“Been selling herrings. M’sister Rose has a cart, but herrings ain’t what they was.” She shook her head sadly at the thought of a world in which a herring could depreciate. “So I took to serving spirits here. But a girl must advance, and so, good sirs or whatever you may be . . .”
“You mean you really would give yourself to one of us?” Zabby asked. “For money?”
“Aye,” she said, laughing, “for all you could do to me, unless there’s something new under the sun. Wherefore do you dress like men? Are you nuns come to chastise the world’s wantons?”
“You knew?” Beth gasped.
Nell patted Beth’s cheek smartly. “Your chin’s as hairless as my . . . Ah, I’ll have done with lewdness, now the secret’s out. What’s your game, then?” She lounged in the chair, curious.
“We’ve come to see what men are like, away from us,” the queen said.
“And?”
“We find them worse, and better,” she replied. For at least my husband would not buy a child, she thought. Would he? “When we go, does another man come for you, little one?”
“Aye, tonight, tomorrow. Such is life.” She shrugged her skinny shoulders.
The queen called her ladies to her and consulted them in hushed tones. Oh, my, Beth said. But we cannot save them all, Zabby protested. Eliza chuckled, shook her head, and said that they might as well be hung for this lamb as a piece of mutton, and took something from the queen.
“Here you go, sweetheart,” Eliza said, tossing her a glittering emerald ring. “From my mistress. Don’t go pawning it, or flashing it around. It’s your chastity belt, until such time as you have another dwelling. If any fellow offers you insult, show him that and tell him you’re under the queen’s protection.”
“Gemini!” Nell said, privately thinking that she’d yet to hear the offer she found insulting.
“Though officially I suppose you’ll be under my protection. Tell your bawd you have a keeper and you’re off the lists. Tomorrow we’ll find a place for you.”
And so, the queen and her maids of honor found they’d acquired a collective mistress.
They might not have been so concerned for Nell’s virtue had they known that, with the judicious use of alum and a sponge soaked in sheep’s blood, her virginity had been sold three times in the last week alone.
Eliza, under the name of Duncan, took a pretty set of rooms over the Cock and Pie Tavern at the end of Maypole Alley, just a stroll away from where Killigrew was supervising the construction of his new theater on Drury Lane.
The girls fretted over Nell as if she were a pet spaniel. Zabby thought she should have plain, serviceable linsey-woolsey clothes, to help her avoid temptation, while Beth wanted to dress her like a doll. The queen sent her a gilded diptych of the Virgin and the Magdalene, so she’d have before her examples of purity and repentance. Eliza, more practical, brought in masters to teach her fashionable speech, dancing, singing, the Spanish guitar.
And like a spaniel, Nell had only to implore prettily to get her way. She complained of being lonely, and after some resistance they let her sister Rose call on her.
“But mind you, you’re a kept miss now,” Eliza said. “No gentlemen visitors.”
A week after giving Killigrew her play, Eliza had met with him again, still in masculine guise, strolling with him as he shouted instructions to laborers at the new theater. He decided to produce her play—with a few alterations—and took the promising lad he too knew as Duncan under his wing. Eliza snuck out to meet him at least twice a week, and she used Nell’s rooms as her headquarters. Eventually, she invited Killigrew to meet her pretty mistress, and Rose happened to stop by with a friend from Madame Ross’s, then Charles Hart and Walter Clun came in search of Killigrew, and it became a regular party, with oysters and a venison pie ordered from Odam’s Ordinary (which turned out to be quite good, despite what Sedley had said). Before long, Duncan and Nell were a popular couple among the actors and demimonde. Nell’s wit remained cleverly coarse, but now it sparkled with Latin and French and court gossip. Eliza was living, firsthand, the decadent life she wrote about.
Zabby and Beth disapproved—Beth on the grounds of propriety, Zabby on those of her friend’s best interests. “What will your father say if he knows you’re consorting with whores and players and writing for the theater?”
“People don’t talk about what they don’t know about,” Eliza replied, supremely confident.
The queen knew nothing of this, but freely allowed her maid of honor to visit their rescued virgin.
