You dress yourself; each button carefully
replaced in its hole as though it never left.
The evening lights you coldly, now the fire
has dimmed to embers. It is only six,
just gone, and the house below us thrums
halloo
as the hunting set return.
‘Thomas, you said—’
It’s hard to be naked when you’re fully dressed;
I pull my shirt on also. ‘When I left,
you said you couldn’t follow me because
some might suspect your role in it.’
Your boots
are going on now, laces tugged as tight
as a good spy’s cover story. ‘That’s still true.’
I picture the cobbler measuring your calf;
of how you’d talk more easily with him
than you do with me.
I say, ‘But time has passed …’
Your eyes stay with the laces, concentrate:
this notch, that hole, criss-cross. ‘Nothing has changed,’
you say. Then glancing up, ‘We cannot be
together, Kit. You want a dozen whys?
Because you’re dead. Because you’re known in Kent.
Because I have a house and estate to run.
Because what we are sometimes drawn to do
is a capital crime. Because I want a wife—’
You read my eyes and save the other seven.
I’m washed up into tears so easily
that I might be your wife, but for one thing.
‘Sorry.’ You watch the floor as though your words
are spilt on the rug between us. ‘Kit, I swore
I wouldn’t—’
You leave me to fill the line.
I don’t oblige. I concentrate on dressing
to distract me from the tightness in my chest.
As long as I’m turned away from you, you stare:
I feel it hot as a brand upon my skin,
an undisguised desire to drink me in
that slides to the fixtures when I look your way.
I shiver.
‘Come sit by me. It’s warmer here.’
I move as I’m bid. Again, you apologise,
and this time touch my arm. So you’re forgiven.
‘Nobody doubts I’m dead?’
I watch your eyes
rest anywhere but on me, like the bee
that lights from flower to flower. ‘Not nobody.
But mostly, yes, your death is very famous.
More famous than your life was.’ There, a smile
like the sort I knew of old. A tug at me.
I sneeze; the thought of my death is full of cold.
‘But you might safely visit me abroad,
if I’m forced abroad again?’
Your sigh’s released
like old tobacco smoke: ‘It won’t be safe.’
You pick up the poker, stir the dying fire.
‘Kit, I can’t live pretence. For years my job
was setting up secret schemes, devising lies
for others to populate – and I can bite
as hard on my tongue as any man, but not
if I’m in your company. Who are you now?
Will Hall? Louis Le Doux? What if I slip,
one night, in the grip of wine, and call you Kit
in a public place? It only takes one ear,
one English-speaking, sly, take-profit ear
to root through my history and dig you up –
and snap, you’re jigging on a hangman’s rope
and your heart cut out still beating. No, I’ll not
be a part of it. It’s bad enough I’m here
to spend Christmas with you. I should not have come.’
Again, constriction. You, the conjuror
whose words alone can starve me of my breath.
Just one word more, and I might turn to stone.
You prod and poke, and tiny tongues of fire
burst into silent speech, and then subdue.
Somewhere, I find inside of me, your name.
‘Tom—’
‘I believed—’
We stall.
‘You first,’ I say.
But a knock at the door is first. It is a maid
with a supper tray, and wine: ‘Monsieur Petit
said I should bring it for your gentleman.
He said the two of you would dine alone.’
As if he had intruded in the flesh,
all thin-stretched smile and stale obsequious French,
a flicker of annoyance finds me words.
‘Monsieur Petit has overreached himself –
but as it comes, this suits us very well.
The fire is dying also – will you tend it?’
She bobs, and in her smile, the signature
of a private joke unnerves me. She brings wood
stacked up like consequences. When she leaves
we break the bread in silence.
‘What I lost—’
I take a gulp of wine to steel my blood.
Afraid of what is written on my face,
you blurt, ‘Say nothing more. I understand.’
No appetite at all, I watch you chew
until obliged to say it anyway.
‘What keeps me hidden is my love of you.’
You swallow. ‘Then love me constantly,’ you say,
‘if you cannot love yourself.’
