The Good Wife
Page 29
At Christmas I will have a visitor. My little Owen, who I have not seen since he was eight years old, who is now a student of divinity in Oxford. Owen, who was buried with me in the clay and, like me, found. Is his hair still white, I wonder?
I parted with Talbot in Lancaster; he declared he had business in Richmond and headed north and east across the moors. He said that he would write to me, if only to tell me how I could have laced my hair with gold and rode in carriages to the courts of kings. ‘Do,’ I said, ‘write to me when you are famous, when you are sought by kings and emperors, when her majesty pleads with you to return to her from Poland and Bohemia.’
‘And to whom should I write, Jabez-Jane, what name?
‘Martha,’ I said, choosing, ‘Martha Stone, Widow.’
Historical Note
Many of the people and places in the book are real. Martha’s journey north and her perceptions of places she goes through echo John Leland’s travels (mostly undertaken in 1539) in his Itinerary, and follow the great Tudor maps of the counties of England by Christopher Saxton and John Speed, with their detailed charts of principal towns and cities.
Ovid brightened up the lives of Elizabethan school children who spent hour on hour translating Latin back and forth. I’ve used Arthur Golding’s wonderful verse translation of the Metamorphoses. It was published in the 1560s and is still available as a Penguin Classic.
Thomas Coningsby and Edward Croft are historical figures – eldest sons of families that vied for dominance in Herefordshire; from the late 1570s the rivalry grew increasingly violent, with skirmishes in Leominster, Hereford and even London. At least one man was killed. Hampton Court Castle in Herefordshire (which is well worth a visit), where the book opens, was inherited by Thomas Coningsby when a boy. He toured Italy with the poet Sir Philip Sidney, saw action as a soldier and acted as High Sheriff of Herefordshire. Towards the end of his life he founded a hospital in Hereford for veterans and servants. Edward Croft was the eldest son of James Croft of Croft Castle (now run by the National Trust). He appears to have been an unstable character. In the late 1580s he was charged with engaging a conjurer to bring about the Earl of Leicester’s death. Not long after he fled to the Netherlands to escape debt. He was disinherited by his father and did not return to England.
Elizabeth Stanley was the heiress of William Stanley of Hornby Castle, but far less is written about her than about her male relatives; her son William Parker, Baron Monteagle, was involved in the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. In 1582 it seems John Dee sent Edward Talbot to obtain books held by her husband Lord Morley after her father’s death.
Edward Talbot was indeed born Edward Kelley. Little is known of his early life, except that he was born in 1555 in Worcester and probably trained as an apothecary. He may have studied (as Talbot) in Gloucester Hall, Oxford. He is believed to have had his ears cropped in Lancaster around 1580 for forging title deeds or counterfeiting coins. There are other, wilder stories – he was indeed said to have attempted to raise a corpse. Then, in 1582, as Edward Talbot, he was introduced to John Dee, mathematician, philosopher and astrologer for Elizabeth I. Dee was involved in a spiritual quest; he used crystal gazers – scryers – to call and talk to angels. The Neo-Platonist and Hermetic ideas I give to Kelley/Talbot are close to those of Dee; the image of the world as a lyre comes from Dee’s Propaedeumata Aphoristica, published in 1568 in English, which Kelley might well have read. In Kelley, at last, he found a scryer up to the task. ‘Dee was a fool and Kelley was a knave,’ A.F. Pollard wrote in his chapter on Kelley for Thomas Seccombe’s Lives of Twelve Bad Men in 1894, but over the last few decades historians have taken Dee’s alchemical researches more seriously and, noted the brilliance and consistency of Kelley’s visions, which Dee meticulously recorded in his diaries.
The men worked in a close and fraught partnership for years. Dee’s diaries show Kelley to be a complicated man; a bully, a brawler and a charmer, given to intense fits of doubt, but also intensely ambitious. Perhaps at his instigation he and Dee left England for Bohemia and spent itinerant years talking with angels and haunting the courts of princes. He married, but reportedly hated his wife, even convincing Dee that the angels had instructed them to swap spouses. He believed, however, in educating women equally, hiring a distinguished Latin tutor for his stepdaughter Elizabeth Jane Weston, who became a celebrated neo-Latin poet. She regarded him as a ‘kind stepfather’.
