She waits for the response. Will a faint hardening of his expression tell her what she needs to know? Will the merest flicker of those oh-so-fine eyebrows betray him?
‘Lord Tyrrell?’ he says innocently. ‘Why would Thomas Tyrrell give me gelt?’
‘Because you’re with his company of actors: Lord Tyrrell’s Men.’
‘Actually, he’s not,’ says Burridge, toying with his pot as though he’s been caught hiding a guilty secret.
‘But I thought–’
‘Mercy, no!’ Marlowe laughs, interrupting her. ‘If I am retained, it’s either by the Earl of Nottingham or the Lord Strange. I had The Jew on at the Rose in January with Strange’s Men. I merely use Tyrrell’s fellows when I’m working up a play. Saving Master Burridge’s presence, I’d trust Sackerson the bear to deliver lines better. Didn’t you hear them in the yard, clubbing my verse to death with their doltish delivery?’
Burridge gives a weak smile to show he can take an insult on the chin with the best of them. Then, with just a hint of bile in his voice, he confides to Bianca, ‘Actually, we’re all Master Kit can afford.’
‘If I didn’t have to keep standing you malmsey, Walter, I could keep the great Ned Alleyn on a retainer for the rest of my career. And buy him silk Venetian hose every month.’
‘Have you ever actually met Lord Tyrrell, Master Kit?’ Bianca asks Marlowe innocently.
‘Once or twice. Dreadful fellow, if you ask me. If ever I need inspiration for a well-bred murderer, I can think of no one better.’
Bianca doesn’t respond immediately. She considers the possibility that if Marlowe isn’t Tyrrell’s eyes in the Jackdaw, then perhaps he’s Robert Cecil’s or that of some other member of the Privy Council. Or perhaps Nicholas was wrong – perhaps Kit really is just a jobbing playwright with an insufferable self-assurance. She decides there’s only one way to find out.
She draws herself up to her full height, which she knows accentuates her neck and her waist, runs her fingers through her hair – willing it to attain an impossible lustre – gives him her best coquettish smile and invites him to take her to the Royal Exchange tomorrow to hear the musicians play.
Out in the beech wood, the door of the lodge flies open, shattering the pre-dawn silence like a cannon shot.
Florin stumbles out into the clearing. He bends double, like someone exhausted after running a great distance. His woollen breeches cling to his legs as the sweat sucks the cold out of the departing night. All across the wood the birds shriek a wild chorus of alarm.
‘Quiet, Florin!’ hisses Arcampora to his assistant as he follows him out of the lodge. ‘What if there are poachers?’
But Florin wouldn’t care if the queen’s Privy Council was waiting for him with a letter of arraignment bearing his name on it. He thinks he’d almost prefer the prospect of the scaffold to another night like this. He fills his lungs with air and stares pleadingly at Arcampora. ‘We are damned!’ he rasps. ‘All of us! We’re going straight to Purgatory! We’ll burn there for all eternity. There’ll be no redemption. This cannot be right, not even for so godly a cause.’
Arcampora regards his assistant with a sigh of disappointment. To discover weakness at such a crucial moment troubles him.
‘I picked you, Florin, because you are no frail woman,’ he says, laying a hand on the man’s shoulder. The deep black sleeve of his physician’s gown hangs between them like a rallying banner on a battlefield. ‘I picked you because I believed your mind was not given to superstitious imaginings. If you saw something, if you felt something, then perhaps it is real. Perhaps the words are coming together as they must. Perhaps the invocation is beginning to work. But you cannot run from it like a scared little boy! God insists that you must have forza – strength.’
In the chill darkness Florin tries to make sense of the night that has passed. The stolid part of him, the part for which he was chosen, makes its case against the irrationaclass="underline" this is the first time they have attempted a summoning to its conclusion. They are exhausted, confused. Perhaps the heady vapours of bearberry, juniper and monkshood issuing from the sconces and chafing dishes that Arcampora has set around the chalk circles have overpowered his senses. Perhaps they have all entered into some transforming religious mania. Florin has seen such a thing happen before, felt it himself when hearing the Mass at the English College in Rome, where they’d trained him and Dunstan with no less rigour to become soldiers of God – soldiers who could return to their native land and save it from the depredations of the heretics.
But what if I’m wrong, thinks Florin. What if the things I experienced tonight inside this little shrine to Arcampora’s extraordinary self-belief weren’t brought about simply by overheated emotion and a lack of sleep? What if it really is beginning to happen: the return?
Dunstan joins him in the clearing. He takes a deep breath, slow and settling. Then he marks the stations of the cross on his head and chest. ‘What did you see?’ he asks Florin.
‘I thought I saw shapes in the air,’ Florin says in a voice fractured by uncertainty. ‘I thought I saw a face, too.’
‘But was it her face? Was it the queen’s face?’ Arcampora demands to know.
Neither Florin nor Dunstan dares to answer.
‘We must continue,’ says Arcampora, suddenly animated. ‘Like the Mass, we must discover the exact words God desires to hear. Only those words. None other. Otherwise we waste our time. We waste God’s time.’ He looks back at the open door of the lodge. Lit by the flickering candlelight within, he glimpses Samuel’s feet lying still on the boards. ‘When the principe has recovered, we will begin the incantation anew,’ he says. And for a moment he imagines the body that he can partly see is not the body of Samuel Wylde, but of Jesus brought down from the cross.
10
Sunday dawns to a sudden flurry of brisk showers. London’s pelt gleams as it dries in the spring sunshine. Across the city, the faithful dress themselves in sober worsted and temperate linen. With pious hearts aglow, they sit on unyielding pews and lose themselves to Thomas Cranmer’s liturgy: the words of God unblemished by Romish heresy, the words that earned Cranmer his martyrdom in Mary Tudor’s regressive fires.
At the Jackdaw – in the liberty of Southwark, where the parish authorities are somewhat less condemnatory of non-attendance at sermon – Bianca sits beside the insensate Bruno and engages in a one-sided conversation about what they’d be doing if they were in Padua: making confession… contemplating the sixteen holy mysteries while listening to the Mass… reciting their Pater Nosters and Ave Marias… watching the parades… feasting to celebrate the end of Lent… All in all, she thinks they’d be having more fun.
As the worshippers spill out of the churches, Marlowe arrives for their assignation. By the redness of his eyes, Bianca suspects he hasn’t been within a hundred yards of a pulpit – or a bed. She feels herself starting to blush. I’ve spent so long cooling the overheated ardour of beery wherrymen, uncouth cordwainers and morose mariners, she tells herself, that I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to be the subject of a cultured man’s attention – even if he is one who’s unbearably full of himself.
With a guilty start, she thinks of Nicholas, which is odd, she decides, seeing as how, not so very long ago, she’d lectured him on having her own life to lead. She cannot deny there have been moments when something has passed between the two of them. She admires his decency, his courage and his honesty, and there’s a wit beneath his stoic yeoman’s exterior that can make her laugh unexpectedly. His desire to heal is unquenchable. And he is handsome, though not in the manner of the traditional gallant. Earthier. Which she likes.