Ladies in Waiting

by Laura L. Sullivan

  He tried once more to drag her along, but she dug her fingers into his collar and latched firm. I will make him believe me, she thought fiercely. He will know—they will all know—that I, a woman, wrote this most excellent play!

  With her free hand she tore at the buttons of her coat. “I will convince you of what I am!” she cried, as with a savage pull she ripped the ribbon that held her shirt closed at her throat, and liberated her unbound breasts.

  Killigrew recoiled as if at a serpent, staggering backwards, and in so doing carried Eliza with him, out of the curtained alcove, out to where the entire cast of Nunquam Satis assembled for their final bows and flourishes. The curtain was speedily drawn back as Eliza shouted, “I, Eliza Parsloe, a woman, as you see, am the playwright you honor!”

  In that instant, Jeremiah Parsloe decided it was not too late to find a modest second wife with wide hips and once again be fruitful and multiply.

  Lord Ayelsworth, seeing the bounty of bosom that could be his, was just as eager to marry Eliza . . . until her father uttered the fatal words: “Not a penny!”

  Zabby forgot, for a moment, all about plots and intrigue, tragedy and desire, and stared at her gallant friend in open-mouthed amazement. Suddenly she could see herself in Eliza—not half naked on the stage, perhaps, but covered in soot, stained with blood, indifferent to the world as she pursued her passion in the elaboratory. That’s the nature of a calling, she realized. It might not bring us happiness, but we have no other choice but to pursue it.

  Beth, taking it all in absently, wondered if, now that she was a married woman, she’d be allowed to have a friend as instantly notorious as Eliza. She soon shrugged it off—Harry didn’t seem the sort of husband who would mind.

  Killigrew, hot as a quartan ague and looking on the verge of an apoplectic fit, threw down his wig with a roar and stormed off to drink two bottles of Rhenish and read an old play about failed Roman senators who threw themselves on their swords.

  But the audience went wild! In the pit, lords and ’prentices stood side by side on the quaking benches and set up a cry like barbarians going into battle. The ladies in the boxes laughed and shrilled, the whores in their vizard-masks hooted derision at their buxom competition. There were a few hisses, perhaps from those who had heard her declaration, but for the most part the audience saw a well-featured strapping girl with bare breasts, and who could ever expect more for their shillings?

  Then Charles, to whom all the theater looked for an example, rose in his smooth, stately fashion. The crowd hushed, and Eliza, wide-eyed and trembling, on the verge of clutching her shirt together and running off the stage in tears, was paralyzed a moment longer. Would he frown and depart? Would he close the theater? There was an impossible moment of anticipation, gravid with possibility.

  Charles met Eliza’s eye, recognized her ruddy, handsome face . . . and smiled. Then very deliberately he clapped his hands together . . . once . . . twice . . . thrice.

  Now there was nothing but applause. Killigrew wouldn’t hear about it until the next morning, when he was too hung-over to fully appreciate it, but the king’s three claps sealed the fate of Nunquam Satis. By midnight illicit printers were spewing out false copies of the play, and balladeers were already renaming their heroines Lady Nuncsat. The play ran for three weeks—a miracle in a time of short attention spans when a week was a good run. There was a great deal of initial confusion—was the author a woman who dressed like a man, or a man who thought he was a woman, or, oh, delicious speculation, a hermaphrodite?—which only fueled the popularity of both play and writer.

  When he felt a little better, Killigrew hired Eliza to write three more plays immediately, and when enough time had passed to see the humor of it, he convinced her to become an actress as well. She would never manage the romantic leads, the tearing beauties, the lovely innocents, but she was a deft hand at the witty old women, the Puritanical hypocrites, the nursemaids and spinsters and relicts. And since she was so frequently the author, she made sure these undervalued characters had some of the cleverest lines.

  Eliza knew none of this that night as she stood half naked before her father, fiancée, friends, and most of the royal court. When she saw her father storm out, she knew she’d lost her fortune, but she knew too she had enough to live as she wished. I want to be free, she thought, and how much can it cost to be free?

