One Dagger For Two Page 17

  April went in a drift of tears, and May Day came, wet and unpromising, so that the country wenches who went a-maying with their lads, gathering flowers and kisses in the woods and hatching together many a love that angry fathers later whipped to the altar, had clothes wet, and returned muddy and bedraggled, singing their songs to tambour and bagpipes as they followed the beribboned, beflowered maypole behind forty-yoke of flower-decked oxen, dancing about it, falling in the mud, worshipping this idol of the spring.

  Day of Mother Mary; and in Germany, in the Black Forest and on the unholy Mount of Brocken, the witches flocked to their Walpurgis Night. May Day; and even in this rain, the women wandered out from London Town to bathe their faces in the dew, God’s free complexion-salve; in country-towns, into churches danced the merry-makers, eating cakes and drinking ale, dressed in fantastic motley, laughing, drunken, bussing the excited lasses, dancing around the jolly maypole.

  In London, celebrations were meagre, for the plague had the city terrified. No masques, no plays, no cock-fights, no bull-or bear-baitings, no pageants; only in Fleet Street did Marlowe and Alice find a little fun watching the puppets, seeing the few shows that managed to elude the law, viewing at close-quarters the tattooed hams of the Wild Indian Maid, naked and bedizened; seeing the rooster crowing with two heads, and other monsters; watching a jig and a half-hearted Morrice.

  There was no joy in the city, and here and there they saw soldiers guarding plague-houses, sniffing rosemary, and hunched-up with fear. Even the taverns were not much livelier than on usual nights; few bonfires were lit, and they smoked miserably in the wet.

  Relieved to escape the feeling of damp terror that cloaked the city, Marlowe and Alice walked that night, raining as it was, down to the small village of St. Giles outside the city, and smelled the few flowers, daffodils, marigolds, and the wallflowers with their cool velvety perfume, that edged through the cold night air in blurs of colour; they stopped in a little inn before a gigantic fire that seemed to shriek under a capon on a revolving spit; and here they drank a pint each of lambs’-wool, of hot ale sizzling with roasted crab-apples.

  Outside, the rain, and they were cosy here before the fire. Alice let down the hood of her lappet-cloak, unwound her long brown hair and plaited it, turning the plaits before the fire to dry them thoroughly. She took off her walking-clogs, and the near-by drinkers watched with great interest those little feet, toes turning shyly in black silk stockings, while Marlowe dried her gloves and cloak.

  “Let’s stay here to-night,” he whispered; but she shook her head.

  “Soon,” she said. “When we be married we can sleep in the strangest inns and be woken by music undreamed of.”

  “We’re really married as it is,” he told her. “Surely you know the law well enough to understand that once a man says to a woman before witnesses ‘I receive you as mine!’ there’s no need even for a church?”

  “Nay! At least a woman is given the privilege of refusing a suitor. She’s got to say ‘I receive you as mine’ also.”

  “You’ve said it just then! We’re married, darling! To hell with the parson.”

  She gazed shyly at the watching men, and said, “Don’t shout so.”

  “I’ll shout it everywhere,” he answered. “Curse this waiting. Let’s get married now and start our travels. Think of the East!”

  She gazed dreamily into the fire and answered him with his own words, crooningly, quoting the Jew of Malta:

  “…But we will leave this paltry land,

  And sail from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece —

  I’ll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece —

  Where painted carpets o’er the meads are hurled

  And Bacchus’ vineyards overspread the world,

  Where woods and forests go in goodly green —

  I’ll be Adonis, thou shalt be Love’s Queen —

  The meads, the orchards and the primrose-lanes,

  Instead of sedge and reed, bear sugar-canes;

  Thou in those groves, by Dis above,

  Shalt live with me and be my love!

  “But, Kit, that’s a man speech: you should say it to me, not I to you.”

  “I’ll say finer things than that to you,” he answered quietly, suddenly beset with memories.

  He had used that line again, forgetting the Jew of Malta, in his poem to Awdrey. He should never have given her that poem. There in his own hand, with her name above, was proof of his passion for her.

  He turned to Alice. “I wrote a poem to you yesterday,” he said, “and by strange fortune, I used the very last line you’ve just quoted!”

