Ladies in Waiting (6 page)

Do?
Catherine knew how to pray, how to be elegant in her native fashion. She had read philosophy and theology. She could embroider. She could sit or kneel patiently for hours on end. Beyond that she had no skills, knew nothing of the political maneuvering or seduction or blackmail that might sway a husband such as Charles.

“I will go home!” she said at last, and Zabby, finding the waters too deep, began to translate so the others could help.

“Oh, don’t go!” Beth said piteously, then wondered if she’d be allowed to accompany the queen. She dreamed of love, but the quiet solitude of convent life sounded tempting. Her mother would never be allowed in a Portuguese convent.

“’Sblood, of course you can’t go,” Eliza said sharply. “That’s just what those painted besoms want, for you to turn tail. Chouse them proper and stay. As for that Castlemaine, why, anyone can see he’ll tire of her quick enough.”

Zabby translated (though she couldn’t recall the Spanish for
besom
) but had her doubts.

“Will he come to me?” Catherine asked.

“Of course,” they lied, exchanging looks. “As soon as he can.”

He shouldn’t have done it to her,
Zabby thought. Not in front of that mocking crowd. The man who had lain in bed for two weeks under her care would not have done that. The man whose hand she’d held, who’d talked with her about the herbs of Barbados, about Carib magic, sailing, Hobbes’s
Leviathan,
would not treat the woman he pledged himself to thus.

I know him,
Zabby thought.
Those days of weakness, of bare skin, of death kept at bay, showed me the real man. He’s clever and kind, loyal to what he loves. And he must love Catherine. He will see that he has treated her cruelly, and repent.

Zabby’s only experience with marriage was a dim memory of her mother and father strolling along the shore, hand in hand, exchanging secret kisses, herself a toddler collecting seashells. All she knew of love was Papa. Until recently.

The three girls did their best to perform their duties as maids of honor. Beth silently combed the queen’s hair, twining the soft waves around her fingers. The other two kept up a halting, desultory chatter, Eliza teaching Catherine how to say all the parts of her dress and jewels in English, Zabby, in Spanish, telling her all about her godmother’s latest work, which together was confusing enough to put the queen into a daze.

If only he’d come,
Zabby thought. I’m sure if they were alone for a while they’d sort it all out.
He wouldn’t make that woman be one of her ladies if he knew how much it meant to her.

Thinking to comfort her, Zabby said, “When I was with him in Dover he told me about your courtship by proxy, how pleased he was to see you in person. He said . . .”

Catherine jerked away from her handlers, leaving a strand of torn hair in Beth’s fingers. “You! That was you with him all these weeks? Penalva told me there was a new one. Another of his whores.” She spat on Zabby’s chest, and the girl sprang up and backed away.

I can’t tell her the truth,
she thought.
I promised the king.

“Did it amuse you to cosset me, lull me with your honeyed kindness, you trull? Did you conspire with that Castlemaine all the while, to laugh together behind my back?”

“Your Majesty, I swear to you—”

“What harlot’s tricks do you know that you can keep him locked up with you for two weeks?” She spoke with scorn, but her eyes shifted guiltily to the side. She wished she were brave enough to beg,
Teach them to me.
“Get out! Leave me!” She snatched the gold and tortoiseshell comb from Beth’s hands and flung it at Zabby’s head. Marksmanship was not among the skills taught in a convent. “By God, if you come near me again I’ll . . .” She could not think of a threat horrible enough, and knew in her heart she wouldn’t have the power to execute it anyway.

Not knowing what else to do, Zabby opened the door without the mandatory deep curtsy and was about to slip out when a wall of warmth emanating from a large body stopped her before she even knew he was there. She looked up into Charles’s dark saturnine face and almost reached a hand to his cheek—to check for fever—before she caught herself.

He was only a breath away, and she stood imprisoned by his proximity. All those days of intimate caress, the tender touch of nurse and patient . . . Yet now, though the very hairs on her arms rose up and yearned, she could not bring herself to sway forward those scant few inches and touch him again. Behind her, the queen’s eyes bored into her back.

Charles looked at Catherine, but it was Zabby’s arm he grabbed roughly as he barked, “I am your king!” He glared for a moment, letting the unsaid volumes recite themselves, then shook off Zabby’s arm as if it had been clinging to his fingers and not the other way round. He was gone with a clap-tap of heels on the black and white tiled floor.

