Ladies in Waiting (12 page)

A final cut, and her voice was almost loving. “Forget him, my sweet, whoever he was. He’s false. Marry well, for your family, for your name. One man’s like another, in the end.”

She whipped out a handkerchief, much laundered but impeccably clean, and draped it over Beth’s bloody thighs. “There’s blood enough for a maidenhead. Perhaps that will cool the heat of your sanguine humors.” She chuckled and peeked at the gore underneath. “They’ll likely scar,” she said blandly, “but that shan’t hurt your value. If ever a man sees them before your marriage night, I’ll kill you, then him, then myself. Will so much blood suffice?”

She hobbled out the door.

When the sound of her knocking cane grew muted, then hushed altogether, Beth stood painfully, as proud and erect as her slight frame would allow. “I don’t care what she says. He came for me, and we’re meant to be together. I will meet him again. I will!”

Blood seeped through her skirt, the first autumnal red on her bright summer green.

Chapter 9

The Dream Made Flesh

P
ARLIAMENT
was in session . . . which mattered not one jot to anyone at court. All that concerned those wits and rakes, debauchers and debauchees, was that when Parliament opened, so did the theaters.

“Eliza, I have
five
fingers, you know,” the queen said as her maids of honor pulled buttercup-yellow gloves onto her hands. Beth was already smoothing the kidskin to the queen’s elbows, but Eliza was struggling to shove two of Catherine’s fingers into one hole.

“Pardon, Your Majesty, but flay me, how can a body know what it’s about when her dream is on the verge of being made flesh?”

“Flesh?” Catherine asked. Her English, though much improved, was not up to the complexities of Eliza’s rapid speech. She thought the word had something to do with the sacraments, and indeed she saw that Eliza was aglow with agitated rapture.

“The stage, Your Majesty! The passion and the pathos of life distilled into a three-hour draught, the world compressed to a jutting apron.”

Catherine had no idea how the world could fit in a cooking smock, but she smiled at her maid’s excitement.

“Charles is most . . . happy? . . . with the theater. He says he loves it with all his cunny.”

Beth gaped, the other ladies tittered, but Eliza only shook her head.

“Your Majesty, Buckingham has done it to you again. What did he tell you that word means?”

“This,” she said, putting her hand on her chest. “Boom-boom, boom-boom. The organ of love, he told me. Did I say it wrong?” She looked around innocently.

“Damned whoreson! Pray, madam, pay no further heed to the duke. Imagine if you’d said it in an audience, or to the archbishop!”

“What does it mean?”

Smirking through her anger, Eliza turned to Beth. “You tell her, sweetheart. You’ve a knack for putting things gently. I’ll shock her back to Portugal if I tell her what a cunny’s for.”

Blushing, Beth leaned into the queen’s black curls and whispered in her ear.

“Oh!” Catherine said, then surprised them all by remarking, “The duke was right about one thing. It is what a woman uses to love a man.”

The queen had changed a good deal in the past few months, or, if not changed, adapted. She dressed exclusively in English clothes, took part, however awkwardly, in the dances and masques, and even learned to play cards, though she still thought gambling a sin. She’d come to understand that patience and grace would serve her better than a show of temper—that was Barbara’s forte—and though she still wept when no one was watching, and thought God must be annoyed that her prayers were ever on the same topic, she gave a convincing show of accepting her husband’s infidelities.

“I’m still not sure playgoing is a moral pastime,” Catherine mused as they powdered her throat and fastened pearl drops to her lobes. “Women flaunting themselves onstage . . .”

“Troth, Your Highness,” Eliza said, “a woman will flaunt herself wherever she goes, even so mean a specimen as myself. When the king your husband granted charters to the two companies, he bid them present life in its true myriad forms. You’d not have a burly fellow of forty play dainty Desdemona, would you? You’ll enjoy it, madam. Come, chin up so I can pin these roses to your bodice. There now, you’re ready for your audience.”

“Another word I use wrong,” Catherine said, shaking her head. “I thought
we
are the audience.”

“You are audience and performer and director all in one. You go to watch the play, and the people go to watch you. And His Majesty, of course. Then they go home and do their best to ape their betters.”

