Love's Alchemy

by Bryan Crockett

  Another half-witted sound came from Dickon. Purvis held the edge of the blade to Jack’s forehead, slowly increasing the pressure until Jack felt his skin give way. Now blood trickled around his other eye.

  Then a sharp cry made Purvis pause. “Here, Uncle Jasper! Here! Hurry! Jack needs you!” It was Henry’s voice. He sped around the corner, looking back into the street he had come from, frantically beckoning to someone still out of sight. “Hurry!” Henry spun around and shouted to his brother. “It’s Uncle Jasper, Jack! He’s come back, on his horse. He has his sword, and—” Henry turned back to the street. “Quickly, Uncle Jasper!”

  Now Jack could hear the steady clop of a horse. Purvis hesitated, then turned and bolted away. The grim-faced boy released his grip, gave Jack a smack in the back of the head, and ran. Apparently unable to comprehend what was happening, Dickon still held tight to Jack’s right arm. Jack turned and with his left fist hit him in the nose as hard as he could. Immediately Dickon released his grip, held both hands to his face, then looked at the blood on them. Jack smiled. “Your friends are gone, and my uncle is come. He and I will break your pate together.” Dickon looked up, and the horror slowly dawned in his eyes. He looked around for his friends, turned, and ran.

  At that instant a hostler leading an old mare rounded the corner and stopped when he saw Jack, whose grin stood out amid the streams of blood on his face. “Henry!” Jack shouted. “That were a device worthy of Ulysses.” He laughed. “I thought you had deserted me.”

  “Never,” said Henry. “I heard the horse, and it was all I could think to do.”

  The hostler, hardly able to piece out what had happened, stood scratching the back of his neck.

  Jack put his arm over Henry’s shoulder, and the two strode home to tease their horrified mother. After that the two brothers practiced daily with blunt-tipped swords.

  Now, as he stood before the door glancing at his sword on the high shelf, the whole encounter with the three boys having flashed though his mind in a few images, another series of knocks—even louder this time—disturbed the quiet of the night. “Anon, anon,” he said impatiently. He fetched the candle from where he had set it on the washstand, undid the latch, and opened the door. There stood a plumed, silk-stockinged, taffeta-jacketed, officious-looking stranger with a cudgel in one hand—no doubt the instrument he had used to strike the door—and a piece of folded parchment in the other. The man had a clean-shaven face, squinting eyes, and an upturned nose.

  “Master John Donne?” he asked in a needling voice.

  “I am,” said Jack. “What is it that would have you batter the boards as to wake all the sleepers in the house and half the sleepers in the churchyard?”

  The visitor gave Jack a supercilious glare. “Only this,” he said, “a message from no lesser personage than the illustrious Lord Robert Cecil, Baron of Essendon, Secretary of State and Chief Privy Counsellor to His Majesty King James, Master of the Court of Wards, et cetera, et cetera. . . . Would you like me to continue with my master’s titles, or would you prefer me to depart with his missive to you? Or”—he pulled back the letter and held it daintily in the air—“would you have me deliver it?”

  Cecil! Good God, Cecil. . . . What could Robert Cecil want with Jack Donne? Whatever it was, it could scarcely bode well. Could this be Anne’s uncle’s work, Egerton’s backdoor way of trying to help? But the Lord Keeper was hardly one to work through Cecil, hardly one to trust his niece to such a serpent, even if the twisted little man did run James’s kingdom for him. Cecil! All of it surged upon Jack at once: all of it, somehow compressed into this moment, while the overdressed messenger stood before him with the parchment in his hand. This instant contained all messages, from God or the Devil or both: messages about patronage, power, providence, fate, freedom, family . . . all of it. His eternal life, his soul—maybe the lives and souls of innumerable others—teetered and reeled on the point of this precarious now. But perhaps it was always so. He breathed. “I will take the paper.” The messenger smirked, his little victory won, and swaggered away with his cudgel tucked under his arm.

  When Jack latched the door and turned, Anne stood on the stairs in the faint glow of the rush candle. “They slept through the noise,” she said, for once failing utterly to read his thoughts. “What sort of creature makes such a sound? Was it a dragon too courteous to burn the house without asking?”

  “Yes,” he said abstractedly. “Ah . . . no. Not so courteous. A messenger from Cecil.”

