A Dead Man in Deptford (21 page)

- Risley is Wriothesley, which is Southampton’s family
name. Aye, it would be Essex at his tricks, taking his minion
to taverns and other places of common resort, surveying his
kingdom. A minion of a minion, a minion of the moon that is Cynthia. A boy only, nineteen or twenty, but of an ancient
family, we grant it. He boasts of going back to Edward III, his
blood richer than the Queen’s, who has that of the bitch Bullen
in her. He speaks to her very familiarly and she shows her black
pegs in complaisant laughter. Games of cards till the birds herald
the morning. Well, I thought I had done for him. That whore of
a sister of his, Dorothy. You start at the name.

- Another Dorothy. Pardon, continue.

- You know not the story? Well, she made a marriage
against the Queen’s express command, some rogue who shall
be nameless, and they broke into a church with a holy clerk
to conduct the ceremony before her family arrived on royal
orders to stop it. She creeps back into the court, and there is
Essex to plead pardon and reinstatement, but I scotched them
both, saying she was in the back row as of your players, one
obscured who will opportunely dart forward, and the Queen was
angry and then Essex was angrier and he called me a knave and
a wretch.

- You were present?

- I was not, but I heard of it. So the Queen pleads
that we be friends and Essex says he will kill me first, and
by God he means it. It should be swords out, but one my age
learns prudence.

- You honour me with this confidence, but I must ask
in humility where it leads.

- It means there is a great division in the world, and all
who are Raleigh’s friends are enemies of the other. Me he will
not harm, not yet but the time will come, for now the Queen
would not abide it with the war at sea approaching.

- A war? Of this I had not heard.

- I thought you were with Walsingham, no, they said you
had left his employ. Well, there are enough captured documents
to tell of the Spanish preparations. You will know in time. Meanwhile, my orders to see to the south-coast defences are delivered
and under lock. More of that when the time comes. Mark my
words of the division. We are not yet friends, but we will be.
I have tasted of the quality of your mind. You are of us, who look to the future and are bent on disassembling the old way.
You will see what I mean when you come to our next meeting,
which will be on Friday at night. You shall be of our party and
must expect danger. But a man who does not scorn danger is
half of a man. And a great part of the danger will come from
Essex. Here, take a pipe and a screw of tobacco. In the solitude
of your chamber court the nymph.

He took Kit down the stairs and out of the front door,
which may be accounted an honour. He shuddered at blustery
November and, giving Kit his hand, a hard one as of a labourer
in the fields of the world, said finally:

- The armour is, in fact, of silver. You caught my dream
of its being gold. It may yet be gold, we shall see. What name
do I call you?

I N the solitude of his chamber, with a fire going and a discarded
page of the second Tamburlaine as a spill, Kit courted the nymph
without delicacy. He drew her in coarsely to the very base of his
lungs and caught hints of her beauty. But then she struck him
like some ugly vindictive crone. He vomited into his Jordan, not
yet emptied from the morning’s libation, and as he vomited he
thought he had a vision of hell. He called, and as he called his
cool brain all above the paroxysm noted with wonder the names
he called, he called on Jesus and Mary and even St Joseph. They
derived from a Catholic past before his begetting. Oh God God
God, he also called in his retching. For, as we all may attest, no
agony is worse than this wrenching and tearing of the inner self,
the body assailed by demons or by the devil who rules them in all
his filthy majesty. After the last strings of spittle joined the coloured mess mingled with mingo mingere in the Jordan (the river of
holy baptism) Kit lay on his floor spent and moaning and cursing
the nymph that was in truth most diabolical. Then he must needs
sit bare-arced on his Jordan, hand scooping sweat from his brow,
and void much black nastiness. His torchecul was yet another discarded page of his play. Heaving then from wretched odours
of ordure that filled his little room, he opened the window to a
raging November sunset. Streams in the firmament came to him
and he grinned sadly at the division of brain and body, that proof
of the independence of the soul, the making mind ignorant of the
disintegration of corporeal elements. He tottered from his room,
Jordan in hands well held away from him, to empty his voidings
on to the dunghill that festered at the corner of Hog Lane. This
was to be cleared by the paid cleansers - the hovering kites
did not find it to their taste, preferring the eyes of traitors’
heads set above Temple Bar (eyeless Father Ballard had seen
eternity there, the pecked skull long removed, Kit had passed
it shuddering). Then, with emptied Jordan rinsed in a raintub
on which flowers of filth were afloat, he walked manlily back
to his chamber and threw himself on his pallet. He slept long
and awoke to the watchman’s blessing (past four of the clock).
Then hunger struck with no shame. On his table was part of a
loaf not yet stale and a hunk of cheese whose redolence did not
appal. First he took a draught of wine that was vinegary; in the
jug, he saw now from his flinted candle, was the floating white
mother that was charged with the ensouring. Then he sat on his
bed and ate. His cleansed stomach rumbled reluctant thanks; it
had not been well treated. And then, to large surprise, came
another hunger, and that was for the nymph. The name, the
poet noted, had no English rhyme, save for a street cry never
to be heard: What do ye lack 0, here is fine tobacco. A trade
to come, an enshipped commodity from Virginia and where?
Trinidad, trinity, the Indies of the West that were no Indies.
His pipe contained some still, overlaid with its cinders; there
was a wet bubbling in the stem. How was it to be cleaned?
Sir Walter would know. A thrust wire perhaps. He scoured
the bowl with the point of the cheese-knife and recharged. He
took yet another Tamburlaine spill and bade her make smoke.
He smoked, the word would come in though some would prefer drinking. But here was an organ summoned for a pleasure
innutritive, the buggery of the lungs.

