Maid of the King's Court Page 2

  “Yes, do sit still for a while, Eliza,” Henny said, as I wriggled to see what she had done to my hair in the old piece of polished silver we used to see our reflections.

  “It’s not Eliza. It’s Mistress Elizabeth!” I whined as I often did. I could hear Henny harrumph softly as she wielded the ivory comb a final time. She resigned herself to it, came round in front of me, and brought her face down near my own.

  “Now, my lady,” she said, looking into my eyes. “You look just as grand as the Princess Elizabeth herself.”

  “Oh, nonsense!” came Aunt Margaret’s caustic voice from behind us. “Is she good and ready? And don’t mention the Princess Elizabeth. All the world knows her father the king has taken against her and sent her away from court.”

  “Yes, Mistress Margaret,” Henny said, drawing back slowly and gently pinching my scowling cheek.

  “Now, Elizabeth,” Aunt Margaret said, as she took Henny’s place before me.

  Here we go, I thought. I’ve heard all this before.

  She used her hand to spin my chin from side to side, inspecting every inch of me. She had a little frown on her face, just as usual, but for once I felt she was really looking at me. And when she spoke, it wasn’t in her usual sing-song drone.

  “Today your troth will be plighted to the Earl of Westmorland’s son. He’s a viscount, which means that one day you will be a viscountess, and when his father dies you will be a countess. That’s second only to a duchess or a princess. I don’t want any of your jokings or frolickings.”

  “No, Aunt Margaret.”

  “And no sullen silences or frowns either. You must be dignified, Elizabeth.”

  “Yes, Aunt Margaret. Is he here now?” I asked, nervousness as well as curiosity stirring inside me.

  “Lord love us, no!”

  I squirmed for a little longer under her critical inspection, until she decided to take pity on my ignorance. “Up in the Great Chamber, we will meet his servant, the man he has sent to stand in. You will take his hand, and the contract will be signed in front of the priest. But this is all legally binding, you know; you will be as good as man and wife.”

  She must have seen something of my confusion on my face. “You don’t actually meet your husband face-to-face until you’re older, my dear,” she said in a more kindly tone. “You think you’re all grown-up already, but you need to wait until your menses begin before you can live with him as a wife.”

  I nodded wisely, although I didn’t really know what she meant. But there was no fooling my aunt Margaret. “Menses are certain pains that will come upon you, child, when you’re old enough to have a child of your own,” she said. I sensed that Henny and Aunt Margaret were looking at each other silently over the top of my head, and I didn’t like the feeling of being excluded.

  “What pains?” I asked, a little crossly.

  “Never mind about that now,” Aunt Margaret said, giving me a smart tap with her cane and shooing me out of my seat.

  We returned to the Great Chamber to find an elderly man in black standing with my father in the place of honour by the fire — roaring for once with hefty logs. My father was holding the poker, as if he had been fiddling with the fire. It looked odd because I had often heard him claim that Camperdownes never felt the cold.

  “Ah, my daughter Elizabeth!” he said in a hearty loud voice, as if he had not seen me for weeks.

  Embarrassed, I found it impossible to look at him and scanned the room instead.

  Around its edges there were now gathered many people well known to me, including my father’s steward and servants from our household. I had many friends among the servants, like Mistress Cox the cook, who would let me steal a piece of pie from her echoing stone kitchen, and Susan the dairymaid, who would give me a spoonful of cheese if I helped her stir the curds. Today, though, their familiar faces were lapped on all sides by strangers whom I’d never seen before.

  Henny was whispering in my ear. “You see that gentleman, Sir Dudley?” she said, nodding at the figure in black. “Today you’ll take his hand in place of that of your real husband. It’s just a ceremony.” The corners of my mouth drooped in chagrin. I had to reassure myself with the memory of my aunt’s earlier words that it would still count as a proper legal betrothal.

  “But he’s so old!” I whispered back, perhaps more loudly than I’d realised, for a muffled sound in the background might have been a suppressed laugh from Aunt Margaret’s maid Betsy. It occurred to me to wonder what my actual husband would be like. Would he be an ancient old man as well? In all my daydreams, my future spouse had been dashing and young, like Sir Lancelot.

  Fortunately, Sir Dudley himself came forward, twitching his head like a bird, and took my hand in a friendly way. Despite this, he looked intimidating, with the silver stitching on his doublet, his neat white beard, and his generally foreign air. I knew that Henny would be sure to say later he had what she called a “court smell,” as if he ate different food and breathed different air from normal Derbyshire people. Although Sir Dudley had only travelled from his master the earl’s house in Westmorland, I imagined that everybody at the king’s court had his sleek, well-groomed look.

  Sir Dudley took my hand and drew me aside from the rest, to a table close to the window. The table was covered with a dark red and green Turkish carpet, upon which lay several sparkling objects. Instantly, my attention was captured, for I love treasures of all kinds. There was a pile of fine moony pearls, a gorgeous ring, and a silver brooch in the shape of the letter “E.” On the top of the “E” sat a curious bird with its beak open. I began to hope that the brooch, with my own initial, might possibly be a gift.

  “Are these my birthday presents?” I asked with some hesitation, for I knew that it was wrong to want other people’s things, to covet them as Aunt Margaret called it. According to her, I had an unduly covetous nature that I was supposed to try to keep in check.

  “Well, yes, of course, as it’s your birthday, they might be,” Sir Dudley said. “But they are also betrothal presents from your future husband, the viscount.” At this he knelt down and gestured invitingly to the glittering things, like one of the ancient eastern Magi bringing treasures to the Nativity.

  “What, all of them?” I sensed that my eyes were open extra wide. I believe I was pulling an expression called “dumbstruck,” like that of poor old Tub, the boy who’d been stricken speechless in Stoneton village as a punishment for stealing and whose words could never pop out of his endlessly open lips.

  “Indeed. These pearls of Barbary are to add to the rope of pearls that belonged to your mother, the lady Rose,” he explained. I felt a moment’s annoyance that he, a stranger, could speak of my mother. “And this is a ring, a symbol of your husband’s great love for you,” he said, successfully distracting me by slipping it onto my finger. Of course, I was distressed to realise it was much too big. “And this brooch, with your own initial, is topped with the crest of your new family, the Westmorland blackbird.” He then pointed out to me that the strangers in the room were each wearing a similar metal badge with the strange silver bird on it. One by one they pointed to their own silver birds and smiled encouragingly.

  “This is your new family,” he said, as he led me to a table where another man was scratching away with a quill upon a sheaf of parchment.

  “And this,” said my father, very softly in my ear, “is where you must sign to finalise the contract.” He picked up the quill and put it in my hand. “Can you remember how to write your name?”

  “Of course I can!” I replied, stung, and it was with a sense of injured pride that I laboriously signed E. Camperdowne. I added a flourish below my name. With my dress and my ring, I felt ready to take my place as a countess. I began to imagine myself strolling through one of the royal palaces, nodding graciously to gentlemen even finer than Sir Dudley who bowed down at the sight of me. Surely the king himself would be glad to know me.

  Replacing the pen, I tried to stand up extra straight, almost
as if there were already a crown on my head. I could hear a murmur of pleasure from the people in the room behind me: Henny, Betsy, the Stewards, the Woods, Mr. Nutkin, Mistress Cox, and Susan of our household, and all the new strangers marked out by their blackbird badges. I even saw a thin smile on Aunt Margaret’s lips, and she gave me a slight but distinct nod.

  This was the first tottering step I took, I believe, on the path towards restoring the Camperdownes to their rightful place in the world.

  I had no notion that it would take so many turns, both for good — and for ill.

  I was proud that I had played my part well. I knew I had excelled because my father told me so. We were sitting at the top table in the Great Hall while all the tenants and guests ate enormous slices of roast beef, and then (glorious moment) raised their cups to drink to my health. At that I bowed my thanks as if I were already a countess. After dispensing my stately nods to the left and right, I took a gulp of sack myself, but it was so sweet and strong, it made me feel a little sick. How could adults drink that stuff?

  Within a few days, I had grown more used to the idea that I was betrothed and that no one but God could part me from my aristocratic husband. I longed for my menses to start, so that I could be a properly married lady and go to live in my husband’s house.

  “When will I leave here to go and live at Westmorland, Aunt Margaret?” I asked each and every morning. “When, when, when?”

  “Oh, for the love of God!” she snapped back at me. “Anyone would think you disliked your home and family.”

  I pondered her words. The turrets at Stoneton were a little crumbly around the top, like a biscuit that you had carried in your pocket, and the gardens below were rather fuller of vegetables than pleasure grounds should really be. Yes, of course I loved this place, but it was so run-down and boring.

  Probably once I was there at Westmorland, there’d be presents like those Sir Dudley had given me every day, and no longer would I have to attend the boring daily grind of lessons in writing or housekeeping. Probably I would wear a pink gown and a tall pointed hat with a veil floating from the top of it, like the ladies did at the court of Prince Arthur. But within a week, our guests had departed, and life mysteriously seemed to have returned to its usual placid course. It was just as if Sir Dudley had never visited and my father had never nearly cried.

  Sometimes I nearly cried myself, in the grey mornings, as I woke in my same old bed to rain outside and to a long boring day of the usual lessons and tasks. I thought longingly of the pearls, the ring, and the silver brooch, taken away from me and hidden safely in a closet so that I couldn’t lose or break them. But as the weeks stretched on, I gradually returned my attention to my old doll, Sukey, to my whip, and to my little model knights. Although they were the same old toys, I did invent some new games.

  Previously, the knights had been engaged in a lengthy war against the evil bodkins, whose fortress was the sewing box. But now they preferred to rescue Sukey from the dark and powerful forces occupying the clothes chest, uniting their puny strength to carry her along upon a palanquin fashioned from a velvet cushion.

  Aunt Margaret was just as tiresome as before, lecturing me on how I was far too old to play with Sukey now.

  Along with my beloved Henny, I saw my aunt every single day. My father, on the other hand, came and went on visits as colourful but as short as the lives of the blowsy pink roses that blossomed around the pointed stone porch that led into our Great Hall. During the dreary stretches when he was away, I always told people the king was keeping him busy “at court.” Really, though, I knew that often he was only visiting our outlying estates.

  When my father was at home, my morning lessons were fun, exciting even. Sometimes he would stride in unexpectedly, dismissing Aunt Margaret. He would tell me about strange lands beyond the sea, lands from which our spices came and that were populated by men with one eye and one leg. Or sometimes he would show me his astrolabe. And now that I was betrothed, we would occasionally decipher books by putting English and Latin side by side, so that I could help my future husband with his legal affairs and his library.

  But my aunt’s lessons were a much more mundane affair, more often than not to do with the necessity of being a good Christian, giving alms to the poor, sitting up straight, and behaving correctly in company. If we did writing, I had to copy out A maid should be seen and not heard, and I was supposed to embroider the same words onto the cushion I had been working on for a good eighteen months. However hard I tried, I never got further than A maid should … I often completed it in different ways in my head, like A maid should never touch a needle or A maid should kill dragons.

  After my betrothal, I felt even more impatient than usual with Aunt Margaret’s attempts to teach me how to make cordials in our still room and cream cheeses in our dairy. She forced me to watch as again and again she and Henny turned out cordials in one, or squidgy white cheeses in the other.

  “But, Aunt,” I cried, “I’m going to be a countess very shortly. I shall have many, many women to do these jobs for me.”

  “And if you don’t know how to do things properly for yourself, Elizabeth, they will trick you and skimp you in their work,” she rapped back at me, as I swizzled the wooden dipstick in the honeypot.

  So we went steadily on through the twelve days of Christmas and through the deadest, coldest, greyest part of the Derbyshire year. The long evenings had the compensation of tales told by the fireside from long-ago times, of battles and ghosts and strange spirits of the hills. The stories were recounted to all the household servants gathered together in the Great Hall by our old men, blind Mr. Nutkin and ancient Mr. Steward, the father of the current Mr. Steward.

  When the catkins came at last, though, my father came home, and this time he had genuinely been at court and had ridden all the way from London. We were gathered outside the porch to meet him, having expected him all day.

  “News!” he said, panting, almost before he was off his horse. “In June the king is to travel on progress round the country. And he’s coming to Derbyshire!”

  Aunt Margaret had grabbed the horse’s head, even though the stable boy was ready to do it. If I didn’t know that her blood was cold, like a lizard’s, I’d have said she was excited.

  “Will he come here? Anthony! Will he come to Stoneton?”

  “Not to Stoneton,” said my father regretfully, jumping down from the saddle. He turned to pick me up round the waist and swing me up towards the sky. “But almost as good. He’s staying with the Earl of Westmorland, in his fine new house, and we’re all invited. You’re going too, Eliza, to meet the king.”

  I whooped out loud as he whooshed me through the air. When he had set me down on the ground once more, he turned to instruct the stable boy. But then, over his shoulder, almost as an afterthought, he tossed out another piece of information.

  And this was the one that really made my heart thud like the galloping hoofs of my father’s horse.

  “Of course, Eliza, you’ll meet the earl’s son. Your husband!”

  I was sick with excitement. For several days after hearing the news, I could not eat my supper or drink my bedtime milk. Henny gave a squeeze to my skinny shoulders one night as I turned away my lips from the cup. “Child, child,” she sighed. “How will you ever grow bonny and buxom if you can’t eat and drink properly?”

  I pondered her words later as I lay in the dark, and I remembered my aunt calling me a broomstick. It occurred to me for the first time that the viscount, my husband, might possibly find me unsatisfactory or disappointing. My excitement was dampened down by a thin little mist of dread.

  At last, in the first week of June, more than six months after my proxy marriage, the fine day dawned when we were to set off in our wagon. It was painted on the outside with our family’s pink rose. I knew that eventually I would grow queasy with its swaying motion, but I could not wait to climb aboard. Although I was wearing an old blue dress, I had seen Henny packing away the gold one in our t
runk. I was inside the wagon, bouncing impatiently upon my velvet seat, long before the packhorses were even loaded with our boxes.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Mistress Cox and Susan had come out into the stone courtyard to see us off, but I was too busy looking ahead and thinking about my life as a countess to acknowledge them. I’m sorry to say that I probably even neglected to respond when Mr. Nutkin and Mr. Steward called out, “God bless.”

  We travelled all day, stopping to eat pies and chicken at the house of one of my father’s tenants. I had been there before, but the second stop we made for the horses to rest was at a strange house belonging to a tenant of the earl’s. Carved into the fireplace of this farmer’s house, I spotted the bird with its open beak, and I looked forward to wearing my own similar silver brooch. I knew Aunt Margaret had it safe in our luggage, because after some considerable nagging on my part, she had shown it to me last night.

  For most of the long day’s journey, Aunt Margaret made me sit up straight. In the afternoon, though, she nodded off to sleep, and in no time at all, I was poking my head out the side of the wagon to watch the woods passing by and trying to glimpse my father riding ahead of us on his horse.

  At last, at dusk, we began to wind our way downhill through a forest, and the wagon paused. My father was calling. “Come out and stretch your legs,” he urged. “We’re nearly there, and you can see the house from here.” I fairly sprang out the door and landed on the leafy trail with an ungainly thud.

  As I straightened myself up, I saw between the trees the massive block of Westmorland House. Set in its broad valley, it looked more like a small town, with extensive gardens and outbuildings all around it, not crammed onto a hilltop like Stoneton. All the windows seemed to be open to take in the soft evening air. I could see figures walking about on the flat leads of the roof and many more in the courts and gardens below. To one side, a great red tent had been pitched, and even now men were tugging the ropes to erect another.