Silent Court Read Online Free Page B

tickle. Kit Marlowe crouched alongside the cat. ‘Oh, Tiberius,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll wager you say that to all the returning graduates.’ He straightened and turned to the stairway, on up past his old room, the one he had shared with the lads from Canterbury, his home for three long years.
    On the landing he fancied he heard something, but it was probably just the creak of the stair, old dry wood shifting against the ancient stone. He felt for the panelled tracery of his door and pushed gently. He couldn’t see the two men waiting for him inside. One, a taut, lean scholar, stood with his back against the wall, a dagger glinting in his right hand. The other crouched on the opposite side of the door frame, a lead-weighted cosh in his fist. There were three men by that doorway and nobody seemed to be breathing.
    ‘Hello, Tom,’ said Marlowe. ‘Hello, Matt. Aren’t we all a little old for tricks like this?’
    The other two spun into his vision, laughing and roaring, hugging him and slapping his back. ‘Kit, you whoreson zed, it really is you!’ Matthew Parker was jumping around as if his pattens were on fire. Tom Colwell held Marlowe’s shoulders squarely and peered into his face in the gloom of the unlit room. He shook his head. ‘The years have not been kind,’ he said and Marlowe threw him backwards so that he bounced off the bed.
    ‘It’s not four months since I saw you two bastards last,’ he laughed. ‘Light a candle there, Matt. Let’s see if you’ve been able to grow a beard yet.’
    They all laughed, babbling about this and that as the room glowed with candles. What old Norgate was doing with the College, how furious the proctors Lomas and Darryl were now they had no powers to punish the boys, the girl that the old Puritan, Tom Colwell, had fallen for. It all came out in a rush and tumble, washed down by the wine Tom had been saving for this occasion. He knew it would happen, that Kit Marlowe would be back; he just hadn’t known when.
    ‘How’s home?’ Matthew Parker wanted to know. ‘Does Canterbury still stand?’
    ‘Home?’ Marlowe had almost forgotten the word, the smell of the tanneries where he was born, the beer of The Star where he had carried pots and held gentlemen’s horses, the sound of his father’s hammer tapping the studs into clients’ boots. But in the one letter he’d written to these lads in the past weeks, that was where he told them he was, resting before he came back to Cambridge. He was ever a dissembler; now he had to keep his skills up to the mark, even when the boys who were boys when he was a boy were sitting and drinking with him. He smiled. ‘Home is still there. Canterbury still stands.’
    ‘Kit.’ Colwell stood up, his goblet in his hand. ‘Here’s to us, eh? The Parker Scholars back together again.’ And he drained the cup. ‘The Parker Scholars!’ Parker and Marlowe chorused and did the same.
    ‘Is Cambridge ready for us, do you think?’ Parker laughed. And they drank into the night.
    There was a time when the trio in front of him would have reminded Marlowe of the three wise men, sitting on their camels in the star-led watches of the night. But that was then, when he was a carefree scholar who knew so little of the world. Now, it was different. Now, the three men in front of him that Friday morning looked more like a Court of the Inquisition.
    In the centre, looking greyer and more cobweb-wisped than he remembered him, sat Dr Robert Norgate, the Master of Corpus Christi. He was feeling his age now that November had come and he didn’t care to stray too far from the fire that crackled and spat in his study. To Norgate’s right sat Michael Johns, as good a man as ever put on a scholar’s cap and tried to din into dimmer heads the weight of his scholarship. He had never thought to see Marlowe again and was glad he had come back to the fold. There had been talk of strolling players and the London theatre. He was quietly glad that that had all