A Dead Man in Deptford (13 page)

The point was, he thought, that a poet, cast into jail or forced to the walking of chill streets, needed rhyme to affix verses to
his memory. But in the playhouse the verse must be blank,
why blank? The Earl of Surrey had seen it as an indignity
to Virgil to render a rhymeless Roman into rhyme, so he had
cut out rhyme from language that cried to have its nakedness
clothed in a vestment that had bells sewn to it. So lo we have
verse close to speech and most proper for the playhouse which
is all speech when it is not blood. But could it be poetry?

Congealed cold indeed. Where could the poetry lie? Perhaps
the line only could grant it, not the couplet, not more, which
stabbed or bludgeoned the ear.

That, whatever it was, was not prose. And there was another
thing, and this his walking feet steadily beating told him. The
five to the line was not natural. There were no fives in nature
save in cinquefoil flowers. No, wait, five fingers, but the thumb
was of a different make and purpose. He meant that the rhythm
of two or four was in nature, for it was the heart beating and the
walking legs. So then the line pentametric was unnatural unless
its fifth beat was taken to be starting a new suppositious four.
To ride in triumph through Persepolis. There was a pause, sure,
after that, and a long one, either in the air or in the head. There
was a justification for end-stopping and the line as a bludgeon.
Moreover.

He was shaken out of his prosodic brooding by disorder on
the mean street of shops whereon he walked. There was a stall
that sold eggs and the corpses of chickens that had a day or so
before laid them, and there were rough men smashing the eggs
and stealing the chickens and seeking to smash the woman that sold them along with a boy that seemed to be her son. A man,
a cobbler like his own father, peered out of his shop to see,
then, spitting nails and wielding a hammer, ran to the woman’s
rescue. Huguenot, Huguenot. And the woman with open mouth
and bad teeth cried that she was not nor her son and made over
and over the sign of the cross in proof she was not. Those that
did not smash the eggs and steal the birds cracked eggs open
to drink of the yolk and slime. But two men more lecherous
sought to strip the woman to her shame while the small boy
beat at them with fists most ineffectual. The cobbler gave a
fair hammer blow to the sconce of one who turned in time and
so reeled without falling, so that most now turned on this man,
whose two prentices ran out now with their own hammers. Kit
felt blood rise then brim in him and then remembered that he
was now acting the gentleman, for did he not bear a sword? A
sword though could slay and here he was, strange in a strange
city. It would be enough to brandish, so he did. He ran across
brandishing, smelling the putridity of some smashed eggs that
had not been laid that morning, nor even yesterday, and cried
Salauds salauds (taken back to the Canterbury streets an instant).
Then he was sliding and slipping on egg-mess on the cobbles. His
sword-point pierced a fat buttock and would have gone deeper
if the howl of the ruffian so struck had not been so loud. He
withdrew and then was hit from behind by something hard.
A stone, he saw, turning, staggering. The ragged grinner who
held it cracked him on the brow and he went down and entered
a vague world where Tamburlaine swore he would crack the egg
of the universe.

He re-entered the day to find himself in his father’s shop,
safe in the smell of leather. No, it was not his father. Mon pere
aussi, he was saying. Comme mon pere qui fabrique les souliers. En
Angleterre. It seemed the fracas was over, though this cobbler
was bruised. Kit’s head beat like a heart, the ache was not to be
described. He lodged where? He remembered what that woman
had been selling, old hens and perhaps cocks. Rue du Coq. The
prentices would escort him thither. It was not far.

So he nodded them off, he had no small coins for them, at the open door of the house called safe and limped in, seeming to
knock at the door on the left with the bruise on his brow. Ready
to fall again. The door was ajar and his body opened it fully.
A bright fire. A table that was a warped plank set on builder’s
trestles. Iron boxes, somewhat rusty, upon it. He took the first
chair he found with his right hand and sat, looking at the two
men who stood wondering. Beard or Berdon in a robe with a
collar of mangy fur, hatted like a rabbi, the young man he had
met in Rheims, very fair, quite bloodless.

- So what is it?

- A street fight. Sons of the Church and the Huguenots.
I interfered.

- No warning, Gifford said to the other. Newcomers must
be warned, Beard. They must not interfere. It is all their own
business.

- Walsingham would see that as heroic.

- But it is foolishness. Are you the man that brought the
letter? Stay, we met at Rheims. I see you have an egg on your
brow. Ready to hatch from its swelling.

- It was an egg woman. It is here in my breast.

- So, opening the pouch, breaking the seal, reading. I am
ordered back. Contacts, contacts, doors swung open, a queen’s
French perfume, words, words, then acts. At once, he says, no
delay. A night ride and Calais at dawn. You, what’s your name,
can be with me. It will he to your credit.

- Marlowe or Marley.

- Real name?

- I am what I am what I am what I. Forgive. They hit
with a stone, a rock, my brain rocks.

- Go lie down on Beard’s bed. We leave at dusk.

