A Dead Man in Deptford

by Anthony Burgess

  I'r was with some surprise and no surprise, first one then the other, that he found Tom Walsingham was to be his fellow voyager. He was on the quay where the Swiftsure lay docked, his man Ingram Frizer not with him, dressed exquisitely in pink with gold beneath the doublet slashes, hair to his shoulders under a hat with osprey feathers and a broad brim. His cloak was scarlet and heavy. His bag was of new leather, perhaps Florence work. He showed no surprise at Kit's coming; the disclosure of travelling companion had been one-sided. He said:

  -Dear Kit. After so long. She will not sail till dawn. I have bespoken a night's lodging for us at Mistress Bull's.

  - So. Over the smell of salt, distant offal in the slaughteryard, fish not fresh, a remembered company of odours floated. It was in odours that memory was entrapped. And where is Mistress Bull's?

  - A brief walk. Eleanor Bull is a hostess of some refinement, she serves succulent fish dishes, her husband is a foul Puritan that brings filthy Puritan print over from Middleburg. Robin Poley that hates Puritans does not hate Rob Bull. There is a mystery for you to ponder.

  They walked together on the crackling dead leaves of the garden of Eleanor Bull's house while she, a decent woman with queen's hair and apple cheeks, dressed in the plain way of the new reformists which Tom Walsingham in his discretion took to be the plainness merely of her liking, oversaw the preparing of their supper, a fish pie with dates and spices. Christ's blood, no, not Christ's blood, streamed in the firmament, only the colours of the autumn day bravely dying, a sweet sad swansong sung to no ear. Tom said:

  - We conquer mad fury, do we not?

  - The fury of the flesh, so to put it?

  - They impel me to winter before my time. A cousin dying and a brother dying and myself last of the Walsinghams.

  - Of your brother I knew nothing, of Sir Francis some spoke of an improvement.

  - To frighten his enemies and give hope to his creditors. He is sick enough. Poley gives the orders. But there will be no more orders for me when I play the part of Lord of the Manor.

  Your man Frizer has had his majordomo's chain ready for some time.

  - I hear the old bite. Frizer is beginning to think well of you. He once had ambitions as a stage player. He was, he says, overborne to an ecstasy of terror by your Faustus. He will not object to your becoming my resident laureate.

  - Those are not for mere Lords of the Manor. You presume, or else you use some metaphor.

  - The heat went out of us. We come to our autumns early.

  - You must speak for yourself, Tom. I am still in my spring.

  - Oh no. There was no spring in Faustus. We shall not share a bed here at Mistress Bull's.

  - So you were in London for Faustus but had no thought of being there for its author?

  - There were other things, he said vaguely. But I think that now we must be together.

  - With Frizer blessing our chaste union?

  - You must remember that Frizer saved my life. I was drowning. A swim in the lake and then a cramp came. You should be glad he was on the hank, watching, always watching.

  - He saved your life, so I dutifully bless him.

  - Let us go eat.

  They ate, and after they slept in chambers somewhat removed one from the other. Kit woke from shallow sleep as the noctis equi plodded towards dawn. Well, to be self-serving, Scadbury Manor was altogether removed from the streets of killing rogues like Orwell. And there was the matter, truly perhaps a duty, of removing himself from playhouse business to serve - who? Erato? Calliope? He had not been in service to Melpomene, rather to her younger ugly sister Thalia. He had had in mind for some years rhyming the tale of the ephebe, hyacinthine-locked, drowned in the Hellespont with no salvatory Frizer plunging in. Of Tom's intentions he could understand little, he riddled overmuch. But Kit foresaw that Tom was foreseeing a kind of dutiful abandonment (duty, always duty) of the pleasure of entwined male limbs, the yielding to marriage, the continuance of the line. In that he would be following the nobility, Essex for one. Essex had, they said, arranged to marry Sir Philip Sidney's widow who was Sir Francis's daughter. The Walsingham red drowned in the Devereux blue. The Walsingham blood must not, like a summer river, dry. It must not be lost to history. Why then was Kit wanted (his own wing, Tom had said, sucking a fish skeleton)? A visible tangible temptation to resist or not resist? My poet?

