A Dead Man in Deptford

by Anthony Burgess

  Here after supper Tom Walsingham and Kit had been enacting part of the tragedy of Edward II, near-finished, with much frolicking and embracing. Tom, being Lord of the Manor, must enact the King with

  And here is Kit in reply:

  Here Ingram Frizer came in to the supper room, still in his riding gear, anxious to speak, but Kit cried:

  - This is for you.

  - Here is grave news, master.

  - Wait.

  - It has happened. Sir Francis died in the most frightful odour, noxious urine pouring and spurting from mouth, nose and ears and all holes else, the stench so great that they must bind the body with bandages about their noses. And there be creditors ready to seize his body but they have been foiled through hiding of it.

  - Well, Tom said, we have been awaiting this. He filled himself a beaker of red and drank to his kinsman's safe passage to the fields of everlasting protestant bliss, saying: A great man for the safety of the realm and in the most profound debt because of it. We mourn and now I must puff myself up as the last of the Walsinghams until I wed and beget an heir that shall beget heirs and so to the end of time.

  He strode, drinking and thinking, along the eighteen paintings of Virginia Indians by Captain White and then back again. These he had bought on Kit's recommending, there was money now though never enough. His eyes looked on inner visions of rich heiresses. Kit pinched himself for twinges of jealousy but found none. Let him then. The hiring of boys who would yield their flesh for a penny when Frizer was not about might or might not cease. Marriage was not for pleasure. It was right he marry and beget. Dire punishments for those that abused God's instrument of increase. They kept him down and withal put into his fundament a horn and through the same they thrust up into his body a hot spit, the which passing up into his entrails and being rolled to and fro burnt the same. That was in Holinshed, the end of the king that loved Gaveston's arse better than his own realm, but how much of that might be shown in the playhouse was a matter to be thought on. It could be regarded as most instructive.

  That, Kit had said, is the end of my commitment to the Service, for there will be no more Service.

  - You reckon without Poley and others.

  - Mr Poley, Frizer had said, it was that gave me the news. Skeres and I were together on the business and -

  - What is this business? Kit had asked.

  - None of yours, Tom had replied.

  - I stand, or sit, rebuked.

  - Oh, it is a matter of lending out at interest, Tom had carelessly said.

  - High interest?

  - Tolerably high. Money must be put out at interest, that is in the scriptures. The unjust steward that buried his talent in the earth was consigned to the outer darkness, was he not? Weeping and gnashing of teeth and so forth.

  - And Skeres, Frizer had said, must report to Mr Poley and I was with him, though discreet in the rear. He came out into the garden very agitated with the news. And he would see Mr Marlin.

  So seeing Mr Marlin he was.

  - It is Sir Thomas Heneage now, that was Sir Francis's friend and there be none firmer in the faith. But that is as it were a stopgap till a lasting appointment can be made.

  - Sir Robert Poley?

  Poley squirmed in a mockery of modesty, seated in his fine chair beside his table loaded with papers. He had on his lap a black cat that looked on Kit as in recognition. Ovid's metempsychosis? Were the eyes the eyes of one he had helped to the scaffold? Poley said:

  - We will not talk of deserts but rather of duty. No, it may be that Lord Burleigh and his humpback son will add a new burden to their existing fardels of state. No efficacy, I fear, they know little of the special agonies. There is one other, and we know who that is.

  - If it is my lord of Essex everything will be diminished to civil war.

  - Meaning?

  - The destruction of Sir Walter Raleigh in the interest of Essex alone, and what you term the papist and puritan menace to be granted very short shrift.

  - The Spanish menace, remember that, that only are we engaged in.

  - Not I, not any longer.

  Poley's stroking hand tightened and the cat squealed, though soon mollified with a gentle scratching beneath its chin. Poley said:

  - You are in the Service, you are bound to it.

  - My allegiance was to a man now dead.

  - Your allegiance is to your faith and your country. Sir Francis was nothing, a mere flagpole.

  - An odd metaphor. True, he was thin enough. My indenture was to him.

  - Papers are nothing, papers can be forged.

  - But not with the old Philips or Phelips skill. I went to him to ask for money, but he has become an Essex man. Like others. The fool Baines for one.

