The Lady and the Poet (15 page)

‘And you know not this Master Freeman?’

Mary shook her head.

‘And what has Nick to say?’

‘He will not talk of money. If I raise it he shouts and stamps and when I next look round he has gone.’

‘Perhaps this man could be a moneylender, think you?’

At that Mary began, very softly, to weep. A sight so shocking because I had never witnessed it before, not even when our mother died. Mary had simply straightened her young back, taken Frances in her arms and proved a tower of strength, far stronger than our father, who blamed all—the Heavens, his doctor, even the infant Frances—for his terrible agonizing loss, and withdrew to his chamber. Mary, but a maid of twelve, as slender as a reed and hardly five feet tall, took charge of all. With the help of my grandmother she summoned the priest, my aunt from the Court (from where the Queen was loath to lose her) and comforted my father as best she could.

‘The sum is two hundred pounds!’

I gasped at that. It was a fortune.

‘And he seeks immediate payment. Ann, this gentleman from the north has written to
me
to ask if I would meet with him and discuss how we can meet my husband’s obligations.’

‘You? Why is he not applying to Nick direct?’

Her only answer was to sob.

‘He has a letter. To a gentleman of my acquaintance. The servant who delivered it must have betrayed me to him.’

‘Who is this gentleman?’

‘One I turned to when my worries over Nick were too great to bear alone.’

‘And what said you in this letter?’

‘Things I should not have said to one who is not my husband. Now he threatens to expose me.’

‘But surely Nick is the one at fault here?’

‘He will turn it round so that I am the one who has sinned more greatly. I know the cast of his mind. I must retrieve the letter from this Master Freeman. And yet—oh Ann—what if Nick discovers my weakness?’

I was so truly alarmed to see Mary, strong, brave Mary, thus reduced that I made a misguided offer of my own. ‘This gentleman,’ I ventured, desperate to ease her burden when she had so bravely eased ours, ‘would it answer if I, who have no connection to the matter, tried to seek him out?’

‘It has not come to that. I still have my necklace of amethysts and emeralds. I will sell that first.’

‘Oh, Mary, the necklet that belonged to our mother, Anne?’

Mary looked away but the bright sunlight caught the tear that ran down her face and made it sparkle. But not with joy.

‘Better than disgrace or penury.’

‘Have you nowhere else to apply to? What about our father?’

‘He might help, but Constance will turn him against me. And remember, it was I who persuaded Father to let me marry Nick, I who wore him down with tales of Nick’s connections and his expectations. Oh, Ann, I cannot admit that we have fallen to such a low as this, with the debtors’ prison holding out desirous arms to us. I must find some other resolution.’

I did not argue with the truth of this. I wished only I had something I could give her to help. And then I remembered the little there was left from Grandmother’s eggs. I found my hidden purse and held it out to her.

Mary’s answer was to weep some more. ‘Ann, I cannot take your pennies.’

‘Please, Sister. They will be of more help to you, I want for nothing here.’

Mary smiled sadly and pushed the purse back to me. ‘The truth is, my little Ann, they would be a raindrop washed away into the ocean.’ She dried her eyes and looked at me askance. ‘By the way, Sister, I hear from our cousin Francis that you have won a heart.’

I stopped short at that, more flustered than I wished her to see. ‘If you speak of whom I think, his heart is well protected. It was more his
vanity that made him notice me, I’d venture. He suspects me a blank page on which to imprint his thoughts.’

‘Then he will be surprised at how many pages are writ there already. You are full of complexity and contradiction, Ann.’

We descended to the Great Chamber to find my father parading in his Court costume for the approval of his sister. For so small a man he did look fine indeed. And yet if only the cost of that fine suit could have been given to Mary, it seemed to me, all her hardship would be over.

But this prospect was as likely as a ship laden with Spanish treasure mooring at York House steps.

‘What think you, ladies, of my new suit of clothes?’ My father turned for us to both admire him.

