The backward movement of returning home
thickened my blood as I approached the walls
of Canterbury. Passing through its gates
like a child squeezing back into the womb
of a mother he has out-suckled.
There, the fence
I used to daub with chalk when I was small,
was clipped around the ear for. There, the school
whose books propelled me into fantasies.
Autumn was shedding summer in the churchyards
and the leaves blew giddy down familiar streets
as though afraid of something.
At his awl
just as I’d left him some three years ago,
my father bends and straightens like a willow,
predictably nattering a customer
into a better pair of shoes. At first
his eye mistakes me for a gentleman
he needs to cozen, misled by my clothes.
‘Young sir, how are you booted?’ Then, ‘Good grief!
It’s Christopher!’ Out back, ‘
It’s Christopher!
’
My mother comes with sodden hands, ‘My son!’
and wets my shoulders with them. ‘Why, you’ve come
so unexpectedly! What brings you here?’
Between the two of them, a glance, a nod:
I wondered then how fast, from man to man,
the word might travel.
With her in the yard:
‘You have leave from your tutoring?’ she asks,
wringing a tunic dry. As if she knows.
‘I’m finished with that,’ I answer, tapping grit
out of my shoe. ‘I am on government work.
I need to rest here for a week or so—’
The truth stuck in my throat.
‘You’d let me know
if you were in trouble?’
‘Ma, you know you’d know.’
She eyes me like a button that won’t fit
through the hole she’s made.
‘I know you less these days.’
I was foolish to go drinking; but what else
is a man to do to stop becoming boy
when he’s moved back with his parents? Darkly lost
in wondering how to rescue me, ‘My God!’
feels like an assault; a cheery parrot’s cry
from a man I fail to recognise. ‘Topher!’
He spits through his teeth the name they used at school.
‘Come on, it’s me, Corkine! The tailor’s son.
Indeed, a tailor now. With a son of my own.
How’s cobbling?’
I confess, it grated me,
his sense that we were equals. I had lost
a job instructing England’s maybe queen,
been slandered by a drunken, envious pimp,
but still was raised to gentleman by degree.
‘Excuse me, sir, I do not cobble now.’
His cheeriness was irrefutable.
‘They call you the cobbler still. You cobble up
some trifles for the public stage, I hear.’
‘I am a scholar. And a gentleman.’
‘You jest!’ He laughs, and jabs a bony digit
into my ribs. ‘Our Toph’s a gentleman.
If you’re an esquire, where’s your rapier?’
It was in London, stored amongst my things,
and just as well, the mood that I was in.
‘Are you suggesting, sir, that I am lying?’
His eye tics nervously, as if the smile
is breaking off in pieces. ‘Not me, Toph.
Just asking where your sword was, that was all.’
He sits beside me, pulling up a stool.
‘So do you have a family? A wife?’
For twenty minutes, I put up with it,
answering trivial questions through my teeth
in one or two words only, but Corkine –
either convinced his cheer will gladden me,
or unaware of how I seethe and boil –
remains there like a birthmark.
‘Well, Corkine,
it’s been a pleasure,’ (said so sourly
my mother could pickle herrings in the tone)
‘but it’s time for me to go.’
He stands up too.
‘I’ll walk down with you to your father’s house.
My own is just beyond.’
‘I’d rather walk
alone,’ I say. Yet ten steps down the road
I find him at my side. ‘It isn’t safe,’
he says, ‘to walk alone at night. Not here.’
The wind spoke malcontentedly through signs,
creaking the baker’s loaf, the glover’s glove.
It wasn’t safe for him to walk with me
against my wishes. Though I bit my tongue,
and though I’m not a natural fighting man,
my ruined life was overcoming me.
I was so close to punching him, I swear
my fist was itching.
‘Look, I need to think.
I have some troubles and must be alone.
Please let me be.’ So firmly to his face
he couldn’t mistake my meaning. Still, he said,
‘I hope we might be friends. Now that you’re back.’
You understand that I must say all this
in mitigation for what happened next.
The facts alone – if you had seen the facts,
laid out, as they were, in court – tell only that
I assaulted the man. But I did so much more.
‘I am not back. And we will not be friends.
I don’t make friends with tailors, any more
than I would marry the shit upon my shoe.’
I watched his face turn crimson in the light
of the tavern window.
‘Furthermore—’ But I
had said enough. And felt it, even through
that bellyful of ale. I turned to go
and Corkine shouted out, ‘You stupid sprat!
You upstart sprat of a man! You know you’re nothing!
You’re nothing at all.’
And did I batter him?
You bet I did. Did I hold my dagger close
against his throat as I had done to Greene?
Did I growl in his face, and cut his buttons off,
saying they’d be his fingers if he crossed
my path again? With certainty, I did.
My father bailed me from the local cells
and talked me home. The shame in my mother’s eyes—
I knew then that I couldn’t stay there long.
To go back to the ground-nest of your birth
when you have fledged, have learnt to use your wings,
flown across oceans, sung with friends at dawn,
is to shrink and rot as surely as a worm
will hole an apple. London, though, was death
tricked out in temptress clothes.
And then you spoke.
Your voice came clearly: ‘
You could come to Kent.
’
Yes, there was more to Kent than Canterbury.
I rode, next afternoon, to Scadbury.
The birds sang my arrival through the woods,
along the path, and through the entrance gates.
