The Marlowe Papers: A Novel

by Ros Barber

  Its windows dark, no ounce of soul in them.

  ‘So why must I come to London? Is it safe?’

  ‘I would deceive you if I answered yes.

  But safe enough, if you are well disguised,

  to cast your eye about those men at Court

  who most deserve to be a Sovereign joke.

  The Queen grows weary, since Lord Essex has –

  been absent. She laughs so little. There’s concern …’

  and here he whispers, though an olive grove,

  a mare, a foal, and a high-circling hawk

  are all our company, ‘The Queen grows old.

  Her health has lessened since she banished him

  from her company.’

  I quickened, I confess,

  at the thought she might be waning. Hand me a lute

  and I’ll write a song to sing the Queen to death.

  Hasten King James, a man to boldly reign

  and overturn the past’s injustices.

  If I could be in London when the news

  breaks of her death, his kingship; collar a friend

  to make a plea for me while power is fresh

  and generous in bestowing its rewards …

  ‘But what disguise could keep me safe at Court,

  which brims with agents? Or the London streets?’

  ‘The work’s half done,’ he says. ‘Thanks to the sun

  you have the very semblance of a Moor.

  All we need now is appropriate attire.’

  TWELFTH NIGHT

  Guests are arriving at the great Noon-Hall,

  and snow is falling like small promises

  as I cross the courtyard ‘wrapped as a corpse should be,

  in winding sheets’. (As Thorpe said, when I swam

  through my ancient haunts, first time in seven years,

  without a flicker I was seen at all.)

  A small and foreign man, his skin deep brown

  through race or cobbler’s dye; they wouldn’t care

  to look close enough. In the country, people stare,

  but London chooses not to notice who

  takes shelter in her, bumped as if he’s air.

  Three months I’ve ducked through mishap and mischance,

  scribbling a play to celebrate misrule,

  which tonight, by the grace of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men,

  will play before Her Majesty.

  ‘Percy!’

  A young man dressed in finery hails a shadow

  lighting a pipe outside. ‘You coming in?’

  The answer both sweet and tart, like damson jam.

  ‘Not yet. I’m waiting for a visitor.’

  Puffs at the pipe, his eyes searching for stars

  that the falling snow obscures.

  ‘My lord,’ I say.

  ‘My lord Northumberland.’ He shakes my hand

  distractedly, his gaze towards the gate

  where others enter. ‘Delighted. We will speak

  later, perhaps, when we are introduced.’

  He takes me for a foreigner, unschooled

  in proper etiquette. I hold my ground,

  and remember a line that he will recognise.

  ‘Above our life, we love a steadfast friend.’

  He stares at me intently.

  Then,

  ‘My word!

  The note – I’d not imagined your disguise.

  Your mother would fail to know you.’

  ‘Then all’s well.’

  He reads my face intently as a page

  of mathematics. ‘You are keeping safe

  in this monstrous lie?’

  His breath surprises me:

  enriched with liquor.

  ‘I am glad to be

  in England again.’ He huffs. ‘If England knew

  she’d have you quartered. Such does England treat

  its poets and thinkers. We’re all heretics.

  You’d like some tobacco?’ Offering the pipe.

  ‘It doesn’t suit this Moorish outward show.’

  He nods, ‘A shame,’ and puffs as if for me.

  Taps out the glowing heart. ‘Shall we? Inside?’

  Noon-Hall is lit for Christmas with enough

  candles to burn a thousand heretics.

  A crush of courtiers and titled guests

  mingle, or sit, before the fervent hush

  preceding the Queen’s arrival.

  Here she is,

  gleaming and pale, her dress a nest of pearls

  but in that nest a thin-armed woman, frail

  as eggshell after hatching. Power rests

  in her hawkish eyes alone: as if shrunk there,

  withdrawn from withered limbs until it set

  in two blue points of purpose. Yet the dress,

  the dress is the outfit of the freshest girl.

  And with her Duke Orsino, and with him

  Archbishop Whitgift. Like a pair of cruets –

  one oil, one vinegar – these opposites

  who, singly, threw me out or took me in.

  At the back of the hall are Heminges and Condell

  in their livery as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men:

  not acting tonight, but managing the purse,

  guarding the props. And here a thought occurs.

  ‘Is Shakespeare here?’ I whisper.

  ‘Never comes,’

  Northumberland says. ‘Or, rather, he came once.

  He rarely comes to London, to avoid

  requests for improvised revisions, but

  he did come to a court performance, yes.

  Hoping to meet the Queen.’

  ‘And did they meet?’

  ‘Most certainly they did. And never again.

