The Lady and the Poet (43 page)

Death is part of life, that had always been my grandfather’s message and who knew it better than I? And yet now, while the summer days blazed outside, a dark mist clouded my mind. I felt imprisoned behind thick walls, even though they might be of my own making. My body, weakened by my fasting, slowed into inaction so that the slightest movement seemed beyond my capacities. It was as if another occupied my mind and possessed my soul.

I knew I must try to shake off this sickness. My grandmother’s loss was greater than mine and she bore it with her usual strength, simply redoubling her busyness, ever active, never allowing herself to sit lest his loss overtake her. The only stillness she allowed herself was in prayer.

All my family came for my grandfather’s burial, and each in turn tried to cheer me or goad me from my despondency, yet none could penetrate the curtain of black that surrounded me. Mary brought her child, now taking its first faltering steps. Margaret sat Perkin upon my lap, to no avail. I turned my back on life and sat long hours with my grandfather’s portrait, wishing I too could slough off the painful coil of my existence.

Only Hope could penetrate my gloom and she came and sat at my feet, reading to me in her halting fluted tones, like some small bird chirping in winter into the high bright empty skies.

My grandmother brought me tisanes of herbs, eyebright, nettle and St John’s Wort, long famed for treating maladies of the mind. Yet even her patience grew thin.

As the summer passed into the chill of late September all were going about their duties, save I. The house was bustling and busy for my father was now to take over his long-awaited inheritance. Soon the place would no longer be the haven of my childhood, but the focus of my father’s ambitions to show the world how imposing he could make it.

One diamond-bright blue day when I sat staring out at the garden, my grandmother swept into the chamber, her face stonier than I had ever seen it.

To my great surprise she took me by both hands and pulled me bodily from my chair. ‘Close your eyes,’ she instructed me harshly. Had it been other than my own grandmother I would have been truly affrighted. As it was I pulled myself up with great reluctance.

‘Trust me.’ My grandmother spoke in a voice so low I could hardly decipher her words, and then I knew that her harshness came not from anger but from fear at what she suggested.

‘I have the healing power. I have had it since I was a girl, though I kept uncommon quiet about it.’ She smiled bitterly. ‘Such things are not often understood and the owner can end up on the ducking stool or with her heels singed at the stake if she vaunts it too much abroad, the more when she is a crone as I am. I’ve seen it time and time again. People take the benefit then turn on the giver. Now, granddaughter, open your eyes and look at me.’

Despite the lowness of her voice there was that in her tone that would have made sovereigns do her bidding. She stood up close to me, her eyes on a level with mine. Then she placed her hands upon my shoulders and there was such lightness yet firmness in her touch that an involuntary sigh of comfort escaped me.

‘Ann More, young though you be, you are a rare woman. Sharp. Strong. Full of light. I have seen many ladies in my time, yet few of your stamp. With your grandfather’s death your light went out. Dark
ness flooded through you, your soul felt in chains. I will strike those chains.’ She hit my wrist with the side of her hand and I could swear I heard the sound of metal clanging. I looked at her, bone-cold panic freezing me to the spot.

‘Ann,’ she spoke even softer now, so that I had to lean forward to catch her words. ‘The chains. They were not made of iron, but of fear. There is no need for that fear. You think your father has treated you cruelly, yet he did what he thought right. I have persuaded him that this was not so. He goes back to London to sit at the Parliament next week. He will take you with him and you may assist him as you did before. You will never wed Richard Manners. Now shrug off this darkness and embrace the light.’

I shut my eyes and behind my closed lids felt the room fill with blinding rays. And I knew that she was right, the light had been there all the while yet I had but lost it from my sight.

‘Thank you, Grandmother.’ I held her to me, feeling the hard starch of her ruff cut into my cheek as I embraced her, yet I cared not a jot.

‘What you do with your freedom is none of my concern,’ I remembered then how she had secretly sent Prudence when she thought me so ill, ‘but I will tell you this much: your father will never agree to a marriage he considers beneath him. There will come a time, Ann, when you will have to take your future into your own hands.’ She turned me to look at her, at that unsmiling face with its great hawk nose and stern jawline, its dark brown eyes that bored into mine. ‘Yet, remember, if you make the choice you long for, you may be choosing a life of hardship, exclusion, perhaps of poverty…’

‘And contentment.’

‘Hardship and contentment are not usual bedfellows.’

‘Then I will make them so.’

‘You are a strange girl, Ann.’

I took her hands in mine. ‘Thank you for giving me a chance.’

‘How could any of us stop you? I doubted not that you would starve yourself even unto death. Now, dress yourself and thank your Redeemer for letting you live.’

‘I will.’ I raised her hands and kissed her roughened fingers—my grandmother had never acted the fine lady. ‘And you also.’

And then I dressed, choosing a gown of yellow under an orange
kirtle, for I felt the sudden desire for the warm colours of the sun, and I combed my hair and pinched my cheeks and went downstairs for the first time in many, many days to find my grandmother and Frances in the withdrawing room, commanding the servants in the task of packing up goods, for my father was planning soon to claim his inheritance, while my grandmother moved to a dower house not far away.

‘When comes my father to take occupation?’

‘He and Constance come today. I am moving to the old manor. Frances stays.’

I took a long walk round the beloved house knowing it would never be as I remembered it. I loved it, in all its solid simplicity; it was a part of old England, the best part too. The portraits on the walls stared down at me: my grandfather, now restored to his proper place, my grandmother, the boy king Edward VI, the ill-fated Anne Boleyn.

Frances said my father planned a picture gallery to put them in, and a riding school also and a new chapel so God would not feel left out of all this magnificence.

