“His Grace visits Kathryn daily in his daughter’s household,” Will said as Dorothy seized me bodily and hauled me away from the peephole. “Sometimes three or four times a day.”
“What are they saying?” she demanded.
“That Lady Latimer is to be our next queen.”
“Truly?”
“Lord Parr just said so.”
“Oh, excellent! That means I will soon return to court. The king himself promised me that I would be one of his next queen’s maids of honor. And with Will’s sister as queen, His Grace will surely agree to unmake Will’s marriage to that wicked woman in Essex.”
“So you knew he already had a wife.”
“Everyone knows, and everyone knows he would gladly be rid of her.” She stepped up to the listening post, but Father and Lord Parr had finished their conversation and were already on their way out of Father’s closet.
Dorothy, ever the bold one, intercepted them. I crept quietly away and did not see Will Parr again before he left Cowling Castle.
4
More than three months passed before word reached our remote peninsula that King Henry had wed for the sixth time. By then it was late July. It had been an unusually wet summer. There were outbreaks of the plague all over England. In an attempt to avoid both the worst of the inclement weather and the deadly path of the disease, the court went on progress in Surrey and Buckinghamshire, far away from Kent. Using the excuse of limited accommodations at some of the king’s smaller manors, large numbers of courtiers fled to their own estates.
No one knows what causes a visitation of the plague, but fewer people seemed to contract the dread disease in the country. At Cowling Castle with my family, I remained safe from infection.
Mother, well aware that I had hoped to return to court once there was a new queen in residence, spent most of August and the first part of September sending letters to influential acquaintances. To distract me, she kept Kate and me busy in the stillroom, teaching us how to make herbal remedies and preventives. Most of the latter were intended to keep the plague at bay.
It is the duty of every wife, whether she be married to a cobbler or a great lord, to look after the health of her household. To that end, Mother taught us to identify dozens of healing herbs and how to prepare them for use. Ceramic pots covered with thin goatskin, glass and horn containers plugged with stopples, and even a few imported stoneware jugs with parchment tied over their mouths to keep the contents dry filled the stillroom shelves. They contained powders, extracts, oils, ointments, and pills. Drying roots hung in bunches from the ceiling. The long table where we worked held equipment, everything from a small still to a handpress used to squeeze the juice out of fruit.
“But why must preventives always smell so vile?” I asked, wrinkling my nose in distaste as I labored with mortar and pestle. The stench of burning leather permeated the entire castle because the purifying fumes created by setting fire to old shoes warded off disease.
“The onions are not so bad,” Kate said. Peeled onions left in a house for ten days absorbed infection from the air, but not even the sweet herbs we used for strewing could mask their pungent odor.
“If remedies do not smell awful, then they taste terrible.” I bore down harder on a handful of briar leaves.
Mother stopped beside me to inspect my handiwork. “Stamp the herbs, Bess. Do not grind them into powder. Bruise them gently.”
I sighed and started over. When I’d bruised the leaves properly, I added them to handfuls of sage, rue, and elder leaves and strained them with a quart of white wine sprinkled with ginger. Everyone in the family had been drinking a little of this concoction, morning and night, for two months. It was not the worst thing I had ever tasted, but I was heartily sick of it.
Just as I finished the straining, Matthew Rowlett came into the stillroom with a letter that had just arrived for Mother. Her face lit up when she recognized the seal. She wasted no time in breaking the wax to read the contents. She was still smiling when she finished.
“Well, Bess,” she said, “it seems you will be going to court after all.”
“But I thought there was no hope of a post as a maid of honor to the queen.” There were only six such positions and all had been filled. My aunt, Dorothy Bray, held one. She’d written to Mother to boast of it. The other five were Mistress Anne Bassett, the young woman who had been so friendly to me at the king’s supper, and four ladies I did not know—a Carew, a Windsor, a Guildford, and one of Sir Anthony Browne’s daughters by his first marriage.
“Before she accepted the post as a maid of honor,” Mother explained, “the Guildford girl was in service to her kinswoman, Lady Lisle. That position is now vacant.”
I frowned in puzzlement. “Do you mean Nan Bassett’s mother?”
Mother shook her head. “Honor Lisle has lived in retirement in the West Country since her second husband’s death. Lord Lisle had no son to succeed him, so King Henry gave the title to his stepson. The new Viscount Lisle is Sir John Dudley. He is also lord admiral of England. His wife, Jane, was a Guildford of Halden Hall before her marriage. She is one of Queen Kathryn’s great ladies of the household. That means she holds an unpaid post at court but is entitled to lodgings there. As a viscountess, she is permitted to keep waiting gentlewomen of her own. This letter invites you to become one of them. It is an excellent opportunity, Bess. You might well advance into the queen’s service, if there is an opening. Even if you do not, you will be at court. And Lady Lisle vows in her letter that she will treat you with as much affection as if you were her own daughter.”
“Does she have a daughter?” All I knew about Jane Lisle, other than what Mother had just told me, was that she was a close friend of my father’s stepmother.
“She lost one of her girls earlier this year, but the eldest, Mary Dudley, is thriving. Mary must be about twelve years old. Since Jane holds an honorary post at court, she could keep her children with her, but she’d not be given any additional space in which to house them. For all the enormous size of the king’s palaces and great houses, lodgings are always hard to come by. Accommodations are even more crowded when the court is on progress.”
“Are most ladies in service to the queen obliged to leave young children behind?” I busied myself scouring the mortar and pestle with sand and putting them away. Mother insisted the stillroom be kept clean and neat.
“Mothers regularly turn even newborn infants over to nurses and governesses so that they can rush back to their duties. But, in truth, most well-born ladies have little to do with their children, even when they stay at home.”
“Not you, Mother,” Kate said. “And we are glad of it.”
“Is that why you never accepted a post at court?” I asked. “Because you’d have had to leave us behind?”
“I was never offered a permanent place, but I was pleased to have it so. But you, Bess—you enjoy meeting new people and seeing new things. You will thrive in that environment.”
It was true that I was eager to see more of the world, but I loved my family and life at Cowling Castle. “I will miss you terribly, Mother.” I glanced at my sister. “I will even miss Kate and the boys.”
“If you do not go,” Kate said, ever practical, “Father will feel obliged to find you a husband and you will leave us anyway. And at court you might meet someone you’d like to marry. I wish I could go, too.”
“Your turn will come,” Mother promised her. “Now, we must make preparations for Bess’s departure. Jane Lisle is already here in Kent. She writes that the king and queen are still on progress and that their next stop is Woodstock, a royal manor in Oxfordshire. They plan to stay for a month. Since Woodstock is one of the king’s great houses, with room for as many as fifteen hundred people at a time, Jane will rejoin the court there. She’ll travel from Halden Hall accompanied by a large band of retainers. They will stop at Cowling Castle on their way north.”