Love's Alchemy

by Bryan Crockett

  Anne hesitated. She had anticipated this question but somehow found the words difficult to form. Her stomach knotted, and tears pooled in her eyes. She gathered a deep breath before saying, “As a secret Catholic, I am afraid to go to him. He would want to know where Father Gerard stayed when I talked to him, and Lord Cecil might not believe me when I told him what I now swear to you: I know not the whereabouts of Father Gerard or any other Jesuit. Father Gerard was about to travel when I spoke with him, and he did not tell me where he is bound. Nor would he have told me if I had asked.”

  “So you fear Lord Cecil for yourself, and for the Jesuits.”

  “Yes. Lord Cecil would perhaps blame me and almost certainly blame them for this business. But they are not at fault. I thought that with your Catholic friends, you might make inquiries enough to learn this Guido’s whereabouts. You could then reveal these news to me, and my husband would do the rest.”

  The Queen rose from her chair, took a few paces, and stood looking out the window at the courtyard below before asking, “What makes you think I have Catholic friends?”

  “I do not know that you do, your Majesty. But Father Gerard thought it would be good for me to talk with you, if I could find a way.”

  The Queen turned and eyed Anne for a long time before saying, “I see. You ask me to take in hand a weighty affair of state, and to trust you with the same. Are not such things matters for men—for his Majesty, Lord Cecil, and the others in the Privy Council?”

  Hardly knowing how to reply, Anne said haltingly, “But we women. . . .”

  With a wry little smile the Queen said, “I have always found the—how do you say it?—the function— of ladies in affairs of state rather too—what is the word?—ah, circum—”

  “Circumscribed?”

  “Yes, I think that is the word. Circumscribed, or—how do you say?—limited. Do you not find the same?”

  “Oh, yes!” Anne said.

  “I will find out what I can. Expect to hear from me soon.”

  Jack sat at his mother’s writing-table. He dipped his pen but held it above the paper. He wanted to write a poem for Anne, but first it was time—long past time, in fact—to send a report to Cecil. Jack had not written since sending a short, uninformative note upon landing at Antwerp. What to write, though? He could report making contact with Sir William Stanley, and should Cecil use another of his spies to verify the account, the details of time and place would agree. Nor would the report put Stanley in any further danger than the man himself had already chosen; Stanley had long since declared himself the enemy of Protestant England. He was protected in the Spanish Netherlands, and in any case nothing Jack said in his report would prove damning. As for this Guido. . . . Jack held the pen, hesitating. Stanley had said Guido was in Rome with the English Jesuits. Almost certainly Guido’s life would be forfeit once Cecil learned his whereabouts, maybe even in the Catholic stronghold of the English College in Rome. Jack would have made up a little lie—would say perhaps that Guido had gone to the Jesuit seminary in Rheims—but like as not, Chute was also reporting to Cecil. Maybe even Burr could not be trusted. Cecil’s scheme for this whole venture seemed to rely on Jack’s finding Guido by using his wits. Chute’s commission, or even Burr’s, would be to kill Guido. What then had Cecil ordered the other two to do with Jack himself? Once the three companions found Guido, Jack would have to watch his own back. In the end he saw no choice but to tell Cecil the truth, trusting that when the time came he could protect himself. Maybe the Jesuits in Rome could help.

  Jesuits. Jack could hardly think the word without rankling. The very sound of it turned him queasy with the memory of his brother Henry’s last hours of agony. Yet now he found himself wondering whether his response accorded with the threat the Jesuit priests really posed. Were they in fact stirring England’s young Catholics to bloody rebellion? Or, as they claimed, did they risk their lives but to bring the sacraments to the faithful, whose souls pined and famished for their lack? Certainly Robert Cecil wanted him to think of Jesuits exactly as the twisted little man already thought of them: as fanatics who, in their blind allegiance to the Pope, threatened to bring England to its knees. But did the real Jesuits he had known match Cecil’s portrait? Father Gerard hardly seemed the wild-eyed firebrand. As for Jack’s Jesuit uncles, in childhood he had known his Uncle Ellis only through the priest’s letters to England and the stories Jack’s mother told. The letters were at once inspirational and witty, and Elizabeth’s tales were filled with nothing but her brother’s heroic resolve. But Uncle Jasper: Jack still wavered between remembering him as a thoroughly faithful Christian, willing to risk all for his Lord and Church, and a showy leader careless of the lives of the young men he stirred to supposed martyrdom.