  Your stand-in had not reckoned on the depth

  of the Queen’s own knowledge of this matter. She

  humiliated him.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  I confess myself eager to imagine him

  deflated by the monarch he admired.

  ‘“Why have you brought this puff-cheeked, small-chinned man

  towards me like the pudding course?” she said.

  When told he was the author, she replied,

  “Of his own conceits and folly. Send him home.”’

  My heart glowed then with more love for my queen

  than a pup feels for its mother. For this night

  I dropped all longing for her death, and grinned

  so madly, on and off, that servants stared.

  These are my notes. Yet I was taken past

  the point where words have any use at all.

  For how to describe the sharp surprise of tears

  as the lute and harp began to pluck my song

  before the Queen, and my words echoed there

  to the thousand-candled ceiling glittering

  on a scene now more than my imagining:

  ‘If music be the food of love, play on.’

  AN EXECUTION

  Essex was exiled only to his house.

  Yet how exclusion wounds a righteous man,

  bruises his heart. I know the depth of it.

  And though he had his country and his name,

  his reputation tattered in the wind,

  like a standard flag with endless residence.

  And though he had wife and child, wine and friends,

  the nearness of the thing denied to him –

  his queen, the Court – buzzed madness in his brain

  as a bee will knock against a window pane

  to sense the flower outside, so bright, so close.

  The year turned, and he sickened. So unjust

  to be condemned for speaking truthfully –

  and he more loyal than those whisperers

  who fawn and aye and bow extremely low,

  unpicking the seams of kingdoms as they go.

  Determined to speak to her, and right these wrongs,

  he gathered th
ose who loved and honoured him,

  would vouch for his loyalty and love for her,

  and marched on the Court. Not in rebellion,

  yet the boots, in concert, had a martial ring,

  and the righteous anger spurring them towards

  their queen caused dogs to growl and doors to bolt.

  And those who’d cheered him on for Ireland

  peeked behind curtains, mimed they were at work.

  The wind had shifted unaccountably,

  and the streets fell silent, empty bar the march

  of Essex and his band. And then a shot,

  a challenge, lines of soldiers shuffling up

  and aiming nervously at noble heads.

  How blind and mindless do old rulers grow,

  afraid for their legacies; more fearful still

  of their snuffing. Jealously extracting oaths

  as insubstantial as a smudge of soot

  from those who do not love them, while the pure

  untainted soul is viewed suspiciously:

  as if some bitter motive lies beneath

  his love, as if his constancy’s a plot

  to inherit the crown and all its fractured woes.

  It’s said that Essex rose against his queen.

  The word that fills the streets is ‘uprising’,

  a word so bloodied by its history

  it can’t contain its entrails. Thus his love,

  his desperation to be seen and heard,

  is treachery; and all who followed him

  to swear his honour are made traitors too.

  Including Hal. The boy is in the tower.

  Today I passed the pikes on London Bridge.

  There was the head of Essex, scabbed and black,

  a March wind ruffling that reddish beard

  like the fingers of a mistress. Upturned eyes

  rolled back and white as if to know the brain

  that read, so grievously wrong, his circumstance.

  Three dozen years of bold entitlement

  severed and sacrificed to bitter gods.

  And knots of people stood awhile and stared

  into that face for remnants of the faith

  they had in him.

  Unwound.

  Went on their way.

  WILLIAM PETER

  Thorpe’s home, in Southwark, rattles in the rain.

  Leaks through the beams upstairs, like crying saints.

  Makes noise as if at sea, a creaking ship

  sailing us down the street towards the Thames.

  Thorpe ushers in the youth who lately knocked

  so softly we had thought it was the wind

  tapping a branch on something.

  ‘He’s for you,’

  Thorpe says, with a servant’s smile, as though the lad

  is my dessert. He is eighteen, no more,

  wet as a man who’s swum in all his clothes,

  and nervous, making note of Thorpe’s retreat

  before he speaks.

  ‘Will Hall?’

  That makes his task

  a governmental one. And I detect

  a delicate air.

  ‘I might go by that name.

  Who asks?’

  ‘I’m William Peter,’ he declares,

  as love’s declared, full-hearted, passionate.

  ‘I’m sent to remove you to a safer place.’

  ‘What place?’

  ‘Abroad.’ Vibrating on his heels.

  ‘There is some urgency? Must we go now?’

  ‘No,’ he replies, attempting to be still,

  though his eyes are darting to the door.

  ‘A drink?’

  I cross the room to where a bottle of sack

  sits half exhausted by two pewter mugs.

  He nurses his, unsure. I gulp from mine.

  ‘First, I will know about this place, Abroad.

