I studied her neat blunt profile. She was not the first blackamoor I had seen. My brother Henry had one in his household, a youth named Peter Blank, though his skin was much lighter. He was a freeborn running footman, who was the great-great-grandson of Henry VII’s court trumpeter, John Blank. There were two African grooms in my mother’s stables, one of whom she dressed in red and gold and took with her everywhere. African merchants and sailors were seen in the London streets, though less often than before the old queen had ordered them sent away. But I had never sat so close to one, nor paid such close attention.
From so close, even in the failing light, I could see that her hair stood out by itself, held up by its own tight zig-zag curls without the aid of any horsehair, puffs or wires, as mine tried to do but fell just short of achieving.
‘Are you the same colour all over?’ I asked, determined to make her answer at least one question.
She pinched her lips tightly then sighed with what sounded like resignation. She held out her hands, paler palms up. ‘My feet are like my hands. Pale soles.’ She opened her mouth and showed white teeth and a pink tongue.
I nodded. There was a small silence.
‘I can sing in three languages, dance, and pick at a lute,’ she said at last. ‘I can play
Cent
and bowls, throw dice, peel you an apple and make a posset.’
‘Why didn’t you say so at once?’
‘I didn’t know what you wanted.’
‘What I don’t want is for people to be all slithery and courtier-like! I want them to tell me the truth at once, so I don’t have to dig and guess and try to pick apart their cipher.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘Truly,’ I said.
‘Then you must give them time to learn to trust you,’ she said. ‘Telling the truth to those with power over you can be dangerous.’ She half-smiled. ‘Is that more agreeable?’
I blinked. I had never talked like this before in my life. Not even with Henry, nor with Anne though we slept in the same bed. I wasn’t even certain what ‘like this’ was. The voice of Lady Harington remained surprisingly silent. Thalia’s strangeness put her outside the place where the usual rules of conduct might apply.
‘You can trust me,’ I said.
She weighed me up openly now. ‘Not yet,’ she said at last. Her eyes met mine defiantly. ‘Am I still being agreeable?’
‘A little more than before.’ I felt an unexplained stirring ofexhilaration. I wanted her to trust me so that our conversation could continue.
Now I was the one being studied. She sucked in both her lips, which gave her the comical look of a toothless old woman. I sat in the steady beams of those large dark eyes wanting to ask her what she saw. After a time, just as I began to grow irritated again, she suddenly observed, ‘You have beautiful hair.’
‘So everyone tells me. It’s safe to compliment my hair.’
‘No. Truly. I know women who stain their hands and faces orange trying to achieve that amber-gold colour. Or else fry their ears with irons trying for those curls.’
I smiled to cover my confusion at her evident sincerity. ‘To avoid offending the queen, I suppose I must try to find a use for you,’ I said. ‘Will you come show me how you sing and pick at your lute?’
‘If you wish.’
‘Surely, there’s no danger in plain “yes"?’
‘If you say so, madam,’ she said, with a tiny smile.
Our eyes met.
I offered a half-smile in return.
‘What music do you play?’ I asked. We settled a little way from my ladies on a pair of stools.
‘What music do you…? Her eyes flicked from her lute to my face. ‘Whoops!’ she said. ‘I nearly was disagreeable again.’
My ladies were pretending to look at their cards.
Thalia held up the lute close to her ear and listened intently as she plucked the strings. ‘Let me think…’ She tightened a string and listened again. Her fingers rippled out a gentle cascade of notes. ‘I can be doleful with Master Dowland…’
At the first notes, my ladies stopped pretending to be interested in their cards. ‘We shall have wondrous heathen music now,’ Frances Howard murmured.
I watched the pink moons of Thalia’s nails dancing on the strings.
‘… or martial…’ She slapped the belly of the lute – one, two, three, four. In the firelight, her lute was more visible than her face. Her eyes, fingernails, and the white edging on her smock stood out against the rest of her.
‘Where is she from?’ asked Frances Tyrrell.
‘She’s an Ethiop!’ Anne announced, as if that fact had escaped the others.
Thalia bent her head to her lute as if she had not heard any of them.
‘Perhaps she’s from the Menagerie at the Tower.’ Frances Howard again.
