Black Death by MJ Trow

Author:MJ Trow [Trow, MJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2019-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

TEN

Kit Marlowe was packing his saddlebags for the road before dawn the next morning. The bay was as unused to this hour as he was, but the animal was of a stoic disposition and took it well. It would take the pair of them half a day to reach Hatfield by the North Road and he wanted to be away before the drovers began to clog the lanes.

‘Master Marlowe?’ The voice made him turn, hand near his dagger hilt as it always was at moments like these.

‘Johanna.’ The hand relaxed and he reached out to take her hand and kiss it. ‘Whatever happened to Kit?’

The woman was struggling with her tears. She had left her children with her mother, a sure sign of her desperation as the woman was a meddling harridan who had thought her daughter had married beneath her and never forgot to remind her. She clutched at Marlowe as a drowning man will clutch at straws. ‘Have you any news of Tom, Kit?’ she asked.

With all that had happened in the last few days, Marlowe had completely forgotten about Tom’s better half and how frantic she must be. ‘He’s safe, Johanna,’ he said, smiling. ‘Safe and well.’

‘Where is he?’ she blurted out, all but stamping her foot.

‘That I can’t tell you,’ he said.

The Devil in Johanna Sledd wanted to slap Kit Marlowe, gouge his eyes out and throw his ravaged corpse onto a dung heap. But the angel in her remembered that this was kind Kit, the man her Tom worshipped nearly as much as he had worshipped his old master, Ned Sledd, whose name he had taken. She closed to him and laid a desperate hand on his chest, just above his heart. He was strong and safe and she needed that to calm her. She looked down for a moment, swallowing hard. Some questions, once spoken, could change a life forever, so it paid to take your time. ‘Has he left us, Kit?’ she asked, her voice scarcely audible. ‘Is there another woman?’

Marlowe couldn’t help but smile. In Bedlam there were several, but none to whom Tom Sledd would give the time of day. ‘No,’ he assured her. ‘Nothing like that. You’ve heard him use the phrase “the Queen’s business”?’ he asked.

She blinked. ‘He’s used it about you,’ she said, ‘but never about himself.’

Marlowe tapped the side of his nose. ‘Enough said,’ he murmured. ‘There are more things in Heaven and earth, Johanna …’

In spite of her misgivings, the woman smiled. ‘That’s one of Master Shaxsper’s lines, isn’t it?’ she said.

Marlowe frowned. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s one of mine.’ When all this was over, he would have to have words with Master Shaxsper. He dipped into his purse and pressed two gold coins into Johanna’s hand. ‘You’ll see Tom soon enough,’ he said. He held up her chin, still wet with her tears, ‘and I don’t want to see any more of these.’

Simon Forman dressed with his usual care to hear his apprentices’ stories and

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