Exit, Pursued by a Bear Read online

  “They mak war with the witches, Gavin says. As I will do, when I am man.”

  “You are too great a boy for such winter’s tales. Do you not now learn the manage of arms?”

  “What art thou?” said the boy a second time.

  “One that lost an eye in the Queen’s service.”

  “Oh! A knight?”

  “Of ghosts and shadows.”

  “Awa’ wi’ your auld wives’ tales” said the boy, daringly. “I am na babby.” Then wrying about, he twitched his nose. “What . . . ?”

  “Smoke,” said Kit. “Tobacco.”

  “Och, awa’ with it. The K-king my father will be much displeasured.”

  “Then I will take it elsewhere.”

  Charles sat up now, his arms round his knees. “Nae, bide. I wad talk with thee. Canst thou fight na mair?”

  “From the hour of my great wound, I have not drawn steel.”

  “Wae’s thee! To have lost thy sight and thy guid mastery. Thou sal be recompensit for thy griefs, as I am leal. Thou knowest I am a Knight of the Bath?” Kit knew he had been carried to that honour. Tittivill had seen. “Master P-pelletier says I grow stronger by the day.”

  “A very Hector.”

  And a third time: “What art thou?”

  “An usher. I am sent to teach.” Kit showed the book.

  “Canst thou read so in the dark?”

  “I know the book by heart. It is the Metamorphoses.”

  A bounce. “Oh, I begin that in the new year. Will I read it with thee? Master Murray says it is the p-purest of Latin.”

  “It is that and more: it is—” Kit caught himself. “Wondrous stories.”

  “O rare! Will it not be morning soon? I will show thee my study and my books. Canst thou teach cosmography? mathematick? divinity and disputation?”

  “I am a Master of Arts.” He did not say which. “Of Cambridge.”

  The boy was kneeling up now, in his plaited nightgown and his cap. Kit looked him up and down, but swiftly, sidelong.

  “No Greek as yet?”

  A curdle of cream. Would do for some lickspoon paiderastos, but Kit’s tooth was for more poignant meats: green figs and ripe, his stenching goat cheese and his little quails. For island Corydon, late left, whose parting kiss yet stirred him, rod and stones. Jove might have sipt out nectar from his hand.

  “I ken the l-letters. I am learning to decline substantives.”

  “I will teach you the first and second conjugations. And then you may read of Troy, of Helen that was rapt away by Paris.”

  “Is it all of Helen? For I wadna read of sic a lightsome quean.”

  “Of Hector then. Of fire-tongued Cassandra.”

  But the boy was fidgeting. “I thirst.” His look was to the servant: give me drink. There was the cup at hand’s reach: that Kit could not lift.

  Quickly, he said, “When your brother was made Wales last summer, were you not his Ganymede? And bore his cup?”

  “Aye. Like this.” York took the cup in both hands, raising it. “God save the Prince of Wales!” He drank, as from a chalice.

  “And keep him.” Kit could work here: on the sickly brother overshadowed by the sun. Ad aemulationem.

  “Hast seen the gey picture of my brother in the Hall? Upon his braw white horse?”

  “With Time at his back? Aye.” Death waits to pull the rider down, will then hold fast. I was that prize: Death changed me in his arms to bone; he cast the earth’s green mantle over me. He wins, he ever wins. And Kit spoke:

  O lente, lente, currite noctis equi![2]

  The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike—

  “Sir?”

  “I rehearse the ancients.”

  When he had lived, he was a poet. He had sailed from that continent: the hills behind him low and brown, that had been empires. And on the island where he dwelt, there was no time. No alpha and omega, first and last, no resurrection and no fall. And so no tragedy. He stayed not in Eden but Arcadia, where he might have his will: love what he lighted on, this faun or that satyr, aye, bright Lucifer himself. And where he could not write.

  On a sudden, he was weary of this game. But he was bound, and doubly bound, to serve his Queen against her Oberon, his Oberon against his Queen. Because he must, he spoke. Would spur ambition.

  “Would you ride such a horse?”

  A shifting. Kit looked where the boy would not. Near at hand, a lover’s last and first gaze, stood a little horse in bronze, round-chestnut-rumped: Italian, masterly. A child had knotted it that bridle of red silk. “A princely toy.”

