Eleventh Hour by M.J. Trow

Author:M.J. Trow [M. J. Trow]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2017-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Marlowe had walked along the Strand many times, past the great houses mellow in their stone. The Convent Garden stretched to his left, a convent no longer but the homes of the squatters and the dispossessed. He wondered how long it would be before the property men moved in, evicting the crawling things without ceremony or redress. To his right had once stood old John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy, but the peasants had torn it down in the hurling time before the Marleys had settled in Canterbury and the ghost of time-honoured Lancaster wandered there no more.

The increasingly necessary Elias Carter had arranged this meeting. Sir Walter Ralegh was at home at Durham House along the river that morning and he would be pleased to receive a poet after his own heart.

No one answered the heavy iron knocker that Marlowe rapped against the sturdy oak, but the door gave on its latch and he stepped inside. The hall was cool after the glare of the Strand sunshine and a curious smell hit Marlowe’s nostrils, still cringing a little after Salazar’s onslaught. In a dark corner, crated in rough wood and sacking, stood bales of dark leaves, dried and curling. Tobacco. It had to be. From the orchards of the Americas. A globe stood in another corner, inscribed with curious symbols. Leviathans crashed through the flowing waters and mermaids sat on the rocks where the lost land of Lyonesse stretched beyond the Lizard. In the third corner, the silver half armour that Ralegh wore as the captain of the Queen’s Guard stood on its frame, glowing in the half light from the open door that stood in the last corner.

‘Hello?’ Marlowe called, but all he heard was his own voice echoing back, muffled by the arras on the walls. This was odd. A man like Ralegh had people around him all the time, as far as the eye could see. Where were they? Especially on a day when the master was expecting guests.

Marlowe crossed the hall and walked through the open door. A corridor with Dutch tiles on the floor stretched ahead, leading to another door. ‘Hello?’ There had to be somebody in. Through the warp of the coloured glass, he could see a figure in the orchard. Actually, two figures, standing close.

‘Sir Walter?’ Marlowe stepped off the terrace on to the close-cropped grass. Ralegh spun at the sound of his name, revealing an extremely flustered lady, whose breasts had spilled out of her bodice. Crimson with embarrassment where seconds before she had been rosy with lust, she was hauling down her farthingale. Ralegh, in the meantime, was fumbling with his codpiece. It was all a little too little. A little too late.

‘Damn you to Hell, sir! What do you mean … Marlowe? Is that you?’

‘Sir Walter,’ Marlowe thought it best to bow in the circumstances. At the very least, it stopped the necessity to find somewhere else to look. ‘If this is a bad time …’

There was a commotion to Marlowe’s left and a knot of Ralegh’s staff arrived, as flustered as their master.

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