‘What’s there to love?’
And I begin the list of all my faults.
And you turn off the faucet with a kiss,
your only weapon.
‘Kit, you must stay hidden.’
There is a quiver in you, in your eyes.
I suddenly understood your presence there
was underwritten not by love, but fear.
You feared that I was breaking. Hence, you came.
And after that, I watched you differently.
As a lover who gifts his mistress beauty’s dress,
but then insists she never take it off.
‘I’m not the only thing that keeps you sane.
You’ve said it yourself before, you live to write.’
A sudden laugh downstairs. All out of time
with our private bartering, yet to my ears
the laugh of the universal gods. ‘I do.
What else do I have but writing? Where my friends
and drinking used to be, or riding down
to the river for a boat, or afternoons
engaged in the playful fare of theatres,
there’s pen and paper and those endless hours
in which to fill it.’
‘You speak bitterly.’
As if to sweeten me, you fill my cup.
Drink loosens resistance. Still I play along
to numb the pain of understanding you.
‘If there were no hope, Tom, I might be restored
to my former life and reputation—’ Here,
my mind lets go and free-falls at the thought,
unable to fill that gaping ‘if’.
‘Oh, Kit,’
you say, and though my name means more than gold,
and to hear you speak it still delights my heart,
that Oh, that empty Oh’s another hole
that can’t arrest my falling.
‘Do you think
I can’t be rescued? I can’t be restored?’
Your eyes, which testify the truth of this,
look anywhere but mine. ‘We worked so hard
to have this lie believed. It isn’t time
to undermine it. They would have you killed.’
‘Who, they?’
‘Archbishop Whitgift and the rest.
Come on, Kit, nothing’s changed. You can’t go back
to the life we’ve buried. There is nothing left.’
Your silence closes like a coffin lid.
The fire spits something burning at my feet;
you stamp it out.
‘So there’s no hope for me?’
‘All hope is in our current plan,’ you say.
‘The plan to keep you writing, and alive.’
‘But no one knows it’s me.’
‘That is the point!’
Infuriation shoots you to your feet
and you settle, swaying, plant yourself more solid
before you say, ‘You have to live with it.’
‘What if I can’t?’ I watch you steadily.
Your eyes are focused on the fire whose light
flares up in them.
‘Then you will die for it.
And I will swing beside you.’
Dearest friend,
I wondered then if it was me or you
that you feared most for. I’d not have you dead
through any fault of mine. Should death weigh hard,
I’ll take my life alone, in privacy.
I felt that night you had abandoned me.
Forgive me, then, if I abandoned you.
Deserts stay rainless year on chafing year.
Then glutted with months of water in a night
they bloom, their hidden sand-beleaguered seeds
seeming to conjure flowers out of air
in sudden, excessive beauty. My blessings too
fell fast and all at once.
Coming downstairs
from supper with you, into the banquet hall
they clear now for a dance, I glimpse his hair
and the glowing face of the girl he’s talking to.
You notice I’ve stopped, and must retrace three steps
to hiss at me, ‘Don’t stare.’ My feet are stuck,
so thank you for the words. They are a jolt.
‘Your obsession with that boy’s insufferable.’
Your eyes are angry, and your mouth’s a wound.
Insufferable is right. I too have wished
his beauty didn’t draw me like a sword
I cannot wield, which cuts me constantly.
And yet I’m drawn. As I reach his side, you’ve gone,
slipping away as thieves do in a crowd,
unwilling to make believe. This is a move
too dangerous for you.
‘Monsieur Le Doux!’
I’m beckoned close to meet the youth I know
too well, and not at all. ‘Young Henry Wriothesley,
the Earl of Southampton. Meet Louis Le Doux.’
Sir John’s a little drunk. Southampton turns
and a ripple passes through him. So intent
does his gaze become, the girl is melted free
from his company as wax from flame. ‘Le Doux?’
Cracking his voice, a hint of broken boy.
