The Maid of Honour

The tide carried them down towards Greenwich under a sky the colour of unpolished pewter, and Cecily Verney sat very straight on the cushioned bench with her hands folded in her lap and her father’s instructions arranged inside her head like plate in a coffer, each piece wrapped in cloth so it would not knock against the others and chip.

Be seen. That was the first. Her father had said it in the great chamber at home with his back to the fire and his ringed hand on the mantel, and she had watched the ring catch the light while he spoke, because watching a thing kept her face from having to answer. Be seen, Cecily, but seen the right way. A maid who is not seen might as well have stayed in Warwickshire eating our bread.

Be useful. Her mother’s, this one, delivered without warmth in the still-room over the drying rosemary. Great people keep what serves them and forget what does not. See that you serve.

Marry well. Her uncle’s, of course, Sir Anthony Verney, who had bought her this place at court the way another man might buy a horse he meant to race, and who had ridden the first ten miles with her to make sure she understood what the animal was for. There are men at court a girl of your birth would never meet in a lifetime of country dancing. Be pleasant. Be modest. Be the sort a rising man decides upon. Your face is well enough. Your portion is not. You will make up the difference with sense.

And under all of them, unspoken and truest, the fourth: survive. No one had said it aloud. They had not needed to. It lived in the way her mother had held her too hard at the gate and then let go too fast, in the coin sewn into the hem of her second-best kirtle against a need none of them would name, in the fact that her father had gone to some pains, in the last week, to teach her which of their kin at court could be trusted and had arrived at a very short answer.

The barge was not theirs. It belonged to a Master Cofferer whose name she had already filed away, a heavy man in marten fur who had agreed, as a courtesy to Sir Anthony, to carry his niece the last stage of the journey down the river, and who had spent the passage talking to a companion about the price of Gascon wine and the failings of a steward at Richmond, and who had, within a quarter of an hour of Cecily boarding, entirely forgotten she was there.

She was used to that. It was, in truth, the only inheritance she trusted.

She was nineteen, and small, and made in a plain enough mould that a stranger’s eye slid off her and went looking for something worth resting on. Her hair was brown, her gown a decent murrey wool cut for wearing rather than for admiration, her manner so quiet that her sisters had used to forget her in the middle of a sentence and have to ask the room where she had got to when she had never left her stool. Cecily had learned early that this was not an affliction. A girl who was overlooked was a girl who was safe, and a girl who listened while others assumed the room was empty of any ear that mattered came, over years, to know a very great deal.

She knew, for instance, that the Master Cofferer’s companion had lied about the wine, and knew it because his voice had gone up a half-tone on the figure, the way voices did over a number they had padded. She knew that the boatmen were tired and had been paid short, from the way one of them muttered the stroke-count under his breath as though counting off a debt. She knew, because she had heard him say it at the last stairs, that they would reach the palace before the tide turned, and so she was not surprised when the great bend of the river opened and Greenwich came at them all at once, and her stomach turned over with something that was not the water.

She had thought she was ready to be unimpressed. She had told herself, on the long ride south, that a palace was a house made larger by money, and that she had seen large houses. This was not that.

Placentia stood along the waterfront in a long reach of red brick and glass, storey upon storey, the tall windows throwing back the pewter light so that the whole face of the place seemed lit from within by a cold fire, and above it the standards hung heavy and damp against their poles, and behind it the park climbed green into the mist with the little turret of the old watch-tower riding the hill like a thought the palace had not finished having. There were barges at the water-stairs (three, four, a fifth putting off) and wherries beyond them thick as waterfowl, and the noise came across the water before the smell did, a wide continuous sound of too many people, and then the smell, woodsmoke and river-mud and, under it, the particular reek of a place that fed and housed more mouths than it could quite carry cleanly.

Be seen, she told herself, and unfolded her hands, and made her back straighter still, and did not let her face do any of the things her stomach was doing.

The barge came in against the stairs with a jar that ran up through the soles of her feet. A boatman handed her out, she thanked him by name, Wat, which she had caught when the steersman used it, and saw the small surprise of it cross his face and then the small pleasure, and filed that too, that a name spent on a servant bought a coin’s worth of goodwill for nothing, and then she was standing on the water-gate stairs of the King’s palace of Greenwich with her box being lifted out behind her and no notion in the world of where to go.

❦

The woman who came for her did not hurry, and made Cecily feel, by not hurrying, that she herself had been hurrying disgracefully all her life.

She was perhaps fifty, dressed in black that was very good and very plain, with a gable hood of the old fashion framing a face that had long ago decided against beauty and settled instead on being obeyed. She came down the stairs with a set of keys at her girdle that spoke louder than any jewel, looked at Cecily for the length of time it takes to price a bolt of cloth, and said, “Mistress Verney.”

“Yes, mistress.”

“I am Mistress Stonor. I have the ordering of the maids of honour, which is to say I have the ordering of you.” She turned without waiting and went up, and Cecily gathered her skirts and followed, and a page she had not noticed took up the box. “You are late. Not by your own fault, I daresay, the tide being what God made it, but you will find that at court a fault is a fault whether you owned the making of it or no. Remember that and you will save yourself a deal of grief.”

“Yes, mistress.”

“You say yes, mistress very readily. We shall see whether you mean it as readily.” They passed under an arch and into a court, and the noise closed over Cecily’s head like water. Grooms, a knot of gentlemen in murrey and blue livery, a woman with a basket of linen, two greyhounds nosing at a doorway, a boy running with a covered dish held out before him as though it might bite, and none of them looked at her, and all of them, she recognised, would look at her the instant she did something wrong.