  “It is my b-brother’s.” Twitched. “He may have my ain, if it wad please him. He will be my king.” He spoke as if he swore a fealty, with all his heart. “I wad give anything to him, both my horses and my books, that he wad love me.”

  “Doth he love you?”

  A silence.

  Good: arise, thou unwaked emulation. Kit thought to say, Would you ride pillion to him? Be his prelate, and wear skirts? Tittivill had seen that quarrel. The firstborn prince had seized a priestly cap and crammed it mockingly on Charles’s head: When I am king, I will make thee my archbishop. Thy skirts will hide thy spindle shanks. The child had snatched it off and stamped on it. (The faerie spy had mimed his fury.) Good. So roused, those legs could kick—

  Now, even now, between his thought and speaking, Kit was thunder-cleft, possessed with prophecy: the lightning of his vision ecstasy. A dagger to the eye.

  He saw a scaffold, high above a crowd. Saw the axe fall, saw the blood leap from the neck—O gods. The downfall of a king. And then the afterstroke. This—child? The tyrant? Who had taken from his bedside book, a paper with a pretty sketch: the Prince in masquing clothes. Aye, he will be, if his brother—vanishes. Stopped. Might be. Or might usher in a Golden Age: a pattern for all princes. Visions lie. And yet he saw this still: the distant figure, kneeling in his shirt. As in a glass, he thought. As on a stage—and laughed. The boy looked quickly up. O brave! A tragedy. If I cannot write a play in ink, I will in blood. And how featly it worked: a prince of earth, a pretty toy for his Queen, and later, when she wearied of the boy, a tithe for hell; mere chaos for his Oberon, who took delight in overturning; and for himself, a play at chess, with kings for pieces. But passing all: a play.

  He must go gently: for he must not flight his bird.

  The boy showed him the drawing. “Look. Is he not braw?” The cloud had passed. “O it was braw, the masque of Tethys at his great solemnity. Tethys was the Queen my mother, with her rivers all in green. I was Zephyrus with silver wings, and gied the Prince his sword. And now am I Oberon’s page—at Master Jonson’s hest—and I will have a garland and a bow, like Cupit. Save that we are English sprites, not amorous.” He sighed. “But I wad there had been horses, as my brother wishit.”

  “There is yet a chariot. Is that not brave?” And Kit turned on him his odd, bewitching smile: a weapon he had left. “They say the Bear is Charles’s Wain, that draws him to his victory. And bear is?”

  “Ursus. Urse. Ursum—Didst thou know—?”

  A finger raised.

  “Ursi. Urso. Urso.”

  “Well.”

  “But didst thou know there will be bears?”

  “Not men in bearskins? Arktanthropoi?”

  “White bears of Thule.”

  “Have they names?”

  “Canst guess?” said the boy.

  “Usumcasane and Theridamas?”

  The boy laughed. “No.”

  “Castor and Pollux?”

  “No! I will tell thee in thine ear.” He whispered. “Diogenes.”

  “A surly fellow.”

  “Master Jonson understudies him, they say.” He laughed, uncertain of the jest. “And the other is Callisto.”

  “Ah. Know you why the name is apt?” The boy shook his head. “You will read this story, after Phaeton’s fall. Callisto was a nymph, a huntress of the moon. Jove desired her, so came to her as her great mistress Artemis, w
ith breasts and bow. Not guising: He-in-She. His beard he kept, but elsewhere. As a votary, she knelt to serve her mistress; but Jove knew not the arts of women. So he toused her; yet she opened to the moon: which grew—a manhood.”

  Round-eyed. Red of cheek.

  “The child he got upon her was a bearward, Arcas.” Kit began to stride. “But when Jove’s wife came to hear of it, she seized Callisto by the forelock; dragged her to all fours: so that in crying out she ate the dust. Her belly that betrayed her Juno scraped along sharp stones, its white now red. Her arms, entreating mercy, bristled out black hairs; her hands curved into claws. That face the moon had made her glass grew terrible, and gaped. When she would speak—O pity me!—her tongue was thick between the horrid teeth; and rearing back her monstrous head, she growled.” He’d shouted that. Kit halted, dizzying with change. Almost he had felt the poet thrilling in him, like return of blood to stiffened hands. Came near to metamorphosis: himself again. Soft now. You astound the boy. “And yet curst Juno gave her not forgetfulness: she was a bear who grieved her loss of nature. And she ran from the sight of gods and mortals to the greenwood, where she lived among the beasts.”

