Ladies in Waiting (3 page)

Another would have tried to hide her condition—not so the Countess of Enfield. Every woman wore gloves, so the queen could not see the lesions on the woman’s hands and arms. But she could see the suppurating sores on her throat and chest and could guess what else might be hidden under the blood red of her gown. In that age of infection and pox, sores were commonplace, if generally kept out of the queen’s apartments. It was the lady’s head that looked most unnatural—a mask, a beast. As Suffolk said, a demon.

The countess’s brow was a lumpy, misshapen thing, a bulbous knob the size of a clenched infant’s fist rising from her temple, throbbing with her pulse. Smaller tumors scattered through the sparse hair of her skull in such profusion as to confound a physiognomist.

Worse yet, where her nose should have been was a silver hawk’s beak, painstakingly polished to a high sheen, strapped across her cheeks and brow with red cord. The great aquiline false nose was a mockery of the court’s masked balls, one of which Catherine had presided over, though not participated in, since her arrival. There, stunning women gave their faces animal or angelic beauty, covering one form of loveliness with another. Here, grotesque covered horror, all the worse, to Catherine’s susceptible mind, for being unseen. Why would she wear that terrifying raptor’s beak if there was not something far more disgusting underneath?

“Syphilis,” Suffolk said in her resounding stage whisper. “A gift from her husband. Her nose has crumbled away, alas.” She fanned herself lazily.

The horror made a formal curtsy, with that perfect balance that comes of strict early training. She’d been bred in the court, lived a life of luxury until her husband squandered her wealth and ruined her body with the disease he picked up on his extramarital carousing. Her rank allowed her free run of the palace, but her appearance and poverty made her a pariah, her daughter a joke. Still, she persevered, flaunting her daughter’s beauty while fiercely guarding her chastity, hoping some man would come along to restore the family fortunes. Her daughter was her widow’s portion, the only bounty her wicked husband left her.

“Your Majesty,” Enfield said, neither brazen nor timid. “They say you would have my Beth as your maid of honor.”

“Yes, better her than another,” Catherine said, though now she wanted the girl for her own sake, and to do a kindness to an obviously ill-used old woman.
The poor thing,
Catherine thought.
I will ask Charles to grant her a pension.

“Well, I suppose she will do as well there as with me. But hear me, Your Majesty, and mark me well. Her chastity is the business of my life, making a good marriage for her my only concern.”

“I quite understand,” the queen said after the pause of translation.

“I fear you do not,” the Countess of Enfield said severely, coming closer, head nodding with the characteristic bob of her disease. “My curse is on her, and on any man who touches her. I will give her freely to the right man, but let any try to steal my beauty, my youth, and I will draw and quarter him with my own hands. Him, or her.” She made a motion of twisting and tearing. “And so to you, Your Majesty, if while in your keeping my virgin is debauched.” Her hands rent the queen in invisible effigy, and Catherine shrank back. Was the woman mad? She spoke of the girl’s beauty and youth as if they were her own.

“You’re a Catholic heathen like the last queen, but at least you’re not like these others.” She jerked her flashing beak at the courtiers, who were torn between mirth and revulsion. “In those idolatrous nations like Portugal you know men for the evil creatures they are, scourge of women, carriers of filth, great hungry maws that drain us of all our virtues and leave us as you see me now. Your husband is such a man. You don’t believe me, I see in your eyes, but those eyes will open soon enough.”

Catherine wanted to flee, but the woman was so close now, her beak thrusting forward, that Catherine could not stand without almost touching her. Where were the guards?

“Ha!” the countess went on. “I loved my husband once. Now there’s not a man I wouldn’t crush beneath my heel if I could.” She turned to a nearby fop holding a nosegay to his powdered cheeks. “You.” She ground her foot into the tile, and turned to a big, virile golden-wigged man, the notorious Duke of Buckingham. “You, for certs.” She dug her heel in again and looked to the queen. “And your husband, too, dear. He’s a man, like all the others, and will break you if he can. Make yourself hard, Your Majesty. Deny him everything and you might survive. Be soft and love him, and you will end like me.”

