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

worried about anything. Instead, he was content – more than content, happy – to stay here writing his verse and reporting to the Council as required. Anyway, if you wanted to murder someone you wouldn’t do it like that, would you? Too complicated.’

It is often thus, I find, with conspiracy theories: the more you probe them, the emptier they become. I have spent much of my life amid real conspiracies, as you know, sir, and as I have said already I know how complicated, expensive, hard to contrive and few they are. Men love to see them everywhere, overcoming all objections by widening the circle of conspiracy so that in time half the world is party to it and it is impossible we should not all know of it.

The last person I spoke to was Eleanor Bull. I rode to her house in Deptford on my way back from Scadbury, following the route that Christopher would have taken on his last journey. The house was easily found, a fine building of three storeys on the Strand, set back from the street with a large garden to the rear. A maid wearing a clean white apron answered my knock and civilly bade me wait. She left the door ajar and I heard her tell her mistress there was a gentleman asking for her. She returned to say that Mrs Bull sent her respects but she was fully booked. I asked that she return to Mrs Bull and say that I came to see her in connection with the matter that had brought the coroner to her house earlier in the summer. After another muttered conversation within, I was bidden enter.

Mrs Bull was a well-dressed lady of ample girth with a round, red, wrinkled face. She was stiff with me at first, perhaps suspecting that I was a court official with some question or complaint. But when I told her I was a friend of the late Christopher Marlowe and that I had been asked by his family to establish the circumstances of his death and burial, and to retrieve any goods or possessions he might have left behind, she began to relax.

‘He left nothing here apart from his belt with his sword and knife and they disappeared when his body was taken. Whether the coroner’s men had them or Mr Poley, I know not.’

‘It was Mr Poley who made the booking, I believe?’

‘One of my regular gentlemen, Mr Poley.’ She nodded and smiled. ‘Whenever he comes from abroad. Such a gentleman.’

‘And the others, were they regulars?’

‘Off and on, they come to meet and drink and talk. And sometimes other gentlemen. Mr Marlowe, poor soul, I’d not seen before, but he was very nice, very polite. He drank well. They all did, except Mr Poley. He is always moderate in his drinking.’

‘Was Mr Marlowe drunk that day?’

Her cheeks wobbled as she shook her head. ‘That I couldn’t say, sir. He may have been. They had plenty to drink, as I said, but who had what I know not. After they had eaten I left them to themselves in their room and saw nothing of them until – until the rumpus.’

‘What occasioned it?’

‘An argument, they said. Mr Poley told me at the time it was about the reckoning and the coroner said so too, afterwards. We down here knew nothing of it until we heard raised voices – you could hear them from the kitchen – and then a stumbling about and thumping and banging and a shout and then silence. A long silence. And then Mr Poley came out and called downstairs for cloths and bandages, and to come quick.’

She obligingly showed me the room. It was on the first floor at the back, overlooking the garden and beyond it the river. A fine room with fresh panelling and a bay window with a window seat stretching the width of it. There was a table across the width of the bay with four chairs. Mrs Bull understood that Christopher had been lying on the window seat, with Frizer on the chair with his back to him and the other two on chairs at the ends of the table. Neither Christopher nor Frizer could have got out into the room without moving the table, or the others moving their chairs.

‘They were playing at cards,’ she said. ‘There was money involved in that too. Maybe they argued about the winnings as well as my reckoning. The cards were all a mess on the table when I came in and Mr Frizer’s chair was overturned and the table pushed out at an angle. Mr Marlowe was lying here’ – she pointed to the floor between the table and the window seat – ‘with his mouth open and a horrid gash in his eye, or near as made no difference, God bless his soul. There was blood on the floor and some on the table and one of the other gentlemen, Mr Frizer it was, was standing there with blood pouring from the top of his head, all down his face. And the cards were all messed up, as I said.’

I stared at the spot where he died as if to read something in it. But silence is all we learn from death. He was buried two days after, she told me, in St Nicholas’s church, in a grave just beyond the north wall of the tower. The graveyard was almost full and soon would be if the plague reached them from London, God forbid. The only mourner apart from herself was Sir Thomas Walsingham. He paid for the burial, she said. There was talk of a memorial stone.

‘Such a kind man, Sir Thomas. A real gentleman. He is acquainted with the Lord Burghley to whom I am distantly related. I have been at Court, sir, when Mr Bull was alive.’

‘So I have heard.’

She swelled with pride. ‘I keep my house for gentlemen, only for gentlemen. I worried that what had happened to Mr Marlowe would