Love's Alchemy

by Bryan Crockett

  Cecil continued: “And so between my halting speech and unpromising aspect, I presented, I am afraid, no very appealing personage to a young lady of Anne More’s sensibility. Neither did I receive at her hand any eagerness of welcome, nor yet any rebuff nor shadow of disdain. From these signs I deemed it best not to pursue my quarry further on that day, but neither to abandon the chase. My strategy you will find, I think, familiar: I retired for some days and plied my pen. I wrote her a sonnet.”

  “A sonnet!” The exclamation escaped before Jack could check it. Cecil seemed the least likely of all men to write love poetry. “You . . . wrote a sonnet for Anne.”

  “I did. And labored over it for many hours—days, even. I wrote, blotted lines, and recast them. For of all things I feared she would read it and laugh.”

  “Did she ever receive it?”

  “No. Nor will she ever receive it, nor will any man or woman, for I have burnt the paper.”

  “Why? Were you not pleased with the verses? Good poetry is, as you must have discovered, most difficult to write.”

  “It is difficult indeed. But in the end I was satisfied. The lines, I thought, would have moved one of Anne’s tender compassion to pity, mayhap to love.”

  This was maddening. What game was Cecil playing? If he desired Anne, if he wanted Jack dead, why had the man with all the power not done away with his lowly, disgraced rival two or three years before? It would have been easy enough. Was it a point of honor? Or did Cecil see Anne as spoiled now that she had lost her virginity? Or. . . . “When,” Jack asked, “did you write this sonnet?”

  Cecil said softly, “I think you have guessed the answer.”

  Jack’s mind numbed with the realization, yet he found himself saying clearly, “At some time, I would hazard, just after Christmastide following the Queen’s last Parliament.”

  Cecil placed his long fingers together, held them to his lips, and nodded. “You have it,” he said. Then his head lolled to one side, and with a little moan he exclaimed, “O, that I had proceeded with more haste! That poem, or the labor I poured into it, spelled the destruction of my only hope for earthly happiness. Imagine, if you will, Sir George’s confusion—then his fury—when letters arrived from you and from me on the same day. From you, an epistle delivered by no other than the Wizard Earl!—of him I would speak with you anon—but a letter boldly announcing the glad tidings of your marriage to his daughter, as though you were within your rights to claim a girl of her standing, still in her minority, without her father’s leave; and a letter from me begging Sir George to speak on my behalf, and offering her the sonnet I had enclosed.” He turned his watery gaze to Jack, as if expecting some manner of explanation or word of comfort or cry of protest or . . . Jack hardly knew what.

  “Why do you tell me these things?” he asked. “Why now?”

  With a little flutter of his hand Cecil waved the questions away. “For all his righteous wrath, Sir George did one thing well that day: he saw that he must not shout to the world that Sir Robert Cecil desired the hand of a girl who had eloped with the son of an ironmonger. No. He must not make me look the fool. Sir George, I am told, roared his displeasure to the very rafters upon receiving your news, but he spoke of mine to no one. That very day he rode to London to disclose to me my sorry fate. He returned the letter and the sonnet. The paper on which the poem was writ I have committed to the flames, but the words are deeper burned, here.” He touched his forehead. “Here.” He touched his heart. “Will you listen to them?”

  “I will.” Perhaps this was all Cecil wanted? A chance, for what reason God only knew, to recite a love poem to the husband of the poet’s beloved? Maybe Cecil somehow thought using Jack was the only way to exorcise a demon that had haunted him these last three years. Jack hardly knew what to make of such a prospect. Certainly much worse could befall a man summoned before Cecil than to be made to hear a bad poem. But after so many disappointed hopes, to be so summoned, to steel oneself for the encounter, and then to be so used. . . .

  “You are a poet,” Cecil said, “so you can tell me where it is wanting. And you are Anne More’s . . . lover.”

  “I am Anne Donne’s husband.”

  “And so, I trust, her lover still. You can tell me, then, whether the words would have moved her to pity, and to love.”

