The Lady and the Poet (3 page)

My father bristled. ‘The Mores are as honourable as any at Court, Elizabeth. And more gentle than many favourites who have come lately.’

This I knew to be only partly true. The More fortunes had risen with my great-grandfather. He too was a new man, not noble, but elevated in the service of the crown, yet we were high enough now and would go higher if my father had his way.

My grandmother emerged from the scullery wiping her hands. ‘George. The very person I was hoping to see. Will you be going to London between now and the marriage day? I am out of all humour with the clerk of the kitchen who has forgotten to order sugar for the Hippocras wine. How can we have a wedding toast without that? And no more currants, either, to sweeten our meats.’

My father shrugged, wanting to hold on to the subject of the honour of the Mores as a dog does a bone. ‘I have no plans to visit the city until next week when I sit on three committees, but I have a man in Cheapside who will send you sugar and currants if you pay for a messenger.’

‘Thank you, my son,’ my grandmother nodded. ‘I will certainly apply to him. Robert, the clerk, believes our last supply was eaten by rats, though it may be he covers up his own bad ordering. Now he has strung all our sweet fruit for the marriage feast in a basket four feet from the ground.’

As if in endorsement of the clerk’s claim we heard a loud shout coming from the kitchen and saw a rat scurry past us, pursued by a crowd of shouting grooms and ushers, all milling helplessly about like virgins at the sight of an invading army.

Impatiently I grabbed the wooden bucking spade used to turn the clothing in the wash barrels and laid about the rat with it. I know not
who was more surprised, the rat or I. Until I caught him square on, as a mallet catches a croquet ball at Hampton Court, and he spun up into the air then landed with a thud, dead, at our feet.

‘Ann, Ann,’ protested my father, ‘truly I despair of you. When will you ever learn to behave like a gentlewoman?’

‘Am I supposed to climb upon a stool when I see a rat and shout until I am rescued like a maiden saved from the dragon by some brave St George? Is that the act of a gentlewoman? Then you are right, Father, I am no gentlewoman.’

At the far end of the path to Loseley we heard the ring of horseshoes on the road and round the bend from the south my sister Mary, slender as a willow reed in smart riding habit and feathered hat, rode into view on a chestnut mare. Behind her, stouter even than when I saw her last, was my sister Margaret, the happiest girl I ever knew. Margaret was happy with all things: her husband Thomas Grymes, her home in Peckham, her new tapestries, her baby son, even her dogs were the best dogs ever owned.

‘Bett! Ann!’ called Mary as she jumped gracefully out of the saddle. ‘Bett, you are as lovely as ever and hardly old enough to be a bride!’ She held my sister at arm’s length. ‘To think, from now on you will look like Margaret, a happy barrel, carrying a baby every year until you are forty!’

‘My sister is envious,’ Margaret announced calmly, even though she needed two grooms of the horse to lift her down. ‘Since I am content with my babe and my Thomas while her husband gambles, goes ever to cocking, or the playhouse and the bowling alley, and rarely spends time enough at home with her even to change his hose.’

‘Aye. But then your Thomas is as dull as an attorney’s clerk.’

‘Hush, Mary, you ever had a forward tongue.’ My grandmother nodded her head towards the group of servants who had appeared from nowhere at the approach of horses’ hooves to welcome my sisters back to their family home.

‘Besides,’ I could not resist adding in a voice too low for Grandmother to catch, ‘you manage not to be always with child yourself, Mary.’

‘Tis a great skill,’ Mary winked. ‘I have two babes and intend to give my husband his heir and one to spare so I need not forever be a brood mare for the Throckmortons.’

‘A dangerous practice.’ My grandmother’s ears were sharper than we had thought. ‘My kitchen cat has more sense than that. She knows disease can wipe out her young so she has many litters.’

‘Worry not, my lady grandmother,’ Mary replied. ‘I intend more kittens later. At the moment I am having a rest. From breeding. And from husbands.’

‘Then keep your eye on the tom cat,’ my grandmother said as she shook out the cleaning clout. ‘He may seek his cream elsewhere.’

