The Lady and the Poet

by Maeve Haran

  I sat up at that, wondering how it could come about that a marriage could thus take place without consent and not be challenged.

  And I could not help but wonder how the upheaval affected Master Donne and whether it might engulf him also.

  Mary, with the sharpest wit of any of my sisters, read my mind. ‘Master Donne has his hands full trying to keep the peace between them and to persuade his employer that the Countess married him not just to have his skills and position on her side in her many lawsuits, but out of affection also.’

  ‘It sounds a weighty task.’

  ‘She has brought forty servants and it is costing him, so he complains, £650 a year to house and pay them all. And of course her servants want to have the mastery over his.’

  I was sorry to hear it, thinking of the kindness of Joan and Mercy, and Thomas the steward. I wondered if even Wat had been affected, though no doubt he lived with Master Donne in his lodgings.

  ‘And my lord Essex is still in deep disgrace,’ Mary confided, greatly enjoying her role as the purveyor of bad news. ‘The Queen did not renew his monopoly of sweet wines and he faces utter ruin.’

  Margaret, not one to often gossip, leaned in towards the fire, her voice a whisper as though even here, twenty-five miles from the Court, the Queen’s spies would be listening, ‘My Thomas says the Earl will foment sedition now he is deprived of his generous income. He wished me to come here that I might be away from London, fearing there might be some great uprising there.’

  ‘Surely Thomas fears unnecessarily?’ My thoughts were suddenly for the safety of Master Donne. ‘Does the Earl have so great a following?’

  ‘He believes he can call on the support of the trained bands in the city. They think him a hero still, or so he supposes. They are unhappy that the Queen still names no successor. Bad for business, Thomas says, and creates an instability.’

  The image of Queen Elizabeth, her wig awry, in that borrowed dress from Lady Mary Howard, so short her stockinged feet stuck out like a scarecrow’s, came into my mind. She had seemed an old woman even then.

  ‘Nick says Essex is no threat,’ Mary disagreed. ‘Except to himself. He will lose his head on Tower Hill if he minds not what he does.’

  I shivered at that thought. Would the Queen ever take such action against the man she had loved for so many years, though he was thirty years her junior?

  Mary caught something in my face, some sadness or inattention to London gossip. ‘And how fare you? Has the handsome Master Manners yet melted your heart?’

  At that I could contain myself no longer and I told my sisters how Master Manners had tried to dishonour me, and that our father would pay no mind to the indignity I had suffered.

  Margaret could hardly credit it but Mary, more used to the ways of men, not only believed my word but flared up with anger. ‘I will go and see Father now. How dare he tell you to hold your peace? Sees he not that a man who acts so before a marriage will be crueller afterwards? For marriage does not change men, believe me, it gives them licence to act in any way they desire.’ She took my hand. ‘Come, we will go together.’

  We looked for my father all over. My grandfather thought he might be in the library. ‘For he has been making use of it often enough. Between ourselves, I think he finds Constance something of a scold and is spending many hours here.’

  There was no sign, neither in nor out. Then Mary thought she heard the babe cry and went back up to discover. To my surprise she was nursing him herself. I was about to follow when I noticed a pile of my father’s belongings on a table next to the window seat where I had whiled away so many childish hours reading. Mostly these were documents and leases, papers for his work as justice and as sheriff. Yet beneath the undermost book I spied a parchment, sealed and folded over, as letters are. It was addressed to me.

  My breath raced and I almost dizzied as I pulled the letter gently out. For I would know that hand anywhere in the world. It was the same that had penned the verses my cousin Francis had stolen for me.

  As I tore it open, my pulse pounding like a hammer in my head, I wondered whom my father had bribed not to give me the letter. Were there others I had not received?

  At that I looked around the room yet there were no useful hidden drawers or places of easy concealment. Gently, since they were my grandfather’s most prized possessions I began to lift the books from the shelves, to search behind.

  Yet there was naught there.

