Faustus looks at me. “So they have finally stooped so high as to send an atheist. Then I shall have to deal with you on the same high level.” He bows to me.
I bowed back.
“If you are a true atheist, and I convince you there’s magic, will you take my word and go away?”
“All magic is mumbo-jumbo, sleight-of-hand, mists, legerdemain,” I say.
“Oh, I think not,” says Faustus.
“Blaze away,” I say. “Convenient Wagner has gone. Next he’ll no doubt appear as some smoke, a voice from a horn, a hand.”
“Oh, Mr Marlowe,” says Faustus. “What I serve is knowledge. I want it all. Knowledge is magic; other knowledge leads to magic. Where others draw back, I begin. I ask questions of Catholics, of Jews, of Spaniards, of Turks, if they have wisdom I seek. We’ll find if you’re a true atheist, a truly logical man. Look down.”
I do. I am standing in a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, written over with nonsense and names in Greek and Latin. Faustus steps off his stool. Onto another drawing on the floor. The room grows dark, then brighter, and much warmer as he waves his arms around like a conjuror before the weasel comes out the glove. Good trick, that.
“I tell you this as a rational man,” he says. “Stay in the pentagram. Do not step out.”
I felt hot breathing on the back of my neck that moved my hair.
“Do not look around,” says Faustus, his voice calm and reasoned. “If you look around, you will scream. If you scream, you will jump. If you jump, you will leave the pentagram. If you leave it, the thing behind you will bite off your head; the Sphinx out yonder was but a dim stencil of what stands behind you. So do not look, no matter how much you want to.”
“No,” I said. “You’ve got it wrong. I won’t look around, not because I am afraid I’ll jump, but because the act of looking will be to admit you’ve touched a superstitious adytum of my brain, one left over from the savage state. I look, I am lost, no matter what follows.”
Faust regards me anew.
“Besides,” I said, “what is back there—” here whoever it was must have leaned even closer and blew hot breath down on me, though as I remember, Wagner was shorter, someone else then.. .’’is another of your assistants. If they are going to kill me, they should have done it by now. On with your show. I am your attentive audience. Do you parade the wonders of past ages before me? Isis and Osiris and so forth? What of the past? Was Julius Caesar a redhead, as I have heard? How about Beauty? The Sphinx woman should have been able to change costumes by now?”
“You Cambridge men are always big on Homer. How about Helen of Troy?” asks Faustus.
“Is this the face that launched a thousand ships, etc.?” I ask. “I think not. Convince me, Faustus. Do your shilly-shally.”
“You asked for it,” he says. I expected the knife to go through my back. Whoever was behind me was breathing slowly, slowly.
Faustus waved his arms, his lips moved. He threw his arms downward. I expected smoke, sparkles, explosion. There is none.
~ * ~
It is fourteen feet tall. It has a head made of rocks and stones. Its body is brass; one leg of lead, the other of tin. I know this because the room was bright from the roaring fires that crackled with flame from each foot. This was more like it.
“Speak, spirit!” said Faustus.
“Hissssk. Snarrrz. Skazzz,” it said, or words to that effect.
And then it turned into the Queen, and the Queen turned into the King of Scotland. I don’t mean someone who looked like him, I mean him. He shifted form and shape before me. He turns, his hair is longer, his nose thinner, his moustache flows. He changes to another version of himself, and his head jumped off bloodily to the floor. He turns into a huge sour-faced man, then back to someone who looks vaguely like the King of Scotland, then another; then a man and woman joined at the hip, another king, a woman, three fat Germans, a thin one, a small woman, a fat bearded man, a thin guy with a beard, a blip of light, another bearded man, a woman, a tall thin man, his son—
This was very good indeed. Would we had him at the Rose.
“Tell him of what lies before, Spirit.”
“Tell him,” I said to Faustus, “to tell me of plots.”
“PLOTS!” the thing roared. “You want the truth?” It was back fourteen feet tall and afire, stooping under the ceiling. “You live by a government. Governments NEED plots! Else people ask why they die? Where’s the bread? Human. Hu-man! You are the ones in torment! We here are FREE!
“PLOTS! BEware ESSEX!” Essex? The Queen’s true right arm? Her lover? “BEWARE Guido and his dark SHINING lantern! BEWARE the House in the RYE-fields! Beware the papers in the TUB OF flour! Beware pillars! BEWARE POSTS! BeWARE the Dutch, the FRENCH, the colonists in VIRGINIA!” Virginia? They’re lost? “BEWARE RUSSia and the zuLU and the DUTCHAFricans! Beware EVERYTHING! BEWARE EVERYboDY! AHIiiiiiii!!!”
It disappears. Faustus slumps to the floor, sweating and pale.
The light comes back to normal.
“He’ll be like that a few minutes,” says Wagner, coming in the door with a jug of wine and three glasses. “He said malmsey’s your favourite. Drink?”
~ * ~
We shook hands at the doorway early next morning.
