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his wine, ‘I kicked you out of my college.’
    Greene remembered. In an age of patronage, he had once hitched his wagon to Harvey’s star, but in the cutthroat world of literary endeavour, all that seemed a long time ago. ‘
Your
college, Professor?’ In that cutthroat world, Greene could fence with the best of them.
    Harvey paused, the goblet still at his lips. Then he put it down and wiped his fingers on his napkin. ‘I let Copcott have it,’ he said. ‘I’d tired of Cambridge. Decided that my rightful place is here.’
    ‘May I join you?’ Greene asked, unbuckling his rapier and hooking it on the wall.
    Harvey was about to say it was a free country, but neither man believed that. Gloriana sat like a vengeful harpy on her throne. She had had her own cousin executed and no one’s life was worth more than the entrance fee to see a play.
    ‘You know
Tamburlaine
opens tomorrow, don’t you?’ Greene asked. ‘Part Two.’
    Harvey laughed. ‘So that’s it. I wondered what would make you swallow your pride after our last encounter. Of course; it had to be. Your insane, irrational hatred of Kit Marlowe. Oh, malicious envy! Greene by name and green by nature.’
    The would-be playwright sat down heavily, clicking his fingers for service. No one came. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t hate him too.’
    ‘I don’t have a pretentious bone in my body,’ Harvey said, arranging his stomacher and crimping his ruff. ‘Unlike you, Greene, I know genius when I see it. Marlowe has that quality – what do people call it? His mighty line? It’s just the man I can’t stand.’
    ‘You’ll go tomorrow?’ Greene asked him.
    ‘To see
Tamburlaine
at the Rose? Assuredly.’
    ‘So will I. As a gallery commoner. I don’t want the smug bastard seeing my face on stage.’
    ‘You think he’ll be there?’ Harvey asked.
    ‘Oh, he’ll be there.’ Greene was still looking this way and that, trying to attract a waiter’s attention. He became confidential, leaning in to his man, resting on his elbows. ‘I may have a surprise for him.’
    ‘Well, well.’ Harvey clicked his fingers and a serving man was hovering at his side in seconds. ‘Let it be a surprise for us all, then,’ he said. ‘Master Greene is about to place an order. Add my reckoning to his, would you?’ And in a swirl of silk and satin, Dr Gabriel Harvey was gone.
    The dead man bobbed his way down stream, rolling with the dark waters past Paul’s Wharf. If he had still had his senses, he would have recoiled at the stink of Billingsgate where the corpses of gutted fish floated, like his, on the ebb tide. He was making for the sea in that casual, unhurried way that dead men will. If he once had promises to keep and places to be, he was past all that now. Time was the river’s, as it had always been between those banks. The tall houses of Elizabeth’s London leaned their gables over to watch him glide between them. He dallied for a while at Queenshithe, rubbing shoulders with the tarred ropes that held the merchantmen at their wharves. He half turned to the blind alleys that ran up from the mud to the Ropery and to Ratcliffe. His clouded dead eyes saw, with the second sight of the dead, the spars black against the fleeting clouds and the cold crescent of the moon beyond them. He saw sailors and their trulls rolling home from the taverns that lined the north bank, their calls and curses and laughter like a half-forgotten dream.
    The current turned him again, as it turned boats on this stretch of the river too. Ahead loomed the rickety arches of the Bridge, its stanchions knee deep in the wild, foaming water. Lights tumbled here and there from the jumbled houses above and to his right the heads of traitors rotted on their pikes, a reminder to all of the risks of crossing Her Majesty the Queen and those who served her. He was hurrying now, his arms lifting out of the frothing current, rushing towards the confines of the archways. His head came up, as though