Exit, Pursued by a Bear Read online

  The stainless dawn was misted, like a mirror breathed upon. He called: “Titania!”

  And she arose, welling up within his circle scratched in sand: there and not there, green against the grey and gold.

  “My Icarus?”

  “I would have work.”

  “Hast thou not everything?”

  “But death.”

  “Oh, thou art dead indeed: thyself was eaten by the Deptford worms long since.”

  “Then time.”

  “Is it not endless here?”

  As a concert of lutes: when he would have the one cracked trumpet at the Rose, blaring out for a play. Would trade his pastoral for a garret and a pot of ink. “Then chance. I weary of this bliss.”

  “I plucked thee from the burning; set thee in this island, fairest jewel of my diadem. Thou hast ’scaped the harvest of thy kind.”

  “If there is hell indeed. Is’t so?”

  A wind among her leaves, that whitened like blind eyes. To his knees. “If not, then my great realm hath paid a tithe to nothingness these many thousand years. Am I cheated?”

  “Mistress, I know not.”

  A sweet wind—airs of roses and of thyme, co-mingling with the smoke of torches—wafted from the steeps. “Here is bonniest. There else is heaven—which thou wouldst not like, my Icarus—or hell.”

  “Or nothingness. Or else—” Else what? “Are there not other stars, with worlds to them, as I have read in Nolan’s book? I would discover.”

  “Wouldst thou wager Arcady against this little chance?” Again the wind-white leaves, her seeress’s eyes. “Choose then, if thou dar’st: this sure felicity or that least chance, that prospect of imagined heavens. Which may be—if they are—all hells.”

  Kit was silent.

  “Thy forfeit is to be my teind. Stake all?”

  “Mistress, I will chance it.”

  For a moment, in her green, Kit saw a leafless thorn, that like an old hag crouched in snow. There were jewels on her hands, like coals of fire, and she counted haws. Then his lady smiled, and it was May. “I have an embassage for thee. To the English court.”

  “To the Queen? Is she yet living? Pan! She would be older than the sibyl at Cumae, but a voice in a jar.”

  “To the King.”

  “An heir? Poured out from her withered bottle? O miracle! Who filled her?”

  “Not her body’s heir, but Scots James—”

  “Is he King then? James?” Kit drank the news eagerly; had not known how he thirsted for the commonplace, for change and accident.

  “—that hath himself an heir: the pattern of all virtues. I would have that princeling in my train.”

  And in your bed, as toy. So then will Oberon, thought Kit. There’s play in that. And said: “Will I fetch you this paragon? This pearl of chastity? And how?”

  “There is presented at this court a masque of Oberon: whom he enacts.”

  “O perilous!”

  “Absurd.” Titania laughed, in a great froth of white blossom. “The part is written chastely—for Diana in Apollo’s cloak. My consort as a Ganymede, a beardless boy—O ’tis the rarest mockery of him!” Maliciously: “He will be vexed.”

  With his wakened thirst for news, Kit said, “Who writ this masque? Tom Lodge? Jack Lyly? Nashe?” And halted: when was England now? Were they all dead, as he was?

  “Our spy at court says one Ben Jonson.”

  Jonson? Jonson. Kit remembered him, a lubberly great youth, a prentice with astounding Greek and loud opinion; an ambition like a water screw, an Archimedes engine that would carry all before it. Crushed pages in his horny hand. What was his trade now? Smith? Mason? Ah, a bricklayer’s son. “What, young Amphion? I will make of his Troy wall a downfall for the English realm.”

  “Then do.”

  Kit louted low. “My lady Queen. I go now to abduct your Helen.”

  And the queen, like a fountain of green fire, rose laughing; and went out.

  It still was dawn. As ever, came the piping as the dance awoke, and came with wreathing figures—fauns and dryads—through the greenest wood. A serpentining that disguised a circle: their garland his chains. Kit scuffed the circle with his heel. He stood, considering what figure he might draw.

  In Blackfriars, St. Stephen’s Night

  In his study, wreathed in smoke, Ben slouched and glowered in his chair, the great unravelling strawstack that was his alone. After his flyting with Inigo, he smouldered still.

