A Dead Man in Deptford (28 page)

- She is in love with some Frenchman called Garnier. She translates him. There is hope for us all on the lay side, the
clerisy thinks us to be filth and disruption.

They were seated in a waterside inn named the Red Hat,
whose sign was a devil clothed as a cardinal. Ned Alleyn had
taken the pages of The Rich Jew from Henslowe. You cannot,
he said, leave Machiavelli alone. And he recited to the inn:

- And the tragedy of the Guise? Kit asked.

- In time, in time, Henslowe said. I tell you, it is a hard
world.

- He means, Ned Alleyn said, that Sackerson the bear is
to have a tooth drawn and the French pox is rampant. Fear
not, Pip, all may yet be well.

- If life were but easier.

Kit found himself singing without much tune:

It all came back to him, the evening with Captain Foscue in
Rheims, the lie the doomed priest had sung about the deadliness
of thinking. A mild-seeming man he did not know, fiddle-shaped
brow and an auburn beard, nodded now at those lines. Kit rose.
He must pack his three shirts and proceed to Deptford, a matter
of catching the evening tide.

I’r was with some surprise and no surprise, first one then
the other, that he found Tom Walsingham was to be his fellow
voyager. He was on the quay where the Swiftsure lay docked, his man Ingram Frizer not with him, dressed exquisitely in pink with
gold beneath the doublet slashes, hair to his shoulders under a hat
with osprey feathers and a broad brim. His cloak was scarlet and
heavy. His bag was of new leather, perhaps Florence work. He
showed no surprise at Kit’s coming; the disclosure of travelling
companion had been one-sided. He said:

-Dear Kit. After so long. She will not sail till dawn.
I have bespoken a night’s lodging for us at Mistress Bull’s.

- So. Over the smell of salt, distant offal in the slaughteryard,
fish not fresh, a remembered company of odours floated. It was
in odours that memory was entrapped. And where is Mistress
Bull’s?

- A brief walk. Eleanor Bull is a hostess of some refinement,
she serves succulent fish dishes, her husband is a foul Puritan that
brings filthy Puritan print over from Middleburg. Robin Poley
that hates Puritans does not hate Rob Bull. There is a mystery
for you to ponder.

They walked together on the crackling dead leaves of the
garden of Eleanor Bull’s house while she, a decent woman with
queen’s hair and apple cheeks, dressed in the plain way of the
new reformists which Tom Walsingham in his discretion took to
be the plainness merely of her liking, oversaw the preparing of
their supper, a fish pie with dates and spices. Christ’s blood, no,
not Christ’s blood, streamed in the firmament, only the colours
of the autumn day bravely dying, a sweet sad swansong sung to
no ear. Tom said:

- We conquer mad fury, do we not?

- The fury of the flesh, so to put it?

- They impel me to winter before my time. A cousin dying
and a brother dying and myself last of the Walsinghams.

- Of your brother I knew nothing, of Sir Francis some
spoke of an improvement.

- To frighten his enemies and give hope to his creditors.
He is sick enough. Poley gives the orders. But there will be
no more orders for me when I play the part of Lord of the Manor.

Your man Frizer has had his majordomo’s chain ready
for some time.

- I hear the old bite. Frizer is beginning to think well of
you. He once had ambitions as a stage player. He was, he says,
overborne to an ecstasy of terror by your Faustus. He will not
object to your becoming my resident laureate.

- Those are not for mere Lords of the Manor. You presume,
or else you use some metaphor.

- The heat went out of us. We come to our autumns early.

- You must speak for yourself, Tom. I am still in my spring.

- Oh no. There was no spring in Faustus. We shall not
share a bed here at Mistress Bull’s.

- So you were in London for Faustus but had no thought
of being there for its author?

- There were other things, he said vaguely. But I think
that now we must be together.

- With Frizer blessing our chaste union?

- You must remember that Frizer saved my life. I was
drowning. A swim in the lake and then a cramp came. You
should be glad he was on the hank, watching, always watching.

- He saved your life, so I dutifully bless him.

- Let us go eat.

They ate, and after they slept in chambers somewhat removed
one from the other. Kit woke from shallow sleep as the noctis
equi plodded towards dawn. Well, to be self-serving, Scadbury
Manor was altogether removed from the streets of killing rogues
like Orwell. And there was the matter, truly perhaps a duty, of
removing himself from playhouse business to serve - who? Erato?
Calliope? He had not been in service to Melpomene, rather to her
younger ugly sister Thalia. He had had in mind for some years
rhyming the tale of the ephebe, hyacinthine-locked, drowned in
the Hellespont with no salvatory Frizer plunging in. Of Tom’s
intentions he could understand little, he riddled overmuch. But
Kit foresaw that Tom was foreseeing a kind of dutiful abandonment (duty, always duty) of the pleasure of entwined male
limbs, the yielding to marriage, the continuance of the line. In
that he would be following the nobility, Essex for one. Essex
had, they said, arranged to marry Sir Philip Sidney’s widow
who was Sir Francis’s daughter. The Walsingham red drowned in the Devereux blue. The Walsingham blood must not, like a
summer river, dry. It must not be lost to history. Why then
was Kit wanted (his own wing, Tom had said, sucking a fish
skeleton)? A visible tangible temptation to resist or not resist?
My poet?

