The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  He shrugged. ‘I will have that wag Wilfred call your servants to bring your accoutrements. Your horses and carriage shall be accommodated in my own stables, your coachman in the grooms’ and equerries’ quarters behind the Royal Coach-Mews, and your maidservant in a chamber off the suite to be prepared for you.’

  ‘I have no handmaiden. The coachman and equipage are hired.’

  ‘What? No maid?’

  The Dainnan scowled. He left his seat and again paced restlessly before the fireplace.

  ‘My lady Rohain, you are a most singular noblewoman. You come here, unannounced; nobody has ever heard of you. You come masked and maidless, bearing a most extraordinary tale. You speak with disarming plainness, unlike a courtier or any member of the peerage. Are you in fact a spy?’ On the last word, he spun on his heel and glared at her accusingly.

  Outraged, Rohain jumped up. Her overblown skirts knocked the table. A goblet fell to the carpet, scattering its contents like spilled blood. Angry words sprang to her lips in the heat of the moment.

  ‘Now you accuse me of treason! Indeed, sir, it seems you have been in the King-Emperor’s service for too long—you have become suspicious of all strangers who set foot in the palace. I have come here in good faith, to carry out my duty, only to be called an infiltrator. My mask disturbs you? Well then!’ She tore off the domino and threw it on the fire. Was it a sigh of the wind she heard, or the sudden intake of her host’s breath? The hounds lifted their heads, snarling.

  ‘If I speak too plainly for your Court manners,’ she cried, ‘teach me otherwise! And as for your treasure, I will prove that it exists. What more would you have me do?’

  Her knees trembled. Abruptly, she sat down. The blood drained from her face. How had she possessed the temerity to dare such an outburst? What would happen now—would she be hanged for insolence? She fixed her eyes on the fire. The fragile mask had already been consumed. She was exposed, vulnerable.

  Out across the city, a bell tolled. Unquiet fingers of air slid under the door and plucked at the curtains.

  ‘Your pardon, lady,’ said Roxburgh at length. ‘I stand chastised.’ He bowed. His visage softened. ‘Pray do not think me unkind. It is my way, to test others at first meeting. Surely I have this night learned not to taunt the ladies of the Sorrows, should I ever meet another! Prithee, rest by the fire awhile.’ He paused for another moment, as though savoring some anomaly or bizarreness, then summoned his pages. ‘Lads! See to Her Ladyship’s belongings and pay off the driver. Have lodgings made ready. Find a lady’s maid.’

  Two or three young boys hastened to do his bidding.

  This Dainnan lord speaks forthrightly to say the least, thought Rohain-Imrhien. He is a man to place faith in.

  ‘You are His Majesty’s guest now,’ Roxburgh informed her.

  And prisoner? What if my ruse were to be discovered?

  ‘Gramercie. I am weary.’

  ‘Wilfred—play.’

  The multiskilled squire took up a lyre, checked the tuning, and began expertly to coax a melody from the strings.

  The wine, the warmth, and the music were sweet. Rohain may have dozed; it seemed no time had passed before a knock was heard at the door. There entered a damsel of her own age, perhaps seventeen or eighteen years, her hair corn yellow, half-encased in a crespine of gold wire. She curtsied, peeping at Rohain out of the corners of her eyes, blinking.

  ‘Mistress Viviana Wellesley of Wytham at your service, Your Grace.’

  ‘You are to be servant to the Lady Rohain Tarrenys,’ said Roxburgh.

  ‘Even so, Your Grace.’

  ‘Lady Rohain,’ he said, ‘I beg you to dine in the Royal Dining Hall tonight.’

  ‘Sir, I am honoured.’

  Roxburgh again addressed the lady’s maid. ‘Miss, is the suite of chambers ready?’

  ‘Yes, Your Grace.’

  ‘Then pray conduct Her Ladyship to them with due consideration!’

  Accompanied by a footman four paces behind to the right and the new personal maid four paces behind to the left, Rohain-Imrhien was verbally guided through a gridwork of resplendent corridors to her lodgings. The footman waited outside the door, holding it open for them to enter. She caught him staring at her and he blushed to the roots of his powdered wig.

  A small, neat woman awaited them in the rooms, a bunch of jangling keys attached to her belt. She curtsied. Her mouth hung open, until she snapped it shut like a frog catching flies. After an awkward pause, Rohain concluded that servants were not permitted to speak first.

