- He may mean harm but he lacks the skill to do it.
- And I am not used to the life of great houses. I will ride my hired nag back with you. 0 tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide. That is your touch, the learnable line. But I will learn. Where do you go?
- To a foreign country. Do not ask.
Tom Walsingham was away with Frizer on, Kit thought he knew, the dragging of high overdue interest on a loan out of some squire's son overspent in London. They led their horses from the stable and then took the London road. It was chill weather and they trotted under a sky that had no hope in it. Kit asked:
- You saw what happened at Holborn?
- It was indecent. I kept away. Tyburn surely is enough for their bloody shows without raising a special gallows in Holborn. Why?
- To fright the lawyers in the Inns of Court that are turning to papistry. Well, it was to do with your patron.
- Not mine, not yet, if ever, but I hope. I must steel my heart to comfort my hopes. I did not think John Florio was a spy, a harmless Italian protestant I thought, bowing to my lord, a good secretary. Nor did I know that the Southampton tutor was a papist and kept a tame jackdaw of a Jesuit. You believe the story that this Fr Gennings called on St Gregory when his heart was in the hangman's hand?
- It was I take it a gargling kind of scream sounding grrrgrrry. I come to believe little. I want peace, peace and again peace.
- There is only the one place where that is. Do not pray for it yet.
They cantered in silence and reached a dark London enlivened by fires whereon Spanish effigies were burnt. Would this never end? Kit found Poley in nightshirt and nightgown, groaning with rheum. His black cat played with a ball of wool that dangled from the table top. Poley offered a hot decoction of blackberries, saying: Peace? We are on the way to having it. It is a matter of giving the Spaniards a sufficient fright. If the Scotch Catholic earls can be seduced to come to Berwick they will be arrested, and all over.
- All over with their murder. You have had experience of murdering Scotch Catholics and one higher than an earl.
- You are morose, you are sullen. Your eyes are feverish in this candlelight. Are you sickening?
- Nothing your physician could cure. On what charge arrested?
- You need to ask? An act of war, the enemy on our soil. Then a trial at which they will dissemble nothing, this Philip of Spain may at leisure digest, then execution.
- And then a great march of all Scots skirling across the border. What am I to do?
- Deliver this letter to young Fowler in Edinburgh. It is to summon the papist nobility to a meeting in Berwick. The letter is signed by one they know.
- A forgery, of course. This is monstrous. Any mezzo will serve your fine. That is Machiavelli. Bruno thought differently. And if I say I will not do it?
- You break trust, and that is a kind of treason. You go alone, taking ship from Deptford tomorrow.
- Money.
- You shall have money. And you will sleep here tonight.
- Under lock.
- Kit, Kit, we are friends.
I know from what he said that he eased a grey trip up that eastern flank with fancied immersion in a kinder sea.
Yet that kinder sea would drown the hero that swam to Hero's arms. The ship rolled and with pain he dipped into the ink of his writing case, alone and huddled in the lee. And once he had the mad thought that he would cast the sealed forged letter into the bitter waters, leave the ship at Scarborough and hide in York where the first Christian emperor had been crowned, so in a manner to be protected by old Rome and its legions. Or make the pretence that the letter had been delivered and young Fowler on his denial of this might be branded the liar. No, he would do what was called his duty. He had seen enough of his own blood shed but had by proxy shed quarts of other blood and would shed more. The pricked blood bladders of the playhouse sickened with their mockery. All wanted blood, blood was a beggar and screamed to be shed. He wished, as sickness struck him in the ship's bouncing by the Scotch coast, that he could live in the dead Greek dream he was in rhymed verses recounting. Free under a redder sun among fauns and myrtle and the treading of the grapes while on the hill smoke rose in some gentle sacrifice to gods crushed now by the monotheist heresy. What was he, what was he to be?
There was a foundering in him, the impaction of a weakness, a desire to be done with the living world and yet not yet in death. The stink of the playhouse rose feebly above the salt spray and he would have done soon with its feigning. You haled from the grave figures of old history who would be gladder to rest, the turmoil done, and there they were, Braile and Johnson and Robinson and Foyle and Rice and the great thundering Alleyn enacting them, suffering again that the rabble might with glee be spattered by swine's blood. He would wrap himself in an older past, and yet he smelt bad breath on Socrates and in the mouth of Alcibiades saw the decay of a tooth. Hero had lost a toe and Leander's laugh was inane.
While I leave Kit to his Scotch venture which there is no need for me to report I turn again to my chamberfellow and aspiring playman. I said, did I not, that I brought him in with reluctance, since his is another story and its nudging and shouldering into this of Kit's harms wholeness and bids break the frame. But Natura abhorret vacuum, and the same is true of what is against nature, nothing more against nature than our mad playhouse, and with Kit's return to England and Scadbury he left a vacuum in playmaking which had to be filled, and there was our Warwickshire man to fill it. The Contention Between the Two Famous Houses was finished by one pen only and that with a kind of speed of insolence. The play could hardly fail, nor its two successors, what with Talbot the terror of France at a time when a protestant French king was yielding to the Catholic League and France was once more a proclaimed enemy. And Will of Warwickshire, that had ever been mild, now became boastful. Boastful most in the presence of the sick and sneering Greene, in his cups at the Mermaid where Tom Nashe of his goodness had bought him a fish dinner.
- Well, it is as I said, there be two poles in the mappamundi of the writer's craft, ever opposed, and the scholarly and the mere crowd-pleasing cannot meet.
