by Octavia Cade
Sibby, it turned out, took almost as much delight in chewing on rib bones as she did in her new animals, and Whitechapel could only tear her away from the latter by letting her gum on the former as she read to her from new storybooks.
“You should like these, poppet,” said Whitechapel, of the heavy piles around the legs of the armchair they shared for story time. “All about the little animals, they are, all cooped up in zoos for little girls to go see when they’re good. Course, some of these zoos aren’t small at all, but big, big parks where everything can run around all free, all the giraffes and the antelopes and the rhinoceroses. Isn’t that a funny word, Sib?
“Maybe you’ll be able to go to the big zoos when you’re feeling better. There’s one in Regent’s Park, there is, though I can’t say as I’ve ever been myself. But there are elephants there, and if you promise not to chew on them, I know one little girl who might get a ride. I expect there’s good views from elephants.” Carefully, Whitechapel wiped drool off Sibylle’s chin. “There. That’s better, isn’t it precious?
“And maybe one day, when you’re bigger, you can go to the big zoological parks like what I’m about to read to you, go on safari with your own little hat, but you’d have to be careful, you would. There’s lions and tigers and crocodiles that you really can’t chew on, for they’d chew back and bigger and no sad gummy face would stop ’em, Sib, no it wouldn’t.
“They’s good practice, are zoos. You can go round and round and see all the toothy creatures behind the bars, or across the river, and you can see how they move when they’re coming for you. It’s important to know, it is, Sibby, because there are more zoos than you think, and the things that prowl up and down inside them . . . You could walk down a street and not think you’re in a zoo, if you didn’t know no better. All the people look the same, you see. Oh, some have a long nose like a horsie, and some have long spider legs, but you can’t see all their teeth, and that’s the most important part of an animal. It’s only their front teeth you can see, and some will be yellow and some broken and some so perfect, but the teeth inside their head, Sibby, the teeth inside their head . . . those are the ones you have to watch out for, pet, for when they start to move, there’s no bars that can save you.”
NELL GWYNN
Pandora had taken little Sibylle on an outing, mostly to give everyone else a break. She brought her back from a trip to Delphi, sunburned and exhausted, having paid a visit to the Pythia.
“Sibby even got to have a go herself, didn’t you, pet?” said Pandora, and they all winced, knowing exactly what would have come out of that little mouth. Sibylle had been learning her alphabet, and her insistence on shrieking the names of various beasts at the top of her lungs, like a chalkboard animal chronicler, had worn them all down.
“Let me guess,” said Anne. “A is for ass and adders and aardvarks . . . ”
“I think she had a good time,” said Pandora, but Sibby was nearly asleep on her shoulder and hardly whimpered in response. “Though she was a bit upset when they didn’t play along. I told her they probably couldn’t understand, what with all the terrible gases they inhale and all, but she’s so used to all of us understanding her that she was quite put out. You should have seen her glare at them! Pythia was in stitches. She says I have to take her back some time.”
“It’s a bit odd that we can understand her,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “Or each other, for matter of fact.”
“I’ve never had any trouble with anyone,” said Pandora. “I expect it’s the box, wanting us to get along. Talking of,” she said, handing it over, “aren’t you off with Whitechapel now?”
“Yes,” said Bluebeard’s wife, and was about to explain further when Anne interrupted her.
“I don’t suppose that I could come along?” she said. “I gave the servants a day off for their prayers, so no one’s expecting me. There’s no reason for you to let me come, I know . . . I’m just curious. Your adventures always sound so exciting.”
“Of course,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “More the merrier. You don’t mind, do you, Pandy?”
“Of course not,” said Pandora. “I’m going to put the baby down for a nap and maybe have a little lie-down myself.” She stroked Sibby’s head. “Say bye-bye to mummy,” she said. “Bye-bye, bye-bye!”
“Buh,” said Sibby, rousing. “Buh! Basilisks. Bandicoots. Blue-foot booby!”
Saint Botolph’s was nearly all tower. To Bluebeard’s wife, the rest of the church looked as if it were huddled under it, seeming too small to be part of the same building. She’d seen taller, she had, but when she looked up the proportions made her feel as if she were falling.
“It’s a place for falling, all right,” said Whitechapel. They were there in early evening, when the light was beginning to fade, and there were rather more women hanging about the place than either Anne or Bluebeard’s wife had expected.
“Are we come in time for a service?” said Anne, uncertain, and Whitechapel laughed.
“They’re not here for religion, milady,” she said. “It’s just they can’t stand about on street corners without being moved on, they can’t. Saint Botolph’s here is like a little island. You can walk around it, like so, and left alone as you want to be. Which is not much, believe you me.”
Bluebeard’s wife watched the women as they pass, watched them walk in what were little more than gaudy rags, side-eying her and Anne both but sliding over Whitechapel as if she belonged there, as if her face and her stance, the turn of her hips, was something familiar to them, something they saw in friends and mirrors and corners.
“This is what you want to remember?” she asked.
“That’s so,” said Whitechapel, in satisfaction. “This is the prostitutes’ church, it is.”
It took opening the box again before Anne could look at the church without blushing, and when she did, the site was the same but the church was not. It was old, crumbling, a little bit dilapidated. There weren’t a lot of whores milling about it that Bluebeard’s wife could see, and if the area was less built up, it was still obviously downmarket.
She was a little worried about how Anne would react; Anne, whose only experience of the box was between Hever and the museum. But this London was closer to Anne’s experience, closer to her time, than Whitechapel’s London ever was, and she looked about with interest, trying to place herself.
Bluebeard’s wife was just about to suggest they go off for a bit of a wander when a carriage pulled up and they were offered a ride.
“Offered” is how Anne described it, anyway. The royal habit of putting the best spin on everything, a universal graciousness, hadn’t left her, and she was up into the carriage quick-smart—more to shut up the occupant than anything else, because that same occupant was staring at her like she’d got herself painted purple.
“It’s your face,” said the woman in the carriage, and even Bluebeard’s wife, newly ennobled with her marriage, could recognize the accents of social climbing. “Your face! You look like a portrait by Holbein, you do.”
“Who?” said Anne, promptly lying through her teeth about the artist who painted her with a face beautiful enough to launch one ship if not a thousand, even if that one was sailing into a storm of terrible bad luck.
“My Charles has some Holbein paintings, you know,” said the woman. She was peeling oranges in her lap, quick and smooth and peeling blind, fingers working as if well practiced. She was fascinated with Anne, so Bluebeard’s wife sat quietly in the jolting carriage, her hands folded prim over the box, and ate orange segments when they were offered to her; ate for sweetness and for seeing.
Nell is thirteen. Plump and pretty and witty, she can make an orange into a naughty, dirty thing.
“Flirt with them as much you can,” Moll says to her, primping her girls before the doors open, pinching Nell’s cheeks and tugging down the front of her gown, but Nell doesn’t need to be told. She gets a sixth of what she sells, six days a week, and an orange from an orange girl at Drury La
ne is a much finer thing than an orange from a street stall or a market. Nell stands with her back to the stage and sells her oranges, sells herself—as a pretty little flirt, an amusing poppet, a clever girl who can see love notes and assignations get passed from patrons to performers in the right order, and at the right times. The seats are where she learns her manners: it’s as good as court, it is, except court has two meanings and she quickly learns the both of them, for there’s more to be made in tips than there is in oranges. The oranges are just a disguise, really, something to make the pink cheeks and little notes blend in with the greasepaint and footlights and the sets that are too wobbly by half, but look impressive from a few rows back.
She is an orange girl for less than a year before she is asked if she wants to be on the stage. “What the devil do you think I’ve been doing all this time?” she says.
Nell offered to take them sightseeing, through the streets. “My Charles just granted a Royal Charter for a market up at Spital Square,” she said. “And I was feeling the need for an outing, so I came to have a look-see. But there’s not a right lot there now,” she continued, “so I’m off for a drive instead.”
“Seems a strange part of the city for a leisure trip,” said Bluebeard’s wife, and Nell eyed her narrowly, eyed the cut and fabric of her dress, the fine embroidery on the dress of Anne of Cleves.
“I’m not the only one poking about where I shouldn’t be expected to,” she said. “Though I grew up in neighborhoods like this, or not far off, which is more than I’d wager for you.”
“We came to look at the church,” said Anne.
“There’s a sight prettier churches about, if that’s what you’re after,” said Nell. “That one—God keep it—looks about ready for the knacker’s yard.”
“Perhaps it will be rebuilt,” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“Maybe so,” said Nell. “They’re going to need a better set piece if they want the people round here to buy what they’re selling, that’s for sure.”
“You’re not religious?” said Anne, trying not to look shocked and failing miserably, for Nell smirked at her, a pleasant, dimpled smirk, a cat about to get cute with a mouse.
“I am when it’s convenient,” she said. “But it’s like a theatre, see. You can only swallow so much at once without knowing what a mouthful you have, so I make the big stories go down easier by ignoring the little ones.”
“Besides,” said Nell, “Our Lord associated with loose women, so I don’t see why my lord can’t enjoy one in his own bed from time to time. Being a king’s a terrible trial. I tell him, if he can’t please the people all of the time, he can at least please me some of the time, and that should be enough for anyone.”
Nell lies as well as any, she knows she does, with her little pink tongue so clever at twisting itself round speeches and mischief, but she always knows when she’s lying and what truth is. It’s more than her coachman knows, bleeding from a split lip, his eye blackening shut, after a fight defending her honor, such as it is. “He called you a whore,” says the coachman, and Nell rolls her eyes. “I am a whore, you dolt,” she says, like it’s something she doesn’t know, like it’s something she’s ashamed of, to have brought her out of the slums and into the private chambers of the king of England, and if her coachman’s not a half-wit he’s better at pretending than she ever was. “You’ll be fighting a good long time if you’re going to object to that.”
He is not the only one to overlook truths. She is stuck one time in a crowd, in a coach again, and they’ve mistaken her for someone else, attacking her for what she isn’t rather than—for once—what she is. But a mob is an audience, no less, and she knows what to do with those, and if the carriage doesn’t stand as steady as the stage, there’s one misconception she can clear up.
It’s one thing to be brought up for a reason. It’s another to be brought up for the wrong reason, so Nell places her feet and tilts her head, smiles as if the stage is at her back and her palms smell of oranges, and calmly, charmingly, tells the blind silly fools that she’s the Protestant whore, thank you very much, and not the Catholic one.
“It’s funny what you’ll let yourself forget when you’re away from it all,” said Nell. “Here I am now, a grand lady, or so we all pretend, like furs and some perfume have given me breeding, instead of me breeding what’s turning the trick. And sometimes I almost believe it myself.” She paused briefly, and even her hands were still on the oranges that sat, half-peeled, in her lap.
“That’s the problem with pretending,” said Anne. “It’s a very useful thing, sometimes. When I was married to . . . well. Let’s just say I married up, and politically, it got sticky. And I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, really, not the first thing even, but I had a position and I had to grow into it. Then the marriage was over. He moved the mistress in, you understand.”
“Silly girl,” said Nell. “If I’d the ring on my finger, I’d never let myself be pushed out of bed. It’s always me as does the pushing, see.”
“The thing is,” Anne continued, “useful or not, pretend too much and you forget where you really are. What you really are. Which, in my case, was disposable. That, I never forgot.”
“I never let myself forget neither,” said Nell. “That’s why I’m where I am. Every time I catch myself thinking, Nelly love, you could get used to this, I bring myself back down to the slums. A real little slap in the face, it is, to remember where you came from.”
“I found it such a relief to stop pretending,” said Anne.
“Oh, aye,” said Nell. “Getting a good lie down is power. I know that better than most—but it’s a stupid girl as doesn’t know she’s lying. And I,” she said, complacent, winkling orange segments apart again, “have never been stupid.”
Court is as much a theatre as ever was on Drury Lane. Everything is public, everything, though acting in this theatre requires as much knowing what isn’t said as what should be. Nell plays the game, she does, as well she can, but there comes a time when knowing what should not be said and then flat out ignoring it works in her favor.
She’s an orange girl at heart, and there’s some freedom in the expectation that she is ill-mannered and ignorant.
She gives birth to the king’s son, twice over, and once, when he asks to see the elder lad, Nell calls the child over in a manner most calculated to draw paternal attention. “Come see your father, you little bastard!” she cries. The king objects to her language, as she expected he would (it’s different when they’re in bed together with all the curtains closed about—he’s never minded her tongue then), but his objection can bring her benefit. Nell points out that it’s a perfectly accurate description, as these things go, and the king has little option but to give the lad a proper title.
Nell would be lying if she didn’t enjoy it. Scandal is her jam as well as her bread and butter—a sweet, tart marmalade that livens up the place and reminds her of what can be done with face and voice and a clear, hard acknowledgement of what is.
“It’d be easy to say I don’t feel sorry for her,” said Nell. “But that’s not the real truth of it. I do feel for the poor thing, of course I do. My heart’s not made of stone. Even if she can’t give my Charles legitimate children, that’s no reason to pretend she doesn’t suffer with me around—and the rest of them. A right bunch of cats, we are. But I suppose I don’t need to tell you about mistresses,” she said, looking to Anne.
“She was quite a sweet little thing, actually,” said Anne. “Thick as treacle, but basically good-natured.”
“There are worse things a husband can do than adultery,” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“Worse things a woman can do as well,” said Nell. “Doesn’t mean I don’t know what it’s doing to her. I know what it’s doing to me, and that’s enough.”
“To you or for you?” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“What’s done to me is what’s done for me,” said Nell. “I’m no saint; never pretended to be one. Truth is, I’d rather hav
e presents and perfumes and soft furs than my virtue and a cold, thin little bed. I’d rather have him and have his wife unhappy than be unhappy myself. That doesn’t thrill you with sympathy now, does it?”
“No,” said Bluebeard’s wife, “it doesn’t.”
“Tough,” said Nell. “Truth isn’t always pleasant.”
Afterwards, Bluebeard’s wife sat with Anne of Cleves on the steps of Saint Botolph’s. They were waiting for Whitechapel, who had gone to visit a friend, she said, in Mitre Square. A policeman had come to move them on, but their clothes were clean and of good quality—if odd—and a few minutes watching Anne hand out oranges to the working girls convinced him they were respectable ladies on a charitable mission.
While that was true, it was also an excuse to avoid talking. Yet when the oranges were gone, Anne sank onto the steps. “No sympathy,” she said. “Is that what you think of me? I took Henry’s money, afterwards. He paid me off, remember, to keep my mouth shut. And I did.”
“What else could you have done?” said Bluebeard’s wife. “Sent it back? He wasn’t one to take embarrassment lying down, your king.”
“And sleeping with me would have been an embarrassment,” said Anne, blinking quickly, as if to force back tears. “That’s the truth, isn’t it? He paraded his mistresses about all the time, but the Flanders mare? That would have been just too humiliating for him.”
“That’s Henry’s truth, not yours,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “But your truth and my truth is that he’s a fat fool who can’t be trusted to piss in the right pot if doing otherwise could cause someone else trouble. The truth is,” continued Bluebeard’s wife, leaning over to nudge her friend, “I’ve never seen a horse with tits like yours. Seriously, Anne. They’re amazing. If it weren’t for Pandora . . . ”
Anne snorted beside her, let out a watery laugh, and Bluebeard’s wife was pleased to see that she was regaining her equilibrium.