Ladies in Waiting

by Laura L. Sullivan

  “I don’t know about that!” Zabby said. “Do you know, although I spent more than two weeks with him, covered in his excretions, his body unclothed before me, I almost fear to see him now, in his natural element.”

  She feared for more reasons than one. Something had happened to Zabby in those two cloistered weeks, something she herself was hardly prepared to admit.

  “He was a tiger in the zoo then, caged and tame,” Margaret said. “Now he’s a tiger in the Afric wilds.”

  “Indian wilds, Godmother. There are only lions and leopards in Africa.”

  “Oh, dear, are you sure? Remind me to amend my manuscript. In any event, he is your king, and it’s only natural to hold him in some awe. If you find yourself growing faint, just remember him breechless and purging, and he’ll seem no more than an ordinary man.”

  Zabby had to hold on to the walls so she didn’t laugh herself into a puddle. A passing page ran from her as if she were a foreign demon.

  That’s one thing I can do that the other court ladies can’t—picture Charles naked. She recalled his reputation. Or can they?

  She felt suddenly possessive of the man she’d saved, of his body, so hard and handsome even in illness, his fevered skin, the feel of him in her arms when the charcoal braziers weren’t enough and she had to warm him with the heat of her own flesh. Her laughter died away as, seized with an unaccountable jealousy, she wondered if she could bear to know that other women had seen that splendid naked body, had lain with it, with him.

  Stop that at once, she chided herself. He was a patient then, a king now, and he will never be otherwise. What would he want with you when he has a queenly wife, and if all accounts are true, a bevy of nobly born mistresses?

  And what, her scientific self asked, would you want with him? You have your studies, your work. What more could you ask for?

  She didn’t quite know the answer, but nonetheless thought, perhaps, there might be more, if she dared to ask.

  She was still frowning at the thought when they swept into the hall. Generally any newcomer was pounced upon by threescore pairs of eyes, dissected, and devoured, to be regurgitated in gossip for days to come. In the hothouse environment of the court, a new face was that much more manure to till into the fecund soil of scandal.

  But now they ignored Zabby. Their gazes were all turned to two more familiar players in the second act of the drama, the prologue of which had been Suffolk’s presentation of the bedchamber list. After a necessary intermission caused by the king’s surprising absence (an amusing, mysterious subplot), there followed scenes of high melodrama (as Charles tried to persuade the wife he thought was meek and innocent, to comply with his wishes) and of pathos (as the Lord Chancellor was given the unenviable task of forcing the queen to relent to the king’s plans). And now, perhaps, came a climax, for Charles was leading Barbara Palmer, known to the world as Lady Castlemaine, up to the chair of the oblivious queen. Catherine still had never seen her rival, for Barbara had just been in what they called an interesting condition, resulting in a lad she named Charles Fitzroy, her second acknowledged bastard by the king. Now, full-fleshed and startlingly lovely, she leaned on the king’s arm as he brought her to be formally presented to the queen.

  Zabby knew none of the actors, except for Charles, who seemed so much more man than king (even her rational mind could not quite yet encompass the idea that he was both) that she hardly knew how to classify him. That small woman with the large, solemn eyes, seated in a position of honor, must be the queen. There were several grand ladies around her in a sort of orbit, as though they had no wish to be any closer but could not quite leave. The only exceptions were two girls about Zabby’s own age.

  One was a large, dark girl of the coloring she’d heard called black: deep brown hair and eyes; high, vibrant color on her cheeks. She looked the hall over with a wry impassivity, as if she were collecting the most amusing bits to assemble into a collage at her leisure. She stood idly at the queen’s side, a silken distaff bodyguard.

  The other girl was slim and fair, soft as a dormouse, with huge gray eyes. She sat on a step at the queen’s feet, a lapdog too loyal to leave, though she looked a little afraid of getting her paws trodden upon. She seemed such a helpless morsel that Zabby felt an urge to coddle her, and laughed at the thought of having another pet. On Barbados every slave and servant knew to bring her baby birds and raccoons and even snakes, and despite her father’s wisdom that sick and orphaned animals were part of the natural order of things, she always interfered and saved them if she could, excusing it as part of her studies. As a result, the plantation was filled with half-tame beasts that would still sneak into the kitchen for handouts, or into her room for a warm, dry bed. She could see instantly that this girl was another such creature, and almost felt her pocket for a tidbit.

