The room was not crowded, but the drinkers were noisy with merriment. Their clothes appeared to be dry; the stabler must have been the only one to arrive after the storm. He stood dripping and cold. But seasoned wood blazed in a big fireplace, and one chair near the fire stood unoccupied. The stabler ordered a tankard of ale from the tapster, then took the open chair. His clothes stuck to his skin. Soon they would be steaming. He rose to take off his coat, then sat again and spread it out on the floor before him. No doubt it would still be wet when he went to knock again at Owen’s door, but perhaps the fire would dry it somewhat.
Anne turned to Jack. “Come: I was on my way to show you something when we stopped here.” She took her husband’s right hand and led him down the hall, then opened the door to a room fragrant with blue and yellow flowers as well as potted herbs. They stepped inside. Constance, a head taller than Jack remembered her, looked at him as if some glimmer of recognition troubled her eyes. She darted to her mother’s side and clung to her skirt.
Little Jack smiled at him and went back to pounding one wooden block against another. Anne reached into a cradle and lifted out the sleeping baby. “This is George,” she whispered.
For the first time Jack looked upon his infant son.
The stabler glanced down at his soggy buckram coat steaming in the warmth of the fire. By the shifting light he could see the corner of the stranger’s letter protruding from a pocket. He pulled it out, intending to make sure it, at least, had dried by the time he left.
To his horror he saw that the ink on the cover-sheet had not held fast; only faint, smudged traces of it remained. Since the soaked cover-sheet had torn free of the seal, the stabler pulled out the note inside to make sure it could still be read.
But it was no better than the cover. No words remained; only black smears on the paper. To be certain of it, he stood and held the letter near the fire, closely examining the paper by its light. No, the message was entirely gone. The stabler was unlettered, but he could easily see that the learnedest in the kingdom could not discern a single word on the page.
Anne laid the sleeping child in Jack’s cradled arms, then turned to the maid-servant and said, softly enough not to wake the baby, “Judith, there is much bustle in the house, and I would have the children away from it and back at Pyrford Place. Pray you come with us.”
“Yes, my lady, if Lord Cecil—”
“You need not ask Lord Cecil; affairs of state have his whole mind, and in any case I give you my leave to join us.”
“Very well, my lady.”
“See whether you can arrange to have a coach carry us there.
Meet us in half an hour’s time in the gaming room.”
“Yes, my lady.” The servant curtsied and left the room.
Jack’s eyes glistened. “This child is beautiful. George. I am glad for your father’s sake you chose that name.”
“Well, my father has softened toward you. I have said nothing to him about it, but I think he guesses you have undertaken some dangerous task on behalf of the Crown.”
Jack looked at the sleeping child’s beatific face: perfectly formed lips, delicate ears, a nimbus of copper-gold hair. “A beautiful bairn. George.”
“Well: thanks be to God, the boy will have a father.”
“Yes, thanks be to God. But it is ’long of you that Cecil dare not now have me killed.”
“ ’Long of us both.” Anne picked up Little Jack, who let fall a bright blue wooden block and reached after it but did not make a stir when Anne turned him away. She led Constance, who still clung to her mother’s skirt, back to the gaming room. She meant to see whether Francis wanted to return with them to Pyrford Place or remain at Cecil’s house. The latter, she guessed: probably Francis would want to stay and try to mend his tattered bond with Cecil.
They had not been back in the gaming room for half a minute before a commotion arose down the hallway. There were footsteps—a good many of them—and men’s voices, along with a child’s. The regimental commander and two other soldiers entered the room, followed by a boy with a rust-colored cap and a woman in a dress of dazzling yellow silk. After them came three more soldiers. A fourth remained outside. He closed the door.
Jack did not want to betray any attraction to the striking woman who stood only a few feet before him; he made an effort to keep his eyes on the boy, a child of some nine or ten years.
Jack thought he had seen the lad somewhere. The child looked like a smaller version of Prince Henry, older son of King James and Queen Anna, but this boy’s features were softer, his expression cannier. Nor could the child be Prince Charles, younger son of the King and Queen; Charles was only four or five years old. A cousin, perhaps.
Jack exhaled heavily. Both princes—Henry, who must be twelve years old by now, and little Charles—would attend the new Parliament’s opening session. They were but children. Yet Catesby, Fawkes, and the rest aimed to blow them up along with everyone else. Well, not if Jack Donne could prevent it. He had shepherded Tresham’s letter to Monteagle into Cecil’s hands, and he had done what he could to spare the conspirators along with everyone else. But he would do more, if need be, before allowing the carnage Catesby and Fawkes intended.
The boy returned Jack’s gaze, then brightened and said, “Woodwose!”
Jack looked closely at the child. “Princess?”
The girl removed her cap, letting fall her long, dark hair. Wolley was looking at her as she did so. He hastily knelt, bowed his head, and said, “Your Highness.” Then others, including Jack and Anne, knelt. Lady Bedford made a perfunctory curtsey.