  Above him, perched up on the window ledge, Nat Field had slipped his ring off, and was graving with it on the pane. Where the candle caught the web of scratches, it was wreathed; it made of them a garland of pale fire round his head. Now one impresa, now another, glinted out amid the maze. Nat worked his own device beside IF&FB in a fine italic interlaced. He knew the quarrel where a bold RB was cut; and the cantle where WS in a crabbed hand scuttled uphill into hiding. At his work, he sang beneath his breath: a little catlike tune, with pounces. He surveyed; went back to his last stroke, and flourished it. He knew the way to lull his friend and master: where the great bear would be scratched.

  “And Tildrum? Dotes he now on boys or wenches?”

  Ben roused. “What, my Dol Common?”

  “She.”

  “An Utraquist,” said Ben. “Communion in both kinds.”

  Nat laughed and let the ring fall on its chain. “And Toldrum?”

  “Takes nothing but cock posset and a little tongue, for his health.”

  “Quaeris quis hic sit? Excidit mihi nomen.”[1]

  “I may not tell: but you may meet him in Cock Lane o’ nights, in a yellow ruff. Let him not pluck thy sleeve.” Up now in his chair, and playing. “Castor and Pollux?”

  “Two quills and but one inkpot.”

  And having set Ben roaring, Nat leapt lightly down. It was November ever in the study: dry leaves pattering down and stacks of quartos, folios, octavos springing up like mushrumps in a wood. He waded through them to the sagging chair. (The younger poets swore it sprouted vine-leaves and ivy; swore it rose and lumbered, baffled, with its blind snout, seeking ale.)

  “Come, Ben. Come old Sylvanus, rise. Is not thy beehive smoked enough? Thy swarm now will drowse; its king not issue forth his myrmidons with vengeful stings, but give us honey of his work.”

  Ben found his jack of ale beneath a nest of pamphlets; drank deeply. “Good my Face, I am confounded.”

  “How, sir?”

  “By my great archrival: he, the Unmov’d Mover. He hath turned the Book of Revelation to a ballad sheet. Didst hear, my Face, my Sylvan?”

  “I did lurk with Phosphorus on the horizon.”

  “Eavesdropping Lucifer? Conjunct with him? O Mercury!” He leaned to Nat. “But this demiurge of deal, this Inigo—Saw you not his great machine, Apocalypse? His stage? How it gaped to swallow us?”

  Nat’s face on a sudden was a prince’s; the study his scene: “O, monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of Ben to this intolerable deal of masque!”

  Old Sylvanus splurted ale through both his nostrils, porpoise-like; and lying back in his chair—which creaked ominously, swaying like a ship in a gale—he drummed his heels and howled.

  “I have hope of thee, my Face.” He set his empty jack aside. “But here is Will now, that hath caught this tragi-comedy, this trick of romance, as a justice would the pox.” Not resentful of his rival now, but impatient, baffled. “Not all in outward show, as pustules on the muse’s cheek: but in his bones. His poetry—” A puzzle. “Wants hackling.” Ben raked the air, unravelling conceits. Elf-ridden Pegasus! “Ill-matched to his small matter: he would bring a consort of celestial music to a puppet show. His plotting—” Nat refilled his cup; but set by it the cold goose he had brought. Being hungry—and half drunk—the bear would rage. “—skimble-skamble. Dead queens to be dredged; lost daughters, unbegotten at the first, to be restored with joyful weeping in the last—Is there mustard, boy?”

  Nat rummaged on the table. Orts and Aristophanes, crusts, lyrics,
eggshells, bones. “In the inkpot. Here.” He stirred it with a quill.

  “But three days since I asked if he’d a play in hand. He said, one in mind: there’d be a shipwreck in Bohemia. Where there is no sea, I told him, by some hundred miles. Yet there might be, he said. If I do write of it.” A snort. “Thou wast ever in the mood subjunctive, Will, said I. And he, Thou, Ben, imperative.” Ben took a wing and gnawed it savagely; then pointing with the bone, he said, “Yet will not write a masque for court.” He tore another wing. “Will not whore with me: aye, there’s the barb. There’s gold in’t, I told him: £40 for six sides. Yet he writes semi-demi-masques for the groundlings to gape at, for their pennies. I the courtesan; and he, the common jade.” Another on the heap of bones. “Not so: he is the King’s Men’s wife, and does the thing by covenant. Well, he will come to it. He hath cheaped with Alleyn for a bear.”

