Come. Am I stupid? Maybe for as long
as it took to watch her climax on the thought
she could be the death of me. A woman’s tongue
is looser than a man’s, and half as loyal.
Desire, which might have told her everything,
grew sober to feel her hot, unruly mouth
feed fiercely on my danger. So I switched
the name in an instant. And the name I gave
bore ounces of truth for being worn before
in government service; so nudged past her doubt,
though she did repeat it twice: ‘Will Hall? Will Hall.’
And chewed on it, momentarily. ‘How strange.
I had an inkling of another name.’
‘What name?’
‘Oh, you would laugh at me.’
‘Not so.’
‘I thought perhaps I was kissing Kit Marlowe.’
‘Why him?’ I say too quickly. Then, ‘Who’s he?’
‘You silly, the man who wrote the play,’ she says,
‘about the Paris massacre. There is –
you must know, there is rumour that he lives?’
My heart is beating like a captured bird.
‘He died in a house in Deptford. In a fight.’
‘He was a wanted man. It is too neat.
I like to think he lives,’ she says. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Not if you’d leave my arms for his,’ I say.
‘What made you think I was him, anyway?’
‘I don’t know. Something. That you hide away
all day in your room, just writing – don’t deny!
The ink is here on your fingers, look!’ She holds
my hand to my face for evidence. ‘And that
you pretended to be French. He wrote in French.
And the name, Le Doux, I thought could be a joke
that one so dark could call himself “The Sweet”.
So why are you hiding? What for, the pretence?
Who do you run from? What is your offence?’
I tell her a little of my narrative.
The part that does belong to William Hall,
the government agent who was sent to Prague
to mix with necromancers, alchemists,
and sniff out the Catholic plot that cursed an earl –
my former good Lord Strange – towards a death
of sudden twisting poison. She is quiet.
‘But why must you hide?’
‘So I will not be next.’
‘And what do you write all day?’
‘Religious tracts.
Pamphlets to turn the Catholics from sin.
I publish them beneath a pseudonym.’
‘I’ve seen such things,’ she says. ‘They are’ – she smiles –
‘useful to wipe oneself upon I think.
What a pity you’re not Kit Marlowe.’
‘Why?’
‘Because.
For him I have a passion. You, perhaps,
have grown a little stale for me.’ She turns
her back as though she’s keeping shop and must
now tend another customer.
‘Lucille.’
She doesn’t answer. ‘When I write those tracts
I make things up, you know.’ The fire now
is burning lower, crouching in its grate,
but my bare need is fuelled by her rejection
and I must heed the ache. ‘Imagination
can be a place to stoke desire, Lucille.’
She breathes as though asleep.
‘We could pretend.
I could be any man you want.’
‘Of course,’
she sighs into the pillow.
‘I could be
pretending to be Will Hall.’ Her shoulders shrug.
‘I hope so. William is my husband’s name.
I have too many Wills already.’
Yes,
and one more than she knows. ‘Perhaps you could
imagine me Kit Marlowe.’
Now she turns
and smiles with teeth.
‘So tell me I am right.’
‘You’re right, Lucille. You found me out.’
These words
unlock her like a casket full of jewels,
and I have her glittering eyes, her ruby tongue
suddenly willing. ‘You are famous, then?’
she coos, stroking my cheek. ‘Oh, infamous.’
‘Tell me again how famous!’
‘You yourself
had heard of me in France.’ ‘Yes, as a rogue!’
‘And the playwright of
The Massacre
.’ ‘Say more!’
I talk her to her climax seven times.
‘What would they do to you?’ ‘They’d make me dead
as I’m supposed to be.’ She chews my arm;
she grinds her pelvis into me; she groans.
And is she done? She sighs. ‘But people know.
Your friends know.’ ‘Some of them.’ ‘How can you hope
to keep yourself a secret?’ ‘No one talks.’
I flop beside her, grateful her desire
has come to some conclusion. Not so mine.
‘They know the danger to myself, and them.
In any case, the Queen has sealed it tight.
She has me writing plays, just as she likes,
but through her censors. She would not be pleased
to have me exposed and killed. That I still live
is purely through her will.’
‘She has a will?’
She giggles. ‘She has grown too manly then,
in her man’s position. I prefer this will.’
She seeks it out and grips it.
Why the mind,
so glorious in all it apprehends
should be encased in flesh, I do not know.
And why its workings shudder, stall and drop
to the call of base desire’s a mystery
no priest has ever purposed. Thus enslaved,
I lose all higher sense, all urgent goal
except the spilling of myself, in her.
‘Call me his name,’ I urge, ‘call me his name.
Tell me you want Kit Marlowe.’ And she does:
the name huffed out of her with every thrust
resurrects me by degrees. My hungry corpse
fiercely asserts its need for life and love,
like the soldier soon to risk his all in war.
And afterwards, the silence almost throbs
with the bruise of my forbidden name. What chance
that the walls, or sleep, contained it? ‘I must go,’
I whisper, though I sense she isn’t there,
but in a dream of goose-down infamy,
fresh bedded by the rogue she thinks is me.
