by Maeve Haran
I knew he talked of the Ars Amtoria which indeed had brought a flush to my cheek when I delved discreetly into it, yet I pretended I knew not what he referred to.
‘If he thought you had read such passages of Ovid your father would choke on his plate of meats.’
‘But the Queen reads Ovid, Grandfather, and has done since she was my own age. My cousin Francis told me so. His father was her Latin Secretary so he must be right.’
‘The Queen can do what she likes. The same is not true of all her subjects. I hope I have done the right thing to encourage you to read as widely as I have.’
‘Of course you have, Grandfather. How can learning and knowledge ever be a bad thing?’
‘In men, yes. But women? Learning is dangerous in women; many say it makes them cunning, like foxes.’
I kissed my grandfather’s brow. ‘Then I will be cunning as a fox and hide my learning from all but you.’
‘I fear it will curb your taste for ordinary life.’
‘And frighten off husbands?’
‘God ordained women to be wives and mothers. It is an important estate.’
‘I know, Grandfather. Yet perhaps it might frighten off the wrong kind of husband.’
‘Your grandmother and I will miss you.’
I took his hand, all seamed with veins, and kissed it.
‘After all, who will be Ratcatcher in Chief when you are gone?’
The thought of Frances’ revelation about my suitor came into my mind, the one shadow on my newly sunny horizon. ‘Grandfather…’ The hesitation in my voice made him look up.
‘Yes, Ann?’
‘Do you know of a gentleman called Manners?’
The expression in his eyes, like that of a weasel with someone’s pet mouse in its jaws, told me all.
‘Ann, my Ann,’ he replied gently, the paper thinness of his skin suddenly reminding me of the skull in the portrait. ‘You have to wed some time. There is no other calling for a woman.’
I walked out into the grounds to imprint them on my memory. I loved this house, its peace and stark grey beauty. But I knew also that life was not as easy for others as it had been for us. I had seen the hordes of wandering beggars, driven off their land by enclosures for sheep, and how they ended up being shuffled from parish to parish, or chased away with sticks, since no one wanted to pay for their upkeep. Some of them ended up in the manor courts my grandfather presided over. I had witnessed the bad harvests also, four of them in cruel succession, that had blighted the life of the villagers, making them thin and pale and anxious, only kept from starving by the pigs they each kept in their small cottages.
Indeed there was so little corn that the Privy Council had instructed my grandfather as sheriff to impose a ban on the unneedful use of it in the brewing of strong beer and to order the closure of the many ale and tippling houses—an unpopular measure if ever there were one.
I knew that life in England was divided and nowhere so much as at the Court, where I would be visiting. And yet I could not suppress a thrill of excitement. London seemed not so much twenty-five miles away, as the other side of the world.
Life for me was about to change and I was glad of it because, truth to tell, now that Bett had become a married woman I knew even less what I wished or how I might achieve it.
I took one last look at the green valleys, the blackthorn hedges a froth of white as if for nature’s own wedding party, and sighed. Loseley was my childhood. The gilded glamour of London was both frightening and alluring in equal measure, and while I felt a shiver of excitement at the thought, it also filled me with fear, and the temptation, strange and contradictory though it might be, to stay here and remain a child forever.
Back in the house I called Prudence to help me with my packing. I had a fine new gown of leaf-green taffeta to wear in the city and a new kirtle the colour of burnished brass, both paid for by my grandmother. ‘Saved up by the offices of my good hens,’ she confided, and it was clear to me that this gave her extra delight.
In both manor house and hovel, money from egg laying belonged by tradition to the woman of the house.
‘Give thanks to my Buff Sussex bantams, the ones your grandfather said looked like drunken slatterns who would never lay an egg to save their lives.’ My grandmother’s stony face, which one of the dairymaids had whispered could turn the butter rancid, softened into a proud smile. ‘They have just started to lay again after their winter resting.’ She chucked my cheek. ‘My silly hens would be glad to have helped make you pretty. They knew there was no hope for me,’ she shrugged, laughing at the same time, ‘even if they laid for a lifetime.’
