The Devil Will Come

TEN

Cambridge, England, 1584

IT WAS PALM Sunday.

It had been four long years.

Every minute of every hour of every day had led to this moment. His final public disputation.

In many ways the scholar’s life had been as arduous as a laborer’s or a tradesman’s. Six days a week, awake at five in the morning for chapel. Then breakfast and lectures on logic and philosophy. Midday meal at eleven a.m., no more than a bit of meat, bread and broth, then classes on Greek and rhetoric. For the entire groaning afternoon, the study of debate and dialectical disputation, an intellectual tennis match to train young minds. Supper was little better than dinner, then study until nine o’clock when the day was done for everyone but him. While his roommates slept, he would sit at the farthest corner of the room and write his precious verses for another hour or two. Sundays were hardly easier.

Alone, he paced the dusty floorboards outside the lecture hall in his plain black gown. Through the closed doors he could hear the audience shuffling to take its place in the gallery. A few would be supporters but most were a sneering lot who would take more pleasure in seeing him fail.

Success would mean the granting of his BA degree and automatic admittance into the MA curriculum. From there, London would be his oyster. Failure would mean an ignominious return to Canterbury and a life of obscurity.

He balled up his fists, stoking his morale.

I am meant for greatness. I am meant to trample their small minds under my boots and crush their skulls like egg shells.

Norgate, the Master of Benet College, tall and gaunt, opened the doors and announced, ‘Christopher Marlowe, we are ready for you.’

Four years earlier Marlowe had made his way from Canterbury to Cambridge, a journey of seventy miles and three days of begged rides on turnip wagons listening to the blather of country folk. Left by a merchant on the outskirts of town he had walked the last mile toting his rucksack. Passersby would have hardly noticed him entering the city through the Trumpington Gate, one more lad streaming into the university for the new December term.

The sixteen-year-old had to ask his way. In an alleyway beside a tavern he saw a man pissing.

‘Which way to Benet College?’ Marlowe had loudly demanded of the fellow. No ‘please, Sir,’ no ‘might you’. It wasn’t his way.

The man had swung his head around, displaying a frown that suggested an inclination to throw the young man into the mud as a reward for his impudence – as soon as he put his member away. But he’d changed his mind after looking the student up and down. Perhaps it was Marlowe’s hard, dark eyes or humorless tight lips, the curious gravity of his juvenile beard or the imperious way he carried his slight frame but the man yielded meekly and provided the information the boy had sought.

‘Cross over Penny-farthing Lane, go past St Botolph’s Church, right turn on Benet Street, into the quadrangle.’

Marlowe had nodded and soon arrived at the place that would be his home for the next six and a half years.

He’d won his position as a Parker Scholar by dint of a laudatory performance at the King’s School in Canterbury. That first day in Cambridge he’d been the last of the roommates to arrive at their assigned room at the north-west corner of the quadrangle. His fellow Parker Scholars, Robert Thexton, Thomas Lewgar and Christopher Pashley, all poor as dirt like himself, had been arranging their meager possessions and haggling over the few pieces of furniture allotted them: two beds, two chairs, a table and three stools, some chamber pots and basins. They’d stopped arguing and had taken the measure of the slender, brooding latecomer.

Marlowe hadn’t bothered with pleasantries. His stare had darted around like that of a feral animal scoping out a patch of territory. ‘I’m Marlowe. Where’s my bed?’

Lewgar, a plump boy with a spotted face had pointed at a mattress and said. ‘You’ll be sleeping with me. I trust you’ll keep your breeches on at night, Mister Marlowe.’

Marlowe had thrown his rucksack onto the mattress and managed his first smile in days, a fleeting sardonic one. ‘Of that, my man, you can be sure.’

Marlowe stood facing his questioners with his chin thrust out and his arms quietly at his sides. In four years he had grown taller by the better measure of a foot and all traces of boyishness had vanished. His beard and moustache had grown thicker and framed his longish, triangular face in a rakish way. His silky brown hair fell just short of his starched ruff. Whereas most of his contemporaries were beginning to develop the bulbous noses and prognathous jaws that would mark their later years, Marlowe’s features had remained delicate, even boyish, and he carried his good looks with an air of haughtiness.

