“Put aside your foolish daydreams,” Edith snapped. “That young gentleman is up to no good.”

Jack was, in fact, arranging cushions on the floor and setting out beakers and cups.

Edith was still trying to push me toward the door when two very finely dressed courtiers entered through it.

“Jack!” the man exclaimed. “Well met! And this must be the lass they call ‘Harington’s pet.’ ” He looked straight at me when he said it, a friendly smile on his darkly tanned face.

“Tom! Mind your manners!” His female companion smacked his forearm with a closed fan, but she was laughing.

Edith bent to speak into my ear. “That fellow is Thomas Clere, squire to the Earl of Surrey.”

Overhearing, the young man’s head snapped around and he gave my maidservant a frosty stare. It faded as quickly as it had appeared. “Edith, by my spurs! We wondered where you had vanished to.”

He might have said more, had not the Earl of Surrey himself arrived just then. The woman with him was not his wife. She was his sister, the Duchess of Richmond. Without standing on ceremony, they settled themselves on the cushions Jack had arranged. Master Clere and the other woman joined them.

I glanced at Jack, who remained standing, uncertain how to act. Was this the “surprise” he had promised me? I could not imagine why he would think I’d wish to meet these people, but when he seized my hand and thrust me forward, I went. With a flourish, he presented me to the earl and the duchess first and then to the gentlewoman who had come with Thomas Clere, Mistress Mary Shelton, companion to the duchess.

Up close, I saw that the earl and his sister shared that auburn hair. Both had hazel eyes, but while her fair coloring was untouched by the sun, his skin had a weathered look. Both he and his squire, I surmised, spent many hours out of doors, hunting, hawking, and riding.

Mistress Shelton’s face was not as full as the duchess’s and her nose was longer and more tapering, but she shared that pale complexion. Along with Master Clere, they were all of an age, and it was nearly twice my years. I managed a curtsey and a mumbled greeting, but apart from that I found myself tongue-tied. This was very grand company indeed for a merchant tailor’s daughter.

Several others soon joined us. I cannot now recall which members of the earl’s circle they were. Surrey often held impromptu musical and literary gatherings. Some of those who attended never came again. Others were part of an intimate group always in attendance on the earl or on his sister.

At first the talk was all of the tournament.

“M’lord Surrey was magnificent.” Mistress Shelton addressed this remark to me in a friendly fashion, attempting to draw me out. Edith had retreated to a corner, effacing herself as any good servant must when in the presence of her betters. “He rode onto the field behind an exquisite float depicting the Roman goddess of arms. His pennant and shield had a silver lion emblazoned upon them and other Howard emblems were embroidered all over his white velvet coat.”

“My father may have made that coat,” I ventured, trying to overcome my shyness around these glittering strangers. If Jack was comfortable with them, so should I be.

“Your father?” Confusion had her brow furrowing.

“Master Malte, the royal tailor.” There was no apology in my voice. I was proud of Father’s work.

She gave me a peculiar look, but if she thought I should go join Edith in the corner, she was kind enough not to say so.

By then, the general conversation had turned away from jousting onto poetry. An earnest young woman begged the Earl of Surrey to recite some of his verses.

He stood and declaimed:

Give place, you lovers here before,

that spent your boasts and brags in vain:

my lady’s beauty passeth more the best of yours,

I dare well sayn,

than doth the sun, the candle light,

or brightest day, the darkest night.

“Mary is working on a new poem,” Lady Richmond announced, nudging Mistress Shelton.

“It is not yet ready to be heard,” Mary Shelton protested.

“Let us judge that.” Thomas Clere slung a familiar arm around her shoulders and planted a smacking kiss on her cheek.

She pushed him away, and none too gently, but after a moment she closed her eyes and recited:

And thus be thus

ye may assure yourself of me.

No thing shall make me to deny

that I have promised thee.

“It needs work,” Surrey said.

“It is the worst sort of doggerel,” Mistress Shelton admitted in a rueful voice. “I am a better copyist than I am a poet.”

Jack Harington cleared his throat. “I wish to present to this company a new poet.”

I looked at him expectantly, and then in slowly dawning horror as I realized I was the one he meant. “Oh, I cannot. My verses have no more merit than an amateur artist’s sketches.”

Thanks to Jack’s lessons, I had discovered talents I’d never dreamed I possessed. Not only had I shown an affinity for playing the lute and for singing, but I also had begun to develop the knack of setting words to music. Encouraged by my tutor, I’d tried my hand at composing my own verses, but they were poor, pitiful things.

“Come, Mistress Malte,” Mary Shelton urged me. “Your attempt can be no worse than mine and we are all friends here, united in our poor efforts to emulate the great poets of antiquity.”

“My efforts are worse than poor and were intended only to be set to music.”

“There is nothing ignoble about writing lyrics,” Lady Richmond said. “Why, the king himself wrote the words to ‘Pastime with Good Company’ and many of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s verses have been set to music.”

“Thomas Wyatt the Elder,” Surrey clarified. I gathered from this that the poet had a son by the same name, but at the time I had never heard of either of them.

“Wyatt is greatly to be admired,” Tom Clere said, “if only for keeping his head.”

Nervous laughter greeted this remark.

“I do not understand,” I whispered to Mary Shelton.

