Conceit Read online

  “He is an arrogant, insufferable—an idler seeking her rank and lands.”

  “His blood is better than you might suppose. His mother is descended from Sir Thomas More, as you are yourself. She fell in love with a City ironmonger who gave his son the best education that could be bought.”

  This was too much. I wished the Earl had stopped short of documenting my husband’s blood lineage.

  “Oh, Annie, Annie, to throw yourself away on an ironmonger.” My father fell down on all fours and squeezed my knees, his eyes filling with tears. “You are beautiful enough to have any man in England. And for this I kept your mother’s wedding lace-for this she died giving birth to you—for this—”

  He had not called me Annie since I was little, but I knew I must not give in to his distress. I had seen him like this before, his gout making him swing from fulsome rants to crying. I must hold myself together until he was done.

  “He is a poet, Father, not an ironmonger.”

  “A poet who cannot afford his own horse. What kind of poet is that?”

  “Oh, Father, you know nothing of poetry. He has little need of money.”

  “It is you, Ann, who knows nothing. Do you realize how much it costs to feed and dress you for a year? More than that fop will earn in a lifetime.” He yanked at my gown, smearing it with pork grease. “This petticoat alone cost £10. And that bodice—” To my relief, he could not remember the amount. “He can give you no jointure, and I shall give you no dowry. For £800 I could have got you a wholesome country squire. I’ll not pay a penny for this tradesman.”

  I thought it wisest to remain silent. Nellie was making more than enough noise, banging the trenchers as she stacked them in a lopsided tower. She was taking far too long and earned my father’s glare.

  “And servants—I suppose you have no need of them? There are fifty servants on this estate, whose names you hardly know. You cannot even get out of bed without two girls to help. Bess herself has three women to command, and then there is your dressmaker, your silkwoman, your laundry-woman—” He had his fingers out to count them.

  I thought of John Donne’s slender fingers caressing my skin as they unlaced my shift. We would manage quite well by ourselves. I had long been suffocating under Bess’s care. “My husband will help me in and out of bed,” I said softly.

  At that, he erupted into choler. “He shall not touch a single hair upon your head. I’ll make him a widower before nightfall. I shall cry all the hounds of heaven upon you, you foul disobedient bitch!”

  He was on his feet like a champion in the tiltyard, casting about for a weapon. Nellie stood by the stack of trenchers, making tatters of her apron. Then the door was swinging and she was gone, taking my father’s meat knife with her.

  “Your daughter is no longer yours to hit.” The Earl was pulling on his gloves. “Only her husband may discipline her now.”

  The Earl’s satin breeches flashed once, then twice as they passed through the door. Perhaps this was why he was called the Wizard Earl, but I knew better than to run. I stationed myself in front of Queen Elizabeth’s coat of arms, newly carved on the chalk fireplace.

  Nellie was back now with Bess behind her. They stood on either side of me, like iron firedogs around a blaze. When my father made a sally towards me, Bess planted her solid frame between us.

  “You, at least, are mine to do with as I please,” he said to Bess, pulling the ladle from the soup bowl. “You are no better than a bawd. Where were you when this whoring took place?”

  “Just you try me, Sir George,” Bess taunted, raising her fists into the downward path of the ladle. “Be you never so fearsome I shall fight you, I shall.”

  When the blow struck, Bess landed hard on her nose, spitting curses in the midst of broken crockery. After a few more half-hearted swipes, my father collapsed on his back, his hand whipping the air and his breath coming in short bursts.

  I knelt to unfasten his jerkin so he could breathe more freely. “Do not thrash so, Father. Let me unbutton you.”

  “Sophie, my darling Sophie, do not die.”

  “He has lost his wits, mistress,” said Nellie. “Be off at once and leave him to me.”

  Bess struggled to her feet. “The boy is saddling two horses for us. His Majesty the Earl waits for us by the gate.”

  I raised my eyes to Bess’s bloody face. I had not realized how tall and valiant she was. She blotted her nose with her starched cap, then blew it for good measure, starting the bleeding again. Stripping off her livery jacket, she threw it to the floor.

  “You cannot come, Bess. It would be worth your life.”

