The Marlowe Papers: A Novel

by Ros Barber

  If not, admit that you’re a parasite

  who borrows from friends and doesn’t keep his word.

  Let’s settle it like men, and not like scum

  who murder with their eating implements.’

  Bradley is reeling back and grinning wide.

  Pleasure has dropped his voice to baritone.

  ‘If you’re a man, then I’m a Persian whore.

  We’ll settle it as you say, though. Call it a duel.

  Then, when I kill you, I’ll have my defence.’

  He and his cronies shamble to the door

  half checking us, half fearless. As he leaves,

  ‘You challenged me. My brothers are witnesses.’

  Everyone sits, and no one says a word.

  Four heartbeats pass before I break the air.

  ‘Tom, that was madness.’

  ‘Well, he made me mad.’

  ‘The man’s a brawler.’

  ‘He’ll not get a sword.’

  ‘Who says he won’t come at you anyway?’

  ‘He’ll be sober tomorrow.’

  Our eyes meet, sharing doubt.

  ‘I liked your speech, though,’ Nashe says, ‘very neat.

  Your mental side-step stole the wind from him.

  You juggled him smartly.’ So the table warms

  and I am toasted: ‘To Kit! To the play!

  To The Jew of Malta!’ And Nashe contributes:

  ‘To pus-filled cullions, may they rue the day!’

  ‘To pus-filled cullions,’ we agree, and roar.

  I notice Greene come in, turn round, and leave.

  LURCH

  ‘I must abandon London, Kit,’ you said,

  catching me as I left the inn that night.

  ‘My brother’s fallen ill.’

  Perhaps the drink

  had magnified my feelings, but your news

  felt like a blow. And that surprised me so

  that I staggered back.

  ‘Woah, Kit!’

  You pulled me up

  from the path of a carthorse and its fatal load.

  ‘All well?’ you asked.

  ‘No, Tom! All isn’t well.

  Why are you going?’ You helped to brush me down

  unaware your touch was setting light in me

  a thousand fuses. And confusion too,

  tipped up, the drink not helping. ‘For my brother,’

  you said. ‘And Scadbury needs managing.’

  ‘Is he very ill?’ I asked. ‘Will you inherit?’

  The drink, the drink. You smiled all your forgiving.

  ‘I do not know the upshot, Kit, only

  that I am called away.’

  ‘Don’t go, dear friend!’

  My sudden passion shocking even me

  as I went to kiss you.

  ‘Kit,’ you reeled, ‘be sober!’

  The boy holding our light looked sharp away.

  ‘I need you here,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t need me.

  You have Tom and the others,’ you replied.

  These days you know how much I needed you,

  my voice of caution, and my gentler side.

  How differently this story might have spun

  had you remained with me. But your advice

  faded in time as clothes do with the sun.

  For I remember, parting, how you gripped

  my hand in both of yours with urgency.

  ‘Work less for my cousin. All the lies required

  are dangerous for honest men like you.’

  ‘When money comes more readily, I’ll stop.’

  You went to Kent. And what was I to do?

  THAT MEN SHOULD PUT AN ENEMY IN THEIR MOUTHS

  Liquor kicks doorframes while the Lowlands sleep.

  It shoulders blame for my catastrophe,

  swallows my life and pisses it in the sink,

  blurs what I hurt to look at, pillows sense.

  Drink fogs a future which is only dark

  and endless tramping into foreign towns

  until tomorrow narrows to a point

  on the nose’s tip. Then soaks and hardens thoughts,

  weighting them into bruising hammer blows

  which wake me, not as senseless as I wish

  I was. Each leaden limb thuds with the poison:

  self-administered. As I lift my cheek

  from its crumpled resting place, and shift my head,

  the world shifts with it, wobbles, settles down.

  ‘And Christ is risen.’ Thomas Thorpe is sitting

  four feet away, his hands placed on his knees

  like handkerchiefs. ‘You’re lucky I’m a friend.

  I could have had eggs and bacon off your back,

  you’d not have noticed.’

  ‘How did you get in?’

  I squint my eyes at the daylight’s acid burn.

  ‘Old-fashioned charm,’ he says, smoothing his hair.

  ‘A drop of rose-oil too. The ladies like it.’

  My brain is coming back from somewhere cold,

  finding its way by following the steps

  it stamped out yesterday. ‘You have the letter?’

  ‘The letter, yes. All in good time, my dear.

  There’s something else more pressing. A request.

  We need a play.’

  ‘The theatres are closed.

  Unless you’re saying they’re open?’

  ‘No such luck.

  The plague’s still rampant. Gathering for sport

  is quite forbidden. All the same a play

  has been requested. You’ll be paid for it.

  A comedy.’

  ‘A comedy!’

  ‘Indeed.’