  - They go, they shift, others come. You are to go to Scotland with Matt Royden who promises well. And you are to go soon.

  - I cannot take that as an order. I may do things for you as the granting of a favour, but I have other work. My trade is the poet's trade.

  - You mean the ridiculous playhouse.

  - Ridiculous or not, I am coming to the end of a play, and there is a clamour for it among the players.

  - Lord Strong's players? I told you Strong must be watched.

  - The Earl of Pembroke's. Must he be watched too?

  - I told you the danger is only with the northern earls. The danger with those is great. That is what your mission to Scotland is about.

  - I do not accept the mission. You look hurt and your cat views me with dislike, but no matter. Another mission I may yet take, but not now. The play must be finished and put into rehearsal.

  - These fripperies and frapperies of plays. If you will not you will not but you must be warned.

  - Warned of what?

  - You have been privy to much that is most secret and you are not to be let loose to blather among playmen and others. Oh, Kit, Kit, are we not friends? And with the change of tone the cat began purring.

  - Of a kind, yes. But not of the playman kind.

  - Let that pass, there are friends and friends. You fear that I am to become a man under Essex? That would be a fair fear were it to happen. In confidence I tell you that Essex will not last. He married the daughter of our late master, God knows why, he seems not to love her, without permission of the Queen. God knows why the men of the court must apply for permission to marry, it is, may we say, the jealousy of a virgin desiccated but fierce in her demands for a devotion she knows to be a fiction and a fairy tale. To marry is to divorce her majesty. Essex mayhap had some fantasy of inheriting the Sidney virtues along with the Sidney widow. Well, it is done, and all was kept quiet and secret, but now she is enceinte and the Queen knows and she has slapped his face at the court and he has slapped back and much else. Raleigh, I believe, made sure that the Queen knew. Essex, you may be convinced, though he take Sir Francis's daughter (may he rest in some sort of peace) will not take Sir Francis's place. You may take it that little may change, that your friend Robin Poley will be steadfast in the old policies and have power enough, and that Kit Merlin will do his old work when he can. Go to your play but be ready for duty after. That a man did his duty is all he would desire to be writ on his tombstone. But we will not talk of tombstones yet or ever.

  - Still, you have talked of tombstones. And it is all dealing in death, is it not?

  - The death of evil, Kit, the pounding into dust of the enemies of a fair realm.

  - I THINK it may well be our end here, the Earl of Northumberland said, busily smoking. The smoke-filled chamber was a comfort. All puffed, and the smoke caressed the maps and the mappamundi, the tokens of a great world without.

  - Do not, Harlot said, be suffused with Sir Wat's gloom.

  - He has his glooms and his consolations, Adrian Gilbert said. These latter, though, will not last. He was ever a bold man. All of forty thousand pound, he says, and what to show?

  - Tobacco and the solanum tuberosum, said Hariot, also an Indian chief. Though why he must be baptised into
the Christian faith his own gods know.

  - The Queen's insistence, said the Earl, relighting. Well, here he is at court to demonstrate to the sceptical that Virginia existeth. He must be prodded to prove palpable reality. He rightly hit back at the palpaters.

  - He was brought to the Rose, Kit said. He wished to join in the fighting on the stage. He has a fine head, they appear to be a fine people. He counted for me: akafa, tuklo, tukcina. He pronounced Alleyn a hatak kallo and Henslowe a hatak ikhallo. A man strong, a man unstrong. You have discovered, he said to Hariot, a strange people and so have they.

  - Well, I am done with navigating. Sir Wat hands all over to the stock companies and to them no poem such as You brave heroic minds will be written. And he goes back to privateering and plundering of Spanish gold, the Queen pretending ignorance. It is a hard life. And so we lose the head of our being.

  - Here is Adrian to confer familial authority on our last sessions, said the Earl. Durham House no longer the sole eyrie of profitless speculation.

  - Profitless, you say profitless? Adrian Gilbert spoke, that was Sir Walter's half-brother. He had none of Sir Walter's ruddiness and bulk, none of the Devonian burr, though much of the sharp eye of enquiry. And how are we to measure profit?

