The Lady and the Poet

by Maeve Haran

  ‘Snaresbrook, mistress.’

  ‘Wat Snaresbrook. Wat is urgently looking for employment and would make an excellent servant.’

  Master Donne’s answer was the bark of a laugh.

  ‘You have found the wrong man, Mistress More! I have had enough of boys to last me several lifetimes! The last I employed helped himself to my best clothes and ran away with them.’

  ‘But Wat is honest, are you not, Wat?’

  ‘As honest as the day is long, mistress.’ Wat bowed as he had seen Master Wotton do a moment back, smiling all the while. ‘And mayhap the night time too in spite of all the wicked deeds that do happen then!’

  ‘God save us from a boy who can speak so eloquently!’ murmured Master Donne, shaking his head.

  ‘Come, John, a poet cannot object to the clever use of words, surely?’ smiled Master Wotton. Yet his friend shook his head.

  ‘Mistress More, I live here in York House. If I had lodgings of my own, perhaps…’

  ‘I am sure my uncle, the Lord Keeper, would have no objection if I talk to him. Wat could sleep on a pallet on your floor as Prudence oftentimes does on mine at Loseley.’

  ‘Heigh, heigh, go not so fast, mistress…’

  ‘Consider it at least. Wat could run errands for you. To the courts.’

  ‘And the alehouse,’ added Wat. ‘Or the stewhouse.’

  ‘Wat!’ I scolded, turning back to Master Donne.

  ‘The other day you asked if there was aught you could do to relieve the misery of my sister’s loss.’ I knew this to be blackmail but the cause was honest. ‘This lad’s mother died in childbirth like my sister. Taking him in seemed a kind of expiation.’

  ‘Which you are generously passing on to me?’ The words could have been cruelly said, but there was a kindness in them. ‘For pity’s sake, what has happened to him?’ He picked up one of the boy’s hands, not even flinching at the oozing sores.

  ‘He was apprenticed to a tanner who made him put his hands into cruel and fiery liquids.’

  ‘And this tanner, to whom he was apprenticed, might I expect a call from him demanding the return of his property?’

  I bit my lip. ‘Very probably. But he may be daunted to discover his charge now lives in the household of the Keeper of the Great Seal.’

  ‘A relief. I would not wish to have dangerous liquids flung in my face by an angry tanner.’

  ‘Never fear, sir,’ Wat informed him helpfully. ‘Master Maunsley is far too scared even to touch the stuff himself.’

  ‘A relief indeed.’

  ‘Then you will take him as your servant after all? Here, Wat, you are to have a new master,’ I told him eagerly, giving Master Donne no chance to change his mind. ‘Master John Donne is secretary to my uncle, as well as one of our most famous poets.’

  ‘Come, come. I have not published a word.’

  ‘Yet my cousin says your verse is circulated among so many, you have no need.’ I turned to Wat. ‘I will take the boy and have him cleaned up so his appearance is more respectable.’

  ‘I wish you great good luck.’

  Chapter 9

  I LEFT WAT to wait awhile near the kitchen door while I sought out Joan to help me clean him up. I was halfway up the staircase when from downstairs in the Great Hall I heard a piercing shriek.

  My aunt had discovered the presence of an urchin boy in her household and had firmly taken hold of Wat’s ear and was dragging him towards the withdrawing chamber to find her husband.

  ‘Do you know whose house you have falsely entered, boy, and who knows with what malicious intent? To steal and rob us, I fancy.’

  ‘Please, mistress, spare me! I am not come to rob your household, but was brought here to do honest work by the young gentlewoman.’

  My aunt turned to me. ‘Ann? Is this true? Who is this boy and what thought you to bring him here, without applying to me first?’

  ‘He was being ill-treated by his apprentice master, Aunt. Look, look at his wounds before you condemn me.’ I took Wat’s poor hands in mine and showed them to her. ‘I saw it as my duty before God our Maker to try and save him, knowing that in your goodness and kindness you would yourself have done the same.’

  ‘God’s wounds! Would I so?’ Her voice was harsh but yet I hoped to persuade her.

  ‘Besides, he will not bother you. Master Donne has agreed to take him as a servant boy.’

