beheaded. Does this make sense?
- A wilderness. I am bewildered. What have Ito do with this?
- Poley is short of couriers. You must take ship and find
Gifford. Savage we have, though he does not know it. He is
learning law at Barnard’s Inn. Gifford we need in London. Our
informers say that he leaves Rheims on the twenty-fifth to stay
with Thomas Morgan in Paris. He must be given a letter. You
will be given that letter, cunningly sealed so that you may not
in youth’s curiosity tamper and pry.
- Why myself?
- Walsingham speaks well of you. Both Walsinghams.
Kit shuddered at that and took a draught of cold ale to
quell a certain mounting heat in his veins. He said:
- It is still term time.
- It is near over. Your absence will do no harm. Remember
that great power boils and thunders behind you. Hardly, hardly.
There is no noise and must be no noise ever. Let me say something of Thomas Morgan in Paris. He is secretary to the Queen
of Scots and most dearly and deeply trusted. She has ever been
a trusting woman. Morgan is Gifford’s passport to the lady. She
is a most beautiful lady and she heats the blood of our Catholics,
especially when they are drunk. She is the Jezebel whom Knox
execrates and she is also the Virgin Mary rediviva. Women are
terrible creatures. I think we may ride to London together.
And so they did, Nick, as he was to be called, proving, des
pite the rain and wind into which they rode, a man cheerful and,
though moral scruple in the higher affairs affected him little,
tender towards snotnosed starvelings in villages and even towards
a dead pied dog that lay with swollen belly ripe to burst on the
road. He gave a reasonable rendering of Catullus’s irrumabo,
approving pedication as a punishment though not as a pleasure,
and listened to Kit’s half-remembered versions of Ovid with
an approving ear. He was dark of eye and skin and beard
like Walsingham his master, and Kit thought on the utility
of such colouring when centres of Spanish intrigue must be
broached. He spoke of Machiavelli and the need to understand
the ferocity of certain acts of policy, as for instance Sir Walter
Raleigh’s massacre of the Irish five years, was it, back, women
and children on their knees begging for their lives ruthlessly
slaughtered and all justified by the need to wage war fast and
then forgotten. Did Kit know Sir Walter? Kit did not. Strange,
for their two names had come together in a pretty posy of poesy
a month or so back printed by Ed Blount, was it. No, Kit did
not know, he had not been told, he had received no copy, he
felt aggrieved. Well, if the time should come when Sir Walter’s
strange doings with mathematicians and atheists had needs be
probed by the Service, then Kit, might he call him Kit, had his entree. Yes, he knew some French. It was known he knew, and
that was a recommendation.
In London, where a high wind clattered down the bricks
of chimneys and women were skirted and men shod in mud,
Kit went at once to Tom Watson’s house. Tom’s servant, the
humpbacked Ralph, let him in and said he might proceed at once
to his master’s bedchamber, as from tomorrow though no longer
his master, and Kit, entering, saw at once the vindictiveness of a
servant dismissed, for Tom was frotting away in full nakedness
with a wench or woman or lady, naked too, the covers of the
bed all fallen, clothes hastily doffed mingled with the rushes of
the floor. Kit excused himself and felt sick. On a table in what
Tom called his study he found four, five, six copies of a thin
book with the title Gaza. Samson and his blindness? No, gaza
was the name of the treasure house of a Persian king, hence of
any foreign prince. In it, his fingers atremble, he found his poem:
And he found also a reply:
No. He read all through, his poem entire, the other, called
a reply, entire, then quatrain answered by quatrain. Then the
names - his and that of the great bejewelled
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