“If only I could trust you.”
“You can, Alice. You can, I tell you.”
She turned away, and, crying a little, played with the gorse-blossoms that bled against her fingers. “I suppose,” she said softly, her back towards him, “that both roads lead to suffering. With you, I suffer; away from you, I suffer. That is woman’s lot because she must rely wholly on love; not like a man who has other interests.”
“Women have children, though.” He walked softly up behind her and put his arms about her neck, fondling her throat and chin. “We’ll have little Kits and Alices,” he whispered, “and they’ll always be yours more than mine, because they are your creations.”
“They too bring only suffering. Is love a thing that can’t be happy?”
“We will be happy. I swear it.”
She put her hands tentatively on his, her back still towards him, and gazed up at the sky as if asking advice from heaven. Then, suddenly making up her mind, she gripped both his hands firmly and swung round to face him.
“Better than leading apes in hell,” she cried, “ to be led by an ape on earth! I forgive you; that’s about all I can do. All my life I’ll be forgiving you. Forgiveness…a woman’s portion of the earthly crown!”
*
Marlowe met her father and mother, and liked them much. Old Jewel — for that was Alice’s surname — was a kind, pedantic old man who liked to talk with Kit in Latin; Mistress Jewel was fat and merry. They had no other children. “I’ve had ten, counting Ally,” Mrs. Jewel confided in him, “but all the others died. Hard it is to rear children in this world with little money.”
Their house was too small to lodge Marlowe, so he took a room at the Swan, and ate most of his meals at the Jewels’. But there were not many meals eaten at home. He and Alice were like children on holiday, she wanted to show him all her countryside and they rode miles, exploring, eating at little out-of-the-way inns and taverns.
He could not help comparing this pastoral world with Awdrey’s. Awdrey’s was a feverish place of hunting wretched stags and conies, of murdering birds and playing at archery or tennis: a restless, miserable existence; but this world of Alice’s was peaceful, like Sidney’s Arcadia, with his silver rivers, meadows enamelled with eye-pleasing flowers, in the trees the jolly songs of well-tuned birds, near by a shepherd piping as if he would never grow old, and a shepherdess knitting and singing, her hands in time to her music…a world of peace such as Robin Greene had dreamed of when he lay next morning in a filthy London bed, sour wine poisoning his belly. “Oh, the country,” Robin would groan. “Oh, the milkmaids smelling as if they were bred on cream and honey. Oh, the birds and the delicate taste of clover! Kit, roll me with a wench in a wagon of hay and dung!”
This was the world that Robin had dreamed of and had never known; he had lacked love in his world. It was Alice that made Arcadia so beautiful, for a tree is only wood without its dryad, and ponds but dull water without naiads to bubble smiles back at your smiling. Alice was Eve to his Adam.
*
Days passed, but merry as they were, Marlowe could not induce Alice to marry him immediately. Always she put him off because May was a bad month for brides to start selling ale to the bawdy gentlemen, gathering money for their bridal.
“On the first of June!” she cried, “you and I’ll be one! June, the month of real spring, when farmers grease carts and sickle for the harvest, when sheep are cropped of their cloaks of soft gold. That’s the month for maids, like sheep, to be sheared for the coming harvest-time! You must choose me the sweetest ring, Kit, and write two lines of your best poetry inside. I want something simple, a heart in two hands. Stupid, I know, all common wenches wear toys like that; but I want one, I want our love to be simple, common, like everybody else’s.”
“What the devil can a month have to do with our marrying?” he grumbled.
“I’m superstitious, Kit! I believe in the Little People. I fear May: it’s a bad month for lovers. Don’t you know it’s bad luck even to pluck the flower called May? Nothing must be plucked in May. It’s an evil month.”
“It’s spring, dear!”
“Spring’s the time for troths; marriage follows, sometimes with angry parents battering on the door.”
“Then now we make our troth. As Greene would say:
‘Even with this kiss, as once my father did,
I seal the sweet indentures of delight!’”
