The Marlowe Papers: A Novel

by Ros Barber

  ‘except to ink and paper.’

  ‘Then you must,’

  she urges me. ‘An untold story sits

  like rust in the heart. It makes the blood go sour.

  Press on.’

  So, hesitantly, I begin.

  ‘At home – and I still call it home, although

  I’m almost two years exiled – I wrote plays.’

  ‘Exiled,’ she breathes. ‘So, so. There is the grief.

  Go on.’

  ‘I wrote a comedy. A farce.

  Most popular. The protagonist so extreme

  in his two-faced treachery, you’d have to laugh

  or despair at humanity.’

  ‘This is a tale

  that promises to stretch to suppertime,’

  the mother sighs. ‘All poets are the same.

  Enamoured with the beauty of their words,

  they spin three yards when half an inch will do.

  Skip quickly to your banishment. What crime

  have you committed?’

  ‘Why, the crime of truth,’

  I say. ‘For every fiction has a core

  of honesty. The seed of the idea

  plants in the mind from life. This “character” –

  though I changed his name, location, race and creed –

  was a man my friend had worked with. And his tales,

  those tavern entertainments, spun the plot

  that then became my play. I didn’t dream

  the dangers of my profession. I was glad

  only to see the theatre glutted out,

  the play a staunch success.’

  ‘What of this man?’

  the daughter asks. I wish I knew her name;

  protecting myself from that was purposeless,

  and I am half in love with her already,

  for caring enough to ask me who I am.

  ‘He recognised himself?’

  ‘He must have done.

  Although, I told myself, this was a fiction

  and, therefore, how could he find fault with it?

  Stupid.’ I stop. Once more, I’m almost floored

  by the weight and depth of my own ignorance.

  ‘What happened?’ she asks, as gentle as a breeze

  lifting a tattered poster from the wall

  for an event long past, and half forgotten. ‘Then?’

  I skip the coining, and the failed betrayal.

  Speak only of ‘invented’ blasphemies.

  The mother has turned her back, and has a hare

  stripped of its skin and on the chopping block.

  ‘A fishy tale,’ she says. ‘If they were lies

  then you could surely say so.’ And the knife

  chops off a haunch.

  I flinch. ‘In England now,

  religion is the tetchiest of notes

  that one might pipe on. Since our Virgin Queen

  passed the point of bearing issue … laws have changed.

  Even to be accused of heresy

  is taken by the courts to signal guilt.’

  ‘My mother’s right,’ the daughter says, as soft

  as a pillow I could expire on. ‘Surely lies

  could be turned out and booted down the street.

  Be honest, please. Was there some truth in it?’

  Her eyes search into mine so tenderly

  I cannot think of lying.

  ‘As a student

  they trained me to debate theology;

  a habit I enjoyed. Sometimes with friends

  I openly expressed opinions which

  I’d not want written down.’ She turns her face,

  ashamed for me. ‘But who when they are young

  is prudent every moment? Which of us

  can claim great wisdom when we’re primed with wine

  and the company of those we love and trust?

  If I have sinned – and I confess I have –

  it is against myself. I’m in the hands

  of God completely and, by his design,

  I never sinned enough that I should die.

  Or I’d be buried now.’

  She takes both hands

  and reads me quickly, scans me like a script

  to find her part.

  ‘And where would you be now

  if not consigned to exile?’

  ‘Why, in love.’

  The shock to both of us has cleft the air

  into a silence, following the thud

  of her mother’s cleaver, finished dismembering.

  Was it my need for rest that brought that word

  out of my lungs? Or just the strange relief

  of finding kindness in a world of stones?

  ‘You barely know my name,’ she says.

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Venetia,’ she says.

  ‘And mine is Christopher.’

  ‘Clear off, she’s spoken for.’ The mother’s lunge

  towards us with a cloth to wipe the table

  shocks us both to our feet, and I, unbalanced,

  weak in the legs, am floored a second time,

  and coughing my surprise into a rag.

  Venetia crouches to help me up. ‘It’s true

  I’m spoken for. And you are far too ill

  to imagine yourself in love with me. Your fever,

  and fear of death, can be the only cause.

  But I will help you – Mamma, stop clucking, please –

  I’ll help you find some passage back to home.’

  She’s leading me to my bed. I say, ‘But home –

  they think me dead at home. All but a few.’

  ‘Then one of those few can nurse you back to health,

  before you’re truly dead,’ she says.

  ‘But what

  if I’m recognised?’

  She stops us before the mirror

  at the foot of the stairs. Says, ‘Do you see yourself?

  Do you recognise that man?’

