by Anne O'Brien
So there it was. Decided on some chance whim, with some underlying purpose that the Queen kept to herself, I became a domicella. A lady-in-waiting. Not a domina, one of the highborn, but a domicella, the youngest, least skilled, and least important of the Queen’s ladies. But I was a part of her household. I was an inhabitant of her solar.
I could not believe my good fortune. When sent on some trivial errand—I do not recall it now—through a deserted antechamber, I lifted my skirts above my ankles and danced a succession of haphazard steps to the lingering echoes of the lute from the solar. Not well, you understand, but more than I had ever achieved in my life. It astonished me what confidence a fine robe with fur edgings could bestow on a woman.
I think I smirked. What would clerk Greseley say if he could see me now? “Waste of good coin,” I suspected. What remark would Wykeham find to make, other than his ambitions to construct a royal bathhouse and garderobe? I laughed aloud. And the King? King Edward would notice me only if I had cogs and wheels that moved and slid and clicked against one another.
I tried a pirouette, awkward in the shoes that were too loose ’round the heel. One day, I vowed, I would wear shoes that were made for me and fitted perfectly.
As for what the Queen might want of me in return—well, it could not be so very serious, could it?
They tripped over their trailing skirts, the Queen’s damsels, to transform me into a lady worthy of my new position. I was a pet. A plaything. A creature to be cosseted and stroked, to relieve their boredom. It was not in my nature; nor was it a role I wished to play, but it was an exhilarating experience as they created the new Alice Perrers. And perhaps I was still very young, thrilled to be the center of their wayward attention. I was not above playing.
I absorbed it all: anointed and burnished, my hands smothered in perfumed lotions far headier than anything produced in Sister Margery’s stillroom, my too-heavy brows plucked into what might pass for elegant arches—if the observer squinted. Clothes, and even jewels, were handed over with casual kindness. A ring, a brooch to pin to my mantle, a chain of gilt and gleaming stones to loop across my breast. Nothing of great value, but enough that I might exhibit myself in public as no less worthy of respect than the ladies from high-blooded families. I spread my fingers, now smooth with pared nails, to admire the ring with its amethyst stone. It was as if I were wearing a new skin, like a snake sloughing off the old in spring. And I was woman enough to enjoy it. I wore the rosary fastened to a girdle enhanced with silver finials as fine as Mother Sybil’s.
“Better!” Isabella remarked after sour contemplation. “But I still don’t know why the Queen wanted you!”
It remained beyond my comprehension too.
The Queen’s damsels were feminine, pretty, beautiful. I was none of those. Their figures were flattered by the new fashion, with gowns close-fitting from breast to hip. The rich cloth hung on me like washing on a drying pole. They were artlessly gifted in music for the Queen’s pleasure. Any attempt to teach me to sing was abandoned after the first tuneless warble. Nor did my fingers ever master the lute strings, much less the elegant gittern. They could stitch a girdle with flowers and birds. I had no patience with it. They conversed charmingly in French, with endless gossip, with shared knowledge of people of the Court. I knew no one other than Wykeham. His fixation with building arches was the subject of laughter.
For the damsels, flirtation was an art in itself. I never learned it. I was too forthright for that, too critical of those I met. Too self-aware to pretend what I did not feel. And if that was a sin, then I was guilty. I could not pretend an interest or an affection where I had none.
Had I nothing to offer? What I had, I used to make myself useful, or noticed, or even indispensable. I had achieved a place in the Queen’s solar and I would not be cast off, as Princess Isabella cast off her old gowns. I worked hard.
I could play chess. The ordered rules of the little figures pleased me. I had no difficulty in remembering the measures of a knight against a bishop, the limitations of a queen against a castle. As for the foolish pastime of Fox and Geese, I found an unexpected fascination in maneuvering the pieces to make the geese corner the fox before that wily creature could kill the silly birds.
“I’ll not play with you, Alice Perrers!” Isabella declared, abandoning the game. “Your geese are too crafty by half.”
