Harry caught up her hands. “I cannot tell you how, but I will win my fortune and yours. For years I have thought of you, spoken your name in my heart. My mother and sisters, too. That we be cursed with such a father is bad enough, but that his poison should seep into your family . . . If you plunged a dagger into my heart, little Beth, I would not blame you. You have, though; I feel the stiletto’s prick. Can I love you already? Madness!”
“It couldn’t be love,” Beth murmured.
“Oh, no,” Harry said, with mock seriousness. “Call it duty, obligation, honor, to the world’s face.” He leaned close to her. “But we know better. Or I do, and I’ll teach you what I know, if you are willing.”
He kissed the swell of her breast above her bodice.
“Can this be real?” she asked, him and herself.
“We are real. This is real, even if we never meet again.” He stepped away from her. He groaned; she whimpered; both in physical pain. “I have bad business before me,” he said. “But at the end, should I survive, your troubles, your family’s and mine, will be over. Will you be here when I return? Will you wait for me?”
She nodded, and he stepped away. “It may be a year, it may be two, but I will come for you, and right the wrongs of my father.”
“Don’t go!” she pleaded, reaching for him, but the iridescent azure of the rough glass-studded wall caught her hair, holding her back just long enough for him to escape. If I had touched him, she knew, he would have stayed.
It was a rape of love. He came from nowhere, ravished her heart, left her trembling and broken.
At last she made her unsteady way back to the hall. In the flutter of her passing, a torch flickered and leaped, and reflected on a silver hawk’s beak in the shadows.
“What ails you?” Eliza asked, but it was too sacred for Beth to speak of yet.
Beth remained in attendance on the queen until she retired, then went with her friends to the room they shared, more elegant than that at Hampton Court, with wall hangings of alternating deep green velvet and pale green silk, and delicate carved walnut furniture from France. As before, they shared a bed.
Their things had been unpacked and arranged by Hortense and Prue, and of course no one could find anything.
“Have you seen my nightcap?” Zabby asked Beth.
“She’s in her own world,” Eliza said when there was no answer. “And a mighty fine world it must be. Look at her face, like Saint Catherine on the wheel.” The saint was the only victim to enjoy that torture device—instead of having her limbs broken, she broke the wheel with the force of her own purity. She was beheaded instead—the executioner’s ax felt no similar qualms.
Zabby examined her friend’s face narrowly. Something had altered her drastically, though subtly. “Has . . . has someone died?”
“Yes,” Beth replied, distracted. “Oh, no, of course not, though I almost think . . . to have him and lose him, all in the same instant, it’s almost like death, isn’t it? Not but what I’ll see him again.”
Zabby checked Beth’s brow for fever. Though flushed, she was cool.
“I found him—he found me!”
“Who?”
“I dare not say.”
“Is she intoxicated or am I?” Eliza asked, torqueing her torso as she tried, unsuccessfully, to reach her own laces. “For I can’t comprehend a word she says.”
Beth, laughing and crying all at once, twitched Eliza’s laces free. “You write about love in your plays, but you don’t know a thing about it. I do. I know it now. I saw him, and I knew him, and he knew me. He came looking for me!” She danced around Eliza with the unwound laces in her hands, twining her tall friend like a maypole. “He says I won’t see him again for the longest time, and I hardly think I can bear it, but I will. Oh, my eyes are open now!”
Indeed, the world looked different, felt different, with a new sensuality—the costly green wall hangings seemed to call out to be touched; the very air dripped like crystal honey, sweet on her tongue. She had to move, to laugh, to sing, to look boldly into every eye, because she was fully alive for the first time. She felt like a madwoman, exultant, exalted by her madness.
The door creaked open, and Beth, thinking it must be Prue with their bath water, had an inspiration. “Prue,” she said without turning, fiddling with the Venetian point trembling at her cleavage, just below the burning memory of his kiss. “You know everything that passes at court. What can you tell me about . . .”
She turned, and the merry smile froze, then crumbled in the face of that red-robed gargoyle, her mother.
