The Tanner’s Daughter – Episode 42
The Tanner's Daughter by Pamela Kavanagh
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- 1. The Tanner’s Daughter – Episode 42
Outside the door Dorcas smoothed her skirts, checked her cap was straight and gave a knock.
“Enter,” the mistress’s voice called from within.
Dorcas did so, walking to the settle and bobbing Constance a curtsey.
“What now?” Constance enquired.
It was not her usual approach and Dorcas was taken aback for a moment.
“I know,” she said. “I know about the babe – and everything else.”
The sneer in her voice was not lost on Constance and, to the maidservant’s concern, she saw the woman’s face tighten.
“Is that so? Well, then, Blunt, perhaps you had better explain yourself.”
The Hattons never adopted the usual manner of calling household staff by their surnames and the sudden change added to Dorcas’s discomfort.
She collected herself. She would not be thwarted when her venture was so close to fruition.
“I want my wages to be doubled as from now.
“Any quibble, mistress, and I shall take what I know directly to the city authorities. Happen the Guild of Tanners would be interested an’ all.”
“Dear me, Blunt, we are taking liberties. Run along. You have said your piece and that is quite enough.”
The words were delivered with verve. Tempted to capitulate, Dorcas resisted.
Caution, she reminded herself. Watch and wait.
She dipped a curtsey and left, adopting a swagger that hid the fact that her legs were shaking.
In the sparsely furnished garret room above the shop on White Friars Lane, Will contemplated the satchel he had brought back from the city.
It contained gifts he had bought.
The staff had not been forgotten. For young Rolf there was a fine linen kerchief for when he went carousing with his friends.
A box of marchpane for Perivale and, for Martha Renfrew, a length of red flannel for a petticoat.
Constance would receive a silk shawl and Ann Lovett a set of cotton threads for the new wardrobe she was stitching for herself.
For Jane, Will had bought from a Bloomsbury bookseller a rare and costly volume of love sonnets by Thomas Wyatt.
He had intended reading them to her in the intimacy of the small parlour.
“Best-laid plans!”
He was tempted to kick the offending satchel into a corner out of sight.
His marriage seemingly in ruins, along with the good name he had striven hard to achieve, his friends turning away?
Will wondered how it had all come to this.
“There has been some skulduggery going on,” he muttered.
He wanted to saddle Monarch, now occupying a ramshackle stable off the back yard of the shop, and ride to Pendle to confront his half-sister.
Then again, he felt that this whole sorry business smacked of a more cunning intellect than Alys possessed, and this gave him pause.
Added to which, a surfeit of work was keeping him in Chester for the time being.
Will blessed the day Nicholas Hatton had legally bound the gloving business to him, making him independent of the main body of Hatton’s Leatherware Company.
On a scuffed second-hand desk, acquired cheaply from a pawn shop on the Watergate, sat the Royal contract for a generous order of gloves.
Wasting no time, Will had requested a delivery of extra-fine pigskin from the warehouse on Barker Street and set the men to work.
He could hear them now, measuring and snipping in the workrooms directly below. Loyal men, every one.
That morning the post had brought a bill for the leather. It had been made out by the new Hatton clerk of work and was countersigned by Jane.
Previously Will had helped himself to whatever was needed from the warehouse.
Now, it appeared, he was a customer and must pay for his acquisitions.
For a long, long moment he stared at Jane’s signature on the bill of payment.
It seemed to personify all that had gone sour between them. But, despite all, Will loved her still.
In the office on Eastgate Row Jane was dealing with a mountain of paperwork.
Her head throbbed, heralding one of the crippling megrims to which she was prone when under duress.
She considered slipping to Margery’s home for a tincture to dull the pain, but was distracted by the sound of measured footsteps in the corridor beyond.
There was a knock on the door. Thinking it was Jarvis, the new clerk of work, she called out irritably for him to enter.
How many times did she need to say it? This was his office as well as hers and he was entitled to come and go as he wished.
The door opened to admit, to Jane’s surprise, the mature figure of her late father’s friend and fellow prominent Guild member, Thomas Glasier.
“Jane, my dear, apologies if I have come at an inconvenient time.
“I was passing and, in view of recent troubles, I wondered if there was any way in which I could help?”
The words were expressed with such courtesy and kindness that Jane indicated a chair and told Glasier meekly to take his ease.