  ‘Has he now?’ said my cousin, who had just appeared in the hall in the company of Master Manners. ‘That is generous indeed. You must have been extremely persuasive, Ann, since this boy will be as much effort as reward, I wager.’

  Wat who had been following this statement with rapt attention, stood up straight at this.

  ‘He won’t regret it, sir. I want the gentleman to say, “I know not how I managed before I had Wat Snaresbrook in my service.”’

  We all laughed at that.

  ‘It is very generous of Master Donne,’ I admitted.

  ‘And does that not surprise you?’ questioned Richard Manners. ‘I have never heard of Master Donne as one who acts so selflessly. Indeed I hope you have done right in giving him the boy.’

  ‘What mean you by that, Master Manners?’

  ‘I heard a rumour there was trouble between Master Donne and a servant before.’

  ‘What manner of trouble?’

  He shrugged. ‘I know not, but it ended in court, I fancy.’

  This news alarmed me somewhat. I had thought Master Donne would prove a kindly master.

  ‘You know a surprising deal about my stepfather’s secretary, Master Manners,’ Francis commented looking at him askance.

  ‘He is a man much gossiped about. If I behaved as Master Donne does, rumour would abound about me also.’

  ‘So you behave at all times like a good Christian gentleman?’ Francis asked.

  ‘So I would hope,’ was the pious reply.

  There was something in his voice that made me bristle. ‘No doubt you will get your reward in Heaven.’

  Penetrating blue eyes turned in my direction, pinning me to the spot. ‘I had hoped to win it sooner than that.’

  There was no mistaking the intention of his words. I dropped my gaze at such uncalled-for intimacy and took myself to find Joan, who had, complaining all the while, taken on the task of supervising Wat’s bathing and had found him a suit of clothes in black stuff with a neat white collar that one of the serving men had grown out of. The collar was too large for his neck and I took out my scissors to make it smaller.

  ‘Here, mistress,’ Joan gently removed the garment from my hands, ‘I can see you are no needlewoman.’

  ‘No,’ I laughed. ‘My sister Frances was handier with a needle than I, never happier than with her Irish stitchwork. My stitchery was a despair to my grandmother. I would rather be riding out or playing with my cat than wasting time making dainty designs on silk or calico.’

  ‘You set no store by a lady’s accomplishments, then?’

  ‘I can see that running a household has its pleasures, but I would lief be reading or riding abroad!’

  ‘You had better have plenty of servants, then, mistress.’ Joan finished sewing the collar and laid it over the jacket.

  A thought occurred to me. ‘Like you the life of a servant, Joan?’

  Joan laughed at me and shook her head. ‘You’re a strange one, Mistress Ann. What kind of question is that?’

  ‘More than you enjoy being a lady, mistress,’ spoke up Wat, whom we had almost forgotten. ‘You would sooner be out in the world living like a man, I’d wager.’

  ‘Keep a civil tongue in your head, young doddypol!’ Joan corrected him. ‘Ignorant whelp that you are.’

  ‘I heard tell in the alehouse of a lady who wanted to be with her lover, some rich duke, so she dressed up as his page!’ Wat informed us gaily.

  ‘I’d reckon you’d spent too many hours watching plays, my lad, if you’d only had money enough for a ticket!’ Joan jerked the jacket over his head.
/>   ‘Oww!’

  She straightened the altered collar and reached for a wooden hair-comb. ‘Tell me honestly, are you lousy?’

  Wat put his head on one side, considering the proposition. ‘Not any more. My sister dosed the lice with warm milk and wormwood.’

  ‘An enterprising girl, this Sarah.’

  ‘And kind as the day is long. When my mother died, Sarah kept me and my brother and sister from being taken by the parish.’

  Joan tugged the comb through his dark hair.

  ‘Owwww!’

  ‘Cry baby!’

  Wat pushed her off. ‘I am not!’

  ‘Let us look at you.’

  She turned him to face us both.

  The wonder of it was that Wat Snaresbrook, cleaned up and freshly combed, looked as if he had worn a fine suit of clothes every day of his young life.

  ‘Come, Wat. I will take you to find your new employer.’

  ‘And I will come with you, mistress,’ Joan offered to my surprise. ‘There’s no telling where he will be in this great honeycomb of a house.’

