A Dead Man in Deptford (14 page)

This Babington was of Derbyshire, his country seat being
near Matlock, and, though a Catholic and a true one, he had had
luck in being able to cling to property by no means small. At one
time the Earl of Shrewsbury had been jailer to the Queen of Scots,
and the boy Babington had been his page. He had conceived a
childish devotion and love to the Queen, who was indeed stately tall and most beautiful and with a voice that enthralled, and,
during that period of her mostly kindly and loose incarceration,
before her grimmer transferral to prison at Chartley, he had,
through a Paris visit, found ways of conveying letters through
Morgan to Mary by way of the Shrewsbury household, but now
all that was over. He served now the cause of the priests, with
money and places of refuge, but that was most perilous, being
not merely treasonous but highly treasonous, that is to say High
Treason. He was but twenty-five and much loved, though not to the point where his High Treason might be condoned. But some
shut eyes to his actions.

I do not know for sure that Kit became embroiled in these
matters at the time of the entry of young Babington, all innocent
and unknowing, into Walsingham’s great plan. But he said that
he did, at the time of his first playhouse triumph when he became
drunken and talked purple untruths in the manner of the poet he
was. The manner of it was, he said, this. He had been summoned
from Cambridge, again by Nick Faunt who was on a recruiting
visit, to see Robin Poley. Poley had met him with: Dear Kit,
dear helper in the cause and most helpful a helper, now is the
time for you to endue the great mask of simulation. I am born
Catholic and am believed to practise the faith, for me there is
nothing hard in false smiling and fraternal embracing, but it is
what you must learn. Faunt said something of your writing plays,
so simulation and falseness you will know something of. We go to
meet Captain Foscue, as the French call him, and one other in a
tavern, a back room I need not say, there to talk privy matters.
You are to be a good Catholic.

- Foscue or Fortescue I know. He saw me at a time when
I spoke of my Jacob wrestling with the agonies of faith.

- Agonies resolved, you are converted. But if you move
wrong through inattention or worse - I need not say more.

- A threat? I hear a threat?

- You hear a pignus of your committal. No more.

Kit did not well understand, though he shivered on that chill
spring day. They went together to the Plough by Temple Bar, and
in an inner room they met Father Ballard the carousing soldier
and the delicate Babington. Ballard or Fortescue remembered
faintly the Rheims meeting. Christopher, a noble name cattified
to Kit. Aye aye, it all comes back. Well, let us drink as friends
and, I take it, all of the faith. Kit said:

- I may now call you reverend father.

- Call me nothing. Poley said:

- I fear suspicion of me grows. I have been bound by
two sureties whereby I must present myself each twenty days.

- Before the magistrates?

- That. I had thought of escaping, though not from Dover
where there are watches set. But it is a matter of getting
money.

- I will gladly advance fifty pound, Babington said. That
for a beginning and more later.

- God and his holy mother bless you for that. But I have
here my young friend to protect that is restored to the faith
and has been too loud in his joyous professions. He has to
learn discretion. In protecting him I am in some danger, but
no matter. There is the other business that bids us all stay.

- The Holy Trinity shower blessing on it, Kit said. It was
extravagant, but extravagance might be forgiven a convert. The
others even murmured Amen. The reverend father in his gaudy
soldier’s extravagance said:

- The rising must all depend on the help of Guise and
King Philip. The attack is in preparation. But Babington said:

- Drag us by the heels at Tyburn before that the stranger
enter our gates. The State here is well settled, and with the
Queen alive though excommunicate nothing may be done.

- The means, the means, Ballard said. It is made. There
is one that took the oath.

- God bless his valiant heart, Poley said. He will leave
his musty law books and strike.

- God forbid, it is a terrible thing, said shocked Babington.
The removal of her is a different matter and toleration and the
freeing of our lady Mary to be made a condition of her release.
But I know not truly what is to be done.

- Yet we know what you have, Poley said. We are in this
together and may be shown. And he put out his hand with a
kind of reverence.

- It is almost a holy thing, Babington said, fumbling with
buttons at his breast.

- Heaven forbid it be a holy relic.

- Amen. And Babington drew out a letter with a broken
seal. Kit leaned across to read it, for it was now in Poley’s
hands. It was to Babington and not in cipher. Here was the
royal hand: I pray you therefore from henceforth to write unto me as often as you can of all occurrences which you may judge in any
wise important to the good of my affairs.

Poley nodded, with greater reverence, and said that Babington
had been writing to Nau that was the Queen of Scots her French
secretary. Whereupon Babington flushed deeply and asked how
he knew. I know, I know, I must know things, a man must
protect himself.

- I asked, Babington said, if you were to be trusted. With
so great matters afoot it was in order.

-And so it was, so it was, you were right. And you
received assurances that I was and am?

- Indeed so.

- And what can you now offer?

- In the matter of what I said? Though still I do not properly
know. There are gentleman enough of stout courage. Gentlemen
pensioners who would seize and hold her against our sovereign
lady’s release.

The time is not yet, as you know. You must continue
your writing to her and holding to her replies as they were
precious gold.

- Amen. I talk of the usurping competitor.

- That is a discreet phrase. You talk to whom?

- I have drafted a letter to her not yet delivered for Gifford’s
sending. I write of doing her one good day’s service. I ask that
she direct us by her princely authority and so forth.

- You have this draft upon you?

