A Dead Man in Deptford Read online

  - 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.

  Tom Watson howled like a hound at that, though in a manner of comedy, and Walsingham, hands clasped behind, sharply looked out of the window, seeing mostly carts. Then he turned and sternly said:

  - Faith is the one binding force. The Musulmans of many colours attest this. When I was ambassador in Paris our doors were opened to protestants of all races fearful of the Catholic knives and bludgeons. Her Majesty, God save her, argued hotly against the cost of such hospitality, but I reminded her that it was her own faith that was under attack. We were not there as cold English bystanders of the Paris massacres. Our enemy was the Catholic enemy and our friends were the protestant persecuted. And yet she prates, argues I would say, of the good policy of keeping France a friend against Spain. Have you thought of this? Have you your own thoughts about France?

  - Sir Philip Sidney calls France a sweet enemy.

  - Ah, Sir Pip. A good son-in-law, the flower of the chivalry of the Reform, no man braver, no greater hater of papistry. Walsingham waved him away as he had waved away Poley, whoever he was, though as though he were a more substantial cobweb. But he is a poet, and poets are given to the half-lie, Plato would say the whole one. He meant the sweetness of their women and wine and comfits. But mark the word enemy. Enemy he means. You are to enter the territory of the enemy. You have things to ask?

  - Money, expenses I would say. The time of going. This is the long vacation but it does not go on for ever.

  - Ah, sweet Jesus, it is always money. July the sixth you must be in Dover, there is an inn called, let me see, yes, the Luce, whether fish or flower is not certain. There Robert Poley will meet you and tell you all and disburse. You are not in this for profit.

  - The profit of the realm, Kit said, standing to greater though factitious attention. God save it and her. Walsingham looked for the ironic but did not find it. He nodded and said:

  - Well, then. It is fortunate that Canterbury is near Dover. You will in any event be making a family visit so need not claim from the Service for your costs of travelling thither. Thenceforward it may be different. God save the Queen.

  - This could be taken as a dismissal, but before Kit could bow and leave, the door was thrust open and one entered. Walsingham frowningly said:

  - This is mannerless, sir. Here be grave matters proceeding and you blunder in as it were a common tavern. Pray leave and come when you are called for.

  The entrant mooed like a calf but in insolence looked about him. He saw Kit. Kit saw him. Nay, it was more than pure seeing. It was Jove's bolt. It was, to borrow from the papists, the bell of the consecration. It was the revelation of the possibility nay the certainty of the probability or somewhat of the kind of the. It was the sharp knife of a sort of truth in the disguise of danger. Both went out together, and it was as if they were entering, rather than leaving, the corridor outside with its sour and burly servant languidly asweep with his broom, the majordomo in livery hovering, transformed to a sweet bower of assignation, though neither knew the other save in a covenant familiar through experience unrecorded and unrecordable whose terms were not of time and to which space was a child's puzzle. He was a young man of Kit's own age it seemed, lank locks of auburn parted and flowing, long face above a long body, so that Kit must needs look up at wide blue eyes and wide doubtfully smiling mouth, the white collar open at the girlish throat, hose wrinkled and points carelessly tied, a light dew on him as though he had come from tennis or fives. From him rose a faint odour of sweat and rose water. He said:

  - Grave matters, was it?

  - Not so grave and over anyway. Kit was aware of his voice grown phlegmy. He cleared his throat. Are you too in what he calls the Service?

  - He uses me at times, not often. He is my cousin and pounds at me like an uncle. He is grave but not to be taken gravely. I think we must have met before.

  - You and I? I think not. You are not a Cambridge man?

  - I am not anything save the most discardable of the Walsinghams. A younger son who does not inherit. Thomas, whose name taught him to doubt. Let us get out of here. It smells of stratagems and death.

  - But you wished to see your cousin?

  - There is no haste. I am thirsty after my bout. The Crown is round the corner.

  - You were at the foils?

  - I call myself a sort of swordsman. And, when the majordomo had opened the door for them, he breathed in London air, which was not sweet, as it were all country blossom and birdsong. Better, he said. I like not the town, all horse dung and hawking. I shall ride back to Scadbury tomorrow.

  - Which is where?

  - An easy canter by way of Chislehurst. You do not sound like a London man. Who are you, by the way?

  - Marlowe or Marley or Morley. You have a choice. The first name does not equivocate. Christopher.

  - Which is Kit, so you are Kit, come, Kit, Kit, Kit. A university youngster on the make, and why not. You have spying ambitions?

  - Rather poetic. And perhaps in the playhouse.

  They had reached the Crown, which held a brace of drinking draymen. These took in indifferently a gentleman indifferently dressed and another in exquisite and mostly borrowed raiment, apt for the grave matters of the court or the airy concerns of city leisure. Thomas Walsingham shrugged with a smile at his lack of a purse, but here they would slate his order; Kit eagerly paid out pennies for ale.

