The Lady and the Poet (6 page)

My father went often, as a member of Parliament and to carry out his other official duties, and my aunt, Lady Elizabeth Wolley, the mother of my cousin Francis, lived in the capital for much of her time when she was not accompanying the Queen on one of her summer progresses. My aunt was a Lady of the Privy Chamber to Queen Elizabeth, second only in importance to the Ladies of the Bedchamber, and the Queen called my aunt her ‘sweet apple’.

We were fortunate that this year the weather had been dry and the road from Loseley to London was passable for my father and me on horseback, together with the carrier in his cart, so we avoided being bogged down by water or with mud. Last year there were floods and our neighbour Lady Montague needed six pairs of oxen to pull her coach from the mire each day to get to church. When we climbed the Hog’s Back near Guildford some three hours past, half the county was laid out before us, sparkling like a jewelled wedding veil, and our ride was broken only by the song of birds and the occasional cursing of the carrier when one of the wheels of his cart lodged itself in the narrow track.

How different from what we saw once we approached London.

We rode for a half-hour through Southwark, a wild area just south of London Bridge, inhabited by many foreigners and strangers, with bear pits and theatres, noisy clanging from a hundred workshops; courts and alleys thick with the stench of wine, piss and cooking fat.
Everywhere there were stray dogs and huge bands of wandering children, many of them dirty and in rags that barely covered their decency, with great begging eyes, all clamouring with their hands up, saying, ‘Give us a groat, kind mistress,’ and making gargoyle faces and pretending to throw stones at us when we did not. And I was shocked at the sight of the oldest and poorest lying in the street on straw pallets but feet away from the filth of the midden. And everywhere yet more children.

‘Are there so many children on the streets as this always?’ I asked the carrier. ‘Have they no homes to go to?’

The carrier laughed. ‘Children are like vermin, mistress. They come out of the gutters and swarm everywhere. Sometimes I think we have more children in London than rats or fleas.’

As we approached the city the carrier, a native of Cheapside, dour as a pall-bearer until now, grew more and more cheerful so that by the time we reached London Bridge he was as gossipy as a wench at a wassail.

Near to the bridge, and from nowhere, a smell so overwhelming assailed us that I caught my breath. I, who thought nothing of whitewash mixed with pig’s blood or the odour of animal excrement spread over the fields by farmers, indeed who laughed at the town dwellers who covered their noses at it, found myself choking like a child with the whooping cough.

It was like nothing I had ever encountered. Rotting and rank. Fume laden. It smelled like the overflow of a thousand privies, burning the nostrils and making the eyes water. I thought of my precious Loseley with a flower garden and green meadows and wondered how our heaven could smell so different from this hell.

‘Aaah,’ said our friend the carrier, breathing in deeply as if he were scenting a batch of new-baked bread, ‘the London stink! Home!’

And then we were on the bridge. On every side of us the crowds swelled, not just with people but with herds of cows and flocks of sheep, all heading for the single entry to the great city, apart from by river, from the south.

But the stink was not the worst thing.

From the first gateway of the bridge, twenty skulls grinned down at us, all beheaded or executed for treason.

I was torn, half fascinated, half repulsed that we, a country that had produced art and song and poetry, could be guilty of such barbarism.

‘Only twenty of ’em! Not like the old days under her father,’ grunted our carrier with regret. ‘There used to be hundreds then. Made an example of, for taking arms against the Crown, to encourage the other nobles to keep their swords in their scabbards.’ He shook his head at the eternal folly of his betters. ‘Yet I’ve heard young gentlemen pointing up at them skulls and showing off with “That were my uncle,” or “He be my father-in-law,” as if it were something to be proud of that their relations ended up with their bowels on a skewer!’ He laughed and spat. ‘They’d better be careful, mind, or they’ll end up there themselves. Since the Pope made the Queen a heretic even the walls inform round here.’

I shuddered and looked away. We were so protected from such things at Loseley. Poor men that died for their beliefs, only to be the object of a cheap boast by their descendants. I remembered hearing the story about Thomas More, whose name we share and are distantly related to by marriage, a fact my father and grandfather chose often to forget. I remembered how his daughter did not boast but went secretly and took his head down from its pike. She must have been a brave woman. Would I do that for my father?