  The boy’s voice shook. “Was she huntit?”

  “Often.” The schoolmaster’s guise again: he-in-he. “But then Jove took and set her and her son, her Arcas, in the heavens. They are stars: the Great and Lesser Bears. Septentriones.”

  “I know them. And Orion, and the Sisters.”

  “You know that stars have seasons? That the rising of the Pleiads is a herald of the spring?”

  An uncertain nod. But Kit was talking to himself.

  “The Bears set never: which the jealous godwife thought a curse. Juno thought that if her rival set, she would defile the ocean. But Juno—even she—was wrong about the Bear. It is the earth that cannot rise to stain Callisto. Other stars may sink beneath it, where is Acheron; but the Great Bear and her starry chariot are of the sky, aethereal. Do you know where they are riding?”

  The boy shook his head. All eyes.

  “By Walsingham Way, to the Faerie Court.”

  “O!”

  And bending closer to the boy—so close that had he reached, he could have felt the nothing that was there—Kit flashed his little fishhook of a smile. “And where a prince may go.”

  Hooked. Netted.

  “’Tis our secret. You may steal away before the Prince of Wales discovers. Think on’t: you would come and go; would enter on him with a fairy sword and crown—”

  “Ohh.”

  “Exulting. ’Twould be the rarest mock.”

  The dark eyes filled with tears; but York spoke stoutly. “He can have my turn.”

  “You would give him that? Titania? Oberon?”

  “I wad.” A sigh. “I will.”

  “A princely gift. He will love you for it.” Softly. “I will tell you the way.”

  “What is’t?”

  “You walk before him in the masque. By the third door, you must take Callisto’s harness. Can you do that?”

  A nod.

  “And then you must say, To the Queen! Can you remember?”

  “To the Queen.”

  “The gates will open.”

  A log fell in, the fire flared. The stranger’s hair flamed too, it seemed; and fire-glints peered out from all the slashings in his antick doublet. And perhaps York would have seen; but childlike, he had turned and dived beneath his pillows, burrowing for some old ragged comfort. He emerged, a babby in his fist.

  “I wad sleep now.”

  “Dream of chariots.”

  And softly, over and again, as if it were a lullaby, as if he rocked a cradle of the stars, Kit said:

  Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles?—

  Usumcasane and Theridamas,

  Is it not passing brave to be a king,

  And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

  The firelight shone through and through him, nothing now but gilding on the empty air, with here and anywhere a twinkling, as of stars or buttons.

  On the cheek a curled hand; the lashes fluttering. A sigh. The prince slept.

  Kit rose, invisible, and slipped into his dream.

  On the Heath

  Toward dawn of that frosty morning, Nat Field came staggering by zeds down Hampstead Heath. The Christmas play had been a triumph; he had stayed to wassail somewhat late. He’d come another way than he set out.

  In the roots of the Great Elm, at its doorway, sat a little crooked fellow in patched leather, with an offcast battered feather in his cap. Seeing Nat, he jumped up.

  “Bless us!” said Nat.

  And the fellow sneezed.

  “I took thee for a stump. Here’s a penny for thy box.”

  The crooked fellow louted low, with all the airs and graces of a courtier—else a mock of them. “I come for Gillesbuig Grumach’s wife.”

  “Oh.” As if the stump had flowered. “Thou art?”

  “My lady’s gardener. I am sent.”

  “On such an embassy?”

  The fellow cocked an eye like a robin’s. “Embassy?”

  Confusion. “I had hoped . . .” He turned his blush on the messenger as indignation. “Could she not send a nearer person to herself? Her waiting gentlewoman?”

  “To the Heath? Afore dawn?”

  “Then at some civil hour; to the playhouse.”

  “To be seen? In a cloak and mask, to traffic with a player?”

  There was that. Field shrugged.

  “She bids you remember the ring.”

  Had flowered and was setting fruit. A great unholy joy was in him. “Yes?”

  “Be patient, sir: it will be worn.”

  A leap of heart.

  “For now she gives you this, in token of the play of Oberon.” The knave held out his earth-creased hand. An acorn.

  “What?”

  “Try it.”