  ‘Speak,’ she offered lamely.

  The Chatelaine of the King’s Household introduced herself and indicated an anteroom where a bath awaited. Rohain dismissed her without thanks. The little woman bustled out with a rattle and a clash of stock, ward, and barrel. The footman closed the door and the sound of his steps echoed away.

  Sixty candles lit the scene, rising from their brackets like tall yellow flag-lilies. Rohain stood staring. The opulence of the palace suite forced Isse Tower’s decor into insignificance. These rooms burgeoned with decor in shades of emerald and gold, from the patterned carpet like a soft expanse of lawn studded with buttercups, to the gilded walls covered with plaster frescoes and the velvet hangings in apple green and lemon, their lush tassels dangling in bunches like ripening fruits. The bed’s four posts were carved in the likeness of flowering wattle-trees whose boughs soared to a canopy of green brocade fringed with round gold beads above a matching coverlet and cushions. The windows were draped, swagged, and pelmeted in green and gold; daffodil tiles framed a niche wherein a fire blazed bravely, gleaming on a burnished grate and fire-irons. Rohain’s fur-lined cloak, which had been urbanely subtracted by a butler as soon as its wearer had entered the palace, had been placed on a gilt chair next to her few pathetic belongings—the boxes from the carriage and, absurdly, the foot-warmer.

  A soft clearing of the throat from the new personal maid drew Rohain’s attention.

  ‘Ah—what was your name again?’

  ‘Viviana, m’lady. Vivianessa, in sooth, but I am called Viviana.’

  ‘Well, Viviana, would you—ah—put away my traveling cloak?’

  This was all that, came to mind, on the spur of the moment. What in Aia was she to do with this girl? Were the Court ladies expected to be incapable of dressing and undressing themselves? What a nuisance, to have someone constantly bothering and fussing around!

  The young servant folded the cloak carefully into a camphorwood chest carved with woodland scenes. Rohain went into the small room indicated by the Chatelaine. Therein stood a copper tub on lion’s feet, lined with white cambric that draped over the sides like falls of snow. The tub was filled with steaming water tinct with sweet oils and strewn with unseasonable primrose petals like flakes of the sun.

  A marble washstand held a matching toiletry set. There was a pair of highly decorated enameled porcelain globes on high foot-rims, pierced all over to allow moisture to drain and evaporate. One contained scented soaps, the other a sponge. These were accompanied by somewhat superfluous porcelain soap stands, soap dishes and soap trays, ewers, jars, pots, candle-branches, and a vase overflowing with hothouse-forced snowdrop blossoms. Incongruously, a shoehorn lay on the floor. Made of pewter, it was mounted in ivory with carved and inlaid handles in the shape of herons.

  The lady’s maid spoke. ‘Wishest donna mine that sas pettibob shouldst lollo betrial?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  The girl repeated her strange sentence, twisting a fold of her skirt in her fingers, gazing hopefully at her new mistress.

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking abdut. Please speak the common tongue.’

  The girl’s face fell. ‘Forgive me, m’lady. Methought Your Ladyship might like to practice slingua for this night. I asked only whether Your Ladyship would like me to test the bathwater.’

  ‘Slingua?’

  ‘Yes, m’lady—courtingle, some name it, or court-speak. Lower ranks call it jingle-ja
ngle. Does Your Ladyship not have it?’

  ‘No, I do not have such palaver.’

  It had sounded like childish babble, yet the girl seemed to hold great store by it. Could that curious string of quasi-words be part of the social fabric of Court?

  ‘I will bathe now.’

  By this phrase, Rohain had meant to indicate that this Viviana should leave her alone. Instead, the girl stepped forward.

  ‘Let me unfasten Your Ladyship’s girdle—’

  ‘No! I can do it myself. Leave me!’

  With a look of despair, the lady’s maid rushed from the room. Rohain’s conscience was stricken. The girl had only been trying to do her duty as she saw it—but how annoying and confusing it all was! Rohain almost wished herself back in the woods with Sianadh and the wights. Existence had seemed simpler then: it was life or death—none of these perplexing customs and slangish vernacular.

  A sound of stifled sobs emanated from the outer room.

