The Lady and the Poet (34 page)

I turned back to my aunt and struggled not to gasp in horror at the sight before me. The rash on her face had spread, dissolving all her features in a mass of oozing pustules.

I fell to my knees beside her, and as I did, caught the putrid smell of the pus that leaked from her myriad lesions.

‘My lady aunt, are you in great pain?’ I longed to reach for her hand.

She seemed to sense this and waved me back from the bed. ‘No more than our Saviour on the cross.’

A peal of joyful bells rang of a sudden through the room.

‘What day is this?’ she asked.

Time had slid quietly by in our curtained-off world and I could not answer her.

There was a soft knock on the door and my uncle the Lord Keeper entered. ‘It is Christmas morn and I have brought the barley cream you favour so,’ he told her tenderly, not seeming even to notice the catastrophe her face had become. He put the drink on the table next to the bed and began to lift her up against her cushions, for all the world as if she were a lovely young girl on the morning of her marriage. He sat himself in the chair I had vacated. ‘I am come to celebrate
the birth of Our Lord with you and to thank Him for the times of great content He has given us.’

He held the drink to her lips and she took a tiny sip.

‘Light the candles, Ann,’ he requested. ‘That we may feel the warmth of their happy glow.’

At that I left them to be private together and went downstairs to see how the household kept its Christmas without us.

The table in the Great Hall could have seated forty people. My aunt was famous for her hospitality and the pleasure she took in entertaining others. Once, when I was a child, we spent Christmas at her home in Pyrford. She had laid the festive table to echo her knot garden, all with borders, paths and edges made from foods of riotous colour, with more than twenty dishes of capon, partridge, pheasant and roast beef, finished with gilded marchpanes and sweetmeats shaped like flowers and diamonds, crowned by a cake moulded into the shape of Pyrford Place itself, complete with its gables and weathervane.

Today all was silent. Guests, servants, all had gone elsewhere to celebrate the twelve days of Christmas and left York House ringing with its own emptiness.

My aunt’s dread journey ended on Monday, the twentieth of January, in the year of 1600.

It was at that moment when the night seems endless and there is yet no sign of light in the sky. She had slipped down the bed so that her feet touched its very posts. I arose from my pallet and saw that she was curled almost into a ball, her hair, which she had once so loved, covering the battleground of her dear face. And she breathed no longer.

I knew I should be glad. Her pain had ended. She was at peace after so much suffering. And yet I was not glad. At first I felt but a deadening akin to jarring your knee against a chair or table, and then pain seared through me, like the branding of a hot knife against tender flesh, burning and stinking and agonizing. Pain is no beautiful purifying thing. It is ugly and cruel. It takes, giving nothing in return but hopelessness and loss.

At last I left my aunt in the presence of her grieving husband and of Francis, her son, summoned from Pyrford at the last, and ran helterskelter up the stairs towards my chamber.

On the darkened landing a figure stepped out of the shadows and
barred my path. It was Master Donne, who had not abandoned the household as had so many others but returned here out of loyalty to my uncle. It seemed as if his eyes had at last been opened to the Countess. ‘Ann, my sweet Ann, I am sorely sorry for your trouble, and wished to tell you that you are ever in my thoughts and prayers.’

‘Prayers!’ I had not known how sharp with fury my voice would sound. ‘Too late for that! I cannot thank God for taking from me all those whom I have loved. Mother. Aunt. Sister. All lost. Shall I yet thank Almighty God for His generosity and loving kindness?’

At the other end of the passage a door opened and I pulled Master Donne silently into my chamber, caring not a shred in my loss and anger of what might be made of it.

‘Tell me, Master Donne, believe you in the rewards of everlasting life? Are we truly to be judged and sit forever at the right hand of the Father?’

Master Donne smiled gently. ‘Is not that the privilege of the risen Christ?’

Heretic though I might be, I had rarely felt so angry in all my life until this moment. ‘I care no more for Heaven, nor its promise of eternal happiness. It is this life, here in this earthly paradise, that I yearn for, that it should be lived, and enjoyed with all our senses, that we should look around us at its wonder.’ I turned away and stared across the endless greyness of the river and then back towards him. ‘Can you, a poet and scholar, persuade me that the rewards of Heaven are so much greater than the pleasures of this Earth?’

