A Dead Man in Deptford (9 page)

- It’s not the kind of logic they teach at Cambridge. It
seems not merely illogical but monstrous.

It is what they call statecraft. Tom Watson said you
were shouting about the greatness of Machiavel in some eating
house or other. Well, here you see Machiavel in action. What
is imported from Italy is not all saints and madonnas. Shall we
go?

- Go where?

- Oh Kit Kit Kit, you know where. To my inn and my room,
whether the bed be made or not, with the door locked and our
linen off for the heat. There are no spying eyes of London here.
I could see in your gaze that day what you wanted, all hidden
under your fine talk of Plato and Petronius.

- I never mentioned Petronius.

- No? It must have been somebody else and other.

He carelessly threw coins on the table and rose. There was
fever in Kit, he had lost voice and was panting. They walked
together past the great brooding monster of the cathedral where
kings had been crowned, round the corner to the rue des
Boulangers or some such name, and at the end was an inn
with no signboard but flowers of the season in pots on its sills.
And they mounted to find Frizer bed-making. Walsingham said
he might leave that, there were urgencies between Mr Kit here and himself, let him take a cool glass of something somewhere
and brood on the infamy of false religion, here are foreign coins
which are here not foreign.

Well, it is not my purpose to describe the acts performed,
since they are enough known. Oscula, oscula, engagement of
light beards and oscula oscula elsewhere, amplexus, complexus,
and also sugere of this and that, and then interjectus and also
insertio and great clamores gaudii, laetitiac, voluptatis. Two young
and naked men, the unchanging under faith and thought, yet
not of the cycle, threshing, making the bed shake, dislodging
with a thrust ecstatic foot a pot with flowers of the season from
its stand, so that dancing soles became wet and empetalled.
Walsingham wrenched the lower sheet from its moorings that
they might wipe off the sweat they had not lapped. They lay on
the palliasse breathing like achieved runners, and Kit looked up
at the ceiling to see if God’s head would poke through. But God
lay indifferent in his shrine, converted to bread. Walsingham,
now merely a Tom, another to clog our narrative, was spread
on his bed snoring. Kit testiculis basia dedit and dressed. He had
said he would attend a lecture.

A poet, he knew the difficulties of that word love, which
meant too many things for any man’s comfort, but it was
the one word that sprang from the heaven of release and
he must regard it with the care he had given to the abstruse
terms of the schoolmen. Love was the lyric cry of desire and
then release and gratitude for release; should it not rather be
the expression in frigid sobriety of the awareness of mingling
of souls, and yet what of soul did Tom Walsingham possess?
True, being human he had a soul that theology would say was
there for divine salvation or damnation, but that was a formal
attribute of the same manner as pure being. But what of soul
with extension and properties? Was there substance deserving
of a lover’s homage? He thought not. Had this wholly blissful
encounter of singing nerves been but of the order of the blind
thrusting on the bank of the Cam or in the dusty London dark
of the haunts of prostitute boys? Was it trussing up and then the
fingers to the lips in goodbye, we shall lie so in pleasure again (not most like)? Did he now possess a friend or lover who would
give and take eternal avowals (eternity invoked with lying lips,
since eternity was God’s province)? Kit felt as it were steel hoops
of self-committal in compress of his ribs. Did the term fidelity
apply? It was not of the covenant of man and woman who must
hold the nest of their progeny together. Infidelity, he had heard
of in such instances, was the knife-sharpener. He, Kit, carried no
knife, but he sensed that there could be knives here too. He had
heard of one in London who had carried the knife to his faithless
boy paramour. The morality, if there was morality, was encased
in the narrow world that two built. Of exterior morality there was
none save what Church, reformed or unreformed, delivered. He
had an itch of merely scholarly import to learn of the nature of
and punishment allotted to such love, if love it was.

