by Karleen Koen
There is no end to your wit, thought Balmoral.
“You are a dear and trusted friend, and I wanted to discuss it with you before I made a reply. What do you advise me?”
“It’s true you’ve become quite old.” He smiled at her sudden smile. “I advise you to wait.”
“I have no other offers, Your Grace. Must I go and live as companion to my aunt, or move back to my father’s house? I cannot continue as a maid of honor, do not, in matter of fact, wish to. Only my love for the queen has kept me there as long as it has.”
She’d thrown down the gauntlet, as he’d known inevitably she would. What he had not known, however, was precisely what he would say. They stared at each other, knowing they’d come to the crossroads of their friendship.
“I am very old, I am very ill. I may not live out the year.”
Alice didn’t answer, and her eyes didn’t leave his face.
“I am far too old for you. But”—he took a breath, and so did Alice—“I ask for your hand in marriage—”
He held out his hand to stop her as she moved toward him.
“With this proviso: that you may at any moment, until the wedding itself, draw back and there will be no imprecations from me.”
She knelt before him, flung her arms around him, put her head on his lap. He touched her hair, vibrant with life, and soft, soft for so many curls, as he continued. “We shall marry at the beginning of summer—”
“So long a wait—”
“I want you to have time to consider what you do.”
“I won’t change my mind. It’s you who will.”
“I will call upon your father in the next day or so.”
She caught the expression on his face. “You believe you ally yourself with a rogue. You do, but a useful one. My father will be your faithful servant. I guarantee it. Within a week, he will be spilling every plot from Buckingham’s cabal.”
“That will be useful. I will ask that you speak of my proposal to no one until I have spoken with your father and he and I are agreed on terms.”
“Yes.”
“Well then.”
“Well then.” She stood, pulled herself up on the wide ledge of the canal, pulled her skirts up enough to show off her stockinged ankles, and began to dance. She leapt and tapped her toes and heels to the stone and sang an old rhyme: “‘Little maid, pretty maid, whither goest thou? Down in the forest to milk my cow. Shall I go with thee? No, not now. When I send for thee, then come thou.’” She clapped her hands and turned round and round, keeping her balance when three times he thought she might fall. Finally, she leaped down to dance around his chair, before falling again in a bell of skirts at his feet.
“Pretty behavior for the Duchess of Balmoral.”
She saw he was cross. “I am not the Duchess of Balmoral yet. It was a jest, a joy, only for you. May the Duchess of Balmoral not dance before her husband?”
“I’m going to regret this.”
She laughed and pulled his age-spotted hand to her mouth to kiss it. “Only every now and again.”
“I already regret it.”
She let go his hand. “Pretty behavior for the Duke of Balmoral. You’ve said nothing to my father. I give you leave to change your mind.”
“No, no, Alice.” He would not draw back now. That would not be honorable, but he didn’t say such to her. He’d upset her enough. “It’s only that I’m much too old for you.” Her zestful dance made him see it too clearly.
She stood up, shook out her skirts. “You hurt me. Until my father comes to talk to me of this, I will not consider you serious in your proposal, nor will I consider us affianced. If I’ve not heard from my father in three days, I will accept the offer of the Earl of Mulgrave, and you may consider that this conversation between us never took place. Good day, Your Grace.”
He watched her walk away in pride and anger.
He watched until she was a small and solitary figure against a horizon colored a soft robin’s-egg blue, bare trees showing budding tips, unfurled leaves. Yes, this was the season of life’s bounteous unfurling, and he felt old in it, old and withered, with nothing to give, and yet spring offered herself to him, lured him with a long white neck and slender, dancing legs. Did one refuse spring’s generosity?
WHEN SHE RETURNED to the queen’s chambers, everyone was busy writing notes of condolence to Lord Knollys. She slipped into a place between Kit and Luce. Dorothy was too happy, and attempting not to show it, to comment on her tardiness. “Be still, Kit, lest you spill ink on your gown,” she said. “Alice, help Kit.”
