Her Last Assassin (6 page)

‘But you are too subtle for me. I must disappoint you.’

Will laughed then, relief in his face. The clouds shifted and the sun poured around them, balmy and golden. ‘You? Lucy Morgan? Disappoint me?’

He walked on down the path, turning to look back at her, beckoning her after him with a schoolboy’s wink and open hands. He was a magician, she thought, and began to follow, jerked along by the invisible cord between his heart and hers.

‘Impossible!’

Will left her outside Goodluck’s house, suddenly more sombre now that the time for his departure had come at last. His arm was tight about her waist as they kissed in the cool shade between houses. ‘Do you go back to St James’s after this?’

‘The court has moved to the Palace of Whitehall. The Queen was restless.’

‘What woman is ever not?’ His kiss found the warmth of her throat, nuzzling there with passionate intent. ‘Dearest Lucy, I can hardly bear to leave you. I will not see you nor lie with you again until the autumn. I do not wish to leave London, but—’

Her heart ached with a pain she could hardly bear. She hushed him, laying a finger on his lips. ‘I pray you, no more farewells.’

‘I love you, Lucy Morgan.’ He kissed her once more, then backed slowly away, studying her as though imprinting her face on his memory. His voice was uneven. ‘I shall dream of you every night until I return, sweet Luce. Do not forget me. Remember Will Shakespeare in your prayers.’

She could not help but suspect that he would too easily forget her once back with his wife and family in Stratford. Yet how could she complain? That respectable woman had borne his children; she had more right over Will than Lucy would ever have as his mistress, sharing his bed in this shameful, covert fashion whenever she could escape from court. She should finish this affair and swear herself to chastity again. But it was impossible. She loved him so much, never to see him again would feel as though part of herself had been torn away. Even now, just losing him for a mere month or two, she found herself as weak-hearted as a girl in her first flush of love.

Clutching the wall for support, she watched in silence until Will Shakespeare reached the corner, his hand raised in a last salute as he disappeared round it.

So he was gone, and it felt as though her life was over. How would she survive until his return?

Wearily, she turned to unlock the door to Goodluck’s house, only then realizing that she was being watched herself.

There was something familiar about the shambling figure leaning against the wall a few doors down. An odd-looking man, his shoulders were hunched, cloak drawn up around his chin and hat pulled down despite the summer’s heat.

Instinctively, she backed away, fearing to be attacked. It was not unknown for the neighbours here to spit at her in the street, knowing her to be without any male protector when Goodluck was away. Nor could she entirely blame them, for they all knew she had taken a lover. Indeed, Will was becoming so well known as a player in the city, some even knew his name and profession, and whispered the louder for it. No doubt they saw her as a player’s whore, and felt she should not be dwelling on this street among more respectable folk.

‘Mistress Morgan!’ he croaked, shuffling forward in muddy boots fastened with knotted lengths of string. ‘Stay a moment, mistress. I would have speech with you.’

She looked more closely. ‘Master … Mistress Jensen?’

It was the strange ragged woman who had come to tend her two years ago after she had lost her baby in a fall, dragged downstairs by Goodluck’s enemy, Master Twist. Lucy remembered that she had smelt of fish, and looked uncomfortably more like a man than a woman, yet she seemed to have the gift of healing and Lucy had soon learned to trust her gentle hands on her badly bruised hip and spine. But she had not seen Mistress Jensen since she had healed enough to walk again, and Goodluck had said the woman had gone back to her river barge.

‘Jensen,’ her visitor corrected her gruffly. ‘That’s how I’m called. May I step in?’

‘Surely.’ Lucy opened the door and moved aside. ‘Can I offer you ale?’

‘Thank you, no. I’ll not keep you. Only, the thing is,’ the barge woman shuffled inside, glancing about cautiously, her hat still pulled down, ‘I’ve your man aboard and need you to take him away.’

‘My man?’ Lucy did not understand. Then she inhaled, seeing the woman’s sharp gaze and suddenly understanding only too well. ‘Master Goodluck?’

‘Aye, Goodluck.’

