by Lucy Worsley
“But, Lady Malpas,” I said plaintively. “I promise that I do try to listen and nod and so on.”
She sighed, and for once her smile slipped from her face.
“Well, my dear,” she said, “I admit that it isn’t fair, but you personally have to be extra careful. Your family has a reputation for — let’s say — being outspoken. And you don’t want any questions about why your betrothal to the Westmorland family was broken off, do you? There is some talk that it was due to impropriety.”
I stared back at her, dismayed. She was perfectly correct that it wasn’t fair for people to say such things. Once more I opened my mouth to speak, but Lady Malpas raised a warning finger.
With a huge, straining effort, I just about managed to close my lips.
In the mornings, before rehearsals, we had much to prepare for the new queen’s arrival. We checked off linen sheets against a huge long list, for example, and helped Lady Malpas to order supplies of soap and oil.
And we still had to be on duty in the Great Chamber when the king came forth. It had become a regular thing for both Ned and me to turn up early, well before the rest arrived. As we waited there together, we would sometimes sit on the sideboard and swing our legs in a manner that would have given the countess a fainting fit had she seen it.
And we talked.
I told Ned all about the masque rehearsal in which the Devil had accidentally got his pitchfork stuck in the wheels of my chariot. Ned revealed in return his regrets that the king, in the summer just past, had banned the rowdy but marvellous new game of football. He even leapt up to demonstrate how to play it, using his wadded-up velvet cap as the ball and placing me “in goal” in the mouth of the oriel window. Sometimes, when we were sure that no one else was around, I would flop down on one of the great floor cushions and Ned would pull me fast across the shiny boards until I shrieked with laughter.
“If only Ned were truly the son of an earl,” I would sigh to myself after each of our rowdy, early morning encounters. “If only he were on the list. Of course he knows we’re just friends, nothing more. Tomorrow I won’t waste my time with Ned. I’ll get down to the business of looking for a husband.”
But somehow “tomorrow” never quite arrived.
I grew bold enough to tease Ned, mocking his habitual failure to do up his doublet properly. “I’m too busy thinking deep thoughts to bother about shallow things like this,” he’d say, shaking the fine full sleeve of my blue dress between his fingers as if he despised it. I knew he was joking because previously — and I’d treasured the remark — he’d told me he thought it rather fetching. In order to make me giggle, he would commit increasingly ludicrous mistakes with his clothes, appearing in the Great Chamber each morning with his doublet inside out or his shoes unlaced.
And there were quieter times when we talked together in the oriel.
“I wonder if the new Queen Anne is feeling nervous,” I mused one morning. “I certainly would if I had to travel across the sea to marry a strange king.”
“I think it will depend on her personality,” said Ned. “Some people — your cousin Katherine, for example — might positively enjoy the challenge. But I hope that she’ll be a gentle mistress to you all. The fact that it’s to be a quiet wedding suggests that she might be a quiet person. Not a total strumpet like Anne Boleyn was. How the maids of honour used to complain about her!”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. Naively, I hadn’t really thought before about how my life might change under the new queen. “Do you think she might be demanding and difficult? Are people ever like that with you?”
“Sometimes,” Ned said, turning his cap round and round in his hands, “the senior courtiers pinch my ears or biff me round the head.”
“Why would they do that?” I asked in consternation, genuinely upset for my friend.
“Well, obviously my job, as set out in the regulations, is lighting the fire,” he explained, looking out of the window. “But the king uses me as a messenger. Occasionally, I have to tell people — oh, important people like the Lord Chamberlain — that the king doesn’t want them coming into his private apartments that day or night.”
It seemed to me to be most unfair, and I said so.
“Oh, I’m used to the unfairness,” he said. “What I can’t quite get used to is the idea that I’m doomed to continue lighting fires forever. I’m sure I could do something better. Something practical. I think I’d like to live on a farm.”
