The Lady and the Poet (40 page)

And my blood froze the while.

My sullied reputation might make some men turn away from me; yet with Master Manners it seemed to stoke up his desire for mastery over me the more.

‘Ann! Ann!’ called out my father querulously. ‘Where have you been all these minutes? Come sit with me. Frances falls asleep or fidgets.’

‘Father,’ I requested urgently, ‘can we not ride to Loseley tonight?’

‘Foolish girl, we would break our necks in the dark. Besides I have the flux and am weak as a kitten.’

‘Then I will sit up in your chair, Father, and make sure you have all that you need for your affliction. Frances can seek her bed.’

Frances shrugged and picked up her Irish stitchwork. ‘I would be glad.’

If my father thought it strange to have me wish to stay in his room he said naught about it.

As I sat next to the bed, the cheerful sounds of the inn retreated and the silence of night wrapped me in its cold embrace and I longed with my soul and my blood and my heart for Master Donne and for London.

THROUGH THE LONG
night I asked myself what I must do. Should I tell my father of Richard Manners’s treatment of me?

I had thought he would object to my sitting in a chair in his chamber yet he did not. Perhaps there were moments even in his life when he drew comfort from the presence of another.

By dawn I had decided.

Already the nights were growing short so that the darkness came earlier and lasted longer in the morning. Yuletide would soon be upon us again.

I stoked up the fire and pulled my shawl tighter round my shoulders, waiting for him to waken.

It was after nine of the clock when he did so, and time we were on the road. I was grateful that the next night we stayed with friends and not at another inn.

I shook him gently. ‘Father, wake up. I have laid your clothes out to warm by the fire.’ I sat down on his great bed, hesitating. He seemed even smaller than usual, half hidden in its downy embrace. ‘There is something I must say to you, which I have thought about all the long night. After we were left alone last night Master Manners tried to dishonour me.’

‘Now, Ann,’ my father sat up impatiently, ‘what nonsense is this? How could he have done so when you were in a busy inn with so many coming and going?’

I paused at that, knowing what an unlikely tale it sounded. ‘I know. I thought myself safe in his company here for the same reason.’

‘Why, had you cause to doubt him?’

‘There have been moments when he looked strangely at me, and tried to press his attentions on me before.’

‘Enough!’ His voice was cold and as sharp as a chisel. ‘What is this farrago? You are fortunate, Ann, that Master Manners ignores this gossip of you and Master Donne and considers you at all.’

‘In exchange for demanding a greater portion!’

‘Be silent! If his father agrees to the settlement you will marry Master Manners as immediately as it can be arranged. And for my part tomorrow would not be too soon. You have caused me a great deal of trouble, Ann, with your pert manner and your extravagant ideas of your due. First you will not even take your place at Court. Then you entangle yourself with a man of no fortune and bad reputation. And now you accuse Master Manners of dishonouring you. You have dishonoured yourself. And I will not allow you to bring down the rest of our family. I wish to hear no more of this matter. Go now and ready yourself for the journey. We leave within the hour. Go!’

I turned and ran towards my chamber. In my deepest soul I had known this was how my father would respond.

I listened out for Master Manners’s voice before descending and greeting the news with the greatest relief that he had gone ahead on horseback.

We left Frances to chatter for us all on the journey back to Loseley, a challenge she rose to with no encouragement. Sir John was the perfect pattern of a man, not even Adam could come near him, Nunwell House was lovelier than all the Queen’s palaces rolled into one, the view from the knot garden rivalled any she had heard of in Italy, and even Sir John’s hens outcrowed Chanticleer.

Her chatter filled the great divide between my father and myself. He stared out of the window, avoiding my eye, while I wrapped up in the fur of my cloak, and pushed up ever deeper into the furthest corner of the coach. Even when we were thrown together by the infernal jolting he treated me as if I were some distant stranger, and I used every ounce of my strength to keep back the tears which I would choke on rather than show him.

As the familiar grey outline of Loseley came into view, my sister leaned towards me one last time. ‘Tell me, Ann, are you not, in even the smallest portion, jealous?’

‘Yes, Frances, indeed I am.’

It was not the answer she had expected, and her smile widened with delight.

Yet I did not add the reason, that she was lucky to want what was within her grasp. An amiable man who loved his land and his animals, and would love her also.

There might be no clashing of cymbals as true souls met, such as I had heard for one brief moment before they were silenced forever. Yet perhaps such things were no more than a painful chimera, a will-o’-the-wisp that leads travellers to their death on fog-filled moors.

Yes, Frances was fortunate indeed.

My admission of envy seemed to cause her inordinate delight.

I had one consolation at least. Mary was coming to stay and would be bringing with her the babe. She might oppose my feelings but at least she knew of their existence, which gave me a comfort of sorts.

Mary’s babe, a fine boy, had eyes the colour of tar and a head of black hair as thick as his father’s. ‘A relief that he has the stamp of the Throckmortons so deep upon him,’ I could not resist whispering to Mary, who in return kicked me so hard it bruised my shin.

Margaret had come also and both were bursting with London gossip which they exchanged with me as we laughed together in my bedchamber. How the Lord Keeper’s new wife Alice, Countess of Derby, was causing yet more havoc with her wilful ways and had even married her daughter to John, the Lord Keeper’s remaining son, apparently without her husband’s consent.

