Love's Alchemy

by Bryan Crockett

  Yes, any man summoned by Cecil—or a piece of any man—might end on London Bridge. But it would not be John Donne. Not unless he knew—knew— that God willed him to die a martyr’s death. Nor would he succumb to the Jesuitical fantasies of his youth. No, he would stop his ears against the bewitching bridal song that lured him into those soft, scented folds of oblivion. Never again would he fall in love with death, pursue her: never dream of hunting her down, ravishing her, and becoming one flesh with her. He must remember the heads on the bridge. In marrying death he would become one flesh with her, but one dead flesh. He would not succumb. He would not. Anne was his wife, and no one on earth was more alive than she. He shared a single flesh with a living woman, with life herself. To choose martyrdom now, unless God did the choosing—all of it, and made His Inscrutable Will as Scrutable as he made it to Jonah—would be to choose not just death but everlasting adultery.

  As Jack approached the bridge’s gatehouse, grinning with the teeth of its raised portcullis, one of the heads impaled on a pike seemed to fix its desperate gaze on him, as if to warn not the others making their way across the bridge but Jack himself that death awaited him on the other side. He looked away and tried to let the easy, rhythmic clop of hooves on cobblestones calm him. When he came to the crest of the bridge, he could make out on the far shore the Tower of London. Perhaps Raleigh was already awake and pacing within the Tower leads, like a caged panther—as beautiful, as proud, and, in the wild, as quick to pounce. Jack had seen him in his glory. Raleigh had looked like Mars himself as he and the shimmering Essex commanded the English forces at Cadiz. But now, first Essex and then Raleigh had fallen prey to this Robert Cecil. Well, maybe Essex had fallen prey to himself, but Cecil’s hand was in that, too. Raleigh, though, had been Cecil’s friend, and the twisted little hunchback had betrayed him. Even at Jack’s distance from the doings at court, he could see just how it had all fallen out. And now that he had made his move, Cecil would have to see that Raleigh spent the rest of his life in the Tower. If he ever gained his freedom, Raleigh would look for revenge.

  Jack had been inside the Tower’s walls just once, some twenty years before. In those days he had all but worshipped his uncle Jasper. As head of the Jesuit mission in England, Jasper Heywood had embodied all Jack’s aspirations for his own life. The man sparkled like the gem that bore his name. A brilliant, spirited seeker of adventure, a soldier and courtier who commanded his sword and his wit with equal dexterity, a scholar of both deep learning and good humor, a handsome priest who garnered respect and inspired devotion wherever he went, Uncle Jasper told stirring tales to Jack and Henry, tales of the fearless saints of old, tales of the English Jesuits and their outwitting of pursuivants and spies, their hairbreadth escapes, their clever disguises—Jasper’s favorite being open, ostentatious travel as a diplomat.

  Young Jack had wept, then moped about the house for days when he learned Uncle Jasper had been recalled to Rome. Two weeks later, when news reached London of the storm at sea that blew the ship back to the English coast, where Uncle Jasper was captured and sent to the Tower, Jack felt a secret, guilty thrill to think he might see his uncle again. For three months he talked of little else to his mother, until at last she agreed to take him with her to visit her brother in the Tower. She absolutely refused, though, to allow Jack’s younger brother to accompany them. So it was Henry’s turn to sulk.

  When the day came young Jack steeled himself against the terrors he would soon witness. Uncle Jasper would lie bound in chains, confined in a narrow, dim-lit keep. Rats would scuttle about his feet as the rack-weakened priest stared at his visitors through haunted, bloodshot eyes. The sight of his faithful nephew would help revive the man, help restore him to his rightful, fearless self. Then, with Jack’s help, he could escape. Although young Jack had never walked inside the massive fortress called the Tower, he knew well enough the moans and plangent cries of the inmates at the Clink and the Marshalsea, the fetid stench, the gritty faces pressed between iron bars, the meager, ragged arms outstretched for alms or crusts of bread.

