Conceit Read online

  Your father handed me a list of sculptors, wiping his eyes with the back of his wrist. I took it without a word. Dumb, blind, crucified—what metaphors did not apply?—I chose one for his name, and composed an epitaph for Nicholas Stone to carve. This stone is commanded to speak the grief of her husband John Donne (by grief made speechless like an infant) who hereby pledges his ashes to her ashes in a new marriage wedded.

  This was no idle conceit, for my grief was unutterable. What tears were left to shed? I had become that very stone, that infant without a mother. I buried you next to your five dead children in St Clement’s. I still have the accounting.

  for the burial of a stillborn

  child of Dockter Dunes

  for the grave in the church…… iiii s

  for the knell……………… viii d

  for the burial of Mrs Dun

  for the knell………………. v s

  for the passing bell………… iiii d

  Should I have withdrawn my seed like Onan and spilt it on the floor? You might have lived another thirty years, but God counts onanism a crime. Since your death, I have paid a price that would make Onan blush, for your fingers call me forth each night to share remembered pleasures. I sometimes wonder, my gentle wife, if you are taking your revenge.

  Four years after your death, when I became Dean of Paul’s and moved the children into this house, I found Bridget’s tinder-box with nail parings. She confessed that she had clipped your nails as you lay dying to entice your soul back to collect them. I rooted out all the children’s relics—the hair that Constance had combed out of your brush, the flannel in which Jo had caught one of your tears. I threw them on the fire as the children watched, and condemned such Catholic idolatry. In truth, I had no wish to encounter your soul gliding about the Deanery at midnight, seeking lost nails or hairs or tears, and rousing allies to avenge imagined slights.

  The children have outgrown their memories of you, except for Pegge, who refuses to be weaned from the few she has. Once in a while, when Sadie barks for no reason, Pegge looks about as if a spirit might be present in my chamber, then lays a hand on the dog to quiet her. For months the dog has shadowed me, even into the chancel of St Paul’s, tracking the rank odour of human flesh. I do believe the animal has some gift, for she knew before my own doctor that I was dying.

  My marriage-bed is now a deathbed. You must leave me, Ann, to the corruption of my body. I can smell it beginning. Let me putrefy and vermiculate, incinerate, dissolve, desiccate, and be dispersed until I am motes of dust. When God is ready, he will call back each mote from wheresoever it has flown, in whatsoever filth, and from these particles he will reintegrate and recompact my body, and revivify it in the blinking of an eye. At the last busy day, when the numberless infinities of souls arise and go to their scattered bodies, my ashes will wed your ashes and we will be young again in one another’s arms.

  14. ENGLISH LAW

  At first light, I was jolted out of John Donne’s embrace by the pipes and clanging pans outside our window at Lincoln’s Inn.

  “Good-morrow to our waking souls,” my lover said, tying my shift for me.

  My clothes were only just back on when the law students burst through the door to toast our health from the leather phallus once again. The hoots and jests were so loud I thought the window-glass would shatter. According to Francis, rubbing his cold hands, they had spent the long midwinter night on Lincoln’s fields where a tavern called the Blue Balls kept late hours.

  John Donne’s face was flushed, but not half so flushed as mine beneath my hastily tied mask. He looked well pleased with our night’s revelry, for there had been nothing mock about this part of the ceremony. This had been a mingling of blood, a bargain entered into willingly.

  But now we had to leave separately. Francis had to get me back inside the east wing of York House, while John Donne resumed his duties for Sir Thomas. It would be some time before we could manage such a night again. We had known this, and had to be content to feed ourselves on memories of love.

  On the following day, I was walking restlessly about York House at midnight when I heard hooves striking and ran into the courtyard, hoping to see my lover. A man dismounted and lost his footing on the frosty pavingstones. I recognized Anabel, my father’s mare, and heard his familiar curses. He had come, he said with an ill-mannered oath, to take me back to Loseley.

