Maid of the King's Court

by Lucy Worsley

  He puts people at ease, I thought. It’s his gift.

  I stepped across to stand next to him, suddenly feeling more like myself than I had for ages.

  “Yes,” I said, looking down. “It seems such a hotchpotch of a place now that I’ve seen Hampton Court. But still I find that I love it.” Whether I felt comfortable to be back at home or just comfortable to be with Ned, he seemed to sense that tonight I wasn’t going to bark or bite.

  “Look over there!” he said, pointing out to the distant hills, and then steadying me against the battlements as I leaned forward.

  “What am I looking at?” I asked, although I wasn’t all that bothered. The warmth of his body as he’d stepped close to me was strangely attractive, and he put his arms around me from behind.

  “Well, maybe it’s nothing,” he said, his chin brushing the top of my hair. “I thought I saw a falling star.”

  We stood there for a while in companionable silence, and there seemed to be a distant beating of a drum. Gradually, I realised that it was my heart. How foolish, I thought, it’s only Ned. Only a page. Only an old friend. But still he was standing very near to me.

  Now he was mumbling something into my hair, touching it with his lips. I could feel his breath warm on my neck.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “I miss you, you know,” he said, more distinctly. “I hate not seeing you like I used to. I’ve been looking forward to coming here to Stoneton just to learn more about where you come from.”

  Before I could respond, there was the scuff of a foot on the stone stairs. For a moment — which felt like it was ten years long — we stood frozen at the battlements, not knowing what to do.

  When we finally sprang apart, it was jaggedly awkward.

  Francis Manham was there in the dark doorway. He stepped out to join us, hands on hips, his head to one side. “Ah, Mistress Elizabeth,” he said, with a cool glance at Ned. “They told me you’d been seen climbing up here. I didn’t realise you had an assignation.”

  “Well, it wasn’t …” I said foolishly, trailing off into silence as I realised that it would have been wiser not to try to defend myself.

  Two friends might stand together watching a falling star. But friends did not stand as close as we had done, nor for so long. My blood was still singing. Ned’s embrace had sent it flooding into my cheeks. They must have glowed like flames in the dark.

  “Anyway, I’ll say nothing,” he said. “A moment alone, Mistress Eliza, if you will. I need some information.”

  There was a long pause during which Master Manham stared at Ned. I glanced between the two, noticing that Ned was not only half a hand-span taller, but sparer and leaner as well. Master Manham was so well built that he was verging on the pudgy.

  “It’s all right, Ned,” I said reluctantly. Our moment was over; it was useless to try to recapture the spell. And surely I would be safe. What harm could come to me in my own home?

  Ned’s eyes searched my face anxiously. I nodded. He gave a low and icy bow to Master Manham and went off down the stairs, whistling insouciantly.

  “Whippersnapper!” said Master Manham as the sound faded. “Who does he think he is? An insolent bastard page boy like him!”

  I wanted to say I preferred a bastard like Ned to a man like him, but I made no reply. My fists clenched themselves into balls, my nails digging deep into my palms. My blood still blazed, and I did not trust myself to speak with a steady voice.

  “Now,” he said, “to business. The queen tells me that you know something about a secret passage to her chamber. She wants me to deliver some important papers to her later tonight, without disturbing the king.”

  A secret passage? The sally port! He was right, it did exist. But how on earth did they know?

  I thought hard.

  Then, for the umpteenth time, I cursed my propensity for showing off. I now remembered telling all the girls at Trumpton Hall my stories about growing up at Stoneton and about our sally port too. Katherine would naturally have remembered, just as she stored away in that brain of hers any information that could be of use. Scheming cow.

  I needed to buy myself some time to think. “I believe you should ask my father,” I said, trying to edge my way towards the entrance to the stairs. I was bound to do what my mistress, the queen, demanded of me. But I was not at all convinced that the king would want me to help a man get into his wife’s room at night.

  “No, not so fast, Mistress Elizabeth,” he said, laying a hand upon my forearm. “You shall show me yourself.”

