A Dead Man in Deptford

by Anthony Burgess

  - She will not sleep in a bed. She wanders the house at night but does little harm except to clatter the skillets down. It is better thus. We have thrown away overmuch soaked bedding. Thus Kit's mother, and his father:

  - What is it then that you now are or do? You make plays in the playhouse but you are in the country in Kent. You are with him and yet he is not your master.

  - Friendship. He gives me the peace to write a poem.

  - It is not what we foresaw, his mother said. The Church with a fair living and a wife and children. You are twenty-eight and that is not young.

  - I am in the midst of things with lords and knights. All will be well. I am known as a poet.

  - A poet, his father said, tasting the word, his bald head aglow in candleshine. We did not think to have a poet in the family.

  - There is more truth in poesy than in the droning of sermons.

  - We have had trouble about religion and we shall have more. These men that nose out Catholics and atheists have been around. They say the Spaniards will try a new landing at Dover.

  - They will not. Do not fear the Spaniards. If there is to be trouble it will be with Huguenots and Flemings. There is a smell of it already in London.

  - Why cannot we all be left alone? his mother cried in some distress. There were some saying that Dorothy is a witch because she babbled to the black cat next door. Well, to sleep, it is a blessing. All we must fear there is our dreams. And so, Kit, to yours. And, when Kit stood, she hugged him and the candlelight showed tears.

  Kit lay in the small bedchamber next to Tom's. A full moon looked in, not long arisen. He could not sleep, since here he was, though this was not the house of his boyhood, put upon by ghosts of a younger self who plucked at him and said: You might have gone this way or else that. He fell into a slumber when the night watchman had called it was two of the clock and all was well or as well as it might be, the fine weather was menaced by a north wind newly sprung. He was drawn from that by a scrabbling at the door, that would be poor Dorothy, then the door's opening and it was not Dorothy but Tom. He could not sleep either, he could sleep well only at Scadbury in his great bed. And now you may allay your sunset engorgement. Here in my parents' house? Smear it with your manhood, you are no longer a boy. The rich drops of a manner of exorcism. His parents' chamber was across the stairwell; they would not hear. So Kit flooded the belled town in his fancy with a kind of defiant manhood, and they sank together to sleep, naked, entwined, uncovered like the drunken Noah.

  At dawn the door was open wide and the Noah story was in reversal, for there stood the father in his nightshirt looking in on the son, Dorothy clinging to the father's hand and pointing drooling. Not so poor Dorothy wandering the house at night. The father showed great grey shock in the grey dawn while the cocks crowed.

  - Oh God. Oh my dear God. Oh no. It is not possible. The poet. The filth of it all.

  And then the mother, whom the father tried to thrust away from the entwined sleepy nakedness. Heard of these things, in their innocence not truly believed. Oh God, no.

  KIT' rode back alone against an insolent thrusting wind and through squalls. Shame shame shame rustled in the leaves. Tom, unashamed, would lodge in the inn in the cathedral's shadow, with brutal bells hammering at him when he rose betimes. The conference of magistrates would take long, he said when they met for their midday cheese and ale at a tavern where there were no French, and he was already sick of it. Kit had best return to Scadbury and, now that they were in their former intimacy, warm the great bed. Ingram Frizer would not be much around, having, with the aid of the daggerman Nicholas Skeres, much drubbing of debtors to do in London. Sixty pounds, as an example, lent out to a squire's son at centum per centum, the fear of some dying of the plague that was sharpening its teeth and the relicts unwilling or unable to meet obligations under law. But this usury was surely not lawful, it was pure Barabas. They be willing, their immediate need is so great, they will sign anything and must be held to it. I do not like it. You do not have to like it, my tenants' rents are slow to come in and meagre, you bade me buy the Smith pictures, I was cheated in a matter of tree-felling. Keep to your poem.

  He returned not to Scadbury but to his London hovel. He had his own money to collect from Henslowe, an unpaid moiety on the Guise play which they said it was safe now to do. He entered London in a bad time. Tom Nashe told him, on London Bridge, of Sir Walter and his lady and their committal to the Tower. The Queen had been slow in discovery of their marriage. Lady Bess had made excuses of family sickness for her absences from court, the excuses now proved to be lies, and the Queen had stormed and hurled small objects. Now both were lodged apart in the stinking Tower, said Nashe, and he cited one who had said that Sir W.R. had been too inward with one of Her Majesty's maids and another that had spoken of all being alarm and confusion at this discovery of the discoverer and not indeed of a new continent but of a new incontinent. It was all Essex stuff; the Earl was prancing and dancing and preening. A man picked out by fortune, one said, for fortune to use as her tennis ball, for she tossed him up and out of nothing and to and fro to greatness. Kit's soul sank. And, Nashe said, Tom Watson was sick. God, Tom Watson sick, oh no.

  Kit visited him afraid, the epidemia as they termed it was manifested, as they put it, in a most pernicious and contagious fever. How was it contagious? Did it hover invisible in air and invisibly bite? Tom was no longer in the great house where he had tutored the stupid boy smelling of cinnamon. He was at his old home in bed, his wife fluttering about. The buboes were clear in his naked armpits; he lay sweating in a soaked bed. Should they then be cut? They say not, they say they will go down. But the cack, Tom Watson moaned, and the vomiting. They say, said his wife, that vomiting is to be provoked with walnut and celandine juice and powdered radish. There is no need, I vomit enough. And he puked foully into the cracked swilling pot by the bed. And, his wife sobbed, I am to carry a red wand of three foot in length when I go out to buy so as to show there is one sick here, and there is a notice outside I have writ on wood, it is an order or command, saying Lord have mercy on us.

  - I will be back, Kit said. Vomit out the poison, the sweating will go, take nourishment.

  - All comes back and out. I am to die.

  - Do not say that, Kit cried in distress. Dear Tom. We have had this before, most recover. I will be back.

  But he would not. Out on the street fearful citizens were, on orders, sluicing the gutters with their twenty buckets from the pumps, fearful old grandams sitting and counting. Afar there were shots of guns and howlings of agony. It would be the men of the Common Huntsman at their work of dog-shooting. A dog's bite would do it if it had been bit by a rat.

  Some said rats, others said foreigners that had brought it in on their ships. I was playing at the Theatre in Have At You Pretty Rogue, a comedy that did not please knocked swiftly together by Nashe, Dekker and Munday, when the apprentices rioted. They heard what they thought was Dutch or Flemish spoken by a hugebellied man who laughed aloud and drank pottle ale, this was during the prayer for the Queen after the jig, and they set upon him. He was in fact from the north of the kingdom on a London visit and his speech sounded outlandish. Outside the playhouse they had stripped him bare and were like to hang him from a sycamore until they saw on the street the man's wife who cried out that he was English enough and desisted, having also seen a known Flemish master weaver slinking by, and him they got. Then three mounted troopers of the Lord Mayor rode into this territory rightly beyond the City's jurisdiction and hit out with staves, though one with a sword that sliced through the belly of an apprentice who screeched in great pain till he died. Then there was fighting without cause for fighting's own dear sake until a cart loaded with five or six corpses came by, a bellman tolling in front, and there was running away in horror, though where to run, since the plague was within and everywhere, and the time had come for our players to run to the country and perform in air uninfected. Criers at all corners read what the magistracy put out:
A strong and substantial watch sufficient to suppress any tumult is to be kept. Moreover for the avoiding of unlawful assemblies no plays may be used at the Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose or other usual places until the Feast of St Michael.

  Will of Warwickshire would stay. He sat calmly at his work while I put my garments together in a basket and a leathern bag.

  - Well, I said, peering, the empty eagle, not a good phrase, is pecking all around, you had best keep yourself aloof.

  - One cannot be aloof of an eagle. The Muse will look after her own. And he looked on me with a kind of smug fatness as I prepared to flee with the others. Then he quoted something not his: Croyden doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn, The want of term is town and city's harm. What does Nashe mean by that?

  - Best ask him. For I was in haste.

  In truth it was only in late summer that he met Tom Nashe, leaner than ever but untouched by contagion as was he himself, in the beer garden of the Dansker, where a sweet breeze sighed from the south and the plague howled some way off. Nashe said:

  - You know Robin Greene is dead? No, not of the plague neither. A cracked heart and a burst liver, somewhat like poor Tarleton. Indeed, this pestilential Harvey, Gabriel not the other, has said something of the king of the paper stage playing his last part and is gone to Tarleton, a filthy man. I blame myself a little. I fed him on pickled herrings and Rhenish, he drank thirstily and gorged greedily, then he collapsed in the street and was taken in by a kind cordwainer. His wife crowned him with bays or perhaps parsley, he rambled much about his greatness while dying. Well, he spits venom as well as that boast from the grave. You have seen the book?

  Will took and opened it, having first wiped its cover on the grass. He read: For there is an upstarte Crowe beautified with oure feathers that with his Tygers harte wrapt in a player's hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the beste of you; and being an absolute Johannes fac totum is in his own conceite the onlie Shakescene in a countrie. He said:

  - Spite. And he thinks that line to be mine.

  - He gets at Kit another way. Read back and aloud.

  - Wonder notte, thou famous gracer of tragedians that Greene, who hath saide with thee like the fool in his hearte There is no God should nowe give glorie to his greatnesse; for penetrating is His powre, His hande lyes heavie upon me, He hath spoken unto me with a voyce of thunder - There is danger there, I would say, an imputation of atheism in print. For me, nothing. For him -

  - He will ride over it, safe with Tom Walsingham in leafy Kent. He rides over much, there is protection there. Have you noted that the whole town is suffused with poetry? Lord have mercy on us makes a good last line. It is everywhere, but now it is my own. Dust hath closed Helen's eye, I am sick I must die, Lord have mercy on us.

  - The present number?

  - Something over fifteen thousand, they say. The whole city a charnel-house.

  NAY, for the end of that year we have an exact figure of sixteen thousand five hundred and three. And it was a warm Christmas, very green, and the deep pits were dug and the carts trundled. The Queen, safe as she believed from contagion at Greenwich, had her plays of the grim festal season performed, and it was a mingling of all the companies that had returned to town that gathered in her great hall to enact Kit's Rich Yew of Malta. She was not against the Jews as so many were and I, who took the part of Pilia-Borza, observed her so closely that I near missed a cue, noting that she laughed little though munched much from a silver dish of candied figs. It was not, to speak the truth, an audience all that easy to please, no groundlings here content with a cracked sconce and pig's blood and leering quips, all ladies and gentlemen finely dressed though many discreetly drunk, Essex stroking the Queen's hand but often thrust irritably away, candles candles and again candles, and at one point a damask curtain enflared but swiftly doused out. It seemed to me that the epilogue that Alleyn, great nose plucked off, spoke to the court sneered at absent Kit:

  - My princely patience, she cried out while Alleyn was bowing low, is not over-wronged. But do not put blame on your betters, who make what you oft mar. In the beginning was the word.

  This seemed to be a kind of blasphemy, but none of the black bishops there that had fidgeted during the play were like to arraign her with it. She spoke, like poor dead Greene, for the makers not the puppets. Then she left, bowed and curtsied at, with a great rustling of skirts and clink of necklaces and winking of jewels. As she left to resume, for all I knew, crafty statecraft and raving and striking at ministers, there was a sigh of relief like a gale and they that had been covertly drunk were more openly so. There was a gap among the Queen's simpering and tittering Glories and no silver armour flashed at the head of the Queen's Guard. We players were given by disdainful footmen but scant fodder as befitted our beastly status - spiced ale let cool and tarts of mince rank and salty - but chewing Alleyn was high with his performance and in exultation said:

  - Tomorrow we see Henslowe. He may open up the Rose.

  - Without permission?

  - This was a manner of permission. The Queen desired a play and by God she has had it, her subjects may too, the law is for all.

