The English Agent Page 5

  “Oh.” Ned’s head drooped a bit. “Well. Money.”

  “Money?” she snapped. “You don’t get paid to be an actor?”

  He sighed heavily. “Not any more. I’m getting older. My voice is about to change, and my looks are—well, as you see.”

  “You can’t get the young female parts anymore,” Marlowe said sympathetically.

  “You have no idea how hard it is for an aging actress,” he complained. “All the roles are for nine-year-olds.”

  “And yet he’s still too young for any of the male roles,” Marlowe lamented. “It’s truly a tragedy.”

  “If we might,” Leonora interrupted in clipped tones, “return to our business at hand!”

  “Ah, yes.” Marlowe offered Ned a hand. “Well, you’re working for us now, Ned. Take off that dress.”

  FIVE

  Edwin’s quarters were small but pleasant for a stable master’s, tucked between the barn and the building next to it. It was only two rooms, but they were tidy. In the first room: table and chairs, several lamps, and a window that looked out on the alleyway behind the barn. The other room held only a bed, but a nice wooden one, with a full, stuffed mattress—evidence of the kind of money Edwin made.

  Despite the fact that Leonora put him into the very nice bed, he was up almost at once, offering food and drink despite his wounds. He seemed to relish the role of host, and he was rabidly curious about his visitors.

  Ned had taken off his dress and was shivering in a thin undershirt and poorly maintained wool breeches. He downed the drink that Edwin had given him without asking what it was, and held out his cup for a second dose. By his third cup he seemed to have collected himself, acquired a cheerful glow, and was willing to be questioned.

  “Have a seat,” Marlowe instructed him, “and tell me how you came to be in such disreputable company.”

  “Well,” Ned allowed, “there’s a tale. I was in Shoreditch, wallowing along in some pig swill idiocy penned by one Robert Greene—a play with the terrible title of The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. I played Margaret, the Fair Maid of Fressingfield, what Prince Edward intends to have in his bed with the help of the questionable Friar Bacon, a necromancer of sorts.”

  “Ned,” Marlowe interrupted.

  “Right, sorry. To the point. The play wasn’t actually finished, it was just something Greene was trying out, and one of the backers, the man what’s killed in that barn just now, he approached me.”

  “In what way?” Leonora asked.

  “The usual: offered me a drink. It’s one of three kinds that offers a person such as myself a drink. You’ve got your admirers, what only wants to tell you how good you was in the play. Then there’s the bollocks boys with bulging codpieces and a bit of drool on the chin. And finally it’s the best of all: the ones with an offer of employment. Our dead man was of this third sort.”

  “How old are you?” Leonora asked. Her voice managed to sound at once sympathetic and disapproving.

  “Couldn’t say for certain,” Ned said loudly, as if he were bragging. “But the general consensus is thirteen. And there’s my trouble. The voice. It’s about to drop. It already cracks. What’s an actor to do?”

  “Ned,” Marlowe sighed again, “we’re after the details of your employment with these persons.”

  “Ah,” he agreed, “of course. They wanted me as both maid and man, as it were. I was to accompany the gentleman as his wife, a prim and somewhat sickly creature, mostly to throw off suspicion, he said—though suspicion of what he never said. We was bound for the Netherlands. That was a bit of enticement for me. Never been to another country. Once on that distant shore, I was to play the part of his son, a lonely boy whose mother had just died. I was really looking forward to that. My first role without a dress.”

  “What about the third man, the other man you were traveling with?”

  “We just met up with him in the inn,” Ned answered a bit more somberly. “No idea what the hell happened there. That man, he’s the one what killed the cook; killed her as soon as she come out of the kitchen. And he would have caused more havoc except that the main man, my husband, cursed him and shoved him out the door, dragging me along, all at sea.”

  “He’s playing the innocent,” Leonora snapped, then leaned her face close to Ned’s and addressed him directly. “You’re playing the innocent, but you shot a man on the road with a wheel-lock pistol and you took his horse!”

  Ned pulled back, and his face lost its pleasant glow.

