Norgate looked him up and down. The boy was very large, like his appetites, his brown hair cropped under his scholar’s cap, his eyes tinged red.
‘A scholar of King’s School, Canterbury.’ Norgate was reading from the parchment on the table in front of him. ‘Secundus Convictus, pensioner . . . nay, Matthew Parker scholar, no less.’
‘Sir.’ Bromerick was happier with just monosyllables this morning. To have your curriculum vitae read to you was akin to a death sentence. Would the Master of Corpus be showing him the instruments of torture next?
‘Dr Lyler speaks highly of your Hebrew.’
Bromerick blinked. ‘Does he, sir?’ This came as a surprise to Bromerick. Had the great man got him mixed up with somebody else?
Norgate waved him back into line. ‘Thomas Colwell,’ he said.
Tom Colwell was smaller than Bromerick, blond and wiry. His grey eyes were clear when he was sober and his mind was like a razor. But today was not a good day. He’d just thrown up spectacularly in the shrubbery outside the door and for all it was June, he shivered.
‘The King’s School, Canterbury,’ Norgate said with a certain sense of having been here before. ‘Matthew Parker scholar. Professor Johns is impressed by your rhetoric in the Discourses.’
‘That’s very kind of him, sir,’ Colwell managed through his chattering teeth.
‘Isn’t it?’ a voice rasped from the corner of the room. All eyes, even Norgate’s, swivelled to Dr Gabriel Harvey, sprawled in his academic finery. He stared back, defiant, his eyes cold and his mouth hard. Harvey had been waiting for this moment for three years. Three years to bring these rule-breakers, these delinquents, to book. Somehow, they’d got away with it before, creeping out on the tiles of Cambridge when the sheer exhaustion of academic rigour should have had them stretched out, dead to the world, in their truckle beds. And he was far from happy that there was one name missing from the roster of roisterers on the Master’s desk. That prize still waited to be claimed.
‘Matthew Parker,’ Norgate said.
The scholar stood forward. He wore the permanently pained expression of all the male members of his family under his curling hair, as though he was about to meet his maker and regretted all the sins he’d committed in his young life. And now, he was.
‘Pensioner,’ Norgate said, shifting the parchment in front of him. ‘Scholar of the King’s School, Canterbury. Recipient of the Matthew Parker scholarship . . .’
‘Jobs for the boys,’ Harvey almost spat. He had come up the hard way, with no scholarship to pave his way, no silver christening spoon clamped between his teeth. He despised the gilded youths standing before him and didn’t care who knew it.
Norgate was nodding his old, grey head. ‘Your grandfather,’ he told the boy, ‘once sat where I am today before God and Her Majesty called him to higher office. What would he have said of his grandson’s profligacy?’
Parker cleared his throat. ‘He would have been appalled, sir,’ he said. Matt Parker remembered his grandfather well. He was a sweet old boy who gave him toys and smelt of incense and old leather. He was too nice to be an Archbishop and certainly too nice to be Master of Corpus Christi. Parker remembered the old man’s funeral when he’d stood in that huge cold vault of the cathedral and saw the tears on everyone’s cheeks. He’d let the old boy down, that much was certain.
‘And yet,’ the Master sighed, ‘Professor Johns and Dr Lyler tell me that your Dialectics are to die for.’
Harvey snorted. Parker was average at best; how could his colleagues be so easily taken in?
‘What a waste.’ Norgate stood up. ‘Gentlemen.’ The guilty three stood to attention once more, gazing steadfastly into the middle distance. ‘You were found climbing over The Court wall at two of the clock this morning, worse for drink. Proctor Lomas reports that you, Bromerick, struck him on the head with your fist.’
‘Flat of the hand, sir,’ Bromerick blurted out, instantly regretting it. ‘Flat of the . . .’ and he stopped short, tucking the offending appendage into the front of his gown, as though to hide the evidence. Shut up, Henry, he heard the little voice inside his head saying. They cut off people’s hands in this great country of ours.
‘You are all good scholars,’ Norgate went on, ‘and today you were to have been invested by our college with the degree of Bachelor of Arts.’
Gabriel Harvey smiled. He had not missed Norgate’s use of the past tense and fully approved of it. There was, as he’d known all along, a God.
‘You know that I could withhold your degrees?’ the Master said.
There were assorted mutterings of assent from the three. They were all students of the Dialectic, well versed in the Discourses; the Master’s use of the conditional gave them hope. Harvey’s lopsided grin was already appearing. Perhaps he’d missed the nuance.
‘I shall consider,’ Norgate said and the grin vanished. There was a dull metallic clanking from across the quadrangle, from the tower of St Bene’t’s. ‘There’s the Chapel bell. Get along with you, now. You will have my decision by twelve of the clock.’
‘Sir,’ the scholars chorused and made for the door, doffing their caps as they went. Parker stopped at the studded woodwork. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I hope it goes without saying that we’re very . . .’
‘Get out!’ Harvey roared. And, with a hop and skip to catch up with the others, he did.
The Chapel bell clanged on in the golden morning and scholars crept out from the staircases, fumbling with caps and gowns, colliding with the Fellows whose rooms they shared. In some ways, Corpus Christi was a victim of its own success. The college had never been fuller, but that meant that space was at a premium. Sizars, always cold, hungry and broke, shared lodgings with the Fellows for whom they skivvied and scraped. Only Gabriel Harvey lodged alone, complaining of the smell of the hoi polloi, whose academic potential diminished year by year.
The Master looked down from his eyrie as he had now for more years than he cared to remember. Then he turned back to his second in command. ‘Well, Gabriel?’
Harvey got to his feet too. ‘Withhold their degrees, Master. Throw the book at them. Damn it, throw every book you’ve got. Damaging the reputation of the college like that. We’ll never live it down.’ Norgate was old school. Mentioning the reputation of Corpus was bound to work and Harvey knew it.
But if Harvey was the Devil’s advocate, then Norgate was equally good at playing God’s. ‘A few lads had too much ale,’ he said quietly. ‘Not a great sin in the scheme of things, Gabriel. You and I have seen far worse things, even here in this university. True, it would have been better if they’d waited until tonight to celebrate. We don’t, after all, flog our graduates . . .’
‘. . . yet.’ Harvey finished the sentence for him. He looked out over The Court as the stragglers disappeared into the Chapel doors, still just in shadow as the morning sun crept over the grass towards the dark interior. His eyes moved upwards and he saw a face in a far window – the liquid eye, the sardonic, unreadable mouth, a look that would outstare the Devil. ‘Of course,’ he said, not turning away. ‘I’d swap all those idiots for the one who’s behind it all.’
Norgate followed his gaze. The scholar in the far window bowed and doffed his cap. ‘Ah, Christopher Morley.’ The old man could never get his name right. ‘You’ve never liked him, have you, Gabriel?’
‘No more than I like the pestilence,’ Harvey growled. He snatched up his satchel. ‘It is, of course, your choice, Master,’ he said, with all the cold contempt at his command. ‘I must to morning service.’
‘Not going to morning service today, Kit?’ Professor Johns wanted to know. He wasn’t all that much older than Marlowe but he had the grey skin that goes with the intellectual, a man who had long ago decided that his would be a world of books and scholarship and the scratching of quill on calfskin.
‘Not today,’ Marlowe said. The flash doublet had gone and he wore the grey fustian of a scholar. Across the quad, he saw that bastard Gabriel Harvey scurrying to the Chapel, hatred seeping from every pore. Every time he saw the man, he wondered what he’d done to upset him. What it was in the three years they’d known each other, teacher and pupil, that had made Harvey so detest him.