“Though I am not as skilled an entertainer as these gentlemen,” said I, nodding to the actor and the singer, “yet I will endeavor to provide some amusement.”
The duke nodded his fine golden head. “Try not too hard,” he said. “It is, after all, meant to be a holiday.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Marchioness of Stayne, regally with child, rode in her own carriage and disdained other company, thus proving, at least in her own mind, her superiority to the court at large.
Showing my fine saddle and indifferent horsemanship, I had rented a courser and was assigned a place in the column, behind the carriages of the guests and before the servants’ carts. I found myself amid a group of lawyers from the Chancellery, and they were pleasant enough company, though none were in a position to offer me employment.
The bridge to Mossthorpe was closed to other traffic while the great convoy rolled over it, which took almost half a day. After a night at the royal castle of Shornside, where I slept in an attic with the lawyers, we continued to the town of Gilmorton Royal, where the inhabitants turned out to cheer the Queen as she passed. Most of them, I am sure, were employed at Kingsmere for at least part of the year.
At the limit of the village we turned onto the manor grounds, and after passing through forests of quickbeam, oak, and ash, came to open grazing land, where we were greeted by a pair of giants—figures six or eight yards tall, one of which beat kettledrums while the other raised a great glittering trumpet to its lips and blew a call to welcome the Queen. (I think there were actual trumpeters hidden in its wickerwork breast.) These great puppets, worked by hidden cables and pulleys, wore tabards that showed the Red Horse, and bowed their leafy heads as Berlauda passed.
Here Viscount Broughton and his lady wife stood by the road to greet her majesty, along with the steward of the house, the gamekeepers, and the foresters. The lover and the wife and the Queen must all have been civil, for I heard no shots fired.
Over the course of the late afternoon the traveling fair that was the court disposed itself about Kingsmere. The old hunting lodge, bought by the Queen’s grandfather, had been enlarged and improved, and was now in the form of a long central building of golden sandstone, graced by a pair of long wings stretching forward and back on either side, the whole in the shape of an H. The central part was for the Queen and her noble guests, one of the large wings for their friends and servants, and the other wing was shared by the staff of the lodge and by a large stable block for the party’s hunting coursers. Lesser beasts were put up in barns, stables, and paddocks.
The lawn before the house sloped down to the lake, both lawn and lake rippled by the breeze. The low sun outlined the ripples with gold. At the pier was a boat that Broughton had constructed for her majesty, built in the shape of a swan and covered with real swan feathers.
After seeing to my horse, I was given a generous supper at a table set up in an outdoor garden—the Queen and her particular guests dined in the Great Hall inside—and then I slept on a rag-stuffed mattress, smelling of mildew, in a room reserved for the duke’s retinue, which in this case meant about half a dozen of the actors, none of whom I knew, but most of whom were already blind drunk, and had been for most of the day. There was little choice but to drink along with them, some sort of foul liquor which I hope never to encounter again.
Next morning, as morning bells tolled painfully in my skull, I joined the Roundsilvers for a day of shooting. We hunters were arrayed in a line, while a legion of beaters, recruited from the village, drove past us great flocks of pheasant, quail, and black grouse. The duke and duchess, firing a pair of matched silver-chased calivers, brought down their targets again and again. I had been loaned a caliver myself, a wheellock venerable but well maintained, but I barely knew how to load it, let alone shoot. I struck down none of the flying targets, but I enjoyed myself, standing with the others on a fine autumn day with the bracing scent of gunpowder on the wind. Nearly three thousand birds were killed during the course of the morning, and we would dine on the fowl, off and on, for the rest of the week.
That afternoon, the weather was suitable for a day on the lake, and so her majesty went out on Kingsmere in her swan-boat, this time with Broughton, whose wife disliked boats and would not go on the water. But her majesty was not entirely alone with him, for there were many other boats on the water filled with members of the court, and one barge with filled with minstrels, and Castinatto in the bow singing.
Still, I could see their heads together as they sat beneath the canopy in the stern, as in full view of the court as they were being rowed about by six men in Broughton livery.
Throughout the day I remained aware of Amalie, who had participated in the bird hunt, and who now lounged beneath an umbrella while being rowed about the lake by a servant. I’d had no opportunity to speak with her, let alone speak privately. Yet I was constantly aware of her presence, a kind of tremor in the atmosphere of which I was subtly aware, as if she were radiating some sort of invisible beams that prickled over my skin. She was always present, yet always unavailable. I was impatient and filled to the eyebrows with frustration, and it was in this mood that in the evening I viewed The Triumph of Virtue, the masque that Blackwell had been employed to write.
Few of the company’s actors were involved, for most of the parts in the masque that did not involve singing were taken by members of the court, all dressed in extravagant costumes that no acting company could possibly afford. There was a good deal of dancing, and I saw Their Graces of Roundsilver in the ballet company, masked and enjoying themselves.
The story was an allegory—which made it tedious—and involved the singer Castinatto as the demon Iniquity, who was rejoicing in the fact that he’d succeeded in capturing and imprisoning Virtue and her friends Honor, Purity, and Piety.
Whatever dungeon he’d put them in, it was a place with a lot of music and dancing.
Queen Berlauda played no part in the production other than watching it from her throne and nodding approvingly at the masque’s moral sentiments. The part of Virtue, however, was played by the little princess Floria, who to my surprise sang in a perfectly respectable contralto. Her acting I thought more mannered, for she delivered her moralizing speeches with a serene expression that seemed to combine complacency with self-satisfaction—and then, with a shock, I realized that Floria was doing a perfect imitation of her half sister’s vacant dignity, and doing it right in front of Berlauda and the whole court. At once my gaze snapped to Berlauda, whose expression mirrored that exact lofty self-satisfaction. She seemed perfectly unaware that she was being mocked.
I turned to the rest of the audience, and their expressions were approving when they weren’t completely bored. It seemed the princess and I were sharing a secret.