The Lady and the Poet

by Maeve Haran

  I wondered if Mary would yet be up or, as was her wont, dallying languorously in her shift, an embroidered wrap about her shoulders, as she tried out which hair arrangement suited best.

  And, indeed, her tire-woman announced that her mistress was still abed. ‘Shall I wake her, and you wait in the withdrawing room, mistress? There is a fire just lit.’

  I should, I suppose, be grateful for such small mercies that the fires were lit at all and yet a flame so recently begun would give no more than a breath of heat, while my sister’s chamber was ever warm and redolent of spice and mine, with its pungent pomanders and gilded candlesticks.

  I would go up and surprise her. And then a memory of the sight of Nick and she upon the bed flooded into my mind and I asked the woman if the master was with her also.

  The woman’s shake of shoulder and raising of eyebrow told me all. The master had not visited his wife’s room lately.

  To my surprise Mary was up and clad in a new gown, richly worked in red flowers upon a background of blue. She stood in front of her looking glass, her hair loose, and she tried—strangely since there was neither maid nor tire-woman present to aid her—with difficulty to fasten a necklace around her neck which I had never seen before.

  When I entered she speedily unhooked it and placed it on her table next to her jewelled hairbrush, her cheeks blushing redder than the roses of her dress.

  ‘Ann! I thought not to see you soon! Has aught befallen our grandmother?’ Mary, I knew, worried that after the demise of our grandfather, she would follow him soon afterwards. But our grandmother was of sterner stuff.

  ‘She fares well and sends you these plums from Loseley.’ I handed her the basket which she barely glanced at before stowing them atop a nearby coffer.

  ‘That is a pretty trinket.’ I pointed to the necklace. ‘A gift from Nick, perhaps?’

  She started guiltily at that and turned to reach for a velvet cloak that lay upon her great canopied bed. ‘Do you not find it cold today? Surely you have not journeyed to me from Charing Cross in that light cloak?’

  ‘I have indeed. And it is a glorious day abroad. You should venture out yourself. And now I must depart for I have other errands for my father.’

  ‘He has forgiven you then for your intransigence?’

  ‘He finds I have my uses.’

  She looked at me narrowly. ‘And what are these errands, and where do they take you? To York House, perhaps, to meet a certain dark-eyed gentleman?’

  I flushed, not knowing I was so transparent.

  ‘Sister, must I counsel you once more against an unwise act? Not just for your own sake, for any ruin it might bring you, but for us all?’

  For answer I lifted the pretty trinket from her table and held it up, studying its green stones as they dazzled in the light of her candle, dangerous and alluring. ‘Might I not offer the same advice to you, sister?’

  Silence filled the room, apart from the flickering of the fire in the grate and the snuffled breathing of Mary’s pug, which snored on a velvet cushion at the fireside like the pet of some imperial ruler.

  Mary shrugged and sat down at her looking glass. ‘I am married, with a husband I can manage. The truth is not the same for you.’

  ‘I know it, Mary. I will be careful.’

  She reached up and took my hand. ‘You risked much for me, sister.’

  ‘Then squander not my efforts.’

  Outside Mary’s house I sent the groom on an errand of his own. I saw he wished to argue, perhaps fearing for his job if my father found I had been out unaccompanied, but I cast him so haughty a look that he dared not cavil but went off on his way.

  At last, alone, I climbed down the stairs towards the river and found that I must hold the railing. Though it was a fine day, my limbs were shivering.

  For two miles up the river my fate awaited me.

  As the great Thames ebbed and flowed beneath me, so did my courage. Could I, the descendant of three knights, truly go and offer my innocence without the protection of God’s holy matrimony?

  ‘Frye Lane or the Savoy stairs, mistress?’ The wherryman broke into my anguished musings.

  The former would be quieter and less noticed by the crowds that ever milled near to the old Savoy Hospital.

  ‘Frye Lane, wherryman.’ He helped me out of the boat and onto the slippery river steps, watching me curiously the while, wondering no doubt what a young gentlewoman did abroad with no attendant. I thought of telling him some story of my groom being taken ill, but why should I lie to a simple boatman?