  But it was not until January 26 of 1593 (I must from now till the end be most exact of dating) that Henslowe dared frowns and the frost to blare the trumpet for the play of Guise and the Paris massacre. At last Kit, plump from a Scadbury Christmas, had the triumph of witnessing a work long boxed and locked, and the afternoon's gather was PS3 14s, but 3s 4d lower than Harry Sixt, which was in the nature of a whisper as to the future rule of the stage. And to Kit's joy and that of many others Sir Walter signalled his new freedom by showing himself to the lower world, gorgeous in his raiment, striding alone into the Rose, planting himself very visibly on a stage stool, and most vigorously making some of the players cough with draughts and puffings of ample tobacco. And after he was glad to take drink with the players before a fire in the tiring room.

  - And your admirable lady?

  - Out, thin, defiant, eating hearty at Durham House. You must not think I am just come from the Tower. I was sent under guard to Dartmouth to quiet rioting and ravaging sailors who were not pleased at Sir Wat's incarceration. The Queen cannot have it all her own way. The sailors were busy looting the Madre de Dios, my take, my prize. Mace, nutmegs, satin, amber, ebony, pearls, gold. The Queen's officers could not control them, but I did. Fourscore thousand pound for her ungracious majesty and for me nothing but what is my right as a man. Free, at least. And if I cannot speak freely at court without termagant rebukes, then I shall speak freely in parliament as one of the people's tribunes.

  - Speak freely on what?

  - I will find something.

  Parliament opened on February 19, with the knights and burgesses coming up but timidly from their country estates, for they rightly feared contagion. The Queen feared nothing, and glared from her throne in the Upper House while she exhorted all not to lose good hours in idle speeches full of verbosity and vain ostentation. She said bluntly that she required the voting of money to meet the imminent invasion of the Spanish from the north and the passing of laws to put down Catholic and puritan alike with brisk severity. There was also the matter of the stranger in our midst, it was in the nature of this realm and its tolerance to welcome all such as were sorely misgoverned in their own lands, and such as, preferring life in a free country, frisked up trade and helped goods to flow, whatever that meant. Still, the bill that was presented was against Alien Strangers selling by Retail any Foreign Commodities, but it was meant for a stuffed figure to be pierced or burnt by the speeches of the liberally given. But Sir Walter was loud in its defence:

  - You argue that it is against Charity, against Honour and against Profit to expel these Strangers. In my opinion it is not true Charity to relieve them for those who flee hither have forsaken their own king, and religion is only a pretext for them. As for Honour, it is indeed honourable to use Strangers as we are used among Strangers, but it is baseness in a nation to
give liberty to another nation which they refuse to grant to us. In Antwerp we are not allowed to have a single tailor or shoemaker living there; at Milan we cannot have so much as a barber. And as for Profit, they are discharged of subsidies, they pay nothing, yet they eat our profits and supplant our own nation.

  Some disagreed, many did not and, when the speech leaked out to the lowlier world, it was seen as an incitement on a high level to the continuance of rioting against the outlander. But on February 2, the feast of Candlemas or the Virgin Mother's churching, the playhouse that had against the law opened was by the law shut, and there were few places for apprentices to gather with clubs and daggers and shards of broken glass.

  - We have had all this afore, said the squire Sir Richard Bradbrooke in parliament. My father did speak much of the day he was not speedily to forget, videlicet May Day of 1517, when there was great apprentice rioting against insolent foreigners. It cannot be put down, as it is the people's voice, though in the tongue of the young. The Sheriff of London of those days, who was Sir Thomas More, he could not well do it.

  - He, said one with no pertinence, was a Catholic traitor.

  - They were all Catholics then and he had not betrayed at that time. What I say is let them do what they will, it is sport that breaks but few pates, and it showeth to these overbearing Dutch and Flemings and French that flaunt their money that they be but guests of the commonweal and no more.

  - It is known, cried a voice, that you are indebted to a Fleming I will not out of decency name, and here is a fine way of cancelling an obligation, kill all Flemings and while your hand is in all other outlanders.

  - I protest. This is monstrous slander, I will not have it, I will have his words put to the arbitrament of steel.