Free Witch Hammer by M. J. Trow

the blood. Sledd’s head snapped up and he counted his flock with a quick flick of the eyes, then grinned. He looked at the women, sitting to one side, chatting together now it was too dark to sew and saw they were smiling.
    ‘Martin’s in good form, by the sound of it,’ he said and they all laughed.
    Through the dense foliage of the tree, fat drops of rain began to drum faintly on the hands of the leaves, like distant applause.
    In the coppiced wood, behind the elder clump, Martin sheltered his temporary love under his cloak, a gentleman player to the last.
    And deeper in the wood, Dorothy sheltered under the panting figure of Thomas and turned her face up to the rain. And laughed.
    The rain which had come with the night was lashing down and with it had come a wind which was roaring through the oaks that ringed Clopton Hall. Every casement in the building rattled and in the Great Hall Sir William’s dogs whined in their sleep before the huge unlit logs in the grate, dreaming of the horns and the hunt.
    Kit Marlowe was still awake when he heard the tap on his bedroom door. The bed was high and soft with feather down and the candle flickered its lurid shapes on the tapestries, velvet and brocade. Men like Marlowe often slept alone but his dagger was always within reach and he slid it noiselessly from its sheath now before sliding off the four poster and snuffing out the candle. He waited behind the heavy oak door and felt rather than saw the thing creak open. Candle shafts darted in the darkness and he heard a voice.
    ‘Master Marlowe? Master Marlowe – are you awake?’
    She almost floated into the room, her face lit by the candle, her eyes bright. He couldn’t see her heart, of course, but he guessed it would be pounding, like his. Joyce Clopton, his host’s daughter, had long dark hair, hanging in a long and tapering plait now down her back, rather than the elaborate pearl-speckled coil wound around a cap as she had worn it at dinner. Her feet were bare and she clutched a long velvet cloak around her, her left hand holding it closed at her breast.
    ‘Tolerably,’ he murmured and she spun at the voice behind her, gasping as she saw the outstretched steel. He caught her wrist with his left hand and steadied it and the candle. ‘My Lady,’ he said, ‘it is late and I am not sure that Sir William . . .’
    She pulled away sharply and placed the candlestick on the table. ‘This is not exactly a social call, Master Marlowe. And you need have no fear. Neither of us shall be compromised.’
    ‘Even so,’ he said. ‘For decorum’s sake. I am a guest in your father’s house.’
    ‘Quite so,’ she said. ‘Quite so.’
    For a moment they looked at each other, the squire’s daughter and the playwright. Then she cleared her throat. The man was in an open shirt, to be sure, but he still wore his leather pantaloons. And his dagger was tucked back into the belt at the back. There was no doubt about it, he was very attractive, especially when compared to some of the spavined aristocrats her father had trotted out for her delight over the last months. But she was not here on pleasure bent, so she put his looks to one side.
    ‘What are you, Master Marlowe?’ she asked, arching her neck and looking up at him.
    ‘Somewhat surprised,’ Marlowe said.
    ‘No.’ The ice broke in her voice for the first time. ‘No, I mean,
what
are you? Father says you are a playwright.’
    ‘That is so.’ Marlowe nodded and relit his candle with the tinder flash. She watched his eyes sparkle in the half light and smoulder in the half dark.
    She moved away from the table and sat down on a gilded chair in the corner. ‘And what else are you?’ she asked.
    ‘I am . . . I was a scholar,’ he told her. ‘From Cambridge. Corpus Christi College.’
    She frowned. ‘I thought the men of Corpus went into the Church.’
    He found himself chuckling, for all sorts of reasons, but mostly in surprise. ‘You are well informed, My Lady;