by V L Perry
In my bed that night, I alternated between dread and excitement.
When my uncle had come home from the French wars in 1513, he received not only his own rewards but the ones that should have gone to my father. He’d managed my mother’s estate ever since, and provided for us. I had met him only a few times, and remembered only his deep voice and a beard that needed combing.
The moon hovered huge and orange above the range of trees low in my window, vanishing half-way up as though swallowed by clouds the color of blood. The country folk would cross themselves and hang basil above their doors and windows, wait until morning to throw the wash-water out. And tonight no Christian man in England would touch his wife as she lay beside him, for fear of begetting demons. My mother was not in bed beside me, but kept Nocturnes belowstairs with some of the household who were too frightened to venture outdoors to the church in Aldington. A bad omen, they said. She was surprisingly patient with such nonsense from them; I suppose she felt it kept them from the business of incantations or charms. Or from slipping off on their own.
I lifted one hand to catch the reddish glow, watching the shadow of my fingers move on the linen counterpane. My mother saved her fanciest embroidery for the parish; most things in our house were fine but plain. I wiggled my fingers, flirting with the danger of being moonstruck. That was one of the worst things about life in Kent; the country thinking I’d tried so hard to leave behind kept surrounding my thoughts like waves pulling down a drowning man. I would even start to talk like them again if I was not careful.
My mother did not want me to go; that much was clear, though she’d said not a word. She hadn’t wanted me to go to the Low Countries either, when I was fifteen and my uncle had secured a place for me in the Princess Mary’s retinue. She was betrothed then to her cousin Charles (now the Emperor), and needed a household of English ladies to ease her transition to her new life. I had seen the princess only once, from a distance, as their procession passed to Calais—the little princess all pink and gold beside the slender, somber figure of her mother. Even then she seemed angelic to me.
When that betrothal was broken (for royals break vows as easily as country folk break eggs), I was transferred with the chests and tables and a handful of other ladies to the household of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. The Low Countries would never fall to heresy, my uncle had assured my mother: the only trouble was a mad monk who kept printing heretical pamphlets. Pope Leo would soon put the drunk German in his place, or else excommunicate him so that none would listen to his ravings. Gone were the days when old Margaret of Burgundy made her court a haven for pretenders to the English throne and send them here to stir up rebellion; now the Habsburgs wanted to keep England as an ally against France. It would be good for our family fortunes, he said, and could do me no harm.
In that, of course, he’d been disastrously wrong.
There was the faint whisper and shuffle of the household going their separate ways to bed. Not my mother, though. I imagined instead that I heard the sound of her knees creaking on the wooden prie-dieu in her private chapel, her whispered pleas for my safety and salvation. As she had before, as she would again and again on the lonely nights without me.
It was rare for my uncle to be wrong, but even rarer that he did not turn misfortune into gain. Even after I returned, before my nightmares had begun to lose some of their sharp edges and I could pass a night without waking in terror from the thunder of an invading army, he’d immediately begun working on a plan to bring me to the English court.
But things had changed since I’d been away. Now that Queen Katharine was gone, banished, my ever-resourceful uncle had found a way to continue on as vice-chamberlain to the king’s mistress, who he’d installed in the queen’s place. So Uncle Edward lost no time in securing a new household staff, including maids and ladies in waiting.
I’d returned home two years ago feeling as shipwrecked sailors must feel when they crawl wet and puking onto shore. The old world had crumbled behind me, and the new one I found myself in was more foreign to me than the Americas: a world where Popes were prisoners and peasants rose up in revolt against their masters, where demon-possessed heretics like Luther and Zwingli spat in the face of the Church and Infidels beat on the very doors of the Christian world. Rome itself was no longer a haven but a charnel house, where severed limbs lay heaped in gutters, scattered here and there with gold coins plundered from offertory boxes, nuns and altar boys violated in the shadow of the crucifix itself.
The shadow of my fingers on the counterpane was trembling; I turned over, pressing my face into the pillow. A single feather poked through the linen and pricked my cheek, but I did not move. In the two years since I’d crawled back to the safety of my mother’s house in Kent and shut the door behind me, wishing for more than a single channel of sea between me and the horrors of the continent, I’d tried not to think of any of that at all. The storm that Luther had whipped up was yet only a rumble here on this little island. But the clouds were gathering, and any week might bring the winds I feared so much. If that storm ever came, there would be no shelter: whether you were with the king or the Pope, you would be flattened just the same.
Such concerns filled my uncle’s chatty letters to my mother—who fingered her rosary as her chaplain read them to her, afterwards instructing him to put them in the fire. Politics were distasteful to her, and of no interest to me. For my part, I had my own heart-prickings about going:
Not about leaving my mother alone in the Kentish countryside, with only her worries for company, and her stern God who demanded fasting and silence as a toll for His continued favor. She seemed to prefer His company these days, and no longer even sewed with the other parish women or sang with the servants.
Not for the chance—as I knew my uncle hoped—of making a good marriage with some ambitious courtier who had a cold bed and empty pockets. I knew already naught would come of that.
