Ladies in Waiting (11 page)

Heart thudding in her chest like echoes of cannon, Beth looked around for her mother. She didn’t bother to search for her face. It was easier to look for any gap in the crowd, any revolted clearing that would indicate the Countess of Enfield stood at the center. But no, all she saw was merriment and dancing, gossip and flirting and backbiting.

I dare not go to him,
she said to herself, even as she told Catherine, “You look chilled, Your Majesty. Allow me to fetch you a wrap.” She was gone on little green slippers before Catherine could protest that she was actually quite warm.

Gasping at her own temerity, she ran until she was alone, then leaned against the cool, rough wall, plaster painted with a solution of cobalt and crushed glass.

She did not let herself think of what her mother would do if she found her with Harry Ransley. She’d likely murder the man on the spot. But what if he had made amends for his father’s perfidy? What if he’d grown rich?

She remembered the touch of Harry’s fingers on her cheek those many years ago, gentle as the flutter of moth wings as he tucked up her hair. She felt dizzy, confused, intoxicated.

I won’t search for him,
she decided.
I’ll just stay here.
With all the excitement inside, the hallway was deserted, but the Banqueting House had a straightforward, simple layout, and she’d be easy to find, if he was looking for her.

And if he finds me, I’ll speak with him. But I certainly won’t allow him any liberties.

Thinking of those liberties, she closed her eyes and let her bright brown hair rest against the wall. She had little practical idea what lay beyond kissing, but knew it must be something that transcended Eliza’s bawdy jests and the courtiers’ mysterious whispered innuendos. While imagining a mystical (and highly inaccurate) union, bare knuckles slipped under her gloved palm and lifted her hand to something insistent but yielding, warm even through the kidskin. She opened her eyes to find him kissing her hand, passion disguised as chivalry.

“Do you know me?” Harry asked her.

She couldn’t bear to pull her hand away, yet she knew that if she confessed she recognized him, family honor would compel her to slap him, or scream, or faint. So she said breathlessly, “I don’t know you, sir.”

“Indeed? But I’ve known you all my life.”

“All my life . . .” she echoed.

“You’ve grown, little Beth, but you still smell of late-summer roses. Do you know me now?”

If she said yes the dream would end. She shook her head.

“Swear you will not hate me when you know,” he said.

“I do not want to know!” she pleaded in desperation.

He smiled. “Then I will tell you everything but the one fact that will damn me. I have come for your hand, Beth. I have no fortune, but when I do—and I will, one day soon—even if you should hate me, a part of what I have will be yours. And if you should love me, tolerate me, even, my hand will join my gold.”

His lips brushed the curve of her cheek. She felt like a mouse in a vacuum chamber, one of Zabby’s experiments.

“You can’t,” she protested weakly.

“Yet I did.”

“You mustn’t.”

“I never will again until you ask me.”

“Please!” But she didn’t know what she begged of him. Her body felt liquid.

“I found I had to take that liberty, for when you know who I am you will likely claw my eyes out.” He chuckled softly, and those eyes, amused and sincere, crinkled. “Ah, out with it, you coward! It was easy when I thought you might have grown up plain.” He sighed, smiled, and said, “I am the son of the man who ruined your father. I am Harry Ransley.”

The Earl of Enfield, Beth’s father, had been a sober aristocrat, pleasant to his small family, taking an interest in his cows and mangelwurzels, until Lord Ransley crossed his path. Beth, a child when her father began the trek down the road to perdition, wasn’t sure how it happened. Perhaps Ransley took him to his first whorehouse, or taught him to palm a card. Ere long, Lord Enfield owed Ransley a considerable sum, and had to sell timber lands to pay it off, but even money failed to sour the relationship, and they pursued their pleasures together, as merry a pair of disreputable rakes as could be found in Cromwell’s England.

After a while, though, the restrictions of the Puritan land began to pall, and the two men scraped together what money they could and went to the stews and whorehouses of Europe. They pretended to serve the king in exile.
Send money,
they would write to their families at home.
Sell the lower acreage,
Enfield scrawled in a drunken hand,
and send the proceeds to
. . . wherever they were at the moment. The Hague, Paris, Lisbon, Beth never knew from one month to the next. Then the house was sold from under Beth and her mother. Just before they were forced out, they received word that Lord Enfield had died from a combination of pox and ague and an unforgiving liver. They never knew what had become of the money paid for their estate. Not long after, Ransley died in a duel, or a brawl, but in any event with a sword in his tripes.

