Love's Alchemy Page 3

  Then, in young manhood when he knew the Jesuit vows were not for him, he had dreamed of fighting with the sword for the Catholic cause. He would lead troops in desperate charges to liberate cities lost to Protestant despots. Wounded with bullets and arrows, he would be cared for by grateful Catholic maidens who would fall in love with him in the soft lamplight. They would weep silently with heads bowed, their long, dark hair rivering loose about his wounds, as the priest came in to administer the Last Rites.

  Such dreams had heated the blood of his youth. But now, twenty years later, he knew the futility—no, the damnable madness—of the Jesuit cause. If it was heresy to turn against the Jesuits and the pope who sent them to speed young men like his brother Henry to their graves, then Jack Donne would prove a heretic. With a clear conscience he would stand before the Almighty on the Day of Doom. Then why did it nettle him when Mrs. Aylesbury said he had turned heretic? She meant him no offense, but her words stung.

  No, he had made his decision in good conscience: catholic meant universal, not Roman, and the nearest thing to a universal faith in his native land was Protestant, the Church of England. Still, he had not made his decision lightly. Months of reading the arguments on both sides had stretched into years. He knew more theology than . . . well, than almost anybody else. Not more than Sarpi, maybe, or Andrewes. . . .

  But why was he wrapped in such thoughts? Why must he always be carried away from what lay before him? Here he stood in a street, not in a lecture hall disputing theology with the Venetian friar Sarpi or the London preacher Andrewes but in a street with Mrs. Aylesbury, where she stood with her chin in the air, and she seemed to want assurance. “No, my friend,” he said, “you may be sure I hate the pursuivants as rootedly as you do yourself. More, it may be.”

  She leaned toward him conspiratorially and half-whispered, half-spat, “I’ll tell you whose doing it is. It’s this bunchback serpent Robert Cecil that now goes styling himself the Lord Essendon.”

  The woman’s eyes were red-veined, liquid with anger. Never had he seen such venom in her.

  “It was Cecil as made the vile Scotsman king,” she said. “The king what promised live and let live to the Catholics. He promised it. He made the promise to some four or five of the Fathers, and I’ve heard Mass from one as heard him say it with his own ears. Now the pursy-wants is worse than ever they was under the Queen, and that was a half-deal more than bad. I say it’s all this Robert Cecil’s doing. It’s him what sets King James against us.” She darted her watery eyes about, then lowered her voice to a bare whisper: “I know good Catholic men what say this Cecil is the Anti-Christ.” She furtively crossed herself.

  To reassure her, Jack crossed himself too. “Mrs. Aylesbury, I think you are right. Not perhaps about the Anti-Christ, but the human source of your woe is Lord Robert Cecil. Lord Salisbury is his next title, some say.”

  The old woman waved a gnarled hand in disgust. “What needs he or any man of all these titles? Cecil. Essendon. Salisbury. All his names hiss like snakes.”

  Jack smiled. There was poetry in the heart of even the unlettered Mrs. Aylesbury. He lifted his palms as if to say, but what can any of us do? She lowered her eyes, chewed her underlip, and fingered her shawl. He asked, “What does Father Ger—what does Father Palmer tell you to do?”

  “Christen forgiveness,” she mumbled. “Patience.”

  “Well, then.” He reached into the flattened little leather purse in the pocket of his cloak. His fingers hesitated over the coins. He had thought to spare only the one angel-noble he had reserved for his family’s food; all the rest he would give the old woman. He knew by feel exactly how much it amounted to: four shillings and a silver half-crown. But after he pressed the lesser coins into her hand, he reached back into the purse, took out the golden angel, and added it to the others. “I wish I could help you more.”

  “Oh, but Master Donne! You have arready done more than what—”

  He cut her off with a deep bow and a graceful sweep of his black velvet hat.

  She did her best to return the gesture with a curtsey. He heard the faint creak of her knees and helped her upright again—or as close to upright as Mrs. Aylesbury ever got—then hurried along his way. Anne and the children would be waiting, and the walk would take a full two hours.

