A Dead Man in Deptford

  When his turn came he found himself in a dark cell with a prie-dieu under a curtain of black lawn through which, by grace of light beyond, he dimly saw an outlined seated figure. A sacramental seal, a double anonymity. He said:

  - I have committed fornication.

  - So have many, my son. With women married or unmarried?

  - Never. With boys and with men. (Married. Unmarried. The rhotic weakness tried to strike a nerve, but the nerves would not stay still for the striking.)

  - So. That is a foul sin since it is against nature. We have not merely the condemnation of Holy Mother Church herself, which ordains burning as Sodom was burned, but the prohibition of reason, since the male seed is for purposes of generation.

  - Is all waste of the male seed equally heinous? Is mastru-pation as evil a sin?

  - Less so since it does not win others to sin, but souls resident in man's seed in potentia that might at the last people God's kingdom are thwarted, nay murdered by an unnatural act. And sodomy is most unnatural, iniquitous and beastly. I beg you to give up that sin.

  - I cannot, save by vowing celibacy. I am drawn to my own sex, not to the other. I was born so.

  - No man is born so. Male and female created he them. You have been perverted at some point in your life recoverable to memory.

  - Not so. I am as I am. I can no more repent than I can change my skin or grow another finger.

  - You say cannot, I say will not.

  - If I say I repent, I lie. If I undertake to turn my face from it, this as I am told being a condition of forgiveness, then the undertaking is a lie.

  - Well, my son, you must needs be damned.

  - And if I say that damnation itself is a lie?

  - Then you commit yourself to atheism and what sins you will. But make no mistake about damnation. When you die you go to hell and stay in hell for ever. This is no matter of supposition. Holy Mother Church is built on the rock of Christ's ordination. Turn your back on truth if that is your will, since all men have free will, but be prepared (prepared, prepared, arhotic) for the ultimate fiery embrace of the Father of Lies.

  - I say that my condition is condoned by Christ's own love of the beloved disciple.

  - That is foul blasphemy and sulphurous ignorance and shows lamentable perversion in confusing eros and agape. You seem to be a lost soul.

  - Amen.

  He left black in mood and ready to fist Frizer to jelly, though his headache was cured. He sat in the refectory with students on whom no sanctity seemed yet to have descended, for they threw bread pith at one another and lifted their arses from the bench the louder to rap forth. They were quiet though when one of their number stood at the lectern to read of the sorrowful but triumphant end of a chosen Catholic martyr, one Thomas Braintree who saw Christ in his glory as the flames ate first his skin, then his flesh, then his bones. It was not a savoury accompaniment to a meal of charred mutton and unsalted turnips. And what of the martyrs under bloody Mary? Kit cursed as he belched and burnt flesh and bland turnip met in his mouth in ghost taste, tenuously bowing one to the other. By the supernumerary testicle of St Anselm and the withered prick of Origen, he would be away from here. By the renneted milk of St Monica, he could stand no more of it. After the meal he went to stand near the inn with its flowers of the season in pots, but Tom Walsingham did not appear, nor dare he enter after last night's fury of love or whatever it was to be called. He went to sleep on his pallet in the dormitory where one sick student only moaned and called on his recusant mother. At sunset, a great drama of flaming armies, he sought a new tavern, ready if need be for fight, and found there the soldierly questioner of yesterday, much at his ease and ordering wine for a student circle around him. Kit asked of the tapster:

  - Qui est ce gentilhomme?

  - C'est le capitaine Foscue.

  - Bien connu ici evidemment.

  - Assez bien connu.

  The captain was quick to hear the enquiry and said in good humour:

  - It is their version of Fortescue. Do not sit alone. You seem sad. Here is good belly cheer. Join the company.

  - Fotescue? (The r was weak.) I am Marlowe or Morley or Marley.

  Fortescue. Sit. Unsure of your family name, is it? A name is what we hear ill and, alas, write ill. For long we did without these additions. It was enough to be named as in the Holy Bible. Enough to be a John, like my friend Savage here, or a Gilbert, like young Gifford here, though a Gilbert is not in the Bible and comes from where? And you are what?

  - Christopher.

