The Lady and the Poet (33 page)

Shocked at my own imaginings, I roused my sister from her sleep. ‘Mary,’ I shook her gently. ‘It is our aunt. Joan is below and says she is much the worse.’

Mary’s eyes opened at last and she struggled to sit up, hampered by the mountain of her growing belly. ‘And you go to her?’ Becoming aware of her nakedness, she reached for her nightgown. ‘Must I also?’

‘No, no, you are with child. I will send you a message of how I find her.’

Mary lay back against her sleeping husband, fitting her gourd-like
body along his like two spoons in a drawer. ‘Then I will doze a little more,’ she murmured sleepily.

Joan stood waiting in the withdrawing room, her cloak held tight about her as if she did not want to be contaminated by this strange, and possibly godless household.

I gathered up the nosegay I had picked for my aunt and flung my own cloak over my gown, putting on my pattens the while, for it would be deep in mud outside once the frost melted.

As we made our way through the noisy, bustling streets down towards the river, to hail a wherry to take us to York House, I looked back at Mary’s house, a sleeping island amidst the busy clatter and clanging of Mile End. It seemed my lot in life to ever be the one who took action.

On the way I made Joan tell me my aunt’s list of ailments, as carefully as she could remember, when each started and for how long.

Three days since, I learned, she had a fever, and complained of chills and back pain. Her arms and legs ached like to a sudden fit of winter illness. This day, when Joan pulled back her curtains, she shouted out loud that Joan was trying to kill her.

‘She asked for a bowl and then spewed greatly into it, still telling me to trouble none with her infirmity, yet I worried for her weakness and sought out the Lord Keeper. Finding him not, I came to look for you.’

After this we stayed silent until the familiar shape of York House hove into view. Then with a failing heart I ran up the great staircase knowing not what I might find awaiting me.

All was quiet in my aunt’s chamber and, following Joan’s advice, I pulled the curtains back to let in only a crack of sunlight. Yet even this dim ray made my aunt cry out afresh.

‘We must call a physician straight away, and find the Lord Keeper whether he is with the Queen or no. Indeed, the Queen may send her own physician, knowing the love she bears my aunt.’

I closed the curtains once more, knowing all light is bad for illness, and sat beside my aunt, making her drink a cordial of elderflower whenever she would accept it.

Around midday she murmured to me that she would sit up, and to my great joy I was able to arrange her against a bank of cushions and
even to open the curtains an inch so that by the time her husband came, his tall frame aquiver with worry at the message he had received, she was greatly better.

‘Now, now, husband,’ she weakly joked, ‘what brings you in so much haste from the State’s business?’

He took her hand in is, his pale eyes softening. ‘Something of greater moment than either Queen or courthouse.’

She smiled and shook her head at such nonsense. ‘Beware such treasonous utterances, man, even the walls have ears.’

The physician came not half an hour later and pronounced the worst to be over.

At that I sat beside her and she took my wounded hand in hers. ‘What ails you, Ann, that you wear this bloodstained napkin?’

‘A prick from the holly tree, no more. I was surprised how much I bled.’

A shadow crossed her face at that. ‘Like unto the wound from the crown of thorns on our Saviour’s head before he died upon the cross.’

‘No, no,’ I laughed to cheer her from such sad thoughts, ‘more like the merry boughs we pick to adorn the house at Christmas time.’

‘They are the same, Ann, the very same.’

I read to her a little after that, until she slept. And then I slept myself and found when I awoke that darkness had fallen.

I smoothed the covers of the bed, and folded back the sheet, exposing the tender whiteness of her long, pale arm.

I lifted her hand to hold it for a moment in my own, and saw a sight that made me gasp with fear.

A flat red rash covered the inside of her palm.

At that I fell to my knees and prayed to the very Saviour of whose death for us she had this day reminded me.

‘Our Lord, which art in Heaven,’ I interceded, ‘let not this be the mark of the smallpox upon my dearest aunt’s hand.’

JOAN SAW IT
next, but said naught, only looked me in the eye then lowered her gaze and kept her distance. Mercy, always a chatterbox would not be so discreet.

The worst was summoning the Lord Keeper, happy as a lark in springtime since the doctor’s visit, and showing him the dreadful evidence.

At first he would not believe there was aught to worry over. Yet I made him call back the physician, insisting that I had heard my grandmother talk of such a rash, and what it led to.

The physician pursed his lips and shook his head and said it might yet turn out to be the chicken pox. ‘If the rash spreads to her breasts and belly and spares her face and legs, then God be praised.’

Yet, as I had feared, it was her breast and belly that were spared. The rash spread instead to her feet and legs, and upwards, breaking our hearts as it did, to her face and mouth. On the third day the rash became raised bumps. And on the fourth these turned to hard-centred pustules filled with a thick, opaque fluid, leaving no shred of doubt as to their deadly nature.

My cousin Francis, almost as thin and stricken as his mother, begged her to let him stay. Yet she would not relent. He was the future, all their hopes resting in him, and he must be gone to Pyrford and to safety.

‘You must be gone also, Ann,’ my uncle told me, his honest face pale as a wraith’s. ‘Go with Francis, or else you risk the same contagion.’

‘But who will care for her if we leave?’ I asked, for Mercy had not been near her door in days and even Joan, who claimed to love her, would not enter the room but left all that was called for beside the door.

‘I will,’ said my uncle softly.

I held fast to his hand, knowing that, although his love was great, his stricken state made him of little use to my aunt in her private needs. And the Queen, with her memory of the smallpox still fresh in her mind although it had struck her years before, would never countenance it. Then, when all had left her, my aunt would be tended by a hired servant who made a living from such tasks, and whose face she would never have seen before.