  CHAPTER 2

  Something slowed him as he neared the house. Jack came to the top of the rise and caught his breath at the sight of Pyrford Place, his young friend Francis Wolley’s mansion, or latest plaything, sprawled golden and russet in the glancing sun. As usual the thought of continuing to lodge at Pyrford troubled him. True, Wolley said the Donnes were to stay there always and forever. He loved Jack, he said—loved Anne, too, who was after all his cousin. But then, Wolley loved the latest blend of tobacco, his newest tapestry, the bronze Adonis that Giovanni da Bologna had cast for him in Florence. The next day Wolley’s loves would be hates. King James was right that tobacco was the Devil’s weed, the tapestry was moth-eaten, the Adonis mocked him. How long until Jack and Anne were no longer welcome? True, they could live for weeks almost unnoticed in their end of the house if Wolley chose to ignore them. The troubling thing was that even if Francis Wolley was a fickle, overgrown boy, Jack was a man. He should be plying his talents, making a name. With Lord Keeper Egerton he had been doing just that. And then Egerton’s niece had come along. . . .

  The gilt-edged colors of the house took him back to his first sight of Anne: very young then—just fourteen—with all the glories of youth and all the graces of womanhood intermingled as she sat reading on a bench of woven willow in the garden at York House. The afternoon sun, the same sun that now tinted the cold stones of Pyrford Place, had played along her coppergold hair as it lifted and eased in the breeze. Her green dress too had softly billowed about her bare feet, billowed and relented. Head inclined slightly to one side, she had kept her gaze lowered to the book that absorbed her, oblivious to the black-clad intruder ominously named Donne.

  He had stood there for several heartbeats, half-hoping she would look up, half-hoping she would not. Seldom at a loss for an apt thing to say, he had opened his mouth to speak but found his tongue dry and useless. What an odd thing: a mere child sat before him, and he stood unable to talk to her. He began to ease backward along the path he had come by and was about to disappear behind a hawthorn hedge when the Lord Keeper himself burst into the garden from the opposite side.

  “Ah! Donne! There you are. I’ve been looking. These papers want your eye.” Jack nodded and mumbled his greeting to Lord Egerton as he pretended to have been just that moment walking into the garden. Meanwhile, the girl darted an untroubled glance at Jack before rising to make a curtsey first to Egerton and then to him. “But have you met my niece Anne,” the Lord Keeper continued, “come from the country to stay with us for a time?”

  “No,” Jack said, finding his voice clear again and turning to her, “but the meeting pleases. Pray, what do you read?”

  “Ovid,” said Anne, with just a touch of pertness.

  “Ah,” Jack said, “then you know your Latin. That is good.”

  She shrugged. “Some I know.”

  “More than some, I should think. Ovid can be difficult.”

  Now her smile spread. “Oh, but beautiful. One of his verses can be worth all the trouble of learning the language.” She held the book to her breast as she said,

  illa velut crimen taedas exosa iugales

  pulchra verecundo subfuderat ora rubore.

  Lord Egerton said absently, “What? Yes, girl. You know your Latin. . . .”

  “That is Daphne,” Anne said, “as she clasps her hands about her father the river-god’s neck and asks him to grant her perpetual virginity.”

  Lord Egerton cleared his throat. “Yes, the Metamorphoses. You were better to read Caesar, my dear. Your Caesar is more wholesome, better suited to the young, than your Ovid.”

  “Caesar!” said Anne. “All those battles, Uncle, all those wars. How are they wholesome?
And Caesar’s writing is not beautiful, not like Ovid’s.”

  “Well, I suppose one must read the Metamorphoses at some time,” said the Lord Keeper. “But consider your youth, my dearest, and be governed by wisdom.” Having closed the matter, he turned to Jack to discuss the papers.

  “Oh, but these are not the Metamorphoses,” Anne said brightly. She held the little calfskin-bound volume in her hand.