It was true pleasure, and he felt some guilt at it. If Christ had known it, would he have transmitted his substance in smoke?
The eucharist in a pipe-bowl. He saw Christ an instant, smiling, bending no angry brows. Christ had been called on in that
agony now past and not well remembered; the demons had not
prevailed. The guilt lay in the pleasure that was not nature’s trap
and it was analogous, Raleigh was right, to that other pleasure.
To rise above the cry of the maw that bread be turned to blood
and bone, of the importunate gentleman of the loins that brats
be begotten - was not that in a manner of the conquest of nature,
vinegary mother that would pull us down? And to overcome
nature was to exalt the soul? No matter, the drawing in of this
divine smoke was an ecstasy and men would in time perceive it
as a great benison to the world. Why did ignorant painted savages already know it? He drank out his pipe and filled another.
Ecstasy to be renewed daily, a pleasure as necessary as feeding,
there was the problem, with daily ravishing of the nymph no easy
entrance to a Henslowe trugging house. The problem of supply
and, brutal irony, the body begetting a need no baker or vintner
could satisfy. Raleigh was for now the keeper of many keys.

- THERE is in the Cena de le Ceneri, the Wizard Earl said,
the character named Prudenzio who is one of those that voglion
vivere e morire per Aristoteles - live and die in Aristotle’s works.
The Nolan says we must purge away doubts and contradictions
- purga tutti i dubii e toglie via tutte le contradizioni - by consigning
Aristotle to the dust and consulting magic.

- Meaning no more, Thomas Hariot said, than philosophy and the mathematics. Magic smacks of the devil to the
uninstructed.

The Earl of Northumberland, ninth Earl, Harry Percy who
might, in this privacy, be called Harry, was of Kit’s age, assured
in his wealth and rank, no minion of the court, a corner of his
mind smouldering with resentment at his father’s death through
holding to the old faith though himself no Catholic, no man of the Reform neither, free of thought (thought is free: there was
even a round catch about it), eloquent though often hindered
by a stammer which with grace he rode over, the Wizard Earl
so called was of Kit’s own age and handsomer. He was at pains
to douse the magic, that other magic, of his rank in this assembly
of the learned and enquiring.

They sat at their ease about Sir Walter’s turret study, the
black November night wrapping the Thames and its masts,
though here and there a ship’s lantern swayed afar - Harlot, the
Earl, Walter Warner, their knightly host, Kit, all busily smoking,
refiring, drawing, the chimney with its banked coals drinking up
the blue fumes (smokers, they would say soon, make chimneys
of themselves). The smoking was an outward sign of the inward
grace of enquiry: it connoted the distant world whence it came
and the ocean over which it had travelled. Kit rejoiced that
in Raleigh’s store-room was a bale not long arrived. Warner’s
tobacco had been dampened by a spilling of his Malmsey. He
tore a page of the Acts of the Apostles to dry it, smiling, all
smiled, there was nothing in a printed page to be revered, the
word was one thing, the Word another. Warner did his drying
awkwardly: he had but one hand, the other was a stump with
five warts on it, a cuff like a pocket covering its shame. Sir
Walter filled his pipe for him; Warner said:

- Giordano Bruno alone will not blow out the Aristotelian
candle, not so long as the beast that Aquinas chained roams
free and tamed in the synods and consistories. He was right,
though, to say that we like candles better than the sun because
of timorousness. We must smoke glass to look at our father in
heaven.

