The Scar-Crow Men

CHAPTER TEN




REACHING THE TOP OF THE ROPE, WILL HAULED HIMSELF SOUNDLESSLY over the battlements into the shadows of the walkway overlooking the western road out of London. Crouching, he peered along the wall to where the guard leaned against his pike under the glow of a gently swaying lantern. The man’s head nodded, and the spy heard the drone of juddering snores.

Easing the rope up, Will tested the grapnel was secure and then lowered himself down into the deserted Palace of Whitehall. He would have found it easier to gain access by hammering on the eastern gate to rouse the guards, but he didn’t want anyone to know he’d been there.

Slipping through the dark among the jumble of stone and timber-framed palace buildings, Will felt that he had spent the last two days trying to navigate sandbanks in the fog. He glimpsed meaning among the shifting strands of devils and murder and knife-wielding masked men, but it disappeared before he could tack a course towards it. One beacon remained clear, though: the Unseelie Court.

The scarecrow staring with Marlowe’s eyes. The pale figures pursuing him with lethal intent.

The empty palace with its ringing halls and blank windows was the wrong place to contemplate the stuff of nightmares. Even though the Queen and the court had long since fled London to escape the plague, Will felt he was being watched.

Creeping to the edge of a large cobbled courtyard, he let his eyes rise up the tall tower that stood at its centre. At the very top of the Lantern Tower, as it had always been known for no good reason that he could see, a faint green glow rolled and folded, like the lights people said they often glimpsed in the northern skies.

Will felt his stomach knot and an ache rise deep in the back of his head. The sole occupant of that tower burned so fiercely not even stone walls could contain her power.

Always alert, four steely-eyed guards in helmet and cuirass walked the courtyard, hands only an inch from pike or musket. The tower itself was filled with lethal traps, many newly installed, but it was the unseen defences that were the most deadly, Will knew. The court’s former alchemist, Dr John Dee, had ensured nothing could get in and the prisoner could never get out, for if that were to happen England would fall.

England’s guilty secret.

Few people knew the tower’s secret, only Her Majesty and a handful of her most trusted men. But Will had learned the truth, and it had eaten away at him for five years now.

Her protectors slaughtered, the immaculate, terrifying Queen of the Unseelie Court had been stolen in an act of grand betrayal during a convocation to discuss peace in the generations-long struggle between men and their supernatural foe. An uneasy truce was no use to a nation caught between the twin poles of fear and ambition, and Queen Elizabeth and her advisers had realized her forbidding counterpart could become the fulcrum of Dr Dee’s magical defences, a shield that could keep the great Enemy at bay for evermore.

Watching the green light wash out, Will imagined the Fay Queen sitting in her cell, seething, plotting, waiting for the moment when her imprisonment would end and a new reign of terror could be unleashed upon the land.

Dread and grief intermingling, the spy’s mind flashed back to a small hamlet not far from Stratford, beside the green, green Avon, where he had stood next to Kit Marlowe in front of a dense wall of briar reaching up higher than his head. Some of the twining growth was as thick as his arm, the thorns as sharp as knives. It had not been there the day before.

‘I am ready,’ the playwright had said, holding his chin up defiantly.

Will had glimpsed the fear in the young man’s eyes and nodded. ‘I am sure you are. But it is one thing to learn about the Unseelie Court in the safety of the Palace of Whitehall and another to meet them in the pale, grave-tainted flesh.’

Marlowe swung the axe above his head and began to hack through the dense vegetation. What sounded like a muffled scream echoed through the briar with each blow. ‘They will not scare me,’ the young man replied.

Will hoped Sir Francis Walsingham and his strange, mad aide, Dr Dee, were correct and Marlowe was ready for his first encounter with the supernatural foe. He had seen other men destroyed by their first brush with the nightmarish force. ‘Remember,’ he said gently, ‘the mind rebels against the slightest contact with those foul creatures. They are beyond all reasoning, the source of all fear, the secret behind all the most blood-chilling stories told on a winter’s night since the days of your ancestors.’

‘I know,’ Kit gasped, sweat dripping as he hacked. ‘There is some quality to them that can drive a man mad. But I am prepared.’