  -A poet. I have no skill, but I have been the object or recipient of verses. Not often good verses.

  - It does not surprise me.

  - That the verse should not be good?

  - That, yes, the age smells of bad poetry, but chiefly the other.

  - That I should be what I said? Well, sometimes through compliments to me fools think they may reach my high-placed cousin. You came another way.

  - Through Tom Watson. A chance meeting, a common concern with poetic trafficking. I am lodging with him. To revert to what you said earlier. You seemed to think that we had already met. I had the same feeling though I knew it was not possible in the way the world calls meeting. But this sometimes happens. Plato or some of his followers might posit the prior or prenatal collocation of souls.

  - Does he not also tell some legend of a unity capriciously split by the gods, so that half goes wandering in search of half? But that is a pretty doctrine of male soul and female soul conjoined if they are lucky, which is rare, after an eternity of seeking.

  - Male and female are grossly conjoined following nature's wish that they breed. There is an airier or more spiritual mode of conjunction.

  They drank and
drinking looked each other in the eye or eyes. Thomas Walsingham said:

  - More spiritual? Angels holding hands?

  - Holding hands, yes. Effecting more intimate joining. We have bodies, we are not all soul. There is a higher order than what crass nature dictates. Nature does not want poetry, nor music, nor the eyes of the seeker looking upward from the dungy earth. Nature does not want the love that she would call sterility but we could designate otherwise.

  - Well, we have known each other some ten minutes and you are already anatomising unnatural love.

  Kit blushed. He said hurriedly:

  - Unnatural love is a bad phrase. What is against nature is sin, so the religions say. But what makes man what he is is unnatural if we raise him as we must above eating, dunging, begetting, dying.

  - Well, these be high or deep matters for a morning cup and a first meeting. In youth is pleasure. (Kit started: someone, perhaps he himself, had said that that previous day or night that seemed now much in the past.) I mean that thought is the enemy of doing. My grave cousin is always saying that thought both makes and undoes life's fabric. If, he says, he thinks too much on racks and thumbscrews and what he calls the apparatus of the finding of truth then he grows sick. And yet, he says, what is the big conflict but a grinding of thought against thought. Some think that bread can be God and some that bread is bread and God but a hovering thought over it. And some that the Pope is the devil. It was different a hundred years back. Thoughts change and become perilous. What, then, are the things that do not change? In youth is pleasure.

  He pledged that in a draining of his tankard. Kit did not drain his. He said:

  - I beg pardon for bringing in the high or deep matters. Altus in Latin is both deep and high. I was seeking some answer to the question how a man can have a conviction that he is drinking with an old friend -

  - You feel that? That we are old friends?

  - I feel at ease and yet not at ease. And you will know why not at ease.

  Thomas Walsingham looked away at that. He looked at the street outside the open door. An old nag, much galled on its flanks, was pulling a cart of country produce; the wheel had jolted against a hitching post and the horse was being blamed. Then he turned and said:

  - I know not why not. You may be at ease, he said in a parody of a captain's tone. Wholly at ease. And then: There is the boy in this thing of Plato's. A slave boy without learning. Yet Socrates shows that the boy knows Euclid and Pythagoras. So the soul lives before birth.

  - You have done some reading.

  - A little. I leave reading to my man Frizer.

  - Frazer?

  - He calls himself Frizer. Ingram is his other name. He is often called Mr Ingram. It's no matter. Very devoted. He has more money than I and yet he is my man. He has ambitions for me. He thinks of buying an inn in Basingstoke, the Angel, he thinks the name apt for some reason, and I shall be the landlord and he a mere tapster. Oh yes, highly or deeply devoted.

  - He loves you, then. I see.

  - You do not see, and the tone was sharp. If you mean the love you spoke of, no. Frizer is a dog and a good dog. He likes being a dog. He is never happier than when fawning and cringing. There are some men born to be dogs. And yet he reads and tells me what he reads. He would serve me in all ways. Lackey and groom and schoolmaster. He licks my hand, but there the licking ends.

  - And you live together at - I have forgot the name of the place.

  - Scadbury near the caves of Chislehurst. My brother Edmund is Lord of the Manor. But he is so little at the manor house that he grants me the run of it. Sir Thomas our father left him all and me little. So Edmund takes pity on me and says Behold this is yours. In a manner, the manor in a manner. He knows what he is. He knows he is a whoremaster and thinks it no shame. He has become here in London the thing of Lady - I will not speak her name. Enough for Mr Edmund. Well, Cat, Kit I would say, you are no dog -

  - You rhymed. Shame name.

  - If you are a poet you may put together rhymes for me properly considered, not dealt by chance like two aces. What have you now in stock?

  - This.

  And then some more I have on paper but not in mind. And then:

  I am too bashful to give you the matching line, but you may guess it. It ends with at first sight.