“And how does our pretty, pure Nell this night?” Catherine asked when Eliza, a bit tipsy, snuck back into Whitehall near midnight one evening.
“Oh, her singing improves immensely, as does her dancing. I watched her practice for many hours.”
“Good, good,” Catherine replied drowsily as her maid of honor, now in a bodice and skirt but smelling of tobacco, undressed her hair. “In a few years we will find her a suitable husband. It is a fine act of charity, is it not?”
“Indeed, Your Majesty.”
She did not mention that Nell had been dancing a sarabande on a tabletop for a cheering crowd of players, whores, and poets, or that the songs she sang were lusty street ballads. The world is what it is, Eliza thought, and she rather liked it that way.
Chapter 12
The Girl Who Says No
CHRISTMAS WAS A TIME at which the court honored the birth of their savior by showing off their choicest silks and most costly jewels, and by concocting merry hijinks and amateur theatricals. They played children’s games, groping each other in blind man’s buff, and concluded with the merry pastime of slip-the-marriage-vow in dark corners and private rooms.
The queen kept a smile tacked onto her face as maids of honor to her and her sister-in-law Anne frolicked in a mummery of pastoral seduction, ending with Winifred Wells dancing the fashionable new minuet with a pillow stuffed under her skirts. There were uncouth shrieks of laughter when her gravid stuffing became dislodged, and Buckingham solemnly declared the pillow a stillbirth and handed it to the king for dissection in his elaboratory.
Catherine had been married seven months and still had not conceived.
“Charles’s own mother did not bear a living child until she’d been four years wed,” Beth said softly when she saw how much the girls’ tomfoolery affected her queen, and how well she hid it. “Then see how many babes she had? There is time aplenty, Your Majesty.”
“So says the witch under the stones,” Catherine said. “Yet every day is torture.”
Across the room, Barbara was eyeing the giddy young girls with indolent superiority. She was pregnant again, standing with her hips thrust forward to emphasize the barely visible bump. Though her husband, Palmer, had made a pretense of claiming the first two, he’d rarely been within fifty leagues of his wife in the last year, and the king was already acknowledging the unborn child as his own, fondling her stomach in public, saying he fancied this name or that. To the world, she was absolutely secure in her position as maitresse-en-titre, the official mistress of the king, but she was always keenly alert to anything that might change her fortunes.
Zabby came reluctantly to the king’s presence chamber from the elaboratory, where she’d been puzzling once more over the Lucifer light. The German alchemist had told them, after the king’s jocular threats (for who can ever be sure if a king is in jest, when he laughingly threatens to hang you for treason?), that it was composed from the substance of the human body, showing that the light of the soul glows from even the basest matter. Pursuing it later, they captured Zabby’s breath in a glass balloon. They waylaid the Duke of York’s physician after the unpopular heir’s quarterly bleeding. They’re framed from collecting feces, thinking no element of the soul would choose to reside in such an odiferous substance, but set aside several basins of the royal urine. Zabby had been scraping the salts left after evaporation, but a servant rapped on the door and summoned her before she could decide how
to proceed. The queen was adamant that all of her attendants enjoy themselves on Christmas day, whether they wanted to or not.
Zabby came through the door and lingered, her mind still in the elaboratory, not noticing who was standing beside her until it was too late to leave without giving dire offense.
“You smell of piss,” Barbara said. Zabby owned privately that it was probably true and bit back her sharp retort. “Is that what you get up to with him, then? I still can’t fathom you, miss, but I don’t fear you. Ah, you should have heard the wagging tongues when you appeared from over the sea, trapping him in that inn with your perverse lust, but I always knew he’d return to me. I have what I need of him, and he of me, and no doxy of the moment will interfere with that.”
She slid her eyes sidelong at Zabby. “D’you know, since you’ve arrived he’s been another man entirely. Calmer and sharper all at once. You must suck some poisonous humor out of him, eh? He used to rise, nights, in my bedroom, and pace for an hour, muttering to himself, but now he sleeps like a babe till sunrise. If you did that to him, my thanks.”