In the centre of the briar wall, the two men heard the muffled screams more clearly. Marlowe blanched, pointing. Arms stretched wide, a man hung in the twisting strands, his eyes wide with terror. Only when he stepped closer did Will see that the briar was driven through the man’s flesh, through his very body, piercing one cheek, or one side, or one leg, and bursting out of the other. Small thorny twists had stitched his lips together so that however much he wanted to express his agony, he could not cry out.

‘What do we do?’ Marlowe whispered, sickened.

‘There is nothing we can do. The Unseelie Court have turned cruelty into a fine art.’ With a soothing smile, Will stepped forward and plunged his dagger into the poor soul’s heart.

Marlowe crumpled for a moment, but when he had recovered, he hacked through the remaining briar with angry determination. On the other side, the two men saw a quaint thatched cottage with whitewashed walls and a trail of woodsmoke rising from the chimney. A young woman stood by the door, pretty but heavy-set in the manner of country girls. She smiled at the new arrivals and brushed down her corn-coloured skirts.

But Will and Kit couldn’t tear their gaze away from the figure who stood beside her. Tall, with long brown hair, sallow skin and doublet and breeches of grey, he looked back with fierce contempt almost masked by a supercilious smile. Will felt his stomach churn, and he saw the blood trickling from his companion’s nose. Marlowe was shaking and Will placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder to steady him. ‘Be resolute,’ he whispered.

The playwright nodded, drawing his rapier. The two men advanced on the pale being, but they had barely covered half the distance to the cottage when the Fay leaned in to whisper in the woman’s ear.

‘No,’ Will shouted, breaking into a run.

A shadow crossed the woman’s face. The supernatural being gave a cruel smile and in the blink of an eye he was gone.

When the two men reached the woman, she was humming a pleasant song and rocking gently from side to side. ‘Did you meet my husband?’ she asked in a musical voice. ‘He has been punished for kissing that harlot Rose Culpepper.’

‘You called that thing in?’ Will asked, unable to hide his sadness at the pain the woman had inflicted upon herself and her love in her hurt.

She nodded and beckoned. ‘Come indoors and see my beautiful baby. He sleeps so quietly.’

Marlowe looked full of dread.

The two men followed the good wife into the warm, smoky interior. She went straight to a crib near the hearth. ‘My boy, my Daniel,’ she said with love.

In the crib was a twisted briar mockery of a baby, blackened and covered in thorns, but it writhed as its mother cooed over it. Sickened, Marlowe turned away.

‘That is a beautiful child, indeed,’ Will said. ‘Now, my friend would like to see your garden, while I attend to a matter here.’

The woman smiled, but her eyes showed little sanity left. Hesitantly, Kit led her outdoors, casting troubled glances at his companion.

Once they had gone, Will snatched the changeling from the crib. It spat and lashed out tiny, thorny hands. He hurled it on to the fire where it cried like a real baby before it was consumed by the flames.

Barely had the last screech died away when Will heard Marlowe shouting. He rushed out into the small herb garden, only to see his friend hunched over the bank of the rushing spring river that curled past the cottage.

‘She threw herself in,’ Kit gasped, reeling.

‘Though her mind was destroyed, a part of her knew the truth. That is why we fight the foul Unseelie Court. They prise open the weaknesses in the human heart and destroy from within. They have done this since man first walked England’s green land and they will try to do it until judgement day if we are not vigilant.’

After a long silence, Marlowe said quietly, ‘And I will stand by your side, God help me. Though my life be corrupted by dread from this moment on, I do what I must for my fellow man.’

Proud but sad, Will had clapped his friend on the shoulder and led him back to their horses with the promise of a night of wine to dull the memories, but they both knew Kit’s life was changed for ever.

Will flashed back to the moonlit courtyard, his heart heavy with grief at his friend’s passing. That day in Stratford their friendship had been forged, for they had shared an experience, however terrible, that set them apart from their fellow men. Despite Will’s fears, Marlowe had survived and grown to be an effective spy. A good man, a sad man, and now he was gone.

What part, if any, had the Unseelie Court played in his friend’s demise?

Looking to the top of the Lantern Tower, Will whispered, ‘Kit will be avenged. And if I find your pale hands stained in his blood, you will pay a thousandfold. I vow this now.’