  A sallow face

  whose skull shows through his skin. A ragged beard.

  ‘No,’ I admit.

  ‘Then no one will know you.

  And if they do, and you’re imprisoned for

  the crimes you fled, what difference will it make

  to die that way, or here, so far from home?’

  I glance at her breasts. ‘I’ll have nowhere so soft

  to rest my cheek at home.’

  She laughs and shakes

  her head at me. ‘You are delirious.

  Lie down, Christopher, Monsieur Louis Le Doux,

  whatever your name is. You are not in love.’

  I lie down meekly. ‘Why are you so … kind?’

  Her eyes, then, spring with tears. ‘I had a brother.

  Had others been kind, I’d have a brother still.’

  Then, brushing the thought to air, ‘No more of that.

  I’ll find a merchant willing to take you home.’

  How powerful that one word has become.

  I might as well die there as anywhere.

  STRAITS

  What part of her she gave – they had no gold –

  I’d rather not imagine. In a week

  my nights were sweated on a merchant ship

  above a hold of Orient silks and spices

  bound for an English dock.

  Across the sheer

  blue of the Mediterranean, the threat

  of Barbary pirates threaded through my prayers.

  And in Gibraltar’s strait those prayers contained

  the damnable Spanish, who might scupper us.

  Yet we sailed through as smoothly as a promise.

  MONTANUS

  Only the sea becomes my enemy.

  As we plough northwards through a deeper swell,

  it builds the waters mountainous and cold

  as the Alps I had avoided. I awake

  to a storm whistling the masts into a creak

  that would a
waken monsters from the deep.

  And we are rolled and yawed, and tossed and dumped

  as a dandled plaything on a Titan’s knee.

  I light a candle, prepare my ink and pen

  and record that simile before it flees,

  follow with how it feels inside my skin,

  then the ominous eerie whistling of the wind,

  the slewing about of all that’s not lashed down

  (retrieving the ink that slides across the boards),

  and how a part of me’s already drowned

  in the fatal fear of knowing I cannot swim.

  Then the door bursts open. If the seaman’s face

  were a single word, it wouldn’t be polite.

  ‘The cap—What are you doing?’

  I can’t explain.

  To most folk, this would be no time to write.

  ‘The captain wants you.’ His glance suspiciously

  on what I’m writing, which he cannot read.

  ‘We must turn into port,’ the captain says,

  shouting above the racket of the wind.

  ‘The storm is too much.’

  ‘What country?’

  ‘Maybe France.

  Or maybe Spain. The pilot’s lost our course.’

  He nods at the man twitching above a map.

  ‘You have your documents?’

  ‘He has a pen,’

  says the seaman who fetched me. ‘Likes to write with it,’

  and smiles with Venetian coldness.

  Like a king,

  the captain dismisses him and stares ahead

  into the howling dark as though it might

  unpeel, revealing stars. ‘So earn your keep,’

  he says. ‘Make a note for the vessel, something that

  will pass in either country. And for yourself.

  And, oh …’ he stops me as I return below

  ‘ … the English are hated everywhere,’ he says.

  ‘Be anything but English.’

  Friend, we survived

  our docking and mending, and the curious eyes

  of Spanish officials on my forgery.

  Now ploughing the sea again, I have prepared

  a passport, in perfect secretary hand,

  and dated almost exactly one year ago

  in the name Pietro Montanus, faithful servant

  to the honourable Anthony Bacon. By this name,

  which ties us to our common love, Montaigne,

  Bacon will know who it must be that sails

  into the Thames to seek his sanctuary.

  BISHOPSGATE STREET

  It’s May again. Two years have cycled round

  as I return, unrecognisable,

  to a neighbourhood that used to meet my boots

  with a cheery ring. I scrape and hobble now,

  pared to the bone by sickness. Here, the street

  slides deep into the skirts of Bishopsgate:

  the former mistress who disposed of me

  and now mistakes me for a foreigner.

  She smells the same. I catch her foetid breath

  as a Gascon servant ushers me indoors

  beneath a blanket.

  Through the afternoon

  she gossips through the window like a wife

  or former lover, oblivious to my pain,

  quite blind to the man who’s aching to chime in –

  and almost says my name a time or two,

  Mar-something – but she’s moved to lovers new

  while I am dying quietly within.

  So close to Hog Lane that I hear the pigs

  driven to slaughter. And the laughing whores

  that kick about these evenings are the same –

  I swear, at least for certain one’s the same –

  that I have hired to celebrate success,

  have sat on my lap and tickled, pouring beer

  into my mouth, and flooding hers with it

  in a drunken, lustful kiss. She glances up

  but doesn’t know this shadow of myself.

