Maid of the King's Court Read online

  We all learned to sing, although Anne Sweet, the youngest of us all, was the only one with a truly sweet voice. A little Italian was required, along with some light mathematics. All the girls were hoping to live at court some day, and we were told that many of the king’s gentlemen there liked to dabble in astrology and science. We should be able to listen intelligently to their explanations of their discoveries.

  “You were so quick!” said Anne Sweet to me one morning after we had taken our turn with the astrolabe and passed it on to our classmates. “How did you know how to use it? You must have done it before!”

  Then I told her that my mother had died without having provided me with any brothers, and that my father had therefore taught me things that the other girls had no need to know. “I am the future of my family,” I told her. “There’s only me to carry on the line.”

  “Oh, Eliza!” said Anne. “You’re so brave!” To my annoyance, the old, shortened version of my name seemed to have followed me here to Trumpton Hall. But Anne’s chubby lips had fallen open into such a heartfelt “oh” of sympathy that I could not bring myself to tell her to call me “Elizabeth.” Her very admiration made me sit up straighter in my chair.

  But I was far behind Anne and the rest when it came to the lessons in beauty that we would take from the duchess’s old waiting woman. “You’ve never used face powder?” Anne squealed, when I first confessed this. “What was your mother thinking of?”

  Then the penny dropped as she remembered what I’d told her. Her cheeks turned crimson, and her mouth fell open once again. “Oh! Eliza! Forgive me!”

  Full of apologies, she bustled me off to the dressing table in the corner of the maidens’ chamber and sat me down amid the pots and jars.

  “This is what you need to make your skin milky white,” she said, dabbing at my cheeks with the white furry paw of a rabbit dipped in what looked like face powder. “Well, it’s only fine white bread flour,” she said in a rush, as if honesty compelled her to admit it, “but face powder does look like this. And here”— she handed me a cockle shell, in which nestled a sticky blob of red —“is cochineal. It’s for the lips.”

  Using a finger, I carefully coated my mouth, pouting this way and that.

  “Ooh, how adorable!” It was Katherine, coming into the room behind us and strolling over to watch, hands on her hips as usual. “The little girls are playing at being fine court ladies.”

  This made me whistle out a harrumph, and I gave her a hostile glare. But I could see that Katherine was interested in the tools and tinctures on the table. Perhaps the art of makeup was a skill worth acquiring after all. Annoyingly, Katherine was so pretty that I couldn’t help admiring her a little. I could also tell, through Anne’s delighted wriggles, that she, too, was basking in the attention of the queen of Trumpton Hall.

  “Don’t ask what this red stuff’s made of,” Katherine said, picking up the cockle shell in a majestic manner and applying a little to her own top lip. It had a deep curved shape to it that looked splendid picked out in red. “It’s better not to know.”

  But this I could not bear.

  “Katherine!” I cried. “Oh, do tell. I can’t stand a mystery.”

  She knelt down beside me and put her face close to my own. “Well,” she said slowly, “you did ask. I won’t be held responsible. But my mother told me that it’s made of the bodies of rare beetles, crushed up.”

  The thought almost made me gag. Shrieking, I wiped the red from my mouth as quickly as I could with a napkin. I felt physically sick.

  “What are you laughing at, Anne?” I cried. “Beetles! That’s disgusting!”

  “But, Eliza,” said Anne, “it’s so funny. You look exactly like my baby brother when he’s been caught eating jam without bread. There’s red all over your face.”

  Eventually, infected by their laughter, my own lips first wobbled, then giggled all by themselves. “Well, then,” I said. “When I’m a fine court lady, I’m just going to use jam to stain my lips, not horrible beetles.”

  At this Katherine stood up and tousled my hair. “That’s an excellent thought,” she said. “Tasty lips. They’d be nice to kiss too.”

  I reminded myself that I disliked Katherine, but I could tell from Anne’s proud nod that having had her spend time with us at the dressing table was something of a privilege.

  “See you later, Carrot Top,” Katherine said, as she swept swiftly out of the room.

  Once again I inwardly gnashed my teeth. I was fed up with gibes about my red hair, even though Anne always came to my defence and did so now.

  “The king himself has red hair,” she said to me, “so I don’t know how people can say that red hair means you’ve been taken by the devil. If it were true, it would apply to the king as well!”

  “And, anyway,” I said grumpily, trying to put my hair straight where Katherine had messed with it, “I would not care if the devil came to get me. I would kick him in the shins.”

  I was grateful to Anne and did my best to be proud of my distinctive hair. It had seemed so fine and bold back at Stoneton, but now I was in the south, I had secretly begun to wish that I had dark curling hair, blue eyes, full lips, and, above all, a bonny buxom chest like Katherine’s.

  Anne also showed me the art of positioning the hoods we had to wear so that a gentleman would notice the vulnerable nape of our necks from behind. “If we expose our necks,” Anne said, “old Abigail says that a gentleman will feel a strange compulsion to place his hand upon them, and that will give him a pleasant feeling of great power.”

  Her message was reinforced by Abigail, the duchess’s elderly waiting woman, in person. In her lessons, she constantly thrust an unfortunate analogy down our throats with respect to our deportment. “Imagine the trembling deer in the woods!” she would beg us in her quavering voice, gesturing with her hands like a dying swan. “Tremble, tremble, and offer up your neck as if it could be snapped in an instant!”

  Her unfortunate imagery and choice of words made us call Abigail “Old Trembles” among ourselves. But the graceful extension of our necks for the wearing of future coronets was a lesson we all enjoyed.

  The best lessons of all, and the ones in which I first began to enjoy myself at Trumpton Hall, were our studies in writing and in the notation of music. Master Manham, our teacher for these subjects, wasn’t old like Monsieur Bleu, but young and very well shaped indeed. All of us considered ourselves to be in love with him. At night in the maidens’ chamber, when we were all in bed but not yet asleep, one of us would describe how nicely his calves filled his stockings. Or another would claim he had slipped her an extra plum under the table during dinner.

  At first I would lie quietly on my little low bed and merely listen to the competitive outpourings about Master Manham. As time went on, though, I found that meek Anne Sweet’s questions about my family and my home helped to melt away my reserve. And I found that I wanted the other girls to know that I had some personal experience with men and with love. After all, I had been betrothed.

  I told Anne the whole story one afternoon when we were by ourselves, and in the evening she begged me to tell the story again to the maidens’ chamber in general.

  “What?” gasped Juliana. “You are betrothed already? You are very young for that, Eliza.”

  “Yes, indeed,” I said casually. “I was all set to become a countess. It was nothing to me really, as the title of Westmorland is much less ancient than my own family’s.”

  But Katherine was too sharp to let it rest at that. “You said you were betrothed,” she pointed out. “But you didn’t say you are betrothed. What happened? Was it broken off?”

  “Yes, there was … an administrative hitch.”

  “He wanted a wife with a proper bosom, more like,” snorted Alice, another girl who was in cahoots with Katherine. She even managed to roll over in her bed in a dismissive manner.

  “Actually, Eliza was too good for him.” It was Anne’s clear piping voice. “And her father
realised it. She will hold out for a better offer than a viscount.”

  She had the attention of the room.

  “Eliza told me this in confidence,” Anne went on, “and I know she is too modest to tell you all. But I feel you should know the truth.”

  I blessed my loyal Anne and silently blew her a kiss through the dark. I wished I had never mentioned the business of the Earl of Westmorland’s son, which did me no credit at all, but dear Anne had painted it in the best possible colours.

  I also promised myself to speak less of my family and its antiquity, and to think a little more of trying to make my cousins like me. For sometimes, as I lay alone and full of pride, I felt jealous of their pillow fights and their discussions of which stable boy was the most handsome.

  Of course I would do my duty at court, when the time came. That would involve winning the richest and highest-ranking husband, and making him fall in love with me rather than with Alice or Juliana. But here at Trumpton, I thought it could not hurt me, sometimes, to be a bit more like them.

  But then came my great setback. The heat of the afternoon one Sunday forced us to come indoors from the garden. Everyone was arguing over which room downstairs would be coolest for our Bible reading. As they tried out one room and then another, I ran upstairs to use the privy in the tiny closet off our maidens’ chamber.

  Before I had finished, though, I heard Katherine and one of the other girls entering the room, clearly thinking themselves to be alone. I dared not step forth once they had begun to converse.

  “Little Carrot Top has left her things in a mess again, I see!” called out Juliana, and I had a horrible feeling that she might have been fiddling or tweaking with my bedcovers or my underclothes. I must admit I had left them in some disorder.

  “Quite! She thinks that she’s far too good for the rest of us,” came Katherine’s languid reply. “What a lazy little snob! She thinks she’s so grand that she doesn’t need to keep her stuff tidy, but the funniest thing is that she doesn’t realise what a comical rustic she sounds like, with her north country accent.”

  My hands clenched themselves into fists, and the pit of my belly dropped down towards the floor. While I had warmed to Anne Sweet and even sometimes to Alice, I wasn’t sure what to think about Katherine, our natural leader. I hid my feelings behind a mask of hostility, but in truth, I found her glamorous. Secretly, I would have liked sometimes to be petted and made much of by her, as Anne often was.

  “It’s hilarious to hear her prattling endlessly about that ratty old castle of hers, all in the tongue of a farmhand,” said Juliana.

  “And then she follows Master Manham round like a sad little spaniel,” said Katherine, beginning to laugh. “I’m sure he doesn’t notice, but it’s so humiliating. It would be a kind deed to tell her. I’m almost tempted to teach her a lesson myself.”

  How unfair! I nearly burst out of the privy to have it out with her, but then I remembered how dreadful it would be if they knew that I was eavesdropping. In my uncertainty, I shifted upon my seat and a floorboard groaned. It sounded as loud as a cannon. I froze.

  Luckily, the stable lads chose that moment to bring one of the horses into the yard below our window, and the distracting noises from outside saved me from detection.

  “Indeed, she thinks she knows it all!” Katherine now ran on. “But I know for a fact that despite her talk of grand marriages and alliances, she understands nothing about how to win a husband and make him happy.”

  I frowned.

  I had to admit to myself that my habit of showing off about my family’s grandeur was unattractive.

  But I also wondered if there were some arcane lessons in making a man fall in love with you that Katherine and the older girls had learned, and that I had not. Perhaps these were the lessons given privately by the duchess herself, in the evenings after dinner, when only a few chosen older girls were invited to withdraw with her into her own chamber.

  At the same time, though, I was relieved to hear Katherine and Juliana clattering out of the room in their leather slippers, with the workbox or book or whatever it was they had sought, and slamming the door behind them. I crept out of my humiliating hiding place and lay down upon the unmade nest of my bed.

  What does she know, anyway? I thought. I rolled on my side, letting a hot tear spill down my cheek and soak into my pillow. I bet I do know more than her about how to make a man happy.

  While all the girls claimed to be passionately in love with Master Manham, our music master, I had reason to believe that among all the girls at Trumpton, he liked me best of all.

  When eventually it all came out, it was said that the old duchess had been very short-sighted — as indeed she was, tapping away with her white stick. But that’s not what they meant. They meant that she had failed to see what kind of behaviour was going on in her very own house, beneath her very own pointy aristocratic nose.

  With Master Manham, it began like this. I went, as usual, to the closet for my lute lesson. Now, for a well-born young lady to be all alone with a man, even a servant of a rank lower than her own, everyone knows that it should not happen.

  But at Trumpton that’s how all of us girls had our individual music lessons, with Master Manham, in the little painted closet upstairs. And everyone knows too that closets are rooms where secrets should be kept safe. One secret that had somehow slipped out of this particular closet during the course of someone’s lesson was Master Manham’s Christian name, and we all learned that it was Francis. A scratched “F” appeared on the diamondshaped pane of one of the windows of the maidens’ chamber, with a raggedy heart drawn around it.

  One day I was in the closet at my lute lesson with Trumpton Hall’s most popular teacher, and we were playing the song “Oh, My Love.” I have not got a beautiful clear singing voice like Anne’s, but most of the teachers at Trumpton had by now told me that I am quick-witted. This was news. Our more formal lessons seemed easy to me, but I’d assumed that was because I had already covered many of their topics with my father. Anyway, it seemed to me simple stuff to write a tune down upon my page, and then to play it, my fingers moving almost mechanically up and down the lute’s board.

  “Oh, my love,” I warbled, sounding more than a little like a mewling cat. I never attempted to sing well in my lessons. I’m afraid that if I cannot excel, I am often guilty of not attempting a task at all. In fact, I usually succeeded in yowling so badly that Master Manham laughed and begged me to stop, and then I would distract him from the lesson with chat instead.

  “Oh, my beauty,” I continued, as the song dictated. At that, Master Ginger, the household’s orange tom, suddenly put his face around the door, for all the world as if I had summoned him in cat language.

  Master Manham and I both burst out laughing at the same time. Master Ginger, with his ears raggedy from fighting, was the very opposite of beautiful.

  “Oh dear, he took my singing for that of a lady cat!”

  This started Master Manham off once more, and I had to join in, a little ruefully. As our giggles subsided, Master Manham stepped close to me. “Never mind,” he said more seriously. “You may not have a beautiful voice, but you have a gift for musical composition. As does the king himself.”

  He did not ask me to play on. I wondered what he was waiting for.

  When he spoke next, it was in much quieter tones. “And you have such pretty dimples too!” he said.

  I felt myself blushing and hung my head to hide it. He said this kind of thing quite often, to many of the girls. But then his smile faded. Dipping his own head to meet my averted gaze and looking at me intently, he placed his hand over my fingers as if to reposition them on the lute. “Oh, my beauty,” he said, looking into my eyes.

  I stared back, transfixed. His eyes were a warm brown and lay beneath an adorable curl of auburn hair that sprang from his forehead. I felt, as I had often done before, an absurd desire to smooth it flat with my hand. One of the reasons I liked him was that his hair, although darker,
was so close to the colour of my own. But I sat quite still, and my insides suddenly turned to a jelly junket. He seemed close, far too close to me. I lowered my eyes. The room had grown very hot and still.

  All too soon, the moment had passed. Master Ginger slipped out with a parting flick of his tail, and Master Manham quickly struck up the song again, proceeding with the lesson quite as usual.

  But something had changed. That night at supper I felt myself sparkling a little more brightly than usual, and I made Anne laugh so much that most unusually the duchess herself had to tell the meek Sweet to behave in a more maidenly manner.

  All this had taken place a few weeks before I overheard Katherine and Juliana talking about me in the maidens’ chamber.

  And that very same evening, I had it triumphantly confirmed that, despite what Katherine had said, Francis Manham had special feelings for me.

  After dinner the whole household went outside. It was a balmy evening, and the big round moon hung low over the lavender bushes. All the girls took a little paper lantern, and we laughingly performed the rather fancy dance that Monsieur Bleu called “The Nine Muses.” We ourselves usually called it “The Nine Elephants” after the beasts of the forest with their long drooping noses, as we had to bow right down with an arm extended to touch the very floor. But I think that all of us, that night, for the first time appreciated the symmetry and grace of the dance. So we swayed and bowed and swung our lanterns high and low in the evening dusk.

  The duchess’s gentlemen and gentlewomen and all the other masters and mistresses burst out clapping, and we ran, our spirits high, out into the woods. It was a glorious hour, one of my best ever times at Trumpton.

  In the woods I myself began to perform a silly dance I’d made up. “I tremble, I tremble!” I sang, “I fawn, I fawn!” Matching my actions to my words, I bowed down before the fallen trunk where Katherine Howard sat. All the girls were laughing, and even she cracked a smile.

  “Oh, King Henry, King Henry,” I continued, “without you I’m forlorn. Do place your royal foot upon my gentle fawnish neck and … crush me.” It was delightful to have everyone applauding my clowning, and the goddess-like Katherine herself playfully pretended to wring my head from my neck.