Ladies in Waiting (13 page)

Even now, Charles was leaning close to Barbara, no doubt whispering some assignation. He supped with his mistress nearly every night, though the maids encouraged Catherine to host her own entertainments, even inviting the hated Barbara, just to keep him home. Why was Charles free to seduce where he pleased? What would he do if she took a lover? In the play it was expected that everyone would wear horns. If plays mimed life, why shouldn’t she do as Charles did?

Chapter 10

The Transfiguration

W
HERE ZABBY LOVED
she denied; where Beth loved she sighed and said nothing, guarding her treasure like a gentle dragon; where Eliza loved she fretted, drove herself and her friends to distraction, and, finally, acted.

“I’m going to see Killigrew,” she told Beth and Zabby as they tied their hair in curl rags one evening. (Almost without noticing, Zabby found herself falling into these little tricks of the feminine trade—though she had a shabby copy of
Alchemical Principles
on her lap as she primped.)

“I don’t think your father would like that,” Zabby said. “You wouldn’t even tell him in your letters that you’d been to a play.”

“My father’s a fine old fellow, but he doesn’t understand the world . . . or me. But that’s neither here nor there, because I won’t be going to see Killigrew.”

“I thought you said . . .”

“I won’t be going—my cousin Mr. Duncan will.” She leaped out of bed and tore through a chest, and when she stood she had what looked like a dead shrew on her upper lip.

“What in the world?” Zabby asked.

“A false mustache. And look. I have breeches, a coat and waistcoat, hose and boots—everything!” She stripped off her shift and began to struggle into the unfamiliar clothes. “Ain’t I a sight? Will I pass, d’you think?” She spat, awkwardly, into the fireplace, took a few swaggering steps, and finally made a leg at the ladies. “Ah, I for got,” she said, and rolled an old glove before stuffing it down her pants, where it made an impressive tumescence. “Now?”

The transformation was amazing. “Clothes do make the man,” Zabby said. “I wonder, did I look like that in Barbados? I wore breeches most every day.”

Eliza put on her most raffish smile, puffed out her chest, and sauntered to Zabby’s side. “Ah, my sweet,” she said in as deep a voice as she could manage—it sounded like a croak, and she modified it. “It takes more than pants to make the man. It takes”—she made a suggestive movement of her hips—“. . . bollocks. Clapping flesh-bells. Dangling—”

“Stop!” Beth pleaded. “However did you get like this? You, growing up in the country.”

“And you at court, Beth dear, how did you stay so virginal? You blush at the name, but when you see the object, no doubt you’ll be hot for it, bell and clapper, eh? Oh, we’ve seen your mooning eyes search the crowds, but we don’t ask, do we, Zabby? Our Beth will tell us in her own good time.” She tapped the side of her nose. “But we have our suspicions, we do. That dark, oldish fellow we saw your mother the countess in deep talk with? The one just come from the Moorish lands, an Earl of Something, if I mistake me not. Briar, or Bramble . . . no, Thorne. The Earl of Thorne.”

“No, not him,” Beth said.

“Ah ha, I’ve caught you out! If not him, then another. Take care: your mother was none too happy the last time you let a man ogle you.” They never knew about the beating. Beth wore double petticoats and a russet dress, and refrained from sitting until the wounds closed. “This Thorne, now, he looked a handsome fellow, if a half-century old. They say the old ones are easiest to cozen, and when their sight goes they’ll never see what you’re up to.”

Beth, eager to change the subject, said, “When are you going to meet with Killigrew?”

“Oh, any day, after the play. He’s sure to be backstage.”

“And how will you get there? The queen won’t let you go, and you can’t take a carriage without her leave.”

“I’ll take a hackney, then.”

“What, ride in a hired hackney all alone? A lady can’t do such a thing.”

“She’s right,” Zabby agreed.

“I thought you told us you used to ride all over Barbados alone,” Eliza said.

“On the land we owned, certainly, which was enough to tire a horse. But London is different. There are cutpurses and highwaymen. Simona was telling the queen the other day about a devil of a scofflaw, one Elphinstone, who robs and ravishes travelers. The roads past the gates aren’t safe, and who knows but what he’ll strike in London itself. A lady shouldn’t be unprotected in the city.”

“But I won’t be a lady,” Eliza said.

