A Dead Man in Deptford (11 page)

- Pretty, Fortescue said, but the pastoral note is lost. Are we
(in change of tone) all for High Mass tomorrow? I suppose if we
seek the solace of singing voices we shall find that best in the
heavenly choristers of the cathedral. And the candles and the colours of the vestments and the divine and intoxicating smoke
of the incense. (He widened his nostrils and inhaled deeply as
if it were already being wafted through the tavern.) What I say
is this, friends, that what the soul craves at times is the majesty
of high ceremony. The deeper meaning skills not, the lifting of
the spirit to strange regions is fulfilled as much by the mass as
by the purple tragedy of Sophocles. It is the elevating that is all.

- So, said Kit, feeling the hand of Tom Walsingham begin
to caress his sitting buttocks, it is not all eating and drinking
and swinking and snoring, as in your song?

- No, if we come down to it, the shepherd’s life is not
enough. The senses need more than the stink of wool and
sheep dung. But I speak of the senses. I do not speak of
thought. Thought has killed millions and will yet kill more.
Let us drown thought in another jug.

I T was in a field on the hot Sabbath under an elm whose
leaves were a tumult in the wind that promised a change of
weather that Kit and Tom consummated, in all gentleness, the
love that could be spoken aloud not in the disguise of French or
of Latin. They lay naked, and on Kit’s back the sparse flue was,
as in the cooling of pottage by the lips pursed, agitated lovingly
by the breeze. God was safely locked away in his cathedral. God
was obliterated by love. This is then for ever? One cannot say so,
but perhaps there is an eternity untouched by God’s covenant that
meaneth no more than the feigning dead of time, and that is there
ever to be sought in the mingling of limbs. And what shall the
future hold? While time feigns death there is no future. I mean,
England, whither, in a day or so, the ship will bear me though
not you for you speak of Paris business. It shall be Scadbury,
the caves of Chislehurst, never London, for London is all talk.
There must be a measure of patience, and if patience will not
hold then there is the communion over distance, communion
most holy, through imagination and the five-fingered playing on an instrument. Faces medallions in our minds. Scents sewn into
skin, sounds held in ears as the sea in seashells. We must have
what we can. Fidelity? That is between essence and essence.
Fidei defensores. We monarchs to each other will hold the faith
better than monarchs.

So to it again - femures, recta, ventra, ala. Cows ambled
up munching roundly to watch, and one left an ample pat
in tribute near to their thrown clothes. It steamed to the sun
and its wholesome odour was borne in to them on the veering
wind. There were enough birds above and about them, flying
low since they had received messages of weather change, to make
it seem that whirring wings of Adam’s paradise and a jangle of
song withal were there to bless them. The scriptures had a lone
Adam before that unhandy work with his rib, but what man
could doubt that there had been a nameless companion for him
expunged by God’s hunger for multiplicitous children to be
tormented or saved according to his caprice, hence the machine
or miraculous contrivance of procreation, which pretended love,
love being there but a trick? And so as the wind freshened they
colled in the finality of their naked coupling among the insects,
then dressed, then hand in hand walked to the town, though,
reaching it, not hand in hand.

Tom rode off to Paris the next morning, Frizer on a nag
fitting his lowliness behind. Kit was not there to bid farewell,
the streaks of dawn at his back. He slept late, sometimes tossing
in dream knowledge of many troubles ahead, sometimes still and
soothed by a new assurance of the surety of what seemed sure.
The following day, having taken courteous leave of his brief
mentors, armed, as he thought, with a kind of intelligence, he
steered his hired horse towards Calais, sleeping two nights in
barns. The weather had cooled but the sky but dribbled. On
the quay at Calais the clouds opened and the sea churned. He
slept, since the packet would not yet set forth, in a foul inn where
fleas and bugs bit his flesh and the landlord his purse. Then he
embarked and was very sick. At Dover he stayed a night with the
Arthur family, these being his mother’s people. That the house
reeked of fish ensured no quietening of his stomach. The slow walk in windy weather to Canterbury was by way of a cure. He
heard Tom’s voice and once turned as he really heard it, but it
was the wind sawing at a broken branch. He was impeded on
the city’s outskirt by a march of geese that held the road and
snapped honking at his ankles, while the goosemaster with his
gnarled stick laughed. And so he was home, very weary, sleeping
much of a day away while poor Dorothy clambered over him, still
not knowing who he was. Brown Peter, well groomed, whinnied
at seeing him, and Kit welshcombed his mane and clapped his
flanks. Then, in warming weather, he was waved off to London.

