The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber Page B

university.’
    ‘If I have time,’ I say, aware of time
stretched out before me in an endless rope
that I must climb towards the heartless gods,
its end fraying behind me. And the drop.
     
    I tuck the purse inside my shirt. ‘I’ll try,’
I say to his eyebrows, arching up like cats
at an enemy. ‘No promises.’
     
                                                     He picks
    up the Chronicles , that volume from the trunk
that groans with England’s misery, and flicks
to a page that wants to open. Reads for a blink,
then puts it down as gently as a babe.
     
    ‘There’s humour in every tragedy,’ he says.
     
    ‘Not this,’ I answer, stabbing the title page
of the bloody play that hacks out my revenge.
     
    ‘The troubled mind is a creative one.
But have you watched the crowd’s reaction when
the blood starts gushing? Faces turned away.
Barbaric as humankind might seem to be,
most cannot look. The point you mean to pierce
is deflected. No one sees. But make us laugh
and we’re toys for you to play with.
     
                                                                       Just a thought,’
    he says when a silence follows.
     
                                                             Though that thought
    is tugging a mental sleeve, points at the door
of my own imprisonment. Which is unlocked.
Liquor, however, clouds the hall beyond.
     
    I turn to Thorpe. ‘What was amusing once
seems less amusing now I am obliged
to forgo my native tongue. Go by a name
I cannot tune my ear to when it’s called.
Good conversation, which would feed my heart,
is fields and seas away, and barred from me.
Banished from friends and loved ones, putting miles
between us daily. That’s my life. Perhaps
you’d like to suggest the humour in it.’
     
                                                                               ‘Well …’
    He thinks for a moment, scratching at his chin
to make a cloud of fairies. ‘You’re alive.
Whereas Marlowe, so they say, is horribly dead.
Stabbed through the eye. Some drunken tavern brawl.’
I startle. ‘Sorry, what?’
                                                 ‘That’s what I heard.’
     
    ‘He was a gentleman! A Cambridge scholar.
He never would have died in such a manner.’
He knows. I know. Third person is a sham.
     
    Thorpe shrugs. ‘Does it matter now? Kit Marlowe’s dead.
And no one looks for a dead man. So. Be glad.
Get out in the air and breathe it. Friends of yours
have taken risks that you might do so.’ And
with that, he turns, gathers the play, and leaves.

THE UNIVERSITY MEN
    No one dared breathe succession , but the stage
was clearing for the coming deathbed scene
of the Virgin Queen. Vibrating in the wings,
the noble houses and the royal courts,
a dozen hopefuls. She would not discuss
such certainties as might endanger them.
     
    For power’s an intoxicating brew,
and plots begin to cook in seething heads
that ache to overthrow the old regime
with cold assassination. So we were placed:
the university men. The tutor spies.
The secretary agents of the State.
     
    For a change of head may bring a change of faith,
and the careful man will shift from foot to foot
and listen to the words that will determine
who will be judges, who will be hanged and burnt.
The university men, known for their wit,
would use intelligence, and gather it.
     
    The God of Shepherds, Poley named himself.
In charge of the poets: as if poets can
be ruled by anything except their dreams.
But still, we drank with him, and called him Pan,
alive with the danger he might put us in
to serve our country, and to serve the Queen.
     
    Watson went to Cornwallis, while my charge
was the King of Scotland’s cousin,