  But Zabby’s gaze was immediately dragged, almost against her will, to the figure in pearl white over cloth-of-silver leaning on Charles’s arm. Even from behind, she could see something barbaric in her gait, a predatory prowl that left Zabby glad she was not the prey.

  A woman like that doesn’t belong on Charles’s arm, Zabby thought hotly, but did not let herself think which woman ought to be there in her stead.

  The queen’s eyes lit up when she saw her husband. She never even noticed the glittering woman with him, only saw the pleasant smile on his face, the fact that he was coming to her voluntarily in public, before all the court. He’d avoided her for days. Her breath caught with hope, and her lips parted in a shy smile that showed one slightly protruding front tooth, a defect she usually tried to hide.

  He’s so handsome, she thought. I know he is good at heart. It is only this place that makes him the way he is, and the hardship of his youth. He will love me as I love him. Look how he smiles at me, like he did that first night.

  She heard a low roar of murmurs, but to her it sounded like a heavenly chorus. After miserable days of shunning her, punishing her, Charles was returning to her at last. He bowed before her and presented the lady, some cousin, perhaps, or a minister’s wife, like the dozen others she’d received that day. She did not hear and did not care. He must see now that he cannot favor his mistress over his wife. I’ll welcome him with all my affection, she thought. He is my lord, my master, my . . .

  “My God!” someone said quite distinctly from the crowd. “Her Majesty has just let Lady Castlemaine kiss her hand!”

  The winsome smile froze on the little queen’s face. Her eyes widened until they looked fit to pop, while the veins stood in sharp blue relief on the pallor of her neck. Her cheeks mottled red, and a thin trickle of blood dripped from her nose. She sucked in a great breath and held it, as did everyone else in the room. Would she scream? At Barbara or at Charles? Would she stop her breath until she passed out? Until she died? Would Barbara have her marriage to Palmer annulled and become the new queen? Anything might happen!

  Zabby knew little of protocol. At times, she was sure, there simply was none. When your king was delirious with plague fever, you wrapped your arms and legs around his naked body to keep him from hurling himself out the window. When your queen looked horror-struck and was plainly about to have a fit, you intervened. Zabby shook off her godmother and insinuated herself between Catherine and the cause of her distress. She cast a quick glance at Charles. It was his business to attend to his wife, and she’d willingly step aside if he meant to sweep her into his arms and carry her back to her chambers. But the king only scowled, as if all this was an overspiced dish or a spatter of mud on his hose, a distasteful inconvenience he’d prefer to dispose of and have done with.

  But she’s your wife, Zabby thought and half mouthed.

  Then she caught Barbara’s haughty, mocking eyes, and Zabby thought she understood. Her godmother had idly passed along a rumor that the king was favoring his mistress over his queen, forcing the one to endure the gadfly presence of the other. This must be the notorious Castlemaine. Zabby gave an involuntary gasp. The king’s reigning mistres
s was frighteningly beautiful. No man could resist her, the courtiers said; no man had ever tried. Why? Zabby wondered. Was it beauty alone that gave her such a hold on the king?

  “Charles,” Zabby said, and the intimacy of that Christian name sparked a week’s conflagration of gossip. “How could you?” She looked at the man with reproach and turned to Barbara as the thunderclouds began to gather on his brow.

  Zabby cocked her head at Barbara and reckoned her up in her scientific fashion—calculating her, vivisecting her—and at last said, blandly, “You oughtn’t use ceruse to whiten your complexion, madam. You’ll go mad and your flesh will fall off.” Spoken so flatly, so surely, with no hint of insult, it sounded like a malediction, and Barbara blanched to the color she had striven for in the first place. She only found her anger a moment later when Zabby turned her back on the pair and curtsied to the queen. Chiffinch had taught her how to do that, among a few other niceties of court, in their idle hours watching over the king’s quiet sleep in the later days of his illness.

  “I am Zabby Wodewose, daughter of Edward Wodewose, Baron of Nonesuch, lately of Barbados. The king your husband has commanded me to attend you as a maid of honor. May I assist you to your rooms, Your Majesty?”