  Half of me dreams up schemes where I will kneel

  upon this bed and roar across the roofs,

  ‘Hey, England! Look, it’s me! Your fool is back!’

  As if I had a voice. As if a ghost

  could solidify to flesh and hope to live,

  when he scares both wives and horses. I’d be struck

  back to the graveyard of my deep pretence.

  I sleep the first few days. Good Anthony

  (a kinder man I could not hope to serve)

  appreciates that love can mend disease.

  He stations a boy to see I’m fed and clean,

  visits me frequently. ‘What do you need?’

  And still – despite the letters not received,

  the last two months of silence on your part,

  the change in me, embittered by disease,

  a silent voice is mouthing, ‘Walsingham.’

  How close you are. Now, not an inch of sea

  roughens the air between us. You might ride

  just half a day and touch the lips of me:

  except these lips are blistered, and my pride

  can’t bear that you would see me broken down,

  the tattered sail of that good barque we planned

  holed and gone under with the barest sound.

  I want your love to know a better man.

  So I sleep. Imagine the air I’m breathing in

  came straight from your lungs, disguised as summer wind.

  I lie, within a lie, in Bishopsgate,

  the name entirely false, the heart still true.

  I long to hear ‘Kit’ or ‘Christopher’ again.

  And when I think of love, I think of you.

  MADAME LE DOUX

  ‘Come. I’ve a treat for you.’ My gentle host

  responds to my better health with a surprise.

  He leads me to a draughty room. A dress

  is draped on the bed as though just recently

  vacated by a princess. ‘It’s your size,’

  he says. I try to read his face. Contained

  within those eyes, the quiet expansive hint

  of naughtiness.

  ‘My size, but not my colour,’

  I say, addressing my fingers to the cloth.

  ‘I’d rather blue.’ I’m playing out the joke,

  whatever the purpose. ‘No,’ he says, ‘this green—’

  I interrupt: ‘The colour’s surely “sludge”.’

  With a teacher’s patience, he repeats, ‘This green –

  an oceanic green – it sets your skin

  off beautifully.’ And holds it to my chest,

  tilting his head as if the angled light

  has made me feminine. And then he laughs.

  ‘Perhaps the moustache might go.’

  ‘What? My moustache?

  You will not have it, sir!’ I fence him off

  with my forearm. ‘Swive, it takes three months to grow.’

  ‘A soft, half-hearted thing.’ He smiles. ‘Believe

  me, Kit, it will be worth the sacrifice.’

  My name dropped like a stitch. We hold the air

  and listen for servants. Not a creaking board.

  And in that stop, I breathe the nectar in –

  to be myself, and to be ‘Kit’ to him –

  I almost dare not say what that is worth.

  He starts again, contrite, ‘Monsieur Le Doux,

  if you might play your wife, then we have seats

  in the balcony to see the latest play

  by a certain William Shakespeare.’

  Me, see me?

  In one disguise to watch my other’s work,

  pretending I don’t know it? Can I fake

  indifference to a script I’ll know as well

  as my tongue knows every crevice of my mouth?

  Might I pretend those phrases new to me

  whose words have kep
t me up at night? And not

  demand some public credit for what spouts

  out of the actors’ mouths? ‘I cannot do it.’

  I sit down, heavy.

  ‘Fie!’ He gives a laugh.

  ‘It’s Ferdinando’s Men. Now working for

  the good Lord Chamberlain. You cannot miss it!’

  He sits beside me softly. ‘Richard the Third.’

  What spirits ride the draught I dare not name,

  but ghostly fingers stroke me to a thought

  that stirs a shiver. ‘I heard they poisoned him.’

  Bacon looks puzzled. ‘Though my history

  may not be deep, and I’ve not seen your play,

  I recall that he was stabbed.’

  The curtain breathes.

  ‘No, Ferdinando Stanley. My lord Strange.’

  Anthony nods. ‘The Earl of Derby’s death

  was most mysterious. If Catholics

  were the cause of it, I have not found the proof.

  I have been looking, trust me.’ And my hand

  is taken in his, and held, and gently placed

  back where he found it, just before it’s missed.

  ‘Do come,’ he says. ‘Come for your old friends’ sakes.’

  ‘Which friends?’

  ‘The quick, the dead, and all those souls

  who’ve wished you well, who’ve kept your secret safe,

  and hoped that you might one day see on stage

  the final quarter of your history play.’

  ‘Does anybody know?’

  ‘No. Not a soul.’

  ‘And is it safe? Can I pass for a maid?’

  He laughs more loudly than the room can take.