Lady in Waiting: A Novel (7 page)

I should have made my presence known, but I stood at the threshold as one struck dumb. The little lady was lost in sadness, this I could see even from the doorway where I stood, and this was foreign to me. In the two years that I had been in the employ of the wealthy, I had not seen such raw sorrow. In my arms I held a garment soft as down and black as pitch. The lady’s mourning gown, which the marchioness insisted I carry on my lap the entire two-day journey from Leicestershire so that her daughter’s dress wouldn’t be crushed in the trunk. The marchioness did not tell me this directly; Bridget relayed the marchioness’s demands, and it was plain in her eyes and in her tone that it would be foolishness to let the dress out of my sight for even a moment. The little lady was to be chief mourner at the funeral of the Queen Dowager, Katherine. The gown couldn’t be anything less than perfectly appointed.

Already I could see that the dress would have to be altered to fit the
wee maiden. And I instantly wondered if I had the skill to do it. Bridget must’ve thought I did. She would not have sent me if she did not.

I was amazed the marchioness believed the gown would fit her daughter. Lady Jane must not have grown much in the months she had been living with Lord Admiral Seymour and the widow Queen here in Gloucestershire, at least not as much as her mother expected.

Or perhaps in her haste, the marchioness selected the wrong dress to be brought. Bridget had wondered if perhaps the marchioness borrowed the dress because there hadn’t been time to make a new one. No one expected the poor Queen Dowager would succumb to childbed fever. No one expected the household of Sudeley Castle would be wearing black that day. Not black. Somewhere in the castle, the Queen’s healthy newborn daughter lay in the arms of a wet nurse. Bridget told me not to ask about her.

I took a step into the room, cautiously, and the dress in my arms swished my name.
Lucy
. The Lady Jane at the window did not turn her head toward the sound. I poked my head farther into the room, letting my eyes adjust to the vastness of the room’s size and the absence of the warming rays of the sun.

Lady Jane and I were alone in her sitting room at Sudeley Castle, a great home whose exterior stones were the color of toasted bread and which were festooned with emerald vines that would soon turn copper, crumple, and skitter away. The maid who escorted me to this room had left to see after the trunk the marchioness had me bring for her daughter, as well as my own small case. I was not accustomed to stepping into a room where the only other occupant was of nobility. I hesitated.

I had asked Bridget, as I prepared to leave, how long the Lady Jane had been away from her parents, since she was already gone from Bradgate when Bridget made me her apprentice. In truth I wanted to know
why
the Lady Jane was living away from Bradgate. Lady Jane had eleven years,
naught but a year older than my sister, Cecily, who at that moment was at our Haversfield home in Devonshire, surely combing wool one moment and chasing butterflies the next. I did not think the Lady Jane had chased a butterfly in many years. Perhaps never. I had only been in the employ of one other nobleman, and his children remained at home until they married. They had not chased butterflies either. But they were not whisked away to other households. Bridget told me that it was no concern of mine why the Lady Jane left Bradgate to become the ward of Lord Admiral Seymour.

Then Bridget told me a nobleman like our esteemed Marquess of Dorset—the lady’s father and my employer—has much to consider when God gives him daughters, and that I was not to be listening to gossip below stairs while at Sudeley or she would hear of it and have me dismissed. She very nearly winked at me.

So it was because the Lady Jane was a girl that she was sent to live with Lord Seymour. It was because she was a daughter whose betrothal was a matter of politics and posturing that she lived in a castle more than a day’s carriage ride from her home.

On the long journey here, I’d wondered how the Lord Admiral figured into the marquess’s betrothal plans for his eldest daughter. The Lord Admiral was himself already married when Jane came here, having wooed and won the widowed Queen Katherine four scandalous months after King Henry’s passing. And the Lord Admiral had no sons. I didn’t know the Lord Admiral personally. I only knew that he was brother to the Lord Protector, the man who managed the affairs of the young King Edward, Henry’s only living male heir.

