A Dead Man in Deptford

by Anthony Burgess

  - Why is it decorous that undergraduates of a university should be clothed humbly?

  - I argue contra. Study is a noble activity and through the acquisition of learning a man, however young, glorifies the whole race of man. This glory may be made manifest in outward show, fine dress enhancing the body but, in a figure that may be termed sacramental, emblemising the shining quiddity of what animates the whole being. The students here should all be clothed in silk.

  - Wrong, wrong and again wrong. This use of the term sacramental is blasphemous. You will put off your finery instanter and revert to the subfusc as is proper.

  For Kit was dressed in purple and primrose and a shirt with cobweb collar. His buttery accounts had grown and he was quite the gentleman. So attired, he was easy to find when Nicholas Faunt came looking for him. Kit was at study in the library on a foul day of late November. Faunt came up and peered at books that had nothing to do with divinity, saying:

  - So this is your study, Tamerlaine and Techelles and what is this, yes, Usumcasane, and Bazajeth and Alcidamus. In my day here at Corpus we kept our noses close to our Latin and Greek. Faunt is the name. I am one of Sir Francis's secretaries, as he terms them. Come away and we will talk in the back room at the Eagle.

  - Is it Service business we are to talk of?

  - Call it that, call it that. Do not speak so loud. See, that boy intent on his Jerome looked up. Come your ways.

  They sat then, having crossed the street where the blustering wind made ripple the plentiful puddles, in that back room over ale which Faunt called for. Faunt said:

  - I take pride in being the one Cambridge man among his regulars. I come looking at Corpus for recruits and yet you I missed. You went in another way.

  - I would not say I was in. I have other ambitions.

  - Like in the direction of the history of Persia?

  - I propose a play.

  - Whose theme is?

  - Power. Pitiless, merciless, absolute.

  - So power appeals to you, young as you are? How young?

  - I am of age. Power, yes, power cut up and anatomised. I want the power of chronicling power. I have read my Machiavelli.

  - Doubtless, all young men read it. Well, you think yourself not to be in the outer lanes of the labyrinth of power, but you are, you are. You wear Sir Francis's money on your back. You have been in Rheims, yes? Yes. In Rheims you met Gifford and Savage, yes? Yes. Tell me about them.

  - Gifford is an exiled Catholic most bitter in his exile. Savage is hard to fathom, but he fought in the Low Countries. This argues his hatred of what Gifford stands for. But what can I say when I was told that his captain is a priest?

  - It is all a wilderness. Gifford is in the Service, you must know. He has persuaded Savage that his duty is to murder the Queen.

  - Which queen?

  - There is only one. The other lives in a secluded state of abdication. Her time will come when Gifford is brought over. The proposal that a true queen be murdered is of Sir Francis's engineering, but only that a false queen may in all legality be beheaded. Does this make sense?

  - A wilderness. I am bewildered. What have Ito do with this?

  - Poley is short of couriers. You must take ship and find Gifford. Savage we have, though he does not know it. He is learning law at Barnard's Inn. Gifford we need in London. Our informers say that he leaves Rheims on the twenty-fifth to stay with Thomas Morgan in Paris. He must be given a letter. You will be given that letter, cunningly sealed so that you may not in youth's curiosity tamper and pry.

  - Why myself?

  - Walsingham speaks well of you. Both Walsinghams.

  Kit shuddered at that and took a draught of cold ale to quell a certain mounting heat in his veins. He said:

  - It is still term time.

  - It is near over. Your absence will do no harm. Remember that great power boils and thunders behind you. Hardly, hardly. There is no noise and must be no noise ever. Let me say something of Thomas Morgan in Paris. He is secretary to the Queen of Scots and most dearly and deeply trusted. She has ever been a trusting woman. Morgan is Gifford's passport to the lady. She is a most beautiful lady and she heats the blood of our Catholics, especially when they are drunk. She is the Jezebel whom Knox execrates and she is also the Virgin Mary rediviva. Women are terrible creatures. I think we may ride to London together.

