Ladies in Waiting

by Laura L. Sullivan

  Feverishly, she forced herself to work. There was a cured skin of a serpent waiting to be stuffed, and she spent some time coaxing it into lifelike articulations. If she could only focus on science, perhaps she could subdue those shameful thoughts.

  But she looked into the snake’s dead, hollow eyes, thought how fine a pair of emeralds would look there, once it was mounted, and from there began to mull once again over what she could do with a fortune, with power.

  How easy it was for her agile mind to light upon the notions that would make it acceptable—preferable, even, the best and most rational course. Catherine was not happy at court. She preferred the solemn silence of the convent. Charles wasn’t a brute; he’d not concoct some petty treason to behead her for. No, he’d simply point out her unsuitability, her barrenness, and send her back to Portugal. Where she’d be happy, Zabby added. And then, whom else would he choose but her? Not Barbara, married, and enough of a termagant to frighten Charles away from a permanent union in any case. Certainly not that insipid, giggling infatuation of the moment, Frances. And not, she was sure, some fat German princess or Spanish infanta. Who understood Charles? Who had nursed him back from the grave? Who shared his passion for books, for science, for beasts and plants and ships? Only Zabby.

  “No!” she said aloud. “I couldn’t.” But that wasn’t true, and with a certain pride she amended it. “I wouldn’t.”

  Still, the possibility loomed, and she could find no way to banish it utterly.

  Me, queen! Me, with the riches and learning of the nation at my command! The idea glowed before her like a sun, and she stared, though she knew it would blind her.

  It would be an honorable way of having Charles, she thought. No, not honorable, but in the eyes of the world, to be a wife was a better thing than to be a whore. If I were his wife, my passion for him would be right and proper. I could yield to it, as often as I cared to. And as Barbara herself said (and who should know the ways of men, if not her?), if Charles had a true friend and helpmeet in his wife, he would not look elsewhere for his diversions.

  I could do it, she thought, just to show that I could. The world might be a better place for it.

  For a moment it seemed to her no more than an experiment. Given such a set of variables, with such forces acting upon them, would the anticipated result follow? Never had she been faced with a hypothesis without attempting to prove it.

  She stroked the snake’s supple scaled leather and recalled a time on Barbados. She’d been twelve, as apt a student of her father’s natural philosophy then as she was still, marveling at the firm, sleek quicksilver bodies of dolphins sporting in the outflowing tide. They swam, like fish, but their eyes were quick and keen like a human’s, and once when she’d perched in the bow of a swift skiff and reached out her hand, a dolphin riding the forewake had puffed hot breath into her palm. Fish, she knew, are cold, so what could a dolphin be, with his warmth and canny eyes?

  She’d asked a fisherman to spear her a specimen for study and dissection. He’d been reluctant to comply, because dolphins are luck to sailors, but she was the little mistress and at last he came to port with a slack body tied alongside his boat. Zabby had been so heartbroken to see the beast dead, its eyes as lifeless as any fish’s, its body as cold as any corpse, that she’d insisted the poor creature be given a proper burial. The slaves dug a hole on the beach and she’d strewn it with hibiscus, hating herself for what she’d done.

  Then her father found out, and with very gentle words explained that in the pursuit of knowledge—as in the pursuit of anything that is worth the chase—there is always pain and sacrifice. What’s more, he pointed out, would you see the creature’s death be a wasted one? And so she had him dug up and together she and her father dissected the dolphin.

  Had the knowledge been worth the sorrow? Would power be worth the pain she would cause?

  The door opened, and Charles said her name. Of course he would know where to find her. Of course he would seek her out.

  Ask me, she begged without turning. Ask me to be your whore, so that I may say no, so that you may desire me all the more. Or ask me so that I may say yes, and you may tire of me before I do irreparable harm. I want . . . I want . . .

  She did not know what she wanted, but she wanted it with all of her heart, with all of her body.

  “What a pretty little jilt you are, sweetheart,” he said, looking her over with a slow, sweeping gaze that made her tremble. “Come, the court must see me dance with my favorite mistress or they’ll all think we’ve fallen out, and make your life miserable.” He held out his arm.

