A Dead Man in Deptford (16 page)

- Curse all who permit it, this butchery, and all for what?

A man should follow what faith he will, God grins at all this,
but mayhap there is no God, a true God would not stomach it,
Christ in heaven if there is a heaven and if Christ be in it must
look down and cry drag them all to hell if there be a hell.

He cursed only to the table and the honest burghers about
it. One said: Have a care, and the others looked for watchers,
officers of the law, ragged informers. But at the neighbour table
a bald man with a long grey beard, much lined, his habit decent
and his drink but a small chalice of sherris, nodded and said:

- Aye aye, it is the way all must feel that have a spoonful of
the compassion that our Saviour taught. And even the Queen,
that has most cause to be vehement against her enemies, even
she feels it, for has she not decreed that tomorrow the agony
shall be lessened? The hanged shall be properly hanged and
dead before that the cutting up commences.

- How, how? called some. Where did you hear this?

- Flood himself told me. He is by way of being my grandson
in law.

Some would then touch the old man as if he were holy,
one that was a link through the flesh of his granddaughter to
a great one of the day. Kit called for a new quart, drank deep
and belched on the yeasty froth, standing staggering to cry to
the tavern so that all were stilled to listen:

- If religion does this to men’s bodies, then let us have
no more religion. We shall all be happier without God and his
black crows of ministers. I do not forget what was done under
bloody Mary and know it will happen again if the Spanish take
us over. It is all one, true reformed or true papish. It is religion
itself that is our enemy. Who is there that needs it save those that
relish the blood it lets or grow fat on benefices and advowsons
and tithes and Peter’s pence? Cast down God like a wooden
puppet. He and his angels and saints are fit only for oaths. By
the six ballocks of the Trinity and the cheese of the milk of the
Magdalen and the hundred prepuces of circumcised Jesus I cry
out on it.

A black-bearded bravo came towards him with clutching
hands to cry:

- You shall be in the Clink for this, bastard. I will not
hear God and his Church and she that is head of it put
down.

There were many growls of those that agreed.

- Hypocrites all. You know nothing of God or anything.
And Kit, who knew he had drunk enough, threw his nearquart into the black beard, clattered with his tankard on the
head one who would bar his leaving and, staggering still, left.
God’s air, God’s sun. No, they were not God’s. Nature’s, that
framed us of four elements. He had now to head to Poley’s
Garden, defiled, defiled, to free Brown Peter, that he had left
enstabled with ample oats, and then ride to Cambridge. He
would not stay another hour in this befouled city, where the
bells still rang jubilantly and death’s celebrators staggered in
drink and sang their dirty songs. Well, he too was a staggerer,
and, as Brown Peter whinnied him a greeting, he found support
against the warm flank, put his arms about the sturdy neck for
comfort, sobbed a minute or so, then drew him out and clumsily
mounted. He would travel back to a citadel of pure mind and
essence in the company of a beast that was pure muscle and
instinct. What did Brown Peter know of Aristotle? And yet
to live and die in Aristotle’s works seemed at the moment of
steering out of crammed London the summit of all aspiration.
It was the all too human passions between planes that, all too
disjunct, were yet akin in sanity that were from now to be
avoided.

He had not thought to ride to Scadbury. To ride to Scadbury
was to plunge to the heart of the human passions. Tom had said
that he would be there and that Frizer would be in Basingstoke.
He had London business (Kit now knew what) but would be
back in early afternoon. Jove send me more such afternoons as
this. No, not now if not no more ever. The genitals were for
slicing off that blood not seed might gush. The passion of the
butcher’s knife was the passion of coupling. There was a foul
amity between the acts of the bed and the acts of the scaffold.
Let the brain ride aloof: these warm animal flanks supported
the regrettable apparatus that supported it. A man could not get away from his body. He would eat no more meat, he
would divorce from his munching of bread and sipping of
wine the memory long ingrained of Christ taking these for
his body and blood. He would prepare for the Michaelmas
term in the conduct of a kind of Lent. Yet what was it that
he was writing but a celebration of human passion? This was
another matter, this was words, it was an Aristotelian purging
of the real through the fanciful. The poet was chained to his
passions, true, but only that he might discharge them in the
splendour of language. The lips spoke and the shackles fell. So
let it be.

W H A’I’ happened in London could not but have its reverberations in the scholarly fastnesses of Cambridge. In October
there was the matter of a trial in secret at Fotheringay whereby
Mary Queen of Scots received her death sentence, though the
passing of this was not made known to the people till December.
Cambridge mimicked London with the clanging of its church
bells and the lighting of fires round which the students danced.
Fire is for warmth, Kit told himself as, chilled by writing
in his freezing chamber, he stood by a fire on the banks
of the frozen Cam. Let us cling to the elemental and not
think. For to think was to be shamed at the knowledge that
it could be no true trial, since the Queen of Scots was not
subject to the foreign power that was England, and that her
condemnation was supported by but a doubtful parliamentary
act and a certain forgery. News had come through that the
death warrant had not been signed, the Queen of England had
become squeamish in the face of the prospect of her vilification
by her peers of Europe. Assassination? There might well be an
assassination.

