A Dead Man in Deptford (8 page)

- Eructat cor meum, Poley said cheerfully. Skeres cheerfully
responded:

- Et cum spiritu tuo. Then he nodded direly and left.
Poley said now they could talk. He poured wine and said:

- You know of me? Sir Francis spoke of me?

- He said you were in jail to trap priests.

- They talk in their distress, many secrets are divulged in
a prison. But I am glad to be out and breathing sea air. Still,
they will talk to me for I speak their language. I was born in
the year that Mary, bloody as they call her, married Philip of
Spain. So I was brought up in the old faith and some believe I
practise it. So I will, I will go through the form, take the bread
that is God but know now that it is only flour and water. Some
know me for what I am, the more so as Sir Francis put me into
the service of Philip Sidney while he was readying himself to be
governor of Flushing. For there is no greater pope-hater than Sir
Philip. Take some more of this wine, have Skeres’s share. Oh,
I have money for you, a little, I will give it you tomorrow. And
I have your orders. You are to enrol at the College, saying you
are studying for the Church but you have doubts about it. They
welcome waverers.

- I am not to pretend to the old faith?

You would not deceive them as I can. Be a waverer in
sincerity and humility. You seek the light. But in truth you
seek those who are to come over to be devilish plotters. They
are plotting already. The pope has excommunicated the Queen,
who, for good measure, is said to be illegitimate, which, if we
reject divorce, she is. The Queen may in all Catholic holiness be
driven off the throne and another queen installed there. Which
queen you know.

- You mean plots to kill the Queen?

- That sounds coarse, worthy of Skeres. Some talk of removing and sequestering, granting the sad berth at Fotheringay which
will then be vacated. Some raise holy eyes to heaven in shock at talk of killing a queen, but it is all show. They will assassinate
if they can, and they think they can. The bad times are coming.
France and Spain lick their lips in prospect of restoring England
to the fold. You have a holy work in hand.

- What can I do?

- Listen. Take names. We will be waiting at this end. If
you had Skeres with you there would be quick dispatching in
tavern brawls. Skeres is good at brawls, as you may imagine.
He is probably into one now, but that will have nothing to do
with our business. He goes with me to Paris, chiefly as my
protector. In Paris I need protection. It is a filthy city. But
no more of that. Leave Paris to me. You will like Rheims. It
is a gentle town where they gently talk of gently killing queens.
Would you wish tonight to share a bed with Skeres? No, I can
see not. Well, you shall have your own rough pallet.

- Skeres said something about shrugging. Shrugging things
away. What does he mean?

- It is the two stages of leaving the Service. Shrugging is the
first, the second is not shrugging. But you are young, ambitious,
a Cambridge man, and you will not leave the Service. To protect
the realm is a life’s work. A man does not in flippancy abandon
it. But enough of that. You have more questions?

- How long must I be in Rheims?

- You may stay as long as a month without charge. They
are welcoming because they think they have great gentle power
of gentle persuasion. You tell them what you told Sir Francis,
that you are a student of divinity but the studies have engendered
grave doubts. These you wish resolved. They will try to resolve
them. (Here he chuckled.) After a brief time go to mass, even
to confession. In confessionals a lot can be heard. And in the
taverns and the dormitories. I do not doubt you will pick up
some names. With luck we sail at dawn. I spoke to the captain
of the Great Eliza, a pretentious name for a Channel packet. He
speaks of calm waters but I do not believe him. To bed.

HE was in Rheims, which the English had once held but Jehane
la Pucelle recovered by witchcraft. He was in Rheims, very weary
and still queasy in his stomach after a rolling voyage of which he
recalled best the vomiting of the passengers and Skeres’s jeers at
his own crying of Jesus Jesus Jesus as he gave bread and fish and
wine to the tigerish waters. Yet the poeticising mind rode high
above his body’s distress and he saw drunken marble as if Rome
had melted. Poley remained below but Skeres stood by him at
the taffrail, relishing his agony. But it was Skeres who brought
a hot posset, saving it would give comfort. It did not.