  “They was going to leave me behind,” Ned said, his voice gone cold. “The third man, the murderer that’s met at the inn? He was bargaining with the people we met on the road, those filthy Heidens. Said I was a bond servant. He was trying to sell me to them. So, yes, I took the pistol from his saddle bag and shot the road rat. Nobody sells Ned Blank. My husband was then in a better position to convince the other man to stick with the original plan. The other gent agreed, I took the family’s horse, and here we are.”

  “Which returns us to my question,” Marlowe insisted. “Where is the third man?”

  “Docks,” Ned mumbled.

  “You already said that,” Leonora growled impatiently. “He’s waiting for your ship. But if we just go wandering down to the waterside, I fear we will encounter his pistol, the same you used to steal a horse.”

  “Not if you stay to the shadows,” Ned answered darkly, “and give out the sign.”

  “Sign?” she asked angrily.

  “Three or four short whistles, pining, like a chiffchaff.”

  “A birdcall?” she sneered. “By the waterside in a port town?”

  “I didn’t invent it,” the boy objected angrily. “That’s what he told me when we—you know we heard you come into town, don’t you? You was rowdy as a dozen drunkards.”

  “Hardly,” Leonora snipped.

  But Marlowe shot her a glance that said I told you.

  “You wait here,” Leonora told Ned, ignoring Marlowe. “I mean it.”

  “Where would I go?” he asked, still shivering a little.

  “Edwin will be watching over you,” she answered.

  Edwin nodded. It was evident from his face that the events of the evening were the most exciting in his life.

  “He’ll not get away from me,” Edwin swore.

  “A chiffchaff sounds like this,” Marlowe said as he headed for the door to the alleyway.

  He gave first three, then four drifting trills.

  “No,” Leonora corrected, “it’s more like this.”

  She softly whistled her own interpretation of the bird.

  Two minutes later they were silent, crouching behind a rain barrel at the end of the long street that ended in the docks. The harbor, such as it was, seemed vacant. There were two small boats dragged onto land from the River Blackwater, but otherwise there was no evidence of any navigable craft whatsoever, let alone one that could cross the ocean to the Netherlands.

  The Blackwater had been a source of fish and oysters for the town of Maldon since Roman occupation. In AD 991, Viking invaders were defeated very close to where Marlowe and Leonora were crouched, in the fierce Battle of Maldon. Salt panned from the river sat on finer tables all over England. Eastward from Maldon the river emptied into the Blackwater Estuary that met the North Sea at Mersea Island. From there it was short sailing slightly northward to the Netherlands and eight-or-so miles inland to Delft.

  “He’s not here,” Leonora whispered into Marlowe’s ear from her position slightly behind him.

  “I’ve only given the sign twice,” he grumbled without turning around.

  “Well what are you waiting for? Give it again.”

  Marlowe sighed, sipped a breath, and gave out once more with the sweet, staccato “chip-chip-chip” he had heard as a boy, the chiffchaff singing to attract a mate.

  The call was met with silence.

  “He’s not here,” Leonora whispered again.

  Marlowe did his best to ignore her li
ps on his ear.

  “Give him a second to respond, would you?” he answered her.

  “There’s no boat,” she began, failing to keep her voice down, “no answer to the sign, and no evidence whatsoever—”

  But her complaint was interrupted when someone grabbed her by the neck, choking her, pulling her backward and up.

  Marlowe felt more than heard the trouble and whirled around, dagger in hand.

  He found himself face to face with the “clergyman,” who had the muzzle of a wheel-lock pistol pressed against Leonora’s temple. His arm was wrapped entirely around her throat, his thick black beard obscuring the side of her face.

  “What did you think you were doing whistling like that?” the man asked. Unlike the few words he had spoken at the Bell Inn, this time he failed to hide a heavy French accent. “You made it so easy.”

  “The sign,” Marlowe began foolishly, realizing as he said it that Ned had lied.

  “First I will kill this girl,” the Frenchman said “and then I will kill you.”

  Marlowe didn’t move, but he spoke in a voice filled with confidence.

