One Dagger For Two Page 13

  He recalled, during sober spasms, Awdrey out of his memory with a curious feeling of detachment, as if she were something tragic that had happened in another man’s life; sometimes, memory of a red-masked lady came to mock him, but he laughed her away. She did not exist; it was Awdrey he tried to drown; but drown her he could not.

  February and wind, then a heavy fall of snow over London, icing the roofs, hiding the dirt in streets, flinging into Marlowe’s empty room through the open window and covering his unfinished manuscripts with tears. He scarcely ever slept at home; sometimes he stayed at Peele’s in the Bankside and kept his wife and pretty little daughter — who was then about ten — well filled with good food; sometimes he slept at Nashe’s above a printer’s in Paternoster Row, for whom Nashe did a little work, advising, editing and correcting for the press, for many printers were also publishers, just as wellnigh every publisher was a bookseller. Rarely, Marlowe slept at home; the window was open, snow and wind bursting through the dirty curtains, whirling his manuscripts about like birds in a storm.

  Snow; and Marlowe staggered drunkenly through it, he and Nashe and Peele, and sometimes Chomley; like a devil, Chomley would suddenly appear and disappear, always muttering treasonable things into Marlowe’s ready ear, always smiling, bulky, good-humoured and dangerous, a murderer, a liar, a spy but a jolly good friend.

  Drunken sport in the cold of February. From London to the Bankside, from the Bankside to London, staggered the friends; arguing with the watermen, joining in their shouts of “Eastward Ho” and “Westward Ho” as they rowed from one side of the river to the other, shouting gleefully as they sped through under the arches of the Bridge: a dangerous trip, not only because of the depth of piers and starlings and the narrowness of the arches — there were twenty of them —, but because of the waterworks at the southern end and the noisy corn-mills blocking up many of the openings; it was so dangerous that careful people refused to let the merry boatmen proudly ship oars and shoot the bridge, preferring to land at one wharf, trudge overland, and meet the wherry on the other side. Marlowe and his friends shouted and sang as they rushed through into the shadows and out again into the snow. On land, too, they found good drunken sport: dancing round coaches caught in the snow, pushing at the wheels, shouting in good-fellowship, back to back with the coachmen; they hit the signs outside taverns and shops, seeing how high they could jump; chased the terrified watch down dark streets; flirted with painted women in street and tavern; played on the citterns kept in most shops and in all taverns for customers to play away their time on; and danced to their own music… Drink and laughter and treason in a city of plague, a city thick with paste of snow; they rattled their heels in Paul’s; played cards and dice; argued with the booksellers in the Churchyard; Greene’s News from Heaven was published, and they read it aloud, jeering and roaring over their cups in a tavern hung with evergreens and box at the picture of poor Robin shut out from Heaven and chased out of hell; they fought in the snow, hurled snowballs at each other and at strangers; skated on the frozen pools at Moorfields amidst iced rushes in the marsh; pretended to buy horses at Smithfield, rode the beasts then refused them with courtly dignity as spavined, glandered or fouled with jaundice; played bowls, tennis and nine-holes; flung apples and eggs at a Puritan in the stocks; in short, they had a very merry drunken time.

  “Look!” said Kyd, when they were with him one day, reeling blear-eyed out of a tavern. “Look! Parliament opens! The Queen is coming, God bless her!”

  “Blast her!” said Marlowe, “where is she, the bitch?”

  “Shhh!” whispered Kyd, “you’ll have us all hanged!”

  “Serve us all right,” said Marlowe. “Where is she?”

  There was little reason to ask; one had but to follow the crowd, decked out holiday-fashion, running to cheer their Queen. She was somewhere in the distance; they could hear the growl that was far-away cheering growing louder every minute. Kicking his way, regardless of whom he hurt, Nashe elbowed to the front. Marlowe followed, shaking himself to see the clearer. The snow had gone, but heavy rain-clouds were puffing up over the skyline, swollen and dark with rain.

  “Hope it does rain,” muttered Marlowe, “spoil some damn women’s clothes.”

