A Dead Man in Deptford (7 page)

So let us have him riding to Canterbury. The horse was his
own, his father’s gift when, but recently, he had been monied
enough to stand as a marriage bondsman. This was Brown Peter,
fat and a little slow, well tended in the Cambridge stables, a
sort of yeaing and paying friend to whom Kit sang or tried out
verses as he clopped through Dartford, Gravesend, Chatham,
Sittingbourne in the fine summer weather. And there he was
- Pound Lane, his own old school by the City Wall, Burgate,
the great cathedral. A single solemn bell mourned a death.
Here the faith had been brought from Rome so that a king
of many wives might reject it, here a witness to the Church of
Rome against the power of another king had been slaughtered,
his holy shrine made most rich and then despoiled. There was
perhaps a curse on the realm. Certainly there was a curse on
his father, whose new house in St Marv’s parish he had to seek
by asking. John Marley or Morley the shoemaker? By there, or
near. He had moved from St Andrew’s for non-payment of rent
and was installed now in premises, Kit knew, not commodious.
Down in the world, the fault of the Strangers.

- Let us look at you, his father said, intermitting his
hammering, spitting nails from his mouth. The two apprentices
too ceased their hammering to gaze. Velvet blue and gold, a
cobweb collar. I like the cloak, his father said, his arms about
him, and you smell sweet and Londonish. God knows why you seem up in the world. Let me see those shoes, they could be
better. I will give them new soles before you go back.

- I go on. To Dover and then take ship for France.

- God help us, you are indeed up. That sounds like state
business.

- War on the papists.

- For God’s sake leave at least the English papishes alone,
they have suffered enough. There is enough trouble here with
the frogs and frogesses. The little froglings would grow up into
proper Kent citizens if they were permitted to speak our tongue.
Here comes your mother from marketing.

His mother, plump but not country rosy, came near-running
down the street with her basket. She was of Dover and liked to
believe the sea salt stayed in her skin, a sea girl. She kissed and
embraced and admired. Quite the gentleman.

- And the girls?

- Joan has a great belly, Meg scolds her tailor for dithering
about the day, Anne is well and that leaves poor Dorothy.

- Poor Dorothy.

- She sits with her wooden doll. The French are not all
bad, a French carpenter made it for her. Of course, this is all
strange to you. You do not know the house.

- Small, Kit said, as they both led him in, hands on
him, their only son.

- We were better off near Bull Stake, his father said. Get
the girls off our hands and there will be room enough. Your
mother and I and poor Dorothy.

The apprentices went back to their hammering and through
the smell of leather that was his boyhood and unchangeable,
unlike thought and faith, Kit was led to the main room, as he
took it to be, with its sad pledges of a dead prosperity - betrothal
chest, rocky table, chairs that were wooden emblems of family
degree, from infant to father, though not in themselves a family
of chairs. Young Dorothy sat on the brown-stained boards and
drooled over a little wooden lady in a wooden skirt. She was
twelve years old and an idiot. She sat in a pool of wet. Her mother
ran to her, lifted her, finding her smock wet and warm, so she had just done it. She cried for Meg and Anne, who should not
have left their sister alone so, and then their feet, unshod from
the sound, could be heard on stairs and the door opened and they
entered. Margaret was twenty and her betrothal to the tailor had
gone on too long. Anne was fourteen and marriageable too, had
not Joan two years back married when she was thirteen? And
now she was fifteen and carrying. All ready to breed, even poor
Dorothy who, if they let her loose in the fields, would be served
by some farm lout as readily as mare and stallion, save that season
for humanity was sempiternally there, like faith and thought. But
he, Kit, would deceive nature, ever and never in season, a
paragon of the cheating of the true end of what was called love.
Now he was kissed and kissed, women with bosoms eager to
give milk. Poor Dorothy, being wiped and changed while the
wet floor was mopped, looked at him without recognition, doll
clutched to her own growing bosom, a finger in her mouth.