  “Say on, my lord.”

  Cecil eyed him for a few seconds before beginning. Then in a steady voice, with nuanced tones as if he had read poetry aloud all his life, he recited the lines:

  If but thy lightsome footfall might but pause,

  While, halting, limping, I made up the pace

  To take thy side; if thou wouldst turn thy face

  To mine and not recoil despite just cause,

  And were thy touch a balm to mend my flaws,

  Or would thy beauty’s gentle force new-trace

  Some faintest shadow of thy soul’s sweet grace

  Upon this visage bent from nature’s laws,

  Then, then, dear Anne, my upright noble form

  Which never in this life was blessed before

  Could smile on tempests and could laugh at storms.

  Thy whispered prayer, enriching one most poor

  In spirit, breathing godly strength, ensures

  Though trembling still, I dare to ask for More.

  When Jack spoke he found his throat had contracted, clouding and half-obscuring his words. “My wife would have taken the verses to heart. It pleases me she did not receive them.” It was true. All might have been different had Cecil written the poem a few days earlier. No. He must not think such a thing. Never had he questioned Anne’s faithfulness to him, and already this twisted little creature was making him do it. But that poem. . . . It did not seem the work of one scheming to make his rival jealous. It was a cry from the heart of a man used to denying the heart’s urgings, of one who had by hard experience learned to rely on his head in its place. Counterpoised against Cecil’s agonized desire to be healed by Anne’s love, agony forced into the confines of a sonnet, the lines from one of Jack’s cynical old poems alighted in his mind:

  Though she were true when you met her,

  And last till you write your letter,

  Yet she

  Will be

  False, ere I come, to two, or three.

  How empty those words seemed, how shallow the mind that had spawned them, now that he had known and loved Anne, now that he sat before such a wretched man as this who had loved her without her knowledge, loved her in silence these three years. “You . . . summoned me to hear this poem, my lord.”

  “I did, yes.” Cecil closed his eyes and breathed deeply before saying, “In part.”

  “In part.”

  “I would have you know, Master Donne, I am no heartless creature. What is said of me in the streets—and even in the halls of the Court—I know well enough. Though the knowing of it pains me, I will confess to using this false repute for the good of the realm. When courtiers, ambassadors, and counts have learned by rumor to fear me, much may be accomplished.” He shrugged. “But I am not without a soul. What I do, I do for the good of all England: for you, for Anne, for your little ones, for all true subjects of the King.”

  This, now: this sounded like the Cecil Jack had expected. When a man made such protestations that what he did was for the greater good, then what he did was like to be foul. And somehow the mention of Anne and the children seemed a threat. Jack asked plainly, “What is it you would have me do?”

  “I would have you serve your king.”

  “And this service you would have me do: it is, I take it, dangerous.”

  “It is.” Cecil shifted in his chair. “But this thought, Master Donne, must have entered your mind already: If I, a widower, desired to make Anne Donne a widow, I could have made her one ere now, and easily might it have been . . . done.”

  Jack looked at him steadily, refusing to speak. At length Cecil continued. “Nor do I mean so to dispatch you now. The task is dangerous, yes,
but no more so than similar work I have assigned to others, not one of whom I would lightly give over to an early death. No, these are men all England needs alive. As are you. I would not commit the sin of David, when. . . .” Cecil opened a hand in invitation for Jack to fill in the rest.

  Jack obliged: “. . . lusting after Bathsheba, he appointed her husband Uriah to the front of the battle, where he was certain to be killed. Second Samuel, eleventh chapter.”

  “You are precise, Master Donne. Perhaps when this business is finished, a vocation in the clergy awaits.”

  Jack said darkly, “I doubt it, my lord.”

  “Well. Time enough for that. But for now I would have you know I would not commit the sin of David.”

  Jack could not resist a little taunt. “But why not? God forgave him. Even in King David’s sins God smiled on him.”

  Cecil snapped, “But God has not smiled on me!” The force of the eruption took Jack by surprise. Quickly reining in his tone, Cecil added, “Or God has kept his smiling countenance hid.”