The remaining days before Bett’s marriage passed in the busy bustle of servants, the shouts of my grandmother ordering furniture to be moved from one room to another, the arrival of what seemed like storerooms’ worth of provisions, and the cook filling every larder and scullery with pies, sweetmeats and marchpanes for my sister’s celebration. The tablecloths, with the piss now added, lay drying on bushes in the park, pewter chargers were scrubbed with sharp river sand or horsetails picked from the garden. Plate was polished, and trenchers were carved out of four-day-old rye bread for the meats to be served to my sister’s guests.

Even though it was summer the weather was so cold that there was a fire in the Great Hall night and day, and the servants who slept there on pallets were glad of its glow. I was glad, too, of Bett’s warm body close to mine, lying next to each other in the big curtained bed. Unlike I, who was always restless and eager for the morn to arrive, she slept like an angel, often with a smile on her face. Softly, I touched her cheek. Did she, as my father said, share the features of our lost mother?

If our mother still lived how different things would be. My father, without a shrewish wife at his side, would have been softer, our mother a balm to his bitterness and bile. And we five girls would have had a mother’s love and a mother’s lore to help us through life. My grandmother, I knew, had done her best to mother us, but she was so brisk, so caught up with the daily necessities of life, that she had scant time for mothering, and it was not in her nature to pet and indulge. At least Bett, Margaret, Mary and I had known our mother a little. Poor Frances, our youngest sister, who lived while our mother lost her life in childbed, had not known her at all. Hard though it might be, I resolved to be gentler with Frances. And today, the occasion of her wedding, I would help Bett to think only of happy things.

As the first light of dawn filtered through the windows on the great day I slipped from the bed. It was a sunny morning but the rays did not warm us since our room faced north, always accounted the healthiest direction, the belief being that none of the diseases from the Continent could blow therefore into the bedchamber. My feet froze with nothing but rushes to warm the cold wooden floor.

Hearing me move around, Bett opened her eyes. Usually she could sleep all morning in her nest of covers, almost until the midday meat was on the table, unless my grandmother came to scold her for her idleness.

‘Only a few more hours,’ I said softly to her. ‘And you will be my lady Mills.’

‘And no longer a maid.’

‘Are you frightened of that?’ Myself, I thought it sounded a great adventure. ‘Mary says it can be a duty or a pleasure, depending on the skill of your husband.’

I pictured heavy Sir John, with his thoughts of hunting the hart and filling his trencher. It did not bode well.

‘And Margaret says I must view it like putting grease on the wheel of a farmyard cart. All moves better when it is done.’

We both laughed at our sister Margaret’s prosaic turn of mind. ‘Practical Meg. How poetical! She must have been studying the lyrical verses of Sir Philip Sidney!’

Now that the day had finally come I almost cried. Instead I bit back my salt tears and helped Bett into her bridal attire. Since children we had helped each other with the elaborate rituals of a gentlewoman’s wardrobe. Clean linen shift first, and for today silken stockings worked in silver stitching, then into the hooped farthingale petticoat, afterwards lacing up her velvet stomacher, stitched with tiny seed pearls, before tying on the skirts of her red taffeta gown, its sleeves adorned with my father’s gift of fur. Next came the dainty slippers with their elaborate shoe roses in white and red. Lastly I took down the starched ruff, as delicate as a spider’s web, from the curtain where last night I had pinned it, that it might keep its stiffness and not be crushed. I attached it tenderly, smiling at Bett’s small white breasts, like two white half-moons, spilling from her dress. After today, as a married woman, they would be covered from the gaze of other men.

With Prudence’s help I combed her hair and left it hanging loose and shining like a pale river of silk, as only a virgin is entitled to wear it.

She looked lovelier than I had ever seen her.

I, too, had tried to look my best, in a kirtle and gown of yellow silk that I fancied brought out the burnished colours of my hair and eyes.

Bett turned to me. ‘I wish our mother were here this day,’ she sighed.

I held my sister so close I could feel her heart beating close to mine. ‘She will be, Bett. If we believe in the immortality of souls, then hers will be here with us this day.’

We descended the great staircase. My father stood waiting at the foot.

‘Bett, you are truly beautiful.’ I saw no sign of his wife, Constance, and hoped he had left her at home with the other sows from his piggery.

‘Thank you, Father.’

To my surprise he turned to me. ‘I know you are no beauty, Ann, but you have the Poynings’ eyes. Warm and nut brown like the shiny seed of the chestnut that boys so love to play with.’