“You will lodge with the other maids,” Mistress Stonor said, mounting a stair. “You will rise when they rise and you will pray when they pray, which had better be oftener than you have been used to. You will attend the Queen’s grace as you are bid and not before you are bid. You will not speak in the privy chamber unless the Queen speaks to you first, and you will pray to be spared that honour until you have learned how to answer without disgracing the family that sent you. You will keep your gowns decent and your tongue decenter. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, mistress.”

“A quiet maid is a safe maid, Mistress Verney. A safe maid is a marriageable maid, and a marriageable maid is the whole of what your uncle has paid me to make of you. I have buried three of my charges from this court and married off nine, and I mean the tally to run my way. See that you help me.”

Buried three. Cecily kept her face still and put the words away whole. It was not the kind of thing a woman said unless she meant it to be heard, and Mistress Stonor had meant it; the question was only whether she had meant it as warning, as boast, or as grief, and Cecily did not yet have enough of her to tell.

They came out into a gallery hung with cloth, and Mistress Stonor stopped at a low door. “The Queen keeps a bright household,” she said, and something crossed her face and was gone. “Brighter than some think wise. You are come into it at a,” she chose the word, “full season. Keep your eyes to your own work and your work will keep you. Now. The Queen’s grace will see the new maids after Vespers. Until then you will make yourself known to the others and you will make yourself no trouble. God keep you, Mistress Verney.”

She was gone before Cecily could answer, keys speaking down the gallery, and Cecily stood at the low door with her heart going hard and thought: she did not once ask me a thing about myself. And then, because that was the sort of thought that could soften a girl and softness was a luxury for later: good. Let them not ask. Let them forget.

She opened the door.

❦

The maids’ chamber was long and low and warmer than she had expected, warmed by bodies as much as by the small fire, and it held more girls than Cecily had ever been shut in a room with, all of them turning to look at her at once with the frank assessing stare of a flock deciding whether a newcomer was hawk, rival, or nothing.

She counted them without seeming to. Six, then a seventh at the window. Their gowns told her more than their faces: two were dressed a shade above what a maid should wear, which meant either great family or great ambition; one wore the French hood set well back that the Queen was said to favour, and wore it as a flag; one, older than the rest, had the still competent look of a girl who had been here long enough to stop being frightened and had not yet been here long enough to be married out. They had been in the middle of something (a card game abandoned on the coffer, a lute, a girl’s half-braided hair) and Cecily had walked into the exact centre of a life already running, the way she always seemed to.

“You’ll be the Warwickshire one,” said the girl in the French hood, not unkindly, and went back to her cards. “Stonor’s been threatening us with you a se’nnight.”

“Cecily Verney.” She said it plainly and did not curtsey, because you did not curtsey to your equals and she had judged, correctly, that these were meant to be her equals and would resent her deciding otherwise. “I’m sorry to be a threat. I’ll try to be a small one.”

That got a laugh from one corner (a real one, quick and surprised) and Cecily turned to it and found the girl at the window.

She was fair and freckled and built on a generous plan, with a wide mouth made for the laugh that had just come out of it, and she had been sitting with her knees drawn up under her skirts in a way Mistress Stonor would have had opinions about, half a letter in her lap and her thumb over the writing as naturally as breathing. Cecily saw the thumb move before she saw the letter, and understood the letter to be private before she grasped it to be a letter, and filed both facts and the small guilty grace of the gesture in the same instant, the way she filed everything, without deciding yet what any of it was worth.

“Jane Ashcourt,” the fair girl said. “Don’t mind Alice, she threatens everyone, it’s how she loves. Come and sit by the window, the fire’s all bespoke by the great ladies of the pack there,” with a tilt of her head at the card-players, who ignored it, “and besides, you can see the river, which is the only honest thing at Greenwich because it goes away.”

Cecily crossed to her, stepping over a discarded slipper, and sat, and found that she could indeed see the river, grey and wide and full of the traffic that had frightened her an hour ago and now, from up here, looked merely busy, like a market. Jane folded the letter one-handed with the ease of long practice and put it inside her sleeve, and did it while looking straight at Cecily, which was either great innocence or great boldness, and Cecily could not yet tell which.

“You’ve come at a strange time,” Jane said, low, under the noise of the room. “I won’t pretend you haven’t. But you look like a girl who’d rather be told than gentled, so I’ll tell you: keep close to me the first week and I’ll keep you from the worst of the mistakes. I made all of them when I came and I’ve a Christian duty to spread the load.”

“Why would you do that?”

Jane blinked, then grinned, as though the question pleased her more than an answer would have. “Because you asked me why instead of thanking me. Half these girls would’ve thanked me and then wondered all night what I wanted.” She lowered her voice further, warm and conspiratorial. “I want a friend who isn’t already spoken for by somebody’s faction, is all. There aren’t so many. You’re new and you’re nobody, no offence, which at Greenwich is nearly the same as being clean.”

New and nobody. Cecily turned it over and found she did not mind it, coming from Jane, and minded that she did not mind, because liking someone this quickly was exactly the kind of softness she had promised herself to keep for later. She looked at the letter’s corner where it showed at Jane’s wrist, and looked away before Jane could see her looking, and said only, “Then I’m glad to be clean. Tell me the worst of the mistakes.”