“A token.” He knew she had met such evasion from him before, and he knew she did not like it. Why then did he simply not admit the truth at the start? But something in him held back even as she asked, “What manner of token?”
“A bracelet,” he admitted, trying to sound matter-of-fact, as if a bracelet were simply payment and not a lover’s gift. “A mere bauble that I took and sold.”
“A bracelet,” she said. Then, as if stunned, she added, “Lady Bedford gave you a bracelet.” All the color drained from her face. Jack had never loved her so much as at that moment, never been so sorry all his evasion had hurt her. He stood and took her in his arms, and she wept a little on his shoulder. He held her until Constance’s tugging at her dress made her pull away. “Well,” she said as she dabbed at her eyes with a sleeve, “I am not surprised she liked it. You told me it was written from the heart.”
“It was. It is.” He spoke firmly as he stood and looked at her. “I wrote it for you, and still it is written for you.” It was the truth. Then why did it sound otherwise when he said it? Damn his . . . whatever it was that made him sound that way. It was the truth, though: he was sure of it. He had written the poem for Anne, and it was still her poem.
There was a strain in her smile. “Of course you must show your poems to others. It is merely . . . a necessity.”
“For patronage. A formality. A courtesy. Nothing more.”
“Nothing more.” She turned away slightly. “How else is one to get him a place?”
He caught the reference.
For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love.
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honor, or his grace;
And the King’s real, or his stamped face,
So you will let me love.
It seemed long ago he had written those lines, but it was only three years. He said slowly and plainly, “We needs must eat, and it takes money for that.”
“Yes,” she said with equal firmness. “We must. And do you think our Heavenly Father does not know we need to eat, and more than bread alone?” This talk of Providence again. He winced, but she continued. “Have these little ones gone hungry, for bread or meat or love? Even if you speak but of the fruits of the earth, then Francis—”
“Francis! Yes, your cousin will suffer us to remain at Pyrford. Francis Wolley will stuff us as he stuffs his Christmas geese.” Jack began to pace, his hob-nailed boots clicking on the fine blue-gray Wilmcote flagstone that Francis had just installed, carted all the way from Warwickshire because the color of the old flooring wouldn’t do. When the baby started to cry, Jack raised his voice above the noise. “While other men make their way in the world, I will prevail upon your cousin to decorate a room with us.”
Anne bobbed the baby gently and tried with a look to get Jack to soften his tone. Neither infant nor husband, though, would be quieted. The one had a lusty set of lungs and the other ignored her silent plea. She said calmly, “He is as much your friend as my cousin. We remain here more for his love of you than—”
“I will offer witty conversation,” Jack said, his voice building even louder, “when Francis fancies wit.” Jack’s gestures grew almost comically expansive. “And when his guests know of my disgrace—which is to say when his guests are friends with your father Sir George More, the new-minted Treasurer to the Household of the Prince of Wales—which is to say when Wolley’s guests are any lords or ladies in the whole of England—as when King James himself came a progress to Pyrford and our part was to linger in the shadows of the staircase in the great hall while your father’s men or trained apes or whatever they fancy themselves bowed and scraped before His Majesty—then I will remain demurely out sight and discreetly of earshot!” This last word rang so loud that the baby stared, shocked into momentary silence while the pewter wash-basin hummed with the reverberation. Then Little Jack started up again in earnest, louder than before, and Constance shrieked as if to outdo them all.
Jack started to storm out of the house but thought better of it. For several seconds he stood with his hand on the latch. My disgrace, he had just said: another unintended dart at Anne. She was the one who had been done out of grace, had been stripped of her father’s favor. Willingly she had given up a fortune for love; Jack had much less to lose, and much to gain if Sir George had released her dowry. Or so the world saw the match. He knew, or he knew when the Devil wasn’t whispering otherwise, that he too had married entirely for love. He had married Anne, not her money. Or did one ever marry entirely for anything? Without her fortune she would never have had the learning, the languages, the wondrous wit that had so captivated him over the years at York House. But of one thing he was certain: His wife was utterly unlike the other women he had known, learned or not. It was Anne he had married, and it was Anne he loved still, for better or worse. And at the moment he was the one making it worse.
