Maid of the King's Court Read online

  “Oh, Rosebud, you were very rash and foolish, but we will teach you to be more ladylike in time,” he said. “Now listen to me carefully.”

  He took a deep breath and put his finger under my chin. I wanted to know what he was going to say so much that I had to stop sobbing. “Little Rosebud, this matter of your marriage is a setback, but it isn’t the end of our hopes. It turns out that the Earl of Westmorland was deceived in his son. The viscount, whom you met, is a bad young man. He drinks too much and carouses, and, it turns out, he was not free to marry you.”

  I pondered the matter, but I couldn’t work it out.

  “He already had a wife. At least I will say this for the old earl — he feels himself to be deeply shamed as well. He has a daughter-in-law of whom he cannot be proud, and he is gnashing his teeth. The lady his son has secretly married is a chambermaid at an inn, I believe, and now she is demanding a high fee to dissolve the union. Despite the secrecy, I understand that it was all done quite formally with a contract.”

  “Is that how King Henry got rid of Queen Anne?” I asked. “Did he pay her to go away so he could marry Queen Jane?”

  I was thinking that perhaps my husband would likewise need to manage matters so that our own marriage would be valid after all.

  “Eliza!” my father said sternly. “It’s dangerous to speak of the old queen now. She had her head cut off for witchcraft and treason. You must never, ever make the same mistake. Thunder rolls around the throne.”

  “Will I have my head cut off for climbing up onto the roof?”

  Now he even laughed. It was a sound I had almost forgotten, for I had not heard it for many weeks. “Rosebud, Rosebud,” he said. “Listen to me. The important thing to realise is that you are not married to the Earl of Westmorland’s son.”

  Only then, I think, did I truly begin to believe it. A worm of disappointment uncurled inside me, a malign sensation reaching up from my stomach and down my arms to my fingers. I crushed them into fists to brace myself.

  “We were tricked, and the earl himself was tricked by his evil and lascivious son. But you are not ready for marriage either. Your behaviour at Westmorland House has shown that you are not learning everything that you ought to here, all alone, at Stoneton. You will be going away shortly, to live with other people in the south. You are not going to be a countess. Instead, you are going to school.”

  I stared at him, unable to take it in. I was to be sent away from Stoneton — to school? Surely that was impossible!

  “Yes, I know,” my father said, as my mouth opened and shut silently, like a fish. It was so quiet I could almost hear the dew falling around us on the grass.

  “I know you want jewels,” he continued, “and servants and not to do your lessons. I know all that.” He took my two hands and gave them a squeeze, and smiled, a little sadly. “I wanted all those things too. But they don’t just fall into your lap. And I hope that once you are away from your home, you might appreciate it more.”

  At that he rose and folded up his letter and gave me a little shove to go back indoors. The garden was growing dusky. “Bedtime!” he said, as if I were still just a baby.

  Back in my bedchamber, I found that Henny knew all about it. “Your father and your aunt have decided that you are going to live with a relation of yours,” she told me, “the Duchess of Northumberland.”

  As so often with Henny, she was folding my clothes as she talked. There was something comforting about her slow, repetitive movements. I sank onto my bed to listen.

  “She is a very old lady, far too old for anyone to remember exactly when she was born. It must have been, I don’t know, before the ending of the Wars of the Roses. She is admired and respected, I think, in the county of Hertfordshire, and she has so many children and grandchildren that her house is a kind of school. She employs teachers there for all her children’s children.”

  At the word “teachers,” I sucked in my breath and opened my mouth to complain. But Henny quickly went on.

  “Lots of the girls there will be your relations, Eliza, and you will soon settle in and learn to love them.”

  “But, Henny,” I asked desperately, “who will look after me? What will it be like?”

  “Child!” Henny laughed and turned to dump a great pile of sheets into my arms. “I don’t know. I’ve never been out of Derbyshire myself.” Then she must have spotted my miserable face, and she softened her tone. “But you’re my own little flaming firebrand, aren’t you?” she said. “You can look after yourself! Now put these in the linen press, my love, and then get into bed.”