They sailed downriver and began the long climb up England’s
eastern flank to the foreign country that was Scotland. There was
ever the comfort to port of green land, ships at anchor, smoke
from dwellings. The winds blew at their own caprice and there
was brailing and loosing of canvas. They put in for the night at
Grimsby and, inns being full, shared a bed as men often must.
Naked, they touched. Tom said:

- Your body does not smell as it did. There is a rankness.

- Suffused with love of my nymph tobacco.

- Yes, you are one of Raleigh’s tribe. Raleigh must be
on guard.

- This he knows.

- You will be safe with me.

- Am I in danger?

- If Raleigh cannot easily be struck, others may be in
manner of a warning. Come then.

They embraced, coiled, clipped, roused nerves to breaking,
joyfully died. And then on to Whitby. And later they touched
Dunbar with rain squalls and flapping sails, Tom sick and Kit
solicitous. At nightfall they nosed into the Firth and anchored at
Leith. There was a brief journey on hired horses to an Edinburgh
that smelt of peat fires. Their inn was on Spittle Street, south
of the King’s stables. Under a rainy moon Holyrood glowered.
They lay, as before, in the one bed.

- Why are you here, Tom?

- For the delivering of a letter. Do not ask more. Here we
become two not one. Sleep. And as to point their disunity he
turned his back.

They awoke to the scent of an air diverse from London’s. Still
the peat smoke, now meeting them eyes and nose on from the
smouldering fire in the room where they were to breakfast, the
casement open, though soon at their bidding closed, to a tarter wind than any of the south. The goodwife who waited on them
offered parritch and herrings. They must wait for milk from a
cow or coo that lowed near by. Kit coughed over a noggin of
usquebaugh. In the street after they must pause in their walk to
avoid the brief deluge from an emptied Jordan above, hearing the
deformed French of gardey loo and knowing the territory to be
foreign. Young Fowler they found in lodgings on Grassmarket.
He made mock obeisances to his London visitors, bidding them
sit, ready with a crock of Scotch ale. His English was of England
though tainted with a Scotch rise that rendered each statement a
question. Mr Walsingham might proceed at once to the palace
where his majesty was at present and by luck residing. The two
seals on Mr Walsingham’s letter, that of the English monarchy,
that of his grace of Canterbury, would ensure prompt ushering
into the presence of some medallioned underling. As for Mr
Marlin here, the Earl of Huntly was in Holyrood lodgings and
would be told of the arrival of the London messenger, who must
present himself at a dawn mass the morrow in St Mary’s chapel,
many thought this to be the dead queen already sanctified, the
ignorance of the populace, there to take the consecrated bread
as token of the sincerity of his faith and his office and after to
deliver his package whose seal was not known to Fowler, nor to
Kit, nor to Tom, but would doubtless be known to his lordship.

So Kit for a day had the freedom of this strange gaunt
city, in whose taverns he heard the ancestor of his own tongue,
though hardly to be understood. On Highriggs near sundown he
saw one he thought he knew and who thought knew him. This
man hailed him as Marlin, Merlin, Marley of Corpus Christi.

- Penry? Is it the same Penry?

- The same as what? I was at Peterhouse. Oh, you mean
the Penry they search for. This sunset wind can be fierce. Let
us eat.

They were given a small room in the back of a tavern named
the Twa Corbies. The peat fire smoked. Penry coughed hard,
showing good teeth. This scourge of the Church Established
was no more than Kit’s own age, red of beard and hair, fiery
banners for one whose mission of fire was tempered with the smoke of laughter, coughs and laughs being alike in that there
was no voluntary checking of them. Penry called for usquebaugh
and ale to quench it.

- We were both, I recall, under poor Francis Kett. You
heard of his fiery end? (This potion is fire enough.)

- With rage. And, answering your former question with
more than a cough, yes, I am both author and printer. I oft
wrote straight into type. You are eating herring with Martin
Marprelate.

- Where is the press?

- On a cart in a stable, I will not say where. I come
and go over the border. Here the Kirk protects me. But it
would be cowardly to cower in Scotland. They will get me yet,
I know.

- Not with assistance from me.

- I have to give you at least negative thanks. You did
not join in with the other play-botchers to attack poor Martin.

- I saw no cause to attack. Sir Walter Raleigh told me
the Queen herself took clandestine pleasure in the Marprelate
tracts. Her bishops are a wretched crew and she knows it.

- Oh, it is the whole damnable heretical nay heresiarchal
boiling that smells of hell. You knew me when I had to put
a cloak over my Catholicism. I have leapt over the casuistry
of the middle way to embrace the other extreme. But Christ
was always there, the same body whatever the garments. It was
Christ I hungered and hunger for, direct, untempered, naked,
body clasped to body. You smile. Why do you smile?

- Forgive me. You attacked your herring with such hunger.
I was thinking of Christ as ichthyos. And you must admit your
attachment to the Lord is expressed in highly physical terms.

- Ah well, it is the shortcomings of language. The saints
have bodies, else they would be angels. The smile, I must say,
is that of a cynic.

- Only among cynics will you find tolerance. I confess I
have been engaged with others in denying Christ’s divinity. In
the honesty of free enquiry. Is that wrong? Free enquiry may
end up in inability to press the denial. Through the thornbushes of thought thus to arrive at what the unthinking must take as a
dogma.

- We must strip off all to arrive at his celestial presence
which is also a fleshly presence. The miracle of God’s becoming
fallible humanity - the head reels more than with this usquebaugh.

- Surely not fallible?

- Flesh failing, flesh responding to pain, then the glory
of the resurrection.