A Net for Small Fishes

by Lucy Jago

  I was sad but not miserable, for I am not someone with my head on backwards; the house in Paternoster Row was not ideal, but it would be only a temporary home to us. Once I was married to Arthur, we would live in a house even finer than that in Fetter Lane and I would be admitted to Court through my own honour and not by clutching to Frankie’s hem. Arthur and I loved each other, and his was the world to which I had always sought to belong. There was a chance for greater happiness than I had ever known.

  Richard Weston arrived as the bells tolled seven.

  ‘What news, Weston?’ I said, using the commonplace greeting of people not, in fact, much interested in the person before them.

  ‘Please,’ he replied immediately, as if he had rehearsed all day what he wanted to say and must unburden himself of it before he forgot his lines, ‘now that I am no longer your husband’s bailiff but your friend and protector by dint of Dr Turner’s dying wishes, might you not call me Richard?’

  I was too astonished to reply immediately. Weston had been our servant for so many years that I baulked at acknowledging him as a friend. Yet he was the only man upon whom I could call when I needed protection; Thomas refused, John was often studying elsewhere, my brothers either lived too far away or were busy with their own lives. In the end I nodded but did not look him in the eye, for fear he would see the dishonesty in my own.

  ‘How smart you are,’ I said, finally taking him in, noting that his hair and beard had been barber-trimmed and his leather jerkin replaced with a cloth coat. ‘Are you hoping to impress the Countess?’ He winced as if I had pinched him.

  ‘You should not be throwing your lot in with the Countess,’ he said, too free with his opinions since George’s death. He had never dared advise me when my husband was alive. ‘Dr Turner did not want her to meet Dr Forman.’

  ‘Things are different now.’

  ‘They will be if you take her there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Your husband saw danger in it.’

  ‘Nonsense. For whom?’

  ‘For you.’ He looked at me in a way that made me see that it was not for the Countess he had dressed up. Embarrassment distracted me from his warning.

  The evening was still bright and Weston’s lantern unlit. The steps to the street were broken and I swore under my breath as I carefully picked my way down. Our shilling-a-week house stood, or rather leant, halfway along the south side of Paternoster Row, the middle of seven identical buildings without workshops. Its single redeeming feature was the view from the back into St Paul’s churchyard. Paternoster Row runs along the north side of Paul’s and its mercers, silkmen and lacemakers attract the better sort whose coaches entirely block the way every day but Sunday. These same stroll about the church to gather the latest news until a little after eleven of the clock when they repair to the Castle for their twelvepenny dinners, or to the threepenny ordinaries if they are saving, to listen to the poets and philosophers and to show off their latest purchases. When their bellies are stuffed with capon and wine they away to a play; but at night, when the shops close, the place is unruly. Not a day went by when I did not resent my eldest son for forcing us out of Fetter Lane or pray that Arthur would soon take us away.

  My neighbour, a widow barely keeping herself from the gutter, was making the most of the fine evening, sitting on the top step in her open doorway sewing a needle-lace trim for a handkerchief, three of her children playing around her like strays. None of them had shoes. Nearby a huge man, helped by his young apprentice, knocked a thick post into the ground to protect the houses from being pushed over by the crowds that clogged the street.

  I had first encountered my neighbour a few weeks before, on the day I had moved in. The nosy termagant had not bidden me welcome but instead barked, ‘The beadles are strict round here. Don’t be entertaining gentlemen – and observe the curfew.’ That first exchange with Mistress Bowdlery, for so she was called, dragged me from the gentility of Fetter Lane into the Stygian world of Paternoster Row, as fast as the current in the Thames pulls a man below.

  ‘Good evening to you,’ I said. She eyed Weston and did not reply.

  ‘You want one?’ shouted the workman, holding the pole like a giant phallus.