  “That would be a neat trick,” he said calmly. “If you shoot her, I’ll cut out your heart and liver before you have time to reload that ridiculous pistol.”

  “I don’t need to shoot her,” the man said, grinning, displaying a row of crusty teeth.

  He began to tighten his arm around Leonora’s throat, and as she began to gasp for breath, he pointed the ridiculous pistol directly at Marlowe’s face.

  “I can kill you both at the same time.” He pushed the gun closer to Marlowe’s left eye. “I’ve done it before, many times: this two at once.”

  Leonora sputtered and Marlowe glanced at her. Unbelievably, she winked, and somehow Marlowe read her mind.

  With a sudden sweep Marlowe brushed the gun away from his face at the exact moment that Leonora dug her dagger into the assailant’s knee cap. The gun went off, the man went down, and Leonora rolled away from him, all in a single instant.

  Marlowe drew his rapier then and thrust toward the man’s heart.

  “No!” Leonora croaked.

  At the last atom of an instant, Marlowe twisted his wrist and stabbed the man in his shoulder.

  The man made no sound.

  “Your compatriots are dead,” Marlowe told him. “The man with the claymore and the boy he had dressed up like a woman.”

  The man remained silent.

  “All right,” Marlowe continued. “Stand up.”

  The man nodded, appearing weakened. He leaned forward, groaning, obviously having a bit of difficulty standing. Marlowe lowered his rapier. Leonora cleared her throat and rubbed her neck. The man had nearly crushed her windpipe. She was still having difficulty breathing.

  Without warning the man was up. He jumped backward like a spider, another pistol in his hand. He did not hesitate. He shot Marlowe.

  Marlowe grabbed his side and dropped his rapier.

  The man picked up his other pistol and bowed very theatrically.

  “I wish I had time to stay and kill you both, for certain,” he began, “but I am called hence. I will see you again.”

  Only then did Leonora notice a small dingy moored to a large rock just beyond the other two boats on the shore, almost impossible to see in the darkness. Before she could manage to cry out, the assassin was away, reloading his pistol and dashing toward the craft.

  Leonora, still gasping for breath, stumbled to Marlowe’s side.

  “He’s getting away,” Marlowe rasped, trying to clear the pain from his mind.

  “Shut it,” Leonora commanded. “You’ve been shot and I can’t breathe!”

  “Go after him!”

  “If I go after him now,” she snarled, “he’ll shoot me, and then who would save your life?”

  They could hear the noise of the small boat being scraped across the beach.

  “Save my life?” Marlowe suddenly felt very cold. “Is it that bad?”

  “I’m afraid it’s a very bad pistol shot wound, yes,” Leonora said. “I can’t stop the bleeding.”

  “I see,” Marlowe mumbled.

  She held both hands tightly on his side. “I’m afraid you’re dying, Marlowe.”

  “Oh,” he whispered.

  The last thing he heard was the sound of the murderer’s oars in the water, and suddenly he was back home, in the Stour River, drowning in black water.

  SIX

  Marlowe woke up with a start. He was in a strange bed in a cold place. He reached for his dagger, but it was not there—and neither were his clothes. As his mind cleared he realized that he was in the stable master’s bed, naked, and dying of thirst. On the table beside him there was a taper with only a half an inch left. Most of the light seemed to be coming from outside the barn: day was breaking.

  He sat up.

  Leonora sat sleeping in a chair close by.

  Marlowe pulled back the covers to examine his wound. It was angry, red, and burned like a hot poker, but not nearly as bad as he’d expected. It was stitched with a fine strong string, possibly catgut, and had been rubbed with a cream-white salve.

  Casting his eye about, he found his clothing folded on the floor near the bed. The doublet was crisp with dried blood but the breeches were relatively clean. He leaned toward them and was surprised that his wound did not torture him.

  “Lie back down,” Leonora commanded sleepily, head still down, eyes still closed.

  “Is this your work?” he asked, staring at the wound once more. “It’s remarkable.”

