by Jane Yolen
“Clean? But I am not dirty,” I complained. “I washed my hands and face before we performed and had a full bath not a month ago in a stream near Nantes.” I did not make a move to strip off my things.
“Now!” Regal Mary’s hand pressed into the small of my back, pushing me forward again. “Into the tub.”
“Mon Dieu!” I cried. “You are going to boil me like a piece of mutton! Does Her Majesty know of this?”
“It is the queen’s own order,” Pretty Mary said.
“But the water is hot.”
“Of course it is hot!” Jolly Mary laughed at me. “We could not possibly bathe you in cold, could we?”
“Of course one bathes in cold water,” I said. “Is not a stream cold? And a pond?”
“Come,” said Regal Mary, “or the water will indeed be cold.” They grabbed me and began peeling off my apron and dress.
There was no point in trying to fight them. Besides, where would I have gone? I wanted to be here. Perhaps this was a test of courage, just as the riddle had been a test of wit. Both to determine if I were worthy of a place at court.
Suddenly I was quite naked, Pretty Mary having tossed my clothes as far from me as she could. I put one arm across my tiny breasts, shamed that anyone should see me bare, especially these Scottish strangers.
“How thin she is,” Regal Mary commented, as if I were some piece of horseflesh at a fair.
“You would be thin, too, if you had had only a baguette to eat today,” I replied, neglecting to mention the cheese or the wine.
Regal Mary harrumphed and turned her back on me.
“Now, Nicola, are you going to get in by yourself or do we have to throw you in?” Jolly Mary demanded, placing her hands on her hips and fixing me with a determined stare.
I had no doubt she was quite capable of tossing me into the tub on her own, so I took a reluctant step closer. When I dabbed one finger into the water, I found it was the temperature of soup that had been sitting in the bowl for some time.
Turning, Regal Mary saw my hand testing the water, and raised a haughty eyebrow. “Hot enough for you, little peasant?” she said. “We can always have more boiled water brought in.”
There was no way I could delay further, so I lifted up one foot and dipped it in. The bath did not feel so bad! Slowly I climbed in, then lowered myself until the water came to my chin. The warmth seeped through my skin and down into my bones. If this is torture, I thought, what a delicious way to die.
Pretty Mary handed me a cloth and soap to wash with. I rubbed down my arms and legs and could see that already I was turning the color of a new babe. I laughed at the thought.
“You will need to wash your hair as well,” said Jolly Mary. And without any more warning than that, she put a hand on the top of my head and shoved me completely under the water.
For an instant pure fear stabbed at my heart. My entire body remembered the great river Rhone that had swallowed my parents; it remembered the waves, the cries of horror, the black tide. I clutched the edge of the tub with both hands and pushed up as hard as I could.
Bursting out of the water, I gasped and spluttered, “Maman! Papa!” I screamed, again and again. “Help! Help!”
At first the three Maries laughed, but they soon stopped when they saw the great fear in my face. And the awful rage.
“You are trying to drown me,” I cried. “Assassins! Help!”
At that very moment, Pious Mary came back in with an armful of clothes. My eyes were drawn immediately to the cross she wore, and as I stared at it, all at once I felt safe again.
She knelt beside me. “Poor child, are you all right?” she asked in her soft voice.
“We were just trying to wash her hair,” Pretty Mary said.
“She thought we were trying to drown her,” added Jolly Mary.
I did not want Pious Mary to think I was just being silly, and so hurriedly explained, my voice raw from screaming. “A year ago I saw my parents drown. I would have drowned myself, had the Lord not saved me.”
Pious Mary glared at the others before turning back to me. “You are safe here, Nicola. No one would dare harm one of the queen’s own house.”
My panic faded and I sat back in the tub. Gradually I relaxed as the Maries scrubbed at my hair and chattered, sometimes in French, sometimes in their own strange-sounding Scots tongue.
I began to drift into sleep.
