Love's Alchemy

by Bryan Crockett

  “Yes, your Lordship, I thank you, and am happy to say my father is well. I was with him at Loseley not two days since, and when I see him again I shall give him your regards.”

  “Yes, regards. Very best, Sir George. Lovely gardens.”

  Somehow she knew Jack must be smiling at the exchange, but she avoided glancing his way. For one thing, Jack liked the Wizard Earl, and so did she. It would not do to let the Earl see them smiling at his expense. For another, she must show her uncle no sign that she thought of Jack as anything but her tutor. And it would harm nothing to put on a show of indifference to Jack himself. She had certainly had to wait long enough, with no word from him whatsoever through the three long weeks. Why should he not have to wait awhile?

  At dinner she was made to sit between the sweaty Sir Thomas Percy and the doltish Lord Buckhurst, who hardly spoke at all through the meal. Percy bit off his words as if it pained him to speak them, as if some fierce anger lay beneath all that he said. A dangerous man, he seemed. All the while she conversed with him, supplying a dozen words for his every two or three, her mind was on Jack, sitting near the end of the table with the Wizard Earl. She wondered whether Jack was watching her.

  But no, during the lapses in her painful conversation with Percy, she could hear that Jack and the Earl were chatting merrily away: now about hawking, now about astronomy and Galileo’s treatise on Archimedes, now about the new “necessary” that the man Owen had built for the Earl: a closet of water mounted on the wall of a jakes, so that when the water was released, it carried one’s merds away with a great rushing noise. “Sir John made one for the Queen,” the Earl was saying. “Harrington. Elizabeth’s godson, he is. And this Nicholas Owen—you must meet this man Owen, Jack—heard about Sir John’s necessary for the Queen. Never saw it. Heard about it merely. And built one for me, what? You must come and use it, Jack. Only three in England: the Queen’s, Harrington’s own, and this. Owen: he is your only man for invention, this Owen. ’Sblood, the very Daedalus of England, Owen is. Must see that you meet him.”

  At that moment Lord Buckhurst coughed to get Anne’s attention. He extended a trembling hand toward the muttonchops, which she dutifully served him.

  When at last the meal was over and the after-supper pleasantries had been exchanged, Anne went directly back to her uncle’s library in the hope that Jack would know to find her there. She took down the Eclogues and sat in the chair facing the casement, where she could read by the evening light.

  Softly sounding aloud the supple cadences of Virgil’s Latin, she had finished the first of the eclogues and had spoken a few lines of the second when she caught the bold, confident sound of Jack’s step in the hall outside. Then he stood before her. She rose from the chair as if directed by an unseen hand, and she fought the urge to run into his arms. His look said he would welcome the embrace. But he was her schoolmaster. With both hands she clutched the book to her breast.

  “I missed . . . our lessons,” she said. “This waiting has been difficult.” He looked at her with something like wonder in his eyes. Hardly knowing what she was saying, she added, “While we were apart I busied myself with trifles. Gathering bits of grammar from the ground.”

  He looked puzzled. “Gathering. . . .”

  Her thoughts swirled in some confused response to the urgings of her heart, but words came to her unbidden. “Each day, being away from you and your influence, a morsel of Latin or Greek would fall right out of my head. I would pick up the pieces and put them in a basket.”

  He leaned against the doorpost. “You did well to save the parts. And the arithmetic? That, I trust, remained in your head, where it belongs.”

  “Oh, no! It all fell out on the first day. I left it to the birds, thinking it would help them multiply. But eating of it, they only tore themselves asunder by division, most horrible to behold. This mathematics is a dangerous thing, and to be avoided at all cost, I think.” She hazarded a step toward him. He straightened, standing squarely in the doorway now. Almost breathless, she took another step toward him, then another. She was near enough to take in his scent: he smelled at once of earth and air. At Loseley she had missed that smell as much as much as anything else about him.

  He opened his mouth to speak but hesitated a moment before saying softly, “I too missed . . . our lessons. It is very . . . very good to see that I have such an eager pupil. Very good.”

