But she had little more to add. ‘That is the story, Master Fludd. She went out to go marketing, and I have not seen her since.’
‘And you’re sure she came to Cambridge?’ the Constable checked.
The Butlers stared at him. ‘Have you been to Royston lately?’ the yeoman asked. The point was made.
Fludd scratched his head and looked out of the window over Jane Butler’s shoulder. He was trying to frame a way of asking his next question without upsetting the woman. ‘And yet you only come to me today?’ he said.
She immediately burst into tears. He gave himself a mental kick – he hadn’t managed to avoid upsetting her after all.
Her husband answered for her. ‘We thought she had . . . well, she’d been in a convent for thirty years, man. We thought she might have . . .’
Incredulous, Fludd suddenly understood his meaning. Tentatively, he checked that his facts were straight. ‘You –’ and here he pointed at each of the Butlers in turn – ‘assumed that because she had been celibate for thirty years she had . . . gone . . . off . . . in order to . . .’
Butler blustered. ‘Yes. Well, that’s what
I
would do!’ This was pronounced with an air that suggested that that was what
any
sane person would do.
Jane Butler shook her head and whispered, ‘No. I knew she hadn’t done that, but Jeremiah . . .’ again, she could only flap her hand at her husband and then blow her nose.
Fludd put down the quill, got up and paced across the room, thinking. Then, he spoke to Jane Butler. ‘Madame, is your sister of about your build, perhaps a little slighter, with auburn hair? She has the mark of a wedding ring, perhaps?’
Jane Butler leapt to her feet and grabbed his hands. ‘Yes! That is Eleanor. She took off her ring as Christ’s bride when she left the convent, but there was still a mark.’ She turned to her husband. ‘Jeremiah! Do you hear? Master Fludd has found Eleanor!’
Joseph Fludd held both her hands firmly in his. ‘Mistress Butler,’ he said, in a calm, low voice. ‘I fear that the news may not be good. No, do not get distressed, but I fear we must pay a visit to the Dead House.’
Jane Butler turned white and fainted dead away, crashing to the sawdust-coated floor in a less-than-ceremonious heap. Her husband looked on as Joseph Fludd laid her more comfortably, instinctively loosening her lace collar and hoping the yeoman would understand. ‘So, my wife’s sister is dead, then?’ he said.
Fludd nodded. ‘I fear so,’ he said.
The man buried his face in his hands. ‘Who will look after her blasted father now?’ he asked.
It was only with an effort that Joseph Fludd did not strike the man. But he had no time for such behaviour. He was Constable of the Watch and he had a coroner to inform.
FIVE
Constable Fludd hated the Sturbridge Fair. In some ways it was the highlight of the Cambridge year and made more money than all the fairs in England. The problem was – who did it make money for? For all Fludd’s life there was wrangling between Town and Gown about who owned the fair and who creamed off the profits.
People like Fludd weren’t included in discussions like this. Rumour had it that the great and good of the Town met behind locked doors in the church of St Bene’t and they were called the Black Company and that they all had cloven hoofs under their merchants’ robes. All Trumpy Joe Fludd knew was that while other people were making money or making merry or both, he was going to get his head cracked keeping Town and Gown apart.
The sun was already high by the time Kit Marlowe arrived. The first day of the fair was a holiday for the whole university, so most scholars who had a second suit of clothes wore them now, welcoming the chance to shed the fustian of their calling for a while. Only the sizars still wore their clerical greys and browns and they counted their coppers to see how far their meagre purses would go in terms of beer and pies.
‘Get your beer and pies here!’ the cries echoed and re-echoed in the cacophony of noise across the Common, the discordant lutes and pipes of the minstrels vying with each other and bouncing off the walls of the old leper church by the river.
Fludd, his staff with its gilded Cambridge arms in hand, walked the river bank. The Cam here was crowded with punts and skiffs, brightly fluttering with carnival ribbons, bobbing on the busy water. The smell of roasting pig and frying eels wafted from the fires in the centre of the field and roars went up from the crowd as two brawny wrestlers tussled with each other in the long grass.