Silence fell, but it wasn’t awkward. My head was cocked in sympathy, and I sighed. It was only when Ned’s face was in repose that I could see how finely shaped his cheekbones were. But I never had to wait long for his slow smile to stretch his lips once again into his characteristically wolfish grin.
“You, though,” he said, “and Mistress Howard too, can certainly hope for promotion. If you make good marriages, you could become ladies-in-waiting rather than maids of honour, or even the queen’s Mistress of the Robes, like the Countess of Malpas.”
Talking to Ned made me realise where my career as a maid of honour might take me, which in turn made me take it more seriously. I had a guilty feeling that somehow my debut at court had fallen a little flat.
Back at Stoneton, I’d imagined myself walking down a line of admiring courtiers, who would doff their hats and bend their legs into bows as I passed. But when I made my entrance into the Great Chamber each morning, the king’s gentlemen didn’t even look up and smile as they did for Katherine. Apart from Ned, most of them still seemed not to know who I was.
That’s why I felt fortunate that during the period of the rehearsals, Master Summers, the king’s fool, who was an important and influential person at court, somehow took to me. Gradually, I became one of his favourites.
He would often compliment me on my performance as Temptation and continued to pay me attention afterwards. When the whole court was with the king for an evening, Master Summers would address his customary entertaining commentaries on the day’s events to me, pretending to assume that I would be shocked and outraged by every mundane detail of what had happened.
“Oh, my lady Carrots would be horrified to hear what my monkey said about her yesterday,” he would joke. “Oh, he is quite in love with her! He pines and mourns for Mistress Temptation! Master Monkey and Mistress Temptation would make a fine pair.”
For some reason I didn’t mind it when he used my hated old nickname of Carrot Top or Carrots, even in front of everybody else.
One day we even met off duty, by chance in the corridor. Will Summers still had the red circles painted on his whitened cheeks for his role in the masque, and, when his face was still, the effect was aging and grotesque rather than funny.
“Hello, Carrots!” he called out jovially enough. “How are your lovers?”
I smiled and told him that, as all the world knew, I had none. “Unlike that minx the Howard girl!” he said, words that were shocking to me for I rarely heard Katherine criticised.
“Well,” I said in mock reproof, “she has to beat them off with a stick.”
“I cannot think why, a moody cow like her,” he said casually. He must have noticed my mouth drop open at that, because he went on, “Yes, a heifer, bursting with milk, that’s how I think of her. Personally, I prefer the more astringent pleasures of Mistress Camperdowne,” he added gallantly, bowing low and kissing my hand.
“Indeed!” I said. “But, kind sir, I look just like a boy!”
“A boy indeed. Or perhaps we should say an elegant elf of the woods? Certainly, there’s something girlish about your green cat-eyes. But, my dear, you’ll find many a courtier willing to share his bed with a beautiful boy.”
I could not decide whether he’d just been appallingly rude or whether I’d just been paid the most delicious compliment of my life.
I considered the matter as I watched Master Summers’s tall black figure stalking away down the corridor. He could tell that I was watching him and did the most ridiculous skip in order to make me laug
h.
Perhaps, I thought to myself, I should not content myself with always being guided by, and measuring myself against, Katherine.
Perhaps I should dare to be a little different.
At very long last, the morning of the king’s marriage to Anne of Cleves arrived. And, almost even more exciting, in its wake would come the night of the masque. We were mad with impatience for both events to begin.
As we went off towards the royal rooms, Katherine was in one of her ebullient moods and poked me in the ribs. “Look at us now, hey, Carrots?” she said. “Off to hobnob with the queen. Wouldn’t the girls at Trumpton be jealous?”
I couldn’t help but smile back, and we strutted along in our coloured gowns, conscious that we made an attractive pair.
Our spirits fell a little as we passed through the door into the hush of the royal suite. The queen’s apartments had been shut up since the death of Queen Jane, and our way was illuminated by shafts of weak sunlight penetrating through windows still only half unshuttered. We came to the threshold of the queen’s private closet, a place in the palace we had never previously been allowed to enter.