The Princess gazed around the room, nodded, and said, “Rise, one and all, and take your ease.” She turned to Jack and asked, “What happened to your face, Woodwose? Did a wicked sorcerer put some horrid spell on you?”
Lady Bedford asked, “Yes, Jack-a-napes, what did happen to your face?”
Jack turned to Lady Bedford. Her eyes were bright, and a half-smile teased along her lips. Sure his expression betrayed nothing, he said, “It was no sorcerer, but your old servant Timothy Burr. With a brick.”
“Burr? And with a brick? Why would he do such a thing?”
“We had a difference of opinion.”
Lady Bedford smiled. “Did he convince you?”
“That, like a brick, were a hard matter.”
“Well. You can both be hard-headed. I have not heard from that miscreant Burr in these several months. If you see him again, take your own brick to that thick pate of his, and it may hap the knock will put him in mind of his duties.”
Lady Bedford turned to Anne. “Ah, there you are; you’re the one I wanted to speak withal.”
“Oh?” It was only a syllable, but Jack registered a tautness in Anne’s tone.
Lady Bedford said, “I would speak with you alone.”
Anne hesitated before replying. Jack watched her, waited for her to speak. At last she said, “Jack will join us.”
“Will he?”
Jack sensed that Lady Bedford had turned back to him, so he met her gaze. Her face was now entirely unreadable, at least to him. Somehow he knew, though, that Anne was looking from rival to husband, no doubt divining what each must be thinking. Jack tried to keep his expression neutral. He thought it best not to look away.
“Very well, then,” Lady Bedford continued. “Perhaps there is no harm in it. I merely wanted to congratulate you both on your reunion after all this time. You must be delighted to find yourselves together again after so many trials and . . . such tumult!”
Anne hesitated, then said, “I thank you.”
“As do I,” Jack added. He could tell by Anne’s tone that she suspected some other motive beneath Lady Bedford’s words. Jack thought the same.
“And I especially want to thank you, Anne,” the Countess continued, “for letting me borrow your husband for some week or two.”
“You are kind to thank me, I suppose,” Anne said, “although I do not remember granting any permission tha
t would deserve your thanks. Nor did I even know, while you kept him, that my husband lived.”
“Owing to an impending attack, it was unwise to dispatch messages from Coombe Abbey, or I would have sent word to you immediately. But I needed a man to command the troops in my father’s absence, and your husband performed the task admirably. In fact, in all he did he was . . . masterful.”
Anne took a moment to gather herself as if recovering from a blow. Then she said, “Well. I am glad your father has returned and that all is well. And I understand your husband returned with him?”
“Yes. But in his absence your husband did all that mine might have done—and more. Really, his performance was breathtaking.”
Anne closed her eyes, then opened them, inhaled deeply, and said, “But he is here, now, as you say, and here to stay.”
“Well, it may hap I will borrow him again. I do like his poems, and I am sure he would very much enjoy my continued patronage.”
“It may hap,” Anne said briskly. “That’s for time to tell. As for now, though, I think Jack and I will return to Pyrford Place.”
“I see,” Lady Bedford said. “The Princess and I will remain here for a time; my father deems it unsafe to remain at Coombe Abbey. One of Lord Cecil’s spies has told us an attack there is imminent. In the meantime, I think I can speak for Lord Cecil when I say that you would be most welcome, Anne, to return to this house at any time. And the woodwose, here: I am certain he will be made welcome.”
Anne said, “We shall see.”
Jack quickly calculated his best course. Yes, his first duty was to get his wife and children to Pyrford Place, out of harm’s way. Once there, he would return to London to lead Cecil, if he had not already found it, to the undercroft. If the gunpowder had been discovered, Jack could hardly go to make sure the conspirators had fled; Cecil’s spies would be watching the buildings surrounding Parliament, and they would suspect his hand in the plot. Well, he had twice warned the plotters already: once with the message on the undercroft door and once with the note the stabler carried to Owen.
Lest Anne worry that Jack was returning to London for some tryst with Lady Bedford, he would tell her all—or all but the particulars of his time with Lady Bedford. Anne would worry about him but would insist that he do what he must to spare all those lives.
The fire had been fed and now blazed hotter than before. The stabler’s coat had all but stopped steaming: at last it was near to drying. The man belched his pleasure. He could hardly know that not a quarter of a mile away a second soaked note of warning, a note written by the same black-clad stranger, sagged from the shard of steel that fastened it to an undercroft door. The door was partly sheltered from the weather, but such was the force of the swirling wind that the wood was wet almost to the lintel.
At the instant the stabler tipped his fourth tankard of ale, the rain-soaked paper pulled free of its pin on the undercroft door and dropped into the flooded street, where the current hurried it toward the Thames.
The coach carrying Judith and the two older children to Pyrford House creaked slowly ahead. Although the storm had passed only half an hour before, the road was well drained and walkable, so Jack and Anne followed along behind. With his bandaged left hand Jack held the sleeping baby against his shoulder. The fingers of his right were interlaced with Anne’s as they walked side by side.