  They sailed downriver and began the long climb up England's eastern flank to the foreign country that was Scotland. There was ever the comfort to port of green land, ships at anchor, smoke from dwellings. The winds blew at their own caprice and there was brailing and loosing of canvas. They put in for the night at Grimsby and, inns being full, shared a bed as men often must. Naked, they touched. Tom said:

  - Your body does not smell as it did. There is a rankness.

  - Suffused with love of my nymph tobacco.

  - Yes, you are one of Raleigh's tribe. Raleigh must be on guard.

  - This he knows.

  - You will be safe with me.

  - Am I in danger?

  - If Raleigh cannot easily be struck, others may be in manner of a warning. Come then.

  They embraced, coiled, clipped, roused nerves to breaking, joyfully died. And then on to Whitby. And later they touched Dunbar with rain squalls and flapping sails, Tom sick and Kit solicitous. At nightfall they nosed into the Firth and anchored at Leith. There was a brief journey on hired horses to an Edinburgh that smelt of peat fires. Their inn was on Spittle Street, south of the King's stables. Under a rainy moon Holyrood glowered. They lay, as before, in the one bed.

  - Why are you here, Tom?

  - For the delivering of a letter. Do not ask more. Here we become two not one. Sleep. And as to point their disunity he turned his back.

  They awoke to the scent of an air diverse from London's. Still the peat smoke, now meeting them eyes and nose on from the smouldering fire in the room where they were to breakfast, the casement open, though soon at their bidding closed, to a tarter wind than any of the south. The goodwife who waited on them offered parritch and herrings. They must wait for milk from a cow or coo that lowed near by. Kit coughed over a noggin of usquebaugh. In the street after they must pause in their walk to avoid the brief deluge from an emptied Jordan above, hearing the deformed French of gardey loo and knowing the territory to be foreign. Young Fowler they found in lodgings on Grassmarket. He made mock obeisances to his London visitors, bidding them sit, ready with a crock of Scotch ale. His English was of England though tainted with a Scotch rise that rendered each statement a question. Mr Walsingham might proceed at once to the palace where his majesty was at present and by luck residing. The two seals on Mr Walsingham's letter, that of the English monarchy, that of his grace of Canterbury, would ensure prompt ushering into the presence of some medallioned underling. As for Mr Marlin here, the Earl of Huntly was in Holyrood lodgings and would be told of the arrival of the London messenger, who must present himself at a dawn mass the morrow in St Mary's chapel, many thought this to be the dead queen already sanctified, the ignorance of the populace, there to take the consecrated bread as token of the sincerity of his faith and his office and after to deliver his package whose seal was not known to Fowler, nor to Kit, nor to Tom, but would doubtless be known to his lordship.

  So Kit for a day had the freedom of this strange gaunt city, in whose taverns he heard the ancestor of his own tongue, though hardly to be understood. On Highriggs near sundown he saw one he thought he knew and who thought knew him. This man hailed him as Marlin, Merlin, Marley of Corpus Christi.

  - Penry? Is it the same Penry?

  - The same as what? I was at Peterhouse. Oh, you mean the Penry they search for. This sunset wind can be fierce. Let us eat.

  They were given a small room in the back of a tavern named the Twa Corbies. The peat fire smoked. Penry coughed hard, showing good teeth. This scourge of the Church Established was no more than Kit's own age, red of beard and hair, fiery banners for one whose mission of fire was tempered wi
th the smoke of laughter, coughs and laughs being alike in that there was no voluntary checking of them. Penry called for usquebaugh and ale to quench it.

  - We were both, I recall, under poor Francis Kett. You heard of his fiery end? (This potion is fire enough.)

  - With rage. And, answering your former question with more than a cough, yes, I am both author and printer. I oft wrote straight into type. You are eating herring with Martin Marprelate.

  - Where is the press?

  - On a cart in a stable, I will not say where. I come and go over the border. Here the Kirk protects me. But it would be cowardly to cower in Scotland. They will get me yet, I know.

  - Not with assistance from me.

  - I have to give you at least negative thanks. You did not join in with the other play-botchers to attack poor Martin.

  - I saw no cause to attack. Sir Walter Raleigh told me the Queen herself took clandestine pleasure in the Marprelate tracts. Her bishops are a wretched crew and she knows it.

