‘Venetia,’ she says.
‘And mine is Christopher.’
‘Clear off, she’s spoken for.’ The mother’s lunge
towards us with a cloth to wipe the table
shocks us both to our feet, and I, unbalanced,
weak in the legs, am floored a second time,
and coughing my surprise into a rag.
Venetia crouches to help me up. ‘It’s true
I’m spoken for. And you are far too ill
to imagine yourself in love with me. Your fever,
and fear of death, can be the only cause.
But I will help you – Mamma, stop clucking, please –
I’ll help you find some passage back to home.’
She’s leading me to my bed. I say, ‘But home –
they think me dead at home. All but a few.’
‘Then one of those few can nurse you back to health,
before you’re truly dead,’ she says.
‘But what
if I’m recognised?’
She stops us before the mirror
at the foot of the stairs. Says, ‘Do you see yourself?
Do you recognise that man?’
A sallow face
whose skull shows through his skin. A ragged beard.
‘No,’ I admit.
‘Then no one will know you.
And if they do, and you’re imprisoned for
the crimes you fled, what difference will it make
to die that way, or here, so far from home?’
I glance at her breasts. ‘I’ll have nowhere so soft
to rest my cheek at home.’
She laughs and shakes
her head at me. ‘You are delirious.
Lie down, Christopher, Monsieur Louis Le Doux,
whatever your name is. You are not in love.’
I lie down meekly. ‘Why are you so … kind?’
Her eyes, then, spring with tears. ‘I had a brother.
Had others been kind, I’d have a brother still.’
Then, brushing the thought to air, ‘No more of that.
I’ll find a merchant willing to take you home.’
How powerful that one word has become.
I might as well die there as anywhere.
What part of her she gave – they had no gold –
I’d rather not imagine. In a week
my nights were sweated on a merchant ship
above a hold of Orient silks and spices
bound for an English dock.
Across the sheer
blue of the Mediterranean, the threat
of Barbary pirates threaded through my prayers.
And in Gibraltar’s strait those prayers contained
the damnable Spanish, who might scupper us.
Yet we sailed through as smoothly as a promise.
Only the sea becomes my enemy.
As we plough northwards through a deeper swell,
it builds the waters mountainous and cold
as the Alps I had avoided. I awake
to a storm whistling the masts into a creak
that would awaken monsters from the deep.
And we are rolled and yawed, and tossed and dumped
as a dandled plaything on a Titan’s knee.
I light a candle, prepare my ink and pen
and record that simile before it flees,
follow with how it feels inside my skin,
then the ominous eerie whistling of the wind,
the slewing about of all that’s not lashed down
(retrieving the ink that slides across the boards),
and how a part of me’s already drowned
in the fatal fear of knowing I cannot swim.
Then the door bursts open. If the seaman’s face
were a single word, it wouldn’t be polite.
‘The cap—What are you doing?’
I can’t explain.
To most folk, this would be no time to write.
‘The captain wants you.’ His glance suspiciously
on what I’m writing, which he cannot read.
‘We must turn into port,’ the captain says,
shouting above the racket of the wind.
‘The storm is too much.’
‘What country?’
‘Maybe France.
Or maybe Spain. The pilot’s lost our course.’
He nods at the man twitching above a map.
‘You have your documents?’
‘He has a pen,’
says the seaman who fetched me. ‘Likes to write with it,’
and smiles with Venetian coldness.
Like a king,
the captain dismisses him and stares ahead
into the howling dark as though it might
unpeel, revealing stars. ‘So earn your keep,’
he says. ‘Make a note for the vessel, something that
will pass in either country. And for yourself.
And, oh …’ he stops me as I return below
‘ … the English are hated everywhere,’ he says.
‘Be anything but English.’
Friend, we survived
our docking and mending, and the curious eyes
of Spanish officials on my forgery.
Now ploughing the sea again, I have prepared
a passport, in perfect secretary hand,
and dated almost exactly one year ago
in the name Pietro Montanus, faithful servant
to the honourable Anthony Bacon. By this name,
which ties us to our common love, Montaigne,
Bacon will know who it must be that sails
into the Thames to seek his sanctuary.
It’s May again. Two years have cycled round
as I return, unrecognisable,
to a neighbourhood that used to meet my boots
with a cheery ring. I scrape and hobble now,
pared to the bone by sickness. Here, the street
slides deep into the skirts of Bishopsgate:
the former mistress who disposed of me
and now mistakes me for a foreigner.
She smells the same. I catch her foetid breath
as a Gascon servant ushers me indoors
beneath a blanket.
Through the afternoon
she gossips through the window like a wife
or former lover, oblivious to my pain,
quite blind to the man who’s aching to chime in –
and almost says my name a time or two,
Mar-something – but she’s moved to lovers new
while I am dying quietly within.
So close to Hog Lane that I hear the pigs
driven to slaughter. And the laughing whores
that kick about these evenings are the same –
I swear, at least for certain
one
’s the same –
that I have hired to celebrate success,
have sat on my lap and tickled, pouring beer
into my mouth, and flooding hers with it
in a drunken, lustful kiss. She glances up
but doesn’t know this shadow of myself.
Half of me dreams up schemes where I will kneel
upon this bed and roar across the roofs,
‘Hey, England! Look, it’s me! Your fool is back!’
As if I had a voice. As if a ghost
could solidify to flesh and hope to live,
when he scares both wives and horses. I’d be struck
back to the graveyard of my deep pretence.
I sleep the first few days. Good Anthony
(a kinder man I could not hope to serve)
appreciates that love can mend disease.
He stations a boy to see I’m fed and clean,
visits me frequently. ‘What do you need?’
