P. Chisholm - A Plague of Angels

‘Any courtiers?’

‘I’d have stopped him if I’d seen him, sir,’ said the man, looking offended. ‘I know what we’re looking for. Tall, dark red hair, blue eyes, lilies on his hose. Right?’

‘Nobody like that has come out?’

‘No, sir. Nor anything even similar.’

The crowds were thinning, a few boys were being shouted at by their mother for tightrope-walking along the church wall. Marlowe folded his arms and his lips thinned with anger. Surely Carey hadn’t given them the slip. His men weren’t bright but their job involved watching carefully for men described to them and they were good at it. Also they were afraid of him and his power from Heneage. They wouldn’t have missed Carey. He must still be skulking inside.

‘Oh, the hell with this nonsense,’ snapped Marlowe. ‘We’ll search the place.’

With his henchmen to back him, Marlowe went into the church and because he had to maintain some kind of respectability in front of his men, he took his hat off.

‘Vicar,’ he said to the portly man putting out the candles on the altar. ‘I am going to search here for a Papist traitor I am seeking. Please don’t put me in the position of having to order my men to lay hands on you.’

The vicar stood stock still, and seemed on the verge of protesting. Then he took a deep breath and gritted his teeth. ‘I protest, sir,’ he said. ‘And I will be writing to the bishop this very afternoon.’

‘Do as you like,’ said Marlowe and nodded to his men to quarter the church.

They did, very carefully, and then the sacristy and that was when one of them came hurrying out, triumphantly waving a lace with a glittering aiglet.

Marlowe took it between his fingers and held it up to the light. It was a beautiful piece of work: gold, with the sharp point of the aiglet formed in the shape of a stork’s beak. Nobody except a courtier would bother with such elaboration. The lace had been snapped by someone in too much of a hurry to untie his doublet points properly.

There had been no naked men in the crowd. ‘Devil take it,’ growled Marlowe. ‘He changed his clothes.’

He spun on his heel and barked at the vicar, still standing at his altar. ‘What did he put on?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Don’t pretend to be any stupider than you are. What was he wearing when he slipped out?’

‘Who?’

‘The man I am looking for, on the Queen’s business, Sir Robert Carey. The man who left this on your sacristy floor.’

The vicar looked at the pretty little thing in Marlowe’s fist. ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘What was he wearing?’ Marlowe was pacing across the church up to the altar, advancing on the vicar who shrank back at first and then seemed to find some courage somewhere in his windy fat body and faced him boldly.

‘Sir, I was working on my sermon, putting last minute touches to it, in my study. If there was a fugitive here, which I doubt, then to be sure he must have been wearing something. What it was, I have no idea.’

‘The vestment bag. The old bitch coney-catched me,’ said Marlowe to himself. ‘Of course. Where’s the old woman? A little short woman who burbled to me about St Bride?’

‘Do you mean Nan? I’m sorry sir, she isn’t here. She asked for the day off and I gave it to her and she’s gone.’

‘God damn it.’

‘Will you stop taking the Lord’s name in vain in my church?’

‘No, I won’t. It hasn’t done me any harm yet and I doubt it will. I shall have words with my master, Mr Vice Chamberlain Heneage, I shall have you investigated thoroughly for Papistry and loyalty, if it lies within my power I shall have you in Chelsea and question you myself.’

‘I’m sure you would,’ said the vicar with a patronising smile. ‘But my own Lord of Hosts will protect me, quite possibly through the agency of my lord the Earl of Essex who is my temporal good lord.’

Marlowe was outbid and he knew it. In the feverish scheming of the court, Essex was implacably opposed to Heneage and worse, Essex hated Marlowe, whereas the Queen loved Essex and generally did what he asked. And Essex was the ultimate object of all Marlowe’s manoeuvring.

Marlowe wrestled with the urge to punch the fatuous old man.

‘If the gentleman returns who changed his clothes very hurriedly in your sacristy, tell him that Kit Marlowe wants to speak to him. I’ll be at the Mermaid.’

‘Certainly sir. Goodbye.’ As if trying to rouse Marlowe to an even worse fury, the vicar lifted his hand in the three fingered sign for benediction. ‘The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his countenance to shine upon you…’

The church door banged behind Marlowe before the old man had finished his superstitious prattling.

For a moment Marlowe stood in the courtyard, irresolute, his thoughts disordered by anger. Carey had somehow managed to give him the slip, probably by changing into his henchman’s old homespun clothes. He was loose in London; probably he was already on his way to Somerset House to talk to his father, or possibly he was taking horse in St Giles in the Fields, to ride to Oxford.

He beckoned his men over and gave them orders for the search, then headed towards the Mermaid inn for an early dinner. He needed a drink badly and he needed to sit and consider how to rescue his plan.

***

Nan stood by the stairwell in Whitefriars over which there had once been a handsome figure of Our Lady standing on the globe, now defaced by Reformers. The young man she had taken rather a liking to came clattering down, now dressed in a well-made homespun russet suit a bit wide for him and short in the breeches, and a leather jerkin, with a blue statute cap on his head. He had done his best to hide the colour of his hair and the excellence of his boots with mud and dust and he had kept his sword which had anyway been an incongruously plain broadsword. There was no question but that he had been a great deal more fine when in his courtly clothes, but she liked him better now. Also he had pawned the whole beautiful suit he had been wearing and got an astonishing price for it, some of which he had given her, without her asking, which had pleased her greatly. And he had told her to call him Robin which also pleased her.

‘Are you sure about this, mother?’ he asked her with a worried frown on his face. ‘When I wished I could find a nurse for my servants, I never…’

She tutted at him and pulled down her little ruff to show him the round scars on her neck. ‘See?’ she said. ‘I had the plague years ago, when I was a maid. We all got it but I was spared. You never get it twice. That was why I went to the nunnery, you know, my family was dead, except my uncle and he didn’t want me.’

‘I didn’t know you were a nun.’

She beamed up at him. ‘Why should you? And I’m not any more, now I clean St Bride’s church.’

‘Don’t you mind?’

Young men were so sweet, so worried about things that didn’t matter. ‘No, of course not. I can pray all the Offices whenever I want to.’

‘Do you do that?’ he sounded impressed.

She laughed. ‘Generally I forget.’ She took his arm. ‘Now help me up all these stairs, I’m not as young as I was.’

The climb left her breathless, so she sat down on the top step just above the dead rat and fanned herself while Robin used his wonderfully enamelled little tinder box and lit the candle she had told him to bring.

As he put it back into the pocket of his jerkin, he paused and frowned, pulled the pocket inside out and looked closely at the seams, as if he was searching for nits. Nan couldn’t make out what he had seen, but she saw his lips move. ‘Mercury?’ he asked and frowned in puzzlement, then shook his head and put the pocket back.