- No perspective trunk, Harlot said, may be trained on
him, but -

- Tele, afar, skopein, to see, Sir Walter puffed. The word
is ready for you, maestro.

- I thank you. Our studies of the heavens lie elsewhere.
Clearly there are stars that are not twinkling jewels set randomly
to beautify the night but suns in themselves. These suns we may
see, our own blesses or burns, an unmoving orb round which we with the other planets turn. This we know, though some
still will not accept it. It diminishes man that he should not
be the centre round whom the sun gyrates. The heliocentric
- a shocking denial of Genesis. But in our occult law the sun,
and I thank Bruno for this, is a universal godhead that, if all
would accept, must burn out our sects and their dissensions.
Why must we take the Christian faith to the Indians I saw in
Virginia? God is enough, the sun his symbol, and it shames me
somewhat to think that this that I draw to my lungs is from a
place called Trinity. Shatter the trinity, proclaim unity. There
would be a word for it.

- Deusism, Deism, Theism, Kit suggested in diffidence.

- What you will, Warner said roughly. Michael Servetus
was burned in Geneva for saying the trinity was a three-headed
dog. He escaped the Romish and Lutheran burners to end up
in flames lighted by Jack Calvin. But I see his contention thus.
There is Aristotelian stasis in the trinity. It is not needed.

- You would say that Jesus Christ is not needed? Sir
Walter asked.

The Wizard Earl looked comically about the chamber, mapped
with strange regions and rivers, as though a spy of the Privy
Council might lurk disguised as an astrolabe. He said:

- In a sense for God to come to earth is a great poem. It
bewilders and yet reassures with the doctrine that spirit can be
made flesh.

- It denies the continuum, headshook Warner. Spirit becomes flesh by a miracle. We do not require miracles. Tom
Hariot here can perform more miracles than ever Moses did, if
we secularate or secularise a miracle into a new wonder that is
nevertheless explained by reason. By the continuum I mean the
flow of one thing into another. The contradictions that Bruno
wished to purge are either end of a linear continuity.

- Bruno, the Earl said, taught that opposites are reconciled
in heaven.

- He did not mean the Christian heaven, Hariot said,
he meant a mystical region that the enquiring brain may
yet encompass.

- Back to Servetus, Warner said in impatience. He encountered a world of stasis, with the blood of the body an unmoving
cylinder. He saw the blood of the arteries and the blood of the
veins, for he was a physician that observed and closely, and he
saw how one became the other through the strange work of the
capillaries. It seemed to him that, if there were a Holy Trinity
as the churches taught, this must be unified through a manner
of capillary action, Father merging into Son and both into Holy
Ghost. So God is motile as the blood is. Bruno was right to turn
our eyes towards the great burning circularity of the sun. I hear
he is roaring out his Italianate Latin now in Wittenberg. That will
shake the pigs of German Lutherans who still revile Copernicus.
We here are shamed by his denouncings of our universities fed
on costive Aristotle. You were at Oxford? he darted at Kit.

- At Cambridge. Alas, we never had him there to stir
our blood.

- And all you learned at Cambridge was Aristotle?

- The Stagyrite as justifier of Christian doctrine, so long
as that doctrine was Henry the Eighth’s donum morganaticum.

All smiled; he seemed to be accepted. Hariot somewhat
wearily said:

- I have been over the edge of the earth where once it was
taught a man would fall into nothingness. The mathematics is
the key to navigation. It enables us to charter the two worlds
that are or were deemed opposed. I mean the infinitely large and
the infinitely small. Contradiction or opposition again, you see,
and the reconciliation effected through numbers. To add and to
multiply one thing, to divide and subtract the same. Would my
tables of logarithms be burned as of diabolic provenance? We
are beleaguered.