“It’s a foolish idea,” Zabby said, “but if you must go, I’ll come with you.”

“My protector!” Eliza said, bouncing on the bed. “Oh, I’ll surely be safe with Zabby the Mighty at my side. Will you come too, Beth? How sweet you’d look as a boy—and probably just as likely to be raped, in this Gomorrah London.” She beamed at the expanding adventure. “We can be a trio of fopdoodles in from Essex to gape at the town. See a play, visit the bawdy-house, eat at an ordinary, fight a duel. Oh, yes, please, let us all go!”

The foolhardy plan grew, and even Zabby became excited, though she told herself it was only an experiment to examine life from the male point of view. With the help of Hortense’s visits to the Royal Exchange and Eliza’s bottomless purse, they outfitted themselves with an extravagant array of clothes: petticoat breeches that looked like knee-length skirts, linen shirts heaped with Flanders point, coats pinked to show a dozen underfabrics, cascading boot-hose. They quickly abandoned Eliza’s initial idea of making herself as masculine as possible with false whiskers and a rough voice, and instead impersonated the dandy of the day, vain, effeminate, affected. Since they’d put it about that they were from the country, Londoners would excuse any flubs as rural gaucherie, thinking them merely new to fashionable society, not the gender.

Zabby even managed to procure them three swords, the slim rapiers that every man with a pretention to status carried and many—even the most delicate-seeming fops—knew how to use to deadly effect.

On the day appointed for their adventure, Eliza copied out the final scene of
Nunquam Satis,
blotted it carefully, and added it to the stack of pages already waiting in a box of gilt Spanish leather. “There,” she said, patting the box. “My fortune and future.”

“How can you say that,” Beth asked, “when you already have nearly all a person could desire? Had I a tenth, a thousandth of your fortune, I’d be content. And as for your future, you have the leisure to wait, and a fond parent who will let you choose your husband.”

“Bah! Husbands! Who wants them?”

“You speak as if everyone keeps a stable full of husbands,” Zabby said, adjusting the ivy-patterned “cheat” waistcoat of her costume—ornate in the front, which showed, but plain in back.

“Now, there’s a thought. If I could have a seraglio of mates, perhaps they’d not pall. But no, ’twould take more than a eunuch to control them. They’d be after me en masse if I bought a costly gown or smiled too long at some young buck, myriad voices of masculine nagging. Perhaps if I had them all gelt . . . but then what’s the good of them? No, I have no wish to marry. What I want is to write plays.”

“You can do that
and
wed,” Beth said.

“By the grace of my husband, perhaps, but only under his suffrage, until such day as I vex him—then he’ll take away my ink. I’m chattel to my father now. A cow in a velvet stall, true, but a cow nonetheless. I’ll stay in his barn because I know how to wheedle him, but I’ll be no other man’s possession.”

“You mean you won’t marry at all?” Beth looked at her as if she were something monstrous, an aberration of nature. To marry was all Beth wanted. No, not even that. Desire, per se, didn’t enter into it. It was the natural order of things that one day, and soon, she would tuck herself under the wing of some man. She might hope he was good rather than bad, wealthy rather than poor, but he would exist, as surely as she breathed. She might have some choice in his identity—and, in fact, had firmly chosen—but not the mere fact of his being.

Even Zabby was astounded by Eliza’s bold proclamation. Zabby had always assumed that someday she’d discover a congenial mate—that’s how she thought of him—and set up a household with her own collection of beakers and books, chemicals and curiosities. She always pictured him (on the rare occasions when she
did
picture him) rather like her father, or perhaps like Godmother Cavendish’s husband, sweetly solemn, gently philosophical. But now, feeling the stirrings of love for the first time, she became aware of a husband’s other purpose, physical comfort, tactile companionship, bodily joy, children, and suddenly she couldn’t quite envision finding any of those things in the paternal helpmeet she assumed awaited her.

She could, however, quite clearly envision doing those things with Charles.

They were flaunting their unfamiliar vestments and laughing at Eliza’s ribald merriment when the door was flung open and Queen Catherine entered, alone. For a moment the girls froze; then, after puzzling through the etiquette of being both host and servant, male and female, curtsied. But a curtsy looks a great deal better in skirts than breeks, and their knees bent outward like awkward dancers.

