4 A Plague of Angels: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (33 page)

‘Sir, I gave my word…’

‘I know you did. But what if they were coney-catching? What if the process you saw was not alchemy at all, had nothing whatever to do with the Philosopher’s Stone, but was a well-known goldsmithing mystery called parcel-gilding?’

‘I am sure it was the true art, sir, as sure as my life.’

‘Then let’s prove it. Have you scales?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have any of the angels that were made?’

‘I…I was given a fee, yes.’

‘Excellent. I have here a true angel direct from Mr van Emden on Cheapside.’ He took out a small yellow coin and tossed it, snapped it out of the air and showed it to Cheke, the Archangel Michael, battling the dragon, bright and fine upon it.

Angry at this bland certainty that Carey was right and he was wrong, Cheke led the way silently to the kitchen of the house, and brought out his scales. Then from a loose brick by the oven, he took one of the angels he had seen made and struck and brought it over.

Ten seconds later the last bastion of Cheke’s world had fallen, for the pan with the true angel on it dipped much lower than the one he had been given by the worshipful Dr Jenkins.

He took the others out, checked them against Carey’s coin.

‘Yours is full of lead,’ he said, desperately.

‘No, Mr Cheke,’ said Carey wearily. ‘Lead weighs less than gold. Look how thin mine is, how much it weighs. You were coney-catched, Mr Cheke, like others before you, and like my brother, who was the gentleman investing in the project.’

‘We weighed them at the…the place.’

‘Who supplied the scales?’

‘Dr Jenkins.’ Cheke looked at the flagstones. ‘But…’

‘You know yourself it’s not so very hard to alter the balance arm of a pair of scales so it’s biased one way or the other.’

Cheke put his head in his hands and fought not to weep. Carey paused and then said quite softly, ‘I am not claiming that the transmutation of matter, that the goal of alchemy, is impossible. I am only saying that you yourself have not yet seen it done.’

‘You have no idea,’ said Cheke, his voice muffled. ‘You don’t know how happy I was. I have spent most of my life seeking out the truth of matter, trying to understand God’s mind therein. And to know it had been done, to know that someone had succeeded… It didn’t matter to me that it was not I that did it, only that it had been done. That God had vouchsafed a little of his mystery…’

‘Mr Cheke, I’m sorry. I must know. Where did the process take place? Where were the angels made?’

For a moment Cheke burned with rage and hatred for Carey and then the fire died inside him, to be replaced with a grey hopelessness.

‘In the Blackfriars monastery, in the old kitchen where there is a fireplace we altered to be a furnace. The gentleman had a key.’

‘Of course he did. And with the noise of hemp-beating in the Bridewell prison nobody would hear the sound of the coins being struck.’

‘Yes, sir, that’s right.’

Carey smiled at him. ‘Come on, Mr Cheke. I want to see it.’

He hadn’t the energy to resist any more. He stood and went with Carey. They threaded through the back streets of the city, behind Knightrider Street and St Peter’s, alleys pockmarked with red painted crosses in some places and utterly normal in others.

Getting into the Blackfriars was made a little complicated by the fact that for some reason, Carey did not want to go through the gatehouse and the cloisters. Instead they went down St Andrew’s Hill to Puddle Wharf and round the remains of the monastery walls that way, threading between the newly built houses to a much older, swaybacked stone building separate from the Blackfriar’s hall.

Carey tried the door, but it was locked.

‘The gentleman had a key to it,’ offered Cheke.

Carey nodded. ‘Yes, he would. I think my father owns this part too. Well, let’s see.’

Carey padded restlessly round the whole building, disturbing a goat in its shed, craning his neck to look at the high windows and the massive chimney.

‘Come on, where is it?’ he said to himself.

‘What?’

‘I never saw a kitchen yet that only had one door. Where did the servants collect the food, where’s the hatch?’

‘Hatch?’

