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

removed from that business, we are in an inn,
are we not, Frizer? Frizer sleeps on straw and does not like it.
    - I like what it is my duty to do, Frizer said. It was
a Thames voice whose sounds were made all in the middle
of the mouth and whose tones were the tones of a whine. A
Thames rat, then, sleeked up for a servant’s office, the devotion
a kind of chronic sickness. He said: I will leave you gentlemen
together, you are gentlemen together. He did not add: I know
my place. He bowed leaving and limped as he left, donning an
old velvet cap Kit knew must be greasy.
    - And so, Thomas Walsingham said. He has his duties to perform, bed-making and ordering dinner. And Kit and Tom
can be free. I tell you, you will find nothing here, all are too
cautious.

    - Poley talks of conspiracy centred in the College. I have
the impression of somebody coming that all await who will nod
at the beginning of something.
    - It is all very simple, Kit Kit Kit. The Queen of Scots is
to be put on the throne, then the Spanish and French will be
invited in to restore us to Rome’s rule. But all that is needed
is the evidence of conspiracy, and then Sir Francis will do the
rest. You know of the Act? No, well, the Act that has been passed
says that if there be conspiracy proved, even if the Queen of Scots
knows nothing of it, then she is as guilty as if she instigated it and
may lawfully be executed. You did not know that?
    - It’s not the kind of logic they teach at Cambridge. It
seems not merely illogical but monstrous.
    It is what they call statecraft. Tom Watson said you
were shouting about the greatness of Machiavel in some eating
house or other. Well, here you see Machiavel in action. What
is imported from Italy is not all saints and madonnas. Shall we
go?
    - Go where?
    - Oh Kit Kit Kit, you know where. To my inn and my room,
whether the bed be made or not, with the door locked and our
linen off for the heat. There are no spying eyes of London here.
I could see in your gaze that day what you wanted, all hidden
under your fine talk of Plato and Petronius.
    - I never mentioned Petronius.
    - No? It must have been somebody else and other.
    He carelessly threw coins on the table and rose. There was
fever in Kit, he had lost voice and was panting. They walked
together past the great brooding monster of the cathedral where
kings had been crowned, round the corner to the rue des
Boulangers or some such name, and at the end was an inn
with no signboard but flowers of the season in pots on its sills.
And they mounted to find Frizer bed-making. Walsingham said
he might leave that, there were urgencies between Mr Kit here and himself, let him take a cool glass of something somewhere
and brood on the infamy of false religion, here are foreign coins
which are here not foreign.

    Well, it is not my purpose to describe the acts performed,
since they are enough known. Oscula, oscula, engagement of
light beards and oscula oscula elsewhere, amplexus, complexus,
and also sugere of this and that, and then interjectus and also
insertio and great clamores gaudii, laetitiac, voluptatis. Two young
and naked men, the unchanging under faith and thought, yet
not of the cycle, threshing, making the bed shake, dislodging
with a thrust ecstatic foot a pot with flowers of the season from
its stand, so that dancing soles became wet and empetalled.
Walsingham wrenched the lower sheet from its moorings that
they might wipe off the sweat they had not lapped. They lay on
the palliasse breathing like achieved runners, and Kit looked up
at the ceiling to see if God’s head would poke through. But God
lay indifferent in his shrine, converted to bread. Walsingham,
now merely a Tom, another to clog our narrative, was spread
on his bed snoring. Kit testiculis basia dedit and dressed. He had
said he would attend a lecture.
    A poet, he knew the difficulties of that word love, which
meant too many things for any man’s comfort, but