The Lady and the Poet (53 page)

Yet I cared not for that.

He would be released and I thanked God for it.

‘Remember, Ann, I will have him freed, yet I can do no more. Your father is your father and I will interfere not in family matters. I lend no approval to this marriage.’

‘Yet it is a step to our reunion. If he is freed I ask naught else.’

His face softened into a wintry smile. ‘Ah, the optimism of youth. I have always valued Master Donne’s talents, though his ambition sometimes makes him blind, and while I would have wished you another husband, yet I can see the merits of this one. You will have a rough road, if ever you are allowed to walk it together.’

‘Yet each will have the other to watch and guide them. It is enough. Thank you!’

‘Then go and good luck. I will have him released to his lodgings this day. The rest is up to your father. And the decision from the Court of Audience.’

Though the weather was now foul, and the stinking mud caught on the hem of my gown, and my best red shoes were spoiled, yet my soul soared. He was to be freed this day! The road to our reunion might be long and hard but at least it would be possible.

I judged it better not to tell my father I had been behind his back to visit the Lord Keeper.

When Wat arrived with the good news of his release I pretended ignorance along with my joy.

Wat stood, his face beaming like a cat at Christmas when it is given its share of festive goose. ‘I bring you word from my master,’ he announced. ‘He is confined to his lodging, yet that is so great a change for the better that it is not to be complained of.’ He dropped suddenly to his knees and grasped my hands tightly. ‘Oh, Mistress Ann, I did
truly fear for him, so sharp was his decline in that dire place. Yet now he is released, the Lord be praised.’

All day I bided my time and played the dutiful daughter, yearning to see him, yet knowing I must not if I were to win round my father, agony though it was. Instead I bid Wat tell him God had blessed us and that surely now it would not be long till He smiled on our reunion.

I was surprised when my father returned early from Parliament and asked if I and my grandmother wished to take the air abroad with him at Whitehall.

In the Whitehall Gardens we felt the first feathery fingers of spring dance across our faces and although it was madness, for I knew him confined to his chamber, I yearned to catch a sight of my husband. Many fine gentlemen promenaded through the gardens, dressed as he would be in lace collars and deep black hats, yet none was he.

Next to the gardens stood a small graveyard where, to my surprise, we spied the Countess of Derby, the Lord Keeper’s new wife, contemplating tombstones.

‘Sir George!’ She greeted us like long-lost kindred. ‘A pleasure to see you! I am glad indeed to hear of Master Donne’s release. He is a man of myriad talents. Indeed I intend to commission some verse from him to mark my daughter’s wedding feast.’

My father, ignorant of the speed of events, looked as if struck by a bolt of lightning that had deprived him of his speech.

‘Has the thought struck you, Sir George,’ the Countess mused, ‘that Master Donne’s verse might live on long after the rest of us have spun our last thread? That it may be
his
tombstone future generations seek out?’

My father fell quiet at that, not even railing against the Lord Keeper allowing his release.

My grandmother nudged me in the arm. ‘Your father has been struck by the notion of immortality, and whether having Master Donne as his son might offer it more securely than a month of mumbling paternosters.’

Yet what caused the wind truly to change was the rumour that our marriage was to be declared valid after all. Mary came to visit and said that, since we were to be husband and wife after all, all the talk
now was that my father had behaved rashly and to his own disadvantage, and seeing this my father had asked the Lord Keeper to reinstate my husband.

For my own part, I dared not hope, but played the dutiful daughter, as quiet and obedient as my sister Frances, and I prayed.

Easter came early, with its penitential stations of the cross, which suited my sombre mood. My grandmother, restless and eager to be back with the chickens she had left in the care of Hope and Stephen, grumbled, ‘Will he never unbend yet stick as stubborn as some old-fashioned schoolmaster to the rules others have long since abandoned?’

And then, on the twenty-seventh of April my father called me into his closet and, looking up from his parliamentary papers said, ‘Daughter, there is one below who wishes to speak with you.’

Slowly, lest the dizziness in my head should send me sprawling, I descended the steep staircase towards my father’s small library.

A man stood in it, alone, his face hidden by a large black hat.

He turned at the sound of my step.

And there, after so many long months apart, a smile of joyful longing lighting up his features, stood my husband.

AFTER THE PAIN
and the uncertainty, even the fear of death in that dank cell, when the limits of my courage and resolve had been tested, I had thought this moment would have been our crowning glory.

Yet now my spirit deserted me and I felt a sudden shyness.

We had overturned so much convention, and angered so many who were close to us, caused such scandal and gossip, risked so much for love, that the prize must be worth the cost we had paid for it.

What if he found me wanting, regretted the loss of his ambition or feared our fate would be too narrow and impoverished?

He stood before me, his beloved face more careworn, wearing a borrowed doublet for the occasion in thread of gold, his familiar black cast away.

And yet I found no words to speak to him.

Indeed I felt a strange relief when my father came into the room, strutting as usual, and no smile to bid us good luck on our way.

‘Well, Master Donne, you have your Ann. Be good enough to let me know your situation when you are settled in lodgings for I take it you have no property of your own?’

Even now, at this late hour, my father could not but twist the knife. Graciousness was not his way, especially in defeat, and he would do all he could to sour our joy.

To me, he reached out a hand as if I were for all the world a yeoman or a groom of the household leaving his employ.

‘Farewell, Ann. I have done well with my daughters, have I not? Mary married to a noble spendthrift and you to a penniless poet?’

I shook the hand, though I would rather have dashed it away from me. ‘Farewell, Father. I am sorry I am not the daughter you wished for. Yet you have a goodly wife in Margaret and Frances may yet prove the cream of us all. Perhaps she may still speak to you in your dotage.’