I glanced across at him, tiny and stiff-backed on his horse. I knew my father greatly disliked Papists and often spoke enthusiastically against them in the Parliament, yet I believed this was because he was a pragmatist rather than a man of principle, acting more out of frustrated annoyance that they could not see what was good for them than from any cruelty or love of doctrine. Yet recently he wrote his own personal defence of the protestant faith,
A Demonstration of God in His Works
, so I had to believe his religion mattered much to him.

It was a slow time to get the horses and the carrier through the jostling crowd. I tried not to stare like a country wench as we passed right under a house with four gilded turrets in the centre of the bridge, adorned with a dome and elaborately carved galleries which hung out many feet over the river. It was wonderful, a proper palace, but in miniature. Yet the idea of sitting in one of those galleries with such a sinister view of skulls would never hold an appeal to me. Perhaps Londoners got used to such sights, but I hoped I never did. To accept
brutal death as normal in the midst of all this teeming life seemed to me a loss of humanity.

‘Nonsuch House,’ the carrier informed us, pointing out the miniature castle we were riding beneath, clearly delighting in having found an innocent such as I to ply with copious information. ‘Modelled on King Henry’s old palace, they do say.’

After the little palace we passed between tall houses, six storeys high, on either side of the bridge with haberdashers’ or mercers’ shops on the ground floor. I watched enthralled as the goodwives of London pushed past crowds and sheep and cows and ducks that had to walk so far to market that they wore leather shoes on their feet, to reach the shops in search of their ribbons and gewgaws.

‘Rich merchants,’ confided our friend the carrier. ‘They live above the shop. And there was a tale to tell in that one.’ He leaned towards me as if I hung on his every word and pointed to a long narrow house whose balcony stretched dizzyingly out over the water beneath. ‘Used to be lived in by Sir William Hewet, who became Lord Mayor of London, great estate of six thousand pounds a year, he had, and a little daughter called Anne, just like you. One day the nurse was playing with her out of the window and dropped the little lass bang smack into the water. Everyone thought she’d gone to her Maker. Except this young lad who worked for Sir William, name of Edward Osborne. He jumped right in and rescued her. And do you know what?’

‘No,’ I replied, ‘but I believe you are going to tell me.’

‘Her father gave him Anne in marriage and an enormous dowry.’

‘If it were me,’ I pointed out prosaically, ‘I would have punished the nurse first. I hope little Anne dried off and was old enough to consent.’

The carrier was disappointed by my lack of wonder.

‘And Edward Osborne,’ he added limply, ‘became Lord Mayor after him.’

‘This fellow’s stories are better than a play actor’s,’ commented my father, directing his horse out of the channel of filth that ran down the middle of the bridge.

The carrier looked injured. ‘God’s honest truth, your worship. I travel this way so often I make a habit of taking in my surroundings.’

We had come to one of three gaps in the line of houses on the
bridge and suddenly, sparkling through the river mist, there was the white stone of the Tower of London, with dozens and dozens of wherries plying their trade in front of it, like a pond full of water boatmen.

Even in broad daylight the Tower evoked a sense of dread. I had heard enough whispered tales of the rack and other terrible fates that awaited men inside those white walls. It would have been in the Tower that all those men whose skulls were on spikes would have spent their last days. I shuddered at the thought.

It took us the best part of an hour to get across the bridge which measured but a third of a mile. We continued our passage down Fish Street and Bread Street, passing round the back of St Paul’s Cathedral, its spire still missing since it was struck by lightning many years ago. I craned my neck to see Paul’s Cross next to the great church, where the famous sermons were preached to crowds of thousands. From there we passed through Ludgate and across the Fleet Bridge into Fleet Street, still so thronged with street sellers calling their wares, sightseers come to see the cathedral or worship there, and more gangs of children, that our passage was slow indeed.

Halfway along Fleet Street the crowds eased and the carrier was able to pull the cart to a stop to let the horses drink from the conduit there.