  Jack watched as Cecil ruffled through a pile of papers on his writing-table, pretending to look for some piece of business, then straightened the stack. When the man appeared to have regained his sense of composure, Jack said, “So the Almighty withdraws himself from you, as well.”

  With a wry grimace Cecil said, “To some he seems to speak often, and at length.” Then without a trace of irony he added, “But me he would have cry out, and cry again.”

  Jack nodded. Here was a kindred spirit. That did not change the fact, he must keep aware, that the man was powerful, treacherous, and still very much in love with Anne. But beneath it all, a kindred soul.

  “This service I would appoint you,” said Cecil, “is voluntary. I would not force your hand.”

  Well, yes and no. Some things were truly voluntary, some in name only. “Say on, my lord.”

  “You come from a family of . . . I will say it: notorious Catholics.”

  “I do. But my family might change the word notorious to faithful.”

  “Catholics,” Cecil continued, “descended from no less a rebel than Sir Thomas More.”

  “Yes, my great-great grand-uncle. But again my family would change a word: he was not a rebel but a martyr.”

  “Of course.” Cecil brushed the air with his fingers as if such distinctions were trifles. “Tell me: your family descends from Thomas More. Does not Anne’s as well? Sir George More shares the rebel’s—excuse me, the martyr’s— name.”

  “There is no relation.”

  “Truly? Curious, that she should share the name of this rebel.”

  What was the hunchback thinking: an annulment based on kinship? “Anne is my wife, not my kinsman.”

  “Well, in any case, Sir George her father remains a stout Protestant, as do all his children. And your own conversion to the true faith is well known. But so are your doubts. So are your troubles. So is your . . . want of employment worthy of your talents.” Cecil paused and looked at Jack expectantly.

  “Say on,” Jack said.

  “Need I? Do you not guess how I ask you to serve?”

  “I think I smell it, and I think I do not like the way it smells. You ask me to feign reconversion to the Catholic faith, to spy upon my brethren.”

  “Not upon your brethren, Master Donne. Upon those who would overthrow the King by violent means. Such men are no brothers of yours, nor of mine, nor of any true Englishman’s.”

  “And of those who are peaceably Catholic?”

  “They are traitors under the law, as you know, but I do not ask you to reveal anything of the truly peaceable. Only the violent: only those who preach martyrdom to our young men, filling their brains with visions of heavenly glory, if only they will blast God’s anointed rulers with the hellish fire of their pistolets and their petards. Only the Jesuits and those who would follow them in their foul plots against the King and all his godly realm. I ask you to enter into their company, and help me thwart their plans. For the good of all. Think of your little ones.”

  The heat rose in Jack’s face. His color must have changed, but he did not care. “My little ones, Lord Cecil, were better served if I stayed near them and worked by some honest means to feed them. I will tell you or any man I care not a jot whether England is Protestant or Catholic, so long as men may live at peace.”

  Cecil shook his head slowly. “But Master Donne.” He dealt out the words one by one: “Men. Will. Not. Live. At. Peace.” Holding up both hands, as if speaking to a child, he said, “That is why we must stop them when they go awry.”

  Jack’s anger rose. “If you but tolerated the Catholics, if you but let them hold their Masses without molesting them, do you think they would hatch these plots? James of Scotland promised toleration before you made him King.” Cecil raised his eyebrows. Jack thundered, “Well, let him be tolerant!”

  A voice from the other side of the door said, “Lord Cecil?”

  Turning to the door, Cecil replied crisply, “Leave us, Master Cobham. It was nothing.”

  Cecil turned back to Jack and said, “Shouting for tolerance. You see? Men simply will not live and let live. Even those who wish to do so soon begin to shout. Then they begin to shoot. And finally the nation is torn by civil war. If only it were so simple as tolerating Popish Masses. But I see that in your passion you are merely rehearsing the part of the indignant Catholic.”

  Jack bit his lower lip for a moment, then said, “I cannot do this thing.”

