The School of Night: A Novel (23 page)

I had long before become an ochlophobist. A detester of crowds. Not merely nocturnal but noctivagant, a night-walker, a prowler, a nomad of the midnight streets, attempting to abolish the distinction between the light that comes from outside and the sort that shines within. And I was even sitting once more at a high window looking down at the world and its traffic. The Thames was only a few minutes away. The only river I could actually see was the moving, smoking, metallic river of motors. And when I moved amongst the crowds in the bars below I was now invisible.

*   *   *

Transparency, I’d always known, was the only effective way to vanish, and nobody ever noticed me these days except for those whose attention I needed. I had learnt the first crucial trick of my new trade.

My walks in the dark had acquired different locations. I seemed sometimes to hear the acres of grass breathing in the park across the river. Battersea Power Station loomed out of the dark, a torn and gaping ruin still waiting for capital’s promise to fulfil itself. There was the church where Turner had sat in the window sketching, until he retired to the other side of the river and refused to be known as anything but Captain Booth. Then the house on Cheyne Walk, where Dante Gabriel Rossetti kept his jabbering menagerie of exotic animals, armadillos, kangaroos, wombats and raccoons, shrieking and defecating in the night and making poor mad Swinburne even madder than he was already. And just down from there the statue of Thomas More, slowly silting from the exhaust fumes of the ceaseless cars flowing up the Embankment. That was where the barge had come for him, to take him away for arraignment at Westminster and imprisonment. He had told William Roper then that the field was won, and had seemed almost glad to go. To the Tower, of course. Where else?

8

One of them kept smiling, never stopped smiling, and I remembered Dan’s words that those were always the ones to watch. I kept an eye on him day after day. Discreetly. But with extreme suspicion. One night I caught him at it. I had been standing at the bar listening to the conversation of the couple sitting at the table behind me.

‘It doesn’t matter what you do at the end, John. That’s not how it’s transmitted anyway. The doctor told me yesterday.’

I never took my eyes from his hands and this time I saw the twenty-pound note make its way back out of the till and furtively into the side pocket of his yellow jacket, and I was there behind him in seconds. I pulled the note back out of his pocket and held it in front of his face.

‘I think it’s time you left,’ I said. ‘Go and get changed and clear off. I don’t want to see your face here again.’ And he fled without another word. There was a hush to the place that night. Charlie Leggatt held up his glass towards me in a theatrical toast.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, Pagett’s silent zany has finally come to life.’

I felt curiously exhilarated. I went back up to the apartment early. There was only one bookshelf there, which Dan had stacked with lavishly illustrated volumes I had barely looked at. I took one down. It was a photographic record of some bordello in New Orleans at the end of the 1890s. I was looking for sex, but I kept seeing death instead, perfumed and proffered bodies communing only with the dead. I thought briefly of Jenny. Then I opened up Dan’s drawer and took out the card I’d seen so many times before, the one he had left there, the one with the word Oasis printed on it, along with an address. I took a handful of money from the metal box and set off to find the place. That wasn’t difficult: the taxi driver seemed to know it well.

It must have been there that Kate Halloran had learnt to powder her body. They all did it, to make the flesh smell fragrant and to render it dazzling white under the spotlights. So many naked breasts moving about you in the darkness. Everything else they wore was black, so the only visible thing that moved in the murk was naked flesh, and I felt as though some potent electric memory had been triggered inside me. There was a thrill of recognition, but I couldn’t have told you of what. Darkness and mirrors. I soon started going every week in search of white bodies in the dark.

In the early hours of the morning, or the early hours of the evening, I would walk along the river. Up and down the towpaths relentlessly, obsessively. Why? It occurred to me at dawn one day as the city was growling crossly into life. I was on a pilgrimage again, wasn’t I? I was re-enacting the Corpus Christi processions of my boyhood when, dressed in white and holding our crosses and icons aloft, we had walked the streets of my northern town, harking back to the days when hundreds of thousands of feet stepped solemnly from sacred well to burial shrine; from holy grave to reliquary. Our reflections in dusty shop windows, our hymns laid on the air, assaulted the dark streets, seeming to open a lethal crack in their blackened, millstone-grit façades. All pilgrimages make the clock hands turn more slowly, at least for the contours of their duration, beckoning heaven into a renewed scrutiny of the earth and a renewed communion with it. The pilgrim marks out sacred circuits; his itinerary inscribes a slow but potent current. His journey is a prayer, a topographic emblem only entirely visible in any case from above.

