A Dead Man in Deptford

by Anthony Burgess

  He re-entered the day to find himself in his father's shop, safe in the smell of leather. No, it was not his father. Mon pere aussi, he was saying. Comme mon pere qui fabrique les souliers. En Angleterre. It seemed the fracas was over, though this cobbler was bruised. Kit's head beat like a heart, the ache was not to be described. He lodged where? He remembered what that woman had been selling, old hens and perhaps cocks. Rue du Coq. The prentices would escort him thither. It was not far.

  So he nodded them off, he had no small coins for them, at the open door of the house called safe and limped in, seeming to knock at the door on the left with the bruise on his brow. Ready to fall again. The door was ajar and his body opened it fully. A bright fire. A table that was a warped plank set on builder's trestles. Iron boxes, somewhat rusty, upon it. He took the first chair he found with his right hand and sat, looking at the two men who stood wondering. Beard or Berdon in a robe with a collar of mangy fur, hatted like a rabbi, the young man he had met in Rheims, very fair, quite bloodless.

  - So what is it?

  - A street fight. Sons of the Church and the Huguenots. I interfered.

  - No warning, Gifford said to the other. Newcomers must be warned, Beard. They must not interfere. It is all their own business.

  - Walsingham would see that as heroic.

  - But it is foolishness. Are you the man that brought the letter? Stay, we met at Rheims. I see you have an egg on your brow. Ready to hatch from its swelling.

  - It was an egg woman. It is here in my breast.

  - So, opening the pouch, breaking the seal, reading. I am ordered back. Contacts, contacts, doors swung open, a queen's French perfume, words, words, then acts. At once, he says, no delay. A night ride and Calais at dawn. You, what's your name, can be with me. It will he to your credit.

  - Marlowe or Marley.

  - Real name?

  - I am what I am what I am what I. Forgive. They hit with a stone, a rock, my brain rocks.

  - Go lie down on Beard's bed. We leave at dusk.

  - You are, Kit said, noting Gifford's finery and collar of cobweb lawn, no longer a student.

  - I never was, not of Rheims. Some day soon we shall all be done with disguises. Go sleep.

  On the dawn packet, the sea unseasonably smooth under a cold sun and little cloud, Kit's ache abated and his brow, soothed with rose water, bade the swelling recede. He was still little coherent either in speech or thought, nor did he understand the wheels that drove the brain of Gifford.

  - Truly a Catholic?

  - Not truly anything. Are you truly anything? No, a lump of pain with an egg on its brow. Truly an Englishman who hates the French and the Spanish and the Italians and puts England before all. Catholic England if it were possible but it is not. So England at peace enough under protestant rule. My father thinks differently but he no more than I would have the old faith restored by grace of Spain or France. He pays his recusancy fines cheerfully. He thinks change will come about in good time.

  - He knows what you do?

  - To know would kill him.

  - But he will know if all goes as you plan it.

  - Que sera sera. Is your evident queasiness the egg on your head? The sea keeps calm.

  - The prospect of killing the innocent.

  - Can you call her innocent? She is called Queen of Scots but she is pure French. She will have the French in and the Spaniards. She shall be tricked into treason. And my father will be tricked, small things yielding to great. Our estate is near Chartley where she is under lock and key. I shall be there. It will be a matter of getting something from her in black ink. Then there will be an end to it. See, there are the white cliffs. And the gulls scream us in with the shrillness of welcoming trumpets.

  - You are something of a poet.

  - Something of nothing.

  I T was the lump on the brow incurred in a good if minor fighting cause as well as the prompt bringing home of Gifford that conveyed to Mr Secretary a sense of the utility of employing Kit in these small matters of courier service. The contusion was visible evidence of a young man's seriousness in the cause. But he was let go back to Cambridge with two crowns in his purse, and the Walsingham plan proceeded without him. He would be brought in later.