  Until the last shelf of all. Appropriately, beyond a battered calf skin-bound copy of Ovid’s Amores, I found a pile of three or four more letters.

  And each of them addressed in the same hand.

  He had not forgotten me for the Countess of Straven after all. With quickening breath I hid the letters in the sleeve of my gown and hurried thence up the great oak stairs towards my chamber, where I broke the seal of the first and laid it upon my bed.

  My sweetest lady,

  It is three months since last we met and your silence chills my heart. I am like the bleak landscape of winter, with no hope of spring until I hear from your own hand that I am not entirely forgot. I have told myself all the reasons that have stayed your hand from picking up a quill and it has brought no more comfort than a condemned prisoner finds who sees his chamber swept and made clean and yet is still in prison. You have all liberty with me, all authority over me, for you are my destiny.

  J. Donne

  I sank down onto the covers, the joy in my heart like to a wild bird, long caged and at last released to sing its heart out in the lofty trees.

  He had not betrayed me. Nor had he used me. His love, passionate yet perplexed, wholehearted yet haunted by my sudden silence, was as deep and profound as my own.

  I was indeed his destiny. And he mine.

  And now all I could think of was to get some message to him for I knew with utter blinding certainty that I could not now marry Master Manners, no matter what consequences might flow from my refusal.

  All this I poured into my letter back to him. A sudden fear beset me that as in his own verse my silence might have made him think that ‘nowhere lived a woman true and fair’ and he might have sought consolation elsewhere.

  Yet in that same moment I knew I wronged him. And also I saw that a letter was not enough, I must go and see him myself, even though my father still looked at me narrowly after my complaints over Master Manners. I knew my father wanted me married as soon as he could and would be watching me as a buzzard does a shrew.

  So, quietly, discreetly, I laid my plans. London was still dangerous and my father would not let me stay with Mary. Nor, with its new mistress, was there a place for me at York House.

  Utter darkness began to descend upon me, and then, almost as I succumbed to it, I saw a distant chink of light. I would have to make myself so useful to my father that when next he went to the city he would agree to take me with him.

  I would begin my plan that very night. Yet, if he were not to be suspicious of me I must put my cherished letters back where I had found them.

  This I did with the greatest misery, wishing with all my heart to keep them close to me, to give me strength.

  I would have to carry the contents in my heart.

  I raised the last letter to my lips and could not stop the tears falling, smudging his life-giving words.

  Afterward, when I had hold of my emotions, I went to look for my father, carrying a posset of spiced ale.

  ‘Here, Father.’ I set it down next to him in the library as I used to do with my grandfather. ‘It is late and you have been working a long time on that great sheaf of papers.’ Indeed, lately he had been spending more time at Loseley, both to escape Constance and to begin the business of relieving my grandfather of duties that he was beginning to find too arduous. It was hard to believe that Grandfather was nearing eighty and still Sheriff of Sussex and Surrey.

  ‘What is this trick, Ann?’ My father looked up suspiciously. ‘You have never been so careful of my health before?’
/>   ‘It seemed to me that you looked tired, that is all.’

  To my surprise he took hold of my hand. ‘Ann, when I seem harsh, it is but for your own good.’ His eyes fixed on mine with a rare sympathy. ‘You have a keen mind that likes to question, yet man is most content when he follows God’s holy ordinance and does what is decreed that he should do.’

  I almost replied that it was not God who decreed I must marry Master Manners but himself. Perhaps he thought both were the same.

  I kept my eyes meekly downward. ‘I have watched this burden of State business grow on you, Father, and would like to use my keen mind to aid you. You seem always to have so much to peruse as commissioner and justice and member of Parliament and yet I know you do not like to trust such affairs to a secretary.’ I knew the real reason my father employed no secretary—as the Lord Keeper employed Master Donne and others—was because he wished to avoid the expense, though it were one he could well afford. ‘If you thought me apt enough, perhaps I might read your petitions and divide the wheat from the chaff, so that you could devote your time to the issues closest to your heart?’

