A Dead Man in Deptford (20 page)

It was in the November, with breath steaming from the groundlings, that true not pig’s blood was drawn and, in a
manner, the needful gory baptism, desired by all architects for
their new erections but rarely fulfilled, was, in a rare fashion,
fulfilled. The Governor of Babylon was tied to his turret post and
was to be mock-killed with a caliver. Timmins, charged with this
shooting, saw too late that the charge was live, and, in deflecting
his piece, aimed at a child, a woman big with child, and a man
near her. The woman was killed, as was the child in utero and
the one ex utero, and the man hurt in his head very sore. The
play, by consent of the majority of watchers, proceeded, as
nothing would be served by feigned regret and mourning.
This was the afternoon that there were viewers in the lord’s
box.

This lord’s box was a contrivance of Philip Henslowe, being
a room curtained, supplied with good chairs and a fire and what
of drink its occupiers wished, placed between left and right upper
galleries and costing for the afternoon’s hire some ten shillings.
The better sort did not cavil at this, as a whole noble family,
from tiny prattler to chumbling great grandfather, could with
ease be accommodated, but this day there were only the Earl of
Northumberland and Sir Walter Raleigh. They had come in a
private boat with liveried oarsmen, in finery but masked, so none
knew who they were until the play’s end and the dispersal of the
brawling, base and popular. Then they appeared unmasked in the
greenroom to much fawning and twittering. Henslowe was near
on his knees with obsequious adulation: what will your lordship
take, and you your worship Sir Walter, it is no trouble, it may
be sent out for, dust those chairs boy, we are highly honoured
(with much breath on the honoured, though none on the highly).
So the two were seated, and the Earl, who was young but
reputed learned, indeed called the Wizard Earl for his skill in
necromantics, enquired pleasantly if there was a true slaughter
at every performance, and Henslowe replied in his fluster Alas
no. It was as though, if his lordship wished, another could be
contrived at their next visit with ease. And Sir Walter in his
thick Devonian that appeared to encrust his utterance with
sea salt said:

- Well, it was done so in the plays of Nero’s time. Were
not condemned criminals made unwilling actors in the action,
beheaded in bloody truth on the stage and not in histrionic
fancy? Perhaps some link or marriage might be made between
our hanging magistrates and your company, Mr Mr I know not
your name.

- Henslowe, Philip, Sir Walter, Henslowe, some say
Hounslow.

- Hounds low more than hens, no matter. And who is your
Tamburlaine? Ah, I see him. A burden to the voice, your part,
sir. Slake, slake, continue, you need it.

- And where is the poet? the Wizard Earl asked.

The poet was with myself in the rear of the tiring house. I
had appeared for the final jig in my Zenocrate skirt and bodice
to show I was resurrected from my death, and, now naked, Kit
had seized me with loving congratulations on my performance.
He seemed unfaithful to Tom Walsingham, or else, sundered,
they had made some bargain about vicarious coiling and thrusting
unclear to any outside their covenant or compact. Now Kit heard
himself called for, smacked a kiss on my lips heavy painted in
ochre, then went to his summons.

- So, he said to Sir Walter, I meet my poetic rebuker.

- Oh that, oh that. The wisdom of age answered youth’s
hot avowals. Yet not hot either. A cool and sweet pastoral, very
pretty. This that you gave us today was not so pretty. No rebuke,
a balance rather.

- The dramatic opposes the lyrical. But here was something
of the lyrical.

- To entertain divine Zenocrate, aye aye. Sitting’s as cheap
as standing, sit.

- In his lordship’s presence? Never.

- There are kings and emperors and sultans enow about, his
lordship said, seeing players not yet uncostumed. The beauty of
your craft is the showing that rank is but show and no reality.
Your true hierarchy is not decreed by birth’s accidents. You have
made some study of the colliding faiths, I see. Mohammedans
and Christians embattled and neither better than the other. You have had your sharp eyes about the court. What was the line,
Sir Walter?

- I’ll ride in golden armour like the sun. There is only
one man I know of with golden armour.

- I had heard of it, sir, Kit said, from Mr Watson. He
heard it from others.

- Well, my ostentation as Captain of the Queen’s Guard is
for the first time exalted. Like the sun, eh? And why not like
the sun? You have heard of the Priest of the Sun?

