Will

by Christopher Rush

  ‘Not a Dr Hall cure, that one?’

  There was no cure for the plague. Catch the pestilence and thou art slain. No medicine in the world will do thee good. Not poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou hadst yesterday. And the dreams you endured instead burned like the mines of sulphur.

  ‘Sweet dreams for me in Warwick – a nice safe neck of the woods.’

  Nor was there explanation. What was the mysterious cause and purpose of it? Find out that and you could perhaps discover the ultimate prevention. Was it in the stars or in the air? Was it bred in dunghills or in brothels? Harboured by cats and dogs and pigs? Spread by the harlots? By the barbers who let blood in the streets, or by the pudding-wives and sellers of tripe who slurped their slops into the gutters meant for cleansing? Or by the slaughterers who let their bloody shambles run everywhere? All were culpable. The Corporation ordered them to contain their crap and carry it in tubs to the Thames, where it could safely be poured in – so that we could then drink it! Every day of our shortened lives!

  ‘I’ll never visit London again!’

  Or it was the theatres to blame, the cause of plague being plays. It was always possible. The playhouses closed like daisies in the dark. And we poor fools melted into the wind. Nothing briefer than the breath of actors. Pembroke’s Men had to pawn their costumes. The once proud Queen’s Men degenerated into a tag-rag gaggle of broken down bumpkins, touring the sticks. Only ourselves and the Admiral’s survived.

  Ned Alleyn travelled to Newcastle, begging his new wife still in London to take what precautions she could for their family against the invisible enemy at the gates – on the walls, up the alleys, in the thatch, wherever it lay. But he wanted Joan to be a busy little mouse while he was in the country, throwing water before her door every night and having in her windows good store of rue and herb of grace. He also asked that the September parsley bed be sown with spinach. ‘And I pray you, Jug, let my orange-tawny stockings of woollen be dyed a very good black against I come home, to wear in the winter.’That’s what he wrote. She showed me the letter, since he wrote to a wife who could not read. Life goes on, in other words. Or at least you try to pretend that it does. Henslowe saw to the spinach. And I noticed the black stockings standing out against the snow that winter. It was the only black he needed. They all survived.

  Robert Browne’s family didn’t. One time of Worcester’s Men, he trod the boards at Frankfurt in the summer of ’93 leaving them in the long slow malignant heat of Shoreditch. When he came back home not one of them remained. Wife, children, servants, all that could be found – the plague had raged through the whole household like a summer fire, executing every one, to a girl, to a boy, to a babe. Browne was inconsolable. I was in the Boar’s Head with Dick Burbage and Austin Philips when he came through the door, white-faced and breathless from the empty house he’d just visited and not even a neighbour left to say him a single word of them.

  What, all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop? Did you say all? O hell-kite, all? Did heaven look on and would not take their part? And I must be from thence…

  And he pulled his hat over his brows after that and couldn’t speak. I never saw such pain in a face and was glad when he hid it. But his silence was even worse.

  Give sorrow words, we urged him. The grief that will not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.

  Browne did speak again, though. In time he asked another lady to marry him and she did, and he fathered another brood of chickens, all of them pretty. As I said, Francis, life goes on. Through the pain, life goes on. Not in plays perhaps, where a man has to take the classic stance, make the grand tragic gesture.

  Life, if I lose thee, I lose a thing that none but fools would keep.

  Here breasts are for beating, not feeling, clothes are for rending, not taking off, and hair is made of ash. If the maidens sit with gold combs in their locks, their lovers are sure to be drowned. In the world of the play a man weeps for Hecuba whom he never even knew. Did she ever even exist? Maybe not, but her tears do, and she weeps like Niobe. But in the real world life goes on, because we all have to die and we all want to live while we’re waiting.

  ‘It’s natural.’

