by Ros Barber
pass without saying so. Forgive me, please.’
I nod. ‘I understand they didn’t work.’
‘Not as my lord intended,’ he replies,
with a momentary flash of summer’s warmth.
‘But something of love is kindled by your lines.’
A servant appears, as if a fairy’s curse
has summoned him from smoke to break the spell.
‘My lord Southampton, you’re required within.’
Gifford was just outside. We left as one,
all hope of further service work undone.
Light-fingered rain had thickened in the hour
and now fell hard enough to clear the streets.
Though the door closed at our backs, we hovered there
to shelter in the doorway. ‘Disappear,’
said Gifford. ‘Baines won’t keep this to himself.’
COLLABORATION
The consolation prize I called my friends
was out of sorts when I returned that night
to the lanes of Shoreditch, freshened by the rain,
rinsed of the stench of urine. I could kiss
their crooked timber houses and the dogs
half bald with mange, prepared to brave the wet
to nose the butcher’s leavings. Much the same
as when I left to tangle with Richard Baines,
excepting those friends of mine. Some argument
had splintered them into separate inns.
First Ned,
nursing a pint of stout between his paws
in the Cock and Bull. ‘The man’s impossible,’
he booms like an ancient king. ‘What? Robert Greene.
I only added six lines to his scene
and he took offence. Called me a pea-brained clod,
a country parsnip, if you please. My God.’
‘And you stayed calm?’
‘I may have said some things.’
Nashe in the Horse and Groom, his mischief sealed
behind a troubled stare. ‘It’s not my fault!’
he says straight off. ‘Though Ned is blaming me
for laughing, the pompous oaf. Greene lost his temper.
Now Ned won’t even pay him what he’s owed.’
‘And what of the play?’
‘The play? The play’s a mess.’
My play. That Ned persuaded me to leave
half finished when I went abroad. Had said,
‘Good hands will finish it! You’ll have your share.
The lion’s share, indeed. Go on, be gone!’
My play was at the core of what went wrong.
Greene had moved in with a strumpet named Em Ball,
who cradled his head between a squelch of breasts,
eyeing me sharply. ‘Don’t be upsetting him.
He isn’t well.’ Greene peered up through the pain
of a whole day’s wine. ‘You can sod your blasted play
unless you’ve come with money from the Crow.’
‘Ned isn’t happy.’
‘Good.’
‘About the play –
you have some scenes?’
‘I fed them to the fire,’
he growled. ‘Delightful words, but we had need
of kindling.’
‘Greene, for God’s sake!’
‘What of God?
What’s God to do with this, you atheist?
I know what you’ve been up to, gone abroad
to pretend at being Catholic, setting traps
for Jesuits. How taxing it must be
to believe in nothing.’
‘Robert, that’s not true –
and protecting Her Majesty is honest work.’
‘If lying through your teeth is honest work
no wonder I’m facing death through poverty.
You’re no more honest than your friend the Crow,
for both of you live by acting. And beneath
are puffed-up nothings, like the fungus balls
we find in the woods, and stamp to clouds of spores.’
‘Greene—’
‘You address me decently. Try “sir”.’
‘What have I done?’
‘Whose brothers have you sunk
with your information? Who now rots in gaol
as the result of your “intelligence”? While I,
with twice the education and the skill,
am hired as a scribbler to complete your play?
And then insulted. And, what’s worse, not paid.
What have you not done? You have left a trail
of devastation in your wake, while you
reap every glory. God will bring you down.
I have that faith.’
‘In God?’
‘He spoke to me.’
He fills himself with air like a balloon.
Em grabs his arm as if to steady him.
‘From the bottom of a cup?’
‘Oh, you may mock.
There is no God for you, of course, but Fame.
Get out. And do not speak to me again.’
His mind diseased, I left him with his whore
and went in search of my own sanity:
an evening with Tom Watson, to offload
the horror that was Flushing, knowing he
would find the joke in it. And we’d share Baines,
and the resurrection of dead spies, with glee.
He’d shore me up.
But no lights in his rooms.
And no Tom in the local hostelry.
And no wife to explain where he might be.
The night was turning filthy, with the rain
harried in all directions by a gale.
In case his tutor’s duty kept him late
I knocked at Fisher’s Folly, spoke his name,
and the door was shut on me.
So I trudged back
to Nashe. ‘Have you seen Watson anywhere?’