  “Cecil.” Her playfulness vanished. “Robert Cecil, you mean. The King’s. . . .” Her voice faded.

  “Agent.” He supplied the neutral word but mentally added a few others: Plotter. Henchman. Spymaster. Devil.

  “What does he want?”

  Jack looked at her for a moment, then at the parchment. “I don’t know.” He broke the wax and opened the letter. He and Anne took it in at once:

  Lord Robert Cecil the Viscount Cranborne requires your attendance at his house in Ivy Lane at an hour and a quarter past dawn tomorrow. Which appointment you are to fail not on peril of the King his displeasure.

  Cecil’s house in Ivy Lane: he made it sound like a cottage, but Jack knew it to be a sprawling mansion covering blocks of London, a fortress flanked to the south by Bridewell—once a hospital, now a cruel workhouse, almost a slave market—and to the east by the broad, open sewer of Fleet Ditch. Bridewell and Fleet Ditch: apt reminders of the poverty, sorrow, and stench that clung to the outskirts of power.

  “Viscount Cranborne?” Anne asked.

  “One of his new titles. Earl of Salisbury is next, they say. But no matter. They are all stuffed into his little personage.”

  “What could this summons mean?” she asked.

  He shook his head slowly. “I know not. Friendly employment of some sort?” he suggested hopefully.

  “If it is, it doesn’t strike the ear so; peril of the King his displeasure has an unwholesome ring.”

  “It is but . . . a custom, a formula. Cecil dictated, said et cetera, and his secretary filled in the rest.”

  Anne knew when she was being coddled. “Come, you have been secretary to a Privy Counsellor. If you were penning a letter from the Lord Keeper, a friendly letter offering friendly employment, would you write such a phrase?”

  “No. But your uncle is not Robert Cecil.”

  “Just so.”

  They stood silently until the candle guttered and all was dark.

  “What will you do?” she asked.

  There was real fear in her voice: a rare thing. What could Anne know about Cecil that frightened her so? Had her uncle been talking? That would hardly be like him. Lord Keeper Egerton, ever the Christian gentleman, would not gossip even to his male friends, much less to women or girls. On the Privy Council he had kept his distance from Cecil—Jack had watched the politic dances by day balanced against the literal ones in the courts by night. As Egerton’s secretary Jack had been like a playgoer at the stagings of statecraft: the farces, revenge tragedies, masques, and interludes. Two or three dozen times he, Jack Donne, had stood near enough the little hunchbacked form of Robert Cecil to wring his neck. He could do it with one hand. Yet no doubt when he saw Cecil tomorrow the man would not recognize Jack’s face at all; Cecil spared none of his attention for anyone or anything not useful to him.

  Jack answered her: “What can I do but go to see him? He is the most powerful man in England, after King James. Or including him. But what makes you worry? What do you know of this Cecil?”

  “Nothing else than what I have seen with my eyes, heard by my ears, or noted by rumor—which is to say I know nothing at all. For rumor is ever untrusty, and at my uncle’s house in the Queen’s reign I exchanged but a few words with Sir Robert as one of our dinner guests, some three or four times. Once or twice with my father at Loseley. There was nothing untoward in anything he said.” She paused. “Only, a chill crept along the edges of his words.”

  Jack nodded in the dark.

&n
bsp; “Oh,” Anne continued, “and once when I was alone in my father’s library, Cecil stumbled in and spoke awkwardly, as if he had entered the wrong room. He stayed a few minutes, spat out some pleasantries, and left.” She added in a quieter tone, “My uncle does not like him—despises him, perhaps, if my uncle can despise any man. He would never say it, but I know it is true.”

  “Well, so it may be. But come what may, this Cecil is but a man. Make him not into a devil, whether or no he be called in the streets Robertus Diabolus. As you say, rumor is untrusty. Cecil is a man. As am I: a man, and no fool. So fear not. I too can be nimble with a word, and were it to come to a contest of the wits—”

  “Jack!” She startled him with the force of the interruption. “This is what I fear, as much as I fear Robert Cecil: I fear Jack Donne fetching the notion it is his business to cross words, which is more fell than crossing swords—with Robert Cecil. Well, he will not kill you with his sword, but he may kill you with a word. It will happen some behind-door way, and the man will lament your death as much as the maiden in your poem lamented the passing of that flea she purpled her nail withal.”