His shoulders flagged. Turning to her with as apologetic a gesture as he could muster, he reached for her hand. For a moment she looked as if she would leave. She stood her ground, though, as her jaw tightened and the unaccustomed cold fire flickered in her eye. She did not take his peace-offering, but left his hand hanging in the air. Jack held only her hard glare while he felt his pulse throb in his temples.
But then, all unaccountably, she cocked her head and mugged such an antic look amid the din that he smiled in spite of himself. From somewhere inside him came a chuckle, and it was answered by one from Anne. Then he laughed, and so did she. He started to go on about Francis but could not get out the name without laughing. Before long he backed against the wall, slid to the floor, and sat convulsed until he coughed and tears ran to his collar. Anne came to sit beside him. Both children crowded onto her lap, quiet and rapt, fascinated by the spectacle of their father so convulsed.
Of course she was right. Of course God—or, in the meantime, Francis (Anne would say it was God working through Francis)—would provide. The baby sat there in his mother’s lap, hale and fat and like to live. Constance’s eyes glowed in the firelight.
Jack and Anne sat without talking but holding hands for a long time: until the logs had burnt to embers, the baby had nursed himself to sleep at Anne’s breast, and Constance lay with her thumb in her mouth, her head on Jack’s lap. Then Anne let go of Jack’s hand, stretched her free arm, and yawned. He was tired too. But the matter was unresolved, and he did not feel right going to bed like this.
“You know I pray,” he said. “You know I pray for guidance, for a way to serve the Lord. The church, though, is not the path—not for me.”
“But how do you know?”
“Anne, a minister must be called of God, must lead a blameless life.”
She paused momentarily before asking, “And where is the blame in yours?”
“Nowhere, now.” Tender as he felt toward her, the words sounded almost bitter—almost as if he wanted to wound her with his life’s blamelessness. But what could he tell her? That God judged the motions of the heart and not the outward doings, that his heart was corrupt even if his actions weren’t? That he desired to sin but forced himself to refrain? Was that even true, or only the foul Fiend whispering that it was true? Was it only because he was timid and not because he was good that he refrained from lifting Lady Bedford’s dress and thrusting her against a wall until she screamed with pleasure? No matter; what would Anne think if he confessed to any such desire? The theology of her own church accounted for these temptations, but he doubted she had ever felt the sudden tug of adultery. He forced himself to speak softly: “We’ve talked of this. My present actions do not stand in the way, but my past ones do.”
Her tone was firm. “Yes, we have talked of it. And do you believe me when I say I have forgiven you your past?”
Well, her forgiveness was easily enough granted: the other women had come and gone before he met her. “Of course I believe you.”
She spoke crisply. “You believe then that I can forgive you but that God cannot.”
/>
“No,” he said wearily. At another time the word might have exploded from him, but now he was too spent for shouting. “No, no.” Jack knew full well that God had forgiven him, but somehow the knowledge pined in his soul and made it cold. “It is . . .” he said uncertainly, “it is that I have no sign, no inner assurance, of the Lord’s favor for the ministry.”
“What, you think a priest of the Church of England should not be married, is that it?”
“No. Yes. I don’t. . . .Yes. I will not deny it: there is something of the Catholic still in me that rankles against a married priest. A priest must give his all to the Church. I have seen men. . . .” The images crowded into his mind now, as they had so often troubled his dreams.
Uncle Jasper, newly back in England as head of the Jesuit order there, was taking him to the vast, three-cornered gallows at Tyburn to see the execution of the great Campion: the quick-spirited Jesuit who had visited Jack’s house only a few weeks before. When Jack’s mother objected that a nine-year-old boy had no business witnessing a bloody murder, Jasper told her it was no mere gruesome spectacle but a glorious celebration, and besides, having the boy with him would aid in Jasper’s own disguise.
