The Marlowe Papers: A Novel

by Ros Barber

  about our working for him. Come this way.’

  He tugged at my sleeve. ‘Shall we meet you anon?’

  Addressing you. ‘The Golden Bear’s still lively.’

  ‘I’m staying tonight with Frances.’ And your eyes

  engaged with mine. ‘So we should say goodbye.’

  Embracing Tom an unknown final time,

  a punch on his arm to seal it off.

  Then me.

  ‘Goodbye, good friend,’ you said. The weight on ‘friend’.

  ‘Goodbye.’ Another clasp. Another taste

  of fiery horses hammering through my veins.

  ‘Be well!’ Tom said to you, and tugged me out

  into the churchyard, cluttered with its stones,

  towards the road where two grey horses stamped

  and steamed. And waiting by his carriage steps,

  ‘Lord Burghley,’ Tom whispered, nodding at the man

  in robes and chains. ‘He wants to speak to you.’

  ‘Morley? Or Marlowe?’

  ‘Either will do, my lord.’

  He rearranged his gown, fussing his thumbs

  around the chain of office. ‘Very good.

  I hear you write poems in English. Latin’s fine’

  (addressing Watson), ‘but the young prefer

  poetry in their native tongue. I have

  in my charge the young Southampton. Quite a fine –

  no, quite is ungenerous, inaccurate –

  an exceptionally fine young man, with all the arts

  a responsible guardian should train him to:

  a taste for poetry, debate, good wine,

  but not, alas, for women. That is to say …’

  I noticed how bright the stars, how velvet black

  the sky this conversation fell beneath.

  ‘ … not so much that he looks the other way

  but dreams of sport and of a soldier’s life

  and says a wife would hamper him, where I

  would have him settled down. He is sixteen,

  and listens far more to poetry than me.

  I wondered whether, for a generous sum,

  you might persuade him of … the benefits …

  that is to say, desirability,

  of marriage.’

  Watson’s smirk, behind his hand,

  he had to cough out, and excused himself,

  leaving us momentarily.

  ‘My lord,

  if you’re imagining I could write a poem

  which would turn his thoughts to women, I’m afraid

  my friends have made too much of me. Though women

  boast charm, some men are naturally averse.

  I could no more turn a fox into a frog

  than persuade your ward to marriage.’

  ‘No, no, no,’

  the Treasurer demurred. ‘He’s not averse.’

  Watson dipped in, then out. His suppressed mirth

  was proving hard to wrestle with. ‘My lord—’

  ‘He’s simply not inclined. Indifferent.’

  Lord Burghley was very used to being right.

  A splat of late-stopped rain, held on a leaf,

  was shaken upon him, yet he wiped it off

  without distraction. ‘Certainly not averse.

  No verse would touch averse. And yet a verse –’

  (nodding the pun to congratulate himself)

  ‘– or several – might turn him in his course,

  if executed with sufficient … grace.’

  Watson rejoined us, his rebellious mouth

  repaired on his sleeve.

  Lord Burghley skimmed him over

  but remained intent. ‘For a substantial purse?’

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘But I must meet him first.’

  SOUTHAMPTON

  The first of his words to me were angry ones.

  ‘Why should I marry who that man decrees?’

  He was a boy, four months from seventeen.

  The sky was in his eyes, intensely blue.

  His second sentence was in praise of love.

  ‘Love is what brings us close to the divine.

  To wed for less is shabby compromise.’

  The simplest shiver rippled through the trees.

  He softened to me then. ‘I liked your play.’

  He patted me beside him on the wall.

  ‘So tell me, you’re a poet, am I wrong?

  Should I forget my heart?’ There was a song

  sung from an open window, light as lace

  upon the moment. ‘Never that,’ I said.

  ‘My mother loved,’ he said, ‘another man.

  It killed my father. Truly. Broke his heart.

  Women are fickle. Love makes lovers damned,

  a marriage bed a deathbed.’ Yet his face

  had all his mother’s tenderness; his rage

  was all his father’s. He, the argument

  for marriage, procreation, and disgrace.

  ‘What is a woman for? The servants cook

  and clean, friends entertain, and whores are cheap.

  Why do I need a wife? For what plain good?’

  The lavender was thick with scent, and bees

  hung round the beds like baleful courtiers.

  Above, his eyes, a sky’s idea of blue.

  The thought occurred: ‘To make another you.’

  In his perfection, here was Love’s excuse

  for all her misdemeanours, every heart

  that split to feel her bastard offspring’s dart.

