The Marlowe Papers: A Novel

by Ros Barber

  Upon all hours, they set off ordnance:

  a savage shout to the surrounding hills

  that power is here, and not to challenge it.

  And still I startle, not quite used to it.

  My own commission to disarm the Danes

  rests on my wit. For I am sent to woo

  the brother-in-law of our most wanted James

  with the benefits of patience. Should he force

  his kin’s succession, bolstering the case

  with men, and horse, and blunderbuss, the Queen

  will melt her promise, fling the crown elsewhere.

  Patience, all patience, for the Scottish king.

  For my fate hangs as perfectly with his

  as if we shared a skin. As if our cloaks

  might side by side be hooked, the doors pushed wide

  and both together launch our lives, begin.

  I LIE WITH HIM

  ‘What would your children think of this?’ Will asks,

  his sweet cheek on my arm.

  ‘Of this?’

  ‘Of us.

  Are any of them as old as me?’

  I breathe

  and calculate how I might lie to him

  whilst being truthful. ‘Dido’s as old as you.’

  ‘Dido!’ he says. ‘After the Carthage queen!

  You know the play? My Oxford tutor said

  it was abominably poor. The speech

  on Priam’s slaughter dragging on and on—’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I interrupt. ‘The play I know

  requires skill to act. I hear it has

  been sawn apart by actors, but the text

  is delicate. The humour of it missed,

  as often as the tragedy is clanged.’

  ‘I don’t mean to offend you.’ He’s concerned

  that I’ve sat up in bed, and strokes my back.

  ‘I’m not offended.’

  ‘You seem very sore.’

  ‘Dido’s so much derided.’

  ‘Will, the play

  reflects not on your daughter.’ Strokes, and strokes.

  I lie back with my eyes upon the beams.

  ‘You write yourself,’ he says, without the curl of a question mark.

  ‘Letters and ciphers, yes.’

  Twice, these past weeks, he’s entered while my desk

  is thick with papers, watched me shuffle them,

  fast as a trickster’s cards, into my trunk.

  My need for privacy’s unclear to him,

  and must remain so, if he’s to be safe.

  He’s silent awhile. Then slides himself beneath

  our blankets.

  Five nights on, a fearful wail

  curls up the staircase. ‘Jesus’ nails, what’s that?’

  the boy says, shocked to a students’ curse.

  ‘It is –

  I fear it is the Queen.’ Anne Catherine

  is lying-in with Denmark’s future king,

  just one week old. The wail grows like a wave

  carving sheer cliffs of grief, which topple now

  to capsize the castle’s peace. From Danish shouts

  first piercing, and then tangling the air,

  I tug this thread: ‘The baby boy is dead.’

  With I a sort of father, he in my arms,

  we drift as the cries, the wailing, dissipate;

  perhaps he is more bothered for my sake,

  for I must be asleep and he awake

  when he murmurs, ‘Unimaginable pain

  to lose a child.’ And, like an open gate

  one’s cherished horse escapes through, I reply,

  ‘Then let us both stay childless.’

  His response,

  speechless and motionless, breaks through my sleep as though that flow had met a heavy stone.

  ‘You like to lie with me?’ he says at last.

  I let time pool. ‘You like to lie with me?’

  He takes my hand and rests it where the lie

  in question is defined.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then truth –

  and only truth – should be your currency.’

  He sits up, lights the taper. In the glow

  he shines, a bronze Adonis, freshly cast.

  ‘You only confirm what I have reasoned out.

  When will you trust me? When I bare my chest

  and ask you to thrust the sword in? I am yours

  in every sense you wish, and I am sworn

  to protect you for Her Majesty the Queen.

  What does a lie suggest you think of me?’

  I sit up, grip his shoulders. ‘Not a lie.

  Not one lie, William Peter, but a cloak

  of lies so vast it’s hard to breathe beneath.

  Why would I want to smother you with that?

  Why would I throw this shroud on both our heads?

  I’d need to cleave to you till death.’

  ‘Then cleave,’

  he says, intensely locking eyes with me.

  ‘I sense you are extraordinary. That,

  whoever you are, a greater spirit beats

  inside this heart’ (his palm upon my chest)

  ‘than I’d be blessed to meet in any life.

  Cleave to me. Let me be your certainty.

  And shed your burden. These most hateful lies.’

  May Fate have mercy. Had you seen his eyes

  you would have tipped up baskets of your truths

  to soak in their redemption. If that youth,

  regaled with an understanding of my sins,

  had opened the door and called the torturers in

  I’d help them break my spine in disbelief.

  Let love be dead if he’s no love of mine.

