Maid of the King's Court

by Lucy Worsley

  Then the other members of the household followed us through the trees, and it was no longer safe to poke fun at Old Trembles. We all went on together, but the path was too narrow for the whole group. It split and split again. Soon I was walking along with Master Manham just an arm’s length away from my side, and I was surprised and pleased to find that we were a little apart from the rest of the company. We pressed on through the glimmering woodland, following the laughing voices ahead of us. Occasionally, he lifted a trail of ivy or a bramble out of my path, bowing nonsensically low as I went by.

  Then suddenly we passed from moonlight into a dark place, and I stumbled a little. Immediately, his hands were round my waist and — amazing sensation — his warm lips were nuzzling against mine.

  I felt that all the blood in my veins had turned into quicksilver.

  Only a moment later, though, Alice and the rest came running back in our direction. We heard the call to return to the hall and trooped back indoors. The spell was snapped.

  That night, our room was full of laughter and gossip until the early hours. But one voice — mine — was completely silent. I was full to the brim with happiness, and I felt that life at Trumpton held nothing but pleasure and promise.

  We had talked so often of love in the maidens’ chamber that I had no doubt that I was experiencing it for myself. I began to imagine the life that I’d lead with Francis as my husband, thinking of new ways to make him happy every day, all the children we’d have …

  There was only one tiny lurking worry in my mind. If I were to marry a music teacher, how could I save Stoneton from ruin?

  Although I had made such a cold, bad start with Katherine, after the silly evening in the woods, we began slowly to approach each other, like the dog and the lion warily circling round each other before either pouncing or parting. I think we both recognised that we shared a sharpness the other girls didn’t possess.

  “Anne Sweet is sweet,” she said to me in a whisper, while Anne was simpering at one of Master Manham’s jokes, “but she’s a little insipid, don’t you find?”

  I secretly shared her opinion, but then Anne had been so kind so me. Feeling more than a little guilty, I cocked my head to the side, as if to say “maybe.”

  And when Anne wanted to sit next to me at dinner, I told her that Mistress Katherine Howard had already reserved the seat.

  But I must admit that Katherine could be devilish. There was the time, for example, when we were all learning how best to wash and starch fine lace. She clumsily ripped the lace collar in her own basin — and I caught sight of her quickly switching it with the garment in Juliana’s basin while Juliana was out of the room. Katherine caught me looking, gave her lazy smile, and gently raised her finger to her lips. Such was the power of her personality that my initial shock gave way to the cosy feeling that we now shared a secret.

  All the girls wanted to look like my cousin Katherine, with her creamy skin and her limpid blue eyes that beamed like lanterns. In the maidens’ chamber, she often used to coach us all in how to throw what she called “killing” glances. She was convinced that if you looked at a man in her special narrow-eyed way, he would be sure to fall in love with you. But this I could not believe.

  “Nonsense!” I cried out one day, when her queenly ways and beneficent advice had begun to grate. “Gentlemen like to hear what you have to say. They like girls with spirit. They don’t just want to look at smiling dummies. They might as well just look at a painting if that were all.”

  “And did your betrothed husband the viscount like what you had to say, my lady Eliza?”

  I did not answer her and made as if I had not heard. I flumped down angrily upon my bed and pretended to read a letter from Aunt Margaret as if it interested me greatly.

  “At least I have had an offer of marriage,” I muttered into the folded paper. “I’m the only one here who knows what it actually feels like.”

  Everyone copied the way Katherine did her hair, coiled round the back of her head almost like a crown. Despite my crossness with her, I could still enjoy the jealous looks that Juliana and Anne gave me when Katherine called me one morning to sit on her own bed so that she could braid my long but rather straggling locks.

  As we sat and chatted, I nonchalantly said that I had seen and not particularly admired the hair of Queen Jane at Westmorland House. As I had only seen her in the distance and by twilight, I would perhaps have been better advised not to mention it. But I knew that Katherine was violently interested, as I was, in court matters. And there was so little that I knew which she did not.

