The Lady and the Poet (32 page)

And then came the terrible news that carefree young Sir Thomas,
elder son of the Lord Keeper and father of the three small girls it had been my role sometimes to care for, had died of wounds sustained fighting the Irish.

Knowing the terrible blow this would be to my uncle I went with all speed to York House to offer him my sympathy. As I alighted at the river stairs I wondered if I might see Master Donne, whose friend Sir Thomas had been. I wished, if I saw him, to offer him also my sympathy, all thoughts of the encounter the other night forgotten now that Death had laid his icy fingers upon us.

I found my uncle pale and sorrowing, yet busying himself still with the business of State.

‘My dear son Thomas is to be buried tomorrow with all honours at Chester Cathedral.’ His honest eyes held mine a brief moment and I saw in them the depths of his pain. ‘I wish to go and sorrow for him, yet Her Majesty says she is loath to lose me even for so short a time.’

I nodded, wondering at the price Queen Elizabeth exacted from her true and loyal servants.

‘His brother John has gone to Chester and Master Donne and others are representing me.’

‘I am sure they will serve your honour well,’ I replied sadly and embraced his young wife, who, it seemed shockingly, was not to go to his funeral either, it not being thought a womanly thing.

As I left that sad house for the frivolous cheer of my sister’s, I saw a new guest arriving. The Countess of Straven.

‘You waste your time,’ I almost said. ‘He is already gone.’ Instead I lifted my head and smiled and asked how her husband did and that I heard he had come to London at last.

At that she looked at me narrowly. ‘You are out of date, Mistress More. He has returned to the country, not finding London to his taste. Yet here
you
are again, and still without a husband.’

‘Yet when I do find one, I intend to love and honour him and not spend my life a hundred miles apart.’

‘Such innocence, Mistress More. A hundred miles is an excellent distance between husband and wife, as I am sure you will yet discover.’

With all her lovely face, and imagined experience, I believed her not. If I was allowed to have the husband of my choice, I would not
spend my life a hundred miles apart but hold him fast within the circle of my arms.

When I regained my sister’s house at Mile End she was in a pettish mood, moving from chair to couch, now staring out of the window, then pacing like a caged bear.

Her husband was at his wits’ end with her.

‘Here,’ he thrust a parchment into her hands, ‘perhaps this will amuse you. A saucy verse penned by your uncle’s secretary. It is doing the rounds of the Inns of Court. Not for ladies’ eyes, so I knew you would wish to see it.’

He chucked her chin affectionately, to cut the edge of his words.

Mary opened the paper. ‘It is called “The Flea”. Not the fittest of subjects for poetry.’ Clearing her throat she read the verse aloud.

As she finished reading my sister started to laugh so much she had to drink a sip of ale to quiet herself. ‘I must admit, he is a witty fellow your Master Donne. I wonder if he wrote it to woo the lovely Isabella.’

I twitched the paper from her. ‘He is not
my
Master Donne. And the lovely Isabella has no maidenhead to protect. Unless her husband is even more incompetent than he seems.’

Yet the truth was, I was stirred more than I chose to admit by the lines I had heard, witty and polished on the surface yet with the veiled hint of mastery beneath.

For there was that in me which might, despite the strictures of God and family, be tempted to surrender my own maidenhead to a laughing, dark-eyed suitor.

Yet I covered such thoughts by pretending scorn and anger so that I stamped from the room, imagining the smiles on the faces of my sister and her husband as I ran to my chamber and threw the parchment on the floor, my face flushed with anger mixed with unmaidenly desires.

AFTER THE DEATH
of young Sir Thomas we had some calm days until the news that shook us all. The Earl of Essex, returning suddenly from the wars in Ireland, which were going very ill, had burst into the Queen’s bedchamber at Nonsuch Palace. She, without wig or make-up and wearing only her nightgown and with none of the lengthy preparations that readied Her Majesty to face the world, might have had him killed for less. The Court held its breath. Yet the Queen was surprisingly tender and sent him kindly away.

Yet when he returned she was much changed and so angry that he had without her permission concluded a treaty, that she declared he must be imprisoned at her pleasure. And to my uncle’s great discomfort York House was selected as the Earl’s place of his detainment.

And so, and at his own expense, my uncle the Lord Keeper had an unexpected and unwelcome guest. Rumour even held it that Master Donne and others must give up their lodgings to make room for the Earl and all his train.

In the weeks that succeeded I saw no more of Master Donne, yet we heard much of life at my aunt and uncle’s house. The Earl of Essex, hitherto a good friend to the Lord Keeper, was now driving him to desperation by his melancholic fits. For the good of the country my uncle wished him to make his peace with the Queen, yet the Earl seemed to be declining faster than the sun upon St Lucy’s Day, the shortest of all the year.

Indeed, the Earl’s decline was so violent and extreme that one night it was thought that the fever he had taken would cause his untimely end. The Queen was told and, by cover of darkness, she came secretly to visit York House in the royal barge, to bid her last farewell.

After that he rallied. And as his melancholy lessened yet a sorrier rumour came to us in Mile End that my aunt herself was stricken by illness.

‘Tis likely to be naught,’ my sister counselled, ‘perhaps my lord Essex’s appropriation of her house has brought her spirits lower still.’

I resolved that the next day, while my sister lay abed as she often did after the midday meal, I would seek more news of my aunt’s ailment.