Carey looked across a tiny jakes-cluttered yard at the Blackfriar’s hall, jutting above the rooftops with its buttressing, narrowed his eyes as he followed some invisible notional path and came up against the goat shed again.

‘Must be,’ he said, and barged into the shed where the goat bleated in fright. There were a couple of bangs and crashes. ‘Come and give me a hand with this,’ he ordered Cheke.

After sidling past the goat who stared with those unnervingly cold slit-eyes of hers, Cheke saw that Carey had managed to wrench two planks from the back wall of the lean-to shed and had uncovered what was obviously a serving hatch. They both tried to lift it, but it was stuck fast and so Carey simply picked up a stone that must have been used for milking and battered through the old wood. It gave in a shower of musty-smelling dust and Carey tutted.

‘It’s got dry-rot,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to demolish it.’ He climbed up onto the sill and pushed through the hole he’d made; Cheke followed him, borne along by Carey’s certainty. The goat stuck her head through the gap after them, bleating with interest.

Very little daylight was filtering through the high glassed windows. A huge table stood in the middle of the flagged floor, the vast fireplace was empty except for its rusting fire-irons and spit. They had used the chimney from the smaller charcoal fireplace on the other wall because it was narrower than the great fireplace and the airflow was more easily controlled. Where the monks’ food had been sinfully soused with complex spiced sauces, Peter Cheke had built a small closed-in furnace with stones and cement, sealed with clay. His own pair of bellows lay at one of the air-holes.

Carey hunted around until he found what he was looking for, a whole treetrunk made into a block, with a small neat round hole set into it. The mallet lay nearby.

‘Now where are they?’ he muttered to himself and began digging in the cupboards. In one he found a dusty academic gown and what Cheke at first took for a dead cat, until he picked it up and found it was a false beard such as players used at the theatre.

It was all too ridiculous for words. Cheke remembered his joy and pride at being present when Dr Jenkins produced the scrapings of the Philosopher’s Stone, of actually admiring the curly dark beard, streaked with grey, that was now tangled with the noble doctor’s gown. He started to snigger helplessly.

‘What is it?’ asked Carey, emerging from another cubbyhole, covered in dust.

Cheke couldn’t stop. ‘He…I think…this is all that’s left of Dr Jenkins.’

Carey glanced at the gown and false beard. ‘Of course it is.’

‘Do you know who played the part?’

‘I don’t know. I suspect. Was the good doctor bald?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thought so. Well if the coin dies are here, I don’t know where. Do you know?’

‘I think that the gentleman had them. He told me he had bought them off a retired mint-master fallen on hard times who had kept a trussel and pile that should have been cancelled as an old design.’

‘Hm. Are you convinced?’

‘How was it done, sir?’

‘Parcel-gilding—you dissolve ground-up gold in boiling mercury to make an amalgam. Then you spread the paste on your pewter rounds, fire it up in a furnace to drive off the mercury and out come your gilded coins.’

‘So the Philosopher’s Stone was only powdered gold?’

‘That’s right.’

Cheke shook his head. ‘What a fool I’ve been.’

‘Don’t blame yourself. My brother was just as much a fool, if not worse.’

‘Do you think Marlowe knew?’

‘Of course he did. It was probably his idea.’

‘What will you do now?’

Carey showed his teeth in an extremely unpleasant expression. ‘I’m going to talk to him.’

Sunday, 3rd September 1592, afternoon

Marlowe waited at the Mermaid where the innkeeper was afraid of him as well as being an employee of sorts. He ate the ordinary which was a pheasant in a wine sauce with summer peas and a bag pudding to follow, and he drank the best wine they had which was always brought to him. As was only right the innkeeper refused his money.