  He keeps his mouth straight, though it longs to smile.

  ‘The Queen, apparently, likes something light

  at Christmas time.’

  I launch towards my desk,

  pick up the papers I was writing there

  and wave them like a fist. ‘I have a play.

  A tragedy of violence and revenge.

  Titus Andronicus. The crowd will love it.

  Henslowe will make a mint. Though he’ll complain

  about the cost of bull’s blood, and the slopping

  and mopping for each performance. Here. It’s done.

  Or close to done. I’ve had my fill of it.’

  A wave of nausea forces me to sit,

  my heart capsized.

  ‘And then the comedy?’

  ‘What? Are you mad? Pray, find me comedy

  in the nonsense that my life’s become. Go home.’

  I press my aching head between my fists

  as if I could squeeze him out of it. ‘Go home.

  Go back to – where you came from.’ Thinking Hell

  might be the place. ‘But give me the letter first.’

  ‘Touchy,’ he says, and offers it from afar

  like meat on a stick that’s pushed towards a bear.

  The seal, and the hand, Southampton’s, and not yours.

  I break it open. Not a word of you.

  ‘There’s nothing else?’

  ‘There’s gold if you’ll write the play.

  I assume you’re running low by now.’

  He’s right,

  and knows he is, but quiet in victory,

  stares out the window at a distant cloud

  feeding his hat brim through his hands, to mime

  that velvet wheel of Fate, necessity.

  ‘I’ll try,’ I say, my hand out for a purse,

  aware of my own petulance. ‘Perhaps

  the joke will come to me in Italy.’

  ‘Commedia dell’Arte! I saw it once

  in Padua. What larks!’ He stops the flow

  immediately, though a boy had bubbled up

  beneath the beard. ‘You’ve travelled much?’ he asks,

  dropping the gold into my open palm.

  ‘A little,�
�� I say, with unmasked bitterness.

  ‘In service of the Queen. What I’ve not seen

  I’m sure to make up for in the coming months.’

  ‘Do you know Padua?’ ‘Just by report.’

  ‘A scholar ought to go there at least once.

  You’re travelling as a scholar, I believe.

  You might want to visit the university.’

  ‘If I have time,’ I say, aware of time

  stretched out before me in an endless rope

  that I must climb towards the heartless gods,

  its end fraying behind me. And the drop.

  I tuck the purse inside my shirt. ‘I’ll try,’

  I say to his eyebrows, arching up like cats

  at an enemy. ‘No promises.’

  He picks

  up the Chronicles, that volume from the trunk

  that groans with England’s misery, and flicks

  to a page that wants to open. Reads for a blink,

  then puts it down as gently as a babe.

  ‘There’s humour in every tragedy,’ he says.

  ‘Not this,’ I answer, stabbing the title page

  of the bloody play that hacks out my revenge.

  ‘The troubled mind is a creative one.

  But have you watched the crowd’s reaction when

  the blood starts gushing? Faces turned away.

  Barbaric as humankind might seem to be,

  most cannot look. The point you mean to pierce

  is deflected. No one sees. But make us laugh

  and we’re toys for you to play with.

  Just a thought,’

  he says when a silence follows.

  Though that thought

  is tugging a mental sleeve, points at the door

  of my own imprisonment. Which is unlocked.

  Liquor, however, clouds the hall beyond.

  I turn to Thorpe. ‘What was amusing once

  seems less amusing now I am obliged

  to forgo my native tongue. Go by a name

  I cannot tune my ear to when it’s called.

  Good conversation, which would feed my heart,

  is fields and seas away, and barred from me.

  Banished from friends and loved ones, putting miles

  between us daily. That’s my life. Perhaps

  you’d like to suggest the humour in it.’

  ‘Well …’

  He thinks for a moment, scratching at his chin

  to make a cloud of fairies. ‘You’re alive.

  Whereas Marlowe, so they say, is horribly dead.

  Stabbed through the eye. Some drunken tavern brawl.’

  I startle. ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘That’s what I heard.’

  ‘He was a gentleman! A Cambridge scholar.

  He never would have died in such a manner.’

  He knows. I know. Third person is a sham.

  Thorpe shrugs. ‘Does it matter now? Kit Marlowe’s dead.

  And no one looks for a dead man. So. Be glad.

  Get out in the air and breathe it. Friends of yours

  have taken risks that you might do so.’ And

  with that, he turns, gathers the play, and leaves.

  THE UNIVERSITY MEN

  No one dared breathe succession, but the stage

  was clearing for the coming deathbed scene

  of the Virgin Queen. Vibrating in the wings,

  the noble houses and the royal courts,

  a dozen hopefuls. She would not discuss

  such certainties as might endanger them.