  Let me: for as you once said, I was honest;

  too honest to live submerged within deceit.

  And borne alone, the heaviness of lies

  had worn me so extremely that I cared

  no longer, truly, if I lived or died.

  He’s pacing then, across the naked floor.

  ‘Your children are books.’

  ‘Are plays.’

  ‘Are plays,’ he mouths

  and slowly comprehends. ‘Dido is yours!

  Forgive me—’

  ‘How could you know?’

  His eyes ride up,

  racking some mental library of facts,

  ‘Your name,’ he murmurs.

  ‘Don’t be concerned with that.’

  ‘You’re Marlowe!’ he cries, and sits hard on the bed.

  I wait for the weight to sink in him. ‘Not dead,’

  he murmurs. Then, ‘Where’s your injury? Your eye

  was stabbed.’ Inspecting my face.

  ‘No, no, not I.

  A substitute.’

  ‘Don’t tell me any more.

  No, tell me everything.’ His switch as fast

  as a dog sent mad by fleas. ‘No, lie no more!

  Marlowe was a blasphemer, heretic.

  You’re no more Marlowe than the rising sun

  is a chamber pot.’

  He pales and smacks his mouth

  on invisible cake; the first sign that he’s gone,

  snuffed out by his brain’s crossed purpose.

  When he wakes

  from this second fit in twice as many days,

  I offer this: ‘There’s not a man alive

  whose death won’t change him. And what tales are told

  posthumously may not reflect the man

  in any case. It’s true I freely spoke,

  shared inklings that, at Cambridge, passed as jokes,

  but in London taverns stank of blasphemy;

  and through my speaking, lost my liberty.

  But I’m not the devil they have painted.’

  He

  breathes calmly now, and takes me in, like air

  from an opened window.

  ‘I am glad of that,’

  he say
s. ‘Too poor that I should suffer this

  and fall in love with a devil.’

  There, a smile,

  the parting of clouds. And I will have my love.

  DELIVERANCE

  Tonight, I remove the label from the trunk.

  The fading ink of some address in Kent

  where someone I loved dearly holds his life

  close to his bosom: wife and child, estate,

  the breeding pigs, the stables by the gate,

  the plip of lively fishponds. Friend, you were

  all things to me. I let you go with love.

  This trunk, these papers, were the things I braced

  against the fear that I would leave no trace

  and disappear into the muddy roads

  of Europe, insubstantial as a cough.

  But time has passed. And you have shrugged me off.

  What I addressed to you, you cannot want

  to know. I suspect they were only for my eyes

  in any case. And for posterity,

  should such a thing alight upon them. So,

  I scratch off the label. Though not easily.

  Like scar tissue, it’s bonded to the lid.

  But I pick, and scratch, and in an hour you’re gone.

  My ‘you’ now is larger, wider. Is the world

  I wish to know me. And would dream upon.

  MORE SINNED AGAINST THAN SINNING

  1602. September. Exeter.

  I came to live close to him. Close as a coin

  in the pocket, or a scar upon the skin:

  drunk on the boy’s devotion, and the joy

  of unloading every feeling into him.

  Rewrote, revised, and focused on the thought

  of the Queen’s impending death. But all the while,

  like the scabrous itch that crawls beneath the skin,

  the knowledge I was just a ride away

  from the man whose name, attached to every play,

  was shaking London’s hands, retiring quiet

  to his manor to count the coins I earned for him.

  Anthony Bacon died with us abroad.

  The old route for the scripts, once copied clean

  by his brother’s hired boys, closed up like sand

  that a stick is drawn through. And my loyal love

  stepped in to scribe, and to deliver them.

  ‘Give my regards to the Turnip.’

  Will is shocked,

  and breaks from lacing a riding boot to say,

  ‘He shields your life!’

  ‘He is a parasite,

  born to suck glory from the quills of men

  too wise for the age to stomach them. His name

  and his silence are his finest attributes.’

  ‘When the Queen dies—’

  ‘When? That woman has the art

  of hanging on, finer than any tick.

  Pull off her body, still the jaws would clamp

  on crown and kingdom.’

  Uncomfortable with me,

  he finishes dressing silently, and slides

  the play into a satchel.

  ‘You should write

  this poison out,’ he says. ‘Before you find

  you’re muttering treason in the street. Or worse.’

  He packs a travelling bag, resignedly,

  and starts to go. ‘I’ll be six days.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  I catch his arm. ‘You’re right. I apologise.’

  Sighing, he sits beside me. ‘That you want

  to claim these plays as yours, I understand.

  Your soul sings through the lines as though through bars.’

  A flash of Southampton, locked still in the tower;

  the axe through the neck of Essex, juddering.