For a while they did not speak. At length Jack said to her quietly, “George. You named him after your father.”
“I did. Much as I misliked his treatment of us, I never left off loving my father.” Jack nodded, and Anne continued: “And he was most pleased with the name I chose. He attended the christening.”
“Did he. Praise be for that.”
“Praise be.”
They walked on in silence as the infant George slept against Jack’s shoulder. Still Jack held Anne’s left hand with his right. After half a mile or so he said, “I take it that were no mere ruse, then. Is it Queen Anna who keeps Cecil’s poem in her care?”
“Be assured she does. I took it to her at Whitehall yesterday. The Queen is a good woman, and she bears little love for Robert Cecil.”
His eyes beamed as he looked into hers. “Anne, you are a wonder.”
She smiled. “I will not deny it.”
Jack lifted her hand and kissed it. Their fingers remained interlocked. She asked, “To whom did you send the writ of annulment for safekeeping?”
“I had no time to send it.” Jack released Anne’s hand, reached into an inner pocket of his jerkin, and pulled out the writ.
Anne smiled. “Well. You almost make me sorry I hit you.”
“I do not doubt you are almost sorry. Anne, my head has suffered repeated battering these last long months. I fear the next man—or woman—who strikes me shall knock my pate clean from my shoulders. If that happens, I pray you retrieve my headpiece and keep it in a box under our bed.”
She put on a purse-lipped, concentrated look as she appeared to think carefully about the request, then said, “I suppose such a box could be found.”
“I thank you. Oh! And speaking of a head in a box, I have something—many things, in fact—to discuss with you about my doings of late.”
She looked up at him, and her eyebrows rose. “A head in a box, you say. Not your putative head under the bed, but a different one.” He nodded, and she continued, “Now, that is the sort of tale that should warm us on a winter’s night. Or chill us on a warm one.” They walked a few more paces. Then she added, “After all these long months of trouble there will be time for tales of that sort, God willing.”
“God willing,” Jack said.
Anne took his hand again, and they walked for perhaps half a mile in complete—and Jack thought contented—silence.
Then Anne pulled Jack from a reverie as she asked, “Is any of it true?” He thought he detected a hint of hesitant fear in her voice, as if she had found it difficult to ask the question.
“Any of what?”
“The things Cecil said about you: that you had turned Catholic. That you worked for a violent Spanish overthrow of England. That you . . . that Lady Bedford was more to you than a mere patron.”
He did not answer for a while, then said tenderly, “My love, I will tell you all. But now is not the time.”
Anne said nothing but released his hand and reached for the baby. She lifted the still-sleeping child and held him against her right shoulder, leaving free her left hand, the one that had been holding Jack’s right. They walked on as the coach rolled ahead. After a while she asked, “Have you turned Catholic?”
“No.”
“Do you work for Spain?”
“No.”
She nodded, and when Jack stole a closer glance he could see that her brow had contracted and her eyes had reddened. He felt something tug hard at his gut, but he did not let on.
They walked, and the carriage creaked.
After a time he reached his hand to take hers again. She glanced at his hand but did not take it.
She did not take his hand, but she walked close to him.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
What we know about the past is but a sliver of light in the broad beam of human experience. While Love’s Alchemy aims to do justice to that bit of bright light, it remains a novel, not a history. In the penumbra of history’s light I have freely invented some of the characters and great swaths of the plot. Time and again I have responded to the demands of storytelling first, history second. My hope is that the reader will approach Love’s Alchemy as a well-informed tale, not a chronicle or biography: a tale that yields a rich sense of the real-life brilliance of John Donne and the torments within him, of the beauty and the tumult of his times.
Post-Elizabethan England gave rise to a peculiar blend of politics, theology, and language that merged the old world with the new. John Donne was a microcosm of that world. We admire Donne above all else for his witty, sexy, stunning poetry, and it is right that we do. Yet his poems were never static; the ma
n was an inveterate reviser. Some of the poems embedded in Love’s Alchemy are presented just as we now know them, and some, or parts of some, are fictive trial runs, putative early versions of poems Donne would later polish into the gems that dazzle us today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An English professor at Loyola University Maryland, Bryan Crockett, PhD, teaches and writes about the interplay between literature and religion in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Marlowe, Jonson, and Donne. He has published a good many scholarly works. Love’s Alchemy, though, departs from the author’s usual academic writing. As literary fiction rather than literary scholarship, Love’s Alchemy aims simply to tell a good story: a tale of spying and intrigue, of faith and love.
When he is not spending time with his family, teaching, or writing, Crockett enjoys reading (of course), poker, playing in the surf, and working with his hands. In writing this novel and in a great deal else he has been aided immeasurably by his wife, Pamela Crockett, a teacher and artist. Pamela and Bryan live just outside of Baltimore. They have three quick-witted children, all of them with an artistic bent: Joe, Becky, and Rosie.
The author can be reached through his website at www.bryancrockettauthor.com.
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