A Dead Man in Deptford (33 page)

- You sang of profitable labour that time.

- When?

- In that tavern. I heard you. You nodded to me.

- I was abstracted. And now am abstracted in the other
sense. Will you stay here while I am gone?

- I like not too much the man Frizer. He looks down his nose.

- He may mean harm but he lacks the skill to do it.

- And I am not used to the life of great houses. I will
ride my hired nag back with you. 0 tiger’s heart wrapped in
a woman’s hide. That is your touch, the learnable line. But I
will learn. Where do you go?

- To a foreign country. Do not ask.

Tom Walsingham was away with Frizer on, Kit thought
he knew, the dragging of high overdue interest on a loan
out of some squire’s son overspent in London. They led their
horses from the stable and then took the London road. It was
chill weather and they trotted under a sky that had no hope in
it. Kit asked:

- You saw what happened at Holborn?

- It was indecent. I kept away. Tyburn surely is enough for
their bloody shows without raising a special gallows in Holborn.
Why?

- To fright the lawyers in the Inns of Court that are
turning to papistry. Well, it was to do with your patron.

- Not mine, not yet, if ever, but I hope. I must steel
my heart to comfort my hopes. I did not think John Florio
was a spy, a harmless Italian protestant I thought, bowing
to my lord, a good secretary. Nor did I know that the
Southampton tutor was a papist and kept a tame jackdaw
of a Jesuit. You believe the story that this Fr Gennings called on St Gregory when his heart was in the hangman’s
hand?

- It was I take it a gargling kind of scream sounding
grrrgrrry. I come to believe little. I want peace, peace and
again peace.

- There is only the one place where that is. Do not pray
for it yet.

They cantered in silence and reached a dark London enlivened
by fires whereon Spanish effigies were burnt. Would this never
end? Kit found Poley in nightshirt and nightgown, groaning
with rheum. His black cat played with a ball of wool that
dangled from the table top. Poley offered a hot decoction of
blackberries, saying: Peace? We are on the way to having it.
It is a matter of giving the Spaniards a sufficient fright. If the
Scotch Catholic earls can be seduced to come to Berwick they
will be arrested, and all over.

- All over with their murder. You have had experience
of murdering Scotch Catholics and one higher than an earl.

- You are morose, you are sullen. Your eyes are feverish
in this candlelight. Are you sickening?

- Nothing your physician could cure. On what charge
arrested?

- You need to ask? An act of war, the enemy on our soil.
Then a trial at which they will dissemble nothing, this Philip
of Spain may at leisure digest, then execution.

- And then a great march of all Scots skirling across
the border. What am I to do?

- Deliver this letter to young Fowler in Edinburgh. It is to
summon the papist nobility to a meeting in Berwick. The letter
is signed by one they know.

- A forgery, of course. This is monstrous. Any mezzo will
serve your fine. That is Machiavelli. Bruno thought differently.
And if I say I will not do it?

- You break trust, and that is a kind of treason. You
go alone, taking ship from Deptford tomorrow.

- Money.

- You shall have money. And you will sleep here tonight.

- Under lock.

- Kit, Kit, we are friends.

I know from what he said that he eased a grey trip up
that eastern flank with fancied immersion in a kinder sea.

Yet that kinder sea would drown the hero that swam to Hero’s
arms. The ship rolled and with pain he dipped into the ink of
his writing case, alone and huddled in the lee. And once he
had the mad thought that he would cast the sealed forged letter
into the bitter waters, leave the ship at Scarborough and hide in
York where the first Christian emperor had been crowned, so in
a manner to be protected by old Rome and its legions. Or make
the pretence that the letter had been delivered and young Fowler
on his denial of this might be branded the liar. No, he would do
what was called his duty. He had seen enough of his own blood
shed but had by proxy shed quarts of other blood and would
shed more. The pricked blood bladders of the playhouse sickened
with their mockery. All wanted blood, blood was a beggar and
screamed to be shed. He wished, as sickness struck him in the
ship’s bouncing by the Scotch coast, that he could live in the
dead Greek dream he was in rhymed verses recounting. Free
under a redder sun among fauns and myrtle and the treading of
the grapes while on the hill smoke rose in some gentle sacrifice to gods crushed now by the monotheist heresy. What was he,
what was he to be?