- It is at home.

- Have a care, have a care, in the name of God have a.
There be thieves enough about. Well, shall we sing a bawdy
catch and tipple more? Or shall we be about our business that is
termed lawful? Even so. And close our meeting with the signum
crucis. Which they made, Kit too.

- You lodge with Tom Watson? Poley asked, out in the
wind of Temple Bar.

- No longer. He said he would not marry but he has married.
The sister of this lawyer Swift. I ride tonight to stay with Tom
Walsingham. But I shall be early in tomorrow, as you request.

- From Tom to Tom. Well, you see how things went. It
will still be a slow business. And shaking his head he led the way
to his house on Bishopsgate that was called the Garden, where
Kit’s horse was stabled. Then Kit rode north to Scadbury with
the wind against him.

THERE was a cottage on the estate where Kit had lodged
before. He was never desirous of entering the great manor house
where Ingram Frizer stalked. He feared Frizer’s mad devotion,
which he could not well understand. It was so unlike his own,
bearing in itself no epicene love nor even simple friendship,
rather the desire to be abased and yet not abasement of a true
lowly servant, for Frizer had money and much of this money
slid into Tom’s lean purse. How he got or had in the past gotten
this money was never clear. As for meeting Tom behind the
back of Frizer, this could sometimes though rarely be a matter
of a dated tryst, a letter left with Poley to be delivered when Tom
was at his cousin’s, or, lurking among bushes, Kit whistling near
a known and lighted casement of the manor house, which was
absurd. The tune he whistled was Wilbye’s setting of his own
shepherd poem, already well enough known about the town.

Anyway, this night they lay together in a cottage which
had been that of an estate woodman long dismissed. It was,
as it were, an abode pared down to love, for there was little in
it but a bed with straw-filled mattress and blankets of stitched
motley pieces, the work of the woodman’s wife. There was a
fire fed by the ample branches and logs with which a leaning shed was well stocked, but, for fear that prowling Frizer
might wonder even at nighttime smoke under the moon, it
was seldom Hinted to life, there being warmth enough in
their conjoined and amorous naked bodies. So, beneath the
blankets in the spring dark, hearing the wind in the chimney
and a far dogfox or a mousing owl, they kissed and colled and
rolled and panted and were disengorged of their urgencies. Then they lay and wiped the sweat the one off the other and
talked.

- They will talk at Corpus of your absences.

- Your cousin swears that all will be taken care of. The
Queen’s service comes first.

- This is the Queen’s service?

- This is one of the rewards of it.

- Very prettily said. And then, later: I think this will all
soon be mine. I shall be Lord of the Manor.

- Who says that?

- Frizer says that my brother is very sick. Nothing stays
in him, it is all vomit vomit.

- How does Frizer know?

- Frizer is a great peerer and pryer. Frizer will be glad
when it happens. His young master will be fulfilled and there
will be a majordomo’s chain of office dangling from the Frizer
neck.

- In Naples did I learn to poison flowers.

- What is that to do with anything?

- A line that came to me. Such lines often come. Then
they must be joined to other lines that come, all complete and
stopped at the end. Blank verse must not melt into prose. Yet
as it came I seemed to see Frizer saying it and bowing deep. I
take it he has not been in Naples.

- He says sometimes a rich grandfather sent him round the
world, but it is all lies. He has a parish in radius all of twenty
miles.

- And villainy enough in it.

- He is no villain, he is all devotion, though the devotion irks.

- He knows that your brother is dying. In devotion is
he helping him towards his quietus or nunc dimittis?

- I should think my brother has the French pox. And Tom
yawned in the dark. Then he encircled Kit with his arms and
they fell to more kissing. At the end of a sore dawn coupling
Kit heard his horse champing grass. Tom said:

- Give me a verse. Said not sung.

- This.

And Watery Walter’s reply:

- Raleigh, they say, must be watched.

- There is altogether too much watching. Frizer will be on
his patrol shortly, seeing that none have stolen twigs from the
trees. He will wonder at a horse chewing his master’s grass. Best
go.

IT was true perhaps that Raleigh must be watched, for, so it was
known in the Service, he had been engaged with Mendoza, who
was Spain’s ambassador in Paris, in negotiation over a Spanish
pension, since the Queen’s favour, so he said, could not last. And
there was one of his circle, whose godless speculations would,
when the time came, invite examination, one named Anthony
Tuichenor, who had put himself forward to Gifford as one who
would convey the captured true Queen, provided no harm came
to her, to a place of safety that Sir Walter himself would contrive.
But all this was but a small concern at the time of the letter that
Babington, guided by Poley and Gifford, sent to the Queen of
Scots by the established beery channel, saying that Forasmuch
as delay is extremely dangerous, may it please your most excellent
Majesty by your wisdom to direct us and by your princely authority
to enable such as may to advance the affair. And it was all laid
out: the invaders were coming, this confirmed by Gifford, now
in Paris and not to be seen in England more (he was to die in a brothel), the deliverance of the Queen of Scots and the dispatch
of, as it was put, the Usurping Competitor. And he, Babington,
would with six gentlemen and a hundred followers release her
Catholic Majesty. Yet there was no invasion coming, nor a
hundred men, and he would be hard put to find six gentlemen
even. What Mary’s reply was we know not, but that there was
a reply we know, sent, in her words, by une petite boite ou sac
de cuir.