Had I believed that all would turn to good
the moment you embraced me, I would wait
only two weeks to learn that pain was still
coming for me, and as relentlessly
as a bloodhound closing in upon its kill.
Tom Watson turned to death to set him free.
Had I forgotten Tom? No. Nor can I
erase from my mind the pained, unruly grin
that took possession of his face the night
I told him I was leaving town.
‘You too?
Of course. Yes, bugger off. I’ll keep the rats,
my loyal companions. I shall press my face
against the bars and gurn at passers-by
for entertainment. Though if this keeps on
there’ll be no passers-by. All London town
will be a prison, which we prisoners
will govern by witchcraft while we slowly rot.’
‘Tom—’
‘Don’t apologise. You have your troubles.
I don’t wish to be one of them.’ Like lard
slides off a cooked goose breast, he changes tack.
‘This heat is insufferable. When will it end?’
I left him there, it’s true. No coin of mine,
no words that I might write, would set him free.
And yet, if I could go back to that night,
I’d boot the guards and wrestle for the key,
rather than standing in that dripping yard,
wondering which unholy mound was he.
We wintered quietly. We fed the fires.
You let me write for hours, and touched my sleeve
when meat was served. December’s ice furred thick
across the moat; fish torpid in the depths
of the fishponds’ cloudy cataracts. I wrote
as deep as I could inside the ancient tales,
as if afraid, should I come up for air,
I’d find a bank of prosecutors there.
When geese cranked spring’s return across the sky,
you rode to town and back, to bend your ear
to the Privy Council’s whisperings, while I
sank deeper still, but all my blood aware
that half those men still pressed to have it spilt
as a fine example of the rebel’s heart:
He who abandons God cannot be saved.
Those men could not imagine how I prayed.
You’d spent two days in London. You had news.
Your wolfhound greeted you with a slow wag;
you stroked him distractedly, and gave your cloak
to Frizer.
‘Bring some wine,’ you said. His brow
showed silent concern. How strange to write him now
bearing only the weight of your cloak along the hall,
knowing how he would bear a greater burden,
and all for love and loyalty to you.
Anxious, I followed you into the room
where so many conversations, games of cards
and quoted poetry had sealed us tight
in friendship: every night held in those walls
as though the wood, still tree, were living witness,
rather than seasoned panelling.
‘Frizer.’
‘Sir?’
‘Dismiss the servants. We’re not to be disturbed.
And you may go to bed.’
It wasn’t late,
and he raised a single eyebrow, but complied.
The crackling fire, which he’d lately fed,
filled up the silence as we listened then
to the quieting of the house.
‘There is a note,’
you said, with blunt despair. You turned your glass
around in your fingers, staring at the wine
as though you wished to drown there. ‘Kit, it’s bad.
Lord Burghley gave me sight of it. It says—’
You shook your head to free you of the thought.
‘Kit, they’ve enough to hang you.’
So it fell,
the sword of Damocles. I barely flinched.
‘What does it say?’
‘Your words. It’s all your words.’
You left a gap, allowing me to summon
which words it might have been: and strangely, then,
I could only remember triumphs. Faustus, mad,
as he fails to save his soul. Or Tamburlaine,
whose bereavement serenades the loved, lost wife
in emerald, ruby words. Leander’s song
for the woman he will throw his life upon.
‘It’s every quip you ever made on drink.
Your arguments against the Trinity:
Mary a whore, the Holy Ghost a bawd,
and Jesus a bastard.’
‘Jesus.’
‘All set down
in a comprehensive list of blasphemies.’
How much I would prefer I had been damned
by the words I crafted carefully in ink.
Instead my pen was cancelled by my mouth,
and scholarship drowned in an hour or two of drink.
If I had drifted into my own pain
on the damp, unstable wreckage that was Kit
you barely noticed, locked in paraphrase:
‘That the Bible’s filthily written. Every gibe
you aimed at religion, recalled perfectly.
That Christ deserved to die more than Barabbas
though Barabbas was a thief and murderer.’
The reference woke me up. With that, I knew.
‘Barabbas – Baines. He wrote this.’
‘Signed his name
with a flourish. Says he can bring witnesses
to affirm his accusations. Ends the note
to plead that every Christian should ensure
your mouth be stopped.’
‘I’m done for.’
Silence sank
into the room as a stone sinks in a pond;
the shadows thrown up by a welcome fire
dancing like hordes of demons on the wall.
‘What if you disappeared?’ you said.
‘To where?’
‘To Scotland, where your friend went. To the King,
Arbella’s cousin.’
‘How could he take me in?
A wanted atheist? No, I’d be sent
home with an escort.’
‘You could go abroad.
We have the contacts.’
‘What, and have to hide
for ever after, fearing for my life,
or end my days in some unsavoury hole,
stuck on the end of an assassin’s knife?
I’d rather die right here.’
I watched your face,
as tender as though I’d kicked it. In a breath,
I’m on my feet, and stalking up and down.
‘Damn it! What do I do?’
‘You die right here,’
you said as quietly as fear allowed.
Still walking nowhere, everywhere at once,
I barely heard you. ‘What?’
‘You die right here.
Not here, not in this house, but somewhere safe.
Under another name, you slip these shores
with passport to travel. While Kit Marlowe meets
a proper death, observed by witnesses,
with documents to prove it.’
‘How?’
‘Sit down!’
you said, more forcefully. ‘I have to think.’