  It is to me somewhat of a relief to sum what happened between Christmas and Whitsun without occasion to besmirch Kit with the dirt of it, for I loved and yet love his genius and if I sometimes hated the man it was not because of craft and deviousness, rather because of a candour of word and act that, being a fruit of innocence, would at length stick in his throat and choke him. So I will speak of Gifford, traitor to his faith, and what he did. He, after his reporting to Mr Secretary, lodged with Philips or Phelips in Leadenhall Market for a time, from there visiting the French ambassador with letters from Morgan, the Queen of Scots her Paris secretary and most treacherous to her, that testified to his devotion to the Queen and the faith they shared. And it was made clear to the ambassador, who at first had his doubts, that Gifford was seeking a way whereby Her Abdicate Majesty should be made aware of what proceeded in the outer world through the contrivance of a secret post that he, Gifford, was most eager in his loyalty to set working. So when he had confirmed with Savage, then at his studies at Barnard's Inn, that the killing of the lawful Queen should, despite Savage's qualms and wish to delay, be assigned to that summer and no later, and when he had caroused with Father Ballard, seemingly firm in the regicidal resolve, who, as Captain Fortescue, was a flame in the London taverns and closely watched yet most free, he proceeded to his father's estate in Staffordshire, lodged with the steward, one Newport (Gifford's father at that time being in jail for some remark he had made detrimental to the peace of the realm though truly not grave), then spoke in simple words to a Burton brewer who delivered beer each Friday to the Queen of Scots her household, saying that he was to deliver also messages rolled in a tube and hid in the bunghole of the cask that should be chalked with a cross as a sign of its presence. And when he collected the cask empty he was to look for a tube and at once hand it to Gifford or one that deputed for him.

  There was an agreed cipher that Morgan had imparted to Gifford, and the unravelling of this when fingered out of the outgoing barrels was a yawning sleepy work for Philips or Phelips, most expert in it, who passed all on to Walsingham in clear English. The letters, then resealed by one Arthur Gregory, who was proud of that skill, none could ever detect his interference, were then taken by Gifford to the French Embassy, and thence they went their ways under the cloak of diplomacy to whoever was to receive them. This business started soon after Christmas, yet by Easter there was nothing found incriminate, which soured Walsingham much. There should have been an acquiescence in the killing of the Queen regnant, often urged in Gifford's letters, but Queen Mary, though she had been foolish in love, was not so foolish in statecraft. There could, of course, be an acceptable forging of treasonous intent by Philips or Phelips, but this was thought to be somehow a manner of cheating, and games in which cheating is permitted are but halt and blind games. So then Mr Secretary cast about for a new strategy and was at length apprised of the name of Anthony Babington, who, in some manner yet to be sifted and brought to the light, might prime the engrossing of an intent that would lead many to the scaffold but one above all.

  This Babington was of Derbyshire, his country seat being near Matlock, and, though a Catholic and a true one, he had had luck in being able to cling to property by no means small. At one time the Earl of Shrewsbury had been jailer to the Queen of Scots, and the boy Babington had been his page. He had conceived a childish devotion and love to the Queen, who was indeed stately tall and most beautiful and with a voice that enthralled, and, during that period of her mostly kindly and loose incarceration, before her grimmer transferral to prison at Chartley, he had, through a Paris visit, found ways of conveying letters through Morgan to Mary by way of the Shrewsbury household, but now all that was over. He served now the cause of the priests, with money and places of refuge,
but that was most perilous, being not merely treasonous but highly treasonous, that is to say High Treason. He was but twenty-five and much loved, though not to the point where his High Treason might be condoned. But some shut eyes to his actions.

  I do not know for sure that Kit became embroiled in these matters at the time of the entry of young Babington, all innocent and unknowing, into Walsingham's great plan. But he said that he did, at the time of his first playhouse triumph when he became drunken and talked purple untruths in the manner of the poet he was. The manner of it was, he said, this. He had been summoned from Cambridge, again by Nick Faunt who was on a recruiting visit, to see Robin Poley. Poley had met him with: Dear Kit, dear helper in the cause and most helpful a helper, now is the time for you to endue the great mask of simulation. I am born Catholic and am believed to practise the faith, for me there is nothing hard in false smiling and fraternal embracing, but it is what you must learn. Faunt said something of your writing plays, so simulation and falseness you will know something of. We go to meet Captain Foscue, as the French call him, and one other in a tavern, a back room I need not say, there to talk privy matters. You are to be a good Catholic.

  - Foscue or Fortescue I know. He saw me at a time when I spoke of my Jacob wrestling with the agonies of faith.

  - Agonies resolved, you are converted. But if you move wrong through inattention or worse - I need not say more.