  I pressed south along the street followed by my escort, trying to shield my ears and eyes from the relentless rattling of presses that worked later than the mercers and lacemakers, the noxious fumes of ink and glue throttling even at this hour. Above the workshops, families, apprentices and servants were crammed into the narrow buildings and jutting pentices, built so close they blocked the air and light that would have alleviated the stench and the gloom.

  Frankie was late, as ever. To avoid talking to Weston while waiting at the river stairs, I broke the seal on Arthur’s letter.

  Dearest Anne,

  I pray that you are settled in Paternoster Row without too much disruption? I have left Baron Ellesmere but am called to the Prince for a fortnight at least, after which you may expect a visit from me. I miss you and the children as if I have an ache in my side and pray that you are all well and suffer not too much in your grief.

  I have received the ten pounds George left me and hope that it will go some way to defraying your expenses. I do not forget his request that I buy a ring engraved, ‘May Time Unite the Lovers’, but shall spend my own money in its acquisition. What a soft heart was his! I pray, my sweetling, that you be as fortunate in me as you were in him. I will try hard to make it so.

  Your servant ever,

  Arthur

  I read the words many times, finding comfort in them. George had, in fact, requested May Fate Unite the Lovers be inscribed on the ring, not Time, and the mistake made me uneasy; I was not sure why. Were not Time and Fate sisters? My feeling is that they both work against us, sometimes gently, sometimes harshly, with the briefest interruptions when the tide flows backwards for a happy moment, mainly due to our own endeavours. Of course, they are both just other names for the workings of God. I had renewed my efforts to stay in favour with my angel keeper after George’s death; I needed God, Time and Fate to work in my favour while awaiting the protection of marriage. Prince Henry was a stickler for the correct observance of mourning and Arthur had warned me that we would have to be more cautious now that I was widowed. We could not be seen in public together and our letters were to be sent only with a trusted servant. I wondered if Arthur would be so punctilious if it were he who was living in a hovel, but held my tongue. I folded the letter. Weston looked at me as I put it in my pocket.

  ‘Sir Arthur did not attend Dr Turner’s funeral, nor send servants to help you move; strange carry-on for a man who promised to look after you. Does he know you’ve little money?’

  ‘He’s away with the Prince’s household,’ I said, piqued that Weston felt it his place to comment on a knight and courtier to the Prince of Wales. He shrugged, which also annoyed me, because I agreed that Arthur’s travels were no excuse for not helping me to move. There was a long pause, during which Weston made it plain he wanted to say something but awaited my invitation. I did not give it.

  Moments later, Frankie arrived.

  ‘You look worried,’ she said when finally we released each other.

  ‘I thought your husband had forbidden you to leave,’ I lied. Most people fear poverty as they do sickness and I did not want to test whether Frankie was amongst them. I needed her invitation to Court so that I could continue to offer fashioning ideas to women who would bestow gifts on me in return, which I could pawn or sell. Her family were denying her funds until she settled in her marriage and returned to behaving as she should: silent and uncomplaining. Yet she had never known scarcity and would not understand my present position.

  Frankie sent her maid back to Whitehall and we descended the river stair, Weston going ahead. The wherryman helped us into the boat and we rowed across a strong current.

  ‘I am sorry to be late. My maid promised to wake me, but she conspires against me. All my servants do. They are eit
her in the pay of my husband or my mother. I am the last person they have to obey.’ Despite her words, Frankie appeared surprisingly content. She was looking about as if the world had been made anew that evening for her. The skin of the Thames was alive with craft of all sizes; the bricks of Whitehall and Lambeth Palaces pulsed red in the setting sun. Smoke from hearths was snatched from chimneys before it could rise and on the far bank fishermen hauled their nets into pitching skiffs, watched by herons, their feathers sharp in the thundery light.

  ‘Some say Dr Forman is a charlatan,’ said Frankie.

  ‘He sees a thousand patients a year. Would so many see a charlatan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He caught and survived the plague of ’ninety-four – do you know any other physician who can claim that? He does not flee from it, like most doctors, and helps both rich and poor. For that alone, I trust him. He is a true magus but a dreadful gossip. Be discreet.’

