After a week of polishing the silver box every night, I wrote to my mother again. Each day, I woke up certain that she would call for me that day. I filled the silver box with cherries, which were as beautiful as jewels. Then I polished each fruit until it reflected a tiny star of light. Each day, I chose a different gown – my dark blue silk taffeta, my copper-coloured shot silk, and stood patiently while my French maid tamed my hair into an orderly halo pinned high off my neck so that I could wear a wired lace collar. I spent each day trying to keep my skirt hems clean and my hair in order. I stopped visiting the stables to stroke Wainscot lest I carry back too strong a whiff of horse and stable dung.
My mother did not send for me.
One morning after breakfast, I gathered my courage and asked the Herd, as I now privately called my ladies to make them less fearsome, to tell me who attended the queen. I was startled by the rush of gossip I provoked. I saw that if I winnowed out the chaff from the malice the Herd could become unwitting intelligencers in my war on ignorance.
In one voice, they all agreed. The lady to petition was Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Another Harington, Lord Harington’s daughter, though seldom seen at Combe.
She had killed two horses, they said, in her race to Edinburgh to get to the new Scottish queen before any other English gentlewoman. She had since become a lady of the queen’s privy chamber and my mother’s closest companion, thus proving the truth of the old saw about early birds.
That same afternoon, I lay in wait in the great court of the palace, just inside the Court Gate.
‘There she is,’ murmured Anne, who waited with me.
I thought the Countess of Bedford very beautiful with her fine fair hair, oval face and porcelain skin, but perhaps a little over-pleased with herself. And her nose might have been the least bit too long.
‘Your grace!’ she exclaimed when she saw me, no doubt startled by the wild-haired, red-faced apparition that leapt into her way. She exchanged glances with her attending gentlewoman and sketched a curtsy.
I decided that I loathed her. I wished that I had taken as much trouble to dress that day as I had the day before.
‘I beg you, be kind enough to tell the queen that I am eager to see her now that I’m here in Whitehall,’ I blurted. I thought I detected slyness in her self-satisfaction. It suddenly occurred to me that the countess herself might have intercepted my letters.
‘Her majesty knows your desires.’
‘When may I see her?’
Lady Bedford smiled in gentle reproof. I knew how I must look to her hatefully long-lashed eyes. An overgrown hoyden wearing a country gown, with freckles and flyaway hair.
‘Her Majesty is not well.’ Her sweet voice made me want to pull out that lustrous hair. ‘She’s still melancholy after the loss of three babes – the boy Robert in Scotland, and then the two girls. And you must understand that she is also preoccupied with the health of the young duke.’
I raised my eyebrows in disbelief.
I knew that Baby Charles, now ten years old, was muchimproved. When I had met him again only the day before, formally, in the care of his new English guardian, Lady Carey, I had noted the changes since I last saw him at our Danish uncle’s visit. The bald patch on the back of his head, where he had once rubbed it against his pillow, was now overgrown with fair, curling hair. Though still very small and with legs that still bowed, he could walk unaided, without braces to straighten his bones. Though he stuttered, he was talking at last.
He had clearly forgiven me for splashing him on the water stairs with water from my posy. He asked the names of all my dogs and their breeds, the names of the stones in my rings, whether I was to have my portrait painted too, like him, and what gown would I wear, if I did sit for the famous Flemish painter who was to paint him, and had I seen our brother Henry triumph in the tilt yet? He talked, hardly drawing breath, not heeding my replies.
Not only did Baby Charles not seem cause for continuing concern, I also knew that my mother was no longer completely drowned in melancholy at the loss of her babes. All the court ladies of honour, including my own, were atwitter with her plans to stage a new masque. In it, the queen was to play the principle part herself and would choose a dozen fortunate ladies to play her nymphs.
After parting from Lady Bedford, I returned to my lodgings and waited. I tried to do my needlework but kept stabbing my finger with the needle. My ladies invited me to join them in a game of
Cent,
but I could not settle to cards or to their talk of flirtations and gowns. Supper served in my lodgings offered a distraction, but I had no appetite.
Just after supper, there was a knock on the door. One of the queen’s running footmen. At last.