  Jack held up both palms in the dark. “I am schooled.”

  “You have children.”

  “All abject submission, I, upon the morrow. I shall hear what he desires, and come to tell you as early as I may.”

  They stood holding each other in the dark until Anne said, “To our prayers?”

  “Hm. Prayers.”

  Early the next morning Jack said he had slept some, but even by the flickering light of the lantern Anne could see it was otherwise. His eyes, always dark, had lost their wonted spark. Shadows tinged the skin beneath them.

  “You look very fine,” she said. “The clothes sit well upon you.”

  “I look . . . black. As ever.”

  “Just the color for this meeting. Nothing for show, but well-fitted. You look fine.”

  “I must go.”

  “Yes.”

  It was yet above an hour until dawn; he had checked the stars and the progress of the moon. He would borrow a good horse from Wolley’s stables: a man must arrive at Lord Cecil’s house in some sort of style. Ah! Wolley’s fine Andalusian stallion would be just the animal, and so the ride into London would barely take an hour—much less if he let the stallion run. And the fine, proud animal would like nothing so much. The horse was the fastest Jack had ever seen—and Francis, for all his foppish delicacy, one of the finest riders. There was no denying it: the man looked good on a horse.

  By no means did Jack want to be late, but he had no need to tire the Andalusian. There was plenty of time.

  Anne kissed him goodbye and watched him walk along the path to the stables until he disappeared around the corner of the hedge. He walked as if conscious that she was watching him: confidently, loosely, as if merrily setting off to the wars. She closed the door softly and went back to sit at the table, wrapping a woolen blanket around herself against the morning chill. The children slept upstairs. Instinctively she started to say a prayer for Jack but stopped before she had well begun. In the parable Jesus urged the seeker to keep knocking, keep pestering the master, and Paul said to pray without ceasing. But she had prayed enough for now.

  The lantern’s flame hissed faintly as it writhed in its fitful dance. Shadows jerked and flickered on the walls. As she sat with her head tilted and her hair hanging loose, she looked into the smoky globe that shielded the lantern’s little fire. Her reflected face, pulled and warped all out of its proper form, stared back at her.

  And Lady Bedford: in the morning Jack sees the enchanting Lady Bedford. She likes his verses well enough to ask for more of them. No, likes him: likes him well enough to give him a bracelet of gold. Then in the evening Robert Cecil sends for him. Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and Robert Cecil. If the two were in league, Anne had never heard it, but amid the complicated ravellings of court alliances it seemed likely enough.

  Anne’s distance from court affairs left her knowing little about how to help her husband. Most days the allure of life at court did not enter her mind at all. Other times she was grateful to be free of the machinations of courtiers. But sometimes, as now, she chafed against the role she had chosen. It might have been otherwise. She could easily have married a nobleman: even before she turned fifteen, several had made their desires plain. But the stirrings of her heart—moved by Providence and love together—had led her to choose Jack. She did not regret her choice. Or not often.

  Maybe if she mustered what little she did know, she could piece together some manner of help for him. . . .Where to start? Prayer: always start with prayer. But once again she found she could not pray, not now. Her heart was not in it, and somehow she knew that mouthing the words would not be pleasing to God, that for this task he wanted her not to pray from the heart but to use her head. The Lord had, after all, given her a good one. Well, what did she know? Just this: whatever Cecil—or Cecil and Lady Bedford—wanted from Jack, it would have to do with politics and it would have to do with religion. For everything having to do with Cecil had to do with both. She picked up the torn loaf that lay before her, turned it, put it down again, drummed her fingers on the table. But to know only that was to know almost nothing. So much was true of anyone at King James’s court, true almost of anyone in England. What else then did she know? Start at the first: James, an odd man from an odd land. The Scots Protestant king with the Catholic mother the Queen of Scots and the Catholic wife, Anna of Denmark. James was the Protestant who had come to power by dangling the hope of tolerance before the Catholic faction on one hand and the Puritan on the other. Then when all was secure, the new king had used Cecil to clench both hands into fists.