‘Oh, Kit. My word, I’m sorry. I was so –
preoccupied. I forgot you didn’t know –
it happened weeks ago.’
‘What happened?’
‘Kit,
he’s in the Fleet.’
It’s true that I had then
a vision of his body, bloated dark
with the sewer water, floating to the Thames.
Rather that than think our friend in chains.
‘Explain,’ I said, winded enough to sit
and help myself to cider.
‘He – oh, Kit,
it isn’t good.’
‘Explain.’
‘The girl, the girl—’
And so he blurted it. Tom’s brother-in-law
falling for Cornwallis’s young daughter,
and how Tom – as a jest – suggested that
he lend ten angels to the miser’s girl,
and have his brother Hugh draw up a deed
to say she’ll repay it on her wedding day,
but worded in such tortured legal speak
that he, the brother-in-law, must be the groom.
‘And all is blamed on Tom? He’s in the Fleet?’
‘He’s in the Fleet, accused of every crime
the family could muster. Chiefly this,
for instigating blackmail.’
‘Have you tried
to bail him out?’
‘They wouldn’t set a price.
His employer’s livid. And in any case
I’m hardly equipped to lend a surety.’
The wind was at my back and in my face,
the links boys scattered by the howling rain,
and only a lighted window here or there
allowed me to thread that mile across the city.
In time, the sullen shadow of the Fleet
reared up its walls and smell.
Though it was late,
I offered what I had in silver coin
to a hook-nosed gaol
er.
‘Watson. Tom. It’s me.’
I shook him, and his soul fell into place
behind his eyes: still him, but somehow changed.
‘I’m done for, Kit.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘Smell the place.’
The torchlight lit him wildly, but the draught
that ripped through the building couldn’t budge the stench.
‘That’s death,’ he said. ‘Three corpses leave a day.’
‘Not yours,’ I said. ‘You’re coming out alive.’
He smiled as if I was insane. ‘Let’s pray.’
And closed his eyes. I waited for the joke
to end. Instead, his eyes steadfastly closed,
his lips were murmuring. And then, ‘Amen.’
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
He looked at me
as though I spoke in Flemish, and the pause
was for his own translation. ‘Am I? No,’
his words as brittle as an ancient book.
‘Tom, you’ll escape the charges.’
‘You don’t know,’
he said. ‘Cornwallis doesn’t go to church.
You understand? He has me for a spy.’
‘I’ll get you out.’
‘With what? A locksmith’s pick?’
‘I’ll think of something.’
‘Yes. The genius,’
he said, unusually sour. ‘Well, think it quick.’
‘Where’s Ann?’ I asked. He threw his head back hard
against the stone. ‘With relatives. My wife
must resort to charity. It was a joke!’
‘What was?’
‘What do you think? The bastard note.
I never thought they’d write the idiot thing.’
He smacked his head against the wall again.
Two hours I stayed, entrenched in his despair,
and each week after, dragged myself to him,
with pies, and paper that he had no heart
to fill with words. The spark in him was out,
and his estate too damp and treacherous
for it to be relit. What was my friend
departed months before the final pinch.
And though I strove to paint his freedom there,
a future for him, he only saw his end
creeping towards him, inch by stinking inch.
THE SCHOOL OF ATHEISM
My own fate crept towards me too. How frail
is the bubble reputation. On a pin.
What starts with only rumour, just the fluff
of some poor servant’s ignorance and fear
becomes corporeal, trails a snaky tail,
until the tale’s found devilish enough,
and scurries to the dark, as lode to pole.
An anonymous agent writes of how we meet
to spread the unholy creed, and from my lines,
twists joke to accusation: how we teach
scholars ‘to spell God backward’. We who thrilled
at Raleigh’s phrase ‘adventure to our souls’
begin to understand we may be damned.
‘Faustus!’ A stranger hails me in the street.
‘Send my regards to Hell!’
I grab his throat
and thrust him against the baker’s door.
‘Who said
that I am Faustus?’ The sweetest smell of loaves
warms in the air between us.
‘Why, it’s known,’
he stammers. ‘Is generally known.’
I see his hand
making a surreptitious cross, and growl
into his face, ‘What’s known? What’s this that’s known?’
‘That the author of Faustus is an atheist.
That you are he.’
‘Who said this?’
‘Robert Greene.’