What was there to tell them? Triv and quad but nothing
yet about his defection from orders. Girls? He had met no
girls. Nay, wait, and he resexed, as in one of his own poems,
Mr Walsingham into a lady of luscious hair, fine carriage, great
prospects, but he must mind his books, get ready for the cloth,
find a parish, then and then only think of a holy family. His
mother and the girls, Dorothy drooling at the tail, clutching
her doll, went to the kitchen to get supper. The kitchen was
small, the flagged floor uneven, but the pots and pans shone
with their old refulgence. Kit stood at the door, watching,
talking, listening. The girls, save Dorothy, had much to say.
John Moore, their father’s once chief apprentice, had his own
shop by the East Gate, not far from the abbey, St Augustine’s,
that the Queen’s father had pillaged and then turned to a palace.
Joan, his wife, though but fifteen, was disdainful of her spinster
sisters. And she now carried a great belly before her in pregnant
pride. They were to have for supper beef boiled with carrots. The
bread, today’s, was fresh. Kit mumbled a torn crust. There was
a firkin of Kent ale. Kit could have wept.

Wept? Why? At the comfortable cycle of life that smelt
of bread and beef seething, round and round for ever if the preachers and governors would allow it, and he himself a tangent
to the cycle. Wept at a future that, he knew, must be perilous.
Wept because they, his womenfolk and his hammering father,
would weep. Weep when? That he did not know. He could hear
weeping on the wind.

- Brown Peter, his father said, as they sat about the table,
is well looked after. He knew not his old stable at first but then
he knew it and whinnied. You have been a good boy with him.
A man and his horse are one in the big world of affairs. Here I
do not need to ride. I am nailed to my soles and heels.

- I shall walk to Dover, Kit said. Twenty miles, it will
be good for me.

- I shall give you new soles tomorrow.

- Kitticat, Meg said, the Reverend Kitticat, mender of
men’s souls.

- It will be a year or so. I must become a Master of
Arts, you know that. And till then a Walsingham man.

- Walsingham? Anne said. That was a holy town, and
the Milky Way in the sky showed the way to it.

Kit explained who Walsingham was. They listened, all except
poor Dorothy, who fed a sop vainly to her wooden doll. Kit
looked in pity and anger at her idiocy. He said:

- It is sometimes hard to give praise to God. Dorothy is
always the same, we thought it was a prolonged childishness,
but she is almost a woman and she wets the floor still and says
nothing.

- She says a word or so, his mother said. She has learned
some words since you left. She knows the names of her sisters
but she uses them turn and turn about. Sky she knows, and sun,
also rain.

- And, his father said as he cored a pippin, she knows
that God is in the sky. But she thinks that God is the sun.

- So did we, so did the Emperor Constantine, Kit said out
of his learning. Sunday is the Sabbath. The theological question
is whether she has a soul to be saved. If yes, then she shall burn
for the heresy of saying God is the sun. If no, she’s dissolved into
elements when she dies, like any beast of the field.

- This is terrible, Meg said. Is this what they teach you
at Cambridge?

- Oh, we’re taught a lot about the soul and who is saved
and who damned. It seems everyone is damned who does not
belong to the English Church, and there are times I grow sick
of it.

- Sick of your studies? his father said. Studies are for
raising you, this you know.

- That and that only perhaps. In themselves nothing. They
are a bunch of keys for opening doors. Feet are for walking but
they need shoes. That is a useful art, the making and mending
of shoes. I am being apprenticed to the useless.

All about that table save poor Dorothy looked at him in
disquiet. His mother at length said:

- And yet they employ you on high business, young as
you are.

- The high business of searching for enemies of the realm.
So they can be apprehended and brought home and hanged. It
is the hanging and drawing and quartering that is important. A
bloody show meant for a warning to the people, but the people
take it as diversion. Well, I mean to give them diversion, but
the blood will be pig’s blood.

They did not understand him. Poor Dorothy had been long
in the situation they seemed only to have arrived at, but she
tried to tear the head of her doll and cried what sounded like
Gog.

- There, you hear, her mother said. Clever girl, she crooned
at her. Say God. Say sky.

- Koy.

- She has said her prayers, Kit said in weariness. I will
say mine and sleep. The sun is down and I will join the crows
and starlings, black-suited choristers that crark. I have not had
much sleep of late. Where do I sleep?

When a son must ask this in his own home, then perhaps
he is past thinking of it as his home.