“You really care for him, then?” Zabby asked the older woman skeptically.
She laughed, sharp and strident, and not a few heads turned and marveled that the rivals for the king’s scepter were closed in conversation. “Does it matter one whit? He’s the king, you chit, and I’d act the same whether I despised him or adored him. Oh, don’t look so shocked. You’d be doing . . . whatever it is you do for him in that stinking magician’s lair of his . . . even if he was a poxed-up blubberous lout, because he’s the king.” Her voice softened and her eyes half closed in what Zabby realized, with a jealousy that made her want to claw the other woman’s face, was a memory of ecstatic passion. “Lucky for me—for us—he’s handsome and considerate and fashioned like Old Rowley himself.” She winked at Zabby, and the girl blushed, hating Barbara but coming closer than she believed possible to liking her too, because of her obvious deep affection for the king.
“No, you don’t worry me one jot,” Barbara continued after a moment. She flicked out her fan and covered her face as she spoke, so only Zabby could see where she looked. “I scent a storm in the air. Do you see that pretty little piece of insipidity there?”
Zabby followed her gaze and saw the newest maid of honor, a girl about her own age who had served the king’s beloved sister Minette in Paris: Frances Stewart. Zabby didn’t have a high opinion of her—the girl had an annoyingly high-pitched giggle and childishly skipping movements, and enjoyed such pastimes as blowing bubbles and crafting houses of cards. Zabby thought she might even be simple, and as much as she pondered her at all, thought only that it was lucky the girl was pretty, because she certainly couldn’t make her mark any other way.
At the moment she was dancing with Charles, or rather, he was trying to entice her into a dance and she was tripping away like a tipsy wood-nymph.
“I give you advice from one whore to another, Zabby,” Barbara said lightly. “Never trouble yourself over the girls who say yes. They’re a dozen to the half crown, everywhere, like slugs on a rhubarb. A man wants a yes, aye, but he needs more than that, and that’s what we can give him. Nulla puella negat,” she added, surprising Zabby, who didn’t realize it was only a common saying: No girl says no.
“Fornication’s no novelty to him,” she went on, “though you’ve apparently come up with something bizarre to please him.” Zabby bristled, wishing she could tell the world once and for all that she and the king were not lovers. But then how Barbara would laugh at her!
Barbara smiled as pleasantly as if they were confederates, two admirals, perhaps, discussing how best to serve their monarch’s interest on the high seas. “It’s not you I have to worry about, nor you me, so long as you mind your place and never interfere with mine. Our danger lies there.” She nodded to where slim, golden Frances, now blindfolded for blindman’s buff, was letting herself be spun around. She stumbled unerringly into the king’s embrace, felt too low and guessed him to be Eduardo, the queen’s Portuguese dwarf, mistaking a fortuitously fondled bump for his nose. “For she says no.”
“Has he propositioned her?”
“Are you blind? He’s been after her for months now. She giggles and simpers and lets him paw her a bit, then pretends to be shocked and says not without marriage. She works him to a frenzy and then sends him away. Then he slakes it on us. Haven’t you noticed? There’s her fortune sitting like a cat in her own lap, and she won’t reach out to stroke it. She’s either the world’s master idiot, which is what we must hope for, or a thousand times cleverer than you or I.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I curse the day I married that blighted Palmer. If not for that . . . Well, I deceive myself. He needed Catherine’s money, and the people wouldn’t have stood for anything other than a princess, so he’d never have wed me even if I’d been free. But if the queen remains barren, and Frances keeps saying no in that way that seems to mean yes, if only, what do you think he’ll do? They say she has a drop of royal blood, if you dissect the escutcheons well enough, and if she’s virgin, too . . .”
“You mean he could cast off the queen and marry Frances?”
“That’s her game, if I smoke her right.”
“He wouldn’t do it!”
“If he gets no heir on his queen, he just might. It’s been done before, and no one can stomach the thought of James as king. Poor Catherine!”
“Poor Catherine? I thought you despised her.”