  Unsurprisingly, the guard who admitted Jack and his mother through the Tower’s outermost portal bore a furtive look. He seemed to recognize Elizabeth but looked none too pleased with the business of leading the two to Uncle Jasper’s cell. The man did not so much as glance through the contents of the large baskets Jack and his mother carried. He simply led them at a brisk pace through roofless, moist, moss-walled walkways. Even in the open air, the rankness of the place made Jack’s gorge rise. But he kept beside his mother and did not vomit. At one point the guard motioned the visitors into a deep shadow while another, keys jangling, crossed a passageway before them. Then the guard led them around a corner and under a torch-lit archway. Jack looked up at the ribbed vault of the entryway’s ceiling. At the base of each of the four ribs a different grotesque, stone-carved image flickered in the torchlight: a snarling monster, a demonic skull, a horrified human face. But the visage that most frightened Jack simply leered eagerly, as if it were welcoming yet more human souls to pass beneath its gaze and never emerge after. Jack had to force himself to look away and move on.

  At last they came to Uncle Jasper’s cell. The guard turned the key, pulled open the thick-ribbed door on its heavy, creaking hinges, and let in the two visitors. Jack’s mother motioned for the guard to follow them inside. The man hesitated, then looked about him and stepped into the room. She said, “We will call again at noon one week from today. There will be four of us: the two you see before you and two who look like an old husband and wife. The woman will be hooded and bent over a cane. Supporting her will be a gray-bearded man with a broad-brimmed hat.”

  The guard looked at Elizabeth suspiciously. “This couple: will they be old indeed, or only made to look old? And will the one with the cane in fact be a woman?”

  “These things you needn’t know,” Elizabeth said.

  “If admitting them would imperil my life, I must needs know,” the guard replied.

  “But let us into this cell, let us out again two hours later, and your office is done. Here are thanks for your pains.” She handed him some coins.

  “But if these men be Catholic priests, my life were forfeit.”

  “Fear us not, but trust in the Lord.”

  The man looked dismayed by that admonition. “If they be Jesuits, Topcliffe will embowel me alive.”

  When she said nothing, he extended his hand to return the money. “I cannot do it.”

  Elizabeth gently closed his hand around the coins and said, “How fares your dear wife? Has her sickness passed?”

  “No,” the guard said quietly, “she fares worse.”

  “And the three little ones. Have you someone to care for them while you are here?”

  “My wife does what she can, but she grows tired and faint.”

  “Is she fevered?”

  “Aye.”

  Elizabeth hesitated only a moment before saying, “My husband is a doctor. Tomorrow he will visit her. With him will come one who will serve as nursemaid for your wife and caretaker for your children. There will be no expense to you.”

  The guard slowly withdrew his hand and pocketed the coins. “I thank you.”

  “One week from today,” Elizabeth said. “Noon. Meet us at the gate. Two hours.”

  The guard nodded his thanks, stepped into the passageway, shouldered the door shut, and locked it from the outside.

  The room was darksome—Jack had been right about that—and his eyes were only now beginning to adjust; he could tell more by sound than sight that the chamber was large. The air felt cool but not dank or cold. Two thick candles glowed on a table, and behind them Uncle Jasper, dressed in gentleman’s finery, sat in a comfortable-looking chair. His finger traced the page of a book open before him. The priest did not so much as look up—as if receiving visitors from outside the walls were the most ordinary thing in the world. Then, his finger pausing on the page, he said, “There: a good place to stop.” He raised his h
ead, and his face brightened. “Ah, my dear Elizabeth: a most welcome sight. And young Jack!” He rose and embraced his sister, then his nephew. Jack held on tighter and longer than might have been quite seemly, but he didn’t care. Nor did Uncle Jasper or Elizabeth protest. At last the priest ruffled the boy’s hair and said, “So. You must have campaigned long and hard to talk your mother into this visit.” Jack nodded, only then releasing his grip on his uncle. Jasper put his hands on Jack’s shoulders, held him at arm’s length, and looked into his eyes. “It is well,” he said. “You are old enough to aid us in our cause, and with more than prayers alone.”

  As if to shift the ground before the idea had time to take root in her son’s mind, Elizabeth said, “I have brought food and drink for us all. Jack, you will take some wine with us. But not too much; I trust not the water hereabouts to qualify the wine, so you must drink sparingly and keep your wits.”

