Conceit Read online

  Lips, legs, and arms, he taught me. And then the word for blushing.

  Fair good his plumage would do him at court. I knew enough about gamebirds from my father’s covey to know that it was the females, in spite of their dull livery, who did the choosing, not the males in their stiff ruffs, and certainly not lawyers of doubtful breeding. Mr Donne was indeed an upstart crow, beautifying himself with our feathers.

  One day when we were walking outdoors, Mr Donne’s usual interrogation in Spanish strayed off course into the familiar—how old I was, and how long my father proposed to let me stay at York House.

  “These are not a tutor’s questions,” I said, “but I am not surprised, since your collar is not a tutor’s either.”

  “That is slight evidence on which to condemn a man.”

  Why were there sumptuary laws when every man of the meaner sort was allowed to flout them? “Gilt spurs are not allowed under the rank of knight,” I said. “Those breeches have more than two yards of wool, and that sword is six inches longer than the Queen permits.”

  “It is true I am no idle gentleman,” he said, dismissing the whole of idle Westminster with a jerk of his thumb upriver. “But since my sword did the Queen good service under Essex in Cadiz, I doubt she will cavil at its length. You would be better listing off your verbs, Mistress More.”

  It was clear he earned his living by his cleverness, whereas I had not yet mastered the regular verbs of Spanish. I had no doubt he was the author of the poems in Francis’s collection, for I had heard his wit in every manicured line. But why lewd poems had to be so full of difficulties, I did not know—I was still trying to work them out.

  He made a low, deliberate bow. “I thought I had the right to more than common intimacy,” he said, “for I have also descended from Sir Thomas More. Would you care for one of the martyr’s blackened teeth? My mother gave me the skull to encourage me in the old religion.”

  “I am not of the Catholic Mores,” I said quickly.

  He nodded, catching my meaning. “Though I came from a people hungry for martyrdom, I have not such a sickly inclination myself. It is unwise in this Queen’s reign. You are a girl of some sense. Why have you left the safety of the country?”

  Some sense, indeed—did he suppose me ignorant of the threat the Catholics presented to the realm? “To find a worthy husband,” I replied. There was a small buzzing noise, from an insect in the dog-rose or from the man beside me. Perhaps it was a Spanish expletive. “It is time for me to return to the house.”

  “I’m sure you cannot tell,” he protested, “for I have observed you do not wear a clock.”

  “I need only look about me. The pimpernel has closed, but the dandelion is still open, so it is between two and three o’clock. Mr Donne, I believe you have walked here all summer, but have never seen the garden at your feet. It tells perfect time.”

  “I have been looking at you, Mistress More.”

  He had been coming closer by bits as he spoke and was now near enough for me to smell a kind of perfume about him. “You would do better to reflect upon the garden,” I said. “Now I shall teach you something. Each of these flowers opens and closes at the same time each day. This pink opened at nine and closed at one o’clock.”

  There was a glimmer of interest in his eyes. “Are all flowers so unbearably dull in their habits? Do none stay open at night to keep lovers company?”

  His scent, mingling with the river behind us, was not unwelcome to one who had been confined inside York House with women. “The evening primrose,” I offered tentatively, “and the Nottingham catchfly.”

  “That is not a name to inspire love. But I could grow to like the tardy primrose. I admit I have been inattentive to gardens, but if you care for them, I shall as well. Why, there are more shades of green than of any other colour. You see, I am interested already. Here is a whole alphabet of flowers that might with mute secrecy deliver messages between a man and a woman.”

  “You must not say such things.”

  “Why mustn’t I?” he said loudly.

  This was too public, and certainly far from mute. As I looked away, feigning a sudden curiosity in roses, a bee landed and embraced a bloom so like a lover that the bloom began to quiver, spraying the bee in yellow dust. I snatched my hand away and felt the graze of flesh. It seemed we had both left off our gloves this day, and perhaps for the same reason.

