Constant Heart (18 page)

“Very well. As you wish.” She lowered herself once more into the chair.

The maid returned with the tongs, lit a candle, and began to heat them by holding them to the flame.

“Proceed, girl.”

The maid glanced from Lady de Winter to me.

I nodded.

Standing behind me, she took up a length of hairs close to my scalp and grasped it between the tongs, twisting them with a force that misshaped my eyes. It did not take long for the marked stench of burning hairs to reach my recovered nose.

“Shall you read to me?” Lady de Winter’s question sounded like a command.

I attempted a nod, willing to do anything that would pull my thoughts from those torturous tongs.

“Joan?
The Faerie Queene
?” I heard her steps swish atop the rushes as she searched for the book.

The maid released me from her grip and I saw Lady de Winter frown.

I looked round to find the maid holding a lock of hairs between the tongs. It had broken from my head.

“You must not use so much heat. And do not grip the hairs so long. With the coloring, they do not take the heat so well.”

The maid stood as if frozen, staring at the hairs.

“Throw them to the fire, girl.” Lady de Winter, done with the maid, turned and glanced over her shoulder, looking for Joan. “And find your lady her book!”

The maid removed the hairs from the tongs and cast them into the fire. Then she heated them by candle flame to begin her punishment anew.

I read through the first seven cantos, pausing only when the pain became too great, and then only to swallow a gasp.

After the whole of my head had been subjected to the tongs, Lady de Winter watched as Joan dressed me and then she stayed to direct the arrangement of my hairs beneath my hat.

Before she left, I asked Lady de Winter a question that had, until then, remained undecipherable. “Why do you help me?”

“Because a lovesick woman left Lytham in my care. I promised her to help him any way I could. I see what you want, girl, and we have the same goal. We both want him to succeed. So if I can aid in your success, then you can aid in his. It is nothing less or more.”

I had grown so used to the girl’s presence that I rarely noted it. She walked softly. She spoke softly. She . . . lived softly. If, as Nicholas had claimed, she had ever hoped to please me, she had, at last, stumbled upon a way to do it. She had nearly made me forget her very existence.

But that all changed one evening when I came down the great stairs for supper and found that a perfect vision of a courtier was waiting for me in her place.

After I had bowed, I took her hand to kiss it and looked into her eyes . . . which looked straight back at me. And it was only then that I realized it
was
the girl. For in truth, there was little of a girl left in her. And not a suggestion of a blush atop those painted cheeks. The change in the color of her hairs completed the illusion that the paint had begun to cast. And somehow it had emboldened her manner.

As I looked upon her throughout the meal, I began to see how she might be used to some advantage.

The next morning I commanded my tailor to come for a consultation. I commanded the draper, the furrier, the cobbler, and the glover as well.

The next forenoon, my presence was requested by the earl. Joan helped to repaint my face and a chambermaid restyled my hairs and fixed my hat to them anew before I went to see him.

I kept the image of the person I had become before me as I struggled to summon each new breath and keep my fear at bay.

What did the earl want of me? And how would a courtier, how would Lady de Winter, choose to respond?

As I walked through the door to the earl’s rooms, my trepidation soon turned to relief. It was not to a private audience that I had been summoned. The earl’s rooms had been overtaken by people and fabrics, furs and fripperies, gloves and shoes. It was filled to overflowing with people. All of them, it soon became apparent, were waiting for me.

“My lord, might I suggest a damask silk in crimson?” The draper bowed before the earl, then approached me while holding out a length of fabric. His assistant took my hand, towing me further into the room. As he did that, another person proceeded to remove my hat from my head and a fourth to unlace the sleeves from my gown. A fifth went to work unpinning my ruff.

A sixth man, a tailor, grasped the end of the damask and arranged it across my chest, tucking it into my bodice and then tugging on the whole to bring it still lower. “Perhaps a style such as this, my lord?”

The earl rose from his desk and stood before me, turning his head first this way and that, examining me with narrowed eyes.

“ ’Tis a vivid color . . .”

“Aye, my lord, and made with the very best of dyes.”

“But I fear it too overpowering.”

The draper dove for a length of azure-colored damask. “Perhaps in a different color.”

The tailor whipped the crimson from my chest and used it instead to wrap around my skirts. “Perhaps in a different location.”

“With a jeweled silk shoe?”

“Or a trim of sable?”

“A kid glove?”

“Perhaps . . .”

By the end of the forenoon, the earl had ordered from the tailor a dozen gowns in a rainbow’s worth of colors; from the cobbler, a dozen pairs of shoes; and from the glover, a dozen pairs of gloves.

But never, not once in all of the draping and wrapping, tucking on and pulling off, had any of them thought to speak to me.

