A Dead Man in Deptford

by Anthony Burgess

  What was there to tell them? Triv and quad but nothing yet about his defection from orders. Girls? He had met no girls. Nay, wait, and he resexed, as in one of his own poems, Mr Walsingham into a lady of luscious hair, fine carriage, great prospects, but he must mind his books, get ready for the cloth, find a parish, then and then only think of a holy family. His mother and the girls, Dorothy drooling at the tail, clutching her doll, went to the kitchen to get supper. The kitchen was small, the flagged floor uneven, but the pots and pans shone with their old refulgence. Kit stood at the door, watching, talking, listening. The girls, save Dorothy, had much to say. John Moore, their father's once chief apprentice, had his own shop by the East Gate, not far from the abbey, St Augustine's, that the Queen's father had pillaged and then turned to a palace. Joan, his wife, though but fifteen, was disdainful of her spinster sisters. And she now carried a great belly before her in pregnant pride. They were to have for supper beef boiled with carrots. The bread, today's, was fresh. Kit mumbled a torn crust. There was a firkin of Kent ale. Kit could have wept.

  Wept? Why? At the comfortable cycle of life that smelt of bread and beef seething, round and round for ever if the preachers and governors would allow it, and he himself a tangent to the cycle. Wept at a future that, he knew, must be perilous. Wept because they, his womenfolk and his hammering father, would weep. Weep when? That he did not know. He could hear weeping on the wind.

  - Brown Peter, his father said, as they sat about the table, is well looked after. He knew not his old stable at first but then he knew it and whinnied. You have been a good boy with him. A man and his horse are one in the big world of affairs. Here I do not need to ride. I am nailed to my soles and heels.

  - I shall walk to Dover, Kit said. Twenty miles, it will be good for me.

  - I shall give you new soles tomorrow.

  - Kitticat, Meg said, the Reverend Kitticat, mender of men's souls.

  - It will be a year or so. I must become a Master of Arts, you know that. And till then a Walsingham man.

  - Walsingham? Anne said. That was a holy town, and the Milky Way in the sky showed the way to it.

  Kit explained who Walsingham was. They listened, all except poor Dorothy, who fed a sop vainly to her wooden doll. Kit looked in pity and anger at her idiocy. He said:

  - It is sometimes hard to give praise to God. Dorothy is always the same, we thought it was a prolonged childishness, but she is almost a woman and she wets the floor still and says nothing.

  - She says a word or so, his mother said. She has learned some words since you left. She knows the names of her sisters but she uses them turn and turn about. Sky she knows, and sun, also rain.

  - And, his father said as he cored a pippin, she knows that God is in the sky. But she thinks that God is the sun.

  - So did we, so did the Emperor Constantine, Kit said out of his learning. Sunday is the Sabbath. The theological question is whether she has a soul to be saved. If yes, then she shall burn for the heresy of saying God is the sun. If no, she's dissolved into elements when she dies, like any beast of the field.

  - This is terrible, Meg said. Is this what they teach you at Cambridge?

  - Oh, we're taught a lot about the soul and who is saved and who damned. It seems everyone is damned who does not belong to the English Church, and there are times I grow sick of it.

  - Sick of your studies? his father said. Studies are for raising you, this you know.

  - That and that only perhaps. In themselves nothing. They are a bunch of keys for opening doors. Feet are for walking but they need shoes. That is a useful art, the making and mending of shoes. I am being apprenticed to the useless.

  All about that table save poor Dorothy looked at him in disquiet. His mother at length said:

  - And yet they employ you on high business, young as you are.

  - The high business of searching for enemies of the realm. So they can be apprehended and brought home and hanged. It is the hanging and drawing and quartering that is important. A bloody show meant for a warning to the people, but the people take it as diversion. Well, I mean to give them diversion, but the blood will be pig's blood.

  They did not understand him. Poor Dorothy had been long in the situation they seemed only to have arrived at, but she tried to tear the head of her doll and cried what sounded like Gog.

  - There, you hear, her mother said. Clever girl, she crooned at her. Say God. Say sky.

  - Koy.

  - She has said her prayers, Kit said in weariness. I will say mine and sleep. The sun is down and I will join the crows and starlings, black-suited choristers that crark. I have not had much sleep of late. Where do I sleep?