  She wanted to rage at him, tell him he’d already danced with his favorite mistress, Barbara, and tell him she refused to play his foolish game any longer. She wanted to pound him with her fists and meet his mouth with hers, to bite him, tear at him, to envelop him.

  But she only put her hand lightly on his arm and went back to the presence chamber for her dance.

  Chapter 13

  The Highwayman

  SLEEPY-EYED BUT MERRY, the maids of honor piled into a gilded palace carosse before the May Day sun rose. The city teemed with hopeful young girls—and some not so young, who never lost hope—who flocked to the fields and commons outside London to gather May dew, a sovereign tonic for the complexion, sure cure of freckles, pimples, moles, wrinkles, and smallpox scars. They would spread their handkerchiefs or clean shifts over the damp grass and squeeze precious drops of fairy balm into stoppered vials, then wait anxiously for male attention to confirm their new beauty.

  “And you must gather it yourself,” Winifred said, “else it doesn’t work.”

  “There’s no rhyme or reason to that,” Eliza said. “It’s only that if you buy a pint off some Royal Exchange ’pothecary you can be sure ’tis no more than well water with a bit of sweet clover steeped in for effect.”

  “But how is it that dew will do such wonders if gathered one day, but nothing if gathered on another?” Zabby asked. The custom didn’t exist on Barbados, where sea bathing and coconut cream were all a woman thought necessary for good skin. “A carrot isn’t healthy if torn from the ground one day, and unpalatable the next.”

  “You should pray May dew works at all,” Simona told Zabby. “Or does His Majesty extinguish all the lights before he makes use of you? The Spanish have a saying: Any spittoon when the mouth is full.”

  “Have you wheedled James into spitting into your filthy gutter, then, miss?” Eliza asked, referring familiarly to the king’s brother. There was a rote to all their acerbic raillery by now, and none of the girls took it very seriously. Spiteful Simona could never quite school her tongue, which dropped steady insults as a scored tree drips sap, yet she was forever making little overtures to Zabby, trying to do her small favors, because she, like everyone, believed her to be the king’s mistress. Zabby paid attention to neither of these behaviors.

  The queen did not accompany them, saying she didn’t believe in such heathen flummery (though she swore by an unguent supposedly made from the fat of a boar and a she-bear taken in the act of generation). The girls dressed for the occasion in peasant costumes, at least, the way they imagined a peasant might dress if she had an unlimited supply of money. Their skirts, daringly above the ankles, were wool, to be sure, but of a weave as tender as a baby’s cheek, the petticoats trimmed with embroidery, and the stockings beneath them clocked silk. Tight black stomachers laced in silver ribbon and drooping straw hats bedecked with roses completed their outfits, and it was only a shame that the male half of the population had little interest in May dew. Curious, jealous female faces peered into the passing coach and wondered if their betters were mocking them.

  They had a chaperone, the half-blind, mostly deaf Lady Bridget Sanderson, mother to the maids, eighty if she was a day. She earned a comfortable pension by sitting quietly in corners, fiddling with her rings and frowning at odd intervals just to show she was wise to her charges’ giddy, hoydenish ways.

  Eliza and Simona continued
to fling their barbs at each other, just to keep in practice, while on either side of them Zabby and Beth gazed silently out the windows. Beth, as always, was thinking wistfully of her beloved Harry. As time passed it seemed more like a dream, and she worried that each time she replayed the encounter she added something or stripped something away. Had he truly said he would find her? In her memory there was the crucial word soon, but soon had come and gone. Did he say he would see her, or contact her? She couldn’t quite recall, and so every day she waited for some page or washing woman to slip a note into her hand. But nothing had come, not a word or a sight. She desperately wanted to ask after him, but lived in such mortal terror of her mother that she dared not do anything that might get back to her. For a woman without the means for bribes, the Countess of Enfield had a remarkably efficient spy system within the court. Beth assumed the rest of the world was too terrified of her to deny her information.

  He will come, she chanted in her matins. He loves me, she whispered in her vespers. And every night she dreamed of him, clasping the proxy limbs of Eliza and Zabby beside her, though to her secret shame she could hardly remember his face. He had more substance than the shadow savior of her early fantasy, but he was still hardly more than a handsome fancy. I know it takes a man a long time to make his fortune, she bargained in her prayers, but please, may I see him just one more time, even if he is still poor?