  People were in windows, on slippery roof-tops, clinging to the chimneys, to see their Queen go by. She came nearer, and with her came the roaring of the people, welling up into a furious, almost murderous-sounding, howl; the noise entered into Marlowe’s blood, like the cheering at a bull-baiting; he felt it ringing inside his head. Excited as any schoolboy, he pressed closer to sec the cavalcade.

  As the Queen passed, each church rang forth its song of bells, blue-gowned apprentices bellowed themselves hoarse, flung their round caps into the air; ladies tore the handkerchiefs from their bosoms and waved them like little coloured flags; the mob was crazy, roaring like an ocean against rocks, while the Court paced gently its contemptuous way over the freshly gravelled streets, drawing nearer every minute to where Marlowe stood, crushed in with flesh.

  Slowly paced the green-clothed harbingers; yeomen of the guard like splashes of blood in their red coats, the Tudor rose on their backs; gentlemen-pensioners lugging gilt battle-axes over their shoulders; noblemen, courtiers, in all the pomp of wilful extravagance, curling their beards, sneering at the shouting populace, followed by serving-men with their master’s badge done out in silver on their arms; soldiers, weary, trailing their pikes, helmets newly polished, breastplates glittering like ice.

  Here comes the Queen, God bless her! What shouting, what a tumult from a hungry mob! The Queen in her painted coach, daubed with gingerbread-work, splashed with gold-leaf; the Queen, in her coach under quivering ostrich-feathers, bobbing inside against the rich upholstery, bruised and shaken, trying to look pleasant, grinning as if she had the toothache, and bowing her lean head on her skinny neck under the tall dyed coiffure.

  Carried away by the excitement, forgetting all jealousies and rancours, Marlowe shouted his loudest as that thin bedizened hag with the dyed periwig bobbed past in her gilded coach.

  It was the cold, amused eye of a maid of honour in her virginal white gown as she sat side-saddle on her palfrey that stopped Marlowe in mid-shout. He caught the wench’s lewd contemptuous glance and a cold flicker of terrible shame ran up his backbone.

  Hurriedly, he jammed his velvet hat down on his head, hunched his shoulders and crept out of the mob, as if crippled with shame.

  *

  Chomley, lounging on a settle, watched him with a grin as Marlowe staggered into the tavern, away from that roaring mob. He leaned on the bar and cried for a pint of sack like a child for a sucket.

  “Caught like any cony, eh, lad?” grinned Chomley, “seeing the painted pig go by.”

  “What can we do?” cried Marlowe drunkenly, “what can we do?”

  Chomley lounged up and went to him; he took Marlowe by the shoulder and whispered fiercely, “Wait, little man, wait. I’ve got my sixty men ready, and more are coming. I’ve got ten deserters in St. Martin’s, and five in Whitefriars. You’ll see something happening soon!”

  “What? For heaven’s sake, give me hope!”

  “Have you noticed many strangers in London?” said Chomley, tickling his own beard and looking rather bored.

  “Strangers? Nay, what do you mean?”

  “Just you wait; you’ll hear about those strangers afore long.”

  And he would say nothing more, except to laugh and to mutter, “Rome wasn’t pulled down in a day, my lad.”

  *

  On went the Queen, bob-bobbing in her coach, on to Parliament to get some more money to carry on her little war in Brittany that nobody knew anything about, nor cared about, either. And her dutiful subjects lined the streets, flung their hats into the air, and bellowed with all the force of their lungs.

  Sitting with a pint of wine in that cosy tap-room, listening to the excited clamour of chambermaids and tapsters, Marlowe heard the ec
ho of that cheering beating inside his ears.

  And as he sat with that great noise around him, he remembered a day some years ago in Harwich.

  There had been cheering then, too, and bells ringing, for Philip’s Great Armada sent from Spain was smashed to a few poor wrecks cluttered upon the coast of Ireland. The Queen talked much of God’s wrath blowing the Dons from the sea, giving the victory to God, to her greater glory, rather than to her own seamen; and actually the winds had fought against England: they had kept Drake and Howard out of Corunna when they could have sailed in and stopped the Armada from sailing — the winds, and the Queen, for she had been so miserly with the stores that Drake dared wait no longer lest his men starve or rot with scurvy. Then the winds kept Drake and Howard in at Devon when the Armada hove over the skyline. It was Spain’s stupidity, not the kindness of God’s weather, that saved England then from inevitable conquest; Howard had sailed out against the damned winds, and the Dons’ chance was gone.