She broke off in a fit of coughing. “Take her if you will!” she said between hacks. “Take her, but remember, I’ll be watching.” She shuffled off, and the courtiers parted before her, covering their faces with scented handkerchiefs.

Beth stood through all this with her head bowed, like a dog well accustomed to the whip. Could this gentle, pretty girl truly have sprung from the loins of that monster?

Catherine stood abruptly. She would show them what it meant to be a queen. Perhaps the Countess of Enfield was right about one thing. She might grant Charles any other request, but she would die before she let his mistress among her most personal attendants.

“Come, child,” she said to Beth. “You will begin serving me at once. And my lady Suffolk, please amend this list and return it to me for my consideration.”

Beth trailed behind the bouncing farthingale, believing that the little queen was leading her away from the hell she’d endured since she was first brought to court—on the market as her mad mother’s only commodity, a world of disease and duty, love and disgust, shame and longing—to a paradise of safety and comfort as one of Catherine’s maids of honor.

Chapter 3

The Peculiar Specimen

“W
HAT ON EARTH
do I do with this?” Zabby Wodewose asked herself as she pulled yard upon yard of rich copper material out of her sea chest. Her father had it sent aboard without letting her see, telling her only to wait until she was ashore in England before wearing it, lest it spoil in the sea air.

“It’s the latest fashion from France, so they tell me,” her beloved Papa had said to her as she sat with him on the eve of departure, staring into the low hearth, her head resting on his knee. “You will set the Thames on fire, my girl.”

“I’m not going to England to impress anyone,” Zabby said. “I’m going to learn everything I can—and not about clothes. I can wear any old thing in Godmother Cavendish’s library, and I’ll certainly wear an apron when I mix compounds and grind lenses.”

He kissed her on the top of her very fair head and said, “Ah, my dear, do it for my sake, if not your own. I’ve kept you like a wild thing here in Barbados, and it would please me to see you in some finery.”

“You’ve had too much Rhenish wine, Papa!” she’d said with a laugh. “Your reasoning is faulty—you won’t be seeing me when I’m there.”

“All the same, my dear, wear it, and have a few more made up once you’ve settled. There is nothing in this world so pure as the unruffled, chill beauty of youth. Like rarefied metal, a serene, airless vacuum. Like a theorem proven.”

She laughed and tried to argue, but he only kissed her again and went to his bed. She sailed with the morning tide.

Now, two months later, they struck sounding off Dover, ahead of a storm, and as they eased into port she prepared to wear his gift. She lay the skirt on her bed and unconsciously bent her knees as the ship shifted in the chop of the docks. She was an experienced seawoman, and so long as it was not actually raining she could be found strolling along the deck, heedless of the heaving, reading a book as she walked. This was her fourth long ocean voyage—once from England to Barbados as a child, then to Virginia and back with her father, and now to her natal soil to complete her education with her godmother, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, philosopher and authoress.

She arranged the undergarments and finally pulled out something she knew about but had never worn—a pair of bodies, or a bodice.

She might be an aristocrat, but she was a plantation aristocrat, who was always looking to the laborers, experimenting with the crops, testing improvements to her fleet of tiny sailboats, and above all, concocting compounds and testing ideas in Papa’s elaboratory. She wore breeches most of the time, and since their land stretched hundreds of acres, there was no one except the slaves and indentured servants to stare. If she did wear a dress, for coolness or the occasional social call, it was a loose one-piece tied at the waist and throat with a ribbon, or an unboned jacket and skirt, hemmed above the ankles. She had never laced herself into whalebone, never been in close company of a lady who did. Her father’s friends were all men, and she had neither a comrade close to her own age with whom to speculate nor an older woman to guide her. When she looked at the stiff bodice with its spider web laces, she was at a loss.

She puzzled over the luminous copper thing but could see only one way of wearing it, laced in the front. How else was she to fasten it? One of the plumper cooks on the plantation stuffed herself into a front-knotting stomacher; it must be something like that. “Gemini, that’s wretched,” she said as she wiggled herself into the garment. A stiff board embedded in the material flattened her back from the shoulder blades down, and the neck was so high in the front that it almost choked her. Her bare back felt indecent. “Papa says this is what they’re wearing in France,” she mumbled as she secured the laces across her chest.