The Master of the college was flanked by three older students taking their MA degrees, all of them with the countenance of sadists aiming to skewer their prey. Once the thesis for the disputation was given, Marlowe would verbally joust with them for four grueling hours and by supper his fate would be known.

Someone in the audience insistently cleared his throat. Marlowe turned. It was his friend, Thomas Lewgar, who would undergo the self-same ordeal the following day. Lewgar winked his encouragement. Marlowe smiled and faced his panel.

‘So, Mister Marlowe,’ the Master began. ‘Here is the final thesis subject of your baccalaureate. We wish you to consider the following and commence your disputation without delay: According to the law of God, good and evil are directly opposed to one another. You may begin.’

Marlowe could hardly suppress his delight. The corners of his mouth curled up, ever so slightly, but enough to unnerve his inquisitors.

The cat’s in the bag. The degree is mine.

At the dining hall, the 120 faculty and students of Benet College habitually sat with their own kind. The dirty leaded windows filtered some of the early evening light but as it was spring, the Sizars had no need to light the candles yet.

At the far end of the hall the Master and Fellows sat at High Table on a raised platform. The four Bible Clerks, holding the most prestigious scholarships with the highest stipends, sat directly beneath the Master. The six Nicholas Bacon Scholars came next. Marlowe sat at the adjacent table with the remaining scholars, including his Parker lot. The Pensioners, all rich lads, filled out the tables in the rest of the hall. Unlike the Scholars, they paid their own commons and other expenses. Their interest in the academic life was generally marginal; their lot in life was to drink, play tennis and accumulate just enough education to return to their country seats as Justices of the Peace. Rounding out the student mix were the Sizars, poor lads who were clever enough to attend university but not meritorious enough to receive scholarships. They had to wait on their fellow students for their tuition, bed and board.

Marlowe was high-spirited and ordered up extra bottles of wine for his table. He could ill afford them but his Sizar, a first-year boy, dutifully made the entry in Marlowe’s accounts for future reckoning.

‘I suppose all of you can have a few more sips, but the lion’s share is for Master Marlowe,’ Marlowe called out to his table.

‘It sounds grand, doesn’t it? Master Marlowe!’ his friend Lewgar exclaimed. ‘By this time tomorrow I pray that I too will have passed my disputation and have received my BA. I shudder to think what will become of Old Tom if I have no degree to carry back to Norfolk.’ Lewgar still had spots on his hairless face and remained a beefy lad where most of the others were rail thin. Though Marlowe was notoriously intemperate and prone to pounding his colleagues with his sly, withering sarcasm, Lewgar had remained on his amicable side by dint of perennial self-deprecation.

From across the table, an older scholar, two years Marlowe’s senior, a serious fellow taking his MA degree, piped up, ‘Rather good show, today, Marlowe. Almost as impressive as my own final disputation.’

Marlowe raised his goblet to the man. Though he had seen him nearly every day for four years, he could honestly say he hardly knew Robert Cecil and, in fact, Cecil was one of the few men in Cambridge who intimidated him. Yes, of course, his father was Baron Burghley, the Queen’s foreign secretary and by rights the most powerful man in a land without a king, but there was more to it than that. Cecil was as strong as a plowman, as smart as any of the Bacon Scholars and as confident in his own skills as Marlowe himself.

But Marlowe was Cecil’s better in one area of endeavor and he was boozily grateful when Cecil called for him to demonstrate.

‘Go on, Master Marlowe, do us the honor of one of your verses on this, the occasion of your elevation.’

Marlowe rose and steadied himself with a hand on the table. ‘Master Cecil, I have just the passage from a small work in progress, my first stage play.’

‘Have you been dabbling, then?’ Cecil asked.

‘As his bedfellow,’ Lewgar cried, to howls of laughter, ‘I can attest that he dabbles all night long!’

‘Quiet, then,’ Cecil demanded of the table. ‘Let us hear what our man hath wrote and, if it is not to our liking, I will let a birdie fly off to Court to let our Good Lady know that her schools are in disrepair.’

Marlowe raised his arms melodramatically, waiting for his moment, and when all eyes were on him he began.

‘What is’t, sweet wag, I should deny thy youth,

Whose face reflects such pleasure to mine eyes,

As I, exhaled with thy fire darting beams,

Have oft driven back the horses of the night,

Whenas they would have haled thee from my sight.

