Alchemy (18 page)

Pressing concerns now called my lady again to her castle of Cardiff where the people had grown ever more mutinous without the old earl’s strong hand to govern them. Yet she lingered at Ramsbury, unwilling, she said, to go on her journey leaving our peaceful lives for the turmoil of the city with its lawless people who would be free of the Herbert yoke, free of their lord, the countess, and her Council of the Marches wherein she stood as for the queen’s majesty herself.

Now came summer on and there was much famine throughout the land so that my lady was driven to take pity on the poor who gathered at the gates of Wilton, for all their stocks of flour were used up and the salt meats they had put down in the autumn all gone. There was no more grain for the mills to grind except that in my lady’s barns. Then we removed to Wilton so that she might more easily give orders for their relief and for money to be given to the parish also to that end, so that when she rode out into the town the people knelt by the roadside to bless her.

Yet in spite of all we could do many were sick, as she said, not of fevers, chills and impostumes but of hunger and even cold for the weather itself seemed determined to punish us, raining daily until the very corn sickened in the fields. The dry wood stacked up for winter was all burnt and the new too green and gave off thick smoke that made the poor to cough up a green phlegm. Many came to the great house with children whose bellies were swollen and whose scant limbs would not bear them. These we gave bread and gruel as much as we might yet there were always more.

Then some blamed the queen for the long wars against the Spaniards that had wasted the land, even though they had been soundly beaten in Ireland by the Lord Mountjoy at the end of the last year. Only the news of the taking of a rich prize, a Portugal carrack, by Sir Richard Leveson under the very guns of their fort brought us some joy in June and men said that Sir Francis Drake was risen and come again.

‘Can you cast horoscopes Amyntas?’ my lady asked me one day. ‘They say at the beginning of her majesty’s reign Dr Dee foretold that she would govern long, while Mary of Scots would die first a violent death. So it turned out. Can you tell what the future holds?’

‘Is Dr Dee not exiled to Manchester since his return from Bohemia? I think he was lucky in his predictions or perhaps he understood the nature of those two queens and so judged of their fates.’

‘Are our fates not written in the stars then for the wise to read?’

‘Madam if the stars are not fixed in their stations but move about the heavens, as Mr Digges his discovery of an unknown celestial body does suggest, and Copernicus has written, then how can they influence the lives of men? And indeed even our Great Bear if we watch it on several nights and at several seasons will change its station.’

‘But when the planets come near the earth, if we are to believe this theory of their mutability, do they not shed an influence over us as Mars to stir up war or Venus to make the world amorous with her shining as morning and evening star?’

‘The poets may say so madam, when they write in parables, but the natural philosopher must reason otherwise or pretend to things to cozen money out of the credulous.’

‘Are you a stargazer Master Boston?’ asked the duenna who was privy to our discourse.

‘I observe the stars when I have occasion to do so as on a journey at night.’

‘Be careful or the moon may turn your brains into a lunacy or men say you are a necromancer yourself with your looking into the secrets of God’s heaven.’

‘Such stories are akin to the Romish superstition that forbade us to enquire into God’s ways except as they were interpreted by their priests or to read His words in our own tongue,’ the countess said.

‘My lady and her noble brother have made the scriptures open to all who can read English as far as David’s psalms.’

‘I was raised under the old queen Mary, her present majesty’s sister,’ the Duenna said, ‘when we did not question as they do in these times but accepted God’s will and our fate, and could be shriven of our sins. But now we must shrive ourselves with looking into our consciences or risk the fires of hell. The old way was easier for simple men and the unlearned to get to heaven.’

I saw that this angered the countess. ‘You presume on your long service to me if you question our religion. Would you indeed return to those old ways? Be careful how you answer. Remember that our family which has given you to eat and lodge for fifty years has always supported the Protestant cause and the truth of our religion.’

The duenna sank to her knees. ‘I meant only madam that
the way seemed easier then for silly folk. The easy way is not always the right way but as I grow old and perhaps silly myself I find it hard to be always at prayer and examining my conscience. Old age asks ease.’

