Alchemy

Down Wessex Road now towards the campus. Which came first, the name of the road or the uni? It was St Walburgha before, so someone must have taken inspiration from the location or nobbled the council to change the name. I cruise towards the first cluster of buildings and I’m stopped dead by a high gated iron fence. Fuck! No storming arrival then with a spectacular purring of the engine in low gear, and skirl of tyres to wake the dead. Drifting right up to the gate I cut the juice and prop the old girl up on her stand. I swing my leg over, take off my helmet and go up to the gate.

It’s the right place. A neat brass plate says so. There’s an entry phone and a numeric pad to open the side panel of the gate to let pedestrians in. But you have to know the code. That’s very clear. I stare at it, willing it to open, for someone to come through and hold it conveniently ajar for me. Beyond I can see grounds with grass, shrubs and winding gravel paths. Way back are buildings, some old brick, others new, glass, steel and what must be concrete under the pale recon stone cladding. I can just make out the octagonal chapel of St Walburgha almost hidden by dark azaleas, where Anglican nuns once taught aspirant scholarship girls to teach.

I go back to the bike and get out my mobile. Gilbert must give me the entry code.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m outside the fence like Love Locked Out.’

‘In my day the gate was always open.’

‘Well it isn’t now. And no one seems to be going in and out. No students I mean.’

‘They wouldn’t be.’

‘Why not?’

‘Term hasn’t begun. Not until next week.’

I feel a complete Wally. Why didn’t I check my facts, instead of zooming off into the sunrise?

‘Maybe I’ll just ring the bell and see what happens.’

‘There won’t be anyone there, except maintenance staff, porters and so on.’

I’ve just put myself at a disadvantage with Gilbert, given him the chance to feel superior. Somehow I have to reclaim the high ground.

‘Can’t you think of anyone who supported you, who might help? I need to get inside, to get the feel of things, when the place is back in business of course. I need to see someone, talk to them, sniff out the background. You’re going to want help. There must be someone who at least knows the entry code.’

‘You must realise they would be putting their own job at risk. These new security arrangements aren’t for general safety purposes, keeping out voyeurs or even would-be rapists. They are designed to keep me out and the students in. Their comings and goings will be monitored by closed-circuit video.’

‘Then we have to find someone now, before term begins, before they’re banged up inside.’

He’s gone. I peer through the bars again and think I see a blue-overalled figure moving about among the far trees with a wheelbarrow. Is Gilbert telling the truth or lying to me in spite of my warning? Did he know about the new security? Suddenly all the excitement that rode behind me on the way down like a following wind has gone out of the case and I’m stranded, gasping for air, with only an empty ride back ahead of me.

That Christmas was the first that I went to the great house but still in my guise of Amyntas, for my lady said that I was too known already in that form to pass now as another. She must have her ladies about her at Wilton which should include Mistress Griffiths who could not be sworn to secrecy. To tell truth I was glad of this for I had become so used to see myself as Amyntas as green summer turned to autumn and thence to foul winter, when all the ways were muddied to the axle and fever ran through our company at Ramsbury and the ladies took to their beds with streaming eyes and noses, and vomiting. The countess and I were kept busy with cordials and balms, boiling pimpernel in wine for healing draughts, hot and cold, and then mixing onion and honey mustard hot for unguents against sores and blains, and for purging the head. I felt a little jealousy stir in me to see how our lady tended them, holding their heads while they drew up the smell of the honey mustard to cleanse the rheum or sitting them up with an arm about their shoulders to drink down the vinum pimpernel.

For ourselves as a prophylactic, the countess and I drank every morning a draught of rosemary-flower wine. Whether that strengthened our bodies to resist the infection or drove it out once in I cannot say, only that we ourselves stayed free of rheum and fever. Then she commended me for this was a receipt of my father’s that I learned of him, and served him well for many years until that death that no man can escape.