  “You cannot.” The two men stared at each other. “Very well. I said the choice was yours.”

  “And what consequence follows my refusal?”

  “Consequence? If there were one, would it not have been more prudent to ask before the refusing?”

  “More prudent, yes. If prudence were my aim.”

  Cecil leaned forward. “Ah, I see. You have some loftier purpose. I applaud you. Still, should prudence not govern the wrath of a man with a wife and children?”

  Jack asked sharply, “What mean you by that?”

  “Nothing,” said Cecil. “Nothing at all. Do you take my meaning otherwise?” He moved his chair back and stood. “I thank you for your time. Master Cobham will show you to the library.”

  Jack picked up his hat as he stood. “I ask again, my lord: the consequence.”

  “And I have said: none at all. All is as it was before.” He paused, then said, “Well, mayhap a constable will call on you about Lord Hay’s nephew, whose head you broke yesterday at the Savoy. But apart from that. . . .” He gestured toward the door as he bowed his head very slightly. “Again, I thank you.”

  So Cecil had not only heard about the incident but knew who had been involved. His spies must be everywhere. Jack said, “Hay’s nephew, is he? Somewhat wanting of his uncle’s prowess, I should say, as well as his courtesy. Well, I care not. The man drew his blade upon me, with my back to him and all unarmed. I but defended myself.”

  “Yes, yes, so it is reported,” said Cecil impatiently. “Doubtless you have naught to fear, if the young man lives.”

  “Well, I will brook that chance,” Jack said. “Is there aught else?”

  Cecil sat again and stared coldly at him. Jack waited a few heartbeats, turned, and took a step or two toward the door before he heard, “Only this: I am a patient man.” Jack turned slowly back as Cecil continued: “I think you must agree I have been patient with you today.” Jack waited with his hat in his hand until Cecil added, “For three long years I have remained patient. But I am flesh and blood. Good day.” It was as though ice had filled the air, and Cecil’s words had cracked their way through it to Jack’s ears.

  He stood still. “What means this?” he asked.

  “What means what?”

  “Your words: you have been patient, but you are flesh and blood. Come: be plain with me.”

  “Are the words not plain? I have been patient, but patience wears thin. I am flesh and blood, as are we all. What is plainer than that?”

  J
ack tried once again: “You will say no more?”

  Cecil rose, put his hands on the table, and leaned toward Jack. With menace in his voice he said, “I have spoken. Construe my words how you will.”

  There was no need to go on. Anne had seen it, or part of it, even the night before: 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. What Anne had not foreseen was that after Jack’s death she would not long remain a widow. The thought of her with Cecil. . . . And the little ones: in later years they would not remember Jack at all, would always think of this scheming, hunchbacked man as their father. There was no choice to make. If this creature was to be outdone, it would have to happen later. Jack said, “Let us discuss this appointment.”

  Stiffly Cecil motioned for Jack to sit, then said, “First: as for the Wizard Earl. . . .”

  CHAPTER 5

  Anne looked up from the dough she was kneading while Constance stood by the corner of the table, waiting for a piece. The single knock had hardly faded when the door swung open to reveal an elegantly dressed man striking a dramatic pose, one hand on a hip, his fine-featured face turned in profile. He wore a close-fitting doublet of pale green, mustard-colored hose, and gleaming new riding boots. Behind him stood a broad-hipped young maidservant with downcast eyes. “Where is my Andalusian?” the man demanded without turning his head.

  Anne smiled at the performance but kept kneading the dough. It was already resilient, ready to rise on its own for an hour or two. The cool flesh of the lump, though, yielding to the impression of her fingers and then slowly reassuming its shape, somehow left her unready to release it. She turned half her attention to her cousin. “Your. . . .” What was it he wanted? “Francis, do come in.”

  “My Andalusian!” said Wolley without turning his head.

  Ah. Of course: he meant the big white stallion. “Oh,” she said, “it must be the one Jack borrowed. It was early, and he did not want to wake you.”