Not for the court itself. I knew royal courts: hunting grounds where men and women stalked one another, strewn about with straw, finery and filth jumbled together. You couldn’t stand to nose them after a month or two, and you never knew where anything was; always on the move, always escaping or pursuing. And the food was never hot. Every court considered itself the center of the world, but at least the Habsburgs and the French had reason to think so. The English court would be as foreign to me as Vienna had first seemed all those years ago. And I had nothing to wear. All my fine gowns were German or Flemish, so different from the ugly, heavy English court dresses; it was as though they did not want women to use their arms. I would wear my finest, I vowed, and English fashions be damned.
But going to court would mean the chance to get away from this house where I’d spent the last two years cloistered as any nun. From the stares of the villagers in nearby Aldington, where I seldom ventured. It would be a chance to talk to people without sensing their fear, or glimpsing the sign of the evil eye as I passed. Only this time there would be no Maria there to help ease my way with jokes, lessons, gentle mockery, as she had in Vienna.
The moon was lower now, peering in at me like a half-lidded bloody eye. My mother would keep vigil all night, and not come to bed at all. I settled my arms and legs luxuriously across the width of the mattress. If I could have mustered it, I’d have said a prayer in return: that she never know that all her prayers for me had come to naught.
It is two chilly days’ journey from Aldington to London, though in summer you can leave before dawn and arrive before nightfall. If you are foolish enough to go when the days are short, however, you will need at the very least to change horses twice, and ride with an armed guard bearing the king’s arms, for the law does not apply to the roads after dark. Only a great fool will stay at an inn, for there is no better place to be robbed. Though unless you are a fool, you will not go at all.
The roads between Kent and London are in terrible condition from the ironmongers’ heavy carts. Even the fees that king imposes cannot keep them in repair
. Holes and ruts scarred the way, some as deep as my ankles, and great pools of cold mud splashed my wool riding robe. The fields ran endlessly brown and white under an empty sky, and there was nothing to look at save sheep, an occasional farmer’s cart, and more sheep. By the time the wind carried the faint sound of church bells ringing for Lauds, I was already tired, my spine ground to pebbles.
“Will we go over London Bridge tomorrow?” I asked the usher at the inn that night, mainly to distract myself from my aching legs, and the stale bread and cheese he brought to my room. I was not permitted to eat in the common room downstairs: my mother’s orders.
“We’ll go under it, my lady,” he replied. “The waterway is the usual entry for all who live at court. Beggars crowd the streets of London and press against the palace gates, and the city itself is full of filth and evil smells. It is safer if we enter from the river.”
Just as well. The English are so proud of their bridge, and sing songs about it, but what is it, really? A path across the water. Still, I had hoped to see the great clock of St. Mary-le-Bow, and the spire at Charing Cross. I would see them sometime on my own, I vowed.
My muscles felt stiff as saddle leather by the time we approached Gravesend on the afternoon of the second day, where my uncle was to meet our party. We waited what seemed a long time. A bell sounded somewhere, though I lost count of its tolling for the ringing in my ears, and the rising wind. Even from this distance, I could taste the river in the back of my throat.
The day before I left, I had asked my mother for her blessing. We were in the hall, the winter light pouring through the casements shut against the chill wind. She sat at her bench below one of the cross-paned windows, working another altar cloth for the parish church. I loved to stroke the dark velvets, the crosses worked in gold and silver thread. I would miss seeing her here, as much a part of the room as the washed stone floor, the rough ceiling beams, the great fireplace in the inner kitchen that took up most of the back wall.
”Court’s hardly the place to go to regain your health. Especially these days.” She pulled a thread taut, snapped it off. “I’d rather you stay here until you’re stronger.”
My mother was very good at wishing things were other than they were. In her mind she wove rich tapestries of should-have and ought-to-be as elaborate as her frontals and chalice cloths.
“It was Uncle’s decision, not my own,” I said, and pressed my teeth together to keep from saying any more. I might have said, for example, that if I’d stayed in Princess Mary’s service, I might well be dismissed or exiled with her to remote Beaulieu by now. Or I might have wished that the catastrophe in Vienna had not brought me back to England in the first place. Or that Father had not been killed. Or even that the boy born before me had lived so he could go to court in my place. I’d seen firsthand how reliable prayers and wishes were.
“Oh, it may be a good opportunity for your fortunes, I don’t doubt that.” She paused in her work to look out over the fields, empty after the harvest. She still wore the old-fashioned hoods with the long frontlets, and I could see only her chin and the tip of her nose. “But it’s a dangerous place for a woman alone. I’d not have you corrupted,” and now she looked straight at me.
“I’ll be all right, mother. I’ll say a Psalter every hour, and wear herb necklaces to keep evil at bay.” I did not smile, and she did not laugh. We were not given to laughing together, my mother and I. But the sigh with which she resumed her sewing was one of resignation.
“Well, you have my blessing,” she said at last. “I daresay you’ll be needing it there.”
The usher beside me put his hand to the knife-sheath on his belt, and I looked up to see a party of five or six men approaching us out of the dusk itself, it seemed. Before anyone could make a move the man in front called out, though the rising wind nearly took his words: “Welcome, niece.”
