• • •
John, Earl of Rochester, took advantage of acquaintance and youth to sprawl in a chair in Lady Castlemaine’s boudoir, watching her apply a patch to her rounded chin with casual skill.
“Have you come only to watch me dress, my lord?”
“Does it displease you, my lady?” Their honorifics had a mocking sound to them.
“’Tis pleasant to have company, I suppose.” Barbara turned from her mirror. “Although that is not the company I would have imagined.”
“This?” Rochester’s tone and expression were all innocence. Perched upon his shoulder, with a tiny paw laced into his master’s fair curls, a monkey dozed. “He hasn’t a name yet. Perhaps you have a suggestion?” Rochester stroked the monkey’s tail, curled across his chest like a plume.
“If he were she you might name her in honor of the queen.” Barbara frowned and turned again to her glass.
“That has an ungracious sound to it. Come, you cannot blame the king for holding a ball for his wife.” His emphasis was light but discernible.
“The ball was my idea,” Barbara said. “I meant to show His Majesty that I can be gracious in victory—”
“So you will be joining the Ladies of Her Majesty’s Bedchamber? Then why so sour?”
Lady Castlemaine shook her head, loosing the chestnut curls at her temples, and took up a silver comb in the shape of a quarter moon. “I am not sour. But I cannot say I like the queen, nor that I think she will be good for the king.”
“Her dowry was good for king and kingdom. For the rest, she seems an unremarkable little woman. No rival to yourself. Is it the queen you dislike, or the fact of her?” Rochester tugged softly on his monkey’s tail and the dozing animal sat upright and began to chitter and look around him. When his master shrugged his shoulder, the monkey took this as a signal to leap to the bed-curtains and hang there, swinging.
“’Fore God, Rochester, if you let that animal befoul my linens—”
“Not for the world, lady.” The monkey could not go far: A fine chain in Rochester’s hand led to a gilded collar round the animal’s neck. But the earl took his time in collecting the monkey, more amused by its antics than Barbara’s outrage. “Do you know, I had a suit made for him, specially for the ball. But I am undecided if I should bring him or no.”
“Oh, do, by all means. Perhaps Her Majesty will like him. Perhaps now all her Portuguese she-monkeys and priests have been sent away, she’ll be seeking a friend.”
Rochester enjoyed the malice in Lady Castlemaine’s tone, but went on: “You never answered me, Barb’ry. Is it Queen Catherine you dislike, or the fact that she exists and—it seems—is not a cipher to be ignored?”
Words broke from Barbara’s lips as if they had been dammed there. “She will do the king harm, I feel it. She’s little and plain and cannot even speak English! The people call her the Catholic whore—”
“When did the Countess of Castlemaine concern herself with the opinions of the people? Catholic she may be, but no whore. There were witnesses enough to the wedding.”
Lady Castlemaine stood and smoothed the cloth-of-silver skirts of her gown, as if that was sufficient to end the subject. For a moment, Rochester felt a little pity for the glorious Barbara. But only for a moment.
“Are you leaving?” He rose to his feet and tucked the monkey under one arm, as one might a hat.
Barbara reached the door as a maid opened it for her. “I am. Do you mean to go attired like that?” She eyed Rochester’s brown doublet.
“No, lady. Clarendon and I”—he indicated the monkey—“I have named him, do you see? We will dress, and see you at the ball.”
“I’m sure that Clarendon will enliven the proceedings.”
Rochester swept a bow. “I shall do my best to see that he does, my lady.”
• • •
The queen and her ladies gone, Jenny spent a few minutes tidying and putting away the patch box and powder. Then she took up the queen’s fine shift and dressing robe and a few other things, and started for the back stairs and the laundry. She wished, for a moment, that she could see the faces of the lords and ladies at the ball when they beheld her little queen—Jenny had developed a proprietary feeling for Queen Catherine—in her spangled and glittering finery. Most had not seen the wan, sickly little thing that stepped onto English soil in Portsmouth, so they could not appreciate how much English fashion and English life had improved her. Jenny was smiling as she went down narrow stone stairs worn by a hundred years of footsteps, the clothes in one arm, her skirts held up with the other. It would not do to fall here.
