P. Chisholm - A Plague of Angels

It was all too ridiculous for words. Cheke remembered his joy and pride at being present when Dr Jenkins produced the scrapings of the Philosopher’s Stone, of actually admiring the curly dark beard, streaked with grey, that was now tangled with the noble doctor’s gown. He started to snigger helplessly.

‘What is it?’ asked Carey, emerging from another cubbyhole, covered in dust.

Cheke couldn’t stop. ‘He…I think…this is all that’s left of Dr Jenkins.’

Carey glanced at the gown and false beard. ‘Of course it is.’

‘Do you know who played the part?’

‘I don’t know. I suspect. Was the good doctor bald?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thought so. Well if the coin dies are here, I don’t know where. Do you know?’

‘I think that the gentleman had them. He told me he had bought them off a retired mint-master fallen on hard times who had kept a trussel and pile that should have been cancelled as an old design.’

‘Hm. Are you convinced?’

‘How was it done, sir?’

‘Parcel-gilding-you dissolve ground-up gold in boiling mercury to make an amalgam. Then you spread the paste on your pewter rounds, fire it up in a furnace to drive off the mercury and out come your gilded coins.’

‘So the Philosopher’s Stone was only powdered gold?’

‘That’s right.’

Cheke shook his head. ‘What a fool I’ve been.’

‘Don’t blame yourself. My brother was just as much a fool, if not worse.’

‘Do you think Marlowe knew?’

‘Of course he did. It was probably his idea.’

‘What will you do now?’

Carey showed his teeth in an extremely unpleasant expression. ‘I’m going to talk to him.’

Marlowe waited at the Mermaid where the innkeeper was afraid of him as well as being an employee of sorts. He ate the ordinary which was a pheasant in a wine sauce with summer peas and a bag pudding to follow, and he drank the best wine they had which was always brought to him. As was only right the innkeeper refused his money.

He watched the people coming in and out of the common room, eating, drinking, talking, kissing their women. How could they think they were important, he wondered, since they lived like cattle in the narrow fields where they were born, according to the rules of their herd, and never looked up to the stars or out to the horizons? His father had lived like that, perfectly happy to make shoes all his life and taking an inordinate stupid pride in the smallness and evenness of his stitches and the good fit he produced. As a boy, Kit Marlowe could remember the boiling of angry boredom under his ribs while his father tried to explain how the strange curved shapes he cut out in leather would bend and be stitched together to form a solid boot. Once the silly man had tried his hand at sermonising: When it’s flat, see how strange it looks, he had said, oddly tender, and then when it’s made, see what a fit shape it was. Perhaps our lives are like that, Kit: strangely shaped when we are alive and then when we die, we see how the very strangeness made us better fit our Maker.

Even as a child I rebelled at being told I was God’s shoe, Marlowe thought, and rightly.

‘Sir,’ said a low nervous voice beside him. Marlowe woke out of his thoughts and blinked at his man.

‘Yes,’ he said, not bothering to hide his impatience.

‘A woman and a boy went into Somerset House,’ said the man, sweating with his run up Fleet Street. ‘We thought you’d better know.’

‘A boy?’

‘Yessir.’

‘The same one?’

‘Yessir.’

‘Well, why didn’t you stop them?’

‘We weren’t sure and anyway you never told us to.’

Marlowe rolled his eyes. ‘I assume Carey wasn’t with them.’

‘Oh, no, sir, we never saw him.’

‘You got the message that he’s in disguise, wearing homespun?’

‘Yessir. But we never saw him. We’d have stopped any man, just to be sure, but it was just an old woman and a boy.’

‘A short old woman, built like a barrel?’

‘Er…yessir.’

‘Well, it’s a pity you didn’t stop them, but I don’t suppose it matters that much. Off you go, keep your eyes open.’

The man pulled his forelock and sidled away. Marlowe tapped his fingers on the table and thought. Carey had evidently gone back to his lodgings despite the plague-cross on the door which Marlowe hadn’t thought he would. He couldn’t watch every place; he had the main roads out of the city covered; he had Somerset House under watch and the Fleet prison, but even with all the men at his disposal he couldn’t cover everywhere. Perhaps he should have kept a man at Carey’s lodgings, but then it had never crossed his mind that the Courtier would go into a plague house just for a couple of servants.

Damn him, where was he? Hadn’t he worked it out yet? Was even Carey too bovine and stupid to understand what Marlowe was about? He ought to have enough information at his disposal by now, especially with the massive hint of Dodd’s arrest. So where was he?

It occurred to Marlowe that perhaps Carey was lunatic enough to go to the Fleet to find his henchman. This was the trouble with real people as opposed to the shadows who danced in his head when he wrote plays: the real thing was so hard to predict.

Marlowe knew he should stay where he was and receive messages, Munday had told him often enough he was too impatient, but he was bored and worried and he could see the structure of his plan crumbling around him because of Carey who didn’t know his proper place in it. Shakespeare hadn’t come back from the Fleet yet either. He didn’t think the ambitious little player had the imagination to know what was happening but he couldn’t be sure.

‘Damn it,’ Marlowe said to himself and pushed away his half-finished ordinary, which was now as cold as a nobleman’s dinner. He put on his hat and went and told the innkeeper to hold any messages for him until he came back and then went out into the sunlight, heading up Water Lane towards Ludgate and the Fleet prison.

Just as he passed through the old Blackfriar’s Gateway, a tall fellow came up to him and pulled at his cap.

‘Ah’ve a message for ye, sir,’ came the guttural northern tones.

Marlowe paused. ‘Yes, what is it?’

The tall northerner moved up swiftly, caught his arm and twisted it up behind his back, rammed him bodily through the little door where the monks’ porter had sat and into a dusty tiny room full of bits of padding, petticoats and sausages of cloth. Marlowe was shoved into a pile of the things, stinking of women and old linen, the grip on his arm shifted slightly but when he tried to struggle free, it was twisted and lifted so that pain lancing up through his shoulder joint made him gasp. He couldn’t see, he could hardly breathe and now somebody’s knee was in the small of his back, hurting him there and there was the cold scratch of a knife at the side of his throat.

‘The message is,’ came a familiar voice behind him, ‘don’t fucking play silly games with me, Marlowe, I’m tired of it.’

He’d been waiting, Marlowe realised dimly, bucking and gasping in an effort to find a way to breathe, and he’s very angry. Half-suffocated and with lights beginning to flash in his eyes, Marlowe tried to say something, only to feel the knee dig harder into his back, the knife moved from his neck and Carey was fumbling for his other hand.

No, thought Marlowe, he’s not going to tie me up. He grabbed desperately to move the bumrolls out from under his head, found the end of one and whipped it round as hard as he could left-handed in the direction of Carey’s face. If you were willing to hurt yourself more, there was a way out of an armlock. Marlowe heaved convulsively to the left, felt Carey’s weight slip, and punched still blind with his left hand for Carey’s groin. He hit something, heard a gasp, scrambled out of the pile of underwear and got to a wall where he stood up and drew his sword.