Mother headed straight for a pewter booth, as I knew she would. Mistress Pudding had given her several pieces of pewter for her New Year gifts. Pewter was for better-off folks, not for outer courtyard servants. In the great kitchen at Greenwich Palace we ate from wooden trenchers with wooden spoons. Mother was very proud of her small collection of pewter ware which she kept in a little wooden casket and carried with her when the court moved from one palace to another. Her favourite piece was a mirror case which had once belonged to a pilgrim. It depicted Christ on the cross with St John and Mary either side. I wondered which shrine the pilgrim had visited and what magic charms had been captured by the mirror. My own favourite was a candlestick depicting Saint Apollonia holding her tooth in a pincer. Whenever father had a toothache, we had to burn a candle to her. Mother had bought a Bartholomew spoon last year. He always holds his butcher’s knife for he is the patron saint of butchers, leatherworkers and shoemakers.
‘It seems that there are not enough apostles to go round,’ I told Mother. ‘The divers trades have to share a saint.’
Mother picked up a larger spoon and examined it. She stroked the top of the handle where Wodewose, the wild man from the woods, was surrounded by oak leaves and carried a club.
‘You wouldn’t sleep at night with him around,’ I said. ‘How about this needle case?’ It bore an inscription which mother and I couldn’t read.
‘Mater Dei Memento, Mother of God remember me,’ the vendor told us.
‘Do you want to buy it?’ I asked Mother. ‘You already have a wooden needle case.’
‘There are so many pieces. I need to have a proper look at everything.’
Mother inspected spoons, buttons, ancient pilgrim badges and larger, more expensive pieces that I knew she couldn’t afford. She picked up a gilt-edged pomander and chain and held it against her kirtle.
‘My ladies at court might wear such as this. It is not for servants such as us in our common apparel. Pray put it back quickly, Mother, the vendor is watching you.’
‘Pewter ware is not grand enough for the Queen’s ladies,’ Mother told me,’even if there be a little gilding.’
The merchant was busy showing off a set of buttons to a lady who must have been quite well off, for she was wearing a dark gown and a gable hood. He elbowed his apprentice boy and pointed towards mother.
‘My master’s finest pewter with very fine gilt work,’ the boy told her.
‘Can you afford it, Mother?’ I asked. ‘No one we know wears a pomander so grand, not even Mistress Pudding. You wouldn’t be allowed to wear it.’
‘Of course I cannot buy it,’ Mother whispered. ‘It costs nothing to look.’
The boy stared at mother’s hand-made cloth pomander and smirked. ‘That will not offer much protection against sickness brought by London’s foul air. This pewter pomander has been blessed by a bishop. I will speak to my master. He will offer a fair price.’
‘Do not trouble your master. My family has been free from illness these fourteen years,’ Mother told him. ‘I will keep my faithful old pomander that I carried to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham nine months before my daughter’s birth.’
Mother settled upon a buckle for Father’s belt. It was prettily decorated with cross hatching and there was a matching chape for the strap end. The boy told us it had been worn by an ancient man for four score years until his demise a month ago and would bring long life to the new owner. Mother began to discuss the price. Knowing her perseverance for bartering and impatient to spend my own money, I skipped off to a nearby leather booth and shouted out to mother to seek me there.
I saw what I wanted immediately. A soft tanned purse, dyed so brightly it was almost cardinal-red. There was an extra pouch pocket at the front and both sets of drawstrings were decorated with pretty bone beads. The vendor laughed unkindly when I offered my three groats.
‘Prithee put the purse aside until my mother comes. She will pay a little more,’ I pleaded.
The trader laughed again. He was here to make his living, he said, not to give favours to pretty wenches who only had three groats. Now, if there was anything else I could offer he might be willing to do a bit o’ business behind that tall gravestone yonder by the wall if someone would mind his wares for a few minutes. Bawdy male laughter followed. A round faced, middle-aged woman standing beside me examined the purse and untied its drawstrings.
‘Cut from goatskin you say?’ she inquired of the vendor. ‘More likely a bull’s pizzle.
‘Gracious, child,’ she told me,’ I don’t know which is ruddier. Your face or this purse.’