- There was enough of the scholarly in this chronicle, though that I left to my partner who defected. But I do not see how university study fits a man for filling a playhouse. It is better he go out in the world and observe manners.
- Meaning the world of butchers and glovers.
- Clothing five fingers need not be incompatible with clothing the five feet of a blank verse. And the whole world eats flesh.
- So we leave the nobility of the art to be traduced by grammar-school boys that strut on the stage and mouth country vowels.
- Envy, envy.
- The scholarly are above envy. Wipe off that false disdain.
- I could be angry. But you are not worth anger. I will pour out on the stage rhetoric that will not require justifying out of Cicero or Quintilian or whoever. There is no substitute for talent.
- Spit out your fishbones and go back to your mouthing.
- By God, I have had enough.
- Earned enough and more. The joybells of coin in your purse and you no more than a country upstart, what be this Hodge why it be a whole shillen and that chav not seen afore. Off ere I vomit.
- You have vomited often enough in fair company. Chief of the scholarly pigs without talent. We will beat you all yet.
- Cutting Ball will get you on my orders.
- I may have country vowels but I have also country muscles. I have butchered and will butcher.
But only once to my knowledge were there blows, and those on Gracechurch Street on a dark night. Greene was drunk and feeble and the country muscles prevailed all too easily. Yet there was shame and a quick desisting, for Greene's sickness was pitiable. And with the plague approaching and the impending closure of our playhouses Will of Warwickshire had set himself to shutting himself off from the world and starting an heroic poem to one that he hoped would be his patron.
; It was at a performance of Harry the Sixth at the Rose that a black-clad fanatic burst on to the stage to denounce all plays with The cause of plagues is sin and the cause of sin is plays therefore the cause of plagues is plays, a syllogism that did not please and he was bundled off crying to the heavens. Yet at Scadbury there was no intimation of coming troubles. Kit was able to say:
- I have not finished but I see a hope of finishing. Listen.
- A good time to pause, Tom Walsingham said. Have you a mind to riding to Canterbury? It is good weather for riding.
- Together? What business have you there?
- We are in Kent and Canterbury is the fair rose of Kent and I am become a magistrate of Kent. The business is to do with the great press of Huguenots and others pouring in and the native people becoming poor. That would include your own people.
- Huguenots buy Huguenot shoes but the native people have feet. My father holds his own, I have heard no cry of distress.
- The magistrates of the county are to meet, I being one, and talk of making your river navigable for boats and lighters, whatever those are, so increasing trade, how I do not know but shall doubtless be told.
- You must grey your beard and look grave, Kit said, leaning back in his chair, rubbing his wearied writing hand. Indeed Tom was much still the ephebe, sharing boys with his friend though talking of the gravity of marriage, hair hyacinthine, eyes bright and empty. You a magistrate.
- We start tomorrow. I shall wear sober black and a great black hat.
And so with the vermilion of the June dawn on their right hand they started, sleepily but merrily, in murmurations of starlings and exaltations of larks, unmocked by cuckoos, bachelors and friends, not properly now in the carnal sense lovers, chewing shives of beef and hunks of a loaf as they rode their first stage, passing from right hand to left left to right a cold flask of wine and water as they rode. On the narrow way out of Bexley they met a carriage with gold cherubim on its corners and a ducal blazon on its doors, driver and two footmen in their scarlet best, two fine Arabs drawing. They took left and right of it with the speed of youthful insolence, causing the ducal steeds to misfoot and whinny, the portly driver to raise his whip and the great man within, a mere youth of long nose, nodding feathers and a poncet box, to cry feebly: Canaglia. What vermin are these, belabour the swine. So that Kit fired back, very merry, with: Sacco di merda, vostro disonore. At Swanscombe was a cattle fair, all dung and lowing, slapping of haunches and chaffering, and they took ale in a tavern where a paunched farmer counted gold for the sale of a bull named Terror, pouching it with obscene love and spit and a snort for the poor who begged a penny for a cooling pot. Outside Frindsbury a man was beating his ass with hate, ferocity and a gnarled club because, overladen with a whole tree trunk about its own trunk tightly bound, already galled and with open sores, it could not engage the hill. He cried: Damned beast you shall go a third day without fodder. Kit and Tom alighted to grasp the club and beat the man in his turn, slashing off the burden with a knife and bidding the ass go free to the fields but it would not. At an inn in Gillingham they fed on cheese and the morning's bread and watched in near disbelief a contest of boys eating, each urged on by bet-placers and a father, the provender provided being a stale simnel cake, two date tarts, an apple pie in a deep dish, a dozen or so custards. At Sittingbourne an acid twisted man of great age, some sixty years, pawed and admired their clothes and horses, lamenting that after all his life as a town clerk he had nothing to show, Why should you be young and merry and I not, there is no justice in the world. In a meadow outside Faversham they saw a shepherd snoring in the sun, with the bolder of his flock breaking through the hawthorn hedge and, unnoticed, unchidden. And, dismounted for leg-stretching and a roadside piss, not far beyond they heard human moaning under Birdsong, and, approaching the sound as it were tipatoe, they saw from behind an elm, looking down into the grassy hollow, a boy and girl busy in the act of love. Smock was up and breeches were down, and he thrust hard moaning until he gave a weak cry of joy to the empty heavens. And she beneath that was country buxom seemed glad it was over.
- 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 h
er 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.