  Ringing of bells and champing of victory, good Queen Bess rode in state to Paul’s, through streets lined with blue cloth in honour of the navy; the city companies flanked one side of the road, the gentlemen of the Inns of Court the other. On rode the good Queen through the tumult, bob-bobbing in her triumphal coach, with a painted lion and dragon holding up the victorious Arms of England; on rode the Queen through a nation’s thanks, to give her thanks to God.

  Marlowe sat that day in a little room with Howard and Hawkins; these two sailors — Lord Admiral and Rear-Admiral — gazed at each other in the candlelight, and there were tears in those cold blue eyes that could tame a mutiny in a glance. Hawkins spoke slowly, that prim hero, his face darkened by strange suns, beaten to leather by outlandish winds. “My dad-in-law told me,” he whispered, “when I took up his task on the Admiralty, he said: ‘I shall pluck out a thorn from my foot and put it in yours.’ And he spoke truth. I can give no more money.”

  “Nor I,” said Howard. Marlowe sat, watching them, and there were tears also in his eyes, for he too had seen the boatloads of dying heroes rowed from the ships, had seen the sailors dying in the streets, wailing for bread, rotten with dysentery, with eating bad Crown stores of salt beef and fish, with drinking sour beer; had seen them trying to creep into the fields to die, knocking with maimed limbs at doors to beg a little food; these men who had saved England from the Spaniard, these sailors of merry England tottered off their ships, wounded, starving, scurvy-struck; and the Queen, God bless her, being cheered as she prayed her thanks to God for the victory.

  Howard wrote again and again to the Council for help, begging at least for money to pay a little of the sailors’ wages; the Council did not reply. The sailors died, rotted in the streets, in the fields, on the wharves; whole crews went, hundreds of men who had braved the Dons unscathed, now fell before the Queen’s niggardliness.

  In rage, at last, Hawkins had written accusing the Council of deliberately killing the men so as not to pay them. He showed Marlowe the letter before sending it. “Your lordships may think,” he wrote, “that by death, discharging of sick, etc., something may be spared in the general pay. Those that die their friends require their pay. For those which are discharged we take on fresh men, which breeds a far greater change.” Even that did no good, and in desperation, Howard took three thousand pistoles out of the captured Capitana to give a few of the seamen. In a great fury, the Queen charged him with stealing the money; and when in the list of expenditure, Howard charged £620 for wine and food to relieve sick and wounded, the Queen refused to pay, and poor Howard had to bring the money from his own purse.

  Marlowe could scarcely credit such meanness. Surrounded as he was, by the dying men, it seemed the foulest possible act not to pay at least their wages; but the Queen thought otherwise: the Dons were wiped from the seas, why should she pay when the battle was over? Let the wretches die, they needed no pay in the grave. So the wretches died, horribly; and the Queen with never penny to give them, fêted victory at her money-rotten Court.

  Never would Marlowe forget that time. Poor Hawkins and Howard had spent their last groat until almost they starved themselves, they had sent urgent unanswered letters to Cecil and the Queen; but the Queen, forsooth, had no money to waste on starving sailors now that England had been saved and the proud Armada was no more.

  England, merry England, with its Virgin Queen…and with sailors dying from starvation, disease and their country’s wounds; and the Great Queen, Spenser’s Gloriana, his Cynthia, receiving a grateful nation’s thanks at Whitehall…

  Bah! Had not the good Queen once called her starving soldiers “miserable creatures,” and shuddered from them, from these men who built her throne securely upon the blood and bones of Spain!

  *

  “Waste no more time,” said Marlowe to Chomley, “if you love me, Dick.”

  “I’m safe enough,” said Chomley, grinning: “I’m on both sides, but my heart’s on yours.”

  “Your heart and your arm?”

  “Ay! and my arm too!”