  Though it was dark and foul, he insisted that we start out at once. What had he heard that brought him back from Surrey in such haste? His face purple, he pushed me ahead of him down the passage, shouting for Sir Thomas. When that poor man stumbled out in his nightclothes, my father demanded his dead sister’s carriage. I gathered that my father was annoyed with something Edward had done, or not done, and that Sir Thomas had betrayed a trust and now owed my father a sum of money. But how these things were connected in his mind, I was too terrified to ask.

  When the lawyer in Sir Thomas came awake, voicing objections and stating facts, my father began to blow in another direction, saying that Sophie was expecting another litter and that he would have me home for company. Finally, when he had sputtered out like a spent candle, we got ourselves quietly into my aunt’s carriage and onto the Strand. No one was there to see me off-not even the gallant Master Edward.

  A long, dead night, it was the worst possible for a thirty-four-mile journey on bad roads, though this time I was well cushioned by my late aunt’s plush. I endured the ride in fearful speculation about what was going through my father’s mind. Had Bess somehow got word to him that I was receiving letters from Edward? But that could not be, for my father was never silent when angry with his children.

  One thing I was sure of—my father could know nothing of my night of love, for even Bess was ignorant. She had not been in my room when I returned, but had staggered in, reeking of garlic and strong drink, some time after I got myself to bed. It had not been difficult to undress myself, for I had not been properly fastened. John Donne’s skill lay in undoing women, not in lacing them back up.

  My father slept all the way to Shalford. When the carriage knocked along the village lane, he began to talk himself awake, cursing Sir Thomas for shadowy crimes. Dawn broke, an ominous yellow, as we entered the grounds of Loseley park. Bess finally quit snoring and my father felt for the velvet bag that contained my dowry gold. For my part, I had thought John Donne’s poems more worth saving, and for hours they had been comforting me next to my skin.

  The days passed slowly, like the mist swirling around the apple tree below my window. Bunches of mistletoe perched on the bleak limbs like oversized crows’ nests, and the lowest branch almost dragged upon the earth, weathered and glistening. It had seemed high off the ground when I was three and Bess lifted me on top of it. Ten years older than me, Bess had climbed up to reach the pippins, polishing the best ones for me on her apron.

  My father had taken offense at all of London, preferring wet, inhospitable Surrey to any warmth the town might offer. I could not discover why we must wait out the winter at Loseley and was too afraid to ask directly. The only cause I could see was Sophie, who had indeed been bred and now was swelling. Her boar had been chosen with the care lavished on daughters of high rank. Sometimes I went out to feed her acorns. It was too cold outside to wallow but, inside her private sty, Sophie was building a nest out of straw and my father’s old, discarded shirts.

  In the evening, I sat with my father in front of the chalk fireplace in hopes of getting some news from him. As the January weather worsened, so did his temper. His sentences consisted of few words, and most of those were directed towards his chaplain and his steward. The gout stiffened his knees and ankles, depressing his spirits further.

  Late one afternoon he came in from outside complaining of the muck and rain. He stirred up the coals and threw himself into the depths of his chair, making piteous sounds. I kept him company on a little chair that had been my aunt’s, making a show of embroidering a silk handkerchief for him.

 
“You should not sit so close to the fire, Father. It heats up your legs too quickly and gives you pain.” He shifted his chair an inch closer and shut his eyes against me. “Do your eyes trouble you?” I persisted. “You should dictate your letters to me to spare your sight.”

  He had always found writing tiresome, and I longed to be privy to his correspondence. If any letters had arrived from my cousin Francis, or any occupant of York House, they had been locked up at once in my father’s study, and I was desperate to know what John Donne had been doing in the month since I had seen him.

  I tried again. “My aunt said my penmanship was equal to her own, and she was one of the Queen’s maids of honour.” My aunt was dead now and could not dispute this fabricated claim.

  This time I was rewarded with a grunt. “My writing is good enough for other men to read.”