It was mixed enough as flattery goes, yet it brought a lump to my throat for compliments from my father were as thin upon the ground as rose petals in winter. I stored this one up as a squirrel does his autumn store. ‘Thank you, Father, I am happy you think so.’

And so we processed down to the church, my sisters Margaret and Mary, my brother Robert, and silly Frances, my father and Constance, who had now appeared decked out in as much finery as if it were she who was the bride in Bett’s place, as well as my grandparents and the noisily sniffing Prudence. My cousin Francis had just arrived from London, but without his mother, my aunt Elizabeth.

Sir John, the groom, looking for all the world like a fat sausage encased in black velvet, stood waiting for his bride at the church door. There, according to the old traditions, he and Bett exchanged vows and rings where all could see, to a great cheer from the guests within and from my grandfather’s servants who had gathered in the churchyard as thick as the faithful on Christmas morning.

After this as many as could fit inside went to see them blessed and
shared the toast of Hippocras wine, sweetened by the good offices of the merchant my father had recommended in Cheapside, who had sent the sugar down on horseback with his wishes for their happiness together with a large bill.

Once they had exchanged their vows and were blessed Bett took it on herself to say a prayer, which she read out in a clear and sweet voice. ‘Give me the Grace, Lord, to acknowledge my husband to be my head, to reverence him, obey him, to please him and be ruled by him in all things. Amen.’

I caught Mary’s eye and saw that she was shaking her head. ‘Forgive her, Father,’ she whispered softly, ‘she knows not yet that husbands need no encouraging.’

After the vows the Hippocras wine was passed round all the pews before my grandfather led his guests away from the church to the Great Hall and tents arranged in the park for feasting and jollity.

There was such a weight of food that you would think an army was expected. Three oxen were turning on giant spits, while six sheep had lain two days in hot ashes. There were peacocks stuffed with pheasant and other small birds. There were boiled capons in lemon sauce, baked rabbit with pickled cowcumbers, spinach tart, stewed oysters, all to be washed down with sweet wines, small beer and lemon mead especially for the wedding pair and followed up with preserved fruits, macaroons and baked custards.

The final centrepiece was a vast marzipan confection gilded with gold leaf and bearing birds, beasts, twists of sugar rope and the coats of arms of both the More and Mills families entwined, which had taken my grandmother’s pastry cook three days, eight pounds of almonds, a pint of rose water and a restorative gallon of strong ale to complete.

At every guest’s place there was a favour of perfumed gloves, scented soap, sweet bags for the linen closet, or water distilled from rose petal, dried orange peel, musk, civet, precious gums and oil of jessamine.

My sister Mary had slipped away after the blessing and changed her gown into one that showed off the flashing jewels my father had told us were borrowed three times against, which took away some of their lustre.

Margaret piled her plate with sweetmeats, then surprised us all by
dancing a galliard with her husband Thomas, with all the grace of a thistledown on the summer wind.

It was, I had to admit, a gathering grand and glorious enough to please even my father’s demanding tastes. The women wore silk, brocade or cloth of gold, some encrusted with garnets or aquamarines, others with heavily worked silver thread or coloured embroidery. As the dancers whirled by to the sound of harps, lutes and drums, the diamonds and emeralds pinned in their hair flashed like sun lighting the stained-glass windows in the hall.

Mary appeared at my side, slyly pointing to the bridegroom. ‘Have you seen that thing in Sir John’s ear?’ Our portly new relation, apart from his unflattering velvet hose, was sporting a vast pearl earring, which threatened almost to tear the lobe away, were it not so firmly bulked by Sir John’s jowly flesh. ‘Poor man, he thinks to copy Nick’s brother-in-law, Sir Walter Ralegh, without an ounce of his charm! You could as much put a pearl in a pig’s ear, it would look as fine. The man must weigh more than three great sacks of lime. Tonight poor Bett will be crushed like grain under a millstone!’

‘Mary!’ I dug her in her ribs, which were well laced in, causing her breasts to stick very much out under their filmy covering. If Mary could have displayed them openly, she would. I had heard her moaning—discreetly, thank the Almighty, or we would all be in the Tower—that despite all of her sixty-five years, Queen Elizabeth could still show off her bosoms, since she might at least claim to be a virgin, yet no one would want to look at them.