by Ros Barber
‘I have been ill.’
‘You don’t look ill.’
I answer ‘You’re a nurse
as well as a nun?’
‘I’m more things than you know.
Today a seamstress. This dress has a tear
would make a harlot blush.’ I turn to see
the green dress she was wearing Christmas Eve;
her smile as she sews the rent across the breast.
‘How did that happen?’
‘Chéri! Do you care?’
‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you.’
‘Nor do lies
suit you. Your friend is leaving now?’
‘He is.’
‘He won’t stay for theatricals tonight?’
Horses are stamping in the yard; the hounds
sniffing and milling round their hoofs. But you
will head not for the fox, but for the south.
‘Pity, I hear the play is very good.
If a little bloody.’
Titus Andronicus.
You couldn’t bear to see the players come.
Or watch Southampton’s surreptitious gaze
in my direction as my words were staged.
You found the play ‘too vengeful, anyway’.
‘Forgiveness,’ you said, ‘might bless you. Not revenge.’
You kiss the countess’s hand. Some final words.
From the portico, a thin-lipped Jaques Petit
steps forward, slides a letter in your hand.
You tuck it in your breast, oblivious.
‘He calls you Mr Disorder.’
‘Who?’
‘Petit.’
Despite the window’s frost, I watch you leave
through a clearing my hand has made upon the glass:
a static wave you never turn to see.
How perfectly you have forsaken me.
‘Do you not care?’ she says.
Do I not care?
I care beyond all measure, and my heart,
already three-way splintered, sinks with lead.
‘I’ve been called worse,’ I say.
‘He is a rat,’
she says. ‘He means to poison everything.’
I turn. She is unpicking stitches made
in anger’s error. ‘I don’t like the man.’
‘What do you know about him?’
‘Only that
he stirs the gossip in the servants’ hall.
And often enough, I leave my room to find
him in the corridor, starting away.’
‘Perhaps he is protecting you.’
She snorts.
‘Write to your Anthony. Tell him he must leave.’
You’re at the gatehouse, now, and rein the mare to the right. A six-day ride to Scadbury.
‘I think he’s here for me.’ Said absently,
but her hiss gets my attention. ‘I despair!
The man is running rumours, sure as rain.’
Yet Anthony’s trust was not won easily.
And though the man was welcome as a flea,
obsequious and greased with copious smarm,
he seemed to serve a purpose. And perhaps
that purpose was to keep this ghost from harm.
She folds the dress across the chair, as if
it is the limpest girl, dragged from a lake,
and comes to my side. Her hand is on my cheek
as tenderly as yours has ever been,
and plants a simple need that I be held
as if you’d never left, and she was you.
I go to kiss her.
‘No,’ she says, ‘not safe.
No more for you till you shoo that rat away.’
REVENGE TRAGEDY
The real play is offstage. It’s her and him:
the Lord of Gorgeous and my fatal nun.
She’s squeezed beside him, palms beneath her chin,
pretending to watch, but gleefully as sin
distracting him with whispers. I’m the one
he should be eyeing, yet he’s eyeing her,
as if forgetting who the play was for.
The once or twice he glances, I am stern
and he half guilty, like a man disturbed
in the act of stealing ripe fruit from a tree
that tickles his fence. Now hungry, now unsure
whether it’s right to lord it over me.
While players strut, while boys bake in a pie,
while throats are cut – she hums the line, ‘Say aye.’
SO
Example of foolish thought love makes occur:
‘I’ll win his heart with poems about her.’
IN DISGRACE WITH FORTUNE AND MEN’S EYES
Three weeks have passed since I last scratched a note
to you in this book of sorrows. I confess
I’ve written only sonnets to a lord,
sliding them, nightly, underneath his door
adorned with the initials ‘W.S.’
As well you are not here. As well that I
shan’t send the bulk of this until my death.
As well it’s all in cipher, for Petit,
I know, has ‘borrowed’ papers from my desk.
Nothing of consequence: I do take care,
despite your certainty that I’m a fool;
my drafts are burnt before I leave the room.
But he is always up and down the stairs,
outside my door, or hers; cleaning his shoes,
wiping a smirk, pretending to polish air.