  Then Catherine screamed. It wasn’t the sound Zabby had been expecting. Hysterics, perhaps, or the high-pitched, desperate shriek of a snared beast when the trapper approaches and it knows there is nothing more to life but pain. She was not prepared for rage. A ragged roar tore from the tiny queen’s throat, a vibrato that made the beeswax candles in the low-hanging chandeliers tremble. She started forward in her seat, eyes closed, teeth bared, as if she would spring at her enemy (though which enemy, Zabby didn’t know), but before she escaped the deeply cushioned seat, her weakness and loneliness conquered her fury, and her knees buckled.

  For an instant she sprawled in unconscious supplication before her husband. Then two pairs of strong hands scooped her up, Eliza at her head and Zabby at her feet, and carried her out of the room, with Beth trailing behind, weeping for all of them.

  Barbara looked appalled, but quickly marshaled her aplomb and gave a tinkling laugh, cut short by a look from Charles. She sobered, then asked him in mock solemnity, “Whatever could have affected her like that, Your Majesty? Are my curls in a disarray?” She shook them against Charles’s shoulder, loosing a scented cloud of ambergris and tuberose, and something else no man can resist: the lingering smell of himself, from their recent amours.

  Charles’s own face was unreadable now. He called for the musicians set discreetly in a corner to strike up his favorite tune, “Cuckolds All Awry,” and squired Barbara through the sprightly dance. More than one courtier remarked that it was a shame a woman couldn’t sprout a pair of cuckold’s horns, and each believed his wit to be original. Charles danced determinedly for an hour, excused himself for a moment, then retired to Barbara’s house in King Street, where he and the gayest men and ladies of the court played (and cheated) at cards until past midnight. Barbara’s husband was obediently rusticating in their country estate.

  Eliza, Zabby, and Beth arranged the queen on her bed of state, a grand furnishing created for the royal consummation, eight thousand pounds’ worth of gossamer linen and Flanders point, of carved puttis and canopies, crowned in the cardinal directions with entire ostriches of feathers. On a dressing table with an oval Venetian mirror lay a scattered disarray of beauty tools in beaten gold, the sale of any one of which would have given a clergyman’s daughter a dowry handsome enough to catch a baronet.

  Catherine, eyes still squeezed tight, thrashed her head back and forth on fat goosedown pillows, clutching the bedsheets in her balled fists. Then, first falling limp, she sat abruptly and said piteously to the wall beyond them, “I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know. How could I have known?”

  “Known what, Your Majesty?” Zabby asked softly in Spanish.

  It was not Catherine’s natal tongue, but she had learned it in infancy, and it was as familiar to her as the cool stone benches in her convent’s garden. Two of the sisters were from Spain.

  With some effort the queen focused on Zabby. She was as alien to Catherine as the Portuguese queen was to the court. Catherine had never seen anyone other than a peasant with a deep tan, but Zabby’s face was sun-darkened and faintly freckled. Her hair made a startling contrast. At first Catherine thought it was white, and tried to reconcile the unlined face with elderly hair, but soon she decided it was a very pale, silvery blond, pellucid and wispy in an unfashionable straight fringe at the brow and a simple chignon at the nape. Her lashes and high, arched eyebrows were the same uncanny fairy shade, and her face was saved from glacial pallor only by her eyes. They’re cat eyes, Catherine thought, almost crossing herself—a peculiar amber or bright tawny orange, very large and opened wide. If she’d been a languid painted court brunette, Catherine would never have confided in her, whatever language she spoke, but that familiar speech, combined with Zabby’s odd, otherworldly appearance, made the queen forget for a moment that she was in a hostile place.

  “What the world is,” she said at last. “What a man is.”

  Zabby had plenty of advice, but she knew it was all theoretical, so she said instead, “But you know yourself, Your Majesty. Begin there.”

  “Know myself?” Catherine asked incredulously. “Did I know there was such a thing as hatred in my heart until this very moment? No one is what he seems! I am not even a queen.”

  The others understood none of this, but Eliza said, “Did you see Castlemaine’s face, Your Majesty, when this one put her down? Her face will fall off—blast my tripes, but that’s rich!”