For a moment the queen assumed her chaste maids had invited a trio of fops to their rooms, and it was in her favor that her first thought was how to shield her charges from scandal. Her second thought, upon seeing neither hide nor curl of the girls, was that the men were robbers. And at last, after Beth giggled, she realized what she saw. Zabby looked like a beardless
kouros,
Apollo perhaps, god of light and truth, healing and prophesy. Eliza, for all her foppish attire, was so well made that she might be Ares, though her amused mouth and high color made her more like tipsy Dionysus. Pretty Beth could be none other than Ganymede, ripe for ravishing.

“A masque?” Catherine asked, and to the girls’ astonishment sat down on a brocade tuffet. It was unheard of for the queen to visit the quarters of her underlings, unprecedented for her to do such a homely thing as perch on a footstool. Beth, long schooled in court etiquette, felt a compulsion to lower herself so her head would be below that of her queen, but since the only way to do so would be to lie on the ground—and that didn’t seem quite right either—she refrained from doing anything. “Life is nothing but amusement here,” the queen added with a sigh.

“How may we serve you, Your Majesty?” Eliza asked.

“I need . . . an ear.” She had to tell someone, and she couldn’t imagine telling languid Suffolk or the scheming, catty dressers or other maids of honor. These three, though, reminded her of her childhood in the convent. She might be nearly a decade older than they, but she could occasionally forget her rank and status far enough to confide in them. They’d never broken her trust.

“I had an idea,” Catherine went on. “I never should have, but I saw him caress Simona’s cheek and I couldn’t bear seeing him pick yet another one, one I’d have to look at day in, day out. So I . . . I . . .”

“You confronted him?” Zabby asked. She wished she could do the same thing herself, but it wasn’t her place.

“I told him what is good for the gander is good for the goose, and then I asked him what he would do if I took a lover.”

The girls gasped. “What did he say?” Zabby asked.

“He got very angry, and said a woman may be pardoned for succumbing to a king, because it would almost be treason not to, but for a queen to be unfaithful is itself treason of the highest order. Then I asked him what he would do if I had a paramour, and he spoke of the eighth King Henry. Which king is that, do you know?”

The maids of honor exchanged glances. “The one with so many wives,” Eliza said at last.

“So many?”

“Eight, I do believe. Some divorced, some beheaded.”

The queen’s mouth made a little O, and she touched her throat as if her slender gloved hands might preserve it from the executioner’s ax.

“Do you want to take a lover?” Zabby asked in curiosity.

“No, never, but if he can cut off my head for it, why can’t I do the same thing to him? It isn’t right! Why should I have to see his bastards fat and laughing in their cradles, and that young bend-sinister Crofts acting like a kingling himself?”

“It is the way of the world, Your Majesty. Fear not: you’ll have a cradle full of baby-fat soon enough.”

“No, no, or I would be quick by now!” She covered her face with her hands. “Oh, why was I born a woman?”

“To laugh at men, Your Majesty,” Eliza said gently. “There’s naught for it but laughter. Against war, and plague and strife, one can but be gay and spite the devil. Take comfort in the knowledge that every man is the same, and every woman full of the same complaints. Your husband wenches well and publicly, because he is king, but the farmer covets his neighbor’s wife—and his ass, too, in Scotland, from all I’ve heard—and the inn-keeper has his hand in the serving-slattern’s placket.”

“It cannot be true. Other men do not use their wives so, or no woman would wed. It must be Charles’s particular sin. Other men aren’t always pursuing a new conquest.”

“Would you like to find out?” Eliza asked, and the others shot her warning looks. “These costumes aren’t for a masque. We’re going on an expedition, into the foreign land known as the World of Men. Clothed in native fashion, we propose to mingle with the savage tribe and discover its secrets. Will you don like garb and join us?”

Catherine’s face grew wistful, distant. “When I was a little girl in the convent, a bit younger than you, my friends and I would barter our embroidered cambric handkerchiefs to borrow the milkmaids’ clothes, and slip from the mother’s watchful eye. Mostly we sported in the meadows, but once there was a hiring fair nearby. My friend Anna was hired to milk goats, and a farmer kissed my sleeve and said my lips were the color of a field poppy. When our abbess found out where we’d gone, we lived on bread and water for a week. But she never knew about the kiss. I always wonder if that farmer found another goat girl to replace Anna. She took holy orders a year later. Quite a different career!”