Sit on my knee and call for thy content;

Control proud Fate and cut the thread of Time.

Why, are not all the gods at thy command

And heaven and earth the bounds of thy delight?’

He grinned, drained the rest of his wine and sat back down, waving for the Sizar.

The diners waited for Cecil to weigh in. ‘Passable, Master Marlowe,’ he said. ‘Rather passable. My birdie will have to remain in its cage and forsake its journey to London. Who do you have giving this speech and what will you call your play?’

‘Thus sayeth Jupiter!’ Marlowe said. ‘And I am calling the play Dido, Queen of Carthage.’

‘Well, Marlowe, if, in three years’ time, you take your Holy Orders, the world will surely lose an eminent playwright.’

The last to leave the table were Marlowe, Cecil and Lewgar. It was growing dark and Lewgar moaned that he needed to be in bed early.

‘I hear the Fellows are not well disposed of your chances, Lewgar,’ Cecil said harshly.

‘You have heard that?’ Lewgar asked fearfully.

‘I have indeed.’

‘I mustn’t fail. My life will be over.’

‘If you cast yourself into the Cam, Thomas, I will write a poem about you,’ Marlowe said.

‘I’ll be fine, as long as I’m not given a thesis concerning mathematics. You know how appalling I am at mathematics, don’t you, Christopher?’

‘I shouldn’t worry, Thomas. Tomorrow you’ll be as drunk as me. In celebration.’

When Lewgar trundled off, Cecil rose and clapped Marlowe on the back. ‘Old Norgate will be letting you know over breakfast, but you’ll be one of Lewgar’s questioners at his disputation. I shall be another.’

Marlowe looked up quizzically. ‘Really? How very interesting.’

His Sizar came to clear away the last of the table but Marlowe sent him for more wine and ordered him to light the candles. The lad obliged. Marlowe stared into the flickering flame of the candle and let his drink-heavy head droop towards his chest. The candlestick, a plain tube of pewter, caught his attention. He’d seen it every day for four years but tonight it jogged his memory. It was very much like a candlestick he’d seen some thirteen years earlier.

His father was always angry, always muttering invectives while he worked. Seven-year-old Christopher sat by the fire, eagerly scribbling on a crossed-out, singed page from his father’s ledger book which his mother had rescued from the fire.

The sun doth shine,

The birds doth sing,

And lo the bluebird

Takes to wing.

Pleased with himself, he looked up to see a woman at their door complaining about a job that John Marlowe had done. It was the baker’s wife, Mary Plessington. The stitching had already come undone on a recent shoe repair.

His father took the shoes mutely and when the woman was gone he cursed her out roundly.

‘Filthy hag. She most likely loosened the stitches by ramming her foot up her husband’s ass. She’s a bloody recusant, anyway. I shouldn’t even take her jobs.’

His mother, Katherine, looked up from her sewing. ‘Papist scum. Makes me want to spit on my own floor.’

The shoe shop and their front room were one and the same. His father sat at his workbench all through the day, flaying and puncturing cattle skins and complaining. The Marlowes were meant for more, he would say. It was well and good that he had elevated himself to a freeman and had been able to join the Shoemakers’ Guild with all the privileges that entailed. But he was still on a lowish rung of the middle class and he couldn’t contain his contempt for the aristocracy and anyone else doing better than himself.

‘Katherine,’ he called out. ‘See how young Christopher gets on with his learning. That’s the way to beat the bastards. With a proper education he’ll become one of them, or that’s what they’ll think. Then he’ll rise above them and take a Marlowe’s rightful place on the top of the pile.’

Christopher was the only son and the oldest child now that his older sister had died of a fever. He attended the petty school at Saint George the Martyr run by the parish priest, Father Sweeting. He’d quickly learned to read from the ABC and Catechism and from the first days when the printed page made sense to him verses and rhymes had popped into his head, demanding that he write them down. They were a cheerful counterpoint to the other thoughts that bubbled in his brain, dark thoughts that had scared him when he was younger.

‘Are we different?’ he remembered asking his mother when he was five.

‘We are.’

‘Did God make us so?’

‘It’s nothing to do with God.’

‘Sometimes I get frightened.’