Bridget had supposed it was for marital prospects that the marquess placed his daughter in the household of the lord whose brother directed our sovereign’s associations. Young King Edward was nearly eleven, like Jane, and not yet betrothed. Also like Jane.

It would not be the first time a monarch married a cousin. And Bridget told me the Lady Jane was fourth in line to the throne, in her own right. The marchioness, her mother, was King Henry’s niece.

But as the carriage had rolled along, I endeavored to imagine myself eleven years old—not so hard, as I was not much older at fifteen—shuffled about in clandestine marriage campaigns, handed over to a man I perhaps did not esteem and made to share his bed and bear his children, all for the prosperity of the young male heir that I simply must produce.

I’d fingered the delicate beading in the mounds of black organza and silk in my lap and wondered what it must be like to wear a dress so heavy, bejeweled, and bedecked, and which, if sold, could feed a family in a croft for nigh a whole winter. Could have paid for my father’s medicine. Could have paid the doctor who cared for him, while my mother and I did what we could—she at my father’s tailoring shop and I at the marquess’s household—to keep him well. I had once thought I would sew happily alongside my father until the end of his days, perhaps marrying late, if I married at all. But there I was, many miles from my childhood home in Haversfield, my parents, and what I had thought would define my quiet life. Everything that mattered to me waited for me in another place.

And now that I stood gazing at the young maiden who would wear the dress I’d carried—a wisp of a girl whose melancholy filled the cavernous room—the gown weighed like lead in my arms, holding me fast.

I took another step, and at last she turned her head.

She had her father’s eyes and her mother’s Tudor bearing. Her hair under her hood was brown like mine, unremarkable like mine. The dress she wore was the deepest green, very nearly black. Whispers of white lace peeked out from the sleeves and neckline. A gold sash at her waist glittered in the only spill of sunlight penetrating the dark stillness of the room. At her throat lay a necklace of pearls and tiny emeralds. Her cheeks were wet.

I fell to a curtsy.

“Beg your pardon, my lady. Shall I come back later?”

She didn’t answer, and I slowly raised my head.

The Lady Jane was looking at the folds of fabric in my arms. Staring at them. Willing the dress, it seemed, to fill itself with bones and muscle and walk out of the room to find some other person to trifle with.

“You came from Bradgate?” she finally said. Her voice was thin and smooth. Cultured. But immature.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Did my mother send that gown?” Her eyes were still on the dress. The room was not so dark that I could not see her unease.

“Yes, my lady.”

“She is not coming.”

It was not a question. But I answered as though it was. “No, my lady.”

She turned back then, back toward the window. She hadn’t dismissed me, so I stood there with the yards of fabric wanting to spill out of my arms like buckets of water and waited for her. Her head was cocked in a childlike way, as if she was wondering when she would wake up from this dream.

It was inconceivable to me that one so young should be the chief mourner at the funeral of the Queen Dowager, King Henry’s widow. Bridget told me protocol forbade the presence of the widowed Queen’s new husband, the Lord Admiral Seymour, at the funeral. King Henry’s younger daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, who had lately lived here at Sudeley and who had left amid troubling rumors, would not be in attendance either, nor would the young King Edward, nor the Princess Mary, King Henry’s eldest daughter.

Instead, an eleven-year-old girl would lead the procession to the chapel, wearing the borrowed gown I held in my arms.

From behind us, deep within the castle, I heard the faint sound of an
infant’s wail. A faraway door opened and closed, and the sound disappeared. Jane raised her head, and her gaze traveled past me to the hallway and the other rooms.

“There will be no one to love her,” Jane whispered.

“My lady?”

“The Queen’s child.”

“Beg your pardon, my lady?”

“Lord Thomas won’t even look at her.”

“L-Lord T-Thomas?” I stammered.

“Lord Admiral Seymour. He won’t even look at the babe.”