The lecture he attended, already begun, was (he twitched
sourly amused lips at it) of God’s love and the reconciliation of
that with God’s punishment. There were thirty or so black-clad
students in the College hall, with, like a random scattering of
flowers, visitors in gaudier dress. The lecturer was a Father
Pryor, a lined and croaking man from Lancashire, where the
old faith had held out longest. Love, so he said, was graced
with the limitless power of forgiveness, but there came in God’s
eternal time the moment when justice supervened thereon. How
is it possible that forgiveness without limit, he asked, can be so
reconciled with punishment that seems to our frail sublunary
sense of a truly monstrous order? No earthly judge or ruler could
conceive of pains as severe as those of hell for acts of a limited evil,
since man is not the devil. And yet God, who loves his creation, is
ready to cast sinning fragments of it into eternal fire. A mystery,
brethren, that may be resolved by taking thought that love has
no categorical substance, that it is itself a facet of justice. It is just
that we love the lovable, and it is unjust that we love what is not
to be loved. Must we love the devil, contrive a forgiveness for evil
whereof God himself has no capability? One of our fathers once
heard a child pray that Satan might be made good and happy,
but the child was in the dreadful state of innocence and the notion
was at once whipped away. Our first parents too, you will say, were innocent and were blessed because of it, but theirs was a
primordial innocence untouched by knowledge of evil until the
fatal fruit was devoured. God may not love sin, though he may
love the sinner in the expectation of his becoming cognisant of
the sin and ready for lustration and repentance. If there be, to
the all-knowing, no hint of such future cognisance, then the
sinner has already joined the ranks of the damned. I call, at
this point, for questions.

Well, Kit thought, it is better here than at Cambridge, where
hunks of doctrine are imposed like deadweights and the crushed
hearer granted no breath. It was one of the gaudily clad who now
asked:

- Must we descry a distinction between the doer of evil
in all conscience and whosoever is drawn into evil through
ignorance?

- Properly, the old priest responded, we must regard ignorance as sinful when the light is shown but disregarded. The
souls of the Indians of America are ignorant but not damned.
Granted the light and wilfully blind to it, the privilege of damnation follows.

Some quietly laughed. In old man’s anger the priest shook
and said:

- Yes, yes, I say that word. For damnation and salvation
alike are the signs of God’s holy care of his highest creation.
In this chiefly are we raised above the beasts of the field.

- Must we love Queen Elizabeth? asked a student in the
rough tones of the priest’s own county.

- She is not Queen Elizabeth, despite her crown and orb and
sceptre and the other trappings of royalty. She is illegitimate in
the eyes of God’s Church.

- And therefore to be deposed? It was the man dressed
brightly who had been the first asker.

- This is to be assumed. This must come in its time. But he
who asked of sin must be answered. We must love our enemies
as we love our friends, but we must not love their sin.

Kit left, unnoticed. It was leafy outside, a sycamore cast kind
shade over the forecourt. Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned. Blessedly the birds flew
over the screams of the charred heretics or the traitors who saw
briefly and in disbelief their intestines cast into boiling water. All
beasts are happy. They thrust in their season and know nothing
of love. Kit sat on what was said to be a thunderstone, a bolt from
the heavens, and watched emerge the priest’s auditors. He had
seen the back only of the gentleman who had asked about the
deposition of the Queen; he saw now his bulk and ruddiness,
a soldierly man with a sword, who was telling laughingly two
younger men, one of them in black, the other in russet and
violet, of the need for tolerance within limits.

- It is the nature of the limits that promotes argument,
he was saying. Our preacher, lecturer I would say, was drawn
into the forbidden when I put my question. God and Caesar -
did not Jesus Christ speak wisely of the division of authority,
though some would say that God being above Caesar there is no
division. The Zealots were in their way logical. But no matter -
we must cling to our limits of action. I keep to my narrow way.