Young though I was, and my thirst for living great, I could not abandon her.

My uncle would hear nothing of it at first, yet God gave me the words and at last he agreed to my insistent persuasion.

Joan found me one of the servant’s pallets and placed it where I bid her, next the bed. As she left she made the forbidden sign of the cross. In our extremes, many turn to the old faith. That night as I lay at my aunt’s bedside it seemed all slept throughout that great house save my beloved aunt, who writhed and mumbled as she travelled on her terrible journey alone.

And as I listened, cold and fearful, the words of Psalm 91, often read aloud by my grandfather during evening prayers at Loseley, came to me as if straight from Heaven.

As the words rang in my ears, I wished with all my being that I was safe back at Loseley, in the comforting arms of my grandparents. Yet I knew in the deepest reaches of my conscience that my place was here.

My own mother had been taken from me. My aunt, lying in her sickness next to me, had been all the mother I had known and I could not forsake her.

May God protect me.

The word of my aunt’s illness spread faster than the fuse on a barrel of gunpowder, so that soon all London knew of it. The Earl of Essex, billeted in the far corner of the house, kept his distance and walked no more in the wintry gardens for fear of catching the infection.

When, to my surprise, the Countess of Straven called to pay her respects I had to revise my opinion of that lady for it was brave in her to venture here to this place where contagion stalked amongst the fine furniture and gilded statuary.

I had been called down to greet her myself, for in that stricken house there was none other left to receive her.

I offered her cakes and small beer in the long gallery that gave onto the river. ‘I thank you, my lady, for coming to York House when most would keep away.’

‘Why,’ she asked, her silks rustling as she laughed, ‘is the Lord Keeper fallen so out of favour with the Queen?’

‘Her Majesty loves him still. I meant my aunt’s most dread condition.’

The change wrought upon that lovely face when she at last understood me, was worthy of a bitter comedy. Her skin, creamy and blooming as money and good food could make it, paled into sudden greyness. And I saw the truth: she had been out of town, away from wagging tongues, and had known nothing of our new affliction.

Faster than the wink of an eye from a painted doxy, she was gone.

I gathered my gown over my arm and turned towards the stairs, stopping at the sight of Master Donne hastening in my direction. ‘Mistress More,’ his face was haggard, older and more careworn than I had ever seen it, the laughing dazzle of the poet and gallant eclipsed by concern and dark presentiment. ‘I have heard the news of your good aunt and come to give you my greatest sympathy.’

‘Thank you, Master Donne. I thought my lady Straven had come to offer her sympathy also,’ I could not keep a little of the bitter amusement from my voice, ‘yet it seems she knew naught of our misfortune and has hurried homewards as if this were a plague house.’

‘Has she indeed?’ He was in the grip of such strong emotion that my irony was lost on him. Instead he took my hand in his, holding it so tight that my fingers pained me. ‘And so ought you, Mistress More. Go back to your sister in Mile End or better still to Loseley.’

‘Master Donne,’ I drew my hand away, holding myself as high and straight as I could, my newness of purpose giving me strength, ‘your brother who died in Newgate, stricken and alone? Would you not have nursed him if you could?’

Master Donne’s haunted eyes slid away from mine, and his shoulders hung in sudden shame. ‘Mistress More,’ he hesitated, his voice jagged with long-nurtured pain, ‘as Jesus is our Saviour, I know not the answer.’

I was grateful for his honesty, that he tried not to fob me off with easy untruth. ‘Such things are different for all, yet I know this is a task I cannot shirk, nor want to either. It is my gift to her who loved me.’

‘Yet is it a gift she wishes to receive?’ The words seemed wrenched from him. ‘Your beauty, Ann? Or your sweet young life, if the smallpox claims you?’

He had not called me Ann before.

‘I was never beautiful. And surely beauty counts not so much in the face of love or death?’

He hung his head, and then, reaching into his own soul, looked into my eyes, seeking strength there.

We were alone in the hall, the bustling servants quietened by calamity. I reached out to him and he held fast my hand against his heart. ‘May God protect you, sweetest Ann.’

‘Amen to that.’ I loosened his handgrasp and walked slowly up the stairs knowing, as he did, that for good or ill this contagion would change our lives forever.

By cruel irony, my aunt’s affliction had come upon her at Christmas time, when all around us was joyful celebration. As the days passed, from my seat at the side of her great bed I could hear merry revellers tipping out of taverns in the Strand, the tolling of seasonal bells; and even, when I ventured briefly abroad, I could smell the scent of Christmas pies and cakes baking in the cookshops.

At York House all was quiet. My aunt, when she had been well, loved to deck every mantel with swags of holly and draped great
swathes of ivy over doors and staircases and the minstrels’ gallery. Each room had scented pomanders and musicians playing festive tunes upon the lute or tabor.

In memory of those happier times I fetched an orange from the kitchen and a bundle of cloves. Sitting by her bedside I stuck a hundred cloves into the orange and bound it up with the red ribbon I had bought to tie a gift for Mary.

‘See, Aunt, do you remember that when I was a maid you taught me how to make these oranges for keepsakes and Christmas gifts?’

In the darkened chamber my aunt stirred and held out a hand, so that I put the orange into it and she held it to her nose.

‘Ann, I cannot see, open the drapes a little.’ Her voice, used so little of late, creaked like a rusty gate.

I walked to the window looking out over the great river and drew back the heavy curtains an inch or two, grateful to bring some daylight into that dark, oppressive room where pastilles burned to combat the sickly smell of disease. The windows were firmly closed and the fire blazing, as was the custom in any time of illness.