Wells and I gaped at each other.
“It was all we could do to get her into that gown for her entry today,” said Frasier under her breath, looking tired from the journey from Portsmouth. “Those scary old maids of hers won’t let us near her.”
“What do we do now?” asked Cary.
“We can go to my rooms,” I said with a shrug. “The Duke of Richmond sent a footman up with a lovely case of blackberry wine when he arrived today.”
* * *
Cornbury cleared his throat nervously a few weeks later as the last violinist packed up his instrument and left my Hampton Court apartments. “Say, Frances, what does the king truly think about Parliament passing this Act of Uniformity?”
“I don’t know.” He’s furious at your father for failing to secure religious toleration for his subjects. “But who cares about politics? Look.” I held a new pair of pearl drop earrings up to the sconce in my antechamber, making them glow with life.
The eyes of my guests widened. “Impressive.”
I watched Bennet calculate the king’s regard for me based on the costly gift. Good. He cleared his throat. “Didn’t you say you are not his mistress?”
“I did.” I dropped the pearls into my jewel casket and slammed the lid. “I’m not.”
“Then why…” He gestured to the casket.
The nature of my relationship with King Charles, whatever it turned out to be, must be shielded from all but Mary and King Louis’ ambassadors. “You’ve seen him dote on me like a sister. I am his cousin, after all.”
“Distant cousin.” Bennet frowned. “I suppose with Lady Castlemaine in hiding, the king has to lavish someone.”
The smile on my face was, I hoped, neutral. Inside, though, I fumed because he was partially right. Castlemaine had made herself scarce since the royal wedding. Cornbury shuffled his feet where he stood near the door. “His attention to Frances has increased since he married Queen Catherine. All the royal trappings enhance her beauty.”
Bennet turned to him. “Is that the reason? So what will happen when the queen falls from favor? She’s wearing those ugly Portuguese clothes again. And she angered the king when she refused to appoint Lady Castlemaine.”
Catherine of Bragança was quiet, cheerful, and seemed pleased by everything her husband did. Then King Charles suggested she appoint Castlemaine as a lady of the bedchamber. She passionately refused. Apparently the Portuguese hadn’t created one of the richest, most powerful trading nations by being fools. He explained that he owed this honor to his mistress and seemed genuinely surprised by his bride’s sudden willfulness. I waved my hand at Bennet. “King Charles smoothed that over.”
“Nothing is smooth for King Charles until Lady Castlemaine gets what she wants,” he replied as he left.
Cornbury bowed and followed Bennet out, concluding another evening of good-natured revelry, and I fell into bed exhausted.
* * *
Hours later I opened my eyes to the blackness of deep night. A hushed voice rose and fell, filled with longing, and I got up, alarmed. A faint glow beckoned from the closet door, and I crept to it.
I saw Prudence kneeling before a tallow candle. She squeezed her lids tight over clasped hands, muttering, “… commune with ye, Jesus … grant me strength…” Her whole body shivered as if her knees were rooted in a block of ice. I pushed the door open and she jumped.
“Go to sleep before you wake Mary,” I whispered.
She blinked red-rimmed eyes.
“Parliament just passed an act to enforce religious conformity, and that looks nothing like standard Anglican worship. This palace abounds with Royalists. Do you want to be sent to the Tower?” I reached to pull the door shut. “Now blow out that candle.”
CHAPTER 16
Late July
The bay windows in Queen Catherine’s presence chamber at Hampton Court Palace were made entirely of colorful stained glass, and none of them opened. I used my fan to swirl sweltering summer air toward the pearls on my neck, longing to escape the linenfold-paneled walls for a walk in the garden. But in the presence chamber, anyone with access to court could have access to the queen, and I stayed put because it was the only time her Portuguese attendants allowed her English ones in the same room with her.
When a herald announced the king, the entire mass of courtiers bowed in unison. Everyone gaped at the sight of King Charles entering with Castlemaine on his arm. Murmurs washed across the chamber. It appeared as if he were about to present his mistress to his wife for formal recognition.