“And as Kit Marlowe says,” she cried merrily:
“‘Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, and woods or fields,
And craggy rocks or mountain yields,
Where we will sit upon the rocks
And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals!’”
The words sent a cold shiver along Marlowe’s spine. He cursed himself now for giving her that poem. If she ever, by any chance, saw the one he had written to Awdrey, the marriage would be doomed; she’d never forgive him, never… A fool he was to give it to her, a fool particularly to say that he had written it especially for her!
May was perhaps a bad month for marrying, yet for all that, they stumbled one morning on a marriage in Long Melford. The bells were crying their merry tune of hope, warning the maids for miles around that one of them was soon to have the right to tuck up her hair and to wear a hat out-of-doors as well as inside, and might, in future, modestly drape her young breasts.
They saw the bride and groom run out of the church, tussling with friends who strove to pluck the true-lover’s knots from the bride’s dress and to tear the points from the groom’s yellow doublet. Up into the air went the bride amidst roars of rustic laughter, her white dress flung high in a flutter of petticoats, legs kicking in flesh-coloured stockings, as the men jostled to pull off her rosetted garters. She was a pretty girl, scarlet with laughter, dressed in white — the favours, or lover’s knots, of a delicate blue for innocence — her long, unbound black hair making the crown of wheat-ears and flowers look white, like petals of snow. One man, holding aloft a yellow garter, kissed it loudly and pinned it in his hat; Marlowe noticed that the bride’s eyes watched him more lovingly than was right in another man’s wife.
“Look!” said he, pointing with his whip, “here’s one brave wench who doesn’t fear May’s malevolence.”
“Unobservant man!” she scoffed. “She fears something worse than the fairies. She dare wait no longer.”
Marlowe saw that this was true, and saw also that, although the bride was young — could have been scarcely fifteen — the husband was old. It sickened him, as he sat his horse while the merry throng danced over the common to the tall wooden house where trestles were laid out under the trees, piled with foods. The musicians played a jolly lewd song as the bridal pair entered the gate, and the younger folk clasped hands, rattled little bells and whirled into a Morrice.
It was a rotten world.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Alice smiled sadly up at him and patted his hand. “Yes,” she said, “we’re happier alone.”
“Let’s always be alone!” he cried. “Away from this dirty world!”
*
They were alone much of the time, riding and dancing together in hidden dells, merry, contented. May was going at last, June was coming, June and marriage.
“Let’s have no bells!” he cried. “No rosemary, no mazar-bowl of cake sopped in muscadel to dirty our mouths with; no flowers on the ground, no garters to be taken from your legs by somebody else to put under his pillow: none of that wretched nonsense!”
“It’s all very beautiful, Kit,” she said with a sly glance up under the lids. “I think it’s lovely that girls should ring the loss of their maidenheads and boast to the world about it.”
“Ay, if it meant that. Look at that rotten affair we saw the ot
her day. It makes me sick.”
“You are such a dreamer, aren’t you, Kit! You want all women virtuous, all men brave and true. You’ll have to make the world again for that.”
“That’s what angers me. It could be such a lovely world, it should be lovely. All this starvation, the decay of old customs, chivalry gone, learning scoffed at, the merchants pushing the poets into the mud, romance — everything gone for the sake of gold. We’re all victims of it. Even I, I’ve lost my faith in the general lust for money, I too believe in nothing. Both of us are the result of this present money-lust, we’ve got no real point to our lives, we’re dreamers, wanderers in limbo. We’ll have to go to the wall because the world doesn’t want us now. Our day’s gone, the day of the troubadour and of knights fighting for a lady’s love. Poetry’s prostituted on the stage, nobody buys it in books. I can’t see any end to this rotten world. Ralegh’s the only man of the old school now that Sidney’s dead.”
“We’ll make our own little world, Kit, a merry world.”
“If the big world lets us. I’m frightened because I’m happy. Happiness like this isn’t allowed to-day. We should be after gold. You should be luring gallants into stews — you’d be respected then; I should be crawling at the Queen’s feet, writing odes to her for a packet of gold, gold, gold. What’s the good of beauty or wit if you can’t sell it for gold!”