  It’s inevitable, like the plague itself. As it tore on through ’93 and into ’94 our world fell apart. Life had proved stronger than art after all. We were scattered like sheep before the wolf. You can picture me on the Italian waterways Francis. Or you can find me in Bath, up to my neck in salubrity. Or in Stratford for that matter, up to my balls in Anne Hathaway. You’d be wrong on that score. No more children from that coupling, though it hadn’t been for want of trying again. And again. Eventually we stopped trying – and in time there seemed no reason left to couple at all.

  ‘Better than life in a plague town.’

  Though for all its horrors London was the place I’d rather be. The very danger made you feel more intensely alive. There was the thrill of simply taking your chances. I even went to see some of the open plague-pits in Finsbury and Moorfields, pulled there to the very brink by that morbid curiosity that makes us all want to stare. Not that they were easy to avoid, those open sores. They reeked with the stench of emptied bellies and intestinal tracts. We hovered on the edge of Gehenna and peered in at the horrors, unable to tear our eyes away from the vision of what was to come. Hell held no surprises for us now. The city graveyards could not contain the dead, were not tomb enough and continent to hide the slain, and so they opened up these huge black holes in the green fields and poured the bodies in.

  They were a gruesome spectacle. Among the mounds of corpses that flickered palely in that ghastly torchlight I caught here and there an eye that blinked and held my horrified stare. I started forward, ready to point and protest. ‘Hold off the earth awhile! There are people moving in there, not yet dead!’ Then I hesitated – and stopped. Who in his right mind was going to wade into that massive tangle of human remains and pluck out a stray survivor? Was I going to see to it myself? Plunge into the very maelstrom of contagion and come out carrying the plague in my arms? I checked myself, stood there and watched as the gravediggers, ignoring the groans and twitchings, went berserk, spading on the earth, hurling it over the pale hundreds, hiding the vague stirrings, soaking up the groans.

  And on the roofs of these very plague-pits, as soon as the earth was put back, drunken dancers went wild and the beast with two backs was rampant. It was said that women climaxed more ecstatically on the plague graves than anywhere else, even the perfumed chambers of the great, such was the savage will to survive, to feel alive, to feel anything at all, to proclaim the life-force in death’s despite. And it was also said that the bastards born of these ghoulish couplings had the tempers of tigers and the appetites of sharks, conceived as they had been out of a diabolical and insane thrusting on. Meanwhile the whore-shops shook their timbers like ships in a storm. The whores of Clerkenwell complained that men came with madness in their eyes and brimstone in their pricks and that they pounded all night long and buggered them senseless in the morning. After that they buggered one another. They’d have buggered the devil himself if he’d bared his arse in Clerkenwell.

  ‘And so, still London seethed.’

  Its stews bubbled over. Worse than ever. The whorehouses of Southwark proclaimed they’d never done such a roaring trade – though the nearby Rose stood dark and empty, where not so long ago the groundlings had given it all they’d got for Talbot fallen in France, and Marlowe’s mighty line had brought the house down in a thunder of applause. They were waiting for the Marlowe magic to return. But in the middle of all this, when the plague was at its height, something happened that changed the theatrical scene forever.

  ‘What was that?’

  You know what it was, Francis. The Marlowe magic was never going to come back. Not ever. Because before the end of May, Year of Our Lord 1593, Master Marlowe lay dead in Deptford with a dagger in hi
s brain.

  35

  ‘I’ll hear about that – and then the pie!’

  Then lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold.

  Christopher Marlowe came to Eleanor Bull’s house on Deptford Strand at ten in the morning and was joined by three men: Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robin Poley. They talked, ate, smoked, strolled in the garden, all rather civilised and subdued – an uncharacteristically muted Marlowe, you may say. Then they went in again around six for their evening meal, during which drink was taken. Quite a skinful. They supped some stuff. After dinner Marlowe left the table and flung himself down on an adjacent bed. The other three stayed where they were, Frizer sitting in the middle of the trio with his back to Marlowe. There wasn’t a lot of room. Frizer especially, flanked by Skeres and Poley, was in what you might call a tight corner – Snug the joiner couldn’t have fitted him up better. You’d have thought he was the one for the chop, not Marlowe. And there they were – all four from the seamy underbelly of the body politic, and not one of them a man you’d be wise to be sitting with in a Deptford drinker, particularly if you were wedged in…

