Cate of the Lost Colony - Lisa Klein [2]
Then I saw the woman on a white palfrey with blue trappings. Her white gown was embroidered with gold, and a crown sat atop her long golden hair. With one hand she held the reins while extending her other arm to the onlookers. I could not take my eyes off her brightness, which even the rain did not dim.
“Long live the queen!”
“God bless Your Grace!”
Forgetting my father, I ran forward to touch the queen. Trying to reach the hem of her skirt, I grazed the horse’s fetlock and smelled its wet flesh. Then my mother pulled me back.
“Mama, she is more beautiful than anyone in the world!”
I felt my mother’s arms stiffen around me.
Father did not visit us that day. When I asked my mother why, she only said through tight lips, “He serves a most demanding mistress.”
Had I really seen the queen pass and touched her horse? If I had, why couldn’t I recall her face? I wondered if it had all been a dream. I could no longer ask my mother. The plague had taken her five years ago. But she really died of loneliness long before that.
It was late at night when we arrived at the queen’s palace. A woman of middling height with a few wrinkles in her pleasant face greeted me, introducing herself as Lady Mary Standish. She wore a nightgown and a coif as if she had come from her bed. I followed her to the kitchen, where she gave me some cold meat, bread, and ale. As I was eating, a man dressed in motley skipped into the kitchen. He was short and sturdily built, with bright eyes and a nose pressed flat against his face, which gave him an odd look.
“Good e’en, Lady Mary, guardian of the maids and their maidenheads.” He winked at me and plucked at his hair. I could not help staring at him.
“Dick Tarleton, why are you here so late? You had better not be dallying with the scullery maid,” she scolded.
“Nay, never!” he said like an actor overplaying his role. “Our royal mistress was melancholy tonight and demanded a jest. But by Jove—or rather, by the suffering Job—my poor feet ache from so much cavorting. My calluses feel like barnacles on the bottom of a boat.” He appealed to Lady Mary. “Oh rub my feet, kind lady, and I will repay the favor at your will.”
“Go to, fool,” said Lady Mary gently. “You have a wife at home.”
“She will truss me like a turkey and baste me with my own juices,” he complained. Then, cowering under his raised arms, he minced out of the room.
“Is the little man a lunatic?” I asked Lady Mary.
She burst out laughing, then, remembering the late hour, put her hand to her mouth. “No, he is the queen’s clown and the only person who can say whatever he pleases without any consequences.”
“Even lies and lewdness?” I asked, thinking of his jest about maids.
“Even lies and lewdness,” she echoed. “He manages to turn it all into truth.”
As she spoke, Lady Mary led me up three floors to the maids’ dormitory. There several girls slept in beds crowded under the rafters like a flock of sheep curled in the lee of a cliff. It took me but a moment to fall asleep.
Awakening some time later to the murmur of voices, I pretended to be still asleep.
“I just peeked at her. She’s a plain one,” said someone with a high voice.
“No, just a little roughened from her journey,” came Lady Mary’s voice.
“She has no fashionable clothes,” said the first voice again, with a note of pity.
Then a third voice said with disdain, “What do you expect of one bred in the country?”
“Emme and Frances, you shouldn’t spy in her trunk,” Lady Mary rebuked them.
I stirred under my blanket with shame.
“The queen will be disappointed in her,” came Frances’s voice again. “She expects us to be pretty.”
“Enough!” said Lady Mary. “I will wake her now and dress her for the queen.”
“I am awake,” I said,