‘Listen, mistress,’ the carrier held a finger to his lips, ‘it is three of the clock.’

From inside the fountain, which was carved with a statue of St Christopher standing atop a band of stone angels, all carrying bells, there came the sound of a clicking and a whirring and to my delight sweet-sounding bells began to gently chime a hymn. As if the fountain were the key that turned a lock, all of a sudden from all around us church bells began to toll so loudly it was like being trapped inside a belltower.

‘You’ll get used to that, mistress,’ confided the carrier. ‘In London we ring bells for everything, the hour, when someone is married, or dying, and then again when they’re dead. There’s a different toll for whether it’s man, woman or child if you know how to listen for it.’

‘How sad. Are deaths so common in London even when the plague is not rife?’ I knew the plague struck often, badly enough to fill the graveyards to overflowing not five years since.

‘Death’s an everyday thing here, mistress.’ He glanced back at Ludgate to where, high above the ground, a metal cage hung, and in it was the rotting torso of a body being picked at by crows. I had to look away before I retched. ‘Though they do say a man’s lucky here to live to five and thirty.’ He clearly deemed this some manner of achievement.

‘That’s enough from you, sirrah!’ my father admonished. ‘You would do well to learn to keep your tales to yourself instead of scaring young women with them. The only people who are punished are felons and traitors to Her Majesty.’

‘I’m sorry, your worship.’ The man climbed back onto his cart. ‘My wife says I do babble on.’

‘Don’t listen to my father,’ I whispered, guiding my horse so that it was alongside the cart. ‘You have made my journey much the livelier.’

The carrier winked.

‘See, Ann,’ my father commanded, looking unusually pleased with himself as we processed up the Strand with its busy shops on one side, where the mud gave way to paving stones under foot. ‘York House is where your aunt is living now.’ He pointed to a small and unassuming door, but I could see that the house it led to was large indeed, no doubt with a fine river frontage. ‘My sister Elizabeth has just wed its tenant, Sir Thomas Egerton, the Keeper of the Great Seal, one of the most important men in all of England.’

‘But she is five and forty!’ I blurted before I had the sense to button my lip. I loved my aunt well but somehow, after Bett’s wedding, the thought of my aunt as a new bride seemed most unnatural.

‘What has age to do with it?’ My father was descending from his horse and handing the reins to a liveried groom. ‘She is no blushing maiden but she had a good fortune from her husband Sir John Wolley. Sir Thomas Egerton is a widower who needs a wife to organize his household. He offered her position and status. It is a good bargain for both.’

And, without waiting for any comment from me on the sensible justification for such a marriage, he swept into the house.

Small though he is, my father walks faster than any other person I know, and I had to rush to keep up with him as we made our way through the warren of rooms, past vast family portraits, enormous
tapestries, suits of armour and, as was just becoming the fashion in more forward households, statues of Greek nymphs and maidens.

I was out of breath by the time we arrived at a wondrous long gallery filled with light, and I saw that beyond it the river sparkled in the afternoon sun. ‘Ann! My lovely girl and favourite of all my nieces, welcome!’ A figure stepped out of the light, almost like a goddess herself, and took me in her arms, a hard task since we both wore farthingales.

‘My lady aunt!’ I returned her embrace with equal affection. She had ever been kind to me, even though she was so busy in the Queen’s service that she had not time for her own son and sent him to be raised with us at Loseley. ‘I am glad to be come.’

I had to admit, though she might be five and forty, my aunt was trim and youthful, her teeth not blackened nor missing, with a straight back and a sprightly step. Her hair, which she wore wound round an Italian wire band, heart-shaped and studded with pearls, as was the fashion, was still brown, though whether by nature or artifice I knew not. And there was something different about her from when we had last met. A glow of contentment.

It was often said by other women that to be a widow, especially a wealthy one, was the best estate of all—with neither father nor husband to command you. And yet my aunt’s smile told a different story. Rich widow though she may have been, she seemed as happy as a girl to be married once again and to so august a person as the Lord Keeper.

‘I was sad to miss your sister’s celebrations. You must recount me every detail. No point asking your father, for all he will tell me is the size of her husband’s expectations.’