The Lady and the Poet (46 page)

And I would choose husband.

I managed to send a message to Mary, but was not sure if she would come. Mary could be provokingly lazy and also provokingly selfish. Perhaps she might think I wished to rebuke her again.

I slept not a moment that night for my whole being felt like a vibrating harp, whose strings were made to sing by everything that touched them. I knew I could not tell those I loved of my plans—Father, Margaret, my grandmother, even my cousin Francis who had shared so much with me over the years. Indeed of all I loved Mary was the only one who was so deep in mire herself that I could share my secret.

I found myself fixed to a spot by the window nearest to the courtyard beneath that I might see all who approached.

‘Ann, what do you do?’ asked my father. ‘You have stood there this half-hour. I wish you would look through these papers on monopolies. There are many in the Parliament who are angered with Her Majesty for handing out monopolies like sweetmeats. It seems to them that everything in the world is now subject to a monopoly from Malmsey wine to salt and all for the benefit of her favourites and at a cost to the rest.’

‘Certainly I will, Father.’ A roan mare clopped into the courtyard below, ridden by a vizored lady in a lean red habit, an egret’s feather nodding from her jaunty velvet hat, a small child seated before her on the saddle. ‘Look, Father. Mary is below with little Nick.’

My father glanced out of the window. ‘I see no sign of the precious basket you wish for so fervently.’

‘No doubt she sends it with a servant.’

‘Then why did she bother to come herself?’

I ignored his logic and skipped down the stairs to greet them.

Inside the small dark hallway I hugged her to me while my father’s
groom took Nick by the hand to carry him off to the kitchen where the cook fed him titbits she saved for him in a china crock.

I pulled Mary into the small withdrawing room, my heart beating louder than the bell of St Clement Dane’s. ‘Sister, we have cast the dice. He looks for a minister to marry us.’

Mary neither smiled nor held me to her but simply shrugged as if I were a lost cause, a hopeless case in which there was no merit in wasting her breath.

Instead we sat and supped macaroons dipped in mead, talking stiffly of the progress of Margaret’s babe and where Mary planned to pass the twelve days of Christmas this year.

At last she stood up to go. ‘I am sorry, Ann, but I have another call to make.’ Seeing the fineness of her dress I could hazard where.

‘Goodbye, sister. Be careful.’

A beat of silence passed before she answered me. ‘I might say the same to you. My husband has made me suffer much, he has gambled away all our contentment and security. Why should he not suffer one tenth of what I have borne so bravely and without complaining?’

‘The world is not the same for women as for men, Mary.’

‘Aye. And there is one law for the rich and another for the rest. You are about to cross that line, Ann. Think of that before you make your final choice.’

‘Mary, wealth means naught to me, you know me well enough to know that fact.’

Mary shrugged. ‘That is because you have always possessed it. You have never had to worry about paying for fine spun wool, or lively chestnut mares. You have travelled by coach and in the Lord Keeper’s barge. You know nothing of poverty or cramped circumstances or chafing at how to feed hungry mouths.’

I could not deny her good sense, yet I was nothing daunted. I was young and full of energy after all. ‘Sister, you are right. Yet love will make me strong.’

‘Love! God’s blood! Love makes us weak, not strong. Goodbye, Ann.’

She rang a bell and little Nick appeared clutching a hot codling wrapped in cloth. ‘Goodbye, Mary.’

Behind her, her small son held on to his codling in one hand and
the bottom of her hem with the other, his big dark eyes reminding me suddenly of his father. ‘Remember, Mary, you have much to lose. More, I think, even than I.’

‘What a pair we are.’ She shook her head, smiling sadly. ‘God be thanked for Margaret and Frances.’

‘We are cut from different cloth, you and I.’

‘Aye, and I would not change silk for linen. They say silk is strong as well as fine.’ She took Nick by the hand and began to go down the stairs.

‘Aye,’ I called after her, ‘yet linen lasts the longer.’

