A Fine Madness by Alan Judd (best classic books TXT) 📕

with an interior of so many secret chambers that none could know them all. There was a fine garden at the back with a mulberry tree said to date from the reign of King John. Mr Secretary studied every plant with the same exactitude that he studied treacherous weeds in the realm. His other pleasures were hawking, music, painting and poetry, which he did much to cultivate and encourage but often out of sight, so that many who benefited from his patronage knew not whose teat had suckled them. It was at his instruction that the players’ company, the Queen’s Men, was founded.

I think Queen Elizabeth never forgave him for having contrived that which she herself had willed, albeit reluctantly. That is, the execution of her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. Sir Francis was deeper in that business than any other, as I know well through having been deep in it with him. Christopher was there or thereabouts, too, though not as deeply. But that was when he first showed himself willing to get his hands dirty.

Mr Secretary was working in his house the day I was summoned, as he often did when not attending the Privy Council or required at Court with Her Majesty. The streets around Seething Lane being crowded and noxious, favourable for breeding the plague, I took a boat downriver from Whitehall where I was working on some Spanish letters that had recently fallen into our hands. The code was slow to yield, like chipping away at rock, and I was reluctant to break concentration. But the summons was delivered in person by Francis Mylles, Sir Francis’s private secretary and a good friend to me. I travelled alone, Francis having other business in Whitehall.

Mr Secretary’s servants knew me, of course, and I was shown into the small room overlooking the street where there was a table, three chairs and a Geneva Bible. Mr Secretary owned at least one other Bible as well as many books of navigation and exploration and a large map of all the counties of England. Indeed, in his private study he had a globe showing all the countries and oceans of the world. He had a passion to know things. ‘Knowledge is never too dearly bought,’ he would say when Lord Burghley protested that we paid our agents too well.

After a while a girl came to fetch me. Like all Mr Secretary’s personal staff, in London and at his country house in Barn Elms, she wore clean white linen and a short blue jacket. She led me to another study at the back of the house, not the large one with the globe. This one overlooked the garden, its single window darkened by the mulberry tree. It was cooler here than in the front room where you could feel the heat of horses and people in the street.

‘If you please, sir, Thomas Phelippes, sir,’ said the girl.

‘Close the door behind you,’ said Mr Secretary.

He was seated at a small desk end-on to the window and gestured me to the chair facing it. His face that day was even paler than usual, almost as white as his starched ruff. ‘God’s greetings, Thomas, I trust you are well?’

‘I am, sir, thank the Lord. I trust you are?’ He did not look it.

He shook his head. ‘A martyr to the stone again. I have not been at Court or Council for a week, but by God’s grace it begins to ease now.’

‘I am glad to hear it.’

He nodded and looked down at two papers on his desk. We sat in silence. I assumed he had more decryption for me since that was my main task in his employ, as well as my main pleasure. Had I not been able to serve Her Majesty in this way I should have been in the cloth and wool trade and in the custom house with my father.

He looked up at me. ‘I wish you to take a letter to Cambridge, an urgent letter. You will leave today. It is for the vice-chancellor, Dr Copcot, and for the master of Corpus Christi College, Dr Norgate. I would normally send it by messenger but I wish you to be there to ensure it is read and understood by both. If they doubt or question it in any way you must tell them there will be consequences.’ He took the letter from a drawer in his desk. It was already sealed with the Privy Council seal. ‘In order that you may discuss it with them you should know its import. It concerns Christopher Marlowe, the boy from Canterbury who helped us with the arrest of Campion and again more recently with Babington and his friends. You were in regular contact with him. When did you see him last?’

‘Early this year, just before the trial of the Queen of Scots.’ Mr Secretary had been witness to that and I was permitted to attend in acknowledgement of my work in bringing it about. My most recent sighting of Christopher, however, was not in connection with that business but at a playhouse here in London. I rarely visited the playhouses and we did not speak because we had agreed to pretend in public that we had no connection. He did not want his earlier association with us known in his world. That suited us too. ‘A chance meeting only. We did not speak.’

‘Corpus Christi is refusing to award him his Master of Arts degree on the grounds that he has not fulfilled the residency requirements. The master, Dr Norgate, fears he has secretly visited the Catholic seminary in Rheims in order to infiltrate priests back into England to murder the Queen and her ministers and restore Papacy here. Or become a secret priest himself. As you know’ – Mr Secretary smiled very slightly, his lips parting just enough to show he still had teeth behind his black beard – ‘young Master Marlowe never went to Rheims but was working here and in Paris on