A Dead Man in Deptford

by Anthony Burgess

  He rose angry from the paving on which he had, sorely and stiff-kneed, knelt, and, leaving, cooled his face with the water that was called holy. He went out into the cathedral square and God howled down at him from the sun. Poor Dorothy was right. There was God. And out of the sun he entered a small tavern and said Du vin. It was gloomy and there was a smell of garlic which struck him as most heartening. It was devil's bane. It was health. Dull gold gloomed at him. It was a garment. Thomas Walsingham was sitting there, not alone. Well, he was foolish not to have expected this.

  - Come then, Kit Kit Kit, you see I have remembered the name. My grave cousin was mumbling of Morley and Marley and Merlin, but Tom Watson said Kit was enough. And this is my man Frizer.

  Frizer sat a table's distance away from his master, sat as though it were not decent to sit in his master's presence, but this was after all a foreign country. He seemed well pleased to stand and bow and then remain standing.

  - You were quick after me, Kit said, sitting with his wine. It must have been the next packet from Dover.

  - Ah no, I was in Paris. We were in Paris, were we not, Frizer, and Frizer did not like Paris. We were waiting to spy on Poley, but Poley seemed to be there to start spying on us. And there was this dirty man with him, a cutthroat, what was his name, Frizer?

  - Nicholas Skeres.

  - An old acquaintance of Frizer's, it seems, but I do not enquire further. Well, you are here and I am ready to start spying on you. Or shall I say keeping you from trouble? Tom Watson said you were a pretty sort of fighter in taverns. That will not do in this holy city.

  - You too are enrolling in the College?

  - No, we are removed from that business, we are in an inn, are we not, Frizer? Frizer sleeps on straw and does not like it.

  - I like what it is my duty to do, Frizer said. It was a Thames voice whose sounds were made all in the middle of the mouth and whose tones were the tones of a whine. A Thames rat, then, sleeked up for a servant's office, the devotion a kind of chronic sickness. He said: I will leave you gentlemen together, you are gentlemen together. He did not add: I know my place. He bowed leaving and limped as he left, donning an old velvet cap Kit knew must be greasy.

  - And so, Thomas Walsingham said. He has his duties to perform, bed-making and ordering dinner. And Kit and Tom can be free. I tell you, you will find nothing here, all are too cautious.

  - Poley talks of conspiracy centred in the College. I have the impression of somebody coming that all await who will nod at the beginning of something.

  - It is all very simple, Kit Kit Kit. The Queen of Scots is to be put on the throne, then the Spanish and French will be invited in to restore us to Rome's rule. But all that is needed is the evidence of conspiracy, and then Sir Francis will do the rest. You know of the Act? No, well, the Act that has been passed says that if there be conspiracy proved, even if the Queen of Scots knows nothing of it, then she is as guilty as if she instigated it and may lawfully be executed. You did not know that?

  - It's not the kind of logic they teach at Cambridge. It seems not merely illogical but monstrous.

  It is what they call statecraft. Tom Watson said you were shouting about the greatness of Machiavel in some eating house or other. Well, here you see Machiavel in action. What is imported from Italy is not all saints and madonnas. Shall we go?

  - Go where?

  - Oh Kit Kit Kit, you know where. To my inn and my room, whether the bed be made or not, with the door locked and our linen off for the heat. There are no spying eyes of London here. I could see in your gaze that day what you wanted, all hidden under your fine talk of Plato and Petronius.

  - I never mentioned Petronius.

  - No? It must have been somebody else and other.

  He carelessly threw coins on the table and rose. There was fever in Kit, he had lost voice and was panting. They walked together past the great brooding monster of the cathedral where kings had been crowned, round the corner to the rue des Boulangers or some such name, and at the end was an inn with no signboard but flowers of the season in pots on its sills. And they mounted to find Frizer bed-making. Walsingham said he might leave that, there were urgencies between Mr Kit here and himself, let him take a cool glass of something somewhere and brood on the infamy of false religion, here are foreign coins which are here not foreign.