  “Was it rich and black?” she asked idly, her fingers busily flicking back and forth with my hair.

  “Yes, it was black,” I confirmed, “but I think her women could have dressed it better.”

  At that she pulled my braid so as to turn my face towards her.

  “You are such a little liar, Eliza,” she said good-humouredly. “Everyone knows that Queen Jane is blonde.”

  I felt myself colour up, but my stubbornness refused to let me back down and say I had been mistaken.

  She finished my hair in silence, but it became torture rather than pleasure.

  Even so, I longed more than anything to brag to Katherine about the kiss I had received from Master Manham in the woods and to ask her what it meant. Oddly — and confusingly — my next lute lesson passed exactly as usual, as if nothing had happened. I began to fear that perhaps indeed I didn’t know how to make a man fall in love with me, as Katherine herself had claimed.

  But then, one evening, she and I were the very last to leave the Great Chamber, where we’d been setting the banqueting table. We had learned that afternoon from old Abigail how to position the goblets, the grapes, the sweetmeats, and the forks for best effect. Our table, the fruit of our work, was a marvellous sight with its sugar sculptures, candied violets, and scattered rose petals. It seemed a terrible shame that no visitors from court were due, to marvel at it and sample its pleasures. Katherine and I lingered on as the light faded, admiring our efforts and giving a final, unnecessary polish to glasses and cordial bottles.

  She herself looked wondrously beautiful as she turned her head this way and that, her profile with its coronet of hair silhouetted against the setting sun.

  “Here’s a table to woo a lover!” Katherine said with pride, as she caressed the fine inlaid marble surface with her hand.

  “Indeed,” I said, “and how would you continue to woo him once he’d eaten and drunk?” I was emboldened by the dusk and our isolation in the darkening room.

  “Well, my dear little Carrot Top,” she said, “I would rip off all his clothes!”

  I tried not to look shocked, for I knew that she was teasing and toying with me. But I did understand that men and woman wanted to touch each other when they were in love. I felt that way about Master Manham. I put up my hands to stroke my own new hairdo, pretending to myself that I looked almost as good as Katherine did, and hummed a little tune. A careful listener might have detected that the melody was “Oh, My Love.”

  “Oh!” Katherine said. “I can see that someone fancies herself to be in love. Who is the lucky man, I wonder?”

  At that, though, I kept my own counsel. I knew that to tell her would give her power over me, and I was not sure that I wanted to take that step. Instead I gave what I hoped was a supercilious smile. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” I said.

  “Aha!” said Katherine. “You forget that I have ways of finding out. No secret is safe from me.” At that she swept out of the chamber. I looked at the door she had just closed, annoyed. Why did she always have to know everyone’s secrets and to be so annoyingly right about everything?

  But then I imagined Master Manham opening the door and coming over to join me at the banqueting table. Soon I was lost in a pleasant reverie.

  It was later that same fateful evening, and I was sitting at my embroidery frame in the dusk, when one of the serving girls came over to me with a slip of parchment folded ver
y small. Little Em, the smallest and least impressive maid, was known throughout the household for being terrified of everyone and everything. She was half simple, poor thing, and couldn’t follow even the easiest of instructions unless you repeated them slowly.

  “For you, m’m, from him,” she mumbled, quickly backing off and departing.

  I set the note aside, as if I couldn’t have cared less what was in it. But my heart was pounding so loud in my chest that I was sure Anne could hear it from across the room. I forced myself to put a few more stitches into the peacock I was working on, before nonchalantly telling the girls that I was going to fetch a lamp against the gloom.

  Once in the dim but deserted hall, I fumbled as if my life depended upon it to open up the paper, trembling with both excitement and trepidation. I already half knew what it would say. There were just three words, in the loopy hand so familiar from the instructions written in the margins of my music books.