‘Your fears will go away,’ his mother assured him. ‘When you’re a bit older you’ll be happy you’re different, believe me.’

She’d been right. The fear faded soon enough and was replaced by something altogether marvelous, a feeling of superiority and power. By the age of seven he genuinely liked who he was and what he was becoming.

The baker’s son, Martin Plessington, was in his class at petty school. Thomas Plessington was one of the more successful merchants in Canterbury, a wealthy Protestant with five apprentices and two ovens. Martin was a heavy-boned boy on his way to being a giant like his father. Inside the school he was slow-witted but on the streets he was a bully, using his muscles for primacy.

One day, Christopher was among the last to leave school, reluctant, as always, to part with one of Father Sweeting’s books. On his way home he took his usual short cut behind the Queen’s Head Tavern and the livery stables.

To his surprise, he saw the thick legs of Martin Plessington poking from a window at the house of the stable master. Martin lowered himself to the ground, clutching something. His eyes met Christopher’s.

‘Bugger off,’ Martin hissed.

‘What do you have?’ Christopher asked boldly.

‘None of your bleeding business.’

Christopher came closer and saw it. It was a pewter candlestick adorned with an ornate Catholic cross.

‘Have you stolen that?’

‘Do you want me to thrash you?’ was the angry response.

Christopher didn’t back away. ‘I assume you mean to sell it. Unless your family are closet Papists who mean to use it in an illegal mass.’

‘Who are you calling a Papist!’ Martin said, growing red in the face. ‘The Marlowes aren’t fit to wipe a Plessington ass.’

‘Tell you what,’ Christopher said evenly. ‘If you let me see it, I’ll swear I won’t tell a soul what you’ve done.’

‘Why do you want to see it?’ the boy asked suspiciously.

‘It’s pretty, that’s why.’

Martin thought about it and handed the candlestick over. It had a heavy round base, the weight of a brick or two. Christopher inspected it closely, then looked up and down the alley. ‘Did you notice this?’ he asked.

‘What?’ Martin answered, drawing closer.

‘This.’

Christopher swung the candlestick with all the might his small frame could muster and slammed its base against Martin’s temple. With a satisfying crunch, the sound of a boot breaking through ice, the boy fell to his knees and pitched forward, blood gushing from the wound. He moved for a few seconds and went slack.

Christopher stuffed the bloody candlestick into his shirt and began dragging the lifeless body toward the stable. It was harder work than he’d imagined but he didn’t let up until he had Martin well inside. The tethered horses shifted and whinnied and tugged at their ropes.

He dropped Martin beside a pile of hay and paused to catch his breath. Then he fished inside his shirt for the candlestick. He grasped it by its base, staining his fingers red.

With one hand he opened Martin’s mouth and with the other he shoved the stick as far down his throat as it would go and watched blood well up and fill the gaping hole.

The next day, Martin’s chair at petty school was unoccupied and Father Sweeting commented prophetically that the boy had better be dead than miss a day of studies. Christopher skipped lightly home, passing by the stables again. The stable doors were shut and no one seemed to be about. When he got home his mother and father were seated at the table talking in low tones, his sisters padding about on bare feet.

‘Did you hear?’ his father said to him. ‘Did you hear about Martin Plessington?’

Christopher shook his head.

‘Dead,’ his father said, starkly. ‘His head stoved in and a Catholic candlestick down his gullet. People are saying the Papists done it, killed a Protestant lad. They’re saying they’ll be trouble in Canterbury for sure. A right civil war. There’s talk of a couple of recusant boys already done in by Protestant gangs. What do you say about that?’

Christopher had nothing to say.

His mother piped up, ‘You wore your good shirt today. I found your other one balled up between your mattress and the wall.’ She reached down between her legs and produced it. ‘There’s blood on it.’

‘Did you have anything to do with this?’ his father demanded. ‘Tell the truth.’

Christopher smiled, showing the gap of his missing milk teeth. He actually puffed out his chest and said, ‘I did it. I killed him. I hope there is a war.’

His father rose slowly and stretched to his full height, towering over the seven-year-old. His lips quivered. ‘Good lad,’ he finally said. ‘I’m right proud of you. There’re dead Catholics today because of you and more to come, I reckon. You’re a credit. A credit to the Marlowe bloodlines.’