“I’m tired of being watched,” Catherine said.

“Then you should have chosen a different line of work,” Eliza said, not unkindly. “You are like one of your popish icons, an object of devotion.”

“Ah, but holy statues can sometimes work miracles. What do I do in this world?”

Eliza shrugged her broad, square shoulders. “That’s for you to decide, Your Majesty. You have the third greatest power in the land—God, the king, then you. And God rarely bothers. Now where is that Zabby?”

“Where she always is,” said Catherine with a sigh. “At my husband’s side.”

Eliza regarded the queen archly. “There are many threats to your happiness, madam, but you and I both know our Zabby isn’t one of them. Here, turn toward the gueridon so I can see to paint your lids. Aye, I know, but you’ve finer eyes than that slut Castlemaine, so you might as well show them off now and do penance for vanity later. No one will notice if your knees are red from praying, but give them a weary eye and they’ll say for weeks how unbecoming you’ve become. Tch!” She held up a hand to stop what she knew the queen was about to say. “You’ve beauty aplenty; only learn how to use it. Perhaps if you watch the actors tonight you’ll have a lesson.”

Zabby slipped into the room, dressed, more or less, though with a black smudge on her nose.

“Pardon, Your Majesty,” she said, sweeping low.

“Please recall you are my servant, not my husband’s,” Catherine said in Spanish, and Zabby did her best to look contrite. But she’d spent a glorious morning in Charles’s elaboratory, examining a specimen brought by a German alchemist, a pale waxy substance that gave off its own light, burning without heat, without being consumed. Because the effect was more noticeable in the dark, they’d extinguished the lamps, shuttered the windows, and huddled together on a workbench, hunched over their Lucifer light. Zabby had watched Charles at least as much as the specimen. His anxious, harried face had been softened in the glow, his cares erased. She remembered, acutely, what it was like to watch him sleep in those days when the danger of death had passed.

Staring into that morning-star glow, side by side, was almost like staring into each other’s eyes, she thought, then chided herself for being as dreamy as Beth, who these days could hardly string a coherent sentence together without trailing off into the silence of some inner fantasy. It was science, no more, Zabby told herself, then set about tying the ribbons on the queen’s garters. She felt Catherine’s eyes on the back of her bent head and willed her own phantasms away. The king belonged to another, and even if he hadn’t, his heart was chipped into so many fragments that she’d scorn the sliver that would be hers.

The maids of honor turned possession of the queen over to the more senior ladies and bundled into one of the royal carriages. Runners and criers paced the length of the splendid train, while liveried coachmen and foppishly clad Life Guards, the king’s ceremonial protective force, held their wigs against the stiffening wind. More efficient guards watched from the sidelines in sober clothes, their pistols hidden beneath their jackets, but Charles had no fear of assassination. He could always read his people, and knew there was little risk of an individual attack. He was well beloved—as a king and as a man. The danger would come not if one man turned against him, but if ten thousand turned against what he represented, and Charles, trained by his early tragedy, would surely smell mass treason in the wind.

Then too, he was known to say privately, he was safe as long as his brother lived, for no one wanted him as king. A bad heir is a monarch’s best protection.

However magnificent the equipage, gilded and plumed, it was really no more than a box tied upon a wheeled frame, the only mechanical cushioning being in the slackness of the ropes—which, if it made the ride a jot more comfortable, also considerably increased the odds the two parts would separate and tip the giggling, silken cargo into the nearest sewer.

Most of the audience arrived an hour or two early, since half the fun of a play was the before-curtain roistering in the pit and the destruction of characters in the boxes. But all chatter stopped when the king and his retinue entered. There were a few
huzzahs,
a whistle or two, a bleat like a billy goat (which for some reason brought a smile to Charles’s lips), and then the crowd devolved into their previous gaiety.

“How does he do it?” Zabby murmured. “How is he god and king and man, all at once? See how they love him, like he is one of them.”

“You’ve struck upon it, Zabby,” Eliza said, fanning herself languidly against the heat and press. “He’s like the Greek gods of old, with all the foibles of a man. I’ve read a thing or two of ruttish Zeus. He had lust and anger and laughter just like a man. People like their gods accessible, and your Charles has the knack of seeming so.”