  *

  Would he never get rid of this accursed money? Why hadn’t he gone to Cotton’s as he had sworn to at first? For all he knew, the lady of the red mask might have called to see him, and he not home. He had not been home for weeks; he had been sleeping at Peele’s, but more often at Nashe’s above the printer’s. “I like the grinding of the press,” said Nashe; “I would like to live over a brothel or a thieves’ kitchen. I want to see the scum of earth about me to remind me of the dirt I’m made of.”

  “You’ve only to look in the glass for that,” sneered Marlowe. “I can’t bear to look into a mirror these days. I feel as if my face’s covered with sack’s cobwebs — like my mind.”

  *

  And Awdrey? Always, she was behind everything, tormenting him; she was at the bottom of his glass, behind his very eyelids, shut in with him at night — the enigma, the beloved he might clasp in his arms but never in his mind; mentally, she was remote from him, as if he had never kissed her. Would to God that he had never kissed her.

  Chapter XI

  POVERTY AND PEACE

  It was not until March with its clatter of winds had blown the wet cold of February aside, had flung the clouds from the face of heaven to reveal a faint blue misty vault, a tremulous haze of bleached colour; it was not until the snow had flown up north on the backs of hunched-up clouds, dragging the rain like a filmy robe in its wake, that Marlowe flung his purse on the table in a small tavern in Cheapside, uptilted it to show only white money — a sixpence, a threepence, a twopence, three farthings: not even a groat — all flat silver coins, no twinkle of gold in the small heap.

  “That finishes it,” said Marlowe. “How much have we? Not a shilling! I’ll buy three pounds of steak, a pound each, and spend the rest on raisins. Then we can all go home and start work again.”

  “Work?” muttered Nashe — that meant a pamphlet for the printer — Peele groaned at the thought of his wife and child waiting with hungry bellies and open hands: he would have to finish that abominable Greek translation a West Countryman had commissioned.

  A pound of meat each and their purses crammed with raisins, the three friends, still quite drunk, bade each other a sorrowful good-bye, and homeward crawled, each to begin his period of hunger and thirst.

  Fortunately, Marlowe had paid a year’s rent in advance out of his winnings at Madame Cotton’s, so that he had only food to worry about. That did not worry him very much. He was well used now to going for days without a bite, and, when his belly seemed to gripe him with hot pincers, of hurrying off to cozen a meal out of some wealthy friend. He had many wealthy friends, old University acquaintances, people he had met at Ralegh’s, but he avoided them, as their untroubled lives made him jealous and he was embarrassed by his own poverty.

  That was Marlowe’s life, the life of the average literary man of the day; a few careful fellows like Chapman and Shakespeare husbanded their paltry earnings, but most of t
hem were like Marlowe, Nashe, Peele and Kyd. Money that comes suddenly in rather large sums goes as swiftly as it comes, it loses its value. But large sums were rare and came only from patrons. For a play one rarely got more than ten pounds and was lucky to get that; two pounds was the average for a dedication; the same for a whole pamphlet, sometimes with a pottle of wine thrown in; instead of money, occasionally a writer received about twenty copies of his own book and hawked them for whatever price he could get.

  Whatever any man earned was usually spent communally; they paid each other’s rents when possible, fed each other and bought drinks for each other; then they all rushed back to their dens to tighten their belts and cramp their stomachs leaning over tables trying to write. Marlowe hated the existence, but there was no escape from it. He had no method of money-making, save of marrying into wealth — hopeless dream for a poet; what woman wanted a hungry poet? His future was a future only of starvation, and that he could not bear to look upon.

  Yet he was merry, walking home to starve in his little room. He had been thinking all the time — when Awdrey gave him snatches of peace and his friends’ chatter lulled a moment — of his play and of Hero and Leander, mainly of his play. The lady of the mask had re-awoken his interest in the stage, she had given him courage.

  He lived above the sign of the carpenter, and the carpenter himself was in his shop as Marlowe passed through. He was working briskly with his adze, while an apprentice whistled beside him.

  “Master Marlowe,” said he, laying down the hefty tool, “you have been having visitors during your sleeping outwards.”