“It’s a short, sweet step from the girl who’s groped in the palace to the whore who lifts her skirts for every poxy sailor on the quayside.” Her voice was so sweetly reasonable that Eliza and Zabby, whose mothers were kindly ghosts, were almost expecting their friend to receive nothing more than a fond lecture. Surely Beth had exaggerated her mother’s maniacal control, her strange combination of pander and protector.
But Beth, looking terrified, backed away until her legs hit the bed, and stood poised like a hart at bay, waiting for the deerhound to close.
The Countess of Enfield hobbled closer and made a maternal clucking sound that, with the syphilitic bobbing of her head, almost made Eliza laugh aloud. Higgledy piggledy, my red hen, she thought, complete with a beak. She stifled the sound in a cough and sidled to the door to leave them to talk in peace, grabbing Zabby by the arm. Beth shot her a desperate look, but the countess said, “Begone, you pair of hoydens. This is none of your concern.” They slipped away.
“Drip, drip, drip,” the countess said when they were alone, punctuating each word with a rap from the light lacquered rattan cane she carried. She stroked Beth’s cheek, erasing the precious invisible kiss. “You’re dry now, dry and clean, but let a man have his way and it will be juices and drippings all your life. You’ll leak and squirt and spurt and sop—aye, my girl, all over.” She ran her fingers coquettishly over her own bodice, showing her oozing sores. “And you’ll die, bit by bit.”
“But, Mother,” Beth whispered.
“Defy me!” the countess roared, brandishing her cane. “Defy me and die in the streets, your body eaten from within while men use whatever scraps remain. Did you even charge him? If you want to be a slut, let me pimp for you. Your virginity will fetch a fair price—if you’ve still got it. Or, if you’d prefer, I’ll slit your throat right now, to save you dying by degrees.” She slid the cane across Beth’s neck, and the girl cringed but could not flee. She knew it was useless. There was no escape.
“Please,” Beth begged, and knew she was pleading for aid from her unknown lover, not her mother.
“You will sit on the dish, a tasty morsel to make their foul mouths water, but you must not let them taste! Not one lick! A taste leads to a nibble, nibble to bite, bite to devouring!” She shoved Beth backwards on the bed, then grabbed her ankle when she tried to scramble away. “Look the whore, to trap them, but let one have his way without buying you outright, and I’ll flay the skin off you.” Spittle flew from her mouth, and she twitched in rage. “Now take your punishment for acting the harlot.”
The command was not new. Beth, swallowing heavily, obediently stood and turned her back to her mother. She dragged her skirts up above her hips and bent over the high bed, exposing her creamy white thighs.
Another woman might have been mollified by such a display of filial submission, but it seemed to drive Beth’s mother mad.
“There is our fortune!” she screamed, hauling back with her cane and striking the tender flesh with all her force. Beth shrieked but didn’t move. A deep purple-red weal rose instantly, and the cane whistled through the air again, this time drawing a line of blood. “Some rutting man will pay a fortune for that, and you think to give it away?” She struck savagely again. “You’re trying to hold on to his touch, aren’t you? But you can’t! You can’t! Not through this!” Again and again the cane fell, until Beth’s thighs were crisscrossed with bruises and blood. “It
always feels lovely at first, the kisses, the caresses, but it is the pain that lasts.”
A final cut, and her voice was almost loving. “Forget him, my sweet, whoever he was. He’s false. Marry well, for your family, for your name. One man’s like another, in the end.”
She whipped out a handkerchief, much laundered but impeccably clean, and draped it over Beth’s bloody thighs. “There’s blood enough for a maidenhead. Perhaps that will cool the heat of your sanguine humors.” She chuckled and peeked at the gore underneath. “They’ll likely scar,” she said blandly, “but that shan’t hurt your value. If ever a man sees them before your marriage night, I’ll kill you, then him, then myself. Will so much blood suffice?”
She hobbled out the door.