‘I believe I met your wife some weeks ago.’
His lips smile playfully. ‘At the theatre.’
‘At a public playhouse? Surely not!’ Sir John
puffs stiffly.
Southampton soothes our host: ‘Sir John,
the Queen herself brings those same plays to Court
as highly suitable for men and women
of the finest breeding.’ And to me, ‘Was it
your wife?’ The boy must play. All his delight
is focused on how I’ll answer him.
Breathe in,
exhale. ‘My lord, forgive me, but I fear
you must be mistaken, for I am not married.’
He can’t resist. ‘Perhaps it was your sister?
Now I think of it, there was a likeness there …’
‘My mistress, perhaps,’ I say.
‘Too many dogs!’
Sir John barks, shocking us silent till we see
he’s waving his arms at servants, and the hounds
marauding beneath the table. ‘Get them out!’
and he stamps away.
The laugh is a relief,
and the absence of his ears a blessing too.
‘Kit, how are you?’
‘Le Doux!’ I say, alarmed.
‘My lord, though I would have it otherwise,
we’re not alone.’ As if to make my point
young Rutland brushes past us with his arm
on the waist of Lucy Harington. The room
is light with Christmas, crammed with gentlemen,
their wives and sisters. Yet between we two
the air is close and intimate.
‘“My lord”?
Surely the time has come to call me Hal.
I loved your poems. The second was very dark,
but the story clear. You are the nightingale,
singing of your destruction. Have a glass
of wine.’
He puts his own into my hand,
and takes another from a passing tray.
The spot where his lips have kissed the sheen away,
he turns towards my own. ‘You need a drink
to warm you through.’
‘My lord, it isn’t safe,’
I say. ‘The tongue behaves like an unschooled child
when doused in wine or ale. I am the proof.’
‘The smallest sip,’ he says. ‘The smallest sip.’
So, yes, I press my lips where his have been
and taste a draught of his intoxicant.
He smiles at me. ‘So many things aren’t safe,
yet pleasurable. Come to my chamber, then.
But you shan’t enter till you call me Hal.’
‘And may another know this Hal?’
It’s Ide,
all bosoms in her dress, or largely out,
and lips as wide as the Thames at Deptford Strand.
‘The Earl of Southampton. Ide du Vault,’ I say,
and watch her almost spill out of her dress
as she curtsies deeply. ‘Please forgive me, sir.
I’m French. And may be “tipsy”, that’s the word?’
For a moment, he is fazed, as if his wit
were wiped by the candid beauty of her face,
erased by her perfection. ‘Miss du Vault,
you are forgiven.’ Lifting up her chin
to fall into the disaster of her eyes.
It’s clear at once: he’s struck. Her look alone
transforms reluctant boy to aching man,
turns Ganymede to Zeus. One glimpse of her
could pull the moon to hang before her face,
abandoning its celestial course to stare
lovingly into her oblivion.
She senses instantly her hook is in,
and takes my arm to sink it deeper. ‘My
Monsieur Le Doux has mentioned you before.’
‘I don’t recall,’ I say. She says, ‘Of course.
You were asleep.
He will talk in his sleep,’
she says to my lovely boy, all matter-of-fact,
as though she hasn’t strung me from her keel
as she ploughs her way towards him.
‘Is that so?’
Southampton eyes me archly. ‘Walls are thin
in the tutors’ quarters?’
‘Thinner than the wing
of a butterfly,’ she says, so prettily
that I forgive her everything. ‘But I
can keep a secret. If I have my Will.’
I swear the woman spoke in capitals.
Her meaning landed there upon his face
in a look of intrigue. ‘Then you must come too.’
‘Must come? To what?’ All wine and innocence.
‘To a private party hosted in my rooms
just after midnight.’
‘What – with only men?
You have mistaken me for someone else,
Monsieur my lord.’ But hangs there like a fly.
A dazzling fly, all emerald and lace.
And when, for a moment, she has turned her face,
he grabs my arm: ‘And you must come at ten.’