Uncle Jasper had read to Jack several times the copied-out letter Father Campion had written to the Queen’s own Privy Council, challenging all the most learned Protestants of the land to debate. The boy had part of the words by heart, and they gave him a thrill every time he said them aloud or merely ran them over in his mind: Touching our Society, be it known to you that we have made a league—all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practice of England—cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood.
And then, racked out of his natural form, consumed by prison, and battered from the drag behind the innocent, strong-necked horse, Campion had stood weakly on the platform at Tyburn. In front of the very fire that would burn his inmost parts, he prayed for the forgiveness of his tormenters as the crowd cursed and jeered. Jack stood close enough to the gallows to hear some of the priest’s words. No longer a bold challenge to the powerful, those words—Look tenderly upon them as you look even now upon your blessed Son— had filled Jack with love for the man and his cause, sick-hearted hatred for the mob and the torturers. Then Campion’s eyes had rested on Jack, with a look that said he would happily die another death if it would relieve the boy’s heated tears.
It was then, when perhaps the martyr needed him most, that Jack had turned away. He heard but did not see the gurgling struggle for breath at the noose’s end, heard despite the clamor of the crowd the rip of live abdominal flesh as the dull blade parted it, heard the sizzle of the priest’s guts tossed onto the fire, heard the hacking at the limbs.
Now, as Anne sat beside him asking about the ministry, the sister-image to Campion’s martyrdom troubled Jack’s mind. Some dozen years later after the hanging, drawing, and quartering that still pulsed through his dreams, Jack’s dying brother Henry, blackened out of his youth with plague-sores, lay gasping out pathetic prayers in his prison cell. It was the priests and all their mindless allegiance to Rome that had cost his brother his life. It was their marriage to martyrdom and death. It was their damnable, suicidal faith, and Jack’s tears had burned against them as Henry refused, for fear of spreading the pestilence, to let Jack hold him as he died.
Now he said none of this to Anne. She had not seen these deaths, and he was glad of it. “The church is not for me,” he said, “unless God gives me some sign of it.”
“Well,” she answered, shifting both sleeping children into Jack’s lap while she rose from the floor, “that’s as may be. God will provide.” The usual Protestant platitude. Then she added, “But the signs of the Lord lie hid in the book of the world. Turn every leaf.” She knelt, carefully picked up Constance, who remained asleep with her thumb in her mouth, and took her upstairs to bed.
Little Jack erupted with what seemed a quart or two of the milk he had just drunk, then went on sleeping peacefully. Jack propped his head against the wall and looked at the ceiling, the smell of half-digested milk rising about him. He held the baby with one hand, pushed himself stiffly upright with the other, and, when he could not find a rag near the wash-basin, went in search of one by the light of a rush-candle he touched off from the fire’s embers. After a minute’s search he found a cloth draped over a chair in the next room. He poured water from the ewer into the basin, dampened the cloth, and did his best to clean the baby and himself.
When he carried Little Jack up to bed, Anne was busy at her hymns and prayers over Constance, so he laid the baby in the padded crib next to the little girl’s bed where the prayers would do for both, and went back downstairs to do what he could to walk away the day’s lingering troubles. Once again he began to pace, this time more slowly than before. He had just brought home the hope of patronage: the bracelet had not fetched its worth, it was true, but enough for some little celebration. Yet the gift had somehow set him at odds with Anne. The flagstone clicked beneath his boots. When he had come even with the door for the third or fourth time, a sharp knock startled him into reaching for his absent sword.
CHAPTER 3
Reaching for his sword-hilt: a habit from the wars, or from all those years of practicing with Henry. But he had not worn his sword to Lady Bedford’s house; the leather belt was cracked and shabby, and the scabbard wanted polishing. There was no need for a sword now anyway. He was in his home—well, Wolley’s home—and it was only a knock at the door. A sharp knock, though, certainly not like the musical tapping of Wolley, who might not deign to knock in the first place. And the hour was late. Instinctively Jack glanced aside. Yes, his sword was in its wonted place, on a high shelf in the corner: near enough, if he needed it. Despite his irritation at the hard rapping on the door, Jack paused before lifting the latch as he remembered the encounter that had spurred his years of sword-practice with Henry.