  The closet, midnight, they read.

  I could hardly swallow my supper when the time came, and when I knelt beside my bed, the words of my evening prayer simply wouldn’t come to mind.

  I knew that I should not meet Francis alone until we were betrothed, and that to follow his instructions would make God angry. But surely Francis wanted me to go to the closet in order to tell me that he loved me? And then it would be all right. I was so excited and nervous that, yes, I trembled like a fawn.

  Never had the late-night chat seemed more trivial, and never did the girls seem to take such a long time to drop off to sleep. There was the usual coming and going to the privy, the running down to the maidservants’ room with forgotten instructions about clothes for tomorrow, and the laughing out the window at the stable boys.

  I closed my eyes as tight as I could and put my fingers in my ears.

  Finally, what seemed like years later, I heard the stable clock bong twelve. I immediately opened my eyes and sat bolt upright. It was much darker now, but it was only summer darkness, with a gleam of evening still present. There was enough light to see quite well as I padded between the lumpy piles of girl and coverlet.

  Up the stairs I went. A faint memory pushed its way into my thoughts: the recollection of another summer night when I had climbed a staircase to an adventure that had turned out very badly indeed. But I continued with my stealthy climb.

  The door of the closet stood very slightly ajar, and inside I could see the gleam of a candle. I nearly went back then, back to safety, back to the maidens’ chamber where I belonged.

  But some devilry that has always been inside me pressed me forward into the room.

  And there, upon a carpet on the floor, lay a tangle of arms and legs. There was not one person present; there were two. There lay Francis Manham indeed, but in his arms lay Katherine. Her dark, tangled hair was loose and lay fanned out all around their heads as if it were a pillow for them both. They looked cosy, almost domestic, with their limbs entwined. I took in the fact that they had been drinking wine, and that he was in the act of popping a strawberry into her mouth.

  They were so relaxed together that I knew at once they’d come here like this many, many times before.

  Nor did they seem at all put out as they looked up and saw my startled face. The worst humiliation of all was when they started to laugh, he rather shamefacedly, she with wild abandon.

  “Oh, Francis, you were right after all!”

  Katherine choked out the words between peals of laughter, sitting up now and clapping her hands. “You win the wager!” she said. “I really didn’t think she’d come, but she must be crazy for you, just like you said!”

  “Crazy!” was the word that rang in my ears as I rushed out of the closet and back towards my bed, fiery red and sweaty with shame.

  Of course my time at Trumpton was tainted after that. I could hardly look at Master Manham. He, too, acted stiffly with me.

  At our next lute lesson, I asked him outright what was happening. “I may be just a foolish northerner,” I said, “but are you quite as friendly with all the girls as you are with Katherine?” I said nothing of our kiss in the woods, because obviously it had meant nothing to him.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Mistress Camperdowne,” he said, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “I treat all the ladies as I believe they like to be treated.”

  When I stared at him, he stared right back, implacable, impregnable. I knew that I would get no further explanation or apology. I turned to the window with a tight little smile, looking through it without seeing the garden outside. My mind sought something — anything — to ease its burning pain, but nothing came into my head at all apart from a desperate desire to show him that I was calm and cool.

  With Katherine, it felt like we had gone right back to the start, to the very day she had been so cruel to me upon my arrival. When I saw her laughing, or bossing the other girls, or flirting with the teachers, I felt I was looking at the devil in the form of a girl. Why could not everyone else see what I saw? To me she was cold, heartless, egotistical, and arrogant. I wondered how I could ever have let her plait my hair, and kept as much out of her way as I could.

  I took to roaming about in the gardens by myself, sometimes playing melancholy airs on my lute. Once again I felt that I was an alien, an outsider in this place. The duchess herself did little to relieve this. As I become one of the older girls, and others took the places of Anne and me as the littlest, she took me into her withdrawing room and told me, in the most frighteningly technical terms, how to perform the duties of a wife and how best to bear a man’s child.

