The Lady and the Poet (13 page)

I flung the poem from me and reached for the second, entitled simply ‘Jealousy’.

This time there was no answering sense of arousal in me, simply fury and disgust.

I was no simpleton. I knew enough of art to know that these scenes, these pictures of libidinous assignations, might never have taken place,
might even be the copies of some ancient Roman fancy. And yet in his words there was so much of directness, and of intimacy, so much caressing pleasure and such angry bile that, despite my logic, it seemed to me they must be true, and had indeed unfolded just as his words described them.

Which meant that Master John Donne was as immoral and pleasure-seeking and careless of other human beings as our first encounter had intimated.

I picked up both sheets and tore them angrily into strips, meaning to set light to them with my candle, and render them into a pyre of ashes as they deserved. I know not why, at the last moment, I stayed my hand and slipped the pieces, ragged and unreadable as they were, into the press that stored my gowns.

As I sank to my knees beside the great bed I caught sight of the sampler sewn for me by my sister Frances, with its timely reminder:

‘Thank you, Frances,’ I breathed as good sense and godliness flooded through my being, ‘for embroidering me lines that would never, under any circumstances, be written by one Master John Donne.’

THE NEXT MORNING
my aunt sought me out to accompany her to the meat market at the Shambles to procure sheep’s suet for the Lord Keeper’s poultice.

‘Come, Ann. This is not a task I would do myself from habit,’ she explained, ‘and yet it will be a good lesson for you in how to go marketing when you have a household of your own.’

It was a fine, breezy day and my aunt decided that since it was dry and the mud in the streets would not sully our gowns, it would benefit our health to walk. I was happy. There was always so much to look at in this city of two hundred thousand souls, probably the busiest city in the whole world.

We first recognized the Shambles by its stench. Dozens of butchers’ shops, cheek by jowl next to the slaughterhouses that fed them, scented the air with the ripe, rotting smell of discarded animal flesh. There were two rows of butchers’ shops and another down the middle, each with a large window and wide sill, two feet deep, where the lumps of meat were on display to be poked and sniffed by fussy housewives and the clerks of the gentry’s kitchens. My aunt chose the cleanest of the establishments and placed her request.

‘Half a pound of sheep’s suet, my lady,
half a pound?’

The butcher laughed so loud I thought he might keel over and die. He kept laughing as he weighed out the suet, a tiny mound of white measured against his bell-shaped bronze weights with their intricate
hieroglyphic inscriptions. ‘All this way for half a pound of suet? Can’t you afford more than that, my fine ladies? The country must be going down the jakes when the gentle folks are eating half a pound of suet. Is it for dumplings, ladies?’

My aunt did not deign to reply, but I could not resist. ‘No indeed. It is for a
flos unguentorum
.’

‘A floss argumentorum, did you say?’ The butcher mimicked the refinement of my voice and winked at his assistant. ‘Then you’ve come to the right place!’

‘Unguentorum,’ I replied, short of temper at being laughed at. ‘Flower of ointments. For a poultice.’

‘Why said you not before?’ The butcher started smiling instead of laughing at us, his big florid face of a sudden friendly. ‘I could do with some for my sore kneecap. My grandam swore by the stuff.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

My aunt was already out of the shop. ‘Such forwardness! I would have him in the stocks for less. The way he addressed us as if he were our equal!’

‘I thought that was just London ways.’ I was getting used to London ways. How everyone talked to you in the street, advising you on where to shop for the best bargain, or how to get to the destination you required whether you asked them or no, or soliciting from you the source of your fan or the fabric of your gown, as if they were old friends. And the children! I had noticed them when we came through Southwark but there were even more here. As we walked along Cheapside we were surrounded by great gangs of them. There were far more children in London, it seemed to me, than there were adults to support them. They reminded me of swarms of bees forever hunting for a hive. And just as like to sting you.

A poor, pinched-looking child of five or six, her legs bent and her face covered in grime, ran up to us. ‘Have you got a coin to spare please, mistress? Only we’ve eaten naught since day before yesterday.’

I reached for the purse tied to my waist and handed her a coin.

‘Ann, you will only encourage them.’

‘And would it be godly to let them starve when I have money in my purse I do not need?’

My aunt raised an eyebrow in exasperation at my seeming innocence. ‘You have much to learn about the world, niece. More than you think.’

‘I hope I will never learn so much that I turn my back on God’s creatures,’ I flashed. ‘Why are there so many children swarming about so in the streets?’

‘The pox or the plague have cut down their parents. This new law the Queen passed is to get many of them apprenticed so they might not be forever begging in the streets.’

‘I hope it helps them.’

My aunt left me stood alone for a moment by the conduit opposite the Mercer’s Chapel, while she went on an errand to Goldsmith’s Row. I tried to ignore the customers of the Conduit Tavern, straight across the road, who were making noisy comments on the subject of my youth and appearance. Instead I stood mesmerized by the statue in the middle of the conduit.