  - A threat? I hear a threat?

  - You hear a pignus of your committal. No more.

  Kit did not well understand, though he shivered on that chill spring day. They went together to the Plough by Temple Bar, and in an inner room they met Father Ballard the carousing soldier and the delicate Babington. Ballard or Fortescue remembered faintly the Rheims meeting. Christopher, a noble name cattified to Kit. Aye aye, it all comes back. Well, let us drink as friends and, I take it, all of the faith. Kit said:

  - I may now call you reverend father.

  - Call me nothing. Poley said:

  - I fear suspicion of me grows. I have been bound by two sureties whereby I must present myself each twenty days.

  - Before the magistrates?

  - That. I had thought of escaping, though not from Dover where there are watches set. But it is a matter of getting money.

  - I will gladly advance fifty pound, Babington said. That for a beginning and more later.

  - God and his holy mother bless you for that. But I have here my young friend to protect that is restored to the faith and has been too loud in his joyous professions. He has to learn discretion. In protecting him I am in some danger, but no matter. There is the other business that bids us all stay.

  - The Holy Trinity shower blessing on it, Kit said. It was extravagant, but extravagance might be forgiven a convert. The others even murmured Amen. The reverend father in his gaudy soldier's extravagance said:

  - The rising must all depend on the help of Guise and King Philip. The attack is in preparation. But Babington said:

  - Drag us by the heels at Tyburn before that the stranger enter our gates. The State here is well settled, and with the Queen alive though excommunicate nothing may be done.

  - The means, the means, Ballard said. It is made. There is one that took the oath.

  - God bless his valiant heart, Poley said. He will leave his musty law books and strike.

  - God forbid, it is a terrible thing, said shocked Babington. The removal of her is a different matter and toleration and the freeing of our lady Mary to be made a condition of her release. But I know not truly what is to be done.

  - Yet we know what you have, Poley said. We are in this together and may be shown. And he put out his hand with a kind of reverence.

  - It is almost a holy thing, Babington said, fumbling with buttons at his breast.

  - Heaven forbid it be a holy relic.

  - Amen. And Babington drew out a letter with a broken seal. Kit leaned across to read it, for it was now in Poley's hands. It was to Babington and not in cipher. Here was the royal hand: I pray you therefore from henceforth to write unto me as often as you can of all occurrences which you may judge in any wise important to the good of my affairs.

  Poley nodded, with greater reverence, and said that Babington had been writing to Nau that was the Queen of Scots her French secretary. Whereupon Babington flushed deeply and asked how he knew. I know, I know, I must know things, a man must protect himself.

  - I asked, Babington said, if you were to be trusted. With so great matters afoot it was in order.

  -And so it was, so it was, you were right. And you received assurances that I was and am?

  - Indeed so.

  - And what can you now offer?

  - In the matter of what I said? Though still I do not properly know. There are gentleman enough of stout courage. Gentlemen pensioners who would seize and hold her against our sovereign lady's release.

  The time is not yet, as you know. You must continue your writing to her and holding to her replies as they were precious gold.

  - Amen. I talk of the usurping competitor.

  - That is a discreet phrase. You talk to whom?

  - I have drafted a letter to her not yet delivered for Gifford's sending. I write of doing her one good day's service. I ask that she direct us by her princely authority and so forth.

  - You have this draft upon you?

  - It is at home.

  - Have a care, have a care, in the name of God have a. There be thieves enough about. Well, shall we sing a bawdy catch and tipple more? Or shall we be about our business that is termed lawful? Even so. And close our meeting with the signum crucis. Which they made, Kit too.

  - You lodge with Tom Watson? Poley asked, out in the wind of Temple Bar.

  - No longer. He said he would not marry but he has married. The sister of this lawyer Swift. I ride tonight to stay with Tom Walsingham. But I shall be early in tomorrow, as you request.

  - From Tom to Tom. Well, you see how things went. It will still be a slow business. And shaking his head he led the way to his house on Bishopsgate that was called the Garden, where Kit's horse was stabled. Then Kit rode north to Scadbury with the wind against him.