  Is it very far? Is its population fair

  or dark-skinned? Can you name its capital?’

  An earnest reply: ‘Abroad is not a place—’

  ‘It is a place, I promise you. I was

  in residence there myself some seven years.’

  He offers back a doe-eyed blink, confused.

  ‘Abroad. You know, Abroad, that wave-arm place

  where awkward squirts are sent. Within its bounds

  no man may settle, since there is no house,

  no job or friend that will not slip from him

  as sand shifts underfoot. Its very streets

  become the hairs one brushes from one’s pillow

  and the cities scabs one must apologise

  to lovers for.’

  He’s barely understood

  a word of my invective. I regret

  impaling him so.

  ‘Go on. Drink up, return

  to your master. Tell him William Hall’s retired.’

  ‘My master?’

  His eyes are very wide and pale.

  His clothes are leaking rain on to the floor

  in rivulets.

  ‘You work for Robert Cecil?

  It was his father christened me Will Hall. I’ll not work for the son.’

  He doesn’t leave.

  ‘Go on. Be gone, I say!’

  And still the boy,

  his lips as full and pink as ripened figs,

  stands motionless. Then, quite as though the broom

  of his spine is stripped from his puppet’s back, he falls,

  translated to laundry.

  Gathered in my arms,

  and heavy as conscience rests on murderers.

  He seems all gone, and yet there is a breath

  on my cheek when I bend close enough, as soft

  as sudden sleep.

  Heeding my cry, Thorpe comes

  and stares as though he witnessed an assault.

  ‘Bring water,’ I say.

  ‘The wound?’

  ‘There is no wound.

  Bring water! The boy has fainted.’

  And his eyes

  come open slowly, beautiful and pale

  as two moons rising on a lake.

  ‘You fell,’

  I say, to explain his body in my arms –

  though neither he nor I yet move away.

  I feel a pulse that might be mine or his

  where he rests against my shoulder.

  ‘Now you know.

  I have the falling sickness,’ he replies.

  Thorpe comes with water, and I mop his face,

  gesture for sack, and let him sip at it.

  ‘You think me defective.’

  I wring out the cloth.

  ‘I think you most dramatic. What a ruse

  to claim a man’s attention.’

  ‘It’s no ruse,’

  he says, with boyish petulance. ‘It is

  a curse. A curse by which you gain the power

  to have me dismissed.’

  ‘I will do no such thing.’

  ‘You’ll keep a secret?’

  ‘Certainly. Can you?’

  I tip the cup towards him, motherly.

  ‘You are in danger, and must come away,’

  he says, refusing more.

  ‘With you?’ I ask.

  I see the danger clear. His cheek, his neck,

  the tempting lips that he is speaking with.

  ‘I’ll serve you and protect you,’ he replies.

  ‘If my protection rests on sickly boys

  I’m doomed indeed.’ I help him to a chair

  and he recounts the mission: Elsinore.

  Two gentlemen I met in Padua

  acquainted me with that court, and with their tongue.

  Now my smattering of Danish marks me out

  to visit the very castle where my ghost

  ranges the battlements nightly in my play,

  urging my murder be avenged: the boy

  can hardly know, and yet he seems to know,

  that Denm
ark will hook my curiosity

  more firmly through the lip, and fling me out

  of my native waters.

  ‘You seem better now.’

  ‘It passes,’ he says. ‘So will you come with me?’

  ‘What if I don’t?’

  He blanches, very pale.

  Paler than when he fell, and for a breath

  I wonder if he’ll pass out in the chair,

  or fake a fit to make me leave with him.

  ‘Tell me the danger.’

  ‘Please,’ he says. ‘Just come.’

  ‘The danger.’

  The boy sighs heavily. His breath

  defeated.

  ‘If you’ll not co-operate

  I’m told to give this message, word for word.

  Your name will be exposed. And every child

  you’ve sired in secret will be put to death.

  If you care not for your life, then care for them.’

  He cannot know what he’s delivering;

  only I know the children are my plays.

  For, from his face, he must believe them flesh,

  and dandled in some mother’s lap somewhere.

  ‘You threaten me?’

  ‘Not I, not I, sir, no.

  I am a messenger.’

  A pretty one

  to carry such poison in his beak. I go

  to the window. Rain is muddying the street

  and across the way a candle flickers on

  to quell the early dark. A neighbourhood

  I’ve kept myself apart from, like a cyst.

  I gather my things, as many times before,

  to leave my country. Go to Elsinore.

  ELSINORE

  Forgive that the boy is in my bed. The cold

  in Denmark is persistent. As I write,

  he breathes as softly as a passive sea

  laps to announce a ship has passed through it.