I sat up at that, wondering how it could come about that a marriage could thus take place without consent and not be challenged.

And I could not help but wonder how the upheaval affected Master Donne and whether it might engulf him also.

Mary, with the sharpest wit of any of my sisters, read my mind. ‘Master Donne has his hands full trying to keep the peace between them and to persuade his employer that the Countess married him not just to have his skills and position on her side in her many lawsuits, but out of affection also.’

‘It sounds a weighty task.’

‘She has brought forty servants and it is costing him, so he complains, £650 a year to house and pay them all. And of course her servants want to have the mastery over his.’

I was sorry to hear it, thinking of the kindness of Joan and Mercy, and Thomas the steward. I wondered if even Wat had been affected, though no doubt he lived with Master Donne in his lodgings.

‘And my lord Essex is still in deep disgrace,’ Mary confided, greatly enjoying her role as the purveyor of bad news. ‘The Queen did not renew his monopoly of sweet wines and he faces utter ruin.’

Margaret, not one to often gossip, leaned in towards the fire, her voice a whisper as though even here, twenty-five miles from the Court, the Queen’s spies would be listening, ‘My Thomas says the Earl will foment sedition now he is deprived of his generous income. He wished me to come here that I might be away from London, fearing there might be some great uprising there.’

‘Surely Thomas fears unnecessarily?’ My thoughts were suddenly for the safety of Master Donne. ‘Does the Earl have so great a following?’

‘He believes he can call on the support of the trained bands in the city. They think him a hero still, or so he supposes. They are unhappy that the Queen still names no successor. Bad for business, Thomas says, and creates an instability.’

The image of Queen Elizabeth, her wig awry, in that borrowed dress from Lady Mary Howard, so short her stockinged feet stuck out like a scarecrow’s, came into my mind. She had seemed an old woman even then.

‘Nick says Essex is no threat,’ Mary disagreed. ‘Except to himself. He will lose his head on Tower Hill if he minds not what he does.’

I shivered at that thought. Would the Queen ever take such action against the man she had loved for so many years, though he was thirty years her junior?

Mary caught something in my face, some sadness or inattention to London gossip. ‘And how fare you? Has the handsome Master Manners yet melted your heart?’

At that I could contain myself no longer and I told my sisters how
Master Manners had tried to dishonour me, and that our father would pay no mind to the indignity I had suffered.

Margaret could hardly credit it but Mary, more used to the ways of men, not only believed my word but flared up with anger. ‘I will go and see Father now. How dare he tell you to hold your peace? Sees he not that a man who acts so before a marriage will be crueller afterwards? For marriage does not change men, believe me, it gives them licence to act in any way they desire.’ She took my hand. ‘Come, we will go together.’

We looked for my father all over. My grandfather thought he might be in the library. ‘For he has been making use of it often enough. Between ourselves, I think he finds Constance something of a scold and is spending many hours here.’

There was no sign, neither in nor out. Then Mary thought she heard the babe cry and went back up to discover. To my surprise she was nursing him herself. I was about to follow when I noticed a pile of my father’s belongings on a table next to the window seat where I had whiled away so many childish hours reading. Mostly these were documents and leases, papers for his work as justice and as sheriff. Yet beneath the undermost book I spied a parchment, sealed and folded over, as letters are. It was addressed to me.

My breath raced and I almost dizzied as I pulled the letter gently out. For I would know that hand anywhere in the world. It was the same that had penned the verses my cousin Francis had stolen for me.

As I tore it open, my pulse pounding like a hammer in my head, I wondered whom my father had bribed not to give me the letter. Were there others I had not received?

At that I looked around the room yet there were no useful hidden drawers or places of easy concealment. Gently, since they were my grandfather’s most prized possessions I began to lift the books from the shelves, to search behind.

Yet there was naught there.

Until the last shelf of all. Appropriately, beyond a battered calf skin-bound copy of Ovid’s
Amores
, I found a pile of three or four more letters.

And each of them addressed in the same hand.

He had not forgotten me for the Countess of Straven after all. With quickening breath I hid the letters in the sleeve of my gown and hurried thence up the great oak stairs towards my chamber, where I broke the seal of the first and laid it upon my bed.

I sank down onto the covers, the joy in my heart like to a wild bird, long caged and at last released to sing its heart out in the lofty trees.

He had not betrayed me. Nor had he used me. His love, passionate yet perplexed, wholehearted yet haunted by my sudden silence, was as deep and profound as my own.

I was indeed his destiny. And he mine.

And now all I could think of was to get some message to him for I knew with utter blinding certainty that I could not now marry Master Manners, no matter what consequences might flow from my refusal.

All this I poured into my letter back to him. A sudden fear beset me that as in his own verse my silence might have made him think that ‘nowhere lived a woman true and fair’ and he might have sought consolation elsewhere.

Yet in that same moment I knew I wronged him. And also I saw that a letter was not enough, I must go and see him myself, even though my father still looked at me narrowly after my complaints over Master Manners. I knew my father wanted me married as soon as he could and would be watching me as a buzzard does a shrew.

So, quietly, discreetly, I laid my plans. London was still dangerous
and my father would not let me stay with Mary. Nor, with its new mistress, was there a place for me at York House.

Utter darkness began to descend upon me, and then, almost as I succumbed to it, I saw a distant chink of light. I would have to make myself so useful to my father that when next he went to the city he would agree to take me with him.