by V L Perry
“Meg—I mean Lady Lee will take you to Mrs. Stonor and help you with anything else you need,” Mistress Gainsford said, all in a rush, so that I hardly understood her. She went away down the gallery, her lappets flying out like wings.
“No ceremony tonight, it seems,” said the sharp-nosed one. When she rose, she towered over the rest of us. “I’m Lady Lee, lately called Meg; this is Mistress Madge Shelton and Mistress Nan Cobham.”
Madge had a face as soft and round as Meg’s was thin and angular, with golden curls spilling from under a shimmering pink hood. She might have been a farmer’s lovely young daughter from a folktale, silly enough to claim to spin straw into gold and needing to be rescued by someone else’s cleverness.
All I noted of Nan was a pair of onyx eyes that looked me up and down. She did not return my curtsey. “You’re Baynton’s niece,” she accused me. She had a look of indigestion, though later I knew it for her natural expression. She had good features, though, give her that.
“Have you come from Germany?” Madge asked, noting my gown. It was Flemish, but
no matter.
Make no enemies, my uncle had murmured as the boat tied up to the dock. But he’d never had to live among women. I knew they saw me as a foreigner, as the Austrian women had. I seemed to fit in nowhere.
“You are correct, Mistress Cobham,” I said. “I’ve come from Kent, Mistress Shelton, and am tired. Perhaps we can discuss our connections another time.”
“All way from Kent,” Nan said sweetly. “I hope you were able to finish the ploughing before you set off for court.”
Meg interrupted. “You didn’t arrive in a gown fit for a queen either, Nan. And I’m a Kentish girl myself. So mind your manners.” Nan frowned and Madge gave a nervous little tinkling laugh just as another woman appeared in the doorway.
“Meg,” the woman called, “Our mistress calls for you, and here you stand gossiping.”
“Mistress Gainsford is with her,” Meg replied, “and she asked me to see to our new arrival.” She turned to me, and if she did not quite smile, her tone and manner were reassuring. “She did not forget you were to come tonight, and sent word that she is sorry not to welcome you herself. But she will see you tomorrow.”
The woman in the doorway came closer, and it became suddenly difficult for me to breathe. My throat wanted desperately to close up; only my will kept it open, and my will had had many years of stern training. It was impossible to tell whether the strange smell came from the woman’s breath or body or clothing, or all three. She was not old; her figure was still firm, and her pale yellow hair was pulled back under a jeweled French hood. Perhaps she had once been beautiful, for her lips her still full, her nose and cheekbones delicately chiseled. But her eyes had the filmy cast very old women’s sometimes have, and her face, though still almost unlined, was a queer mottled silver-grey. There was something else about her face that was unsettling, though it took me a moment to realize what it was: she had no eyebrows. On later occasions I saw her draw them on with a stick of lead, but that night she looked like a surprised old child.
As if to counter such ugliness, she was dressed in a fabulous gown of brocaded green velvet girdled with silver. When she spoke, I saw how far her gums were pulled back from her teeth:
“Our mistress is upset tonight, poor dear, and is resting now. You must not think she does not wish to receive you.” She smiled at me. It was terrible.
“Lady Rochford.” Meg’s voice held a note of warning. So this must be the Lady’s sister-in-law, married to her brother George. “Please prepare our new arrival for swearing, and then take her up to Mrs. Stonor.”
She turned back to me. “No one is admitted to her service without the oath of service. You can take it tonight, if you’re not too tired.” Madge and Nan would be witnesses. Lady Rochford brought a book and papers, a pot of ink and a quill.
This was not how things had been done in the Archduke’s court. Such oaths were reserved for those serving queens or duchesses. The whole thing had a strange, rushed air; Madge shifted nervously from one foot to another as Lady Rochford held the book out to me. I placed my hand on it. It was large and heavy as a brick, with a cover of thick soft leather.
Meg read the oath aloud in a way that seemed forced. I wondered if she could actually read every word, or had memorized what the paper said:
…committed to her household…in her service…right and good obedience…our lord Christ Jesu...