Kit could barely spell her name. Spelling and composition were not considered foremost in a young lady’s education.
“I want Renée to help me,” said Kit. Renée was the bright star among them now. The king’s favor did that.
“Of course,” said Renée with a resplendent benevolence that frayed Alice’s nerves.
“Your English is good enough to write a letter?” Alice asked.
In fact, Renée’s English was increasingly better. Mister Dryden, the poet laureate and playwright, tutored her every morning for several hours. It was another source of irritation to the queen, that Renée should learn English faster than she had and already speak it better. Study, Alice had told her. Surprise His Majesty. No, Queen Catherine had replied.
“I write it in French, and then you help on the other, yes?”
“Yes.”
For a time, there was the sound of scratching pens, of Kit and Renée whispering. Alice translated Renée’s letter to English, and Renée frowned as she copied out the English words:
I do not know you well, but I send condolences at your sad news. You have always been kind to me, and we here in the Queen’s court await your return eagerly. God and the Holy Mother bless and keep you.
“May I say that, too?” asked Kit.
“You ought to say something different,” said Alice.
“Why?”
“I don’t mind it,” said Renée, and Alice shrugged.
“Are we done?” Dorothy walked from one to another, blotting ink. Alice brought a candle to warm the sealing wax.
“I haven’t a proper seal,” said Kit.
“You can use mine.” Renée held up a heavy gold signet ring, one of her valentines from her royal cupid. Everyone of consequence had them, their initial or the arms of their house engraved into the flat head of the ring. It gave an official importance to a letter, identified its sender. Dorothy and Alice flicked their eyes at each other. The queen, sitting and writing with her lady-in-waiting Frances, the Duchess of Richmond, said nothing.
“We can count ourselves fortunate he didn’t give her the great seal of England,” Alice whispered to Dorothy.
“Let’s add black ribbon under the wax.” Dorothy left to find it.
“Did you give Richard my note?” Renée whispered to Alice in French.
“Of course.”
“Was there an answer?”
“No.”
“Are you talking about Captain Saylor? He’ll answer,” Kit whispered to Renée. “He’s wild in love with you.”
“Everyone has their limit,” said Alice.
Kit stared at Alice uncomprehendingly. Alice looked away. It was all too absurd. There was no one left among the maids but giggling, wild children who thought her fussy. Her—Alice Verney!
“Here we are.”
Dorothy placed ribbons on the backs of the folded papers, and Alice dropped wax. Seals were pressed, and the letters were placed on the mantel by Dorothy to dry.
“I have a lesson with Fletcher,” said Alice, but no one was listening. They didn’t listen much to her these days. Not even Renée.
WHEN SHE RETURNED after dinner, King Charles and several of his gentlemen companions were there. Renée was playing upon the lute for them, Kit and Luce at her feet like acolytes.
Dorothy patted a place beside her on the window seat, and Alice sat down.
“I’ve news I thought you’d want to
know. Barbara called upon the queen while you were gone. There is word from Gracen. She wrote to Barbara to say she had been helping with the last days of Lady Knollys and that she sent her love to us. She’ll be returning soon, now that it’s over. Alice, I’m so happy I can barely contain myself.”
“When are new maids going to join us, Dorothy? If I hear Kit and Luce titter on too much longer, I’m going to jump out a window.”
“It’s up to her,” said Dorothy, nodding in Renée’s direction. “Queen Catherine asked His Majesty this morning to approve the names of two young ladies, and he said not yet, and when she asked him the reason for the delay, he gave some answer that did not fool her in the least. She returned angry and blamed Renée, calling her the real queen of England. Lady Arlington and Lady Suffolk were in attendance and heard, so of course they’ll tell His Majesty, and that will mean he’ll be cool and distant for days, until the queen goes to him and begs pardon.”
“Her only recourse is to accept this gracefully, allow the king his pleasure, and then he will be kind again.”