  Ah, a little silver catch. Most curious. Nat pressed it, and it sprang. “O!” An inbreath of wonder. Within was a great pearl, lustrous as the moon: to be worn at ear. A princely gift. Hesitant, he made to touch.

  The gardener snapped the springe. “Not yet.” And with a smile, “But soon. She bids you wear it for Oberon.”

  He could frame no thanks, but said foolishly, “I will be in a sylvan’s guise. Would not this jewel look strange?”

  The gardener smiled, dangling the acorn at his barky ear, by its string

  “Oh. Oh, I see. If Master Tyrant Jones sees it not . . .”

  “My lady will. You walk before the chariot, she says.”

  “Before the bears! To a loud triumphant music”: playing now in his blood. He sang:

  Melt earth to sea, sea flow to air,

  And air fly into fire,

  Whilst we in tunes, to Arthur’s chair

  Bear Oberon’s desire

  At which the gardener laughed himself to tears: which shook a late owl from the elm. It flew away, hooting: Two, two to woo.

  “And then my speech,” said Nat. He spoke it as reproof:

  Give place, and silence; you were rude too late;

  This is a night of greatness, and of state,

  Not to be mixt with light and skipping sport . . .

  And like the antimasque that heard this speech, the gardener was subdued. He held the acorn with its little catch out on his earthy palm. “Wear this for the lady’s sake. For Oberon. She keeps the key.”

  “I will.” Nat took the gift. “Do thou bear my deep obeisance and my loving thanks to her ladyship; tell her I will fail not.”

  And again, that birdlike glance. “There is another matter. But ’tis odds you would not dare—”

  “Dare what?”

  “A trial of love. Your lady bids a thing of you, before the key is in the lock.”

  “What? If aught an honest man may do—”

  “When they do sing that laud, that song of Oberon’s desire—”

  “Come, come, sirrah.”

  “Take the bear by its harness.�
� And bowing, he was gone.

  All the birds of the heath woke chittering, as a red sun rose. Nat stood high above the smoke of London, with an acorn in his hand, that rattled.

  On Ludgate Hill

  The Horace was too dear. Ben flapped away the importunate bookseller, buzzing round his ear; and went on reading. “This? Or this, but lately in from Holland? Or this Quintilian? In quarto, sir: ’twould look rarely, bound in calf.” A drone, yet honeying his ear: “A scholar, sir, of your discernment . . .” At last, Ben sighed and closed the book; and by long habit, nearly walked away with it under his arm. “Half a crown, then?” called the seller. Ben acceded. It went on the stack.

  So: my lady Rutland kept table to poets. He need not starve. He looked over the table once more. Disputations, riff-raffs—ah, The Scourge of Folly. On the stack. In among the riff-raffs, by oversight perhaps, was a pamphlet in Latin: Siderius Nuncius. Hum. The Starry Messenger, revealing great, unusual, and remarkable spectacles—more damned turbulent Scenes. He nearly tossed it down; but his glance had caught a name. Ah, by the Florentine, Galileo. Had he not devised a glass—perspicillum—to spy upon the gods? O great Surveyor! ’Tis the fashion now: to make toys even in philosophy. All arts, all sciences, to do with nothing now but light and motion. Four planets, swiftly revolving about Jupiter at differing distances and periods, and known to no one before the Author recently perceived them. On the stack. Which was all the silver he had.

  On his way to Paul’s Walk, Ben mused. To call this quadrumvirate of planets Medicean was but good policy: to exalt his patron was an artist’s, an astronomer’s, a poet’s burden. The work served but as a foil to glory. His own masques might be called—what?—Jacobean? (A halt; a going on.) But then, laid Tuscany its claim to these four worlds, as England to Virginia? Were there riches in these furthest Indies? Spices? Gold? Apes, ivory, emeralds? Tobacco? Would a Company be chartered for the trade with—what? these Jovians? And in what ships? At that he laughed: conceited fantasy. Tobacco? Smoke! And Will’s voice in memory said, Yet there might be. (A turn.) Yet this flattery of mere earthly princes liked him not. These stars, Jove’s waiting boys, should have high names befitting to their sphere. Ha! He clapped, once, sharply. Ganymede. No other boy so loved? Why then, his mistresses. Too many. Semele. Callisto. Io. Leto. Leda. And Europa . . .