  There was none but myself in Frye Lane and I hurried unseen down the narrow alley towards my destination.

  Master Donne’s lodging was found at the back of the great building, a row of black and white timbered dwellings hard by an arch which led towards the thoroughfares of the Strand end of Fleet Street.

  Once outside I stopped to pray to the Blessed Virgin, even though I knew that the path I stepped down was a sinful one.

  ‘Are you lost, my lady?’ a voice behind me asked.

  ‘Not “my lady”…’ I turned to find Master Donne’s landlord not two feet away from me, and spoke on, my voice as brisk and certain as one who knew what she was about and needed no assistance. ‘Mistress will do well enough. I have a commission for Master Donne.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he bowed. ‘A popular man with the ladies, Master Donne.’ He smiled unctuously. ‘All with commissions like yourself, no doubt.’

  ‘Is he within?’

  ‘Indeed, he is in company with a gentleman.’

  As if in endorsement of this I heard a crack of laughter, loud and bawdy, the kind that is shared between men enjoying a joke that concerns a woman.

  Coming out of the door, still clapping his visitor upon the back, Master Donne, clad in hose and undershirt, caught sight of me.

  The manner of his face was hard to read. I would place it somewhere between delight and devastation.

  ‘Mistress More… my sweetest Ann…’ The words were out before he had the sense or wit to censor them.

  His guest smiled and raised an eyebrow as if my name were not unfamiliar to him.

  For once Master Donne seemed at a loss for words. ‘My friend here, Master Davies, is just leaving.’

  The gentleman endorsed this with a wink so lascivious I wondered if it had been he who spread the rumours that had come to the ears of Richard Manners.

  It was no auspicious start to our encounter.

  ‘Mistress More has come to you with a commission,’ chimed in Master Haines. The insinuation in his voice was unmistakable.

  ‘I am glad to get it.’ Master Donne made himself suddenly businesslike, offering to take my gloves and cloak. ‘Can I offer cakes and spiced wine while we talk of it?’

  He ushered me towards his chamber, casting a nervous glance at Master Haines the while.

  Once inside his door the storm broke.

  ‘Mistress More… Ann…’ he demanded roughly, ‘what thought you in coming here today, all unannounced, in broad daylight without even a vizor to conceal your features, and to speak thus openly with my landlord? He is a not a man of great discretion. I fear your good name will now be trampled underfoot.’

  At that my temper cracked like a bolt of lightning across a summer sky.

  ‘My good name! You dare to speak of my good name when Master Manners told my father of your boasts that there had been relations between us! Which you had vouchsafed to some gimcrack friend—perhaps the winking Master Davies!’

  My anger would not now be held back but gushed like water through holes in a broken dam. ‘Know you the pretty question Master Manners asked of our precious, God-spared time together?’

  Master Donne shook his head.

  ‘That we lay together, you and I, and where one had broke the ice then perhaps others may have followed!’

  ‘Mistress More, Ann, this is wicked calumny! You know yourself no such relations took place! Indeed, in spite of extreme temptation, I respected your
innocence above my own desires!’

  ‘True. Yet you would not be the first man to increase his credit by exaggerating such matters in private to his friends.’

  Master Donne shook his head, as if seeing something clearly for the first time. ‘I am touched by the good opinion you clearly hold of me, mistress.’

  I felt a pang of guilt, but how had Master Manners heard such things if not through loose talk from Master Donne’s own lips?

  Yet I was not finished. ‘And know you what my dear father said in reply to defend his cherished daughter’s honour? Naught! Not even one slippery, hand-wringing attempt at my defence. Indeed, he raised the value of my portion to five hundred pounds to cover the embarrassment.’

  ‘Ann, sweet…’

  ‘I am not your sweet Ann!’

  Until coming here, in my deepest soul I had not believed he had bandied our intimacy about the town, yet that odious wink from his friend had undone all my trust and certainty.

