The Marlowe Papers: A Novel

by Ros Barber

  if you call me an atheist in print—’

  ‘You’ll soon be back in gaol, where you belong.’

  He takes a gulp of wine. ‘And I’ll be dead.

  Chettle will publish it when I am gone.’

  A smile spreads on his face as though a stain

  has crept across a tablecloth. He coughs

  and pats his mistress’s hand. The spill of glee

  has spread to her lips, which curl up like a cat.

  ‘Well, damn you both!’ I pace across the room

  and, in a surge of fury, draw my sword.

  ‘What maggot in a cloak, what pickled turd,

  would find this shit amusing? And what sow,’

  I skewer her with a glance; she looks away

  ‘would suckle this poison? In the name of God –

  for now you swear allegiance, like a cur

  licking the foot that kicks him – damn you, Greene!’

  He eyes me like a sore. ‘How very choice.

  In the name of God you damn me. Does that work,

  I wonder, when your blood’s so thick with sin?

  I will not fight. So murder a dying man,

  be witnessed by my Em. I am unarmed.’

  He coughs again. She pats him, eyes all spite

  in my direction.

  ‘Sin? You hypocrite.’

  I sheathe the sword with difficulty. ‘Sin?

  You’re the high priest of sin. You’ve said as much

  yourself. Full house. Let’s lay them out to see:

  pride, envy, greed and lust.’

  This last word licked

  against Miss Ball, who steels each dwarfish inch

  of herself towards me. ‘Get out of my house!

  I’ll call the constables. Flo! Get the law!’

  she shouts at her neighbour’s wall. ‘A man in ’ere

  is causin’ trouble! ’Andsome. Now ye’re cooked,’

  she says, self-satisfied. ‘Go on, clear orf,

  before ye’re clapped in irons.’

  ‘Don’t do it, Greene.’

  ‘I’ll do whatever I please.’ The mug set down.

  ‘Perhaps if you had come on bended knee,’

  he smoothes his beard into a sharper point,

  ‘and not on a horse that you can ill afford,

  full of yourself and your self-righteous wrongs,

  full of your friendships with the sirs and earls,

  trussed up in velvet like a bloody lord.

  You’re all pretence. An upstart cobbler’s son

  who dresses up as pounds what is worth pence.’

  ‘You filthy weasel!’ I am at his throat

  with my eating knife before his breath is out,

  and Mistress Ball at the window, ‘Murder! Help!’

  ‘You piece of shit.’

  He’s not the least alarmed,

  knowing I’ve not the heart for it. ‘How quaint.’

  His Adam’s apple bobs against the blade.

  ‘You’ve reverted to your class. I’ve heard distress

  will do that to a man.’

  ‘This way! This way!’

  the shrew shrieks at the window. ‘’Ere they come.’

  She grins at me. ‘Ye’re really for it now.’

  It could have been worse. I was bound to keep the peace

  and warned to stay away from Holywell Street.

  But had I hoped to stem the bleed like this,

  I was mistaken. ‘Marlowe the atheist’ –

  the rumours thickened, reproduced and spread

  from house to inn, from corner shop to bed,

  from maid to fishwife, serving man to priest.

  A GROATSWORTH OF WIT

  Death came that summer, dressed up in a heat

  as unforgiving as the smelter’s fire,

  stalking the alleyways and London streets

  as hot and unrelenting as desire

  will track a woman down and smear her sheets.

  So many deaths, they couldn’t count them all:

  the cry, Bring out your dead, soon emptied complete

  houses. It heaped whole families with its call

  and tipped them into everlasting sleep.

  Summer burnt on relentless. At St Paul’s

  the thinning buyers milled more thickly where

  the stationer stacked Greene upon his stalls.

  A freshly dead contagion in the air

  as accusation gossiped round the walls

  the plague of rumour. I would not be spared.

  And the fear that gripped me as it spread its wrong

  ensured I would be perfectly ensnared

  by throwing me into a dark despond.

  For the flavour and appearance of despair

  looks much like guilty truth when stamped upon.

  Such heat. September came without relief,

  the summer furiously clinging on,

  killing exhausted mule, pernicious weed

  and sucking the river dry. Thom Nashe was gone

  to spy on the Church; our friend was in the Fleet

  sucking the humid air, while like a fly

  my brain buzzed madly round the corpse of Greene

  pressing to find a window to the sky

  but only knocking into stink. A priest

  confused me with Doctor Faustus as if I

  had damned the world to gulp his curses down.

  So merged the playwright and the Queen’s own spy,

  by the power of language flushed from underground;

  my fictional creations now not mine,

  but me. And in their mythic flesh I drowned.