  - Not in the Bible either, but who would not be a bearer of Our Lord Jesus on his back? Well, Christopher, drink. And to what do we drink? To a Scots queen or a carroty Tudor? To faith old or new-fangled? Well, for dear Gilbert we know what the answer is, but Jack Savage is chronically unsure. This makes him savage.

  Kit took in the trinity - Captain Fortescue in silver-buttoned doublet, cape gold-laced, black-bearded, black of eye, at ease with himself, easily pleased; Gilbert Gifford (was it?) in a student's black that made the more intense an extreme pallor as of bloodlessness; Savage rufous, in rutilant taffetas threadbare but defiant. Savage said:

  - It is all a struggle. And the taking of sides may as well be on the roll of the dice. Let us for God's sake go back to our fighting, for, fighting, a man is freed of the bondage of thought.

  - He fought well, Fortescue assured Kit, and will fight well again. That was in the Low Countries whence we come. In a day or so we take ship for England to raise a new company. We will do for the Don.

  - My brethren in the faith, Gifford said, but to hell with my brethren. When England was Catholic we could have Catholic enemies. I hate the French as I hate the Spanish and I have had to live among them. Too few see the true injustice of the Reform, that it makes false alliances between peoples opposed in blood. What did my family do wrong? We were in Staffordshire back in the mists, serving the God that was good enough for Harry Seven and his son till the black eyes of the whore Bullen seduced him. We stay, we do nothing, we become traitors. Then Gifford drank bitterly. Fortescue's eyes were, it seemed to Kit, very catholic in their sympathy. Kit said:

  - Here in Rheims we seem to be in a limbo where the blood of opposition is drained away. I mean protestant and Catholic may meet without rancour over wine. I study divinity at Cambridge -

  - I am an old Caius man, Fortescue said. You?

  - Corpus. Divinity, as I say, and am drawn here to resolve doubts. Doubts dissolve in knowledge that religious change has never been truly religious. Faith is corrupted by matters of state. Christians should be Christians, that and no more.

  There has to be work for curious theologians, Fortescue said. They thrive on division. Leave it to them and go your own way. The bread of the altar is what you think it is. Forget religion and think on justice. It is unjust that slobbering Spaniards bring their racks and thumbscrews en el nombre de Dios to oppress the honest Dutch. The Hollanders are men of trade who would be left alone. I fight Philip of Spain in the spirit of one who hates empire.

  - And, Gifford says, in the extending of his empire he may put a Catholic monarch on the English throne. The Giffords may be restored to the ancestral seat in Staffordshire. By grace of Spain. What am I to think?

  - Do not think, Fortescue said. Drink. Sing.

  His voice was high and pleasing. The words and tune were his, he said, but he had gotten no further. Could Christopher, whom he would call Kit with his permission, add aught, he had the look of a poet. Kit tried:

  - You lack a rhyme, but no matter. (Weak the r in rhyme and matter but what Kit thought might be so was not possible. There was a limit to contradictions.) Now Jack here will sing of shepherds. It is deep in the race, this longing to be at rest on a grassy knoll, piping to sheep. And see what happens. Christ rightly calls himself the good shepherd, but the bishops carry metal croziers that would never disentangle a baaing prisoner of a thorn bush. So by metaphor all things be in time made false. Sing, Jack.

  So Savage
sang:

  It was now that Tom Walsingham entered, alone and smiling. He knew Gifford, the others not. Fortescue said:

  - Of the tribe of Walsingham that is the Argus of the Queen, God bless her?

  - Argus as faithful watchdog, Argus of the hundred eyes. Not so many. Yes, his cousin but not in his service, Heaven forfend.

  - And you do what here?

  - I am here with my friend. (He stroked Kit lovingly.) To help ease the torment of decision.

  - Where is your man? Kit asked.

  - Beaten soundly for presumption and went whinging to bed. Is it song we are having?

  Savage said he could not remember the rest. Kit said they might try this:

  - Pretty, Fortescue said, but the pastoral note is lost. Are we (in change of tone) all for High Mass tomorrow? I suppose if we seek the solace of singing voices we shall find that best in the heavenly choristers of the cathedral. And the candles and the colours of the vestments and the divine and intoxicating smoke of the incense. (He widened his nostrils and inhaled deeply as if it were already being wafted through the tavern.) What I say is this, friends, that what the soul craves at times is the majesty of high ceremony. The deeper meaning skills not, the lifting of the spirit to strange regions is fulfilled as much by the mass as by the purple tragedy of Sophocles. It is the elevating that is all.