  Despite her loss, despite her fears, she was radiantly happy. She was doing exactly what she wanted to do.

  Without even bothering to cover her bosom, she found Nelly in the pit, gave her a broad wink, and made a courtier’s elaborate bow, one hand on her heart, the other flung wide.

  Had Catherine been entirely well, it is unlikely that Eliza would have been allowed to return to court. However fond she was of the braw plucky girl who’d taken her into the world of men and tried to save her from kidnappers, Catherine was still a product of her convent upbringing and would be hard pressed to find a suitable reason to keep a maid of honor who’d bared her breasts onstage. But she was not made aware of it until weeks later, and by then the story had changed so drastically, the queen did not know what to make of it. Some of the court—her Portuguese attendants, and those who lived for a tasty scandal—swore Eliza had been caught fornicating onstage while ’prentices in the pit tossed up for the next go at her. But those who had no particular grudge against either Eliza or sin only shrugged and said a woman wrote a good play, and as everyone had spent the first years of his life latched to a pair of teats, no one should pretend to be shocked by them now.

  And so Catherine never formally dismissed her wayward maid, and though Eliza moved from Whitehall that night to take up permanent residence over the Cock and Pie Tavern, she was never barred from the palace.

  The next day Eliza bounced up in a hackney and greeted the waiting Zabby with kisses. They had gathered to see Beth off to her wedding with Thorne.

  “Did you see what Lady Castlemaine was wearing this morning?” Eliza asked, her face ruddy and radiant. “I saw her driving in the park. A man’s tailored jacket and a trim little weskit, all in crimson, with a skirt, it’s true, but she must have had her seamstresses up all night to be the first to adopt it. I warrant within a week all the fine ladies will be dressing half like men. Only think, I, a merchant’s daughter, setting the mode! Beth, though . . . when her honey month is over she’ll burst forth to set the trends herself. She’s a face and figure to set the world alight. She’ll do well enough with her earl, so long as she never speaks of what is past. Some of us are meant for marriage, some for other things, and the only place for Beth is in a comfortable home with baskets of babes all about her.”

  “You don’t believe she loved Harry?” Zabby asked.

  “Oh, of course she did. And I’m not saying she’ll come to love this Thorne in his place. Only, every person needs a profession. Not just for money, but for the soul, and the heart, and the brain, else she goes mad. I’ve found mine—the stage—and I warrant you found yours, too, amid lenses and potions and dead beasts in spirits. We’re not fit to be wives. But most people aren’t like you and me. They don’t have a calling. They fall into whatever is handy. For a man, that’s what his father did, farmer or soldier or pimp to the king. For a woman, pah, I think well of my sex, but if they’re no worse than men, they’re certainly no better. A woman tends to do what her mother does, and that’s marry. Most folk do what’s easiest.”

  “She’ll be miserable with Thorne,” Zabby said. “Misery’s not so easy.”

  “Don’t fear for Beth. She’s the dearest thing in the world, but she’s not made for anything beyond marriage, and there’s no harm in that. It is her natural profession. She only made a false start in it, but thank the heavens her fright of a mother came through in the end. Have you seen Thorne? He’s a handsome piece for such an old fellow, and rich as . . . well, as my father, I suppose. I vow Beth will end up happier than the pair of us, though troth, I can’t imagine a happier creature than me. Look, here comes the blus
hing bride and the weeping mother. Her sores, I mean, for she looks as cross as ever. Yes, I’ll hush now. Darling Beth, my congratulations! Lady Enfield.” She curtsied to the diseased harridan.

  “I’ve pulled it off,” Lady Enfield crowed. “Despite her hoydenish companionship”—she glared at Eliza—“and the vile stink of the court, I kept my flower in the bud, squeezed tight shut.”

  “It is a splendid match,” Eliza said, edging away from the hunched syphilitic horror but darting in to kiss Beth.

