Ladies in Waiting

by Laura L. Sullivan

  She pulled up the skirt, tied and pinned it into place with much cursing and a few bloody fingertips, then sallied down the gangplank to the bustling dock. They were two days early thanks to the storm’s stiff winds, and she’d have to wait at the inn until her godmother’s carriage arrived for her.

  Sailors were already unloading the crates of animals and plants her papa was sending to fill her godmother’s hothouses and menagerie. Bright jungle birds fluttered nervously in their wicker cages, while an ocelot brought from Spanish territory hissed at the unfamiliar smells. She patted him through the bars—she’d raised him from a kitten, and though he’d rake any servant who disturbed his sleep, he was fairly tolerant of Zabby’s affection.

  She felt her throat itch as soon as she disembarked. Even with the high wind across the channel the air was rank and heavy with coal soot and a smell of feces, animal and human. Past the organized bustle of the docks she could see the jumble of town: buildings crowded upon one another, leaning precariously over the muddy roads; the slow-moving trickle of gutters carrying their filth directly into the sea; men and women dressed too heavily for the season, their bodies adding a musky note to the heady medley of stink.

  How do they live like this? Zabby wondered as she picked her way along the wharf to the inn suggested by the captain (an agent of her father’s) as reputable and clean—the King’s Arms. She already felt oppressed by the noise and crowds, and this was only Dover. Imagine how London must smell, and sound. She coughed, feeling the grain of coal on her tongue. And taste!

  Thank heaven she’d be going to her godmother’s country estate, not her London home. Zabby didn’t think she could bear it after the freedom—and clean air—of her Barbados plantation.

  She let herself into the inn, and a dozen faces looked up from their mugs and tankards.

  “God’s cods!” one cried. “What will the whores think of next? Lacing in the front!”

  “Mighty convenient,” said another, a young rake who perhaps had more experience with the genuine article. “Keeps the goods locked up till the shilling’s paid. That miss can let her udders bounce out at will, and no maid needed to lace ’em up again.”

  Another argued she’d sell her wares better if her bodice was right way round, giving them an advertisement of what was to come. Yet another claimed all the business was lower down, that only a fool would pay a whore for the top half.

  Nurtured by a loving father, surrounded by a virtual city of people beholden to her, Zabby had never felt the sudden rude mortification of being the butt of the crowd’s joke. She looked at them angrily, but wasn’t quite strong enough to tell them off. Just as well—pertness in a prostitute is an invitation, and the men might well have offered more intimate insult. She stalked to the rear of the public house, a quiet nook where only two men sat in the shadows, and waited for the captain to join her. Once she secured a room she could change out of these ridiculous clothes. It went against reason to lock herself up, backward or forward, in such impractical garb.

  “Pick another seat, sweetheart,” one of the men said, not unkindly, but she was too deep in her humiliation to hear him, and sat at the next table, staring sulkily at the polished grain of the heavy oak slabs.

  The man half rose and, before she could think to stop him, slipped (not without difficulty) something cold down the front, which was really the back, of her bodice. “We’ve business to discuss, mistress, and would be alone.”

  She met his eye with a scowl. It was hard to make out his features in the flickering candlelight at the back of the inn, but he seemed almost a gentleman, large and dark, with neat curling mustachios and heavy-lidded black eyes. He was dressed, as far as she could tell, as a merchant, but there was something majestic and confident in his mien. A student of nature wild and domestic, she had spent many hours watching Papa’s herd of horses. One male led them all, not always the biggest or strongest, but certainly the most self-assured. Larger, wilder stallions would defer to him, let him have his way with all the mares, though they could easily defeat him in open battle. This man had the same fine carriage, the same haughty eyes, as the herd stallion. He was accustomed to obedience.

  Zabby was in no mood to be obedient, particularly when the only alternative was sitting by the men who thought her a whore, after parading by for their pleasure.

  “Sir, I will not move,” she said, lifting her chin.

  The man’s eyes glittered. She saw now that they were bloodshot. A sheen of sweat slicked his ruddy face. Perfect—he was drunk.

