Love? If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d say
love is a saw that amputates the heart.
I’d call it my disease, I’d call it plague.
But yesterday, I hadn’t heard from you.
So call it the weight of light that holds one soul
connected to another. Or a tear
that falls in all gratitude, becoming sea.
Call it the only word that comforts me.
The sight of your writing has me on the floor,
the curve of each letter looped about my heart.
And in this ink, the tenor of your voice.
And in this ink, the movement of your hand.
The Alps, now, cut their teeth upon the sky,
and pressing on to set these granite jaws
between us, not a mile will do me harm.
Your letter, in my coat, will keep me warm.
(translated from the Latin)
‘A horse has summer flies; a sheepdog fleas.
A swift will harbour lice, a brook its rocks.
Bright days breed duller endings, and a girl
of perfect beauty’s not immune from pox.
An apple has its worm, a rose its thorn,
the noblest seat of earls, its ghost in chains.
Good books will suffer misprints, will they not?
The gods have sin. And you have Richard Baines.’
One of Tom’s favourite tales was Richard Baines.
The priest of spies; the spy who was ordained
while under cover with the Jesuits,
his ear out for their plotting as his mouth
swallowed the wafered lie: ‘The body of Christ.’
How you and he, that Paris summer (there
to receive each message at the embassy:
who went to England, under which false names)
watched as he crumbled like a papal biscuit.
The Old Religion drove the man insane.
His identity submerged beneath a fib
that even he believed: so who was he?
A hundred per cent pretend; and Richard Baines,
who sucked in incense and incensed himself.
Who counted tedium on his rosary.
And once he was ordained, bad faith took hold:
rotted his humour, and disturbed his sleep –
the laughable sinful mismatch of his roles
as Father Baines and agent of their foes,
betrayer of the faithful, took him deep.
The stink of fish on Fridays up his nose,
he salivated at the thought of meat.
He took to sneaking pork pies to his cell:
‘God cannot be concerned with what I eat!’
Began to gibe at prayers and snort his truth
beneath his breath, not knowing that he spoke.
Love was his downfall, though. There was a youth
– for who can bear so much deceit alone? –
he shared a bed with. Stroked his novice head,
while plotting ways that he could take him home.
The boy was a thorough Catholic: convinced
that the seminary served a holy cause.
Baines moulded him like warm wax, dropping hints
that darker secrets lay behind locked doors.
‘And will you plot against your natural queen?’
The boy’s uncertainty filled up the pause.
This, how Tom told it, dramatising scenes
over the tavern table, playing Baines
as he existed afterwards, post Rheims:
shocked into greyness, with a limping sway
not yet inflicted on the loving priest
who stroked the boy’s anxieties away.
The lie would send him witless: he must leave.
But not without the boy. And not without
shutting the college down; no, no reprieve
for the priests whose mumblings broke his sanity.
Think: Tom’s cruel mimicry of Richard Baines
watching the morning gruel, the evening soup,
with sudden insight – every bowl the same!
How easy to wipe them out, this nest of rats,
with poison in the food. He would be loved,
he told himself, by government and queen.
And now to persuade his lover.
Could he blame
the boy for running to the powers that be?
Baines had been breaking slowly ever since
he donned that itchy robe, humility,
and now had shed the cloak of decent man,
exposing the loveless murderer beneath.
Enter the later version, Richard Baines,
crippled by vengeance that he cannot take
and joints that creak and groan each time it rains,
betrayed by the youth who still comes to his dreams.
How easy it is to get a laugh from freaks.
‘Incense and blather!’ Tom’s adopted twitch
that Baines himself developed after weeks
of the strappado – hung like butcher’s meat
with weights on his feet, and dislocated arms,
in a new mode of confessional for priests –
forgetting it was a man they’d broken there.
Forgetting that we weren’t immune from sin.
Forgetting how whispers travel on the air
and get back to the subject.
If I wrote
a play whose central character was him,
I never dreamt his hands around my throat
or thought that he might recognise himself.
He didn’t matter. He was just a tale,
material I foisted on the shelf
of a London stage or two. He was the Jew,
the counterfeit believer, counting gold
above all human life, tainting the stew,
out-plotted to a most theatrical end,
and played for laughs. And that it tickled you
was all I used to think about, dear friend.
Thom Nashe’s lip relaxes to curb his teeth.
‘You’re not concerned he’s seen it?’
It is cold.
We’re standing in the doorway of a shop
festooned with carcasses; and half a pig,
eviscerated, sawn from snout to tail,
spins gently round to eye me.
‘Richard Baines
at a public entertainment? Heaven forfend.
Watson says Baines was made more serious
than sentence of execution. Anyway,
I go as Morley. Marlowe wrote the play.’
When the winds decreed, I sailed to Vlissingen:
Flushing to English ears; and English ears
were everywhere: in street, in crooked inn,
on frozen river, at the chestnut stall,
stamping in garrisons and coaxing whores
from frosty doorways. I reported there,
leaving my passport with the governor,
then through snow, up a creaky flight of stairs
to the cold room I would share with Richard Baines.