  The talk turned to the reckoning – who was to settle with Mistress Bull and how much the day’s hospitality had cost them. That’s when the fracas flared up, like lightning, and the prince of Cats came out with his claws as he was very apt to do, sudden and quick in quarrel. Only this time, oddly enough, he didn’t rely on his own claws. Instead he snatched Frizer’s dagger from its sheath at his back and wounded him twice in the head. Frizer, boxed in by his two associates, had little chance to defend himself against the murderous Marlowe, a formidable foe when in the violent vein. Yet somehow Frizer managed to turn it around (himself included) and fight back – and in the rammy retrieved his dagger and rammed it into Marlowe’s forehead, just above the right eye. The mighty-liner screamed like a stuck pig and swore like a trooper (so they recalled). Then he fell down. And fell silent.

  ‘Into the blind cave of eternal night.’

  Well quoted, Francis. The author of Faustus and Tamburlaine and all those brave translunary things was no more. Like his dramatic raptures he was now air and fire. And earth. And not far from the water, as it happened. Dead over the merest trifle: a tavern tiff and who was to pick up the bill. Had the size of it tipped the balance? A great reckoning in a little room. It was 1593, seven o’clock in the evening, on the penultimate day of May, and rough winds had just shaken one of its darling buds, the Muses’ darling. He was twenty-nine years old.

  That at least was the official version, somewhat dramatised by me in the telling, mind you, Francis, for your better entertainment. And that roughly is how it was recorded two days later by the Royal Coroner, Sir William Danby, after the inquest, which was heard by a jury of sixteen men good and true, if you want to believe the adjectives – the number’s accurate anyway. A sordid little case of manslaughter arising out of a banal little brawl, and occasioned by the ignoble question of who was to pay the bill or how it was to be apportioned. After all, when four men are dining one of them may drink more than his fair share. Sound all right to you, Francis? Smell sweet as a great pie, does it, in your expert nostrils? You’re a lawyer, after all.

  ‘It stinks and rings – hollow.’

  As to the real version, the date is correct and so is the setting and the names of the cast. You can probably forget the rest. Unless you’d care to slip back with me thirteen years from the date of his death and hear something a little closer to the truth.

  ‘How quickly can it be told, Will?’

  In motion of no less celerity than that of thought. This is how it happened. When Marlowe went to Cambridge he was an unlikely enough undergraduate, more interested in politics and Ovid than in becoming a churchman. Still, he’d have been under plenty of persuasion. Campion and Parsons, along with a hundred other Jesuits, were busy targeting England in obedience to the Pope’s command and fanatical call to arms. They were peaceful men, Campion especially, but there was nothing secret about the ultimate papal objective: the killing of the queen, the Jezebel whose version of religion was killing the country through the souls of its people. The political mission was therefore to kill her. Take with you the armour of God, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit which is the word of God (as interpreted in Rome). Together with whatever poisons and wicked little knives you can smuggle through. Naturally your feet will be shod with the gospel of peace.

  To the self-same tune again. And you well know how even the devil can cite scripture for his purpose.

  ‘Especially the devil.’

  The Pope donned his horns and gave it the full Beelzebub treatment. We were marked men. England was under attack. Not that Campion ever saw it that way.

  ‘We travelled only for souls?’

  Something like that. ‘We touched neither state nor policy. Assassination? Regicide? We had no such commission.’ And even a triple measure of stretching and other procedures failed to move Campion from that idealistic angle of his, the one he was always coming from, the one I had seen in his eyes, the impossibly pious squint, burning there like a vision. Topcliffe tried hard enough to shift it, to straighten him out on the rack. ‘Look, Edmund, let me put it to you this way. It’s not just the hand that actually holds the dagger that’s the guilty one, you know. Your hand, my dear, is as red as any man’s. You don’t agree? Oh, I’m sorry, perhaps I didn’t hurt you enough. Let’s try it again – but this time a different way.’

