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‘King’s Lynn.’
    ‘Get yourself a good horse and follow them. I want to know exactly where these travelling people are.’ The mayor managed to make the two words sound like a particularly virulent curse and Fludd almost felt his skin crackle under the heat of it.
    ‘And if I catch them, sir? I have no jurisdiction outside Cambridge.’
    ‘That is entirely your problem, sir,’ Whetstone snapped. ‘You created this mess, you can clean it up. Oh, and, Fludd…’
    ‘Yes, sir?’ The Constable was already halfway to the door.
    ‘How’s the carpentry business these days?’
    ‘It’s doing quite well, sir, thank you.’
    ‘That’s good, Joseph, I’m glad. Because I think your constabulary days are over.’
    Fludd closed the door carefully behind him, afraid that if he slammed it now, he would never stop slamming it, imagining the Mayor’s stupid head between the planks and the jamb. Then he squared his shoulders and went in search of a good horse.
    Nicholas Faunt was waiting for Christopher Marlowe at the bottom of his staircase the next morning as the scholar spun round the final turn of the spiral, late as always, his grey fustian flying in the breeze of his passing. He nearly trod on him and brought himself up short. Faunt’s nose was blue with cold and he slouched in a huddle against the hard stone of Corpus Christi. He had ridden hard and long through the night and was not in the best of moods.
    Marlowe didn’t know the man, but months at William Shelley’s house had sharpened his wits and made him circumspect.
    ‘Dominus Marlowe?’ Faunt stood upright.
    The university form of address. An insider? It seemed possible, but Faunt did not have the look of a scholar, the parchment grey skin and the fussy abstraction. He was wearing spurred boots and carried a sword.
    Marlowe stepped back up two risers and his hand went automatically to the small of his back for his knife, to meet only shirt over skin; he was a scholar right at this moment and his knife was back in his room, hidden in the mattress. ‘I am Marlowe,’ he answered.
    ‘Nicholas Faunt.’ The man extended a gloved hand.
    Marlowe took it. ‘Sir Francis Walsingham’s secretary,’ he said, with a half smile.
    ‘Among other things.’ Faunt looked about him. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’
    Marlowe motioned up the twisting wooden stairs and led the way. He unlocked his study door and let the man in. ‘I’m sorry there’s no fire. I can offer you wine, at least.’
    Faunt nodded. He crossed to the window with its thick and twisted glass and looked out on to the Court below where scholars hotfooted it from one lecture to the next. ‘Some things never change,’ he said.
    ‘You know this college?’ Marlowe paused in mid-pour.
    ‘Man and boy,’ Faunt said. ‘Old Norgate must be in his grave by now, I suppose.’
    ‘Possibly –’ Marlowe passed the cup to him – ‘but he was fit as a fiddle yesterday. When were you up?’
    ‘I took my Master’s degree in the year of Grace 1579. You were still at the King’s School in Canterbury.’
    ‘And doubtless you can tell me a great deal more about myself.’ Marlowe looked into the man’s blue-grey eyes.
    ‘Of course.’ Faunt began to run those eyes over Marlowe’s books, their leather spines cracked and fading. ‘Your father is John, he is a tanner and cobbler. Your mother is Katherine, of the Arthur family from Dover. You have an older sister, Mary…’
    ‘Had,’ Marlowe corrected him. ‘She died.’
    Faunt stood corrected, but as Walsingham’s secretary he had learned to have no sympathy and so offered no condolences. ‘You were christened in the church of St George the Martyr, Christopher, the carrier of Christ.’
    ‘I am flattered, Master Faunt, that you should have bothered to learn so much about me…’
    ‘Don’t be,’ Faunt told him flatly, sipping the wine. ‘Despite appearances, this isn’t a social call.’
    ‘Walsingham sent you,’ Marlowe said,