A Dead Man in Deptford (6 page)

Tom Watson howled like a hound at that, though in a
manner of comedy, and Walsingham, hands clasped behind,
sharply looked out of the window, seeing mostly carts. Then
he turned and sternly said:

- Faith is the one binding force. The Musulmans of many
colours attest this. When I was ambassador in Paris our doors
were opened to protestants of all races fearful of the Catholic knives and bludgeons. Her Majesty, God save her, argued hotly
against the cost of such hospitality, but I reminded her that it
was her own faith that was under attack. We were not there
as cold English bystanders of the Paris massacres. Our enemy
was the Catholic enemy and our friends were the protestant
persecuted. And yet she prates, argues I would say, of the
good policy of keeping France a friend against Spain. Have
you thought of this? Have you your own thoughts about
France?

- Sir Philip Sidney calls France a sweet enemy.

- Ah, Sir Pip. A good son-in-law, the flower of the chivalry
of the Reform, no man braver, no greater hater of papistry.
Walsingham waved him away as he had waved away Poley,
whoever he was, though as though he were a more substantial
cobweb. But he is a poet, and poets are given to the half-lie,
Plato would say the whole one. He meant the sweetness of their
women and wine and comfits. But mark the word enemy. Enemy
he means. You are to enter the territory of the enemy. You have
things to ask?

- Money, expenses I would say. The time of going. This
is the long vacation but it does not go on for ever.

- Ah, sweet Jesus, it is always money. July the sixth you
must be in Dover, there is an inn called, let me see, yes, the
Luce, whether fish or flower is not certain. There Robert Poley
will meet you and tell you all and disburse. You are not in this
for profit.

- The profit of the realm, Kit said, standing to greater
though factitious attention. God save it and her. Walsingham
looked for the ironic but did not find it. He nodded and
said:

- Well, then. It is fortunate that Canterbury is near Dover.
You will in any event be making a family visit so need not
claim from the Service for your costs of travelling thither.
Thenceforward it may be different. God save the Queen.

- This could be taken as a dismissal, but before Kit could
bow and leave, the door was thrust open and one entered.
Walsingham frowningly said:

- This is mannerless, sir. Here be grave matters proceeding
and you blunder in as it were a common tavern. Pray leave and
come when you are called for.

The entrant mooed like a calf but in insolence looked
about him. He saw Kit. Kit saw him. Nay, it was more
than pure seeing. It was Jove’s bolt. It was, to borrow from
the papists, the bell of the consecration. It was the revelation of
the possibility nay the certainty of the probability or somewhat
of the kind of the. It was the sharp knife of a sort of truth in
the disguise of danger. Both went out together, and it was as
if they were entering, rather than leaving, the corridor outside
with its sour and burly servant languidly asweep with his
broom, the majordomo in livery hovering, transformed to
a sweet bower of assignation, though neither knew the other
save in a covenant familiar through experience unrecorded and
unrecordable whose terms were not of time and to which space
was a child’s puzzle. He was a young man of Kit’s own age
it seemed, lank locks of auburn parted and flowing, long face
above a long body, so that Kit must needs look up at wide blue
eyes and wide doubtfully smiling mouth, the white collar open
at the girlish throat, hose wrinkled and points carelessly tied,
a light dew on him as though he had come from tennis or
fives. From him rose a faint odour of sweat and rose water.
He said:

- Grave matters, was it?

- Not so grave and over anyway. Kit was aware of his voice
grown phlegmy. He cleared his throat. Are you too in what he
calls the Service?

- He uses me at times, not often. He is my cousin and
pounds at me like an uncle. He is grave but not to be taken
gravely. I think we must have met before.

- You and I? I think not. You are not a Cambridge man?

- I am not anything save the most discardable of the Walsinghams. A younger son who does not inherit. Thomas, whose name
taught him to doubt. Let us get out of here. It smells of stratagems
and death.

- But you wished to see your cousin?

- There is no haste. I am thirsty after my bout. The Crown
is round the corner.

- You were at the foils?

- I call myself a sort of swordsman. And, when the majordomo had opened the door for them, he breathed in London
air, which was not sweet, as it were all country blossom and
birdsong. Better, he said. I like not the town, all horse dung
and hawking. I shall ride back to Scadbury tomorrow.

- Which is where?

- An easy canter by way of Chislehurst. You do not sound
like a London man. Who are you, by the way?

- Marlowe or Marley or Morley. You have a choice. The
first name does not equivocate. Christopher.

- Which is Kit, so you are Kit, come, Kit, Kit, Kit. A
university youngster on the make, and why not. You have
spying ambitions?

- Rather poetic. And perhaps in the playhouse.

They had reached the Crown, which held a brace of drinking
draymen. These took in indifferently a gentleman indifferently
dressed and another in exquisite and mostly borrowed raiment,
apt for the grave matters of the court or the airy concerns of city
leisure. Thomas Walsingham shrugged with a smile at his lack
of a purse, but here they would slate his order; Kit eagerly paid
out pennies for ale.

-A poet. I have no skill, but I have been the object
or recipient of verses. Not often good verses.

- It does not surprise me.

- That the verse should not be good?

- That, yes, the age smells of bad poetry, but chiefly the
other.

- That I should be what I said? Well, sometimes through
compliments to me fools think they may reach my high-placed
cousin. You came another way.

- Through Tom Watson. A chance meeting, a common
concern with poetic trafficking. I am lodging with him. To
revert to what you said earlier. You seemed to think that we
had already met. I had the same feeling though I knew it was not possible in the way the world calls meeting. But this sometimes
happens. Plato or some of his followers might posit the prior or
prenatal collocation of souls.