An unfamiliar servant went past her, carrying, from the smell of it, a pail of night soil. Jenny wrinkled her nose and continued downward. On the next landing she threaded her way through a crowd of manservants, porters or the like, standing about nattering as if they had naught else to do. She was headed for the leftmost stairway; it had taken her a long while to get her bearings here—there were more than a thousand rooms at Whitehall—but she knew her way to the laundry right enough.
“What’s that smell, Rob?” one of the men she saw in the crowd said loudly. “That the smell of a papist, ye think?”
Jenny flushed. She clutched the queen’s robes tighter and kept her eyes down. She could handle one rowdy man, right enough, but six or seven? Best to keep moving.
“Smells like a papist to me, Jack,” another man said. “Like one of them Port-a-gee. Thought they’d sent ’em all packing?”
“Looks like a papist, too,” Jack said. The crowd closed up, and Jenny found herself confronted by one broad chest, then another. “Brown as a nut and black-haired. Only thing I heard is: Them Port-a-gee women, when ye get ’em alone—” He went on with a description so raw that Jenny blushed . . . and lost her temper.
“I’d check my own scent before I talk of anyone else’s,” she snapped. “And speak civil to an honest woman. I’m no more a papist than the Archbishop of Canterbury, born in Portsmouth and as good an Englishwoman as—”
The man nearest her, stocky, with tow hair and smallpox pitting on his cheeks, put an arm out to gather her in. “Now, sweet, don’t be like that. Th’art comely enough for a Port-a-gee—”
Jenny dodged backward, but found herself against the wall. A lick of panic flamed in her. The leftmost staircase was too far away.
“Hal Sudby, ye mind yer hands! Rob, Tim, Jack! What are you lot doing about ’ere?” The interruption had come from one of the cooks, a broad, red-faced woman with winged ginger eyebrows and a starched coif, who stood, arms akimbo, glaring comprehensively at the group. “Ye’re wanted belowstairs—there’s tuns of good wine to be brung up. And you, girl, get about yer business and don’t try your tricks on a bunch of honest lads.”
It was on Jenny’s lips to defend herself, but already the cook had started toward the kitchen, and the crowd of men stepped away. As one of them passed her he gave a great sniff and made an exaggerated gesture of holding his nose. Then he was gone.
Jenny turned to the laundry stairs, still clutching the robes in her arms hard. Her pleasure in imagining the queen’s reception at the ball had quite fled. Honest lads, indeed; her mother had often said one lout in a crowd of good fellows could spell trouble as well as one bad apple in a barrel. She hoped that the queen met with more courtesy at the ball.
• • •
The walls and ceiling of the Great Hall were hung with velvet drapes. Nearest the doors, they were the blue of a midnight sky, spangled with brilliants like stars clustered in the arch of the Milky Way. Dom Francisco de Mello eyed the drapes with delight; whatever could be said of King Charles and his court, style did not lack. As de Mello walked farther in he looked up to see the blue shading to the soft grays of the skies before dawn, then pale rose and the blazing gold of sunrise (with wisps of gauze hung like clouds across a morning sky) and at the farthest reach of the chamber the velvet drapes were the brilliant, clear blue of noon, and the thrones that waited were gilded and set b
efore a spray of golden wire: the sun, de Mello thought with amusement and appreciation. And the king and queen would be the suns around which this celebration orbited.
De Mello looked for the queen, but among the dozens of brilliantly dressed ladies and gentlemen of the court, he did not see his goddaughter. The king—taller than any other man in the room, and nearly ablaze in the cloth of gold and satin of his doublet and breeches, was here—not yet seated. Perhaps he was waiting for Catherine. De Mello watched as the king spoke to this courtier, then the other. He did not stand upon ceremony, this king, and yet—de Mello’s eyes narrowed as he observed King Charles—with all his easy charm, there was a distance and a melancholy a sharp eye could observe.
The king made his way toward the dais and the thrones, looking here and there for someone. De Mello hoped perhaps it was the queen he sought, but then, as he watched, the king’s eye was caught by the tall beauty in cloth of silver, her chestnut hair coiled around and framed by a silver disk behind her head. The moon. Dom Francisco marveled at the audacity of Lady Castlemaine. The moon, to partner with the king’s sun.