His face had lost its teasing humour and those haunting eyes looked into mine, as if into a window on my soul. And then he spoke, so soft I could hardly hear him. ‘I want, with my whole heart, to believe that I will one day be ravished into God’s loving arms and held there for all eternity. Yet, in the very depths of my soul, sweet Ann, I fear with all my sins I shall be left to perish on the shore.’

‘And what of woman’s arms?’ I raised up my eyes until they were fixed upon his own. ‘Do you not long to be ravished into a woman’s hold, and stay there, forever, in the circle of her loving arms?’

‘Were they your arms, I would gladly forget the world and all its lures.’

I stepped towards him rashly, my eyes afire, overwhelmed by the desire to obliterate myself in him, to lose this terrible numbness and, callous though it seemed, to feel alive and breathing in the midst of death.

For one fleeting moment he caught my fire and I felt the crushing delight of his embrace.

Then he seemed to shake himself. ‘Ann, Ann, sweet Ann. My body and my soul are at your disposal. Yet I am not so lost to the world as to forget your innocence, above all at such a time as this.’

‘An apt time indeed you have chosen for this sudden saintliness.’ I stroked his face, and ran my finger over his full woman’s lips which yet had such masculine persuasive force. ‘Then hold me as you would a child for I am sorely in need of tender comfort.’

I could see the struggle that took place within him before he reached out and held me safe against his chest.

And there I stayed, my breathing stilled almost to holy silence, feeling peace such as I had last felt only in my grandfather’s study, while around us the shadows fell and the silence enveloped us.

In this world of tears we were left alone. At his dear wife’s death the wound of my uncle’s grief, not yet healed from the loss of his oldest son but five months since, opened again. Darkness overcame him, the Lord Keeper would see no one, and refused to leave his chamber, no matter how august the summoner. Messages came from the Privy Council demanding his attendance, from the Star Chamber and the court of Chancery, yet my uncle heeded none of them.

For seven blissful days, Master Donne and I were readmitted to that garden of delight lost so long ago by our first father and mother. And, like Adam and Eve before the first stain of sin sullied their lives and ours forever, we gloried in the grandeur of our innocence.

It was strange, for though I longed for the touch of his skin on mine, there was yet a release in simple affection, the succour such as a mother gives a babe.

At first I was so needy that I slept.

It was as if I had imbibed some opiate that dulled my senses yet calmed the soul. And each time I awoke I saw him seated next to me on bed or chair, and knew I was safe to sleep again.

When I awoke at last refreshed he told me that the sun had set twice on my slumbers. I sat up hungrier than ever I could remember.

‘Where can we find food at such an hour?’

‘At the cookshop across the road, behind the Strand.’ He shook his head at the length of my requests, and returned with my groaning order of rabbit pie, pastry coffins crammed with cold meats, pears and warm almond cakes. ‘Your grief hath not quite killed your appetite, I fancy,’ he remarked.

For answer I threw a slice of good cold beef at him, which he caught in his mouth, and made me laugh until I choked and must be patted on the back. And then guilt overwhelmed me at smiling so when my aunt lay still and my uncle grieved, yet I knew her own words would be that life must go on.

And go on it did in our small paradise.

The next day I washed his hair, tenderly, in lukewarm water I fetched myself from the kitchen, and dried on an old shift, watching it spring into soft black curls he said would make him the envy of every maid from Cheapside to Chancery Lane.

He told me of his mother, Elizabeth, that stern lady whom he yet loved much, of his sister Anne, and lost brother Henry, and three young sisters besides who died in childhood.

‘What of your father?’ I asked, as we sat upon the bed watching the sun sink once more.

‘He was taken from us when I was but four years old, the best father any boy had. I remember him still, his kindness, that he always kept the managing of me to himself, and would allow no servant to discipline me.’ He turned his face away and I saw, with great surprise, for I had thought it was only I who mourned a parent’s loss so long, that the wound of his father’s loss still caused him pain.

