The Marlowe Papers: A Novel
Page 12
My information fatally out of date,
or set up to label me. Quick thinking due.
‘I’m glad to hear you’ve stronger loyalties,’
I doubled back. ‘These are unsettled times.’
He knelt now to undo the trunk, his hair
all in a circle, monkish round his pate
and prematurely grey from torture’s jolt.
He fed the papers in, replaced the lock
and turned the corded key around his neck.
‘Why are you here?’ he said again, like ice
at the heart of sleet.
‘In truth, I have a message
of some delicacy. And understood you might
know a way to send it onwards.’
‘Oh? To whom?’
‘To Sir William Stanley.’
‘Ha!’ Baines gave contempt
both vent and volume. ‘You are very young
if you imagine I would commit myself
to knowing the Queen of England’s enemy.’
On this point, some years later, I’d agree.
‘I’m nearly twenty-eight.’
‘You are a babe.’
He grimaced, approaching close until his breath
assaulted me. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘You’re Richard Baines.’
‘I’m Richard Baines,’ he echoed,
glaring the broken vessels of his eyes,
‘who spent three years at Rheims to serve the Queen
and took a punishment you’d not survive.’
His lip curled back, trembling as if his teeth,
filed by their rottenness to tiny points,
had terrified it into revealing them.
‘I don’t take kindly to the implication
I’m the Duke of Parma’s whore,’ he said, and spit
fell softly, unintentionally, like rain
upon my cheek.
‘Sir, I apologise,’
I said sincerely. ‘I meant no such thing.
Only, I understood you knew of ways
to pass a message. If I was mistaken,
forgive me.’
‘I don’t forgive,’ he breathed. ‘That job
I leave to God.’
But stepped away at last,
if only to appraise the whole of me:
if I were a joint, how long I’d take to cook.
‘If that is so, then I’ll be on my way’ –
re-shouldering my knapsack with relief
at the prospect of escaping his foul air,
fair swap for failure. ‘Please, forget I called.
So many rumours fly about my charge
I would not wish to stir them.’
‘What? Your charge?’
He pecked the words, half starving. ‘Who is that?’
I confess, I used Arbella like a worm
to jerk before that grasping mind. ‘Her name
has caused great trouble to the bearers of it.
If you don’t know, I’m glad not to expose her.
I come on another matter.’
Though her marriage
to the Duke of Parma’s son was brokered there
in Flushing – in that month.
And when he knew,
boiled down the stock of his deductive broth
to the royal bones, he said, ‘Forgive my haste.
It was un-Christian of me to suspect
your motives. These are awkward times. And yet’ –
drawing his hesitation on the air
like an unsheathed sword across my exit door –
‘I might know ways to help you. You have money?’
FISHERS
Which of us had the net, I couldn’t tell.
Both of us fishers, sounding out the depths
of the other’s beliefs. I’d not declared a side
and nor had he. He offered to make enquiries
on condition – to keep the closest eye on me –
that I shared his room and rent.
No, not his bed,
though I felt those pink grey eyes upon my back,
like cold on my buttocks and my shoulder-blades
undressing at night, conscious he never snuffed
the candle till I was covered.
No, not his bed,
dear absent friend, whose ear these words address
in the silent theatre of my empty head
some two years since they brought the curtain down,
and the cheering crowds dispersed to pick their teeth
and the plague played kill-kick-jenny on the streets.
A sea away, two countries’ width away,
a war away, a mountain range away,
each sentence that I form, I form for you.
You are the love I tell my story to –
who knew so much of it, and yet the truth
eluded both of us. Yet, I’ve begun
to understand.
All histories are fictions,
so if I skip the worst, forgive my fault.
Though you would not condemn me: like the sun,
my imagined perfect audience of one,
your light seeps through this darkened, shuttered room
somewhere in northern Italy. But grieve,
and remain with me, as I return to Baines,
confess my part as I reap the bleak remains
of the game I played with him.
No, not in bed.
For even then my body’s touch was yours.
A RESURRECTION
The game was simple. It was not to lose.
The game was complicated. It was this:
If he was Catholic, I was Catholic too.
If loyal Protestant, I mirrored him.
Neither of us committed to a thing.
I let slip nothing that was not my view.
And yet I bathed in contradiction, sharp
to each shade of his behaviour. Faith, we were
chameleons trying to conceal ourselves
in the ever-changing colours of the other,
so standing out against the barren hues
of that bitter coastal town. And like a scene
unravelling before me on a stage,
my mind’s eye conjures up the day it changed.