  When a son must ask this in his own home, then perhaps he is past thinking of it as his home.

  He walked, as he said he would, to Dover. His shoes were freshly soled; he carried on his back the flat leathern sack which held two newly washed shirts and three pairs of hose. A good mother. Oh, they were all good, the kind embracing round to which he must be the tangent. He walked the round earth that looked tangential. Kind clouds were propelled above him by a kind wind. The summer weather held. He walked over fields and along paths, seeing sheep and shepherds. These did not pipe. They were as leathern as his sack. If they sang they sang coarse ancient songs with swive in them. Pastores. The good shepherd. But this raising of shepherds predated Christ searching for lost lambs, he who became a lamb to be slaughtered. Theocritus and Virgil. Why this need to purify them into Damon and Lycidas? No fleece oil on their hands, their smocks white. Clean Mr Thomas Walsingham sat on a knoll, piping. Swive in deep grass while the sheep cropped and occasionally went baaaaa.

  He ate his bread and drank spring water at Shepherdswell or Shepherdswold, the name was uncertain. Lydden, Temple Ewell, Buckland, another ruined abbey. Then the castle was ahead and the salt was on his lips. A jumble of dwellings whose dwellers preyed on the sea and its travellers. He found the inn named the Luce (fish or flower?) on a sidestreet sheltered from the strong Channel wind. He asked a roundly chewing dirtyaproned sweeper who swept ill, for Mr Robert Poley. The two London gentlemen? Two? One of them appeared, clattering down the stairs. He was not Mr Robert Poley. He called himself Nick Skeres.

  There was a room where they were to take supper. Skeres opened the door to it with a kind of blind familiarity, his black eyes on Kit. From the white of Theocritan shepherds to the black of the dirty world. Skeres was dirty to match that world. It seemed not the casual dirt of the careless, rather as applied as Alleyn had applied white and lines to his young face to render it ancient. I will be a dirty man for all to wonder at. Skeres wore with pride long dirty hair, and the hairs in his skewed nose had trapped scraps of dry mucus. The teeth conceded to a lighter colour, but not white. His slops were dirty but he had a clean-bladed dagger which he had taken from its sheath at his belt. He juggled with this in his long dirty fingers.

  - Well, we will sit, he said, and wait for bonny sweet Robin. He is a clean man (and he tapped the clean as to emphasise his own dirt) and washes himself from toes to scalp in clean cold water. It is the way he is. And you?

  The accent was, Kit thought, from the south-west. He had heard from Alleyn what he called the Sir Water Devonian. Skeres burred and rasped.

  - Am I clean, you mean? Some would say we were bent on a dirty business. I do not say it, but some would say it.

  You're a young beginner. You know nothing of it. But you will keep at the business and learn. A dirty business for keeping clean the realm, so they say. It is a trade like any other. But once in the trade you will not be out of it. Clean Robin will shrug but not everybody will shrug.

  - Shrug at what?

  - At a man's coming and going and following his own desires, as they call them. But he will tell you more of that.

  Clean Robin appeared, a marvellous proper man, as they would say. Of Corpus? I am of Clare. He shook hands with vigour. Straw beard well trimmed, spotless cambric, silk under the slashes of the trunks, doublet well t
ailored, well pressed. The face cheerful, guileless even, as if he had shunted guile on to Skeres. The eyes even merry, the white smile welcoming. He asked if the fish had been ordered. Skeres nodded direly, as if this were a code for a killing. Poley said:

  - Fresh Dover fish, flat and overhanging the dish at either end. It is worth coming to Dover for the fish. So, Marley or Morley, we are to go over together on the morning tide, Skeres and I then ride to Paris, you not.

  - Not by way of Paris? I had a mind to see Paris.

  - Another time. You marvel at Nick here, I can see it in your eyes. They fear Nick, but they do not fear me. They fancy that he is all malevolence. And so he is, so he is.

  He spoke cheerfully and even laid a clean affectionate hand on dirty Skeres. When the fish came in, brought by a shy maid at whom Skeres, as if taught to do so in some stage comedy, leered, the dirty fingers were delicate about dissecting it, the bones were spat out near silently. He drank his Dover ale with little finger finickingly spread. At the end of the meal he begged pardon for his belch.