  Jasper smiled. “A fine young man. Taller by three inches, I think, since last we met. If they let me keep my swords for exercise within these walls, I would try blades with you.”

  “Henry and I practice at home.”

  Elizabeth said, “And too lustily you practice. I doubt not but one of you will soon hurt the other past all cure.”

  They ate a leisurely meal: roast fowl, beef-and-cabbage pies, crisp apples, honeyed bread, and good Spanish wine. Jasper told them the story of the storm in the Channel, the near-shipwreck, and the party of pursuivants that met them on the Sussex shore—pursuivants or ordinary thieves, more like, looking for plunder if the ship should split. But as it was they had to content themselves with searching for crucifixes and rosaries, which they found in plenty. It was not long before one of the passengers, pressured by a pursuivant who salivated at sight of the poor man’s daughter, identified Jasper as a Jesuit.

  “It is by God’s own blessing you were spared the gallows,” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes,” Jasper replied as the customary gleam faded from his eyes, “I suppose it’s a blessing to be spared the gallows. To say nothing of the drawing and quartering. Or it would be a blessing if I could say my fellow-priests at the trial shared in it. I had prepared my soul for a goodly death, but the Queen would not have it so.”

  Jack’s mother had not told him about the Queen’s intervention, had not even told him of the trial. He said to his uncle, “Queen Elizabeth herself spared you?”

  “She did. She knew I counseled my Jesuit brethren not to seek out maryrdom, but to abide by the law if they could. She knew I told them to administer the Sacraments and to renounce rebellion. Besides, I think she remembered my days as her schoolmate, or she remembered your grand-uncle’s music and jesting in her father’s court.” Jasper paused before adding, “But there were six of us at the trial, and I alone was spared.” He said it as if being spared were a burden.

  “They died well,” Elizabeth said quietly. “They sang a Te Deum on the way to the scaffold.”

  Jasper nodded. Brightening a little, he said, “We sang one at the trial, just after our sentence of death. At that time I had no thought of a reprieve. Well, I suppose I might have known: I did, after all, carry the tooth in my pocket.”

  Jack’s mother turned to him. “Your kinsman Thomas More’s tooth,” she said. Jack knew the story well enough, but he let her tell it. “When your uncles determined to enter the Society of Jesus, both secretly wished to claim the relic, but each said the other should take it. On the eve of their departure, the tooth miraculously split into two, each a complete tooth; through the good Sir Thomas’s intercession, the Lord saw fit to bless them both with a wonder-working relic.” She added warmly, as if the point might be missed, “It was a miracle.”

  Although feeling flushed with the wine, Jack refrained from suggesting it was no miracle but a rotten tooth, cracked and ready to fall apart. His mother might insist that each relic was complete, but Jack had seen the one Jasper carried. If that was a whole tooth, it was a sorry one.

  Jasper was saying wistfully, “Singing that Te Deum with my friends while the justice pounded his gavel in fury. . . . Never have I felt so happy.”

  Jack could see his mother was torn: moved, perhaps, by the thought of condemned priests singing songs of thanksgiving for the gift of martyrdom, by her brother’s reprieve while the others went to their horrific deaths, by the bittersweet fear that her son would follow in her brothers’ risky path, by her reading in the boy’s expression the beginnings of doubt. Jack could hardly bear the look on her face; he felt he had to say something. He looked away from his mother and asked his uncle, “Is it long of the Queen that you live so well?”

  Before Jasper could answer, Elizabeth said, “What do you mean, he lives well? Your uncle lies in prison.”

  No, his uncle Jasper did not lie in prison; he sat, and in a cushioned chair. He watched the priest, wondering how the man would respond, and said, “But this chamber is large and clean. You have books and light to read them by. Did the Queen give order for them?”

  Jasper smiled. “No, good friends gave order for them. Friends like your mother, and many other of the faithful. I thank God for such friends. No, Jack, it is money that buys comfort in prison.”

  “They moved you here from the Clink. Did you live so well there?”

  “What a thing to say!” Elizabeth snapped. “No more wine for you, boy.”

