A Dead Man in Deptford (32 page)

- Still, you have talked of tombstones. And it is all dealing
in death, is it not?

- The death of evil, Kit, the pounding into dust of the
enemies of a fair realm.

- I THINK it may well be our end here, the Earl of Northumberland said, busily smoking. The smoke-filled chamber was
a comfort. All puffed, and the smoke caressed the maps and the
mappamundi, the tokens of a great world without.

- Do not, Harlot said, be suffused with Sir Wat’s gloom.

- He has his glooms and his consolations, Adrian Gilbert
said. These latter, though, will not last. He was ever a bold
man. All of forty thousand pound, he says, and what to show?

- Tobacco and the solanum tuberosum, said Hariot, also
an Indian chief. Though why he must be baptised into the
Christian faith his own gods know.

- The Queen’s insistence, said the Earl, relighting. Well, here
he is at court to demonstrate to the sceptical that Virginia existeth.
He must be prodded to prove palpable reality. He rightly hit back
at the palpaters.

- He was brought to the Rose, Kit said. He wished to join
in the fighting on the stage. He has a fine head, they appear to
be a fine people. He counted for me: akafa, tuklo, tukcina. He
pronounced Alleyn a hatak kallo and Henslowe a hatak ikhallo.
A man strong, a man unstrong. You have discovered, he said to
Hariot, a strange people and so have they.

- Well, I am done with navigating. Sir Wat hands all
over to the stock companies and to them no poem such as
You brave heroic minds will be written. And he goes back
to privateering and plundering of Spanish gold, the Queen pretending ignorance. It is a hard life. And so we lose the head
of our being.

- Here is Adrian to confer familial authority on our last
sessions, said the Earl. Durham House no longer the sole eyrie
of profitless speculation.

- Profitless, you say profitless? Adrian Gilbert spoke, that was
Sir Walter’s half-brother. He had none of Sir Walter’s ruddiness
and bulk, none of the Devonian burr, though much of the sharp
eye of enquiry. And how are we to measure profit?

- He means, Hariot said, that the inspissation of a bigoted
and superstitious nation with the new knowledge and the new
scepticism is slow to accomplish.

- You will never instruct the bulk of the nation, the Earl
said. And the heads of a nation do not cry out to know that their
power is built on most flimsy foundations. They are quick - I
think of the bishops mostly - to instruct the lower sort through
the spoken word, since the unwashed are also the unreading,
and will even, as with the Marprelate flimflammery, use the
playhouse for damning what they wish damned. What has our
Merlin here done to flush a clean wind through the brains of
the sausage-chewers? Faustus could as well have come from the
bishops themselves with its flouting of the virtue of knowledge.

- What is spoken on the stage, Kit said low and with
some despondency, is pored over by the jailers of our souls.
Only history is unassailable. Here is the truth of those that
lived and it is nobody’s office to praise or condemn.

Her ladyship of Pembroke, Adrian Gilbert said, is always
saying that the people whose forebears made the past, and she
means the common sort, should know that past. Show that beliefs
and manners do change, that all things are subject to change, that
there is no stasis.

- You sound like Warner, Harlot said. Where is Warner?

- We were together in our alchemic enquiries at Wilton.
He stayed, I am here at a near-brother’s summons. He helps
the Countess to make filthy her most delicate hands.

- Honoris tui studiosissimus, Kit murmured. All looked
askance and he said: Pardon me. The letter she sent me stank of assafoetida or devil’s dung. I was charmed. Laurigera stirpe
prognata Delia, Sidnaei vatis Apollinei genuina soror I had written.
This was the dedication to Tom Watson’s Amintae Gaudia, writ
for her but yet to be printed, my Latin is better than Tom’s but
not better than hers. She disliked my play for Pembroke’s Men.
Too much sodomy, she said, and not enough history. I cut out
the buggering of King Edward with a branding iron. Well, she
shall have history without sodomy, if it can be found.

Sir Walter’s man came to the door to announce that Sir
Walter and his lady were arisen and about, all might go down
to the hall to partake of somewhat, an it please my lord and
gentlemen. They rose and wondered if they should abandon
their pipes. Lady Raleigh was a most delicate lady.

- Lady Raleigh, the Earl stoutly said, would not be Lady
Raleigh if she abhorred tobacco. It is in the weft of her husband’s
skin. But we will descend pipeless.

- Below, there was a table with decanted wine white and
red, cold small fowls, a sallet of cold boiled tubers diced with
parsley, and a careless throw of kickshawses. Then Sir Walter,
jewelled like the sun in his glory, entered with his lady. This was
Bess (it was a kind of deference to her royal mistress to rustify her
given name thus) of the Throckmortons, and, seeing her for the
first time, Kit felt that the disposition of his inner juices might
well undergo a kind of Pauline conversion, as in Kyd’s wretched
poem:

Though never enmity, indifference rather, all women being his
mother and sisters and odd oyster wenches. She was termed one
of the Queen’s Glories, and so, by God, she was, or rather one
of, by God, God’s. Glory was in her eyes, and the sun in his
glory debased through the mullioned window was caught and
reglorified in her hair. Straight as a tree in farthingale of cloth
of gold with scarlet petticoat, with a waist that a man might span with two hands, nay to be truthful three, her bosom demurely
covered to show she had yielded her knot, she radiated qualities
above virtue, the eyes grey and merry, a smile as of kindly
mockery on her lips, and her scent not of the mixers of aromatic
drops but of spring fields and the bruised fruits of the fall. Kit
near went down on his knees. 0 dea certa.