If Father were there, he would have bartered for the purse. I knew he would. I returned to Mother who had bought the buckle and was now inspecting a large flagon.
‘Did you see anything you like?’ Mother asked whilst opening the lid and inspecting the smooth finish inside the vessel.
‘Just a purse, but it is too dear.’
‘Who says it is too dear? Traders ask more than their goods are worth, especially from a young girl. Where is this leather dealer?’
I wouldn’t take Mother to the booth. I was ashamed to have the dealer talk to me the way he had in Mother’s presence.
‘It’s no matter. Let’s go to the meadow where the conies have been set loose for the boys to catch.’
‘I suppose when you are fourteen a gaggle of apprentice boys chasing rabbits is more amusing than a pretty purse,’ Mother said.
*
It wasn’t a cutpurse who took my old hide purse. The cord wasn’t cut and, anyway, thieves don’t give you something better in return. To lift my kirtle, snatch my old purse and me unawares; a deft piece of sleight of hand. Could it have happened while we cheered the proud boys holding rabbits aloft by their ears? Or was it later, when the great bear with his angry red eyes was hauled from his iron cage and I was terrified? Amongst the shouting crowds who laid their wagers while the fierce baiting mastiffs snarled and the ancient, blind animal pounded his mighty front paws into the air, was there someone who had list to change an old purse for a new? Or did it happen in the meadow, where patient palfreys with ribbons on their tails pawed the ground and waited to be sold? While Mother and I stroked their manes, fed them apples and chose which ones we’d have if we were my ladies, mother was the bay and me the small brown mare, was it then?
The street seller handed Mother two pudding pies from the basket upon her head. It was to be my treat. I reached for my purse. Instead of shiny cracked ox hide I felt soft goatskin and smelled new leather. Hanging from the purse guard at my waist between my shift and my kirtle was the bright, cardinal red purse. I opened the drawstrings and reached inside. The purse was empty.
Mother had to pay for the pudding pies.
‘I do not understand,’ Mother said quietly. ‘Why did you not tell me of your purchase? You have never deceived me before.’
I ate my pie and said nothing. I had told Mother twice that the purse was swapped without my knowledge. She didn’t believe me. What more could I say.
‘Did the tanner ask for favours?’
‘He was lewd. A woman dressed in goose-turd green laughed in a vulgar way. So I ran away and came to you and forgot the purse.’
Mother licked her fingers clean. ‘Let me see this purse.’ She fingered the goatskin. ‘The colour will seep in the rain and ruin your shift and what be the use of this foolish little pouch at the front?’ She untied the drawstring and poked inside the pocket with her fingers. ‘Avis, did you peek inside the pouch before you bought it?’
‘I’ve told you thrice. I did not buy it. By some mystery it has appeared at my waist.’
‘By some mystery, Avis, you have lost three groats and an old purse and acquired a gaudy new purse and this,’ between her thumb and forefinger mother held a golden coin. One side depicted St Michael slaying the dragon with his spear, the other, a ship on the sea.
‘What manner of coin is this?’ I asked.
‘It is a golden angel,’ Mother
told me. ‘Some folks call it an angel noble.’
Chapter 11
September 1533
On Monday the twenty-fifth of August the King’s harbingers galloped through the courtyard. The King and Queen were returning to their favourite palace to await the birth of their first legitimate heir. The next day, everyone in the palace knew that the Queen had taken to her chamber to shut herself away for the few weeks before the birth. I thought of her often and imagined her sitting amongst her ladies while they sang and played beautiful music upon their lutes or silently read their prayer books by candlelight.
While the servants went about their duties in the morning of the seventh of September they learned that Queen Anne had begun her labour earlier than expected. Everyone talked of a prince. After more than twenty years England was about to have a male heir.
At three o’clock in the afternoon the Queen delivered a healthy child. It was the maid child I had foreseen.
‘The King’s doctors and astrologers will be hiding in corners with their tails between their legs,’ Mistress Pudding said. ‘How can it be that every one of them got it wrong?’
‘The King will not want our sugar deceits now that he is only celebrating a princess’s birth,’ mother said, and stopped her beating.
