A Want of Kindness Read online

  The men on either side of him have kept their heads covered, so must be ambassadors, here to examine Mary. The usual pack of courtiers follow the three of them as they approach her, and she greets them all with a perfect curtsy, first taking a step to one side, towards the men, then drawing the foot back so that her heels touch, before making a bend of carefully judged depth, allowing her arms to fall gracefully to her sides. All the men, apart from the King, bow in return, the ambassadors slightly, the courtiers deeply and elaborately.

  The King lifts Mary’s face by the chin, holds on to it while he praises her dancing, her poise, her height, her fine verse-speaking, her charming yet modest demeanour and, most fulsomely, her beauty. The ambassadors join in with accented compliments. Meanwhile, Anne’s favourite spaniel, Hortense, starts sniffing about her skirts, so she bends down to pet her. They are both of them afflicted with a constant watering of the eyes, and Anne believes that this has given them a special understanding.

  She is stroking Hortense’s ears when a hissed Your Highness! from somewhere makes her jump: the King has finished with Mary and is now addressing her. As she straightens up, she feels one of her worst blushes coming, hot and red, spreading out from the sides of her nose all the way to her ears, up to her temples, and down to her neck. Once the blush has started, nothing can go right, and her curtsy is suf­ficiently unlike Mary’s for some of the courtiers to laugh a little into their sleeves. The King, at least, doesn’t laugh. She looks straight up at him, at his black intelligent fox face, and waits to hear what he has for her.

  ‘Anne, I think you astonished our Court tonight.’

  She sees she is expected to speak.

  ‘How is that, Your Majesty?’

  ‘With your voice. We hear it so seldom, and that is a great pity, for it is a very fine thing, sweet and clear. If you were not a princess, you should have a great career upon the stage. It was a pleasure for us to hear you speak your lines – a great pleasure. We must work upon that voice – I shall have Mrs Barry give you more lessons.’

  ‘Thank you, Sir.’

  ‘But tell me . . .’ and he leans towards her, ‘which shall you be, do you think? A comedienne or a tragedienne, hmm?’

  Anne knows that she should provide an answer, but she has nothing to offer except more blushes. All the same an answer comes:

  ‘Her Highness is too modest to give an answer, for the truth is that she knows she must excel at both.’

  But it isn’t her voice – it is an older, altogether more confident one, and it comes from behind her, from the same source as the hiss: insolent Mercury, speaking out of turn.

  Her uncle’s gaze shifts, and a change comes over him, so that he reminds Anne of the way Hortense looks when she thinks she might have caught the scent of something interesting.

  ‘Vivacious Mercury,’ and he beckons Sarah Jennings forward. She makes her curtsy a little awkwardly, because she is still in breeches, but a sound performance, all the same.

  ‘So, Mercury, what will you?’

  ‘I, Your Majesty?’

  ‘Yes. The Lady Anne is for the stage, but Mercury?’

  Sarah gives the King, the ambassadors and Court gentlemen only the shortest time to watch her thinking before she replies:

  ‘Well, Sir. When Mercury has put off his costume he must become Mrs Sarah Jennings again, a most dutiful Maid of Honour to her Grace of York, and later, if it pleases God, some gentleman’s virtuous wife.’

  There is a brief silence in which many things Anne does not understand seem to be happening, and then her uncle bursts into laughter, taking his pack of gentlemen with him.

  After the King has left, Anne asks Sarah why he laughed. Was it because she was jesting?

  ‘No,’ Sarah replies. ‘He laughed because I was in earnest.’ Then she lowers her voice and adds: ‘Your Highness, try not to screw your eyes up so: people are saying it gives you a disagreeable look.’

  Anne’s Eyes

  For as long as Anne can remember, her eyes have caused consternation. It is on account of them and their watering that her earliest memories are all in French.

  She is at her grandmother’s chateau in Colombes, and one of her grandmother’s physicians is dropping something into her eyes. She cries, then her face is wiped, and she is given something to eat. Later, in the nursery, something nasty is spooned into her mouth; she splutters, and cries again, and is given something nicer to console her.