I READ THROUGH
all the submissions sent to my father on the unpopular subject of monopolies. At first these had been a way for the Queen to give an advantage to those she favoured, granting them the income on all from salt to playing cards, but as she awarded more and more, some as honours and others sold to raise revenues for her wars, it seemed as if the air we breathed was subject to a monopoly. And now the Queen found herself in a new situation where Parliament dared oppose her and was suggesting a bill to challenge the free hand she had shown. Even those who had been her staunch supporters wanted to take Her Majesty to task over them.

And tomorrow a committee of the Parliament met to decide what line to take in its submission.

For once my father, a natural moderate who greatly disliked any change, witnessed by the fashions he wore from forty years before, was fired up to join the charge. ‘Monopolies are an eating, filthy disease which I have ever detested with all my heart,’ he insisted, ‘and I intend to tell Her Majesty so.’

Opposition was not a concept Queen Elizabeth was accustomed to. The picture of my lady Mary Howard and how she fared when she crossed the Queen in love, flooded into my memory, followed by the Earl of Essex facing his execution one fine day on Tower Hill.

So, gently, quietly, as if I made only the smallest suggestion, I counselled my father in how to make his case and keep his head. ‘Leave the hot-heads to say their piece then thank Her Majesty humbly for deigning to listen to your case. Remember whose daughter she is,
after all.’ For neither the Queen nor her father Great Harry brooked being told how to run their own kingdoms.

I was glad of this diversion since there was still no word on the progress of our marriage plans. I knew not whether my father followed my suggestion until he returned from Whitehall on the morrow dazzled by the wonder of Queen Elizabeth.

‘She received us all in the Presence Chamber and we fell to our knees as she entered,’ he recounted, his eyes still shining with tears. ‘Her great Majesty told us that there is no jewel, be it never of so rich a price, which she sets before the jewel of her love for us, her subjects. Ann, she has promised to revoke many of the worst monopolies. I did as you bid and thanked her humbly and she smiled especially upon me and said my father and I had ever been wise counsellors, and our like not to be found among the younger men!’

I listened in wonder that the Queen, so old now, having outlived all her advisors and her allies, capable as I had seen myself of such strange behaviour, could still so move her subjects that they wept from gratitude for her love.

That was power indeed.

‘I am going to bid members of the Parliament to a feast in celebration of this—and, Ann, you shall be my hostess!’

‘Congratulations, Father, you are a wise counsellor indeed!’

I dropped a curtsey as if he were of royal blood himself. Most fathers would smile and think it an endearing joke, yet not mine. I could see how pleased he was by the gesture, taking it as a mark of fitting filial respect at last.

‘You are a good child, Ann, when you put your mind to it, and a credit to the Mores.’

I wondered what word he would use to describe me had he known where I had so recently passed my afternoon.

In the bed of one John Donne.

I made up my mind to be as useful and as dutiful as I could during this time while all the while I planned my escape. ‘A mug of small beer for you, Father, or would you rather something stronger?’ His response was to sneeze and I took this as excuse to order him a hot bath to be drawn in front of his chamber fire and afterwards an early
night with a brick in his bed and a warming drink of spiced ale to aid his slumbers.

The prescription worked as does a charm.

The following night we threw a feast for twenty members of Parliament, Mary’s Nick and Margaret’s Thomas, both members in their own right, amongst them. And since he was now a member also, my father deigned to send a message bidding Master Donne.

Before the feast of swan and roasted peacock, trout pasties and smothered rabbit, I prettily poured wine—a custom my father favoured over having an usher do it. I somehow found a word and a smile for all our guests while all the time looking out for only one.

Skulking in a corner I came across my brother-in-law.

‘Some wine, Nick? Why hide you away from all the company?’

When I put down the wine flask he grabbed it and refilled his goblet to the rim. ‘It is quiet at our house now you’ve deserted us, Ann,’ he told me. Then, suddenly, with no explanation for the change of mood, his eyes narrowed giving his handsome face a wolf-like look which made me worry for Mary’s sake. ‘All that your sister owns is mine,’ he said in a voice sharpened on the whetstone of bitterness and suspicion. ‘Perhaps she should remember that.’ He looked at me again. ‘And mayhap you should remind her.’