  At the touch of our fingers, something stirred, so fragrant and full of colour that to live henceforth without it would be an impoverishment I could not endure. His mouth was bearing down towards me with excruciating slowness. And for once it was not speaking. With a little movement, as darting as a frog’s tongue collecting a fly, his tongue would collect mine and I would taste him, sweet and salty, inside my mouth.

  But all at once he withdrew, looking over his shoulder as if hearing the busy world behind him. I had removed myself from it like an expiration from a lung, but now my breath came surging painfully back.

  His eyes alive with warning, he gestured at the reflecting panes of York House. Anybody could be watching. Even my maid Bess could not be trusted, for it would be like her to report to my father in exchange for a goose pie or a roast pigeon. We resumed walking a distance apart, neither of us speaking.

  “The four o’clocks are opening,” I said at last.

  This made him angry. “You cannot go on telling time by buttercups and water lilies,” he exclaimed. “The world of men goes by the clock, not in these infant ways. You have spoken no Spanish this half-hour, as you well know, unless you count this Spanish torpor. You must realize that as soon as your aunt presents you at court these lessons will be over. Perhaps sooner, if the Spanish do not improve their manners to the English.”

  Why had I not thought of that? I had spent more time thinking of my hair than of the continent of Europe.

  “These hurried snatches of time cannot satisfy,” he said. “Time passes too swiftly in this garden. Even kings and queens are but flowers, some gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight. Carpe florem. Surely you have learnt a little Horace? Look—” His palm cupped an extravagant white bloom. “Even the petals on this rose are damned. By the end of summer, each one will be withered and brown. Can you not see?—the very hairs on your sweet head are numbered.”

  Suddenly I did see. The spectre of my father rose up before me. Soon I would be betrothed and have no need of tutors.

  “Oh, do not say such things. Teach me, Mr Donne, teach me everything you know! I cannot be married until I have learnt”—I cast about for something he and my aunt might equally approve—“philosophy.”

  My fingers slid unthinkingly over the bare skin at his wrist. He snapped his hand over mine and twisted me around. It seemed there was a power in my fingertips that had nothing to do with stitching jasmine bushes on inept tapestries.

  “You are so ethereal, Ann More—it is as if you belong out of time, or in some long-past perfection of our history. I wish that all my body could be turned into tongues so that I could declare your praises to posterity.”

  My fingers were trembling inside his, in fact my whole arm was begging to be included in the embrace, but he had raised our two hands towards the sun to stare at them, explaining something about hours and shadows and the sun’s height at noon. Then he broke from me and strode rapidly ahead, leaving me to walk through gravel to catch up.

  I found him stopped in the middle of the path, rooting around in his doublet under a deep compulsion. Producing an inkhorn and pen at last, he demanded, “Where is that list of Spanish verbs I gave you?”

  I admitted that I had left it in my chamber.

  “Then excuse me, sweet mistress, for I am in most desperate need of paper.”

  As he ran towards York House, I noted the common knit of his hose and the Thames mud clinging to the gilt of his departing spurs. Wit, I reminded myself, trying to slow my breathing, was no substitute for lands and titles.

  This time it was a very faint word, so faint I
could barely see it scrawled on the pane: conjugation.

  It had nothing to do with learning foreign tongues, for our lessons had long since turned to metaphysics. He taught me what Plato had to say, and then he corrected Plato, for he had no modesty. He talked so much that my head ached, but when he was near me his meaning was not hard to grasp. Ecstasy, Plato said, was to be found in the conjugation of souls, but John Donne said that ecstasy found pretty entertainment in the body before it rose up to the mind. This was where he differed from Plato, who kept the flesh well out of it.