  “To me!” She faced him with bright eyes, mouth parted happily. “You wrote a poem to me, Kit? Show it me.”

  “I didn’t bring it, it’s not quite finished, but I’ll write it for you. Hey, boy, drawer, here! Pen, ink and paper! Yarely!”

  Swiftly, a standish and paper were laid on the table beside him, and he took up the pen, sat gazing at the fire a moment, trying to recall each line.

  Alice watched him. She had never before felt so excited, she could not keep still with excitement, even the toes in her black stockings twitched together, her hands clenched, as she craned her long lovely neck above the doublet — for the damp ruff was drying before the fire — trying to see over Marlowe’s broad shoulder.

  The words came slowly back to him. He felt that he had written them hundreds of years ago, had written them in another age. And now he was taking revenge upon Awdrey, coldly spinning out words written in passion to her, now to be given to another woman; perhaps Awdrey read them at this very moment and was caught by their beauty; how she would be hurt to know another woman had a copy with another name above it. It was revenge, revenge on the ghost of Awdrey in his mind; he took back the plunder from her, took back his dream.

  Alice would have it, she was worthier of it.

  Shyly, he passed her the paper and watched her closely as she read. She blushed like a youngling at love’s first whisper as her bright eyes seemed to eat the words.

  “Come outside!” she whispered to him after she had read the poem again and again. “Slip on my shoes, my ruff; pass me my mantle. I want to kiss you. I want to kiss you for this. Now, now I feel that you really do forget that woman, that you care for me; if this were any month but May I would not wait longer. We’d marry to-morrow. This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. Come outside…”

  Through the dark country lane to London, up to Holborn, over the wide stone bridge near Newgate, where the prisoners shouted piteously for alms to a deaf wet world; then outside St. Paul’s, these lovers went, and paused there under the shadow of the broken steeple, kissing in the darkness.

  In the darkness of London, love; in the vast blackness, hideous with men and women dying rottenly with plague, these lovers kissed; soaked with rain, their boots oozing clammily at every step, their clothes making smacking sounds like gigantic kisses against their bodies, they crept through the narrow streets, black save where taverns split the night with bright candleflame.

  In the Bread Street Mermaid, they stopped for a last warm glass of spiced sack, drugged with ambergris, then on into the darkness again, down narrow lanes, past thieves, past the watch herded together like sheep under a penthouse. This was the first night that Alice had been out with Marlowe. May Day, and their first night together. And now she showed him where she lived, but she would not let him enter; she showed him her home suddenly; after leading him away from the place, abruptly she made up her mind and led him straight there.

  She lived quite near the Mermaid, he discovered, and close to Madame Cotton’s; it was a goodly house, recently built of strong oak and plaster, in Watling Street, crushed between two draper-shops, now well-shuttered and seeming flat against the night.

  “So this is where you live?” He gazed up at the pointed roof. There was a light in the attics where the servants slept, but the rest of the house was in darkness.


  “Ay; and this is my key: soon it’ll be your key.”

  Rain swept in a wide circle down the street, caught into an arching spray by a gust of wind, and patted against them like pebbles.

  “Good-bye,” she said, drawing away from him. “This has been the most wonderful night of my life.”

  “Mine too! Soon we will marry?”

  “The minute this unlucky May-month’s over.” She pushed the key into the lock, and when the door swung open and he would have followed her inside, she put her hand upon his chest and whispered:

  “Soon, very soon now, Kit; when we be married.”

  He did not try to follow her, but let her dart inside alone. She blew him a last kiss, then slammed the door on the wind and the rain and darkness, and on Christopher Marlowe standing quietly on the cobbles.

  He saw the light appear in a room above and knew by that that it was her bedroom. He saw the thin curtains drawn, then her shadow showed gigantic on the cloth, one hand fumbling with the laces of her doublet; another figure, a girl’s coifed head, bent to help, and the long laces unwound suddenly from behind as if dragged from inside her; the shadows moved back from the curtain, and he was alone in the dark street, alone with the rain and the wind and darkness.