  “How is that?” said the Lord Keeper, the conversation already half-forgotten. “How . . . but you said you were reading Ovid.”

  “Oh, I am,” she said with wide-eyed satisfaction. “The Ars Amatoria.”

  “What?” thundered Egerton, thrusting the papers into Jack’s grasp and snatching the book from his niece. “Where did you lay hold of this, child?”

  Jack watched closely. She did not flinch, did not blush, did not blanch. “Why, in your library, of course, Uncle.”

  “But . . . who gave you the run of my library?”

  “You did, Uncle. Yesterday.”

  “I. . . . So I did. But that was. . . .That was for. . . .” Jack looked on, amazed. Never had he seen the Lord Keeper, legendary orator and legal counselor, member of Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council, so put out. “That was not for the Ars Amatoria,” Lord Egerton proclaimed.

  “But why not?” asked Anne. “The Ars Amatoria is the art of loving. We are placed on earth to love, are we not? Is there to be no art to it?”

  “There is to be no loving. Not for you.”

  “No loving! But our Lord Jesus commands us—”

  “Enough!” Egerton turned to Jack, who did his best to maintain the requisite air of decorum. “Master Donne: I have hitherto plied your brains and your hand: your brains increasingly in matters of state, some of them weighty, and your hand in scrivening. The latter service as my amanuensis I have valued largely for the fluidity and grace of your Italianate script. Henceforth, however, I shall employ some other scrivener, and you shall devote a portion of each day to undoing some measure of the harm my niece’s prior tutor has done the child, apparently without her good father’s knowing it.”

  “I should be honored,” Jack said.

  Anne replied, “And I should be pleased to be . . . is diseducated a word, Master Donne?”

  Jack arched an eyebrow. “If it were, what would you think of it?”

  She wrinkled her nose in thought. “Diseducated: I should call it uglificatory.”

  Jack smiled. Lord Egerton said, “That, my dear, I think is not a word.”

  “Just so, Uncle. Master Donne, it is clear, thinks neither is diseducated one, so I fancied a made-up description would be just the thing. But I must be wrong. Have I already displeased my new master?” She looked up at Jack through bright green eyes.

  “Not at all. The first lesson augurs well.”

  “Good. Since I am to be diseducated, I shall now forget that I have learnt it.”

  Egerton looked at his niece and blew out an exasperated sigh. “Enough, young malapert. Master Donne, this creature to be diseducated has learnt her Latin, her French, her Italian. . . . Am I correct?”

  “Yes, Uncle. Some of each.”

  “What else?”

  “A little Greek.”

  “Greek!” said Jack. “What think you of it?”

  She pursed her lips for a moment, then said, “A rocky language, like the country. Full of echoes. Good for poetry, I think. But I know only a little.”

  “Well,” said Egerton. “Improve her languages, Jack. If she does well, give her Hebrew for a treat. If she misbehaves, set her to arithmetic for a fortnight on end.”

  “Ugh,” said Anne. “Arithmetic.”

  “And she may begin reading theology. Calvin and Beza should suffice.”

  “Oh, Uncle! Both are dull. Let me read Luther. Luther has life to him.”

  “Calvin and Beza, good Protestants both.”

  “Please, Uncle. No such suffering as Calvin and Beza. We Protestants do not believe in Purgatory.” It was all Jack could do to stifle a snort.

  Egerton said sternly but, Jack thought, with a gleam in his eye, “My dear, I have spoken.” He lowered his bushy gray brows before adding, “You are excused from the garden.”

  Anne said with a sprightly air, “Cast forth from Eden, like—”

  Egerton held up a hand in warning, and his niece seemed to know enough to hold her silence while he said, “No more in my library, do you hear, not until Master Donne has perused it. Scriptures only until then.” She curtseyed and left.

  Lord Egerton pocketed the book and took Jack’s arm. The older man seemed more weary than usual, his beard more hoary, like some long-suffering patriarch of the Old Testament. “Have men-children only, Jack, men-children only.” They walked a few steps before he added, “Still, I love that child like none other in the wide world.” Jack could tell from the little hitch in his voice that the Lord Keeper would weep if he said more, so Jack kept his eyes ahead and walked on, silent.