With relief I recognized my uncle’s voice. He never called me anything but niece, just as he called my mother my brother’s wife. “We will embark here; it is three hours to the court.”
In the tilt I wrapped my cloak tighter around me and shivered; my uncle made no move toward me, but talked and laughed heartily with the watermen and ushers. When I jerked my head up from a doze, the stars had taken their places in the clear, cold sky, like dancers. I could count on them to remain unchanged, at the very least, wherever I went.
I slept again, missing the palace of Greenwich (so my uncle told me later), and woke as we bumped through the estuary of the river. Flecks of snow were coming down now, being churned into the dirty brown water. The rows of lights outlined the river’s path and showed the shadow of houses and shops, Not a proper city; just a town, after all.
“We’re in London now, my lady,” one of the watermen called to me. “There’s Southwark, the cathedral that is, and there’s the Tower.”
I knew what they were; all the English, whether they have seen it or not, know the Tower. I had always imagined it as grey--stones that had seen the murder of kings and princes must surely be grey. Yet its walls and turrets shone almost golden in the torchlight surrounding it.
“Is that its true color, uncle?” I asked.
For a moment he did not answer. “You must be careful how you call me,” he finally said, when the watermen fell to doing something with their gear. The passing torchlight fell on my face, and when he saw my look he explained:
“You might soon be in the presence of the king more than I, and able to ask him for small favors. It will be far better if he sees you not as the vice-chamberlain’s niece, but simply as a pretty maid. One who delights in his generosity.”
He sat back, and after a moment he added, “The Tower stones change. In full daylight they can be honey-colored, or nearly white. In winter, or when it rains, they can seem grey or black.” He pointed out the great cross in Cheapside, and St. Paul’s cathedral, its sharp spire the highest point on the landscape and lit with pinpricks of light.
Even breathing through my mouth I could smell the foulness of the streets where the people dumped garbage and emptied chamber pots, where the blood and entrails from the slaughterhouses and fishmongers ran in shallow ditches to the river. If it was this bad at the end of autumn, what would it be like in high summer? Vienna, with its covered sewers and regulations against dumping filth in the streets, was larger but far less noxious.
“What will I call her?” I asked as low as I could
He looked at me for a moment, though all I could see clearly was the reflection of his eyes. “She is merely the Lady,” he said slowly. “And that’s what she will still be when he tires of her.”
By Ludgate I could see the lights of the court ahead. They shone in the black water, reflecting the upside-down palace of Whitehall. Where there were no queen’s apartments, and no queen. Upside-down indeed.
The barge bumped up to the landing, and yeomen in green and white livery rushed to help us up the slippery steps to the great wooden doors standing open to admit us.
Where were the fantastic decorations the king of England covered his palaces with? The rich hangings, the magnificence, the bright music that were said to dazzle the ambassadors and draw the best artisans from all over Europe? The room I found myself in was a plain wooden box, no bigger or better than my bedchamber at home.
The men, my uncle among them, were searched by the yeomen guards and then moved out of the chamber in a body, talking and laughing. He did not even glance backward at me, so I could not be sure of what I’d thought I heard him mutter to me as he handed me out of the boat.
A woman came hurrying in; she was neither old nor young. Her pink cheeks made me wonder she’d run to greet me, and her quick, fluttering movements and brown satin gown reminded me of a small bird’s. In a breathy voice introduced herself as Mistress Gainsford.
“You must have had a tiring journey,” she said. “I will bring you to the royal apartments straightaway. But first, do you need anything?”
I could have kissed her. She led me
to a small closet just off the waiting chamber, containing a basin of water and a box with a hinged lid, decorated with the Tudor arms etched in gilt. Royal or common, master or servant, everybody shits.
After I emerged she helped me tuck the loose strands of hair under my hood and brush the worst of the dust and stains from my skirt. A long drink of cider, now that I was not about to burst, was heavenly. Was I hungry? The very thought made me feel sick. Then we would proceed straightaway. I could find a bed in the dormitory, and meet my new mistress tomorrow.
The sharp nervousness in my throat fell into my stomach and became disappointment. Did the English court always retire so early? It could hardly be time for Compline yet.
There was a rush of heat and noise as we passed the Great Hall. The court was still awake, then. I caught a glimpse through the open doorway: the gentlemen’s servants taking their last meal of the day late, after evening duties were done. Dogs fought amid the straw under the tables for scraps; servers rushed about, answering calls for more food and ale, tripping over the dogs in the near-dark and cursing.
In Vienna the queen’s ladies had taken meals in her apartments. Queen Anne of Bohemia, the archduke’s wife, did not like to be alone but always ate first while we stood and watched in silence. The Lady was not a queen; would she keep state as one? Or would I have to eat among that rabble in a room dark as a barn?
Outside the double doors to Lady’s apartments, I took a moment to catch my breath while a guard brought word of our arrival. If Mistress Gainsford always moved at such a pace, no wonder her cheeks were so flushed. It is not good for women to be sanguine; too much blood leads to a pricking, so the saying goes.
We were admitted along a narrow gallery to the inner chamber, where three young women sat. Their conversation cut off abruptly when they saw me, though the sharp-nosed one bit off the words “—like this!” before looking up. .