  *

  He did not feel like sleeping. He felt exalted, love was blossoming in him, love for Alice; she was strangling the mandrake, slowly killing it. Already, memory of Awdrey did not bring such pain with it as it had before. He felt that very soon he would love Alice wholly, she was so kind, so childish and at the same time, so intelligent. She was the perfect woman for a poet, so understanding and so gentle.

  From tavern to tavern he went, for nowadays his purse was well-stocked by Alice; for it was the custom for women to keep men as much as for men to keep women, and no shame was attached to it.

  In the Paul’s Head, near the south chain of St. Paul’s Churchyard, he met Chomley talking to two friends, two burly rascals: Harry Younge, a lean, scar-faced man with heavy eyelids and a jutting under-lip who boasted that he was up for the highest bidder that wanted the Queen assassinated; and Jasper Borage, well-known to the prison-authorities as “dangerous,” a bull of a man with no chin or neck and pale, untroubled eyes.

  “Hey, Kit! Just the man I want to see!” Chomley waved to him to come over. “You know the lads? They’re my bodyguard.”

  “Bodyguard?”

  “Ay. Didn’t you know that the Privy Council have been chasing me since early in March? I thought you knew that; I’m sick of sneaking around, thrashing the justices sent to take me. I’m going for a country walk. Wondered if you’d like to come with me?”

  “No, not I.”

  “Safest.”

  “I’ve got naught to fear,” said Marlowe.

  “Mayhap,” said Chomley, shrugging his shoulders. He gave the bull-like Borage a kick. “Fill ’em up again,” he commanded. “That rat Baines,” he added to Marlowe, “has shoved in a long list of accusation against me — one about you, too —; not that I’m afraid, no prison’s going to hold me, lad. Never has. I know the law, and when it’s needful, I can shift well enough. But I’d like you to come with me for a few months’ walking.”

  “No,” said Marlowe, firmly, “I’m staying here.”

  “Plague’s bad here.”

  “I don’t fear the plague.”

  “Well, it’s your funeral. I’ve only got one thing to say — keep an eye on Nick Skeres.”

  “What’s Nick done to me?”

  “Nothing to you, perhaps; but your corpse might be worth a few yellow-boys to him. Nick sells corpses, you know. That’s how he makes such a good living. You’ve merely got to give him the name, and even if it’s alive at the time, he soon turns it into a corpse. Just a friendly warning, lad. Here’s to the Pope!” He drained his glass. “Fill ’em up again,” he said. “Your turn, Harry… By the way, Kit, did you see what some dirty rat’s been printing about the poor strangers sheltering over here? Read that. It makes your blood run cold.”

  Marlowe took the small pamphlet from him and scanned it hurriedly, smiling, for he could guess what hand had guided the hand that penned it.

  “’Doth not the world see,’” he read aloud, “‘that you, beastly brutes, the Belgians, or rather drunken drones, and faint-hearted Flemings; and you, fraudulent fathers, Frenchmen, by your cowardly flight from your own natural countries, have abandoned the same into the hands of your proud, cowardly enemies, and have by a feigned hypocrisy and counterfeit show of religion placed yourselves here in a most fertile soil under a most gracious and merciful Prince; who had been contented, to the great prejudice of her own natural subjects, to suffer you to live here in better case and freedom more than her own people!’ He’s got a strong pen, this fellow,” said Marlowe, nodding at Chomley. “Wonder who he is?”

  “Yea,” said Chomley, nodding back very solemnly. “I wonder who the hell he is! Read the end of it. That’s going too far, I say.”

  “‘Be it then known to all Flemings,’” read Marlowe, “‘and Frenchmen, that it is best for them to depart out of the realm of England, between this and ninth of June next. If not, then to take what follows. For there shall be many a sore strife. Apprentices will rise to the number of two thousand three hundred and thirty-six. And all prentices and journeymen will down with Flemings and Strangers!’”

  “You mark my words,” said Chomley, “the fellow what wrote that’ll get it in the neck with a chopper.”

  Jasper Borage suddenly neighed, exactly like a horse; then tried vainly to look as solemn as a parson.