  He said naught, and yet I knew this to be a good thing. If he adopted my suggestion it would have to be as though the idea came not from myself but him.

  ‘Good night, Father.’

  And so, over the coming weeks, slowly and surely, I took on the role of my father’s secretary and amanuensis. And without seeming to have agreed to the process, my share of his load grew subtly greater.

  To be honest, it was a role I relished. It both took my mind away from its burden of misery and proved of more interest than I would have guessed. And soon I vow no lady in the realm, save Her Majesty, and possibly not even she, knew more about the evils of horse stealing, the production of kerseymere, the prosecution of recusants, and—my father’s favourite topic—the ungodly expansion of alehouses.

  I think my grandmother, ever sharp-eyed, guessed there was another motive behind my sudden dutiful manner, yet did no more than raise an eyebrow and said naught. She had often been the quietest of my family where Master Manners was concerned.

  With every day that passed I began to think my plan would work, and that if Master Manners’s father had not yet given his agreement by the time my father returned to London, he might yet take me with him.

  And then something happened I had never counted on in the joyful expectation of my young life.

  I fell ill.

  At first my head ached and the joints of my limbs pained me so that I could not stand. My throat raged and I had such a thirst upon me that nothing could quench it.

  On the sixth day a rash appeared. My grandmother, with fear in her eyes, called a physician and I heard again those words, like nails banging into my coffin, that all depended on where the lesions spread to.

  And I knew then the truth that hid in their eyes.

  They feared I had the same dread pestilence that had carried away my beloved aunt.

  Chapter 19

  I TRIED WITH all my heart to keep it out, yet fear possessed my soul.

  Would I die before I even had lived? Or feel my face dissolve in pain and agony as my aunt’s had? Or would I survive, to be marked like Queen Elizabeth’s devoted lady, with such disfigurement I would forever need a veil?

  My grandmother nursed me, telling all that she had lived a good long life and God would choose to do with her as He saw fit.

  As I remembered when a like fate befell my aunt, the house beneath me was struck suddenly silent, the servants talking only in hushed tones, and the very horses seeming to have cloth on their hooves.

  On the seventh day the lesions spread thickly upon my belly and breasts, yet spared my legs.

  By the ninth they had formed into scabs and begun to fall off, though all the while new ones formed.

  And then I wept out of joy for I knew that I had escaped my aunt’s fate and had been blessed not with smallpox but with the chicken pox.

  I was no thing of beauty, scabbed and suppurating, yet I would not die nor have to hide away forever, for which I thanked Almighty God. And in some mysterious way the relief I felt served to harden my resolve.

  That night my grandmother ended her lonely vigil at my bedside and the house breathed again.

  Dawn had but lightened the sky for a few moments on the morning that followed when I heard a footstep beyond the curtains of my bed. I sat up, thinking my grandmother had come to see if I would take another sip of her brew of chamomile.

  ‘Mistress Ann!’ A familiar voice, low and shaking with fear at its own temerity, whispered through the heaviness of the hangings that surrounded my great bed.

  I pulled them back, forgetting the ravages of my skin with its still weeping lesions.

  ‘Wat!’

  ‘Mistress Ann, your beauteous face!’

  He fell to his knees and buried his own in the stiff worked coverlet.

  I laughed at that, a rusty incongruous sound. ‘Worry not, Wat. Such beauty as I had will be restored to me. That is, if I do not scratch these damned itching scabs! I am ashamed to say it is naught but chicken pox!’

  ‘Then thank God for it!’ Wat regained some of his wonted happy looks. ‘My master has been on his knees since he heard the word of your affliction. He wished to come himself but his friend Sir Henry persuaded him that to risk your father’s wrath and your good name would hardly help his case. So he sends a message by myself of his deep concern.’

  ‘Are you then of less value to the world than Master Donne?’ Now that I knew I was not to die or be disfigured I could afford to tease a little, especially since Wat had become so very much the gentleman.

