Marlowe was appalled. The house, although he had been often disoriented in its labyrinthine corridors, had been a marvellous world of exotic things, sights and smells that he knew he would now never experience again. ‘How did it happen?’
Dee drew him to one side. ‘Do you know a quiet inn?’ he asked.
‘We could go to the Swan,’ Marlowe offered. ‘I need to speak to Meg if I can. She will find us a quiet corner, if there is one to be had.’
Dee nodded and the two walked through the afternoon streets, through market stalls, miraculously restored, through geese and sheep being herded by their new owners to their fate. It seemed nobody had hanged the Mayor after all. Neither man spoke, each being busy with his own thoughts, until they were ensconced with an ale each in a quiet corner of the inn, with the back of their settle turned out into the room, for added privacy.
‘How did it happen?’ Marlowe repeated. ‘Is everyone well? Helene . . . your servants?’
‘Everyone got out. They are staying at one of my other properties in London, just a small house, but all of my papers, my potions . . . everything has gone. Many of the things I work with are rather easily ignited; the place went up like a torch, or so I’m told.’ The magus slumped on his seat.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ Marlowe said. ‘But, you haven’t told me; how did it happen?’
Dee closed to him. ‘That’s the thing,’ he said. ‘I have started the rumour, which will be all over England before the summer is done, that an angry mob overpowered my grooms and put torches to the house.’ He looked up briefly. ‘I have a reputation to keep up; people must be afraid of me, if only slightly, otherwise I am just a magician, doing tricks for a meal and a bed.’
Marlowe smiled. As a conjuror of a different sort, playing people and words off against one another to keep ahead of the game of life, he understood. But he still didn’t know what had happened. He opened his mouth to ask again, but Dee raised a hand to forestall him.
‘You must promise not to tell a soul.’
‘I promise.’ And Kit Marlowe kept his promises.
Dee stared at him for a long minute. ‘Do you promise not to put me into one of your plays, even?’
‘I don’t write plays,’ Marlowe said. ‘I am a poet, at best. I saw what happened to Lord Strange’s Men. A theatrical life is not for me.’
Dee knew what his showstone had told him about Marlowe and shrugged. He had less faith in it now that it had not foretold the fire. He drew a deep breath. ‘It was the cook,’ he said, baldly. ‘And her perpetual toast.’
‘Toast can’t burn a house down, surely?’ Marlowe sat back. It seemed unlikely.
‘No, it can’t,’ Dee agreed. ‘But a candle can if the manservant who should have been watching the house to make sure that if the curtain was blown into the room because the window was left open and touched the flame and caught alight was put out straight away was having toast.’ He gasped at the end of his mammoth sentence which had been punctuated by ticking each brick in the wall off on his fingers.
‘Ah. I can see how it happened now.’
‘The curtain in question then flapped in the wind against a particularly fine stuffed vulture which was hanging from the ceiling. The moss with which it was stuffed caught fire and before they knew it . . . the beams were alight and in a matter of hours, the house was gone.’
There seemed nothing to say, so Marlowe sipped his ale and kept quiet.
Then Dee brightened up, however falsely. ‘To get back to the inquest, though, Kit. There seemed to me to be . . . a lot missing from your testimony.’
‘A little. Possibly a little.’
Dee waited patiently.
‘There was . . .’ Marlowe weighed his words and began again. ‘When I broke away from Steane, at the edge of the wood, something frightened him, so that he ran towards the church.’
‘Did you see what it was?’
Marlowe could picture it quite clearly in his mind; a nebulous white shape, which had risen from the ground over Ralph Whitingside’s grave and had skimmed along the boundary wall, heading for the gate into the churchyard proper. It must have reached it a second at most after Steane had disappeared into the blackness beyond the yews. If it had a face, he had not seen it. ‘It was . . .’ he sketched a helpless shape in the air. ‘It was white,’ he said, finally. ‘That’s all I can say.’
Dee slapped his knee and made the ale jump in the jug. ‘I knew it,’ he almost shouted. Then he remembered the need for secrecy. ‘I knew it,’ he repeated, in a whisper this time. ‘It was the soul of Ralph Whitingside. I knew that I should have completed that banishment rite, hedge priest or no hedge priest.’
Marlowe looked at the man. He seemed quite sane, most of the time, and yet it was hard to swallow his belief in souls and wandering spirits. He dropped his voice so low that it was just a breath in Dee’s ear. ‘I rather thought it was Meg,’ he said.
Dee bridled. ‘When you are an expert in raising the dead, Dominus Marlowe,’ he said, sharply, ‘then I will take your advice on these things. Why would Meg make Steane scream and run for his life?’
‘Because he thought it was the soul of Ralph Whitingside,’ Marlowe said. ‘It hardly matters, does it, whether it was or not?’
‘It matters to me,’ the magus said, in a huff. ‘And it matters to all those who use that church, unless they mind a shiftless ghost attending their services when it fancies.’ He picked up his ale mug and drained it. ‘But, I must be away. My manservant is sorting out the horses at the livery and I have a lot of work to do when I get home.’
‘And when do you expect to get home, Dr Dee?’ Marlowe said, drily.
‘First thing tomorrow, Master Marlowe,’ Dee said with a twinkle. ‘It would be sooner, but I have decided to take the scenic route.’ He stood up and looked down at the scholar. Dee could see, all laid one over the other, the boy he had been and the man he would, with the grace of something, possibly God, become. ‘Travel safely, Kit,’ Dee said.
‘And you, too, John.’
They clasped hands briefly, then, with a smile and just a hint of saltpetre and a shower of sparks for the look of the thing, the magus was gone.
‘You’re very quiet back here, Master Marlowe.’
The voice came from above his head and behind him and he twisted his neck to check who it was.
‘Meg!’ he said. ‘Can you come and sit with me?’
‘I can,’ she said, ‘but only for a minute. I had the afternoon off for the inquest, but I am back at work now, officially.’
‘Officially?’
‘Well -’ she patted her stomach – ‘I won’t be working, here or in the other way, for much longer. So it doesn’t matter if Jack Wheeler tells me to go today; it will all be the same in the end.’
‘What will you do?’ Marlowe knew there should be some sort of justice for Meg and her baby, but didn’t know how to make it happen. In fairy-tales, he would have married her himself and they would have lived happily ever after, but this was no fairy-tale.
‘Sir Roger Manwood has offered me a place in his house,’ she said, ‘but I’m not sure. It’s a long way from home and . . . well, I’m not sure why he did it.’ She bent closer. ‘I’m not sure what he’s after.’
‘Justice, of a sort,’ Marlowe said. ‘Don’t forget that you . . . well.’ He dropped his voice until she could hardly hear it. ‘You did . . . kill Benjamin Steane.’
She looked at him, her eyes wide. ‘Don’t say that, Master Marlowe. Anyone could be listening. I thought when you didn’t mention it in the inquest . . .’
‘It doesn’t mean I don’t know, though, Meg,’ Marlowe said. ‘I had to tell Sir Roger and Dr Dee; they had been helping me with the case from the beginning, they deserved to know.’ He clapped her on the shoulder. ‘Go to Sir Roger’s house. He lives in acres of woodland, with a lake, a stream, everything that little Ralph could want as he grows up. And . . . don’t forget the baby’s father grew up there too. It will be like a homecoming.’ He didn’t tell Meg Sir Roger’s feelings about children; there would be plenty of occasions, he felt sure, when she would discover that for herself.