  ‘Thank you, Joan,’

  We found Master Donne, after much searching, in the Lord Keeper’s library looking at some law book.

  ‘Here is your boy, Master Donne, all polished up and gleaming like a new penny.’

  Master Donne surveyed Wat with a smile, and then a look of sternness came over his features. ‘I hope you have no taste for silk hose and velvet suits, Wat.’

  Wat looked confused. ‘Serge is good enough for me, sir.’

  ‘My last boy helped himself to my best satin suit and a handful of gold lace.’

  ‘And yet, Master Donne,’ I asked, in a voice of innocent good humour, ‘did not one of your own verses mock the downy-chinned gallants for going off to war in satin suits and quantities of gold lace much like those you lost?’

  Francis had told me that of all Master Donne’s verses this was the one he liked the most.

  ‘Mistress More, it did,’ conceded Master Donne. He looked at me askance, his eyes narrowed in amusement. ‘You know a surprising deal about my poor verses it seems to me.’

  ‘They are much talked of. This boy who ran off—what was his name?’

  ‘Tom Danby.’

  ‘Perhaps Tom Danby thought to save you the humiliation of donning your satin suit and looking like one of those sad gallants you describe.’

  Master Donne cracked with laughter. ‘What a charitable construction indeed—save that he sold the clothes he stole for five and twenty pounds in a Cheapside frippery and was seen neither hide nor hair of again! In fact, I have lately been recompensed with thirty pounds by the court of Chancery for my pains.’

  I own I was glad to hear it and that the tale Master Manners reported did not stand up against him, not for my own sake, but for Wat’s, for I would not wish to land him with a cruel master.

  Master Donne noticed Joan standing shyly behind me and beckoned her forward.

  ‘Mistress Joan, what a pleasure indeed.’

  Joan, though all of forty years, reddened like a maiden announcing her betrothal. Surely solid Joan could not have fallen for Master Donne’s silver words, as half the wives of city merchants and alehouse keepers seemed to have done?

  ‘Speaking of Chancery, how goes your suit in the court there?’

  ‘That is what I came to tell you, sir. We have had a judgement. Fifty pounds to be shared between us, and no more bribes under the counter, thanks to your kind involvement.’

  ‘I am delighted to be of service. The Lord Keeper is trying to put an end to the outrageous fees demanded by every court official; they are a canker on the honour of our system.’ Master Donne signalled to the boy. ‘Come, Wat, I will find you some honest employment.’

  ‘So, Joan,’ I asked her in a low voice when Master Donne was called away a moment, ‘what was this suit in Chancery Master Donne talked of? I thought Master Donne was the wolf waiting to pounce on the innocent lamb in your eyes.’

  ‘Perhaps my judgement was a little harsh,’ Joan admitted. ‘The suit was concerning my grandfather’s inheritance. Only a small cottage, but the profit of it is as much as my brothers and I are like to earn in our whole lifetimes. It was all tangled up in the law and we were being asked for fines and fees and all manner of palm-greasings to sort it out.’

  ‘And you took the problem to Master Donne?’ I was surprised at Joan taking so bold a step. ‘Why went you not to the Lord Keeper or my aunt, your own employers?’

  Joan twisted her hands. ‘I knew not where to turn and one day Master Donne came upon me wringing out a dishcloth and weeping into the suds. I finished by telling him all and he bade me take the matter to him. And now it is all resolved in our favour.’

  This new side of Master Donne as problem solver struck me deeply.

  For one brief moment I wondered if I might confide in him my sister Mary’s difficulties with Master Freeman, for as Joan had endorsed there was that about him that made me feel he could be trusted. But what if I were wrong, and he gossiped of her indiscretion in the Parliament or Inns of Court? No, however tempting it was to share the burden of my worries, I must keep them to myself.

  ‘Mistress More,’ he interrupted my troubled thoughts. ‘I have often meant these last weeks to ask you of your lost sister, and to say that I was sorry to have given you so ill an answer when you were so angered at losing her. I do indeed know how great such pain can be.’

  ‘Because of your own brother?’

  He stared suddenly at my face, startled.

  ‘How know you of my brother?’