  Zabby looked at her wide-eyed and said, “But it’s true. Lead seeps into the skin and—”

  “Well, no matter the genius behind it, you’ve made one enemy today, and found an admirer in me. How do you speak Portugee?”

  “That was Spanish,” Zabby said. “My father trades with Spanish merchants. Portuguese too, sometimes, but I only speak a little.” She turned to the queen. “Your Majesty, what will you do?” No one could loose that howl of rage without following it with action.

  Do? Catherine knew how to pray, how to be elegant in her native fashion. She had read philosophy and theology. She could embroider. She could sit or kneel patiently for hours on end. Beyond that she had no skills, knew nothing of the political maneuvering or seduction or blackmail that might sway a husband such as Charles.

  “I will go home!” she said at last, and Zabby, finding the waters too deep, began to translate so the others could help.

  “Oh, don’t go!” Beth said piteously, then wondered if she’d be allowed to accompany the queen. She dreamed of love, but the quiet solitude of convent life sounded tempting. Her mother would never be allowed in a Portuguese convent.

  “’Sblood, of course you can’t go,” Eliza said sharply. “That’s just what those painted besoms want, for you to turn tail. Chouse them proper and stay. As for that Castlemaine, why, anyone can see he’ll tire of her quick enough.”

  Zabby translated (though she couldn’t recall the Spanish for besom) but had her doubts.

  “Will he come to me?” Catherine asked.

  “Of course,” they lied, exchanging looks. “As soon as he can.”

  He shouldn’t have done it to her, Zabby thought. Not in front of that mocking crowd. The man who had lain in bed for two weeks under her care would not have done that. The man whose hand she’d held, who’d talked with her about the herbs of Barbados, about Carib magic, sailing, Hobbes’s Leviathan, would not treat the woman he pledged himself to thus.

  I know him, Zabby thought. Those days of weakness, of bare skin, of death kept at bay, showed me the real man. He’s clever and kind, loyal to what he loves. And he must love Catherine. He will see that he has treated her cruelly, and repent.

  Zabby’s only experience with marriage was a dim memory of her mother and father strolling along the shore, hand in hand, exchanging secret kisses, herself a toddler
collecting seashells. All she knew of love was Papa. Until recently.

  The three girls did their best to perform their duties as maids of honor. Beth silently combed the queen’s hair, twining the soft waves around her fingers. The other two kept up a halting, desultory chatter, Eliza teaching Catherine how to say all the parts of her dress and jewels in English, Zabby, in Spanish, telling her all about her godmother’s latest work, which together was confusing enough to put the queen into a daze.

  If only he’d come, Zabby thought. I’m sure if they were alone for a while they’d sort it all out. He wouldn’t make that woman be one of her ladies if he knew how much it meant to her.

  Thinking to comfort her, Zabby said, “When I was with him in Dover he told me about your courtship by proxy, how pleased he was to see you in person. He said . . .”

  Catherine jerked away from her handlers, leaving a strand of torn hair in Beth’s fingers. “You! That was you with him all these weeks? Penalva told me there was a new one. Another of his whores.” She spat on Zabby’s chest, and the girl sprang up and backed away.

  I can’t tell her the truth, she thought. I promised the king.

  “Did it amuse you to cosset me, lull me with your honeyed kindness, you trull? Did you conspire with that Castlemaine all the while, to laugh together behind my back?”

  “Your Majesty, I swear to you—”

  “What harlot’s tricks do you know that you can keep him locked up with you for two weeks?” She spoke with scorn, but her eyes shifted guiltily to the side. She wished she were brave enough to beg, Teach them to me. “Get out! Leave me!” She snatched the gold and tortoiseshell comb from Beth’s hands and flung it at Zabby’s head. Marksmanship was not among the skills taught in a convent. “By God, if you come near me again I’ll . . .” She could not think of a threat horrible enough, and knew in her heart she wouldn’t have the power to execute it anyway.

  Not knowing what else to do, Zabby opened the door without the mandatory deep curtsy and was about to slip out when a wall of warmth emanating from a large body stopped her before she even knew he was there. She looked up into Charles’s dark saturnine face and almost reached a hand to his cheek—to check for fever—before she caught herself.