‘Mistress Bristo is from Southwark,’ I said.
The ladies at the gaming table exclaimed in surprise.
‘I don’t know why you’re all so astonished,’ cried Anne. ‘Prince Henry’s blackamoor footman was born at Richmond.’
‘But he’s not truly a blackamoor!’ retorted Elizabeth Apsley. ‘His mother’s as white as you are and comes from York.’
‘Play anything you like,’ I said.
Thalia cleared her throat. ‘Sleep, wayward thoughts…’ An air by Dowland, who had been court musician to my uncle in Denmark and was now my father’s musician. Who had followed the queen, some said, when she came here from Denmark.
Like her speaking voice, Thalia’s singing was strong and husky, deep for a woman and a rich sound to come from such a slender frame. Her tongue was pink like her palms and nails. Against her dark mouth, her teeth looked bright.
My ladies abandoned their cards and gathered around us to listen.
‘I am astonished…!’ murmured one.
‘Where ever did a savage learn to sing Dowland?’ Frances Howard demanded at large.
‘Queen Elizabeth’s Galliard,’
Thalia announced, drumming a dance rhythm on the body of the lute.
Now she grew intent, frowning down at the lute cradled against her body, forgetting the rest of us. Her fingers leaped and attacked the strings. Her whole body rocked with the fierce triple beat. Her shoulders lifted a little with each suspended pause. Her elbows marked the leaps and the landings. Her head sketched the flow of the runs, so that she herself seemed to be dancing on her stool.
In my lap, my hands twitched and mirrored hers, as if touching strings. My feet jiggled. My bones hummed. Behind me, I heard the rhythmic rustle of skirts, and tapping fans.
‘Hoop! La!’ cried Thalia, playing even faster.
‘Yes! ‘ My feet insisted. I stood and danced a few steps.
She struck a fierce final chord and looked up. My ladies clapped and exclaimed.
‘Who’d have thought it?’ cried Anne.
‘The creature plays wonderfully well,’ said Frances Tyrrell.
‘I don’t know why you’re all so astonished.’ Frances Howard imitated to perfection Anne’s earlier earnestness. ‘Monkeys can be trained to do wondrous clever tricks.’ She spoke just loudly enough for me to hear and just quietly enough so that, if I chose, I could pretend that I had not.
There was the tiniest of pauses while they all waited for my response. Thalia’s face became a dark blank oval, as she looked at the floor. I was not certain whom Frances had most insulted, Thalia, Anne or myself.
‘Fetch me my lute,’ I ordered. ‘Let’s see what tricks this Scots dobbin has learned.’ Frances Howard did not meet my eye.
You invited me to enter the lists, I reminded her silently.
While Lady Anne went into my bedchamber in search of the lute, I listened to our breathing in the silence. Stays creaked. Lace scratched against silk as someone fidgeted. The floor creaked under shifting weight. Someone cleared her throat. I could almost hear the glances colliding behind my back. The two chamber grooms who came to light the candles both blushed dark red when they realised how intently they were being watched by a group of silent young women.
‘Do you know the parts for the
Seven Passionate Pavanes?’
I asked, when my instrument was in my hand.
Thalia nodded.
I pulled my stool closer to hers. I lagged behind in the duet, but Thalia was kind and waited each time for our notes to meet and marry again. At the end, my ladies clapped politely.
‘Now follow me,’ Thalia ordered.
She played a phrase and stopped expectantly. After a moment, I responded with a phrase of my own. She nodded then questioned again.
Again, I answered. She asked; I replied, gaining courage. Faster and faster, into a country dance now, playing together, fingers slipping, mistaking, recovering, galloping, until we were both laughing too hard to play the right notes at all.
‘Now I know what to do with you!’ I blew a loose strand of hair out of my face. ‘I must make you my music mistress so you can teach me to play as well as you do.’ I felt as light as after a morning gallop, ready to do exactly the same again.
There was more polite applause, followed by a silence as thick as porridge. I handed my lute to Anne. I stood up and shook out my skirts.
Thalia leapt to her feet.
‘Well!’ I looked at the paler faces around us. The candlelight showed speculation in one or two pairs of eyes, curiosity in another, naked animosity in another. Poor loyal Anne looked wary.