“It was easier for the queen when his amours were actresses. He didn’t bring them to court. This is right in front of her nose.”
“You forget the Duchess of Cleveland and our dear Duchess of Richmond when she was plain Frances Stewart. He hasn’t changed. Speak with her, Dorothy, remind her of that. If she displeases His Majesty, she does herself a great disservice. The talk about divorce has died back, but doesn’t she remember when that was her daily terror? The king gives her respect as a princess.”
“As long as she is agreeable.”
“As long as she is agreeable.”
“It isn’t my place to tell her that.”
It is your place as a member of her court, thought Alice. Our lieges have to hear the bad as well as the good, else what use are any of us to them? She lifted her chin. She’d talk with Frances and with Father Huddleston. Talk of divorce might have died back since Henri Ange was caught, but the queen’s position remained precarious, her only ally His Majesty, because she plotted for no others. She had to be reminded of that again and again, whether she wished it or not.
If only Lord Knollys were here.
“By the by, Barbara is going to be made a woman of the bedchamber as soon as the child is born. King Charles did approve that.”
Well, I really must leave Her Majesty’s service, thought Alice.
“I wish you’d make up with Barbara.” Then, seeing Alice’s face: “Well, you can always come and live with me, you know that, don’t you?”
“And where are you going, Brownie?” The question was teasing.
“To heaven.”
Alice squeezed Dorothy’s hand.
“You cannot imagine how I despise being here these days,” said Dorothy.
But I can, thought Alice. And so we all abandon the queen. But that wasn’t true—Barbara was returning. So would she, when she was a duchess. I already regret it, she heard Balmoral say in her mind. If she was a duchess.
LATER, AS THEY sat in the playhouse and the actor Charles Hart was mouthing a tedious prologue, Alice whispered in French with Renée. “I think Richard is hurt beyond words.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“He is your shield, Renée. As long as you have his love, you have a way out.”
“Nothing I do pleases him. The queen is very angry with me, Alice. I’m told she said mean things of me this morning.”
So, already they come to tattle, thought Alice. Renée is ascending fast. “She can’t help it.”
“I try not to hurt her, Alice.”
“I know you do, and I admire you for that.”
You don’t want a way out, thought Alice. Why did her heart hurt the way it did? Why did her head ache a little all the time? Because she very well might have to marry the inarticulate Mulgrave? Because the heady days of being a maid of honor were over for her? Because she missed Barbara so much, perhaps even Caro, in some deep part of her? Knew she was wrong, but knew she would do nothing to change? Was appalled by and yet allowed the size of her pride to grow and grow until it was a prison around her? Because Richard was free? Because she was not? Something was in her, pressing, all the time pressing.
She saw the king’s lord chamberlain make his way to His Majesty. Even in the dim light of the playhouse, something about the way the lord chamberlain carried himself caught Alice’s attention. He leaned over to whisper to the king, then King Charles said something to those with him and left. Those in the king’s box hissed among themselves and leaned over to speak to those around them. People stopped watching the actors as a kind of buzz rose, and then person after person abandoned their seats and left the theater. It was as if a spell fell on the audience, as whatever had been told the king spread throughout the theater. Onstage, the actors continued, but it was to no avail. The strange mood sweeping over the theater touched even them.
Dorothy leaned over to speak with Frances. Alice and Renée and Kit and Luce leaned forward, too. “The Duchess of York is dead,” she told them.
EVERYONE AT COURT was stunned. As servants rummaged through trunks and boxes looking for black crepe with which to cover mirrors, as tailors and seamstresses pulled out cards of black thread, found black ribbons, and began to cut black cloth into coats and gowns, as pages and undergrooms scrambled to find cats and lock them away out of sight because there was an old folk custom that cats couldn’t be present when there’d been a death, courtiers gathered in small groups, talking of what they knew, conjecturing of what they didn’t, mixing rumor and truth to a brew that was neither but from which all drank. They remembered that she was the daughter of the Earl of Clarendon, for years the king’s most powerful adviser, an architect of the Restoration, now in exile. Would he return for this? Would the king allow it? Might he sit once more with Arlington and Buckingham and Balmoral to advise the king? Would he take revenge for those among the ministers—chiefly Buckingham—who’d betrayed him?