By afternoon all was abustle with the arrival of my father and his wife, Constance, any moment expected.

The servants had all gathered anxiously to greet him, from the steward down to the humblest groom. There was a sense of tension in the air, for none knew what the future would hold, never mind they had worked here all their lives in my grandfather’s devoted service.

And they were right in their anxiety. No sooner had I arrived in the Great Hall than I heard Constance’s voice ring petulantly out. ‘We have fifty liveried servants of our own at Baynard’s, so I know not what work we will have for all of these. And our own steward to boot.’

Along with Frances and our grandmother, I curtsied dutifully as my stepmother took possession of our childhood home, though the feeling in my heart was as black as night.

Constance was a plump woman who had become so stout I doubted she could climb on a horse. And if ever she mounted my father she must surely smother him.

She accepted our curtsies as if she were Queen Elizabeth herself. A kinder lady would have told my lady grandmother, who was nearing eighty, that standing in line to greet her was unnecessary in one of her
advanced years, yet she did not. And when we stood up again she whispered loudly to my father, ‘I had forgot. At least Frances is a credit to you.’

Frances smiled proudly, until I kicked her.

Even before the servants had been dismissed I could see Constance look around the room, planning how she would improve it. How this must have seemed to our grandmother, who had lived at Loseley all her married days and filled it with her treasures, I know not for she bore it with great dignity. Yet, as Constance swept from the room to tour the house, quill and parchment in hand, I heard a small sigh escape her.

‘You will soon be safe in your jointure house,’ I murmured.

‘Ann, be not so ungenerous,’ corrected Frances. ‘Our stepmother has many worthy qualities.’

My grandmother and I smiled. When Frances left on some errand my grandmother leaned into my ear. ‘You are fortunate to be going to London. There will be changes enough here.’

At last the moment came of my release. We would leave for London within the hour.

As I packed up my baskets and trunk I decided to speak to Constance about Stephen and Hope, and how I would answer for their treatment if aught befell them.

‘How can you answer for them when five minutes since you ran about half-mad like some demented creature from Bedlam?’ Constance demanded, laughing scornfully. ‘How can even you take care of yourself? And who will wed you now that you have refused Master Manners? Not your scandalous poet. We have seen the last of him.’

I turned on my heel that she would not see the pain in my eyes.

Frances tried to follow, eager to tell me aught, yet Constance called her back.

Yet despite all, my spirits could not be kept down for long. I was going to London, not York House it was true, now that the new Countess was its mistress, but a stone’s throw away at the lodgings my father had taken in Charing Cross.

And but ten minutes on foot from Master Donne’s lodging.

My grandfather’s groom broke into my thoughts with the news that our coach was ready and waiting outside and my father installed in it.

‘We will miss your lively presence, mistress,’ the man said and though he smiled I could see the fear shining through about his future here.

‘Not so lively lately.’

‘Aye, it has been a sad time.’

He took my basket and carried it from the dark back entrance out into the sunlight where the coach stood waiting.

I took one last glance round my family home, no longer a place of peace and protection, and prepared to follow him.

‘Goodbye, child!’ My grandmother had followed me out. ‘Go to London, and good luck to you!’ I clung to her, conscious that the future awaiting me was uncertain and difficult. And yet for the first time in many weeks I felt an unfamiliar emotion.

Hope.

YET I HAD
to keep this feeling hidden from my father. The journey to London passed in bitter silence on his part, as if he no longer had a daughter.

His humour I found to be matched by a city that was quieter and surlier also. More taxes were being squeezed from the populace for the Irish war, and a new commander chosen, yet the war dragged on apace. The Earl of Essex, so long the Queen’s delight, had met a sombre end on Tower Hill as my sister’s husband had predicted, so far gone in vanity and treason that even the Queen could not save him. I wondered what the lady Mary Howard thought of that.

The lodgings my father had bidden in Charing Cross were surprisingly spacious given my father’s closed fist. They comprised ten rooms, with several bedchambers, dining chamber, withdrawing room and space for cook and servants and a small garden. The views were of naught but other buildings, so near across the alley that I could reach out and shake the hand of my opposite neighbour. Each chamber was large and clean enough, yet had gloomy walls adorned with tapestries that had seen better days, each having acquired a faint greenish hue that cast a depressing light on all the occupants, as if viewed through a murky pond, and this did little to raise our sombre mood.

My father had brought baskets of petitions and submissions sent to him as member of Parliament, commissioner and justice and I began to try and make myself as useful to him here as I had at Loseley.

This was not easy as he was as cold and forbidding as a mountain
crag in wintertime. Even, on one occasion, he withdrew his arm from the chair where it leaned lest I touch it as I bent to pick a paper from the floor.

All the same I worked steadily through, summing up each petition for his greater ease, using up four good swan’s quills, until my eyes ached and the fingers of my hand cried out from writing, and all the while I wondered how soon I might get word of my arrival to Master Donne.

I sat in the withdrawing chamber, a good ashwood fire burning next to me, for the weather had turned cold, contemplating the great pile I had just perused—I had read enough of disputed leases and boundary arguments than ever I wished to know in my whole life—when my father’s groom announced the arrival of both my sisters.

‘Ann,’ demanded Mary, her eyes aglow and her fresh complexion making her more lovely than I had seen her for many months, ‘why hide you away here with these dusty documents? It is a fine afternoon abroad, too good for sitting here in the gloom like the bent-up clerk to some fusty apothecary.’

‘I wonder what brings this new sparkle to your eye,’ I replied. ‘Mayhap it is your child, overwhelming you with motherly love?’