Mistress Shelton’s shoulders tensed. Her lips flattened into a thin, tight line. I learned much later that she had once been courted by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder and that he’d written poems to her, even though he’d had both a wife and a mistress at the time. Still, she was, as I was to learn, the most blunt-spoken of that company and was nothing loath to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

“Sir Thomas Wyatt, when a young man, was in love with Anne Boleyn . . . before she married the king. He might easily have gone to the block, accused of having been one of her lovers. Together with my sister, Margaret, one of the queen’s maids of honor, I was at court to witness these events. I truly believe that it was one of Wyatt’s poems that saved his life, for King Henry took it as proof that the poet never meddled with the queen.”

“Whoso list to hunt, I put him out of doubt; As well as I may spend his time in vain!” the Earl of Surrey recited in a low voice. “And graven with diamonds in letters plain there is written her fair neck round about, Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am, and wild for to hold, though I seem tame. ”

“Noli me tangere?” I was ignorant of foreign languages. “What does that mean?”

“Do not touch me,” Mary Shelton translated. “And Caesar was meant to be the king. Now you, Audrey. Share something you have written.”

I knew I did not approach within a mile of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poetic talent. I doubted I even reached the heights of Mary Shelton’s “doggerel.” But I was emboldened by her encouraging smile.

Because I was not accustomed to reciting verses in a normal speaking voice, I sang the words:

The linnet in the window sings despite her cage

when other creatures would rail and rage.

And I, beside that same window, do peruse my page

and wait for the one who’ll free me when I come of age.

I faltered into silence. An unnerving pause followed.

“Clever,” the Earl of Surrey conceded. “Although you would do better to follow Petrarch’s model and write a sonnet.”

As if the rest of the company had only been waiting for the approval of the highest-ranking person in the chamber, they all chimed in with words of praise and helpful hints for improving my verses. For the most part, the criticism was kindly meant. More remarkable still, in spite of my youth and my inferior station in life, they treated me as an equal.

I left Durham House that day with my heart overflowing with emotion and my mind full of new ideas. Jack Harington had introduced me to a world I’d never dreamed existed.












12

May–June 1540

In the weeks following my introduction to the Duchess of Richmond and her companion, Mary Shelton, I was invited on several occasions to Norfolk House in Lambeth. Father hesitated the first time but, after the Tudors, the Howards were the most powerful family in England. The Duke of Norfolk, father to the Earl of Surrey and the Duchess of Richmond, was an important and influential man. Courtiers flocked to Norfolk House, just across the Thames from Whitehall, much as they did to the royal court, seeking favor and presenting petitions.

“You must be careful not to presume upon their friendship,” Father admonished me as Edith and I were about to set off for the river stairs, accompanied by one of his apprentices, a gangly lad named Peter. “At the same time, it would do no harm to make yourself useful to the duchess. It would be a great honor were you to be asked to enter her service.”

“I am not a maidservant,” I protested, “nor am I in need of employment.” I knew full well how wealthy Father was.

“Young gentlewomen are customarily sent away from home to finish their education. They learn how to manage a household, against the day when they will marry, under the supervision of some great lady skilled in such matters.”

“But I am not a gentlewoman, either. I am a merchant’s daughter and proud of it.”

“Master Malte,” Edith interrupted in a timid voice. “If I may make an observation, it seems to me that the duchess favors Mistress Audrey because of her talent. The ability to create poetry and music is what matters in that circle. They pay no mind to whether someone is of merchant, noble, gentry, or even peasant stock.”

Father hemmed and hawed and scratched his nose, but in the end he sent us off with his blessing. If nothing else, he was loath to offend.

Norfolk House was a huge, sprawling place. It was not as big as its Lambeth neighbor, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace, but there was more than enough space for several separate households. The Duchess of Richmond occupied one section of the house. Her father, when he had business in London or Westminster, lived in another. And a third was the domain of the old dowager duchess, Agnes, the Duke of Norfolk’s stepmother. A bevy of young relatives had been entrusted to her care—to finish their education, as Father had explained—and they were in residence, too.

“They live in a dormitory, country gentlewomen and the duchess’s granddaughters all mixed together.” Edith sounded as if she was not sure she approved of such an arrangement. Mother Anne preached the same philosophy, that overfamiliarity between mistress and servant inevitably led to trouble down the road.

“Did you live here for a time?” I asked as we approached the water stairs on that initial visit. “With your mother and the Earl and Countess of Surrey?”

“A brief period only, but I still have a few acquaintances among the servants.”

I gave Edith leave to seek them out while I spent time with the duchess and her companion and this soon became the established pattern of our trips to Norfolk House.

The house was adjoined by substantial gardens, several paddocks, and a two-acre close. On a pleasantly warm day in June, we left the music room where we usually met and brought our instruments out of doors. Seated in a bower, surrounded by flowers and trees, a light breeze cooling our faces and stirring the lace on the duchess’s sleeves, I picked out a new tune on my lute.

It was private there, just Lady Richmond and Mary, as Mistress Shelton insisted I call her now that we had become better acquainted. I had brought Pocket with me, for the duchess was fond of dogs. She kept several spaniels. Mary had a cat, a great striped beast with an uncertain temper, but it had gone off on business of its own.

“An appealing melody,” the duchess said when I finished playing. “Have you set words to it?”