A Dead Man in Deptford (3 page)

- The swinging udders I was nursed at? I am given otherwise
but here I am but the English voice of Ovid.

- Otherwise? I see. The slim flanks of a boy. The choristers
of the King’s Chapel are known, I believe, for their delectability
and amenability. Ability, in a word, to arouse.

- I am of Canterbury. I was briefly in the cathedral choir.
I learned early what men could do with boys.

- Here you have your own ragged catamite?

- Not young Tom. Young Tom is sacred. I take it you
are not that way inclined.

- I follow nature up to the point where nature says breed.
There is something absurd about grown men rubbing their
beards together and untrussing. Something pathetic but appealing about the traffic of man and boy. There is much of it in the
theatre. This line of yours, where is it, yes - Ioue send me more
such afternoones as this - it seems to me for some reason to be
a theatre line. I hear it on the stage. You know plays?

- In Canterbury we had visits from the Queen’s Men. Dick
Tarleton and his Seven Deadly Sins. The Earl of Surrey’s troupe
came to regale us here. We were not impressed.

- And you propose for yourself life in a country vicarage?
Kit looked at him. Watson was some ten years older than
himself, fixed, he could see, in a world where country vicarages were a shuddering nightmare, sole end of men from the universities whose talents lay not in advancement in the secular
fields. They must all come to it unless.

-Unless, Kit said, fortune my foe becomes my friend.
What is there? My ambition, you may have guessed, lies in
poetry, but no man can live on it. Patrons are hard to find.
The stage? I have not thought of the stage.

- It diverts both the washed and unwashed. I shrug but
I work at play-botching. They talk of Tom Watson’s jests. In
balductum plays. You know the word?

- Trashy, tawdry. Groundling stuff.

- You know of groundlings, then. Shillings slide into my
purse and shillings, by mean alchemy, turn to gold. But my
Passionate Century sold well. You must come to London.

- To do what?

Young Tom brought, panting, the sherris from the buttery
in a crock. He dealt copper change. Watson lordily bade him
keep it. Kit unhooked two battered college tankards from the
wall. He poured. They drank, toasting what they did not know.

- To prepare your advancement. But you must first dissemble your distaste at your prospects. You have a father in
orders who sent you here to sustain a family line of comfortable
clerisy?

- My father makes shoes. I came on a scholarship from the
King’s School, holy orders being the one end in view. Your lips
twitch at the shoemaking.

They were meaty lips under a Turkish nose. The black eyes
caught the summer afternoon light and dealt it at Kit more in
compassion than merriment.

-Who would laugh at shoes? We shall go on needing
shoes until our feet are permitted to tread the golden street
or dance on hot bricks. The trade is noble enough. Dissemble
and take your degree. Be a master of arts, without that you are
nothing. But you have the long vacation coming. You propose
returning to Canterbury? Come to London. Stay at my house.
In the Liberty of Norton Folgate.

- Liberty?

- It is in London and yet not in it. Outside the jurisdiction of the City officers. I am at the corner of Bishopsgate Street and
Hog Lane. Close to the Theatre in the Liberty of Holywell. You
shall see the Theatre. Also the Curtain. More important, you shall
see Sir Francis Walsingham.

- Walsingham. A holy name. And what is he?

- Universities forbid universal knowledge. You are cut off.
You know nothing of the Service?

- Tell me. See, the mud is dried. It will soon come away.

- I will tell you of Sir Francis, Frank as I call him. We met
in Paris. I was seventeen, studying if it could be called that. He
was England’s ambassador. He was kind without condescension.
He corrected my Latin verses, listened to the songs I wrote. It
was perhaps a relief for him in the midst of such troublesome
business St Bartholomew was preparing. You know surely of the
massacre? The mob screaming for the blood of the Huguenots.
Two thousand Huguenot corpses on the Paris streets.

- We all know of this. See, it is as if there had never
been mud. I will pour more.