Our new mistress had come to Greenwich some days before, but since then she had been closeted away with her own German attendants. So we were wild to know what manner of a woman she was. The king’s fourth marriage was to be kept strictly private. I think after the great public show he’d made of his earlier marriages, and with their very public failure, he felt safer behind closed doors. But now, the wedding ceremony was complete, and Katherine and I were called into the closet to make our curtseys.
The sight of the two of them still standing side by side in front of the priest, not speaking, not touching, recalled my own experience, so many years ago, when I had “married” Sir Dudley. It was not a pleasant memory. I knew perfectly well that, despite what the minstrels said, marriage need not involve love.
I shuddered. One day I, too, would have to stand there like that, hoping and praying the man I had just married would turn out to be a good husband.
I knew that the new queen was twenty-four years old, but was astonished now to observe how much younger than that she looked. Perhaps this was partly by contrast to her husband. It would be treason to dare to speak the words, but the king appeared rather older than his forty-eight years, with his stick, his belly, and his bad foot.
Katherine and I by now both knew the king well enough to realise that he was in a bad temper. We exchanged glances.
“Ah, here are your maids,” he grunted as he saw us, giving us a dismissive nod. “Her Majesty is not well. Help her away.”
To our surprise, the new queen came forward, rather than waiting for us to approach her, and took us each by the hand. I noticed that her hand in mine was shaking, and I saw that her face, beneath her foreign-looking white hood, was even whiter. She was blinking back tears. Gradually, supporting her, we shuffled out of the room.
We went to the queen’s own chamber, and there it was shocking to find that Queen Anne seemed rather like a convent girl. Although she was older than us, I guessed that she knew even less about the world than we did. She could hardly speak English, as we had been warned, but no one had told us that she would also dress so oddly, like a nun.
Queen Anne went almost immediately to lie on her bed and turned to face the wall. Katherine and I, at a loss for something to do, looked through her dresses to choose one suitable for her to wear to the masque. But they all seemed to be black or dark coloured, and it was sorry work.
As the daylight faded, we managed to coax her off her bed and into the finest gown that we could find. Despite our efforts, the queen fairly failed to open her mouth to speak at all that afternoon. And she smiled only when the German Fräuleins she had brought with her from home came in to give her their congratulations on her marriage.
I’m not at all sure what the new queen made of our masque that evening. It started late, and despite our rehearsals, every scene hopelessly overran in terms of timing. By the time we Vices were ready to make our entry in our chariots, the spectators had all been drinking wine for hours. We could hear shouts and jeers as we waited in the backstage area, nervous and impatient at the same time. Again and again I resettled my sleeveless green satin toga upon my shoulder, as it had a tendency to slip down. But I could hardly suppress my smile when Ned Barsby slipped out into the passage where we waited to wish us luck. He was wearing Master Summers’s jester’s cap and looked a little harassed.
“Be prepared for a bit of action,” he warned us. “They’re not in the mood for art appreciation.”
“Oh, Lord!” said Katherine. “Will we be safe?”
I was pleased that Ned ignored her fussing and instead helped me into my chariot.
“Lovely dress!” he said quietly, dipping his head so that the bells on his cap jingled against my cheek. “It’s wasted on these barbarians.” His hand was grasping the green-painted bar around the front of my chariot. I had a sudden certainty that if I placed my own hand nearby, his hand would touch mine as if by accident. As if Ned had the same thought at the same time, our fingers made contact in midair. I gasped. It was as if lightning momentarily flashed between us, as if I really were the powerful goddess Temptation.
Calm down! I told myself. It’s only Ned. No one important.
But Will Summers was hissing at Ned to get out of the way, and our chariots jolted into motion. I felt a rosy glow rising to my cheeks as I turned my head back towards Ned to say goodbye. This meant that I entered the Great Hall looking the wrong way, and all of our carefully rehearsed choreography was wiped from my mind.
