said no,’ he went on. ‘He said I had to settle myself in the world before I could think of marrying you. He told me that if I’d got so interested in herbalism I should go and turn myself into a learned and rational physician – get my MD on the Continent – and bring something new to the new learning in England. Well, I have. And I came back to England with you in my heart. I swear I did. The first thing I wanted to do when I got to London was to come to you.’
He sighed. ‘But the problem was that your father still said no,’ he said.
I couldn’t stop myself looking up now. He must have seen a flash in my eyes. ‘Why?’ I said, and I could hear my voice – which I’d thought would come out breathless with a happiness I’d never even imagined might be mine – sounding hard and vengeful instead.
‘There are things he wants me to be able to tell you,’ he said. He stopped again. Looked down again. Took a big breath, as if making a decision, and went on. ‘He says I have to become a member of the College of Physicians first,’ he continued, and there was anxiety in his voice. ‘Not just a member, but one of the elect. I’m doing everything I can. I’m talking to Doctor Butts, the King’s physician. It’s not easy; I’ve been away for years; I have to prove myself as a good physician to someone I’ve never worked with. But your father won’t be swayed. He says I have to be able to tell you I’ve succeeded in my work.’
It was the More household attitude: everyone must bow to the things of the mind. Usually I shared it. I revelled in my knowledge of things no ordinary woman knew, and most men didn’t either. But now, when the picture of a life of ordinary domestic happiness seemed both tantalisingly within reach and impossibly out of reach, Father’s strict intellectual requirements of John Clement suddenly seemed unnatural and harsh.
‘I shouldn’t be here now, to be honest; I promised him I’d stay away. But when I met Elizabeth,’ he looked down and scuffed the straw with a boot, ‘and started thinking about how close you were here, just down the river, and I knew your father was away at court, and it was about to be Thursday – well, you’ll have to put it down to a lover’s impulse: I just couldn’t resist coming to take you out for a walk.’
I didn’t know what to say. His words and my feelings were going round and round, somehow failing to blend, leaving me speechless. I tried to control my spasm of anger with Father and concentrate on the happiness of being with the man I loved at last. He was looking searchingly at me.
‘Say you believe me,’ he said.
‘Say you love me,’ I heard myself say. With self-loathing, I heard myself sounding petulant. Like a child not understanding a story but wanting a happy ending.
‘Oh, I love you all right,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve always loved you, whoever you were – the little orphan crying over your lost past, the bright-eyed child storing up everything the apothecaries could show you, the girl who couldn’t stop asking difficult questions, the beauty you’ve turned into now,’ and he stroked my black hair, exposed now, with my white cap gathering straw on the floor. ‘And I always will love you. We’re two of a kind. And even though I’m twice your age, and not quite settled in life even in my dotage – if you’re willing to have me, nothing will stop me coming back to ask your father for your hand. Again and again. Until the time is right. Don’t you ever doubt that.’ And he folded me back into his arms so that his cloak covered us both, and moved his face over mine.
‘Stop,’ I said breathlessly, almost unable to pull back but with a new, more urgent question suddenly bursting through my head. ‘Tell me one thing. Why are you letting Father just give you orders like this? You’ve known him for years. You know he loves a good argument. Can’t you at least try and talk him round?’
I couldn’t bear what I saw next. His face fell, and the lover’s antennae I had just discovered felt him moving away somewhere very distant.
A defeated look came over John’s face. ‘I owe it to him to do as he asks,’ he said, very quietly. ‘I can’t even begin to go into all he’s done for me over the years. It sounds odd to say this, since we’re much the same age as each other, but he’s been like a wise father to me for most of my life. I can’t start defying him now.’
‘John,’ I said, with a new resolve in my voice, groping inside my head for a way of showing him how things were for us these days. ‘Let me show you Father’s new life.’
And this time it was my hand on the door, pushing it open into a roar of fresh wind and sunshine, and my strong young arm guiding this man with the troubled eyes out of our darkness.
‘Listen,’ I whispered, and tiptoed to the very edge of the gatehouse window, beckoning John forward.
I’d brought him to the western gatehouse again. He was hanging back, bewildered, clearly wondering why I wanted to return to this little brick building when I’d been so scared of it just an hour before. But it had become important to show him the truth. I took his hand and drew him up in front of me so he could peer into the darkness inside too, and the touch was a fresh revelation of how my skin loved being against the skin of those long, fine, delicate fingers. Regretfully, I put that private joy aside. This was no place to think of love.
In that stillness of bodies waiting, with the wind on our cheeks and flapping in our cloaks, we gradually began to hear the whispering from inside the window. Lost, hopeless, desperate; a thin Cockney chant. ‘Lord of your endless mercy bring my body to death … Lord of your endless mercy bring my body to death … Lord of your endless mercy bring my body to death.’ It had been going on from morning to night for the entire week that Father had been away. It had been chilling me every time I crept this way on my walks. I heard it in my dreams. All I could see of John was his shoulders and the back of his head, but I could almost feel the goose bumps rise on his flesh. Slowly he turned his head around towards me, and there was horror on his face, and his mouth was forming the silent words: ‘What is it?’
‘Look inside,’ I mouthed back, ‘but carefully. Don’t let him see you. Don’t scare him any more.’ He peered forward. I knew what he would see when his eyes got used to the gloom: the wooden stocks, and the pitiful little stranger’s figure with his legs and arms trapped in its holes, a living arc of thinly covered bones and torn clothes topped by two bloody eyes, half-closed, over swollen lips moving in perpetual prayer.
John stepped back quickly from the window and I came with him. He looked sick. He hurried twenty steps away with me trotting behind before he paused for me.
‘A heretic?’ he asked in a whisper.
I nodded. ‘This one’s called Robert Ward. He was a shoemaker on Fleet Street until last week. They arrested him as part of a conventicle praying in the leather-tanner’s rooms upstairs. He has six children.’
‘Why has your father brought him to your home?’ I thought there was pity in the hush of his voice, too, and it gave me strength. ‘What’s wrong with a prison?’
‘There’ve been half a dozen of them in the past few months. Father doesn’t tell us anything about them, not even that they’re here. But he told the gardener who feeds them that he just wants to talk them out of evil. I happened to overhear –’ I felt my cheeks redden, though John let my blush pass and didn’t ask how I happened to overhear a conversation so obviously not intended for me and how long it had taken to pick the mulberry twigs out of my hair afterwards ‘– him saying he’d brought them home to interrogate “for their own safe-keeping”.’
‘Well,’ John said, stopping and looking straight into my eyes, visibly trying to follow my thoughts, searching for an explanation to hold on to, ‘perhaps he’s right to do that. Someone’s clearly been beating that man up. He probably is safer here.’
There was something comforting about hearing him say those sensible words. I liked the searching way he looked at me, really listening to my concern, trying to get to the bottom of what was on my mind. But it was too easy to cling to the belief he was