Free The Scar-Crow Men by Mark Chadbourn Page B

who stood so close, they could have been involved in a lovers’ tryst.
    ‘Return to the graveside, Grace. I will be back soon,’ he said with a sharpness that he instantly regretted.
    With a cold expression, Grace held Margaret’s gaze for a moment. The Irish woman gave her a smile that Will only ever saw women share among themselves; it circumscribed a position of strength.
    Once Grace had gone, Will hardened. ‘Now. Your business.’
    With a skip in her step, the flame-haired woman moved away from the wall into the warm sun. ‘I am a wife and I tend my home well, Master Swyfte. I only meant that as I go about my chores I keep my eyes and ears open to the gossip of my neighbours.’
    ‘And one of your neighbours threatened to kill me?’ Will mocked. The woman still gave no sign of lying, but he didn’t believe her. He had started to accept that she was as skilled at deceit as he was.
    Will was puzzled to see her come to a sudden halt and the blood drain from her face. ‘I am innocent,’ she said in a whispery voice. The spy realized her widening eyes were looking past him to the yews.
    A figure stood in the stark interplay of shadow and sunlight beneath the swaying trees, framed by ragged gravestones. The spy’s stomach knotted when he saw it was Jenny, followed by a moment of excruciating dislocation when he realized it wasn’t Jenny at all. Those same black, hateful eyes fell upon him as they had in the Rose Theatre.
    Will sensed Margaret hurry away, but his attention was locked on the cruel imitation. He felt a sudden attraction, a part of him desperately trying to make up for the years of grief and yearning. But another part of him was repulsed, and the point where the two sides met left him sickened.
    ‘Is this it, then? I have my own devil now to torment me?’ the spy whispered to himself.
    Drawing his rapier, Will ran into the dense copse of yews only to find that whatever had waited there was gone. Only a wisp of brimstone remained in the air to show it had ever been. But he could feel its black eyes on him even then, and a deep, chilling dread that was so tightly wound around him he was afraid it would never leave.
    Will already understood what Marlowe was describing in the play he had half heard the other night at the Rose: to want and never gain was a special and very personal hell.

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 towerthat 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