I held her to me at that, moved to my heart at her kindness. ‘Thank you, Grandmother. Not for this alone, but all you have done for me.’
I took one last look at the bedchamber I had shared with Bett since I was in short coats. I knew we two had been blessed. It is the custom for children, no matter how gently born, to be sent from an early age to be brought up in other people’s houses, so that they might learn the ways of their betters, and to further the advancement of their families. I was fortunate mine had waited so long to be paid back for their much-delayed investment in me.
I looked at the familiar bed with its green and blue hangings, the tapestry behind it of Ruth, standing exiled in her field of corn, and wondered if London would feel like the distant land Ruth had been sent to or a world of wonderful opportunity. I emptied the presses where I had kept my gowns and the coffers where my few jewels were stowed. The room had seemed mournful without Bett. Now Frances would sleep in it alone, giving it up to grander guests when any came to stay here.
‘See, Ann,’ Frances’ voice behind me made me turn, ‘I have made a parting gift for you to take to London.’
It was a package, all wrapped in silk with a ribbon I had seen in Frances’ hair.
I opened it to reveal a sampler, sewn with perfect delicate stitching, as neat and clear as if it had been illuminated by a monk in some long-gone abbey. I turned it over. The sign of good stitching is at the back. Mine looked always like a nest of vipers. Frances’ stitching was as perfect behind as in front.
‘Do you like the text?’ she asked me eagerly. ‘I found it in Grandmother’s book on needlework.’
I looked down at the sampler in my hand and read aloud:
‘Virtue is the chiefest Beauty of the Mind
The noblest Ornament of Womankind;
Virtue’s our Safeguard, our guiding Star
That stirs up Reason when our Senses err.’
I felt moved that she had taken so much trouble for me, and yet strangely shaken at the message she had chosen. It seemed to foretell of an adult world where virtue and the senses were forever pitched against each other in battle. A world I had not yet encountered. All of a sudden a frightening sensation flooded through my very soul. Was this a lesson I would one day need to learn?
‘Thank you, Frances. I will read your homily if ever my senses try to lead me astray.’
‘I am glad of it,’ replied my pious little sister. ‘I have heard that the Court is a very ungodly place.’
‘Then I will have to be doubly virtuous.’
And then my saintly sister took me by surprise.
‘I will miss you, Ann.’
I took her hand. Her face was so serious, her great dark eyes like those of a dog that watches, waiting for its master’s return. It would be lonely here for the last child, but then Frances was hardly a child at all, despite her tender years.
‘I know that great bed will seem empty at first. Bett and I were often glad of each other’s company on winter nights. Yet it is also a magical place, your own world, a castle, or a great ship, to take you off to wondrous places of your own imagining.’
‘I shall try to remember that on the darkest nights. Yet I am not one to yearn for ships and castles. I am happiest at home by the fireside. You are the fearless one, Ann. You can kill a rat or brave Father’s anger, and Grandmother’s sternness,
as if they had no power over you as they do over the rest of us.’
‘More fool me, perhaps, for they do have power over me. I have no house or money of my own. But I do have strength of will.’ I held her to me for a moment. ‘Though I am not sure it is always such a blessing. Come, help me take down my basket and we will ask the usher of the bedchamber to carry down the trunks.’
My grandfather and grandmother, together with Prudence, all the gentlemen servants and grooms, had gathered in the Great Hall to bid me farewell. My father had already arrived on horseback to accompany me to his sister’s house in London.
‘Goodbye, Ann.’ My grandmother kissed me on my cheek. ‘Some words of advice. Be chaste, silent and obedient.’
My grandfather was waiting behind her. ‘Be the first at least,’ he said to me softly. ‘Asking you to be silent and obedient would be like asking the stars not to shine in the sky.’
‘Goodbye, Grandfather.’ I felt a sudden wrench of pain and fear along with my excitement. All my short life my grandparents had been my rock, now I would have to sail into the treacherous ocean of womanhood alone.