  I was discovering that there were many ways of alluding to this entertainment. My aunt used the word consummation when speaking of what was yet to come between Francis and Mary, whose skin had broken out in pustules since his departure. Bess said there was nothing wrong with Mary that a bit of husbandry wouldn’t clear up. The way Bess said the word left me in no doubt as to what she meant. In her own way she was a connoisseur of words, vulgarities flowing out of her like mother’s milk. She had been using such turns of speech since I was very young, but they had recently acquired new meaning. Even perfectly innocent words like placket and sleeve began to present troublesome images. They would pop into my mind at unexpected moments, ripe with significance. It was as if another hemisphere had sprung up which mirrored mine. I no longer trusted my eyes, for even household objects were assuming odd shapes that suggested sinister, intimate uses.

  John Donne’s conjugation rang on my ear like a beaten chalice, brazen and new. It was a word that veered from sharp to sweet, like the petals falling from an overripe poppy. That morning, while walking with him, I had stopped to stare at a flower exposing herself to raiding insects—the whole garden was bristling with indelicate activity—and then, ashamed to be seen looking at such a thing, for his lips were curving in humour, I bolted, leaving him to enjoy the garden’s lewd performance on his own.

  I erased his word from the pane with my fist. The next day I noticed that the maids were applying a white paste to the passage windows and rubbing it off with paper. Was this an ordinary household chore or had someone noticed the writing? I heard Bess grumbling at the work, and quickened my steps so I would not get an earful.

  Now that our slate was gone, John Donne had taken to whispering the words, drawing out the syllables as he bestowed them, gifts warm from his tongue. Labial A labial wooing. Labyrinth. The inner shell, a ravishment of the ear. Why did I not stop up my ears with wax against him? Oh, I was labile—docile and willing.

  In corridors, in solitary rooms, whenever we met fleetingly in that great house, words spilled from his lips into the bedchamber of my ear. I fell in love with John Donne’s words, darting like swallows in and out of the frippery of this world, no more belonging to it than birds belonged inside a house. Yet they did belong. I was mistaken.

  Now John Donne had no time to seek me out, though he was quite able, I discovered to my annoyance, to go to the edge of England to carry the funeral sword for Sir Thomas’s son, who had been killed under the Earl of Essex in Ireland. I was sorry for Sir Thomas, but I thought he might more easily have spared someone other than his secretary. Then Essex returned in disgrace and was held captive by Sir Thomas right under our noses in York House while the Queen decided what was to be done with him.

  Everyone was in a grey mood. I would not be dancing that season, though new dances were rumoured at court, for my Aunt Beth kept to her room. All that winter, the closest I got to John Donne was in my aunt’s chamber at Christmas, when he consoled her by calling Essex a fallen angel and reproached the Queen for her gaiety at Greenwich. How could she be gay, my aunt cried out to Mr Donne, when Her Favourite was so fallen from grace? I could hear the capital letters when my aunt talked of Essex. Sweet England’s Pride, she called him, gripping her visitor’s hand as he knelt beside her bed to comfort her.

  John Donne did not seem to care that I might need some gaiety myself, or that I also craved the comfort of his long slender fingers. He hardly touched me as he took me aside, just counselled that I should guard my speech about Essex, as he guarded his, for the axe could turn either way.

  As if I would waste my words on the Earl of Essex when I had John Donne nearby. How was it that men were so narrow in their affairs, so poor-sighted in their view of the world? It was household rumour that Mr Donne had taken lodgings near the Savoy and now kept a simpering French servant. Matters of state seemed to have driven me out of his head. Unless it was true, as Bess reported, that he had taken the lodgings to meet a married woman and had found pretty entertainment there.

  I was incapable of chiding Bess for gossiping. Worse still, I sent her to the scullery, to the buttery, even to the stable, as often as I could, to throw her in the path of the other servants, who were as fond of gossip as she was. It had become a disease, the need to hear every syllable I could about John Donne.