HOLYWELL STREET
‘Greene! Open up!’ I hammer on the door
of his digs in Holywell Street. A passer-by
skirts me like I’m a pothole. ‘Mistress Ball!
I need to speak to Robert.’
It is May.
Enfeebled sunshine warming up the roofs
and the foul load of the gutters. ‘Open up!’
Movement. An upstairs window creaks its joints
and the woman’s face appears. ‘’E isn’t well,’
she says in a voice as sharp as splintered wood,
‘and not receiving visitors.’ She’s gone.
I could have left. Perhaps, had I turned my heel
and left them well alone, his spiteful pen
would not have felt it had to set in ink
the vitriol he’d drafted with his tongue
and freely spewed in taverns and hostelries.
But I was righteous. Full of consequence.
I hammer again. ‘Greene! Open up this door!’
It flies from my fist. ‘Whaddya want ’im for?’
Miss Ball was Greene’s protector, those last days,
her shrew-like features screwed up like a page
whose scenes he had rejected. ‘He is ill,
I said, and if you do not know the word,
then please acquaint yourself and catch the plague.’
Her diction was deliberately strained.
‘He has the plague?’
‘Whaddya take me for?
Would I be ’ere without an ’andkerchief?
No. No, you fool. Although a plague of “friends”’
– her tone has marked the word for quarantine –
‘seems to descend here daily. What’s yer beef?’
‘I want to speak to Greene,’ I say, and take
advantage of the open door to bolt
like lightning up the stairs. She follows. ‘Hey!
Don’t push me! Don’t go up there! Bloody men.’
Greene is indeed in bed, but fully dressed,
as though he’s just retreated there.
‘Ah, Marlowe.
I thought I recognised your dulcet tones
drifting up from the street. And such a rhythm
you played on my door, as if it were a drum
and I should break out singing. But, alas,
I am unwell. They say the very air
can spread contagion. You may note the smell.’
There was, indeed, a stench.
‘One cannot catch
the slow death wrought by liquor, Greene,’ I say,
stalking across the room to pull the sheets
away from his booted body. Emma swears,
arriving in the doorway out of breath,
and hands him the olive cloak draped on a chair.
‘And you have been well enough to venture out
and smear my name amongst the taverners.’
‘So? I must eat. My Em’s a dreadful cook.’
She scowls at him; he smiles and grasps her hand
to pull himself up to sitting. Clears his throat.
‘A dying man should have his fill of fare
while time allows. If I should stagger out
for breakfast, an evening meal—’
‘You miss my point,’
I say. ‘Eat what you will. And where you will.
But keep your mouthparts busy mangling food
and not unravelling slanders. Several men
in this last week alone, have savaged me
for views I do not hold, and claimed that you –’
(I jab my finger in his chest. He coughs.)
‘– were their source of information.’
‘Oh? What views?’
All innocence he is, all empty-eyed,
though his lips are curled like paper by a fire.
‘A man’s religious opinions –’ I begin
‘– that is, beliefs – should not be simplified.
Not in these times.’
‘What times? I’m out of touch,’
> he sneers. ‘Dear Em, will you fetch me a mug of wine?’
‘The Queen herself once promised, we are told,
not to make windows into her subjects’ souls.
But if others, spreading lies—’
‘What have I said?
No more than you’ve said yourself a dozen times.
“Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest.”
The atheist highlights, if you please.’
‘For God’s –
for pity’s sake, you cannot spread this stuff!’
Nashe said I should have run him through, right there;
but to witness one man die was enough for me.
And I am not a natural fighting man.
I prefer the bright and bloodless cut of words.
‘What fiendish foul excuse for a human being
would put my life and liberty at risk
for his private entertainment? The powers that be
have cooked up fear until it bubbles thick
in the brains of the ignorant, and you would stir
it further, give them names? And give them mine,
as if this mind is fodder for the ropes
at a public hanging? Damn you, Greene, you may
have bitterness against me, but this life
of graft by pen and ink, and several friends,
we have in common. Say what you like of me,
but do not say I am an atheist.’
Emma returns with wine. He curls a hand
around the mug, and pats her on the bum.
‘Say it? I’ll write it. Publish it indeed,
under my name. Greene’s Devils. That would sell.
Greene’s Former Friends, the atheist and the clown,
who feed their best lines to an upstart crow.’
‘But you will ruin me. For mercy’s sake,