I leapt to my feet. ‘Come help me change to a finer gown!’ I said to Anne.
The footman bowed. ‘Her majesty has sent you a gift ofwelcome, your grace.’ He stepped aside and waved forward the person standing outside the door. ‘Here it is.’
My mother’s gift entered and stood staring at me in open disbelief.
‘There’s no letter?’ I stared back at the new arrival.
My ladies gawped over their cards.
‘What am I to do with her?’ I wanted my mother. Not this strange girl who looked as startled to see me as I was to see her, and not much happier about it.
‘The queen sent no letter, your grace.’
No word of welcome. No invitation. No explanation.
‘I don’t want her,’ I said at last, fighting desolation.
‘That is for your grace to say.’ He bowed again and backed out of the room.
‘You may go, too,’ I told the girl. ‘I thank you, but I have no use for you.’
She stood frozen, clutching a painted leather lute case in front of her like a shield. She wore what had once been a fine black silk gown, now re-cut many times and faded to dusty grey.
She was perhaps a little older than I was and much the same height. But she was more delicate, like a tall wading bird. A cloud of black hair stood out around her neat round head that balanced atilt on a long slender neck. The hair framed large eyes, a full mouth, a firm pointed chin, and a nose that was a little shorter than mine but wider and flatter. Her skin was almost black and shone with purplish lights on her cheeks and forehead, like a plum.
She didn’t deceive me, who was the mistress of that same false stillness, which I recognised as a mask for intense feeling, like anger or fear.
‘You may go,’ I said again. And take your anger or your fear with you, I thought. I have enough of my own.
She bobbed a tight serving maid’s curtsy and went, holding her lute case against her breast.
But when I headed later towards the privy garden for an after-supper stroll, I saw her again – the sop my mother had thrown me while withholding herself. The girl was standing at the far end of the long gallery near the door of my sleeping chamber, a shadow cut out of the evening glow that fell through the high narrow windows. In the late light, her skin and dark gown looked almost the same colour. The open lute case sat on the floor by her feet. The alternating light and dark stripes on the back of the lute in her hand stood out clearly against her skirt.
I pretended I did not notice her.
An hour later, when we returned from the privy garden, she was still there, the lute now re-cased. This time, I approached her.
‘Not gone yet?’ I asked. ‘I told you to go.’
My ladies murmured behind me. My gift glanced at them, then at me but did not reply.
I was certain that Lady H would have found her insolent. But my lady guardian had never taught me how to deal with a human gift. I felt the possibility of undefined social disaster.
‘Go lay out the cards again,’ I told the Herd over my shoulder. I wanted no witnesses. ‘I’ll come join you shortly.’ They rustled away into my main receiving chamber.
‘Why are you still here?’
‘To serve you, madam.’ Her voice was unexpectedly lowand husky coming from her delicate frame. Her speech was pure rough Southwark. ‘Or so I understand.’
‘You sound more English than I do!’ I exclaimed.
‘Yes.’
Again, I considered her tone. I could detect only the flatness of blunt truth.
‘But I’ve no use for you,’ I said. ‘I told you before. My mother has a taste for exotic maids and grooms, not I. Go back and offer your services to her.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
She looked me in the eye again. ‘If I leave here, I risk being hanged as a thief.’
‘For stealing what?’
‘Myself.’
I stared back at her for a moment. ‘Come walk with me here in the gallery.’
‘Thank you, madam.’
I gazed at her sideways as our skirts swung in unison like a pair of bells. In the failing light, she was beautiful. And mysterious in a way that made me feel earthbound and ordinary. I would not have been surprised to see her perched high up like a dryad among the leaves of a forest tree, or looking up from under the water of the Thames. Her dark, gleaming skin made me feel pasty and pale.
I looked down at our hands. In the dusk, hers were solid shapes of darkness. Mine swam like pale fish just under the surface of the water. Her lithe elegance and long bones made me think again of a graceful wading bird, while I felt like a half-grown hound or yearling deer still awkward with its new length of leg. I should have hated her, as I hated the Countess of Bedford. But she felt like another kind of creature altogether. I might as well envy Wainscot.