  Head in hands, his mane upraked with greasy fingers, he groaned. “’Tis all one, all nothing: our invention, Jones’s whims. Forgotten ere the stick has fallen or the smoke dispersed. A fire on air.”

  “Your words? And Shakespeare’s? Beaumont’s?” Nat turned Ben’s words on himself: “How nothing’s that?”

  A silence: so they heard the wind, that howled and muttered in the chimneytops. “I am that my father damned.” Nat stood. “Thou know’st he preached against the lewdness of our trade; that when the scaffold fell at Paris Garden, he exulted in the deaths of many: whose great sin on the Sabbath was to see the bears.”

  “I mind,” said Ben.

  “But coming from my school, there stood a dark knight in the road, the Queen’s catcher of children. And the wittier I answered him, the more would have me. So the pander of players took me: and my soul was lost.” A turn. “I give thanks he toyed me not. Dared not, lest my stones drop and his prize be spoiled.”

  Turning east of north, the wind now cast a fitful hail against the glass. The names were blotted out with snow. “My father then had died: so could not rail upon my whoredom and eternal fall.” A silence, understood. He dead, I cannot beg redemption; so I take fathers of my company. Like you, old Chiron.

  A creak and rustling from the chair. As I have taken sons. For that I lost.

  “By good fortune my first part was one of thine: I quarrelled for the prologue’s cloak; and lost; and won.”

  “In a measure, thou hast thrived.” The pearl that dangled at one ear; the lustrous silks—Bah! frippery, thought Ben in his old coachman’s coat that would stand itself alone—and O! that fine fine linen, blackworked, like a hedge of thorns against a January snow. The ring he tucked within his doublet not of brass: no serving wench’s pledge.

  “I have been in Bridewell and at court. In church, but this last Sunday, when I went to take my Savior’s blood and body, I was hindered from His table. As a player: as a thing outcast. Yet those who scorn our mystery I disdain: “a play is not so idle a thing as thou art, but a mirror of men’s lives.”

  “And of bears’.” Ben spoke less blackly; yet a cloud—a front of cloud—oppressed his spirit. “I dreamed of Kit last night.”

  “Sir?”

  “Kit Marlowe, dead when thou wast yet in petticoats, thy father’s Benjamin.”

  “What, Faustus Marlowe? He? The atheist?”

  “The poet, aye. Out of fashion now: but strode our antick theatre like a tyrant; set his foot on vanquish’d necks. The style then was for kataklysmos, deluge rolling on in measured waves: a thund’rous line; a stop; another; and a stop. As if passion went by halts and vehemence were governed by caesura.” In his deepest voice:

  Holla, ye pamper’d jades of Asia!

  What, can ye draw but twenty miles a-day,

  And have so proud a chariot at your heels,

  And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine?

  On his feet now, flourishing a viewless whip.

  You shall be fed with flesh as raw as blood,

  And drink in pails the strongest muscadel:

  If you can live with it, then live, and draw

  My chariot swifter than the racking clouds;

  If not, then die like beasts, and fit for naught

  But perches for the black and fatal ravens.

  “O barbarous! yet passing high,” said Nat: whose plays were nimble.

  “’Twas an age of Titans: Kit, Hyperion.” Ben dizzied, looking back: but twenty years from then to now, from Aeschylus to Apuleius; from Kit’s great rants to Will’s late witchery. “His team was emperors. Mine, brutish beasts.”

  Softly. “But the ghost? The vision? apparition?”

  “Not in pain; as if the fire were his element.” A halt. “Not as in life: his eye was lost.”

  “Spoke he?”

  “In riddles. Let the chariot roll on. I thought of Paris, and the regicide, the tutor Ravaillac, who killed good Henry of Navarre. The street was thronged; the carriage halted by a quarrel of carters; and the villain climbed upon the wheel and struck. The cause? That Henry suffered Huguenots to live.”

  Nat Field had seen the broadsides of Ravaillac’s death; to which the torments of Guy Fawkes were but a pinch. He shuddered. But to kill a king!