  What a featherbrain of a girl! Fancy having nothing better to cry about than a sharp word from her mistress! To one who had faced the Direath and the Beithir, it all seemed so superficial.

  Rohain removed her girdle of leather and filigree, and struggled’ with the gown’s difficult fastenings. Presently she peered around the door.

  ‘Viviana, will you help me unlace?’

  The lady’s maid came willingly, red-eyed. Together they battled the endless buttons, the petticoats, the pinching, mincing little shoes.

  Timidly: ‘Does my lady wish that I should soap her back!’

  ‘No. I bathe alone.’ Providence forbid that the girl should see the whiplash-scars.

  Nervously: ‘Then shall I lay out Her Ladyship’s raiment for the evening?’

  ‘I have no other clothes—only what you see.’

  The girl’s face crumpled as though she were about to cry again.

  Rohain gathered her wits and said quickly, ‘Naturally, I shall require a more extensive wardrobe. You must soon expedite some purchases on my behalf.’ It is fortunate that so much money remains to me from the sale of the emerald.

  The servant picked up her skirts and effected a dismal bob of acknowledgment.

  Beyond the walls, the wind wailed.

  Bathed and dressed, Rohain sat before a many-mirrored dressing-table in which she could scarcely recognise herself, while Viviana brushed out her coal-black locks. The courtier was subdued, doleful. Recalling only too well her own servitude, Rohain’s heart went out to her. Anthills could appear to be mountains if one were an ant oneself, condemned to live among them daily. Softly, she said, ‘I come from a faraway place where Court customs and ways are not known. This seems to trouble you. Why so?’

  ‘Indeed, my lady!’ Viviana blurted out. ‘It troubles me, more than all the wights in Aia, because it will trouble you, my mistress!’

  ‘Why should my tribulations be yours?’

  ‘As I am your servant, your standing reflects on me. I shall suffer for it.’

  ‘You speak with honesty, if not tact. How shall my plain manners trouble me?’

  Viviana spoke earnestly. ‘My lady, there is a way of going on that is not commissioned by those holding office, yet it has grown up in our midst. Here at Court, there is a self-styled elite Set or Circle. The Royal Family and the dukes and duchesses are not part of this courtiers’ game, but many nobles below the degree of duke are counted Within the Set or Out of it, with the exception of the very old and the very young. If one is regarded as being Within the Set, one must fight to retain one’s hold, for if one is Cut, which means cast Out, there is little chance of regaining one’s place.’

  ‘Is it so terrible, to be Out of this Set?’

  ‘Indeed, I would say that life is scarcely worth living! Until she witnesses with her own eyes, my lady will not know of what I speak. But by then it may be too late. If my lady is not included in the Set, she will want to leave Court and then I shall be sent back to be maidservant to the unmitigable Dowager Marchioness of Netherby-on-the-Fens! I’d as lief die, in honesty. ’Tis unspeakable, the manner in which the Marchioness treats us. She is continually finding fault and slapping us with her broad and pitiless hand.’

  Rohain assimilated this information, staring unseeing into the mirror.

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘My lady, as the daughter of an earl, you shall be seated amid the cream of the Set at table tonight—the very paragons of Court etiquette.’

  ‘What makes you think I am the daughter of an earl?’

  ‘Oh, simply that your finger displays no wedding band, ma’am—despite that I caught a rumour you were a widow—and to be called by the title of “Lady”, you must be the daughter of at least an earl, a marquess, or a duke. Yet since the name Tarrenys is not familiar at Court, methought it must be an earl, begging your pardon, Your Ladyship.’

  This was encouraging. Viviana possessed a certain acuity of mind, then, despite her frail emotional state. It seemed that during her stay at Court, no matter how brief, Rohain would need an ally. She studied the lady’s maid in the mirror, seeing a rounded, dimpled face, a turned-up nose, a spot of colour on each cheek, hazel eyes with brown lashes that did not match the bleached hair. A pretty lass, Viviana was clad in a houppelande of sky-blue velvet, with a girdle of stiffened wigan. In addition to the girdle, her waist was encircled by one of the popular accoutrements known as a chatelaine, from which depended fine chains attached to a vast assortment of compact and useful articles such as scissors, needle-cases, and buttonhooks.

  ‘And I reckoned that my lady came from a faraway place,’ the girl chattered on, wielding the hairbrush, ‘because of the way m’lady thanked the Duke for his dinner invitation.’