- Listen. The Queen has never been willing to see how the
faith of the Huguenots is England’s faith, or near to it. She sent
a baptismal font, all gold, worth all of a hundred thousand, when
the French king’s daughter was born. She stood as godmother,
imagine. The font was taken by Huguenot pirates in the Channel. Friendly with a France that murders Protestants. She calls
it diplomacy.

- Which means double-dealing. Go on.

- Sir Francis is no double man. Perhaps it is easier for a
woman to deal double, in state affairs as in the amorous life.
They are all Eve’s daughters, treacherous by nature. However,
Sir Francis runs his service mostly from his own purse. This is
love of country at its most shining and laudable. He knows the
Catholic threat.

- And not the Puritan one?

- Pooh, that is nothing. There is no Puritan candidate
for the throne. But there is a Catholic one, and she is the
daughter-in-law of the Medici bitch who has all the French
power. I weary you.

- No, you do not. But I must consider myself unworthy
to receive confidences about affairs of high state import.

- Pish, all the world knows them. Sir Francis needs spies.
There is money in spying. There, that is something new for
you.

- You wish to turn me into a spy?

I wish nothing. I tell youu only a way of advancement.
I shall be in London during the summer. You know where I
am.

- I shall note it on the verso of this Englished Ovid. There,
you may dress again, as immaculate as before you were maculated.

- Do not try your pretty wordplay with Frank Walsingham.
He is a plain man. Well then, we shall meet. I thank you for your
hospitality.

- It was all yours. The wine, I mean. A cup for the stirrup.
He poured. They drank, and Watson spat the lees from his
lips: pt pt. He took Kit by the shoulders and seemed about to
lift him to tell his weight.

- To my mother in Newmarket, then. Master - what is
it - Merlin? Marlin?

- Marlowe will do. Or Marley. Marl is clay and lime,
my name’s lowly constant. I will he in London.

Kit had copied from the manuscript of Sir Philip Sidney’s
Defence of Pocsie, then in circulation in Cambridge, these words:
Nature never set forth the earth in so rich a tapestry as divers
poets have done. Her world is brazen; the poets only deliver a
golden. Kit thought: I am a poet, I must not be lowly. London
must not terrify me. If I see London. As he stood with his eyes
beyond the world (brazen’), his roomfellow young Barnabas
Ridley came in, a different dream in his own eyes. He said:

- Ah, she is cream and strawberries. Such a straight leg.

- Which you saw entire?

- Handled. In the hav of the barn I covered her with
flowers.

- Enough. There is a party of us going swimming in the
river. You will come?

- That is forbidden. Nakedness. A whipping in the college
hall by the Proctor. I beg you not to.

- Grantchester. There we shall not be seen. Cleanse from
your body the sweat of the fornicator. I can smell it from here.

- I do not fornicate. I am in love.

As the summer moon came up Kit splashed and swam
with George Taplow, Jack Fothergill, Abraham Curlew and
small nameless boys of the village who loved the water games
but ran home to their mothers when the play took a different
turn. There. Now. Have at thee. Ease of the body, turn and
turn about. Under the elms by the water’s margent. Naked.
Altogether too animal, save that animals did not. The work of
breeding too urgent and life too short. Love? Mind and mind?
It did not apply.

So, then, I suppose it to have been. I saw Kit for the first time
in London at Burbage’s theatre, named aptly the Theatre, when
I played Bel-Imperia in The Spanish Tragedy. He was on a stage
stool, next to Watson, much taken by Ned Alleyn, younger than
he by a year but altogether the quavering ancient as Hieronimo,
Marshal of Spain:

- He would not say that, said Kit. This was after, in the
tiring room. I was unwigging myself, wiping off the white from my chubby boy’s face, easing myself out of bodice and fardingale.
Kit saw me an instant in a boy’s nakedness and seemed to glow.
The tiring room the afternoon sun had baked was a cram of players, Dawson, Hawkes, Crampson, Digges, Birkin, Timmes, the
rest, transformed now from Portugal and Spain their notabilities
into men and boys of the street, cursing at their thirst, thumping
each other over tripped entrances, slowness on cues, a stutter, a
finger-snapping momentary forgetting of a phrase put right by
Haddock the bookholder. Tom Kyd, whose play it was, was
there, a timid little man with bowed legs though not timid in
defence of his work. He said:

- The distracted brain can oft turn to a kind of logic which
we see as mad, absurd also, but the absurd can be a face of the
tragic. This Seneca knew. This I know. You are one of these
university puppies that think they know better.