The threat in his voice was ugly and corrosive, leaving no hint of the usual charming courtier.

I turned away, repulsed and a little frightened. Women were so entirely in the hands of their menfolk. If Nick threw off my sister, what would become of her? And what would my father do if he found out my plans? Beat me? Incarcerate me properly this time, with Constance as jailer? A role she would much enjoy no doubt.

And then I saw Master Donne arriving with the Lord Keeper and our eyes locked for the barest of moments before I made myself busy pouring out more wine.

The Lord Keeper had brought his new wife, Alice.

‘Ah, Ann,’ my uncle greeted me, ‘how fresh and lovely you do look in that green gown. Like a breath of spring in all this garish pageantry of approaching Yuletide.’

I curtsied in return, noting that his wife Alice was looking sour-faced
in the richest of ruby reds, laced with gold and enough jewels to outdo the monarch. Perhaps my uncle had had to pay for them. She was handsome indeed, if you like your ships laden with showy treasure, yet her beauty was marred by a deep line of dissatisfaction on either side of her cochineal-hued mouth.

‘Thank you, Uncle.’

The Countess Alice surveyed the peacock all laid out upon the table, its tail feathers fanning out in magnificent display.

‘Exotic indeed!’

‘Yes, my lady,’ I smiled in agreement. ‘Like a feast given by Queen Cleopatra!’

Alice looked at me curiously, then laughed out loud. ‘I had heard of your learning, Mistress More. I hear your father thinks it has done you nothing but ill and wishes he had not paid for it.’ She glanced frostily at her husband and added in tone that spoke of the bedroom. ‘Lucky Cleopatra, eh, to be beloved by an Antony?’

My uncle stiffened at the deliberate insult, and I saw how bad things were between them.

I curtsied again and moved off, wishing to remove myself from their ire and anxious to exchange a word, no matter how brief, with Master Donne.

At last I glimpsed him standing in an alcove off the main hall. I raised my hand to greet him, then saw he was engaged in a serious discourse with another gentleman.

‘Who is that conversing with Master Donne?’ I asked of the Lord Keeper.

‘His good friend Sir Henry Goodyer.’

I put down my jug of wine and fought my way through the crowd towards them. Yet Master Donne’s words stopped my progress.

‘Henry, please,’ he begged, his voice an urgent whisper, ‘be a witness for us. There are not so many we can trust to do this.’

‘I am sensible of the honour, yet how can I when you know I am in opposition to this marriage? It will be the end of you, John, of all your hopes and aspirations.’

‘No, friend.’ His voice rang with such hope and certainty that my heart glowed. ‘It will be the fulfilment of them.’

He saw me then and his eyes held mine, alight with the fire of love. Fearing if I stayed I would give myself away I turned back into the busy throng.

After this I saw him not until the evening’s end as I helped our guests to find their mantles and their cloaks.

‘My friend Samuel has agreed to help us,’ whispered Master Donne. ‘Next I must approach the Savoy Chapel. It is but a few minutes from my lodgings and I have heard the incumbent is an easy-going man. For a fee.’

‘Then God speed us both.’

AFTER THAT NIGHT’S
encounter I neither saw nor heard from Master Donne in two weeks. Yet I worried not, so deep was my certainty in our great love.

November was now over and almost a week of December passed. Soon the Parliament would disband and I knew my father intended to return at once to Loseley, where he was eager to review all his great new building works.

Could it be that all agreed with Sir Henry Goodyer and none would be prepared to help us?

The thought almost caused my courage to fail and I had to hold fast to my bedpost not to faint away. What if I had given myself, body and soul, and now we could not wed after all? A knock on my chamber door brought me back to my senses. Prudence, sent by my grandmother to keep watch on me, stood on the landing, arms crossed, regarding me with a sullen eye. ‘The boy Wat is below, mistress, and asks to speak with you privately. I have sent him to the small withdrawing room.’