  - Eructat cor meum, Poley said cheerfully. Skeres cheerfully responded:

  - Et cum spiritu tuo. Then he nodded direly and left. Poley said now they could talk. He poured wine and said:

  - You know of me? Sir Francis spoke of me?

  - He said you were in jail to trap priests.

  - They talk in their distress, many secrets are divulged in a prison. But I am glad to be out and breathing sea air. Still, they will talk to me for I speak their language. I was born in the year that Mary, bloody as they call her, married Philip of Spain. So I was brought up in the old faith and some believe I practise it. So I will, I will go through the form, take the bread that is God but know now that it is only flour and water. Some know me for what I am, the more so as Sir Francis put me into the service of Philip Sidney while he was readying himself to be governor of Flushing. For there is no greater pope-hater than Sir Philip. Take some more of this wine, have Skeres's share. Oh, I have money for you, a little, I will give it you tomorrow. And I have your orders. You are to enrol at the College, saying you are studying for the Church but you have doubts about it. They welcome waverers.

  - I am not to pretend to the old faith?

  You would not deceive them as I can. Be a waverer in sincerity and humility. You seek the light. But in truth you seek those who are to come over to be devilish plotters. They are plotting already. The pope has excommunicated the Queen, who, for good measure, is said to be illegitimate, which, if we reject divorce, she is. The Queen may in all Catholic holiness be driven off the throne and another queen installed there. Which queen you know.

  - You mean plots to kill the Queen?

  - That sounds coarse, worthy of Skeres. Some talk of removing and sequestering, granting the sad berth at Fotheringay which will then be vacated. Some raise holy eyes to heaven in shock at talk of killing a queen, but it is all show. They will assassinate if they can, and they think they can. The bad times are coming. France and Spain lick their lips in prospect of restoring England to the fold. You have a holy work in hand.

  - What can I do?

  - Listen. Take names. We will be waiting at this end. If you had Skeres with you there would be quick dispatching in tavern brawls. Skeres is good at brawls, as you may imagine. He is probably into one now, but that will have nothing to do with our business. He goes with me to Paris, chiefly as my protector. In Paris I need protection. It is a filthy city. But no more of that. Leave Paris to me. You will like Rheims. It is a gentle town where they gently talk of gently killing queens. Would you wish tonight to share a bed with Skeres? No, I can see not. Well, you shall have your own rough pallet.

  - Skeres said something about shrugging. Shrugging things away. What does he mean?

  - It is the two stages of leaving the Service. Shrugging is the first, the second is not shrugging. But you are young, ambitious, a Cambridge man, and you will not leave the Service. To protect the realm is a life's work. A man does not in flippancy abandon it. But enough of that. You have more questions?

  - How long must I be in Rheims?

  - You may stay as long as a month without charge. They are welcoming because they think they have great gentle power of gentle persuasion. You tell them what you told Sir Francis, that you are a student of divinity but the studies have engendered grave doubts. These you wish resolved. They will try to resolve them. (Here he chuckled.) After a brief time go to mass, even to confession. In confessionals a lot can be heard. And in the taverns and the dormitories. I do not doubt you will pick up some names. With luck we sail at dawn. I spoke to the captain of the Great Eliza, a pretentious name for a Channel packet. He speaks of calm waters but I do not believe him. To bed.

  HE was in Rheims, which the English had once held but Jehane la Pucelle recovered by witchcraft. He was in Rheims, very weary and still queasy in his stomach after a rolling voyage of which he recalled best the vomiting of the passengers and Skeres's jeers at his own crying of Jesus Jesus Jesus as he gave bread and fish and wine to the tigerish waters. Yet the poeticising mind rode high above his body's distress and he saw drunken marble as if Rome had melted. Poley remained below but Skeres stood by him at the taffrail, relishing his agony. But it was Skeres who brought a hot posset, saving it would give comfort. It did not.

  At Calais there was French and English chaffering about horses - a deposit greater than the worth of the raw nags offered, charges for hire exorbitant. As Kit mounted he voiced a wonder he had had in his mind, namely was he to be alone and trusted on this mission, he a young beginner, as Skeres had called him. Poley, who had asked to be called Robin, was rosy and smiling and unscathed by the voyage. He said:

  - Fear not. There will be somebody along. You shall not be alone. We are not fools in this business.