  Without any decision to do so, she moved still closer until she stood within inches of him, near enough to kiss him if he would but incline his head. “Ah,” she said as she looked up at him and searched his face. There was no certainty in those dark eyes with their little flecks of green, and no hint of seduction; what she saw looked more like sorrow tinged with regret. She had a fleeting thought that his eyes reflected at least a few bits of the pure sapphire-green of her own. “But I fear I am such a slow learner,” she continued, “that you must be my . . . schoolmaster for all our lives. Do you think we could spend all our lives together?”

  He exhaled heavily, stepped around her, and moved to the window, where he stood with his back to her as he looked into the waning light. “What would your father say to that?”

  She bit her lower lip. “I do not know.”

  He turned to face her. “Why? Does he say aught about it? Does he not like me? Does he not think me a good prospect for a . . . for a lifelong schoolmaster?”

  She lowered her eyes. “He speaks only of others. He talks not of my love . . . of learning . . . but of my marrying: marrying this nobleman or that, all of them landed and wealthy, none of whom I would have—if I had my will. But he is my father.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, then said, “Well. On the morrow we have Latin and Greek to insert back into your head, and the arithmetic that has unaccountably subtracted itself. Bring your basket of pieces.”

  On another day Jack would have liked nothing better than to spend the afternoon in a library like Cecil’s. The rows upon rows of shelves held nearly every book he might want to read: leather-bound volumes in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, English; collections of maps on parchment; chronicles, scriptures, myths; philosophy, natural history, theology; mathematics, architecture, music, theories of art; poems and tales of adventure and love. But today Jack could hardly hope to keep his mind on any of them. It was only of late, Cecil had said, that he had turned his mind to book-collecting. Had he done so with Anne in his thoughts, knowing her love of reading? How long had the hunchback schemed to bring her to this house, to this very room? But if that were his aim, why invite Jack to go home and tell her so? Why confess his love for her? Surely she would hate Cecil now that he had used her to force Jack’s hand, whereas before she had hardly thought about the twisted little man at all. Could it be that her indifference hurt him more than her hate? Or did Cecil think he could somehow turn her hatred into love, once Jack had died as a spy in some dirty business? And was there no truth to such an idea? The stage-poet Will Shakespeare’s Richard III, a hunchback even more grotesque than Cecil, had seduced the Lady Anne Warwick just after killing her husband. Women had ever been drawn to strength, and Cecil had already proved himself the stronger. Maybe, then, Jack should say nothing to Anne, should merely tell her that his work was secret.

  No. Cecil wished him to think such thoughts, to entertain such doubts. Anne Donne was no shallow, power-hungry harlot. Nor if Jack died would she prove the grief-stricken, confused Anne Warwick of Shakespeare’s imagination. Yet the scene on the stage had rung eerily true. After Jack’s death, would his wife, though faithful, not grieve in confusion? Cecil’s sonnet had moved Jack despite all his suspicions; how much more would it move the woman for whom it was composed? Or if poetry did not seduce her, what of force? Would not Robert Cecil, who had just forced Jack Donne to do his bidding, though Jack was faithful and in his right mind, easily do the same with a grief-stricken young widow? And even if he couldn’t force her hand, would not her father demand the marriage?

  Or could Ce
cil have been telling the truth—that he wanted Jack alive rather than dead, and the confession of love was a way of exorcising the ghost of a woman who had been denied him? Jack knew Cecil to be above all a practical man. Maybe he had simply found the readiest way to achieve two ends at once: add a spy to his ranks of intelligencers and rid his mind of the image of an impossible love. Maybe.

  As Jack sat agitated in his enemy’s library, surrounded by leather-bound volumes that distilled all the fruits of learning from time immemorial, all at once his mind cleared. There was no book in the vast room that could show him his course. Only one path lay before him: he must tell Anne all, trusting her to know best what to do when the time came, and he must take on the task of spying in some way that satisfied Robert Cecil and at the same time outwitted him.