Not for the first time, de Mello felt a great sadness for his goddaughter.
The king joined Lady Castlemaine, who bowed very low to her sovereign, but with such a dimpling, laughing eye that it was plain she believed him entirely in her thrall. And the court around her observed this behavior and saw nothing out of the ordinary: Barbara, Countess Castlemaine, captor of the king’s heart. De Mello quelled an impulse to go forward and chivalrously defend Catherine’s place. There was no point. She was queen, yes, but Charles was king, and what he made of the marriage was what it would be.
A servant passed with a salver of cups. De Mello took one and drank deeply.
For a quarter hour he walked through the crowd, smiling and bowing when courtesy required it, aware as he always was of the few who turned away from a greeting from his Catholic self. Where was the queen? Had Catherine’s nerve failed her? A ball in her honor, but one at which Barbara Castlemaine held court? Perhaps as well that the queen stay away.
And then there was a flurry of movement at the door, and a fanfare. De Mello moved forward in the crowd, straining to see who had come.
The figure at the doorway could hardly be his goddaughter. Two of her attendant ladies were behind her, but de Mello had eyes only for Catherine, who tonight wore a gown of velvet so deep a blue that it seemed to capture the light from the sconced torches and candles. Nearest the hem of her skirt, the cloth was patterned with brilliants in the same way as the drapes overhead, and on one side a ray of brilliants twisted into the tail of a shooting star that blazed across the queen’s breast to a brooch of diamonds and sapphires upon her shoulder. Her dark hair was held in place with combs that sparkled with brilliants, and across her head, fixed among her curls, a trail of silver foil and more brilliants ascended to a radiant star.
De Mello gave a private laugh. Barbara Castlemaine might be the moon, but Catherine, Queen of England, had eclipsed the moon and come as a comet.
For a moment Catherine paused, looking out at the court—which, in turn, was looking back at her. Did her heart fail her? Did she step back? Perhaps for a moment. Then, with a smile as bright as her jewels, she began to cross the room. De Mello watched her acknowledge the bows and salutes from the crowd, and ignore the two or three whose scowls were a commentary on her foreignness or her Catholicism. She stopped to raise someone—Lady Bath, one of her English ladies—and kiss her cheek.
Deus, regal as her mother, de Mello thought.
He, and all the court, watched Catherine as she approached her husband. Dom Francisco was pleased to see that, for the moment, at least, the king’s attention was entirely upon his wife.
De Mello thought that Barbara Castlemaine, standing behind the king, did not care for that at all.
When she reached the king, Catherine bowed deeply. He held out a hand, took hers, and raised it to his lips. De Mello could not hear what he said to her, but Catherine blushed and laughed. Her eyes were all for her husband.
And then the Queen of England turned to greet her husband’s mistress.
Catherine inclined her head as she might have done to anyone at all. Had Lady Castlemaine hoped for a scene like that from their last encounter? She was to be unsatisfied. Catherine, standing by her husband’s side, looked patiently at the other woman. The whole room was hushed, all eyes upon the two women before them. Catherine did not speak; she did not smile; she waited until Barbara Castlemaine, slowly, almost awkwardly, dropped into a curtsy.
Catherine nodded again and turned to speak to her husband. The king, de Mello thought, had been surprised, perhaps amused, by his wife’s composure. Lady Castlemaine had not.
De Mello considered how he would describe the scene to his queen when he wrote to her tonight. He had told Catherine that she must find her way, but how had it happened so quickly? Queen Luisa might think there was only one way to be a queen, but she had never imagined the challenges she had sent her daughter to face.
The girl is a queen.
• • •
He could feel Barbara’s eyes upon his back. I shall pay for that, Charles thought. But what would she have had him do? The moment he saw Barbara dressed in garb meant to complement his own, he knew that she meant to put her rival in the shade. But Catherine—he smiled down at his wife, frankly magnificent in her gown and jewels. Who would have thought her capable of carrying off such a toilette?