In December came a week of sharp frosts. Suddenly all were well again and busy with preparations to remove to the great house. There was laughter and bustle and talk of who might come to Wilton. Mistress Griffiths was disappointed that the young earl would not come, being still in disgrace, but would keep the feast with his uncle Sidney, if her majesty would let my lady’s brother home to Penshurst from his employment in Flushing as governor there, or if not Earl William would pass the season with other friends, for the countess would not receive him, he showing no sign of remorse now that his lover had been delivered of a dead child, but was gone to London to attend at the Parliament and petition her majesty to let him travel abroad to wipe out his disgrace in her service.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘the other young lord, Mr Philip, will come.’ But she would have none of that saying he was but a schoolboy still.

‘Many are married younger than seventeen,’ said the duenna, and she began to sing in a low cracked voice:

O daughter, o daughter I’ve done to you no wrong, I’ve married you to a bonny boy, his age it is but young, And a lady he will make you, that’s if you will be made Saying your bonny boy is young but a-growing.

So we took our journey from Ramsbury to Wilton, my lady in her coach with Mistress Griffiths and the duenna, and the other ladies following in their coach, and the rest of the household train behind them. I rode with the steward and other gentlemen through Marlborough where we stayed only for dinner at the Bear Inn and thence to Upavon, a pretty village by the river where we were received for the night at the manor house to lie there as the countess was accustomed to do to break her journey, though some of the household were obliged to lie at the Antelope, it being but a small house for such a company. Often my lady would rest there two or more nights but this time she was eager to be at Wilton. So we resumed our way early in the morning as soon as it was light which being December and St Lucy’s Day was late enough if we were to reach the great house before nightfall.

‘Dearest Wilton, where I first came as a bride, how soon shall we be sundered,’ the countess said as the great gateway and the lofty walls came towards us out of the down-setting sun that turned all the sky behind to a furnace of red and gold where the clouds were puffs of pink smoke as from a giant bellows. Beside its walls runs the river whose name of ‘Nadder’ signified in the British language ‘birds’, as my father told me, and to this day the waterfowl swim there in great numbers, in especial the painted mallards in blue and green livery with their dun wives and the silver swans who sing only at their dying.

When the gate was flung open we saw the whole household assembled in the courtyard to greet their lady, all bowing deep, with music playing and the children from the cathedral to sing one of her own psalms in greeting.

When long absent from lovely Zion By the lord’s conduct home we returned We our senses scarcely believing Thought mere visions moved our fancy.

Then in our merry mouths laughter abounded Tongues with gladness loudly resounded While thus wond’ring nations whispered, ‘God with them most royally dealeth.’

My lady took up her own chamber again where she used always to lie. The steward would have had me lie with one of the grooms of the late earl’s chamber but I said I was accustomed to lie near my lady to fetch and carry, and he let me put a pallet in an alcove of the passage that led from her anteroom, where Mistress Griffiths lay, to the great staircase. Then I saw that my sex might be the more hard of concealing among such a press of people for we were like a little town in ourselves or a country echo of the queen her court.

Every day more company resorted to us, as all the nobility and gentry of the county bringing rich presents and petitions for my lady’s word in high places, for the earl being but a minor, and besides out of favour, the world still made suit to the countess though but the dowager. There came too some of her people out of Wales from her castle of Cardiff and other her properties so that Mistress Griffiths spoke with many in her own tongue which seemed to me truly like the language of the adepts or necromancers.

She made great play to tease me with my ignorance of it, laughing and nodding towards me as the words poured from her to one of her kinswomen. ‘Ah,’ she said in English, ‘if you had been bred up by the old earl you would understand us for our language came easier to his tongue than the English.’ And indeed I have heard it said that the old earl writ English but poorly.

At her other houses as Ramsbury and Ivychurch the countess ate modestly but at the great house we dined and supped in state with many dishes of meat of birds, and beasts, as beef and mutton, coney pies, herons, larks baked, bitterns, plovers and teals with chickens, pheasant and partridge. Cheat and manchet, both coarse and fine wheaten bread we had with butter and eggs and sallets in season, for drink ale and beer and Rhenish wine, and for sweetness tarts, fritters, custards and doucets. The ladies’ skins glistened and plumped, and there was much laughter behind hands and whispering in dark passages when there was no dancing or the play to be had.