Ned was wise to have warned us about the state of the court. As I turned round to face the audience, the gentlemen courtiers fairly hollered and slavered over us maids of honour. “I feel the Vice of Lust!” yelled one of them, seeing our costumes. “Begone, Vice!” shouted another, and he and the rest of them began to pelt us with sugar plums and the occasional hard and hurtful nut.
It was a struggle to smile, but glancing round at Katherine, I saw her beatific beam in place as usual and her arm curved high above her head in an attitude of wonderful grace. The dance! I had forgotten! I frantically tried to remember which limb I was supposed to raise and attempted to look as if I, too, were enjoying myself.
During the banquet that followed, the queen sat silently at the top table, clearly trying hard to look relaxed, while the king openly neglected her, twisting round in his chair to talk to other people. I felt chagrined on her part and crept up behind her to whisper in her ear that she should signal if she wanted anything.
“Cunning little devil to curry favour like that!” Katherine hissed, as I returned to my place. But in all honesty I had merely guessed that Queen Anne did not know our customs and might have been sitting there in need of the close-stool or a handkerchief without quite knowing how to ask for it.
In our bed late that night, though, the January moon peeping in through the window, my final thought was not of the wedding day of the queen or the disappointment the long-awaited masque had brought. It was of Ned’s hand meeting mine midair. I wondered if he was sleeping or, like me, looking at the moon. I recalled the moment our hands had touched again and again, time after time, until sleep lowered my lids.
The next morning we were all tired after the late night, but the Countess of Malpas and the other married ladies-in-waiting were up early and eagerly. It was their duty to strip the queen’s bed, carefully searching for evidence that the king had taken his pleasure there in the night. Katherine and I, as unmarried maids, were not permitted to be present. But the news of the investigation’s result flashed around the whole palace just as fast as a bout of contagious sweating sickness. It was Will Summers who came to our chamber to tell us, hardly waiting for an answer to his knock before charging in through the door.
“No blood,” he said shortly, before turning smartly round and leaving.
We knew at once what he meant, and Katherine audibly sucked her breath thr
ough her teeth. The ladies-in-waiting had found no blood or other substances on the sheets, no trace of proof that the king and new queen had consummated their marriage, no hint that an heir was on the way. I presumed that Will had rushed off to spread the gossip even further and gain as much credit as he could by being first with the news.
“Silly German sow!” Katherine said as soon as the door had swung shut. “If I were her, I wouldn’t go round with that gaggle of German nuns in tow. I’d consult the best astrologers about the time to conceive and ask the best midwife for advice, and I’d get on with it.”
“Children are God’s gift, Katherine,” I said, perhaps somewhat primly. I, too, felt intense curiosity about what might or might not have happened, but I also felt it was unseemly to show it. “They may come or they may not.”
“Oh, that’s all right for you and Master Summers and the intellectuals to say,” Katherine said, tossing back her head and inspecting her nails. “Remember Queen Katherine of Aragon. People say the king had to divorce her because she couldn’t get pigged up again after Princess Mary. Remember Queen Anne Boleyn. Her piglets were all either dead or female. And look what happened to her. Fools, both of them.”
She gave an evil snigger. “There are ways to make it happen.”
I turned away, unwilling to share her smugness. “But what do you mean ‘me and Master Summers,’ anyway?” I asked as an afterthought.
“Ha!” said Katherine. “Everyone knows that he likes boys who look like girls and girls who look like boys.” Again she had me speechless. I leaned back in my chair and tried hard to look blasé rather than reply.
“I prefer a good red-blooded man myself,” she went on. “And I don’t mean Ned,” she added, with a warning jab of her finger. “It’s beyond me why you waste your time on him. Can’t you see that you’ll never hook an earl or a baron while you have a base-born page buzzing round? I’m off to see if old Malpas has any more lurid details.”
The door banged. Alone in the room after being abandoned for the second time in two minutes, I jumped up and paced about. I felt intensely angry with my know-it-all cousin for being so worldly and cruel.