At length Kelley broke away from Dee and turned to practical alchemy through which he acquired great wealth and fame, even becoming a knight of Bohemia. Increasingly, it was he and not Dee who became sought after across Europe – Lord Burghley petitioned him to come home to make gold for Elizabeth. Perhaps to keep him Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor, imprisoned him twice in a castle in Bohemia. Dee’s son Arthur reported that he died after falling from the castle walls, attempting to escape.
The poor, like Martha, or like Jacob, are, of course, not so well chronicled; all we have are songs and plays and stories.
Book Club Questions
How does Martha change across the novel?
What do you think are the key turning points for her? Do you think she makes good decisions?
What do you think of Kelley/Talbot? How much sympathy do you have for him?
In Martha’s world, superstition and the supernatural were very much part of everyday reality – is this still at all true for you?
Kelley/Talbot is a real historical figure who is believed to have had his ears cropped around 1580. Do you like fiction to weave in real historical people and events? How far is it important to be accurate?
As a man Martha has a level of freedom – of movement and of speech – that she could never have as a woman. How far is this still true today?
If Jacob had never left do you think Martha would have been content to stay in the village?
Do you recognise any of the herbal remedies which Martha uses? Do you use any?
Alchemy was as much a spiritual quest as a quest for gold. Kelley/Talbot’s words – ‘whatever is in the universe has order and harmony in relation to everything else’ comes from John Dee, Elizabeth I’s astrologer. The idea of the universe as a lyre is also Dee’s: ‘The entire universe,’ Dee wrote ‘is like a lyre tuned by some excellent artificer, whose strings are separate species of the universal whole.’ What do you think of these ideas?
Martha is drawn to Kelley/Talbot’s idea that identities aren’t fixed, but where he pursues golden perfection, she accepts earthy realities. Where do you stand?
The journey Martha covers opened up new worlds to her. The distance between the Welsh Marches and the north is nothing today, but do real differences remain?
Do you think Martha will ever see Jacob again? Will he be happy, do you think?
Acknowledgments
A great many people helped me write this book and I am grateful to all of you. Firstly, my friends and family for their patience and support; most of all my parents, Sarah Porter, Sarah Eisner, John Porter, Steve Roser, Tara McCullough, Kathleen Woodhouse, Jane Greenwood, Ros McCarthy and Sarah Warren. Thank you to my lovely agent Peter Buckman and the brilliant team at Boldwood. Particular thanks to Clare Mockridge for reading an early draft and improving my horse lore; to Lily Xia for trying to teach me not to splice commas; to Joe Xia, my first reader; to my fellow Scribblers Olivia Levez, Sarah Dukes, Mike Woods, Cathy Knights and Mel Dufty. Thanks ever so much to William Edmundson and Vicki Hunt (and Jack) for the space and warmth and friendship that restored us all this plague summer and gave me room to write. And most of all and always, thank you to Chris; for everything, but especially, this year, the shed.
Martha’s travels follow the beautiful, detailed early modern maps of Christopher Saxton and John Speed. For the life of Kelley/Talbot and his theories of alchemy I drew particularly on Deborah Harkness’s scholarship on John Dee; the lectures that introduced the Royal College of Physicians 2016 exhibition: The lost library of John Dee; Christopher Whitby’s PhD thes
is: John Dee’s actions with Spirits; The Diaries of John Dee edited by Edward Fenton and Benjamin Woollet’s biography of Dee: The Queen’s Conjuror. For the history of scrying I drew on Theodore Besterman’s: Crystal Gazing: A Study in the History, Distribution, Theory and Practice of Scrying. The Dictionary of National Biography was, as always, a great first source for all the historical figures in the book.
For Martha’s herbalism I culled Maud Grieve’s: A Modern Herbal (1931). I’m grateful to all the local tourist, history and folklore sites I trawled through to understand Martha’s journey – particularly when lockdown made real travel impossible.
More from Eleanor Porter
We hope you enjoyed reading The Good Wife. If you did, please leave a review.
* * *
If you’d like to gift a copy, this book is also available as a paperback, digital audio download and audiobook CD.
* * *
Sign up to Eleanor Porter’s mailing list here for news, competitions and updates on future books.