“Don’t be so bitter, love,” she smiled, ruffling his hair.
“It’s because I am afraid,” said Marlowe; “fate hates to see you happy. This can’t last.”
*
Four days to June. They walked around the lily-splashed pond behind the church, gazing at their own reflections twisted with ripples as some insect scudded over the water.
“I want to be alone,” Alice insisted. “I want to prepare myself like a country maid. And on the first of June, I’ll come to you, dressed all in white: a maid again! Ah, love, I wish I was a maid again!”
“I love you as you are: you’ve learnt tenderness and understanding.”
“I would have loved you to teach me. Oh, why weren’t we children together?”
“God wished it otherwise.”
“But I am going to lie to myself. I’ll come to you hatless, my hair unbound, my breasts uncovered. I’ll shut my eyes and think your bridal kiss the first ever pressed on my lips.”
“I want you as you are,” he whispered. “I don’t want you changed.”
“Obey this last whim of mine, Kit, please! Go back to London, buy the licence, arrange with the church. Let’s get married at St. Clement’s above the Strand, for oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clement’s. Wait for me on the steps: I’ll come dressed all in white with yellow garters under my petticoats, my hair let down. You must carry a bunch of rosemary.”
“But, honey, I told you I wanted none of that nonsense!”
“And I tell you, Kit, darling — I want it all. I’ll have my house — our house — strewn with flowers, and perfumed. A great feast laid: peacocks and the most delicious sugarmeats. Please, Kit, give me this last conceit? I know I’m a child. I want to fool myself. Play with me, Kit darling.”
Marlowe smiled and took her hand. “I’ll be waiting on the steps with a bunch of rosemary,” he said, “outside St. Clement’s near the Temple. And I’ll not kiss you again till we’ve both drunk from the mazar-bowl.”
“That is my own dear Kit!”
*
He kept his promise, and did no more than kiss her hand before he left for London. She waved good-bye to him from the step of her house until he had turned the corner at the bottom of the incline, his horse stumbling in the mud, for it had been raining.
He rose up on his stirrups and waved his hat. She stood at the door of her house, dressed in a simple green kirtle with white collar, a green coif over her brown hair.
Sunlight shone around her, sparkled like gold on the puddles under her high wooden clogs. He saw her throw him a kiss, and he felt happier than ever he had felt as he rode away from her, rode away only later to meet her again when she came to him on the steps of St. Clement’s, eyes lowered, dressed in white with blue lover’s knots on sleeves and gown, her long brown hair falling to behind her knees… Alice, his Alice…
And that was how Marlowe rode out of Lavenham that day, the 28th of May, 1593 — with the memory of Alice waving to him from the stone step of her little house, dressed in green; with that memory and with the picture of Alice walking slowly to him out of the traffic in Fleet Street, dressed all in white, her hair unbound, up the steps of St. Clement’s under the ringing of laughing bridal bells shouting for oranges and lemons, oranges and lemons — oranges and lemons for fertility, for the dying of green-sickness in longing maids; oranges and lemons…the bells of St. Clement’s…
…Fate was not usually so kind to poets…
Chapter XVIII
THE BLANK LICENCE
Two days to June. Wednesday, the thirtieth of May, 1593, with plague in the city growing worse every day, the weekly deaths nearing one hundred; and in the little village of Deptford outside London, Kit Marlowe sat under the trees in Eleanor Bull’s tavern next to the open square beside the Royal Shipyard. With him, sat Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley. It was now past midday and they had sat there since ten that morning, except to eat indoors, in the bay-windowed Rose Room, from where the river could be seen glittering like a mirror in the sunlight.