Even loosely tied, the thing made it hard to breathe, and the board at her back prohibited her from bending.
Why are women such fools about fashion?
she wondered.
Imagine, a board at your back!
“I’ll make him happy in absentia this once, though I warrant Godmother Cavendish has more sense than to imprison herself in a cage of silk.”

She pulled up the skirt, tied and pinned it into place with much cursing and a few bloody fingertips, then sallied down the gangplank to the bustling dock. They were two days early thanks to the storm’s stiff winds, and she’d have to wait at the inn until her godmother’s carriage arrived for her.

Sailors were already unloading the crates of animals and plants her papa was sending to fill her godmother’s hothouses and menagerie. Bright jungle birds fluttered nervously in their wicker cages, while an ocelot brought from Spanish territory hissed at the unfamiliar smells. She patted him through the bars—she’d raised him from a kitten, and though he’d rake any servant who disturbed his sleep, he was fairly tolerant of Zabby’s affection.

She felt her throat itch as soon as she disembarked. Even with the high wind across the channel the air was rank and heavy with coal soot and a smell of feces, animal and human. Past the organized bustle of the docks she could see the jumble of town: buildings crowded upon one another, leaning precariously over the muddy roads; the slow-moving trickle of gutters carrying their filth directly into the sea; men and women dressed too heavily for the season, their bodies adding a musky note to the heady medley of stink.

How do they live like this?
Zabby wondered as she picked her way along the wharf to the inn suggested by the captain (an agent of her father’s) as reputable and clean—the King’s Arms. She already felt oppressed by the noise and crowds, and this was only Dover.
Imagine how London must smell, and sound.
She coughed, feeling the grain of coal on her tongue.
And taste!

Thank heaven she’d be going to her godmother’s country estate, not her London home. Zabby didn’t think she could bear it after the freedom—and clean air—of her Barbados plantation.

She let herself into the inn, and a dozen faces looked up from their mugs and tankards.

“God’s cods!” one cried. “What will the whores think of next? Lacing in the front!”

“Mighty convenient,” said another, a young rake who perhaps had more experience with the genuine article. “Keeps the goods locked up till the shilling’s paid. That miss can let her udders bounce out at will, and no maid needed to lace ’em up again.”

Another argued she’d sell her wares better if her bodice was right way round, giving them an advertisement of what was to come. Yet another claimed all the business was lower down, that only a fool would pay a whore for the top half.

Nurtured by a loving father, surrounded by a virtual city of people beholden to her, Zabby had never felt the sudden rude mortification of being the butt of the crowd’s joke. She looked at them angrily, but wasn’t quite strong enough to tell them off. Just as well—pertness in a prostitute is an invitation, and the men might well have offered more intimate insult. She stalked to the rear of the public house, a quiet nook where only two men sat in the shadows, and waited for the captain to join her. Once she secured a room she could change out of these ridiculous clothes. It went against reason to lock herself up, backward or forward, in such impractical garb.

“Pick another seat, sweetheart,” one of the men said, not unkindly, but she was too deep in her humiliation to hear him, and sat at the next table, staring sulkily at the polished grain of the heavy oak slabs.

The man half rose and, before she could think to stop him, slipped (not without difficulty) something cold down the front, which was really the back, of her bodice. “We’ve business to discuss, mistress, and would be alone.”

She met his eye with a scowl. It was hard to make out his features in the flickering candlelight at the back of the inn, but he seemed almost a gentleman, large and dark, with neat curling mustachios and heavy-lidded black eyes. He was dressed, as far as she could tell, as a merchant, but there was something majestic and confident in his mien. A student of nature wild and domestic, she had spent many hours watching Papa’s herd of horses. One male led them all, not always the biggest or strongest, but certainly the most self-assured. Larger, wilder stallions would defer to him, let him have his way with all the mares, though they could easily defeat him in open battle. This man had the same fine carriage, the same haughty eyes, as the herd stallion. He was accustomed to obedience.