“I was impressed,” I said. “All that foofaraw just for me.”
“If they’re sending atheists, I had better get out of this country. No one will be safe.”
“Goodbye,” I said, putting the box in my pack. The door closed. I walked out past the hitching post. Tied to it with a leather strap was a carpenter’s sawhorse. Strapped about the middle of it, hanging under it, was a huge stoppered glass bottle filled with hay. How droll of Wagner, I thought.
I went to the river, put on my skates, and headed back out the Churn to the Thames-Isis, back to London, uneventfully, one hand behind me, the other counterweight, the pack swinging, my skates thin and sharp.
Skizz skizz skizz-
~ * ~
When I got back to my lodgings, there was a note for me in the locked room. I took the token of proof with me, and went by back ways and devious alleys to an address. There waiting was another high lord of the realm. He saw the box in my hand, nodded. He took the corner of my sleeve, pulled me to follow him. We went through several buildings, downward, through a long tunnel, turning, turning, and came to a roomful of guards beyond a door. Then we went upstairs, passing a few clerks and other stairwells that led down, from whence came screams. Too late to stop now.
“Someone wants to hear your report besides me,” said the high lord. We waited outside a room from which came the sounds of high, indistinct conversation. The door opened; a man I recognised as the royal architect came out, holding a roll of drawings under his arm, his face reddened. “What a dump!” said a loud woman’s voice from the room beyond.
“What a dump! What a dump!” came a high-pitched voice over hers.
I imagined a parrot of the red Amazonian kind.
“Shut up, you!” said the woman’s voice.
“What a dump! What a dump!”
“Be sure to make a leg, man,” said the high lord behind me, and urged me into the room.
There she was, Gloriana herself. From the waist down it looked as if she’d been swallowed by some huge spangled velvet clam while stealing from it the pearls that adorned her torso, arms, neck and hair.
“Your Majesty,” I said, dropping to my knees.
The lord bowed behind me.
“What a dump!” said the other voice. I looked over. On a high sideboard, the royal dwarf, whose name I believed to be Monarcho, was dressed as a baby in a diaper and a bonnet, his legs dangling over the sides, four feet from the floor.
“Well?” asked the Queen. “(You look horrible without your face hair.) Well?”
I nodded toward the box under my arm.
“Oh, give that to someone else; I don’t want to see those things.” She turned her head away, then back, becoming the Queen agai
n.
“Were we right?”
I looked her in the eyes, below her shaven brow and the painted-in browline, at the red wig, the pearls, the sparkling clamshell of a gown.
“His last words, Majesty,” I said, “were of the Bishop of Rome, and of your late cousin.”
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew it!”
“I knew it!” yelled Monarcho.
The Queen threw a mirror at him. He jumped down with a thud and waddled off to torment the lapdog.
“You have been of great service,” she said to me. “Reward him, my lord, but not overmuch. (Don’t ever appear again in my presence without at least a moustache.)”
I made the knee again.
“Leave,” she said to me. “You. Stay,” she said to the lord. I backed out. The door swung. “Builders!” she was yelling. “What a dump!”
“What a dum—” said Monarcho, and the door closed with a thud.
~ * ~
So now it is another wet summer, in May, and I am lodging in Deptford, awaiting the pleasure of the Privy Council to question me.
At first I was sure it dealt with the business of this winter last, as rumour had come back to me that Faustus had been seen alive in France. If I had heard, other keener ears had heard a week before.
But no! The reason they sent the bailiff for me, while I was staying at Walsingham’s place in Kent, was because of that noddy-costard Kyd.
For he and his friends had published a scurrilous pamphlet a month ago. Warrants had been sworn; searches made, and in Kyd’s place they found some of my writings done, while we were both usually drunk, when we roomed together three years ago cobbling together old plays. I had, in some of them, been forthright and indiscreet. Kyd even more so.
So they took him downstairs, and just showed him the tongue-tongs, and he began to peach on his 104-years-old great naunt.
Of course, he’d said all the writings were mine.
And now I’m having to stay in Deptford (since I can get away to Kent if ever they are through with me) and await, every morning, and the last ten mornings, the vagaries of the Privy Council. And somewhat late of each May evening, a bailiff comes out, says, “You still here?” and “They’re gone; be back here in the morning.”
But not this morning. I come in at seven o’ the clock, and the bailiff says, “They specifically and especially said they’d not get to you today, be back tomorrow.” I thanked him.
I walked out. A day (and a night) of freedom awaited me.
And who do I spy coming at me but my companions in the adventure of the iceboat, Nick Skeres and Ingram Frizier, along with another real piece of work I know of from the theatres (people often reach for their purses and shake hands with him) named Robert Poley.
“What ho, Chris!” he says, “how’s the playhouse dodge?”
“As right as rain till the Plague comes back,” I say.
I watch, but neither Skeres nor Frizier seem to recognise me; I am dressed as a gentleman again; my beard and moustache new-waxed, my hat a perfect comet of colour and dash.