  Her grandmother falls ill and takes to her chamber; then she disappears altogether and Anne is taken to another nursery. It belongs to her cousin Marie Louise, who is sometimes kind to her and sometimes a tormentor. Every now and then their play is interrupted for visits from Marie Louise’s mother – the kind and pretty aunt whom everyone calls Madame – or from more physicians who come to put drops in her eyes. Sometimes they cut or blister her for good measure. The doctors come and they go, but there are always ladies to wipe her face, to administer nasty spoonfuls, and to feed her sweetmeats afterwards.

  Months pass like this, then a day comes when the house is full of people hurrying and hushing and nobody remembers to wipe her eyes. They are all wiping their own, because her aunt Madame is dead. Her uncle, Monsieur, comes to the nursery, puts his hand on her head, and gives her a candied apricot. She does not like Monsieur – maybe it is his smile, or perhaps his smell – so she hides the apricot inside her sleeve and drops it later, in a corner.

  On Monsieur’s orders, Marie Louise and Anne are dressed in long violet gowns with veils down to their feet, and she is dragged, stumbling, to a chapel where she is upset by overwhelming music, rich scents and too many adults weeping.

  Soon after this, she is told the good news – her father has sent for her, and she is to return to London, because her eyes are cured! She is put on a boat with her ladies, and two pearl and gold bracelets, a present from the King of France. They are such beautiful things that she feels compelled to lick them, but as soon as she does so, they are taken away. And then her eyes are wiped again.

  Man or Tree?

  That night they stay at their father’s house, at St James’s, but next day they are sent straight back upriver to Richmond, where the air is cleaner, and the smell of rut only perceptible when the deer are in season.

  Even in a royal barge, with eight strong oarsmen, the journey takes a couple of hours or more, and the first part, from Whitehall Stairs, is never pleasant. The night before, in the prologue to Calisto, Thames made her appearance as a beautiful river nymph draped in silks, leaning on an urn, attended by Peace, Plenty and the Four Parts of the World, all come to pay homage and bring her presents of sparkling jewels. In daylight, her character is quite different. Her broad body is pasted all over, in the most ramshackle way, with boats of various sizes and states of repair, which are themselves studded haphazardly with boatmen, passengers, coal, timber, livestock, cabbages, pails of milk, and whatever else London and the Court might consume, or excrete. Her attendants, the watermen, hail her with coarse and violent oaths. One small mercy, as Danvers says, is that it is February, and cold, so the smells are not too bad.

  But the cold, like the watermen, is no respecter of rank, and it is pretty bad. The princesses are sitting in the shelter of the tilt with their dressers and Sarah Jennings, they are wrapped up in heavy cloaks, fur boas and fur muffs, but the cold comes to find them all the same, to pinch their royal noses. Anne pulls her hood over her face, as far forward as she can. Mrs Danvers asks if she might not push it back just a little, but Anne says ‘No’, and this sets Mary off telling Mrs Jennings her favourite story about her sister. Anne supposes Mrs Jennings must be the only one of their step­mother’s Maids of Honour not to have heard it already.

  ‘My sister can be so stubborn.’

  This is how it always starts.

  ‘She was quite small then – I remember she had not long returned from France – and we were wa
lking in the Park together, out in the open, and we saw something at a great distance. Whatever it was, it was too far away for us to be certain as to what it was – of course we both have our bad eyes, but even if we did not – but we were wondering aloud together what it was, and then a dispute was started between us as to whether this something were a man, as I believed, or, as my sister thought, a tree. After a short while, we came near enough to make out the something’s shape, and then, clearly, it was a man, so I said, “Now Sister, are you satisfied that it is a man?” But then Anne, after she saw what it was, turned so that she had her back to him, and cried out, like this – “No, Sister, it is a tree!”’

  Sarah laughs obligingly, then turns to Anne and asks her, ‘But what were your thoughts?’

  Anne pushes her hood back long enough to say, ‘Mary tells everyone about this, but I don’t recall it,’ then having nothing more to add, retracts her head again.