  “I am newly come to England, but I am told every person is free the moment he steps upon English soil. This is not a land of slaves, sir. There is only one man in this country I would be obliged to obey, and I do not think even he could compel me to change seats at this moment. Leave me be, sir. I’ll not trouble you.”

  She tried to fish for the coin to return it, but it was lodged too deeply down her bodice. It stayed there, cold against her heart.

  “Fascinating raiment, mistress,” he said wryly.

  Zabby glared at him. “I have never worn a bodice before. Papa says that ignorance is no shame, so long as it is corrected. As soon as I can secure a room, my error will be set aright.”

  She turned away and pretended to be fascinated with the names carved into her table. The men resumed their discussion.

  “Blast and hang him,” the dark man said to his companion, who looked to Zabby like a baker dressed above his station, plump and comfortable, with soft white hands. His eyes, though . . . small and pale, they looked at her and through her, seeing every vice she’d ever so much as thought of. They sought, and evaluated, but did not condemn. She thought he must see people as Papa saw animals and chemicals, always in their most basic form, stripped of the things they hid behind, things that obscured the truth.

  He sighed. “They’re sure to be here soon.”

  “Three days in this pit. I’ve a good mind to leave.”

  “That would be disastrous, Your Maj . . . sir. There’s none but you who can, ahem, accomplish this.” He glanced over at Zabby, whose sharp, bare shoulder blades now faced them. It was a part of a woman men seldom saw in public, and, exposed, it was strangely alluring. “I just saw a ship tie up. His is certain to be close.”

  Zabby wasn’t sure what compelled her to speak. “No more ships will make port for a day at least.”

  The dark man looked at her with weary amusement.

  “Then what, sweetheart? I might as well follow you to your room, or lead you to mine? You’re a paragon of your profession, I’m sure. I’ll give you another coin if that’s what you’re after, but I’m too weary to make you work for it.”

  She raised eyebrows so pale that they were almost white and said, loudly enough to draw guffaws from throughout the taproom, “I am not a whore, sir!” Her voice fell in embarrassment. “I arrived on that last boat, ahead of a gale, and I know the sea well enough to tell you no vessels will make port until it blows through. A day at least, the seagulls say.”

  “If she speaks truth, perhaps we should repair to White . . . to home, sir. You look tired, and, if I may presume, unwell.”

  “A touch of fever, no more.”

  But Zabby, staring at him now, suddenly knew otherwise. The dark man was not drunk; he was ill, dangerously so.

  “Still, perhaps I’ll away to bed, just for an hour or so. You’ll fetch me, Chiffinch, if they come after all.” His breath was labored, and Zabby could see he was trembling. He’d hidden his sickness well, but it was about to best him.

  He rose, but as soon as he gained his feet, his knees buckled. Zabby caught him under the armpits and he half fell on top of her. She met Chiffinch’s eye. “Plague or smallpox,” she said. “Summer ague’s not so fierce, nor so quick.”

  “Plague?” Chiffinch whispered. “No! It cannot be!”

  “Here, get him to his room. I’ll send the innkeeper for a physician.”

  “No! You must not!” His eyes darted like frantic mice across the r
oom, scampering over and under all the possibilities. “No one must know.”

  “Oh,” Zabby said, understanding. “They’ll throw you out? Papa said folk in England don’t understand sickness. Don’t worry—plague contagion doesn’t spread through the ether. Not unless he’s coughing, too, but then there’s no hope for him. Take his other arm.”

  They dragged him upstairs, to a chorus of hoots and howls. “Lusty baggage!” one rake exclaimed. “Two at once!”

  “Aye,” said another, “but that poor louse is too soused to remember if he got his money’s worth.”

  She didn’t even hear them. She’d slipped into that stoic practicality necessary in the sickroom, and their taunts troubled her no more than would a patient’s vomit or blood.