  - Hm, hm, hm. Well, we shall meet at some other place. I must go see if my cousin has yet called for me. We shall meet, though, make no mistake of that.

  It was this first encounter, I believe, that put Kit in a fever that had to be allayed. We were not playing at the Theatre that afternoon, and he sought me out at Ned Alleyn's lodging. Alleyn was with Henslowe and Peter Street the master builder, sniffing roses and stringing measuring lines on earth cruelly stripped of its bushes. And so he found me alone, conning the part of the Queen in Hamlet Revenge, a half-finished play of Tom Kyd's (all these Toms, a world of toms like a night roof top). His eyes closed, muttering strange words and also groaning, he had me stripped and himself stripped and was soon at work that seemed strangely loveless. Then his cat's eyes blinked in shame as he wiped the sweat from us both. It could not be animality, for animals are directed by the gods of increase, and animals have no shame. He kept crying God God God as in some form of repentance but there was nothing to repent except the spending of seed in barren places, the fault, if it be fault, of fortuity, as in Christ's parable of the sower that went forth to sow.

  So let us have him riding to Canterbury. The horse was his own, his father's gift when, but recently, he had been monied enough to stand as a marriage bondsman. This was Brown Peter, fat and a little slow, well tended in the Cambridge stables, a sort of yeaing and paying friend to whom Kit sang or tried out verses as he clopped through Dartford, Gravesend, Chatham, Sittingbourne in the fine summer weather. And there he was - Pound Lane, his own old school by the City Wall, Burgate, the great cathedral. A single solemn bell mourned a death. Here the faith had been brought from Rome so that a king of many wives might reject it, here a witness to the Church of Rome against the power of another king had been slaughtered, his holy shrine made most rich and then despoiled. There was perhaps a curse on the realm. Certainly there was a curse on his father, whose new house in St Marv's parish he had to seek by asking. John Marley or Morley the shoemaker? By there, or near. He had moved from St Andrew's for non-payment of rent and was installed now in premises, Kit knew, not commodious. Down in the world, the fault of the Strangers.

  - Let us look at you, his father said, intermitting his hammering, spitting nails from his mouth. The two apprentices too ceased their hammering to gaze. Velvet blue and gold, a cobweb collar. I like the cloak, his father said, his arms about him, and you smell sweet and Londonish. God knows why you seem up in the world. Let me see those shoes, they could be better. I will give them new soles before you go back.

  - I go on. To Dover and then take ship for France.

  - God help us, you are indeed up. That sounds like state business.

  - War on the papists.

  - For God's sake leave at least the English papishes alone, they have suffered enough. There is enough trouble here with the frogs and frogesses. The little froglings would grow up into proper Kent citizens if they were permitted to speak our tongue. Here comes your mother from marketing.

  His mother, plump but not country rosy, came near-running down the street with her basket. She was of Dover and liked to believe the sea salt stayed in her skin, a sea girl. She kissed and embraced and admired. Quite the gentleman.

  - And the girls?

  - Joan has a great belly, Meg scolds her tailor for dithering about the day, Anne is well and that leaves poor Dorothy.

  - Poor Dorothy.

  - She sits with her wooden doll. The French are not all bad, a French carpenter made it for her. Of course, this is all strange to you. You do not know the house.

  - Small, Kit said, as they both led him in, hands on him, their only son.

  - We were better off near Bull Stake, his father said. Get the
girls off our hands and there will be room enough. Your mother and I and poor Dorothy.

  The apprentices went back to their hammering and through the smell of leather that was his boyhood and unchangeable, unlike thought and faith, Kit was led to the main room, as he took it to be, with its sad pledges of a dead prosperity - betrothal chest, rocky table, chairs that were wooden emblems of family degree, from infant to father, though not in themselves a family of chairs. Young Dorothy sat on the brown-stained boards and drooled over a little wooden lady in a wooden skirt. She was twelve years old and an idiot. She sat in a pool of wet. Her mother ran to her, lifted her, finding her smock wet and warm, so she had just done it. She cried for Meg and Anne, who should not have left their sister alone so, and then their feet, unshod from the sound, could be heard on stairs and the door opened and they entered. Margaret was twenty and her betrothal to the tailor had gone on too long. Anne was fourteen and marriageable too, had not Joan two years back married when she was thirteen? And now she was fifteen and carrying. All ready to breed, even poor Dorothy who, if they let her loose in the fields, would be served by some farm lout as readily as mare and stallion, save that season for humanity was sempiternally there, like faith and thought. But he, Kit, would deceive nature, ever and never in season, a paragon of the cheating of the true end of what was called love. Now he was kissed and kissed, women with bosoms eager to give milk. Poor Dorothy, being wiped and changed while the wet floor was mopped, looked at him without recognition, doll clutched to her own growing bosom, a finger in her mouth.