Kit Marlowe was wearing his black and scarlet doublet today, his dagger at his back. Actually, he’d had to buy a new one after Proctor Lomas had had the temerity to confiscate his on the night before graduation. He took in the crowd: the flirting village girls from Cherry Hinton, Babraham and Dry Drayton; the shepherds from the Bedford levels in their smocks; and the children scampering and laughing around the clowns and running shrieking from the dancing bear, which swayed and snarled on its length of chain. For a brief moment, Marlowe met the gaze of the bear-ward, a surly-looking fellow with only one eye. Had he lost the other, the scholar wondered, to a short-tempered paw from his dancing partner?
Marlowe recognized, as he combed the booths of the fire-eaters and sword-swallowers, one or two Corpus men. Henry Bromerick wouldn’t have strayed far from the roasting pig, he could be sure of that. Tom Colwell would be browsing in the bookstall, looking for a bargain or something racy and prohibited he could suddenly whip out in college just to annoy Gabriel Harvey.
It was the foreigners Fludd was watching. The Sturbridge Fair of the Feast of the Holy Cross was four centuries old and word had got around. Flemish weavers had set up their jacquard looms on the flat ground near the leper church and were haggling in their curious broken English for their exotic silks and brocades. A large German woman, festooned with trashy ribbons was haranguing the crowd with the exquisite workmanship of her husband, a tiny man with thickened glass spectacles who was carving a cuckoo clock at his stall behind her.
The Constable noted the reaction of the fair-goers who sampled the slimy cheese on the French stall.
‘You want to try English cheese, mate!’ a labourer grunted, reaching for an ale mug to rinse away the taste of the Brie. ‘You froggies’d be all the better for a bit of Stilton.’
It was as well perhaps that neither the labourer nor Fludd understood the flick of the thumbnail on incisor that the French stallholder flashed back.
At the butts, a couple of sizars, all of fourteen in their freshman fustian, were making fools of themselves aiming at the targets. Scholars were exempt from the law that insisted on regular archery practice and against the village lads it was no contest. One of the sizars took aim as he had just watched the others do and the bowstring twanged painfully, stripping a layer of skin off his left forearm, while the arrow dropped uselessly to the grass at his feet. The watching lads jeered as the sizar writhed, holding his arm to his side and hopping from foot to foot with the pain.
‘Never mind, son,’ one of the villagers was saying. ‘You’ll get better at it. Care to put some money on the next one?’
But if the sizar had missed his mark, Kit Marlowe had found his. Against the trunk of one of the huge elms that ringed the field, Meg Hawley was talking to someone. Her head was thrown back with laughter and her golden curls flashed in the sunlight. Marlowe groaned inwardly. It was the person with her that was the problem.
‘Cut along now, Dominus Parker,’ he said, as he reached the pair.
‘Kit!’ Matthew Parker darted backwards in surprise, away from the girl he’d been trying to kiss.
‘Fumbles in the Swan after dark are one thing –’ Marlowe wagged a finger at him, smiling for all the world like Dr Norgate in one of his more indulgent moments – ‘but this is the Sturbridge Fair, man. Remember where you are. Look – ladies, gentlemen, children present. One or two churchmen, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Matt Parker decided to take umbrage. ‘Are you implying that Meg isn’t a lady?’ he asked.
Marlowe was half a head taller than his old friend and had sent him sprawling more often than either of them had attended the buttery. He smiled at Meg, then reached across and took her hand. ‘Certainly not.’ He bowed and kissed her fingers, with their pot-carrier’s callouses. ‘Mistress Hawley,’ he said. ‘You look radiant today.’
For all Meg Hawley never knew how to play this man, she curtsied deeply. ‘Why, thank you, Master Marlowe.’
‘Master Marlowe?’ A voice made them all turn. A solid-looking fellow stood there with curly russet hair and cold blue eyes. He wore the leather studded jerkin of a labourer and there were three men with him.
Meg broke away from the scholars and held the newcomer’s arm. ‘Hello, Harry.’ She smiled up at him. ‘I was looking for you.’ She patted his shoulder.
‘Yes,’ he grunted, not taking his eyes off Marlowe. ‘I can see you were.’ He glanced down at her. ‘You know this man?’ he asked.
‘He’s . . . he’s a customer,’ she trilled. ‘At the Swan, you know.’
‘Yes.’ The stranger looked Marlowe up and down. ‘I know.’ He passed Meg back to the clutches of the men behind him and stepped forward. ‘What I want to know is why a roisterer like you is kissing the hand of my betrothed.’
Marlowe frowned for a moment, then smiled. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I had no idea.’
