Death of the Fox

by George Garrett

  Very well, I have wandered afield.

  My question is: Considering all I know and can judge by, beginning and end, what caught her eye and kept her favor toward Walter Ralegh? Why this one instead of a dozen or more of the others hanging by, men who were living on promises, patiently waiting upon and serving her until their patience finally vanished with their wits and the substance of their estates?

  Say this: She marked him for what he was, a man with nothing to lose—a soldier. A man who had gambled his life for no reward many times.

  Just as she had. Just as she must.

  A man who acted like a veteran captain. She, who had lived with danger since childhood and more danger as Queen of a threatened kingdom, needed such a man close by.

  Then, my guess is, she tested him, with lavish rewards. The best of men can be corrupted by an excess of good fortune. The hardest resolve can be softened by too much sweetness.

  Outwardly he changed not at all. Or better, since his swagger and appearance outraged so many, say that though he changed his vestments, he gave every sign of being the same beneath them.

  Misfortune settled the matter. When still a soldier, though in the privy chamber and beyond, he found one of the Queen’s maids of honor swelling up with his seed, he married her in secret. And the two tried to brazen it out. They failed, of course.

  Here, someone will say, he failed the Queen’s testing.

  Another will add that Ralegh proved his limits, how far and how well he could be trusted.

  I would argue that to find the limits of trustworthiness and fidelity—and all creatures, even a good dog, have limits to these—had been her aim all along. She may have been secretly happy upon two counts. First that his actions served to confirm her original judgment of him. And all those who lead men need some confirmation of their judgments.

  Second, relieved she had not been so enchanted as to raise him higher, where he could work real harm.

  He proved himself not quite fit for the Council. Not by greed, for she made good use of greedy men. Not by lechery either or, for that matter, folly or infidelity. Those failings can be taken into account.

  Not by any of these so much as by—indifference. In a final corner of himself, he did not care. The Queen could go and stand on her head.

  I think, sir, the Queen may have been pleased. Now she knew her man by heart.

  Do you see?

  In certain conditions, in the grip of uncertain events, Ralegh would throw away his future like feed for chickens.

  Now she knew that his finest moments would come at those times when a future seems no longer possible. His most shining times would be those, like a soldier’s, of pure and perfect present time.

  She could hope such a time would never come for her or the kingdom. Yet if it should happen that all things fell away, in adversity and dreadful misfortune, and all things and all hopes were lost, he would still be there and then he would surely live or die for her. His life and body would shield hers. And not out of love or fidelity or ambition or honor or virtue, but out of the joy and the style of it and because that time would truly be his home.

  Thus none of her favors had been wasted. She could wish him well and look on him always with love and confidence.

  Well, so do I wish him well. Though if I wake him from his snooze to tell him so, he’ll curse me for a meddlesome fool. And we would come to blows soon enough, I’ll bet you.

  There he dozes. Who else but an old soldier could nap in the shadow of the heading ax?

  Why not? He has lived a long time and far beyond the use of king and kingdom. His time was really done when the King made peace. For a soldier in peace is a chimney in summertime.

  One thing more and then I am done.

  Somewhere in the fields of France a stranger wheeled horse and fired at the lad from a dozen paces and the wind and heat of the bullet singed his ear. Then the lad fired his pistol and saw a man gasp, go white-eyed, and topple out of saddle to lie spurting blood on grass while the riderless horse galloped away. Somewhere, then and there, Walter Ralegh gave up his ghost with a shudder. And as a good hunter honors the fallen stag, so he, looking down at a dying stranger, partook of death himself.

  A man can only die once. A soldier dies early, and he lives, if he lives, on time that is given him, nothing he ever earned.

  Every soldier is the ghost of the man he was. He can never shed fear until he sheds flesh and bones. But he need not be fearful.

  What does a ghost have to be afraid of?

  Take it all, wars and glory and riches and fame, and stuff it down the privy.

  I’ll settle for one more night in a certain Irish tower by the burning fire.

  Say to the Court it glowes and shines like rotten wood …

  RALEGH—The Lie

  For whoso reaps renown above the rest, With heaps of hate shall surely be opprest.