Chapter 3
I FELT MORTIFIED that I had never visited London before.
My father went often, as a member of Parliament and to carry out his other official duties, and my aunt, Lady Elizabeth Wolley, the mother of my cousin Francis, lived in the capital for much of her time when she was not accompanying the Queen on one of her summer progresses. My aunt was a Lady of the Privy Chamber to Queen Elizabeth, second only in importance to the Ladies of the Bedchamber, and the Queen called my aunt her ‘sweet apple’.
We were fortunate that this year the weather had been dry and the road from Loseley to London was passable for my father and me on horseback, together with the carrier in his cart, so we avoided being bogged down by water or with mud. Last year there were floods and our neighbour Lady Montague needed six pairs of oxen to pull her coach from the mire each day to get to church. When we climbed the Hog’s Back near Guildford some three hours past, half the county was laid out before us, sparkling like a jewelled wedding veil, and our ride was broken only by the song of birds and the occasional cursing of the carrier when one of the wheels of his cart lodged itself in the narrow track.
How different from what we saw once we approached London.
We rode for a half-hour through Southwark, a wild area just south of London Bridge, inhabited by many foreigners and strangers, with bear pits and theatres, noisy clanging from a hundred workshops; courts and alleys thick with the stench of wine, piss and cooking fat. Everywhere there were stray dogs and huge bands of wandering children, many of them dirty and in rags that barely covered their decency, with great begging eyes, all clamouring with their hands up, saying, ‘Give us a groat, kind mistress,’ and making gargoyle faces and pretending to throw stones at us when we did not. And I was shocked at the sight of the oldest and poorest lying in the street on straw pallets but feet away from the filth of the midden. And everywhere yet more children.
‘Are there so many children on the streets as this always?’ I asked the carrier. ‘Have they no homes to go to?’
The carrier laughed. ‘Children are like vermin, mistress. They come out of the gutters and swarm everywhere. Sometimes I think we have more children in London than rats or fleas.’
As we approached the city the carrier, a native of Cheapside, dour as a pall-bearer until now, grew more and more cheerful so that by the time we reached London Bridge he was as gossipy as a wench at a wassail.
Near to the bridge, and from nowhere, a smell so overwhelming assailed us that I caught my breath. I, who thought nothing of whitewash mixed with pig’s blood or the odour of animal excrement spread over the fields by farmers, indeed who laughed at the town dwellers who covered their noses at it, found myself choking like a child with the whooping cough.
It was like nothing I had ever encountered. Rotting and rank. Fume laden. It smelled like the overflow of a thousand privies, burning the nostrils and making the eyes water. I thought of my precious Loseley with a flower garden and green meadows and wondered how our heaven could smell so different from this hell.
‘Aaah,’ said our friend the carrier, breathing in deeply as if he were scenting a batch of new-baked bread, ‘the London stink! Home!’
And then we were on the bridge. On every side of us the crowds swelled, not just with people but with herds of cows and flocks of sheep, all heading for the single entry to the great city, apart from by river, from the south.
But the stink was not the worst thing.
From the first gateway of the bridge, twenty skulls grinned down at us, all beheaded or executed for treason.
I was torn, half fascinated, half repulsed that we, a country that had produced art and song and poetry, could be guilty of such barbarism.
‘Only twenty of ’em! Not like the old days under her father,’ grunted our carrier with regret. ‘There used to be hundreds then. Made an example of, for taking arms against the Crown, to encourage the other nobles to keep their swords in their scabbards.’ He shook his head at the eternal folly of his betters. ‘Yet I’ve heard young gentlemen pointing up at them skulls and showing off with “That were my uncle,” or “He be my father-in-law,” as if it were something to be proud of that their relations ended up with their bowels on a skewer!’ He laughed and spat. ‘They’d better be careful, mind, or they’ll end up there themselves. Since the Pope made the Queen a heretic even the walls inform round here.’