‘We would lie now under the yoke of the Spaniard, a subject people, if God had not protected us.’

‘As he did madam in driving them out of Ireland,’ I said, anxious to end this dangerous dispute that had so agitated my lady, for I knew that her wrath might not fall on the duenna alone but that she might strike out at anyone near at hand.

‘O sing Jehovah, He hath wonders wrought,

A song of praise that newness may command.’

The countess began.

And I answered again with her own words:

‘His hand, His holy arm alone hath brought Conquest on all that durst with Him contend.’

‘Thank you Master Boston,’ the duenna said when we were alone later. ‘My tongue had lost me my place, if not my head for treason, if you had not deflected madam’s anger. I see you will be a courtier as well as physician. Is she not fine in her choler? Do her eyes not flash fire and her cheeks flame like a maid’s blush? Such passions we must expect from great ones and still love them for it for they are as children in these matters. And truly I have seen her majesty herself stamp her foot and toss away her glove in a rage though I have never known how much this was simulate to her will.’

Such words seemed to me almost treasonable themselves so I did not answer but bowed and turned away.

‘I must attend in the stillroom. There will be patients waiting.’

After the rains that summer came days of extreme heat that sucked up the moisture from the earth and brought a sickly miasma that foretold fevers and plagues. Within doors we gasped for air and the sweat dried salt on our skins as if we were being pickled in brine. The ladies went about with pomanders and nosegays and even the gentlemen carried sprigs of herbs, rosemary, thyme and lavender in their hats or brooches against the stink and the fear of sickness. These bunches I made continually to distribute to the household to keep us all refreshed. Distilled rose and jasmine water was also sprinkled on the bedlinen and on kerchiefs for both men and women.

The countess found these days most oppressive and walked often in her garden where the air was fresher and scented with summer flowers. Even so, one day of great heat this would not suffice. She commanded her horse and mine to be saddled, and two others for a groom and one of her ladies. She would ride into the forest in search of a cooler shade under its canopy. So we rode out, with me beside her and the others behind. After we had ridden for half an hour through the glades she drew up.

‘Are we not near that deserted estate of Sir Henry Stilman, he that was arraigned for treason, and now none will rent or live in it? Yet I remember it had a fountain and a most rare pool that I should like to see again,’ and she set off at a canter through the trees until we came to the edge of a park where sheep were grazing and beyond what seemed from a distance a fine house but with no sign of life about it apart from the sheep. My lady reined in her horse.

‘Here one might retire from the world and live a shepherd’s life as in my brother his
Arcadia.’

‘Yet there were princes too in Arcadia madam and all the distractions of a court.’

‘I spoke of a thing to be desired but not attained. The fountain as I remember lies behind the house beyond a garden.’

We rode on towards the house which was set upon a green
knoll so that from its windows there must be a fine view over the countryside around and I marvelled that such a rare seat should stand empty out of a superstition that it was in some way accursed.

The great panelled front door, which was approached by a double staircase leading to a stone dais, seemed barred from within. We rode around to the back where the groom dismounted and knocked. There was no sound from inside the house.

‘Look under that stone beside the door,’ the countess directed as if she knew what lay there, and indeed when the groom turned it over there was revealed a little brick cistern with a heavy iron key inside it which fitted the lock in the door and turned, though but stiffly. Still the door held until the groom put his shoulder against it, and it yielded slowly at last as if unwilling to give up the secrets of the house. Inside was cold and dark, smelling of damp and decay.

‘Open the shutters,’ the countess ordered. The light streamed in on empty rooms inhabited only by dust and cobwebs that laced the corners of the windows and hung here and there, sad banners, from the beams.

‘Stay here with the horses,’ she said to the other two. ‘Amyntas come with me. I have a wish to find if the fountain still runs.’