  Gradually, with increasing force, he backed me up against the stone of the battlement. Its corner was pressed painfully into the small of my back. I could see the tiny red-clad figure of a guard crossing the courtyard many head-spinning storeys below.

  Should I shout for help? But that would cause a scandal. What had I been thinking, allowing myself to be trapped up here at the top of a turret, late at night, with such a man?

  Anger and shame finally gave me the strength to tug myself free.

  “I shall show you at once.”

  My whole body was shaking, but I managed to clip out the words. As we descended from the turret, my legs quivering like jelly, I remembered how I had once used to duel with imaginary knights up here for whole afternoons of play.

  But now I had an enemy in real life, and he was right behind me on the stairs.

  That horrible night at Stoneton was only the beginning of an uneasy period for me. As the weeks of the royal progress rolled on, I gradually became certain that Katherine and Francis Manham were meeting up nearly every night. I also guessed that the other maids of honour must know of it, or at least suspect it. How could it be otherwise in the tight, incestuous world of the court?

  In the houses where we stayed, there seemed always to be a sally port, as at Stoneton, or a secret passage or a back door to the close-stool room just waiting to be discovered and used by the lovers.

  Katherine’s boldness seemed breathtaking to me, but there was a certain logic to it. What she was doing was so wildly wrong, so patently mad, that it almost defied belief. Who would even countenance the possibility that the queen would dare to deceive the king? To cheat upon His Majesty would be a certain path to treason and death. So of course none of us maids of honour could even bring ourselves to mention it, let alone discuss it. The risks of being overheard were just too high. It was safer to pretend it wasn’t happening.

  There was something else of which we never spoke. Katherine had now been married a year, and each month we maids had to wash her shifts and her underlinens as they became spotted with blood from her menses. Of course we all appreciated the significance of this, and somehow the news got round the court too. On the day that her menses came, Katherine would snap and bite like a spoiled lapdog, and we all learned the hard way to submit at once to whatever humiliation or service she required.

  Only one thing stopped me from confronting Katherine when she was in one of these moods and doing my best to gouge out her eyes with my fingernails. During our stay with the abbot of Lyddinghouse, I was on duty as the maid of honour selected to sleep on a camp bed outside the queen’s bedchamber door. I did not mind this duty at all, for it was a cramped and miserable business sharing a bed with two or even three bedfellows in the limited accommodation of these borrowed houses. I like a bit of space and quiet in which to think my thoughts and sometimes read my book in my little pool of candlelight.

  In the abbot’s house, my camp bed had been made up in a stone cloister that reminded me of my home. Although the space was cold and echoing, I had furs and blankets to keep me warm, and I could hear the comforting sound of the guards laughing together some way off around the turn of the passage.

  As I dozed off that night, though, the peace was broken by a ragged sigh from inside the queen’s room. Then another. I sat up, stiff as a board, transfixed with horror.

  My first thought was that Katherine must be ill, and I nearly got out of bed to go to her.


  Then, as I strained my ears in the silence, I realised that she was weeping. All at once I remembered that this afternoon she had called for linen cloths. Putting two and two together, I realised that she wished she had a baby in her belly, and that she was rightly worried that the rest of the court was wondering why she did not. I thought about going in and attempting to comfort her. But I was fairly certain that Katherine’s pride would mean that she’d rather I didn’t.

  My glimmerings of pity for Katherine, though, were erased the very next day. Anne and I went along to her chamber in the early evening to do our usual work. Finding the room deserted, I busied myself by picking up the nightgown Katherine had left lying on the floor and putting the pins straight in her pincushion, while Anne was pulling the hairs from her brush.

  “So how was it?” Anne asked.

  “How was what?” I replied with a gruffness I did not really feel.