  Well, it is not my purpose to describe the acts performed, since they are enough known. Oscula, oscula, engagement of light beards and oscula oscula elsewhere, amplexus, complexus, and also sugere of this and that, and then interjectus and also insertio and great clamores gaudii, laetitiac, voluptatis. Two young and naked men, the unchanging under faith and thought, yet not of the cycle, threshing, making the bed shake, dislodging with a thrust ecstatic foot a pot with flowers of the season from its stand, so that dancing soles became wet and empetalled. Walsingham wrenched the lower sheet from its moorings that they might wipe off the sweat they had not lapped. They lay on the palliasse breathing like achieved runners, and Kit looked up at the ceiling to see if God's head would poke through. But God lay indifferent in his shrine, converted to bread. Walsingham, now merely a Tom, another to clog our narrative, was spread on his bed snoring. Kit testiculis basia dedit and dressed. He had said he would attend a lecture.

  A poet, he knew the difficulties of that word love, which meant too many things for any man's comfort, but it was the one word that sprang from the heaven of release and he must regard it with the care he had given to the abstruse terms of the schoolmen. Love was the lyric cry of desire and then release and gratitude for release; should it not rather be the expression in frigid sobriety of the awareness of mingling of souls, and yet what of soul did Tom Walsingham possess? True, being human he had a soul that theology would say was there for divine salvation or damnation, but that was a formal attribute of the same manner as pure being. But what of soul with extension and properties? Was there substance deserving of a lover's homage? He thought not. Had this wholly blissful encounter of singing nerves been but of the order of the blind thrusting on the bank of the Cam or in the dusty London dark of the haunts of prostitute boys? Was it trussing up and then the fingers to the lips in goodbye, we shall lie so in pleasure again (not most like)? Did he now possess a friend or lover who would give and take eternal avowals (eternity invoked with lying lips, since eternity was God's province)? Kit felt as it were steel hoops of self-committal in compress of his ribs. Did the term fidelity apply? It was not of the covenant of man and woman who must hold the nest of their progeny together. Infidelity, he had heard of in such instances, was the knife-sharpener. He, Kit, carried no knife, but he sensed that there could be knives here too. He had heard of one in London who had carried the knife to his faithless boy paramour. The morality, if there was morality, was encased in the narrow world that two built. Of exterior morality there was none save what Church, reformed or unreformed, delivered. He had an itch of merely scholarly import to learn of the nature of and punishment allotted to such love, if love it was.

  The lecture he attended, already begun, was (he twitched sourly amused lips at it) of God's love and the reconciliation of that with God's punishment. There were thirty or so black-clad students in the College hall, with, like a random scattering of flowers, visitors in gaudier dress. The lecturer was a Father Pryor, a lined and croaking man from Lancashire, where the old faith had held out longest. Love, so he said, was graced with the limitless power of forgiveness, but there came in God's eternal time the moment when justice supervened thereon. How is it possible that forgiveness without limit, he asked, can be so reconciled with punishment that seems to our frail sublunary sense of a truly monstrous order? No earthly judge or ruler could conceive of pains as severe as those of hell for acts of a limited evil, since man is not the devil. And yet God, who loves his creation, is ready to cast sinning fragments of it into eternal fire. A mystery, brethren, that may be resolved by taking thought that love has no categorical substance, that it is itself a facet of justice. It is just that we
love the lovable, and it is unjust that we love what is not to be loved. Must we love the devil, contrive a forgiveness for evil whereof God himself has no capability? One of our fathers once heard a child pray that Satan might be made good and happy, but the child was in the dreadful state of innocence and the notion was at once whipped away. Our first parents too, you will say, were innocent and were blessed because of it, but theirs was a primordial innocence untouched by knowledge of evil until the fatal fruit was devoured. God may not love sin, though he may love the sinner in the expectation of his becoming cognisant of the sin and ready for lustration and repentance. If there be, to the all-knowing, no hint of such future cognisance, then the sinner has already joined the ranks of the damned. I call, at this point, for questions.