“Craftier than your fox, my lady.” Isabella’s fox was tightly penned into a corner by my little flock of birds. “Your fox is done for, my lady.”
“So it is!” Isabella laughed, more out of surprise than amusement, but she resisted a cutting rejoinder.
I could make silly, harmless love charms and potions to please the damsels, gleaned from my memory of Sister Margery’s manuscripts. A pinch of catnip, a handful of yarrow, a stem of vervain, all wrapped in a scrap of green silk and tied with a red cord. If they believed they were effective, I would not deny it, although Isabella swore I was more likely to add the deadly hemlock in any sachet I made for her. And I could read. I read to them endlessly, when they wanted to sigh over tales of courtly love between a handsome knight and the object of his desire.
Not bad. Not bad at all for a nameless girl from a convent, and an abandoned wife.
And Isabella was wrong. I would never use hemlock. I knew enough from Sister Margery’s caustic warnings to be wary of such satanic works.
But what service could I offer Queen Philippa when the whole household was centered on fulfilling her wishes even before she expressed them? That was easy enough. I made drafts of white willow bark.
“You are a blessing to me, Alice.” The pain had been intense that day, but now, propped against her pillows, the willow tincture making her drowsy, she sighed heavily with relief. “I am a burden to you.”
“It is not a burden to me to give you ease, my lady.”
I saw the lines beside her eyes begin to smooth out. She would sleep soon. The days of pain were increasing in number, and her strength to withstand them was ebbing, but tonight she would have some measure of peace.
“You are a good girl.”
“I wasn’t a good novice!” I responded smartly.
“Sit here. Tell me about those days when you were a bad novice.” Her eyelids drooped, but she fought the strength of the drug.
So I did, because it pleased me to distract her. I told her of Mother Abbess and her penchant for red stockings. I told her of Sister Goda and her inappropriate love poetry, of the chickens that fell foul of the fox because of my carelessness and how I was punished. I did not speak of Countess Joan. I knew enough by now not to speak that name. Joan, the duplicitous daughter-in-law, far away in Aquitaine with her husband the Prince, was not a subject to give the Queen a restful night.
“It was good that I found you,” she murmured.
“Yes, my lady.” I smoothed a piercingly sweet unguent into the tight skin of her wrist and hand. “You have changed my life.”
A little silence fell, but the Queen was not asleep. She was contemplating something beyond my sight that did not seem entirely to please her, gouging a deep path between her brows. Then she blinked and fixed me with an uncomfortable gaze. “Yes. I am sure it was good that you fell into my path.”
I was certain it was not merely to smear her suffering flesh with ointments. A shiver of awareness assailed me in the overheated room, for her declamation suggested some deep uncertainty. Had I done something to lose her regard so soon? I forced my mind to rove over what I might have said or done to cast her into doubt. Nothing came to mind. So I asked.
“Why did you choose me, Majesty? Why did you send for me?”
When the Queen looked at me, her eyes were hooded. She closed her hand tightly around the jeweled cross on her breast, and her reply held none of her essential compassion. Indeed, her tone was curt and bleak, and she drew her hand from my ministrations as if she could not bear that I touch her.
“I chose you because I have a role for you, Alice. A difficult one, perha
ps. And not too far distant…but not yet. Not quite yet…” She closed her eyes at last, as if she would shut me from her sight. “I’m weary now. Send for my priest, if you will. I’ll pray with him before I sleep.”
I left her, more perplexed than ever. Her words resurfaced as I lit my own candle and took myself to bed in the room I shared with two of the damsels. Sleep would not come.
I have a role for you to play. A difficult one, perhaps. And not too far distant…
Chapter Five
It became my habit to keep a journal of sorts. Why? Did I need a reason? Only that I should not lose the skill I had learned with such painstaking effort. No one needed me to write in a palace where men of letters matched the number of huntsmen. Sometimes I wrote in French, sometimes in Latin as the mood took me. I begged pieces of parchment, pen, and ink from the palace clerks. They were not unwilling when I smiled, when I tilted my chin or slid a long-eyed glance. I was learning the ways of the Court, and the power of my own talents to attract.