“Well, we’re heading for Mrs Bull’s place,” says Poley. “She owes us each a drink from the cards last night; it is our good fortune, and business has been good,” he says, holding up parts of three wallets. “How’s about we stands you a few?”
“Thanks be,” I say, “but I am at liberty for the first time in days, and needs be back hot on a poem, now that Shaxber’s Venus and Adonis is printed.”
“Well, then,” says Poley, “one quick drink to fire the Muse?”
And then I see that Skeres is winking at me, but not one of the winks I know. Perhaps his eye is watering. Perhaps he is crying for the Frenchmen who we hear are once again eating each other up like cannibals. Perhaps not.
Oh well, I think, what can a few drinks with a bunch of convivial invert dizzards such as myself harm me? I have been threatened with the Privy Council; I walk away untouched and unfettered.
“Right!” I say, and we head off toward Deptford and Mrs Bull’s, though I keep a tight hold on my purse. “A drink could be just what the doctors ordered.”
<
~ * ~
A DAY WITHOUT DAD
BY IAN WATSON
I asked Miranda at breakfast, “Will you do me a favour, darling?”
Beloved daughter looked dubious, which surprised me.
“Will you look after your grandad today?”
Miranda gazed into her bowl of oats and dried banana bits. Her flaxen hair hung around her face, hiding her expression from me.
“Can I keep him asleep, Mum? There’s a French test this morning— and...there are swimming heats in the afternoon.”
“Grandad can help you with the French.”
“Don’t be silly—that’s cheating. Black mark if they find out.”
When she said cheating, involuntarily I glanced at Paul, but just then he was looking at his watch.
When had beloved husband last made proper love to me? Not for three years, since Dad was installed as my guest. ‘Are you sure he’s asleep, Cath?’ ‘Of course I’m sure.’ ‘You might lose control...’ In my spasm of pleasure Paul thought that Dad might surface as an uninvited spectator of his performance. I could hardly ask Miranda if she would host Dad for an hour at bedtime so that her parents could enjoy some unspecified spontaneous privacy! How embarrassing, how inhibiting.
Increasingly I suspected that in the past year or so Paul may have enjoyed a little side-dish, as it were—which he would no doubt justify to himself by some rationalization about his male urge demanding to be satisfied; as if I had become some sort of hospice nun without appetites and frustrations. Probably an occasional girl from the Rough, picked up while he was taking a Jag to some customer. A girl who would be glad of a modest gift of cash.
I wasn’t about to rock the boat of our marriage. Paul was sensible. So was I. Full-blown affairs, divorces, were ruinous. These days financial considerations dominated most people’s lives. Ours, certainly. Keeping up payments on house and health and winter heat and insurances and service contracts and all else. Investing for Miranda’s future. Oh, let her become rich through her talent for design—surely she was showing flair!
Although Paul and I were only in our mid- to late-thirties, we invested obsessively for our old age so that we did not ever burden Miranda, as Dad burdened me.
“I’d gladly help out if I could,” Paul murmured.
He couldn’t, as he knew full well. Guesting only worked with genetically close relatives. All to do with the brain patterns.
“I could get some practice in,” he joked feebly.
Not much need of that! Paul’s own Mum and Dad weren’t even sixty. Betty and Jack were both hale and hearty. Anyway, Paul tagged his sister Eileen as a soft touch if it ever came to hosting Betty and Jack. Both at once. How could the aging couple be separated after a lifetime together? Eileen would have to take both parents on board.
“You know I don’t normally mind, Mum,” Miranda said. “It’s just...well, with the swimming this afternoon.”
Miranda didn’t wish to be in changing rooms with a seventy-odd’ year-old man inside her head. Like a voyeur. If her friends knew, they would be furious, never mind that she swore she was keeping her guest suppressed. She would need to pretend all day long that she was on her own, which would be a strain, and a bit alienating for Dad too.
Oh why hadn’t she mentioned those swimming heats until now? I’d been counting on her.
Answer: I didn’t pay enough attention to her swimming. I wanted Miranda to concentrate on art, where she showed such budding talent. But Miranda nursed dreams of being a champion swimmer, which wouldn’t bring her very much long-term money, only some transitory glory. Maybe art would be a false trail too, yet at least art might be a route to something special. Or art might be an awful blind alley—which was why she strove at swimming, imagining medals and sponsorships and product endorsements. Miranda didn’t show much skill at economics or scienc
e or computer studies.
She was usually willing to give me respites from day-in-day-out-Dad. Not that Dad was intrusively present all the time, but still the sense of him was always with me, beneath the surface if not above.
What else could I have done other than accept the responsibility of having Dad in my head when he became unable to look after himself? The cost of putting him in a nursing home would have hamstrung Paul and me.
Could have been worse, I suppose. Mum might have lived long enough for guesting to be developed. Then both of them would have been sharing my brain.
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