  In the failing light, Jack gave up trying to write to Cecil. He turned to his mother as she sat at the hearth. Sir William Stanley had left soon after the game of Primero, and Burr and Chute had gone to bed. The fire smoldered in a few smokeless, blue-gray embers. The only light came from a lamp that had begun to sputter, its oil all but spent. “I want to ask you to do something for me,” Elizabeth said.

  “Of course. Anything.”

  “There is a treasure of untold value I have kept hidden hereabouts for some dozen years. Much trouble went into getting it to me here, getting it out of England. Still, our hope is that one day, in happier times, it will return to its home. For now, though, I would ask you to take it to the English Jesuits in Rome. Give it to Father Parsons there; he will know what to do with it.”

  “Of course.”

  “Wait here.” She disappeared into her bedroom and closed the door behind her. Jack sat for what seemed a long time. He knew by the glow beneath his mother’s bedroom door that she had lit a lamp. A few minutes later he heard her turn the key to another door, or perhaps to some piece of locking furniture. She returned to the fireside with a plain but well-made wooden box, a cube that just fit in her slender lap. She inserted a brass key into a lock in the box’s side. She lifted the lid, gently folded back some cloths inside, and carefully handed the treasure to Jack.

  The first thing he noticed was the smell, at once musty and bespiced. Tilting the lamp a little to see by the faltering light, he peered into the box. It took him a heartbeat or two to make out the contents. The instant he did, he nearly dropped the box. Staring up at him through vacant eyes—or holes where eyes used to be—lay a human skull. Three small patches of skin and hair still clung to the crown and the sides of the head; the aromatic scent must come from some mummifying preservative in the cloth.

  “What—who—is this?” he asked. He stared at his mother, whose expression was peaceful, even beatific.

  “It is a relic of wondrous power,” she said. “Through it—through him—many prayers have been answered, my own prayers and those of others. He has already blessed me beyond all reckoning. After my prayers yesternight I received assurance that it is time to turn him over to the holy fathers. My plan was to return him to England, had King James kept his word. But hopes for that are past. One day I think he will once again see English soil, but for now take him to Father Parsons in Rome; your sojourn to that holy city is providential.”

  “Perhaps,” he said drily. “But whose head is it?”

  “Have you not guessed? This is our kinsman, Sir Thomas More.” The lamplight was nearly spent, but still his mother’s face seemed to glow.

  Thomas More. Jack’s great-great-grand-uncle, or a piece of him—the man whose smooth forehead had sheltered perhaps the most brilliant mind in England, whose eloquent lips had amused the learned with their wit and moved the mighty with their counsel—now gaped stupidly at his latter-day kinsman, a few ragged teeth hanging here and there along the jaws. One of the missing teeth had split between Jack’s two Jesuit uncles, both gone now to their graves. And More himself was reduced to this. Well, all flesh is grass, Jack reminded himself, even Thomas More’s. And bone is only tougher grass. Still, the more Jack peered into the casket in his hand
s, the more the bones seemed to take on a tremulous light, the faintest whisper of a greenish gleam, along cheekbone and jaw. A mere trick of the sputtering lamp, perhaps. Or was it something more, something Elizabeth’s luminous eyes devoutly beheld? What manner of man did these empty sockets and thin-boned jaws bespeak? Faithful martyr or mere fool?

  Thomas More. Maybe a riddling poem lay in the name. Thomas. Thom: Hebrew for fathomless depth, or Toma: Aramaic for twin, for mere redundancy. A twinned, split tooth, nothing more. More. Mehr: Teutonic for something beyond what lies in hand, orMoros: Greek for fool, as the good Sir Thomas well knew. A fool for Christ—a saint someday, perhaps—or a mere fool for the Pope: a worldly pontiff if the world had ever seen one. Pope Paul III, the one who fathered three bastard children, the one who dispatched the nettlesome Ignatius of Loyola by making him head of a new religious order: the Jesuits, with all their missionary zeal.

