A Dead Man in Deptford Read Free Page B

nothing of the Service?
    - Tell me. See, the mud is dried. It will soon come away.
    - I will tell you of Sir Francis, Frank as I call him. We met
in Paris. I was seventeen, studying if it could be called that. He
was England’s ambassador. He was kind without condescension.
He corrected my Latin verses, listened to the songs I wrote. It
was perhaps a relief for him in the midst of such troublesome
business St Bartholomew was preparing. You know surely of the
massacre? The mob screaming for the blood of the Huguenots.
Two thousand Huguenot corpses on the Paris streets.
    - We all know of this. See, it is as if there had never
been mud. I will pour more.
    - Listen. The Queen has never been willing to see how the
faith of the Huguenots is England’s faith, or near to it. She sent
a baptismal font, all gold, worth all of a hundred thousand, when
the French king’s daughter was born. She stood as godmother,
imagine. The font was taken by Huguenot pirates in the Channel. Friendly with a France that murders Protestants. She calls
it diplomacy.
    - Which means double-dealing. Go on.
    - Sir Francis is no double man. Perhaps it is easier for a
woman to deal double, in state affairs as in the amorous life.
They are all Eve’s daughters, treacherous by nature. However,
Sir Francis runs his service mostly from his own purse. This is
love of country at its most shining and laudable. He knows the
Catholic threat.
    - And not the Puritan one?
    - Pooh, that is nothing. There is no Puritan candidate
for the throne. But there is a Catholic one, and she is the
daughter-in-law of the Medici bitch who has all the French
power. I weary you.

    - No, you do not. But I must consider myself unworthy
to receive confidences about affairs of high state import.
    - Pish, all the world knows them. Sir Francis needs spies.
There is money in spying. There, that is something new for
you.
    - You wish to turn me into a spy?
    I wish nothing. I tell youu only a way of advancement.
I shall be in London during the summer. You know where I
am.
    - I shall note it on the verso of this Englished Ovid. There,
you may dress again, as immaculate as before you were maculated.
    - Do not try your pretty wordplay with Frank Walsingham.
He is a plain man. Well then, we shall meet. I thank you for your
hospitality.
    - It was all yours. The wine, I mean. A cup for the stirrup.
He poured. They drank, and Watson spat the lees from his
lips: pt pt. He took Kit by the shoulders and seemed about to
lift him to tell his weight.
    - To my mother in Newmarket, then. Master - what is
it - Merlin? Marlin?
    - Marlowe will do. Or Marley. Marl is clay and lime,
my name’s lowly constant. I will he in London.
    Kit had copied from the manuscript of Sir Philip Sidney’s
Defence of Pocsie, then in circulation in Cambridge, these words:
Nature never set forth the earth in so rich a tapestry as divers
poets have done. Her world is brazen; the poets only deliver a
golden. Kit thought: I am a poet, I must not be lowly. London
must not terrify me. If I see London. As he stood with his eyes
beyond the world (brazen’), his roomfellow young Barnabas
Ridley came in, a different dream in his own eyes. He said:
    - Ah, she is cream and strawberries. Such a straight leg.
    - Which you saw entire?
    - Handled. In the hav of the barn I covered her with
flowers.
    - Enough. There is a party of us going swimming in the
river. You will come?

    - That is forbidden. Nakedness. A whipping in the college
hall by the Proctor. I beg you not to.
    - Grantchester. There we shall not be seen. Cleanse from
your body the sweat of the fornicator. I can smell it from here.
    - I do not fornicate. I am in love.
    As the summer moon came up Kit splashed and swam
with George Taplow, Jack Fothergill, Abraham Curlew and
small nameless boys of the village who loved the water games
but ran home to their mothers when the play took a different
turn. There. Now. Have at thee. Ease of the