Those two men, Father and Ransley, had been the chthonic gods and devils of the Countess of Enfield’s personal religion, the hatred of masculinity.

“No!” she cried. “I will not let you be him!” Her eyes grew luminous.

“I am not him. He is my father. I am me, only me. Hush, hush!” She was weeping with little gasping sobs. “He ruined us too, sweeting. My mother, a lady, took in embroidery to keep meat on the table. I have four sisters with no dowry. We live in the gamekeeper’s cottage while our erstwhile tenants tip their caps to the privateer who rents our manor for a pittance. I hate his memory too. But I mean to make amends.”

“Oh, Harry,” she cried, “do you really think I wouldn’t know you out of all the world? Of course I knew you, the moment I saw you. I only pretended . . . I thought if I could have these few minutes with you, before I was forced to hate you, it might be enough.”

“You do not hate me,” he said gently.

“I thought of you for so long, after we were forced from our house. I imagined there might be some mistake, that our fortunes would be restored and our families reconciled, and you would come to the rose garden once more. No, I do not hate you. I’m afraid, if you stay but a moment longer, I will love you. But it cannot be. You, of all people! My mother curses your name daily. Oh, why did you come only to show me what I cannot have?”

Harry caught up her hands. “I cannot tell you how, but I will win my fortune and yours. For years I have thought of you, spoken your name in my heart. My mother and sisters, too. That we be cursed with such a father is bad enough, but that his poison should seep into your family . . . If you plunged a dagger into my heart, little Beth, I would not blame you. You have, though; I feel the stiletto’s prick. Can I love you already? Madness!”

“It couldn’t be love,” Beth murmured.

“Oh, no,” Harry said, with mock seriousness. “Call it duty, obligation, honor, to the world’s face.” He leaned close to her. “But we know better. Or I do, and I’ll teach you what I know, if you are willing.”

He kissed the swell of her breast above her bodice.

“Can this be real?” she asked, him and herself.

“We are real. This is real, even if we never meet again.” He stepped away from her. He groaned; she whimpered; both in physical pain. “I have bad business before me,” he said. “But at the end, should I survive, your troubles, your family’s and mine, will be over. Will you be here when I return? Will you wait for me?”

She nodded, and he stepped away. “It may be a year, it may be two, but I will come for you, and right the wrongs of my father.”

“Don’t go!” she pleaded, reaching for him, but the iridescent azure of the rough glass-studded wall caught her hair, holding her back just long enough for him to escape.
If I had touched him,
she knew,
he would have stayed.

It was a rape of love. He came from nowhere, ravished her heart, left her trembling and broken.

At last she made her unsteady way back to the hall. In the flutter of her passing, a torch flickered and leaped, and reflected on a silver hawk’s beak in the shadows.

“What ails you?” Eliza asked, but it was too sacred for Beth to speak of yet.

Beth remained in attendance on the queen until she retired, then went with her friends to the room they shared, more elegant than that at Hampton Court, with wall hangings of alternating deep green velvet and pale green silk, and delicate carved walnut furniture from France. As before, they shared a bed.

Their things had been unpacked and arranged by Hortense and Prue, and of course no one could find anything.

“Have you seen my nightcap?” Zabby asked Beth.

“She’s in her own world,” Eliza said when there was no answer. “And a mighty fine world it must be. Look at her face, like Saint Catherine on the wheel.” The saint was the only victim to enjoy that torture device—instead of having her limbs broken, she broke the wheel with the force of her own purity. She was beheaded instead—the executioner’s ax felt no similar qualms.

Zabby examined her friend’s face narrowly. Something had altered her drastically, though subtly. “Has . . . has someone died?”

“Yes,” Beth replied, distracted. “Oh, no, of course not, though I almost think . . . to have him and lose him, all in the same instant, it’s almost like death, isn’t it? Not but what I’ll see him again.”

Zabby checked Beth’s brow for fever. Though flushed, she was cool.

“I found him—he found me!”

“Who?”

“I dare not say.”

“Is she intoxicated or am I?” Eliza asked, torqueing her torso as she tried, unsuccessfully, to reach her own laces. “For I can’t comprehend a word she says.”