I shuddered and looked away. We were so protected from such things at Loseley. Poor men that died for their beliefs, only to be the object of a cheap boast by their descendants. I remembered hearing the story about Thomas More, whose name we share and are distantly related to by marriage, a fact my father and grandfather chose often to forget. I remembered how his daughter did not boast but went secretly and took his head down from its pike. She must have been a brave woman. Would I do that for my father?
I glanced across at him, tiny and stiff-backed on his horse. I knew my father greatly disliked Papists and often spoke enthusiastically against them in the Parliament, yet I believed this was because he was a pragmatist rather than a man of principle, acting more out of frustrated annoyance that they could not see what was good for them than from any cruelty or love of doctrine. Yet recently he wrote his own personal defence of the protestant faith, A Demonstration of God in His Works, so I had to believe his religion mattered much to him.
It was a slow time to get the horses and the carrier through the jostling crowd. I tried not to stare like a country wench as we passed right under a house with four gilded turrets in the centre of the bridge, adorned with a dome and elaborately carved galleries which hung out many feet over the river. It was wonderful, a proper palace, but in miniature. Yet the idea of sitting in one of those galleries with such a sinister view of skulls would never hold an appeal to me. Perhaps Londoners got used to such sights, but I hoped I never did. To accept brutal death as normal in the midst of all this teeming life seemed to me a loss of humanity.
‘Nonsuch House,’ the carrier informed us, pointing out the miniature castle we were riding beneath, clearly delighting in having found an innocent such as I to ply with copious information. ‘Modelled on King Henry’s old palace, they do say.’
After the little palace we passed between tall houses, six storeys high, on either side of the bridge with haberdashers’ or mercers’ shops on the ground floor. I watched enthralled as the goodwives of London pushed past crowds and sheep and cows and ducks that had to walk so far to market that they wore leather shoes on their feet, to reach the shops in search of their ribbons and gewgaws.
‘Rich merchants,’ confided our friend the carrier. ‘They live above the shop. And there was a tale to tell in that one.’ He leaned towards me as if I hung on his every word and pointed to a long narrow house whose balcony stretched dizzyingly out over the water beneath. ‘Used to be lived in by Sir William Hewet, who became Lord Mayor
of London, great estate of six thousand pounds a year, he had, and a little daughter called Anne, just like you. One day the nurse was playing with her out of the window and dropped the little lass bang smack into the water. Everyone thought she’d gone to her Maker. Except this young lad who worked for Sir William, name of Edward Osborne. He jumped right in and rescued her. And do you know what?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘but I believe you are going to tell me.’
‘Her father gave him Anne in marriage and an enormous dowry.’
‘If it were me,’ I pointed out prosaically, ‘I would have punished the nurse first. I hope little Anne dried off and was old enough to consent.’
The carrier was disappointed by my lack of wonder.
‘And Edward Osborne,’ he added limply, ‘became Lord Mayor after him.’
‘This fellow’s stories are better than a play actor’s,’ commented my father, directing his horse out of the channel of filth that ran down the middle of the bridge.
The carrier looked injured. ‘God’s honest truth, your worship. I travel this way so often I make a habit of taking in my surroundings.’
We had come to one of three gaps in the line of houses on the bridge and suddenly, sparkling through the river mist, there was the white stone of the Tower of London, with dozens and dozens of wherries plying their trade in front of it, like a pond full of water boatmen.
Even in broad daylight the Tower evoked a sense of dread. I had heard enough whispered tales of the rack and other terrible fates that awaited men inside those white walls. It would have been in the Tower that all those men whose skulls were on spikes would have spent their last days. I shuddered at the thought.
It took us the best part of an hour to get across the bridge which measured but a third of a mile. We continued our passage down Fish Street and Bread Street, passing round the back of St Paul’s Cathedral, its spire still missing since it was struck by lightning many years ago. I craned my neck to see Paul’s Cross next to the great church, where the famous sermons were preached to crowds of thousands. From there we passed through Ludgate and across the Fleet Bridge into Fleet Street, still so thronged with street sellers calling their wares, sightseers come to see the cathedral or worship there, and more gangs of children, that our passage was slow indeed.