  And so it was that Mary found us at the hour of midnight on St Agnes’s eve—the candle almost burnt out and my buttons still done up, my hair uncombed about my shoulders, the pins only taken out, nothing more done, Bess’s arms at work in the air describing John Donne’s latest costume—the stiffness of the ruff about his barbered chin, the scarlet hose tight across his calves, the rich lace, the excessive ambition in every stitch and dart—and my face eager with delight as I absorbed the telling, as I had absorbed her reckless tales since childhood, since the loss of a mother I had never known. It was then that Mary burst in on us, sobbing that my aunt had suffered a blockage of the heart and even now was slipping away. I was to come at once if I wanted to take my leave of her in this world.

  I went, with Bess supporting me, with Mary lighting our way, down the long, dark corridor to death, realizing too late how dear my aunt had been to me. And now I lie in death’s black underworld myself, weighted down by hundredweights of stone, telling endlessly such tales of life to any who might wish to stand above and listen.

  9. PRIDE’S ITCH

  Pegge was sitting on her father’s great-bed, helping him sort the manuscripts from his cabinet. She picked up some papers and flattened out the creases.

  “Verse letters,” she said. “Should they go with letters or with poems? They are clearly dated.” He did not reply, so she put them with letters, where their chances of surviving would be best.

  Stacks of paper covered the horsehair blanket. Sitting cross-legged, he was inking dates and titles onto sheets, then handing them to Pegge to put in bundles. Her eyes kept shifting to his toenails, curled and yellow, unpared for months. Surely Con had not done that for him? He had already written to Con to tell her he was dying, but perhaps he was only counterfeiting to force her to visit, for he looked less ill than when the artist had sketched him on the previous day. Death appeared to be a tonic, putting him into a strange jubilant ecstasy.

  Some of the papers were to be burnt, some published, and some fell into limbo. Every so often, debating its fate, he would read some turgid prose, enunciating so pointedly that his lips got stuck at the corners before they sprang back into shape.

  “Letter to the bishop,” he would announce, or “Sermon preached on Candlemas Day,” writing the particulars at the top.

  “This would be easier to do in your library, Father.”

  “When God comes to claim me, he will look for me between these old bedposts. Push that stack closer, Pegge.”

  “How long have you had this bed?”

  “It came from Loseley thirty years ago.”

  Then it was his marriage-bed, as she had suspected. Twelve children had been conceived where Pegge and her father sat together now. His mind must have wandered in the same direction, for he was taking too long over the expenses for the chapter-house, squaring up the corners far too neatly.

  “Was it all my mother received for her dowry?”

  His silence did not surprise her. She knew he could not admit he had taken Ann without her father’s blessing, for fear that his own daughters might do the same, though Pegge could not imagine her sisters marrying in the
heat of love.

  If he was really dying, his death would orphan all her own hopes. There was still time to admit that she would rather marry than be incarcerated in a foreign nunnery, or in Con’s house at Barking, but she could not force this dry confession from her mouth, not with his passion for Ann hanging in the air between them. Even Bridget and Betty would soon be consorting with perfect strangers in marriage-beds, enjoying gamesome rites that Pegge could only guess at.

  “When you met my mother, she was only Betty’s age,” she said, thumbing through some quarter-sheets. “How did you know you were in love?” It came out too bluntly, like a child’s question. She knew she must sound as foolish as her sisters.

  “How do you know there is a God?” he thundered back. “Whom do I tremble at, and sweat under at midnight, and whom do I curse by next morning if there be no God?” He tapped a large pile. “These are the sermons not yet transcribed. We will need Mr Walton’s help with them. Send him a note to come at once.”

  “I can manage on my own, Father.” They would not be able to sit so companionably on his bed if Walton were there, interfering.

  “You will be needed to make fair copies of these holy poems.” He pushed some papers towards her. “Be sure to ask about any questionable lines before I die.”

  “I will copy out the secular poems as well.” So far she had found only five, but she could see several likely-looking sheets closer to her father. “How shall I order them? I think by date, so they will make a kind of story. You will need to tell me when they were written.”

  “Give them to me.” He clamped the five under his left knee, a stack Pegge knew was destined for the fire.