  I knew Anne had seen me in the abbot’s herb garden that afternoon, walking and talking with Ned. I had been picking petals for a potpourri when he came out to join me. The sun had tempted all of us to shed some of our usual courtly finery, and his doublet was slung over his shoulder. Ned’s shirt was open and a few hairs were visible on his chest. I had never seen so much of his skin before, and although there was nothing particularly improper about the way he was dressed, it seemed as shocking to my senses as nakedness. My eyes returned again and again to his chest as we talked of this and that, wandering between the flower beds. It was wonderful to be friends again. Despite our long estrangement of months past, I found myself interrupting what he said and teasing him as easily as if he were Henny. Nobody made me feel as light and airy inside as he did.

  It was with a guilty start that I’d noticed Anne smiling at us from across the garden, and I’d thought it strange that she did not come to join us.

  “Eliza,” she now said seriously, “you should not lead him on, you know. He cares for you.”

  I furrowed my brow. Anne, little Anne, was daring to criticise me? On such a personal matter too?

  “And how do you know all about it, sweetie?” I asked, carefully careless in my tone and bending over the dressing table so that she could only see my back.

  “Ned’s my friend,” she said in her simple manner. It was guileless and unanswerable, yet I, too, would have described Ned as a “friend” to any bystander. What a range of emotions that word could cover. I felt a twinge of conscience. Yes, I’d been friendly towards Ned, but how would I feel if Aunt Margaret, for example, had seen us talking and flirting in the sunshine? Guilty and wrong was the answer. I knew that I shouldn’t have been wasting my time on such a pointless pursuit.

  And yet I felt that more than anything I would like to spend the evening ahead sharing a cup of wine with Ned in that garden as dusk fell. All I wanted was to be with him. I couldn’t stop myself.

  My thoughts were interrupted by a little sound from the close-stool room in the corner. Glancing over, I saw that its door stood closed, and I assumed at once that the necessary woman had come in through the outside service door to take away the chamber pot and to clean the room. Each day she needed to lay out fresh napkins and maybe place a vase of scented roses on the windowsill.

  But the sound grew and turned into scuffling and then giggling. It was unavoidable that Anne and I should acknowledge it. We stood in the middle of the room staring at each other, frozen in doubt and dismay. Anne still had the queen’s hairbrush held uselessly in her hand.

  A few seconds later, Katherine herself burst through the close-stool room door back into the bedchamber, her face flushed. On seeing us, she checked herself and grabbed the brush from Anne, banging at her hair with it and humming a little tune. I did not dare to ask who had been in the close-stool room with her, and who it was who now banged the outer door closed so loudly that we could all hear.

  “Your face is a picture!” she said to me, smiling gaily. I knew that my cheeks were crimson, and I turned away in silence. All the pity I had felt when I’d heard her crying in the night was replaced with embarrassment.

  And worse than that, fear.

  My eyes travelled over the ceiling. Its golden fretwork and golden cherubs glowed against a blue-painted background of sky, its construction swooping down into great bulbous knobs in an amazing feat of carpentry. And amid it all, the golden words: Dieu, et mon droit. God, and my right. The king had both of them on his side.

  I sighed. Even the chapel ceiling at Hampton Court was a reminder to me of my duty: to obey God, to obey the king, to submit. But sometimes it was so very hard.

  With a well-drilled rustle, the congregation sank to its knees. Coming to my senses, I found myself stranded in a standing position. I knelt down as quietly and smoothly as I could manage as the prayers began. We were at a special service at which the king was to give thanks for his marriage and the merry life he was leading with the queen. The queen! Despite all the months that had passed, I still couldn’t quite get used to the fact that my cousin was the queen.

  And I wasn’t the only one. As the ripe phrases of the bishop rolled over us, extolling the sanctity of marriage, I caught Will Summers casting half a glance in my direction. He was down in the body of the chapel with the gentlemen of the court and had turned up and back to watch us maids of honour in our gallery with the queen. I studiously failed to acknowledge him. Will was taking a risk by removing his attention from the priest for even an instant, and I felt annoyed with him for compromising me.