In Tom Watson’s house, at the corner of Bishopsgate and
Hog Lane, Kit found the poet at work. Kit was now troubled,
as I must myself be, by the fact of three Toms in his London life,
for Kyd was like to be a kind of rivalrous friend, and one Tom
of them most especial, nay crowned and golden. Tom Watson
said:

Well, you are back and looking none the better for your
French jaunt. Of it I will ask nothing. You will see what I am
doing here. It is the making of a rosary of poems, not all mine.
Blount asks for it. Sit, sit. Lie down on the floor with a pillow.
Very weary, I can see, and thinner. What verses did your brain
churn out on your long rides? I need your verses, it will be a
beginning for you.

- You shall have something. First I must report to Robin
Poley.

- Not to Poley, Poley is in Paris with his cutthroat. Mr
Secretary himself asked after you, were you returned.

- So. I see Mr Secretary.

Mr Secretary, in the musty small room that was a mockery
of the rest of the spacious mansion on Seething Lane, bade Kit
sit on a manner of creepystool and levelled on him the black
gimlet eyes of the interrogator. Had he been tempted, seduced
he would say, by the discardable knacks and tawdries of a foul
faith, who and what had he seen, what suspected?

- There was a Captain Fortescue. He spoke of coming
to England to raise troops for the Low Countries.

- What of him?

- I think he was a priest.

- Why think you that?

- A matter of his voice. I heard that voice in both the
tavern and the confessional.

- Pursued it from one to the other, did you?

- In a sense. There was the weakness of a sound of speech.
He was disguised as a soldier but his voice he lacks the skill to
disguise. That skill must be left to the players. Like Mr Alleyn.

- Well, this is no discovery. We know Captain Foscue, as
the French call him. A certain Father John Ballard. This you
could not know, but your guessing may be accounted a kind of
intelligencer’s success. He had tavern companions?

- I noted their names. Gilbert Gifford. A Catholic and
bitter in enforced exile. And there was a John Savage, a soldier
but else I know not what.

- These too we know. So. They are coming.

- In August.

- No no no, I mean more. Many are coming. It is the
conspiracy.

- There will be arrests?

- No arrests. Ballard could long ago have been on the
scaffold. No more. It is a waiting matter. We shall see.

- Now what must I do?

- I said it was a waiting matter. Go back to your studies.
You may go to Phelips and tell him delta grade. He is three
doors away.

- Phelips?

- Or Philips. It is all one. He spells his name Phelips.
That is his humour.

Kit found this man in a chamber greatly larger than Walsingham’s own. He was at a high desk and was flanked by two clerks
as they seemed to be from their quills, which squeaked busily. As
Kit entered and delivered his message, Phelips-Philips descended
from his lofty stool by means of two rungs, holding out a hand
in courtesy and welcome. He wore spectacles. He was small and
thin, was yellow in hair and beard, and his face, which leered,
was much pocked.

- A young beginner, the name? The name I now have,
the grade is as he said. Well, it is here.

He unhooked a great key from his girdle and opened with a
rasp a trunk of iron that sat squat on a table else unencumbered.
From it he took with his thin hand a tiny leathern bag and, with
a giggle, threw it at Kit who caught it.

- We play at ball, eh? The great game, and the balls are
the souls of men. We shall win, have no doubt of it. And so
off with you.

In his bedchamber in Watson’s house Kit untied the bag
and emptied money on the coverlet. Nobles, marks, groats. He
counted. It was near five pounds. Half of England’s parishes
had stipends of less than ten a year, a third under the five.
So the Archbishop himself had complained. Elation made his
member swell, visibly in his codpiece, and he was thus led to
the composing of a poem of love.