  - So, said Kit, feeling the hand of Tom Walsingham begin to caress his sitting buttocks, it is not all eating and drinking and swinking and snoring, as in your song?

  - No, if we come down to it, the shepherd's life is not enough. The senses need more than the stink of wool and sheep dung. But I speak of the senses. I do not speak of thought. Thought has killed millions and will yet kill more. Let us drown thought in another jug.

  I T was in a field on the hot Sabbath under an elm whose leaves were a tumult in the wind that promised a change of weather that Kit and Tom consummated, in all gentleness, the love that could be spoken aloud not in the disguise of French or of Latin. They lay naked, and on Kit's back the sparse flue was, as in the cooling of pottage by the lips pursed, agitated lovingly by the breeze. God was safely locked away in his cathedral. God was obliterated by love. This is then for ever? One cannot say so, but perhaps there is an eternity untouched by God's covenant that meaneth no more than the feigning dead of time, and that is there ever to be sought in the mingling of limbs. And what shall the future hold? While time feigns death there is no future. I mean, England, whither, in a day or so, the ship will bear me though not you for you speak of Paris business. It shall be Scadbury, the caves of Chislehurst, never London, for London is all talk. There must be a measure of patience, and if patience will not hold then there is the communion over distance, communion most holy, through imagination and the five-fingered playing on an instrument. Faces medallions in our minds. Scents sewn into skin, sounds held in ears as the sea in seashells. We must have what we can. Fidelity? That is between essence and essence. Fidei defensores. We monarchs to each other will hold the faith better than monarchs.

  So to it again - femures, recta, ventra, ala. Cows ambled up munching roundly to watch, and one left an ample pat in tribute near to their thrown clothes. It steamed to the sun and its wholesome odour was borne in to them on the veering wind. There were enough birds above and about them, flying low since they had received messages of weather change, to make it seem that whirring wings of Adam's paradise and a jangle of song withal were there to bless them. The scriptures had a lone Adam before that unhandy work with his rib, but what man could doubt that there had been a nameless companion for him expunged by God's hunger for multiplicitous children to be tormented or saved according to his caprice, hence the machine or miraculous contrivance of procreation, which pretended love, love being there but a trick? And so as the wind freshened they colled in the finality of their naked coupling among the insects, then dressed, then hand in hand walked to the town, though, reaching it, not hand in hand.

  Tom rode off to Paris the next morning, Frizer on a nag fitting his lowliness behind. Kit was not there to bid farewell, the streaks of dawn at his back. He slept late, sometimes tossing in dream knowledge of many troubles ahead, sometimes still and soothed by a new assurance of the surety of what seemed sure. The following day, having taken courteous leave of his brief mentors, armed, as he thought, with a kind of intelligence, he steered his hired horse towards Calais, sleeping two nights in barns. The weather had cooled but the sky but dribbled. On the quay at Calais the clouds opened and the sea churned. He slept, since the packet would not yet set forth, in a foul inn where fleas and bugs bit his flesh and the landlord his purse. Then he embarked and was very sick. At Dover he stayed a night with the Arthur family, these being his mother's people. That the house reeked of fish ensured no quietening of his stomach. The slow walk in windy weather to Canterbury was by way of a cure. He heard Tom's voice and once turned as he really heard it, but it was the wind sawing at a broken branch. He was impeded on the city's outskirt by a march of geese that held the road and snapped honking at his ankles, while the goosemaster with his gnarled stick laughed. And so he was home, very weary, sleeping much of a day away while poor Dorothy clambered over him, still not knowing who he was. Brown Peter, well groomed, whinnied at seeing him, and Kit welshcombed his mane and clapped his flanks. Then, in warming weather, he was waved off to London.

  In Tom Watson's house, at the corner of Bishopsgate and Hog Lane, Kit found the poet at work. Kit was now troubled, as I must myself be, by the fact of three Toms in his London life, for Kyd was like to be a kind of rivalrous friend, and one Tom of them most especial, nay crowned and golden. Tom Watson said:

  Well, you are back and looking none the better for your French jaunt. Of it I will ask nothing. You will see what I am doing here. It is the making of a rosary of poems, not all mine. Blount asks for it. Sit, sit. Lie down on the floor with a pillow. Very weary, I can see, and thinner. What verses did your brain churn out on your long rides? I need your verses, it will be a beginning for you.