  ‘You have kept me from him so long because you think I cannot hold my tongue?’

  ‘You could have gone to your mother. Does she not dabble in alchemy?’

  Frankie laughed. ‘With the wife of the Bishop of Bath! The Bishop wrote a book on alchemy and now she considers herself capable of turning toothache into gold. I don’t have toothache, at least. My mother is almost tender to me. She thought the arrival of my monthly bleed meant that I had lost a child.’

  ‘Why did you not tell her what Lord Essex did?’

  ‘For fear she would not mind. To her, it is unthinkable to take a husband to court, whatever illegal thing they have done.’ Then she pulled a note from her pocket and handed it to me.

  O, nature too unkind,

  That made no medicine for a Love-sick mind.

  Thus wishing you in all your desires remedy, I rest,

  Your true servant.

  The pamphlet carries a sole name. She only is the remedy for your love-sick mind.

  ‘That means me,’ said Frankie, leaning forward to point at the last line. ‘I am the remedy for a love-sick mind.’

  I suddenly felt my age. I doubted a poem could work such magic upon me if Eros himself wrote it; there is no leisure for giddy obsession once children arrive.

  ‘Who sent it?’ I asked, already guessing. Sir Robert Carr was perhaps the most handsome man at Court but he was not the brightest; someone else must have written the poem for him.

  ‘This morning, in the Privy Garden, Sir Robert bent to pick up a handkerchief as our paths crossed, though I had not dropped one. When he handed it to me, I felt the note hidden inside. My sisters were only two paces behind, but they suspected nothing.’

  ‘Was Sir Thomas Overbury with him? He has more of a reputation for poetry.’

  ‘Yes, but these will be Sir Robert’s sentiments.’

  I handed the note back to her. ‘You are flattered that he is too busy to compose verses himself?’

  ‘You are too harsh! He is probably shy of his talents as a writer,’ said Frankie, retying the scroll.

  ‘Sir Thomas Overbury takes great pains to write his friend’s love-letters, despite his disdain for your family.’ For the first time I saw danger in what I had thought a benign distraction.

  We were close to the south bank of the river by then. Fishermen at the edge of the marshes pulled their catches into boats, the gills of the thrashing fish catching more firmly in the nets as they struggled. At Lambeth Stairs, Weston pushed aside moored boats as Frankie and I put on our masks.

  ‘Why do you hire a man so old?’ she whispered.

  ‘He is loyal and strong and distinguished in his own way. He was caught counterfeiting sixpences and would have hanged had any witnesses testified against him but none would, and not because he threatened them.’

  ‘I know nothing about my servants,’ said Frankie, clearly surprised at the length of my answer to her question. ‘There’s no point, it is impossible to keep them.’

  We climbed the stairs and followed close behind Weston. Lambeth is not so scabrous a place as Bankside, but the street leading from the river stairs is lined with bawdyhouses.

  ‘Feel a real cock! Posh cocks don’t suffice!’ called a bawd standing in a doorway, and I smiled to think of her surprise if I told her how active were most Court cocks.

  As we walked away from the river, cobbles petered into hard mud, rutted by carriage wheels and infested with clouds of biting flies. We grumbled, as if Weston should somehow have arranged matters differently, until we reached a long pale against Lambeth Marsh that led to a house of some importance. The windows, containing glass in all but the attics, burned red in the last rays of the sun.

  Weston knocked and a young boy let us in and took our outer clothes, although we retained our masks. The entrance hall had a gallery, on which an unsmiling woman was handing a cloak and mask to another. Both of them stared down at us as Weston was directed to the back of the house and we to the parlour.

  ‘Is the sour woman his wife?’ asked Frankie, taking the only chair.

  ‘He calls her Trunco, though her name is Anne. She is forty years his junior.’