  - He means, Hariot said, that the inspissation of a bigoted and superstitious nation with the new knowledge and the new scepticism is slow to accomplish.

  - You will never instruct the bulk of the nation, the Earl said. And the heads of a nation do not cry out to know that their power is built on most flimsy foundations. They are quick - I think of the bishops mostly - to instruct the lower sort through the spoken word, since the unwashed are also the unreading, and will even, as with the Marprelate flimflammery, use the playhouse for damning what they wish damned. What has our Merlin here done to flush a clean wind through the brains of the sausage-chewers? Faustus could as well have come from the bishops themselves with its flouting of the virtue of knowledge.

  - What is spoken on the stage, Kit said low and with some despondency, is pored over by the jailers of our souls. Only history is unassailable. Here is the truth of those that lived and it is nobody's office to praise or condemn.

  Her ladyship of Pembroke, Adrian Gilbert said, is always saying that the people whose forebears made the past, and she means the common sort, should know that past. Show that beliefs and manners do change, that all things are subject to change, that there is no stasis.

  - You sound like Warner, Harlot said. Where is Warner?

  - We were together in our alchemic enquiries at Wilton. He stayed, I am here at a near-brother's summons. He helps the Countess to make filthy her most delicate hands.

  - Honoris tui studiosissimus, Kit murmured. All looked askance and he said: Pardon me. The letter she sent me stank of assafoetida or devil's dung. I was charmed. Laurigera stirpe prognata Delia, Sidnaei vatis Apollinei genuina soror I had written. This was the dedication to Tom Watson's Amintae Gaudia, writ for her but yet to be printed, my Latin is better than Tom's but not better than hers. She disliked my play for Pembroke's Men. Too much sodomy, she said, and not enough history. I cut out the buggering of King Edward with a branding iron. Well, she shall have history without sodomy, if it can be found.

  Sir Walter's man came to the door to announce that Sir Walter and his lady were arisen and about, all might go down to the hall to partake of somewhat, an it please my lord and gentlemen. They rose and wondered if they should abandon their pipes. Lady Raleigh was a most delicate lady.

  - Lady Raleigh, the Earl stoutly said, would not be Lady Raleigh if she abhorred tobacco. It is in the weft of her husband's skin. But we will descend pipeless.

  - Below, there was a table with decanted wine white and red, cold small fowls, a sallet of cold boiled tubers diced with parsley, and a careless throw of kickshawses. Then Sir Walter, jewelled like the sun in his glory, entered with his lady. This was Bess (it was a kind of deference to her royal mistress to rustify her given name thus) of the Throckmortons, and, seeing her for the first time, Kit felt that the disposition of his inner juices might well undergo a kind of Pauline conversion, as in Kyd's wretched poem:

  Though never enmity, indifference rather, all women being his mother and sisters and odd oyster wenches. She was termed one of the Queen's Glories, and so, by God, she was, or rather one of, by God, God's. Glory was in her eyes, and the sun in his glory debased through the mullioned window was caught and reglorified in her hair. Straight as a tree in farthingale of cloth of gold with scarlet petticoat, with a waist that a man might span with two hands, nay to be truthful three, her bosom demurely covered to show she had yielded her knot, she radiated qualities above virtue, the eyes grey and merry, a smile as of kindly mockery on her lips, and her scent not of the mixers of aromatic drops but of spring fields and the bruised fruits of the fall. Kit near went down on his knees. 0 dea certa.

  - You said? she said, smiling.

  - This is our poet Merlin, sweetheart. The rest you know. Well, my lord and gentlemen, here is Raleigh the married man, and we may expect the worst from her majesty, since the Earl of Essex is back in favour. A man must go his own way and a maid hers, in ecstasy we court disaster, but there will be time. Amor vincit omnia, though the royal displeasure may be said to be an exception. "Tomorrow we ride to Devon, whence no doubt we shall be haled out and back. Now we eat together as friends.

  And so they did, standing about the table with no stiff formality. Bess, Lady Raleigh, chewed a pheasant leg with exquisite greasy lips, a dancing beaker of white in an exquisite hand, and said to Kit:

  - There was your Dr Faustus at court for the Shrovetide revels. Her majesty was much agitated by your parade of the Seven Deadly Sins.