At Calais there was French and English chaffering about
horses - a deposit greater than the worth of the raw nags offered,
charges for hire exorbitant. As Kit mounted he voiced a wonder
he had had in his mind, namely was he to be alone and trusted
on this mission, he a young beginner, as Skeres had called him.
Poley, who had asked to be called Robin, was rosy and smiling
and unscathed by the voyage. He said:

- Fear not. There will be somebody along. You shall not
be alone. We are not fools in this business.

So he had ridden the long way to Rheims, jolting on illmade roads, seeing the French farms not much different from
the English, drinking warm milk fresh from the udder and the
day’s new bread. He was not at his best when he sat before
Father Crawley in his study. On the wall Christ writhed on
his cross, and there was an Italian painting of the Madonna
and child. The Madonna, Mother of God, was not much seen
in England now. The priest’s desk was massive and Spanish.
There was a smell in the room that seemed to Kit Catholic and
alien - incense on the skin brought in from the chapel perhaps.
Something close and frowsty, and from Father Crawley a faint
odour as of bad teeth or an ailing stomach. Yet the glance from
his lined face was shrewd. He asked:

- Are you a Walsingham man?

- The shrine, you mean? There is no longer a shrine.

- I think you must know my drift. Have you been sent?

- Sent by my own doubts.

- You must not think us innocent here. We are open to all comers but we remain watchful. What is it you wish?

- To meditate a week or so. Talk and be talked to. Attend
lectures, services, anything.

- You’re welcome to such hospitality as we can give. A
bed and spare diet. Tell me, what is your view of the Seven
Sacraments?

- That there are seven and not fewer.

- So our late king believed and wrote. His treatise earned
him the title of Fidei Defensor. He retained it when he no
longer believed. And so for the Queen and her successors.
This is hypocrisy. I recommend that you meditate on the Seven
Sacraments. Above all the Holy Eucharist. What are you taught
of the Holy Eucharist?

- At Cambridge we learn that the bread and wine are
commemorative. That there is no transubstantiation.

This is in spite of Christ’s own words. Hoc est corpus meum.

- It is taken to be a manner of metaphor. It is said the
unreformed faith is one of cannibals.

- Well, you will learn.

He seemed to grow weary, matching Kit’s own state. He
tolled a small bell as in exorcism of the heresy that clung to
Kit’s travelling cloak. A fat young priest beamed in. Father Hart,
said Father Crawley. Father Hart led Kit to a wing of the College
where beds were ranged in, so to say, the symmetry of triv and
quad propositions. He might take this one at the end. He might
rest. He rested. Those who were to be his fellow sleepers were
awake and out and at work. The building reeked of fresh size.
The faith was renewing itself for battle.

Awake on his third day, having eaten soup meagre and
munched bread among rowdy puppies who were to be priests, he
homed to the cathedral. Homed because he was cathedral-bred,
ever in hearing of bells, ever aware of strong and authoritative
stone, a pretended solidity in Canterbury, where it had been
one thing and was now, stripped and scrubbed, another. Here
though, in the sumptuous God’s house of Rheims, the grudging
hammers of reform had not struck at saints’ statues, nor stained
glass, nor the images of the Virgin Mother recognised, through the cold sharp eyes of the north, as an incarnation of the foul
goddess Ashtaroth. Kit looked up to his neck’s limit, at the
groins of heaven, about him at the chapel-suburbs of the immense
stone city. Jewels and gold unfilched illumined the grey; sunrays
pierced like God’s swords the high windows whose tints refracted
pure light into the sevenfold covenant of his bow. Old women in
black knelt about. Kit stood. The winking light of the reserved
sacrament was coy with him. Three students in black entered,
crossed themselves with water, genuflected, nodded at him. He
had been near to them at supper; they had asked his name and
purpose in coming hither. They too knelt. He, playing his part,
knelt also, playing at praying.