  DISMISSED

  Fear sends the mad man running off a cliff.

  I asked Arbella Stuart for forty pounds;

  an annual sum, to save me from the list

  of poverty-murdered poets. I could hear

  Fate drumming at the window. But the doubt

  surrounding my religion reached the ears

  of the countess. Like a flea, I was dismissed.

  THE COBBLERS SON

  The backward movement of returning home

  thickened my blood as I approached the walls

  of Canterbury. Passing through its gates

  like a child squeezing back into the womb

  of a mother he has out-suckled.

  There, the fence

  I used to daub with chalk when I was small,

  was clipped around the ear for. There, the school

  whose books propelled me into fantasies.

  Autumn was shedding summer in the churchyards

  and the leaves blew giddy down familiar streets

  as though afraid of something.

  At his awl

  just as I’d left him some three years ago,

  my father bends and straightens like a willow,

  predictably nattering a customer

  into a better pair of shoes. At first

  his eye mistakes me for a gentleman

  he needs to cozen, misled by my clothes.

  ‘Young sir, how are you booted?’ Then, ‘Good grief!

  It’s Christopher!’ Out back, ‘It’s Christopher!’

  My mother comes with sodden hands, ‘My son!’

  and wets my shoulders with them. ‘Why, you’ve come

  so unexpectedly! What brings you here?’

  Between the two of them, a glance, a nod:

  I wondered then how fast, from man to man,

  the word might travel.

  With her in the yard:

  ‘You have leave from your tutoring?’ she asks,

  wringing a tunic dry. As if she knows.

  ‘I’m finished with that,’ I answer, tapping grit

  out of my shoe. ‘I am on government work.

  I need to rest here for a week or so—’

  The truth stuck in my throat.

  ‘You’d let me know

  if you were in trouble?’

  ‘Ma, y
ou know you’d know.’

  She eyes me like a button that won’t fit

  through the hole she’s made.

  ‘I know you less these days.’

  I was foolish to go drinking; but what else

  is a man to do to stop becoming boy

  when he’s moved back with his parents? Darkly lost

  in wondering how to rescue me, ‘My God!’

  feels like an assault; a cheery parrot’s cry

  from a man I fail to recognise. ‘Topher!’

  He spits through his teeth the name they used at school.

  ‘Come on, it’s me, Corkine! The tailor’s son.

  Indeed, a tailor now. With a son of my own.

  How’s cobbling?’

  I confess, it grated me,

  his sense that we were equals. I had lost

  a job instructing England’s maybe queen,

  been slandered by a drunken, envious pimp,

  but still was raised to gentleman by degree.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, I do not cobble now.’

  His cheeriness was irrefutable.

  ‘They call you the cobbler still. You cobble up

  some trifles for the public stage, I hear.’

  ‘I am a scholar. And a gentleman.’

  ‘You jest!’ He laughs, and jabs a bony digit

  into my ribs. ‘Our Toph’s a gentleman.

  If you’re an esquire, where’s your rapier?’

  It was in London, stored amongst my things,

  and just as well, the mood that I was in.

  ‘Are you suggesting, sir, that I am lying?’

  His eye tics nervously, as if the smile

  is breaking off in pieces. ‘Not me, Toph.

  Just asking where your sword was, that was all.’

  He sits beside me, pulling up a stool.

  ‘So do you have a family? A wife?’

  For twenty minutes, I put up with it,

  answering trivial questions through my teeth

  in one or two words only, but Corkine –

  either convinced his cheer will gladden me,

  or unaware of how I seethe and boil –

  remains there like a birthmark.

  ‘Well, Corkine,

  it’s been a pleasure,’ (said so sourly

  my mother could pickle herrings in the tone)

  ‘but it’s time for me to go.’

  He stands up too.

  ‘I’ll walk down with you to your father’s house.

  My own is just beyond.’

  ‘I’d rather walk

  alone,’ I say. Yet ten steps down the road

  I find him at my side. ‘It isn’t safe,’

  he says, ‘to walk alone at night. Not here.’

  The wind spoke malcontentedly through signs,

  creaking the baker’s loaf, the glover’s glove.

  It wasn’t safe for him to walk with me

  against my wishes. Though I bit my tongue,

  and though I’m not a natural fighting man,

  my ruined life was overcoming me.

  I was so close to punching him, I swear

  my fist was itching.

  ‘Look, I need to think.

  I have some troubles and must be alone.

  Please let me be.’ So firmly to his face

  he couldn’t mistake my meaning. Still, he said,

  ‘I hope we might be friends. Now that you’re back.’

  You understand that I must say all this

  in mitigation for what happened next.