He wasn’t there. I poked amongst his things.
Some jottings in a crabby, slanted hand
and half in cipher. Flints and candle stubs.
Some undergarments draped over a chair
like unwrapped bandages. A locked-up trunk.
A Douai Bible with a broken spine
and scribbled in. And when the stairs complained,
I closed and set it down.
Baines, coming in,
froze in the door. Eyes flicked around his things,
then back to my face, and narrowed.
‘Who are you?’
‘Morley,’ I said.
And something on his face
like pan-burnt porridge, betrayed an aftertaste,
as if he knew that name. But only now
do I understand that look.
‘Why are you here?’
he asked, not watching me, but limping in
to gather his papers up like promise notes
snatched from a fire.
‘I believe we have a friend
in common. Richard Cholmeley?’
‘Drury’s “mate”?’
He spat the word like bones. ‘What kind of friend
will put a friend in prison? You should leave.’
My information fatally out of date,
or set up to label me. Quick thinking due.
‘I’m glad to hear you’ve stronger loyalties,’
I doubled back. ‘These are unsettled times.’
He knelt now to undo the trunk, his hair
all in a circle, monkish round his pate
and prematurely grey from torture’s jolt.
He fed the papers in, replaced the lock
and turned the corded key around his neck.
‘Why are you here?’ he said again, like ice
at the heart of sleet.
‘In truth, I have a message
of some delicacy. And understood you might
know a way to send it onwards.’
‘Oh? To whom?’
‘To Sir William Stanley.’
‘Ha!’ Baines gave contempt
both vent and volume. ‘You are very young
if you imagine I would commit myself
to knowing the Queen of England’s enemy.’
On this point, some years later, I’d agree.
‘I’m nearly twenty-eight.’
‘You are a babe.’
He grimaced, approaching close until his breath
assaulted me. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘You’re Richard Baines.’
‘I’m Richard Baines,’ he echoed,
glaring the broken vessels of his eyes,
‘who spent three years at Rheims to serve the Queen
and took a punishment you’d not survive.’
His lip curled back, trembling as if his teeth,
filed by their rottenness to tiny points,
had terrified it into revealing them.
‘I don’t take kindly to the implication
I’m the Duke of Parma’s whore,’ he said, and spit
fell softly, unintentionally, like rain
upon my cheek.
‘Sir, I apologise,’
I said sincerely. ‘I meant no such thing.
Only, I understood you knew of ways
to pass a message. If I was mistaken,
forgive me.’
‘I don’t forgive,’ he breathed. ‘That job
I leave to God.’
But stepped away at last,
if only to appraise the whole of me:
if I were a joint, how long I’d take to cook.
‘If that is so, then I’ll be on my way’ –
re-shouldering my knapsack with relief
at the prospect of escaping his foul air,
fair swap for failure. ‘Please, forget I called.
So many rumours fly about my charge
I would not wish to stir them.’
‘What? Your charge?’
He pecked the words, half starving. ‘Who is that?’
I confess, I used Arbella like a worm
to jerk before that grasping mind. ‘Her name
has caused great trouble to the bearers of it.
If you don’t know, I’m glad not to expose her.
I come on another matter.’
Though her marriage
to the Duke of Parma’s son was brokered there
in Flushing – in that month.
And when he knew,
boiled down the stock of his deductive broth
to the royal bones, he said, ‘Forgive my haste.
It was un-Christian of me to suspect
your motives. These are awkward times. And yet’ –
drawing his hesitation on the air
like an unsheathed sword across my exit door –
‘I might know ways to help you. You have money?’
Which of us had the net, I couldn’t tell.
Both of us fishers, sounding out the depths
of the other’s beliefs. I’d not declared a side
and nor had he. He offered to make enquiries
on condition – to keep the closest eye on me –
that I shared his room and rent.
No, not his bed,
though I felt those pink grey eyes upon my back,
like cold on my buttocks and my shoulder-blades
undressing at night, conscious he never snuffed
the candle till I was covered.
No, not his bed,
dear absent friend, whose ear these words address
in the silent theatre of my empty head
some two years since they brought the curtain down,
and the cheering crowds dispersed to pick their teeth
and the plague played kill-kick-jenny on the streets.
A sea away, two countries’ width away,
a war away, a mountain range away,
each sentence that I form, I form for you.
You are the love I tell my story to –
who knew so much of it, and yet the truth
eluded both of us. Yet, I’ve begun
to understand.
All histories are fictions,
so if I skip the worst, forgive my fault.
Though you would not condemn me: like the sun,
my imagined perfect audience of one,
your light seeps through this darkened, shuttered room
somewhere in northern Italy. But grieve,
and remain with me, as I return to Baines,
confess my part as I reap the bleak remains
of the game I played with him.
No, not in bed.
For even then my body’s touch was yours.