  “What life is here? Sir George’ll whip me when he comes to his right senses. If I must die, I will die at your side.”

  It had almost a poetic sound, but there was no time to thank her. Hurrying down the stairs, we got through the buttery and into the kitchen as quickly as we could, barring the door behind us. Once outside, we looked about for the saddled horses. Instead, we heard a bolt driven home in the iron gate ahead.

  The Earl had gone, and in his place stood my father’s steward with a face of granite and a loaded gun.

  Cloistered on the upper floor of the house, I was now even more ignorant of my fate. Since my father had forbidden me to step foot on the great staircase, Bess carried my meals upstairs, complaining at the extra work.

  Cradled in wool, I sat by the fire and drank warm ale. I told time by Bess’s broken nose, watching it go through every shade of plum on Loseley’s trees—-from purple-black, to green, to murky yellow. She sat on a stool nearby, mending my clothes or helping me make scarlet tassels for new bed curtains, her large fingers making delicate stitches. Sometimes I looked at those hands to pass the hours, wondering if they would ever touch a man as mine had done.

  Picking at my dinner on the ninth day, I accused Bess of letting my food go cold and demanded something hotter. For a big person, she was swift on her feet, disappearing into the tapestry on the wall. In a few minutes she reappeared the same way.

  “This should put you in better temper.” She threw some letters into my lap.

  “How did you get these? My father keeps his study locked.”

  “But not the servants’ door between it and the hall. Be quick about it, for he will be back at dusk.”

  The first letter was from York House. Apparently, my father had written to Sir Thomas at once, saying that he had applied to the High Commission to annul the marriage and demanding John Donne’s blood. But the Lord Keeper was in no mood to oblige, for he had just discovered that his son Edward had married his stepdaughter Agnes.

  Lady Egerton had arranged it all behind his back—such was the tale that came out in his letter. More than one mischief had been done. She had tricked us all, putting Agnes up to smiling at John Donne. Edward’s attention to me was another blind. By such deception, the three of them drove John Donne mad with fear of losing me. He carried me off in a passion, dwarfing the evil of their own crime.

  It seemed that York House had been full of spies and matchmakers. I had been thrown in Edward’s path by our two fathers from the moment I arrived. Even the dowry and jointure were agreed upon, the down-payment of the carriage made, hands all but shaken, but when time dragged on and Edward did not speak for me, my father returned to claim me and my aunt’s plush coach. As my father had been most blind—tricked by all and trusted by none—he was most angry.

  If Sir George More was to suffer, others would suffer with him. Sir Thomas’s second letter revealed that the young chaplain had been imprisoned in the Marshalsea and John Donne tossed into the Fleet.

  The last letter was from John Donne, pleading his case to my father, for he swore he was falling headlong to his destruction. Was he fearful of dying from gaol-fever like his brother? I read hastily, my ear attuned equally to melancholy in my husband’s letter and my father’s boots thumping back into the house. All my endeavours and the whole course of my life, John Donne promised, shall be bent to make myself worthy
of your favour and her love.

  At those most welcome, most moving words, my tears spilled dangerously upon his letter.

  Two more days of agony passed until, looking out my window, I saw our boy guiding a strange horse towards the stable. Someone had come for a visit with my father, expecting to stay for several hours. I sent Bess down to listen.

  Before long, she was back. “Another earl or bishop of some kind,” she reported. “His gentryship was a time coming out with it, but at last he pulled out some letters and your father chased him off.”

  The stableboy was now leading the horse past my window, stopping to tighten the hastily buckled saddle. The gelding had barely got a mouthful of Loseley oats.

  “Go and look for the letters, Bess. My father will be taking dinner in the hall. If he is angry, we do not have much time, for he might burn them.”

  “And risk my life for you again?” She dumped a cold pie in front of me. “I’ll wait until your father rides out to inspect his grounds.”

  The tapestry on the inner wall appeared seamless, but when I ran my hand across the pastoral scene I felt the narrow door, barely wide enough for a milkmaid to squeeze through. There was no knob or latch, just a finger-hole. My father had not needed to forbid me to use these hideously dark stairs, for he knew I had been badly frightened in them as a child. However, if John Donne could use the servants’ passageways, then so could I.