And what did I write? A chronology of my days. What I wished to remember, I wrote for more than a year.
Did I ever consider that the damsels might discover what I wrote? Not for a moment. They mocked my scribbling. And what I scribbled was excruciatingly dull. Once, to satisfy their curiosity, I read aloud.…
“‘Today I joined the damsels in my first hunt. I had no enjoyment of it. The King celebrates his fiftieth year with a great tournament and jousting held at Smithfield. We all attend. I am learning to dance.…’”
“By the Virgin, Alice!” Isabella yawned behind her slender fingers. “If you have nothing better to write about, what in heaven’s name is the value of doing it? Better to return to scouring the pots in the kitchens.”
Dull? Infinitely. And quite deliberate, to ensure that no damsel was sufficiently interested to poke her sharp nose into what I might be doing. But what memories my writings evoked for me, rereading my trite comments when my life was in danger and turmoil. There on the pages, in stark letters, in the briefest of record, the pattern of my life unfolded in that fateful year, as clear as a flock of winter rooks digging in a snow-covered field. What a miraculous, terrifying, life-changing year it proved to be.
Today I joined the damsels in my first hunt. I had no enjoyment of it.… What a mastery of understatement that was. The gelding I was given was a mount from hell. I would never see the pleasure in being jolted and bounced for two hours, to come at the end to a baying pack of hounds and a bloody kill. Truth to tell, the kill happened without me, for I fell off with a shriek at the first breath-stopping gallop. Sitting on the ground, covered with leaf mold and twiggery, beating the damp earth from my skirts, I raged in misery. My crispinettes and hood had become detached. The hunt had disappeared into the distance. So had my despicable mount. It would be a long walk home.
“A damsel in distress, by God!”
I had not registered the beat of hooves on the soft ground under the trees. I looked up to see two horses bearing down on me at speed, one large and threatening, the other small and wiry.
“Mistress Alice!” The King reined in, his stallion dancing within feet of me. “Are you well down there?”
“No, I am not!” I was not as polite as I should have been.
“Who suggested you ride that brute that thundered past us?”
“The lady Isabella! That misbegotten bag of bones deposited me here.…I should never have come. I detest horses.”
“So why did you?”
I wasn’t altogether sure, except that it was expected of me. It was the one joy in life remaining to the Queen when she was in health. The King swung down, threw his reins to the lad on the pony, and approached on foot. I raised a hand to shield my eyes from the sun where it glimmered through the new leaves.
“Thomas—go and fetch the lady’s ride,” he ordered.
Thomas, the King’s youngest son, abandoned the stallion and rode off like the wind. The King offered me his hand.
“I can get to my feet alone, Sire.” I was ungracious, I knew, but my humiliation was strong.
“I’ve no doubt, lady. Humor me.”
His eyes might be bright with amusement, but his order was peremptory and not to be disobeyed. I held out my hand, and with a firm tug I was pulled to my feet, whereupon the King began to dislodge the debris from my skirts with long strokes of the flat of his hand. Shame colored my cheeks.
“Indeed you should not, Sire!”
“I should indeed. You need to pin up your hair.”
“I can’t. There’s not enough to pin up, and I need help to make it look respectable.”
“Then let me.”
“No, Sire!” To have the King pin up my hair? I would as soon ask Isabella to scrub my back.
He grunted, a sign of annoyance I recognized. “You must allow me, mistress, as a man of chivalry, to set your appearance to rights.…”
And tucking my ill-used crispinettes into his belt, he proceeded with astonishingly clever fingers to repin my simple hood to cover the disaster, as deft as if he were tying the jesses of his favorite goshawk. I stood still under his ministrations, a stone statue, barely breathing. Until the King stepped back and surveyed me.
“Passable. I’ve not lost my touch in all these years.” He cocked an ear to listen, and nodded his head. “And now, lady, you’ll have to get back on!”
He was laughing at me! “I don’t wish to!”