“Too accessible,” Zabby said.

“Jealous?”

Her pale eyes widened. Had Eliza read her secret, the one she denied even to herself? “No . . . no, certainly not. I only meant that he rides with scant guard, he touches the masses to cure their ills, he walks through St. James’s Park where any ruffian could accost him. He should hold himself apart.”

“He wants love,” Beth said. “Desperately.”

Eliza laughed, thinking Charles had that aplenty, and Zabby was sure Beth was wrong, but before they could argue, the crimson curtain rose and a distinguished silver-haired gentleman stepped out. Slim and elegant, he twirled his mustachios affectionately until the crowd hushed, then addressed the audience directly.

“Slit my gizzard, I never thought I’d see the day!” Eliza gushed as Zabby strained to catch the actor’s words. “Thomas Killigrew himself! He runs the King’s Company, you know. I have a folio of all his plays. I weep every time I read
Claricilla.
How can so much genius fit in such a small, neat head? You’d think his skull would positively bulge with it.”

The maids of honor were seated in the royal box (mostly to fetch syllabubs, fans, or a scented
mouchoir
) two rows behind Their Majesties and Highnesses, and their view was obstructed by piled curls and feathers. The Countess of Suffolk hissed at Eliza to hold her tongue, and Eliza muttered in a stage whisper that Suffolk wouldn’t know a good play if it crawled up her petticoats. She canted herself this way and that, trying to get a better view, and at last stood up, hands behind her back like a soldier at her ease.

The movement caught Killigrew’s eye, and he turned to speak the last lines of the prologue directly to the royal box—and, Eliza was sure, to her.

“
He wed her, then away to war.

Will she be true or play the whore?

All unguarded, bound yet free . . .

The married maiden’s tragedy.
”

In a dreamy voice—much the same as the one Beth had been using of late—Eliza sighed and said, “If only I could have a moment with him. If only he’d read but a page of
Nunquam Satis.
”

She stood through the rest of the play, like any apprentice or cocklemonger at a shilling a head in the gallery. She had found her personal deity—not a virile, unattainable monarch such as Zabby almost unwittingly, certainly unwillingly, desired, or yet a mere man such as Beth adored.

What she’d felt before was no more than an infatuation with words on paper, a lusty green-sickness for a thing she imagined but had never experienced. Now Eliza had seen her heart’s desire, and she knew that she was firmly, unequivocally, passionately in love with the stage.

When the curtain closed she clutched at her heart in a true tragedienne’s expression of grief. She was so distracted on the way out that the queen was forced to resort to picking up her own dropped fan.

“My pardon, Your Majesty,” Eliza said, elaborately contrite, and, under the influence of the recent exhibition, bowing with exaggerated drama. “But how can a soul do her duty when she’s been glamoured? I vow I’m not responsible for a thing I do in the next hour—I’m under such a spell! What did you think, Your Majesty? Was it not a marvelous spectacle?”

“I couldn’t quite follow it,” Catherine confessed.

“It was rather simple, Your Majesty. As soon as the lady was married, her husband was sent to war before the consummation could take place, so of course the neighboring gallant made a play for her. To guard her chastity, the maid suggested the women switch places, and then to further guard themselves they dressed as master and manservant.”

“Those pretty boys were females?” Catherine asked, baffled.

“Certs, and then the gallant dressed his page as a girl to sneak him into the lady’s estate, and the lady, dressed as a boy servant, and the page, dressed as a girl, seduced each other, but were such innocents neither thought anything was amiss at the grand unveiling.”

“And the marriage at the end?”

“The gallant married the maid, thinking her the lady.”

“The married lady?” the queen asked, almost giving up.

“The maid—acting the lady—swore it was annulled.”

“And this is called a tragedy?”

“Aye, for the absent husband it is, I suppose. The clever maid gets a step up in the world, the swindling gallant gets swindled himself, and the lady finds pleasure. Best of all, she can keep the lad as a servant under her husband’s nose, once he returns.”

It was a new world for Catherine. She was aware that none of it was serious, that the play was only an elaborate excuse for jokes and puns and clever verse, yet it grated on her that such obscene frippery should be held up as an example.