Ladies in Waiting

by Laura L. Sullivan

  “You mean, they were never found guilty?”

  “Nor did they admit guilt. They turned themselves over to a higher court, and the state’s only role was to deliver them there. Harry—Elphinstone—came from a fine old family, one that supported my father in his troubles. I did not want to see them shamed.”

  “Charles, I was at his execution.” This drew raised eyebrows. “He was only hung, not drawn, not gibbeted, not torn up and hung from the city walls. He kidnapped the queen—there was a plot against her. How could he not be charged with high treason?” For a moment, Zabby almost forgot about the proximity of his dark, warm skin, and she watched his long, sensuous mouth only for an answer.

  “There was no plot,” Charles said.

  “But there was! I heard it that night in the park.”

  “You were mistaken.” His voice was suddenly stiff.

  “Charles.” She took his hand now but didn’t know if it was with lascivious intent. “This is me, Zabby. I know the truth . . . though evidently not all of it. Tell me. Please.”

  His hand was rigid in hers for a moment, then turned palm up and clasped her own. “There are four people in this vast world who love me,” he said with a deep sigh. “And three people I love.”

  “Oh, Charles, a hundred thousand people love you!”

  He shook his head and looked out at the scene of those many years past, the one he saw daily as if he had been beneath the scaffold, not safe across the ocean. “The love of the people is the love of a whore, lasting only while I please them, while I pay them, while their lives are comfortable. What they feel, they feel for the king. For thirty years of my life, I was not a king. I was a pauper. Who loved me then? Can you guess, Zabby, who are the four who love me now?”

  “Catherine, of course, and . . .” It would have burned her tongue to speak Barbara’s name.

  “My sister Minette is dearer to me than all the world. But we did not grow up together, and after rediscovering each other we soon parted, I to my kingdom, she to be the second lady of France. Perhaps that is why I love her so—we had not the leisure to quarrel. And Catherine loves me, yes.” He gave a rueful smile. “But there is another, who was a boy beside me, raised almost as my brother, who saved my life in war and kept me from slitting my own throat in despair in my exile.”

  “Buckingham,” Zabby said, beginning to understand.

  “It is very lonely, being a king. You’d not think it, the way they clamor to hold my piss-pot. I’m never solitary, but I’m always alone. Yes, Buckingham is the only thing I have left from my childhood. When I look at his face I remember who I was, when I was happy, unafraid, when I knew, as only a child can know, that the whole world adored me and I was as safe in it as in my nurse’s arms. Can you remember that feeling? Perhaps that’s what the Philosopher’s Stone brings, not eternal life but eternal childhood. Perhaps that is heaven.”

  “But he has not been a good friend to you.”

  “He has the very devil in him, I’ll not deny that. Maybe it is the child still in him, unable to keep his fingers from the jam pot because he knows he is too well loved to be beaten for it. He has betrayed me before, or so it seemed, but when I heard the reasons I always excused it. I can’t help it. He is my friend.”

  “But he stole your wife!”

  “The plot was foiled, and no one must ever know that there was a plot. That is why Elphinstone was allowed, encouraged, to request the judgment of God.” Charles did not mention that he had been tortured in subtle ways, threatened with unspeakable acts against his family, first to uncover the truth of the plot, and then to ensure that it never came to light. “If the people knew about it, I’d have no choice but to execute my dearest friend. That, or allow him to escape into exile, and to be without him . . . I know you don’t understand it, but after all we’ve been through together, I can’t part with him. He is wicked; he is Buckingham—it’s saying the selfsame thing.”

  So much love for an unworthy friend, Zabby thought, and none for me.

  “And there are plotters everywhere,” he said, lowering his voice and pulling her closer. “Plotters who don’t even know they have a plot in them.” His mouth was near hers as he whispered his deepest fears to her. “Once they know that I am vulnerable, that my friends can betray me, my own queen can be taken, they will try to seize power. There are a thousand factions who would overthrow the kingdom. Yet I walk among them, in reach of a pistol or dagger every day, and none dares strike so long as I wear that impenetrable mantle of king. But let that royal cloak unravel even a thread, let them see I am weak, or mortal, or vulnerable, and from somewhere a waiting serpent will strike. Then there will be blood—mine on the butcher’s block, or the blood of those hundred thousand you say love me in another civil war.”

