Some dark wind huffed and made her manifest.
The first week of October. Coming in
from a stroll by Rutland water, I am met
by notes as strangely tuned in to my heart
as a mother’s lullaby: faint in the hall,
but strong, insistent, as they beckon me
towards the drawing room where at the keys
of the virginals, a woman sits and plays
such melancholy music that my eyes
begin to fill. If she has noticed me
she doesn’t break her step: indeed, she starts
to sing just as I wander through the door,
as though I am the ear she’s waited for.
The song, in French, seems penned, alone, for me.
Sweet bird in exile
– so the first line goes –
why do you sing so distantly of love?
Do you not know the cage has an open door?
I paraphrase; perhaps if I had seen
the words on the sheet I might find I was wrapped
in some sorcerer’s illusion and the song
was a list of gizzards, scales, and contumely.
How could I tell? For watch me, I’m entranced.
She comes to the end and halts. ‘Monsieur Le Doux?’
‘How do you know my name? I don’t know yours.’
‘Excuse me. I was sent by Jaques Petit.’
Anthony’s Gascon servant. ‘With a message?’
‘With just myself. I do apologise.’
She rises. ‘Chevalier Harington is out?’
‘Until tonight. The servants let you in?’
‘With a letter from Jaques, who suggests I could be nurse
to Chevalier Harington’s infant girl.’
Her eyes
have the promise of storms; a power that augurs change.
‘Where should I wait? I don’t know where to go.’
I sell my afternoon into her care.
She spills her story out as if her trust
were won just by my asking for her name.
‘I go by Ide du Vault,’ she says. ‘Why laugh?
What’s funny?’
‘Sorry, the name comes to the ears
as Hide the Fault, in English.’ Hide the Fault.
Much more of a giveaway than Louis the Sweet.
She looks ashamed. Her eyes drop to her lap.
‘That is the name I’m given for my sins
by a wicked man. A joke at my expense.
I see. And now I can’t escape the joke,
for all my papers bear it.’
‘It is false?’
She looks at me accusingly, my twin.
‘No falser, I know, than yours.’
‘What do you know?’
‘Just that you’re not a Frenchman,’ she replies.
‘Your accent’s true: but the lascivious gaze
a Parisian would deliver has betrayed
you, by its absence, for an Englishman.’
So dangerously smart; so unafraid.
Yet vulnerable, for in the next rich braid
of the beautiful tale she’s weaving, she reveals,
‘I’m hiding from my husband.’
‘You are married?’
‘Unfortunately, yes. Though in that name
I shan’t be known, I’m Madame Vallereine.’
So open, so bare, a field prepared by plough
for whatever seeds Fate plants; the ruffled wind
is lost on her. Her tongue reels out her woes
and reels me in upon them. How Monsieur
had betrayed her publicly, then set a slur
against her name to furnish his excuse –
‘And all the eyes of Paris were upon me.’
Hers fall into her lap again. ‘And he,
believing his own story when he drank
began to beat me also for the shame
I brought on to his head. Such wicked men—’
She broke her thoughts. ‘I shouldn’t speak of him.
He is a curse that gives me nightmares still.
For there are men who prey on women’s minds.
I only hope you are not one of them.’
I try to look softer. ‘I was raised with sisters
and a mother I respected.’
Though her head
shakes at this point in open disbelief
it’s not my information, but her own
losses she’s moved by, like a weather vane
bothered from both directions.
‘Do go on,’
I press her, gently, noticing a tear –
a tear as fiercely wiped as though it comes
from the scoundrel husband.
‘So one night I fled
to a nunnery in the hills. I did not say,
of course, I could not tell them I had wed
two years before. It’s true I told them lies –
but also true, I gave my heart to Christ.
Still, when he found me—’ Here she blanches white
and I will stop. For though a woman’s tongue
will often shake off secrets, that report
does not become the listener’s currency.
What matters is the love that had begun
to surge through my veins, like running down a hill
with the wind behind me, sure her body was
calling me with its longing; love so strong
that it washed me from my reason. I was won
the moment she lied to me and hooked the truth
of my own pretence. She was both warming sun
and rain on the shoots of hope, perched on that stool
with all the beauty of a ruined nun.
December chills the sheets. Much warmer they
become when doubly occupied. She stops
resisting me, my garrulous, lovely Ide,
to obtain my furnace in her bed. The month
brings more than sharpening frost and softening thighs.
A party descends, two weeks before the feast
is due to start, some forty men and maids
on horse, on foot, in carriage. It’s the Earl
and Countess of Bedford, daughter of Sir John.
With Jaques Petit. He is a stick-limbed man,
plucked from his mother’s dugs too soon, a face
like a smear of butter on a stale bread roll.
Yet Anthony sends him; and with him, a list
of friends who will descend here presently:
a Christmas to crown all Christmases!