  I shudder.

  ‘What thought?’

  ‘The head that spoke to me

  of restoration, falling in a bowl.’

  ‘Which is the fate we must protect you from.

  Write, and say nothing. I will plant this seed

  with the Turnip, as you call him, and in time

  you’ll harvest it. Be cheery while I’m gone.’

  ‘Cheery?’

  ‘Not melancholy. I will send

  my sister to see you. Liz. She’ll cook and clean

  and listen to you politely.’

  ‘Does she know?’

  ‘She knows we’re the closest friends. The best of friends.’

  He kisses me. ‘I’ll leave you to your pen.’

  LIZ

  How like him she was. As if he was made twice,

  but one time female, softer than the brush

  of a flightless wing. A he with breasts, with skin

  as velvet as mole’s pelt, but as light as light.

  She filled his absence with a gentle hum

  of kindness, and forgiveness. Left a scent

  behind her that I dreamt of, when she’d gone.

  Four days, and I had drawn her to my tongue.

  I loved her bruisingly, the way that ground

  loves a fallen apple. She had all his eyes

  and an inches softer bosom: all the love

  that a carer for foundling kittens satisfies

  herself to give another came to me.

  Beyond lust, I admired her as I had

  the Virgin Queen, when I was twenty-one

  and first her servant. Will was not surprised.

  He read the air between us in a blink.

  We argued, certainly. I challenged him:

  and will you not get married? Yes, he would.

  He wanted children. So, I said, do I.

  And won’t your sister keep us close enough?

  Convenient cover for an illegal love,

  he swallowed it.

  The week the old Queen died

  Will Peter’s sister, Liz, became my wife.

  IAGO

  Oh, foolish heart, to store your beating hope

  in the whim of an unmade king. The wind blows in

  from the north, as icy, suddenly, as glass

  stuck in the throat.

  A friend will ask a friend

  to ask a friend to ride and put to him

  the case for my resurrection.

  How my heart

  thumps strangely in my ears, keeps me awake

  beside my wife through hours that only those

  haunted or haunting come to know so well.

  It knocks like a stranger not at any door.

  And every day, no message, though the King

  is riding southwards, closer.

  In the square,

  where Exeter’s merchants come to chop and chat,

  I hear Southampton has been freed. This is

  the king to set injustice straight. But still

  no end of endless sentence comes to me.

  A NEVER WRITER TO AN EVER READER. NEWS.

  ‘A letter!’

  Will Peter’s panting from the ride.

  He drops it in my lap, a baby bird

  he prays I might revive, and stares at me –

  all fear, all hope, all sharp expectancy.

  The seal is still intact.

  ‘So you don’t know

  what’s written here?’

  Will Peter shakes his head.

  ‘For God’s sake, open it.’

  ‘You couldn’t tell

  from his face?’

  ‘His servant brought it. Open it!’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Then I will!’ Lunging for it.

  ‘No!’

  I snatch it flat to my bosom. ‘No. Call Liz.’

  ‘I’m here,’ she says, appearing from behind

  the doorframe.

  Hands that shiver (as she slides

  a paring knife beneath the waxen seal)

  like new-sprung beech leaves rattled by the wind.

  The night before we said our marriage vows

  I told her who s
he married; that she might

  one day be Mrs Marlowe. You would laugh

  to know how she shuddered at the very thought:

  ‘Then I’ll be married to a heretic!’

  ‘No,’ I promised, ‘I’ll not take the name

  until it’s cleared of every blot and stain

  the world has heaped upon it.’

  ‘So a royal

  pardon is necessary?’

  ‘As the blood

  that keeps these sweet lips red.’ I kissed her then,

  but sensed her fear my past would swamp us both,

  King’s blessing or no. Thus it was her I chose

  to open the letter, knowing what would thrust

  a knife in my ribs might be my wife’s relief,

  so that her joy could temper breaking grief.

  And should that letter free me up to live,

  to witness her love for me throw over fear.

  Her lips are trembling and her eyes have filled.

  Just for a moment, grief and joy are one,

  impossible to tell apart as twins.

  ‘He –’ she says ‘– you—’ and cannot tell me what.

  Will Peter is impatient. ‘Give it here!’

  He snaps it from his sister’s floured hands

  and, as he reads, grows angry.

  Now I know,

  and a cold seeps from the ground into my feet,

  my legs, my waist, my chest, as liquid soaks

  up a wick prepared to take it.

  ‘He cannot,

  apparently, risk restoring you. He feels

  such action is impossible, would be

  dangerous – for you and also him –

  damn him, the coward! “That I must unite