A Dead Man in Deptford (31 page)

- You believe that?

- These are ideas that pass through the brain of the bold
man. I think you hold such and speak them. I do not yet have
the boldness.

- And where have I spoken such heresies?

- Oh, around and about. I would not say heresies.

- What are you? Kit asked. Where do you come from,
where were you educated, in whose employ are you?

- A Cheshire man with a brother a knight, brought up in
private tutelage, as for my employ I have been in the service
of many but am too hot in nature to stay long. Last year I
was apprehended in the Strand for rioting after the Portingal
adventure. I was spoken well of by my lord Essex that lost most
through the expedition.

- You are in the employ of my lord Essex?

- Well, Baines said, we must all go where we can. With
Mr Secretary near to death the Service is like to fall apart.

- I take it, Kit said, that you would have me talk of Sir
Walter’s imputed atheism so that you may pass this on to my
lord Essex. I am not so simple but you I think are, both. When
I reach the street I will spew up your wine.

- You are wrong, Cholmondeley said very mildly. You
have too much fire, it is the poetic faculty. I have fire too but
it is held well in check. I thought there might be friendship.

- The friendship of fellow atheists?

- Fellow enquirers into the truth. Well, you are in some
agitation it is no wonder, you found fault in the acting of your
new play I do not doubt.

- You are bold enough in your talk, Kit said to Baines. You
were quick to tell Poley of my failure in duty at Flushing. That
is the way of the puling schoolboy. It was not manly.

- Nor is your speaking friendly.

- Here is a curse for your tablets, Kit said in glee and
anger. May the hosts of Beelzebub bite off your pricks and
then spit them out as unsavoury, may Belial juggle with your
ballocks, may the great Lucifer himself pedicate and irrumate
you in fine Catullan fashion. Hell’s a fable, though not for you,
in hell is a special stinking zone for spies.

- That is far from friendly, Baines said.

- Of which you are one, Cholmondeley said. So the hell
is for you too.

- Like God, if he exists, I am what I am.

And Kit left, tipping the bottle of wine before departing,
so that a quantity dripped into Baines’s lap. He would not find
that friendly either.

KIT rode on Jack Cade, Perkin was unwell in the fetlock,
rode with reluctance (how free was he?) through Chislehurst,
Mottingham, Eltham. The news of Sir Francis Walsingham’s
death had come to him and the Lord of the Manor at the
manor house in Scadbury. I have not seen but have heard
of this building, being told it was a fine one though somewhat neglected for lack of money, the great disease of our
time, half-timbered with a long gallery some seventy feet by
thirteen, a ceiling of curved braces and panels of devices with
some meaning for the Walsingham family though not for others.
There were carved corner posts and gables and surfaces of the
style termed magpie because, I take it, of the black and white.
There was wainscoting not hangings and there were touches of
the Flemish, or so I was told. The building was said to be by
Athelwold Smythson, of the family of the Robert Smythson
who was to erect in Derbyshire Hardwick Hall more glass than
wall.

Here after supper Tom Walsingham and Kit had been enacting part of the tragedy of Edward II, near-finished, with much
frolicking and embracing. Tom, being Lord of the Manor, must
enact the King with

And here is Kit in reply:

Here Ingram Frizer came in to the supper room, still in his
riding gear, anxious to speak, but Kit cried:

- This is for you.

- Here is grave news, master.

- Wait.

- It has happened. Sir Francis died in the most frightful odour,
noxious urine pouring and spurting from mouth, nose and ears
and all holes else, the stench so great that they must bind the
body with bandages about their noses. And there be creditors
ready to seize his body but they have been foiled through hiding
of it.

- Well, Tom said, we have been awaiting this. He filled
himself a beaker of red and drank to his kinsman’s safe passage
to the fields of everlasting protestant bliss, saying: A great man
for the safety of the realm and in the most profound debt because
of it. We mourn and now I must puff myself up as the last of the
Walsinghams until I wed and beget an heir that shall beget heirs
and so to the end of time.

He strode, drinking and thinking, along the eighteen paintings
of Virginia Indians by Captain White and then back again. These
he had bought on Kit’s recommending, there was money now
though never enough. His eyes looked on inner visions of rich
heiresses. Kit pinched himself for twinges of jealousy but found none. Let him then. The hiring of boys who would yield their
flesh for a penny when Frizer was not about might or might not
cease. Marriage was not for pleasure. It was right he marry and
beget. Dire punishments for those that abused God’s instrument
of increase. They kept him down and withal put into his fundament a horn and through the same they thrust up into his body
a hot spit, the which passing up into his entrails and being rolled
to and fro burnt the same. That was in Holinshed, the end of
the king that loved Gaveston’s arse better than his own realm,
but how much of that might be shown in the playhouse was a
matter to be thought on. It could be regarded as most instructive.