Jolly Mary’s voice roused me. “You’d best get dried off and dressed now,” she said, offering a hand to help me out of the tub.
The drying towels were so soft and sweet-smelling it was like rubbing rose petals over my skin. The velvet gown Pious Mary loaned me was very long and loose, but the silken hose were lovely. I had never had any but woolen before. However, they had no shoes that came near to fitting me.
“I have just the thing,” I said, finding my sack next to the pile of my discarded clothes. I pulled out the last pair of boots Papa had ever made me. I had worn them but once before, when the nuns had taken me to a special mass for my parents. The boots had been too big for me then, and I had not tried them on since. But now they fit me nicely, snugged on over the new hose.
Regal Mary turned her nose up at the boots. “Peasant wear!”
But the others agreed they would do until proper shoes might be cobbled for me. However in my heart I doubted even the queen’s shoemaker could make me anything half so fine.
Then the Maries brought me into a carpeted room where the walls were hung with rich tapestries. Two large canopied beds stood side by side. On a small table were several sets of inlaid combs and brushes.
“Sit here, Nicola,” Pious Mary said, gesturing to a stool by the table. Then she tutted to herself as she stood over me, working out the snarls in my hair. “I will put it into a proper style in the morning.”
At first I swore at each pull, crying out, “Mon Dieu!” And “Assassin!” And even “Mother Mary!” which, under the circumstances, with all the Maries around me, was almost laughable. But at each swear, Pious Mary gave me a sharp rap on the head with the brush. “Do not take the Lord‘s—or His Mother’s—name in vain.”
At last, the tangles being mostly untangled, Pious Mary stood me in front of a mirror. I was startled, for I had never seen myself, except in a pond. I looked entirely different from that Nicola. My cheeks were now baby pink, not with blushes or with Nadine’s paints, but with scrubbing. My hair, in two long plaits, shone an antique gold, instead of the dirty yellow I knew so well. And the dress made me look like a courtier. I ran my hand down the skirt.
“Am I ... in the least pretty?” I asked, remembering what the queen had said.
“A fool does not need to be pretty,” Regal Mary said with another sniff. “Mostly they have humps and bumps, crossed eyes and bad teeth.”
“She is not that kind of fool, and well you know it!” Pious Mary picked up her embroidery frame again. “Those are God’s own fools. It is a sin to laugh at them, poor helpless creatures.”
Helpless creatures? I thought of the dark angel-faced dwarf letting go a fart in Uncle’s face. She had not seemed helpless then.
“Oh, la! You make every occasion a lecture, ” Pretty Mary grumbled.
Jolly Mary whispered in my ear as she dabbed me with some perfumed oil that smelled like lavender. “You are very pretty. Especially cleaned up. They are just jealous, you know. Jealous that the queen has a need of more wit than theirs.”
A wiser fool would have kept silent at that and simply held the compliment to herself. But I was not wise yet. “If I am to be the wit, then why are you all here? Are you all relatives of the queen?”
“No, not relatives,” Jolly Mary replied, “though we all come from good Scottish families. We were sent here to France as children to become maids-in-waiting for the young queen.” She spun around, her skirt belling out.
“Our mothers were promised we would be living at court,” added Pretty Mary. “But the dowager queen sent us away to the convent at Poissy.”
Her mouth went all sour and she was suddenly not very pretty at all. “A long way away from the games and the fun of the court.”
“They say little Mary cried for want of us,” Jolly Mary added. “But still they did not bring us back.”
“There are rather too many games in this court as it is,” Pious Mary said. “It is a place of debaucheries. All Europe knows it. For the sake of our eternal souls it is good that we went to the convent.” Her hands busily tied off a knot in her embroidery. “The Prior has been very attentive.”
“Too attentive, if you ask me. Paying attention equally to our ABC’s and our letters from home,” said Regal Mary. There was a heavy bitterness in her voice. “Prior de Vieuxpont is a tyrant.” She looked so angry that, for the first time, I was almost sorry for her.
“He is a holy man,” replied Pious Mary.
I wondered how they could be speaking of the same person, but then I remembered that the way I saw Uncle was not at all the way Nadine saw him. Or his favorite, Annette, saw him. Or even Pierre.
“Why could you not stay with the queen,” I asked, “having come so far to be with her?”
“Queen Catherine wanted her to be a proper French princess, as she was to marry the little prince,” said Jolly Mary, pulling a face. “She was already a queen, you know, of Scotland. She had been so since an infant. But that was not good enough for Queen Catherine. ”
“And we were not French enough,” Regal Mary said.
“Or witty enough,” added Pretty Mary.
“You were children,” I said. “How could they expect it?”
“How indeed,” Jolly Mary said, hooking her arm through mine once again.
“It is no surprise they hid us away,” Pious Mary replied, hardly looking up from her work. “The Scots lords brawled in King Henry’s presence. They were drunk and they were rolling about on the floor pulling hair like peasants at a fair. What a disgrace!”
“Well, how can anyone lay the blame for that on us?” Pretty Mary’s lower lip stuck out. “We were only children. And not even there, but shut away at the convent!”
“We are here now,” Pious Mary pointed out. “And we must be ornaments in the young queen’s crown. We must show them that not all Scots are drunken brawlers.”
“Here today—and gone tomorrow.” Regal Mary shook her head. “Once the coronation celebrations are over, it is back to the convent for us. And back to Prior de Vieuxpont.”
I just did not understand. “Why not go back to Scotland, if you hate it so here in France?”
“We cannot just do as we will, little fool,” Pretty Mary said. “We go or stay at the king’s pleasure.”
“But that almost makes you ... slaves.”
“Slaves!” Regal Mary drew herself up and glared at me. “We are of good families. Unlike ... some.”
All my sympathy for her fled at once.
“We will get home anyway in a year or so,” added Pretty Mary. “To be married off, most like.”
“What about the queen? Will she go back to Scotland with you, as she is queen of that land?”
“Not if she has any sense!” Jolly Mary laughed. “It is much pleasanter for her here in France.”
“And safer, too,” Pious Mary said, crossing herself quickly, “for a Catholic queen.”
8
MASS
That hat night, though I had been bathed in the four Maries’ tub and was wearing one of their velvet dresses, I was sent to the servants’ quarters. There I shared a cramped bunk with two other girls. Still it was the softest bed I had ever had. Far softer than the roadsides and hard pallets that had been my lot the past year.
The two girls with whom I shared the chamber kept their distance. I tried to speak to them, even asked them questions about the court. But they looked at me as though I were carrying the plague and turned their faces to the wall, falling asleep without a word.
I did not sleep well. Both of them snored.
In the morning I ate breakfast in the kitchen among the servants, many of whom were already hurrying about their duties. I filled myself to the bursting point in case I got no more food that day. But the others paused only briefly for a snatch of bread or a swallow of water. Their gossip was full of names I did not recognize, duties I did not understand. And all of them seemed wary of talking to me.
I could only guess that, as the queen’s own fool, I was neither one of them nor one of their masters. Yet I had no idea what I was to do or where I was to go. Or how I could once again talk to the queen.
When I could not eat a morsel more, and it was clear I had no other reason to remain in the kitchen, a potboy pointed to the back stairs.
“You be wanted there,” he said.
I climbed slowly, still marveling at the fairy tale my life had become. Who needed friends or duties, surrounded by such luxury?
On the second floor, I heard again the harsh jangle of the Scottish tongue and found my way to the room of the four Maries. They barely looked up from their embroideries to greet me, though Pious Mary eventually arose and came over.
“That hair!” she said, making a tsking sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth, as Maman used to do when the cat got among the chickens.
She was but slightly gentler than she had been the evening before, pulling the brush through my hair stroke after stroke till it crackled like summer lightning. Then she parted my hair in the center, twisted and tucked it into a fluted cap. When she showed me the results in a hand mirror, I did not recognize the girl who stared back at me.
“That will do, then,” Pious Mary said, taking the mirror away. “Any more is an invitation to the sin of pride.” As she finished speaking, the cathedral bells rang out a cheery invitation.
“What am I to do?” I asked. “Where am I to go?”
“Why—to mass with us,” Pious Mary said. “Where else?”
“With the whole court,” Jolly Mary added.
“And the queen?” I asked.
“Foremost the queen,” said Pretty Mary, standing. She had a small book in her hand.
“After the king, of course.” Regal Mary’s voice was stern. “Always after the king.”
We went down to the cathedral where the young king had been crowned only the day before. But now, instead of watching cold and weary from a grey street while nobles hurried by, I was to be a part of the court’s own worship service. I pinched the skin of my arm, thinking I was dreaming, but I did not wake.
The four Maries sat on special benches up in the front of the cathedral, only slightly behind the royal family. I was well in back, though not as far back as the kitchen staff. Squeezed in between a girl with crooked teeth named Eloise, who was a handmaid to the Maries, and a rather fat maid-in-waiting who had obviously never waited for a meal, we were on the same bench as the dwarf La Folle, who snored on and off through the entire mass.
Up in the pulpit, the cardinal in his brilliant crimson robes preached a long sermon about heretics. He called them traitors to both God and the king and said they should be burned at the stake. “The smell being an incense to the Lord,” he roared.
Burned! I shivered with the thought of such a terrible punishment. But I could not follow his argument, for much of it was in Latin, which was like—but not like—the Italian I knew.
Suddenly a great fear took hold of me. The Maries had told me that the queen wanted someone amusing. But I was fool indeed if I thought I could be witty enough for this company. And if I failed, would I be judged a traitor to the queen if not to God? Would I be beheaded as Uncle had said? Or burned at the stake? I hardly heard a word more of the sermon, but sat trembling like an alder leaf, all those questions rattling around in my head.
Then, suddenly, mass was over, and we all stood while the royal party trooped down the aisle towards the door. They walked slowly, and were very grand and very, very frightening.
Because I now realized how my very life depended upon pleasing them, I turned to Eloise and asked, “Who are they al
l?”
She giggled, naming each as they went by. “The king and queen, of course,” she said, nodding at the first two.
“Those I know. And the next man, with the white plume?” He had been sitting at the high table when we had performed. His handsome face was only slightly marred by a long scar.
“The Duke de Guise. He received that scar in battle,” Eloise added. “He is the bravest man in France.”
“Braver than the king?” I asked.
Her voice dropped to a scornful whisper. “The new king is a boy. He knows nothing of fighting. He is not his father.” Then she put her hand partly over her mouth. “I did not tell you that.”
“I am as silent as one in the grave,” I said.
“Where we both will be if you repeat what I said.”
I shivered. “I am only curious who they all are,” I said. “I do not wish to spread gossip about them. But to please them, I need to know them.”
She nodded. “The duke is Queen Mary’s uncle,” Eloise told me. “The cardinal, too.”
I remembered thinking how much the duke and the cardinal had looked alike sitting together at dinner and nodded.
Eloise continued. “Since the old king died, the cardinal and the duke have been running the government. The old queen is not happy with either of them. But of course what can she say now?”
“They must be very important men,” I hazarded.
“More important than the king, some people say.” Eloise raised an eyebrow, then nodded at the next to walk by, the purse-mouthed dowager. “The old queen Catherine, the dead king’s wife.”
“She looks fierce.”
“She is fierce.” She leaned even closer, her voice dropping till it was scarcely a whisper. “After marrying the king, she was found to be barren.”
“But ... she has children. Sons and daughters.”
Eloise put a finger to her nose and nodded. “She took every powder and potion she could get her doctors to make. Some even say she resorted to magic. She is a de Medici, you know.”