  “Who’re you laughing at?” snapped Chomley. “Get some drinks, it’s your turn. By the way, Kit, you won’t come on my country walk?”

  “Nay,” said Marlowe, smiling.

  “Well, well; don’t forget I asked you to.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  Everybody seemed to be leaving London. It was the plague that drove them off. Even Nashe and Peele talked of slipping away to Dover to stay with a wealthy friend called Fineux, who had both literary aspirations and a commodious cellar. They wanted Marlowe to go with them, but he refused.

  Yet he suggested to Alice that they leave at once when he saw her next.

  “Nay.” She shook her head. “I wish we could,” she added, “but we must wait till after we’re married, and I will not be wedded in this unlucky month. Besides, we must wait till my lord returns from Italy. He won’t be back before June. We won’t have enough money otherwise; and he’ll help us get a licence. We must get a blank one; it’d be terrible to be forced to return in two years or so merely to get a renewal.”

  “I’m frightened of this plague,” said Marlowe, biting his fingers. He wanted to get away, away from Awdrey and the Privy Council: Chomley had warned him to go, and Chomley always knew when danger threatened; but Marlowe was too ashamed to tell Alice that, he was ashamed to confess his own idiocy in talking too much about what didn’t concern him. “There were over thirty deaths last week,” he muttered.

  “I’m never afraid of dying,” she answered calmly. “If one of us goes we’ll both have to go together, it would be impossible for the other to escape infection. Would you mind leaving this world, very much?”

  “It’s a bad world, but what follows it might be worse. If anything follows it. I wish I knew, I wish I had faith.”

  “Love like mine can’t die,” said Alice, smiling. “It’ll live on eternally, and your poetry’ll always live. We’re both immortal. I by your kisses, you by your pen. That’s my faith.”

  “A lovely faith for a lovely wench,” said Marlowe, trying to laugh. “How old are you, sweet?”

  “Twenty-five. Why do you ask? Do I look old?”

  “Goddesses never age,” he smiled.

  But he was worried, worried by Chomley’s hints — by the Privy Council now bellowing with rage at the manifestoes about the aliens; by the threat of Skeres’s dagger, raised at an unknown�
��s bidding; by the plague, growing worse every day, from thirty to fifty deaths a week.

  With the plague, and man’s terror of death, grew other terrors. Everything hid death. And with terror, grew intolerance, stronger laws, more determined law dealers. Last month, early in April, Barrow and Greenwood had been suddenly dragged from the prison in which they had been rotting for six years: two noisy separatist Puritan reformers they were, harmless enough actually, but Archbishop Whitgift with the wellnigh unlimited powers of his Court of High Commission behind him, swiftly hanged the poor devils because they had denied the spiritual authority of the Bishops. It was as the pagans, during moments of danger, had offered human sacrifices to a raging deity; Archbishop Whitgift threw corpses to his god. He passed frenzied laws. An order was pasted on the walls of the city commanding all aged and infirm people to run back to wherever they were born or to where they had mostly lived during three consecutive years, and there to die at somebody else’s expense; beggars, rogues and vagabonds were threatened with a whipping if they loitered from their parishes: they were locked up and bolted into the stocks if they stayed in their parishes; which put them in rather a quandary. Few books were being published, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Drayton’s Idea were the only poetical works; the rest were medical books or sermons, or works like Boethius’s Consolatione Phliodophiae and the Christian Passions.

  There was a feeling of despair over the city, sunk in gloom and soot. Spring with its daffodils and swallows, its bright greens and little pointed buds, came like a false dawn: there was no promise in it. People were tight-mouthed in the streets, they slunk along, walking hurriedly as if dogged by evil spirits. They watched you suspiciously from the corners of their eyes. Shops were shutting; the Court was flying into the country; the Queen was issuing infuriated letters to the Lord Mayor because the evils of his filthy city might even presume to contaminate Her Divine Majesty. And Chomley, preparatory to wandering off into the country (like Her Majesty), was running about, stirring up trouble, acting as spy for government, for rogues, for dissenters and for the Catholics. He was on every man’s side, and on nobody’s. He wanted his fun, he wanted excitement, to see men at each other’s throats and himself drinking calmly while they butchered each other.