I pull on clothes, now greyed out by the dawn
and make for my room. But as I cross the floor
I swear that something scuttles from the door.
Yet I was not uncovered, and the quiet
that hung over breakfast tables, white as cloth
prepared for a christening, was shaken off
in under an hour by more distracting things:
the Countess of Bedford’s evident delight
at the Christmas plans, which she swore quite the best
of the fifteen years since she was born. ‘See here,’
she squealed to her father, waving in his face
the letter that occasioned her to dance.
‘The Earl of Southampton’s hiring Pembroke’s Men
to come from London with a play. A play!
How wonderful! Let’s hope a joyous one,
full of romance and clowning.’
Lutes and drums
were in her head, but I thought,
One of mine.
He’s bringing one of mine.
He’s bringing one of mine.
‘And Rutland too,
with quite an
entourage
.’ She mouthed the French
with gusto that the dogs around her feet
took as a cue to whine as though they sensed
a hare on the lawns outside.
‘Twelve days of fun!’
She twirled with the thought of ‘Lords and ladies here!
So many lovely gentlefolk!’
My mind
was stuck on the play, what play, and would the cast
be old familiars, fooled by no disguise?
Until a certain name fell from her tongue.
Undid me, straight.
‘ … and Thomas Walsingham!’
Could time run slower? Only if God’s hand
were pressed against the sun to keep it still.
If shadows made to inch across the floor
were painted in their places. Come. Please come.
Before the weight of waiting buries me.
The boy’s sums take for ever. Afternoons
grow whiskers, even though the days are short.
And nights would stop completely, but for Ide
pestering me to look into her eyes.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she says. ‘Where have you gone?’
I say I’m nowhere but between her thighs.
But I’m lost in you, beyond my boots in you,
and the blessed future day when you arrive.
A faithful dog, I raise my head to see
each visitor arrive. It’s never you.
The hurt of half imagining your arms
on a coach’s door, or seeing at the end
of the drive, on horseback, someone of your frame
melting to unfamiliar on approach
has steeled me thus: I’ll have no faith in you.
I’ll not believe you’re coming till you do.
I immerse myself in scripting thwarted love
while the hubbub grows around me. Christmas Eve,
and a hundred guests expected down below
as I scratch doomed love towards oblivion.
A knock, as soft as a servant’s, come to feed
some logs to the fire.
‘Come,’ I say. ‘Come in,’
intent on my sentence, finishing the line
before I sense no housemaid at the grate
but a solid, watchful presence.
‘Hello, Kit.’
And there you are, like a month of blessed rain
on a field of sun-blanched wheat: too much, too late,
and yet embraced at once. I clasp your flesh
like a storm would tear me from your mast, the chair
I’ve abandoned faking a gunshot as it falls.
I hold you like a once abandoned babe
clings to its mother, though your arms, round me,
seem hesitant, as though you’re scared to touch
something so live, so hot, so not the same.
You smell of Kent. You smell of Scadbury.
‘I dare not let you go,’ I tell your ear,
and feel your breath draw in. ‘And yet you must’ –
you unclasp my arms as gently as you might
undo the bonds of a prisoner soon to hang –
‘or how can I look a dear friend in the face?’
Your own is plagued by nervousness. ‘The door—’
‘I’ll lock the door,’ I say. ‘Don’t move an inch.’
And you obey, as if the world will fall
should you exhale. There is a chill in you
like you brought the outside inside.
‘You are cold.
You’ve only just arrived?’ I feed the fire
with all the logs there are. ‘That ought to help.
Sit down,’ I say, and offer you the chair,
put right on its feet, while I perch on the bed.
‘Tom, I’m so glad you came. I thought perhaps—’
Though words are what I worship, mine are lame
straight from the mouth, uncrafted. ‘You had said
you wouldn’t come.’
‘That was the safest course.’
Your eyes are troubled. You barely look at me
as though afraid I really am long dead,
a spectral illusion. My own eyes are slaves
to the face I worked so hard to conjure up
that effort erased each feature over time:
they relish and restore to me the slant
of cheek, of neck, of nose, the different hues
within your hair. I wait for your voice, which comes
like a rumble over mountains: ‘Kit, I fear
I put us both in danger being here.’
I reach to take your hand. Cold as a bed
no one has slept in, but the pulse in it
connects me to your heart. ‘But, Tom, you came.
You cast off fear and came. What made you come?’
Twelve weeks without a letter was the start.
And as you told the tale of how you’d sat,
your heart as heavy as a mason’s stone,
at Chislehurst Common, at the crossroads there,
unable to point your horse towards your home,
or spur her to chase a chosen compass point,
my heart rose up to kiss the thought of you
statued by doubt, and every ounce of me
sang that your strange paralysis was love.
The smallest tug of your arm, and you are mine.
You are the puppy suddenly, and I
the master commanding that you kiss my face.
The strangest transformation’s wrought by fear:
you are quite melted, subject to my will.
Though all these thirty months you’ve held like rock
to a separateness, you now consent like snow
consents to its thawing underneath the sun;
consent to let me in, consent we’re one.
So let the fire crackle that perfect hour
when we, again, go deeper now than friends,
swim in our Hellespont, and hope to drown.