  Jasper looked at his nephew carefully. “No, perhaps not so well as this, but I thank God I fared well enough—again, thanks to faithful friends.”

  “I have seen them at the Clink,” Jack said. “The prisoners there are hungry and dirty and sick.”

  “Many of them are, yes,” Jasper said.

  “Were it not well for you to give some of your money to them, that they might have food?”

  “Jack!” Elizabeth rose from her chair. He knew she was glaring at him, but he kept his eyes on the priest.

  Jasper calmly held up two or three fingers, a slight gesture to stay his sister. “My friends give me money that I might fare well. That is their wish. I feed the poor here as I fed them at the Clink: with word and with sacrament. Comfort of the soul.”

  “But you could buy them comfort of the body as well. Money, you said, buys comfort.”

  Elizabeth raised her hands. “I know not where the boy learnt such impudence.”

  “Oh,” said Jasper calmly, “I think he did not learn it, but it runs in his blood. Our father had it in his, I have it in mine, and”—here his eyes gleamed—“it may hap even my sister did not escape it entirely.”

  “Well, I am sure he did not learn it of me.”

  Jasper said, “But the question is well asked. When our Lord visited the house of Mary and Martha—this was long after he had raised their brother Lazarus from the dead—Mary anointed the Lord’s feet with costly spikenard. Tell me, Jack: who was it who said she had done ill for not selling the nard to feed the poor?”

  “Judas Iscariot.”

  “It was. Our Lord said Mary had done a good and holy thing; Judas was wrong to rebuke her. So too has your mother done a good and holy thing, as have others who have eased my lot. It would be wrong of me to deny them their wish.”

  The argument came straight out of the Gospel, and it came from Jack’s beloved uncle. Yet somehow the boy remained unconvinced. It was in fact what his mother feared, what he himself feared but felt powerless to stem: the young growth of doubt, the quickly flourishing questions about his elders, the Jesuits, the Roman Catholic Church. He could see that Uncle Jasper had cast him as Judas in the analogy, just as the priest had cast himself as Christ. That hardly seemed fair-minded, especially in light of all the places in the Gospels where Jesus insisted on feeding the poor. Jack pressed his luck: “Yes, but when the rich man came asking what he must do to find everlasting life, our Lord said, ‘Go, sell the things that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.’ ”

  Elizabeth was pacing now, arms folded, but she said nothing. With a wry little smile Jasper asked, “
How old are you now, Jack?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Twelve years old. Just the age of our Lord when his parents missed him on their journey home after the Passover feast, and they returned to find him in the temple disputing Scripture with the rabbis and wise men of Jerusalem. The men were astonished that a mere boy spoke with great authority.”

  Elizabeth stopped pacing and glared at her brother as if he had insulted her son. “Jasper,” she said, “you must not put such ideas—”

  “I but say that Jack is of the same age,” the priest replied. “I make no further comparison.” Jack was glad to hear that. He had bristled at being compared to Judas Iscariot, but this would be worse. To be likened to the young Jesus of Nazareth would put an intolerable burden on him, one he knew he would never be worthy to bear. Surely Jesus never had such thoughts as Jack harbored, never longed to pull the clothes off a girl like Katherine Fletcher, whose soft body moved so fluidly beneath her dress as she helped her father at the butcher’s shop.

  Elizabeth sat again, and the three ate and drank in silence for a few minutes. Then Jasper said, “Still, it is true Jack will prove a credit to the Jesuit order.”

  “That’s for our Lord to decide,” Elizabeth said. “And not for some while yet, I pray.”

  To live as a Jesuit: to serve the Blessed Virgin without a trace of fear, to outwit the pursuivants in a holy cause, to inspire the devotion of admiring maidens, to navigate grateful souls along the secret currents of a forbidden faith. A year, a month, even a week ago young Jack would not have hesitated to swear he would one day join the priesthood despite his longing for the likes of Katherine Fletcher. Now, though, now that he had finally been allowed to visit his uncle in prison, now that he had seen how Jasper prospered even within the Tower’s walls—a sight that Jack knew should make him grateful—somehow all this, more than his youthful lusts, made him doubt his calling.