  It was essential to all our sanity to believe in the king’s marriage and his great love for Katherine. Now that we were back at Hampton Court, there were at least no more secret passages or hidden doors as there had been in the strange houses we’d visited on the progress to the north. Here the security arrangements were as tight as could be, and whatever Katherine had been up to with her nocturnal visitor would have to come to an end.

  I felt reasonably well rested, for I could now sleep much more peacefully at night, secure in the knowledge that I wouldn’t hear a man’s heavy footstep in the passage when no man should have been there. I was glad that Katherine had stopped asking me to dress her hair or hand me her pink lip salve even though it was bedtime. And I was pleased that she was no longer quite so hard to wake up in the mornings. I glanced sideways at her now, praying, a picture of demure piety. I could only admire her sangfroid.

  She had good reason for smugness. Quite unlike the days of Queen Anne of Cleves, the queen’s apartments were still busy in the late evenings, for the king was a constant visitor. When we saw the two tall yeomen standing outside the queen’s bedchamber door with their spears, it was a sign that he had come to visit his wife. I would quickly turn around with the basin of water or cup of wine or fresh candle, or whatever it was I was carrying, and retreat out of sight and sound until it was safe.

  Sometimes I might unwillingly overhear a laugh as I padded silently away, or else the king’s great whooping coughs. He wasn’t in what one would call good health, but Katherine had certainly improved him, making him happier, a little less snappy, and certainly a little less porky. In the early mornings, they would ride hard together out in the park. “Look!” the king would say in his disarming manner, as he came into the Great Chamber after these expeditions. “My rose without a thorn has taken inches off my waist.”

  Now we could hear the boards creaking in the king’s own gallery next door, as he stepped forward to the front rail of his own closet. We could not see the king, but he prayed out loud, so that everyone could hear him.

  “I give most hearty thanks,” he said, sounding like he meant it, “for the good life I lead and trust to lead with my wife.”

  Anne Sweet, predictably, thought this was rather sweet. “Fifth time lucky!” she whispered into my right ear. To my left, I sensed Katherine straightening herself up even further and arching her back with pride.

  Really! I thought to myself, sickened to my stomach. I can hardly bear all this. It’s intolerable. I’d be better
off as a laundress or a farmer’s wife.

  The king’s thanksgiving for his marriage may have been the very worst moment of a life that was dull, unpleasant, and hard to bear during the whole of that autumn at Hampton Court. But little did I know that it had been a perfect paradise of bliss compared with what was to follow.

  The very next day, Katherine’s supposed cleverness caught up with her, and all of our lives were placed in danger.

  The first we knew of the disaster was the appearance of one of the Yeomen of the Guard, with the news that the queen would not need anyone to dress her that evening.

  This was unprecedented. We were all gathered in the countess’s chamber, waiting for the call to come on duty. Some of the girls were doing embroidery, Anne was strumming a lute, and I was tracing out a family tree for the countess herself. She was in a tetchy mood, which made me think that news had come from home of some achievement of her little son’s that made her miss him more than usual.

  The yeoman stood red-faced and bowing in our midst. The end of his tall halberd knocked against the table where I worked and joggled my inkwell.

  “Nonsense!” said the countess sharply. “Of course the queen will need dressing. And what are you doing here?” She meant that the message should not have been sent by a yeoman, his status being too low. “I don’t want your clumsy and vulgar weaponry in my chamber,” she added with a lofty wave of the hand.

  “Forgive me, my lady,” the man said, bowing low and looking so uncomfortable that I almost felt sorry for him. Indeed, there was a giggle from somewhere in the room, which made him blush even more. “I am only doing what I was told. I was commanded by the Lord Chamberlain to say that the queen’s cousin is required. No one else. Just the queen’s cousin.”

  There was a long drawn-out pause while everyone took in the tidings. The girl who had giggled turned it into a cough. This sounded like trouble, even danger. And I had no wish to be singled out or drawn into it. For a long while, my brain stubbornly refused to believe that by “the queen’s cousin” he meant me.