Canterbury had become the greatest medieval centre. Canterbury, in whose ecclesiastical shadow Marlowe had been raised until he was ready to shine in his own darker fashion. Here had been the shrine of St Thomas à Becket, slain by hands and swords eager to assuage the king’s wrath, and now remaining as a potent indictment of the whited sepulchre of earthly power. You can almost hear the sigh of relief, even perhaps a belch of satisfaction, as Henry VIII smashes to bits those monuments worn smooth from the urgent caresses of millions of penitent fingers. But there had also been plenty of pilgrimage tracks and circuits through the streets of London itself, before the Reformation sealed them off with State hygiene, just as the invisible portcullises of security checks and CCTVs have now started their enclosure of the modern City. After all, a mighty town’s wealth was measured then not so much by its merchantmen and traders as by the collection of sacred shrines it could boast. Any city in Christendom needed to be a rich lectionary of holy relics and legends.

So here I was, pacing out every foot of the Thames, from the Tower to Hampton Court, as though that tidal thoroughfare still carried on its back the kings, queens and traitors who’d once been its weighty cargoes; as I’d once paced out the route from Tower Hill to Tyburn, coming in the process to feel I could actually smell the entrails pulled steaming from disembowelled martyrs, as the traffic of Marble Arch buzzed relentlessly around me, in its riotous, entropic order. It was still there, the inquisitor’s mighty and allusive question: history as self-incrimination, with your conscience duly scraped.

And as I walked back and forth, up and down Blake’s chartered streets gridlocking the Thames, I started to believe, without any artificiality, that time was now indeed standing still, or had actually run backwards – this being one of the more occult properties of any pilgrimage – so as to lessen the distance between where, in the world of longitude and latitude, we stand and what we might in faith and truth come to apprehend. I was glad at last that I’d never learnt to drive, no longer embarrassed about it. After all, no one has ever unthreaded time’s labyrinth like this from the inside of a car. You must touch the holy tracks for yourself. The truest pilgrims even take off their shoes and kiss the ground until their lips, along with the soles of their feet, start to bleed.

Pilgrimage.
Peregrinatio.
The soul in its wild wander, out on the roads in search of a home.
Pegrinus
: foreign. Here is no abiding city. We discover nothing for as long as we feel at home. The imagination is everywhere a stranger’s kingdom.

*   *   *

I had moved the table over to the window so that I could sit there and work with the world beneath me, just as Ralegh and Hariot had done on the top floor of Durham House. And now, fresh from my new training in the dark world of suspicion, I was at last ready for my task. Like the members of the School of Night themselves, I no longer accepted what tradition had bequeathed me. However venerable the legend, I now doubted it in its entirety. I’d become as dubious of the historical certainties I’d been handed as I was of the motives of every shifty, light-fingered employee downstairs. I had become, I suppose, my own black intelligencer. I had even started looking in the mirror at last, but with suspicion, suspecting a subterfuge, and I was right of course, for there was one. I was it. Dan’s man. Dan’s cryptic agent with the golden skin. Whoever was emerging out of that silver pool, it no longer looked like me.

Now at long last I had come to study in detail, and without prejudice, the darkest of all the rumours that have emanated from the School of Night, the one that might at last make sense of the crowding doubts that had been accruing in my mind through the years. Many accepted that Marlowe’s hand could not be disentangled from Shakespeare’s in the early works. Even the most orthodox of Stratfordians, including Sidney Lee, who had effectively invented the modern orthodoxy of the Bard, were in agreement that the following plays could not be settled between the young actor from Stratford and the young scholar from Canterbury:
Titus Andronicus, Richard II, Richard III
and all three parts of
Henry VI.
That’s a fair bit of the corpus to be another questionable body underneath the accepted body. In fact there’s no doubt that if Marlowe could ever have been viewed as a serious candidate for the true authorship of the works attributed to Shakespeare, that case would have represented the gravest threat ever posed to the Stratfordians, but they have always had one simple and seemingly unanswerable response to this lethal enquiry: Marlowe had died on 30 May 1593. But had he?