  Well, Kit thought, it is better here than at Cambridge, where hunks of doctrine are imposed like deadweights and the crushed hearer granted no breath. It was one of the gaudily clad who now asked:

  - Must we descry a distinction between the doer of evil in all conscience and whosoever is drawn into evil through ignorance?

  - Properly, the old priest responded, we must regard ignorance as sinful when the light is shown but disregarded. The souls of the Indians of America are ignorant but not damned. Granted the light and wilfully blind to it, the privilege of damnation follows.

  Some quietly laughed. In old man's anger the priest shook and said:

  - Yes, yes, I say that word. For damnation and salvation alike are the signs of God's holy care of his highest creation. In this chiefly are we raised above the beasts of the field.

  - Must we love Queen Elizabeth? asked a student in the rough tones of the priest's own county.

  - She is not Queen Elizabeth, despite her crown and orb and sceptre and the other trappings of royalty. She is illegitimate in the eyes of God's Church.

  - And therefore to be deposed? It was the man dressed brightly who had been the first asker.

  - This is to be assumed. This must come in its time. But he who asked of sin must be answered. We must love our enemies as we love our friends, but we must not love their sin.

  Kit left, unnoticed. It was leafy outside, a sycamore cast kind shade over the forecourt. Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned. Blessedly the birds flew over the screams of the charred heretics or the traitors who saw briefly and in disbelief their intestines cast into boiling water. All beasts are happy. They thrust in their season and know nothing of love. Kit sat on what was said to be a thunderstone, a bolt from the heavens, and watched emerge the priest's auditors. He had seen the back only of the gentleman who had asked about the deposition of the Queen; he saw now his bulk and ruddiness, a soldierly man with a sword, who was telling laughingly two younger men, one of them in black, the other in russet and violet, of the need for tolerance within limits.

  - It is the nature of the limits that promotes argument, he was saying. Our preacher, lecturer I would say, was drawn into the forbidden when I put my question. God and Caesar - did not Jesus Christ speak wisely of the division of authority, though some would say that God being above Caesar there is no division. The Zealots were in their way logical. But no matter - we must cling to our limits of action. I keep to my narrow way.

  They were away around the corner and Kit heard no more. What he noted in the speech of the speaker was a property that was not of the language of London, though otherwise the soldierly gentleman spoke that language in due conformity to what was known as the Queen's usage. Our language is rich in what our orthopeists term the rhotic (I know these things; I was brought up an actor), that is to say our dog sound is a firm roll in words containing the letter r. But this gentleman was weak in it and spoke argument and preacher and Caesar with but a limp tap. It seemed at the moment nothing - a mere way of walking or of agitating of the hands, or the outlandish cut of a doublet or the tilt of a feather in the hat. And so Kit forgot it, or so he thought, stood and wondered whether he should go back to Tom's inn and propose resumption of what they had done or else supper, or else hand-holding and talk of Plato. But his shyness overcame him. It would be a shy moment to face him again in all sobriety and perhaps be impelled into utterance of the word love. They stood or lay equal, man and man, and who must say it first? And Tom had spoken darkly of another meeting he had in the evening. At remembrance of that Kit sweated a moment in jealousy. He would think of the work for which he was paid and slink slyly into a student tavern, there to listen.

