Читать книгу The Sonnets - Warwick Collins - Страница 9

MY LORD BURNED WITH A CONTINUOUS, dense energy. He was one of those who needed little sleep. When he rested, he slept instinctively and deeply, like an animal. After we had thrown the apple, he approached me and said, ‘Master Shakespeare, I wish to speak with you about certain matters.’

It was already past midnight. In his chambers during the early hours, he paced up and down. I stood still and silent, leaning against the wall, not daring to interrupt his fervent movement. Eventually he turned towards me. ‘Is Master Marlowe older than you?’

‘Hardly,’ I answered, surprised by this odd question. ‘By only a few months, I believe.’

‘Yet you openly acknowledge him your superior?’

‘My superior in art,’ I said. ‘The worthier pen.’

‘You say so freely.’

To which I answered, ‘Every scribbler in our land is in debt to his great peroration, his mighty line. Where he leads, we others follow.’

‘You truly admire Faustus?’ he asked.

‘Marlowe is Faustus,’ I replied. ‘They say he necromances spirits, that he is on speaking terms with Mephistopheles.’

He smiled at that, saying, ‘This … other work that you mentioned at our table –’

‘Hero and Leander,’ I said.

‘Hero and Leander. What is it, precisely?’

‘A poem about love, dwelling much on masculine beauty. It is said that he intends to dedicate it to you.’

His face lit up. He was addicted to praise.

‘To me?’

‘So it is said.’

‘Yet it is unfinished.’

I smiled. ‘So it is said.’

He looked at me searchingly. ‘And you do not mind … a rival for your praise?’

‘He has a worthy subject.’

He paused and considered me. ‘You are honest. You see coldly and clearly, and yet I believe you burn hot inside.’

I would not deny it. So before him I said, as though in affirmation of a fact, ‘I see clearly and burn hot.’

That night, after I left my lord’s rooms, I attempted to give some further shape to the thoughts I had earlier that day – that his youth and beauty incited dreams in the observer. Earlier that morning, when he emerged from the lake, there was one more witness than those I had already described. In the dawn mists, a figure was collecting brushwood in some dense, nearby scrub. At first I thought it might have been a boar, rooting in the undergrowth. Despite the low-lying vapour, I could begin to make out an elderly crone, bent-backed, in a grey hood. She had been dragging a sack of brushwood backwards from a thick covert where she had been collecting sticks for firewood.

The foliage was so dense there that it would have been difficult to lift the sack under the immediate oppression of the overhanging boughs. Once she was out of its entanglements, she intended to lift her load onto her shoulders. So she emerged from the thicket backwards, like some strange animal, hauling her load, wheezing and gasping, at precisely that place on the shore where my lord, unconscious of any other human witness, was approaching after his swim in the lake. I supposed that, suspecting a meeting, I could have warned her of his emergence from the water, but the comical nature of our situation touched me and stimulated my curiosity.

Perhaps the elderly crone heard the jingle of horses’ bridles, or the splashing of my lord’s feet as he neared the shore, for she seemed suddenly aware of others in her vicinity. She turned round, perplexed, and was faced with an entirely naked youth emerging like a god from the elements.

Her face, I do recall, was a picture. It was a wonderful old countenance, wrinkled and shriven, but with a clear, bright, and intelligent eye. I know enough of age to appreciate that the inhabiter of that bag of bones was the same being who had danced with graceful feet on the common in her youth.

For a brief moment her eye surveyed the figure that had risen from the waters – heavy, pale shoulders, long fair hair, the nub between the slender legs – with the purest appreciation.

Why should either of them have been offended? It is true that he, at first as startled as she, tensed a little from the unexpected meeting; but seeing almost immediately that his witness offered no offence and appeared appreciative of his form, he relaxed, and even lowered the lid of his eye in the form of a rakish wink. For a moment, all that old woman’s Christmases seemed rolled into one. She cackled with pleasure, allowed her eye one more appreciative traverse of his figure, and then – modesty imposing itself at last – turned away to lift the sack onto her back. It seemed she shook with laughter as she slowly disappeared into the mist.

I handed my lord his clothes. When he had dressed, we rode back through the morning towards the great house.