  RALEGH—dedicatory poem for Gascoigne’s The Steele Glass

  Comes forward now, slouched, faint smile, eyebrows arched to engrave a smooth clear forehead with thin delicate lines which may mean annoyance or merely signal mild tedium, so composed, from the blink of the lone diamond in the center of the ribbon flower rosette upon the high-heeled velvet slippers, pinked at the toes to show glimpses of the lining of contrasting satin, to the crisped curls and ringlets of his hair, he seems to have been created all at once as he is. By a portrait painter perhaps. Limned upon wood or canvas cloth and fixed in a decorative gilt frame to hang upon the wall among others of his kind.

  Could be one among hundreds who played out their springtime in performance of vague service, living on abundance of hope, only to depart from Court, sooner or later, older, impecunious, and embittered, if no wiser.

  He could be just such a one, a likely type, though not likely to speak across time offering anything more than the worldly wisdom of wounded pride and thwarted ambition.

  Whatever truth he might tell would be tinctured by failure, an honorable experience, but one many men have shared.

  Besides he would have been at a distance, though in and of the Court. Sometimes in the presence chamber, he can never have been admitted to the privy chamber. He could offer long views, through, over, around the heads of a crowd. A bird’s view of ceremonies, processions, pageants. Tag ends of gossip. Color, noise of music, voices raised together in psalms or in concord counterpoint in madrigal and motet; rich resonance of viols; exquisite echoing of lute and cithern; birdcalls of recorders and woodwinds; bold bell-ringing brass of trumpets and, deeper, the long hautboy; pulse, shiver, and throb of drums; heraldic splendor of the organ and the light wine-sparkle of the virginal; of pippety-pop, slither, and slide of dancing slippers moving to the latest corantos, pavanes and galliards; discreet crackle and rustle of stiff expensive cloths, tinkle of chains, snap and stretch of leather; outdoors shouts and cries and laughter, prancing rhythm of hooves on stone and hard earth. Moments of abrupt hush to hear through a press of bodies, over the garden of heads, the announcements of heralds and officers, or, soft and clear, the voice of the Queen. Or that same voice and others, and then a burst of male laughter, with all the chitter-chatter of the maid of honor and Court ladies, too distant to be distinct.

  Odors: scent of perfumes and herbs and powders and unguents from body and clothing and nosegay, rich as incense, thick as smoke of burning leaves, yet all invisible, and all together not quite disguising the odor of the sweat of bodies too often unwashed; of dying rushes strewn against the cold of halls; crisp lightwood burning in fireplaces and the smell of sea coal; sweetened candles casting a sky of little stars; or the fat torch in its socket sparkling, smelling of the country; dank, damp, and sour, the odor of privies and stables; sour and stale, despite herbs and perfumes, the odor of bedsheets.

  Odor and taste of the score and more of dishes served at noon dinner. Meats and fowl spiced and sweetened. Candied fruits and marzipan. Wines fuming in silver and glass. Ale like the heart of grain at harvest time, dry and musty.

&nbs
p; Oh, they ate well, and he might be happy to remember that.

  He could tell of lazy afternoons at cards and dice, where he had small luck; bowling or tennis and wagering. Of walks in the glory of garden paths in good weather. Strolls along galleries in grayer light, where portraits watched the coming and going, pieces of joinery polished and shining, locks and handles of best brass and silver.

  Tell of days at the theater or an evening masque in the banquet house. And what the clown said that made the Queen laugh or frown. What a dying hero, sore distressed, put into noble words which made them dab at tears with handkerchiefs as lacy as their ruffs and cuffs.

  Speak of brawls in spinning crowded taverns and how, laughing, they outran the London Watch.

  Tell, with a sigh, of cold hours and interminable sermons in churches; flutter and feathers and blood of the cockpit; and wagers there too.

  All off together, young and unimportant, to Tyburn to hear a wretch make the one speech of a lifetime, then dance his capriole on air. Or watch a vagabond or a whore whipped naked through the streets.