  The facts alone – if you had seen the facts,

  laid out, as they were, in court – tell only that

  I assaulted the man. But I did so much more.

  ‘I am not back. And we will not be friends.

  I don’t make friends with tailors, any more

  than I would marry the shit upon my shoe.’

  I watched his face turn crimson in the light

  of the tavern window.

  ‘Furthermore—’ But I

  had said enough. And felt it, even through

  that bellyful of ale. I turned to go

  and Corkine shouted out, ‘You stupid sprat!

  You upstart sprat of a man! You know you’re nothing!

  You’re nothing at all.’

  And did I batter him?

  You bet I did. Did I hold my dagger close

  against his throat as I had done to Greene?

  Did I growl in his face, and cut his buttons off,

  saying they’d be his fingers if he crossed

  my path again? With certainty, I did.

  My father bailed me from the local cells

  and talked me home. The shame in my mother’s eyes—

  I knew then that I couldn’t stay there long.

  To go back to the ground-nest of your birth

  when you have fledged, have learnt to use your wings,

  flown across oceans, sung with friends at dawn,

  is to shrink and rot as surely as a worm

  will hole an apple. London, though, was death

  tricked out in temptress clothes.

  And then you spoke.

  Your voice came clearly: ‘You could come to Kent.’

  Yes, there was more to Kent than Canterbury.

  I rode, next afternoon, to Scadbury.

  RE:SPITE

  The birds sang my arrival through the woods,

  along the path, and through the entrance gates.

  Had I believed that all would turn to good

  the moment you embraced me, I would wait

  only two weeks to learn that pain was still

  coming for me, and as relentlessly

  as a bloodhound closing in upon its kill.

  Tom Watson turned to death to set him free.

  A FELLOW OF INFINITE JEST

  Had I forgotten Tom? No. Nor can I

  erase from my mind the pained, unruly grin

  that took possession of his face the night

  I told him I was leaving town.

  ‘You too?

  Of course. Yes, bugger off. I’ll keep the rats,

  my loyal companions. I shall press my face

  against the bars and gurn at passers-by

  for entertainment. Though if this keeps on

  there’ll be no passers-by. All London town

  will be a prison, which we prisoners

  will govern by witchcraft while we slowly rot.’

  ‘Tom—’

  ‘Don’t apologise. You have your troubles.

  I don’t wish to be one of them.’ Like lard

  slides off a cooked goose breast, he changes tack.

  ‘This heat is insufferable. When will it end?’

  I left him there, it’s true. No coin of mine,

  no words that I might write, would set him free.

  And yet, if I could go back to that night,

  I’d boot the guards and wrestle for the key,

  rather than standing in that dripping yard,

  wondering which unholy mound was he.

  SCADBURY

  We wintered quietly. We fed the fires.

  You let me write for hours, and touched my sleeve

  when meat was served. December’s ice furred thick

  across the moat; fish torpid in the depths

  of the fishponds’ cloudy cataracts. I wrote

  as deep as I could inside the ancient tales,

  as if afraid, should I come up for air,

  I’d find a bank of prosecutors there.

  When geese cranked spring’s return across the sky,

  you rode to town and back, to bend your ear

  to the Privy Council’s whisperings, while I

  sank deeper still, but all my blood aware

  that half those men still pressed to have it spilt

  as a fine example of the rebel’s heart:

  He who abandons God cannot be saved.

  Those men could not imagine how I prayed
.

  A SLAVE WHOSE GALL COINS SLANDERS LIKE A MINT

  You’d spent two days in London. You had news.

  Your wolfhound greeted you with a slow wag;

  you stroked him distractedly, and gave your cloak

  to Frizer.

  ‘Bring some wine,’ you said. His brow

  showed silent concern. How strange to write him now

  bearing only the weight of your cloak along the hall,

  knowing how he would bear a greater burden,

  and all for love and loyalty to you.

  Anxious, I followed you into the room

  where so many conversations, games of cards

  and quoted poetry had sealed us tight

  in friendship: every night held in those walls

  as though the wood, still tree, were living witness,

  rather than seasoned panelling.

  ‘Frizer.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Dismiss the servants. We’re not to be disturbed.

  And you may go to bed.’

  It wasn’t late,

  and he raised a single eyebrow, but complied.

  The crackling fire, which he’d lately fed,

  filled up the silence as we listened then

  to the quieting of the house.

  ‘There is a note,’

  you said, with blunt despair. You turned your glass

  around in your fingers, staring at the wine

  as though you wished to drown there. ‘Kit, it’s bad.

  Lord Burghley gave me sight of it. It says—’