* * *
Explore Martha’s first adventure in The Wheelwright’s Daughter. You can buy it now by clicking on the image below. Or read on for an exclusive extract…
We would sit on the ridge, Sunday afternoons. On bright days, the shadows of the clouds sauntered over the fields bigger than churches, with no weight or noise at all, making their way wherever they wished and no one to stop them, not night nor hunger. ‘Look, Owen,’ I would say, ‘there’s the whole world lapping at our feet,’ and he would believe me.
Often the men would be at the butts by the chapel, practising with their bows, and sometimes in the summer there’d be dancing, though like as not we’d be down with them then, watching the boys vie to dance with Aggie. They passed me by – spiky Martha Dynely, skulking by the hedge – but that was no matter, Owen was as handy for a partner. Once in the set you take what hand is offered you.
I loved to dance. I loved the whirl and the stamp of it, especially in the open air, with the line of the hill steady above and around you like a mother’s arm. The boys could go hang. They laughed at me because I had a way of closing my eyes to my partner, of being alone with the fiddle and the steps. One time Jacob Spicer put out his foot to trip me as we weaved the Black Nag. The grass bounced me back and I laughed in his face, then I grabbed Owen’s hand and we ran off towards the slopes. We didn’t look back till we were out of breath, till the crowd was none of them bigger than my thumb. How close we dance to the graves, I remember thinking, and I did not like the thought, so I turned away to the hill that sat heavy and still like the frame in one of the paintings at the Hall, bounding the scene and fixing it for ever. If I close my eyes I see the picture: folk around the chapel at their jigs and talk, me and Owen running up the slopes, with the ridge and fields piled about us.
It was all I had known since I was a tenderling, when my grieving father had brought us here. Every day I trotted after my grandmother and she taught me the names of plants and how to use them. It was only after we had laid her in the earth that I began to notice the world and our footing in the village. I was unhappy, but my unhappiness felt as familiar as the red soil that lined our nails and stained the hems of our garments brown as old blood. I dreamed of escaping the fields and flitting over the horizon; I had no sense that the horizon itself would fall. That I might bring it down.
When I think back I don’t know where to begin. The slip did not happen all at once; there was some pulling at the stitches before the cloth gave way. One night in the last month of the year I lay down in my bed and called on my dead mother and woke to the noise of a terrible rending. I threw on my cloak while my father lit a lantern, then we hurried outside. The noise had gone as if it had never been, but through our feet we felt the earth softly shudder. The wind blew out the lantern and we saw it: the road ripped open. The earth itself had come undone. I felt in my heart at that moment that I was answerable for this undoing of the earth. I had picked at the threads and they had come loose.
A curse unpicks God’s work. That’s the truth of it. Words pelt out of our mouths and we think they are gone when the sound dies, but they are not. They hang in the air, or puddle at our feet, biding till they can start their cankering. Some trickle into the earth itself, joining whatever evil lingers there; some flow back to the sayer, smiling as they sour the blood. That autumn was full of rain and cursing. My father’s cursing as he blundered drunk through the workshop, marring his work, and my curses that I threw at the air and at my neighbours. The curses I called out in the chapel.
About the Author
Eleanor Porter has lectured at Universities in England and Hong Kong and her poetry and short fiction has been published in magazines.
* * *
Follow Eleanor on social media:
About Boldwood Books
Boldwood Books is a fiction publishing company seeking out the best stories from around the world.
* * *
Find out more at www.boldwoodbooks.com
* * *
Sign up to the Book and Tonic newsletter for news, offers and competitions from Boldwood Books!
* * *
We’d love to hear from you, follow us on social media:
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Boldwood Books Ltd.
* * *
Copyright © Eleanor Porter, 2021
Cover Design by Becky Glibbery
Cover Photography: Shutterstock
The moral right of Eleanor Porter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologise for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
* * *
Paperback ISBN 978-1-83889-531-0
Large Print ISBN 978-1-83889-530-3
Hardback ISBN 978-1-80162-560-9
Ebook ISBN 978-1-83889-532-7
Kindle ISBN 978-1-83889-533-4
Audio CD ISBN 978-1-83889-525-9
MP3 CD ISBN 978-1-83889-526-6
Digital audio download ISBN 978-1-83889-527-3
Boldwood Books Ltd
23 Bowerdean Street
London SW6 3TN
www.boldwoodbooks.com