‘The King and Queen will have to eat them. My lord, the comptroller of the household, will not allow sugar and gold leaf to be wasted. Just imagine,’ Mistress Pudding said with a giggle, ‘if I had to serve a sugar banquet to the outer courtyard servants to save it from going to waste.’
‘Master Lydgate, in his wherry, can read the stars more truly than the King’s astrologers,’ Aunt Bess said later when I visited the laundry.
‘I got it right,’ I confided to her. ‘I knew it was a maid.’
‘Queen Katherine divorced and the Pope defied and all for nought,’ Father said. ‘King Henry has no need of another daughter.’
‘This is God’s doing. The King will beget no son with that whore, Anne Boleyn,’ Mother told him.
*
A few days later, a thin young usher wearing new purple and blue livery stepped into the confectionary.
‘Avis, daughter of the confectioner’s servant, come hither.’
Mistress Pudding set aside the quill with which she was glazing an almond pudding.
‘Whatever is the matter?’ Mother asked.
The usher stuck his nose into the air and announced in a voice deeper than is normal for a skinny boy, ‘It is our most gracious Queen Anne’s pleasure that Avis, daughter of the confectioner’s servant, come to the …’
‘What, come to the Queen,? Now?’ I pulled off my apron and threw it into mother’s lap.
The usher stuck his nose up higher, sighed and repeated. ‘It is our most gracious Queen Anne’s pleasure that Avis, daughter of the confectioner’s servant come to the royal …’
‘She kept her promise, mother. The Queen kept her promise.’
‘I know of no promise.’
The usher stuck up his nose so high he was almost looking at the ceiling and announced at great speed, ‘Avis, daughter of the confectioner’s servant, is to come to the household of our most gracious Queen Anne, tomorrow at eight of the clock, to be a servant in the service of the Princess Elizabeth.’ He set his voice at a gentler tone and his nose at a lower pitch and spoke conversationally. ‘You’ve to come with me now, Avis. Nurse wants to fit you for your servant’s attire.’
‘This is unexpected.’ Mistress Pudding looked towards me and Mother.
‘You owe the goodwife and myself an explanation,’ mother said flatly without raising her eyes from the mound of sugar she was working.
‘It had to be a secret. Be pleased for me, Mother.’
‘Go with the usher and remember your place. He is the son of a gentleman and deserves your respect,’ Mistress Pudding said. ‘Even though he be a little spotty of the face and squeaky of voice,’ she added in a whisper.
I danced in circles around the boy. ‘I’ll be back soon to show you my new clothes.’
It was as if I was a ghost. Invisible. Unheard.
Mother was wringing out my apron with her sticky hands, like wet washing. ‘Why my daughter, why must she take my daughter?’ she chanted like a nun at her prie dieu. Mistress Pudding stood by Mother’s side with one hand upon her shoulder. In her other hand she held a kerchief that caught a tear running down mother’s cheek.
‘Take heed, daughter,’ Father said, later that day. ‘Conversations at court are like autumn leaves in the wind, blown hither and thither into corners and crevices where they be discovered later, rotten and corrupt.’
‘You will worry the girl,’ mother said. ‘Gracious me, she is quiet enough and keeps her own counsel. She will not speak out of turn and will do the right thing if she hears something amiss.’
‘Do the right thing? Now what in our Lord’s name do you mean by that.’
‘Keep her mouth closed, of course, especially touching religion and the Pope in Rome. We keep our beliefs to ourselves and to God and let our masters see what we want them to see. That’s how we must live, and Avis knows it.’
Mother dropped my clogs into the coffer where she would store my old shift and kirtle after I had I left in the morning wearing my new attire.
‘You may as well give those to a beggar at the gate, I won’t wear them again,’ I said, holding my new kirtle of soft blue wool to my shoulders and twirling around.
‘Heed what your mother says and remember what I tell you,’ Father said. He steered me towards a stool and sat himself upon another beside me. ‘Honour the Pope in your heart and close your ears if you hear the Lord’s word read from a Bible in the English tongue, for it is heresy.’