‘That’s all,’ I said. ‘Time for bed.’ My ladies swirled and rustled as they put away the cards and set their chairs against the walls again.
‘Good night, your grace.’ ‘Good night.’ One by one they curtsied and left, with backward looks over their shoulders at Thalia. None of them spoke to her.
My gift watched them taking their leave, frowning.
‘What are you thinking?’ I asked.
‘Nothing, madam.’
‘But I saw a thought in your eyes.’
She looked around to see that we were alone. ‘Perhaps it was my own thought.’
Insolence! whispered the voice of Lady Harington in my head. No doubt about it this time.
‘I can’t bear to see it and not know,’ I said.
She shook her head stubbornly.
‘You can’t imagine how I long for people to be open!’
After another moment, she nodded. ‘I was thinking that you’d best take care, madam.’
I inhaled sharply. ‘What do you mean?’
A pale palm flashed to ward off more questions. ‘I may be new here, but I know about women living all together like this, even you ladies…’ She hesitated. ‘You’ll make enemies for both of us.’
‘Your grace?’ Anne’s voice called from my bedchamber.
‘"Your grace"?’ repeated Thalia. ‘What does that make you, then?’
‘A princess or duchess,’ I said a little sharply to this exotic creature from Southwark, who presumed to advise me how to behave with my own ladies. One Lady Harington was enough. ‘Or a bishop.’
As soon as I entered my sleeping chamber, I realised that I had just refused to answer a perfectly reasonable question. It had not occurred to me that she might not know who I was. I ran back to the door, but she had gone, perversely, when I had wanted her to stay.
At the very least, the arrival of Thalia Bristo required me to thank my mother for her gift. In my letter, which I began to write at once before going to bed, I would ask to do this in person.
‘You torture me with my impatience to see you, madam, ‘
I wrote.
‘I beg you…’
I stopped. What if something was wrong with my mother that no one would tell me about? Perhaps my father hadsecretly put her into the Tower. Perhaps she was fatally ill. Perhaps my father had ordered her not to see me, just as he had stolen Henry from her. Whatever it might be, some force that she could not overcome was keeping us apart.
I would not write after all, I decided. I knew a surer way to learn why my mother was being kept from me.
THALIA
Fool! Fool! Don’t make that mistake again! You had the world’s finest tutors in deceit, but would you learn? You pushed her too far, should never have believed her when she said she wanted the truth.
Madam doesn’t know what she really wants. She’d send you back fast enough if she knew the truth about you.
She’s trying to trick you, girl, whoever she is. Trying to trap you with seeming friendship. I read what she really thought, in her eyes at the end. ‘Presumption.’ She asks for openness but wouldn’t give away so much as her own name. Now she’s angry. I feared she was going to send me back.
‘Princess or duchess…’ she said, mocking me for my ignorance. No bishop, for sure. Forgive me, madam, but I can’t read minds. You may be richly dressed but you’re lodged near horses and fighting cocks – I have a nose, can smell them both. God’s Blood! Will no one be civil enough to explain the simplest things? If they don’t mock me like she did, they gape and sidle away.
‘I don’t want her,’ she said. The way she’d refuse a cake. I’m handed about like a parcel. If I were a dog, someone would feed me at least, and give me a basket to sleep in.
But I won’t be sent back!
Hide for now. Keep your head down. Try to get some sleep so you can think straight tomorrow… then decide what to do next. Too much for one day. Lost. This cursed palace is a city in itself. Lucky chance, finding this gallery.
Here’s just the place, in the corner, out of the torchlight, out of the way. Blend with the other shadows. If no one claims this pallet… I might have the devil’s luck and not have to sleep on stone. No food, but sleep at least. If no one notices me… but what’s the chance of that?
You’d never think that we’re sleeping in a palace – more like homeless people in an alley than maids and serving women. Well, I can tell them, their farts stink like anywhere else.
Even tucked here in the corner where I can’t see my own hand, I can still see the whites of eyes out there, staring at me over blanket tops. Even in the dark, I can’t turn invisible. How they all keep at a safe distance! Do they fear I’ll eat them in the night? All the better for me. Gives me room to stretch out my legs.
So, Tallie. You’re not where you feared to find yourself, but where are you instead?