  I held up my candle and pulled, stepping into the marrow of the house. Every so often, I saw a spear of light and felt for a finger-hole. Testing to see where each door led, I finally emerged through the wooden panelling of the study and reached for the letters stacked on top of my father’s table. They were all from John Donne.

  My husband was back in his rooms under close arrest. He wrote to my father that enemies had been blackening his name for deceiving some gentlewomen and for loving a corrupt religion, and he feared this poison had reached my ears. Some uncharitable malice, he added, hath presented my debts double at least.

  What rumour was here that I had not heard before? That he had written poems to other women? That I knew. That he was Catholic? That I cherished, for what other faith made saints of its women? That he had debts? We should remedy that state together, for poets and their wives lived frugally, if not entirely upon fresh air.

  From his next despairing letter I learned to my anguish that Sir Thomas had let his secretary go, crushing his hopes of rising, for no one at court would employ a man dismissed by the Lord Keeper of England. My husband could not strike off such fetters with his own hammer blows. A torrent of self-pity was unleashed on page after page—wild, feverish writings that would have melted a fiercer man than my father. On the last page was scrawled a desperate pun: John Donne. Ann Donne. Undone.

  Though I went down the perilous, dark stairs each night, I found no more letters, and the cold ashes in the grate did not reveal what verbal thrusts and parries now took place.

  It had been four months since I had lain with John Donne, and four months since Sophie had been bred. In spite of Bess’s eavesdropping, I could not discover whether the High Commission had annulled my marriage. Perhaps I no longer had a husband. I knew now what it meant to swear I will die if I cannot have you, what it meant to cry tears pregnant of thee.

  In the daytime, I worked on the tapestry I had begun at York House. Now I could survey the garden I was stitching. Over the months, I had added small figures—the steward with his loaded harquebus, Nellie feeding her pullets, and the bent form of my father shuffling to the pig house to feed acorns to Sophie, who was almost ready to farrow. Sometimes he looked up and saw me at my needlework. Perhaps good manners would one day inspire him to touch his hat, as King Henry had done to his imprisoned daughter Elizabeth.

  For a week, four birds sat calling on the garden wall. I stitched them into my work, along with the cat lurking below them. I wanted to tell it that an archbishop was allowed six blackbirds to a pie, a bishop four, but commoners and tomcats none. This was no shroud for past love that I was making. I wanted my commoner in my bed. Each morning, I put a cross-stitch for a night we spent apart. It was now past Lady Day and I had one hundred and fifteen.

  I was stitching a rose-bush when Bess entered, dangling a raw chicken by its feet. By its stench, I guessed the innards had been rotting for a fortnight. Apparently my father’s blow had bruised her sense of smell.

  “Take it back to the kitchen, Bess.” Selecting a pale red skein, I made a French knot for a rose.

  “That I will do, madam, when you have had a closer look.”

  “There are flies on it,” I said, annoyed that she had begun to call me madam. “Is that close enough? I hope it is not intended for my supper.”

  Nellie arrived next, looking for Bess. “Give me back my poultry. I know what you are up to and it’s no kindness to Mistress Ann.”

  “What do you mean, Nellie?” I asked.

  “My sister thought she was stuffed by that pample-mousse who got between her legs, but now that she’s not, she’s trying to find out if you’ve got a bellyful.”

  This took a moment to work out, but John Donne’s conceits had given me good training. Nellie had likely got this idea from stuffed carriage seats or cooking hens.

  “What happens to a woman with child when she sees a chicken, Nellie?”

  “It’s more the smell, mistress. It’s a vomit, anybody knows that.”

  I would have to take better notice of such things in future. I had not known that Bess and Nellie were sisters either, though I could see the resemblance now that it had been pointed out. Certainly they shared the same coarse speech.

  “Look at Bess, her neck is like beetroot,” said Nellie, pleased.

  “Would you care to tell me about this … this Frenchman, Bess?”

  “You know Jakes well enough, that fast-fingered weasel. You set him to pluck me, with his sweet wines and his foreign talk.”