At that I turned and walked from the chamber. I had not even readied my possessions for my new life, yet I could not wait another moment in that mean and narrow house. My grandmother could send on all I needed.

Yet there she was, waiting in the hallway, a look of tender sadness softening the fierceness of her features. ‘Pay no mind to your father. He confuses love with blind obedience. He cares much now, yet his rigidness will soften when he hears the good things I know will be spoken of Master Donne.’

‘He may relent. I am not sure that I can.’

She pressed a bag of coins into my hands. ‘A wedding gift from my poor hens. They wish you very happy.’

At that I felt my throat close over, and tears begin to sting my eyes.

Prudence appeared behind her, with a basket containing a few of my possessions. She delved into her apron pocket for a small bundle which she handed to me with humble apology. ‘For your new home. Tis not much, mistress. A pillow slip I have worked with your initials and your husband’s.’ I looked down at the letters ‘A M’ entwined forever with ‘J D’ in scarlet silk, and the truth of my new situation enveloped me.

‘Thank you, Prudence. You have been a good friend.’ The tears began to run down her face at that, for servants rarely felt their employers’ kindness.

‘Thank you, mistress. We will miss you sorely.’

And then we were out in the muddy street. I was grateful that he had hired a coach for our departure, even though we could not afford it, for I wished to leave the house in Charing Cross, and my father in it, with all speed.

A thought struck me and I turned to John.

‘But where will our home be?’ I had sudden visions of us thrown onto the street with our meagre possessions around us. ‘Will Master Haines allow a wife to share your lodging?’

He shook his head.

‘Your cousin Francis bids us come to live at his house in Pyrford. It is not far from Loseley and your grandmother, and Francis promises there are many spare apartments. I will have peace and quiet for my writing and can help him with his accounts and any tasks needful of doing around the estate. Perhaps he is being kind, yet he says we will be the greatest help to him and Mary.’

‘Poor John.’ I touched his face gently. ‘You who hate the country so, and see it as the root of all boredom and all evil.’

‘That was without you. Now I shall gaily walk the meadows, adorning the cows with ropes of wildflowers and writing verse to sing the praise of farmyard fowl.’

I laughed at that, relief flowing through me that I appreciated his company as much as I had done before. ‘Mock not farmyard fowl.’ I chinked the bag of coins. ‘For they may be paying for this coach we ride in! Do we go to Pyrford now?’

At that he smiled a secret, lazy smile. ‘On the morrow. Tonight shall be our bridal night, so long awaited.’

‘And where will we spend this long-awaited bridal night?’

‘Wait and you shall see.’

I looked out of the window as we passed down the busy thoroughfare of the Strand and into Fleet Street up towards Ludgate Hill. I could see him shudder at the nearness to the Fleet Prison and was glad when the coach turned away towards Smithfield, drawing up at last outside the Rising Sunne, a quiet inn in Cloth Fair, hard by the church of St Bartholomew the Great.

I felt a certain disappointment at surroundings so modest and discreet for our first wedded night, yet told myself our luck was in being together at all.

The innkeeper, a decent-looking man, answered our knock and led us upstairs to our chamber. As he opened the door I almost gasped aloud, for the chamber was one of the most beautiful I had ever beheld, panelled in wood from floor to ceiling and everywhere I looked
were Turkey carpets in bright shades of indigo, blue and crimson, not just on the walls but on the floor also. The curtains were of great swathes of silk in russet and green, tied back with thick knotted ropes as if we were for all the world in a playhouse.

And everywhere were strange and unfamiliar objects, a pipe attached to a silver stand on which incense or some other spice burned; a spinning globe with all the new world marked upon it; and all round the bed hung small lanterns, their sides of coloured glass, with star-shapes cut from their silver holders so that all the room was jewelled with coloured light.

Yet the eye was caught most of all by the vast canopied bed, adorned with rich brocades and glowing velvet coverings edged with ermine and white fox.

He saw me look and then my eyes shyly turn away.

‘The chamber belongs to a sea-captain who stays here only between voyages.’

‘I have never seen aught like it before.’ I felt suddenly the need to chatter, to postpone the moment when, at last, we two would be truly man and wife. Instead I picked up a huge shell in dazzling iridescent blue.

‘From the Indies. The room is full of such treasures.’

My eye caught something familiar laid out upon the bed and then I smiled, my fear departing, for it was my own white linen nightgown.

‘Your tire-woman Prudence summoned Wat and sent it on before us.’

‘Yet, Master Donne, if I remember your verses aright, I should not need such a garment. Is it not full nakedness that is required to taste whole joys?’

He laughed and took my hands.

‘Was there ever such a one as you, my Ann?’

‘No, never. And I am sure if there was you would have found her, since you seem to have undressed every lady in London. And some, I fancy, who were less than ladies.’

‘Tut tut, such boldness in one so young. Sir George is well rid of you, I think. No wonder he relinquished you so easily in the end.’

I stopped laughing then, remembering the fear and the loneliness
of these three long years. ‘No, John, he did not relinquish me so easily. I had to fight him every step of the way.’

‘My sweet Ann, I know that. And now after all your struggles I have transported you to a meagre fortune.’

‘No, say not that. Our fortunes will be joined together from this moment hence. No such future could be meagre. Indeed it will be rich beyond imagining.’

He caught me to him then and lifted me onto the bed.

‘You are right,’ he told me merrily, ‘we will not need this chaste garment.’ At that he flung my nightgown to the floor and looked back at me, his smoky eyes darkening yet further. ‘Come, let us indeed remove that girdle and that spangled breastplate.’ And so we unlaced one another’s clothing until we lay side by side, each to each truly a new-found land.