talkingpiffle: 4 October.—Went round to Peter’s flat to advise about settings for
talkingpiffle: 4 October.—Went round to Peter’s flat to advise about settings for some stones he picked up in Italy. While there, registered post brought large, flat envelope—Harriet’s writing. Wondered what it was she wanted to send and not bring! (Inquisitive me!) Watched Peter open it, while pretending to examine zircon (such a lovely colour!). He flushed up in that absurd way he has when anybody says anything rather personal to him, and stood staring at the thing till I got quite wound up, and said, “What is it?” He said, in an odd sort of voice, “The bride’s gift to the bridegroom.” It had been worrying me for some time how she'd grapple with that, because there isn’t an awful lot, really, one can give a very well-off man, unless one is frightfully well off oneself, and the wrong thing is worse than nothing, but all the same, nobody really wants to be kindly told that they can’t bring a better gift than their sweet selves—very pretty but so patronising and Lord of Burleigh—and after all, we all have human instincts, and giving people things is one of them. So I dashed up to look, and it was a letter written on a single sheet in a very beautiful seventeenth-century hand. Peter said, “The funny thing is that the catalogue was sent to me in Rome, and I wired for this, and was ridiculously angry to learn it had been sold.” I said, “But you don’t collect manuscripts.” And he said, “No, but I wanted this for Harriet.” And he turned it over, and I could read the signature, “John Donne,” and that explained a lot, because of course Peter has always been queer about Donne. It seems it’s a very beautiful letter from D. to a parishioner—Lady Somebody—about Divine and human love. I was trying to read it, only I never can make out that old-fashioned kind of writing (wonder what Helen will make of it—no doubt she’ll think a gold cigarette-lighter would have been much more suitable)—when I found Peter had got on the phone, and was saying, “Listen, dear heart,” in a voice I’d never heard him use in his life. –Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon, “Prothalamion,” 1937. Letter from John Donne to Lady Kingsmill, 26 October 1624. (x, x) (Not necessarily the letter, but there’s not enough detail in the text to identify a specific Donne letter, if Sayers had a real one in mind.) -- source link