- Cambridge has taught me Seneca. Puppy I may be, but
I am right to whimper at that whilom.

- Whilom is very good, Ned Alleyn said. It is old-fangled
but so is the speaker. There is nothing wrong with whilom.

- I defer, Kit said. I was moved. My back hairs bristled.
I sweated. It was hardly to be believed.

And Ned Alleyn, removing from his young and blank face
the paint of lined age, smirked, a creature of null person as of
null features, the condition of his art, the empty vessel to be
filled with what the poet brewed, what there was of him so to
say with the buskins off was a nullity that nonetheless gave off
a manner of heat. He said in a voice as of song, wiping:

- The skill is long to learn. Meaning he had been at it
some five or six years, starting like myself as a bound prentice
to his company. Long, yes, it seemed long. And then: We will
go drink. Then Smigg the door-gatherer came in swinging his
leathern bag, so Alleyn asked what was the take.

- Two pounds thirteen and some odd bad coins.

- Ruination, said James Burbage, who owned the Theatre
and the Curtain and whose son Richard had his own ambitions,
the chief of which was not to be an arm-swinging actor like
Alleyn. Dick Burbage, who had carried a pike, said:

- The ruination will not come from low takings. We shall be
closed. An officer I know to be of the Lord Mayor was looking
in for another prentice riot.

- They were quiet today. Besides, we are in Middlesex,
not London. The Mayor’s men may keep their long noses out.

- London prentices, London laws. And Dick Burbage shook
his head. It is all a shaky business.

The Unicorn on Bishopsgate Street had as landlord Ned
Alleyn’s elder brother Jack. Kit and Watson, Alleyn, Kyd and
I trod the slimy cobbles thither. I was young but, motherless
and fatherless, was under Ned Alleyn’s protection, lived with
him; he was as yet unmarried, but that was to change. In the
street we saw Philip Henslowe, who said Well met, I would
have a word. Alleyn nodded. It was Henslowe’s stepdaughter
Joan Woodward, no more than a girl, little older than I, in
whom Alleyn was said to have an interest.

The main room of the Unicorn was a cram of drinkers who
had come from the Theatre, and some greeted Alleyn as ever
with What outcries pluck me, which had become a catchline of
the time. He waved his arm, smiled as from aloft, and led us
to a back or private room. Jack Alleyn, as to make up for his
brother, was of a face not easy to forget, with a black jutty beard,
jutty eyebrows that were fierce, a fierce eye, one only, the other
walled and sightless, and the flame cheeks of one that knew his
own potions. He himself brought in my small beer, beer not so
small for the others, save for Watson who had a pewter mug of
sherris. Henslowe laid money on the humped and scarred table,
saying:

- Earned on the flat of their backs.

He was a coarse man, and he alluded to one of his brothels.
He had other interests and of one he now spoke, saying:

- The situation is known well enough. James Burbage is
spent out. Said ruination, did he, well, no wonder. Too much
of Jack Brayne’s money in it. His groceries do well but his
soap-works in Whitechapel dissolves into suds, it will soon be
no more. You know the strength of his investment. He says
the playhouse is rightfully his. Now, as you know, Brayne is Burbage’s wife’s brother, so we shall see what we may call a
family feud. There is no future there. I see you pull your beard
in some dismay, Mr Watson. A matter of the lawyer who acts
for Burbage, am I not right, Hugh Swift, and you to marry his
sister, have I got it? You will be forced into the taking of sides,
which you will not like, for the salt and sauce of your paid quips
are spread over the whole players’ commonalty and you would
be neuter.