A Dead Man in Deptford (29 page)

- This we find hard to accent. The physical Christ ascends
to a physical heaven. Harlot the cartographer cannot map its
whereabouts. When your people come to power will they burn
me for this?

- We will think of burning others when we ourselves have
gone through the fire. But he spoke with a smile that showed
fishbones in tooth crevices. And, not now smiling, I will go
through the fire when the time comes, for come it will.

- You accept martyrdom?

- As the final expression of love.

- Love of Christ which is not love of God.

- Christ is God, he is God tempered to our weakness. We
may expunge from our view the fiery Jehovah of the Hebrews.
Christ in glory is still Christ in rags. And then: Why are you
here?

- I accompany one who delivers a message to the King
of Scots.

- On what matter?

- This I am not permitted to know.

- It will be about a Catholic invasion of England. Nothing
will come of it, I can tell you. There have been Spaniards here
nodding in their beards aye aye and then sailing back to the Low
Countries. All depends on King Jamie, and King Jamie dithers.
He thinks he will come to the English throne in time and he may
be right. He is learning to love bishops. Us he hates, but the Kirk
is powerful. So you come here with a Catholic emissary.

- In a manner, keeping my own thoughts secret.

- You, Penry said, leaning over the broken herring earnestly,
must put your house in order. You believe nothing.

- I believe in the power of words.

- Power on behoof of what?

- This I must learn.

- The time is short and groweth shorter. And, as though
the eating of a herring were a frivolous expense of it, he said: I
am glad to have met you again. I will pray for your soul. Christ
will hear me.

Kit slept alone that night; Tom must have been granted a bed
in the palace. When he came down to the smoky fire, the wind
dashing rain against the panes, the dawn all tumbling clouds,
he refused breakfast, first not knowing why and then knowing.
The sacrament on an empty stomach. But it was no sacrament,
it was but bread. And yet throughout all of the Christian time it
had been Christ’s body. Could the edict of mortal men, preening
in fine robes, cancel Christ’s own words? But Christ was but a
mortal man. Or Christ never was.

- Hoc est corpus meum. Haec est enim calix sanguinis -

He retched on the round wafer. It would not be swallowed,
it clung as flesh to flesh. The bulky man at the far end of the
altar rail and the black-clad thin man at his side had marched
before Kit down the short aisle, the bulky one limping, clad in
the doublet and hose of the south, though very sober, but with a
sort of blanket over his upper body, as for the cold, in what Kit
took to be the colours of his clan. Now both looked toward the
sound of retching, and he in black whispered to his companion
after the ciborium had passed.

- Ite, missa est.

They met in the chapel porch, waiting till the scant worshippers, mostly poor old women, had gone out into the wind and
rain before speech. The Earl of Huntly donned his bonnet. Kit
could not comprehend his words. The other spoke the English
of London, saying:

I am Shelton that serves his lordship. You are come
with a letter?

- And to collect one. Kit handed over his sealed package.
The Earl tore open the outer wrapping with great and clumsy
hands. Frae Pawley.

- From Mr Poley. Him perhaps you will know. He has
been this way before.

- Know of. He has suffered prison and torture for the
cause. Mr Shelton did not look innocent. He was brisk and
with the discreet features of dissembled jesuitry. None more
trustworthy, he said.

- Amen. And Kit almost retched again. And for him?

- This. And he took from his breast a letter with a threefold
seal. Kit stowed it.

- The Earl of Huntly surveyed Kit from sad grey eyes
under eyebrows shaggily grey and licked chapped lips that
showed red through a grey beard in need of barbering. He
spoke.

- He says you must keep clear of the martyrisers. You have
the look of one most vulnerable. He bids you pray to the mother
of God for protection.

FREE, how free? he thought.

- Free, totally, Robin Poley pronounced. They were in
the Garden, whose garden was all sleeping trees and bushes
frost-crusted. Your discharge is confirmed and the bail money
remitted. In another sense you are not free, this you know. You
will never be free till England is free of the threat. Nor I, he
added.

- The message is what you expected?

- Sir William Stanley is building his force in the Low
Countries and paying his men with coined pewter. The invasion
will not be yet. Time to sow fears, hates and so forth. And the
Scotch king has declared against the Catholics, we have his
own word for that in his own fist. He loves the Archbishop
of Canterbury and adores our royal lady. So now they must
seek an English claimant to the English throne and who will
that be?

- How can I know?

- You are closer to him than you think. He has no mere
nominal patronage of players. I mean Lord Strange. Stanley
is his cousin. King James Sixth and Strange have blood in
common, James from the elder sister of Harry Eighth, Strange
from the younger on his mother’s side. There is little to choose
between them, but James hopes to succeed the easy way. He is
a drunkard, a sodomite and a coward.

- Is there evidence that Lord Strange plots to succeed? He is
no Catholic. He insists that his players pray before performance,
and it is not Catholic prayers. And all must kneel to pray for the
Queen at the end.

- Subterfuge, dissembling. He would have full-blooded popery back on us tomorrow if he could, and all the bishops Spanish.
He must be watched. It dies hard with these northern earls, the
old faith. The people have rejoiced in a lost armada and are ready
to sleep again. They must be pricked awake to the danger. Fears
and hates must be sown.

- As you said.

- As I said, and you look sour enough about it.