  Of course I knew that I would hate it. How could I go from being singular, special, and unique, the heiress to a noble family, to being just one more among the duchess’s grandchildren and their cousins? I despised my father and aunt, and Henny too, for their lack of understanding, and I screamed and railed for many days before I finally and sullenly gave in and accepted that I had no power of refusal.

  I could see that my aunt Margaret was tired almost to distraction by my dramatic carryings-on.

  “Now, child,” she said one day as we sat at our needlework in the Great Chamber, “there are many benefits to your going to the duchess’s household. You will see how a great establishment works and how people behave in good society.”

  Instead of responding to her, I feinted at an imaginary enemy with my dagger (or spindle).

  “Listen to me, Elizabeth!” she tried again. “You will learn polished manners and make good friends to help you in the future.”

  The hank of thread suddenly detached itself from my spindle and fell to the floor in a mess. With a loud sigh, I also hurled down the spindle itself.

  Aunt Margaret’s uncanny ability to be in two places at the same time came into play once again, and a harsh hand unexpectedly slapped the back of my head and made me yelp. “Now pick up that thread and sort it out,” she said. “The most important lesson that you’ll learn from the duchess is that you are not the centre of God’s world. You need to lose those headstrong ways.”

  So it was that a few months later, after my thirteenth birthday, Henny and I were once again setting out on a journey. But this time we would be travelling much farther, into an entirely new part of England. And this time there was nothing to look forward to at the other end.

  There was sourness in my final parting with my aunt and father, and I turned my face away and refused to answer when they tried to kiss me goodbye. I climbed in the wagon as fast as I could, just as I had when we had gone to Westmorland. But this time I did so because I wanted to crouch down on the floor and hide my face in the velvet seat. I no longer wanted to see my much-loved Stoneton, swathed now in autumn mist, a place that evidently I was no longer considered good enough to inhabit. And I had no intention of meeting the eyes of the father who had sent me away.

  Worst of all, I could tell that Henny was disappointed in me. As our litter lurched into queasy motion, I could see that she regretted my refusal to say goodbye properly to those who had loved and looked after me for my whole life.

  Only ten minutes later, when tears began silently to trickle down my face, did she hold out her hand to pass me something. Something soft. It was Sukey. The poor ragged old doll was a pitiful sight, but dear Henny had brought her along to try to cheer me up.

  “Oh, Henny!” I choked. Clutching Sukey to my chest, I turned to Henny and pressed my teary face into my nurse’s lap. “My mother would not have sent me away.”

  “Hush, hush, Eliza,” Henny said. “Your father and aunt do love you, you know,” she murmured into my ear. I lay there, while she stroked my hair for many hours as we travelled south.

  During this journey we made together, she told me things that I will remember and hold dear for the rest of my life. She told me that my father and aunt were only acting for the best. She reassured me that they had been as hurt as I had by the failure of my marriage with the Earl of Westmorland’s son, and that they wanted to find me a rich, powerful husband, to whom
I would bear many children and live with in great comfort. To meet such a man, who was probably to be found at court, I needed to learn the art of pleasing, to be able to meet strangers with ease, and to live pleasantly with other people. There was no other way for people like my father and my aunt and me. We had to do our duty so that other folk, like Henny herself, would have somewhere like Stoneton, a safe place in which to live. And Henny herself told me that she was grateful and proud of me.

  “Eliza, little Eliza!” she said. “I do love you as if you were my own girl, and it will break my heart to leave you in the south and travel back to Stoneton without you.”

  I learned later that Henny should not have said these things, and that generally it is wrong and against the order of things decreed by God and nature for a servant to speak in such a way. But at Stoneton matters were arranged differently. At Stoneton we all trusted each other, and although I have no brothers or sisters, I felt that everyone there was part of my family. Only in the big wide world beyond Stoneton’s walls was I to learn that masters and servants sometimes hate and fear each other.

  That night we slept in an inn, and I was so tired after my tears and our travel that I slept like a carved stone sleeper on a tomb in a church.

  In the days that followed, we began to pass through towns larger than I had ever seen before, and rich tawny fields with fat brown cattle rather than sheep. We encountered creaking carts piled high with hay, and occasionally a great flock of geese being driven to market and completely blocking the road. Our wagon, with its coronet and the Camperdowne pink rose painted on its side, always let people know that we were gentlefolk, and the other traffic had to get out of our way. If there was any delay, our footman let loose with a volley of curses.

  Once, a masterless man with a bristly face and ragged clothes reached up to our vehicle and banged on its side, shouting out that he wanted “Alms, for God’s sake, some alms.” But our footman leapt down with his stick to clear the vagrant away. Another time, outside an inn, a woman carrying a rolled-up quilt came over and showed me the wonderful coloured ribbons she had wrapped up inside it. But when Henny noticed, she spoke with uncharacteristic sharpness.

  “We will save our money, thank you, madam!”

  On the fifth day of travel, my eyes and ears felt sated with new sights and sounds, and Henny told me we were now in the county of Hertfordshire. We passed through a paling into a park of tall trees, broad enormous oaks in their autumn plumage of bronze, quite unlike the rather scraggy trees of Stoneton.

  In the middle of this park was set a garden, with beds of lavender and hedges of box, a fountain and a great cage full of singing birds. And in the middle of the garden was something I’d never seen: a house built out of oak. It was called Trumpton Hall. My new home.

  Henny and I climbed out of our litter, and a great number of maidservants and menservants seemed to materialise from behind the neatly clipped hedges to take our boxes and to show us to a room with a bowl of water and a polished mirror before meeting the duchess.

  The house was snug and pleasantly scented inside. It had timber floors that moved a little as you walked and groaned as does — I imagine — the inside of a ship.

  After we had washed and taken a drink, and Henny had knelt before me to straighten my dress, the oldest and sternest of the maids came to fetch us. The maid led us — me in front, Henny following — up a wide staircase. The light was red and blue from the coloured glass in the small panes of the windows. I could not help caressing the tail of a finely carved wooden leopard standing upon the turning of the bannisters. He was elegant and aloof, but extremely beautiful too. As I looked around, unwilling to leave him behind, I saw Henny give me an encouraging smile, and I almost smiled back.

  We came out into the Great Chamber at the top of the stairs, which was filled with a rainbow of light from more stained glass. Painted upon its plaster walls were a wonderful unicorn in a forest and a walrus in an ocean.

  But the unicorn and the walrus weren’t the strangest creatures in that room. It was full of a noisy, chattering crowd of creatures I had never encountered before.

  They were other girls.

  I later learned that there were eight of them, but at first sight there seemed like many more, both big and small, talking with each other and running about. First one, then another, noticed me, and they all fell silent and stared. Henny whispered to me to curtsey and say my name. But first one of them, and then another, started to giggle.

  “She’s brought her Nursey!” said one of the girls.

  “Nursey, Nursey!” called another. “Wipe my nosey, Nursey!”

  “And, Nursey, I’ve hurt my finger!” shouted another.

  “And, Nursey, be quick, I need the poo!” yelled a fourth over the growing sound of laughing and jeering. All the rest of them whooped and clapped. For a moment I wished the floor would open and swallow me. Through the hand she had on my shoulder, though, I could feel Henny stiffen, and on her behalf I found my courage.

  “Do not be so rude to my tiring woman!” I snapped out, copying my father’s most commanding voice.

  “Oh, the little madam has a tiring woman, has she?” cooed one of the biggest girls, who came forward, hands upon her hips and swinging her skirt. She had a heavy jaw, but with her big eyes, she was utterly beautiful. “She’s also got the carroty hair of the bastard daughter of the old Queen Anne. Are you illegitimate too, like her, my lady Carrot Top?”

  I began to shake with rage. “I am far too well born to consort with the likes of you, you … cow!”

  The word seemed both offensive and somehow accurate. Her eyes were so large and liquid, and her face so broad, even though she seemed to brim over with a luscious, milky beauty.

  Indeed, I scored something of a point. One of the girls from the back let out a low “Moooo!”

  The big girl turned angrily towards the miscreant, and I took the opportunity to replant the soles of my feet on the floor, glance at Henny, and take a deep breath to prepare for the next round.

  There was to be no more sparring or teasing, however, because now the inner door flew open. Out came more maids. All the girls instantly turned to face the doorway and fell into a deep curtsey. The big, beautiful girl’s demeanour had completely changed. No longer saucy and bossy, she was almost on the floor in the most graceful and submissive obeisance I had ever seen.

  I was still so confused and hurt, though, that I failed to bob down, and when the Duchess of Northumberland came in, I was the only one left standing, staring like an awkward lonely stork. Only at Henny’s urgent whisper did I clumsily sink to my knees.

  “Elizabeth Camperdowne!”

  The old duchess — white-haired but spritely, leaning on a long white stick — called out my name in a clipped voice, somehow making it sound strange rather than familiar. “Welcome to Trumpton Hall!”

  At that moment, I felt I would rather be anywhere else in the world.

  How hard I wept when Henny had to leave the next morning. I clung to her arms so that she gently had to prise my fingers free. Once my father’s wagon had departed through the woods and I could no longer see it, I felt that I might creep off and die somewhere by myself, like a very old dog. But there was nowhere I could go to be alone. Everywhere I went there were faces: cruel faces, yes, and one or two kindly ones as well. But all were nosy, their mouths asking constant questions.

  It took me a long time to get straight all my relations at Trumpton Hall. The old duchess was rarely seen by the maidens, as we were called. If one of us heard her long white stick tapping along the passage as she came towards our chamber, there would be a sharp hiss of “The duchess!” Dice would be hidden, beds would be covered up, books snapped shut, and caps clapped back onto heads.

  The eight other young ladies in the household were there, like me, to learn a little polish. We all slept together in the big attic room called “the maidens’ chamber.” From the duchess, who was grandmother to three of the girls, we would hear lengthy disco
urses on genealogy and the manner in which all of our families interlinked. Thus I learned that I was related to Katherine Howard, the boldest and buxomest among us, who had been so cruel to me upon my arrival. I also learned that there were many more families in England than I had thought.

  “So you two are cousins!” said the duchess to us, her oldest and her newest students. She was concluding an explanation of a long parchment scroll with all the names of her relatives written in coloured ink and their coats of arms painted below them.

  “Cousins!” Katherine exclaimed. “But I have never heard of the family of … what is it? Camden?”

  “It’s Camperdowne!” I cried out, dismayed. “The oldest family in Derbyshire!” And I stabbed with my finger at the pink rose beneath my father’s name on the scroll.

  “I cry you mercy,” she said. “There are so many families nearer the king whose names we have had to memorise.”

  I turned to the duchess, expecting her to chastise her granddaughter for her rudeness, but a little smile flickered across her dry old face, almost as if she were amused by her star pupil’s put-down.

  The other girls had also looked to the duchess for a cue. They now turned towards me as if controlled by one mind, and each of them scorched me with a pursed, fake-looking smile of her own.

  I looked down at my hands and sincerely swore to myself that one day I, too, would have a phalanx of ladies-in-waiting all of my own, who would smile like sour lemons at my enemies and make them feel as uncomfortable as I was feeling now.

  But it wasn’t all bad, even though I was reluctant to admit it in the letters I wrote home to my family at Stoneton. From our dancing master, Monsieur Bleu, we learned the galliard, the deep court curtsey, and the best way to run in slippers while gracefully trailing a gauzy scarf. We learned that we should skip towards a gentleman as if we couldn’t wait to meet him, at the same time divesting ourselves of a glove or a kerchief, garments that he would consider decorative but unnecessary.