  “Ten thousand a year settled on her for her use, and a thousand for my own self—have you ever heard the like?” For the first time in living memory, Lady Enfield smiled, a quick flash of crumbling teeth, a curl of ruined lips, gone almost as soon as it came. “He’s a man, and foul, fouler than most, I dare say, but the name of Enfield is restored from this day forth, and my girl will bear children into riches and security. My job is done.”

  She took her daughter’s hand. “Tell that husband of yours he needn’t worry overmuch about his bargain. He’ll find it cheaper than expected, for now I see you well and safely wed I’m free to leave this walking corpse that is my own body. I’ll take my thousand for this year, as that’s my due, but he’ll not have to fret about paying it next year, for I’ll be gone.”

  She laughed, without a trace of that quick smile, and Beth felt her throat catch. Just when she thought she was done with emotion, beyond the reach of either affection or grief, she felt again the terrible strength of her mother’s love for her, vast and pitiless as the sea, and quite against her will found she loved her back. Hated her, resented her, pitied her, feared her, aye, but loved her too.

  “Where are you to get married, Beth?” Zabby asked.

  Lady Enfield answered for her. “The earl says in a little chapel not far from here, a place where his mother was wed. It’s to be by special license, you know,” she added proudly. “He arranged the whole thing. Ah, here he comes now.”

  His equipage, his leather, his horses, were black and gleaming, and even as they came to a halt, a boy swung down and began to polish the ebony wheels. The servants were thrashed for any imperfection, real or imagined, and Thorne’s diligence kept them industrious. He descended from his carriage without so much as glancing to see if the steps had been lowered. If they had not, if by chance his foot met empty air, the entire carriage staff would have been severely whipped with the knout, a clever instrument the earl had adopted from a Russian friend. Twenty strokes of that terrible thing had been known to kill. He never settled for fewer than twenty-five.

  He made a stiff bow to the assembled ladies, then without a word held his hand out to Beth, who shrank back.

  “Go on, precious one, I’ll be right behind you,” Lady Enfield said with somewhat forced cheerfulness.

  “No, my lady, you will not,” Thorne said. “A marriage is a private affair between bride and groom. You’ve done your duty in the rearing of her. Now you turn her over to me. Completely. Good day, my lady.”

  “What are you about, sir? Not attend my own daughter’s marriage? Infamous. I’ll have you know . . .”

  “Perhaps this will silence you.” He handed her an overstuffed satchel that clinked with a particularly golden rattle. When she stared at him, mouth gaping below her gleaming hawk’s beak, he simply dropped the bag at her feet, snatched Beth’s hand, and guided her firmly toward the carriage.

  “Mother . . .” Beth’s plaintive voice sounded, in Lady Enfield’s ears, exactly as it had in her childhood, when mother and baby were happy and the life ahead was full of promise.

  Then she was gone, drawn away by the gleaming black horses.

  Lady Enfield, shrunken, trembling, watched the child who had been the sole focus of her every energy, every thought, for the last sixteen years, fulfill the destiny she’d marked out for her.

  “That’s all a woman is,” she said. “A womb that’s full for a spell, then empty forever.”

  She watched until the black carriage turned the corner, then hobbled away, leaning heavily on her cane.

  Chapter 26

  The Elaboratory

  ELIZA LEFT SOON AFTER, relieved to return to the merry, heartless world of the demimonde, where girls never married against their will. Zabby, not knowing what to do with herself, feeling empty without her friends, wandered through the palace until she found herself outside Charles’s elaboratory. Their elaboratory, she corrected.

  She was about to go in when a man she just barely recognized as the Italian ambassador addressed her from down the hall. He trotted to catch up with her.

  “My lady,” he said, “have you but a moment? I have these little trinkets, poor paltry things which have no home. Would you perhaps do me the honor of accepting them?” He held up a pair of pigeon-blood ruby ear-drops as large as grapes. “And then, but a moment, I would so love to discuss the Dutch question.”