Chapter 5

The Three Elizabeths

Z
ABBY WAS IN BED
when Beth and Eliza tumbled in, stripbodices. ping off their slippers and pulling their busks from bodices.

“Oh, you’re here?” Eliza said archly. “Thought you’d be on the gibbet by now. That or made a duchess, though even Castlemaine’s just a countess after all her service to the Crown. Still, even she couldn’t keep His Majesty abed for two weeks straight.
Nunquam satis,
indeed!” She scattered pearl-tipped pins on the dressing table and pulled her dark hair out of its topknot, digging her fingers into the sides of her scalp and shaking vigorously.

“I didn’t . . .” Zabby began, but broke off. What was the use of violating her oath to Charles? She was planning to leave in the morning, as soon as she could get word to Godmother Cavendish to fetch her.

Beth sank down on the bed they were to share. “I don’t think it’s true,” she said softly.

“And why not?” Eliza asked. “She’s an odd-looking thing, but Gemini, look at Anne Hyde, and she caught herself a royal highness. No offense, sweetheart—you’re pretty enough, but you don’t look like you belong at court. I can’t quite put my thumb on it, but you don’t.” She snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it after all! You walk like you’ve real legs under your skirts.”

Zabby laughed. “Don’t you have legs under there?”

Eliza lay back beside Beth and crossed one leg over the other so her skirts fell above her knees. “Bless me, there they are. But then, I’m a peasant, and peasants all have legs. Ladies like our little countess here usually act like they float on rarefied air. Till the skirts come off and the legs wrap around someone, that is. On our backs we’re all peasants—countess and commoner alike.”

Beth blushed scarlet, but stubbornly persisted in her point. “I don’t care what they say. I don’t think she’s the king’s lover.”

Eliza snorted. “Good for her if she is, I say. He’s a handsome devil, and the king, after all. It’ll be hot for a while, but Her Majesty will forgive all the king’s rannigals in time—just hold out.”

Zabby rolled over to Beth. “Why don’t you think I’m his mistress?”

Beth answered in a whisper. “I’ve lived here at court. I’ve seen . . . my mother has shown me . . . what the mistresses are like. You’re no one’s mistress—I can see it in your eyes.”

“And you know all there is of love and lovers?” Eliza asked archly.

Beth had fed on love, the idea of love, for as long as she could remember. Ever since she was a little girl she’d dreamed of it, and felt it for the first time at age ten, when she became enamored of a gallant neighbor boy, Harry Ransley. Though that budding love had been cruelly crushed, she clung to its memory, and the boy, now long gone, grew to man’s estate in her imaginings. She looked for him everywhere. One day, she was certain, Harry would light upon her, reach out his hand, and say, “I have found you, my love.” And then her struggle would be over. She would be safe in the shelter of his heart.

“I know what love should be,” Beth said. “And my mother has, in one way and another, taught me all that it should not. No, our Zabby is not the king’s lover.” She paused and examined her new friend more critically. “Or if you are, you’re ashamed of it, and I’ve never yet seen one of the king’s mistresses ashamed.”

I’m ashamed,
Zabby thought,
because with his wife in the room behind me, all I could think about was bathing Charles in his bed.

“Well, I, for one, don’t care,” Eliza said. “I’m here to find a husband myself, so my father informs me, as is our Beth, as are you, I suppose, and the king’s not going to marry any of us, so who he quiffs is of no importance beyond a jest. Now I think on it, any jest is of the greatest importance. Come, we are all oddments here at court—I can tell that already. Lovely little Beth with her mad mother and noble blood back to Adam; you, whore and not whore from some barbarian land, they say; and me with a lineage of dirt and more money than the king. Let us be friends, shall we?” She shuffled herself until she was between them, then took their hands. “Lord, look at those bruises. His Majesty has a mighty strong grip. No matter, they’ll fade, and from what they say he’s softest to the women he’s wronged, so long as they’re soft to him. Now listen, are we friends? I don’t want a bedmate who’ll stab me in the back and whisper poison over my corpse.”

Zabby had never had a female friend, and was pleased—if rather astonished—at Eliza’s free, bawdy talk. It had the same flavor as her lively, intellectual conversations with Papa, though the ingredients were vastly different. And she took to Beth immediately, first for her mousekin softness, and also because she’d defended Zabby against gossip.
(Though I could have been his lover,
a small voice whispered.
Why couldn’t I have?)