- You are, Kit said, noting Gifford’s finery and collar of
cobweb lawn, no longer a student.

- I never was, not of Rheims. Some day soon we shall
all be done with disguises. Go sleep.

On the dawn packet, the sea unseasonably smooth under
a cold sun and little cloud, Kit’s ache abated and his brow,
soothed with rose water, bade the swelling recede. He was still little coherent either in speech or thought, nor did he understand
the wheels that drove the brain of Gifford.

- Truly a Catholic?

- Not truly anything. Are you truly anything? No, a lump
of pain with an egg on its brow. Truly an Englishman who
hates the French and the Spanish and the Italians and puts
England before all. Catholic England if it were possible but
it is not. So England at peace enough under protestant rule.
My father thinks differently but he no more than I would have
the old faith restored by grace of Spain or France. He pays his
recusancy fines cheerfully. He thinks change will come about in
good time.

- He knows what you do?

- To know would kill him.

- But he will know if all goes as you plan it.

- Que sera sera. Is your evident queasiness the egg on
your head? The sea keeps calm.

- The prospect of killing the innocent.

- Can you call her innocent? She is called Queen of Scots
but she is pure French. She will have the French in and the
Spaniards. She shall be tricked into treason. And my father
will be tricked, small things yielding to great. Our estate is
near Chartley where she is under lock and key. I shall be
there. It will be a matter of getting something from her in
black ink. Then there will be an end to it. See, there are the
white cliffs. And the gulls scream us in with the shrillness of
welcoming trumpets.

- You are something of a poet.

- Something of nothing.

I T was the lump on the brow incurred in a good if minor
fighting cause as well as the prompt bringing home of Gifford
that conveyed to Mr Secretary a sense of the utility of employing
Kit in these small matters of courier service. The contusion was visible evidence of a young man’s seriousness in the cause. But
he was let go back to Cambridge with two crowns in his purse,
and the Walsingham plan proceeded without him. He would be
brought in later.

It is to me somewhat of a relief to sum what happened
between Christmas and Whitsun without occasion to besmirch
Kit with the dirt of it, for I loved and yet love his genius and
if I sometimes hated the man it was not because of craft and
deviousness, rather because of a candour of word and act that,
being a fruit of innocence, would at length stick in his throat
and choke him. So I will speak of Gifford, traitor to his faith,
and what he did. He, after his reporting to Mr Secretary, lodged
with Philips or Phelips in Leadenhall Market for a time, from
there visiting the French ambassador with letters from Morgan,
the Queen of Scots her Paris secretary and most treacherous to
her, that testified to his devotion to the Queen and the faith they
shared. And it was made clear to the ambassador, who at first
had his doubts, that Gifford was seeking a way whereby Her
Abdicate Majesty should be made aware of what proceeded in
the outer world through the contrivance of a secret post that he,
Gifford, was most eager in his loyalty to set working. So when
he had confirmed with Savage, then at his studies at Barnard’s
Inn, that the killing of the lawful Queen should, despite Savage’s
qualms and wish to delay, be assigned to that summer and no
later, and when he had caroused with Father Ballard, seemingly
firm in the regicidal resolve, who, as Captain Fortescue, was a
flame in the London taverns and closely watched yet most free,
he proceeded to his father’s estate in Staffordshire, lodged with
the steward, one Newport (Gifford’s father at that time being in
jail for some remark he had made detrimental to the peace of
the realm though truly not grave), then spoke in simple words to
a Burton brewer who delivered beer each Friday to the Queen of
Scots her household, saying that he was to deliver also messages
rolled in a tube and hid in the bunghole of the cask that should
be chalked with a cross as a sign of its presence. And when he
collected the cask empty he was to look for a tube and at once
hand it to Gifford or one that deputed for him.

There was an agreed cipher that Morgan had imparted to
Gifford, and the unravelling of this when fingered out of the outgoing barrels was a yawning sleepy work for Philips or Phelips,
most expert in it, who passed all on to Walsingham in clear
English. The letters, then resealed by one Arthur Gregory, who
was proud of that skill, none could ever detect his interference,
were then taken by Gifford to the French Embassy, and thence
they went their ways under the cloak of diplomacy to whoever
was to receive them. This business started soon after Christmas,
yet by Easter there was nothing found incriminate, which soured
Walsingham much. There should have been an acquiescence in
the killing of the Queen regnant, often urged in Gifford’s letters,
but Queen Mary, though she had been foolish in love, was not
so foolish in statecraft. There could, of course, be an acceptable
forging of treasonous intent by Philips or Phelips, but this was
thought to be somehow a manner of cheating, and games in
which cheating is permitted are but halt and blind games. So
then Mr Secretary cast about for a new strategy and was at
length apprised of the name of Anthony Babington, who, in
some manner yet to be sifted and brought to the light, might
prime the engrossing of an intent that would lead many to the
scaffold but one above all.