  And so they did, Nick, as he was to be called, proving, des pite the rain and wind into which they rode, a man cheerful and, though moral scruple in the higher affairs affected him little, tender towards snotnosed starvelings in villages and even towards a dead pied dog that lay with swollen belly ripe to burst on the road. He gave a reasonable rendering of Catullus's irrumabo, approving pedication as a punishment though not as a pleasure, and listened to Kit's half-remembered versions of Ovid with an approving ear. He was dark of eye and skin and beard like Walsingham his master, and Kit thought on the utility of such colouring when centres of Spanish intrigue must be broached. He spoke of Machiavelli and the need to understand the ferocity of certain acts of policy, as for instance Sir Walter Raleigh's massacre of the Irish five years, was it, back, women and children on their knees begging for their lives ruthlessly slaughtered and all justified by the need to wage war fast and then forgotten. Did Kit know Sir Walter? Kit did not. Strange, for their two names had come together in a pretty posy of poesy a month or so back printed by Ed Blount, was it. No, Kit did not know, he had not been told, he had received no copy, he felt aggrieved. Well, if the time should come when Sir Walter's strange doings with mathematicians and atheists had needs be probed by the Service, then Kit, might he call him Kit, had his entree. Yes, he knew some French. It was known he knew, and that was a recommendation.

  In London, where a high wind clattered down the bricks of chimneys and women were skirted and men shod in mud, Kit went at once to Tom Watson's house. Tom's servant, the humpbacked Ralph, let him in and said he might proceed at once to his master's bedchamber, as from tomorrow though no longer his master, and Kit, entering, saw at once the vindictiveness of a servant dismissed, for Tom was frotting away in full nakedness with a wench or woman or lady, naked too, the covers of the bed all fallen, clothes hastily doffed mingled with the rushes of the floor. Kit excused himself and felt sick. On a table in what Tom called his study he found four, five, six copies of a thin book with the title Gaza. Samson and his blindness? No, gaza was the name of the treasure house of a Persian king, hence of any foreign prince. In it, his fingers atremble, he found his poem:

  And he found also a reply:

  No. He read all through, his poem entire, the other, called a reply, entire, then quatrain answered by quatrain. Then the names - his and that of the great bejewelled courtier whom the Queen called Water and he himself, in grandiose magnification, Ocean. Kit, the very sound of dripping, kit kit kit, faced the roar and swell. Up in the world sang a far hautboy. Tom Watson entered girdling his nightgown about him, his face thunderous. Kit excused himself anew, blame Ralph. Tom said he had already buffeted him out. The lady? My lady wife. No. Yes. My lady. We are two months wed. Your lady. My heartiest, my most cordial, it is a surprise. It was sudden. Yes, you were not told of your poem in print, Raleigh, well there was the wedding and the ways mire and the carriers slack. My heartiest. It will do no harm, this dour response to pastoral prettiness. Much happiness. It will help sell the printing, already four hundred odd on sale in Paul's yard. Why are you here? An eternity of. My thanks. Why here?

  Kit saw Robin Poley the next morning. Poley was all smiles and amiable strokings. Here is the letter sealed and here a pouch to enpouch it. You must be armed, you know that? On the Queen's service in a perilous city. You have no sword but here is one I loan, my father's, God rest him, and precious. The scabbard worn and the belt frayed but no matter. It is foul weather for riding and expect a rough Channel which they call the Sleeve or Manche.

  I must guess and suppose as ever, but that Kit was in Canterbury that November is attested by his name in good
black ink in the form Marley. The last will and testament of a certain Mrs Benchkyn bears it as fourth witness. I spoke to one who had seen it, but this is of no moment. I see Kit as queasier than before on the bouncing packet over seven or more tumultuous leagues of churning bile answering his own, hiring his horse at Calais with money but adequate that Philips or Phelips had rung out, and proceeding to Paris in the foul weather that lashed and enshivered northern France as much as southern England. Paris put fear into him, a city of monstrous size to which London was but a market town. Its ambages of streets bewildered. He had been told he must seek the lodgings assigned to Service agents great and small between the rue de Champ Fleury and the rue du Coq near to the Louvre. Here were stinks and ordure enough, beggars and pimps, cutpurses and cutthroats, whores with pocked bosoms open to the wind and rain. It was termed a safe house, the one to which he rode. Its street door was open. Kit dared not yet enter for fear that a Paris prigger of prancers would steal his mount under pretence of holding, but an ostler that was English, though of rascally appearance, doubtless fled France to escape English justice, appeared to lead the horse to a stable. Then Kit found Berdon, or Beard, a name for one place and another for another, Walsingham's Paris agent in chief, a man who appeared with a bone in his fist, chewing and weighing up the visitor. He said:

  - Well, you must shift as you can, we are crowded out. We keep a deal of straw for our odd helpers to doss on. Do not be made afraid by such as you meet, few are fine gentlemen. We must use what we can. You are a philosopher? You have studied of how old absolutes must yield to new relatives? There is but one crime for us now and you will know what it is. A man may be a thief or murderer and yet shine in the great virtue of loyalty. Who are you after?

  - Mr Gifford.

  - Aye, dear wayward Gilbert that goes his own way and is hard to track. Here he is called Monsieur Coleredin. He will be here for his London post though none knows when. You talk of urgency. There is nothing that is not urgent, so London says. But there are relative urgencies. You may come and eat.

  A sort of dinner was proceeding in a room fairly furnished in the French manner, a couple of silent men in black dipping each a half of an avian carcase of some kind in a brown sauce and finickingly though drippingly biting off what flesh was left. Berdon or Beard made no introductions but offered Kit bread, a highly stinking cheese, and a decanter maculated by greasy fingers. Then he said:

  - There are troubles coming here. St Bartholomew will be nothing to it. They talk of the war of the trois Henris, you know enough French, good. That is the Henry that is the Third, him of Navarre and him of Guise. And behind the King is Medical Kate as we call her, bitch and woman devil. Him of Navarre is out of the succession because the Pope has damned him to hell for ever, and Guise, who is a duke, is going to kill all the Huguenots. He is to get the crown, they say, and help put Scottish Mary, who is another French bitch and harlot, on the Catholic throne of England. He is a cousin or some such thing. So you see what we are in the midst of. Beware of the streets. Eh, friends, eh?

  That was to the two carcase-chewers. They chewed and nodded. Kit asked to hear more of Guise.

  - Guise? They call him already King of Paris. You know the rue St Honore? No, not yet, you will not. There is what they call the Hotel de Guise and when he emerges in his finery they all bow down to him and beg to kiss his arse and the women to lick his poxed prick and there he is waving his hat of many feathers and crying to kill the Huguenots, rob their shops, knock out their teeth with crowbars and much the same, rape the women and roast the babies on spits. And then off the blackguardly rogues go to do as they are bid, it is all great sport for them, eh, bullies, eh?

  Kit left the straw-filled garret that danced with fleas early the next morning. He had half-slept with his fist round the pommel of the borrowed sword. Rogues snored or lay awake or sat awake, sucking their teeth and scratching, looking at him. At dawn he saw an act of buggery proceeding, a double act, turn and turn about with the straw flying and a sneeze timed with a final thrust, irrumabo. The look of the act of what could be love or lust did not please him. The beauty was all within, behind the locked doors of the eyes. He had, back in Cambridge, taken one of Jem Follett's boys for a penny, an envisioned Tom Walsingham in his head like a god and the motion towards irrumation like a prayer. He rubbed his face and hands with rose water, a mother's gift, before seeking a shop where hot possets might be sold. But they did not know of hot possets in the tavern where workmen downed harsh red as a breakfast, eyes on him the sworded stranger. He drank a mug. He was given the morning's bread.

  - Anglais?

  - Anglais. Et bon catholique comme vous. Exile.