Beth, laughing and crying all at once, twitched Eliza’s laces free. “You write about love in your plays, but you don’t know a thing about it. I do. I know it now. I saw him, and I knew him, and he knew me. He came looking for me!” She danced around Eliza with the unwound laces in her hands, twining her tall friend like a maypole. “He says I won’t see him again for the longest time, and I hardly think I can bear it, but I will. Oh, my eyes are open now!”

Indeed, the world looked different, felt different, with a new sensuality—the costly green wall hangings seemed to call out to be touched; the very air dripped like crystal honey, sweet on her tongue. She had to move, to laugh, to sing, to look boldly into every eye, because she was fully alive for the first time. She felt like a madwoman, exultant, exalted by her madness.

The door creaked open, and Beth, thinking it must be Prue with their bath water, had an inspiration. “Prue,” she said without turning, fiddling with the Venetian point trembling at her cleavage, just below the burning memory of his kiss. “You know everything that passes at court. What can you tell me about . . .”

She turned, and the merry smile froze, then crumbled in the face of that red-robed gargoyle, her mother.

“It’s a short, sweet step from the girl who’s groped in the palace to the whore who lifts her skirts for every poxy sailor on the quayside.” Her voice was so sweetly reasonable that Eliza and Zabby, whose mothers were kindly ghosts, were almost expecting their friend to receive nothing more than a fond lecture. Surely Beth had exaggerated her mother’s maniacal control, her strange combination of pander and protector.

But Beth, looking terrified, backed away until her legs hit the bed, and stood poised like a hart at bay, waiting for the deerhound to close.

The Countess of Enfield hobbled closer and made a maternal clucking sound that, with the syphilitic bobbing of her head, almost made Eliza laugh aloud.
Higgledy piggledy, my red hen,
she thought,
complete with a beak.
She stifled the sound in a cough and sidled to the door to leave them to talk in peace, grabbing Zabby by the arm. Beth shot her a desperate look, but the countess said, “Begone, you pair of hoydens. This is none of your concern.” They slipped away.

“Drip, drip, drip,” the countess said when they were alone, punctuating each word with a rap from the light lacquered rattan cane she carried. She stroked Beth’s cheek, erasing the precious invisible kiss. “You’re dry now, dry and clean, but let a man have his way and it will be juices and drippings all your life. You’ll leak and squirt and spurt and sop—aye, my girl, all over.” She ran her fingers coquettishly over her own bodice, showing her oozing sores. “And you’ll die, bit by bit.”

“But, Mother,” Beth whispered.

“Defy me!” the countess roared, brandishing her cane. “Defy me and die in the streets, your body eaten from within while men use whatever scraps remain. Did you even charge him? If you want to be a slut, let me pimp for you. Your virginity will fetch a fair price—if you’ve still got it. Or, if you’d prefer, I’ll slit your throat right now, to save you dying by degrees.” She slid the cane across Beth’s neck, and the girl cringed but could not flee. She knew it was useless. There was no escape.

“Please,” Beth begged, and knew she was pleading for aid from her unknown lover, not her mother.

“You will sit on the dish, a tasty morsel to make their foul mouths water, but you must not let them taste! Not one lick! A taste leads to a nibble, nibble to bite, bite to devouring!” She shoved Beth backwards on the bed, then grabbed her ankle when she tried to scramble away. “Look the whore, to trap them, but let one have his way without buying you outright, and I’ll flay the skin off you.” Spittle flew from her mouth, and she twitched in rage. “Now take your punishment for acting the harlot.”

The command was not new. Beth, swallowing heavily, obediently stood and turned her back to her mother. She dragged her skirts up above her hips and bent over the high bed, exposing her creamy white thighs.

Another woman might have been mollified by such a display of filial submission, but it seemed to drive Beth’s mother mad.

“There is our fortune!” she screamed, hauling back with her cane and striking the tender flesh with all her force. Beth shrieked but didn’t move. A deep purple-red weal rose instantly, and the cane whistled through the air again, this time drawing a line of blood. “Some rutting man will pay a fortune for that, and you think to give it away?” She struck savagely again. “You’re trying to hold on to his touch, aren’t you? But you can’t! You can’t! Not through this!” Again and again the cane fell, until Beth’s thighs were crisscrossed with bruises and blood. “It always feels lovely at first, the kisses, the caresses, but it is the pain that lasts.”