  THERE was a cottage on the estate where Kit had lodged before. He was never desirous of entering the great manor house where Ingram Frizer stalked. He feared Frizer's mad devotion, which he could not well understand. It was so unlike his own, bearing in itself no epicene love nor even simple friendship, rather the desire to be abased and yet not abasement of a true lowly servant, for Frizer had money and much of this money slid into Tom's lean purse. How he got or had in the past gotten this money was never clear. As for meeting Tom behind the back of Frizer, this could sometimes though rarely be a matter of a dated tryst, a letter left with Poley to be delivered when Tom was at his cousin's, or, lurking among bushes, Kit whistling near a known and lighted casement of the manor house, which was absurd. The tune he whistled was Wilbye's setting of his own shepherd poem, already well enough known about the town.

  Anyway, this night they lay together in a cottage which had been that of an estate woodman long dismissed. It was, as it were, an abode pared down to love, for there was little in it but a bed with straw-filled mattress and blankets of stitched motley pieces, the work of the woodman's wife. There was a fire fed by the ample branches and logs with which a leaning shed was well stocked, but, for fear that prowling Frizer might wonder even at nighttime smoke under the moon, it was seldom Hinted to life, there being warmth enough in their conjoined and amorous naked bodies. So, beneath the blankets in the spring dark, hearing the wind in the chimney and a far dogfox or a mousing owl, they kissed and colled and rolled and panted and were disengorged of their urgencies. Then they lay and wiped the sweat the one off the other and talked.

  - They will talk at Corpus of your absences.

  - Your cousin swears that all will be taken care of. The Queen's service comes first.

  - This is the Queen's service?

  - This is one of the rewards
of it.

  - Very prettily said. And then, later: I think this will all soon be mine. I shall be Lord of the Manor.

  - Who says that?

  - Frizer says that my brother is very sick. Nothing stays in him, it is all vomit vomit.

  - How does Frizer know?

  - Frizer is a great peerer and pryer. Frizer will be glad when it happens. His young master will be fulfilled and there will be a majordomo's chain of office dangling from the Frizer neck.

  - In Naples did I learn to poison flowers.

  - What is that to do with anything?

  - A line that came to me. Such lines often come. Then they must be joined to other lines that come, all complete and stopped at the end. Blank verse must not melt into prose. Yet as it came I seemed to see Frizer saying it and bowing deep. I take it he has not been in Naples.

  - He says sometimes a rich grandfather sent him round the world, but it is all lies. He has a parish in radius all of twenty miles.

  - And villainy enough in it.

  - He is no villain, he is all devotion, though the devotion irks.

  - He knows that your brother is dying. In devotion is he helping him towards his quietus or nunc dimittis?

  - I should think my brother has the French pox. And Tom yawned in the dark. Then he encircled Kit with his arms and they fell to more kissing. At the end of a sore dawn coupling Kit heard his horse champing grass. Tom said:

  - Give me a verse. Said not sung.

  - This.

  And Watery Walter's reply:

  - Raleigh, they say, must be watched.

  - There is altogether too much watching. Frizer will be on his patrol shortly, seeing that none have stolen twigs from the trees. He will wonder at a horse chewing his master's grass. Best go.

  IT was true perhaps that Raleigh must be watched, for, so it was known in the Service, he had been engaged with Mendoza, who was Spain's ambassador in Paris, in negotiation over a Spanish pension, since the Queen's favour, so he said, could not last. And there was one of his circle, whose godless speculations would, when the time came, invite examination, one named Anthony Tuichenor, who had put himself forward to Gifford as one who would convey the captured true Queen, provided no harm came to her, to a place of safety that Sir Walter himself would contrive. But all this was but a small concern at the time of the letter that Babington, guided by Poley and Gifford, sent to the Queen of Scots by the established beery channel, saying that Forasmuch as delay is extremely dangerous, may it please your most excellent Majesty by your wisdom to direct us and by your princely authority to enable such as may to advance the affair. And it was all laid out: the invaders were coming, this confirmed by Gifford, now in Paris and not to be seen in England more (he was to die in a brothel), the deliverance of the Queen of Scots and the dispatch of, as it was put, the Usurping Competitor. And he, Babington, would with six gentlemen and a hundred followers release her Catholic Majesty. Yet there was no invasion coming, nor a hundred men, and he would be hard put to find six gentlemen even. What Mary's reply was we know not, but that there was a reply we know, sent, in her words, by une petite boite ou sac de cuir.