  And Lady Bedford. The Protestant Lady Bedford had grown fast friends with James’s Catholic queen, Anna of Denmark. Jack said the new queen had become the only person in England allowed to hear Catholic Masses without fear of torture and death. Was Lady Bedford, then, trying to convert the Queen to the new faith? Or was the Countess secretly . . . ? Anne had seen Lady Bedford only once, at a great gathering at Loseley, years ago. Anne had been a child of eleven or twelve, Lucy the Countess of Bedford already married at only thirteen or fourteen—yet seeming years and years older. Proud-looking she had been, with a quick eye. Beautiful, yes. Perhaps. At least the young men seemed to think so; her doltish, droop-lipped new husband the Earl of Bedford had kept a watchful eye on her. At the time Anne had seen no use for the haughty, learned young countess who bantered with the bachelors home from university—had run off instead to play with her cousins.

  Now Anne fingered the smooth edge of the wooden trencher in which lay the sodden remnants of the broth-soaked bread Jack had pretended to eat before he left. What was left of the loaf rested before her on the table. She absently tore off a little piece and chewed it slowly.

  . . . And there was Jack, summoned: the handsome scholar-soldier, the troubled poet and statesman-in-the-making spurned by his Catholic family and then his wife’s Protestant one, unrewarded hero of the wars, ignored by Raleigh and Essex, finding a place at last with her uncle, and—she couldn’t help a wan little smile in the lamplight—falling desperately in love with a wealthy, fair-haired young maiden against all the rules. Like a tale of passion in Boccaccio. Or one of Shakespeare’s love stories for the stage. Her smile faded. A tragedy, it might be. Who could say before the last act? One thing was sure: comedy or tragedy, Cecil would make a fine villain. The third Richard, perhaps, or Iago.

  Anne drew the blanket closer about her. The pre-dawn chill made her breath hang in a faint cloud before it fell away into the shadows. But it was the thought of Iago more than the cold that made her shiver. She and Jack had seen the play at the Globe not a fortnight since. One of Wolley’s maidservants had stayed with the children. True, Jack was no Othello, and she no Desdemona. There should be nothing to fear then from this Cecil, Iago or no. Yet for days the play had not left her mind. When they had come home afterward, she had gathered the sleepy
children into the big bed, held them to her, and wept. Jack had not understood, or not quite. He too had been moved by the play but in a different way. Swept along by the words, the spell of the verse, he had wanted to find Will Shakespeare afterward and talk with him—had not understood that they must get home to the children and hold them, hold them.

  Warmed by Wolley’s fine horse, Jack rode along the Bankside under the cold, fitful stars. Just visible across the river in the first blush of dawn rose the great, blunt-topped summit of St. Paul’s, its steeple still not rebuilt after the lightning strike over forty years before, the flat-roofed remains nonetheless rising hundreds of feet above the London streets. Nearer at hand to his right stood the humbler-looking structures that in a few hours would house all manner of entertainment and depravity: the bear-baiting pits, the brothels, and the theaters, first the Swan, then the Hope, then the Globe. Before him spanned the architectural wonder that always took his breath away: London Bridge, with its twenty massive stone pillars that carried a highway across a quarter-mile of water. Teetering out over the river all along both sides of the bridge, supported by struts angling down to the piers, hung the shops. Some were made of stone and rose two or three stories. They tempted travellers with London’s finest goods: velvet caps, colorful silks from the Orient, gleaming jewels set in laceworks of silver and gold. But now all the shops stood shuttered against the night.

  Jack had time to spare—too much of it. He eased the Andalusian to a stop and watched the sun rise over London Bridge. As the stars faded, the eastern sky flushed with promise. But he could also make out the heads of traitors—or men executed as traitors—impaled on pikes fixed to the bridge’s gatehouse, rotting and gaping in their grotesque parodies of human woe. There they stayed as a warning to walkers and riders over the bridge until the quarreling birds had pecked them clean and carried away even the hair to line their nests. When only skulls remained, new traitors seemed ever at the ready to supply their heads. Absurd, insane these contraries seemed: the glorious hues blushing across the sky and the blackened death-masks on the bridge. With a grim eye Jack turned away, pulling the rein a bit too brusquely. The good horse moved obediently but snorted at the indignity. Jack reached down to give the stallion a pat on the side of his neck and a gentle word to let him know he meant no hurt.