Baines is as bony as a beaten hound.
And me? Cocksure, bright-eyed, ridiculous.
Our pie has just arrived.
And spying us,
across the tavern, munching gristled beef,
is a dead man.
Gilbert Gifford.
‘4,’ I breathe,
and his jaw falls open as he reads my lips,
then fiercely resumes its chewing, eyesight dropped
to read the grain of the table.
‘For? For what?’
Baines is intrigued to read the shock on me.
Six years before. My first assignment. 4
was the spy we most admired. As slick as wax,
and warming the kirtle of the Queen of Scots
as he passed her coded letters. Ordained at Rheims
the year I left Cambridge. Later caught in bed
with a whore. Jailed by his Catholic friends. And dead.
‘For pity’s sake,’ I say, ‘that meat is tough.
Look at him chewing. Do you know that man?’
(My God! What was he doing in a port
so full of spies, when Poley had fixed his death
in a Paris prison not three months before?)
But Baines is in the dark. ‘I’ve seen his face
these last few days but don’t possess his name.
I’ll ask.’
‘No—’
As he leaps up, deathly keen
to inflict a meeting, I forget myself.
‘He may be offended,’ I explain, ‘by me.
That I was staring.’
‘Tush. Don’t be a mouse.’
Baines stride-hops over like
a half-chewed goose
and stops at the other’s table. Though I strain
to catch their conversation, it is lost
in the songs of a dozen soldiers at the bar
comparing wives to liquor. Gifford laughs;
they both glance over.
Then the dead man nods,
abandons his bowl of stew, picks up his beer,
and follows Baines towards me.
Baines is pleased.
What odds, two former bogus Catholic priests –
one rumoured to be dead, one broken-kneed –
have come this way to sift me?
‘Since his beef
was inhumanely tough, I said he might
share some of our rabbit pie.’ Baines stands aside
for the weathered man who once looked like a child
to introduce himself. 4 has a skill
more powerful than Ned’s. The lie is steel.
‘It’s Gilbert. Gifford Gilbert.’ He gives his hand
as though I’d never taken from its clutch
the notes to Walsingham that laid the trail
one Queen of Scotland followed to the block.
An oddly bloodless hand, and glacial look.
‘Gilbert,’ I echo, as if the name reversed
has turned him inside out. ‘I’m Morley, sir.
Called Christopher.’ So begins another game.
‘What brings you to Flushing?’
Not a hint of sly,
deception’s signature not in his voice,
no hint of recognition in his eye.
‘I come as a messenger.’
‘Ah, Mercury.
My favourite of all the Roman gods.’
Had I imagined that some Paris brick
had knocked all memory clean from his skull,
his use of my codename clarified the rules.
‘Are you staying long?’
‘Not long.’
Just long enough
to ascertain Dick’s contact. And to play
another round of Who’s In Catholic Pay?
‘And on what business do you pass this way?’
I ask the handsome corpse.
‘Oh, for my trade.’
‘What is your trade?’
‘A goldsmith,’ Gifford lies,
audaciously demanding my belief.
‘I give shape to the precious. What of you?’
‘For my sins, I’m a scholar,’ I reply.
‘I give shape to the precious also, but the gold
flees to the hands of others.’
‘And your trade?’
he asks of Baines.
‘I trade in human souls,’
Baines mutters without blinking. ‘I’m employed
to find good men wherever they may be.’
‘Is that a trade?’
‘Recruitment? Possibly
it’s more of a vocation.’
Baines has sliced
a section of pie and hands it to our guest
on my empty trencher.
‘Who do you work for?’
Gifford’s pretence at innocence demands
he asks such forward questions. Baines, exposed
by a twitch on his cheek, replies, ‘Whoever pays.’
We laugh at the sour joke, and make a toast
to the paymasters, whoever they may be,
that feed this poet, crippled spy, and ghost.
A COUNTERFEIT PROFESSION
So we became a threesome, thick with spells
we might cast on each other. Gifford made
some sad excuse of homelessness: some bill
for a phantom signet ring due any day –
was grateful to lodge his body in that room
where we might frisk each other’s souls, unheard.
A week went by, during which time we stuck
so closely to each other’s sides, we stank;
needing the privy all at once, like girls,
so as not to miss a whisper. What we lacked
we held in common: the coppers to pay our chits
and the knowledge that might furnish us with gold.