  I gathered up my gloves and cloak and put them on. ‘I will go now. My visit today was as you say naught but a mistake and an invitation to yet more scandal. Clearly to quash it we must end our friendship here. If I leave now I can be home before my father returns from the Parliament. We need not extend the embarrassment of pretending we have more to say.’

  ‘No, Mistress Ann, wait. I will go first and explain to Master Haines some justification for your visit, a poem for your sister’s bridal in the Isle of Wight perhaps.’ Speedily he began to pull on a doublet.’

  At the mention of the Isle of Wight the memory returned, as cold as icy seawater, of what took place that day, leaving me numb. I was left alone in his chamber, my dreams unravelling, my great design in pieces at my feet.

  I glanced round one last time at the chamber, as neat and orderly as it had been at York House. On the coffer next to the bed I spied a scrap of fur, and saw it was the rabbit’s foot he held up in his portrait.

  So Master Donne still hoped his luck would turn.

  Yet mine own had all run out.

  In his haste to leave he had thrown down his undershirt upon the bed. A sudden impulse, I know not from where, bade me pick it up and hold the fine white lawn, still heated from his body’s warmth, against my cheek.

  And there I stayed, breathing in the faint musk male scent of his sweat until I heard a rustling sound behind and turned to find its owner standing watching me.

  I caught my breath and pushed the shirt behind my back, my face flaming, as he walked towards me and reached behind, removing the shirt from my feeble grasp.

  ‘Had you need of a handkerchief to mop your brow, I could have easily supplied it,’ and then his mouth sought mine and I cleaved my body shamelessly to his, making no more pretence to cover my emotions.

  An Elizabethan lady is no easy ship to board and he laughed and swore in equal measure as he struggled with the hooks and laces of my heavy garments.

  My kirtle, sleeves and jewelled stomacher were set aside until all that remained was the folds of linen slipping from my shoulders to expose the tender buds beneath. I closed my eyes as at last he released each rounded breast from its upholstered prison and kissed it, soft and slow.

  “‘Come, Madam…’” His eyes teased as he quoted from the verse he knew had stirred me so long ago, and held out his hand to draw me towards the private world of his great curtained bed.

  I shivered, remembering the lines he had left unsaid:

  Licence my roving hands, and let them go

  Behind, before, above, between, below.

  And how I had secretly longed for it to be my body beneath those exploring hands.

  And now it would be so.

  And yet, before we made that fateful journey, he stopped and took my hands in his.

  ‘At last we have found each other, you and I. So many false trails and long searches yet after this naught else will ever count with us, not riches, nor high opinion, nor preferment. They all will be as dross is to gold compared with this.’

  And now he knelt before me and my linens slithered to the floor, leaving me as naked as was Eve in the Garden of Eden.

  And yet I felt no shame. Naught but joy as he stroked the softness of my skin, and skimmed his lips across the contours of my body, moving ever downwards.

  I breathed in sharp, fear fighting pleasure, to sense his tongue, as gentle as the beat of butterfly wings, and yet so strange and unfamiliar I knew not what I might expect, running down the softness of my belly until by infinite degrees it reached its destination.

  Then such a wild explosion overtook me that I shook and cried out with joy. And I knew that he was right. From this moment on I would care for naught—not family, nor future, faith, nor stain of sin. Only for him and for the love we bore one another.

  Afterwards, our bodies spent, we lay together and were silent, listening to one another’s breathing, in the fading light of afternoon, as if drawn into but one soul.

  And yet a shadow of something lingered in his grave expression.

  ‘Is that sadness I see in your eyes?’

  He kissed the palm of my hand. ‘Every creature is sad after making love.’

  ‘Aha,’ I teased him merrily, recognizing his Latin reference and glowing at my own knowledge. ‘Yet surely there is another thought you have forgot? Every creature is sad after making love—save women and roosters.’

  He shook his head in true delight. ‘Mistress Ann More praise be that you exist. For you are indeed a miracle.’