  For power’s an intoxicating brew,

  and plots begin to cook in seething heads

  that ache to overthrow the old regime

  with cold assassination. So we were placed:

  the university men. The tutor spies.

  The secretary agents of the State.

  For a change of head may bring a change of faith,

  and the careful man will shift from foot to foot

  and listen to the words that will determine

  who will be judges, who will be hanged and burnt.

  The university men, known for their wit,

  would use intelligence, and gather it.

  The God of Shepherds, Poley named himself.

  In charge of the poets: as if poets can

  be ruled by anything except their dreams.

  But still, we drank with him, and called him Pan,

  alive with the danger he might put us in

  to serve our country, and to serve the Queen.

  Watson went to Cornwallis, while my charge

  was the King of Scotland’s cousin, Arbella Stuart.

  We were to guide our pupils down the road

  of strict obedience and loyalty.

  We were to note who called, who crept to church.

  The loyal man at work. Yet still, I played,

  dandled that toy, religion. Spun ideas

  to jet above Ned’s buskins on the stage.

  For it was God – at least, it seemed like God,

  who kept me up at night, and scribbling

  those thoughts humanity might understand.

  Only, I wrote – and signed them – in my hand.

  THE PACT OF FAUSTUS

  ‘So should I sign in blood?’ My joking words

  fell silently on the official’s face.

  I put my name to paper anyway.

  And so I set the wheel of my disgrace

  trundling towards me on some distant road.

  Knowledge. It sounds as gentle as a bell

  at three a.m. from the neighbouring parish clock.

  It sounds as safe as wood does to a tree.

  It guides me dreamily, from book to book.

  But certain volumes, authorised in Hell,

  are dangerous to know. Some knowledge lifts

  and some intoxicates. Jesters and clowns,

  pretending they know nothing, are the wise.

  Some knowledge airs the mind; some knowledge drowns –

  and yet, I couldn’t drink enough of it.

  I had such faith in me, such certainty

  the licensed bloodhounds couldn’t do me harm;

  dull thinkers not equipped to sniff me out,

  who missed the jokes, too slow to see me palm

  the words from hand to hand, or hand to mouth.

  But the universe has lessons, tailored tight

  to fit the sin, and I was set to fall.

  Proud of the name I signed away that day,

  as former cobbler’s son who had it all

  but shared with Lucifer the sin of pride.

  Bright Lucifer, once so beloved of God

  but tumbled out of heaven, and his wits;

  the universe correcting for its gifts.

  True knowledge of humanity confirms

  that this is Hell. Nor are we out of it.

  THE TUTOR

  ‘You have been recommended. And your name

  is Morley, I understand.’

  ‘It is.’

  She’s still

  as a spider who has felt a fly alight.

  The Countess of Shrewsbury knows the Queen as Bess,

  a name they share. A cold, entitled look:

  three husbands haven’t lasted her. The fourth

  is not at home in London.

  ‘Hear me then.

  My granddaughter deserves the best of minds

  to guide her education. Rhetoric’

  – she enunciates carefully, lest I mishear –

  ‘will not be taught to her. No woman should

  be trained for disagreement. Literature

  will do. The classical sort. Not Ovid, mind.

  She’s just thirteen.’ She scours me with her eyes.

  ‘Come closer, Master Morley.’ Lifts a sleeve.

  ‘Now. Velvet? Surely a scholarly gentleman

  cannot afford it.’

  ‘I have generous friends.’

&nbs
p; ‘Do you indeed? Tom Walsingham, no doubt.’

  She casts for the reaction on my face;

  I give her nothing. Still, a narrowed gaze.

  ‘Oh, I know all about it. Why you’re here.

  The eyes and ears of the Queen range far and wide

  across our troubled country. There are those

  who fancy Arbella on a Catholic throne –

  please don’t insult me with your feigned surprise –

  and she must be protected. You’ll report

  to Walsingham or Burghley. So be it.

  Then the government shall pay you. I’ll provide

  paper and books, and ten hot meals a week.

  A room when we’re not in London.’

  Like a thief

  cutting the purse strings – certainly as quick –

  but with deservedness.

  ‘Your ladyship,

  What if I can’t afford those terms?’

  Her brow

  rises as gently as the sea. ‘Then I

  will find someone more flexible,’ she says.

  ‘Someone who understands the value of

  tutoring she who might one day be queen.’

  ‘My lady, we can’t discuss succession.’

  ‘No.

  But be aware succession will occur.

  Dear Bess is not immortal.’ Flashing teeth

  as black as widow’s weeds. ‘If not Arbell,

  then her cousin the King of Scots. This royal charge

  is valuable. Be aware that I could ask

  for any prospective tutor to pay me

  and have a hundred applicants.’

  It’s true.

  And bowing to greet her rug, I sniff the bait