A Dead Man in Deptford (5 page)

- Not my thought though my words, Kit said. But I see
the danger. A man can be identified with his creation. Create
a villain and you become a villain.

- Those devilish verses would be in the manner of a prologue,
Alleyn mused. But the prologue of what piece?

- Machiavel is no Satan, Kit said. It is his honesty that
astounds. We have seen in our time men sent to the flames
or the hangman’s hands on the grounds of their rejecting the
holy word of God as our prelates interpret it. These prelates
have lifted up their eyes as they were swooning with joy at
the salvation of the sinner through deeply regretted agony
inflicted. But they were and are hypocritical. They love the
pain of others for in it their own power is made manifest. It
is the one thing men want. Not knowledge, not virtue, but
power. This Machiavel knew, this he has taught us. And so the show of holiness is in the service of the love of power.
But our prelates would be shocked to be told it is but a show.
They do not gaze deep into themselves. Machiavel counsels
this and sees virtue in dissimulation if it be exercised in the
pursuit of power. You yourselves look shocked so I will say
no more.

By this time the coffined veal had been placed steaming on
the board by Shilliber’s younger daughter Kate, whose hoisted
bosom was well on show. Ned Alleyn took the great ladle and
dug in and the spiced aroma rose. We proffered our dishes and
he unladled with a clash of metal on metal. Kyd’s watering was
visible to the depth of his chin: saliva played in his reddish beard.
He ate greedily and Tom Watson gently disengaged his hand
from his horn spoon that grace might be said. I, at Henslowe’s
nod, said it:

- May the good Lord bless our victuals. As our bellies
fill with thankfulness may our souls fill with grace. Amen.

- Well, Kit said, but toying with his sauced veal, it is a
good grace. Meaning that there is no harm in it. But God’s
grace is no special condiment. And it is more of a bestowal for
the abstinent than for the gorger.

Kyd gorged. Tom Watson ate with delicacy. Kit drank deep
and praised the Bergerac red. Watson said, delicately munching:

- I see some great giant striding the stage in the pursuit of
power. There are such giants out there in Europe but topicality
is dangerous. Machiavel, they say, is the Bible of the French
queen mother. Put her on the stage and that would put you in
jail.

- The topical, Kyd said indistinctly, veal sauce colouring
his beard, must ever be inserted as it were on the side. My
tragedy is of Spain and Portugal but on the side. To bring in
King Philip would be indiscreet, however we know him to be
the enemy. Young sir, you must learn of discretion. London
will teach it if Cambridge not. And he fell to again.

Kit smacked his lips over a fresh potation, saying: By God this
wine is good, call for more. And then: Discretion is a great killer
of God’s truth or the devil’s. We must not wound, we must not discharge a nauseous stink in the nostrils of the hypocritical.

- Talk not of stinks, Ned Alleyn said, when we are eating.

- Yes, I see that and say pardon. Discretion is a matter
of good table manners. But it is not more.

- You must learn, Kyd said, dish held out like an alms
bowl for a second serving. Discretion at the last will save your
neck. You will regret indiscretion when your dying eyes see in
an instant the cutting out of your beating heart and the tumbling
into the air of your bloody bowels.

- I beg you, Ned Alleyn cried in pain.

- Well, he must learn, Kyd said. But I cry you regret.
He impelled me to it.

- To turn your belly to a wineskin, Watson warned, is the
royal way to a quelling of discretion. And tomorrow early you
must be of clear eye and brain. I will not call for more.

- More, more, cried Kit. In youth is pleasure. Then, grinning like a fool, he stroked my unfeeding hand, which was to
his right. Is it not so, you luscious Bel-Imperia that was, nay,
you are better as you are, women are but machines for breeding,
boys are perfection. To be young and of lucent skin and luminous
eye, the flesh not yet disfigured with the gross hairiness of what
is termed maturity, to be of youth’s sweet breath and unpustular
and unblemished by fatty comedones -

- What is that word? I asked, reaching for a bread manchet
with my left hand.

- It is Greek. It means sebaceous eruptions.

- Please, said Ned Alleyn in agony.

- You are wrong, Kyd said. It is Latin.

- I will wager you it is Greek.

- It is Latin. A comedo is a glutton.

- Then you, sir, are a comedo. But I still say it is Greek.

- You try to be too much the Greek, said Kyd. This is not
Plato’s Symposium. Learn discretion. Take your hand away.

- Discretion discretion, Kit cried to the whole ordinary,
so that many, chewing, looked. And he opened out the four
syllables with a verberant gong stroke on the on. Then he sang to a tune of his own devising words of his own devising:

Shilliber came up to us, chewing his nether lip, and made
eye-gestures of plain meaning though not to Kit. Tom Watson
sighing said:

-Well, I had a mind to eat your hayberry flawn, but
I have a duty to my guest.

- That is another fine word, cried Kit, and he sang duty
duty duty like some loud bird. Then he became suffused with a
kind of green sickness. Ah well, he murmured in some sobriety,
we are but the guests of life, we begin aghast and end a ghost.
And he raised himself abruptly so that his chair fell and suffered
himself to be led away by Tom Watson. But outside in the street
on their way to Hog Lane corner he could be heard singing with
force but tunelessly:

Tom Kyd shook sadly his head as his horn spoon dug into
a dish of flummery and, in a mood of prophecy, said he gave
him but few years.