  The Ruin of Winifred Wells

  Anne has been told, many times, that Richmond was a great Palace once, but that was before Cromwell and his traitorous Parliament took possession and sold it. Then the buyers took down the white stones of the State and privy apartments, the Great Hall and the Chapel, leaving only the red-brick buildings that had housed the lesser people, the courtiers and officials. Now Cromwell’s head sits justly rotting on a spike above Westminster Hall, while the Duke of York’s daughters inhabit these red-brick remains, along with their governess, Lady Frances Villiers, her daughters Betty, Barbara, Anne and Catherine, their chaplains, nurses, footmen, necessary women, laundresses and suchlike, portraits of forgotten courtiers and various pieces of heavy oak furniture no longer wanted at St James’s or at Whitehall, where tastes run to more delicate items, fine-legged, inlaid or japanned, and preferably made of walnut.

  So when they sit down to dine, it is at a refectory table of quite exemplary sturdiness, the bulbous legs of which, as Sarah Jennings points out, resemble nothing so much as two rows of squabbish frights in farthingales.

  Eating dinner is one activity to which Anne always applies herself most diligently. It is not only that she loves it for itself, but also that nobody can reasonably ask her to speak if she’s using her mouth to eat with. When at table, the sisters always divide the labour between them: Mary keeps up the flow of conversation, while Anne eats.

  In this way, they work together through the first course, and the second. Mary chatters, laughing first, then checking herself, then moralising, then forgetting herself, and laughing again. The Villiers sisters, Betty especially, do nothing but laugh. They find Mrs Jennings particularly amusing; Anne cannot help noticing that her sister does not.

  With dinner almost over, the broken meats of the second course not yet removed, Anne pulls a silver dish towards her, and helps herself to a sippet. It is her favourite way to end a meal: first she crams the sodden bread into her mouth, then – and this is the heavenly part – she presses it against her palate with her tongue, forcing the warm gravy out over her tongue and down her throat, waiting until the last, tiniest drop has gone before chewing and swallowing the squeezed-out bread. She has finished one and is reaching for her second, when Mary’s brittle voice cuts in:

  ‘Sister, must you always finish every sippet on the table? I fear you will grow as fat as our mother did.’

  The word ‘mother’ to Anne means a richly upholstered lap, and sweet bites offered by sparkling, chubby fingers. Fat or not, the face has long since faded, and she takes the portraits on trust. Now another sippet has arrived in her mouth; she hears her sister huffing through her nose, and glances towards her.

  Mary is sitting bolt upright, her face severe, a silver spoon held with conscious delicacy halfway between a bowl of rosewater cream and her perfect mouth. Anne stops, shamed, her mouth full of half-sucked sippet. She can hardly spit it out, but she no longer feels like swallowing. Then Mrs Jennings pushes another dish towards her, saying, ‘But such tiny morsels, what difference can they make?’

  ‘Besides,’ Betty adds, ‘surely it is the duty of every royal person to increase her dignity?’

  ‘My sister needs to learn to moderate her appetites.’

  ‘Quite so,’ says Betty, and then, in a voice a little less like her own and a little more like Mary’s she adds, ‘We might all profit by your example: I have never known Your Highness to sit down more than three hours at the card table, or to write to her dearest dear Mrs Apsley more than twice in one—’

  ‘That’s enough, Betty.’

  ‘Yes, Mother. That was too sharp: Madam, forgive me.’

  If Betty sounds less than sincere, Mary is gracious enough to accept her apology in the spirit in which it should have been offered. Anne continues with her sippets, and the conversation moves on. Sarah Jennings is asked for her opinion on the Duchess’s other Maids of Honour, which she delivers in plain terms.

  ‘Great fools, for the most part, and easy prey. There’s hardly one among them who wouldn’t exchange her honour for a pair of kid gloves, a fan or two, a handful of compliments and some inferior verses bought off a hack.’