He said nothing for a while and then he put his arm around my shoulder. ‘There is a gentleman at court who I have had occasion to speak to once or twice. He is a servant of Sir Henry Norris, the King’s friend. George Constantine is his name. He has not been long returned to court for he had to escape abroad into exile. He calls himself a friend of the Gospel, you see, and Sir Thomas More would have had him burned for heresy. I pray that God will bring him back to the true religion for he is a good man, like his master, an honest man for all his heretical beliefs and his English Testament. If you find yourself in trouble at court, you may trust him. God knows who else you may trust, for I don’t.’
‘Really, Mother, Father,’ I said, ‘you should both heed your own advice. Everyone knows you both hate Anne Boleyn and the new religious ways. You should seal your own lips with wax. There’s no need to concern yourselves about me. What am I likely to hear in a nursery except a babe’s wailing?’
‘The gossip of nursemaids for a start, concerning the privy matters of the Queen and Jesu knows what else besides.’ Father cupped my chin in his hand.’Take heed of my words, Avis.’
*
A day or two later, I saw the King.
The wet-nurse had laid Princess Elizabeth in her cradle and came to me where I waited on a settle in the outer chamber. I was stretching out my feet to admire my new leather slippers. Every few minutes I would take a turn around the room for the pleasure of walking softly upon the matting as if with bare feet. No more heavy servant’s shoes for me now that I was a servant of Queen Anne’s household, albeit a lesser one.
‘The princess is satiated, she’ll bide two hours before suckling again,’ the nurse said, tucking in her breast clouts and lacing her bodice around her breasts. I wondered if I would develop large breasts like these.
‘Why are you sitting around doing nothing, girl?’
‘I have but lately returned from the laundress. I’ve folded Princess Elizabeth’s linen and put it neatly away in her chests with sprigs of lavender, as you told me to do.’
She opened each chest and inspected my work, pulled out a sheet, tut tutted and folded it again. ‘How came you by your position?’
‘I was asked to be a nursery maid.’
‘A lowly girl like you from the oute
r courtyard?’
I didn’t know how to answer so I shrugged my shoulders and did what mother had told me to do. I said nothing.
‘You look very young,’ Nurse said, peering into my face.
So did she. She was younger than I had supposed a wet-nurse would be, barely into her twenties, younger by several years than the Queen, too young, surely, to have had many children.
Her name was Mistress Pendred but I had to call her ‘Nurse’.
I told her that I was just past my fourteenth birthday.
‘You look younger. Are you well?’
I nodded, wondering whether I looked pale and sickly for I had been constantly indoors for days and, already, I was missing the sunshine and the gardens.
Nurse poked at my eyes and ears. She made me open my mouth and stick out my tongue.
‘You seem well enough. Three of the rocking girls are ill. A snuffle only, but we cannot take risks. Princess Elizabeth is the King’s only heir now that Lady Mary has been declared a bastard. Tonight, girl, Mistress Blanche will show you how to rock Princess Elizabeth’s cradle. I need not say what a great honour this will be for an outer courtyard wench like yourself.’
She stared at me again and looked me up and down. I held her gaze, confident that my bleached linen shift and apron were as spotless as her dove grey gown and crisp wimple.
‘Off you go wench, don’t tarry, and take good heed of Mistress Blanche.’
This wench has a name, I thought, if you would have the manners to use it. Anyway, how difficult did she think it to be, rocking a cradle.
‘Take a turn around the chamber now and then, to keep yourself lively. Maids have been known to drop asleep,’ she said.
‘There is no fear of that,’ I said confidently.
‘And fetch me at once if the princess wakes. Do you understand? At once.’
‘Yes, Nurse.’ I bobbed a curtsey and passed into the nursery chamber.
*
I saw him immediately: a splash of brilliant gold filling the room. He was sitting in the nursing chair by the fire, cradling his sleeping daughter on her swaddling board. The little cap and biggin bands that had bound her head were discarded on to the floor at his feet alongside his big feathered bonnet. He kissed her forehead, letting his russet hair mingle with her pale-marigold curls while his bulky shoulders heaved in violent jerks, making the little white bundle jolt in his arms.
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