  CHAPTER 6

  Old Timothy Burr’s chair sat as near the fire as Lady Bedford’s. What was the woman thinking? Some half an hour ago she had addressed him almost as her equal, inviting him to join her at the fireside. They had chatted about the biting February wind that swirled outside, rattling shutters and scattering bits of debris along the streets; about the men and women gaining or losing favor at the royal court; about the new treaty with Spain; about her husband’s brief letter just arrived that morning from his latest hunting trip with the King—not a letter, really, as much as a catalogue of animals killed in the hunt. Now Lady Bedford brought the talk around to Jack Donne and his latest visit. Burr listened and watched carefully. He registered a faint note of stiffness in her tone, and she crossed her hands on her lap at the mention of the man’s name. So this was the reason she had asked him to sit and talk with her by the fire: all this had to do with Jack Donne.

  “It was on one of Donne’s first visits here—you remember, Tim, we talked about the bracelet I gave him—on that very day I sent word to Lord Cecil that this man Donne was just the sort to do good service to the King. There has been some delay, but by this time Lord Cecil will have given orders for him to go abroad upon a mission.” She paused and watched the flames. They quivered like aspen leaves as they curled along the big oak backlog. She said, “You have doubtless guessed his mission’s purpose.”

  So she thought as little of the man Donne as that. He had sold the bracelet or given it away or melted it for its gold, and she had turned him over to Robert Cecil. Burr said only, “Yes, my lady. I think I have guessed it.”

  “And, Timothy—not lightly have I done this, I assure you—I have offered your services.”

  Burr arched an eyebrow. “My services. In what capacity, might I ask?”

  “You are to travel with Master Donne as his manservant. Prepare to spend some weeks or months abroad. Perhaps a year or two. You will of course write to me frequently. I expect to hear everything worthy of note.”

  Burr felt the blood drain from his face. A year or two! And abroad: that would likely mean the strange, dangerous worlds of the Spanish Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain herself. . . . Had the Countess considered his age? For an old man he felt hale enough, but to go gadding up and down the Continent with one so much younger. . . . Had she thought of the perils of the mere Channel crossing, the stormy passage that had pulled so many to their cold, shifting graves? Before he could think how to reply, Lady Bedford looked at him and softened her tone: “My dear Timothy, I am but lending you; when this business is finished you may return here and retire at ease for your last long years.”

  Yes, if he lived to see them. But what was there to do? Burr gathered his breath, nodded, and said, “My lady.”

  Quill in hand, Jack sat motionless at the little writing-table beneath the window of the narrow room that served as his library—the only library at Pyrford Place, in fact; Wolley had no great love of books. Outside, the chill wind shook against the stone, feeling for secret cracks along the walls or beneath the thatching of the roof. The house had been well fortified by the masons and joiners, but somehow the cold found ways of creeping in. Jack laid the quill aside, cupped his hands, and breathed into them. Between the moans of the windstorm he could hear Anne weeping in the next room, just as she had during the days after he had told her all: Cecil’s love for her, the sonnet, the little hunchback’s plan to force him into spying.

  Through those days they had waited on edge, every hour expecting word from Cecil. None came. The days became weeks, then months, and while the ghost of foreboding never left off haunting the house, it faded with the passing of time.

  Then, just when Cecil’s plans for Jack had begun to seem more threat than substance, the dreaded message arrived. Jack was to leave within the next few days. Further word would soon be delivered.

  Now Jack picked up the quill, dipped it, paused a moment above the leaf of Wolley’s fine parchment, and wrote:

  Sweetest love, I do not go

  For weariness of thee,

  Nor in hope the world can show

  A fitter love for me.

  No, that would not do; the mere mention of another love would awaken Anne’s suspicion, groundless or no. He tried again:

  When thou sigh’st, thou sigh’st not wind,

  But sigh’st my soul away;

  And when thou weep’st, unkindly kind,

  My life’s blood doth decay.