“Ah, well, one cannot despise a mouse in a trap. She had no say in her life. Not everyone is captain of her own vessel, like us. Besides, what would I be without her? She’s my safe port.”
“How do you mean?”
“Charles is bound to a childless, plain woman, so of course he loves elsewhere. But say he had a tart little baggage like that Frances to excite him, and give him children. Why, if she played her cards right he’d drop us all like blistering roasted chestnuts. I need Charles to stay bound to his yellow Portuguese bat. And he probably will. He likes things to be easy. Keep an eye on Frances, though. Together you and I should be enough to carbonado her.” She sighed. “If it gets too serious, we can always hire someone to ravish her. I doubt he’d be interested in spoiled goods, particularly for a queen. Well, back to business.”
With a wave of her fingers she sailed off and caught Charles expertly in her clutches, whirling him away from the pouting Frances, promising him untold delights. It didn’t look to Zabby as if they had anything to worry about.
What a merciless, terrible woman, Zabby thought. All the same, there was something admirable about her. She was analytical, practical, almost scientific in her pursuit of power. With what cold precision she’d tossed off the scheme to have Frances raped, as though such a crime was but an inconvenience on the path to fulfillment, like the stink of urine in the quest for the visible soul. What a shame Barbara could not be a statesman, or a general.
She didn’t realize that in her own way, Barbara was.
Zabby stayed aloof for the rest of the festivities. She used to think the petty machinations of the court ladies beneath her notice, schemes of love and vengeance, but now she studied them like the natural history lessons they were. She saw Simona flirt simultaneously with four men, but after close observation Zabby realized it was all for the sake of a fifth, the Duke of York, whose interest increased in proportion to his competition. She watched Suffolk move among the foreign ambassadors, whispering a word here, granting a nod there, which struck Zabby as odd because she knew the mistress of the robes had no interest in politics. Then she remembered the woman had the queen’s ear, and as Catherine adjusted to court life people were beginning to court her favor too, thinking her word to the king might win them whatever they desired. She saw a something glinting change hands—a fine pair of diamond ear-drops from the Italian ambassador in an exchange for a message Suffolk would never deliver to the queen, that the queen would not comprehend, in any event, that her hu
sband would not listen to. Gossip, bribes, blackmail, were the favored currency of the day.
Godmother Cavendish’s advice came back to Zabby. I’m cleverer than any of them, she thought, and I have Charles’s ear. I could have ambassadors seeking my counsel. I could scheme to have funds sent here, withheld there. I could make such a fortune as to build my own elaboratory, a library surpassing the king’s, gardens full of wild beasts, alchemists and philosophers at my beck and call.
Zabby thought she didn’t care for money. The truth was, she simply had no wish to spend it as these empty-pated fops and wantons might. She could have money and power surpassing them all.
Why, look at Barbara. To the nation’s displeasure, Charles had granted Barbara all of his Christmas presents that year. So the clocks from the Netherlands, the Titian, the baubles and Bibles and pearls and plate from ingratiating courtiers and merchants all went into the royal mistress’s coffers, to be turned to cash, and thence to silks and jewels. What Zabby could do with that money! Her family had always been comfortable, but now, musingly, in the haze of the wassail bowl, she dreamed of extravagance: her own sort, a spendthrift riot of science and learning.
And all I have to do is take part in this vice and madness, she thought. I could be the most powerful woman in London, in England.
If the world worked out exactly right—and if I helped it along—I could be queen!
She’d been holding a goblet of raspberry cordial, viscous and rich as blood. When that thought struck home, the vessel slipped from her nerveless fingers, splashing Catherine’s hem with sanguine crimson. With a stifled cry, Zabby fled from the room.
She started for her own chamber, but at the last moment whirled, knowing it was all too likely one of her friends would seek her out there. Where to hide with her shame? The elaboratory, of course. Anyone might stumble on her elsewhere in the palace, but no one save Charles ever visited the elaboratory at night, and it was unlikely he’d be torn from the festivities by the lure of chemicals. She dashed down the hallways, her heels clack-clicking, and tucked herself away in her sanctuary.
Ladies in Waiting Page 12
