The Lady and the Poet (45 page)

He ushered me towards his chamber, casting a nervous glance at Master Haines the while.

Once inside his door the storm broke.

‘Mistress More… Ann…’ he demanded roughly, ‘what thought you in coming here today, all unannounced, in broad daylight without even a vizor to conceal your features, and to speak thus openly with my landlord? He is a not a man of great discretion. I fear your good name will now be trampled underfoot.’

At that my temper cracked like a bolt of lightning across a summer sky.

‘My good name! You dare to speak of my good name when Master Manners told my father of your boasts that there had been relations between us! Which you had vouchsafed to some gimcrack friend—perhaps the winking Master Davies!’

My anger would not now be held back but gushed like water through holes in a broken dam. ‘Know you the pretty question Master Manners asked of our precious, God-spared time together?’

Master Donne shook his head.

‘That we lay together, you and I, and where one had broke the ice then perhaps others may have followed!’

‘Mistress More, Ann, this is wicked calumny! You know yourself no such relations took place! Indeed, in spite of extreme temptation, I respected your innocence above my own desires!’

‘True. Yet you would not be the first man to increase his credit by exaggerating such matters in private to his friends.’

Master Donne shook his head, as if seeing something clearly for the first time. ‘I am touched by the good opinion you clearly hold of me, mistress.’

I felt a pang of guilt, but how had Master Manners heard such things if not through loose talk from Master Donne’s own lips?

Yet I was not finished. ‘And know you what my dear father said in reply to defend his cherished daughter’s honour? Naught! Not even one slippery, hand-wringing attempt at my defence. Indeed, he raised the value of my portion to five hundred pounds to cover the embarrassment.’

‘Ann, sweet…’

‘I am not your sweet Ann!’

Until coming here, in my deepest soul I had not believed he had bandied our intimacy about the town, yet that odious wink from his friend had undone all my trust and certainty.

I gathered up my gloves and cloak and put them on. ‘I will go now. My visit today was as you say naught but a mistake and an invitation to yet more scandal. Clearly to quash it we must end our friendship here. If I leave now I can be home before my father returns from the Parliament. We need not extend the embarrassment of pretending we have more to say.’

‘No, Mistress Ann, wait. I will go first and explain to Master Haines some justification for your visit, a poem for your sister’s bridal in the Isle of Wight perhaps.’ Speedily he began to pull on a doublet.’

At the mention of the Isle of Wight the memory returned, as cold as icy seawater, of what took place that day, leaving me numb. I was left alone in his chamber, my dreams unravelling, my great design in pieces at my feet.

I glanced round one last time at the chamber, as neat and orderly as it had been at York House. On the coffer next to the bed I spied a scrap of fur, and saw it was the rabbit’s foot he held up in his portrait.

So Master Donne still hoped his luck would turn.

Yet mine own had all run out.

In his haste to leave he had thrown down his undershirt upon the bed. A sudden impulse, I know not from where, bade me pick it up and hold the fine white lawn, still heated from his body’s warmth, against my cheek.

And there I stayed, breathing in the faint musk male scent of his sweat until I heard a rustling sound behind and turned to find its owner standing watching me.

I caught my breath and pushed the shirt behind my back, my face flaming, as he walked towards me and reached behind, removing the shirt from my feeble grasp.

‘Had you need of a handkerchief to mop your brow, I could have easily supplied it,’ and then his mouth sought mine and I cleaved my body shamelessly to his, making no more pretence to cover my emotions.

An Elizabethan lady is no easy ship to board and he laughed and swore in equal measure as he struggled with the hooks and laces of my heavy garments.

My kirtle, sleeves and jewelled stomacher were set aside until all that remained was the folds of linen slipping from my shoulders to expose the tender buds beneath. I closed my eyes as at last he released each rounded breast from its upholstered prison and kissed it, soft and slow.

“‘Come, Madam…’” His eyes teased as he quoted from the verse he knew had stirred me so long ago, and held out his hand to draw me towards the private world of his great curtained bed.