Marlowe had come for the blank licence Frizer had promised him. When he returned from Lavenham he had found Skeres sitting on his doorstep, munching an apple. “Frizer’s got that licence ye’ve been wanting,” he had said while he ate, “wants ye to go to Eleanor Bull’s pot-house in Deptford, ten to-morrer.” And Marlowe, eager to get away from England, had been up early in the morning for the walk. He dropped into the Swan on his way and met Poley there. Bob Poley, coiner, spy, informer, murderer, and general rascal, was one of those sly ruffians who refused to take a hint even when almost bellowed at him. Marlowe could not get rid of him. He ran from him, rushed out of the back doors of taverns on the excuse of looking for the privy; but Poley always caught him. And with a bad grace, he submitted to the rascal’s company. “I’m lonely,” Poley grumbled, “every damn clown’s got out of town, scared of the plague, the rats. Takes more than a few spots to scare me.”
Frizer glared at him when he and Marlowe entered the garden of Eleanor Bull’s.
“Couldn’t get rid of him,” explained Marlowe.
“I’m like a leech,” said Poley complacently. “I go where I want and I get what I want. Where’s the Rhenish?”
“I want my licence,” demanded Marlowe.
Frizer made a hopeless gesture with his hands. “I haven’t got it yet,” he said. “Wait awhile, it’ll turn up before nightfall. It should have been here hours ago…”
And Marlowe was forced to be content with that. Nevertheless, it was very pleasant, sitting here in the warm sunlight, cooled with a gentle wind, while next door, in the shipyards, the workmen hammered and sang. Deptford was a pretty village, separated from Greenwich, where the Queen had one of her country homes, by the placid Ravensbourne River. The tavern faced Deptford Strand; behind the houses and the glebe-land, they could see the church-steeple next to Trinity House. It was very quiet, save for the noise in the shipyards.
Under the trees in the garden, the four men sat, drinking Rhenish and talking drinkers’ talk — of wine, women and their own prowess at fighting and love. Marlowe was very merry, waiting for the hours to pass till June. He no longer felt the least resentment against Frizer. His love for Awdrey had soured to hate; he was thinking all the while of bells crying oranges and lemons, and of a brown-haired lass in white smiling up at him before the divine.
“What’s the good of women,” Poley was grumbling in his half-serious, half-comic way. “Here am I hooked with Joan Yeomans; thought she was a fine brach when I saw her under her husband’s coverlid making saucer-eyes at me;
she makes me sick now I’ve got her.”
“And all the trouble you took to steal her off stupid Will Yeomans,” laughed Skeres, “him going crying to Dicky Ede about it. The cony wouldn’t let her go. Lord love me, if I’d a wife what showed what she shouldn’t to another feller I’d kick her outer winder! Why, we had ter shove Will inter the Marshalsea ter git him outer the way, didn’t we, Bob?”
“I did, you mean,” said Poley. “You were only a nuisance, Nicholas rat, always poking your nose into somebody else’s business.”
“Now, now, Bob,” said Skeres.
“Shut up,” said Poley, “or I’ll pull your nose!”
Marlowe intervened, not wanting a quarrel this day. “How did you get her in the end?” he asked Poley.
“Oh, she went to market one day and didn’t go home. I wish she’d go to market again.”
Women…they cropped up inevitably when wine was on the table; Marlowe could listen now with complacence: he felt sure of his wench; she would be true to him, he knew, and they would be most happy, for ever and for ever.
“A health to the doxies!” he cried, lifting his glass.
Frizer was the only one who drank the toast; the other two refusing with terrific curses; preferring, they said, to drink to the devil himself rather than to his damned emissaries.
*
They went over to the Golden Hind that had circumnavigated the world, and they drank aboard her with a lusty boatswain who swore “by Drake!” as if by a god. She was a holiday-ship now, crowds came to eat and drink aboard her. This stout ship that had seen the strange lands of the West was now being slowly pulled to scraps by souvenir-hunters cutting slices from her to show their children and their grandchildren. Marlowe felt the wood tenderly, and fondled the ropes. He went all over her, into the little cabin where Francis Drake himself had slept and schemed.
These, surely, were the great men of earth, these men who voyaged fearlessly into unknown waters! Why hadn’t he gone with Lodge two years ago? He knew nothing of the world, of the vital world of blood and magic lands over the skyline.
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