  - Oh, it is the whole damnable heretical nay heresiarchal boiling that smells of hell. You knew me when I had to put a cloak over my Catholicism. I have leapt over the casuistry of the middle way to embrace the other extreme. But Christ was always there, the same body whatever the garments. It was Christ I hungered and hunger for, direct, untempered, naked, body clasped to body. You smile. Why do you smile?

  - Forgive me. You attacked your herring with such hunger. I was thinking of Christ as ichthyos. And you must admit your attachment to the Lord is expressed in highly physical terms.

  - Ah well, it is the shortcomings of language. The saints have bodies, else they would be angels. The smile, I must say, is that of a cynic.

  - Only among cynics will you find tolerance. I confess I have been engaged with others in denying Christ's divinity. In the honesty of free enquiry. Is that wrong? Free enquiry may end up in inability to press the denial. Through the thornbushes of thought thus to arrive at what the unthinking must take as a dogma.

  - We must strip off all to arrive at his celestial presence which is also a fleshly presence. The miracle of God's becoming fallible humanity - the head reels more than with this usquebaugh.

  - Surely not fallible?

  - Flesh failing, flesh responding to pain, then the glory of the resurrection.

  - This we find hard to accent. The physical Christ ascends to a physical heaven. Harlot the cartographer cannot map its whereabouts. When your people come to power will they burn me for this?

  - We will think of burning others when we ourselves have gone through the fire. But he spoke with a smile that showed fishbones in tooth crevices. And, not now smiling, I will go through the fire when the time comes, for come it will.

  - You accept martyrdom?

  - As the final expression of love.

  - Love of Christ which is not love of God.

  - Christ is God, he is God tempered to our weakness. We may expunge from our view the fiery Jehovah of the Hebrews. Christ in glory is still Christ in rags. And then: Why are you here?

  - I accompany one who delivers a message to the King of Scots.

  - On what matter?

  - This I am not permitted to know.

  - It will be about a Catholic invasion of England. Nothing will come of it, I can tell you. There have been Spaniards here nodding in their beards aye aye and then sailing back to the Low Countries. All depends on King Jamie, and King Jamie dithers. He thinks he will come to the English throne in time and he may be right. He is learning to love bishops. Us he hates, but the Kirk is powerful. So you come here with a Catholic emissary.

  - In a manner, keeping my own thoughts secret.

  - You, Penry said, leaning over the broken herring earnestly, must put your house in order. You believe nothing.

  - I believe in the power of words.

  - Power on behoof of what?

  - This I must learn.

  - The time is short and groweth shorter. And, as though the eating of a herring were a frivolous expense of it, he said: I am glad to have met you again. I will pray for your soul. Christ will hear me.

  Kit slept alone that night; Tom must have been granted a bed in the palace. When he came down to the smoky fire, the wind dashing rain against the panes, the dawn all tumbling clouds, he refused breakfast, first not knowing why and then knowing. The sacrament on an empty stomach. But it was no sacrament, it was but bread. And yet throughout all of the Christian time it had been Christ's body. Could the edict of mortal men, preening in fine robes, cancel Christ's own words? But Christ was but a mortal man. Or Christ never was.

  - Hoc est corpus meum. Haec est enim calix sanguinis -

  He retched on the round wafer. It would not be swallowed, it clung as flesh to flesh. The bulky man at the far end of the altar rail and the black-clad thin man at his side had marched before Kit down the short aisle, the bulky one limping, clad in the doublet and hose of the south, though very sober, but with a sort of blanket over his upper body, as for the cold, in what Kit took to be the colours of his clan. Now both looked toward the sound of retching, and he in black whispered to his companion after the ciborium had passed.

  - Ite, missa est.

  They met in the chapel porch, waiting till the scant worshippers, mostly poor old women, had gone out into the wind and rain before speech. The Earl of Huntly donned his bonnet. Kit could not comprehend his words. The other spoke the English of London, saying:

  I am Shelton that serves his lordship. You are come with a letter?

  - And to collect one. Kit handed over his sealed package. The Earl tore open the outer wrapping with great and clumsy hands. Frae Pawley.

  - From Mr Poley. Him perhaps you will know. He has been this way before.