I M U ST suppose, I suppose, that Kit was giddy with his crapula
when he stood before Mr Secretary of State at eight the following
summer morning, the enfeebling sun in his eyes. Mr but a knight,
this being Sir Francis Walsingham, lord of the Service as it was
called. He was a frail dark man that the Queen, who liked him
little, called the Moor. This was royal ingratitude, since on her behoof, and partly from his own pockets that were not bottomless, he maintained fifty-three sniffing agents between Calais and
Constantinople. These he called his eyes. He said, and it was a
strange echo, as if he himself had eyes that could pierce a man’s
breast:

- Duty with discretion. Sign your name here. And he pushed
forward abruptly on his paperloaded table a particular paper,
neatly scrivened, which, so Kit with his painful crapulous sight
descried painfully, said something of an oath of secrecy and
lifelong fealty and much more of a binding nature. Kit felt as
if two men, each holding an end of rope that was coiled about
his neck, pulled and pulled opposedly. He said:

- Wait. I cannot be so committed. I am still a student with
years of study to go. Mr Watson here has doubtless told you of
my situation.

- One that is committed to the taking of holy orders but
is also a poet of sorts and is wavering in his allegiances. This
signing is by way of fixing the ultimate allegiance which is above
both. We will have no wavering in this respect. (And he fixed
on Kit stern eyes black as hell’s hobs.) The Queen, the Queen,
and her holy Church. A man who will not put his name to such
a testimony of allegiance may well call himself a traitor.

- I am no traitor but I am dubious about signing.

- Dubiety is in itself a sort of treachery. Sign.

So Kit dubiously signed with a swan feather and ink black as
the gaze of him who was to be his master. Sir Francis frowned
at the scrawl arsiversy, saying: I see the first name is Christopher
and a good name, one who bears Christ on his back, but what is
this other?

- The beginning is sure, being Marl or Merl or sometimes
Morl, but we are not clear in the family whether it be Marley
or Morley or Marlowe. I have in my time been called Merlin,
the magician’s name. This I write is, I think, Marlowe. May I
now sit?

- You would do better to brace yourself to attention in
soldier fashion, for you are now a soldier of the cause.

At this, Tom Watson, who lolled in a fine Spanish chair all knobs and curlicues which should have been wooden heresy to
Walsingham but displayed his ironic temper, smiled and smiled
and Walsingham sourly released a smile as if he must dearly pay
for it, saying: Eh, eh, Thomas?

This study in Walsingham’s mansion was small and stuffy
and, as it were, penitential, the window shut tight to the summer
air of noisy London as though the very motes were charged with
enemy poison. There were bulky papers bound in tapes, some
near-tumbling from their shelves, and there was a drawn map
of Europe with red-headed pins to mark the loci of spies for
England, not all of them English. Walsingham said:

- You will have to meet Poley, for Poley will be your
help and guide and master under myself, but at the present
Poley is in the Fleet prison, only for a supposed and fictitious
crime, for he is there to nose out priests. He will be out soon.
You will meet him at Dover, for he must be your cicerone into
a Europe black as hell.

- So. I am to go into Europe. Kit could not hold back
a shiver of pride, that he was to go into Europe.

- Yes, and soon. You are to visit the city of Rheims.
Tell me something of Rheims.

- It is in France. I know little more.

- Our Catholic traitors pondered their coming onslaught on
our realm and its lawful monarch in the town of Douai. They
had been sluiced out of the Lowlands by William of Orange
and rightly. Philip of Spain, the inferno is being stoked for
him, founded the university of Douai because he feared the
protestantism of his Dutch subjects, and what they call the
English College was set up there. Set up for the training of
filthy priests to come to our land disguised as dancing masters
to mutter the mass in priest-holes and dare the risk of capture
and drawing and quartering. It is a kind of courage but as much
may be said of the kitticat cast in the tub for drowning that swims
and swims. The Pope in Rome, the devilish pincers are waiting to
drag out his nails everlastingly, puts a hundred gold crowns each
month into this venture. It has left Douai and is now established
at Rheims, a nobler town where kings are crowned. So Rheims goes with Rome and Spain and hell itself as loci of diabolism
that menace our Queen and must be prayed against. And, here
you come in, acted against.

- Then what must I do in Rheims?

- Watch, watch and learn. Learn what is intended, listen
for talk of assassination and rebellion, find out names of traitors
who propose treachery. You speak French?

- I learned French of the streets from the Huguenot children.
I went to lessons given free by a Huguenot teacher. Canterbury
is my town and it is infested with Huguenots.

- Infested, you say infested? They are our brethren in
arms, they are of the reformed faith. You do not know of
the Bartholomew butchering? You will use another word.

- Indiscreet, I apologise. But it is only honesty to say that
the Huguenots are not liked in Canterbury. They were moved
inland from the coast to check their buccaneering. The city is
full of them. They have taken possession of the river for water
for their weaving. They bring no trade, they have their own
bakers and butchers.

- Also, Tom Watson interposed, shoemakers, I take it.

- Those too. They are their own world and speak their own
language. Nay, they pray in it. Part of the cathedral is reserved
for them and it resounds with French.

- Would you, Walsingham browed at him, rather have
a Catholic Englishman than a French protestant?

- You try to trick me. But it is true to say that some men
of Canterbury are driven back to the secret practice of the old
faith because they do not like these Huguenots with their French
prayer-books. That is in the nature of how humanity behaves.
Blood is thicker than belief.