“Well,” Zabby said, “I’ll be gone by the morrow, but in the meantime I’m your friend.”

“I too, both of you,” Beth said, immeasurably relieved. She’d dreaded being teased and put upon by the sophisticated maids of honor, the ones with money and real family to back them, with the confidence to hold their own at court. But these two were different. With them, and the kind queen, she might at least be peaceful, a short jaunt away from happiness. Now she felt like a kitten curled up beside two large and friendly dogs: warm and safe.

“But I don’t think friendship can be only for the meantime,” Beth went on, gentle and earnest. “If we’re friends now, truly friends, we’ll stay friends. If we don’t, we never were in the first place.”

Zabby nodded. “Papa says that certain things, the pure elements, aren’t mutable.”

“By your reasoning, Beth, sweetheart, we won’t know if we were ever friends till we’re not friends anymore.”

“Proof by contraries,” Zabby said.

“I’m no philosopher,” Eliza said, “but let us set out our properties now so we don’t have to test ’em later. We’re the gods of our own beliefs, so if we create a friendship true, then true it will be, and if not, we’re blasphemers against ourselves. Say, that would do for the stage. I’ll write it down come morning. What do you say to an oath, Beth, and Zabby, was it? What an outlandish name!”

“Elizabeth, really.”

“Od’s bodikins, three Elizabeths in one bed. A fop’s fantasy! Well, that seals it for me. One Elizabeth for all Elizabeths. Stand or fall together, eh?”

Zabby smiled. It was foolishness, all of it, but Eliza’s enthusiastic prattle was soothing, and she was sleepy, so she clasped their hands tighter and with them swore a giggling oath of eternal friendship. Released, she rolled to her side, almost asleep. Beth’s breathing was like the Barbados breeze, and Eliza’s gentle snores like waves grinding on the shore.

The lowliest rose the earliest. Several hours before dawn, scullery maids rubbed the sleep from their eyes, their bodies set like clockwork at the start of their careers by sound beatings meted out for any laziness. They coaxed the banked kitchen hearths into life, then woke the next on the hierarchy, who might get an extra few minutes of sleep, but in exchange had to empty all the servants’ chamber pots. This accomplished, they awoke their betters, who in turn awoke theirs, until sometime around daybreak the palace hummed with stirrings of the unseen, unacknowledged underlings who made life pleasant for those above them.

Eventually, the series of human alarms came to wake the genteel servants, ladies’ maids and waiting women who were privileged to empty the chamber pots of the nobility. One of these slipped into the bedroom of the three Elizabeths, and opened the shutters just loudly enough to make the bed heave with the simultaneous shifting of a dozen limbs.

“Good morning, ladies,” the spry elderly woman said briskly. “Tea, like Her Majesty takes, or good English ale?” Tea was vastly expensive, but a portion of Catherine’s dowry had been paid in leaf—when cash was desperately needed—and for the nonce it was plentiful and, despite the queen’s lowly position, fashionable.

Eliza demanded ale straight away, while Beth made a polite noise of demur. “Tea, I warrant? It’ll put some color into you, dearie, if I may be so bold. I’m Prue. Prudence Honor Goodfellow, and I’ll be serving you lasses, or ladies, or whatever you are.”

“I’ve a maid of my own,” Eliza said. “She’ll be here directly.”

“That fumble-fingered bumpkin who calls herself Whore-tense? I met her in the kitchen, with her theatrical airs. Rely on her and you’ll be poisoned or clapped or pilloried within a fortnight. She don’t know the court as I do.” She sidled up to the girls and gave them a broad wink. “Treat me right, missies, and I’ll see you never come to harm. We servants, we hear all, and tell all too, for a consideration.” A swollen-knuckled hand presented itself, and waited.

Finally Eliza reached for an embroidered pocket tossed carelessly on the floor. She pulled out two shining shillings, clinked them together like castanets, and dropped them into Prue’s palm. “See you keep your end of the bargain, Mother.”

Prue cackled and put a tray of white bread and perfect ivory butter balls on a small table near the window. “Silver always stimulates my memory,” she said. “Though gold, they say, is a
sovereign
cure for absentmindedness.” The hand snuck out again.