More of him later. First, I want to say
forgive the weakness that your absence spawned;
this dawn tiptoeing for want of him, or her.
Love is the only point of drawing breath,
and I’m marooned without it. The poems seemed –
given Hal’s love for those I wrote before –
my only power. But so much for art.
My stormy, merciless mistress has his heart.
She tugs us on a double-baited hook.
She kisses me swiftly, then returns to him.
‘Banish Petit,’ she says.
Tonight, in tears
she came to my room with letters for two friends
in London. I am to deliver them.
For a letter in cipher came from Anthony,
compelling me to leave. Her every fear
about Petit is true. He’s threatening
to expose us both for our moral laxity,
his own disgust.
Oh, moral laxity,
how you have sweetly leavened my flat dead hours,
deliciously inspired both prick and pen.
Only a juiceless man denied such good
could call it evil.
Lucille placed her head
upon my shoulder, sobbing properly
how sorry she was, and she was in my hands,
and could I deliver, please … and all my thoughts
I must confess, were on her bosom there,
most warmly pressing. Even as her tears
soaked through my shirt, I went to raise her head
and kiss her mindlessly.
I leave at dawn.
ESSEX HOUSE
January ends, but passes winter on
as seamless as this river meets the sea.
The edge of the Thames is creaking. Ceaseless snow
falls from a sky white as a winding sheet,
obliterating what marks street from street.
As light fades, I dismount at Essex House,
swaddled against the cold up to my eyes:
disguise itself disguised as keeping warm.
Anthony’s strangely cheerless.
‘I am here
myself by the earl’s good grace. Which may be stretched
as far as lodging dead men if you stay
stuck fast in this room, in case you’re recognised.
We’ll find you service shortly
.’
I’m in pain.
I’ve warmed my feet too quickly by the fire
and my toes are aching. His good-natured smile
is cooler than I remembered it. The source
is soon apparent.
‘Tell me, does the air
in Rutland cause conversion?’
I’m unclear.
I run my mind through maths and alchemy
while he gulps liquor.
‘I believed we shared
– proclivities.’
And though his meaning dawns
with that word’s hesitance, I feel compelled
– annoyed perhaps that he should limit me –
to tease him with ‘Montaigne? Italian verse?’
‘Your Edward the Second and his Gaveston!
Your Gany—Ganymede.’ A stuttered halt.
I massage my foot to urge the chilblains out.
‘I write of killers, yet I am not one.
Nor am I Doctor Faustus, though the world
would have it so. Though Adonis disdained
the arms of Venus, must I do the same
because I write the tale?’
No answer comes.
He’s picking at his thumbs.
‘Although it’s true
I might enjoy male intimacy too.
But what I value most, experience,
is not found compassed in a single shape.’
He shifts uncomfortably.
‘I cannot share
your taste for female flesh.’
No remedy.
I slide the foot back in its chilly boot.
‘And I don’t ask you to. But don’t ask me
to love no more than half humanity.
Beauty is sexless. It’s found everywhere.’
He lowers his gouty frame into a chair
and watches me as though I might combust
and turn to ash in front of him.
‘It’s clear,’
he says, ‘that we must find some task for you.
And more engrossing work than tutoring.’
THE EARL OF ESSEX
A bear of an earl. This cousin of the Queen
requires to meet the man he’s sending off
to serve him on the continent. He stands
like a monument to pure nobility,
his back to the room. Though younger by a year
than me, his person breathes entitlement.
From his padded shoulders to his slender knees,
he’s dressed like a king in waiting, and might seize
the whole air of the room to draw a breath.
His beard is red as embers, and his eyes
– now rested on my face – as shocking soft
as tenderness upon the battlefield.
And in his presence, one might quite forget
what one is for. He clears his throat.
‘My friend
the Lord Southampton tells me you’re discreet.
And Mr Bacon, that you pass as French.
I gather you’re a victim of this war
against the Catholics.’
‘I served the Queen
until I was slandered grievously.’
He nods.
‘And now you may serve me. I pray, sit down.’
I take the seat that faces him.