My fan arrested mid-wave. I took note of Castlemaine’s shoulders, thrust back, and how her breasts bulged forward, accentuating her flat bodice front. So she has given birth. She hadn’t been hiding in deference to the royal wedding at all. She’d been busy concealing her bastard. I wanted to judge her, but my own mother came to mind and my scorn died.
My fan slipped from my fingers and swung from its bracelet. If the king insulted the queen so openly, she, and everyone attached to her household, would be disgraced. To my right stood Cornbury. Or rather, he slouched. He shot a questioning glance at me.
Bennet’s face betrayed no emotion at all. But his eyes, which I’d learned to watch carefully, widened subtly as he scanned the court’s reaction, to see how this insult to the queen would be received. Frasier’s frantic whisper stirred the hair on the back of my neck. “The king is going to introduce that slut to Queen Catherine!”
I followed Bennet’s gaze across the chamber to a clutch of courtiers who had gathered around Wells. She smirked and pointed at the queen. She would ridicule Queen Catherine behind her back after this. She would emphasize the queen’s disgrace in order to separate herself from it.
I pursed my lips and looked at our new queen. Catherine of Bragança, queen consort of England, sat on her dais like a twig wrapped in silk. English ladies-in-waiting should have surrounded her. Instead, her Portuguese attendants stood behind and beside her. Their huge farthingales made their skirts jut out several feet to their right and left, so wide they brushed against Queen Catherine’s hair.
Today, finally, the queen herself had dressed in a more suitable, English fashion. Not that it helped. Her green bodice, cut to hug her shoulders, seemed to hang off her as she hunched uncomfortably beside the Farthingale Frights. She knew not a word of English and struggled painfully to learn our manners. None of us English ladies could break past the Frights to help her. Although King Charles wasn’t deterred. He’d just spoken to her in Spanish and sent the Frights scattering with a wave of his hand. Everyone in the room saw how enamored she was of him, how her eyes lingered on him.
The panic in Fraiser’s whisper rose. “We shall lose all the ground we’ve gained at court if the king does this.”
I reached back and squeezed her hand once, but I had no reassurance to offer. I held my breath as the pair breezed past us.
Bennet muttered, “He will not be governed by his wife, and he’s going to show her publicly.” He nodded his head, an almost imperceptible twitch. “The king will have his way, and the court will follow his example.”
King Charles and Castlemaine took their final steps, and Castlemaine curtsied deeply. When she rose, the king made his introduction. Queen Catherine didn’t understand a single word. She smiled and extended her hand. Castlemaine bent and kissed it, winning her official welcome into the queen’s presence.
One of the Farthingale Frights hissed and leaned toward Queen Catherine’s ear, whispering. The queen’s face paled as she looked from her royal husband to Castlemaine and back again.
I muttered to Bennet. “He shouldn’t have done it.”
“Would you dare tell him that yourself?” He didn’t look at me. “This is the custom of English kings. Queen Catherine would be happier if she understood that.”
Poor Queen Catherine trembled in her green bodice. Her eyes fluttered and she leaned back. She is fainting! A bright crimson trickle oozed from her right nostril, dripped off her lips, and splattered o
nto her chest. Castlemaine jumped back with a gasp that sounded more like a laugh. King Charles stepped forward, but the Farthingale Frights barked at one another in Portuguese, crowding around Queen Catherine and shutting him out. As they bundled her up to carry her away, King Charles pointed at Bennet. “You, come with me. We’re sending her Portuguese attendants away.”
The king turned his fiery glare on me. A quick shadow of astonishment crossed his features, followed by a little guilt. “Don’t look at me that way, Frances,” he said. “And do something with my queen. She’s innocent to the point of stupidity.”
Hours later, when a twilight glow lit the red bricks of Hampton Court Palace, the courtiers within its walls still reveled in the afternoon’s gossip. By the next evening they were mocking Queen Catherine openly, while the queen wept in her chambers.