  They got the man in bed and Zabby gave Chiffinch parting words of advice. “Keep him warm, however he throws off the bedclothes, until his fever is painfully hot under your own hand. Then strip him and cool him with wet cloths and an open window, fanning all the while. Force liquid in him. He’ll not keep it down, but you must try. Tea, cooled, or small ale, or if you can, the liquor off boiled vegetables. I see no blackening of his digits, and he’s strong, so he’ll like as not live, with your care.”

  She made for the door, but Chiffinch grabbed her arm, his eyes full of panic. “You must not leave me! He must not die!”

  Accustomed to frantic relatives, she patted him kindly but said with some warning, “My godmother, the Duchess of Newcastle, will be here for me soon. At least, her men will.” Best to let him know she was protected.

  “Please, will you wait just a moment? Only a moment, I swear!”

  “Very well.” She lingered by the door as Chiffinch doffed his hat and fell to his knees at his friend’s bedside.

  “What am I to do? Send for a doctor?”

  The dark man answered weakly. “No. The people must not know. My father was all too mortal. If they hear I am thus, the land will erupt in chaos.”

  My, Zabby mused, he certainly thinks well of himself.

  “Do you think it is . . . plague?”

  “I know I feel like a dying child, my friend. If that is what plague feels like . . .”

  “It is,” Zabby said from the door. “But check the pits of his legs and arms to know for sure. Now I’ll be off.”

  She opened the door, but a hushed voice of authority halted her. “I command you to attend me,” the dark man said.

  She whirled, but bit back her retort. The poor man thought he was dying—and might well be.

  “I told you, sir,” she said gently, “there is only one man in this realm with the power to command me.”

  With the last of his failing strength he dug in a leather wallet at his belt and tossed her another gold half crown, which she caught in a deft snap.

  “Look at the face on the coin,” he said. “I am that man, and I command you to stay with me.”

  She looked, and saw in profile that same strong jutting nose, the same sensuous curl of lip, the jaw just starting to slack. She gasped, and did not know if she should flee or fall on her face. Instead she did what she’d do for any sick sailor or slave: she tucked up her skirts, pushed up her sleeves, and called for a basin of water. Her lack of courtesy didn’t matter, for His Majesty Charles II had passed out.

  Chiffinch scurried for spirits and clean cloths, for blankets and basins and knives and anything he thought she might need. After each trip he hovered over her.

  “Shouldn’t you bleed him?” he asked.

  She stared at him. “Whatever for?”

  “Oh, yes, of course, how ignorant of me. A clyster then? Or blistering with the cups?”

  “Do they really believe that here?” she asked, looking at him as if he were a barbarian suggesting she sacrifice a lamb and read its entrails.

  “But his humors must be out of balance.”

  Zabby sighed. “We do not hold with the theory of humors,” she said.

  “We?”

  “Papa and I. We are the only physicians and chirurgeons for our three hundred slaves and a hundred indentured servants. And for ourselves. We’ve treated two plague-infected ships.”

  “And they lived?”

  “Of course not. Not all of them, anyway. But a good dozen out of a thirty-man crew on the first, and far more than half of the second. Better than those who put into the main port. They were quarantined and starved as soon as they crawled ashore.”

  “And you saved them without bleeding?”

  “We believe vis medicatrix naturae.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The healing of nature.” As she spoke she loosed the king’s collar and checked his skin for spotting. “My father told me about a great battlefield contest among three famous physicians. Each was brought a man with a sword cut. One physician would bleed his patient and poultice him with moss from an unburied man’s skull and salve him with burning cantharides. With the next man, by heaven, the second physician would treat the sword —sympathetic medicine, he called it—and not touch the wound. The third would wash his patient’s injury with good wine and lay a clean linen cloth atop it, nothing more. The men bled of their angry humors always died. The men with the mystic swords got the creeping blackness up their limbs, yet sometimes lived if the limb was removed. Those who were washed with wine and left to the kindness of nature were likely to heal. The best course is often to do nothing. Failing that, do no more than is necessary.”