  At night alone in a small chamber. Too small for more than one servant and lucky if that. To prime pump with wine and to waste costly paper, powder, and ink on verses written to a lady too grand to know his name. Crumpling paper and feeding it to the dying fire. Rising not steady, but steadily more aroused, to stagger and stumble in hat and muffled cloak toward some house, hand on hilt of sword and hat cocked with menace against any wretch with club or knife who might think he was defenseless. To enter that house and wait for his turn with someone who, if no lady, offering no idyllic garden, could share, bright as a summer hayfield, in the immemorial country of flesh and forgetfulness.

  Yet knowing, even at peak pleasure, he would sleep late in the morning, eggshell head full of noises, drums and horsemen, dreams of another kind of rod across his backside at school long ago. Fears, too, of the first jewel, prime bloom of God-knows what nameless French or Italian disease. And then a cure of strong waters, foul purges and medicines, chilling baths.

  Might tell of the solemn frenzies in summer when the Queen made her progress in the country. Miles of wagons and horses; jolt and jar of roads. Saddlesore, sunburned, wind-wrinkled, sweat-bathed, and well powdered—with English dust. To arrive at last at some manor house, grand as a palace and newer than any, owned by a fellow no better than himself, only luckier.

  “Well, we’ll see about that, my great man, while we drink you dry, cellar and wells, gobble your fodder in stable, pick your meat to slick bones at table. Break glasses and filch a silver salt …”

  Placed in a chamber small as a monk’s cell, if not in a tent, a bed like a coffin to share with three others. But to turn out prompt and clean as a whistle, fresh as a May morn, to stand and hear interminable hexameter Latin verses and speeches delivered by bumpkins, officious merchants, mayors, and ministers and rusty old knights, full of fire and beer and braggadocio, greeting the Queen. Music tortured by awkward musicians. With good luck, may be a country dance of lightly clad, beflowered, sturdy-limbed country girls.

  “Always a chance, my lad, in the darkness, while fireworks and colored fountains play for the Queen’s pleasure, to slip away with some fine country lass and teach her the oldest of Court dances, to clothe her in green clover and show her a wondrous rocket of my own.”

  Up before daylight to hunt; not himself to kill, but to haloo and cry with valiant vigor though it lift the roof of his head, and to bear, with saintly grin, hunting horns screaming inside it. Seeing not much with red-rimmed, red-veined, and lid-lazy eyes. Holding tight rein and gripping saddle with trembling shanks lest he tumble and break a leg and have to lay a month in the country to mend. No better off than the parable’s man in the ditch; and not one Samaritan this side of London.

  Up at dawn in a roar of packing and leaving.

  “And who stole my toothcream and toothpicks? By God, I’ll have his liver in an Apostle spoon!”

  More speeches to hear, farewells; and pray that the girl, over there, doesn’t know your face by daylight; it’s for sure you never told her your name.

  And then off again, one of a string of fantastic beads, down a road of pure dust or pure mud, mouth full of wool and beard made of cobwebs, happy to doze and happier to sweat away ale and soreness of the nights before.

  “Call it a poem and a pilgrimage. I call it a pain in the arse.”

  He could tell all that and more. With uncertain nostalgia and shrugging. Conceal any shame behind a taut grin of regret. For he was not raised up to or taught to love idleness. And that’s what it was, what all added up to in the reckoning. A long accounting of wasted days, pleasant at the time, give or take, but sadly regretted now that none of his schemes took roots.

  Better he had stayed home to become, maybe, a justice of the peace. Or taken a company to the wars to risk his neck and his health for small pay and dead men’s wages and whatever he could scoop and scrounge; or gone to sea and risked fevers and drowning and the Spanish Inquisition in the hope of gold and other dry goods.

  Better that than this; but he chose it once because—they told him at home and he believed them—he had good looks, quick wit, a nimble way about him, and an eye for advancement.

  Now looks have gone, wits are weary, having never had much exercise; limbs are not nimble, and his eye rests on a fat country widow who smiles to prove the scarcity of good teeth in England. But she has a nice piece of land and a sturdy half-timbered thatch-roof house, and cattle and pigs, and not too many children. Bless her heart, fluttering beneath a sack of paps. For he’ll still dress up in the patched ruins of his Court clothes—lucky to have kept clothes on his back—and strut like a peacock; as at Court he never could.