  So he had ridden the long way to Rheims, jolting on illmade roads, seeing the French farms not much different from the English, drinking warm milk fresh from the udder and the day's new bread. He was not at his best when he sat before Father Crawley in his study. On the wall Christ writhed on his cross, and there was an Italian painting of the Madonna and child. The Madonna, Mother of God, was not much seen in England now. The priest's desk was massive and Spanish. There was a smell in the room that seemed to Kit Catholic and alien - incense on the skin brought in from the chapel perhaps. Something close and frowsty, and from Father Crawley a faint odour as of bad teeth or an ailing stomach. Yet the glance from his lined face was shrewd. He asked:

  - Are you a Walsingham man?

  - The shrine, you mean? There is no longer a shrine.

  - I think you must know my drift. Have you been sent?

  - Sent by my own doubts.

  - You must not think us innocent here. We are open to all comers but we remain watchful. What is it you wish?

  - To meditate a week or so. Talk and be talked to. Attend lectures, services, anything.

  - You're welcome to such hospitality as we can give. A bed and spare diet. Tell me, what is your view of the Seven Sacraments?

  - That there are seven and not fewer.

  - So our late king believed and wrote. His treatise earned him the title of Fidei Defensor. He retained it when he no longer believed. And so for the Queen and her successors. This is hypocrisy. I recommend that you meditate on the Seven Sacraments. Above all the Holy Eucharist. What are you taught of the Holy Eucharist?

  - At Cambridge we learn that the bread and wine are commemorative. That there is no transubstantiation.

  This is in spite of Christ's own words. Hoc est corpus meum.

  - It is taken to be a manner of metaphor. It is said the unreformed faith is one of cannibals.

  - Well, you will learn.

  He seemed to grow weary, matching Kit's own state. He tolled a small bell as in exorcism of the heresy that clung to Kit's travelling cloak. A fat young priest beamed in. Father Hart, said Father Crawley. Father Hart led Kit to a wing of the College where beds were ranged in, so to say, the symmetry of triv and
quad propositions. He might take this one at the end. He might rest. He rested. Those who were to be his fellow sleepers were awake and out and at work. The building reeked of fresh size. The faith was renewing itself for battle.

  Awake on his third day, having eaten soup meagre and munched bread among rowdy puppies who were to be priests, he homed to the cathedral. Homed because he was cathedral-bred, ever in hearing of bells, ever aware of strong and authoritative stone, a pretended solidity in Canterbury, where it had been one thing and was now, stripped and scrubbed, another. Here though, in the sumptuous God's house of Rheims, the grudging hammers of reform had not struck at saints' statues, nor stained glass, nor the images of the Virgin Mother recognised, through the cold sharp eyes of the north, as an incarnation of the foul goddess Ashtaroth. Kit looked up to his neck's limit, at the groins of heaven, about him at the chapel-suburbs of the immense stone city. Jewels and gold unfilched illumined the grey; sunrays pierced like God's swords the high windows whose tints refracted pure light into the sevenfold covenant of his bow. Old women in black knelt about. Kit stood. The winking light of the reserved sacrament was coy with him. Three students in black entered, crossed themselves with water, genuflected, nodded at him. He had been near to them at supper; they had asked his name and purpose in coming hither. They too knelt. He, playing his part, knelt also, playing at praying.

  I cannot pray to you because you do not exist. A small matter. I contain both existence and its opposite. You cancel out yourself. You condone too many murders in your name. I condone nothing. I am above such things. My name is not myself. When men use my name this means they do not know me. What shall I do? What you are driven to do. And if I refuse to believe in you? My existence does not depend on your belief. You are then detached from men. What then is meant by God's love? The passionate acceptance of myself as my own highest achievement, manifested to senses live and yet unborn in the universe as my palpable garment. Men are a strand in that garment. Why did you have to come down to earth as a man? I do what I will. Men must be taught. The loving community of men must figure the perfection of the divine order. Men have learnt nothing. Does not this argue a flaw in the divine substance? When men have destroyed themselves utterly there will be left one man who has learnt. That will be enough. And I can wait. This is not you who speak. It is only a voice among the many voices that dart like wind about the crevices of my brain. Did you expect it to be otherwise?