Leaving the others in the house and the horses to crop the overgrown lawn we set off down a path through an arch in a yew hedge grown straggly with neglect. The day was hot and still. The scent from the yews almost came near to overpower the senses as they sweated under the sun. We passed through a knot garden, rank with weeds, where rue and thyme still struggled to sustain life, and into a dense maze.

‘I had forgot the maze,’ the countess said, from which I understood that she had indeed been here many years before. ‘You will wonder how I know this place Amyntas. When my brother was in retirement here and out of favour with her majesty we often rode out to this place to discourse alone
even when I was heavy with my first child and some said I should not ride. Here in this garden he would take out his tablets and write a little in his
Arcadia
then read it to me, sitting beside the same fountain, for even then the house was inhabited only by servants, Sir Harry being on the queen’s employ in Ireland.’

I knew then that it was the memory of her beloved brother that had brought her this far. We passed by a little summer lodge and at last came upon the fountain, a great stone conch shell held by a giant Triton, spewing water into a basin so large a group of Diana’s nymphs or Nereides bathed in its crystal waters, life-size and seeming to laugh with the splash of the spray against their stone bodies.

‘Come Amyntas let us bathe with them.’ My lady began to unlock her bodice, for she had ridden out lightly clothed because of the heat.

‘Madam I may not. Suppose we should be surprised.’

‘They will not dare to come after us when I have ordered them to stay with the horses. Must I play the goddess and bathe alone with only these stone companions?’

I could see that my lady was becoming angry. ‘Madam remember when Philoclea and her companion bathed in the river and Zelmane was forced to watch from the bank, guarding them from jealous eyes. Let me be your watchdog.’

‘A little spaniel came and stole Philoclea’s glove and book and took it to his master who overlooked them from some bushes. Perhaps you are right. Even now my brother watches over me with his words. At least help me off with my apparel.’

Then indeed I felt like Zelmane who quivered when she would have put out a helping hand to her princess until at last the countess stood, her smock fallen to the ground, as her brother wrote, like a diamond taken out of a rock or rather like the sun getting from under a cloud and showing his naked beams to the full view, and as I guided her to the edge of the
basin and she stepped down into the water resting the other hand on the cold stone breast of one of the nymphs, the same ‘pretty kind of shrugging came over her body like the twinkling of the fairest among the fixed stars’ as overtook the princess Philoclea, and I saw that her noble brother’s imaginings were but a mirror of nature herself.

The sun threw up sparklets from the waters where she stood. Then she reclined herself among the nymphs, her skin white and gleaming against their dull chill flesh and striking the water with her hands set up a watery firework of spray and bubbles as a child will play with no thought of being observed. Indeed I had never seen her so carefree.

A little cloud obscured the sun. The countess stood up from among the motionless Nereides. ‘Phoebus warns me to return to dry land. Give me your hand. What shall I dry myself on?’ she asked as she stepped out on to the grass.

‘My shirt madam,’ I said and unbuttoning my doublet I took the shirt of fine white lawn off and gave it to her.

‘You must rub me dry Amyntas.’

So I was fain to steel my senses and tenderly dry her body with trembling hands, feeling the blushes mount in my own cheeks as I worked my way round.

‘Is my old woman’s body not disgusting to you Amyntas? Do you not flinch at it?’

‘My lady has borne three children yet her form is as young still as a maid.’ I knelt down before her and taking her hand kissed it, almost overcome with the desire to go further and print my lips everywhere upon her person.

‘Now help me to dress. Our English air is not so soft as that of Arcadia. I am greatly refreshed and even grow hungry as I have not been these several days of heat. We will ride back to Wilton. Will you remember this place?’

‘I shall remember it as one of the most charming on earth,’ I answered as I refastened my doublet over my damp shirt,
happy to feel it take warmth from my own body and absorb the moisture that had clung to hers like a crystal dew.

‘Jim said you were quite brilliant today. Clients were frightfully impressed.’

We had bought our tickets and were whiling away the time with big goblets of red wine and a fag for Helen in the nearest pub to the plush King’s Road cinema where the steamy French movie she’d elected to see was showing.