I could not tell the truth, that in my present state he brought to mind a nobleman’s pet monkey dressed in borrowed finery.

‘Father,’ I began, ‘here is Mary, come to me with a message from Bett. She fears her confinement comes upon her sooner than she expected and Sir John has left her alone to go hunting. She begs for me to go to Camois as soon as ever I can to assist her.’

I dared not mention my fears for her safety in childbed after what had happened to my mother, since my father was one for hiding his hurts away under lock and key and liked not the person who tried to release them.

Today he had the look of a sulky child. ‘Bett’s confinement is not for some weeks yet. Besides, she will have other gossips around her than you. Sir John’s mother and his sisters will already be with her. They have no need of you.’ His voice took on a querulous, stubborn tone which often it did when he wished to get his own way against heavy opposition. ‘There are plenty of churchmen who hold that this ritual of confinement goes on far too long. Indeed the Reverend Able quoted more than fifty relatives attending one childbed, and consuming enough sweet wine and hot spiced caudle to inebriate an army. I cannot hold with it. So many women gathered together in so small a chamber must surely bring with them a far greater chance of infection than if they stayed away!’

‘I am sure you are right, Father,’ I soothed. ‘But Bett is all alone, Mary says, and becoming fearful, which cannot be good for the expected child, can it?’

‘Giving birth is part of nature,’ intoned my father, making me wish to throw a goblet of ale at him, ‘accomplished every day by the beasts of the field and the commonest country wench. Bett fears too much.’ I watched him, startled. Could those locks be so tightly shut that he truly did not remember the loss of his dear wife?

‘I would like to go, Father, as soon as my aunt can spare me.’

‘I cannot spare you, and there’s an end to it. I wish you to come to Court for my dubbing.’ His tone softened. He put his arm about my shoulders. ‘And I wish you to have a new gown, so that you may shine even brighter than the other ladies. My sister will take you to buy it, will you not, Elizabeth?’

My eyes widened at the thought of a new gown but my conscience would not let me off so easily. If I held to my position, what would he do? Lock me in my chamber? Confine me to York House?

‘But, Father, what if Bett really is ill?’

I could see my father was at the end of his patience with me. ‘Daughter, dispute no more. You will come with your grandmother and grandfather to the Court for my ennoblement. Our family honour requires it. After that you may go to your sister.’

I almost argued further but good sense and the thought of the cinnamon-coloured satin I had seen in a shop in the new Royal Exchange stopped my mouth. What difference could a few days make?

‘And afterwards, can I go to Bett the very next morn?’

‘You have the persistence of a fly on a dung heap, Ann. I pity your poor husband.’ He looked at me tetchily. ‘If ever you have one.’

My sorrow at my father’s stubbornness was assuaged by two things: the cinnamon satin and the arrival of my grandparents.

My aunt had requested they stay in my chamber and that I move while they were present to a smaller room, which I was happy to do.

The day appointed for my grandparents’ arrival I waited for them by the river steps all morning in the cold February air, and almost leapt into the water with joy when at last I saw the barge the Lord Keeper had sent to meet them approaching from Southwark, carrying both my grandparents, my sister Frances, and my grandmother’s gentlewoman, Prudence.

Prudence alighted first to help my grandmother climb down, whispering to me smugly as she did so, ‘Stephen, the usher of the
bedchamber was as mad as a speared boar that I was bidden to come instead of he, but my lady has ever had a low opinion of serving men, so here I am in London Town.’

Next came Sir William, my grandfather, and the thought struck me that though I had seen him but recently, he had suddenly grown old. When we were private I would ask my grandmother how he was faring.

‘Well, Ann, let me look at you,’ my grandmother instructed. She, I was grateful to see, was as brisk and as bustling and as bad-tempered as ever before.

For the occasion she had added to her usual severe black gown a double chain of silver links, fastened in the centre under her chin. This, though no doubt designed to compete with the moneyed merchants and landed aristocrats she would encounter here, had instead the effect of making her resemble the Lord Mayor of London.