  And so he did. Les Trois Couronnes, which three crowns were meant was uncertain, was near the meat market, so that the scent of blood was on the street before one entered. Here French Catholics of the lower orders - draymen, ostlers, butchers and the like - were taunting English Catholics, of moneyed families though in exile, with their impotence to restore their faith, a deformed faith since these were English, to their island of mist and snow and no vineyards, without the aid of French arms and money. And, said they, votre roi avail douze femmes et preferait que son peuple fut damne s'il pouvait inserer son baton dans une treizieme, adding too that their present queen la vierge etait en realite une grande putain, and much more of the same. With this, despite exaggeration, they would have been disposed to agree, except that some nerve of patriotism was set ajangle, and a young and burly aspirant to Catholic orders clanked his winemug on the sleek head of a lawyer's underclerk and set a minor riot afoot. In this Kit would not have joined had these French truculants let him alone, but as he was standing not sitting he was easy to trip and went over in his clean garments on a filthy floor to the partially toothless derision of the strawy ostler whose large tripping muddy boot he at once grasped and so upped the leg and had him down. The fighting was brief, for the tavern-keeper was of notable muscle, as was his wife, and Kit was chosen for the attention of the latter, whose bare arms were like thighs. So, with bruised head and blood on his jerkin, he departed with some of the Catholic English to another quieter tavern, where there was song and pedantic theology enough. He would, when he had both money and his mastership, buy himself a sword.

  By midnight he had vomited thrice under the moon, not in pain since it was the mere mechanical voiding of a surfeit, and one more cup of wine settled his stomach but set his drunkenness newly awork. He tottered towards the inn where Tom Walsingham was, battering the locked door and crying Courrier important de la reine d'Angleterre pour le milord Walsingham. He was doubtfully admitted and clattered up the stairs to the known room, finding it unlocked and, in strong moonlight, Tom awake and startled in his shirt. Kit called Mon amour, me voici and ripped off the shirt as well as his own bloodied raiment. What he then did was more brutal than before, making Tom howl. The news from la reine d'Angleterre must, so the wide-awake keepers of the inn must now assume, be of appalling gravity.

  The next day Kit woke alone in the dortoir, his sleepfellows long out and at their lectures. He found Tom Walsingham's man, Ingram Frizer, standing over him, chewing a straw. So it was he who had been part of a dream of being newly pummelled. Frizer was ready to pound again but desisted on seeing bruised Kit blink in the painful light. He spat out his straw and spoke, saying:

  - I will not have this, master.

  - Not what?

  - Blood upon him and he sorely battered. My office is to protect him I serve and I will not have you nor any other do him harm by slyly getting under what is my guard. So you are warned and told.

  - What are you, fellow, that presume so? Kit asked with scorn under an aching sconce.

  - You know what I am, fellow yourself, what are you in spite of your fine bloodied clothes and your graces and airs? A boy student and no more, that had better mind his book than meddle with my master that is brother to the Lord of the Manor and will inherit. So keep away from him or it will be the worse. Here he bunched a mottled fist in threat.

  - Learn manners, mannerless lout. Raise your fist at me and you will be beaten black. By God, I will leave my bed now to do it.

  - Aye, aye, and Frizer retreated thoug
h bunching still, you are good at beating, we all know of you. Well, you are warned. You are no more than a drunken booby and foul bugger. And I do not speak of myself, for I can put men on to you that strike to the very liver.

  - Ave aye yourself, and Kit sat on the edge of his bed in some queasiness. Off, off.

  - I saved him from drowning, know that and keep it in your black heart. And I can outbook you in learning if I wish. I know the Greek word tupto and can act on it.

  So saying he left, and Kit straightened his wrinkled hose, blindly attached his bloodied trunks thereto, and put on his dirty shirt. He was in need of a hot posset. This he got in the College kitchen, where he instructed an undercook in the curdling of hot milk with wine and the adding of cinnamon and cloves. Then he went to the College chapel and sat in its cool dark in a manner of self-disgust. There were confession boxes here and, the hour being eleven, some students were lining up on their knees at one of them. Auricular, as it was called, from the Latin ear, but auric meant gold. Golden confession, a trinket of the old faith reformed out of being. Now one confessed, if at all, to God direct, but God rendered no absolution. He creaked over, his headache still at him, to join the end of the line, asking in a whisper:

  - What is the formula?

  - How?

  - What do I say?

  - I see, your first time. Say: Bless me father for I have sinned exceedingly in thought word and deed through my most grievous fault. And then peel your sins off one at a time, seriatim if you prefer.