  Swiftly, before I had the chance to snatch back the words, I answered him, ‘I overheard you talking of him to your mother.’

  ‘My mother?’ I saw at once how vulnerable this revelation rendered him and how shaken he was to hear me say it.

  ‘Master Donne, I never meant to speak, and the secret of her presence is safe with me, I promise you.’

  I saw how for one instant he thought to deny her visit, then shrugged instead and sighed, while I rushed on.

  ‘I wished but to say this: your mother now seems lost to you but it is not so. My own died when I was but a maid of four, and I well know the anguish of such feelings. Yet my mother has returned, in thought and memory.’ Involuntarily I touched the locket round my neck. ‘And your mother also will return to you.’

  ‘I trust you are right.’ Yet there was a chill in his voice as if I had opened some private door which he wished to be kept shut.

  ‘I am, Master Donne, I know it.’

  ‘You have an understanding of matters beyond your years, Mistress More.’

  ‘I know there is a sadness at the heart of things that not even God our Maker warms with His grace.’

  ‘Indeed there is, yet not many see that truth and dare live with its cruel sentence.’

  ‘I am one who can.’

  At that he held my gaze with such intentness that we two seemed for one instant held together by a silken thread before it was broken and the noisy, rushing world of York House enveloped us once more.

  I turned away to seek out Joan, noticing that all around us my uncle’s servants were running back and forth carrying the best platters of silver and pewter, jugs of ale and of flowers. And the thought occurred to me that the ceremony for tonight’s meal was far greater than the usual.

  ‘Who dines with my uncle this night that so much silver is to be laid on for them?’ I asked. ‘Not Her Majesty or surely I would have heard of it?’

  ‘Not the Queen, no. Another great lady. The Countess of Straven. I have bidden Mercy to come and help to dress you. The other ladies of the house are putting on all their finery.’

  Although I pretended lack of interest, my curiosity was yet excited by a guest who was being treated with so much show and ritual.

  ‘What is she like, this Countess of Straven? A venerable dame like my aunt? An acquaintance of hers perhaps from her days at Court?’

  ‘Not she.’ Joan shoo
k out my gown of leaf-green taffeta. ‘She is a distant cousin of my lord’s, whom your uncle knows and honours.’ She cast a sly glance in my direction. ‘She comes with quite a reputation by all accounts.’

  ‘And with a convenient earl for a husband,’ snorted Mercy, who had appeared with a pitcher of water to share in the excitement of my preparations. ‘He never ventures from their country estate, so I heard Thomas the steward say. On account of his speech is strange. His words do trip so over each other, says Thomas, that it takes a se’enight for him to finish a sentence.’

  ‘She must be a patient woman.’

  ‘It suits her well enough. She leads her own life, lucky lady, and her husband is content to let her, so Thomas says, since she brought him ten thousand pounds and the manor of Bell Episcopi.’

  ‘Ten thousand pounds!’ I whistled. ‘A royal fortune!’

  Even the Queen had not such wealth in her coffers, nor nothing like.

  ‘Yet she be most unwomanly in her deportment,’ Mercy whispered, ‘for they do say she spends more time in her closet with her books than managing her household.’

  I, who told myself I cared nothing for her other attributes, found I minded very much to hear of this paragon’s great learning. ‘And this educated Countess,’ I asked, ‘is she a sober-looking lady, Mercy?’

  ‘Thomas welcomed her an hour past, Mistress Ann, with the yeoman of the horse and the gentlemen ushers.’ She smiled at me wickedly. ‘Thomas says she is as beauteous as the morning star.’

  Mercy and Joan curtsied and excused themselves to accomplish other tasks, while I stole one last glance in the glass. I bit my lips to make them redder and rubbed each cheek till they glowed like russet apples. I wished my bodies had been pulled tighter to show off my budding breasts to better advantage, but to ask for Mercy’s help in doing so would only have made her smile and recount the tale to the other servants that Mistress Ann was feeling the Devil’s pinch of jealousy.

  And then I remembered all of a sudden my sweet Bett, not cold in the ground, and felt ashamed of my unworthy thoughts. ‘Dear God, who is our Saviour, forgive me,’ I quickly prayed. And added as an afterthought: ‘Yet make this Countess not too learned nor too lovely.’