A Dead Man in Deptford Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the side. To bring in
King Philip would be indiscreet, however we know him to be
the enemy. Young sir, you must learn of discretion. London
will teach it if Cambridge not. And he fell to again.
    Kit smacked his lips over a fresh potation, saying: By God this
wine is good, call for more. And then: Discretion is a great killer
of God’s truth or the devil’s. We must not wound, we must not discharge a nauseous stink in the nostrils of the hypocritical.

    - Talk not of stinks, Ned Alleyn said, when we are eating.
    - Yes, I see that and say pardon. Discretion is a matter
of good table manners. But it is not more.
    - You must learn, Kyd said, dish held out like an alms
bowl for a second serving. Discretion at the last will save your
neck. You will regret indiscretion when your dying eyes see in
an instant the cutting out of your beating heart and the tumbling
into the air of your bloody bowels.
    - I beg you, Ned Alleyn cried in pain.
    - Well, he must learn, Kyd said. But I cry you regret.
He impelled me to it.
    - To turn your belly to a wineskin, Watson warned, is the
royal way to a quelling of discretion. And tomorrow early you
must be of clear eye and brain. I will not call for more.
    - More, more, cried Kit. In youth is pleasure. Then, grinning like a fool, he stroked my unfeeding hand, which was to
his right. Is it not so, you luscious Bel-Imperia that was, nay,
you are better as you are, women are but machines for breeding,
boys are perfection. To be young and of lucent skin and luminous
eye, the flesh not yet disfigured with the gross hairiness of what
is termed maturity, to be of youth’s sweet breath and unpustular
and unblemished by fatty comedones -
    - What is that word? I asked, reaching for a bread manchet
with my left hand.
    - It is Greek. It means sebaceous eruptions.
    - Please, said Ned Alleyn in agony.
    - You are wrong, Kyd said. It is Latin.
    - I will wager you it is Greek.
    - It is Latin. A comedo is a glutton.
    - Then you, sir, are a comedo. But I still say it is Greek.
    - You try to be too much the Greek, said Kyd. This is not
Plato’s Symposium. Learn discretion. Take your hand away.
    - Discretion discretion, Kit cried to the whole ordinary,
so that many, chewing, looked. And he opened out the four
syllables with a verberant gong stroke on the on. Then he sang to a tune of his own devising words of his own devising:

    Shilliber came up to us, chewing his nether lip, and made
eye-gestures of plain meaning though not to Kit. Tom Watson
sighing said:
    -Well, I had a mind to eat your hayberry flawn, but
I have a duty to my guest.
    - That is another fine word, cried Kit, and he sang duty
duty duty like some loud bird. Then he became suffused with a
kind of green sickness. Ah well, he murmured in some sobriety,
we are but the guests of life, we begin aghast and end a ghost.
And he raised himself abruptly so that his chair fell and suffered
himself to be led away by Tom Watson. But outside in the street
on their way to Hog Lane corner he could be heard singing with
force but tunelessly:

    Tom Kyd shook sadly his head as his horn spoon dug into
a dish of flummery and, in a mood of prophecy, said he gave
him but few years.
    I M U ST suppose, I suppose, that Kit was giddy with his crapula
when he stood before Mr Secretary of State at eight the following
summer morning, the enfeebling sun in his eyes. Mr but a knight,
this being Sir Francis Walsingham, lord of the Service as it was
called. He was a frail dark man that the Queen, who liked him
little, called the Moor. This was royal ingratitude, since on her behoof, and partly from his own pockets that were not bottomless, he maintained fifty-three sniffing agents between Calais and
Constantinople. These he called his eyes. He said, and it was a
strange echo, as if he himself had eyes that could pierce a man’s
breast:

    - Duty with discretion. Sign your name here. And he pushed
forward abruptly on his paperloaded table a