“I will,” I said. As simple as that.
Nan thrust the quill at me. “Make your mark there, if you can.”
She and Madge had already marked at the bottom: a circle, a cross. I looked Nan Cobham in the eye, then slowly, firmly, wrote my name with a flourish.
What can I tell you about the days that followed? They were like a bright carpet of colors, smells, sounds, tastes and emotions, so that even now to pull a single thread is to unravel the rest:
Mrs. Stonor rang the bell to wake us in time for Mass at eight. We set about the slow task of combing and plaiting hair with sleepy fingers, arranging hoods. Many maids of honor wore our mistress’s old gowns, handed down in payment or as gifts—elaborate creations that required two pairs of hands to fasten our skirts, tighten busks, lace the sleeves and bodices smooth over the layers of kirtle and petticoats. The chambermaids who slept in a small adjoining alcove helped us dress, swept out the room each morning, collected melted wax plugs from the wall sconces and brought our daily ration of candles from the buttery. Grooms delivered torches and wood, carefully counted out to last the week.
That first morning I woke among two dozen strangers, all eager to devour me with their eyes. My bedmate was Eliza Browne, a cheery girl with shining chestnut hair and an overbite like a mule. She asked me how I’d slept, and Nan Cobham frowned at her for it. After that she ducked her head and said nothing more, though she did help me with my laces. They were a struggle: I had chosen my finest Austrian gown, with the sleeves puffed and slashed in a way most of the English had never seen. It drew some strange looks from the others.
Mary Boleyn had lived among the maids since her husband’s death. Perhaps because she had once been the king’s mistress (her two children were said to have the king’s red hair), and so had little reputation to protect, she alone gave me a small smile, like a candle-flame of warmth. I smiled back, almost before I knew it.
Once down the winding stone staircase, we gathered in the outer chamber where other members of the court might mingle to greet her and hear Mass led by her chaplain, Cranmer. I feigned prayer while secretly examining the magnificent blaze of gold, green and scarlet silk tapestries, the lovers’ knots and Tudor roses gilded on the richly carved ceilings. The Habsburg palaces had been ornate, but many of them had been the work of generations. All this must have been done in the few months since the king had installed his lady love here.
My first glimpse of her that morning was fleeting: a slender back clad in dark blue velvet, head bowed in prayer. She was at the front, surrounded by attendants, Meg on one side and Lady Rochford on the other. And she was small, no bigger than a girl. The top of her dark head came barely to Meg’s shoulder.
Right in the middle of the liturgy, she turned and looked straight at me. I ducked my head, but not before I glimpsed the big, dark eyes and the smile they held.
Afterward Mistress Gainsford took me aside and said the Lady would receive me in her audience chamber directly after services.
“You look fine,” she added, smoothing my hood. I’d taken the gown from my trunk only that morning, and was worried that the creases still showed.
She’s as human as you are, Maria’s voice sounded in my head. Not a statue or a saint. Some sluts are luckier than others, is all. She used to whisper such things to me and then watch me try not to laugh.
I told myself that the woman seated in the velvet-covered chair before me was no queen, however much she might playact it. Just another gentleman’s daughter from Kent. My uncle’s words echoe
d in my head. Please those whom the king loves, and you will please him.
“You may rise,” she said. I looked up at her.
She was pretty. That was something I’d not expected. There were so many reports of her, ranging from bad to worse: a wen on her neck, six fingers, a witch’s mark. Her face was a pointed oval, paler than I’d imagined. Not yellow, as they said. She was smiling, and all her teeth were white and even. Her eyes were her best feature, framed by beautifully shaped eyebrows. I was to come to know intimately just how much time and work it took to maintain this appearance of simple beauty, but the effect was worth it.
Though Meg and Lady Rochford attended on either side of her, she and I might have been the only two in all the world, and her whole day devoted only to speaking with me:
“I should have let you go to your breakfast in peace,” she said. “But I did not want to delay your welcome any longer. Indeed, I’m sorry that I could not greet you yesterevening. You are welcome; your uncle has spoken to me of you, and I think you will do well here.”