  For the thousandth time dark doubts troubled Jack’s mind. There had been a time when he would have gladly gone the way of More: would have tossed away his own life for the sake of the Holy Catholic Church as frankly and as cheerfully as had his kinsman. In those days the Holy Virgin often graced Jack with her love, assuring him more than once with the same divine message that had brought comfort to Julian of Norwich two centuries before: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. He had believed the promise with his whole heart. Yes, there had been such a time. Then he had left that church for another, convinced that the leaving of it was God’s will despite the hurt it cost his mother. After all, had not Our Lord said that he who would not spurn father and mother for the sake of the Kingdom of God was unworthy to be a disciple? Yet at any point would Jack Donne have given up his life, smilingly or otherwise, for the sake of the Church of England? He doubted it. Had he merely taken the easy path in abandoning the forbidden church for the officially sanctioned one, all the while fooling himself into thinking he was doing God’s will? Had he in truth played the traitor to God, to the Catholic Church, to the Jesuit order, to his own family, perhaps to his innermost self? Were the very bones of his kinsman Thomas More mocking him with their mindlessly maniacal grin? Did they taunt him while they revealed to his mother the viridescent promise of a glorified, resurrected body? Here she sat without a trace of accusation, with nothing but love in her eyes. In that moment Jack felt utterly unworthy of that love, felt himself nothing but a traitor to her and to so much else: a hired henchman of Robert Cecil, the twisted little lord who leered after Anne More. Maybe the gibbous-backed schemer was seducing her even now.

  From aught that Jack could read or hear of him, Thomas More never felt such doubts. Even at the end, when More’s prison-weary legs could hardly bear him up the steps to the scaffold, he remained the faithful jokester. To the lieutenant he said, “Pray, sir, see me safe up; and as to my coming down, let me shift for myself.” Then he told the crowd—some jeering, some weeping—that he died the King’s good servant but God’s first. Next, after reciting the Miserere mei psalm and heartily forgiving the huge, hooded executioner, he looked up and reminded the man, “My neck is very short; take heed therefore thou strike not awry.” Last, he stayed the axe-man just before the fatal blow and draped his beard over the front of the block. “For it has committed no treason,” he said. The hooded man did his work. Mercifully, one blow was all it took.

  Then, through all the vagaries of chance or all the persistence of faith, the blessed head had tumbled into the box in Jack’s hands. Before that, he knew, More’s skull had served its month at the end of a pikestaff on London Bridge. How then could scalp or hair remain, even in these leathery patches? A miracle, Jack’s mother would say. Or perhaps nesting season was simply over, and the gulls on the Thames no longer had need of it. Or maybe this good woman before him, her face somehow still aglow, had been duped. Maybe the bones in the box belonged to someone else: not the jesting, other-worldly martyr More but some thick-witted, plodding plowman whose shock at leaving the earth remained imprinted on the bones. Well. There was no good in suggesting such things to her. She believed, and that was enough. “Of course I will take this relic to Father Parsons,” he said.

  Elizabeth placed her hand on his, saying, “I am now certain: one day these bones will return home to England. Maybe sooner than we think.”

  Jack doubted it. Almost to a man, these Jesuits—Robert Parsons not the least of them—proved as shrewd in the affairs of earth as eager to hasten their trip to heaven. Once the Jesuits at the English College in Rome possessed as lucrative a relic as the head of Thomas More, emblem throughout Europe of Catholic learning and faith in an age of tyranny, they would not part with it lightly—not even to send the bones home.

  “And one thing I ask of you,” Jack said. “You are known in England and abroad as a faithful Catholic and a great friend to the Jesuits. And to my shame, I—your only living son—am known all too broadly as an apostate to the Church of Rome and a disgrace to an illustrious Catholic family.” She started to protest, but he silenced her with a look that she seemed to register even in the faint, flickering light. “Do but this: write me a letter I may show to whatever Catholic I find. A letter of assurance that I have repented and have heartily sought the forgiveness of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and the Blessed Virgin.” He crossed himself.

  She gripped his hand and said, “Of course.”