“Madam, I think we must take our place in the heavens,” he said to her in Spanish. He paused to look over the crowd, gave a salute, and the musicians struck up. At once, couples began to form for the dance.
“Shall we lead them out?” he gestured to the dancers.
She curtsied, then leaned forward to murmur to him, “I have not thanked Your Majesty for your patience in teaching me quinze the other night. May I call upon your patience again in acquainting me with English dance?”
“It would be my honor, lady.”
He led her down among the dancers, who parted to let their sovereign take his place.
At the end of the dance, when the queen stood, laughing with pleasure, he said, “Madam, is it possible you have lied to your sovereign lord?” Charles looked down at Catherine from his full height, a smile in his eyes.
“Lied, sire?’
“You gave me to believe that you required tuition in dance, but the woman with whom I shared a branle has quite a pretty step.”
Warm color suffused his wife’s olive skin. “You are too kind, sire.”
The blush pleased the king. “And your eyes are brighter stars than any you imperson. Now, will you dance again or sit?”
As a king and a man, Charles had long understood his effect upon women—and their effect upon him. But this—he remembered again that this was his wife. This charming girl with stars—and her heart—in her eyes. And he was her husband. As different to be a lover or a husband as to be a prince in exile or a king in his own land. He had, he thought, some things to learn of this.
Catherine was speaking.
“Pardon, lady?”
“I would like to dance again, if Your Majesty will partner me.”
The musicians were tuning up for a country dance. Around them the lords and ladies of the court turned and turned again in patterns of brilliant color.
“It would be my greatest pleasure.” He held out his hand, she put hers in it—more confidently, this time—
From somewhere at the rear of the room a sudden roar of noise brought the music and the dancers to a halt. Impossible at first to see what the ado was, and then half a dozen dogs, his dogs, came tearing through the crowd, being deviled by some sort of imp. Rogue and True, in the fore, tore under the skirts of this lady, into the knees of that fat fellow in a green doublet. And the imp—no, a monkey in a tiny striped red-and-white doublet and a laced hat tied upon its head—leapt from True’s back to the shoulder of the Duchess of Richmond, then on to a torch, where the heat
made the creature hiss, rear up, and jump again.
All was chaos. Rogue, True, Amity, Bacchus, even wise old Babette were running through the crowd, baying at the monkey that cowered and gibbered and swung from the cloth that draped the ceiling. The chain that swung from the monkey’s collar caught in this hat, that lace, with each of the animal’s movements. Servants ran from all corners, waving uselessly at the monkey with spoons and staves.
Movement caught the king’s eye from the back of the room. Dear Christ, not another monkey! No, no ape but a young man with fair hair stood there, tucked into the doorway, watching the mayhem of his creating with satisfaction.
The king strode through the tumult toward the doorway, and took the man by the ear like a schoolboy.
“My lord Rochester, I presume that is your monkey, and not a relative?”
Rochester, evidently torn between mirth and apprehension, attempted a bow while the king still held his ear. When that availed him naught, he agreed that the monkey was indeed his.
“You will go and collect your animal—and my dogs, if you will be so good—and remove them from the Great Hall. In fact, I pray you will take the monkey to your own house and leave him there—with yourself. Am I understood?” The king released Rochester’s ear and kept his voice steady by main force; laughing at the boy’s prank would only encourage him.
“I understand entirely, sire. My apologies, sire.” Rochester swept the king a deep bow and charged forward into the Great Hall, making a peculiar clicking noise to get the monkey’s attention until he could grasp the chain and bring the animal to bay.
Charles followed more slowly, watching Rochester untangle the monkey from a shred of velvet from the drapes, then from a lady’s curls it had clenched in its fist. With the beast finally clutched to his chest, the earl gave a sharp whistle to summon Charles’s dogs, and led them away in a ragged parade. In his wake, ladies wept or swooned; some men were laughed, others scolded or bent solicitously over the women.
Which made the king turn to look to his women. Barbara was not to be seen. But Catherine? He sought her among the dancers, saw her not, then looked to the dais. There his queen sat in her gilded chair, her hand raised to her mouth in an attempt to contain her amusement, her expression what he imagined to be a mirror of his own.
Whitehall--Season One Volume One Page 16