“Thank you, my lady.” In full light I saw that the hair beneath her elegantly arched hood was a dark, rich brown, almost the same shade that Maria’s had been. Not black, as popular talk had it. Her voice was like her hair, thick and dark and soft. Cardinal Wolsey had called her the night-crow. Wolsey, who had hated her and was now dead.
“I have no secrets in my household,” she said suddenly, and laughed. It was much higher and wilder than her voice hinted at. Words flowed from her like a stream, and she seemed unable to dam them up. “It seems I am not as popular with the good wives of London as my coterie would like me to believe. Last night some women who heard I was at Carew’s house came and made a scene there. A few threw stones right through the glass windows. He’d just got them in, too; I must have them replaced. Help me remember that, Meg, would you?
“The king wanted them arrested and examined,” she continued, “but I prevailed on him to let the poor creatures alone. No, Meg, I don’t blame anyone; if anything it was my fault for venturing out without a guard. Still, home I came, safe and sound except for a case of nerves, for which Mistress Gainsford gave me a posset. Her possets are quite effective. I slept soundly right through to this morning and nearly missed Mass.” She giggled as I stood bewildered. Was I meant to share a joke?
“They deserved flogging, every one of them,” Lady Rochford said suddenly. “You are merciful to spare them.”
“Ah, Lady Rochford,” she smiled. “If a queen punished all her subjects who did not approve of her, half the queens in English history would be called tyrants. Rather than whores and she-wolves, of course. I can be patient. And careful in the meantime to avoid crowds. “You are from Kent, yes?” She brought those dark eyes back to me, and I curtseyed.
“Sometimes I miss it so. There is one there who still predicts the kingdom shall come to ruin if the king does wed me; `the Holy Maid,’ they call her, though she is neither one. Have you seen her? No? Well, more’s the pity; I hear she puts on quite a show. I have a mind to stop there on my way to Hever and see her for myself!
“Doubtless you are famished,” she said, rising. “You may break your fast in the outer chamber with the others.”
I was dismissed. Something else I’d have to get used to again.
As I reached the door, I heard her add to Meg: “By this afternoon the tale will grow to a mob bearing torches, as in a woodcut, and me swimming across the river for my life. Wait and see my powers of prophecy--not for nothing do they call me a sorceress!”
Later I indeed heard of how the Lady had been attacked by a murderous crowd, and barely slipped away with her life by virtue of a timely barge. De Selve, the Venetian ambassador, wrote every word of it down and sent it to the Doge. Thus do paper and ink transform lies into truth: it is the simplest form of alchemy, and the most dangerous.
Breakfast was the quietest time of day: porridge or barley bread with beef, or fish on fast days, delivered with ale to the outer chamber and distributed under the watchful eye of Mrs. Stonor, a broad woman with a flat face and a cap she never changed or washed. For all her household economy, she was kind, and used to ask each of us our dreams from the night before, fancying she could see portents of our futures in them.
The Lady sometimes broke her fast with us, which was how I learned her strange tastes: sweet wine, fruit, and honey biscuits—habits she’d picked up in France, no doubt. Most often, though, she ate in her inner chamber in the company of Meg and Lady Rochford. Sometimes her brother came to join her after attending the king at his own meals.
Our mornings were taken up with small tasks until dinnertime: the ladies of the privy chamber attended her person, and the scullery tasks of scrubbing the linens and garderobes belonged to the chamberers. The maids of honor fell somewhere between. We might tend the fire or clean the Venetian-glass mirror (a notorious task that required a knack), or polish the jewelry with ground-pearl paste, or sponge the reeking spots of her gowns with rosewater, or lay out her nailcloth and hairbrush and pumice stone and jars of white ceruse and red madder, or any of a thousand other things that required no thought. All of it new and glittering. None of it with the weight of age, of dignity; no need to rub the dullness off of candlesticks or cups touched by generations of hands.