It was remembered that the marriage had been considered a terrible misalliance, that York should have married a foreign princess, but what they mainly remembered, minced and chopped and turned to one side and then another, was that—because the queen was barren—the Duke of York remained heir to the throne and that now he would remarry, and even though his dead wife had converted to popery, their two surviving daughters were being reared in the Church of England; here was a chance for another beginning.
York could marry a Protestant princess and so perhaps father a Protestant prince, who would take precedence over his sisters. Was York a cat’s-paw for the pope? Yes? No? Had he converted, as rumor sometimes said? Yes? No? Oh, they’d be watching this year, to see if he took Communion at Easter. Because it was not a good thing if the heir to the throne was a Papist. And finally, the cruelest scandal broth of all, why had it to be the Duchess of York who died, courtiers commiserated with one another. Why could it not be the queen herself who lay stiff and white on the funeral bier?
Alice made her way among the press of courtiers who were thronging the Duke of York’s apartments on the far western end of the palace. King Charles was there, Queen Catherine, Prince Rupert, and Monmouth. Several of King Charles’s children by the Duchess of Cleveland were with him. He kept them by him, stroking their hair, as people made their way to his brother, spoke their condolences, and if they were fortunate, King Charles said a word or two to them. Alice looked at the king, whose expressions she knew so well. This day his face was stoic, drawn, tiredness dragging down his mouth.
Alice searched the chamber for Balmoral but didn’t see him. Others were there, the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Arlington, other privy council members. Where was Balmoral? He should be here also. Had her scene yesterday sent him on a drunken fit? It was what she feared. Her stomach was in a knot with it. She made a deep curtsy before the Duke of York, whose face was puffy. He wore the slightly startled expression of someone who has sustained a great shock and isn’t quite certain of what is happening.
“Your Grace, I am so sorry.”
“Verney, you dear thing. No one expected this. It just came out of nowhere, nowhere.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she simply nodded.
“I’m lost without her.”
“So many people mourn with you, Your Grace.”
“Do they? Thank you, Verney.”
She moved away. King Charles nodded to her, Prince Rupert took her by the arm.
“Come and have a pipe with me,” he whispered.
“Gladly.”
They left the crowded chamber and walked through an antechamber, almost as full. In a corner were the Duchess of York’s maids of honor, some weeping, all huddled together like mewing kittens who had lost their mother. Barbara and Caro were with them, as were Alice’s fellow maids of honor. She saw Sir William Coventry and Sir William Penn and Samuel Pepys, all those who worked in the naval office, but then York was admiral of King Charles’s navy. Of course they were there. Where is Richard? she thought. He must make his condolences.
In another chamber now, she watched Prince Rupert rummage in a drawer in an ornate Chinese cabinet. This was the Duke of York’s set of apartments, yet Prince Rupert knew exactly where the tobacco was kept. In a moment a pipe was filled for her, he was striking flint to tinder, then holding up a slim burning stick to the pipe’s bowl, and she puffed to get it burning. Oh, she did love the rich aroma arising, the pale smoke like a benevolent spirit. He was stuffing the bowl of his own pipe, and soon the pair of them contentedly inhaled and exhaled sweet, soothing clouds of tobacco. At some point, they both sighed in unison.
Alice smiled. Prince Rupert sat beside her, patted her hand.
“It’s sad times, it is. We’re all awhirl. Two days ago she was sitting at my table, eating like the trencherman she was, not a thing wrong with her. Not a sign. Jemmy is beside himself. He sat with the body all night, holding her hand and weeping, remembering back when she was young and slender and had a sweeter temper.”