  And here was Love herself, conducting songs

  from neighbours’ windows, rustling up the trees

  to shed the spring’s confetti for his hair

  and bring this moment, begging, to its knees.

  Love is oblivious. All the love was mine.

  And all the wisdom of a dozen plays

  of wit and genius will not assist

  the motley fool whom sudden love enslaves.

  Except this was not love, but pure desire

  for perfect beauty, for a taste of it.

  For he was both man and maiden, boy and girl,

  the consummate alchemy of human form.

  Unworldly, godly, in his countenance,

  a blazing sun round whom a room must turn,

  yet utterly insensible to his power.

  Three years have gone, and still that blessed sight

  – the jewel of Southampton, sitting on that wall –

  accompanies me to my oblivion.

  ARBELLA

  Arbella was wild as a clipped goose smelling fox.

  She lurched from wall to wall. ‘Why not go out?

  There’s education in the wind and rain.

  We could get wet and you could teach me why

  it bounces off the sparrows.’

  ‘Read this book,’

  I offered, patiently, the only poultice

  that’s ever worked for me.

  ‘Pah! Read a book!

  Another dusty book? Another wedge

  of dead man’s brain? No, thank you. What is it?’

  ‘It’s poetry.’

  A snort. ‘What good is that?

  What good are words? Words are not real life.’

  ‘But they create in here,’ I tapped my head,

  ‘whatever’s locked out there.’

  Another snort.

  She stamped her boot, and spun towards the view.

  ‘But not the Earl of Essex,’ she replied.

  ‘You can’t create him, can you?’

  She was hooked

  two years before, at court, when she was twelve.

  Imagined they might marry, though I knew

  by then your cousin Frances had his child

  tucked in her belly.

  ‘You might be the Queen

  one day,’ I said. ‘How to prepare for that

  except to read and imagine how it feels?’

  Knowing she’d ma
rry whom the Queen decreed.

  Be pawned to the Duke of Parma’s son, Farnese,

  to end the war. Be dangled like a threat

  to keep her cousin James obedient.

  And me, determined to get close to both.

  How powerful I felt myself to be.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Prepare me.’ Still outside.

  I turned the pages silently and found

  the lines where the sultan’s riches glow like fire,

  the pulsing light of each delicious gem

  its own confection, savoured on my tongue.

  And drawn across, as though the jewels were real,

  Arbella knelt in front of me, her hands

  open as though she thought this spell of words

  would conjure and drop into her lap those stones.

  I closed it, and we listened to the weather

  beating itself against the window pane.

  ‘Now love,’ she said. ‘Now tell me how love feels.’

  ALPINE LETTER

  Love? If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d say

  love is a saw that amputates the heart.

  I’d call it my disease, I’d call it plague.

  But yesterday, I hadn’t heard from you.

  So call it the weight of light that holds one soul

  connected to another. Or a tear

  that falls in all gratitude, becoming sea.

  Call it the only word that comforts me.

  The sight of your writing has me on the floor,

  the curve of each letter looped about my heart.

  And in this ink, the tenor of your voice.

  And in this ink, the movement of your hand.

  The Alps, now, cut their teeth upon the sky,

  and pressing on to set these granite jaws

  between us, not a mile will do me harm.

  Your letter, in my coat, will keep me warm.

  WATSON’S VERSE-COMMENT ON MY FLUSHING ASSIGNMENT

  (translated from the Latin)

  ‘A horse has summer flies; a sheepdog fleas.

  A swift will harbour lice, a brook its rocks.

  Bright days breed duller endings, and a girl

  of perfect beauty’s not immune from pox.

  An apple has its worm, a rose its thorn,

  the noblest seat of earls, its ghost in chains.

  Good books will suffer misprints, will they not?

  The gods have sin. And you have Richard Baines.’

  POISONING THE WELL

  One of Tom’s favourite tales was Richard Baines.

  The priest of spies; the spy who was ordained

  while under cover with the Jesuits,

  his ear out for their plotting as his mouth

  swallowed the wafered lie: ‘The body of Christ.’

  How you and he, that Paris summer (there

  to receive each message at the embassy:

  who went to England, under which false names)

  watched as he crumbled like a papal biscuit.

  The Old Religion drove the man insane.

  His identity submerged beneath a fib

  that even he believed: so who was he?

  A hundred per cent pretend; and Richard Baines,

  who sucked in incense and incensed himself.

  Who counted tedium on his rosary.

  And once he was ordained, bad faith took hold:

  rotted his humour, and disturbed his sleep –

  the laughable sinful mismatch of his roles

  as Father Baines and agent of their foes,

  betrayer of the faithful, took him deep.