It was a cold afternoon, the balmy days of October, with their golden glory, had now vanished and we were well through the month of November. Last week had been the Queen’s Accession Day feast, one of the greatest in all the year, with tilting and masques and all manner of celebration. I wondered if the Queen missed her Earl and whether this time his sin was too great to forgive, being about not the peccadilloes of love but the defence of her realm. Was life at her Court, now functioning smooth again, too quiet without her gentle knight who, though so many years her junior, made her ache with pain as often as thrill with pleasure? Perhaps at well past sixty years any feeling was better than none? Or yet again, she might be bored of such tiring games as his, forever dallying with her ladies, or sulking at slights to his honour.

When I arrived by water at York House it was quieter than I had ever known it, despite the presence of the Earl of Essex. My uncle had
been called to an urgent meeting of the Privy Council and had taken many of his advisors and secretaries with him. The Earl of Essex himself seemed wrapped in melancholy and glid around like a wraith outside in the gardens all day long, clad in old clothes.

When I asked the groom of the Great Chamber to see my aunt I found it was Joan, her tire-woman, who came to greet me.

‘Joan, good day to you,’ I wished her, remembering the outings she and I had shared around this fair city. Indeed I had to hide a smile at the memory of her tutoring in the art of bedmaking, and how it ended in so strange and fatal an encounter.

‘My sister heard a tale of your mistress suffering some illness. How is she today and is there aught I could do to help her?’

‘My lady is in her chamber resting. I think it better she is left alone.’ Without more words she turned swiftly for the door.

‘Joan, Joan…’ I knew the woman well and this day it seemed there was something in her manner I knew not, a refusal to meet my eyes, the way she moved, as fast and silent as a rat scuttling from the broom. ‘What manner of illness is it?’

‘A fever. She talks of chills and cramps as if she had stood all night in the rain. Her head aches somewhat.’

It was unfortunate that my aunt was herself the one who dosed others, so that when the finger fell upon her, there was none to aid her.

‘Have you talked to the apothecary? What has the Lord Keeper to say of her condition?’

‘She wishes not to bother the Lord Keeper. He grieves still for his son and my lady wants not to add to his burden.’

I could understand this, and yet it worried me.

‘Tell her I will return tomorrow and bring some of the orange pippins that delight her so.’

Still not catching my eye, Joan curtsied. ‘I will, Mistress Ann.’

I made a small detour on my route homewards. Before taking to the water I stopped at the church of St Bride’s, hard by Fleet Steet, and slipped in before evening prayers. When I was a small child it was still possible, if you were discreet, to light a candle to symbolize some wish or intercession. Now such things were frowned upon as the trappings of dangerous Popery. Instead I offered up a prayer for my aunt’s health to be restored.

A lively gathering was wending its rowdy way through Mary’s house when I arrived, settling now in this chamber, now in that. Darkness had fallen and the candles and torches were lit, casting a coloured glow on the assembled gathering in all their finery as if they were Italian princelings or the young nobility of some Spanish court.

‘How was my lady aunt?’ Mary enquired, yet I could see her mind was on filling goblets from a gilded tray for her chattering guests.

‘I did not see her. Joan, her waiting woman, said she was resting in her chamber.’

‘And a good thing too,’ Mary nodded. ‘A lady needs to have her rest from care and labour lest her household take too much advantage of her.’

I tried not to smile, since Mary’s life did not seem so very full of care and labour.

‘I will go again tomorrow. I wish our lady grandmother were close by, with all her knowledge of plants and their good properties.’

‘Come, Ann, you make too much. Join us in a glass of sack, and after perhaps you could read to Francis and to Nicholas? They have been asking for you this last half-hour. I can tell my headache begins to come apace.’

I forwent the sack and took pleasure in reading to the children. They were quiet, contented infants who seemed to find Mary’s un-wifely ways as normal as if all households were conducted with the laxity of Mary’s. Had she consigned them to their nurses and seen them not for days on end, as befell many children, they would have found that strange behaviour indeed.

Next morning I awoke before the rest, and went downstairs in my night attire. I shook my head that it was almost eight and the fires not yet lit, while in most houses they would have blazed since five, and shivered in the chill air that seeped under the garden door. Outside all was covered in a thick hoar frost, white almost as snow, in the walled garden. I opened the door and ventured out to pick some ivy strands, rich with purple berries, and a handful of Christmas roses to fashion a winter nosegay for my aunt. As I reached for a bough of holly, bright with berries, of a sudden I heard a loud knocking at the front door and turned so swiftly I caught myself upon the bush and
tore my flesh so that blood began to gush, marking the white linen of my nightgown with a stain of brightest red.

And yet no servant opened the door. So I, my hand still dripping from the wound, opened it myself to find Joan, her skirts all muddy from the London streets, standing upon the doorstep.

‘Mistress Ann, it is your lady aunt. She is taken worse and the Lord Keeper nowhere to be found. Perhaps he is with the Queen. She told me to bother none, that she would rally soon.’ Joan looked distraught, indeed near to weeping, and wrung her hands incessantly. ‘I knew not who to turn to, mistress, and Mercy and I remembered you, and that you love her well, and she you.’

I took her in and stood her in the withdrawing room, next the Great Chamber, while I went to dress myself. I could see her look around in wonder at so exotic a dwelling place, and yet none from the household up and busy.

Fumbling at the hooks of my bodies I cursed at having to dress in so elaborate a selection of clothing without even Prudence to help hook me up, and yet at last I was dressed and ready. I bound up my hand with a napkin from the press by the kitchen, hoping it was clean, though in this house that was by no means certain, and went to wake my sister.

No knock roused her so I gently opened the door of her chamber.

She and Nick lay in the great bed, wound together like a plait of hair, Mary’s nightgown discarded on the floor beside them.

I tried to avert my gaze but, against my will, found it drawn back like iron to a lodestone. Yet it was not Mary and her husband I pictured there, with bodies so entwined, but myself and quite another.