Silent Court Read Online Free Page A

nearly eleven and Greene decided to call it a night; he clearly wasn’t coming. He threw his cloak over his shoulder and strode over the already-frosting cobbles. Then he saw him, shoulders back, spine straight, striding over the pavements as if he owned the place.
    ‘Dr Harvey,’ he hissed as they met at the corner.
    ‘Is that you, Greene?’ Gabriel Harvey knew perfectly well who it was, but he wouldn’t give the guttersnipe the satisfaction.
    ‘Good evening to you, Doctor.’ Greene nodded.
    ‘There’s nothing conceivably good about it, Greene,’ Harvey snapped, poking his nose out to squint up at the blue-black of the Cambridge sky. ‘I left a warm fire and a hot toddy to come here. And every step I took I wondered why I did. Your note said it was urgent.’
    ‘It is,’ Greene assured him. ‘Er… The Bell?’ Both men looked up at the iron inn sign creaking and cracking in the wind. The clapper had long gone, spirited away by some drunken scholar on a spree, so the empty bell just clanked dully against a thick arm of withered ivy which hung from the wall. It sounded like the ghost of a dead bell, still marking the hours with no one to hear it ring.
    Harvey peered in through the thick, warped panes. ‘And sit drinking with half the scholars of my college? Are you utterly out of your mind?’
    ‘It’s Marlowe.’ Greene blew on his frozen fingers again, hopping from foot to foot.
    Greene stood upright, turning slowly to him. In the light from the inn, his face was a mask of fury. ‘Where?’
    ‘In Petty Cury,’ Greene whispered. ‘I saw him myself. Not two hours since. I can show you the very spot.’
    ‘Why?’ Harvey asked. ‘Will Machiavel have burned his cloven hoof into the cobbles? Mother of God, give me some respite from all this.’ He looked the man squarely in the face, then gripped his shoulders, shaking him. ‘You’re sure, man? The last I heard of Marlowe, he was going south with those strolling players. He let everyone know he’d done with Cambridge. Of course –’ Harvey released the man as a thought occurred to him – ‘we all know what that was about. He couldn’t cut it, the scholarship, I mean; the cut and thrust of debate. No, his Dialectic was sloppy, his Greek only so-so. I wasn’t impressed.’
    Greene hardly liked to argue with Harvey in full spate, but facts were, after all, facts. ‘He’s back.’
    ‘Damn!’ Harvey thumped the door frame of The Bell.
    ‘I thought you should know.’
    Harvey sneered at the informant. Ordinarily, he’d wipe things like Robert Greene off his patten soles, but in a way the St John’s graduate was a kindred spirit. They both hated Marlowe; that gave them a certain bond.
    ‘What will you do?’ Greene asked.
    ‘Do?’ Harvey pulled himself up to his full height. ‘Perhaps it’s best you don’t know.’ He half turned, then he half turned back. ‘Watch yourself, Dominus Greene,’ he said. ‘If the Devil is loose in Cambridge, then none of us is safe.’
    There were just shadows in the Court at Corpus Christi college that night. The last roisterers had crept home under the fitful moon and the proctors had missed them again. Under the eaves in the cramped attic rooms, the sizars snored softly in their hard, narrow beds, dreaming of the Aristotle, the Plato, the Cicero and the Horace crammed into their heads day after day. The frost drew its silent pictures on the inside of their grimy windows and brought a kind of beauty to the room which the meagre belongings of the sizars could never bring. A mouse crept out, without much hope of finding anything and then froze as its ears, triangulating madly for the smallest sound, heard the soft padding of Old Tiberius, the college cat, as he made his way up the staircase at the far corner where the path wound its way into the silent churchyard of St Bene’t’s.
    A hand reached out and stroked the animal, who arched his back and purred, his tail curling upwards and his chin lifting for a