CHAPTER 17
Early August
King Charles was so angry, Queen Catherine was so unrelenting, and the entirety of the English court was so preoccupied with ridiculing her, no one even thought to call her ladies to wait on her in the week that followed. But I tiptoed to her antechamber the day I saw the Portuguese train leave Hampton Court grounds, waiting for the first moment I could enter. I’d help her recover from her public embarrassment and benefit from it by my alliance with her.
Wells caught me loitering. “The queen is hopeless. Dress her when you’re called. Stand behind her at banquets. Why bother with her any other time?”
“Duty.” I wasn’t going to tell her King Charles wanted me to help. I wasn’t going to explain I needed the queen. No English woman held higher rank, after all.
“She’ll never have any respect here. Neither will you if you cling to her side.”
Wells left me, and Queen Catherine’s priest scuttered out of her antechamber. I slipped in. Sadness and myrrh clung to the air inside. A Portuguese countess, so old and near death that she was allowed to remain with the queen, approached me. I curtsied and hurried past so she could not push me away.
Queen Catherine sat hunched by her open window, bundled in a cotton undress gown. I took in its painted design; limbs and leaves branched out from her back and down her sleeves in a pattern called the Tree of Life. Its happy birds and colorful flowers contrasted with the queen’s hunched posture. Items like this gown, and the other exotic wares she’d brought into England, were the only things about Queen Catherine that the court liked. Such foreign goods were a sign of prosperous trade, a mark of wealth.
She turned puffy eyes to me. A gold and silver rosary clinked in her fingers. She wore no cosmetics, no crown, no jewels. She looked pious and pitiful. She should lace herself up in fine new silk, don some diamonds, and order a supper party with violins in the garden. She should get up and start acting worthy of the court’s admiration. The stringy curls in her poor attempt at an English hairstyle caught my eye, and I clicked my tongue. She must have arranged those curls on her own. If she wanted to work at it, maybe I could help her.
She reached to me. “Orar.” Portuguese for “pray.”
I shook my head. “English. Pray.”
We knelt at her prie-dieu where she whispered in a jumble of foreign words that had no meaning to me, pleas I hoped God could discern. Then I slipped my hand into my hanging pocket and pulled out a small paper fold. “Tea.” I opened it and held it toward her.
She nodded and motioned to the old countess, who shuffled to a tall cabinet, lacquered and gleaming, the ebony and ivory inlay on its doors depicting scenes of birds, trees, and little people in strange hats. When the countess opened the doors, a wave of spice filled my nose with the essence and herbs of new worlds. The old woman carried a mother-of-pearl box to me and opened it. It overflowed with tea leaves.
Queen Catherine pointed. “Chá.”
I shook my head. “Tea.”
“Tea,” she replied carefully.
We smiled while the countess fetched boiling water. She brightened as I named objects for her to repeat. I would drink tea with her today. Tomorrow I would dress her and, after that, teach her to dance.
Queen Catherine pointed to a small portrait of King Charles. “King.”
I nodded, studying her face as it filled with longing. “Yes,” I said. “King.”
She laid her hand upon her chest, and the rims of her eyes reddened. I felt the emotions swimming in her face: the questioning, the clinging to hope, the longing for joy.
“Love,” I replied. “That is love.”
* * *
At the end of August we lounged under the canopy of flower garlands draping the royal barge as rowers pulled us up the Thames to Whitehall Palace for Queen Catherine’s official entry into London. Every boat, raft, and skiff crowded together from bank to bank so one could hardly see the water. All packed with people cheering and waving and welcoming the queen. If only everyone at court respected her thus.
“I’ve never seen you fidget so badly.” Cornbury glanced to my twining fingers. “Do you not want to return to Whitehall?”
I smoothed the lap of my petticoat for the hundredth time. In the weeks following the bedchamber incident, the queen’s ladies had gathered enough sense to follow my example and had begun a daily routine of waiting on her. The Queen Mother had returned from France and conducted two official visits with Queen Catherine, one at Greenwich and one at Hampton Court, and neither one in enough privacy to speak with me. Queen Catherine was still unpopular, but the Queen Mother’s presence had at least quieted the court’s ridicule. “The Queen Mother will be greeting us. My mother will be there, too,” I said quietly. “I fear she will not be—proud of me.”
Lord Cornbury waved a hand. “Parents never are.”
“Are yours not proud of you?” I wasn’t really surprised. The court said his father, the lord chancellor, had only pretended to be furious when his daughter trapped the Duke of York into marriage. Like any man with power, he was very ambitious.
“Everything I have attained was granted through my father himself.”
“But you are a good and dutiful son.”
His lips pressed into a grim line while he scanned the crowd bobbing around us on the water. “Nothing is ever good enough for so great a man. If it be impossible to please him, why should I bother trying? I am free to choose my own path in life, after all.”
I agreed, thinking of all I’d done to secure prosperity for my family, despite my own mother’s wishes.
* * *
The Queen Mother greeted the king and queen on a pier near Whitehall, built just to receive them. The evening light made the swaths of gold fabric glow, and a salute of cannons fired across the river. She kissed her son and grasped the new queen’s hands, and the commoners on the river burst into cheers. My mother presented my brother and sister, flushed with excitement, and they handed bouquets of flowers to Queen Catherine.
Mother hugged me tightly. “I hear it goes badly for the new queen.”
“But she is making slow strides in English, in dancing. All will be well. Now, may Sophia stay with me at last?”
Her smile wavered. “Very well. But only while the Queen Mother stays at Whitehall. She must return with the Queen Mother when work at Somerset House is finished.”
I was delighted, but as we made our way to the carriages that would carry us onto palace grounds, the Queen Mother caught my eye. She frowned, and I knew that soon she would summon me. Perhaps our mother was wise to shield my sister from court.
CHAPTER 18
Whitehall Palace
Mid-September
Sophia followed me everywhere for a fortnight. She stood behind me as Queen Catherine sat at her toilette table and peered at her new hairpiece in the looking glass. The queen turned to me with a questioning look. “Good?” She pointed to the masses of wired ringlets falling over each ear.
I nodded from my place among the rest of the ladies in attendance. “Yes.”
“King Sharles like?”
“Yes. King Charles will like it.”
She stoo
d, and the dressers removed the brooch holding her mantua gown together. She pointed to her hair. “Like you.”
“Yes.” Of course, I had several hairpieces in the latest mode. “Like me.”
Queen Catherine studied me as the dressers laced her bodice. “King Sharles like you.”
Frasier, who was waiting to apply the queen’s shoes, dropped a slipper on the carpet. It landed with a soft thud. She snatched it up and shot me a quick glance. My sister peeped from behind me.
But I ignored Frasier and all the others. I held her gaze. “Yes. King Charles likes me.”
Queen Catherine eyed me a moment more, the one English lady who served her earnestly, then nodded. “King Sharles like Laydee Casslemaine.”
The queen’s presence chamber was only full when Castlemaine came. Queen Catherine, who had never consented to appoint her as a lady of the bedchamber, ignored her, but the court made it painfully clear they preferred to flock to Castlemaine’s side.
“Milady,” a servant whispered behind me. “The Queen Mother’s page, milady. He’s outside and has a summons for you.”
I had been waiting. And, I thought, I was ready.
Sophia followed me to the end of the Privy Garden, dotted with sculptures, and we turned into the Privy Gallery. Halfway up the black-and-white marble stairs, I eyed the huge painting of Adam and Eve and the way they tried to shield their tender pink flesh. Though I’d never dared broach the issue of Catholic conversion with King Charles, I could make it appear to his mother that I was trying. We reached the golden fountain. “Stay right here,” I told Sophia. When footmen opened the door to the Queen Mother’s temporary apartments, I crouched in a low curtsy. “Your Majesty.”
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