  - You shall have something. First I must report to Robin Poley.

  - Not to Poley, Poley is in Paris with his cutthroat. Mr Secretary himself asked after you, were you returned.

  - So. I see Mr Secretary.

  Mr Secretary, in the musty small room that was a mockery of the rest of the spacious mansion on Seething Lane, bade Kit sit on a manner of creepystool and levelled on him the black gimlet eyes of the interrogator. Had he been tempted, seduced he would say, by the discardable knacks and tawdries of a foul faith, who and what had he seen, what suspected?

  - There was a Captain Fortescue. He spoke of coming to England to raise troops for the Low Countries.

  - What of him?

  - I think he was a priest.

  - Why think you that?

  - A matter of his voice. I heard that voice in both the tavern and the confessional.

  - Pursued it from one to the other, did you?

  - In a sense. There was the weakness of a sound of speech. He was disguised as a soldier but his voice he lacks the skill to disguise. That skill must be left to the players. Like Mr Alleyn.

  - Well, this is no discovery. We know Captain Foscue, as the French call him. A certain Father John Ballard. This you could not know, but your guessing may be accounted a kind of intelligencer's success. He had tavern companions?

  - I noted their names. Gilbert Gifford. A Catholic and bitter in enforced exile. And there was a John Savage, a soldier but else I know not what.

  - These too we know. So. They are coming.

  - In August.

  - No no no, I mean more. Many are coming. It is the conspiracy.

  - There will be arrests?

  - No arrests. Ballard could long ago have been on the scaffold. No more. It is a waiting matter. We shall see.

  - Now what must I do?

  - I said it was a waiting matter. Go back to your studies. You may go to Phelips and tell him delta grade. He is three doors away.

  - Phelips? br />
  - Or Philips. It is all one. He spells his name Phelips. That is his humour.

  Kit found this man in a chamber greatly larger than Walsingham's own. He was at a high desk and was flanked by two clerks as they seemed to be from their quills, which squeaked busily. As Kit entered and delivered his message, Phelips-Philips descended from his lofty stool by means of two rungs, holding out a hand in courtesy and welcome. He wore spectacles. He was small and thin, was yellow in hair and beard, and his face, which leered, was much pocked.

  - A young beginner, the name? The name I now have, the grade is as he said. Well, it is here.

  He unhooked a great key from his girdle and opened with a rasp a trunk of iron that sat squat on a table else unencumbered. From it he took with his thin hand a tiny leathern bag and, with a giggle, threw it at Kit who caught it.

  - We play at ball, eh? The great game, and the balls are the souls of men. We shall win, have no doubt of it. And so off with you.

  In his bedchamber in Watson's house Kit untied the bag and emptied money on the coverlet. Nobles, marks, groats. He counted. It was near five pounds. Half of England's parishes had stipends of less than ten a year, a third under the five. So the Archbishop himself had complained. Elation made his member swell, visibly in his codpiece, and he was thus led to the composing of a poem of love.

  DROUGHT year, drought year, so they called it. A parched Michaelmas, and a Michaelmas the more parched for the aridity of studies that oppressed one who had smelt of the kitchen of great affairs, drunk French wine on French soil, more, most, had gorged on what was to be termed love. And so in the schools he was insolent in the exercises, seated on his tripod, delivering his logic.

  - Should Aristotle have placed a wife among the goods of a philosopher?

  - Goods are possessions that are deemed good, that is useful. In the sense that what is good conduces to the higher moral life, such goods are not of necessity good. Possessions may be inanimate, as plate, houses, land, also animate as slaves, cattle, horses. Hence a wife, being animate, may be accounted a possession. But in that a wife, being a woman and hence a human being and hence endowed with freedom of will, may contradict all other possessions in a capacity for choice, she may not be accounted so. Thus, Xantippe chose to feed her husband Socrates on little but boiled lentils and, in her wrath at his absence from the house in colloquies with the youth of Athens, emptied a pisspot on his head. So I argue that a wife, being a free soul, cannot be accounted a possession.