  She sat up, stretched, rubbing her eyes. “I took out the pistol shot,” she told him, “cleaned the wound. You’ll be fine in a week or two.”

  “A week?” He sat up and reached for his clothes. “We haven’t got an hour. I assume the assassin got away.”

  “He did,” she said. “And there’s more.”

  “More?” Marlowe held his breeches in his hand.

  “The stable master, Edwin, is dead,” she said, “and your Ned has gone with two of the horses.”

  “Two?” Marlowe wasn’t certain he’d heard her correctly.

  “The body of the man who had the claymore, that’s gone as well.”

  “Ned’s betrayed us,” Marlowe acknowledged.

  “He’s more a part of the larger plot than he let on.”

  “The larger plot to kill William?” Marlowe shook his head. “Not likely. He’s an actor. He doesn’t care about politics in the Netherlands.”

  “Lie back down, I said.” She stood.

  “Look,” Marlowe countered, “I’m going to put on my breeches now. Would you mind leaving, or at least turning around?”

  She sighed. “You understand that I took those breeches off. It’s not likely that I’ll see anything this morning that I did not see last night.”

  Marlowe looked away. “Yes. Well. Things are a bit—different this morning.”

  She crossed her arms. “No.”

  “I—it’s a bit—look. Last night I was unconscious. Asleep. Lying down.”

  “Yes. I lugged your guts back here myself, without help from you.”

  “No, my point is,” Marlowe insisted, “that this morning—this morning I am a bit—at attention.”

  He glanced downward.

  It took Leonora a moment to realize what Marlowe was saying. When she did, her face turned vermillion, and she instantly quit the room.

  With some doing Marlowe wrestled his breeches on, then his stockings and boots, his undershirt and soiled doublet. As he was beginning the buttons he called out.

  “I’m thirstier than I’ve ever been in my life. Is there any ale about, do you think?”

  “Are you dressed?” she asked angrily.

  “Yes.”

  She appeared in the doorway with a tankard. “I knew you’d be parched. You lost a great deal of blood. You should eat something.”

  “Possibly I should,” he agreed, “but wouldn’t it be more in keeping with our appointed t
ask if we found out what happened to the man who tried to kill me?”

  “Oh,” she answered, “you mean the man who rowed his small boat down the river just far enough to meet a ship in the channel? A ship out of the line of sight from this town’s harbor area? That man?”

  “How do you know—you followed him?”

  “I saw to it that you’d not bleed to death and then, yes, I scurried down to the waterside just in time to see that ship was headed far off down the river, running lights on at last.”

  “He left without a thought of his compatriots,” Marlowe said slowly, “and his accent was decidedly French. We know Ned is a Londoner, and we might assume that the dead man in the barn is a Scot”

  “Owing simply to his claymore?” Leonora shook her head.

  Marlowe nodded.

  “Just a guess, of course,” he answered, “but my point is this: it was an odd crew. It’s entirely unclear to me what, exactly, happened at your inn. They met there, Ned told us.”

  “The couple,” she began slowly, “I mean the man with the claymore and Ned dressed as a woman, they were meeting the Frenchman at the Bell. They weren’t there to kill Lopez or even to stop me from delivering Walsingham’s message to you.”

  “Agreed,” Marlowe nodded. “I wonder if they even knew we’d be there at all.”

  “My recollection,” she mused, her eyes far away, “is that they hadn’t spoken to each other at all before you and the doctor came in. They had only just arrived themselves. Maybe one was waiting for some sort of sign from the other.”

  “And we merely happened in.” Marlowe shook his head. “Is that too much a coincidence?”

  “Judging by the chaos that our trio left in their wake,” Leonora answered, “and the unanswered questions about Ned’s part in all this, I’d say that none of this went as planned—nothing like a plan emerges at all, under examination.”

  “Yes.” Marlowe was working to ignore the pain in his side. “The Bell Inn is, after all, the primary horse-changing station in this part of the world. It would not be out of the question that they would meet there in order to—but that’s just it: in order to do what?”

  Leonora bit her upper lip, staring out the small window of dead Edwin’s bedroom.