- You said? she said, smiling.

- This is our poet Merlin, sweetheart. The rest you know.
Well, my lord and gentlemen, here is Raleigh the married man,
and we may expect the worst from her majesty, since the Earl of
Essex is back in favour. A man must go his own way and a maid
hers, in ecstasy we court disaster, but there will be time. Amor
vincit omnia, though the royal displeasure may be said to be an
exception. “Tomorrow we ride to Devon, whence no doubt we
shall be haled out and back. Now we eat together as friends.

And so they did, standing about the table with no stiff
formality. Bess, Lady Raleigh, chewed a pheasant leg with
exquisite greasy lips, a dancing beaker of white in an exquisite
hand, and said to Kit:

- There was your Dr Faustus at court for the Shrovetide
revels. Her majesty was much agitated by your parade of the
Seven Deadly Sins.

- She may have known it was a tribute to dead Tarleton, my
lady, who travelled the country with a play of the same name.
And that doubtless took her back to the Earl of Leicester. She
liked the rest?

- These days she likes nothing. And what Wat and I
have done she will like least.

- An end, this Wat was saying, to our honest endeavours.
But do not think there will be an end to enquiry less honest.
There is some murmur of having Tom Harlot here up before
the Privy Council.

- Oh no, not that, oh my God not that.

- Love and reason, it seems, are booted out of the
door. Well, we expected this. Did we not expect it, Kit
Merlin?

- I know not what to expect.

- Always expect the worst. Exspecta pessima. I think I
shall change the family motto.

- Exspectamus, amended Kit the Latinist.

I M u s T now with reluctance bring in the man I lodged withal
and who was to be my associate for many years with the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men, a company not formed in Kit’s brief lifetime.
His name, like all names, suffered a multiplicity of deformation,
from Shagspaw to Shogspere, from Choxper to Jacquespere,
which was the ingenious etymologising of a drunken Huguenot,
of whom London had many. He and Kit were at work on The
Contention Between the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, a most incommodious title which later would be changed to
Henry VI Part One. The play of Edward II, though a brutalisation of historic truth, had pleased with its nobles and bishops and
violence, and there was a need now for further theatricalising of
old Holinshed. Kit had invited his collaborator to Scadbury, with
Tom Walsingham’s approval, and as they sat in the summer saloon
Kit asked what he should be called, and he replied that Will was
enough. Then he said:

- Aio te, AEacida, Romanos vincere posse. This will not do.

- You do not pronounce it aright. Are you an Oxford man?

- No, they whipped Latin into me at the grammar school,
very little and no Greek. Perhaps I in my ignorance am the
better fitted to say it will not do. It is learned and will not be
understood.

- It will be by those that have read their Ennius. It is
what the oracle at Delphi told Pyrrhus. It means both that
he will conquer the Romans and that the Romans will conquer
him. It is a pregnant ambiguity.

- Its pregnancy, like that of a wife two months gone, will not
be easily apparent. But this I know. Difaciant laudis summa sit ista
tuae. I have read a sufficiency of Ovid. But would York’s son cry
that to his murderer? It seems to me that you seek the praise of my lord Pembroke and his lady rather than the comprehension
of the multitude.

- The multitude oft likes to be mystified. It flatters them
to think they are thought to know the classical authors.

- If you will have it, though I remain doubtful. I wrote
this while you were wandering the woods with your Lord of
the Manor.

- So the adder Tom killed bit your fancy.

- We have enough adders in Warwickshire. Listen.

- You have learned, you have been learning.

- You find yourself there?

- It lacks a shout. Hyena’s heart, no, lion’s, no, tiger’s
heart dressed in, no, wrapped in a female skin, woman’s hide.
Why did you come to this gear, as they say?

- To stop breeding. Three children were too many to keep
on the wage of a lawyer’s clerk. When the Queen’s Men came
I showed them part of a play and they had me because one of
them had been beaten to death in the churchyard. I had been
trying to translate Plautus but it seemed easier to pen my own
lines. So I am here, though first as an actor. They will not have it
that grammar-school boys can write plays. Botch and help when
speed is needful, yes, but not sit to write a Tamburlaine.

- Well, I must leave much to you with this, and I am
not sorry. The Lord of the Manor requires a poem so I must
write a poem, he will lock me up with bread and water if not.
Besides, I need to.

- What theme?

- Zero and Menander or some such thing.

- You mock yourself.

- It is all a great mockery. What is there for us who have
no land nor goods to trade in? I think my lines from Ennius and
Ovid are to comfort myself with the illusion that my learning has
a use. Why, sir, you are a gentleman with your Latin tags, I had
thought you to be a hedge-dragged sturdy beggar.