A glow
must shine from me as I extricate myself
and this knowledge from the room; first Jaques Petit
attempts to trip me on the stairs with ‘What
did my master say of me?’ I freeze. The sheer
effrontery is baffling. ‘If he
had wanted you to know, assure yourself,
he would have scribed in French,’ I say. His flinch
is measurable. His spine contorting like
a sausage shrinking over flame. ‘But you
will recommend me to Sir John, perhaps?
To stay for Christmas?’ And a smeary smile
is plastered on with effort.
‘When he asks
to see me,’ I say. ‘He’s with his daughter now.’
I’m turning on my heel when he remarks,
‘Be careful with the woman.’
‘Woman, sir?’
‘Miss Ide du Vault. Her tongue is very free.
I do not think it wise—’
‘Excuse me, sir,’
I interrupt, ‘but you exceed your place.
Did Anthony speak of Miss du Vault?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then neither shall we. Good day, Monsieur Petit.’
The manner of the Frenchman bothers me,
but I brush it from my mind, as one might brush
a cobweb from a velvet sleeve. My friends,
Southampton among them, coming here! Again
the joy so strong it draws into my path
its opposite – the darkness of my love,
who is pouting more than usual because
of Jaques Petit’s arrival. He it was
who gave her the punning name, apparently.
‘He’s full of evil, as an egg-bound hen
is full of egg,’ she says.
‘Sorry, my love?’
‘That stupid man you left not seconds ago
fawning and crawling. Petty Jack. The spy
from Anthony Bacon’s house.’
‘Shush! He’s no spy.
Anthony’s sound. We’re friends. The man is just
obsequious. Loves Anthony too much
and the rest of us too little, for the threat
or competition that we pose. My love—’
‘Love is for later on. The letter he brought.
It lit you like a candle, and you ran
away from us all to read it, like a cat
who caught a bird. Since I share all with you –
most intimately – what will you share with me?’
‘My body,’ I say, stroking her shoulder.
‘No,
you cannot sell me what’s already mine.
I have your body. I would know your mind.
The letter. What moved you?’
‘It is just some news.’
She waits.
‘Of friends,’ I say.
She’s waiting still,
her tongue ticking against her palate.
‘Friends
who are coming to visit.’
‘So!’ she says, and smiles.
‘I will know more, but not in corridors.
The rest you will tell me when we are alone.’
With her tongue on my thigh, unholy in its course,
intent on torturing out of me the name
that most delighted me. ‘So he’s an earl?’
A fire is blazing in the grate. A touch
of her lips, like coals.
I groan, ‘So you’re a nun?’
She laughs like broken glass. ‘A woman has
so many faces. I have worn the veil.’
‘You didn’t learn this at the convent.’
‘No.’
She leans back on her elbow, drags her hair
across my belly like a paintbrush. ‘No,
the skill is natural. It comes from liking.’
‘You have experience.’
Her eyes grow dark
as if turned inwards. ‘What have I to sell
except the thing men most desire, myself?
My flesh is only ever a hired mount.
My heart, I’m saving.’
‘Saving for me?’
‘Perhaps.
If it pleases me. And then I will move on.
Perhaps I’ll move on now,’ she teases, ‘go
to the other wing and find myself a man
who does not keep such secrets.’
‘Ide—’
‘Not Ide!
Call me my name, Lucille. And tell me yours.’
‘I can’t. It’s dangerous.’
She makes a noise
like swallowing poison; turns her head away
when I see her eyes have filled with sudden tears.
She shrugs off the hand I reach to her, ‘No good,’
she says. ‘No good, we do not use the names
that we were born with. Lovers should be true
to themselves, they should be honest.’
‘Ide—’
‘Lucille!’
She’s half across the room now, every inch
as naked and angry as a trodden snake.
More blaze in eye than grate. ‘My name’s Lucille.
And what is yours?’
She looks so beautiful,
my sulky temptress, that the ache for her
might almost conquer reason.
‘Here. Lucille.
Come back to bed.’
Her skin, so biscuit brown,
shivers a little.
‘Not without your name.
I do not sleep with strangers any more.’
The fire spits some gobs upon the hearth
of wood it has rejected, all in flame.
‘There is a tale attached to it,’ I say.
‘And you must hear the whole tale in my arms
if you’re to have my name. For they are one,
the name, the story, and they must be held
between two lovers, closer than the child
that might come from that union. Lie down.
I promise you, you will be satisfied.’
So in her bed, with all the house asleep,
kissing her neck to warm her up to me,
I make her promise on a future child
(which I may plant in her, should luck decree)
to keep to herself the story I’ll reveal
or know her tongue itself will be the axe
that severs her lover’s head, and turns these lips
cold and unyielding as the winter ground.
The thrill of being entrusted with my life
quickens her sighs, and she responds as wild
as I have known love, tugging me inside
and reaching instantly that mounded peak
few women ever climb: two stops of breath,
then blushes flooding to her chest and cheek
like soldiers running on to battlefields
when war is over. Softened,
‘Tell me more,’
she says, half satisfied. ‘What is your crime?
What do you hide? Who are you, man of mine?’