Snow lay heavy over Europe that winter. Snow encased
Cambridge and kept Kit, to his small regret, bound in. He
gathered wood and sat by his chamber fire and, on the day of the feast of the birth of the child he could no longer see
as his Saviour, he was busy at his play. In January the thaw
came briefly and passed. On an icy road Nick Faunt’s horse
slithered and recovered and slithered again as he returned to
London from northern business, pausing awhile at Cambridge.
He came to Kit’s chamber burring with the chill, bowing to the
fire like a son of Zoroaster.

- You have been out of things. Skeres told me of your
heaving and spewing. You are become the good student again,
I note your ragged black. But this that you are writing is not
student stuff. I recall your Techelles and Bajazeth. Now you
have kings of Argier and Fez and Morocco. In your fancy you
travel wide. Yet you hug yourself to yourself.

- Are you come with orders from Walsingham? I am done
with it all.

- You will never be done, as you know. Hoops of steel
and the like. But you talk of Walsingham, and you would
pity the man if you saw him. You know of Sidney’s death at
Zutphen?

- We had sermons till we were sick with them. Thy need
is greater than mine. The Protestant Knight.

- And Walsingham’s son in law. He has to see to the
creditors he has left behind. That will delay the state funeral,
he says. It would be unjust and shameful to bring out the black
plumes while poor creditors scream for payment. Sir Francis is
a great man for justice.

- Aye, a great man. Has he found means of killing a
queen in the full odour of justice?

- There has to be a new plot afoot. It was thought you
might wish to be part of it. Something to do with the French
ambassador putting gunpowder under Queen Elizabeth’s bed.
Forgeries, of course. That will put him under house arrest and
stop his crying to his king for pleas for Scotch Mary’s release.
And there must be rumours of Mary’s escape and Spaniards
flooding into Kent and Sussex, then marching to set London
afire. You could help spread the rumours.

- I will have nothing to do with it. You may tell Sir Francis I am returned to the state you see, a poor scholar that works for
his master’s hood and is bound to his books.

- Sir Francis will weep bitterly. And Poley still in the
Tower will weep yet more.

- There it is. Poley was by way of being my tutor and
keeper. And Poley is done and so I am done.

- And yet, Faunt said, taking up a sheet from Kit’s table,
you dislike not the great world of power.

And all this of riding in triumph through Persepolis. You
are on fire with the great world.

- Reduced to a poet’s perspective. Enlarged through his
fancy.

- Shall we eat at the Angel? We can ride the ice without
the motion of a leg muscle.

- Mr Secretary will pay and bind me to him again?

- Ah no, this is money from another source. A man must
have many sources.

The death warrant was signed on February 1. Queen Elizabeth
feigned reluctance, it was but a matter of the need of the nation
with the Spaniards already landed in Wales and the capital
guarded of necessity by armed levies. As for Mr Secretary, sick
in his chamber, the grief thereof, she said, will go near to kill him
outright. And one week later the Queen of Scots, given but a day’s
warning, was beheaded in a late sunrise of winter, and her little
dogs trotted out from under her skirts to lap her blood. So all
were happy, with the London mob lighting a great fire outside
the French Embassy and knocking on the door to beg wood for
it. The fires and dancing and bells and songs would have gone
on like an endless carnival had not the imposed Ash Wednesday,
though it was truly a Thursday, of Sir Philip Sidney’s funeral shut
the toothed mouth of rejoicing. Many of the fellows and students
of Cambridge rode down, some even walked, that they might
witness the obsequies. Kit stayed where he was. Tom Lewgar came back bubbling with a piece of poetastry he had writ:

- A good torchecul or arsewipe, Kit said. Bad rhymes, foul
metre. You dishonour one that was a poet before he was a
soldier.

- Can you do better, eh, can you do better? Little Lewgar
frothed and danced in his little rage.

- Better does not come into it. Is a lion better than a
flea? But here we have a flea that is lame and blemished and
cannot jump. Go back to your study of ballockless Origen and
leave verse to them that have ears and counting fingers.

- I know of your atheism too.

- I descry no pertinence there. Next and elects, though.
That could be accounted worse than atheism. Go away.

IT was a few weeks before the beginning of the long vacation
that Tom ‘Walsingham came, unaccompanied by Ingram Frizer.
Kit found him in his room, reading sheets of the play that was
coming to its close. Barnabas Ridley, still Kit’s chamberfellow,
sat at the same table conning lecture notes. Ridley was one of an
ancient breed that could not internalise the words he read: he was
mumbling about the heresy of Sabellius. Tom, not mumbling,
said:

- Good bloody stuff here.