They were away around the corner and Kit heard no more.
What he noted in the speech of the speaker was a property
that was not of the language of London, though otherwise the
soldierly gentleman spoke that language in due conformity to
what was known as the Queen’s usage. Our language is rich in
what our orthopeists term the rhotic (I know these things; I was
brought up an actor), that is to say our dog sound is a firm roll
in words containing the letter r. But this gentleman was weak in
it and spoke argument and preacher and Caesar with but a limp
tap. It seemed at the moment nothing - a mere way of walking
or of agitating of the hands, or the outlandish cut of a doublet
or the tilt of a feather in the hat. And so Kit forgot it, or so
he thought, stood and wondered whether he should go back to
Tom’s inn and propose resumption of what they had done or else
supper, or else hand-holding and talk of Plato. But his shyness
overcame him. It would be a shy moment to face him again in
all sobriety and perhaps be impelled into utterance of the word
love. They stood or lay equal, man and man, and who must say
it first? And Tom had spoken darkly of another meeting he had in the evening. At remembrance of that Kit sweated a moment
in jealousy. He would think of the work for which he was paid
and slink slyly into a student tavern, there to listen.

And so he did. Les Trois Couronnes, which three crowns
were meant was uncertain, was near the meat market, so that
the scent of blood was on the street before one entered. Here
French Catholics of the lower orders - draymen, ostlers, butchers and the like - were taunting English Catholics, of moneyed
families though in exile, with their impotence to restore their
faith, a deformed faith since these were English, to their island
of mist and snow and no vineyards, without the aid of French
arms and money. And, said they, votre roi avail douze femmes
et preferait que son peuple fut damne s’il pouvait inserer son baton
dans une treizieme, adding too that their present queen la vierge
etait en realite une grande putain, and much more of the same.
With this, despite exaggeration, they would have been disposed
to agree, except that some nerve of patriotism was set ajangle,
and a young and burly aspirant to Catholic orders clanked his
winemug on the sleek head of a lawyer’s underclerk and set a
minor riot afoot. In this Kit would not have joined had these
French truculants let him alone, but as he was standing not
sitting he was easy to trip and went over in his clean garments
on a filthy floor to the partially toothless derision of the strawy
ostler whose large tripping muddy boot he at once grasped and
so upped the leg and had him down. The fighting was brief, for
the tavern-keeper was of notable muscle, as was his wife, and
Kit was chosen for the attention of the latter, whose bare arms
were like thighs. So, with bruised head and blood on his jerkin,
he departed with some of the Catholic English to another quieter
tavern, where there was song and pedantic theology enough. He
would, when he had both money and his mastership, buy himself
a sword.

By midnight he had vomited thrice under the moon, not in
pain since it was the mere mechanical voiding of a surfeit, and
one more cup of wine settled his stomach but set his drunkenness newly awork. He tottered towards the inn where Tom
Walsingham was, battering the locked door and crying Courrier important de la reine d’Angleterre pour le milord Walsingham. He
was doubtfully admitted and clattered up the stairs to the known
room, finding it unlocked and, in strong moonlight, Tom awake
and startled in his shirt. Kit called Mon amour, me voici and
ripped off the shirt as well as his own bloodied raiment. What
he then did was more brutal than before, making Tom howl.
The news from la reine d’Angleterre must, so the wide-awake
keepers of the inn must now assume, be of appalling gravity.

The next day Kit woke alone in the dortoir, his sleepfellows
long out and at their lectures. He found Tom Walsingham’s
man, Ingram Frizer, standing over him, chewing a straw. So it
was he who had been part of a dream of being newly pummelled.
Frizer was ready to pound again but desisted on seeing bruised
Kit blink in the painful light. He spat out his straw and spoke,
saying:

- I will not have this, master.

- Not what?

- Blood upon him and he sorely battered. My office is to
protect him I serve and I will not have you nor any other do
him harm by slyly getting under what is my guard. So you are
warned and told.

- What are you, fellow, that presume so? Kit asked with
scorn under an aching sconce.

- You know what I am, fellow yourself, what are you in
spite of your fine bloodied clothes and your graces and airs? A
boy student and no more, that had better mind his book than
meddle with my master that is brother to the Lord of the Manor
and will inherit. So keep away from him or it will be the worse.
Here he bunched a mottled fist in threat.

- Learn manners, mannerless lout. Raise your fist at me
and you will be beaten black. By God, I will leave my bed
now to do it.