  ‘How awful to lie with an old ruin,’ said Frankie, forgetting that George had been Forman’s age. ‘That explains her churlish expression.’

  ‘He is a very active old ruin,’ I said, thinking his unquenchable appetite for his female patients a more likely cause of his wife’s unhappiness. That, and having to look after his illegitimate children, such as the boy who had opened the door to us. I removed my mask and admired the well-set garden with its neat beds of herbs and plum, apple, quince, ward, apricot and pear trees.

  ‘The other woman was Lady Coke. I did not expect to see her here,’ said Frankie. ‘She ran away from her husband, the pompous, self-righteous, Catholic-hating Chief Justice. Have you met him? He is a despotic bully. Lady Coke is full of life and a quarter of a century younger than he. Fancy seeing her in the hallway of a necromancer!’ she laughed – though her delight was immediately extinguished by the realisation that, if I was right about Forman being a gossip, her own secrets might soon be as widely known as those of Lady Coke.

  There was no chance for us to leave. Footsteps crashed downstairs and into the room flew the man we had come to visit.

  ‘Ah!’ he cried, as if seeing us made his joy complete. Forman’s manner of dressing always made me blink. That evening he was tricked out in a doublet of crimson, covered by a gown of turquoise lined with yellow shag. Green hose and blue stockings adorned his thin legs, and on his left hand he wore an immense ring. His dark eyes, already large, were outlined like those of a black and white creature in the King’s menagerie called a lemur. Forman’s wrinkles were white in their depths against a complexion burnt chestnut from his many hours of gardening; any shift in his expression was shouted out by the stripes on his face. He had the same twitchy curiosity as that creature, the same haughty rump.

  ‘My dear Mistress Turner, I miss George. How he loved you,’ he sighed, as if his own conquests of women were attempts to reach the level of affection George and I had attained. ‘As you know, I am no stranger to the pain of a broken heart. There is help for those in grief.’ He patted my hand, unaware that I was there only to accompany Frankie. I handed him a French Baby I had sewn with a design for his wife, requested before George’s death. He eyed it with dislike, as if remembering why he had to mollify her. He shoved the poppet inside his open doublet then turned and bowed deeply to Frankie, his hair flopping forwards as if it also wanted to please. I had not told him her name but as I had only one friend amongst the high nobility, he would know who she was. Frankie waved vaguely at the bright little conjuror that he might sit, but he walked to the door.

  ‘Follow me!’ he cried.

  George had told me that Forman only invited women to his study with whom he wished to fornicate, but even he could not hope to tumble us together. He showed us into a large, dimly lit corner chamber, crammed with tables, stools, boxes, strange stuffed creatures and pale forms in glass jars. He sat and o
pened a ledger on his desk, waving Frankie towards the chair in front of him.

  ‘Your name?’ he asked, charging his quill with ink.

  ‘You write?’ she said, sitting. I was surprised too. I had never consulted a physician who wrote before he smelt the piss-pot and I had kept my motions back for the purpose. I was discomfited by his unprofessional behaviour.

  ‘Urine and stool tell me nothing of the mind or the heart,’ he explained. ‘For physick to work you must trust the physician. The unity of mind, heart and body renders the cure efficacious.’

  ‘I am not sick,’ said Frankie.

  ‘But you seek remedies for problems of the heart,’ stated Forman. Frankie shifted in her chair, probably impressed by Forman’s perspicacity, or that of the angels with whom he conversed, but I knew it was not those holy messengers that informed him of her concerns, but good intelligence. The entire Court knew of the unhappiness between Frankie and her husband, as did every laundress, maid and coach driver who worked there. Forman had probably slept with Frankie’s chambermaid to collect the gossip he needed. Frankie removed her mask. Forman blinked his lemur eyes at her beauty. I had suggested she remain masked and unnamed; as ever, she listened to advice then did as she pleased. Had she forgotten already that we had just seen Lady Coke in Forman’s hall?