He watched the people coming in and out of the common room, eating, drinking, talking, kissing their women. How could they think they were important, he wondered, since they lived like cattle in the narrow fields where they were born, according to the rules of their herd, and never looked up to the stars or out to the horizons? His father had lived like that, perfectly happy to make shoes all his life and taking an inordinate stupid pride in the smallness and evenness of his stitches and the good fit he produced. As a boy, Kit Marlowe could remember the boiling of angry boredom under his ribs while his father tried to explain how the strange curved shapes he cut out in leather would bend and be stitched together to form a solid boot. Once the silly man had tried his hand at sermonising: When it’s flat, see how strange it looks, he had said, oddly tender, and then when it’s made, see what a fit shape it was. Perhaps our lives are like that, Kit: strangely shaped when we are alive and then when we die, we see how the very strangeness made us better fit our Maker.

Even as a child I rebelled at being told I was God’s shoe, Marlowe thought, and rightly.

‘Sir,’ said a low nervous voice beside him. Marlowe woke out of his thoughts and blinked at his man.

‘Yes,’ he said, not bothering to hide his impatience.

‘A woman and a boy went into Somerset House,’ said the man, sweating with his run up Fleet Street. ‘We thought you’d better know.’

‘A boy?’

‘Yessir.’

‘The same one?’

‘Yessir.’

‘Well, why didn’t you stop them?’

‘We weren’t sure and anyway you never told us to.’

Marlowe rolled his eyes. ‘I assume Carey wasn’t with them.’

‘Oh, no, sir, we never saw him.’

‘You got the message that he’s in disguise, wearing homespun?’

‘Yessir. But we never saw him. We’d have stopped any man, just to be sure, but it was just an old woman and a boy.’

‘A short old woman, built like a barrel?’

‘Er…yessir.’

‘Well, it’s a pity you didn’t stop them, but I don’t suppose it matters that much. Off you go, keep your eyes open.’

The man pulled his forelock and sidled away. Marlowe tapped his fingers on the table and thought. Carey had evidently gone back to his lodgings despite the plague-cross on the door which Marlowe hadn’t thought he would. He couldn’t watch every place; he had the main roads out of the city covered; he had Somerset House under watch and the Fleet prison, but even with all the men at his disposal he couldn’t cover everywhere. Perhaps he should have kept a man at Carey’s lodgings, but then it had never crossed his mind that the Courtier would go into a plague house just for a couple of servants.

Damn him, where was he? Hadn’t he worked it out yet? Was even Carey too bovine and stupid to understand what Marlowe was about? He ought to have enough information at his disposal by now, especially with the massive hint of Dodd’s arrest. So where was he?

It occurred to Marlowe that perhaps Carey was lunatic enough to go to the Fleet to find his henchman. This was the trouble with real people as opposed to the shadows who danced in his head when he wrote plays: the real thing was so hard to predict.

Marlowe knew he should stay where he was and receive messages, Munday had told him often enough he was too impatient, but he was bored and worried and he could see the structure of his plan crumbling around him because of Carey who didn’t know his proper place in it. Shakespeare hadn’t come back from the Fleet yet either. He didn’t think the ambitious little player had the imagination to know what was happening but he couldn’t be sure.

‘Damn it,’ Marlowe said to himself and pushed away his half-finished ordinary, which was now as cold as a nobleman’s dinner. He put on his hat and went and told the innkeeper to hold any messages for him until he came back and then went out into the sunlight, heading up Water Lane towards Ludgate and the Fleet prison.

Just as he passed through the old Blackfriar’s Gateway, a tall fellow came up to him and pulled at his cap.

‘Ah’ve a message for ye, sir,’ came the guttural northern tones.

Marlowe paused. ‘Yes, what is it?’

The tall northerner moved up swiftly, caught his arm and twisted it up behind his back, rammed him bodily through the little door where the monks’ porter had sat and into a dusty tiny room full of bits of padding, petticoats and sausages of cloth. Marlowe was shoved into a pile of the things, stinking of women and old linen, the grip on his arm shifted slightly but when he tried to struggle free, it was twisted and lifted so that pain lancing up through his shoulder joint made him gasp. He couldn’t see, he could hardly breathe and now somebody’s knee was in the small of his back, hurting him there and there was the cold scratch of a knife at the side of his throat.