When the sound of her knocking cane grew muted, then hushed altogether, Beth stood painfully, as proud and erect as her slight frame would allow. “I don’t care what she says. He came for me, and we’re meant to be together. I will meet him again. I will!”
Blood seeped through her skirt, the first autumnal red on her bright summer green.
Chapter 9
The Dream Made Flesh
PARLIAMENT was in session . . . which mattered not one jot to anyone at court. All that concerned those wits and rakes, debauchers and debauchees, was that when Parliament opened, so did the theaters.
“Eliza, I have five fingers, you know,” the queen said as her maids of honor pulled buttercup-yellow gloves onto her hands. Beth was already smoothing the kidskin to the queen’s elbows, but Eliza was struggling to shove two of Catherine’s fingers into one hole.
“Pardon, Your Majesty, but flay me, how can a body know what it’s about when her dream is on the verge of being made flesh?”
“Flesh?” Catherine asked. Her English, though much improved, was not up to the complexities of Eliza’s rapid speech. She thought the word had something to do with the sacraments, and indeed she saw that Eliza was aglow with agitated rapture.
“The stage, Your Majesty! The passion and the pathos of life distilled into a three-hour draught, the world compressed to a jutting apron.”
Catherine had no idea how the world could fit in a cooking smock, but she smiled at her maid’s excitement.
“Charles is most . . . happy? . . . with the theater. He says he loves it with all his cunny.”
Beth gaped, the other ladies tittered, but Eliza only shook her head.
“Your Majesty, Buckingham has done it to you again. What did he tell you that word means?”
“This,” she said, putting her hand on her chest. “Boom-boom, boom-boom. The organ of love, he told me. Did I say it wrong?” She looked around innocently.
“Damned whoreson! Pray, madam, pay no further heed to the duke. Imagine if you’d said it in an audience, or to the archbishop!”
“What does it mean?”
Smirking through her anger, Eliza turned to Beth. “You tell her, sweetheart. You’ve a knack for putting things gently. I’ll shock her back to Portugal if I tell her what a cunny’s for.”
Blushing, Beth leaned into the queen’s black curls and whispered in her ear.
“Oh!” Catherine said, then surprised them all by remarking, “The duke was right about one thing. It is what a woman uses to love a man.”
The queen had changed a good deal in the past few months, or, if not changed, adapted. She dressed exclusively in English clothes, took part, however awkwardly, in the dances and masques, and even learned to play cards, though she still thought gambling a sin. She’d come to understand that patience and grace would serve her better than a show of temper—that was Barbara’s forte—and though she still wept when no one was watching, and thought God must be annoyed that her prayers were ever on the same topic, she gave a convincing show of accepting her husband’s infidelities.
“I’m still not sure playgoing is a moral pastime,” Catherine mused as they powdered her throat and fastened pearl drops to her lobes. “Women flaunting themselves onstage . . .”
“Troth, Your Highness,” Eliza said, “a woman will flaunt herself wherever she goes, even so mean a specimen as myself. When the king your husband granted charters to the two companies, he bid them present life in its true myriad forms. You’d not have a burly fellow of forty play dainty Desdemona, would you? You’ll enjoy it, madam. Come, chin up so I can pin these roses to your bodice. There now, you’re ready for your audience.”
“Another word I use wrong,” Catherine said, shaking her head. “I thought we are the audience.”
“You are audience and performer and director all in one. You go to watch the play, and the people go to watch you. And His Majesty, of course. Then they go home and do their best to ape their betters.”
“I’m tired of being watched,” Catherine said.
“Then you should have chosen a different line of work,” Eliza said, not unkindly. “You are like one of your popish icons, an object of devotion.”
“Ah, but holy statues can sometimes work miracles. What do I do in this world?”
Eliza shrugged her broad, square shoulders. “That’s for you to decide, Your Majesty. You have the third greatest power in the land—God, the king, then you. And God rarely bothers. Now where is that Zabby?”
“Where she always is,” said Catherine with a sigh. “At my husband’s side.”
