Read Online A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess - Free Book Online Page A

solidity in Canterbury, where it had been
one thing and was now, stripped and scrubbed, another. Here
though, in the sumptuous God’s house of Rheims, the grudging
hammers of reform had not struck at saints’ statues, nor stained
glass, nor the images of the Virgin Mother recognised, through the cold sharp eyes of the north, as an incarnation of the foul
goddess Ashtaroth. Kit looked up to his neck’s limit, at the
groins of heaven, about him at the chapel-suburbs of the immense
stone city. Jewels and gold unfilched illumined the grey; sunrays
pierced like God’s swords the high windows whose tints refracted
pure light into the sevenfold covenant of his bow. Old women in
black knelt about. Kit stood. The winking light of the reserved
sacrament was coy with him. Three students in black entered,
crossed themselves with water, genuflected, nodded at him. He
had been near to them at supper; they had asked his name and
purpose in coming hither. They too knelt. He, playing his part,
knelt also, playing at praying.

    I cannot pray to you because you do not exist. A small matter.
I contain both existence and its opposite. You cancel out yourself.
You condone too many murders in your name. I condone nothing.
I am above such things. My name is not myself. When men use my
name this means they do not know me. What shall I do? What you
are driven to do. And if I refuse to believe in you? My existence
does not depend on your belief. You are then detached from men.
What then is meant by God’s love? The passionate acceptance of
myself as my own highest achievement, manifested to senses live and
yet unborn in the universe as my palpable garment. Men are a strand
in that garment. Why did you have to come down to earth as a
man? I do what I will. Men must be taught. The loving community
of men must figure the perfection of the divine order. Men have learnt
nothing. Does not this argue a flaw in the divine substance? When
men have destroyed themselves utterly there will be left one man who
has learnt. That will be enough. And I can wait. This is not you
who speak. It is only a voice among the many voices that dart
like wind about the crevices of my brain. Did you expect it to be
otherwise?
    He rose angry from the paving on which he had, sorely and
stiff-kneed, knelt, and, leaving, cooled his face with the water
that was called holy. He went out into the cathedral square and
God howled down at him from the sun. Poor Dorothy was right.
There was God. And out of the sun he entered a small tavern
and said Du vin. It was gloomy and there was a smell of garlic which struck him as most heartening. It was devil’s bane. It was
health. Dull gold gloomed at him. It was a garment. Thomas
Walsingham was sitting there, not alone. Well, he was foolish
not to have expected this.

    - Come then, Kit Kit Kit, you see I have remembered the
name. My grave cousin was mumbling of Morley and Marley
and Merlin, but Tom Watson said Kit was enough. And this
is my man Frizer.
    Frizer sat a table’s distance away from his master, sat as
though it were not decent to sit in his master’s presence, but
this was after all a foreign country. He seemed well pleased to
stand and bow and then remain standing.
    - You were quick after me, Kit said, sitting with his wine.
It must have been the next packet from Dover.
    - Ah no, I was in Paris. We were in Paris, were we not,
Frizer, and Frizer did not like Paris. We were waiting to spy
on Poley, but Poley seemed to be there to start spying on us.
And there was this dirty man with him, a cutthroat, what was
his name, Frizer?
    - Nicholas Skeres.
    - An old acquaintance of Frizer’s, it seems, but I do not
enquire further. Well, you are here and I am ready to start
spying on you. Or shall I say keeping you from trouble? Tom
Watson said you were a pretty sort of fighter in taverns. That
will not do in this holy city.
    - You too are enrolling in the College?
    - No, we are