‘On your barge?’

‘Aye, mistress, that’s it.’

Lucy looked out at the street. The sun was beginning to dip, and the shadows were lengthening between the high timbered buildings. It was well over a year since she had last seen her guardian. What trouble was he in that he could not walk back to his house from the river?

She found this woman’s masculine garb unsettling, and the odd way she was prowling about the room now in muddy boots, peering into every dark corner. Yet if Goodluck trusted her, Lucy might as well put her faith in his judgement too, for all he had been mistaken in his old friend Master Twist.

She made up her mind. ‘Take me to him, Jensen.’

Three

G
OODLUCK SPRAWLED AT
his ease, facing Kit Marlowe across the upturned crate which served as a makeshift table below deck. At anchor, the barge swayed gently on the Thames, a motion he had grown accustomed to over many weeks when this craft had been his home. Here, some years ago now, he had recovered from a near-mortal wound, and learned to hope again that his time on earth was not finished.

The owner of the barge, one Jensen, a brave but shambling woman who lived as a man, had reluctantly agreed to let him and Kit rest and drink here awhile. Now she had vanished.

He did not smell a trap. Jensen was to be trusted, he felt it in his gut. But there was still the question of Kit Marlowe’s loyalties. It would be good to know what he had been doing in the Low Countries. And there he was still very much at sea.

‘More ale, master?’ he asked, gesturing to the young man’s tankard. He took care to slur his words, though in truth he had not drunk so much as he had spilt these past few hours. ‘There is yet a little if you are still thirsty.’

‘No.’ Marlowe hiccuped, then held up his hand. ‘I have taken sufficient, I thank you. What I need now is … is …’

Kit Marlowe stood unsteadily, fumbling at his hose which seemed to have become unfastened.

‘A piss?’ Goodluck suggested, his eyebrows raised.

They both laughed uproariously, then Kit shook his head, stepping back to wag an accusing finger at him. ‘No, good master, for I …’

The young man blenched suddenly, and made for the upper deck, his hose almost falling down in his hurry, clambering up the narrow ladder just in time before he was sick over the side.

Goodluck followed the unpleasant sound of retching and found his companion hanging over the side of the barge, his face quite white in the sunshine, spittle on his lips.

‘You are unwell?’

‘Too much … ale.’ Marlowe rolled on to his back, staring up at the smoky air. ‘And I smell fire.’

Goodluck looked down the river, feigning a loss of balance as he staggered to the side and clung on. ‘Ah! Some fool has lit a bonfire by the bridge. To celebrate our famous victory over the Spanish, no doubt. But now it … it threatens the houses.’

‘Damn the Spanish though. May they rot in hell. Damn their black … black hearts!’

‘Aye, aye,’ he agreed rather too loudly, slamming the side of the barge with his hand so that the vessel rocked uneasily in the water. ‘Damn the Spanish and God save the Queen!’

Marlowe wiped his mouth, staring up at him fixedly. ‘You serve the Queen. No, do not try to deny it, man. Why else would you have been there, amid the enemy?’

‘And you?’

The young man threw his arms wide. ‘A poor player, that is all I am. A maker of scenes. I have told you this a thousand times. Yes, I have worked for Sir Francis Walsingham in the past, when I was a student at Cambridge. But do not think me a master spy like yourself, Master Goodluck. Pray excuse me that. I do not have your … your nose for trouble.’

Goodluck grunted and turned away, the warm sun behind him as he looked downstream towards the bridge. Coming back to London from the Low Countries in Marlowe’s company, he had made up some fanciful story about having fallen on hard times abroad and taken work reluctantly to earn his keep. Not quite believed, he had been forced into a drinking match with the young man, who seemed determined to stop him making his report to Walsingham. Although impatient to leave and be reimbursed for his expenses, he was also curious to see where it would lead, this drunken charade with Kit Marlowe. He had a suspicion the boy was no more drunk than he, though putting on a good act.