Grief! The pretence we made, of being friends,
began to wear in like a favourite cloak,
and I relaxed into that dangerous state
as though too deaf to understand the joke
that every one of us was counterfeit,
and more in need of truth than we’d admit.
THE FATAL LABYRINTH OF MISBELIEF
Money was almost all we spoke about.
Baines wanted more.
Unsummoned comes his voice,
edged like an axe. ‘A crown is just enough
to pass your message. A reply costs two.’
And again the past comes vividly alive:
that room, my younger self, and Richard Baines
limping this way and that to warm his bones.
I weigh him up. ‘I’ll pay you when it comes.
I’m clipped at the minute.’
‘I will need it first.’
He shakes his head at the floorboards. Cold, so cold,
and I back against the warmth of a chimney breast
fed by the heat from someone’s fire below.
Baines fidgets at the window. ‘Here he comes.
Back from the docks, I see. Not looking well.
He’s ill-clad for a goldsmith, don’t you think?’
‘His cuffs are a little worn.’
‘Yes. And his shoes,
two seasons old at least.’
‘Your point is what?’
‘Our friend may not be all he seems to be.
Or more. You know this town is full of spies.’
His eyes on me.
‘If you suspect him so,
then why invite him to come in with us?’
I ask. He limps to the bed to relieve his bones
from the stress of standing. ‘What you do not know,
young scholar, could be stretched between the stars
and hang the world’s washing. There’s great benefit
in keeping close those folk you do not trust.
Though half a wheel keeps stiller than a whole,
only the wheel that turns is immune to rust.
Gilbert!’ he greets him. ‘What a nice surprise.’
(Leaving me to decode his homilies.)
‘I thought you would be gone two hours at least.
You have your money?’
‘No.’ The boyish face
that, legend has it, charmed a dozen nuns
into breaking their vows to Christ, is sour with age.
He throws his jacket off. ‘The boat has sailed.’
Had coinage passed between us quite as freely
as talk of it, we would all three be rich.
Over some broth: ‘Stanley’s in want of funds.’
Baines offers common knowledge like a gift
I should be grateful for. ‘That is well known,’
I answer.
Did the slight lead me astray?
Why would I add, ‘And more in want of funds
since the man who pressed his coins was put away.’
‘What man?’
‘John Poole,’ I say. ‘I met him once.
In Newgate.’ This news ignites our Richard Baines
as a spark strikes out of flint. Here is the key,
I think to myself, engaging with the lock
of Baines and turning him. ‘And did he speak?’
The veins of his eyes are like faint trails of blood
across some week-old snow. I make him wait.
Gifford is leaning inwards, though he feigns
to pick dirt from his nails.
‘So? Did he speak?’
‘Yes, a most prodigious speaker.’
‘That is he,’
Baines nods and sits back, coldly satisfied.
‘If words were food, he’
d vomit himself skeletal.
You spent long with him, did you? Dear John Poole.
How was he?’
A sudden rush of chilly air.
‘Alive,’ I say. ‘Grateful to be alive.
Look smart. The drink is coming.’
We put coins
in the wench’s hand; Baines takes no pleasure in it;
remarks, ‘How quickly money runs away.’
‘Yet how many ways to make it,’ Gifford muses,
sipping a drowsy beer. ‘If we but knew.’
‘You are a goldsmith,’ Baines says, ‘surely you
could press a coin or two.’ Gifford’s awake
immediately to the danger. ‘Do you ask
could I commit a treason? No, I couldn’t.’
But Baines’s smile is serpentine. ‘Not tried?
Even for fun? To see if you’ve the skill
to make a coin that’s passable.’
‘I’ve not,’
Gifford says firmly, his conviction melded
with the fact he’s never handled molten metal.
An opportunity to whip away
my former contact’s cover; bond with Baines
in his unmasking. And in doing so,
remove his complication. Sorry, 4.
‘Why, Gilbert,’ I say, ‘what treason could there be
in testing a goldsmith’s talents?’
Baines concurs.
‘Should anyone find out – and how would they?
we’d vouch for you. That it was just a game,
and not in earnest. Why, we’d not strike coins
in any quantity. And not in gold.’
‘But pressing coins? That is a specialist skill.
My talents lie in crafting jewellery.’
Yet mutinous pearls of sweat had broken out