  He stood, dropping her hand, and looked as if he was about to begin his habitual pacing. He could never be still for long. When he was ill and feverish, she’d pressed her body to his to calm his tremors. Now, seeing his anxious fears, she stood and pressed her body to his again, and did not know if she offered him her comfort or her lust.

  “You named three who love you. There is at least one more.” She raised her face to his, but he did not bend to meet her and her lips brushed his cleft chin. She stood on tiptoe to trace the black stubble of his jaw with her mouth, and though she could feel his instant response to the pressure of her hips, as automatic as a soldier when he draws his sword at the trumpeting clarion, he stood still as a stock.

  “Four who love you, and three you love. I know you do not love me.” She let one hand wander up, one down. “But you desire me. Or if not me, then a woman, any woman. Please, Charles, let me be like the others.” She kissed his throat and longed for his mouth. Still he did not embrace her.

  “You don’t have to love me as you love Barbara, or Frances. You don’t have to love me at all. Only treat me like your other women. I don’t care if you have them, too. I don’t care if it is only once. Please!” She pulled him even closer, her thighs pressed eagerly to his. “You desire me, I can tell! Oh, Charles, kiss me!”

  He took her shoulders, and she was sure he was about to force her back onto the couch and lie on top of her. But he only separated her from his warmth and shook his head.

  Mortified, she cried, “Why? What’s wrong with me? I know I’m not like the other women, not really, but I’m fashioned of the same parts and I promise you . . . I promise I’ll . . .” Tears began to trickle and she lost the power of speech. She’d thrown herself at her king and he’d been repulsed by her. He’d bedded low-class actresses and kindly, sheep-faced Winifred Wells; hellcat Barbara who, rumor had it, threatened to dash his last bastard’s brains out on the rocks if he wouldn’t own him . . . yet he couldn’t bring himself to spend a fraction of his passion on her. Was she that strange? That hideous? Was a learned woman such an unnatural thing that, after seeing her in his elaboratory, he no longer considered her the proper sex? He had so many women. Why not her?

  His gentle voice only made her tears fall faster. “My sweet friend,” he began, and did not know that word struck like a spear into her heart. “Whenever a woman looks at me, or whispers a word in my ear, when a man does me a kindness or pays me a compliment, when anyone inquires after my health or solicits my opinion or wonders if I liked the latest play, I ask myself one thing. And when a woman kisses me or fondles me or proclaims her undying devotion, I ask it again. It is the question by which I judge every human contact. Would she, were I not the king? Would he, were I not the king? Catherine passes the test, as does my dear sister, and in his own way, Buckingham, but no one else, not a man, woman, nor child in this world, save only one.”

  At last he kissed her, like the brush of a petal on her lips.

  “Zabby, my love, can you doubt for a moment? I love Buckingham but I do not trust him. I trust Catherine but . . . but I do not love her. She is my wife and I will never put her aside, even to save the kingdom, but I do not love her. My sister is across the channel and might
as well be across the ocean. Do you wonder who the third is? Who would I love but you? You, who raised me from the dead, preserved my secrets, toiled beside me in the quest for truth. You, with your clear-seeing eyes and clever mind.”

  “But don’t you desire me? As you desire Barbara?”

  “What, and make you one of many? I’d not give the others up,” he told her frankly, “and you couldn’t bear that. Besides, one desires what one cannot possess. That is the trick of whores the world over, you know, from the stews to Whitehall. They make you think there is always something more, some inaccessible tidbit always just out of reach, to keep you coming back. They tease and they conceal. You’re too open to do that. I don’t desire you, Zabby, because I already have you. I know you, and love you, and possess you to the core.”