  Rohain swiveled in alarm.

  ‘Said I something incorrect?’

  ‘Yea, verily, m’lady. A dinner invitation from a duke is a command. One must reply, “I thank Your Grace for the kind invitation and have the honour to obey Your Grace’s command.” I don’t know what he thought, forsooth, but likely the lack of form did not irk him, for those of the Royal Attriod are above such matters.’

  ‘But you say that I will be scorned and reviled by others if I am ignorant of these complicated forms of etiquette?’

  ‘In no small measure, m’lady! The cream of the Set can hang, draw, and quarter the ignorant, in a manner of speaking. Those they have scathed never prosper in Society. But ’tis not merely the forms of address and the slingua—’tis the table manners and all. Entire libraries could be devoted to them. Coming from a high-born family, Your Ladyship will have all the table manners, I’ll warrant.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  Unbidden, images formed in Rohain’s mind; the table at Ethlinn’s house—everyone seated around, plucking food from a communal dish with their hands and wiping their greasy fingers on the tablecloth; Sianadh clutching a joint of meat in his fist and tearing at it with his teeth; thick bread trenchers used as plates, to soak up the gravies and juices and to be eaten last.

  Rohain chewed her lip. To be catapulted from shame to glory and back to shame would be more than she could bear. And what if Thorn should attend this dinner, to witness her humiliation?

  ‘Do the Dainnan attend the Royal Dining Hall?’

  ‘Sometimes, m’lady, when they do not dine in their own hall.’

  ‘Are you acquainted with any of the Dainnan?’

  ‘Not I, m’lady.’

  ‘Viviana, why do the noble courtiers insist upon this? These dialects, these intricate manners you hint at—why are they necessary?’

  ‘Marry, I vouch it is to show how clever they are, how much they deserve their station because they are privy to secrets of which the commoners know naught. Yet again, those of the highest degree do not concern themselves with slingua and such codes—they do not have to prove themselves worthy.’

  ‘Viviana, you are wise. I believe I have misjudged you. Teach me, that I may not be made an outcast this night.’

  ‘My lady,
there is no time!’ From somewhere down the labyrinths of corridors, a hum mounted to a reverberating crescendo—the sounding of a gong. ‘It is the dinner gong! In a few moments, a footman shall come to escort Your Ladyship to dinner. And then we are both ruined!’

  ‘Calm yourself. Listen, you must help me. When I go to the table, stay beside me at all times. I will do as others do. Prompt me if I err.’

  ‘But my lady’s hair is not yet coiffed appropriately!’

  ‘Shall I wear the headdress to conceal it?’

  ‘No, no—that design is not suitable for evening wear.’

  ‘Then attend to my hair.’

  ‘It will take long—’

  ‘Nonsense! Do the best you can. We have moments, do we not?’

  ‘Verily, m’lady.’

  Determinedly, Viviana swapped the hairbrush for a polished jarrahwood styling-brush inlaid with coloured enamels, its porcelain handle knopped with crystals. She twisted the heavy tresses, looping some of them high on her mistress’s head. Securing them with one hand, she fumbled at the legion of assorted knickknack boxes, bottles, and jars set out on the dressing-table, fashioned from silver, ivory, wood, and porcelain. Rohain lifted a few lids, unscrewed several caps, to reveal pink and white powders, black paste, pastilles, gloves, buttons, buttonhooks, ribbons, decorative combs of bone, horn, or brass inlaid with tortoiseshell, silver pique barrettes, enameled butterfly clasps, scented essences, aromatic substances.

  ‘What seek you?’ Rohain winced in pain as Viviana in her haste tweaked a strand of hair.

  ‘I seek pins for the coiffure.’

  A carved ivory box fell open, spewing jeweled pins. Viviana snatched them up and began thrusting them ruthlessly into Rohain’s cloud of curls.

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘Forgive me …’

  ‘What is the purpose of these paints?’

  ‘They are for the beautification of the face. Kohl for the eyes, creams and coloured powders for the skin; rouge made from safflowers …’

  Suddenly panicking, Rohain clapped her hands to her cheeks. In the looking-glass, her new visage had seemed unobjectionable to her, but how could she be certain that this was not merely wishful thinking? Her heart began hammering.