- You mean Bruno?

- So you know of him. He left us two years agone and
a loss to us despite his Italianate Latin. Chaelum, indeed.
Exchelsis, indeed. Your play opened doors, sir. I could smell
the dust dispersed by your broom. I must reward you with the
quintessence of newness. I had thought of a play to spread the
news of it. You know where I am?

- Indeed, sir. Durham House.

- That. Haunted by Durham’s Catholic bishops, but they
are easily smoked out.

- Talking of that, his lordship said, rising and hatting.

- Yes, yes. The nymph beckons. And Sir Walter too rose,
his hat very ornate with shed feathers from a whole aviary.
Gentlemen, it was diverting, oh more. Very earnest. Keep your
powder dry.

This was the prologue to Kit’s, it may so be termed with
little exaggeration, tragedy.

FIGHTING, sir? You look belaboured.

For Kit presented himself at Durham House with a bruised
cheek and a torn collar.

- Perhaps, he said, I should have gone home to change
or else cancelled my visit. But you will be habituated to frays
and the frayed in frays. A man in the street accused me of the
murder of his wife and unborn child. He said it was in the play and I had writ the play. The watch had to be called. One of the
rarer hazards of the poetic craft.

- I have somewhat to soothe. But perhaps not yet. You
like my turret?

It had maps and a mappamundi, Florentine Raleigh said.
Books, of course. And the wide window looked on the Thames
that bristled with masts under boiling clouds of early winter.
Raleigh was not in his costly finery whose intention was to
amaze; Kit was not to be amazed. He wore a shabby black
gown and was in old slippers; the bare legs were haired like a
satyr’s. A fine seacoal fire smoked, following the caprices of the
wind. Read this, Raleigh said. Read it aloud. I think Hariot has
an inner music even when he discourses practicalities. Kit took
the open book and read:

- The leaves being dried and brought into powder, the
inhabitants of Virginia take the smoke thereof by sucking
it through pipes made of clay into their stomach and head
from whence it purgeth superfluous phlegm and other gross
humours, openeth all the pores and passages of the body and
not only preserveth the body from obstructions but, if they have
been of too long continuance, in short time breaketh them…
So, Kit said, what is this panacea?

- Panacea is right, and Raleigh slapped his thigh. We need
a play to disseminate the truth of it. This kneaded and daubed
gallimaufry of Anthony Chute - you know the man? No, why
should you - is meant for the stage, but none will have it.

Kit read the title from the ill-ordered manuscript Raleigh
took from his ill-ordered table: The Transformation of the King
of Triniidado’s two daughters, Madam Panacea and the Nymph
Tobacco. He said:

- This last name, which I do not know, seems not a
feminine name.

- Well, she may at first strike you with a masculine buffet,
but thereafter she is gentler than love. And all that Hariot says
is true. You know Hariot? No, but you will. There are many that
you are yet to know. Are you willing to yield to the nymph? You
look doubtful. Well, I will demonstrate.

And Raleigh opened up a cabinet under his window. It held
rows of long tubes, as he showed, curved gracefully and ending
in a shallow bowl. Clay, he said, as in Virginia, but here I have
one especially fashioned in silver. It glinted in the firelight. And
here is the nymph. From a drawer of the cabinet he took a fair
pinch of a herb, strands of yellow, brown, black, and stuffed
this in the silver bowl. Smell, he said, proffering. Kit sniffed.
Heady, outlandish, altogether new. And now, Raleigh said, her
enlivening and curative spirit riseth in smoke. He took from a
pot a spill and enflamed it at his fire. Then he inflamed the
herb, the herb smouldered, he drew in smoke and, in a blue
jet, emitted it. The aroma sidled towards Kit; Kit coughed
gently. Aye, you will cough more when you kiss her. But the
cough will be in the manner of a cleansing, a disgorgement of
the grosser humours, you may even vomit them up. There is a
bowl beneath that table. And then no more coughing, only the
bliss of inhalation. Curse it, my talking has doused her. And he
refired his spill and relighted. The blue jet bore his words: Will
you try?

Kit tried. He held the warming clay bowl in his fist; the fumes
crept up the narrow tube. He drank to his lungs. And then his
whole body burst in the manic fit. Aye aye, Raleigh said, kicking
the spew-bowl from under. Be not shamed by it. I too when I
began. Cough cough, my boy, cough out the rottenness of the
age. And then gently draw. Gently but gently.