Not that it mattered. By the time they had reached the port of London three days ago, hindered in their approach by bad weather, the news he bore had grown old. The Armada had sailed and been assaulted, they had heard on arrival, first by a storm and then by their stout English warships, smaller by far than the vast Spanish ships, but faster in the water and more manoeuvrable. Now those ships that remained intact were limping back to Spain, much to King Philip’s shame, and it seemed likely to Goodluck that the exiled Catholics in the Low Countries had not been able to sail in time to bolster their numbers.

‘Nay, do not go,’ Marlowe had insisted whenever Goodluck stirred and tried to leave, itching to make his report. ‘Not yet, not yet. Take another cup of ale, good master. It’s not every day I am honoured to drink with one of Her Majesty’s greatest spies, and with our war half-won. Let’s play another game of thimblerig.’

‘I am no master spy,’ Goodluck had told him several times, but Marlowe was having none of it. He just kept smiling and tapping the side of his nose as though to indicate some secret knowledge.

‘Are you afraid that I will speak of it abroad? I am not one of those loose-lipped fools, for all I am a player. Your profession is safe with me, Master Goodluck. Come, another cup? Let us drink to England, and the Queen’s good health!’

After a day of drinking in the riverside taverns with Marlowe and his player friends, Goodluck had staggered away, thinking to sober up before he made his rendezvous with Sir Francis Walsingham.

He had made his way down to the waterside, sick of the stench of ale and smoke, and had found Jensen’s barge moored alongside the quay, low tide making it sit several feet below the wall. Hailing the man-woman hunched on deck with her ubiquitous pipe, he had come aboard only to find himself followed by Marlowe, bearing more ale and apparently not yet ready to stop his debauchery.

‘A new place to drink?’ The young man had slapped Goodluck on the back, nodded to Jensen, then made his way below deck, shouting back, ‘Come down here, man, there is a crate for a table and a good light. I was sick of the taverns’ prices anyway. Here we can talk more privately, for I know you spies dislike long ears wagging about you, even at your play.’

A night and a day later, Marlowe was only just beginning to show signs of weakening, while Goodluck himself had grown sick with fatigue, no longer able to hold his own with these young drunkards.

They had drunk long into the night, playing cards and thimblerig while Jensen reluctantly fetched more ale and hot pies for them. Then they had dozed uneasily until first light, neither man wishing the other to slip away unnoticed, and started drinking again as the sun came up. But though Marlowe had questioned him hard and relentlessly, under the guise of drunken banter, Goodluck had held his peace. There was only one man to whom he would talk of what he had learned in the Low Countries, and that was Walsingham, the Queen’s spymaster.

Now it was late afternoon and the river stank in the heat, the north bank of the Thames shrouded in smoke from the fire near London Bridge. He could hear shouts from those watching out of windows on the bridge, crowded with narrow houses, as the flames were doused with river water, one bucketful after another.

Goodluck looked impatiently at Marlowe, stretched out on the deck and groaning now like one in mortal pain. He had to get away somehow and make his report to Walsingham. But this young man was tenacious, and an expert dissembler. Even his groans sounded realistic. But Goodluck was convinced it was all for show, merely a distraction while the young man studied Goodluck in his turn.

Certainly he was still a spy. There was no other explanation for it. But in whose pocket? Was Kit Marlowe working for the Queen these days, or the Spanish?

If the former, then Goodluck was once more under suspicion, for it was clear that Marlowe was intent on discovering what he knew by whatever means possible. If the latter, it was his duty not to let Marlowe out of his sight, for God alone knew what information he might have gained in Nieuwpoort, or one of the other places under Spanish control he had visited in his guise as a travelling player.

‘Master Goodluck!’

Hearing his name called, Goodluck turned in shock to see a tall, dark-skinned lady standing above him on the quayside. She was not dressed as a lady would be, but simply, her sleeveless gown plain-cut and of coarse stuff, more like a peasant woman than one of the Queen’s own ladies. And yet that was what she was, her face as well known at court as any wealthy noblewoman’s, the one-time protégée of the Earl of Leicester himself, and still one of the Queen’s favourite singers. And Goodluck’s ward.