I cannot pray to you because you do not exist. A small matter.
I contain both existence and its opposite. You cancel out yourself.
You condone too many murders in your name. I condone nothing.
I am above such things. My name is not myself. When men use my
name this means they do not know me. What shall I do? What you
are driven to do. And if I refuse to believe in you? My existence
does not depend on your belief. You are then detached from men.
What then is meant by God’s love? The passionate acceptance of
myself as my own highest achievement, manifested to senses live and
yet unborn in the universe as my palpable garment. Men are a strand
in that garment. Why did you have to come down to earth as a
man? I do what I will. Men must be taught. The loving community
of men must figure the perfection of the divine order. Men have learnt
nothing. Does not this argue a flaw in the divine substance? When
men have destroyed themselves utterly there will be left one man who
has learnt. That will be enough. And I can wait. This is not you
who speak. It is only a voice among the many voices that dart
like wind about the crevices of my brain. Did you expect it to be
otherwise?

He rose angry from the paving on which he had, sorely and
stiff-kneed, knelt, and, leaving, cooled his face with the water
that was called holy. He went out into the cathedral square and
God howled down at him from the sun. Poor Dorothy was right.
There was God. And out of the sun he entered a small tavern
and said Du vin. It was gloomy and there was a smell of garlic which struck him as most heartening. It was devil’s bane. It was
health. Dull gold gloomed at him. It was a garment. Thomas
Walsingham was sitting there, not alone. Well, he was foolish
not to have expected this.

- Come then, Kit Kit Kit, you see I have remembered the
name. My grave cousin was mumbling of Morley and Marley
and Merlin, but Tom Watson said Kit was enough. And this
is my man Frizer.

Frizer sat a table’s distance away from his master, sat as
though it were not decent to sit in his master’s presence, but
this was after all a foreign country. He seemed well pleased to
stand and bow and then remain standing.

- You were quick after me, Kit said, sitting with his wine.
It must have been the next packet from Dover.

- Ah no, I was in Paris. We were in Paris, were we not,
Frizer, and Frizer did not like Paris. We were waiting to spy
on Poley, but Poley seemed to be there to start spying on us.
And there was this dirty man with him, a cutthroat, what was
his name, Frizer?

- Nicholas Skeres.

- An old acquaintance of Frizer’s, it seems, but I do not
enquire further. Well, you are here and I am ready to start
spying on you. Or shall I say keeping you from trouble? Tom
Watson said you were a pretty sort of fighter in taverns. That
will not do in this holy city.

- You too are enrolling in the College?

- No, we are removed from that business, we are in an inn,
are we not, Frizer? Frizer sleeps on straw and does not like it.

- I like what it is my duty to do, Frizer said. It was
a Thames voice whose sounds were made all in the middle
of the mouth and whose tones were the tones of a whine. A
Thames rat, then, sleeked up for a servant’s office, the devotion
a kind of chronic sickness. He said: I will leave you gentlemen
together, you are gentlemen together. He did not add: I know
my place. He bowed leaving and limped as he left, donning an
old velvet cap Kit knew must be greasy.

- And so, Thomas Walsingham said. He has his duties to perform, bed-making and ordering dinner. And Kit and Tom
can be free. I tell you, you will find nothing here, all are too
cautious.

- Poley talks of conspiracy centred in the College. I have
the impression of somebody coming that all await who will nod
at the beginning of something.

- It is all very simple, Kit Kit Kit. The Queen of Scots is
to be put on the throne, then the Spanish and French will be
invited in to restore us to Rome’s rule. But all that is needed
is the evidence of conspiracy, and then Sir Francis will do the
rest. You know of the Act? No, well, the Act that has been passed
says that if there be conspiracy proved, even if the Queen of Scots
knows nothing of it, then she is as guilty as if she instigated it and
may lawfully be executed. You did not know that?