  ‘So,’ I asked him boldly as we lay in our private paradise, ‘am I indeed, your new-found land, as in your scandalous verse? Or did that honour go to another lady before me?’

  ‘No, Ann,’ his harsh tone took me by surprise, ‘you are not my America. That description was of another gentlewoman.’

  I struggled to sit up, shocked at the seeming cruelty of his words.

  ‘I wish I could deny that there have been others before you, yet on pain of my soul’s damnation there will be none after.’ He raised my hand to his lips. ‘You are my north and south, my rising east and sharp declining west. You are my lodestone and my compass, the fixed centre of my universe. After this we two will never part. We must take on your father, the Lord Keeper, all.’

  He knelt up suddenly upon the bed as if he were in church, and pulled me with him. ‘When you and I most lovingly tie that knot, naught will ever sever it. Not sickness, nor cruel fortune, nor even shades of death itself. And I, once wed to you, will marry none other my whole life long. Wilt thou also plight me thy troth?’

  In that small, darkened space it seemed to me the sacrament quietly entered in.

  ‘I do so plight it.’

  And saying no more we let our bodies celebrate the joy of this our blessed union, then fell asleep, folded lovingly in one another’s arms.

  It was late afternoon when we awoke, roused by the strange sound of a bird on the window sill, scratching as if it wished to come inside the room. It was a ring-necked dove and, despite the season and the lack of a mate, it puffed up its blue-green neck as if it too sought the pleasures we had so lately known. I smiled at the memory of that other bird, seen so long ago, the day that first I ever saw him.

  And then in the midst of all our delight I remembered Master Manners and our encounter in Portsmouth.

  ‘Ann, Ann, what ails you? You look as if you had seen a ghost.’

  ‘I have.’ I turned back to the bed. ‘Let us hope it is not an evil spirit sent to haunt us.’

  He was out of bed, and dressing, full of energy, like a taper which was waning and is given new air. ‘None can touch us now. Our love will protect us more than burnished armour.’ He held me fast, stroking the hair away from my face. ‘Doubt not, my Ann. If we love truly, who can harm us?’

  I hesitated, not wishing to burst the fragile bubble of our delight, but knew I must.

  ‘Master Manners might. I am not contracted to him, nor ever have been, not even by promise nor by handfasting, which some accept as binding.
Thank the heavens his father was so demanding that the marriage negotiations were never sealed, yet he will do what harm he can.’ I ceased for an instant, for it grieved me to continue. ‘Some time ago I went to the Isle of Wight to see my sister Frances celebrate her betrothal there. Master Manners came with us. My father had a notion I would look with greater favour on him if we had more acquaintance. We came back through Portsmouth and there Master Manners, driven I think by jealousy of you, attempted to dishonour me.’

  ‘Ann!’ His face was a mask of fury. ‘Why did you not tell me? I would have found him out wherever he was! If he hurt but one hair of your head…’

  ‘He did not. I cannot vouch for what might have happened but we were interrupted by the innkeeper. John, he is a cruel man. He will try to harm you if he can. And us also.’

  He took my hands in his and held them to his chest. ‘Then we must wed with all haste, before he can find a means to stop us. On the morrow I will search for a chapel where we may be married without delay, and for one who is prepared to marry us.’

  The sudden furrow in his brow told me that this might prove a hard task, that some might shy away from marrying a woman as young as I, and in secret, without a father’s consent and no banns read out. Though many married far younger than I, it was with the endorsement of their parents, not in secret with neither present.

  Even I trembled at the magnitude of our intended action.

  And then his face cleared, like the sun emerging from dark clouds on a distant peak. ‘My friend Christopher Brooke! His brother Samuel is in holy orders. He might perform the office for us.’

  He ran to his desk and found paper, and dashed off a note, turning it over to write the direction on the other side, then impressing the melted wax with his seal of a sheaf of snakes, the one I recognized from letters I had received myself.

  I looked at the letter in his hand, my breath coming faster. All our hope, that we would in truth spend our whole life together, was sealed by that small mark of melted wax.