  Beth thought about her love all the time, and chided herself if he slipped from her thoughts even for an instant. Zabby, in turn, had learned the terrible impossibility of trying not to think about something. One can ignore, one can lose interest, one can forget, but apparently one cannot purposefully not think of a thing. To make the effort is to think the thought, and the battle is lost in the first muster. Though Zabby marshaled all of her considerable mental forces to drive away the notion, it returned time and again to mock her with its logic.

  Yet she had done nothing to further it. As far as she was able, she went to the elaboratory only when she knew Charles was elsewhere, playing at Pall Mall or taking his customary morning walk up Constitution Hill. Still, he found her often enough, and his flirtatious pleasantries were enough to make her heart race. She deliberately ignored his bawdery, feigned ignorance of his innuendo, and forced their conversations into purely scientific lines. Charles never ventured beyond talk, never touched her except to brush her fingers when taking a vial from her hands, or hold aside her tumbling pale wisps when she bent over a steaming concoction.

  I wouldn’t have him out of wedlock, she told herself time and again, and I wouldn’t displace the queen to have him in marriage. But why won’t he at least make the attempt? Every other woman, from loyal, sheep-faced Winifred to that clergyman’s daughter to the insufferable giggling Frances, was apparently worth the chase. Why, then, did he (despite her effort to avoid him) always seek her out, always look at her admiringly, always make his little jokes that could be taken innocently or indecently . . . and yet never attempt to seduce her? What was wrong with her? For the first time in her life she spent a long time before the mirror, tucking combs under her locks to bolster her curls, placing decorative black patches just so, anointing herself with orange-flower water, all to no avail.

  I don’t want him to, she thought as she stared out the window, but why on earth won’t he?

  They were well outside the city now, deep in the rolling fields. The six matched flaxen chestnuts thundered ahead of the carriage as the coachman searched for a solitary oak, reputedly the best place to gather May dew. Suddenly another horse pounded alongside, matching their pace. How thoughtful, Zabby mused for a moment. Charles sent outriders for our protection. Then the man flashed her a black-toothed grin, pulled a shining constellation of stars from his saddlebag, and whirled them around his head. No, not stars. Something she’d seen only in old manuscripts: a morning-star flail, three spiked balls swinging from chains attached to a cudgel. He winked at her, hung off the side of his mount like a Scythian, and smashed the carriage’s gilded axle.

  The horses screamed as the drag caught them, the back ones stumbling in their traces and the lead beasts in their panic trying to rear even as they ran. The listing contraption tipped sideways and shuddered to a halt.

  “Stop your bellyaching long enough to get your arse off my face!” Eliza shouted to the wailing Simona. The girls were tumbled on top of each other but unhurt, thanks to the masses of cushioning petticoats and the stomacher boning that would probably keep a mule kick from snapping their ribs.

  Eliza struggled to the top of the heap and pushed open the door of the capsized coach. A large hand in ornately scrolled gloves took hers, and she said, “Many thanks, sir, and if the coachman’s still breathing, would you put a stop to it? You’d think the king’s servant could make sure the wheel was sound. Oh!”

  She finally noticed the pistol. It wasn’t quite pointing at her, but its proximity was enough to make her queasy.

  “Have you any cream for me today, my pretty milkmaid?” he asked, and now she noticed the mask, a hood of softest velvet covering his hair and his face down to the nose, with eye holes stitched in gold thread. She couldn’t help but notice too that what she could see was remarkably handsome: broad, curling mouth; crinkling, merry eyes that somehow took away the gun’s menace . . . while she looked in them. Then the cavernous barrel loomed, and she replied, shaking, “I’m afraid all my cream’s soured into clabber.”