  The duchess’s clinical detachment made my heart throb a little with a sensation I had not felt for some time: that of missing my mother. This should have been her task, performed with warmth and sympathy, not coldness. And my sore heart made me think of my aunt anew. Although Aunt Margaret was strict and practical too, I knew, if only from Henny, that she cared about me. Even if the duchess did care, she certainly did not show it.

  The duchess, though, did admire my progress as her pupil, and I knew she was pleased with me. One summer’s evening, nearly two whole years later, I was kneeling before her, peeking up at her demurely through my eyelashes as we had been taught, and raising in my hand the cup of cordial for which she had called.

  I artfully allowed my sleeve to fall back to reveal the graceful turn of my wrist, exactly as Monsieur Bleu had prescribed. This time, though, she failed to take the drink. Instead, she grasped my wrist and drew me up to my feet to stand before her.

  “Child, how old are you now? Fifteen years?” she asked. I nodded. She frequently addressed me as “child,” in a strange echo of my aunt Margaret, but sometimes I feared that she did it only because she had genuinely forgotten my name. “I congratulate you. You have been a very quick learner, as accomplished as girls two years older than yourself. We have nothing more to teach you here. You are now an elegant young lady, an asset to our extended family, and ready to go to grace the royal court.”

  My eyebrows arched with surprise and pleasure, despite my efforts to keep them down and not to furrow my forehead. I hoped that the older girls to whom she had referred included my cousin Katherine. My mind ran ahead. Perhaps one day, at court, I might even put her into the shade by becoming the court’s most popular and sought-after maid of honour.

  I knew that the treaty had recently been signed for the king’s new marriage. Queen Jane, whom I had glimpsed at Westmorland, had died in childbirth, horrific news to all of us who would be expected to bear heirs to our husbands when the time came. The king had been left bereft and miserable, but we had heard that he’d recovered to the extent of contemplating marriage to the German princess, Anne of Cleves.

  New maids of honour would of course be required for the household of the new queen, and it was widely expected that the Duchess of Northumberland would be consulted for her recommendation. After so much training and debating and waiting, all of us girls longed to go to see the palaces and pageantry of the court.
I discovered that I was actually holding my breath in anticipation of her next words.

  “I am sending Mistress Howard to court,” she now said, “as a maid of honour to the new queen.” A stab of jealousy and hatred made me wince.

  Despite her poor eyesight, the duchess did see some things quite clearly, and she obviously noticed my reaction. “Tell me,” she continued, “I am curious about you and her. You two have so much in common — you’re cousins — but you’ve hardly spoken to each other these past two years. Why are my brightest girls enemies, not friends? Your looks are so different that you cannot compete on the grounds of beauty.”

  She had no need to add that Katherine was beautiful and that I was … not. Although Anne Sweet was always bubbling up with compliments for my clothes and my style, as we dressed up of an evening in the maidens’ chamber, everyone wanted to be luxuriantly plump and sloe-eyed like Katherine, not willowy and gingery like me.

  I couldn’t think what to say. “Your Grace, I am indeed most fond of Mistress Howard” was my final, if inadequate, answer. I clasped my hands in front of me to keep them still, eager to give nothing else away.

  “Well, keep yourself to yourself, then!” the duchess said smartly. “There is indeed precious little room for friendships at court. But tell me, would you not like to be a maid of honour too?”

  Now my careful courtly mask slipped. “Indeed I would!” I burst out. I knew that I should not bounce on my toes like a child, but I could not help it. “I would like of all things to go to court.”

  “Well, go you shall,” she said. “But there is a final task here for you before you become a maid of honour. You should study the German language. Your new mistress will need all the help she can get.”

  I had never before thought that a princess, shortly to become a queen, would require help, especially not the help of a useless gawky creature like me. But I would help her, I decided, as best as I possibly could. And certainly I would be kinder and more helpful than that beast Katherine.