There was a foundering in him, the impaction of a weakness,
a desire to be done with the living world and yet not yet in death.
The stink of the playhouse rose feebly above the salt spray and
he would have done soon with its feigning. You haled from the
grave figures of old history who would be gladder to rest, the
turmoil done, and there they were, Braile and Johnson and
Robinson and Foyle and Rice and the great thundering Alleyn
enacting them, suffering again that the rabble might with glee be
spattered by swine’s blood. He would wrap himself in an older
past, and yet he smelt bad breath on Socrates and in the mouth
of Alcibiades saw the decay of a tooth. Hero had lost a toe and
Leander’s laugh was inane.

While I leave Kit to his Scotch venture which there is
no need for me to report I turn again to my chamberfellow
and aspiring playman. I said, did I not, that I brought him in
with reluctance, since his is another story and its nudging and
shouldering into this of Kit’s harms wholeness and bids break
the frame. But Natura abhorret vacuum, and the same is true of
what is against nature, nothing more against nature than our mad
playhouse, and with Kit’s return to England and Scadbury he
left a vacuum in playmaking which had to be filled, and there
was our Warwickshire man to fill it. The Contention Between the
Two Famous Houses was finished by one pen only and that with a
kind of speed of insolence. The play could hardly fail, nor its two
successors, what with Talbot the terror of France at a time when
a protestant French king was yielding to the Catholic League
and France was once more a proclaimed enemy. And Will of
Warwickshire, that had ever been mild, now became boastful.
Boastful most in the presence of the sick and sneering Greene,
in his cups at the Mermaid where Tom Nashe of his goodness
had bought him a fish dinner.

- Well, it is as I said, there be two poles in the mappamundi
of the writer’s craft, ever opposed, and the scholarly and the
mere crowd-pleasing cannot meet.

- There was enough of the scholarly in this chronicle, though that I left to my partner who defected. But I do not see how
university study fits a man for filling a playhouse. It is better
he go out in the world and observe manners.

- Meaning the world of butchers and glovers.

- Clothing five fingers need not be incompatible with clothing the five feet of a blank verse. And the whole world eats
flesh.

- So we leave the nobility of the art to be traduced by
grammar-school boys that strut on the stage and mouth country
vowels.

- Envy, envy.

- The scholarly are above envy. Wipe off that false disdain.

- I could be angry. But you are not worth anger. I will
pour out on the stage rhetoric that will not require justifying
out of Cicero or Quintilian or whoever. There is no substitute
for talent.

- Spit out your fishbones and go back to your mouthing.

- By God, I have had enough.

- Earned enough and more. The joybells of coin in your
purse and you no more than a country upstart, what be this
Hodge why it be a whole shillen and that chav not seen afore.
Off ere I vomit.

- You have vomited often enough in fair company. Chief
of the scholarly pigs without talent. We will beat you all yet.

- Cutting Ball will get you on my orders.

- I may have country vowels but I have also country muscles.
I have butchered and will butcher.

But only once to my knowledge were there blows, and
those on Gracechurch Street on a dark night. Greene was
drunk and feeble and the country muscles prevailed all too
easily. Yet there was shame and a quick desisting, for Greene’s
sickness was pitiable. And with the plague approaching and the
impending closure of our playhouses Will of Warwickshire had
set himself to shutting himself off from the world and starting
an heroic poem to one that he hoped would be his patron.

