. ‘I wish I knew,’ he muttered without looking at her. A bundle of papers caught his eye, wrapped in scarlet ribbon. He tucked them into his doublet in one deft movement, careful to keep his back to the woman and was just turning over Whitingside’s Geneva Bible when something fell from inside it. It was a slim volume, parchment, much written on in his old friend’s handwriting, crossed this way and that, now vertical, now diagonal. Some of it was in Greek, some in Latin, but it was the single inscription on the front that gripped Marlowe most. Quod me Nutruit me Destruit . That which feeds me destroys me. He frowned. He couldn’t remember reading that anywhere. Pliny, perhaps? Not Cicero, surely? The volume followed the other papers into his doublet.

He glanced out of the window. Against the black tracery of Gonville’s rooftops, the dawn was creeping over Cambridge. Soon the solemn bell of King’s would call the faithful to breakfast, then to Chapel. And with the finding of Ralph Whitingside, all Hell would break loose.

Marlowe squatted in front of the bedder, snuffing out his candle and relying on hers. He helped her to her feet. ‘Eliza,’ he said, ‘you must go to the Proctor. Tell him about Master Whitingside. The authorities will know what to do.’

‘Yessir,’ she said, still numb in the chill of the morning. Marlowe nodded and swept to the door. He took one last look at the dead man on his bed. Time was he would have crossed himself, knelt in prayer; perhaps, since this was dear old Ralph, cried. But not now. Those days were past, gone forever.

‘Sir -’ Eliza’s voice held him for a moment longer – ‘when they ask me, sir, I shall have to tell them, about you, I mean.’

‘Of course.’ He nodded briskly.

‘May I know your name, sir?’ her voice trembled.

He smiled in a way that frightened her. ‘Know that I am Machiavel,’ he said. And he was gone, to the stairs and the leads and the light.