‘We are alike, then,’ I told him gently, ‘whom you think so different in estate. We each lost the softer parent who would have nurtured and protected us.’ I raised his hand to my lips, surprised that he quivered as gently as the breeze through a summer tree at my touch. ‘We are twin souls, you and I.’

‘Indeed?’ He smiled, and yet there was bitterness in it. ‘The man of eight and twenty, beyond his youth, a writer of rags of verse whose reputation is already tarnished, beholden to others for his fortune?
And a maid upon whom the bloom of youth still glows like the rising sun, hopeful and eager, who must wed a man of her own rank?’

I heard his litany of our two selves and saw, like a sudden shaft of light in a darkened cell, that despite the risk and danger our love might bring, he was the only one who could set me free. ‘And yet,’ I said firmly, ‘without you I am bereft. My rectitude needs your impudence, my straightforward soul your clever refracted ways. You are the prism through which I see the world in all its wonder and complexity.’

‘And in you I see a shining light, a certainty I find not in myself. Your true heart begets a holy thirst in me to make myself a better man.’

‘I would not that you became
too
good, and lose the very thing that woke my slumbering senses.’

He reached for me then, his mouth seeking mine, his breath hot upon my neck, his hands exploring, yielding to the softness of my breasts until I thought I might die of my desire.

And then he groaned and tore himself away. ‘If we go down this road there will be no stopping place.’ He marched over to the window and stared down at the wide river below.

I straightened my clothes and followed him. ‘Life will go on whatever we two choose to do.’

‘Ann, we must not. I have loved many in my youth, yet none who offered me their innocence.’

I smiled, weaving my body close to his, as the woodbine winds around the ivy. ‘Yet in “The Flea” you wooed the lady for her maidenhead.’

‘It was naught but a pretty verse designed to bring a smile to wearied courtiers.’

I saw that I would not persuade him from his course. ‘If I may not have your body, then I shall require at least the fruits of your mind, since my cousin Francis admires it so. Will you share your thoughts of Ovid and Catullus?’

He kissed my hand fondly. ‘Ovid will lead us both astray. We will read the works of Petrarch and his Laura, and confine our joys to the realms of ideal love.’

And so we sat and read the works of Homer and of Petrarch, I playing the pupil and he the teacher, to our mutual comfort and delight,
hidden away from the public gaze, yet knowing our time was running swiftly out.

Only Mercy noticed our continued absence. ‘Beware, mistress,’ she whispered one day as I fetched bread and beer, ‘this morning the Queen has sent a message to my master commanding him to return to his duties. Public service must be preferred over private passions, she decrees.’

At hearing this I fired up with anger at Her Majesty’s response to the death of one she called her ‘sweet apple’. Yet I also knew that Mercy’s words were intended as a warning and that our peaceful interlude, overlooked and interfered with by none, would soon be at an end.

‘Be grateful, my sweet Ann,’ he kissed me softly upon the eyelids, ‘for we will ever remember these few days with joy and wonder.’

I turned away to hide the dampness of my eyes. For there was that in his voice which spoke of endings, where my own heart sang of a beginning.

The funeral was held with quiet dignity two days after, my poor aunt buried in a lead coffin for the sake of her contagion. The Queen, perhaps repenting, offered that it should take place at the palace of Whitehall. Yet my uncle—in a deliberate provocation that made all at York House hold our breath—answered that since private passions must not take precedence over public service, he would grieve alone.

We wondered if he would end up in the Tower for such insolence but Her Majesty accepted it, and even granted his further wish that the Earl of Essex, my uncle’s prisoner as well as his pensioner here at York House for four long months, should return to his own home and let my uncle grieve in his.

My father came for the funeral, bringing my sisters Mary and Margaret. Yet Grandfather, whom I knew would long to say farewell to his beloved daughter, was prevented making the journey by an ague, my grandmother staying at Loseley to minister to him.

Master Donne also stayed away, not wishing to intrude upon family misery, but detained me a moment on the morning of the requiem.

‘I long to share your sadness as well as your joy. Yet for me to come to so small a gathering might attract the notice of others.’ He raised my hand swiftly to his lips.

The new tenderness that passed between us must have shone from my face, for my sister Mary, waiting at the great front door, spoke of it at once.