Read Online The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber - Free Book Online Page A

terms?’
                                                                       Her brow
    rises as gently as the sea. ‘Then I
will find someone more flexible,’ she says.
‘Someone who understands the value of
tutoring she who might one day be queen.’
‘My lady, we can’t discuss succession.’
                                                                             ‘No.
    But be aware succession will occur.
Dear Bess is not immortal.’ Flashing teeth
as black as widow’s weeds. ‘If not Arbell,
then her cousin the King of Scots. This royal charge
is valuable. Be aware that I could ask
for any prospective tutor to pay me
and have a hundred applicants.’
                                                             It’s true.
    And bowing to greet her rug, I sniff the bait
of royal stories. Close to history’s forge
as a cobbler’s son could ever dream to be,
think not of danger, or grey poverty
gnashing its teeth. Just opportunity.

SMALL BEER
    ‘Not pay you?’ Nashe is shrill, incensed. ‘Not pay?
The richest English woman beside the Queen?’
‘But how did she become so?’ Watson nods,
filling a pipe. ‘Think on. The woman’s shrewd.’
‘Not pay you, though,’ Nashe murmurs.
                                                                         ‘I’ll survive,’
    I reassure him. ‘You should see the meals.
Quality fare, a ransom on their own.
The books and paper are invaluable,
and time to write in. And the rest of it –
the beer and ink and horse food, I can cover.
Intelligence will serve if the playhouse shuts.’
     
    The tapster’s girl, collecting empty jugs
at this point trips, almost into my lap
before I help her onwards. Watson blinks
at the accident. ‘You mean your wits, of course.’
‘Of course. These were expensive wits to train.’

SOLILOQUY
    Listen. The hoot owl sweeping from the woods
marks, like a breath expelled, the starlit air.
The moon scores loneliness across the fields,
slow as the rolling ocean, and a breeze
slides to my cheek and whispers, He’s not here.
     
    The road might carry love upon its back
like a dusty serpent winding from the hills;
you might be sleeping one night’s dream away;
and yet your absence crawls inside my bones
and makes its home there, like a broken vow.
     
    Two things remain: the thudding of my heart,
that drumming clown whose audience dispersed
to leave only litter, tickets … and the sound
that thought makes when it’s battered on a wall
that won’t admit it. Oh, love, let me in.
     
    I grieve myself. This shadow I’ve become
that berates itself for being out of doors,
the rusty nail on which my name is hung
now on the edge of falling; I’d be yours
were I not crushed and bootless. Who is this?
     
    I grieve that boy who practised walking tall
around the quiet squares of academe;
who, like his father, aimed to fashion souls,
envisaging the awl as poetry.
     
    I grieve that young man, choking on the jests
that he and friends had conjured from their dreams;
of how it will be when all the world is theirs
and they will fall to bed in satin sleeves …
oh, clod, oh, stupid man, where was your head?
     
    This age abhors the truth. It beats it down
like a smart unruly servant, like a dog
whose eye reflects his master, club in hand
and poised to destroy him. Meanwhile, churches cram
with poisoned congregations, social ticks
who nod to each other, followers of faith
who don’t believe the words, but sing the song.
     
    Oh, irreligious world, so scant of good
that good, when it comes, cannot be recognised –
a tolerated foreigner, who’s blamed
the moment we’re engulfed by our own sin.
     
    Oh, sacrilegious world, to kill a man
for the form his prayer takes, when we need all