"You were very convincing."

"A lie, yes. But you lie, do you not? Is it not all lying with you? Is not your poetry a kind of lying?"

"A very Platonic way of looking at it. Fictions, yes, the making up of things, but with no intent to deceive. Coleridge says something about the willing suspension of disbelief. Your lie was charming and harmed no one. It was a kind of poetry. That was good, I thought, old Bony shouting Voltaire at you from his cabbage patch."

"Yes, I thought so too. It could have happened, could it not? I could have been posted to St Helena. In the army you are liable to be posted anywhere."

"Where were you in fact posted? When, according to your fiction, you were posted to St Helena."

"Oh, I was in Chatham. And now, naturally, you are fully within your rights not to believe that either."

"I believe. Credo. I believe any man who tells me he was at Chatham."

"Well, we must drink to it, we must sink a bumper."

"With all my heart."

Elton looked at John with a cunning kind of frowning. "You do not take me in, you know. You pretend things, but you are laughing at me all the while."

"I assure you I am not."

"To what is it that I just now proposed we drink then?"

"To Chatham, to St Helena, to the mendacious arts, to your recovery. We have forgotten your good news. You're no longer a sick man."

"Oh, I am very sick." Elton bitterly bit off the word several times to the interest of the Romans. "Seck," one of them ventured. "Aye, sick," cried Elton. "What do you common labouring louts know of the soul's sickness? I have given her everything and now she raises her petticoat for the pleasure of Major Kettering. He will pleasure her, aye." A gnarled wall-eyed huge-shouldered Roman nodded with Elton, also saying ai. "I will not have your mockery," Elton cried, "I have been mocked enough." He started to rise. John tried to hold him down, saying:

"No, man, sit. This wine is stronger than you think. Do not let the wine talk for you."

"My sword shall talk for me, damn you."

"You're wearing no sword."

"Am I not?" Elton, in surprise that seemed to contain no displeasure, tapped his swordside and looked down on it, then sat. "I must have forgotten to put it on," he said, smiling.

"But you're not in uniform, are you? You are dressed as I am."

"I am better dressed than you are, sir." Elton sped to becoming haughty and truculent drunk.

"You are a gentleman, sir, an officer, sir, and I am but a poor poet, sir."

"And a liar, sir, remember that, sir."

"It is you who are the liar, sir, and on your own admission, sir."

Elton drunk-thundered: "No man calls me a liar, sir." And then he sillily smiled. "Let us have all that again, about foul fustilugs and she is like a cow in the waist and her feet stink and so on." And then, in fine truculence, "It is a foul libel on the sex, sir."

"All of it?"

Elton simpered. "Some of it. What was all that about gubber-somethinged and a sharp fox-nose?"

"I am too weary to do it all again."

"It is true, though," pouted Elton, his eyes stern. "The nose, I mean. I had always wondered what her nose reminded me of, and it was of a fox's. Vixen's, rather. A very small vixen, though, and her nose was always very cold. A sign of health, they say." He felt his own nose. "A sign of good health, so they have always said." He started to laugh. "Blow thy nose in her bosom," he laughed. "The old rogue, whoever he was."

"You are emerging from the dark wood of sadness."

"Oh, but I'm sick, very sick. I love you, madam, but I have taken a severe cold. Permit me to blow my nose in your bosom." He laughed hard and then began to cough. He looked alarmed, coughing and not able to stop. John clapped his back, soft, hard, harder. Elton choked. He searched for his handkerchief and found it at last in his left sleeve. He spat heavily into it. He peered in the lamplight at the gob and said, "Oh no." He moaned.

"It may be the wine," John said, his heart stirred to pity and referred fear. But of course the wine was white, urine.

Elton sternly stowed the wrapped sputum in his right sleeve. "Tell no one," he ordered. "Don't tell that fool Clark."

"You must see Clark. At once."

"What will he do, the fool? Cup me, bleed me, bring in the leeches. I can rid myself of my own blood, thank you and him. I go home tomorrow, I will say nothing of it."

"You go home to winter weather. It will be a stormy cold voyage."

"I go home to Christmas, sir. To the bosom of my family and the house decked with ivy and holly. Perhaps my -"

"No snivelling, damn you." He saw with disgust and a kind of relief to be anatomised later the sickly vignettes: his last Christmas, the cosseting of wet-eyed brave parents, death at the time of the daffodils, daffodils in the sick room, the military funeral, weeping Augusta at the grave with her fox-nose red, red-yarded Major Whoeveritwas saluting. Here lies Isaac Marmaduke.

FOUR

John awoke to the bright December morning coldnosed and well, and he knew why. He had strapped on to a soldierly back the burden of dying for love. This was not war, this was not epidemic. Death did not like to be laughed at. Its multiplication was not funny, but its duplication was sidesplitting. For himself and Elton to be spitting arterial blood together would be the most comical thing in the world. One deals a red ace, the other trumps it. Elton could attend to his own death first; his, John Keats's, could follow at an uncomic interval. Death would endeavour, in its glum way, to keep things serious. He went into Severn's room. Severn was working on sketches for a painting to be called The Death of Alcibiades. John said:

"You know what I said I would write?"

"A poem on the river Severn you said." Severn smiled up with shy pleasure.

"Yes, full of sweet Severn and gently flowing Severn and mighty Severn and Severn well-loved. Your name eternised in verse and you to glory in adventitious fluminous attributes."

"I did not say that. I did not think that. I am pleased that you think of working again. I should, of course, be pleased also with a dedication."

"To Severn this poem on the Severn. That would never do. I could of course write instead on the Tiber. The syllables are the same, both names trochaic. The fluminous properties differ little, though the history of what each river has borne upon its back – well, no: men are men, battles battles, bridges bridges. I see little difference. Tiber has rhymes, at least I can think of one rhyme – fibre. A useful rhyme?"

"You must decide what is useful. You must decide whether to rhyme or no."

"Is that Alcibiades? He looks a little like Wordsworth."

"You mock, John."

"Seriously, I am here in Rome and I dream of English themes. Is that right?"

"You must decide."

"Let us imagine that William Shakespeare is brought here by his patron and friend the Earl of Southampton. It's possible, of course, that he was, and to Venice and Verona and Padua besides. What would he write?"

"The Rape of Lucrece?"

There was a knock at the apartment door, and John went to answer it. A sturdy young curled Roman, very ragged, his feet bare, smiled, pulled at a curl in humble greeting, held out a parcel roughly wrapped in newspaper, French for some reason, an old copy of the Gazette de Francfort. The lad said: "Misiter Kettis?"

"Approssimativamente."

"Is lettera, misiter."

There was indeed. A note from Elton. With a book, a very big one. Queen Anna's New World of Words. The author John Florio. John's heart prepared to leap. He smiled at the boy and said: "So you speak some English?"

"Misiter Eliton a little a teach."

"And your name? Come ti chiami?"