He walked, as he said he would, to Dover. His shoes were
freshly soled; he carried on his back the flat leathern sack which held two newly washed shirts and three pairs of hose. A good
mother. Oh, they were all good, the kind embracing round to
which he must be the tangent. He walked the round earth that
looked tangential. Kind clouds were propelled above him by a
kind wind. The summer weather held. He walked over fields
and along paths, seeing sheep and shepherds. These did not pipe.
They were as leathern as his sack. If they sang they sang coarse
ancient songs with swive in them. Pastores. The good shepherd.
But this raising of shepherds predated Christ searching for lost
lambs, he who became a lamb to be slaughtered. Theocritus and
Virgil. Why this need to purify them into Damon and Lycidas?
No fleece oil on their hands, their smocks white. Clean Mr
Thomas Walsingham sat on a knoll, piping. Swive in deep
grass while the sheep cropped and occasionally went baaaaa.

He ate his bread and drank spring water at Shepherdswell
or Shepherdswold, the name was uncertain. Lydden, Temple
Ewell, Buckland, another ruined abbey. Then the castle was
ahead and the salt was on his lips. A jumble of dwellings whose
dwellers preyed on the sea and its travellers. He found the inn
named the Luce (fish or flower?) on a sidestreet sheltered from
the strong Channel wind. He asked a roundly chewing dirtyaproned sweeper who swept ill, for Mr Robert Poley. The two
London gentlemen? Two? One of them appeared, clattering
down the stairs. He was not Mr Robert Poley. He called
himself Nick Skeres.

There was a room where they were to take supper. Skeres
opened the door to it with a kind of blind familiarity, his black
eyes on Kit. From the white of Theocritan shepherds to the
black of the dirty world. Skeres was dirty to match that world.
It seemed not the casual dirt of the careless, rather as applied as
Alleyn had applied white and lines to his young face to render
it ancient. I will be a dirty man for all to wonder at. Skeres
wore with pride long dirty hair, and the hairs in his skewed
nose had trapped scraps of dry mucus. The teeth conceded to
a lighter colour, but not white. His slops were dirty but he had
a clean-bladed dagger which he had taken from its sheath at his
belt. He juggled with this in his long dirty fingers.

- Well, we will sit, he said, and wait for bonny sweet
Robin. He is a clean man (and he tapped the clean as to
emphasise his own dirt) and washes himself from toes to scalp
in clean cold water. It is the way he is. And you?

The accent was, Kit thought, from the south-west. He
had heard from Alleyn what he called the Sir Water Devonian.
Skeres burred and rasped.

- Am I clean, you mean? Some would say we were bent
on a dirty business. I do not say it, but some would say it.

You’re a young beginner. You know nothing of it. But
you will keep at the business and learn. A dirty business for
keeping clean the realm, so they say. It is a trade like any other.
But once in the trade you will not be out of it. Clean Robin will
shrug but not everybody will shrug.

- Shrug at what?

- At a man’s coming and going and following his own
desires, as they call them. But he will tell you more of that.

Clean Robin appeared, a marvellous proper man, as they
would say. Of Corpus? I am of Clare. He shook hands with
vigour. Straw beard well trimmed, spotless cambric, silk under
the slashes of the trunks, doublet well tailored, well pressed.
The face cheerful, guileless even, as if he had shunted guile on
to Skeres. The eyes even merry, the white smile welcoming. He
asked if the fish had been ordered. Skeres nodded direly, as if
this were a code for a killing. Poley said:

- Fresh Dover fish, flat and overhanging the dish at either
end. It is worth coming to Dover for the fish. So, Marley or
Morley, we are to go over together on the morning tide, Skeres
and I then ride to Paris, you not.

- Not by way of Paris? I had a mind to see Paris.

- Another time. You marvel at Nick here, I can see it
in your eyes. They fear Nick, but they do not fear me. They
fancy that he is all malevolence. And so he is, so he is.

He spoke cheerfully and even laid a clean affectionate hand
on dirty Skeres. When the fish came in, brought by a shy maid at
whom Skeres, as if taught to do so in some stage comedy, leered,
the dirty fingers were delicate about dissecting it, the bones were spat out near silently. He drank his Dover ale with little finger
finickingly spread. At the end of the meal he begged pardon for
his belch.