And still – despite the letters not received,
the last two months of silence on your part,
the change in me, embittered by disease,
a silent voice is mouthing, ‘Walsingham.’
How close you are. Now, not an inch of sea
roughens the air between us. You might ride
just half a day and touch the lips of me:
except these lips are blistered, and my pride
can’t bear that you would see me broken down,
the tattered sail of that good barque we planned
holed and gone under with the barest sound.
I want your love to know a better man.
So I sleep. Imagine the air I’m breathing in
came straight from your lungs, disguised as summer wind.
I lie, within a lie, in Bishopsgate,
the name entirely false, the heart still true.
I long to hear ‘Kit’ or ‘Christopher’ again.
And when I think of love, I think of you.
‘Come. I’ve a treat for you.’ My gentle host
responds to my better health with a surprise.
He leads me to a draughty room. A dress
is draped on the bed as though just recently
vacated by a princess. ‘It’s your size,’
he says. I try to read his face. Contained
within those eyes, the quiet expansive hint
of naughtiness.
‘My size, but not my colour,’
I say, addressing my fingers to the cloth.
‘I’d rather blue.’ I’m playing out the joke,
whatever the purpose. ‘No,’ he says, ‘this green—’
I interrupt: ‘The colour’s surely “sludge”.’
With a teacher’s patience, he repeats, ‘This green –
an oceanic green – it sets your skin
off beautifully.’ And holds it to my chest,
tilting his head as if the angled light
has made me feminine. And then he laughs.
‘Perhaps the moustache might go.’
‘What? My moustache?
You will not have it, sir!’ I fence him off
with my forearm. ‘Swive, it takes three months to grow.’
‘A soft, half-hearted thing.’ He smiles. ‘Believe
me, Kit, it will be worth the sacrifice.’
My name dropped like a stitch. We hold the air
and listen for servants. Not a creaking board.
And in that stop, I breathe the nectar in –
to be myself, and to be ‘Kit’ to him –
I almost dare not say what that is worth.
He starts again, contrite, ‘Monsieur Le Doux,
if you might play your
wife
, then we have seats
in the balcony to see the latest play
by a certain William Shakespeare.’
Me, see me?
In one disguise to watch my other’s work,
pretending I don’t know it? Can I fake
indifference to a script I’ll know as well
as my tongue knows every crevice of my mouth?
Might I pretend those phrases new to me
whose words have kept me up at night? And not
demand some public credit for what spouts
out of the actors’ mouths? ‘I cannot do it.’
I sit down, heavy.
‘Fie!’ He gives a laugh.
‘It’s Ferdinando’s Men. Now working for
the good Lord Chamberlain. You cannot miss it!’
He sits beside me softly. ‘
Richard the Third
.’
What spirits ride the draught I dare not name,
but ghostly fingers stroke me to a thought
that stirs a shiver. ‘I heard they poisoned him.’
Bacon looks puzzled. ‘Though my history
may not be deep, and I’ve not seen your play,
I recall that he was stabbed.’
The curtain breathes.
‘No, Ferdinando Stanley. My lord Strange.’
Anthony nods. ‘The Earl of Derby’s death
was most mysterious. If Catholics
were the cause of it, I have not found the proof.
I have been looking, trust me.’ And my hand
is taken in his, and held, and gently placed
back where he found it, just before it’s missed.
‘Do come,’ he says. ‘Come for your old friends’ sakes.’
‘Which friends?’
‘The quick, the dead, and all those souls
who’ve wished you well, who’ve kept your secret safe,
and hoped that you might one day see on stage
the final quarter of your history play.’
‘Does anybody know?’
‘No. Not a soul.’
‘And is it safe? Can I pass for a maid?’
He laughs more loudly than the room can take.
‘A maid? Certainly not! Though it heartens me’
– he crosses the room to open a chest of drawers –
‘that your vanity’s survived such tragedy.
No, but your shaven face is soft enough
to make a widow of the plainer sort.’
‘The sort no one will look at?’
‘That’s the plan.
Best not to draw attention to the man
in woman’s clothes, by making him beautiful.’
‘It’s risky, still.’
‘I regard your biggest risk
as wearing my mother’s hair.’ He throws the wig
into my lap. ‘I stole it years ago
for some revels at Gray’s Inn. You’ll find the itch
is somewhat testing. Like the woman herself.’
‘And if I look male?’
‘I will not let you out.’
But ‘out’ is what tugs me, strongly as a hook
this fish has swallowed and life is winding in:
the street with its hum of voices, and a stink
as homely as my armpits – even now
I’m savouring the ride to Gracechurch Street,
past a dozen taverns I know well enough
to stumble from, and maybe with a glimpse
of someone I might know.
But then, the show.
And all the bloody deaths that it entails.
And all the ghosts that curse and swear revenge.
And me without a sword to fight for them.
‘I wish that you had booked a comedy.’
‘Could you have laughed?’
‘I’d rather laugh than cry.’
He comes to join me, looking at the street,
which, this midsummer evening, light as noon,
is filling up with revellers and song,
the shriek of swifts and martins, stitching roofs
in gentle loops.
‘Yet welcome what tears come.
They’ll only enhance your womanly disguise.
Now don’t be long. See? There’s the coach outside.’
As he turns to go, I halt him. ‘Wait! Will he –
the man from Stratford who is playing me –
will he be there?’
My host laughs. ‘Have no fear.
He comes to London only twice a year.
More often, and he’d be fending off requests
to rewrite scenes. You will not see him there.’
Curious, glad and sorry, I stepped in
to the sludge-green dress, arranged the wig with care.
Persuaded by my metamorphosis,
I left that house obsessed with who I’d see,
and not concerned enough with who’d see me.