‘No,’ the villager said. ‘That sounds about right.’ He flashed defiance at Matthew Parker. ‘And you, you’re another of these quill-scratchers, I suppose.’
‘Dominus Parker is a scholar of the University of Cambridge.’ Marlowe spoke for the man.
‘University of Cambridge, my arse!’ the man spat and turned to go.
Marlowe let him get three or four paces. ‘Hire your arse out a lot, do you, clod?’
The man stopped, squaring his shoulders, eyes widening. He spun back to Marlowe. ‘What did you say?’
Marlowe threw his arms wide. ‘Deaf as well as stupid,’ he tutted, shaking his head.
It all happened in a second. The villager’s knife was in his hand, the blade glinting in the midday sun. Meg cried out, but neither man heard it. Marlowe slowly and deliberately drew the dagger from the sheath in the small of his back. The villager blinked at it and at the smouldering, dark eyes of its owner.
‘That’s not fair.’ It came out as a school-yard whine. ‘That dagger against my whittle. It’s twice the length.’
‘I don’t like to boast,’ Marlowe said, ‘but before we start, might I have your name? I hate to kill a man I haven’t been introduced to. Such bad breeding, don’t you think?’
‘This is my intended, Master Marlowe.’ Meg dashed forward, wriggling away from the churl who held her. ‘Harry Rushe. He lives with us all on the farm, remember, I told you. He didn’t mean any harm, Master Marlowe.’
‘Is that true, Rushe?’ Marlowe asked. ‘You don’t mean any harm?’
‘Dickie,’ Rushe called to one of his confederates. ‘Give him your whittle. If you’ll fight man to man with me, Marlowe, we’ll settle this once and for all.’
Dickie produced his knife, hilt-first to Marlowe who shook his head. ‘If it’s an advantage you’re after, Master Rushe,’ he said, and slapped the hilt of his dagger into Parker’s hand. ‘Look after this, dear boy.’ Then he turned to face Rushe, open-handed and beckoning him forward.
Meg gasped. She’d seen her man in a knife fight before. It wasn’t pretty. But before she could intervene, talk some sense into the thick idiots, Rushe had lunged at Marlowe. The blade missed and the Corpus man grabbed the labourer’s wrist and, using his body as a pivot, twisted the arm backwards. The blade fell from his grip and there was a sickening dull crack as his forearm snapped. Rushe dangled there, on his knees and in agony, as Marlowe hauled him upright.
‘Stop!’ a voice boomed across the noises of the fair. Even before much of a crowd had gathered, Constable Fludd was standing by the duellists, his staff with its lead-weight end under Marlowe’s chin, prodding his ruff. ‘Let him go,’ he growled.
Marlowe looked at the Constable and smiled. ‘Certainly,’ he said and let the man go. Rushe fell with his full weight on his broken arm, gave one grunt of pain and passed out.
The midsummer sun never shone in the gatehouse of Cambridge castle. The tower stood below the old Norman motte, shaded by a copse of birch on one side and a cherry orchard on the other. The castle itself had long ago collapsed, as furtive Cambridge men, at dead of night, had silently lifted the building apart, stone by ancient stone, and carried it away to shore up their tenements in Jesus Lane, Market Hill and Slaughter Yard. Eventually, they had abandoned the night altogether and brazenly quarried the flint and chalk from the motte itself, often under the disinterested gaze of Joseph Fludd’s forebears, constables of the watch who didn’t do much more than that.
They had reinforced the gatehouse in the days of King Harry, adding bars to the windows and the various college Proctors took regular advantage of the brew house in the old barbican. So, despite the rats and the damp, mould-black patches on the Medieval walls, Cambridge gaol had something of a lived-in look.
An ancient man with pale, red-rimmed eyes stared at the young men striding past outside his cell. One was the Constable – the old man knew him well. He was a shit, but you knew where you stood with Trumpy Joe. The other was a well-dressed bastard, a roisterer by his cut. But the old man knew that a week or so in this place would pluck his feathers.
Kit Marlowe waited while Joe Fludd unlocked the charge room. Across the dimly lit passage from him, a harlot called out to him and hauled down her kirtle, waggling her ample breasts at him. Marlowe just smiled as Fludd shepherded him inside and slammed the door. He opened a heavy, leather-bound ledger on the table in front of him and spun it round, dipping a quill into an inkwell and holding it out to Marlowe.
‘I would say “make your mark”,’ Fludd said. ‘But I think you can do better.’