King Henry VII, the old-timers said, had been more like a clerk than the mighty victor of Redmore Plain who had defeated Richard III, and his court more like an abbey than a royal dwelling: austere, chilly, corrupt. Our King Henry VIII, on the other hand, was every inch a king. He would have a glittering new outfit for every important audience, new jewels and plate, new men about him, new learning, new books and ideas--and new wife to match. And before long (so they hoped) a prince, which old Queen Katharine had failed to provide.
But that was a long way off. The ladies of the privy chamber who washed her and dressed her and trimmed the hair of her body (another odd French habit) knew every detail about her person. It was they who reported that, though she returned to her bedchamber late some evenings with her laces undone and some of the threads of her neckline pulled, her underskirts were always dry and unstained.
Except for Meg, she did not seem to trust any of them. She knew they talked. I used to wonder whether she chose Lady Exeter for the privy chamber on purpose, giving her the honorable task of emptying her night pot just to watch her lip curl in disgust. Any other lady of the realm would have counted it a high honor, but Lady Exeter had the notion that the Boleyns were upstart commoners, with no claim on the king so good as her own husband’s. She talked incessantly of his lifelong closeness with his cousin the king: “There was no separating them when they were boys,” I was to hear her say a hundred times. “Both tall and redheaded; you’d have been hard-pressed to tell them apart.” At the time I thought she was merely proud of him.
It was the fact of her task which galled her, not so much the stench or mess of it. Indeed, Henry Norris, the king’s Groom of the Stool, had the same task and boasted of it. Men were forever falling over themselves to curry his favor, asking him to speak to the king on their behalf during his closeted times.
The Lady reserved her affection for us, the maids of honor. We were no threat, in those days; with us she could safely share out little pleasantries and confidences as easily as she did her worn gowns and stockings.
Queen Anne of Bohemia had never talked with us so. But then, I hadn’t had to wipe the grease from her haircombs and inspect them for nits, either. At the Austrian court our only duties were to keep her company and make sure we never breached one of the hundreds of rules about how high or low we were to have our heads, when and how to sit, stand, enter or leave a room. “Next she’ll give us leave to fart only when she nods,” Maria had whispered once. I shook with quiet mirth until the queen herself asked me what ailed me and I had to pretend sickness and excuse myself.
Our duties were rotated in shifts, so that at any hour she might have fresh attendants. The rest of us were free to go back and forth b
etween the great hall, chapel, the gardens and the Lady’s apartments, so long as we had her permission. The fine for “seeking out corners and secret places” was one shilling. Despite being trumpeted up and down Europe as “The Great Whore”—more likely because of it—the Lady did not allow any hint of scandal to taint her household.
Very little about the court was clean, untainted. Everything, from the gingerbread to the privies, was covered in paint or built to look like something else. There was sugar in the wine, the bread, the salad, the fruit. Even the water had orange petals or rose essence or licorice in it; the butter was mixed with garlic or herbs. Hair from the lapdogs—and their owners—found its way into everything, and you’d find one tickling the back of your throat. Despite the fines, men pissed into fireplaces and the rushes strewn about the corridors. If you leaned against a table cover, like as not you would come away with a dirt-print to brush out of your skirt. Two years buried in Aldington had nearly stifled me, but now I longed for the clean food and air of country life.
After dinner in the great hall, she liked to gather us about her. We might sew clothing or standards for the king and his men: I recall Madge, poor girl, working on a green silk shirt for Henry Norris, and Ann Saville threading silver through a collar for Will Brereton. Those without a sweetheart busied themselves making dresses and blankets for the poor, trying to look virtuous about it.
The Lady herself might work alongside us, or read to us from one of her many books. French romances, mostly, or some works by Queen Marguerite of Navarre, her former mistress; often she told us stories of her time as a girl at Marguerite’s court in Alençon. Marguerite, it seemed, was a saint come to earth, a martyr married for politics to an illiterate fool. After her first husband’s death she’d run his duchy better than he had, until she married Henry of Navarre. When her brother the king of France got himself captured at the Battle of Pavia, it was she herself who rode all the way to Spain to ransom him, since none of the ambassadors dared. Privately I thought she should count it her good fortune to be surrounded by weak men.