Conceit (17 page)

A familiar bell calls me back from my wanderings. Lincoln’s Inn. I must send Pegge to find out who has died.

Lucy is dead, but better a cold grave than a spinster’s bed, for Lucy was not made for marriage. Perhaps George will die before me also. Of all my children, he is the least likely to seek martyrdom, but it may find him all the same. When we give our children to the grave, they do not disappoint. They are there when we come to look for them at the last.

My own brother died of gaol-fever in Newgate where he had been sent for harbouring a Catholic priest. My mother told me that when the priest was cut down from Tyburn gibbet, he sprang back to life, forcing the hangman to disembowel and quarter him. It was one of my mother’s bedtime tales. Meditating on such lessons made for hard sleeping when I no longer had my brother at my side.

That bell was our prize from Cadiz, where George is a hostage now. When last I passed Lincoln’s Inn, I met a face
in the street that looked like George. He would put on that face whenever he wanted something. Once he challenged me to a game for a handful of tobacco, then dealt falsely, playing with more cards than are known to the deck. When I found him out, he erupted in laughter and stuffed his pipe with my tobacco anyway.

Pegge will miss George if he dies, but Jo will miss his brother even more. He could never get the best of George. They would fight over a meat pie until I ordered one of them to cut it into halves and the other to choose. George would measure the line so precisely that Jo could not profit by his choice. Never has a boy been so unfit for a holy calling as Jo, and yet he will be John Donne hereafter.

George would be safer in his grave than in Catholic hands. Thirty-five years ago I sailed into Cadiz with Essex at the helm of the
Repulse.
Ever rash, Essex entered the outer harbour ahead of the fleet. When the cathedral bell rang out at two in the morning to warn the city, we had no choice but to attack. We went in at dawn and the running sea defeated us. It is not easy to walk on water wearing armour, especially in the Protestant cause. The Spaniards planted our dead upright at the tidemark. When the tide turned, the flotilla of bodies sailed out past our ships, shining in the moonlight like the Catholic heads I had seen as a boy on London bridge. In several hours, the flowing tide would carry the corpses past us in the opposite direction. We could hear the dogs fighting for position on the beach.

We did not stay to see the feast, but stormed the inner harbour, driving their galleons aground. The Spaniards
swarmed like rats, leaping into the sea to extinguish their flaming clothes. Smelling a second meal, this time of Spanish meat, the dogs began to bark.

I was with the band of English volunteers in gold lace and plumes who took the plaza that day with Essex. Why was I, a crypto-Catholic, breaching a holy city in Spain? I had no wish to become a martyr like so many of my family. I had renounced my faith for a Protestant Queen, and hoped by such bravery to find employment in her service.

Although our flesh boiled in our armour, the city and its bell were ours by dawn. Today, that bell tolls in the chapel at Lincoln’s Inn, telling me I shall be next to die.

We are all Time’s slaves. The Earl of Essex’s head was taken off cleanly with Toledo steel in England, not in Spain. He had come back from Cadiz a hero, his glamour running before him like the incoming tide. On the return voyage, we trained our beards to grow like his. When he left for Ireland, the people walked for miles to set him on his way.

I stayed behind as secretary for Sir Thomas Egerton, the Queen’s Lord Keeper, in York House. It was there that I met you, Ann, and there that Essex told me his story. In Ireland, he lost twelve thousand of the Queen’s men. Desperate to tell the Queen before she heard it from her messenger, he disembarked at Chester, then rode for four days across England. Saddle-mad, his spurs befouled with mud, he arrived at Nonesuch unpardonably early and took the stairs two at a time. He strode through the presence
chamber, the privy chamber, the withdrawing-room, and burst unannounced into the royal bedchamber. The Queen waved her women behind her and faced the intruder head-on.

What comfort it was, Essex told me, to find her in her old bed-gown with some tokens of his affection laid tenderly upon her table. He fell on his knees and called her
My Prince
, throwing himself upon her mercy and thanking God that though he had suffered trouble and storms abroad, he had found a sweet calm at home. When he finished pleading, she asked him to withdraw so that her ladies could dress her.

Only then, he told me, did he notice that she had no brows. Her skin was unpainted and her teeth black. One of her ladies was combing something on a stand. It was the Queen’s wig, impaled like a traitor on a pike. For the first time since entering the room, he focused upon Elizabeth’s head—pale, blue-veined, and utterly devoid of hair—and saw his fate reflected in her eyes.

Essex was quartered in the Lord Keeper’s own chamber. You hardly knew he was there, Ann. You were no more aware of influence and rank than the air you breathed, but they were as natural and as necessary to you. Essex meant nothing to you, but I was his channel to the outer world. Even in his close prison, infected equally with despair and pox, he never sullied the Queen’s honour. She had refused to see him, but it was not in her power, he told me, to make him love her less.

I wrote his letters in my best hand for him. The most pitiful he wrote for himself. Each night, back in my
chamber, I copied out his words from memory for the Lord Keeper. Soon Essex was in court, planted upright in the stand, about to be torn apart by dogs. I can remember the exact moment—I was handing Sir Thomas a deposition in the case against the Earl—that Essex’s eyes turned towards me, dark with accusation.

I can recall the exact number of steps through the unlit halls from Essex’s prison in York House back to my own room as if they were steps to Golgotha, but I cannot recall, Ann, where your sweet bedchamber lay.

11. THE SUN RISING

My father took me back to Loseley park the morning after my aunt’s funeral. Sir Thomas Egerton was inconsolable at his wife’s death, so much so, he wrote my father, that the Queen had reprimanded him for preferring his private grief to his duty to the state.