I shivered, remembering the lines he had left unsaid:

And how I had secretly longed for it to be my body beneath those exploring hands.

And now it would be so.

And yet, before we made that fateful journey, he stopped and took my hands in his.

‘At last we have found each other, you and I. So many false trails
and long searches yet after this naught else will ever count with us, not riches, nor high opinion, nor preferment. They all will be as dross is to gold compared with this.’

And now he knelt before me and my linens slithered to the floor, leaving me as naked as was Eve in the Garden of Eden.

And yet I felt no shame. Naught but joy as he stroked the softness of my skin, and skimmed his lips across the contours of my body, moving ever downwards.

I breathed in sharp, fear fighting pleasure, to sense his tongue, as gentle as the beat of butterfly wings, and yet so strange and unfamiliar I knew not what I might expect, running down the softness of my belly until by infinite degrees it reached its destination.

Then such a wild explosion overtook me that I shook and cried out with joy. And I knew that he was right. From this moment on I would care for naught—not family, nor future, faith, nor stain of sin. Only for him and for the love we bore one another.

Afterwards, our bodies spent, we lay together and were silent, listening to one another’s breathing, in the fading light of afternoon, as if drawn into but one soul.

And yet a shadow of something lingered in his grave expression.

‘Is that sadness I see in your eyes?’

He kissed the palm of my hand. ‘Every creature is sad after making love.’

‘Aha,’ I teased him merrily, recognizing his Latin reference and glowing at my own knowledge. ‘Yet surely there is another thought you have forgot? Every creature is sad after making love—save women and roosters.’

He shook his head in true delight. ‘Mistress Ann More praise be that you exist. For you are indeed a miracle.’

‘So,’ I asked him boldly as we lay in our private paradise, ‘am I indeed, your new-found land, as in your scandalous verse? Or did that honour go to another lady before me?’

‘No, Ann,’ his harsh tone took me by surprise, ‘you are not my America. That description was of another gentlewoman.’

I struggled to sit up, shocked at the seeming cruelty of his words.

‘I wish I could deny that there have been others before you, yet on pain of my soul’s damnation there will be none after.’ He raised my
hand to his lips. ‘You are my north and south, my rising east and sharp declining west. You are my lodestone and my compass, the fixed centre of my universe. After this we two will never part. We must take on your father, the Lord Keeper, all.’

He knelt up suddenly upon the bed as if he were in church, and pulled me with him. ‘When you and I most lovingly tie that knot, naught will ever sever it. Not sickness, nor cruel fortune, nor even shades of death itself. And I, once wed to you, will marry none other my whole life long. Wilt thou also plight me thy troth?’

In that small, darkened space it seemed to me the sacrament quietly entered in.

‘I do so plight it.’

And saying no more we let our bodies celebrate the joy of this our blessed union, then fell asleep, folded lovingly in one another’s arms.

It was late afternoon when we awoke, roused by the strange sound of a bird on the window sill, scratching as if it wished to come inside the room. It was a ring-necked dove and, despite the season and the lack of a mate, it puffed up its blue-green neck as if it too sought the pleasures we had so lately known. I smiled at the memory of that other bird, seen so long ago, the day that first I ever saw him.

And then in the midst of all our delight I remembered Master Manners and our encounter in Portsmouth.

‘Ann, Ann, what ails you? You look as if you had seen a ghost.’

‘I have.’ I turned back to the bed. ‘Let us hope it is not an evil spirit sent to haunt us.’

He was out of bed, and dressing, full of energy, like a taper which was waning and is given new air. ‘None can touch us now. Our love will protect us more than burnished armour.’ He held me fast, stroking the hair away from my face. ‘Doubt not, my Ann. If we love truly, who can harm us?’

I hesitated, not wishing to burst the fragile bubble of our delight, but knew I must.

‘Master Manners might. I am not contracted to him, nor ever have been, not even by promise nor by handfasting, which some accept as binding. Thank the heavens his father was so demanding that the marriage negotiations were never sealed, yet he will do what harm he can.’ I ceased for an instant, for it grieved me to continue. ‘Some time
ago I went to the Isle of Wight to see my sister Frances celebrate her betrothal there. Master Manners came with us. My father had a notion I would look with greater favour on him if we had more acquaintance. We came back through Portsmouth and there Master Manners, driven I think by jealousy of you, attempted to dishonour me.’