I repositioned the dress in my arms. I could not tell for whom she grieved. A moment earlier, I thought her sadness was due to missing her home and family. Then, no, it was the unnamed baby. And now, was it the Lord Admiral’s sorrow that clutched at her heart?

I said nothing else. I didn’t know what to say.

“You need for me to try on that dress?” she said languidly.

“Yes, my lady. I am afraid I do.”

“Why didn’t Bridget come? I do not know you.”

I did not tell her Bridget was losing her eyesight and couldn’t travel alone as the dressmaker. Bridget needed to stay at Bradgate where she could blend in with the rest of the wardrobe staff. No one but me knew she struggled to see her own stitches.

“I am new to Bradgate, my lady. Bridget sent me. And the marchioness.”

“What is your name?” Her young voice rang with subtle authority.

“Lucy Day, my lady.”

“I like that name.” But her voice was sad.

“Shall we?” I hefted the dress in my arms.

She nodded, turned, and we headed to her wardrobe room, which adjoined her sitting room.

I helped her remove the green dress she wore. As I began to lift the black dress—so she could step into its skirt—Jane, with the folds of the black dress now all around her, began to tremble. I held the dress open and waited. Her eyes misted over and her trembling increased, and she stepped away from the ballooning fabric.

“My lady?” I said.

“I cannot stain it!” she gasped, savagely wiping away tears lest they should fall onto the material.

She grasped at her heaving chest, flat and narrow underneath her chemise, as grief silently pounded its way out of her. She sank to her knees as a sob erupted from deep within.

I dropped the dress I had carried on my lap for one hundred miles and knelt down by her, sisterly instinct sending me there before I could think clearly. Jane leaned into me, and I nervously slipped an arm around her and patted her shoulder, vaguely aware that if anyone came into the room, I would surely be dismissed for not knowing my place.

Her tears and anguish were innocent and raw.

“I miss her,” she whispered.

“Your mother?” I whispered back. Lady Jane shook her head.

The child grieved for the Queen.

T
he seams lay open on the curved bodice as I slid the whittled whalebone stays back into their tiny pockets. Lady Jane’s nurse, Mrs. Ellen, stood over me, sipping a tisane as I worked to resize the black mourning dress to fit a girlish bosom.

Her presence made me uneasy.

She had come into the room earlier as I assisted Lady Jane to her feet, after my lady’s tears had all been spilled. When she saw us, Mrs. Ellen rushed, aghast, to the lady’s side as if I’d poisoned her.

“What have you done?” Mrs. Ellen had exclaimed, wrenching the girl from me.

Before I could answer, Jane spoke. “She has done nothing except show kindness to me. Leave her be.”

Mrs. Ellen, so I’d heard, had been my lady’s nurse since the day Jane was born and was quite protective of her. She proceeded to fuss about us as I took the lady’s measurements, unnerved, I think, that I had been the one to witness my lady’s outpouring of grief and not her. She kept asking my lady if she was quite well, and Lady Jane finally asked her to fetch her a bit of syllabub from last night’s supper.

“She worries over me,” Jane said as Mrs. Ellen left to find a maid to send to the kitchen.

I bunched the skirt at her waist and nodded.

“She knows I dread going back.” Jane’s gaze sought the doorway
where Mrs. Ellen had left us, and she seemed to be speaking to no one. But then she turned to look at me, and I knew I had been spoken to. She waited for me to comment.

“Back, my lady?” I said.

“To Bradgate.” Jane said the name of her home with equal parts longing and dismay.

“You … you don’t like Bradgate?”

She’d sighed quietly. “I love Bradgate.”

I made a mark on the skirt where I would need to take it in and waited. I didn’t know what to say to her.

“But I was happy here with the Queen. She was happy too. Even with everything … everything that had happened.” Jane stopped for a moment as if she had said too much. Then she went on. “The Queen loved the Lord Admiral, and she loved this child … and she even loved me. At Bradgate it is … different.”