‘Such a tiresome journey,’ she complained. ‘The mud was so bad between Loseley and Guildford that we had to dismount and walk like a string of pilgrims.’ I tried not to smile. My grandmother rarely if ever found anything away from Loseley to her satisfaction. I suspected that to do so would quite spoil her pleasure in life.

‘Here, Ann,’ she handed me a basket covered in a chequered cloth, ‘I have brought you some fruit from our hothouse.’

All of a sudden the cloth moved. I screamed, thinking it haunted, and pulled it back to find my cat hidden beneath.

‘You have brought Perkin!’ I shouted from joy.

‘He would not settle since you left. No good to man nor beast. The mice dance about in front of him and he claps his paws in time. Perhaps the London rats will restore his zest for life. You look well, Ann. I thought only country girls had pink in their cheeks but I find you blooming like a rose in the hedgerow.’

‘It is her two admirers,’ Mary commented with a sly look, seeming to have forgotten for the moment all her own problems in the pleasure of greeting my grandparents.

‘Two?’ My father looked at her searchingly, but Mary had gone to prepare a comfortable chair for my grandfather whose stiff joints troubled him sorely on long journeys.

‘Ann,’ my father persisted, ‘what is your sister’s meaning?’

‘I have the very thing for Grandfather’s knee.’ I skipped off towards the door of the chamber. ‘My aunt and I prepared it for the Lord Keeper. Grandmother will greatly approve of it. A
flos unguentorum
made of herbs mixed with sheep’s suet.’

Once out in the passageway I stopped, trying to catch my own breath and silence the rush of blood that was pounding in my ears at the thought of the man Mary was describing as my other admirer.

And what a fool I would be to succumb to the lures of one whom I knew to be as great a libertine as Master John Donne.

ON THE DAY
my father was to be knighted, I dressed with care, though my thoughts kept straying to the inference my sister Mary had made about myself and Master Donne. Then I remembered the pressing secret she had entrusted to me and wondered in what way we might solve it and save our honour at the same time.

Mercy smiled as she helped me into my new gown of cinnamon satin, the kirtle embroidered with green strands of ivy. The habit now is for dresses to be slashed as if by a thousand knife cuts, the under layer being cloth of a different hue which is pulled through the rent to make an elaborate pattern. To me such dresses make the wearer seem laughable, like a scarecrow in the fields. Instead I favour this style with its high waist, flattened chest and delicate cobweb ruff which makes me feel as light as thistledown, though this is by no means the truth.

‘Bring me my casket of jewels,’ I bid Mercy. ‘Today I will wear my mother’s amethyst ring.’

The ring winked up at me from its case of purple leather. I slipped it onto my second finger. It was fastened, as is also the fashion, to a black silken cord which I wrapped three times round my wrist. They do say a lace from the second finger runs straight to the heart. If my mother had lived until this day, my father’s new title would have made her the Lady Anne. Would she have relished the ennoblement? Or laughed at the tawdry nature of earthly glory? Yet on this day, for the first time, I wondered about the ring’s value, and whether I should offer it to my sister Mary, sore though I would feel at parting with it.

‘Mistress Ann,’ Mercy whispered as she finished brushing my hair, her voice bringing me back to the present, ‘the colour of your new gown is lovelier on you than any I have yet seen.’

‘It is, is it not?’ I laughed, enjoying the rare and wicked pleasure of vanity. ‘Let us hope it does me some good!’

I walked into the Great Hall to search for my father and found instead a large group of black-clad gentlemen waiting there. I started to see that Master Donne was amongst their number.

The Lord Keeper, who was ever polite but rarely seemed to notice I was beyond six years old, looked startled, as if a stranger had appeared. ‘Mistress Ann, you are the very picture of your sainted mother, whom I had the joy to meet at Loseley. Come, John, does our little mistress not outshine the stars this day?’