- I picture Christ on the Mount preaching fear and hate.

- This is hypocrisy, you know it to be so. Merlin the atheist.

- Slander.

- It may be slander but the imputation doth little harm.
The true English Church makes atheists and Catholics sleep
under one blanket. And how did you enjoy taking the Catholic
eucharist?

- How do you know of this?

- My meetings with the Scotch earls always begin with
a mass. I take it your encounter did too.

- It was not pleasant.

- Oh come, man, a morsel of bread, no more.

- To them, no. To us no for a thousand years and more.
It was not decent. The host would not be digested.

- Superstition, man. I was brought up on eating to my
own damnation, which you were not. It is flour and water.
Well, enough. You need money for drink, your digestion will
soon improve. Philips or Phelips will have some silver for you.

- Have I now paid my debts? Am I free of the Service?

- Kit Kit Kit, you will never be free. Or rather in that
service to the Service lies your only freedom. Go now.

Kit went then. Whither and to what I do not know. But I know
that on the vigil of the Nativity he was about in icy Eastcheap,
wishing himself nor any others joy in the season. There were
many in the dusk streets spewing into the kennel their devotion to
the child of the birth that was approaching. No great star shone;
the sky was murky. Kit took his early dinner at the Three Tuns,
where, his past rowdiness forgiven or forgot, he was welcome
enough as Mr Tom Berlaine or Dr Forster. He asked for a baked
pigeon with a forcemeat of saffron and dried rosemary. He could
eat little but was thirsty for ale. He sat alone at one end of the long
table at whose other end was a laughing company of stuffers and
swillers. Alone though not long. Soon Ingram Frizer came in with
Nicholas Skeres, making with the draught of their entrance the
candles dance and with Skeres’s stumble a chair rock. They were
drunk, though gently, and recognised Kit, sitting on either side
of him without invitation, Skeres tearing a tiny leg off the pigeon
that cooled untouched and tearing the flesh with finicking teeth.
He was, doubtless for his Saviour’s nativity, clean and cleanly
dressed. Frizer was as always in sober black. Kit said:

- No majordomo’s chain as yet?

- I have it but do not flaunt it. My master asked you to come
to him but you have not obeyed. For this Yule, said he. There is
to be a great fire tomorrow in the great hall and the tenants and
servants are to be given drink and pasties. Holly and ivy are all
about, aye.

- Mr Walsingham is doubtless Lord of the Manor at Scadbury
but he is not my lord and you may not talk of obedience.

- I cry your mastership’s mercy. He is, he told Skeres,
to be the poet that resideth. A good poet, he admitted, I have
some lines off.

- A thousand. Ilium.

- All one.

- You do not have it right. But it is good for you to have
me even if deformedly by heart. Do, Mr Skeres, devour all my
pigeon. I have no appetite.

- No? Is there roast pig? he asked young Kate Shilliber,
in whose bosom some ivy rested. We shall have roast pig. We
will, he told Kit, have roast pig, being entitled to it. We have
roasted our pig and at leisure we will crunch his crackling. No
more.

- I said Winchester, Frizer leered, because I was thinking
on Winchester geese. They are all across the river in the Bishop
thereof his jurisdiction. But they hiss not in my direction, I will
not have it. Cleanness of life, master poet, is the clench and the
out-about. So I attain where I am through cleanness. In buying
and eke selling. And if there be coneys to be catched -

- Enough enough, Skeres said, digging the stuffing out
of Kit’s dove with a long clean finger.

- Aye, discretion. Take counsel from one that knoweth. My
master’s brother that had been Lord was pecked most viciously
by the geese. A skellet with holes all agape. When he died, I
was there, the forcemeat burst out of him.

- No, no, Skeres protested, desisting from his finger-poking.
Be cleanly, we are in gentlefolk’s company. Gentry coves they
call them in the place that shall have no name.

- So, Frizer said, each night after supper you will recite
what lines you have writ in the day and my master will nod or
shake according to whether they be good or no. I have a pretty
taste in such things I may say, I have read books to him.

- You are then raised above majordomo, Kit said. He
could not take offence: they were drunk and this was Christmas
Eve, but he had not known that their friendship or alliance had
brought two worlds together. You are Aristotle to his Alexander.
Or Seneca to his Nero.

- You will not call him Nero, Frizer said with sudden sharpness. I know of the emperors, you think I do not, and
Nero was cruel but my master is not. Save to them deserving
of it. Things are changed and changed mightily. There is to be
no more beastliness.

- What beastliness do you mean? And on whose part?

- It is Christmas, I say no more. Think on the pretty child
in the stable with beasts all about him. Though no geese either
of Winchester or Jerusalem. It is the season of cleanly love.

Robert Greene, staggering in, took that as a stage cue. Love,
he cried, and charity, which may be accounted the same thing. Of
your charity a pot of Malmsey. I will pay on the feast of Stephen,
my credit is good. He saw Kit and raised a finger as in menace. I
forgive my enemies. My salvation is in my Saviour who saveth me
hence the redundancy and pleonasm of my asseveration. Cutting
cutteth and Em emmeth and Master Greene of arts a master is
alone. Malmsey.

- Are all drunk this night save myself? said Kit rising and
seeking to push his way out. Skeres pushed him back to sitting.
He said: