He left printed notes in the streets, pinned them to doors, notes against the foreign refugees, the Protestants seeking refuge from Flanders and France who, by their great industry and thrift, were stealing the bread from the mouths of lazier Englishmen. He bred rage in the hearts of British apprentices, and they fondled their clubs, ready for the call that would lead them out on to a London St. Bartholomew Night. Archbishop Whitgift fumed with his High Commission, sent out spies, but could not lay his fists upon the man behind the men who worked up the sedition.
Intolerance, sedition, and the plague: they went hand in hand in London. There was a feeling of suspense, of waiting for they knew not what. This was to be a year different from other years, bloodier perhaps. It was the plague that started the trouble; with man’s fear of death grew rage against life.
Spring: and spring brought nothing but flies, and gnats from the marshes engirdling the city. All those that could, packed their bundles and tramped into the country; summer was coming, and the plague was always worse in summer.
*
“Come on,” said Nashe to Marlowe. “Why wait for death in this stinking city when you can drink yourself alive at Dover?”
“Nay,” said Marlowe, “ I’m staying with Alice.”
“She’s got you well, you poor mome. We’ll have another married poet soon. Look at Georgie, watching his daughter eat more every day and trying to count up how much the smallest dowry amounts to: he’ll never have the money to marry her, and there’s only one end to such a spirited girl if not jessed in marriage. Not a pretty prospect for a father! Look at Shakespeare — he daren’t go back to Stratford because of his sweet Annie!”
“That’s different. Will was cheated into it. He was only having a bit of fun with a woman old enough to have sense; she caught him whiningly with a big belly. She was sharp and he was only a youngling.”
“He’s an example of a forced marriage. Georgie’s is a love-match; and if you think of marrying for money, remember Robin Greene, he could only stand his wife a year.”
“For heaven’s sake, Tom — shut up! A man can do what he likes with his own life, can’t he?”
“Not when he’s got friends.”
“I don’t care, I’m going to marry her.”
“Oh, Lordee! Tamburlaine with toothless babbies in his arms! You’ll never write another line.”
“I’ll write such masterpieces…”
“Going to settle down and live quietly? I’ve heard it all before. But when a fellow marries he doesn’t realize that he’s settling down for ever.”
“I realize it.”
“Then you’re a mightier mome than I thought you were!”
*
The only one of his friends who blessed the match was Kyd. “I wish I could find a sweet woman who’d care for an old fool like me,” he murmured; “my blessings, Kit.”
Neither Nashe nor Peele would give their blessings; they were determined to stop Marlowe’s rashness, they talked slyly of woman’s famed inconstancy, made irrelevant remarks about cuckolds, argued whether bay-leaves or stag-horns suited a poet most. Marlowe treated their arguments with a tolerant smile, but they enraged him; and he was pleased when, at last, in a fit of mad despair, both Nashe and Peele (with Peele’s family) fled suddenly from London, leaving tacked to his door a virulent sonnet on marriage.
At first, he was pleased; then he was lonely. He grew to hate London, and locked himself in his room, refusing to move until Alice would promise to marry him and go to the continent.
And he thought often of Awdrey. He thought of her with a calm rage that he mistook for indifference. He wondered what she would say when she heard of his marriage; and once when Frizer came on a flying visit, he took a malicious pleasure (that afterwards left him to a fit of depression) in introducing him to Alice, knowing that he would tell the Walsinghams.
Alice refused to marry until June, swearing that May was unlucky for marrying — a common belief — but at last, to please him, she decided to have her boy’s suit made.
“But where?” she said. “I daren’t go alone to a tailor and ask him. Let’s to your tailor, Kit.”
“Does the fly walk into the dog’s mouth!” jeered Marlowe. “As soon drag me to hell.”
“How much do you owe him?”
“A mere matter of twenty jolly guineas.”
“Then I’ll pay it. Come!” She caught his hand and pulled him from his stool. “Let’s give the rogue the surprise of his life!”
Marlowe’s tailor had a small shop in Red Lion Court off Watling Street. It was a pretty little court, entered through a wooden gate surmounted by a gigantic red lion hacked out of timber. Almost every shop inside was a tailor’s or a draper’s, the windows — that could be let down to form a counter — piled high with coloured cloths; pretty women — the masters’ wives, daughters or girl-apprentices — lounged at the doors to ogle the gallants into entering, and shouted sweetly when a customer rove near: “What d’ye lack, sir, what d’ye lack? Toys for your sweetheart? Here’s clothes lovely enough to make an angel into a wanton! What d’ye lack, sir?” and cried out other lewd enticing things, smoothing their dresses tighter against their bodies to reveal bust and thighs, and pouting sweetly as if they kissed you in advance.
“Worse than harlotry,” muttered Marlowe; “then the husbands and fathers kick up hell’s own fuss if, like the King and Jane Shore, you take more than common goods out of their shops. They’re asking for it.”
“I think it’s pretty,” smiled Alice. “Which is your tailor?”
“Can’t you see him at the end! Look at the redfaced brach with the fat hips gaping at us. That’s his daughter. And the lad, there — that’s an apprentice he’s sent out to run for a catchpole if I try to slip by. He’s got a warrant ready, I swear.”
“Be very gallant, Kit; look at him from under your lids,” she whispered, squeezing his arm.
Marlowe was very gallant. He chucked the plump daughter under the chin and gave her a brotherly kiss on her gaping mouth, and she smiled weakly, trying to get over the shock. He patted the tailor on his stooping back, and leaned against a bolt — or roll — of taffeta as the tailor scribbled a receipt, his hand shaking with joy.
“Now, my man,” said Marlowe, pushing the receipt into his belt, “ I want to speak to you in private.”
“Yes, sir, certainly, sir, certainly.”
A weak, little, bow-legged man the tailor was, sniffing at every second word and trying to look pleasant with a twisted mouth.
“I want you to make this lady a boy’s suit,” said Marlowe, when the tailor had led them upstairs to his private apartment. “It’s for a frolic we’re having at Clement’s Inn, but it must be kept quiet.”
“Ay, sir, I understand,” said the tailor, smirking. “I could busk the doublet with wood, sir, it’s getting quite the fashion, and that, sir, would — er — conceal her figure, sir.”
“Thin wood!” agreed Alice. “Fine! And I want satin for the doublet, at about twelve shillings the yard, tawny satin. Show me some. How much’ll I need?”
He measured her briskly with his eyes, approvingly. “About four and a quarter ells, I should think,” he murmured. “Well, we’ll see, we’ll see.”
It was really fun, ordering that costume. Alice took hours examining satins for the doublet and velvet for the breeches; then when she had made her choice, the tailor called his wife and daughter to take the measurements, while Marlowe waited with him in the shop below, jesting with the apprentices.
Buying clothes excited Alice. She insisted on buying shoes, too, and the apprentices bending over their lasts, cocked their eyes at her firm, plump ankle and well-rounded foot as their master measured her sole and instep.
“Now a hosier!” said she.
Striped hose, she insisted on having; and after buying those, she went to an armourer’s for sword and dagger.
“Now,” she said, “I must to the barber’s! Mar
ry, I’ll be no man unless I shave!”
“Right!” laughed Marlowe taking up the jest, “I insist on that,” and despite her protests, he dragged her into a barber’s shop, but when she found herself inside, she coyly asked the barber to stare into her mouth to see if there were any teeth there decayed enough for pulling.
*
Marlowe had never entered her home, and one day she came to him and said, “I’m taking you home now. I want you to see my rooms, and I want to see you sitting in my chair before the fire and eating at my table.”
He was delighted; and indeed, her house was very beautiful. It was not large, but was sweetly furnished and had softly painted cloths at the windows, and on the walls, tapestries telling of classic loves. Above the fireplace in the parlour there hung a painting of her, so carefully limned that it was as true as life, as fresh and almost as lovely as herself.
“A Dutchman in Fleet Street painted it,” she said. “I’ll leave you with this image of myself while I rouse the cook for dinner. I’ve got a peacock for you!”
He stood, hands behind his back, before the fireplace, gazing up at that painting. She was dressed in blue, breasts naked, with the doublet falling open from the shoulders like the petals of a flower unfolding to show the delicate heart. The flesh was exquisite, meticulously painted in the popular manner, and of a soft coral-colour, faintly pink; her head was up, to show the long neck, the rounded contours of her chin, the tousled crown of uncovered hair; her shoulders sloped exquisitely, plumply.
Marlowe was so charmed by the painting that he did not notice the minutes slip by, and the rustling of the curtain at the doorway suddenly made him turn.
Alice stood there; yet it was not Alice, it was an hermaphroditic Alice. She wore a copatain — a steeple-hat — in which she had bunched up her hair, showing small ears, red now with shyness. Her doublet was a man’s, not so waspishly drawn in at the waist as a woman’s, and laced with purple cord against the tawny satin; her breeches were of red puffy velvet, slashed to show purple lining; and her long, perfectly shaped legs were encased in ribbed stockings of yellow and pink. A sword hung limply at her side from a golden belt.
“Your page, sir,” said she, going on one knee.
“A tomrigg of a page!” he cried. “A pretty ingle indeed for a man to take with him a-voyaging. There’ll not be a wench in any city that’ll look at me with such a lusty boy beside me. What is your name, lad?”
“Allen, sir,” she said demurely: “your servant.”
He went to her, lifted her to her feet, and kissed her. Then he suddenly pulled off the copatain, and the long brown hair gushed down like a living thing out of a trap.
“That’s how I love my Allen!” he said.
“Wicked man!” she cried, pushing from him. “Now I have to do it all up again.”
“Nay, let it fall. I love you with it down.”
“Do you, Kit?”
“I love you every way,” he said softly, playing with her hair that purred against his fingers, as if drowsy with happiness.
“I must practise!” she cried. “Sit ye down, sir, while I wait at table; and you must slap me if I do it badly.”
“Such dress was made for slapping!” he laughed. “But you must promise not to tie up your hair.”
*
Children they were, playing the game of grownups: children again in a city haunted by childhood’s phantoms, with the plague like some terrible bogy creeping from house to house, leaving the red carbuncles behind on once-quick flesh for startled eyes to gaze at suddenly in a gust of horror: plague-spots, red spots, the marks of inevitable death.
But there was life in Alice’s house — life and laughter, the laughter of children playing at make-believe.
Chapter XIV
A FRIEND IS TORTURED
Death in the city, sudden death, going swiftly from house to house, choosing its victims here and there, haphazardly, in all paths of life, from babies to the aged. One went to bed and dared not sleep for fear that one would never see the light again. In all this great city of London there was no special plague hospital, though even the smaller foreign cities had at least one. Houses became hospitals overnight, they were guarded, and the inmates forced to stay beside their dead, to breathe the fumes of death. Red Death, the Red Murrain, the Red Pestilence — call it what you will, it was death, horrible death. Bodies, young, agile, good for many, many years, suddenly were blotched where death had pressed its finger, swelled up into what were known as carbuncles, usually red. And once that swelling was on your flesh, do what you might, almost inevitably you were doomed. Call in the doctor, he would charge you his angel a visit — ten good shillings — and would gravely advise you to place the entrails of a pigeon on the spots, or to rub them with garlic or his own highly-priced unguent, to drink mithradate in dragon-water, plaster the sores with yolk of egg, honey, herb-of-grace and wheat, or to put hot bricks on the soles of your feet — something that did no good.
People walking in the roads suddenly fled, darted into shops, down alleyways, holding their noses and shutting their mouths, and you would see a corpse doubled up on the cobblestones, touched with the Red Murrain. Carts rumbled by, bells ringing, the bodies flung into them for a common grave. Terribly lax the limbs, heavy with their own weight, disjointed, necks like rubber, young bodies, old bodies, useless bodies, they were marked with the Lord’s Tokens, with the red spots of death. Onward the pest-carts, jolting over cobbles, piled with dead flesh they were, arms and heads hanging over the sides; bells ringing for the corpses to be flung aboard, while the carriers averted their white faces and dared not look up at the hanging arms, hands open, swaying, head lolling like a doll’s — the corpse, perhaps, of a child, of a young lass, of a husband, a father or old granddame. Corpses all, outworn, thrown on to the dung-heap; death had chosen; silently it had planted the spots on good clean flesh.
Bells, bells of death… Marlowe heard them ringing in the street below, calling for the corpses. Any corpses to-day, ma’am, any corpses? …like lazar-bells rung by lepers to warn the healthy that disease walks by on two legs; bells, bells of the Red Murrain, tolling for its feed of corpses, for bodies marked, chosen by death.
Bells, doleful bells, ringing in Marlowe’s head. Chop-chop-chop goes the chopper. Had not Robin Greene written: “Defer not (with me) till this last point of extremitie; for little knowest thou how in the end thou shalt be visited”? Would the Red Death be that visitor? How would he come, this hooker of souls, this death that made poor Robin Greene quaver like a babe, crying: “I knowe the least of my demerits merit this miserable death!” How would he come when he came knocking at Kit Marlowe’s chest? Bringing red spots under the arm-pits? Or stabbed suddenly from behind by Skeres’s thin dagger? Or muddle-headed, aged in his bed?
He was afraid to think about his death, it seemed so close to him in this impested city with bells wailing in the streets, and with cartloads of corpses lumbering by with masked men at the reins crowned with rosemary. It could not come to him now, when soon he would be so happy; it would not dare to touch him now. Not dare! This death who took a prince as familiarly as any clown, this death who chose a virgin and let the harlot pass, who ignored the warrior breathing lustfully in battle and knocked some peaceful quiet man walking in the street suddenly under a horse’s hoofs. Not dare! What respect had death for lovers? It had taken Paris while his Helen slept, had dragged Leander under the Hellespont while Hero watched horror-struck from the heights; and in this present day, had it not struck down Sir Philip Sidney in the laughing pride of his youth when he fought at Flanders, leaving in England a Virgin Queen to hide her tears behind her feathered fan, a young wife to-weep upon a lonely pillow and a sister to cry her sorrow in sweet verses? Prince or simple, poet, merchant…death did not care, so long as it was flesh.
Starting down at the water-side, by the sluggish Thames where lean rats scampered on the stonework and burrowed into the store-houses, death, with plague
as a mask, had first chosen the poorer people — laundresses slapping the water from the clothes with their wooden beetles and gossiping on the steps, the sailors, warehouse-clerks and wharf-labourers; it had stolen up the hill from the Thames, entered even Paul’s, and pinched the gallants as they postured in the middle aisle, Duke Humphrey’s Walk; it had squeezed into the goodly houses behind Paul’s, had stolen even into the miserable suburbs. Now it was everywhere.
Panic-stricken, their ears and nostrils plugged with rue and wormwood, the people whispered together of God’s judgment; both Puritan and Catholic saw in it the hand of heaven taking toll of England’s wickedness. But Puritan and Catholic also were seized by this remorseless death and flung as carelessly into the grave as atheist or Church of Englander. Death had no favourites; all that was flesh, whether rich or poor, godly or godless, was food for him; flesh, quick flesh, was his choice.
Death’s bells in the streets. The low, dull clangour entered Marlowe’s room and spun his thoughts around the terror of death, the fear that every man has of going from life when life seems just beginning.
Better to be outside than caged in this little room! He buckled on his rapier, fitted the ruff about his neck, slipped on his shoes, put on his round velvet hat and clipped the short winged cloak to his back.
*
The streets were silent. And this was spring, English spring, with fields bubbling with yellow daffodils, gorse on the heath dusted with golden buds; with little flowers perkily tossing coloured crowns in the wind, with the grass stretching for miles, softly green and springy underfoot; sweet-smelling earth, rich and warm with life. Now was butter-and-cheese-month in the country; the ewes and cows gave out their milk under the deft fingers of merry country-lasses, their smock-hems drenched with dew. Hops were being gathered; soon the sheep would be sheared, and the hay harvested. Summer was coming, drawn by cuckoo-song and the swift dart of the swallows overhead. Spring in the country — and the quietness of death in city-streets, scared faces peering through shut windows, shops walled up with wooden shutters; taverns and inns wellnigh empty; but little traffic in the streets; beggars had fled like rats from a doomed ship; the roads without the town were thick with people running like refugees from a besieged city, fields strewn with unburied corpses of those who fell by the way, fleeing from death, yet taking death with them; pedlars had packed their bags, and only here and there a doleful old man or woman cried out their packs of blasted rosemary or camphor, of cypress and yew. Death’s terror had London in its grip.
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