  She trembled and reached for him again. “You do, Charles, oh, you do. But I want more.”

  “Foolish child,” he said softly. “There isn’t any more.”

  She made one last desperate attempt, despising herself even as she said it. “Am I really so ugly? I will blow out the lights . . .”

  He took her face firmly in his hands and kissed her, a real kiss that made her weak and invincible all at once, a kiss that made her soul exult and sink, for the finest moment in her life, and for the certainty that it would soon end, and never happen again.

  “You are a most beauteous creature,” he said with a smile curling at the corner of his mouth so that, looking back on it, she could never tell if he was in jest. “And if I weren’t so fond of you, I’d bed you in a trice.”

  Suddenly, Charles was his usual brisk self again. Several crises averted, he was ready to move on. Forward, always forward.

  “As you know, the College of Physicians receives ten bodies a year from the unclaimed Tyburn corpses, of which two are passed to me. His family refused to claim him, and I didn’t think he deserved a pauper’s grave, though I couldn’t exactly step in and order him buried at Westminster. So I claimed him for my elaboratory, and when he is forgotten I’ll have his remains decently interred.”

  He pulled down the linen sheet and Zabby saw Harry, pale, still, with the strange marble solidity of death.

  Though the taste of Charles was still on her tongue, she knew that this was all there was of love. Foolish passion, blind hope, misplaced trust, all ending in a cold slab of lifeless flesh. Had those two young lovers any idea it would come to this, that night they’d caressed in St. James’s Park?

  Or, Zabby wondered with a quick, hard swallow, had they known and not cared? Is that the secret of love, knowing it can end, must end, very likely horribly, and yet persevering despite that certainty? She knew there was some secret that she, with all her intellectual power, could not grasp. Was Beth, in her loveless marriage, better off than she herself was simply for having known love for that brief moment? Was Harry, with his bruised throat and hemorrhaged eyes, luckier because he’d understood the greatest of life’s mysteries?

  She stood at Charles’s side and accepted the scalpel from his hand, hardly noticing when his fingers lingered on hers.

  There’s a secret in there, she thought, looking at Harry’s chest where lay the silent heart that once beat for her friend.

  With Charles at her side, she made the first incision to delve within and ferret it out.

  Chapter 1

  Phil sprinted along the bank of the Thames, unbraiding her hair as she ran, so late she didn’t dare ask a passing stranger the time. Even that small delay might be disastrous. This was opening night.

  She’d been doing clever bits of magic for a wounded soldier at the hospital as part of the Women’s Voluntary Service when she caught sight of his watch: six o’clock. With a hasty apology and a promise to return the next day to finish the trick, she dashed off to the Hall of Delusion. She didn’t know the soldier’s watch had stopped the moment the bombs first fell on his troop of the British Expeditionary Force in France, and that he kept it only as a memento.

  Fee, dear Fee, was waiting for her when she slipped around the back of the theater. As always when they’d been apart any length of time, they embraced in their own peculiar way, forehead to forehead, leaning against each other, their long hair mingling in an alchemical blending. When they stood together like this—and they tended to linger, supporting and drawing support—they looked like a single creature. A magnificent portmanteau beast, said one of the old thespians who treated the Hall as his personal salon—a griffin, a chimera.

  “I’m so sorry,” Phil whispered to her sister. “Do we have time to dress?”

  “We have all the time in the world!” Fee said merrily, and revealed that it was only a little before five. “Time enough to draw a crowd.”

  Phil groaned with the familial melodrama and separated herself from her sister. As always, they made a mutual soft murmur of regret that they must become their own unique selves again. With all that was going on in the world, they needed each other’s sisterly solace more than ever, but were so busy that they rarely had time simply to be together, as they had almost every moment in their earlier childhood.

  Maybe there’ll be time tonight, when the show is over and everything is still, Phil thought as she ran inside to change. There was so much for them to talk over.

  When Phil came out, disguised, the sisters tossed a coin with Hector and Stan for who would be the busker and who would be the shill.