  Ben had brooded on the thing for months—his faith was argument—and at Martinmas was reconciled and took communion in the English church, in both kinds. When the chalice passed to him, he took it in both hands and drank it down: the full cup.

  Nat said, “I marvel that the King should hold his revels in the shadow of his brother’s death.”

  “And I fear the Queen’s great openness would let his Death, like a Christmas beggar, in at door.”

  “’Tis not the open street, but Whitehall. The King is wary since the Plot.”

  “He was ever wary: drank suspicion at his mother’s breast. With reason. I am told he wears a corslet that would turn a dagger.” The thought of the King’s mistrustfulness cheered Ben. He took a scrofulous orange from his store, and broke it with his thumbs.

  “Mayhap this show will be like Solomon, when Sheba overset her burden of delicates—herself the syllabubs—in the Danish King’s lap; and rubbed the place with a napkin to expunge the fault: so enlarging his confusion. Up he rose—and stood as well: would dance with her, but missing of the steps, he fell, and so was carried giggling to his chamber and laid out upon his bed of state in a welter of jellies. On then came Hope and Charity and Faith, sheep-drunk, and made a cast—or six or seven—at the throne; the highest of their speeches was a belch. I met them spewing in the lower hall. Last, Peace was lion-drunk, and laid about the King’s pate with her olive-branch.” Ben snorted happily. “Now that was a masque. Tim Toldrum’s.”

  “What a coil,” said Nat Field, stepping lightly as a cat amid the pyramids of books. He whistled softly as he turned about: that little miching music. “Will my lady Argyll be of the Queen’s company?”

  “Ho,” cried Ben, now wonderfully revived. “Didst thou not play to her wedding but a year since?”

  “To old Grimbald? Gillesbuig Grumach? He hath eyes for her dowry alone. But she—at Twelfth Night last—”

  Ben’s turn to whistle. “Ere those shoes were old!”

  The player held his ring up, so the jewel winked, cast a flittering of lights like butterflies about the room: so it was summer in the wintry dusk. He made to slip it on his finger; stopped. “Not yet, but she will.”

  “Thou wilt be hanged, boy.”

  But Nat sang. “What cares she for her new-wedded lord, and her sheets turned down so bravely O?” He tossed the ring up in the air, and caught it. “She would give them all for an open Field.”

  At Whitehall, Childermas

  Far in the night when the boy waked, Kit was standing next his bed: a stranger reading, a flicker of the dying fire in his hair. Amber in shadow.

  An outbreath, scarce a word.

  Kit held a finger to his lips. “They sleep.” As he had cast them, grooms and guardians. “As you do.”

  Very still. “What art thou?”

  “A candle at your bed
side.” Kit closed the book, his finger at his place.

  “Why?”

  “God keep your Grace”—but he did not say what god—“I am sent to watch you, lest you wake and see bugbears.”

  “Na harm will come to me.” His voice was very small. “I say the collect, kneeling, as the King our father taught us.”

  A schoolmasterly voice: “Lighten our darkness . . . ?”

  In antiphon: “. . . we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us . . .”

  “. . . from all perils and dangers of this night—”

  “. . . for the love of thy only Son, our Savior Jesus Christ.”

  “Amen,” said the stranger—and he did not vanish in a bleeze of fire. He sat. “Would you then have a candle?”

  “Nay, the shadows like me not.” A hesitation. “They flecker.” And lowering his voice impressively, the boy said, “I hae seen things na canny.”

  “Like to me?”

  “Much waur.” His cradle-tongue was Doric, Englished over. “There was once a wee man creepit in by my cradle, and he cast a black cloak ower me. And old Marioun that was my rocker, she said he was Lankin, and wad p-prick me all ower wi’ a siller pin, and fill a basin with my b-blood.”

  “Would. I see did not.”

  “My daddy wad hae made the stake for him. And Harry wad hae thrust the torch.”

  Can shadows burn?

  Softer still. “There are warre wolfis in Embro. Gavin has seen them at the moonrise drop and gang on a’ fours, snatching at bairnies. At dawn they cast awa’ their slouches, and are naked men.”

  As I have cast away my fell of man: rise daemon.