Within a month’s time, all that the earl had ordered had been delivered to Lytham House. And it was with great rejoicing that I learned, the next day Lady de Winter was absent from court, that all that toil had been worth the trouble. I had people aplenty to speak to and none turned from my voice.

19

T
he more I became part of the circles of the court, the more the earl began to turn his attentions toward me. Advised by he Joan, I tried to do nothing that would turn them away once more. But it was not long before I knew his attentions to be perfunctory rather than personal. He played at being a noble husband and, having watched and learned from Lady de Winter and her friends, I played at being a noble wife.

But still, I was not a wife who could satisfy her husband. The earl found other delights to amuse him than my bed. And though he now spoke to me and laughed with me, he did the same with every lady in the court.

I learned to smile when I would rather grimace. I learned to laugh when I would rather cry. I learned to pretend interest in what bored me and to pretend indifference to those things which might have caused the lift of an eyebrow—had I had any left.

One forenoon, since the tides were against us, we rode across London Bridge to Southbank to stroll in Paris Garden. Upon our return, in approaching the bridge, I looked up too early and saw a rotting head leering from the first gateway. A swarm of kites were picking at the flesh. The top of the skull had been pecked clean to a knob of ivory.

Lytham glanced over, saw me looking up, and followed my gaze.

“A priest. Quartered. For treason.”

My stomach roiled and I frowned against the surge of bile that erupted into my throat. Unable to help myself, I heaved and then leaned across the saddle and emptied my dinner into the street.

When we dismounted at Lytham House, the earl commanded wine from one of his men. When it was delivered, he handed it to me.

“Forgive me, my lord. I am sorry . . .”

“Never be sorry for possessing a woman’s heart.”

“It does not move you?”

“When a man commits to his path, as did that priest, his destiny is writ by his steps, and the best he can accomplish is to delay the hand of fate.”

“And you, my lord? What of your path?”

He looked on me and smiled, but the warmth of the smile did not reach into his eyes. “My steps have led me to fair places indeed.”

Such pretty words, but now I knew how easily they rolled off a courtier’s tongue. They were as false as my own red hairs. But I returned the smile and drank some more. The earl was a courtier and would always be one. But then, perhaps I had become one too.

The girl had asked me of my path. Did I truly believe that my destiny was writ by my steps? That I could do nothing more than delay the hand of fate? I puzzled on my own words as I walked up the grand stairs and pondered them still more as I paced within my chamber.

They were pretty words, couched in pretty phrases. Pretty words were my currency, though I rarely gave any thought to their actual meaning. But these words . . . I could not help but wonder if I truly meant them.

By fate, did I not perhaps mean God? Were they one and the same, or did fate perhaps place herself into the hands of God?

Perhaps.

Surely when a man committed himself to a path, he must choose one destiny over another. My brother, for instance. Had he not committed himself to his lustful passions, then Holleystone might never have been sold. He might never have caught the great pox and died.

Might, in fact, have lived on to marry some suitable woman who could have borne him an heir.

But then, where might that have left me?

What might have been a more judicious choice for his own destiny would have been disastrous for mine. Or perhaps not. Who is to say that I might not have made my own fortune had I continued in the wars? Or that I would not have become the sort of courtier that I was now?

I ceased my walking and placed myself at my desk. Took up a quill and dipped it into the inkwell.

No matter what my destiny might have been, it was fixed now. I had planted my feet firmly upon the path of the courtier. My family’s honor, my own destiny, would rise or fall according to how well I trod that sometimes—oftentimes—disreputable path. There now was an irony: that my family’s good name should rest upon my own duplicity! In my life Her Majesty seemed to play the role of the Most Almighty God. If I were to receive any benevolence, any sign of goodwill, I must look to her to receive it.

Blasphemy, all of it, but uncertain though I was of my own theology, I knew one thing quite well: I served Her Majesty, the Queen. And when that Queen dictated who God was and how He was to be worshiped, one might have a very hard time drawing any other conclusion than this: ’twas Her Majesty the Queen of England who determined the very nature of God.

How had religion come to be so mixed up in politics? And if I had been so bold as to observe such heresies, did that mean my soul was damned?

Perhaps.

But who would do the damning? Her Majesty or God? Perhaps one could place himself in the service of both at the same time.

That was certainly what Her Majesty implied. But what could there truly be of faith when a Queen had dared to set herself above God?

If indeed God was truly sovereign, if indeed I was leading a life unworthy of my family’s honor, then it was He who would have to convince my own sovereign to loose me from the courtier’s path. I could see no other way to live my life.

I sighed and then put the quill to the paper before me.

There was no point in thinking such melancholy thoughts. They could only lead to confinement in the Tower. If there was a destiny to be had, a fate to be influenced, then I might as well be about the doing of it. There was a letter that must be written to the steward at Holleystone, and later, entertainments to be had in Her Majesty’s Presence Chamber.