  Wat grinned. ‘He did not believe your father would let him enter, while I had an excuse to visit on account of my brother and sister, that was all.’

  ‘You have not asked after them.’

  ‘No. They flourish, I imagine.’

  ‘Made of sterner stuff than I, and can better withstand infection?’

  ‘Mistress Ann,’ Wat’s happy eyes clouded over, ‘I meant no such thing.’

  ‘I tease, Wat. And how is your master?’

  ‘He has suffered much since you left. First no word from you to his letters, and my lady Straven lost no time in talking of your Master Manners and what a handsome substantial man he was, and bound to win your approval and how your betrothal was soon to be announced. Hard on that the news came that you were stricken with the smallpox, like your aunt before you.’

  ‘How did he come to hear of my affliction?’

  I was surprised that word should have reached him in London.

  ‘A message came for Master Donne with a serving woman. Prudence, I think was her name.’

  I started at that. How would Prudence have known to seek out Master Donne?

  My grandmother! In the extremes of her concern she must have sent word to Master Donne, fearing a burial was more like to happen than a bridal.

  ‘I have written a letter to your master and would be grateful if you would give it to him.’ I handed Wat the sealed paper.

  ‘It would be a pleasure to see his face light up in these dark days. The Lord Keeper does naught but carp about his new wife and she screams at him, and my master is caught in the middle. It has not been an easy time.’ His smile was sweet in its shyness. ‘Above all, without you. He often recalls the time you had alone together and the happy meetings that occasioned when you were living at York House.’

  This put me in mind of Master Manners and his vile gossip. ‘I hope he has been reminiscing of his time with me to none but you.’

  ‘Mistress, he would never do so.’ His young frame stiffened with offence. ‘He talks to me only because I know and love you also.’

  My heart was touched at that.

  ‘Thank you, Wat. And now, take the letter and hide it carefully.’

  He nodded and hid the letter inside his doublet next to his heart, looking so young and serious as I imagine Sir Lancelot must once have done when first he encoun
tered Guinevere.

  Yet I was no Guinevere, covered as I was in dozens of weeping lesions. What token of my love and faith could I send his master? As I leaned forward a scab fell from a pustule on my face.

  Struck by a thought that amused me, I picked it up and wrapped it in a piece of crumpled silk. ‘Tell him my grandmother says if he puts it next to his skin it will protect him.’

  I smiled at the revulsion on Wat’s young face. ‘The Turks do it with lesions even of the smallpox, according to my lady grandmother.’

  The gown I had worn before I fell ill was hanging on a hook near the bed and next to the gown my girdle on which were tied my fan, gloves and a small pair of scissors. I reached for them and cut a lock from my auburn hair.

  ‘Give him this also. I know his taste for saints and angels and such mysteries. Tell him it is a relic, to remind him of Saint Ann, who by some miracle is not dead as she had feared, but living and filled with a joyous longing to see him.’ I laughed then with relief, and delight, and the sheer pleasure of being alive. ‘And tell him he may write a verse on the subject of her deliverance. Now, go. Confide to no one you have come to see me but are visiting Stephen and Hope and bring them good wishes from your sister Sarah. Go!’

  Wat saluted me, then grinned. ‘Knowing Master Donne he is as like to write about the scab as about the lock of hair.’

  ‘Let him write of both! Now that I know I am not to die I shall opt not just for life but for immortality through Master Donne’s verses.’

  ‘Dream not of that, mistress.’ Wat shrugged. ‘My master says his verses will be forgot in five minutes’ time.’

  I laughed again. ‘Tell him to be not so bleak. I am sure they will last for ten.’

  As I climbed from my bed and reached for my smock it struck me that I had heard not one word from my suitor, Master Manners, since I had sickened. Like my lady Straven, Master Manners, it seemed, kept a safe distance between himself and all contagion. So much for the vows he would have us say binding us to one another in sickness and in health.