A Dead Man in Deptford

by Anthony Burgess

  - I will lie down, Frizer said. It is the pain in my leg. I bear no ill feeling, but there is the pain. And wincing he lay on the daybed.

  - The loan, Kit said.

  - Shall I put it as your stakes by the board? You may be in luck. Shall we play high?

  - Low, very low.

  - As you will. Sit. Take the dice. Start.

  Kit tossed the pair. He moved his discs but his finger-ends were clumsy. Skeres had a monkey quickness with his dirty paws. He was easily first to move his store to the inner table. Frizer on the bed groaned. Kit dropped three of his coloured pieces. Enough, in no mood for play. You fear the catertreys? Fear not. Again? Kit rose, saying he must go. The loan. You already have your pledge. I do not see it.

  - Stored for safety, along with your baggage. Urchins in and out, quick of the finger. Come, you mar the merriment of the day. It will be suppertime soon. What is it to be, Ingram?

  - A beef pie in a deep dish. With onions and pounded peppercorns.

  - You hear? The Peppercorn sails tomorrow at dawn. Some that come from afar for it sleep on board. It saves the cost of an inn.

  - And so?

  - To exhibit my knowledge of the traffic of the river I grant such breadcrumbs of information. And so nothing. Ah, the awakened Robin.

  Robin Poley was down, washed, combed, neat, a marvellous proper man, yawning and smiling.

  - Sleep is like hard labour. It promotes powerful appetite. I smell good news from the kitchen.

  - Sleep is strange, Skeres said. Some die in it. Dreams are strange. A man can wake sweating in terror. What is that dark country of the mind through which we wander in sleep?

  - A forest, Poley said, in whose depths the soul lieth hidden like a golden egg.

  - Pretty, Skeres said. You are something of a poet. Is he not so, Mr Christopher, oh I will say Kit, we are all friends.

  - As you please.

  - May I too say Kit? Frizer asked from the daybed.

  - As you please. I have small dignity to maintain.

  - I will ask you three riddles, Poley said to Kit, comfortably sitting at the table now cleared of its backgammon board and counters. Your answer must be in one word only. You are ready? Good.

  Ready, yes. The riddles and their solutions were to no purpose at ail. The answer was to something else and must be in the manner of a triple amen.

  - Is the Queen a virgin?

  - No.

  - Is God in his heaven?

  - No.

  - Have you ever bedded a woman?

  - No.

  All except Kit sighed out as it were with a kind of reverence. Poley said:

  - War, you will remember, depended that time on a straight yes or no in a message from Flushing. Well, we know by that no. The stout smell of beef and onions marches towards us. The wine danceth.

  And so it did. The Widow Bull herself brought in the crusted mound, her girl the trenchers and horn spoons not knives. It was, said the widow, stewed very soft for them without teeth. But all had teeth and strong ones. They ate smokily, Frizer left his daybed limping but limped not in his steady devouring. Good, he said, excellent good. Thou eatest but little, he said daringly to Kit. Thou drinkest overmuch of the wine. Eating and drinking should be nicely in equipoise.

  - Supper, Poley said, is a word of strange finality. Perhaps that derives from the scriptures. Revenge is a good supper but a bad breakfast, they say. Do I have that right?

  It was indeed a deep dish, they could not eat all. There was a sighing and a loosening of belts after. The scullions would be glad of the leavings, the fragments, the orts. Kit had not loosened his belt. Skeres called somewhat roughly that the table be cleared, though let the wine and the cups stay. And he called too for the reckoning. He said to Kit, while the others faintly smiled:

  - We thank thee for the kindness of the bestowal of this merry day. Good wine, food, company. That one who should have come did not come we must account a small disappointment. Ah, here is the reckoning.

  He took it from the hands of the Widow Bull (Pasiphae, Kit thought for a moment madly) and said:

  - It amounts near enough to the amount you asked to borrow. Dear, true, but she keeps a dear house. Thus - item, one fish in a coffin I is 5d; item, two quarts of Bordeaux wine 15s Od; item -

  - You Jest, Kit said, and it is sour. I was invited. The reckoning is not mine.

  - Not altogether jest, Skeres said. There is a reckoning to be made. Let me play a manner of president of a council. I sit here, and you two gentlemen sit either side of the carrier of Christ.

  Kit started at hearing his name's true meaning in that mouth. There was no pretence of merriment now. Robin Poley, smiling, moved his chair to Kit's right. The limping and wincing Frizer skirred his chair along the floor to the left. So now all three faced Skeres for what Kit did not know. But these others seemed to know.

  - What doss thou do, Skeres asked, with a quill pen that is past sharpening?

  - Do you really require an answer?

  - Good, thou knowest.

  - I am not thou.

  - Very well, you. You are not anything. You need not sword, money nor goods. Not even nutriment, though you have eaten little enough. The wine will assist your passage.

  - I understand nothing. I will be off. And he rose, but Frizer's arm, surprisingly strong, pulled him down. I will not be pawed, I will not be hindered, let me pass.

  - Listen, Skeres said, and he looked to Poley for approval. Poley nodded. You are in the situation of one that is no proper criminal, unmeet for trial or hanging. Of one, rather, that had best be voided. We heard your threefold no, we speak not of treachery but of its possibility. There is one reason for your being voided. There are two others, and you will never know whether it is a knight or an earl who wishes the voiding. The wise man takes his money where he can, like the judge that takes bribes from both sides. One deletes you from life's book as a warning to others, or because he fears your tongue, or for dislike and no more, or as payment for insolence. The other is afraid of a speaking out under duress that will light the powder of his own ruin. Whatever it is, you had best go, though not out of that door. This is by no means an execution. We three here seek only to defend ourselves against a wild man. For you are wild to leave, are you not?

  Skeres took out a dagger and slid it across the table so that it lay under Kit's hand. Kit hesitated and then grasped it. He was permitted to rise.

  - Go on, strike, you passionate shepherd.

  Kit struck at Frizer's head but grazed his brow. Frizer spoke foully. He reached over for Kit's striking hand but the reach was too far. It was Poley that seized the right hand while Frizer seized the left. Poley wrested out the weapon and threw it to Skeres. Skeres, on his feet, came round. He said:

  - I will hold. Thou, dear Ingram, shalt have the privilege of the strike. You have been broody long and may now lay the egg. The eye will serve, the right one.

  He was round to take Kit's left arm from Frizer. Frizer and Poley wheeled Kit so that he faced the light from the garden. Frizer stood before him with the dagger.

  - It is, Skeres said, a target permitted in fencing, though the sword's length doth not always allow the accurate thrust. Ugly hell, gape not, come not, Lucifer.

  - There is nothing in truth, Poley said. The blowing out of a candle. They tell me he was a good poet.

  Kit's mind rose above all, observing, noting. The fear belonged all to his body. The dagger-point was too close to his eye for his eye to see it. Frizer spoke very foully:

  - Filthy sodomite. Filthy buggering seducer of men and boys. Nasty Godless sneering fleering bastard. Aye, I will lay the egg.

  So he thrust. The eye's smoothness deflected the blade to what lay above under the bone. Kit felt at first nothing. Then dissolution, the swooning of the brain, great agony. He heard the scream in his throat and saw with his left eye Poley, recoiling from him, making the signum crucis. Dying, he knew the scream would not die with him, not yet. It lived for a time its own
life. He even knew, marvelling, looking down on it, that his body had fallen, thudding. Then he knew nothing more.

  So I suppose it happened, but I suppose only. The finding of the coroner, endited in good black lasting ink, was that on Wednesday the thirtieth of May in the year of our Lord 1593 Messrs Marlowe, Poley, Frizer, Skeres (now come his words) about the tenth hour before noon met together in a room in the house of a certain Eleanor Bull, widow, and there passed the time together and then dined and after dinner were in quiet sort together there and walked in the garden until the sixth hour after noon and then together and in company supped; and after supper Ingram Frizer and Christopher Marlowe uttered one to the other divers malicious words for the reason that they could not agree about the payment of the sum of pence, that is le recknynge, there. Christopher Marlowe then lying upon a bed in the room where they supped and moved with anger against Ingram Frizer and Ingram, sitting with his back towards the bed where Christopher Marlowe was lying and with the front part of his body towards the table and with Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley sitting on either side of him so that he could in no wise take flight, it so befell that Christopher Marlowe on a sudden and of his malice against Ingram maliciously drew the dagger of the said Ingram, which was at his back, and with the same dagger gave him two wounds on his head; whereupon Ingram, in fear of being slain and sitting between Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley so that he could not in any wise get away, in his own defence and for the saving of his life then and there struggled with Christopher Marlowe to get away from his dagger, in which affray Ingram could not get away from Marlowe; and it so befell that in that affray Ingram in defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid to the value of 12d, gave Christopher a mortal wound over his right eye of which wound Christopher Marlowe then and there instantly died.

  And so the jurors say upon their oath that the said Ingram Frizer killed and slew Christopher Marlowe aforesaid on the thirtieth day of May in the thirty-fifth year of the reign of our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth at Deptford Strand within the verge in the room aforesaid, in the manner and form aforesaid, in the defence and saving of his own life. In witness of which thing the Coroner as well as the Jurors have interchangeably set their seals.

  Le recknynge? What Frenchified madness is this? It is a lie of language, unpurposed maybe, that is a badge or brooch of the lie of the whole. Even the covering of the body with its ravaged eyesocket, that the delicate stomachs of the jurors might not be turned, this too was a kind of lie. And there is the lie of anonymity, since, as the plague growled still, that body was, straight after the lying verdict, interred in a grave unmarked in the churchyard of St Nicholas in Deptford.

  I have lived long. I have seen both the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh, in that order, go to the block on Tower Hill: treason, like loyalty, is a wide word; at length the two concepts become one. I saw Thomas Walsingham knighted and married to a wife who grew much in favour with the Queen of the Scotch slobberer that was less of a man than the irritable harridan he replaced. I even, as a player with the King's Men at Valladolid, saw the sealing of perpetual peace between Spain and the new Britain that contained England as one of its provinces. Most names in this brief chronicle faded from sight, so we may envisage their owners dying in peaceful beds perfumed with lavender. My own name you will find, if you care to look, in the folio of Black Will's plays, put out by his friends Fleming and Condell in 1623. In the comedy of Much Ado About Nothing, by some inadvertency, I enter with Leonato and others under my own identity and not, as it should be, the guise of Balthasar to sing to ladies that they sigh no more. So a useless truth obtrudes on to a most ravishing lie. I would say finally that, as the earth turns and the truth of summer and the lie of winter interchange (interchangeably set their seals), so the bulky ball of history revolves, and what a man dies for may become the thing that dies for him. The England that killed Kit Marlowe or Marley or Merlin will define itself in one of its facets by what he wrote before he died swearing. And there, you see, we have another lie. Let me lie down and, fair or foul reader, say farewell.

  Not quite. Your true author speaks now, I that die these deaths, that feed this flame. I put off the illmade disguise and, four hundred years after that death at Deptford, mourn as if it all happened yesterday. The disguise is i11-made not out of incompetence but of necessity, since the earnestness of the past becomes the joke of the present, a once living language is turned into the stiff archaism of puppets. Only the continuity of a name rides above a grumbling compromise. But, as the dagger pierces the optic nerve, blinding light is seen not to be the monopoly of the sun. That dagger continues to pierce, and it will never be blunted.

  Author's Note

  N 1940, months before the Battle of Britain began, the Luftwaffe trundled over Moss Side, Manchester, on its way to the attempted destruction of Trafford Park. In Moss Side, in the small hours, I sat, my induction into the British Army deferred, typing my university thesis on Christopher Marlowe. The visions of hell in Dr Faustus seemed not too irrelevant. "I'll burn my books - ah, Mephistophilis." The Luftwaffe was to burn my books and even my thesis. Mephistophilis, as Thomas Mann was to show in his own Doktor Faustus, was no mere playhouse bogeyman.

  I determined some day to write a novel on Marlowe. The year 1964, which was his natal quatercentenary, was also that of William Shakespeare, and the lesser had to yield to the greater. In that year I published the novel Nothing Like the Sun, a fantastic speculation on Shakespeare's love-life. Now, with the commemoration of Marlowe's murder in 1593, I am able to pay such homage as is possible to an ageing writer.

  I make a certain claim here to secondary scholarship. All the historical facts are verifiable. One of the known Elizabethan thugs was named George Orwell, which is embarrassing, but truth must not yield too much to discretion or delicacy: after all, that expungeable bravo had a better claim to the name than Eric Blair. I acknowledge the help I have received from the major biographies by John Bakeless and F.S. Boas as well as the extremely useful "informal" life by H.R. Williamson. The most recent study of Marlowe as a spy is The Reckoning by Charles Nicholl. The scholarly delving will go on, and other novels will be written, but the true truth - the verita verissima of the Neapolitans - can never be known. The virtue of a historical novel is its vice - the flatfooted affirmation of possibility as fact. As for the man Marlowe, he smiles, somewhat ironically, and is still, not exactly out-topping knowledge but continuing to disturb and, sometimes, exalt. Ben Jonson knew what he was talking about when he referred to the mighty line. Shakespeare may have outshone him but he did not contain or supersede him. That inimitable voice sings on.

  A.B.