Voices from the Past Part 100

February 20, 1615

F

og, that old-year-treachery, steals round my house, thief at every window: renegade, despot, carrion-maker.

That night the fog mauled us after we left the theatre, Ellen and I. I thought of throwing my cloak around both of us, as we walked along: dark blue cloak in white fog.

Instead of covering both of us I covered her...

The play had been well played, Alleyn up to form, Marlowe's lines appreciated by a better than usual audience, some of them royalty. Tambourlaine usually appeals to royalty. This was Crown night, Christ's crown, h.e.l.l's crown, fog on every thorn, thorns sticking through our laughter, to be remembered, in that cloak, b.a.s.t.a.r.d thorns.

Like dogs they followed us as we left the theatre, late, our arms around each other, the cloak flapping, fog leaving us inconspicuous. I saw her carriage approaching, inching the fog, fog through the spokes of her wheels.

And then outcries, and Ellen beside me, falling, and as she fell I turned and saw my cloak slide with her, lantern and dagger on the road, misericord.

Here it is now: yes, here it is: I have it, p.r.i.c.king thing for future p.r.i.c.king, if need be: long, needle- pointed: Toledo steel: the right length to kill her-or me.

Laughter and fog, spines and theatre, the royalty of crime in a London gutter; time doesn't remove them, can not remove them.

When we could we located guards-trustworthy men-and with a constable informed her servants and posted guards.

Later, Jonson and I sat with her doctors and learned a little more about pain. I went for Ellen's brother and he came, a cold young man who resembled Ellen, a slight fellow in handsome black. Hand on sword, he drew himself up, face ashen, mouth trembling...

"I'll comb London for them...get them..."

Jonson often visited her, his words and thoughts the stuff for those days, my brain run dry, bats coasting out, En.o.barbus memories:

Why, sir, give the G.o.ds a thankful sacrifice. When it pleases their deities to take a man's woman from him, it shows the tailors of the earth; comforting therein, that when old robes are worn out, there are members to make new...so grief is crowned with consolation.

Did I write that?

Henley Street

February 26, 1615

I am not able to write poetry and yet I must write, must tell the teller, crush the shards of illness. What is life, the undone and the done, the foolish and the great? I hate drowning in real and invented apprehensions but mine is the stumbling, after the play, after the com- pliments and the celebration, a mixture more brew than sanity admits.

My pen jerks and my hand wavers and my head aches, and I watch faint light creep into the sky, exacting a promise from me to defy pain.

I hate sleeplessness on a foggy night like this, for there is something in the fog that makes death come alive, that sears the sordid into the mind...what was the cause: contorted memories? Am I afraid to die, be laid in straw or committed to a sulfurous pit?

Give me my rope, put on my crown...

Memory is for me acting in a dissolve, cloud of rain, concatenation of nothings, performing yet recalcitrant, ambiguous and poor. Here, in this town, this room smelling of spilled wine, the candles ugly, I see a woman, the filaments of yesterday's straw tangled in her hair-selling love for a price. Why is love obtuse, ruthless, rain-buried, eerie and demanding, slinking one to the other?

Stratford

March 2, 1615

I write with rain across my oriel, and the fire almost out in my fireplace, and my loneness sniveling in its pot. I am sick of self-pity. I taste with wretched ap- pet.i.te, so be it! To be generous, hungry, guiltless, and free...what would I give!

Pincers, pinch harder at the rushes, keep the light burning as long as possible, for each of us.

At my age, I am guilty of longings that I can never realize: dreams hawsered to nowhere. I have been guilty of this all my life. I copulated with commas. I hunted dreams on paper-cheap privateer! I was priest, pharaoh, general, slave, glutton. Paper is a sickness, a sweltering fever, clammy forehead, thudding pulse, ague within ague: so I am a man of paper, elongated, soggy, contorted, multiple of calligraphic speculation: paper bones, paper heart, paper skull, paper blood, paper p.e.n.i.s.

Listen, isn't that time rustling a sheath of paper?

Snow buffets Shakespeare's cottage:

Snow enters a window.

There are varnished ceiling beams,