“You will, unless you intend to walk home.…” Thomas had returned with my recalcitrant mount, and before I could make any more fuss, I was boosted back into the saddle. For a moment as he tightened my girths, the King looked up into my face, then abruptly stepped back.
“There you are, Mistress Alice. Hold tight!” A slap of the King’s hand against the wide rump set me in motion. “Look after her, Thomas. The Queen will never forgive you if we allow her to fall into a blackberry thicket.” A pause, and the words followed me. “And neither will I!”
And Thomas did. Only seven years old, and he had more skill at riding than I would ever have. But it was the King’s deft hands I remembered, not Thomas’s enthusiastic prattling.
The King celebrates his fiftieth year with a great tournament and jousting.… Magnificent! The King was superlative in his new armor. I could not find the words, burnished as he was by the sun, sword and armor striking fire as his arm rose and fell, the plumes on his helmet nodding imperiously. And yet I feared for him, my loins liquid and cold with fear. I could not look away, but when blood matted his sleeve, dripping from his fingers, I closed my eyes.
No need, of course. His energy always prodigious, he was touched with magic that day. Fighting in the melee with all the skill and dash and finesse of a hero of the old tales, he had the grace at the end to heap praise on those whom he defeated.
That day he was all hero to me.
Afterward, when the combatants gathered in the banter much loved by men, the Queen’s ladies threw flowers to the knight of their choice. I had no one. Nor did I care, for there was only one to fill my vision, whether in the lists or in the vicious cut and thrust of personal combat. And I was audacious enough to fling a rosebud, when he approached the gallery in which we women sat with the Queen. He had removed his helm. He was so close to me, his face pale and drawn in the aftermath of his efforts, that I could detect the smear of blood on his cheek where he had wiped at the dust with his gauntlet. I was spellbound, so much so that the flower I so ineptly flung in his direction struck the cheek of the King’s stallion; a soft blow, but the high-blooded destrier instantly reared in the manner of its kind.
“Sweet Jesu!” Startled, the King dropped his helm, tightening his reins as he fought to bring the animal back under control.
“Have you no sense?” Isabella snapped.
I thought better of replying, horrified at what I had achieved, steeling myself to withstand the King’s reproof. Without a word he snapped his fingers to his page to pick up the helm and the now thoroughly trampled flower. I look
ed at him in fear.
“My thanks, lady.”
He bowed his head solemnly to me as he tucked the crumpled petals into the gorget at his throat. My belly clenched; my face flamed to my hairline. Proud, haughty, confident, the King would treat me with respect when I had almost unhorsed him.
“Our kitchen maid cannot yet be relied upon to act decorously in public!” Isabella remarked, setting up a chorus of laughter.
But the King did not sneer. Urging his horse closer to the gilded canvas, the fire dying from his eyes as the energy of battle receded, he stretched out his hand, palm up.
“Mistress Alice, if you would honor me…”
And I placed mine there. The King kissed my fingers.
“The rose was a fine gesture, if a little wayward. My horse and I both thank you, Mistress Alice.”
There was the rustle of appreciative laughter, no longer at my expense. I felt the heat of his kiss against my skin, hotter than the beat of blood in my cheeks.
I am learning to dance. “Holy Virgin!” I misstepped the insistent beat of the tabor and shawm for the twentieth time. How could I appreciate the ability to count coins under the stern tutorship of Janyn Perrers, yet not be able to count the steps in a simple processional dance? The King’s hand tightened to give me balance as I lurched unforgivably. Should it not have been a graceful dance? The King was a better dancer than I. It would be hard to be worse.
“You are allowed to look at me, Mistress Alice,” he announced when we came together again and snatched a conversation.
“If I do, I shall fall over my feet, Sire—or yours. I’ll cripple you before the night is out.”
“I’ll lead you in the right steps, you know.” I must have looked askance. “Do you not trust me, Alice?”
He had called me by my name, without formality. I looked up at him to find his eyes quizzical on my face, and I promptly missed the next simple movement.