The one draw was for the moment enough. His stomach
settled, his lungs shrugged an acquiescence, but his head danced.
His eyes took in a reeling room then bade a stiller image ensue.
There sat Sir Walter, calm, drinking in his smoke, saying:

- There is a philosophy in this. As some say the love of
boys is the higher refinement of coupling - I cannot agree,
being by temperament given only to the enjoyment of women,
nevertheless - they say this, I say, meaning that appetite is no
longer chained to what nature wills, as with animals, so with
tobacco eating and drinking are refined to an essence beyond the
reach of gross nutriment. You follow me? I think you do. Harlot
will give you a lecture on this at our next meeting, which to you will be the first. Now draw gently and say how you are to grow
in love with the nymph. She enjoys the company of wine.

Raleigh rose, took from a corner table with sextants and
astrolabes on it what seemed to be the new-born child of a
ship’s bell. He tolled and soon a man that seemed a salted
mariner in livery entered and was told to bring Malmsey.
Soon, smoking intermitted by both, Raleigh settled to a musing
discourse, saying:

- Your Tamburlaine rang certain bells within me. It seemed
that you were not at the business of easy diversion but pouring
out a truth of the times. And the truth is that a man may rise from
nothing, and it is the man that doth this that is most likely to gain
the summit. For me, I was nothing, one of lowly Devon family
that had not even joined in the ennobling pillage of the Reform.
You know them, at least you know one, and that is Walsingham
of what he terms the Service. There are others - Leicester, the
Cecils, others. Now I grow old, I am in the middle of the road
of the Italian poet Bruno was ever citing, yet I hold favour. This
house was the Queen’s when she was a princess, now it is mine,
a royal bestowal. I have but the rank of a mean knighthood but
that is at least a signum of things done. I have founded a colony
in the name of her virginity, though the founding has been done
by means of an unworthy remoteness, since she would not let me
go, holding me to the court as her minion. But there you have
the greatness of Harlot, no man like him, sailor, mathematician,
skilled in the arts of navigation and all else needful, myself in
spirit on the raging ocean. Ocean, Ocean, aye, I call myself
but am by royal decree land-bound, beached. ‘Take more of
this Malmsey. Well, in your Tamburlaine you caught me, the
passionate shepherd riding in triumph through where was it?

- Persepolis. You are unjust to yourself. Tamburlaine is
all cruelty.

- And so am I, of necessity. Machiavelli has unveiled the
truth of our natures. The slaughter in Ireland and my cold eyes
looking on at the massacre of women. You have that in your play.

- So you saw the first part?

- I was told of it, but soon I will see it, it is ever being revived. You too, eh, a passionate shepherd riding in triumph
through wherever it is. Bruno talked much of what he called
mezzi and fini, meaning means and ends. Some ends, he was
always saying, might not be justified because of the baseness
of the means. He was sometimes more in the past than the
present. The present, as indeed the future, tells us, tells us
that this is outmoded and rubbishy doctrine. The condemned
Babington sent me a thousand pound to speak up for him. I
did not so speak but I kept the thousand. I needed all I could
get for the Virginia venture. What is your view of the morality
of this?

- My breath goes. It will come back.

- A tobacco shock, call it. It is you and myself that are not
of the ancient nobility that have to be weaned out of the old way
of sorting among the means and rejecting, coughing out I would
say, it is apt, it is a response uncontrollable, spewing out the
mezzo that harms the innocent. And yet if the world could be
saved by the slaughter of one such innocent, a child say, would
we not do it?

- It was attempted, I believe, in Palestine some sixteen
hundred years agone.

- So you may say that God himself approves the cruel
means to attain the needful end. Even so, we must school
ourselves to the quietening of our stomachs, as with tobacco,
delicious nymph. There are some that need not be so schooled.
You have heard of the Earl of Essex?

- Heard and, I think, seen. There were two in one of the
galleries at the first Tamburlaine, common people, a merchant
and his young wife, or so it seemed. There was talk that it was
my lord Essex and my lord Southampton, but which was the
wife and which the husband was in doubt, the name Mistress
Risley I think it was was heard, and both peered from what are
called Venetian dominoes.