DROUGHT year, drought year, so they called it. A parched
Michaelmas, and a Michaelmas the more parched for the aridity
of studies that oppressed one who had smelt of the kitchen of
great affairs, drunk French wine on French soil, more, most,
had gorged on what was to be termed love. And so in the schools
he was insolent in the exercises, seated on his tripod, delivering
his logic.

- Should Aristotle have placed a wife among the goods
of a philosopher?

- Goods are possessions that are deemed good, that is useful.
In the sense that what is good conduces to the higher moral life,
such goods are not of necessity good. Possessions may be inanimate, as plate, houses, land, also animate as slaves, cattle, horses.
Hence a wife, being animate, may be accounted a possession. But
in that a wife, being a woman and hence a human being and
hence endowed with freedom of will, may contradict all other
possessions in a capacity for choice, she may not be accounted so. Thus, Xantippe chose to feed her husband Socrates on little
but boiled lentils and, in her wrath at his absence from the house
in colloquies with the youth of Athens, emptied a pisspot on
his head. So I argue that a wife, being a free soul, cannot be
accounted a possession.

- Why is it decorous that undergraduates of a university
should be clothed humbly?

- I argue contra. Study is a noble activity and through
the acquisition of learning a man, however young, glorifies
the whole race of man. This glory may be made manifest in
outward show, fine dress enhancing the body but, in a figure that
may be termed sacramental, emblemising the shining quiddity of
what animates the whole being. The students here should all be
clothed in silk.

- Wrong, wrong and again wrong. This use of the term
sacramental is blasphemous. You will put off your finery instanter
and revert to the subfusc as is proper.

For Kit was dressed in purple and primrose and a shirt
with cobweb collar. His buttery accounts had grown and he
was quite the gentleman. So attired, he was easy to find when
Nicholas Faunt came looking for him. Kit was at study in
the library on a foul day of late November. Faunt came up
and peered at books that had nothing to do with divinity,
saying:

- So this is your study, Tamerlaine and Techelles and what
is this, yes, Usumcasane, and Bazajeth and Alcidamus. In my
day here at Corpus we kept our noses close to our Latin and
Greek. Faunt is the name. I am one of Sir Francis’s secretaries,
as he terms them. Come away and we will talk in the back room
at the Eagle.

- Is it Service business we are to talk of?

- Call it that, call it that. Do not speak so loud. See,
that boy intent on his Jerome looked up. Come your ways.

They sat then, having crossed the street where the blustering
wind made ripple the plentiful puddles, in that back room over
ale which Faunt called for. Faunt said:

- I take pride in being the one Cambridge man among his regulars. I come looking at Corpus for recruits and yet you I
missed. You went in another way.

- I would not say I was in. I have other ambitions.

- Like in the direction of the history of Persia?

- I propose a play.

- Whose theme is?

- Power. Pitiless, merciless, absolute.

- So power appeals to you, young as you are? How young?

- I am of age. Power, yes, power cut up and anatomised. I
want the power of chronicling power. I have read my Machiavelli.

- Doubtless, all young men read it. Well, you think yourself
not to be in the outer lanes of the labyrinth of power, but you
are, you are. You wear Sir Francis’s money on your back. You
have been in Rheims, yes? Yes. In Rheims you met Gifford and
Savage, yes? Yes. Tell me about them.

- Gifford is an exiled Catholic most bitter in his exile.
Savage is hard to fathom, but he fought in the Low Countries.
This argues his hatred of what Gifford stands for. But what can
I say when I was told that his captain is a priest?

- It is all a wilderness. Gifford is in the Service, you must
know. He has persuaded Savage that his duty is to murder the
Queen.

- Which queen?

- There is only one. The other lives in a secluded state of
abdication. Her time will come when Gifford is brought over.
The proposal that a true queen be murdered is of Sir Francis’s
engineering, but only that a false queen may in all legality be
beheaded. Does this make sense?

- A wilderness. I am bewildered. What have Ito do with this?

- Poley is short of couriers. You must take ship and find
Gifford. Savage we have, though he does not know it. He is
learning law at Barnard’s Inn. Gifford we need in London. Our
informers say that he leaves Rheims on the twenty-fifth to stay
with Thomas Morgan in Paris. He must be given a letter. You
will be given that letter, cunningly sealed so that you may not
in youth’s curiosity tamper and pry.