Eliza regarded the queen archly. “There are many threats to your happiness, madam, but you and I both know our Zabby isn’t one of them. Here, turn toward the gueridon so I can see to paint your lids. Aye, I know, but you’ve finer eyes than that slut Castlemaine, so you might as well show them off now and do penance for vanity later. No one will notice if your knees are red from praying, but give them a weary eye and they’ll say for weeks how unbecoming you’ve become. Tch!” She held up a hand to stop what she knew the queen was about to say. “You’ve beauty aplenty; only learn how to use it. Perhaps if you watch the actors tonight you’ll have a lesson.”
Zabby slipped into the room, dressed, more or less, though with a black smudge on her nose.
“Pardon, Your Majesty,” she said, sweeping low.
“Please recall you are my servant, not my husband’s,” Catherine said in Spanish, and Zabby did her best to look contrite. But she’d spent a glorious morning in Charles’s elaboratory, examining a specimen brought by a German alchemist, a pale waxy substance that gave off its own light, burning without heat, without being consumed. Because the effect was more noticeable in the dark, they’d extinguished the lamps, shuttered the windows, and huddled together on a workbench, hunched over their Lucifer light. Zabby had watched Charles at least as much as the specimen. His anxious, harried face had been softened in the glow, his cares erased. She remembered, acutely, what it was like to watch him sleep in those days when the danger of death had passed.
Staring into that morning-star glow, side by side, was almost like staring into each other’s eyes, she thought, then chided herself for being as dreamy as Beth, who these days could hardly string a coherent sentence together without trailing off into the silence of some inner fantasy. It was science, no more, Zabby told herself, then set about tying the ribbons on the queen’s garters. She felt Catherine’s eyes on the back of her bent head and willed her own phantasms away. The king belonged to another, and even if he hadn’t, his heart was chipped into so many fragments that she’d scorn the sliver that would be hers.
The maids of honor turned possession of the queen over to the more senior ladies and bundled into one of the royal carriages. Runners and criers paced the length of the splendid train, while liveried coachmen and foppishly clad Life Guards, the king’s ceremonial protective force, held their wigs against the stiffening wind. More efficient guards watched from the sidelines in sober clothes, their pistols hidden beneath their jackets, but Charles had no fear of assassination. He could always read his people, and knew there was little risk of an individual attack. He was well beloved—as a king and as a man. The danger would come not if one man turned against him,
but if ten thousand turned against what he represented, and Charles, trained by his early tragedy, would surely smell mass treason in the wind.
Then too, he was known to say privately, he was safe as long as his brother lived, for no one wanted him as king. A bad heir is a monarch’s best protection.
However magnificent the equipage, gilded and plumed, it was really no more than a box tied upon a wheeled frame, the only mechanical cushioning being in the slackness of the ropes—which, if it made the ride a jot more comfortable, also considerably increased the odds the two parts would separate and tip the giggling, silken cargo into the nearest sewer.
Most of the audience arrived an hour or two early, since half the fun of a play was the before-curtain roistering in the pit and the destruction of characters in the boxes. But all chatter stopped when the king and his retinue entered. There were a few huzzahs, a whistle or two, a bleat like a billy goat (which for some reason brought a smile to Charles’s lips), and then the crowd devolved into their previous gaiety.
“How does he do it?” Zabby murmured. “How is he god and king and man, all at once? See how they love him, like he is one of them.”
“You’ve struck upon it, Zabby,” Eliza said, fanning herself languidly against the heat and press. “He’s like the Greek gods of old, with all the foibles of a man. I’ve read a thing or two of ruttish Zeus. He had lust and anger and laughter just like a man. People like their gods accessible, and your Charles has the knack of seeming so.”
“Too accessible,” Zabby said.
“Jealous?”
Her pale eyes widened. Had Eliza read her secret, the one she denied even to herself? “No . . . no, certainly not. I only meant that he rides with scant guard, he touches the masses to cure their ills, he walks through St. James’s Park where any ruffian could accost him. He should hold himself apart.”
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