A Dead Man in Deptford (34 page)

- Seed shot in, Tom said, as they resumed riding. Nature
the brutal mother of all demanding more mothers. But these
rural folk have ways of cheating her, I know not what. Our
cheating is of a profounder and more metaphysical order.

Kit thought the words not well chosen. Soon on their horizon
the stained glass of Canterbury cathedral caught the late sun afar,
and Tom said:

- You recall Rheims? The cathedral there was indifferent to
our metaphysical cavorting in a field with the benodorous cows
looking on.

- No meta. Better than meta. But now we are past it.

- Not so. I refuse to be all magistrate. Let us roll naked in
that meadow. Thus you may bite both thumbs at old constrictions. Soon I think we meet your family. The great cathedral
frowns down. I hear the whistle of whips in your old school.
We are free men.

They tethered their horses in the meadow itself on the low
branches of an oak and, their clothes thrown off, heard the contented munching of deep June grass as they rolled. This sweet
air cleanses your skin of its tobacco smell, we are as we were,
there is this, aaaaaah. Well, yes, Eden recovered, God would not
come peering in the evening cool, he was locked up, puzzled at
reforms that had remade him, in the great sacring house of the
chief archepiscopate. It was Tom that took all the dominant part,
Kit yielding. Their reversal of roles was forbidden by the Lord of
the Manor and Kent magistrate, who shot his seed into a barren place as of the right of some ancient jus. Kit clothed a swollen
rod and Tom laughed at it. Their feet beat the juicy meadow as
they led their horses to the road. The two gentlemen clopped into
the city by the North Gate, the King’s School (whistle of whips,
smell of Ovid) to their left hand, seeking a lowly shoemaker’s
shop.

- My friend, Lord of the Manor of Scadbury, a magistrate
of the county. I trust you have room for him.

The father and mother were older but still vigorous. Margaret
had at last married her tailor, nay more, their boy John had just
been baptised, he came early and folk talked. And poor Dorothy?
A woman now but little changed, she hath ten words, she hugs
all her old dolls. Poor Dorothy. I hope his lordship can take
our fare - a roast giggot as the Huguenots do call it. He is not
his lordship, he is plain master like me. Tom, you may call me
that. Thomas is of greater dignity, said Kit’s father. Come back
when all is ready, Kit will show you the town.

This did not signify the cathedral. Tom did not wish to
see where another Tom had been butchered by four knights,
his sanctity, so swiftly bestowed, denied by a butcher king that
could unmake saints as readily as wives. They went to a tavern,
the Mule’s Head, to ease thirst and found it full of French protestants. Dew yang, the tavern-keeper mocked Kit’s order. There
was a drunken Gallic guest of the nation, nay no longer guest,
a tradesman here prosperously rooted and lavish host to toper
friends of his blood and faith. Je pisse sur ces beaux citoyens de
Canterbourg, he seemed to be saying as he circled, qui possedent
des mceurs ridicules et dont les femmes puent d’une religiosite hypocrite. Car aux tenebres elles acceptent volontiers une bitte francaise.
And, to laughter and cockcrows and finger-horns to brows, all
watched him mime deep rutting and heard him squeal high Oh
yu urt mon sewer thu art to beeeeg.

- No, Tom warned, hand on Kit’s hand on pommel, no
swordplay here. The Scotch say foo and the French say fou and
he is both.

But when the man left to most cordial valedictions Kit was
(No, Tom said, again no) quick to follow. He was back in five minutes with skinned fists, saying: He is able to totter home,
though blindly, no trouble. And then: home, I say, this town
is theirs and many of ours are homeless. Unity of faith permits
all, the granting of air, land and water and the right to scoff.

- You have no love of Canterbury. Why then so hot for
its protection?

- They do not respect our women.

- Nor you, though you do not choose that manner.

- You have not yet met my sister Dorothy.

- The idiot girl? You fear her ravishment by rollicking
frogmen?

- Something of that.

Indeed, as they saw at supper, Dorothy was now much
the woman in size and shape, with great breasts and haunches,
though in a stained frock fit for a child, and ever scratching
openly her privities. She did not recognise her brother, but she
bade Tom Walsingham kiss doll after doll after doll and then kiss
her. Throughout the eating of the giggot and parsnips she kissed
Tom slobberingly and sought to play with his long locks. It is
the way she is, we beg pardon, but what can be done we know
not, sir. Tom, Thomas. Speak thy words, Dorothy. Hung, gyre,
grayne, fowre. What is that that shineth in the sky in the night,
Dorothy? Hoon. Harg.

- This, Kit said, is, alas, my sole gift from the great city.
A problem of money. No, I am no longer a worker for the
State. A poet merely. And he handed to his father a copy of
Tamburlaine by Ch. M., printed by Richard Jones at the sign
of the Rose and Crown near Holborn Bridge. His father saw
blank verse and nodded blankly, then passed it to the mother
who blankly passed it back. Dorothy cried bitterly for it and,
having slavered and snotted thereon, sought to tear off the cover,
screaming when her brother snatched it. When Tom told her that
her tearing and wetting were a most direct manner of judgement
of a book’s worth, she calmed and grasped a hank of his hair,
drooling. But Tom seemed much beguiled by the candlelit scene
of the poet and his idiot sister, the solid and flustered parents,
torn Tamburlaine.

- Tomorrow in the Guild Hall is I gather the time and
place. It will be a long colloquy on raising of money to effect
what will benefit the - do I say Canterburians?

- It is them that will get all, the father said in gloom, it
is always the outlanders first. So, you had best sleep now. You
have your chamber ready, it was once that of the elder girls,
both now married. My wife has aired linen and garnished the
bed with fresh lavender.

- Good and thanks. The giggot or gigot as it should properly
be was of an exceeding savouriness. These Kent pippins are good.

- You have surely Kent pippins where you are.

- None like these.

But, Kit observed, Tom had cored one but left most of it.
Nor did he greatly like the correction to gigot, the great travelled
man of the manor raised so far above the hammerer whose leather
smell had vied with the tang of herbs. So Tom was candled to bed
and Kit talked awhile with his parents, still about the table and
Tom’s browning uneaten apple, while Dorothy crawled, pissed
on the bare boards, and soon snored where she was, a court of
dolls about her.

- 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.