‘My aims,’
he says, ‘are much as hers. Protect the realm.
And gather knowledge of our enemies.
But where Her Majesty refuses flat
to favour a successor …’ In his eyes,
the spark of meaning I am meant to catch.
‘Say that you had a preference for the throne …’
He leaves the silence open as a hand
that I must shake correctly, brotherly.
‘The King of Scotland.’
‘Good. Then we concur.
Plans cook abroad, and thicker year by year,
to plant a Catholic. Though Lord Burghley has
averted many plots, he isn’t well.
A younger man must take the mantle on.’
The beard seems fiercer, somehow, in the sun
that filters weakly through the window pane.
Some six weeks’ snow has settled.
‘So. We’re done.
Here is a memo, written out in French
by Mr Bacon’s servant. You will find
all your instructions. You’ll accompany
the Baron Zeirotine to Germany,
and send news from the court. Then on to Prague
and, should conditions suit, to Italy.
I gather you have the language.’
‘Sir, my tongue
has peeled that fruit, and others.’
‘Has it so?’
One eyebrow rises like a proving loaf.
‘I trust you won’t resort to poetry
when filing reports.’
I’m chastened. ‘No, sir, no.’
‘My wife’s first husband favoured poetry.
You know his work, I’m sure.’
He pares his nails
with some device he’s fished out from his desk.
‘And I know yours,’ he says, letting the weight
of his words sink in my chest. ‘I know the names –
true names – of all my agents. That includes
the slandered one you left behind.’
I try
to meet that gaze: that steady, kingly gaze.
‘My lord—’
‘No, please. You’d best to hear me out.
Should you prove true and loyal to my cause
I will ensure your restoration comes
as surely as the King of Scots is crowned.’
‘I swear—’
‘And you are eager, I can see.
No oaths are necessary. That’s the point.’
He hands across a seal: the name Le Doux
and a man whose face is masked.
‘This, I will trust.
Work diligently, then. For both of us.’
SMALL GODS
Small gods they are that shuffle men like cards,
dealing them into courts, minding their hands,
and laying wagers they will stay ahead.
Again, I’m alchemised to Mercury.
Letters delivered. Nobles led to Prague.
Messages tramped across the lines of war.
Armies estimated; counts dispatched.
Rumours reported and alliances forged.
And though I miss the semblance of a home,
and a dark-eyed mistress I might dream upon,
the European air is savoury
as wine to a man just recently set free.
For I shape more than one boy’s alphabet.
Licensed to roam, observe and scribble down,
to mingle amongst the gossip of the troops
and privy councils both, to taste the sounds
of history thrashing to be born, to breathe –
my usefulness to England warms me through
Bohemia, and the cold of Germany.
When you know this, may you be proud of me.
For though I’ve put you away, as soldiers do –
folded and dog-eared, sewn into a coat –
still all is done in reference to you
and love is inclined to catch me at the throat
when it sifts from the crowd a voice that rings like yours.
I fill my head with duty, discipline,
but when I sleep, my heart slides from its post
and slips on the outfit of a future year
when I’ll reclaim the plays I send from here
and reimburse the man who’s loved me most.
MERRY WIVES
My fear, at first, was that familiar tropes
would shout my name in each delivered line,
hanging their author from a stylish rope.
Could they tell my invention’s
work from mine?
My fear now is, they do. This sheltering name,
beneath which wisdom grows as sorrow’s fruit,
is fathering plays I still hope to reclaim
but sharper, without the arrogance of youth.
And who will know them mine? How can I snag
some threads of myself to show I passed this tree,
and not stuff Kit into the drowning bag?
I write in fits and starts, a comedy,
between the inns and lodgings of the road –
bizarrely peppered with some scraps of me
too ghostly for the ignorant to see,
disguised, as truths had better be, as jokes.
IN THE THEATRE OF GOD’S JUDGMENTS
A book stall in Frankfurt. How the ear homes in
on the English language, as a lamb’s attuned
to its mother’s bleat and trots with wagging tail –
in my case, to be startled. For within
two steps I heard my name at Cambridge, ‘Merlin.’
There by a pile of English tracts, a man