  Chiffinch, who was bled regularly twice a year, looked at the pale, earnest Zabby with some doubt. Maybe he should defy his sovereign and send for a real physician after all.

  “Help me strip him,” she ordered, and he gave in to her command. Her voice had the same ring of authority as the king’s, and he was used to obeying orders.

  “No bubos in the arms,” she said, palpating her king from his inner arms to their hairy hollows. “Help me strip his breeches.”

  “But my dear girl—” he began.

  “When you thought me a whore, you wouldn’t have objected to me handling his privities,” Zabby said archly. So the poor man helped denude his king.

  “Fetch me some more candles,” she told Chiffinch. “I can’t see a thing.”

  He left, and she tried to bend over Charles, but the stiff board at her spine kept her straight. Glancing nervously at the door, she calculated how long it would take Chiffinch to go down and up the stairs, then hastily fumbled at her laces and pins. She had just gotten the contraption off and was about to reverse it when Charles groaned and mumbled something. The bed was wide, and she had to climb on it to lean near his lips.

  “You have my thanks,” he whispered. “The eternal thanks of a king.”

  There was a sharp rapping on the door. She ignored it, but the landlord had his own key and let himself in, just in time to see Zabby, bodice off, loose smock dangling, about to climb atop the naked body of the king of England. The landlord had seen him at his restoration two years past, when he rode by in triumph, and knew his monarch by sight.

  Chiffinch came up a moment later and paid the man for his silence, but it soon became known throughout England that the king was so fascinated with his new mistress—a pale but enthusiastic young unknown—that he’d locked himself in an inn with her for two solid weeks, enjoying her so much that he never once poked his head out. The queen was in a fury. So was another lady.

  When he emerged, they said, he was a wasted shadow of his former self.

  He brought Zabby Wodewose to London and informed her that she would be one of the queen’s maids of honor, the designation of “maid” being a rich jest to the court. She arrived with an ocelot, a reputation, and the deepest enmity of the king’s reigning mistress, Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine.

  Chapter 4

  The King’s Mistress

  “YOU DON’T SEEM TO UNDERSTAND, my dear,” Margaret said to her goddaughter as they swept their trailing skirts along the corridors of Hampton Court, where His Majesty was making a summer honeymoon jaunt of
several weeks’ duration. “When a king voices a preference, it is law.”

  “Unless Parliament naysays him,” Zabby quipped.

  “You’ll not find Parliament interfering with the king’s mistresses,” Margaret said. Zabby made a choking noise of protest, but Margaret held up her hand. “I know, you need not convince me, child. You’ve told me the truth of it, and you’ve virginal eyes if ever I’ve seen a pair. But the king has a secret, and he feels the best way to keep it is to keep it close. He doesn’t want anyone to know he had plague, so we must all bend to his whim—for a time, anyway.”

  “But I came to England to learn, not to mince around court and fetch the queen’s handkerchiefs.”

  Margaret laughed. “You’ll do much more than that. You have an infinity of resources here. His Majesty’s menagerie is the finest in the world, learned men are always welcome at his court, and they say his elaboratory has advances I can only dream of. Fetch handkerchiefs? The whole of civilization is made in these halls, child. Every bit of wit and beauty and learning passes like flies through a web, and those living here decide what sticks. A mind like yours, Zabby-heart, can shape society from here. Only get yourself listened to by the right ears, and soon the whole nation will be thinking as you think.”

  “Then why aren’t you here, Godmother?”

  “Do you know why I write?” She had already published her autobiography and diverse treatises on philosophy and the physical world. She was at work on a volume titled Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy. “I write because I cannot speak. I think highly enough of my own opinions to wish that others might know them, but place me before a crowd and I become mute as a worm.”

  “You speak well to me.”

  “My trembling increases exponentially in relation to my audience. I can speak to you, or to my darling husband, but I lack the fortitude to make myself known in the press and rush of court. I was maid of honor to the last queen for a time, you know, though I only stayed for shame of fleeing. Everyone thought me a fool. But you, dear, you’re fearless.”