- Does he not also tell some legend of a unity capriciously
split by the gods, so that half goes wandering in search of half?
But that is a pretty doctrine of male soul and female soul conjoined if they are lucky, which is rare, after an eternity of seeking.

- Male and female are grossly conjoined following nature’s
wish that they breed. There is an airier or more spiritual mode
of conjunction.

They drank and drinking looked each other in the eye or
eyes. Thomas Walsingham said:

- More spiritual? Angels holding hands?

- Holding hands, yes. Effecting more intimate joining. We
have bodies, we are not all soul. There is a higher order than
what crass nature dictates. Nature does not want poetry, nor
music, nor the eyes of the seeker looking upward from the dungy
earth. Nature does not want the love that she would call sterility
but we could designate otherwise.

- Well, we have known each other some ten minutes and
you are already anatomising unnatural love.

Kit blushed. He said hurriedly:

- Unnatural love is a bad phrase. What is against nature
is sin, so the religions say. But what makes man what he is
is unnatural if we raise him as we must above eating, dunging,
begetting, dying.

- Well, these be high or deep matters for a morning cup
and a first meeting. In youth is pleasure. (Kit started: someone,
perhaps he himself, had said that that previous day or night
that seemed now much in the past.) I mean that thought is
the enemy of doing. My grave cousin is always saying that
thought both makes and undoes life’s fabric. If, he says, he
thinks too much on racks and thumbscrews and what he calls
the apparatus of the finding of truth then he grows sick. And
yet, he says, what is the big conflict but a grinding of thought
against thought. Some think that bread can be God and some
that bread is bread and God but a hovering thought over it. And some that the Pope is the devil. It was different a hundred
years back. Thoughts change and become perilous. What, then,
are the things that do not change? In youth is pleasure.

He pledged that in a draining of his tankard. Kit did not
drain his. He said:

- I beg pardon for bringing in the high or deep matters.
Altus in Latin is both deep and high. I was seeking some
answer to the question how a man can have a conviction that
he is drinking with an old friend -

- You feel that? That we are old friends?

- I feel at ease and yet not at ease. And you will know
why not at ease.

Thomas Walsingham looked away at that. He looked at the
street outside the open door. An old nag, much galled on its
flanks, was pulling a cart of country produce; the wheel had
jolted against a hitching post and the horse was being blamed.
Then he turned and said:

- I know not why not. You may be at ease, he said in a
parody of a captain’s tone. Wholly at ease. And then: There
is the boy in this thing of Plato’s. A slave boy without learning.
Yet Socrates shows that the boy knows Euclid and Pythagoras.
So the soul lives before birth.

- You have done some reading.

- A little. I leave reading to my man Frizer.

- Frazer?

- He calls himself Frizer. Ingram is his other name. He is
often called Mr Ingram. It’s no matter. Very devoted. He has
more money than I and yet he is my man. He has ambitions for
me. He thinks of buying an inn in Basingstoke, the Angel, he
thinks the name apt for some reason, and I shall be the landlord
and he a mere tapster. Oh yes, highly or deeply devoted.

- He loves you, then. I see.

- You do not see, and the tone was sharp. If you mean
the love you spoke of, no. Frizer is a dog and a good dog.
He likes being a dog. He is never happier than when fawning
and cringing. There are some men born to be dogs. And yet
he reads and tells me what he reads. He would serve me in all ways. Lackey and groom and schoolmaster. He licks my hand,
but there the licking ends.

- And you live together at - I have forgot the name of
the place.

- Scadbury near the caves of Chislehurst. My brother
Edmund is Lord of the Manor. But he is so little at the manor
house that he grants me the run of it. Sir Thomas our father left
him all and me little. So Edmund takes pity on me and says
Behold this is yours. In a manner, the manor in a manner. He
knows what he is. He knows he is a whoremaster and thinks it
no shame. He has become here in London the thing of Lady -
I will not speak her name. Enough for Mr Edmund. Well, Cat,
Kit I would say, you are no dog -

- You rhymed. Shame name.

- If you are a poet you may put together rhymes for me
properly considered, not dealt by chance like two aces. What
have you now in stock?

- This.

And then some more I have on paper but not in mind. And then:

I am too bashful to give you the matching line, but you
may guess it. It ends with at first sight.

- Hm, hm, hm. Well, we shall meet at some other place. I
must go see if my cousin has yet called for me. We shall meet,
though, make no mistake of that.

It was this first encounter, I believe, that put Kit in a fever
that had to be allayed. We were not playing at the Theatre that
afternoon, and he sought me out at Ned Alleyn’s lodging. Alleyn
was with Henslowe and Peter Street the master builder, sniffing
roses and stringing measuring lines on earth cruelly stripped of its
bushes. And so he found me alone, conning the part of the Queen
in Hamlet Revenge, a half-finished play of Tom Kyd’s (all these
Toms, a world of toms like a night roof top). His eyes closed, muttering strange words and also groaning, he had me stripped
and himself stripped and was soon at work that seemed strangely
loveless. Then his cat’s eyes blinked in shame as he wiped the
sweat from us both. It could not be animality, for animals are
directed by the gods of increase, and animals have no shame.
He kept crying God God God as in some form of repentance
but there was nothing to repent except the spending of seed in
barren places, the fault, if it be fault, of fortuity, as in Christ’s
parable of the sower that went forth to sow.