I sat out the spring and summer listening to my father talk about his livestock while wondering whether time was passing as slowly for the inhabitants of York House. Then, just before Michaelmas, I received an invitation from Sir Thomas, who had always been fond of me, to come to town to meet his new wife and her three daughters. It seemed he had proved all too consolable when he had met the Countess of Derby.

The fourteen miles and three furlongs in the old carriage from Loseley to Cobham were made unbearable by my father giving instructions to Bess on how to care for me in London. She was holding my unfinished tapestry, though I had told her I would have no need of it. By the time we reached Cobham bridge, I was so shaken by the
disagreeable roads that I pushed the tapestry behind my back to cushion the hard bench. My father was sprawling across from me, his boots muddying my gown, and Bess was taking up two-thirds of the seat we shared. At Kingston-upon-Thames, I decided it was time for me to have a lady’s maid, not a servant bred in the country, and began to plot how I might get my father to take Bess back with him when he returned to Loseley. I was never so glad to see the windmill turning in St George’s fields and the gates of London bridge rising up before us.

I progressed cautiously into the salon, for I had discovered that my new farthingale went its own way without my legs if I moved quickly. Mary was at the virginals, with my cousin Francis at her side, playing much more expressively than when I had last heard her. By the improvement in Mary’s complexion, I guessed they had consummated their marriage when my aunt’s death brought him home from Oxford.

The chamber was filled with the liveliest conversation, the sort men and women engage in when determined to be publicly charming. Wall sconces and flickering candles lent a warmth to the room which had eluded it in my aunt’s time, and a row of men in livery stood looking servile and idle. My aunt, with her lessons and needlework, might never have existed. I hoped that this new Lady Egerton would let me learn the latest dances.

The salon was knitted so tight with voices I did not know which strand to pick up for fear of dropping one or all of them. I wanted to absorb everything-every syllable of London talk, every jot of London news.

“I wish Mother would not say such things. Sir Thomas cannot wish his wife to be so indiscreet.”

“On the contrary, he is so besotted he will let her say anything.”

“Our guest will do very well, I think, for she has no sense of fashion.”

“And he will do even more nicely. I cannot say how pleased I am with poets. They are far more charming than I was led to believe.”

“What news of York House’s infamous guest?”

“He is now at liberty at Essex House.”

“I hear necklines will be lower this season—”

“But toes will be more pointed and heels rounder.”

“How can he put up with her? It has been less than a twelvemonth.”

“A man does not use his head in such matters, my dear.”

Breathless with anticipation, I could hardly take it in. I had been away too long from society. My eyes strayed enviously to the row of pastel feet across from me. Had the three daughters shortened their hems to show off their shoes? I tried to glimpse the heels so that I could describe them to a City shoemaker.

“Come, Ann, and meet Lady Egerton,” Sir Thomas said, drawing me towards his wife, who seemed delighted to find me less well shod and dressed than she was, and soon returned her attention to her daughters. “And there is my son Edward and my secretary, Mr Donne. I am surprised he is not talking to the ladies as is his custom.”

Sir Thomas left me at the table where servants were setting out quelque-choses and wines. As John Donne
took a sweetmeat, I overheard him say to Edward, who was washing a mouthful down with sack, “Today the Queen cancelled Essex’s licence for sweet wines.”

Edward said, equally low. “There’s an end of him, poor man. It was folly to set him free then humiliate him. Since he cannot recover her favour, he will strike out against her. He has been heard saying that the Queen’s conditions are as crooked as her carcass. God knows what he will do next, but we must stay clear of it.”

“And let the birds of prey peck out his liver?”

“The pox has eaten it, more likely,” Edward said. “It would be better for us all if he died. We must take the Queen’s side if we wish to rise in these times. Do not forget you have further to fall than most.”

John Donne’s answer was too quiet to hear.

“Now, Mr Donne, stop whispering to Edward,” Lady Egerton called out gaily. “I hear you have written a new elegy. You must show me all your poems as soon as they are written.”

“Why, madam, I keep no copies.” His bow had a trace of mockery in it. “They are mere evaporations.”

“No gentleman publishes his verses,” she agreed, “but since your manuscripts circulate amongst men, what harm if they are seen by women?”

Just as I was straining to catch the reply, my ears were assaulted with the dimensions of a particularly fine animal. I was horrified to hear my father praising his sow. After describing the birth of her large litter, he moved on to her slovenly habits and the incontinence of her diet, delighted to have gained the attention of the entire company.

“Sophie is a fine creature indeed,” I said, gripping his arm, “and has the most amiable temperament. But, Father, since we are in town at last, should you not ask Sir Thomas what has gone on at court?”

“He refuses to speak of public affairs and keeps me talking of the country. How am I to be in Parliament,” he said loudly, “if no one will tell me anything? Young man,” he turned to John Donne, “what news of Essex? How does the Earl?”

Lady Egerton intervened, pulling John Donne quickly to her side. “I will suffer no secrecy where love-poems are concerned. You must disclose all your amorous goings-on.”

Must the whole room hear of his
goings-on
during my exile to Surrey? We might as well hear the pedigree of Sophie’s boar as John Donne’s latest conquests. Edward was beside me at once with a clever remark. I laughed up at him, though I had scarcely heard. I felt a good deal more poised than when I had last been at York House.

“Ann looks well tonight,” Edward said to Lady Egerton. “Her hair suits her remarkably, don’t you think?”

He was a most obliging man, and it gave me great comfort to know that others were listening.

“She is but sixteen and apes a fashion she falls short of mastering,” John Donne said. “Why do women delight in artifice when men admire nothing so much as simplicity?”

My hand pushed in a stray pin. Over the hairpiece, which Bess had scornfully called a rat, Lady Egerton’s maid had combed my hair into a shining beehive. The effect was flattering in the mirror in my chamber, but perhaps the light of the salon was harsher.