All this time the duenna became more kindly to me, telling me many things of my lady’s childhood, she having been with her since her birth when her mother was my lady’s wet nurse. ‘Which if I should lean upon it would give me the right to call her foster sister but I would not. Yet I am privy to many things known to none else.’ And here she looked at me straightly as if some of them might pertain to me so that I kept very still.

‘My mother brought me into her service when I was a girl and charged me to watch over her and keep her from harm. And this I do as best I may. I think there is no harm in you, child Boston, but as for the others I do not trust them. They use her to gain their own ends and not out of love. But any that harm her I will find ways to bring down. There is more than one power that may be called on and the angels, as the old ways say, have care for the innocent.’

From this I understood that she had been brought up a papist and might be one still but this she would keep from my lady, being with her brother, Sir Philip, and my Lord of Leicester their uncle among the foremost in the work of reformation, and the preservation of the Protestant faith, as her psalms do attest.

One thing in especial I was glad of in our stay at Wilton in that I might find occasion to visit our old home in Salisbury and that churchyard of St Edmund’s where my father is buried. And now I think as I sit here writing this memorial, that if they should hang me as a witch I shall not lie beside him, my mother and brother in consecrated ground but be flung into a limepit to dissolve without hope of resurrection when the dead shall rise in the flesh. And yet I am innocent of any malicious practice which, if this is not made manifest, then I shall doubt of God himself as the atheists do since he has no power to protect the innocent.

The first night of our coming to the great house we did not sup in state for my lady was tired from the journey, the ways being very foul and rutted so that she and her ladies were bruised from riding in the coaches which swayed and jolted extremely. The countess went at once to her bedchamber and said that she would receive only the chief steward until the next day. Then came in Mr Davys her steward to report, with gifts newly come from her brother Sir Robert in Flushing where there is much trade with the Indies. Among them, with some French wines, was a parcel of tobacco which she had requested from him, of the finest high Trinidad which my lady became accustomed to during the sickness of the late earl, her husband. ‘For nothing,’ she said, ‘would give him any ease but to take tobacco and I trying it found likewise and for the headache it is the only thing.’

She called at once for her pipe which Mistress Griffiths filled with a little of the leaf and laid a wax taper to it. My lady drew in the smoke very daintily and her face which before had been warped with fatigue softened at once. ‘Come Amyntas and try what it will do for you,’ she said. So I took my first breath of tobacco to the envy of her ladies who would try it for themselves but she would not let them suck on the pipe for she said their teeth were rotten and their tongues like goats. When I coughed a little from the smoke they laughed very much together and I saw that her speech which was sweet to me would do me harm with the other servants. The taste of it was of herbs blended together as rosemary and sorrel. It seemed to suffuse through my veins like a draught of spiced wine on a winter morning.

Mr Davys then handed my lady letters from several parts which she bade me open and read. Two were of little account but when I opened the third from Sir Philip her brother’s friend Sir Edward Wotton I found two sheets of paper folded small that seemed to have slipped between the pages by chance. First I read her the letter which was but a report of the queen’s health and the court’s progress towards London. There was no mention of the enclosures which raised my suspicion that they were not intended for the countess.

‘What more have you there?’ she asked. I unfolded the papers which were written in a different hand.

‘My lady some verses which I think have got in by chance.’

‘How so? What verses?’

‘They are inscribed “to my dear brother Edward”.’

‘Go on child.’

‘From his loving brother Henry. Some lines sent me in a letter by my friend the wit J. Donne, secretary to the Lord Keeper. Since he asked that no copies be made of them I send you the originals.’

‘This is done to raise his brother’s interest. Let us hear them.’

‘My lady, the first is titled “On his Mistress Going to Bed”.’

‘Young man’s bawdy. And the second?’

‘An heroical epistle. “Sappho to Philaenis.”’