Constant Heart (25 page)

She had got her fan stuck to her brooch and she asked me to help her unfix it. She asked an old family friend because she did not wish to be an embarrassment to her new husband.”

By the time I had finished my recitation, I was smiling from sheer relief. From giddiness. Marget had misinterpreted my actions for cheating! But what havoc her thoughts had wrought. What havoc my own thoughts had wrought. I wondered how the love between us, which had seemed so strong, could also be so fragile. I reached a hand out to her. “Come here.”

She stepped near. But she did not reach her hand out to mine.

“How could I ever look at another woman when you stand before me as you do this moment? Without ornament, without paint, without anything at all?” My heart seemed to have such a ridiculous way of soaring. “You are more than enough.”

Her head rose, her eyes shining. “And I could never think of looking at another man the way I look at you.”

Her hand met mine and I pulled her into my lap. I had more in mind than just sitting, but why should it not first begin with a kiss?

26

W
ith all well once more between Lytham and I, we greeted the cold with the indifference that comes only from the knowledge of a warm and congenial bed. Winter poured forth from heaven’s gates in a freezing rain, which glazed all of London’s houses and made the streets treacherous. But once the ice had melted and Her Majesty took herself to Richmond Palace, Lytham asked permission to return to Holleystone.

I awoke the first morning at the estate with cramps in my wrists.

When Joan came to draw me from sleep, she observed me trying to shake them out.

“What is it?”

“ ’Tis nothing. My wrists have simply decided to sleep longer than I am prepared to permit.” The sensation was not unlike that of a person left too long abed, when the insides begin to ache for want of motion. By the time I had been dressed, the impression had vanished.

But the next week it returned. And by the end of February, it had become my constant morning companion. We tried bundling my hands in heated cloths. It did nothing for my wrists, but it reddened my palms.

I had become rather glum about the state of my hands when one morning Lytham tried to cheer me.

“Come! You are too melancholy. Sport is wanted. Change into your riding clothes and I shall meet you out front with your horse.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the mews.”

The mews? Then he meant to hawk.

Once Joan had helped me change, Lytham and I mounted and rode out to the birds.

A man dressed in a rough jerkin and hose emerged from the structure to meet us. He had the air of a man stepping out of his castle, his demeanor not unlike Lytham’s when he stepped out of Holleystone. His nose was rather like Lytham’s as well. But his face was bronzed and roughened by wrinkles, as if he had spent his life in the sun.

“Falconer, we wish to hawk.”

“My lord.”

“Is it not time to be finding you an apprentice?”

“Time enough once I am dead. My lord.” He turned his back to us and disappeared inside the building.

“Falconer’s the best in the county. Perhaps in the realm. I could not otherwise allow my person to be treated so disrespectfully.”

Lytham’s words were apologetic, but his smile was not.

Upon entering the mews, the birds turned their heads and looked at us with unblinking eye. One of them shifted in its cage, setting the bells on its legs to jangling.

“I had always wondered how falcons were kept.”

“You have never hawked?”

“You find me so masculine as that?”

Lytham bowed before me, then took my hand and kissed it.

“Nay. I find you so clever as that!”

“My father loves the hunt, but he has never kept birds.”

“Never?”

I relented. “He kept pigeons.”

“Pigeons!” Lytham and the falconer exchanged distressed glances.

Lytham addressed the falconer. “Do you not still keep a merlin?”

“The Lady Elinor’s?”

Lytham frowned.

The falconer recognized that he had made a mistake and tried to reduce it. “That merlin has gone.”

“Then find another. The countess shall be trained a merlin.”

“Aye.”

I waited for Falconer to say “my lord,” but he never did. I was surprised the earl would tolerate such impertinence. But perhaps, as he had said, the man was worth it.

The falconer handed Lytham a sturdy leather glove before pulling on a long, thick glove himself and removing one of the birds from its cage.

Lytham mounted his horse, then bent and reached an arm down toward the falconer. The bird, now transferred to Lytham’s arm, was hooded.

We rode out into the hunting park, where Lytham set the bird to flying while the parks-keeper sent men out into the woods to scare up the game.

“They call this the sport of kings, for the falcon is king of all he sees. He can spy even the smallest of creatures.” The bird, as if to oblige Lytham, paused in mid-flight, tucked his wings to his body, and plummeted toward the earth. Hardly stopping to sink his claws into his prey, he flew back to us and landed at Lytham’s feet, his claws grasping a wriggling squirrel.

The bird released the prey and Lytham kicked it aside, then sent him out to fly again. We spent several hours at hawking, and it proved a good diversion from thoughts of my hands.

As I progressed on my needlework that spring, back at Lytham House, I noticed increasing prickles and itching in my thumb and long finger. They felt dull and swollen, as if my skin were too small, though in looking I could perceive no change in their shape nor in their size.

Joan caught me trying to rub the tingles from my palm one forenoon.

“If I might . . . ?” She took my hand between her own and began to rub the palm with her thumbs. It helped for a time, but my ailment reappeared the next morning.

As if in answer to my prayers, it soon became apparent from what ill I suffered. If we were correct, Joan and I, the cure would show itself in six short months. I was to birth a babe! And there was much to be prepared.