It was an almost life-size representation of the goddess Diana, half naked, carved from alabaster, with water from the river trilling from her left breast. I remembered how Francis had told me of it, how the statue here had once been, before worshipping her was disallowed, not of Diana but the Virgin Mary.

Despite myself and the raucous crowd behind me, I could not fail to laugh at such absurdity, until a voice interrupted my thoughts.

‘A sound far sweeter than the water that runs from that fair breast.’

I turned and found myself not three feet away from my uncle’s secretary.

But I returned not his smile. The memory of those poems with their cynical indulgence and their casual deceits was too fresh in my memory. ‘Oh, please, no sugared words. They are wasted on me, I assure you.’

‘I shall stick only to vinegar then,’ he said and bowed low, doffing his hat as he did so. ‘But what made you smile at that poor goddess? She is more used to worship than to being laughed at.’

‘Perhaps I was musing on the loss of her predecessor, the Blessed Virgin.’

He stiffened at that, his smile frozen. Such talk was probably treasonous in me, the Blessed Virgin being tainted so with Popery, and
perhaps he sensed I lay some kind of trap, knowing as I did that his background was Catholic.

But in fact I spoke the truth. Having lost my own mother, I did feel a closeness to the Mother of God, whether it was dangerous to admit or no.

I was glad of the sudden frost between us, for I could not persuade myself what manner of man he was. My first impression as he talked to the amorous doves had made me warm to his humour and pleasing informality. Yet after that I had cause to see him as both dangerous and also two-faced, one who might be honourable in company, but secretly, when none observed him, would take advantage of a powerless maidservant or a weak-willed wife.

‘Then perhaps you should not admit as much,’ Master Donne said quietly, glancing around him, ‘at least in public. You may be young and new to the city, but such talk is not tolerated. The Queen is the only Virgin we venerate now.’

I would not have him snatch the virtuous ground away from me so easily, when I knew from his verses how deceitful he might be.

‘Lecture me not, Master Donne. For are you not one who holds public office and yet in private behaves in quite another manner, which behaviour you boast of in your verses?’

He had the gall to pretend he was pained. ‘If you have read my verses then I am sorry indeed. I would not, for the sake of God’s own wounds, have you read aught that ever I have written. I have already had cause to regret the writing of them, and have never shown them but to my closest friends.’

‘Then you must number half the gold-laced gallants of Lincoln’s Inn amongst your closest friends.’

I almost added that my cousin had had so little trouble in the getting of them that Master Donne must not guard them very close, but he might then conclude that it was I who had solicited their getting. And I blushed to admit so much.

I could see he was already wondering how it was I might have encountered his poetry.

‘I was blessed with a plentiful education, and was encouraged to read widely,’ I enlightened him coldly. ‘It is my pleasure to study a great range of literature, both poetry and prose.’

‘Ah,’ he shook his head, all seeming serious now. ‘And how measured my poor verses against those others you had studied?’

My answer would have been gentler had I not had the strong suspicion he laughed at me. ‘I thought their writer seemed one who would take advantage of the frailty of others.’

He flinched at that, as if I had struck him.

‘Madam, you are harsh indeed. I assure you the ladies involved were more than willing to play their parts.’

I meant to ignore him then, but the low desire overtook me to show off the educated mind of which I had boasted, and that I was not the simple innocent he took me for. ‘You asked me what I thought as I looked at Diana’s statue.’ I kept my voice distant and reproving for I was no merchant’s lustful wife nor liveryman’s eager daughter, hoping for some clandestine encounter while husband or father were busy in their counting houses. ‘I was thinking of the irony that lies behind the alabaster image.’

I could see that disconcerted him. ‘How so?’

‘Here is Diana, mother naked for every urchin and shopkeeper to stare at and yet in legend poor Actaeon but glimpsed her nakedness and paid the price by being turned into a stag and eaten by his own hounds.’

I found him watching me curiously now, his head on one side under his great black hat. ‘And how does a gently bred maid from the county of Surrey know of the misfortunes of poor Actaeon?’

‘From reading her grandfather’s Ovid. I told you my education was a curious one.’

‘Translated by Kit Marlowe?’ he asked with sudden interest. ‘What a world he has opened up to all with that.’

And now I scored my point. ‘No. I read the work in the original. My grandfather instructed me in the Latin tongue.’ Godly or not, I revelled in his look of wonder.

‘Mistress Ann More, you are indeed full of surprises.’

‘And you, Master Donne, are as easy to read as an open book.’

I turned on my heel and walked after my aunt towards the goldsmith’s shop.

‘Mistress More…’ Master Donne clearly relished having the last word yet I fully intended not to give it to him. ‘I think you will find
your aunt is outside that mercer’s shop. She returned some moments past and has been waving at you with her kerchief.’

AFTER THAT ENCOUNTER
I did not see Master Donne at the supper table or in the winding passageways of York House for many days. Either he avoided me or my uncle had sent him hence on some distant business.