  Hm. Not good enough, not for Anne. Why should he seem to blame her, even in the conceits of poetry? Already she laid blame enough upon herself: had she not somehow allowed Robert Cecil to think she might love him? Last night in her desperation she had offered to cut her hair, disguise herself as Jack’s page, and go with him on his travels. When he had asked whether she could really leave the little ones in another’s care, she had broken into coughed-out sobs intermixed with keenings of dismay.

  Now the wind relented for a moment, and he could hear nothing from the next room. Maybe she had finally come to see there was no solution short of his plan—a desperate one, she thought—of trying to outwit Robertus Diabolus. Jack pressed his cold fingertips to the bridge of his nose, took up a blank leaf of parchment, and started again:

  Our two souls, Anne, which still are one

  Though I must go, endure not yet

  A breach, but an expansion,

  Like gold to airy thinness beat.

  He whispered the word expansion, drawing it out to four syllables instead of the usual three. He smiled. Yes, that was the sort of music Anne would savor. Around such an image he could build a poem worthy of her.

  Still there was no sound from the next room. He rose, rolled his head to ease the stiffness in his neck, stretched, walked to the doorway, and stopped when he saw Anne. Bundled into a blanket, she sat staring into the fireplace, having let the fire burn low. With a stick from the woodpile, Jack jostled the embers into flame, then tossed on several more pieces. Anne turned her red-rimmed eyes to him.

  He said, “The children are . . . ?”

  “With Abigail.” Her tone, like her posture, said she was drained; there were no more tears in her. “I’ll get them in a few minutes,” she added. “It’s almost time to feed Little Jack.”

  “I will miss them,” he said.

  She nodded. The fire began to hiss and pop. “They won’t remember you.” She said it matter-of-factly; there was neither spite nor sorrow in her voice. “If you don’t come back.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “Well. A blessing that may be. For them.” She gave him a rueful little smile and said, “A blessing.” He added, “But I will come back.” Anne looked back into the fire but did not otherwise respond.

  A sharp knock, followed by two more. Jack glanced at the door before turning back to Anne. She did not move but sat as if nothing could startle her. Jack strode over and opened the door. The same officious messenger who had come from Cecil months before, the same yellow-plumed popinjay with the same cudgel, stood with another sealed letter in his hand. The man cleared his throat and opened his mouth to speak. Without a word Jack snatched the letter and closed the door.

  He tore through the waxen seal. The letter w
as signed only with a C. Jack read:

  D,

  You are this day licensed to travel wheresoever you will, in England and all foreign lands, in the company of one Sir Walter Chute. This Chute will be furnished with £400 of his own monies for expenses pertaining to your travels. Know ye I have it by certain report that this Chute desires most sincerely to be converted to the papist faith. This his earnest desire, which he has been given to think you share, shall lend a greater color to your enterprise. By no means are you to allow our designs to be known to this Chute. He has been informed that although his rank and station exceed your own, all choice regarding your movements wheresoever, and all control of the aforesaid £400, lies with you alone.

  The manservant to attend you both shall be one Timothy Burr, whose worth is known to the Crown. This Burr has been informed of all. He and Chute will call upon you in three days’ time.

  The task I have set you is to seek out, wheresoever you may find them, any and all Catholic men or women who would proffer any degree of bodily harm whatsoever to our most Godly Sovereign, or any of his lawful ministers. Seek ye out all such, but in especial one Englishman whom the papist hellhounds call only Guido; we know him not otherwise, nor whether this Guido be his true Christian name. Mayhap he sojourns in England, mayhap in the Low Countries, where he has fought betimes under the command of the traitorous Sir William Stanley, mayhap otherwhere.

  We further require you to burn this missive in the sight of the bearer. Vouchsafe him not to read it, but only to see it burned.

  C

  Anne was now standing beside him; she too had read the letter. She looked at Jack, then opened the door. The messenger still stood there in the swirling wind, this time with his arms folded, the cudgel cocked at an angle. With a smug look he asked, “Does the Lord Cecil Viscount Cranborne desire thee to perform any act in the presence of my person—to wit, to perform an act without my suffering the door to be shut before my very face, as thou, a notorious rudesby, I warrant, hast shut it?”