That, Kit had said, is the end of my commitment to
the Service, for there will be no more Service.

- You reckon without Poley and others.

- Mr Poley, Frizer had said, it was that gave me the news.
Skeres and I were together on the business and -

- What is this business? Kit had asked.

- None of yours, Tom had replied.

- I stand, or sit, rebuked.

- Oh, it is a matter of lending out at interest, Tom had
carelessly said.

- High interest?

- Tolerably high. Money must be put out at interest, that
is in the scriptures. The unjust steward that buried his talent
in the earth was consigned to the outer darkness, was he not?
Weeping and gnashing of teeth and so forth.

- And Skeres, Frizer had said, must report to Mr Poley
and I was with him, though discreet in the rear. He came out
into the garden very agitated with the news. And he would see
Mr Marlin.

So seeing Mr Marlin he was.

- It is Sir Thomas Heneage now, that was Sir Francis’s
friend and there be none firmer in the faith. But that is as
it were a stopgap till a lasting appointment can be made.

- Sir Robert Poley?

Poley squirmed in a mockery of modesty, seated in his
fine chair beside his table loaded with papers. He had on his lap a black cat that looked on Kit as in recognition. Ovid’s
metempsychosis? Were the eyes the eyes of one he had helped
to the scaffold? Poley said:

- We will not talk of deserts but rather of duty. No, it
may be that Lord Burleigh and his humpback son will add a
new burden to their existing fardels of state. No efficacy, I fear,
they know little of the special agonies. There is one other, and
we know who that is.

- If it is my lord of Essex everything will be diminished
to civil war.

- Meaning?

- The destruction of Sir Walter Raleigh in the interest of
Essex alone, and what you term the papist and puritan menace
to be granted very short shrift.

- The Spanish menace, remember that, that only are we
engaged in.

- Not I, not any longer.

Poley’s stroking hand tightened and the cat squealed, though
soon mollified with a gentle scratching beneath its chin. Poley
said:

- You are in the Service, you are bound to it.

- My allegiance was to a man now dead.

- Your allegiance is to your faith and your country. Sir
Francis was nothing, a mere flagpole.

- An odd metaphor. True, he was thin enough. My indenture
was to him.

- Papers are nothing, papers can be forged.

- But not with the old Philips or Phelips skill. I went to
him to ask for money, but he has become an Essex man. Like
others. The fool Baines for one.

- They go, they shift, others come. You are to go to Scotland with Matt Royden who promises well. And you are to go
soon.

- I cannot take that as an order. I may do things for you as
the granting of a favour, but I have other work. My trade is the
poet’s trade.

- You mean the ridiculous playhouse.

- Ridiculous or not, I am coming to the end of a play,
and there is a clamour for it among the players.

- Lord Strong’s players? I told you Strong must be watched.

- The Earl of Pembroke’s. Must he be watched too?

- I told you the danger is only with the northern earls.
The danger with those is great. That is what your mission to
Scotland is about.

- I do not accept the mission. You look hurt and your cat
views me with dislike, but no matter. Another mission I may
yet take, but not now. The play must be finished and put into
rehearsal.

- These fripperies and frapperies of plays. If you will not
you will not but you must be warned.

- Warned of what?

- You have been privy to much that is most secret and you
are not to be let loose to blather among playmen and others. Oh,
Kit, Kit, are we not friends? And with the change of tone the cat
began purring.

- Of a kind, yes. But not of the playman kind.

- Let that pass, there are friends and friends. You fear
that I am to become a man under Essex? That would be a
fair fear were it to happen. In confidence I tell you that Essex
will not last. He married the daughter of our late master, God
knows why, he seems not to love her, without permission of
the Queen. God knows why the men of the court must apply
for permission to marry, it is, may we say, the jealousy of a
virgin desiccated but fierce in her demands for a devotion she
knows to be a fiction and a fairy tale. To marry is to divorce
her majesty. Essex mayhap had some fantasy of inheriting the
Sidney virtues along with the Sidney widow. Well, it is done,
and all was kept quiet and secret, but now she is enceinte and
the Queen knows and she has slapped his face at the court and
he has slapped back and much else. Raleigh, I believe, made sure
that the Queen knew. Essex, you may be convinced, though he
take Sir Francis’s daughter (may he rest in some sort of peace)
will not take Sir Francis’s place. You may take it that little may
change, that your friend Robin Poley will be steadfast in the old policies and have power enough, and that Kit Merlin will do his
old work when he can. Go to your play but be ready for duty
after. That a man did his duty is all he would desire to be writ
on his tombstone. But we will not talk of tombstones yet or ever.