  “What sort of name is that?” Nellie hooted. “Did you plant your buttocks on this jakes, Bessie?”

  Jacques, of course—John Donne’s servant. On the night of our wedding in Lincoln’s Inn, Jacques had been told to take Bess to a tavern, feed her copiously, and keep her plied with strong drink. That he had done, for she had come home reeking. But it seemed he had gone further on his own initiative. I waved Nellie out of the chamber.

  “Have you heard from him, Bess? Did he ask if you might be carrying?”

  She wiped the back of her hand across her nose and sniffed. “What difference would that make?”

  “You might have married him,” I said gently.

  “A Frenchman?” she snorted. “A polecat that greases his fingers to put them who-knows-where? And then weasels off to France in his master’s best suit? As if I’d be tricked by such a one. I’d never have gone,” she said righteously. “I promised your mother on her deathbed to care for you.”

  There was that upward thrust of the jaw, that bluster. With Bess, it was hard to know how much was true, but this sworn bond was not good news. She would never budge from my side now.

  Despite the rotting chicken, I was managing to keep my meat and drink down. I picked up my needle in relief. I had not known how to tell whether I was carrying and had refused to beg Bess for the information. It was a mercy that the only female who would produce a litter at Loseley park was Sophie.

  “We should both be thankful we are not with child,” I said, hoping to make an end of it.

  “Not exactly madam.” She jiggled the chicken back and forth a little.

  I stabbed the needle into the tapestry. “Why are you so exasperating, Bess?”

  “Sir George wouldn’t be asking half of London to stop the marriage if you were great-bellied, would he? Then any blockhead could see you’d been rightly bedded.” She swung the chicken a little more freely now. “Surprised you didn’t think of that yourself, madam, you being so close with poets and all.”

  A little upholstery pillow, stuffed under my bodice like dressing in a ro
asting hen, bought my release from my father’s cloister. He was easy to gull because he had refused to look at me for weeks. I approached the pig sty from the upwind side while he was showing a suckling pig to his chaplain, my hands clasped discreetly over my well-upholstered belly, my eyes downcast, docile.

  The Right Worshipful Sir George More, Knight, of Loseley Park, Surrey, wasted no time writing to J. Donne, Esq., in his lodging by the Savoy, to come to collect Mrs Donne at once. After showing me the page, my father held out the quill so I could add an encouraging postscript.

  Within a day of receiving the letter, my husband rode up on a rented horse in his second-best suit of clothes. No French servant danced attendance, but in his hand he clasped a permit that had taken him four months and £20 to procure. It had the seal of the Archbishop of Canterbury and declared the marriage of Ann Donne alias More and John Donne legitimate and sound in English law.

  15. FLAT MAPS

  When she could no longer bear the stink of the rotting pigeons, Pegge made Izaak Walton carry them out by their slimy legs. He returned with a jar in which white grubs were feeding on a woodmouse, a treasure collected on a stroll. Scooping out a handful, he arranged the maggots on top of her father’s blackened toes, then cocooned the feet in moss and secured the moss with gauze.

  Each morning, Pegge picked off the maggots glutted with dead flesh and put on hungry ones. There was an endless supply, Walton assured her, delighting in his role of purveyor of services to the dying.

  Now Walton sat in Pegge’s chair beside her father, their hair mingling in an irritating way. She was standing at the window watching the bedsheet dry on the bare limbs of the apple tree when she noticed a papery growth under the eaves. The first three cells of a wasp’s nest, though there was little sign of spring.

  Inside the room the talk was of the sorts, species, and genders of worms, a subject dear to both men, worms of the dunghill, basilisks or blind worms, scarabs or silk worms, squirrel-tails and brandlings—found in cow-dung or hog’s-dung rather than horse-dung, for the last was too hot and dry, Walton was adamant on that point—and of the abundance of flies which adorned and beautified the riverbanks and meadows and whose breeding was so various and wonderful that Walton was swallowed up in the excitement of the telling, until her father steered him on to flies hastening the decay of a carcass, and whether maggots were bred in dead flesh or were drawn there after birth to feed, and whether buried flesh could bring forth grass.