I studied the evidence in detail. I went down twenty or thirty times to Deptford Strand and St Nicholas, as though proximity to the reported events might somehow let the truth leech into me out of the ground, out of the air. I became convinced, though I couldn’t prove it, that this stretch of the river had provided these lines in
Hamlet
:

And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed

That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,

Wouldst thou not stir in this.

I became more and more convinced that Marlowe had not in fact died that night in Deptford in the house of Mrs Bull. That instead his friend and patron Thomas Walsingham had arranged for a drunken sailor of his height and build to be killed with a poniard through the eye, and to be dressed in Kit’s clothes. A local inquest had been fixed and swiftly conducted. Promises had been made; money had changed hands. Strangely, no friend or relative of Marlowe’s had been summoned to identify the body and where the corpse was buried has remained a mystery to this day. ‘Nearby’ says the plaque, hardly even taking the trouble to believe its own words.

This way Marlowe did not have to return to Star Chamber, and so did not have to talk of what had happened in the School of Night. He was spared the ordeal of incriminating all his friends under torture. He was spared and so, of course, were they. All three men in the room with him when he ‘died’ were in the employment of Thomas Walsingham, and all three were taken back into that employment without question after they were released from their perfunctory imprisonment one month later. Marlowe was undoubtedly Walsingham’s favourite. It was at Walsingham’s house that he mostly stayed. Some have even said that their relationship went far beyond mere friendship. It would have been a curious act to have taken Marlowe’s murderers back into his employment so swiftly, so entirely without recrimination. So if Marlowe didn’t die, then what did he do?

He was spirited abroad, under a false name, in some chartered vessel covered by the Kentish mist. He went to live in the north of Italy, there to continue writing plays for the rest of his life, plays of mystery and devastation, plays about murder and disguise, about how a human being is an exile even from himself. Plays endlessly concerned, obsessively and inexplicably concerned, with people who die but are not really dead, who come back after ten or twenty or thirty years to be met with tearful incredulity by those who thought they’d witnessed their demise. But there was a problem. If these astounding works were to be published, under whose name could that be done? Well, who better than another low-born theatrical character with gifts above his station, though nothing like Kit’s, born in the same year, his father another leather worker, and with whom Kit had already collaborated, using the actor for his working theatrical knowledge while he provided all the intellectual substance? Who better than a man from Stratford desperate for coin, who knew his way around the London stage? They had something on him, in any case, for one of Kit’s discoveries in his murky work at Rheims was that Shakespeare was not merely Catholic, but had done some business for the cause during his hidden years amongst the recusants of Lancashire. This he very much wished to keep secret.

Thus did these inexplicable works of loss and desperation come to be published under the name of the reasonably gifted actor from Stratford-upon-Avon, whose first published work appeared a few months after Kit’s own disappearance from the world. Thus did Marlowe, the divinity student and translator of Ovid, provide all the material which could not have been provided by the somewhat less sparkling intellect of William Shakespeare, a man who left not a single book in his will and spent his last years relentlessly pursuing matters pertaining to his tithes. Not alchemy as Ralegh and the Wizard Earl had done, not witchcraft, a subject that evidently fascinated Marlowe and the author of
Macbeth
, but tithes. Tithes and litigation. As though nothing in the world truly mattered except for money. How many zeros might balloon in mischievous vacuity behind a particular figure. This man, a zero in his own right, was perfect. Tom Walsingham arranged it and from then on Marlowe, already posthumous, used the fellow’s name, perhaps even his hand, but had no need of his spirit, having substituted his own instead. Thus did the dead speak through the living. And this would also explain the curiosity, often remarked upon, of what appears to be a considerable knowledge of continental Europe on the part of a man who never seems to have journeyed south of Bermondsey. It might also explain the kindly tone so often employed in the collected works when the word spy appears, for Marlowe had been one himself while he was at Cambridge. It was the State, after all, which had employed him to travel to Rheims, there to impersonate a Catholic at a Jesuit college to ensnare real Catholics and facilitate their imprisonment on their return to England. This might also explain the fascination with disguises that flows through the plays like a continuous and mighty river. And it explains the oddity of what I had so constantly noticed: that this man seems to know from practical and sinister experience something about murder and its accoutrements. Marlowe had killed at least one man and others had undoubtedly attempted to kill him. A whole state waited to do so, should it ever be revealed to them that he was still alive somewhere and writing.