A Dead Man in Deptford (37 page)

Tom Kyd was dragged from his cell in the early May morning,
haggard and in pulsing pain. With his left hand he could raise
the cup of water he was surlily given, but he could eat no bread,
having small stock of saliva. He was taken, not pushed, to the
room of his yesterday’s interrogation. Here there were now two
men, the one he knew who, in acknowledgment of the formality
bestowed by the other, now gave his name as Cooper. The new
man was of a higher order, a servant of the Privy Council who
called himself Stephen Wheelwright. Kyd’s spinning world of
great agony caught a bond of ancestral craft between the two
names, what he could not say, something to do with axeing,
cutting and sawing. Mr Wheelwright was in black very neat and
smelling at the new flowers of the morning. He said somewhat
grimly to Kyd:

I dislike not these verses. Odd lines of your tragedy adhere
to the memory. You are not to be dealt with as any common
scribbler of subversion. That is why you are not to be put
further to the torture. I take it you are dextrous not sinstrous.
Your writing will be somewhat hampered. This now must be
explained. And he gave Kyd’s face a cooling draught from the
waved papers marked Vile Heretical Conceits.

- I have already. Marlowe.

- Or Marley or Morley or Merlin. Copied under duress
saith Mr Cooper here. How then?

- He is of extremest violence. The copying of heresies from
a book he brought. A commission. From Sir Walter Raleigh.
He said. I would not but there was vile and foul importunacy.

- For Sir Walter Raleigh you say. Yet they remain among
your papers. That argueth contra.

- They were never collected. The commission was forgot.

- You were paid for an act of scrivening?

- I am owed still. Those papers not truly mine were shuffled
among papers mine truly. I am in pain.

- A man of violence, you say, this Marlowe. Also of violent
and atheistical speech, as is much reported. His atheism has
gone into recent print. Or the imputation thereof. You confirm
this from your knowledge?

- Ever mocking God and our blessed Saviour. He mocked
at my great poem of St Paul. He said that St Paul was but a
juggler. That Harlot that is a Raleigh man could perform better.

- Back ever to Sir Walter Raleigh. Did he speak of a
nest of atheism?

- He spoke of no nest. The heretical speech was all his own.

- Do you swear to all you have said?

- Bring me the blessed Bible and I will swear on it. Bring
me the communion cup to drain. So fervent am I in abhorrence.
I swear as I hope to be saved.

- You will see the virtue of torture, Mr Kyd. It bringeth
a man to a manner of humility in which the truth is the sole
garment. He cannot say like your Hieronimo Why then I’ll fit
you. All is not over but you may go. You will be called when
wanted. And then we shall have done with the matter.

So Kyd left in great agony to abide the subsidence of the
gross swelling and the mending of his fingers to strange and
useless shapes, like twigs of a dead tree. And the interrogation
was reported to the Privy Council and the Heretical Conceits
delivered up to the same. And on May 18 one of the Messengers
of Her Majesty’s Chamber, a Mr Henry Maunder, was directed,
in the words of his commission, to repair to the house of Mr
Thomas Walsingham or to any. other place where he shall understand Christopher Marlowe to be staying and to apprehend him
and bring him to court.

i’r had long to wait, in that afternoon of May 20,
in the gallery outside the chamber where he was to
be examined. It was in Westminster and he wondered
why not in the cooler salt air of Greenwich, away from the stench
and howls and moans and bells of the ever-present plague,
though that, they said, was abating. It had all something to
do with Tom Kyd, and he did not properly understand. Mr
Maunder, who had ridden with him from Scadbury, spoke in
a manner saturnine of Kyd’s not writing much any more since
he was dextrous of fist, and this he did not understand either.
So he patrolled on soft shoes the corridor, murky with dusty
mullioned windows against which leafy summer struck silently
like ghosts of old time in vain demand of entrance. There were
in a corner between the great doorway of the chamber and the
windowed wall dried-up flies, muscal mummies, in abandoned
webs and, as a good poet, he forbore to convert them into figures of a possible future state for himself. He was not under
arrest, merely here for examination in some matter pertinent
to no longer dextrous Kyd, whatever that signified. A liveried
man, bald though young, was near-deferential when he came out
of the examining chamber, nodding that Kit might now enter and
holding open the door.

- Sit, sir, sit. So he sat. The Archbishop of Canterbury had
spoken, for this session not garbed for ceremony but in the
plain gown and square cap of his quotidian business. That lined
and acid face was of Sir Thomas Heneage, appointed head of the
Service: him Poley had once pointed out at a distance. There was
Sir Robert Cecil, of the great family, whom fate, unmindful of
familial greatness, had endowed with a hump on his back. His
eyes were affable, he even nodded. Of course, they were of a year
at Cambridge, what now had been his college? And the peevish
boy’s face over a snowy ruff and gold and scarlet beneath was of my lord of Essex. Kit had not thought him to have joined the
Privy Council; this was exceptional honour for one so young and
must be of most recent date. His Grace of Canterbury held up a
taped bundle, saying:

- To be brief, there are heresies written here duly noted,
found in the chambers of a Mr Thomas Kyd, yeoman not
gentleman, admitted by him to be in his own hand, imputed
by him to have provenience in your request or, as he puts it,
impetuous importunacy that they be copied from your dictation.
The heresies are foul and blasphemous. What do you say?