He had been only ten or eleven, Henry a year younger, when they rounded a corner to find three older boys huddled around a dead cat on a narrow street. Jack recognized the leader of the three: Tom Purvis, a short, stocky youth with a limp hank of hair that hung in a greasy strand before his face. The boy had served a year or two as Jack’s father’s ironworking apprentice before the good man’s death, and the spark-burns on Purvis’s hands and face proclaimed him an ironworker still. “Look here,” Purvis had said, “it’s Jackie Donne, what should be an apprentice like us, but now as his father is dead and his new father too fine for the trade, little Jackie puts on airs.”
“No,” Jack had said, “I think laboring for an ironmonger a noble trade.”
“He thinks it a noble trade! Listen how he puts on airs.” Purvis tried to match his tones to Jack’s—“I think working for an ironmonger a noble trade”—then scoffed. “His new father the doctor sends him to school to learn how to put on airs, instead of work.” One of the bigger boys flanking Purvis snorted, and the other stared ahead stonily, jaw clenched and hands flexing.
“I put on no airs,” said Jack, “and I mean no hurt to any of you.”
“He means us no hurt! Did you hear that, Dickon? He means us no hurt.”
Dickon, the one who had just snorted, now guffawed. “Oh, ’e means us no ’urt. Well, then, now we can breave easy, then, if ’e means us no ’urt.”
Purvis gave Jack a shove. “Now do you mean us any hurt? Your filthy Jesuit uncle will not help you hurt us, for he has fled London, has he not? Do you mean to hurt us, Jackie Donne?”
Henry pulled at his brother’s sleeve. “Jack, we should go.”
Without taking his eyes off Jack, Purvis said, “You’ll go when we tell you to go.” The big, grim-faced boy took a step forward and stood louring over the frail-boned Henry.
“
Stand away from him, you,” Jack said.
The boy said nothing, but with an upward blow, lifted Henry off his feet and sent him sprawling to the pavement.
Jack launched himself at the big boy, hooked his foot behind the boy’s, and made him stumble and fall onto his back. Jack swung his fist but hit nothing as he felt himself jerked back, and a knee in the stomach made him double over and left him gasping for breath. From the corner of his eye he saw that Henry’s head was bleeding. Still bent at the waist, Jack watched as Dickon advanced on him, an idiotic grin on his face. Jack lunged forward, butting the boy in the midsection with the top of his head. Dickon staggered back and tripped over the grim-faced boy, who had just started to get to his feet. For the moment the two lay in a tangled heap. Jack turned to Purvis, who stood with a cruel smile on his face. In his hand he held a knife. “Say you put on airs since you went to school instead of work. Say it.”
Jack coughed out the word: “No.”
He jumped back as Purvis swung the blade. The bigger boys were untangled and starting to rise. Purvis tried a jab with the knife. Jack dodged to the side, then elbowed Purvis in the ribs. The knife clanked to the cobblestones. Jack reached for it, but Purvis kicked it out of the way. Now Henry was standing, weaving a little, and Jack felt someone grip his arm. Henry turned and ran. Hardly believing what he saw, Jack watched his little brother disappear around a corner. It was Dickon holding his right arm, and now the other big boy gripped his left. Jack sagged at Henry’s betrayal, hardly caring when he saw Purvis creep into view, a menacing smirk on his face. Purvis pulled back his fist, and Jack felt it slam against the side of his head. When he looked up, the same fist was on the way again. This time it hit him just above the eye, and it seemed no time passed before he felt the warm trickle of blood. Purvis’s next blow came in low, and once more Jack had to gasp for air. Purvis said, “Shall we teach Jackie Donne to put on airs, now his father is dead and his filthy Jesuit uncle is gone? Shall we carve it into him?” Dickon made an incomprehensible sound of approval as Purvis turned, then walked to the curb where his knife lay in a puddle of rainwater. He picked it up and moved slowly toward Jack. “What shall I write on him? I know my letters too, Jackie. I need none of your schooling to know my letters. What shall I carve upon him?”
Love's Alchemy Page 4