  Feeling as if he had just betrayed her, Jack lifted her hand and kissed it, Judas-like, then folded the scented cloths back over the skull. He closed the casket and set it aside. His mother’s eyes retained their glow. She said, “A marvel, is it not?”

  “Yes,” he replied, even as his thoughts turned to the practical difficulties of transporting the skull. He had hoped to use Chute’s money to see something of the Continent: to take his time riding through France, over the Swiss Alps, and into Italy. But it would hardly do to jog along a-horseback with Thomas More’s skull in a box. Even if highwaymen ignored what would surely look like a treasure chest, however Jack tried to disguise it, More’s bones would be jostled to bits by the time he got to Rome. Nor would the skull fare much better without the casket. The overland journey would have to wait. Neither Chute nor Burr would welcome the news that the three travellers would have to sail, but there was no help for it. “Yes,” he repeated, trying to muster some semblance of sincerity, “it is a marvel.”

  The lamplight was completely gone now. Jack sat in the dark, absently tracing his fingers along the plaits of the hair-andleather band on his wrist. For a moment he thought he caught a glint of light off a strand of Anne’s hair. Maybe the bracelet could furnish the conceit for the poem he wanted to write for her. Or—he felt the bracelet—maybe a poem for Lady Bedford. Or both, in two versions centered on the same conceit. Anne wouldn’t like the idea, but need she know of it? He felt the stirrings of discomfort at the thought of upsetting her or hiding anything from her, but did he not need to consider his livelihood when the whole business with Cecil was finished? Was not Lady Bedford’s patronage his most promising means of supporting his wife and children?

  The more he thought about it, the angrier he grew. Who was Anne More to tell him what he could and could not write? Had he not remained faithful to her these three years and more? If jealousy about his relations with Lady Bedford distressed her, what was that to him? After all, he had never given his wife cause to doubt him—had never so much as reached out a hand to touch Lady Lucy—had only written some verses for her, some poems with clever intimations of seduction. The Countess liked such poetry; it pleased her—stirred her to passion, perhaps, without paying passion’s price. All she paid was money. Money was the object for Jack, and what was money to Lady Bedford? It was all part of the courtly game of patronage. Clearly, she liked the part she played. She liked to think of herself as the distillation of all that men desired. Did Anne not understand that? True, at times Lady Bedford seemed willing to take the game into her bedroom, would likely do so if Jack responded to her a
dvances. But he had piously refused to take that bait.

  Bait. He had used that very image in one of his poems for Lady Bedford:

  Let coarse bold hands, from slimy nest

  The bedded fish in banks out-wrest,

  Or curious traitors, sleavesilk flies

  Bewitch poor fishes’ wand’ring eyes.

  For thee, thou needst no such deceit,

  For thou thyself art thine own bait;

  That fish, that is not catched thereby,

  Alas, is wiser far than I.

  It was a poem, nothing more, and the Countess ought to know as much. Yet did she not continue to lure him, not just as poet but lover? And what had he done in response? Out of faithfulness to his ever-pregnant wife he had denied himself a delight any courtier would have seized. He let his head fall back, rubbed his eyes with finger and thumb. He forced himself to think of his children, of how much he missed holding them. Somehow he knew his anger at Anne was misplaced, was really anger at himself for betraying his mother. Or maybe it was lust for Lady Bedford disguised as anger.

  He shifted in his chair. Suppose he did not refuse the Countess the next time they met. Were there not far worse sins than bedding a woman like Lady Lucy? Surely her desire wanted quenching. And would she not remain discreet about a tryst with a man other than her husband, a man far beneath her in social rank? Even if the doltish Earl of Bedford discovered his wife with Jack, would the fool not easily enough be cowed into silence? Maybe Jack could even father hearty children for Lady Lucy in place of the misbegotten, abortive lumps the Earl had sired.

  After all, why should Jack Donne have to bear such a heavy burden for so little reward? Here he sat, chaste in his marriage as any Puritan, spurned by the Court, dispatched by a misbegotten Machiavel on a dangerous mission that forced him to live a lie for the good of his wife and children, and now charged with bearing a dead man’s pate into the very midst of the Romish thicket. Upon his return to London, did he not deserve a bit of dalliance with the likes of the dark-eyed Lucy Harrington, Countess of Bedford? He sat fuming.