  Then he was writing to men, but to which ones? “You would be more companionable in London, Father. You would have no need to correspond with your friends then, for they would all be near you.”

  “I shall return when Parliament is called, not sooner.”

  He had set his heart against London and nothing I could say would revive his civic duty. Perhaps I would do better with a domestic theme. “Is it true that my aunt worked one side of this chair and the Queen the other?” A grunt, possibly a licence to continue. “Aunt Beth said Her Majesty was always glad to see you. You have not forgotten I am to be presented at court, Father?”

  A churlish oath. “If the Queen wishes to see you in this unspeakable weather, she may travel on the filthy roads herself to Loseley.”

  Perhaps sullenness was preferable to activity. When the weather improved, his attention would turn all too quickly towards me. Soon he would be riding his prize mare about the countryside, assessing neighbouring estates, tallying livestock and weighing crops still ripening in the field. Any day now he would begin to scrutinize the bloodlines of country squires for his fifth son-in-law.

  The jasmine had begun to crowd the winter house the gardener had built for it. On warm days, he opened the panes so it would not overheat. One morning I heard him beneath my window with a saw, pruning the apple tree to make way for new shoots. Before long, he would be netting the tree against marauding birds.

  It had been two months since I had seen John Donne, two months of guessing what my father was plotting, when I was called to sit at table with his visitor, Henry Percy, the ninth Earl of Northumberland. As I entered, my father was complaining about his lazy swineherd. The Earl stopped feigning an interest in rural economy and gave me a sharp measuring look.

  Could it be that my father, a rabid anti-papist, had decided to match me to a Catholic peer three times my age? I hung upon every word, hoping to find the Earl already settled in life. I was relieved to hear of a daughter, and soon hoped to hear of a mother for her. If he was widowed, surely he would have mentioned his loss when my father said that our sow Sophie had been named after my dead mother, but no-the Earl’s eyes were dry and watchful. I was heartened. His wife must be alive. But if so, why did he stare so pointedly at me?

  In the dynastic portrait behind my father, I leaned on the knee of my dead mother, who was petting a small fancy-dog. Either she had been copied from an earlier picture, or my face had been painted over a dead child’s, for I had never known her. Everything I knew about my mother was on that wall, and none of it, perhaps, was true. Even the dog’s name had been forgotten. Perhaps it had died of sorrow at her death, or been killed by my father in a fit of grief.

  When the first hot dish was carried in, the Earl stood up so abruptly that the bench teetered. “I have brought a letter for you, sir.” He reached inside his doublet.

  “Read it,” said my father, cutting himself a liberal slab of pork.

  After a moment of doubt, the Earl began.

  To the Right Worshipful Sir George More, Knight

  SIR,

  If a very respective fear of your displeasure did not so much increase my sickness as that I cannot stir, I had taken the boldness to have done the office of this letter by waiting upon you myself to have given you truth and clearness of this matter between your daughter and me.

  As a fish rode past on Nellie’s platter, the Earl paused to steady his breathing. I had recognized the Jesuitical style of the opening and was now in fear of just how wrongly the writer would judge my father’s temper.

  So long since as her being at York House this had foundation, and so much then of promise and contract built upon it as, without violence to conscience, might not be shaken. At her lying in town this last parliament I found means to see her twice or thrice. We both knew the obligations that lay upon us, and we adventured equally; and two weeks before Christmas we married.

  Here the Earl stumbled over some sentences, and I did not blame him. The argument seemed to turn upon the fact that had my father known of our adventure, he would have impossibilitated it but, now that the act was done, he should pardon us at once. This was like putting a whip into a man’s hand—a man who had never, to my knowledge, spared his horse’s flanks—and forbidding him to use it. There was more.

  I know this letter shall find you full of passion, but I know no passion can alter your reason and wisdom, to which I adventure to commend these particulars-that it is irremediably done; that if you incense my lord Egerton, you destroy her and me; that it is easy to give us happiness, and that my endeavours and industry, if it please you to prosper them, may soon make me somewhat worthier of her.