  They spat before leaving. A French flea jumped from his hand to his shoulder. And with this weight I'll counterpoise a crown or with seditions weary all the world. Words often came to him thus, they were dealt by a ghost called the Muse. Since all cards are within your hands to shuffle or to cut. A clinching rhyme needed. Surest thing. Deal yourself a king. Fill in the lines. He went out into a street enlemoned by a weak sun. The wind had dropped to sleep. He caught and crushed another flea, or perhaps the same, on the sleeve of his doublet. I'll either rend it with my nails to naught or something something. How high could a flea leap? Scale the high pyramides. It was a long walk to the rue St Honor&. In a tavern where he took a second cup he heard men talking in French he could barely follow. Come from Chalons-sur-Marne where the League was (what league?) to meet les seize. The arrondissements were planning their final coup under him. Vive le duc. He thought he understood. He did not wish to see the duke at his street levee. He could fashion a better duke in his brain. He saw this duke enstaged, ranting in rhythm. Heroes were in a sense lining up for his inspection. All of the age, however set far back in the mists. Was then that a mission, to give the times their images of pure power, an alembication of Machiavelli (himself no mean playmaker), pure in that the heart with its allegiances and meltings would not pollute it? He could hear now as he sat near the mean spitting fire of this tavern a noise some streets off, that of a crowd howling, belike for blood. Le duc, an old man nodded.

  He left, leaving small English silver, it was all one, and walked away from the noise. Where could he go, where could he wait, for it was all waiting? November Paris was plaguily cold. He entered the first church he came to and warmed himself at a bank of candles. A low mass proceeded with few worshippers kneeling on the stone paving. Hoc est corpus meum. He kept his eyes coldly on the raised host. A Huguenot gesture so he bowed. Tavern, church, tavern, a host in each. He left and walked aimlessly but briskly. His feet, one two, one two, were a faint drum to the recorder of his verses:

  The point was, he thought, that a poet, cast into jail or forced to the walking of chill streets, needed rhyme to affix verses to his memory. But in the playhouse the verse must be blank, why blank? The Earl of Surrey had seen it as an indignity to Virgil to render a rhymeless Roman into rhyme, so he had cut out rhyme from language that cried to have its nakedness clothed in a vestment that had bells sewn to it. So lo we have verse close to speech and most proper for the playhouse which is all speech when it is not blood. But could it be poetry?

  Congealed cold indeed. Where could the poetry lie? Perhaps the line only could grant it, not the couplet, not more, which stabbed or bludgeoned the ear.

  That, whatever it was, was not prose. And there was another thing, and this his walking feet steadily beating told him. The five to the line was not natural. There were no fives in nature save in cinquefoil flowers. No, wait, five fingers, but the thumb was of a different make and purpose. He meant that the rhythm of two or four was in nature, for it was the heart beating and the walking legs. So then the line pentametric was unnatural unless its fifth beat was taken to be starting a new suppositious four. To ride in triumph through Persepolis. There was a pause, sure, after that, and a long one, either in the air or in the head. There was a justification for end-stopping and the line as a bludgeon. Moreover.

  He
was shaken out of his prosodic brooding by disorder on the mean street of shops whereon he walked. There was a stall that sold eggs and the corpses of chickens that had a day or so before laid them, and there were rough men smashing the eggs and stealing the chickens and seeking to smash the woman that sold them along with a boy that seemed to be her son. A man, a cobbler like his own father, peered out of his shop to see, then, spitting nails and wielding a hammer, ran to the woman's rescue. Huguenot, Huguenot. And the woman with open mouth and bad teeth cried that she was not nor her son and made over and over the sign of the cross in proof she was not. Those that did not smash the eggs and steal the birds cracked eggs open to drink of the yolk and slime. But two men more lecherous sought to strip the woman to her shame while the small boy beat at them with fists most ineffectual. The cobbler gave a fair hammer blow to the sconce of one who turned in time and so reeled without falling, so that most now turned on this man, whose two prentices ran out now with their own hammers. Kit felt blood rise then brim in him and then remembered that he was now acting the gentleman, for did he not bear a sword? A sword though could slay and here he was, strange in a strange city. It would be enough to brandish, so he did. He ran across brandishing, smelling the putridity of some smashed eggs that had not been laid that morning, nor even yesterday, and cried Salauds salauds (taken back to the Canterbury streets an instant). Then he was sliding and slipping on egg-mess on the cobbles. His sword-point pierced a fat buttock and would have gone deeper if the howl of the ruffian so struck had not been so loud. He withdrew and then was hit from behind by something hard. A stone, he saw, turning, staggering. The ragged grinner who held it cracked him on the brow and he went down and entered a vague world where Tamburlaine swore he would crack the egg of the universe.