‘Ann!’ His face was a mask of fury. ‘Why did you not tell me? I would have found him out wherever he was! If he hurt but one hair of your head…’

‘He did not. I cannot vouch for what might have happened but we were interrupted by the innkeeper. John, he is a cruel man. He will try to harm you if he can. And us also.’

He took my hands in his and held them to his chest. ‘Then we must wed with all haste, before he can find a means to stop us. On the morrow I will search for a chapel where we may be married without delay, and for one who is prepared to marry us.’

The sudden furrow in his brow told me that this might prove a hard task, that some might shy away from marrying a woman as young as I, and in secret, without a father’s consent and no banns read out. Though many married far younger than I, it was with the endorsement of their parents, not in secret with neither present.

Even I trembled at the magnitude of our intended action.

And then his face cleared, like the sun emerging from dark clouds on a distant peak. ‘My friend Christopher Brooke! His brother Samuel is in holy orders. He might perform the office for us.’

He ran to his desk and found paper, and dashed off a note, turning it over to write the direction on the other side, then impressing the melted wax with his seal of a sheaf of snakes, the one I recognized from letters I had received myself.

I looked at the letter in his hand, my breath coming faster. All our hope, that we would in truth spend our whole life together, was sealed by that small mark of melted wax.

He saw the fear that had crept into my eyes.

‘Come, Ann.’ He took my hand and kissed it fondly. ‘Take heart. Where is that young girl who chased away the rat? Who rides on horseback as if she were the wind itself? And would have taken on Master Freeman in a bawdy house had I not stopped her?’

I breathed in, willing myself to have the courage needed to carry
through this marriage that would outrage convention, and my family and friends also—not for my age, for I was now almost seventeen, but for the absence of my father’s consent—all for the sake of love for this man.

I stood up straight, my eyes fixing upon his.

‘She is here, and she is ready to brave all.’

Yet when it was time to leave I looked down fearfully into the alley below, in case my father had already heard of our scheme and come to stop it. There was naught but darkness beckoning and I ran as fast as I could to find a wherry to take me the short distance back to Charing Cross.

My father was deep in his papers when I returned.

I stood on the threshold of his closet fearfully. Surely there must be aught in my eyes, some sign of love, or loss of maidenhead, or of the soaring heights of ecstasy I had so recently known.

And yet his interest was not in me but in another pressing matter: the state of repair of the Queen’s highway.

‘Ann,’ he looked up for a brief moment, ‘how was your sister? Were your grandmother’s plums to her liking?’

I could not but smile for the dizzy charms of love and of rebellion were in me. ‘She was happy indeed. The plums were beauteous and delicious. She devoured them all and wrung the last drop of sweetness out of each. They were the best plums ever picked since Eden’s harvest.’

He looked at me curiously at that. ‘And you, Ann, are you quite well yourself? You seem light-headed. A fever perhaps?’

‘Never better, Father. I have asked Mary to bring us back the basket as soon as she can.’ The truth was I wanted Mary to return the basket for I could not keep my secret to myself but must share it, if only with one, and Mary was the only possible confidante.

‘The basket?’ He looked puzzled. ‘But it is a worthless thing made of reeds from the river…’

‘No indeed, Father, it is one my grandmother treasures. I have oft heard her admire it.’

He shook his head. ‘Women are strange creatures. I had hoped you might help with this reading. I have much to do.’

‘Then I will do it now, Father.’

As I sat down in the carved and gilded chair opposite, with its golden lion’s claw feet, my father smiled at me.

I had to look away, my heart shrivelling up with guilt and regret. All the years he had rarely noticed my presence on this earth, or been angry at my insubordination, and now he chose this moment, when I was so close to breaking free of his yoke, to soften towards me and offer me the love I had so long yearned for.

Yet there came a time when a woman must choose between father and husband.