  The coachman, footman, and the spry teenage postillion rider had been dragged down and huddled in the grass under a third man’s gun, muttering curses but too frightened to meet the marauders’ eyes. The masked man helped the maids of honor out. Simona screamed until the black-toothed thug dangled his morningstar in front of her face, then she settled into a whimpering heap, throwing her apron over her head like a real peasant. Winifred looked like a soldier at his execution, knowing exactly what she was in for but willing to take it bravely, as was her duty. Zabby and Eliza each thought she should do something but wasn’t sure what. Eliza had grown accustomed to playing the dashing blade, but she never thought to use one, and that day her only weapons were hairpins. Zabby was perfectly comfortable with guns, knew the rudiments of fencing, and could hurl a tolerable harpoon, but she had even fewer weapons, for she’d worn her hair down.

  Frances, pale as birchbark, cowered behind the mother of the maids. Her eyes were dead and her body rigid. She too thought she knew what would happen to any young lady captured on the open road by a band of highwaymen. Zabby felt a rush of sympathy for the girl, whose plans (if she was canny enough to have any, as Barbara thought) hinged on her chastity. However infatuated, the king would never have her, not as a lover and certainly not as queen, if she’d been ravished by three criminals in a roadside ditch.

  Beth emerged last of all, and Zabby clung to her, thinking to offer comfort, for wasn’t Beth in the same position? She might not be angling for the throne, but her marriage prospects depended on her purity.

  But of all the girls, only Beth was serene, for she had seen the mouth, the crinkling eyes, and they were enough to reconstruct the face she thought she’d forgotten. She patted Zabby’s cheek reassuringly and smiled at the highwayman.

  “I know who you are!” Mother Bridget crowed. “You’re the one they call Elphinstone!”

  He bowed, and Zabby noticed he had a courtier’s flourish. “Your servant, madam,” he said. “And you, likewise, gentlewomen.” He turned to Beth. “And you, my lady.” To her he bowed lowest of all. “As my reputation precedes me, it will save me my customary speech.” He winked at his fellows. The one with black teeth chuckled, while the lean man with the pistol rolled his eyes to the heavens. “Your jewels, my dears, or . . . something else. I’ll have payment one way or t’other.”

  “You can see they have no jewels,” Mother Bridget snapped, brave, for she knew even the most desperate criminal wouldn’t bother ravishing her. “We’re May-Daying. Young man, do you know what fate awaits the man who molests the queen’s own ma
idens? Begone, gallows-bird, before His Majesty’s Life Guard is upon you.”

  “Peace, madam. I have no fear of the noose. But if life’s to be short, why, then, it must be sweet. You wear no jewels, but every woman carries a choice treasure wherever she goes, and in the finest purse.” The other highwaymen guffawed. “Now which shall it be?” He stroked his beardless chin contemplatively as he paced before them, making a show of looking them up and down. Eliza tried to pull Beth back so he wouldn’t notice her, but Beth evaded her grasp and stood at the fore. “Only the loveliest lass will do for Elphinstone, a girl of unsurpassed beauty, charm, grace.”

  Frances gave a stifled cry, sure he must mean her.

  Elphinstone stopped in front of Beth and took her hand.

  Shows you, Frances, Zabby couldn’t help but think even as she lunged between them. “No, not her!” she cried. Eliza joined her, and Elphinstone stepped back, raising his pistol.

  “You have loyal friends, my lady, but tell them to step aside. Now.” His voice hardened.

  “Please, Zabby, Eliza, do what he says,” she said.

  “Sir, if you’re a gentleman . . .” Eliza pleaded.

  “I’ve seen a gentleman slit another gentleman’s nose to the bone for an imagined slight. I’ve seen gentlemen ravish other gentlemen’s wives in their own houses. I’ve seen gentlemen sell their families for a bottle of brandy and a poxed whore. Do you still ask me to be a gentleman?” He smiled ruefully. “I’m no more than a man today.” He took Beth’s hand again and gently pulled her from her friends. “I claim one dance from this beauty, nothing else. A dance in my arms is your ransom. Do that, lady, and all go free.”

  “Gladly, sir,” Beth said, and followed him to the far side of the carriage.

  “Better her than me,” Simona said, recovering as soon as her own skin was safe. “What will her demon mother say now? Ow!” Eliza had pinched her. “You know what these peasant louts mean when they say a dance, don’t you? They dance in the haystacks, they dance behind the hedgerows, they dance with their sheep if there’s no skivvy about. They say Elphinstone has never left a maidenhead intact, that indeed he’d prefer it to jewels and gold.”