A Dead Man in Deptford Read Free Page A

bare
feet filthy, in cast-off trunks and jerkin too large. Kit told him
to bring sherris and be quick. Watson took from Kit’s table a
scrawled sheet. I-Ie read aloud:

    Ovid, he said. Fifth Elegy of Book One.
    - Correct. And not fitting for a divinity student.
    - I like the breasts prest. A rhyme confirming that there
are two of them. You are a lover of breasts?
    - The swinging udders I was nursed at? I am given otherwise
but here I am but the English voice of Ovid.
    - Otherwise? I see. The slim flanks of a boy. The choristers
of the King’s Chapel are known, I believe, for their delectability
and amenability. Ability, in a word, to arouse.
    - I am of Canterbury. I was briefly in the cathedral choir.
I learned early what men could do with boys.
    - Here you have your own ragged catamite?
    - Not young Tom. Young Tom is sacred. I take it you
are not that way inclined.
    - I follow nature up to the point where nature says breed.
There is something absurd about grown men rubbing their
beards together and untrussing. Something pathetic but appealing about the traffic of man and boy. There is much of it in the
theatre. This line of yours, where is it, yes - Ioue send me more
such afternoones as this - it seems to me for some reason to be
a theatre line. I hear it on the stage. You know plays?
    - In Canterbury we had visits from the Queen’s Men. Dick
Tarleton and his Seven Deadly Sins. The Earl of Surrey’s troupe
came to regale us here. We were not impressed.
    - And you propose for yourself life in a country vicarage?
Kit looked at him. Watson was some ten years older than
himself, fixed, he could see, in a world where country vicarages were a shuddering nightmare, sole end of men from the universities whose talents lay not in advancement in the secular
fields. They must all come to it unless.

    -Unless, Kit said, fortune my foe becomes my friend.
What is there? My ambition, you may have guessed, lies in
poetry, but no man can live on it. Patrons are hard to find.
The stage? I have not thought of the stage.
    - It diverts both the washed and unwashed. I shrug but
I work at play-botching. They talk of Tom Watson’s jests. In
balductum plays. You know the word?
    - Trashy, tawdry. Groundling stuff.
    - You know of groundlings, then. Shillings slide into my
purse and shillings, by mean alchemy, turn to gold. But my
Passionate Century sold well. You must come to London.
    - To do what?
    Young Tom brought, panting, the sherris from the buttery
in a crock. He dealt copper change. Watson lordily bade him
keep it. Kit unhooked two battered college tankards from the
wall. He poured. They drank, toasting what they did not know.
    - To prepare your advancement. But you must first dissemble your distaste at your prospects. You have a father in
orders who sent you here to sustain a family line of comfortable
clerisy?
    - My father makes shoes. I came on a scholarship from the
King’s School, holy orders being the one end in view. Your lips
twitch at the shoemaking.
    They were meaty lips under a Turkish nose. The black eyes
caught the summer afternoon light and dealt it at Kit more in
compassion than merriment.
    -Who would laugh at shoes? We shall go on needing
shoes until our feet are permitted to tread the golden street
or dance on hot bricks. The trade is noble enough. Dissemble
and take your degree. Be a master of arts, without that you are
nothing. But you have the long vacation coming. You propose
returning to Canterbury? Come to London. Stay at my house.
In the Liberty of Norton Folgate.
    - Liberty?
    - It is in London and yet not in it. Outside the jurisdiction of the City officers. I am at the corner of Bishopsgate Street and
Hog Lane. Close to the Theatre in the Liberty of Holywell. You
shall see the Theatre. Also the Curtain. More important, you shall
see Sir Francis Walsingham.

    - Walsingham. A holy name. And what is he?
    - Universities forbid universal knowledge. You are cut off.
You know