  Ah, he saw the real peacocks, close enough to copy. Though he skulked and shrunk whenever they came by. Though slack of wit and weary of recollection, he can tell lies as well as a London tapster. And if his tales please her, and though her tail prove as tough as a Dutch saddle, he can live out his remaining days in modest comfort, and—who knows?—die a country knight who lived a fool.

  But leave him, for this moment. Leave him to the English countryside.

  For it is not he who has come to stand with an ambiguous smile and a loose-limbed satiric posture. Not he set free from the frame of a portrait or an oval miniature by Isaac Oliver or Nicholas Hilliard, fitted to one perfect gold locket; to hang upon a chain of thin gold and to rest warm and unseen—unless that fashion should change this season—between two perfect, gentle, milk-white, classic, rounded temples, pavilions of love, much worshiped in an excess of adoring kisses.

  Not a finished picture. Not to be found in any gallery, or high attic festooned with cobwebs, or turned to the wall in a cellar. He has never posed for his own portrait; though he has sat in a stiff pose for another, a great man, after the features and lines of the true model were drawn from the quick. Such men are busy with affairs and cannot keep still for picture makers.

  For a jest he wore his own new slippers wrought in frilly, fancy Paris style. But the gentleman he posed for cannot have troubled to notice this, and now sits in the portrait gallery of a manor house in all his splendor, wearing an incongruous pair of peach-colored, utterly foppish French slippers.

  He will sit no more for others’ pictures. Unless, of course, the King himself or a member of Council should ask him. And that will not happen. He will not, either, have his own portrait done.

  No way to know if this ageless young man has come from manor house or ancient castle. Perhaps he is a younger son, cousin, or a nephew of modest means. A matter of no consequence. Nor whether he idled at Cambridge or Oxford or which, if any, of the Inns of Court he calls his. He has read proper books and knows improper ones as well. And, rich or poor, son of an ambitious merchant or some stark-Bedlam knight of the pasture, he plays his part with such an ease that anyone must wish for him that his bloodline could be traced back to Britomartis.

  To wish is but a half step from believing it so.r />
  Handsome, healthy, and well favored, much barbered, groomed, and beautifully dressed—even to the last gentle grace note to complete the harmony, a certain slight negligence, some signs of artful casualness, this man is unchanging. For him mutability’s a word for poems and easy rhymes.

  The other one kicking stones and clods in the meadow behind the cottage he first came from and has returned to, poorer than he planned, still daydreaming, a litigious daydream, the case for and against the widow; widow of the gap-toothed, irrepressible smile. Trying to discount a cynical, skeptical barrister’s voice that tells him he knows, without further examination, what secrets lie hidden beneath apron, kirtle, gown, skirt, and shift. Denying that voice and trying to conjure up an inverse ciphering whereby her charms, at last exposed and tasted, will be sweeter and softer and uncloying exactly in opposite balance to her formidable front: ragged-sail, leaky; just as an old galleon may conceal chests of treasure, sacks of rare spices, bolts of silk; just so imagining her and hoping imagining will make it so and raise his ensign proudly and no retreat; fantasy being more than half the music, half the art.

  This one changed, grew older, bade farewell to the Court silently, not in verses. Slipped away by dark of the moon on account of a misunderstanding with a certain greedy moneylender who had not given him half value on his best plate. Vowing never to return. Took passage homeward not by horse or coach, but propped in a rumbling baggage cart. Until, one day’s journey from his village, he rented the best post horse at the inn. Changed into his finest, buckled harness and sword and set forth. Into a pouring rain, leading and tugging the horse through mud on a road that seemed to have vanished, and, indeed, did so before, far after nightfall, he sneaked up the village street and beyond it to a house where he waited, rain or no rain, a long time to knock and wake the servants, feeling, without having to see, his wet ruff and cuffs limp and sad, his hat shapeless as an oyster; muddy as a pig farmer; all soaked to the bone—one last lost survivor of the Armada.