  - Know of. He has suffered prison and torture for the cause. Mr Shelton did not look innocent. He was brisk and with the discreet features of dissembled jesuitry. None more trustworthy, he said.

  - Amen. And Kit almost retched again. And for him?

  - This. And he took from his breast a letter with a threefold seal. Kit stowed it.

  - The Earl of Huntly surveyed Kit from sad grey eyes under eyebrows shaggily grey and licked chapped lips that showed red through a grey beard in need of barbering. He spoke.

  - He says you must keep clear of the martyrisers. You have the look of one most vulnerable. He bids you pray to the mother of God for protection.

  FREE, how free? he thought.

  - Free, totally, Robin Poley pronounced. They were in the Garden, whose garden was all sleeping trees and bushes frost-crusted. Your discharge is confirmed and the bail money remitted. In another sense you are not free, this you know. You will never be free till England is free of the threat. Nor I, he added.

  - The message is what you expected?

  - Sir William Stanley is building his force in the Low Countries and paying his men with coined pewter. The invasion will not be yet. Time to sow fears, hates and so forth. And the Scotch king has declared against the Catholics, we have his own word for that in his own fist. He loves the Archbishop of Canterbury and adores our royal lady. So now they must seek an English claimant to the English throne and who will that be?

  - How can I know?

  - You are closer to him than you think. He has no mere nominal patronage of players. I mean Lord Strange. Stanley is his cousin. King James Sixth and Strange have blood in common, James from the elder sister of Harry Eighth, Strange from the younger on his mother's side. There is little to choose between them, but James hopes to succeed the easy way. He is a drunkard, a sodomite and a coward.

  - Is there evidence that Lord Strange plots to succeed? He is no Catholic. He insists that his players pray before performance, and it is not Catholic prayers. And all must kneel to pray for the Queen at the end.

  - Subterfuge, dissembling. He would have full-blooded popery back on us tomorrow if he could, and all the bishops Spanish. He must be watched. It dies hard with these northern earls, the old faith. The people have rejoiced in a lost ar
mada and are ready to sleep again. They must be pricked awake to the danger. Fears and hates must be sown.

  - As you said.

  - As I said, and you look sour enough about it.

  - I picture Christ on the Mount preaching fear and hate.

  - This is hypocrisy, you know it to be so. Merlin the atheist.

  - Slander.

  - It may be slander but the imputation doth little harm. The true English Church makes atheists and Catholics sleep under one blanket. And how did you enjoy taking the Catholic eucharist?

  - How do you know of this?

  - My meetings with the Scotch earls always begin with a mass. I take it your encounter did too.

  - It was not pleasant.

  - Oh come, man, a morsel of bread, no more.

  - To them, no. To us no for a thousand years and more. It was not decent. The host would not be digested.

  - Superstition, man. I was brought up on eating to my own damnation, which you were not. It is flour and water. Well, enough. You need money for drink, your digestion will soon improve. Philips or Phelips will have some silver for you.

  - Have I now paid my debts? Am I free of the Service?

  - Kit Kit Kit, you will never be free. Or rather in that service to the Service lies your only freedom. Go now.

  Kit went then. Whither and to what I do not know. But I know that on the vigil of the Nativity he was about in icy Eastcheap, wishing himself nor any others joy in the season. There were many in the dusk streets spewing into the kennel their devotion to the child of the birth that was approaching. No great star shone; the sky was murky. Kit took his early dinner at the Three Tuns, where, his past rowdiness forgiven or forgot, he was welcome enough as Mr Tom Berlaine or Dr Forster. He asked for a baked pigeon with a forcemeat of saffron and dried rosemary. He could eat little but was thirsty for ale. He sat alone at one end of the long table at whose other end was a laughing company of stuffers and swillers. Alone though not long. Soon Ingram Frizer came in with Nicholas Skeres, making with the draught of their entrance the candles dance and with Skeres's stumble a chair rock. They were drunk, though gently, and recognised Kit, sitting on either side of him without invitation, Skeres tearing a tiny leg off the pigeon that cooled untouched and tearing the flesh with finicking teeth. He was, doubtless for his Saviour's nativity, clean and cleanly dressed. Frizer was as always in sober black. Kit said: