Ladies in Waiting (15 page)

She sidled closer and looked up at Eliza, evidently the leader of the rubes, and therefore, in her vast experience, keeper of the fattest purse. “I have a treat for you, a rare pastry, soft and buttery, a bun as yet untorn. Are you in the mood for a delicious little morsel, noble sir?” It never hurt to flatter the yeomanry with a grant of rank. “She’s virgin and clean, I trow, natural daughter of a nobleman who left her to my tender care. She’s been like a daughter to me, but even a daughter must earn her keep when she comes of age. What say you, sir? Do you fancy the taste of ginger? She’s sharp, but if there’s ever a one to tame her, it’s a strapping buck like yourself. Or perhaps another of these gentlemen? Her honor is yours for . . .” She reckoned up their clothes, their lace, their swords, and said with confidence, “Fifty pounds!”

The girls looked at each other uncertainly. They all wanted to leave now, slip out while their companions were otherwise occupied (and occupying) and make their way back to Whitehall.

Mother Ross wondered if they’d not been to a brothel before. Now, there’s an idea, she thought. Country outposts of my establishment.

“Perhaps you’d care to step into my private chamber, and I’ll show the lady, the young lady, the child, the infant, in.” She ushered them into a room hung with deep crimson, flames flickering perilously near the loose material. “I’ll bring her in, but no sampling, mind, not without payment upfront.” She was suddenly businesslike. “Many gentlemen have been asking after her. If you don’t seal the bargain tonight, like as not the duke himself will be after her.” Which particular duke, she did not say, but implied with a significant nod that it might be the notorious Buckingham himself, or perhaps even the king’s brother, the Duke of York.

A moment later the red-haired serving girl slipped in and leaned against a chair back. “Well?” she asked, staring at them each in turn. “Which is it to be?”

“Are you the one she is selling?” the queen asked, forgetting to pitch her voice like a man’s.

“No one’s sellin’ me . . . sir,” she said with a little smirk. “Only a small part of me.” She slanted her eyes provocatively. “Very small. So, who’s the lucky gentle . . . person, eh?”

The disguised ladies looked from one to the other, torn between mirth and disgust.

“Do you mean,” Eliza asked, “that woman would actually sell the . . . honor . . . of a child your age?”

“I’m old enough,” she said, puffing out a chest that was barely there. She was in fact nearly fifteen, but her slight, lissome form helped her pass for the child so many customers favored.

“Oh, blessed Mary, we must save her,” the queen said.

Eliza sighed. “What is your name?”

“Nelly Gwynn,” she said.

“And do you want to work here? Would you rather do something else?”

“Been selling herrings. M’sister Rose has a cart, but herrings ain’t what they was.” She shook her head sadly at the thought of a world in which a herring could depreciate. “So I took to serving spirits here. But a girl must advance, and so, good sirs or whatever you may be . . .”

“You mean you really would give yourself to one of us?” Zabby asked. “For money?”

“Aye,” she said, laughing, “for all you could do to me, unless there’s something new under the sun. Wherefore do you dress like men? Are you nuns come to chastise the world’s wantons?”

“You knew?” Beth gasped.

Nell patted Beth’s cheek smartly. “Your chin’s as hairless as my . . . Ah, I’ll have done with lewdness, now the secret’s out. What’s your game, then?” She lounged in the chair, curious.

“We’ve come to see what men are like, away from us,” the queen said.

“And?”

“We find them worse, and better,” she replied.
For at least my husband would not buy a child,
she thought.
Would he?
“When we go, does another man come for you, little one?”

“Aye, tonight, tomorrow. Such is life.” She shrugged her skinny shoulders.

The queen called her ladies to her and consulted them in hushed tones.
Oh, my,
Beth said.
But we cannot save them all,
Zabby protested. Eliza chuckled, shook her head, and said that they might as well be hung for this lamb as a piece of mutton, and took something from the queen.

“Here you go, sweetheart,” Eliza said, tossing her a glittering emerald ring. “From my mistress. Don’t go pawning it, or flashing it around. It’s your chastity belt, until such time as you have another dwelling. If any fellow offers you insult, show him that and tell him you’re under the queen’s protection.”

“Gemini!” Nell said, privately thinking that she’d yet to hear the offer she found insulting.

“Though officially I suppose you’ll be under
my
protection. Tell your bawd you have a keeper and you’re off the lists. Tomorrow we’ll find a place for you.”

And so, the queen and her maids of honor found they’d acquired a collective mistress.

They might not have been so concerned for Nell’s virtue had they known that, with the judicious use of alum and a sponge soaked in sheep’s blood, her virginity had been sold three times in the last week alone.

Eliza, under the name of Duncan, took a pretty set of rooms over the Cock and Pie Tavern at the end of Maypole Alley, just a stroll away from where Killigrew was supervising the construction of his new theater on Drury Lane.

The girls fretted over Nell as if she were a pet spaniel. Zabby thought she should have plain, serviceable linsey-woolsey clothes, to help her avoid temptation, while Beth wanted to dress her like a doll. The queen sent her a gilded diptych of the Virgin and the Magdalene, so she’d have before her examples of purity and repentance. Eliza, more practical, brought in masters to teach her fashionable speech, dancing, singing, the Spanish guitar.

And like a spaniel, Nell had only to implore prettily to get her way. She complained of being lonely, and after some resistance they let her sister Rose call on her.

“But mind you, you’re a kept miss now,” Eliza said. “No gentlemen visitors.”

A week after giving Killigrew her play, Eliza had met with him again, still in masculine guise, strolling with him as he shouted instructions to laborers at the new theater. He decided to produce her play—with a few alterations—and took the promising lad he too knew as Duncan under his wing. Eliza snuck out to meet him at least twice a week, and she used Nell’s rooms as her headquarters. Eventually, she invited Killigrew to meet her pretty mistress, and Rose happened to stop by with a friend from Madame Ross’s, then Charles Hart and Walter Clun came in search of Killigrew, and it became a regular party, with oysters and a venison pie ordered from Odam’s Ordinary (which turned out to be quite good, despite what Sedley had said). Before long, Duncan and Nell were a popular couple among the actors and demimonde. Nell’s wit remained cleverly coarse, but now it sparkled with Latin and French and court gossip. Eliza was living, firsthand, the decadent life she wrote about.

Zabby and Beth disapproved—Beth on the grounds of propriety, Zabby on those of her friend’s best interests. “What will your father say if he knows you’re consorting with whores and players and writing for the theater?”

“People don’t talk about what they don’t know about,” Eliza replied, supremely confident.

The queen knew nothing of this, but freely allowed her maid of honor to visit their rescued virgin.

“And how does our pretty, pure Nell this night?” Catherine asked when Eliza, a bit tipsy, snuck back into Whitehall near midnight one evening.

“Oh, her singing improves immensely, as does her dancing. I watched her practice for many hours.”

“Good, good,” Catherine replied drowsily as her maid of honor, now in a bodice and skirt but smelling of tobacco, undressed her hair. “In a few years we will find her a suitable husband. It is a fine act of charity, is it not?”

“Indeed, Your Majesty.”

She did not mention that Nell had been dancing a sarabande on a tabletop for a cheering crowd of players, whores, and poets, or that the songs she sang were lusty street ballads.
The world is what it is,
Eliza thought, and she rather liked it that way.

Chapter 12

The Girl Who Says No

C
HRISTMAS WAS A TIME
at which the court honored the birth of their savior by showing off their choicest silks and most costly jewels, and by concocting merry hijinks and amateur theatricals. They played children’s games, groping each other in blind man’s buff, and concluded with the merry pastime of slip-the-marriage-vow in dark corners and private rooms.

The queen kept a smile tacked onto her face as maids of honor to her and her sister-in-law Anne frolicked in a mummery of pastoral seduction, ending with Winifred Wells dancing the fashionable new minuet with a pillow stuffed under her skirts. There were uncouth shrieks of laughter when her gravid stuffing became dislodged, and Buckingham solemnly declared the pillow a stillbirth and handed it to the king for dissection in his elaboratory.

Catherine had been married seven months and still had not conceived.

“Charles’s own mother did not bear a living child until she’d been four years wed,” Beth said softly when she saw how much the girls’ tomfoolery affected her queen, and how well she hid it. “Then see how many babes she had? There is time aplenty, Your Majesty.”

“So says the witch under the stones,” Catherine said. “Yet every day is torture.”

Across the room, Barbara was eyeing the giddy young girls with indolent superiority. She was pregnant again, standing with her hips thrust forward to emphasize the barely visible bump. Though her husband, Palmer, had made a pretense of claiming the first two, he’d rarely been within fifty leagues of his wife in the last year, and the king was already acknowledging the unborn child as his own, fondling her stomach in public, saying he fancied this name or that. To the world, she was absolutely secure in her position as
maitresse-en-titre,
the official mistress of the king, but she was always keenly alert to anything that might change her fortunes.

Zabby came reluctantly to the king’s presence chamber from the elaboratory, where she’d been puzzling once more over the Lucifer light. The German alchemist had told them, after the king’s jocular threats (for who can ever be sure if a king is in jest, when he laughingly threatens to hang you for treason?), that it was composed from the substance of the human body, showing that the light of the soul glows from even the basest matter. Pursuing it later, they captured Zabby’s breath in a glass balloon. They waylaid the Duke of York’s physician after the unpopular heir’s quarterly bleeding. They’re framed from collecting feces, thinking no element of the soul would choose to reside in such an odiferous substance, but set aside several basins of the royal urine. Zabby had been scraping the salts left after evaporation, but a servant rapped on the door and summoned her before she could decide how to proceed. The queen was adamant that all of her attendants enjoy themselves on Christmas day, whether they wanted to or not.

Zabby came through the door and lingered, her mind still in the elaboratory, not noticing who was standing beside her until it was too late to leave without giving dire offense.

“You smell of piss,” Barbara said. Zabby owned privately that it was probably true and bit back her sharp retort. “Is that what you get up to with him, then? I still can’t fathom you, miss, but I don’t fear you. Ah, you should have heard the wagging tongues when you appeared from over the sea, trapping him in that inn with your perverse lust, but I always knew he’d return to me. I have what I need of him, and he of me, and no doxy of the moment will interfere with that.”

She slid her eyes sidelong at Zabby. “D’you know, since you’ve arrived he’s been another man entirely. Calmer and sharper all at once. You must suck some poisonous humor out of him, eh? He used to rise, nights, in my bedroom, and pace for an hour, muttering to himself, but now he sleeps like a babe till sunrise. If you did that to him, my thanks.”

“You really care for him, then?” Zabby asked the older woman skeptically.

She laughed, sharp and strident, and not a few heads turned and marveled that the rivals for the king’s scepter were closed in conversation. “Does it matter one whit? He’s the king, you chit, and I’d act the same whether I despised him or adored him. Oh, don’t look so shocked. You’d be doing . . . whatever it is you do for him in that stinking magician’s lair of his . . . even if he was a poxed-up blubberous lout, because he’s the king.” Her voice softened and her eyes half closed in what Zabby realized, with a jealousy that made her want to claw the other woman’s face, was a memory of ecstatic passion. “Lucky for me—for us—he’s handsome and considerate and fashioned like Old Rowley himself.” She winked at Zabby, and the girl blushed, hating Barbara but coming closer than she believed possible to liking her too, because of her obvious deep affection for the king.

“No, you don’t worry me one jot,” Barbara continued after a moment. She flicked out her fan and covered her face as she spoke, so only Zabby could see where she looked. “I scent a storm in the air. Do you see that pretty little piece of insipidity there?”

Zabby followed her gaze and saw the newest maid of honor, a girl about her own age who had served the king’s beloved sister Minette in Paris: Frances Stewart. Zabby didn’t have a high opinion of her—the girl had an annoyingly high-pitched giggle and childishly skipping movements, and enjoyed such pastimes as blowing bubbles and crafting houses of cards. Zabby thought she might even be simple, and as much as she pondered her at all, thought only that it was lucky the girl was pretty, because she certainly couldn’t make her mark any other way.

At the moment she was dancing with Charles, or rather, he was trying to entice her into a dance and she was tripping away like a tipsy wood-nymph.

“I give you advice from one whore to another, Zabby,” Barbara said lightly. “Never trouble yourself over the girls who say yes. They’re a dozen to the half crown, everywhere, like slugs on a rhubarb. A man wants a yes, aye, but he needs more than that, and that’s what we can give him.
Nulla puella negat,
” she added, surprising Zabby, who didn’t realize it was only a common saying: No girl says no.