  Zabby listened, half in a trance, as the ambassador pretended to solicit her opinion, all the while offering his (and presumably his country’s) own and trying to discover what the king might think, and whether he could be swayed. It was on the tip of Zabby’s tongue to say he ought to talk to Barbara or Frances if he wanted a royal mistress to do his bidding, but then it struck her, all in a flash. I may not be a royal mistress, but all the world thinks I am. Why on earth don’t I take advantage of that? Here is this little man actually asking me to take part in the affairs of the continent. Barbara would do it for jewels and tell the king whatever would be best for her. Frances would take the jewels and promptly forget what she was supposed to tell the king. But I . . . I can take the jewels, use them to set up my own elaboratory, and then use my power, the power they all think I have, to actually change the court, the country, the world! Why, with a word, supposedly from Charles, I could make this little man carry a new policy home to Italy.

  She recalled what her godmother had told her when she first came to court against her will. 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.

  She already was listened to by the right ears, by those sycophants who through vicarious use of her body wanted to touch and please the king, her supposed lover; and by the king himself, her dear friend.

  Why did I dream of being queen, she wondered as the Italian continued to babble, when I have twice poor Catherine’s power at my fingertips, if only I choose to use it? I don’t need to be Charles’s lover to have everything I ever dreamed of!

  The Italian walked away, satisfied, leaving her with a palm full of blood-colored stones and a hollow feeling in her heart.

  It is nothing, she thought to herself. The power, the influence—all nothing.

  That’s not what I want.

  I want him.

  She wanted that powerful body she’d dragged from death’s door so long ago. She’d dueled with Plague itself for the right to that man. When he’d lain weak as a blind spaniel pup, she’d cupped her body around his to keep him warm. She’d bathed every inch of him, held him in his delirium, and later, when his mind returned before his strength, laughed with him and philosophized, argued and bantered as if they were the only people left in the world, alone on the island of his bed. And later still, laboring side by side in the elaboratory, in a shared love of knowledge. Shared love. That must be close to love for each other.

  She wanted the mind, the body, the man. She did not need the power, the honor. She did not even need the acknowledgment of the world. That was all just a salve for her intellect. She was not an enlightened human after all, but an animal. All she wanted was the frankness of lust, the stark honesty of sex, the bright, incendiary moment of skin on skin. She did not want to be the mistress of the king, but the lover of the man. He might have been a stable boy, but he happened to be the king. She deci
ded then and there that she would have him, and hang the rest.

  No ambitions clouded her mind now; there was no confusion in her intentions. She heard a clink of glass within the elaboratory, a crash and muted curse, and entered, intent on seduction.

  There was death in the room. She could scent it as well as any hound. Not blood, not illness; simple death, the inexorable state. A sturdy oak table had been dragged to the center of the room, and on it lay something covered in a heavy swath of unbleached linen.

  “Zabby, my dear, I was going to send a page to search you out. Has your pretty little friend gone to be wed yet? I heard it was to be today.”

  “She left just this past half hour.”

  “A shame. I’d hoped to send her my blessings, and a present, though the one she’s bound to now is a richer man than I by far. It seems there’s a hole in the privy purse, cut by Parliament. But it is you I’d hoped to talk with, sweetheart. Here, sit beside me.” He took her to a crimson chaise he called the fainting couch, put there for the occasional lady spectator who thought she ought to be overcome by chemical fumes or live rabbit dissections.

  “You are her friend, so I hope you can tell her, delicately, and, if I may suggest, not in writing, husbands being what they are.”

  Zabby sat beside him, hardly listening, wondering how to begin. There was his thigh, a bare inch from her own. Dare she touch it? Or perhaps his hand. The hand is a good way to start, chaste, yet so full of nerves that it thrills to the lightest touch.

  “Will you tell her that, for her sake, his body and property were spared? Harry Ransley and his cohorts were allowed to request the judgment of God.” It was a rarely used form of officially sanctioned suicide, in which a judgment was not passed and the public was left to draw its own conclusions. The suspect agreed to die, the state agreed to kill him, and nothing was said as to the reasons why. If the criminal was found guilty, his property was forfeited to the Crown. If he chose the judgment of God, his money and property passed as if he’d died in his sleep.