It was at a performance of Harry the Sixth at the Rose that a
black-clad fanatic burst on to the stage to denounce all plays with The cause of plagues is sin and the cause of sin is plays therefore
the cause of plagues is plays, a syllogism that did not please and
he was bundled off crying to the heavens. Yet at Scadbury there
was no intimation of coming troubles. Kit was able to say:

- I have not finished but I see a hope of finishing. Listen.

- A good time to pause, Tom Walsingham said. Have you
a mind to riding to Canterbury? It is good weather for riding.

- Together? What business have you there?

- We are in Kent and Canterbury is the fair rose of Kent
and I am become a magistrate of Kent. The business is to do
with the great press of Huguenots and others pouring in and
the native people becoming poor. That would include your own
people.

- Huguenots buy Huguenot shoes but the native people have
feet. My father holds his own, I have heard no cry of distress.

- The magistrates of the county are to meet, I being one,
and talk of making your river navigable for boats and lighters,
whatever those are, so increasing trade, how I do not know but
shall doubtless be told.

- You must grey your beard and look grave, Kit said, leaning
back in his chair, rubbing his wearied writing hand. Indeed Tom
was much still the ephebe, sharing boys with his friend though
talking of the gravity of marriage, hair hyacinthine, eyes bright
and empty. You a magistrate.

- We start tomorrow. I shall wear sober black and a great
black hat.

And so with the vermilion of the June dawn on their right hand
they started, sleepily but merrily, in murmurations of starlings
and exaltations of larks, unmocked by cuckoos, bachelors and
friends, not properly now in the carnal sense lovers, chewing
shives of beef and hunks of a loaf as they rode their first stage,
passing from right hand to left left to right a cold flask of wine
and water as they rode. On the narrow way out of Bexley they
met a carriage with gold cherubim on its corners and a ducal
blazon on its doors, driver and two footmen in their scarlet best,
two fine Arabs drawing. They took left and right of it with the
speed of youthful insolence, causing the ducal steeds to misfoot
and whinny, the portly driver to raise his whip and the great man
within, a mere youth of long nose, nodding feathers and a poncet
box, to cry feebly: Canaglia. What vermin are these, belabour the
swine. So that Kit fired back, very merry, with: Sacco di merda,
vostro disonore. At Swanscombe was a cattle fair, all dung and
lowing, slapping of haunches and chaffering, and they took ale
in a tavern where a paunched farmer counted gold for the sale
of a bull named Terror, pouching it with obscene love and spit
and a snort for the poor who begged a penny for a cooling pot.
Outside Frindsbury a man was beating his ass with hate, ferocity
and a gnarled club because, overladen with a whole tree trunk
about its own trunk tightly bound, already galled and with open
sores, it could not engage the hill. He cried: Damned beast you
shall go a third day without fodder. Kit and Tom alighted to
grasp the club and beat the man in his turn, slashing off the
burden with a knife and bidding the ass go free to the fields but
it would not. At an inn in Gillingham they fed on cheese and the
morning’s bread and watched in near disbelief a contest of boys
eating, each urged on by bet-placers and a father, the provender
provided being a stale simnel cake, two date tarts, an apple pie
in a deep dish, a dozen or so custards. At Sittingbourne an acid
twisted man of great age, some sixty years, pawed and admired
their clothes and horses, lamenting that after all his life as a town
clerk he had nothing to show, Why should you be young and merry and I not, there is no justice in the world. In a meadow
outside Faversham they saw a shepherd snoring in the sun, with
the bolder of his flock breaking through the hawthorn hedge and,
unnoticed, unchidden. And, dismounted for leg-stretching and a
roadside piss, not far beyond they heard human moaning under
Birdsong, and, approaching the sound as it were tipatoe, they
saw from behind an elm, looking down into the grassy hollow, a
boy and girl busy in the act of love. Smock was up and breeches
were down, and he thrust hard moaning until he gave a weak cry
of joy to the empty heavens. And she beneath that was country
buxom seemed glad it was over.