  - She may have known it was a tribute to dead Tarleton, my lady, who travelled the country with a play of the same name. And that doubtless took her back to the Earl of Leicester. She liked the rest?

  - These days she likes nothing. And what Wat and I have done she will like least.

  - An end, this Wat was saying, to our honest endeavours. But do not think there will be an end to enquiry less honest. There is some murmur of having Tom Harlot here up before the Privy Council.

  - Oh no, not that, oh my God not that.

  - Love and reason, it seems, are booted out of the door. Well, we expected this. Did we not expect it, Kit Merlin?

  - I know not what to expect.

  - Always expect the worst. Exspecta pessima. I think I shall change the family motto.

  - Exspectamus, amended Kit the Latinist.

  I M u s T now with reluctance bring in the man I lodged withal and who was to be my associate for many years with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company not formed in Kit's brief lifetime. His name, like all names, suffered a multiplicity of deformation, from Shagspaw to Shogspere, from Choxper to Jacquespere, which was the ingenious etymologising of a drunken Huguenot, of whom London had many. He and Kit were at work on The Contention Between the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, a most incommodious title which later would be changed to Henry VI Part One. The play of Edward II, though a brutalisation of historic truth, had pleased with its nobles and bishops and violence, and there was a need now for further theatricalising of old Holinshed. Kit had invited his collaborator to Scadbury, with Tom Walsingham's approval, and as they sat in the summer saloon Kit asked what he should be called, and he replied that Will was enough. Then he said:

  - Aio te, AEacida, Romanos vincere posse. This will not do.

  - You do not pronounce it aright. Are you an Oxford man?

  - No, they whipped Latin into me at the grammar school, very little and no Greek. Perhaps I in my ignorance am the better fitted to say it will not do. It is learned and will not be understood.

  - It will be by those that have read their Ennius. It is what the oracle at Delphi told Pyrrhus. It means both that he will conquer the Romans and that the Romans will conquer him. It is a pregnant ambiguity.

  - Its pregnancy, like that of a wife t
wo months gone, will not be easily apparent. But this I know. Difaciant laudis summa sit ista tuae. I have read a sufficiency of Ovid. But would York's son cry that to his murderer? It seems to me that you seek the praise of my lord Pembroke and his lady rather than the comprehension of the multitude.

  - The multitude oft likes to be mystified. It flatters them to think they are thought to know the classical authors.

  - If you will have it, though I remain doubtful. I wrote this while you were wandering the woods with your Lord of the Manor.

  - So the adder Tom killed bit your fancy.

  - We have enough adders in Warwickshire. Listen.

  - You have learned, you have been learning.

  - You find yourself there?

  - It lacks a shout. Hyena's heart, no, lion's, no, tiger's heart dressed in, no, wrapped in a female skin, woman's hide. Why did you come to this gear, as they say?

  - To stop breeding. Three children were too many to keep on the wage of a lawyer's clerk. When the Queen's Men came I showed them part of a play and they had me because one of them had been beaten to death in the churchyard. I had been trying to translate Plautus but it seemed easier to pen my own lines. So I am here, though first as an actor. They will not have it that grammar-school boys can write plays. Botch and help when speed is needful, yes, but not sit to write a Tamburlaine.

  - Well, I must leave much to you with this, and I am not sorry. The Lord of the Manor requires a poem so I must write a poem, he will lock me up with bread and water if not. Besides, I need to.

  - What theme?

  - Zero and Menander or some such thing.

  - You mock yourself.

  - It is all a great mockery. What is there for us who have no land nor goods to trade in? I think my lines from Ennius and Ovid are to comfort myself with the illusion that my learning has a use. Why, sir, you are a gentleman with your Latin tags, I had thought you to be a hedge-dragged sturdy beggar.

  - You sang of profitable labour that time.

  - When?

  - In that tavern. I heard you. You nodded to me.

  - I was abstracted. And now am abstracted in the other sense. Will you stay here while I am gone?

  - I like not too much the man Frizer. He looks down his nose.