  Now he moved down the hill through the lengthening shadows toward Pyrford. In the few years since that first glimpse of Anne at her uncle’s house—three years of improving her education and letting her improve his sense of wonder, and then three of marriage and children—he had come to shed all the Lord Keeper’s loving tears, and more. He knew in his very bones what it was to love Anne More like none other in the wide world. Yet that first meeting in the garden seemed a lifetime removed.

  He found her now stirring the fire into flame: poker lightly wielded like a foil in one hand, baby held to her hip with the other. He took up the infant, sat on the cushioned bench, and watched as Anne propped the poker in the chimney-corner. Pressing with both fists against the small of her back, she arched away the stiffness. Constance waddled over from her seat on the lowest of the stairs to protest her baby brother’s privileged spot on her father’s lap. Jack helped her up too. Anne puffed back the fugitive wisp of hair that had fallen across her forehead and eased into a smile as she watched Jack try to hold Little Jack away from both Constance, who wanted to push the baby aside, and his own face. The boy had taken a liking to Jack’s beard of late and had a fine, healthy grip. He squared the baby around to face the fire, and the boy promptly forgot about the beard as the flames flicked and darted around the smoldering back-log. With his free arm Jack half-hugged, half-restrained Constance. She squirmed against his grip until he let her slide to the floor where, having made her point, she sat and watched the fire.

  Anne said to Jack, “You’ve walked from London.”

  “Yes: Bedford House.” Best get it out now; she would know soon enough.

  “Bedford House! What took you there?”

  “Verses. Patronage.” He added, “It may be.”

  “From the Earl of Bedford? How did you come to know him? He likes your poems? But how so? A great clot-poll, is he not? A blockhead. But what did he tell you?”

  Before answering, Jack looked for a moment at the fine curves of her body in the firelight. Marriage and motherhood had taken the edge off her youth, her eagerness. Yet as usual, the regrets about the loss of her fortune seemed all Jack’s, not hers. And although childbearing had been hard—very hard—motherhood deepened her beauty rather than famished her spirits. Only from time to time did a vague shadow creep in about the corners of her eyes, a darkness that Jack had not learned to penetrate.

  But she had been asking about the Earl of Bedford. Jack found himself saying, “Yes, he liked ‘The Ecstasy.’ ” A stab of guilt: he had never met the Lady Bedford’s husband. The nearest he had come was watching him pass by in the street. Why tell this little lie? What made him do such things?

  “No wonder,” she was saying. “I like that one, too.”

  Where, like a pillow on a bed,

  A pregnant bank swelled up to rest

  The violet’s reclining head,

  Sat we two, one another’s best.

  Little Jack reached toward his mother, who took him up as she asked, “But what did the Earl say? Y
ou haven’t told me what he said.”

  “He said . . .” Jack shifted on the bench. “He—”

  “He was not wholly pleased, is that it? Or he did not grasp the sense of it, more like.”

  Ah, a way out: “Not entirely. But Lady Bedford—”

  Anne’s eyes widened. “The Countess read your poem?”

  “Yes. And liked it. Somewhat.”

  “Now, that were a patroness. Jack, this is—” Anne pulled back her head a bit as she considered the matter. “They say she is become a great friend of the new queen. And she liked your poem! Well, why would she not?” She recited more of the lines:

  A single violet transplant,

  The strength, the color, and the size

  (All which before was poor and scant)

  Redoubles still, and multiplies.

  She spoke with both wistfulness and wit. Jack nodded. “The poem already earned me gold,” he said. “I paid Hilliard four angels against his loan.”

  “Four angel-nobles! Did she give them or lend them?”

  “She gave them, or . . . it.”

  He could see that Anne noticed the slight disturbance in his voice. A hint of a cloud crossed her face. “It?”

  “Yes, she—” Why did he find this difficult to say? “The gift was a token that I sold.”