Wainscot was beautiful, yet I loved her. And it seemed that this girl was mine, just as much as Wainscot was.
‘You were bought?’ I did not add, ‘like a dog or horse,’ but felt the unspoken words shake themselves loose into the air and racket around both our heads.
She nodded. There was a tiny jolt in the air between us. I looked more closely at her. But the air had turned smooth again.
‘I must call you something,’ I said awkwardly. ‘Do you have a name?’
‘Thalia Bristo.’
I don’t know what I had expected, but it was not ‘Thalia Bristo'.
‘Thalia… one of the nine Muses,’ she began to explain.
‘I know the names of the Muses!’ My father might not wish to have me educated like Henry, but I could read. ‘She’s the muse of either Comedy or Pastoral Poetry. Which are you?’
‘She’s also one of the Three Graces, if you prefer.’
I wished again for Lady H to guide me in this odd, uneasy conversation. I sat on a bench in a window bay and motioned for the girl to sit beside me.
Thalia Bristo folded herself down onto the bench, arriving exactly where she intended, with no shuffling or rearranging of farthingale and skirts.
‘How do you do that? I asked. More often than not, I felt like a long-legged dog that had to turn around and around in its basket to find the right fit.
‘Sit, do you mean?’ She gave the tiniest shrug. ‘Like everyone else, I imagine.’
I decided to leave it. ‘Did the queen buy you?’
‘I don’t know who it was, madam.’
‘Are you a slave?’ I had never thought much about slaves before. There were slaves in plays and masques, of course, and heroic poems, most often captives of war, like Queen Tamora and Aaron the Moor in
Titus Andronicus.
And Henry’s beloved Ralegh had made at least one slaving voyage between Africa and the West Indies. But real living slaves were rare in England.
She shrugged as if tossing off a foolish question.
Nothing of what I thought I knew fitted this girl with her worn black silk dress, lute and speech more English than my own Scots roll.
People’s services could be bought. Apprentices sold themselves at mops and market fairs. Labourers sold their sweat to planters in exchange for money or land at the end of their term. The guardianship of a wealthy orphan could be bought. Even wives.
‘Not indenture?’ I ventured.
She gave another shrug. I felt that she was learning more from our exchange than I was.
‘Where were you bought?’
She hesitated. ‘In Southwark.’
A chink in her self-possession at last, I thought. I tried again. ‘But where are you from?’
‘Southwark.’ She returned to flat civility.
‘No,’ I said impatiently. ‘Where are you really from?’
‘Southwark.’
She could not look like that and still be less strange here in London then I was. I squelched my rising irritation. ‘Surely, you weren’t born in Southwark!’
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘I was born in Bristol, madam. That’s why my name is “Bristo".’
I breathed in sharply. I was certain now that she was mocking me.
‘Or so I’ve been told,’ she added.
‘But you don’t know?’
She shook her head.
‘What do you know, then?’ I asked. ‘Do you know what you’re for?’
I felt her quiver, like a tree hit by a sudden blast of wind. ‘That’s for you to say, madam.’
‘God’s teeth! Please, give me one straight answer! Can you play that lute?’
‘Oh, yes, if you wish.’
We were sliding across each other in this conversation like a pair of greased planks. I couldn’t fault her tone, which was civil beyond reproach. And yet. ‘You can begin by telling me why your civility irritates me so much.’
‘Forgive me.’ She sounded startled. ‘I was trying to be agreeable.’
I turned on the bench. Our glances locked. ‘Not entirely,’ I said.
‘You don’t find being agreeable to be agreeable?’ she asked with real curiosity, looking at me properly for the first time.
‘I find it agreeable to have my questions answered,’ I said. ‘I’m surrounded by civil lies and flattery and secrets that aren’t my business to know. Sometimes I think ignorance will drive me mad. Or else kill me.’ I pressed my fingers against my mouth, startled to hear myself say these words to someone so strange, whom I had just met. Whom I owned.
She nodded with feeling, then looked down at her hands. Her palms were ashy pink, divided by a clean boundary line from the dark brown, almost black, of the backs of her hands. Her nails gleamed in the dusk like pink oval moons. The set of her shoulders warded off further questions.