- I deny the impetuous importunacy, as your grace or Mr
Kyd has it. I admit that this work was done. As a noverint
by trade turned playwright Mr Kyd was willing for a fee to
do it.

- These are not Kyd’s opinions?

- Far from it. I know him for a man of somewhat whining
piety.

If he had expected then a smile he did not get it. His
lordship of Essex said:

- Are these then your opinions?

- No, my lord - if, as I take it, that is how you are to
be addressed, I have not had the honour of an introduction
- no, they are Arian arguments taken from an old book. They
were copied that they might be discussed and refuted. My lord
of Canterbury will doubtless know the book. It came my way
in my studies of theology. It was printed in the reign of Queen
Mary of inglorious memory. The Fall of the Late Arian is the
title. Its author I have forgot.

- Let me say now, the Earl said, that you had best not
teeter in the direction of insolence. These be grave matters and
modesty and deference are on your part in order.

- I modestly defer, my lord. The Archbishop said:

- I do not see what this is about. The book, as you say,
I know or knew. Arianism is finally confuted and there is
no further need of argument. Did you consider you could
do better?

- Not I, your grace. I was fully satisfied. But some whose learning I respect thought there were gaping holes in the arguments that might lead some to consider there was a possible truth
in the heresy that Jesus Christ was not the Son of God.

- Who are these paragons of learning? Sir Robert Cecil
gently asked.

Kit now hesitated. He smelt danger. He said:

- Mr Thomas Harlot, for one. The Earl of Northumberland
for another. There are several men of learning most warm to give
to the truths of our faith the structuring of what must appeal to
reason.

- Reason and faith, the Archbishop said, do not of necessity
cohere. Reason saith that water will not be transformed to wine.
Faith has a contrary answer.

- We were warned at Cambridge, your grace, of the dangers
of what is termed fideism. The Summa of Aquinas makes an
appeal to reason.

- Was this Kyd one of these reasonable enquirers? Sir
Thomas Heneage asked.

- Never, sir, never.

- And you? the Earl of Essex asked.

- I was admitted to the company, my lord.

-A company that held up the truths of religion to the
examination of reason?

- Yes, my lord.

- A company that met at Durham House under the shield
of the man Raleigh?

- Sir Walter, if I am to be absolute in matters of title
and address. This company enquired in full legitimacy of the
nature of the stars and the planets, and of divers matters of
cosmogony.

- And, the Archbishop asked, of the nature of Almighty
God and His Blessed Son?

- The presence of the outlines of Arian heresy in those
papers you hold, your grace, doth indicate that that most deep
and awful matter was never raised. The company deferred to the
teachings of the Church over which your grace presides.

- It is the monarch that presides, the Archbishop harshly said. Be mindful of that. One of her titles is Fidei Defensor.

- A papal bestowal, Kit unwisely said. Be mindful of that.

- How dare you, sir, the Archbishop cried. How dare
he, the others seemed to mutter.

- I beg pardon, your grace. I should have said be mindful
of that, your grace. I do not however beg pardon for the truths
of history, your grace, my lord, gentlemen. The late King Henry
was granted the title for his defence of the seven sacraments, of
which his reformed Church appears to have lost two or three. I
say no more on the matter. I am here not to question but to be
questioned.

- Questioned, that, the Earl said. Questioned on your association with one that teacheth atheism. I mean the man Raleigh.

- Sir Walter, yes, my lord. He has never taught atheism.

- In the House of Commons he has been preaching it.

- I do not think that can be so, my lord.

- Confute your Arians, whatever they be, but not me, puppy.
He speaks against the strangers in our midst and advocates riot,
he follows with loud pleading for freedom of belief.

- That is not atheism, my lord, and I will not be called
puppy. We are both grown to reasonable doghood.

- This, Sir Thomas said most reasonably, is neither time nor
place for spleen and insult. If my lord of Essex would fire guns
against Sir Walter, there are occasions and loci where we others
would not wish to be implicated. With all due and most humilous
deference, good my dear lord. This Mr Marlowe has been one
of the faithful hounds that smell out treason and dissidence. He
is a master of arts. He is known to be a most mellifluous poet.
There are occasions for deference which are unconcerned with
mere rank.

- Mere? Mere?

- Enough, the Archbishop said. Mr Marley, I am unhappy
about the condition of your Christian faith. I fear a contagion
unrelated to the present, though thank God dying, pestilence.
I think you may well have been touched by heterodoxy. I think
we require from you a deposition in writing concerning what you
know of what has been diffused in a certain company.

- You mean, your grace, that I am to write down Sir
Walter Raleigh as an atheist and all his companions, myself
included, as such?

- That is most raw and brutal, Sir Robert Cecil said. We
are all concerned solely with the safety of the realm.

- The craft of the playwright, Kit said, which alone I
may be said to understand, though I have much to learn, must
deal, alas, with the rawness and brutishness of the life of men.
The safety of the realm, as you term it, is not best served by the
terror of its subjects.

- What terror is this? the Archbishop asked.

- The terror of punishment at opening what has been too
long hid, at voicing doubt which is man’s natural state in a world
that is God’s enigma, at tearing off a mask of high-mindedness
to disclose the nakedness of rivalry and hate.