  “I hate being the shill,” Phil said. “Anyway, by rights we shouldn’t have to do a thing but get in our costumes and gather our powers. It is our night, after all.”

  “If we don’t have an audience, it won’t be much of a show,” Fee said, coaxing Phil down the steps and casting an angelic smile at the two orphan boys her family had informally adopted. “Besides,” she added, “they’re much better at close-up magic than we are.” They parted, going around opposite sides of the Hall of Delusion, the theater that had been in their family since the seventeenth century.

  Phil might have preferred to sip tea (though not too much before going onstage, she’d learned the hard way) or, better yet, work out her nerves boxing with her brother, but she would never dream of shirking her duty—any duty. Her life, her calling, was the stage, but she had any number of lesser passions too, and she approached each of them with a single-minded dedication. Everything she did was, to her, the most important thing in the world, and she took herself, and her causes, very seriously.

  She adjusted the severe lines of her dowdy wool suit. Fancy, dressing like a spinster secretary at my age, she thought. In addition to her inherited histrionics, she shared her family’s obsession with clothes and generally managed to wear something that sparkled, even in wartime. Phil was seventeen but was disguised that day as a forty-year-old, complete with faint painted crow’s-feet around her eyes. She came from a long line of performers and was ready to play anything from infant to sexpot to granny if it made the audience roar.

  Now she looked respectable, practical, as ordinary as it was possible for her to look. A close observer might have noticed the lush curves that strained against the spare, rationed goods of her skirt, or the extravagance of flame-colored hair she’d tucked up under an efficient turban—she was most palpably made for the stage—but her family’s business relied on the public’s inability to closely observe anything, and Phil was, to the casual eye, just another pedestrian, one who would never believe in magic.

  Which made it all the more impressive when this stodgy gray-clad secretary loudly exclaimed, “Merciful heavens, that fellow is flying!”

  She let her mouth gape and her eyes bulge—an unattractive expression, but one she’d practiced at great length in front of a mirror. She looked like a codfish, but it got people to stop and share her amazement.

  The instant she’d cried out, a young man in sprightly plus-fours who was apparently levitating a few inches in the air fell heavily to the ground with an apologetic grunt, as if to beg the public’s pardon for doing something as frivolous as floating when there w
as a war going on. No fewer than five people stopped and stared.

  “It can’t be,” the disguised Phil said, shaking her head. “I must be seeing things.”

  “What you are seeing, madam, is magic, pure and simple.”

  “I don’t believe it,” she said, for there’s nothing more compelling than seeing a skeptic converted.

  Another three people joined the gathering.

  “Do it again,” Phil begged, then settled back to watch Hector work his magic.

  “Take care, please,” he told a woman bending curiously to examine his shoes for wires or hydraulic lifts. He gave a self-deprecating little laugh. “I am only an apprentice, and sometimes I fall from the sky.”

  A clever new touch, Phil thought, suggesting he could soar to the heavens if he trained a bit more. If you lead someone to consider the impossible, they’re that much more likely to accept the merely improbable.

  “And you, sir, with your fine watch, please step back a bit. The antigravitational forces are such as to occasionally disrupt timepieces.”

  Phil nodded in approval. He had them positioned exactly right, clustered and facing traffic so the passing motors and pedestrians too single-minded to stop would create a blurring backdrop to the trick and add to the distraction. He turned so they looked at his heels from an angle, placed his feet just so, raised his hands with a flourish that brought all eyes but Phil’s briefly away from his feet, then, trembling with the mighty effort needed to control the forces of the universe, raised his entire body three inches off the ground.

  Except, of course, for the toes of his right foot, which the astonished crowd couldn’t see.

  Gravity pounced upon him again, and he landed with a stagger, out of breath and grinning. “Come back in a year and see how high I can go. Or you can see what a master magician can do this very afternoon.” He gestured to a brightly lit marquee that would be extinguished when blackout began at dusk.