I wrote to my mother for linens and she sent them back in abundance. I sent Joan back to Holleystone to find a wet nurse and a rocker for the babe’s cradle. I began work upon a small cap, though it went slowly for lack of strength in my fingers. I collected a coral for the babe to cut its teeth on and bought a tiny ruff.

Lytham took great care that I not over-tax myself. No longer was I allowed to accompany him to Southwark to the theaters, though he would always search me out to tell me of the plays that he had seen. As my belly grew bigger, Lytham’s concerns increased. Though every other woman in England continued her habits up until her lying-in, I could not. Though I would not allow myself to be barred from court, he forbade me to attend state dinners. He had seen me, once, pause in my handiwork and pull at my fingers, so that pleasure was denied me as well. Soon all I could do was sit at the house while he went about the city at his leisure.

27

W
ith my activities so severely curtailed, I gave Joan little about which to worry. And so she set her thoughts on chilblains. Since I was spending so much time in the stillroom, laying up salves and remedies for the season and for the babe, I was exposed, more than was usual, to winter’s chills. She insisted that I not tarry upon leaving but come first up to my chambers. And waiting there, she would heat stones upon which I could warm my hands and feet.

One afternoon the cloth in which she had wrapped one of the stones slipped. We did not discover it until she uncovered my hands and I lifted them from the rock. We both cried out when we saw the blisters.

She dropped to her knees, her eyes drowning in tears. “I beg your pardon! We can plunge it into water. I can cover it in unguent!”

“Aye, quickly. Go!”

Her distress was much worse than my own. For although it was my hand that had been burned, I could not feel the pain. I ran the edge of a fingernail across the blisters and felt still nothing. Not even when I pressed down against the bubble of my own flesh.

I lifted the palm to my cheek and it felt hot against my face.

Curious indeed.

I tried to hide the blisters from Lytham, but he discovered them at the first opportunity.

“Are you well, my sweet?” I bent to kiss Marget as she sat by the fire in her chambers. She had stayed at Lytham House that night while I had attended entertainments at court.

“I am well.” Her eyes belied her statement.

I caught up one of her hands and meant to kiss it, but she recoiled at my touch. Opening my hand, I gasped at the sight before my eyes.

“What have you done?”

“It is nothing. Just a blister.”

“ ’Tis more than one. ’Tis several!” I turned her hand toward the fire’s light so I could see them more clearly. “How did you come by them?”

“I was heating my hands.”

“Why?”

“I had been in the stillroom.”

“Why?”

“To lay up unguents.” There was exasperation at work in her voice.

“But you were there long enough for your hands to swell so?”

“You sound just like Joan!” She pulled her hand from me and tried to fold it into her other.

“And Joan is a woman with some sense in her head. You cannot do such things.”

“Then what
can
I do? I cannot sing, I cannot dance, I cannot embroider, I cannot . . . do anything!”

“I only want you well. You
and
the babe.”

“I
am
well.”

“Perhaps . . . shall I ask the musicians to perform? Tomorrow night?”

She shook her head.

“I could . . . invite a group of players to come.”

She shook her head once more.

“We could . . . play a game of chess!”

“I wish to
do
something, not just sit in a chair and watch something done.”

“I can think of many things that do not require you to sit. One thing, for instance, that might require lying down. Upon a bed.”

Her chin came up. “Nay. You will not have me so easy as that!

Not when you cage me up.”

“What if I promise to uncage you?”

“To do anything I like?”

“To do some things that you like . . . just so long as you promise me one thing: do not over-tax yourself.”

“I promise. But I regret to inform you that your suggestion of entertainments for this evening is quite taxing indeed.”

I might have kept my promise to Lytham, but Sir Walter Raleigh got himself placed under house arrest in May. And Lady de Winter told me Lytham would want to know. I found him in his chambers with Nicholas, surprising the both of them with my presence.

“What has happened?”

I took several moments to reply, lacking the breath to say anything at all.

Lytham led me to a chair and bid me sit.

“ ’Tis Raleigh.”

“What of him?”

“His marriage has been discovered . . . and his babe.”

“His marriage?”

“To Bess Throckmorton. Her Majesty’s maid-in-waiting.”

Lytham’s brows rose near to his hairline and I knew then the feeling of sweet triumph. I had told him something that he had not known.

“He has been married?”

“Aye.”

“Are you certain? Surely the babe was just . . . an . . . accident.

A singular occasion.”

“It has been said that it resulted from a series of several . . . accidents.” Such bold behavior by one of the Queen’s maids would not be tolerated. Not if the love affair had been carried on beneath that very long, very aquiline, very jealous, vain, malevolent nose.

Indeed, Raleigh was questioned for two days. And then Bess was taken and placed under house arrest with her babe, elsewhere in town. It could not go well for her.

And in some respects, it was not going well for me. My hands were swift becoming useless. And I knew it most upon dressing. One morning I asked Joan for my rope of pearls and a brooch.

She brought them to me and I inclined my head so that she could drape the pearls over it in several loops. She worked some moments to arrange them in cascading lengths. “And the brooch?”