  ‘A darling man, Topcliffe.’

  But even when Campion lay like a dislocated elephant, unable to rise, and ate his bread like an ape, between cupped and crippled hands, still he refused to see it the government way, the Topcliffe way. And, to do them justice, the Privy Council were greatly impressed by the piety and purity of this gentle scholar. Even the queen, gave him a hearing, anxious to offer him an exit strategy.

  ‘So you told me.’

  So I did.

  She put the questions herself. One word was all he needed to say. The way out was wide open for him. But he wouldn’t take it. So they took him out and hanged him.

  ‘His choice.’

  No, God’s – or the Pope’s.

  That was in July ’81, only six months into Marlowe’s student days. In his second year at Corpus Christi either the Catholics got to him or the Secret Service got there first and asked him to feign Catholicism, pass himself off as a Catholic student at Rheims and spy on the true Catholics, in other words on the traitors to the state and enemies of the queen. Marlowe the mole was doing intelligence work for the Cabinet long before he’d graduated. That was his first and only job, apart from writing, and all he ever gave away on that front was that even a dramatist earned more than a spy.

  By the time he’d got his first degree, droves of Catholics had been slaughtered at Tyburn. Including Francis Throckmorton. Two sessions on the rack and one on the strappado had made him sing a different song from Campion. To wit: Spain would invade, Mary Stuart would be sprung from jail and crowned Queen of England, and the country would be under Catholic occupation until it settled down again to its natural state and true faith, the old religion.

  ‘And Queen Elizabeth?’

  Well, clearly there would be one place and one place only for her to lay her uneasy head, made easier by the removal of the crown.

  Christopher Marlowe B. A. had graduated into a world of prejudice, terror, political paranoia, and intrigue.

  ‘A mad world, my masters.’

  A mad world Francis.

  If a wild wave of Catholicism was sweeping the decade the response of the authorities was nothing less than hysterical. The hundred seminary priests sent across the Channel from the training camps at Douai, Rheims, and Rome were easily outnumbered by the vast army of agents employed by Secret Police Chief Francis Walsingham to track them down, root out their converts and protectors, and sniff out conspiracies, often while themselves posing as Catholics or sym
pathisers with Rome. They ranged from common cut-throats and scullions and flunkeys to intelligencers, double agents, agents provocateurs. Robin Poley, who fetched up at Eleanor Bull’s house at the end of May, was a Catholic who betrayed Catholics and used sodomy in his honey traps.

  ‘All nice people underneath!’

  Marlowe was in much the same mould. Very shortly after he’d enrolled at Cambridge he started missing classes. In Walsingham’s pay he went first to Paris and then to Rheims (the Jesuit training camp had moved from Douai in ’78) to spy on the English ambassador there, a known crook. Skeres was an agent too at this time, while Poley strung Babington along, sweet as a harp, stroking his genitals as was his wont, knowing that the Babington genitals were numbered. They came off the year before Marlowe became a Master of Arts. After that Poley did two years in the Tower – part of his insurance cover plan – following the government round-up of the old suspects, though he lived the high life there, they say, well supplied with wine and whores.

  ‘They look after their own.’

  Only till their own become inconvenient. Both Poley and Marlowe later turned up in the Low Countries, where English spies were active. There were murmurs about English money being counterfeited, and Marlowe was ordered home. He retired from espionage and left for London, where he became an instant success and famous overnight, the toast of the town.

  One of his closest cronies in London was Thomas Watson, scholar, soak, and sonneteer, much obsessed by time, classicism, and the pastoral.

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  Not surprising. Just another of the host of doomed poets who never made it out of the nineties – or out of their thirties, if you prefer to look at it that way. He too went down in ’92. Marlowe shared lodgings with Watson in Norton Folgate. They drank and smoked at the Nag’s Head in Cheapside, where they were roaring boys with Greene and Peele and Nashe. He also drank a lot with Thomas Kyd, with whom he had shared rooms in Shoreditch in ’91.