  The stink of fish on Fridays up his nose,

  he salivated at the thought of meat.

  He took to sneaking pork pies to his cell:

  ‘God cannot be concerned with what I eat!’

  Began to gibe at prayers and snort his truth

  beneath his breath, not knowing that he spoke.

  Love was his downfall, though. There was a youth

  – for who can bear so much deceit alone? –

  he shared a bed with. Stroked his novice head,

  while plotting ways that he could take him home.

  The boy was a thorough Catholic: convinced

  that the seminary served a holy cause.

  Baines moulded him like warm wax, dropping hints

  that darker secrets lay behind locked doors.

  ‘And will you plot against your natural queen?’

  The boy’s uncertainty filled up the pause.

  This, how Tom told it, dramatising scenes

  over the tavern table, playing Baines

  as he existed afterwards, post Rheims:

  shocked into greyness, with a limping sway

  not yet inflicted on the loving priest

  who stroked the boy’s anxieties away.

  The lie would send him witless: he must leave.

  But not without the boy. And not without

  shutting the college down; no, no reprieve

  for the priests whose mumblings broke his sanity.

  Think: Tom’s cruel mimicry of Richard Baines

  watching the morning gruel, the evening soup,

  with sudden insight – every bowl the same!

  How easy to wipe them out, this nest of rats,

  with poison in the food. He would be loved,

  he told himself, by government and queen.

  And now to persuade his lover.

  Could he blame

  the boy for running to the powers that be?

  Baines had been breaking slowly ever since

  he donned that itchy robe, humility,

  and now had shed the cloak of decent man,

  exposing the loveless murderer beneath.

  Enter the later version, Richard Baines,

  crippled by vengeance that he cannot take

  and joints that creak and groan each time it rains,

  betrayed by the youth who still comes to his dreams.

  How easy it is to get a laugh from freaks.

  ‘Incense and blather!’ Tom’s adopted twitch

  that Baines himself developed after weeks

  of the strappado – hung like butcher’s meat

  with weights on his feet, and dislocated arms,

  in a new mode of confessional for priests –

  forgetting it was a man they’d broken there.

  Forgetting that we weren’t immune from sin.

  Forgetting how whispers travel on the air

  and get back to the subject.

  If I wrote

  a play whose central character was him,

  I never dreamt his hands around my throat

  or thought that he might recognise himself.

  He didn’t matter. He was just a tale,

  material I foisted on the shelf

  of a London stage or two. He was the Jew,

  the counterfeit believer, counting gold

  above all human life, tainting the stew,

  out-plotted to a most theatrical end,

  and played for laughs. And that it tickled you

  was all I used to think about, dear friend.

  DANGER IS IN WORDS

  Thom Nashe’s lip relaxes to curb his teeth.

  ‘You’re not concerned he’s seen it?’

  It is cold.

  We’re standing in the doorway of a shop

  festooned with carcasses; and half a pig,

  eviscerated, sawn from snout to tail,

  spins gently round to eye me.

  ‘Richard Baines

  at a public entertainment? Heaven forfend.

  Watson says Baines was made more serious

  than sentence of execution. Anyway,

  I go as Morley. Marlowe wrote the play.’

  FLUSHING

  When the winds decreed, I sailed to Vlissingen:

  Flushing to English ears; and English ears

  were everywhere: in street, in crooked inn,

 
; on frozen river, at the chestnut stall,

  stamping in garrisons and coaxing whores

  from frosty doorways. I reported there,

  leaving my passport with the governor,

  then through snow, up a creaky flight of stairs

  to the cold room I would share with Richard Baines.

  He wasn’t there. I poked amongst his things.

  Some jottings in a crabby, slanted hand

  and half in cipher. Flints and candle stubs.

  Some undergarments draped over a chair

  like unwrapped bandages. A locked-up trunk.

  A Douai Bible with a broken spine

  and scribbled in. And when the stairs complained,

  I closed and set it down.

  Baines, coming in,

  froze in the door. Eyes flicked around his things,

  then back to my face, and narrowed.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Morley,’ I said.

  And something on his face

  like pan-burnt porridge, betrayed an aftertaste,

  as if he knew that name. But only now

  do I understand that look.

  ‘Why are you here?’

  he asked, not watching me, but limping in

  to gather his papers up like promise notes

  snatched from a fire.

  ‘I believe we have a friend

  in common. Richard Cholmeley?’

  ‘Drury’s “mate”?’

  He spat the word like bones. ‘What kind of friend

  will put a friend in prison? You should leave.’