  ‘I heard,’ says Barbara, ‘that Monmouth and Mulgrave and even—’ she stops short and looks at Anne, ‘others are daggers drawn over Mrs Kirk.’

  ‘Mary Kirk is the biggest fool of all of them – and lately most unwell.’

  ‘That I can believe.’

  ‘It was just the same when my sister Frances was at Court. Worse, perhaps – have you heard of Winifred Wells?’

  ‘Winifred Wells?’ Betty sits up. ‘Wasn’t she the one who—’

  Sarah, not to be cheated of her story, cuts in again. ‘Had a mind to take Lady Castlemaine’s place with the King. She was pretty enough, but had no wit to speak of, and surrendered far too readily to hold his interest—’

  ‘There is a verse about her!’ Betty again. ‘It puns upon her name, like this:

  “When the King felt the horrible depth of this Well,

  Tell me, Progers, cried Charlie, where am I? oh tell!

  Had I sought the world’s centre to find—”’

  ‘Betty! You are quite incorrigible! Remember where you are!’ Sarah takes up the story again. ‘So, the affair did not last, and no-one – except I suppose Mrs Wells – thought much more of it, but then some months later, at a ball, in the very midst of the Court, as she was dancing in Cuckolds All Awry, she suddenly stopped, and groaned, and before everyone’s eyes she dropped her child!’

  Anne clears her throat suddenly, and everybody looks at her. ‘What became of the baby?’ ‘Another dancer, a lady, took it up in a handkerchief—’ ‘Did it not cry? Had the dancers stepped on it?’ ‘No, I believe it was . . . it was an abortion, quite dead.’ ‘Just as well, under the circumstances,’ says Barbara. ‘Perhaps, but Mrs Wells had to leave Court, all the same.’ Then Lady Frances announces, very firmly, that dinner is over. Anne is glad of this: she has the beginnings of a stomach ache.

  A Catechism

  First, Anne believes in God the Father, who hath made her, and all the world.

  Second, in God the Son, who hath redeemed her, and all mankind.

  Third, in God the Holy Ghost, who sanctifieth her, and all the elect people of God.

  Her duty towards God is to believe in him, to fear him, and to love him, with all her heart, with all her mind, with all her soul, and with all her strength; to worship him, to give him thanks, to put her whole trust in him, to call upon him, to honour his holy Name and his Word, and to serve him truly all the days of her life.

  She knows that she is not able to do this of herself, because she is weak, and naturally sinful, and so cannot walk in the Commandments of God, or serve him, without his special grace, which she must at all times call for by diligent prayer.

  Every morning and every evening, she says the Lord’s Prayer, and asks him to lead her not into temptation.

  She prayed last evening, and
again this morning, but she cannot deny that her heart and mind were both times very much taken up with the play, the dancing, the costumes, the Court and Mrs Jennings.

  So that there was not enough room in them for God.

  So when she prayed, he did not hear her; he caused sippets to appear before her at dinner time, and she ate a surfeit of them.

  This surfeit being an offence in his eyes, he has sent her a correction in the form of a stomach ache, so there will be no cards after dinner, and no tea.

  But as he is merciful, he has also provided a spoonful of Mrs Danvers’ surfeit water, and a soft bed on which she may bear her sickness patiently, and with a contrite heart.

  In the Ruelle

  Anne is the cunningest fox that ever was. She has made a harbour of the ruelle in one of the bedchambers at St James’s, and her sister and step-mother may seek as much as they like, but they shall not find.

  When Anne was smaller, too small to understand that grown people have different pleasures, she supposed that the Palace was built with hide and seek in mind. Behind the well-ordered state rooms is a ravelled heap of closets, staircases and narrow, curving passages that drop down a step without warning, or run on for miles with nothing in them but bottled ships and dead mice, or end abruptly in sullen, doorless walls. Hiding in the ruelle, Anne sits between the two palaces: to her right, behind the hanging, is the Duchess’s Great Bed; on her left is the wall, with a door in it which leads to a closet, which has another door, that leads to a staircase, that might lead to another closet, or the kitchens, or outside, or anywhere.