  Yours in all duty and humbleness,

  J. Donne

  From my lodging by the Savoy

  2nd February 1602

  My husband had chosen as his viceroy one of the most important men in England, a man I had heard called the Wizard Earl. Perhaps making his acquaintance was what had taken John Donne two long months. I studied the stripes on my skirt trying to will the parallel lines back into focus.

  The Earl placed the letter in front of my father and judged it best to remain standing. “I have been sent to collect Mrs Donne and take her to her husband.”

  “There is no such person here,” my father replied, digging out a fish eye with his knife and holding this delicacy out to me.

  The Earl looked at the eyeball on my father’s knife, then looked at me.

  “I am Mrs Donne.” I was shaking so horribly that the words came out in spurts. “I shall not eat the eye today, Father. My stomach—”

  My father placed the eyeball in his mouth and crunched it. The Earl’s face whitened, as if he had only just grasped the danger of his commission. He moved towards my end of the table to inspect the tarnished family armour hanging on the wall. “Gather your servants and your things,” he said in a low voice. “The more quickly this is done, the better.”

  “Tell him this is nonsense, Ann,” my father ordered. “I believe I recognize the name J. Donne. I am not one to forget a thing so easily. It is that foppish man of Sir Thomas Egerton’s, is it not, the one who is always making jokes about his own name? I gave him a coin once for writing me a letter as garrulous as this.”

  “He is not foppish,” I said quietly, “and this is no jest.”

  “Speak up, speak up, Mistress More! I cannot hear you. My ears fail me. Answer your father, girl. Tell me you have not wed that fool of a secretary!”

  “The ceremony took place at Lincoln’s Inn,” the Earl said, “as part of the Christmas revels.”

  “Ah, then it was all a mock. This is some Inns of Court foolery. It was a student, not a chaplain.” My father’s jaw clamped shut with satisfaction.

  “It is true he was newly installed in orders,” the Earl acknowledged. “Only the principals knew he was a lawful priest.”

  “Ann More was no lawful bride, since she did not have her father’s blessing.”

  “I am now Ann Donne.” Perhaps I would convince myself, if not others in the room, by repeating it.

  My father’s knife was now back in the air. “You are a minor and have defied both civil
and canon law. What is worse, you have deceived your own father. I shall have this marriage stopped—mark me, I shall—by trial of nullity.”

  “Not if it has been consummated,” the Earl said sensibly.

  “And that it has not!” My father was certain on this point. “She has not been breached. This is no country bitch in heat. My youngest daughter is a true, most perfect virgin.”

  The Earl had no ready answer. His eyes met mine, then fell to his boots.

  “We have five witnesses to the consummation,” I said, rather too loudly, “all students of law at Lincoln’s Inn who are prepared to testify in court.” I had been coached on this point by a man who was no stranger to the law himself—the Lord Keeper’s own secretary. In my mind’s eye, I could see the bed we had lain on that night. “If proof is needed, they will produce the bloody sheet.”

  Even the Earl was disconcerted by this homely detail and seemed to be searching for his gloves.

  “I shall see all five of them in leg-irons,” sputtered my father. “If I find out that it was my nephew Francis who led you like a mare to stud—”

  “No one at York House was party to it,” said the Earl. “The bridegroom told me so himself.”

  This was true so far as it went, for Francis would by now have come of age and inherited my aunt’s estate at Pyrford.

  “And you believe the stallion, a known womanizer, a Jesuit who wants a Protestant wife to raise himself at court.” My father’s fist was rattling the pewter on the table. “He would sleep with his stepdame sooner than take the Queen’s oath.”

  “You can hardly expect me to think ill of Catholics,” the Earl said, “being bred one myself. However we have both foresworn the old faith out of loyalty to the crown.”

  “It will be the end of my daughter’s chances with the Queen.”

  “You said yourself he is eager to rise at court.”