This is my first teaser in a full gestation period, which is fitting, because our unhappy heroine in A Temperate Woman (the sprawling tale of Alice, a patroness of Edmund Spenser, chock full of sex, death, and jailtime - I won’t give away the bit about the sizzling gypsies) is about sixteen months pregnant and not enjoying it. Isabel, her midwife, is doing her best to keep her comfortable, but nothing works until Isabel - the Queen’s favourite with an intriguing and obscured past - tells us something of herself.
NB: I know this teaser is a mite too long. But teasers - like tweets - teach you something about culling: how long will you hold your reader’s attention? How long before the music starts and the hook comes out to drag you off the stage? I went over this piece four times with a hatchet to make it a mite too long instead of a volume of Remembrance of Things Past, which is what it was half an hour ago. This is what I tell people who say that Twitter is a waste of time: not to writers. Get that message out, stat! Tension in every tweet. But again, sorry: this is a mite long. And so, as an exercise for me: if you don’t read to the end (although it’s worth it), tell me when you stopped. This might be the most important writing lesson of all.
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I pass my days writing, or else in chapel, smelling the incense more deeply, feeling the liturgies enter me. I am open to prayer in a way that I was not before.
‘It is because you need prayer, now,’ Isabel says one day late in spring. She feels my massive belly. ‘You’re carrying high,’ she tells me. ‘A boy?’
‘I’m carrying high, I’m carrying low, I’m carrying everywhere,’ I say.
It is a beautiful day, the sun filling my bedchamber, bright but not too bright. The deep green curtains are half open, the orchard beyond the window bursting into the beginnings of apples and pears and the flowers that will fill the palace during the summer. I heave myself from position to position. I thought that lying back would be comfortable, but there is no comfort in this enormous body. I am close to tears, I can feel it, for something so small as the lack of a pillow behind my back. For knowing that a pillow would do no good. ‘It is everywhere,’ I say again. ‘It might be ten boys.’ I pause. ‘What do you know?’
She tries a pillow behind my back, shifting my girth with very little cooperation from me. ‘I know,’ she grunts, ‘what it is to need prayer.’
I was right. The pillow doesn’t help. ‘Burgundy,’ I say. The sideboard, from my bed, looks a pilgrimage away. I make a token effort to move, and fall back again. ‘I want some wine.’
I didn’t mean for it to come out like that. But remember that I am biting back tears. I am a great ball; I am the size of the sun, as graceful as a drunken man. A fat, drunken man. ‘When would you ever need prayer, anyway,’ I say.
‘I have needed prayer, madam,’ Isabel says.
The wine tastes all wrong. ‘You speak in such riddles,’ I say.
‘Riddles?’ Isabel asks, and her mildness makes me more angry, more desperate.
‘Riddles, yes! “I have needed prayer”,’ I sneer. ‘What does that mean? You are the Queen’s very favorite, you’ve known her since she was a child. When have you “needed prayer”? Why have you needed prayer?’
Isabel looks at me, and there is something wide open and dead in her grey eyes. ‘Don’t excite yourself,’ she says, tonelessly, and takes the wine glass from my hand.
Here I try to summon the hauteur of a great lady: ‘It is not for you to tell me what to do,’ I say. ‘I ask a question, and you will answer it.’
‘It is for me to tell you what to do,’ she says, and the dead look in her eyes persists. ‘My very commission is to tell you what to do. For your own safety, madam.’
‘You are hiding something,’ I say, with some satisfaction, falling against my inadequate pillows.
Isabel stands, using both arms of her chair to do so. I have never seen her look old before. ’I have learned discretion,’ she says, still toneless. ‘You might do the same, madam.’
And this is the greatest injustice of all, being accused of indiscretion when I carry such a horrid, corrosive secret. ‘You don’t know,’ I say, my voice very suddenly as barren of inflection as her own. ‘You don’t know.’
She ignores this. ‘I have asked you before not to ask me of myself,’ she says. And now she does something I have never seen her do before. She turns on her heel and almost loses her balance in doing it, and makes for the sideboard to pour wine for herself. There is a voice in the back of my head thinking My wine – how dare she – but it is a distant one. ‘Isabel?’
She downs the wine in two draughts and turns to stare at me - no, not me: my belly. ‘When will it be born?’ she asks. ‘It could be any day.’ She looks up. ‘Please God it be any day, any day now.’
‘Isabel, what can you mean?’
‘This court is a place for secrets,’ Isabel says, ‘no matter who sits at its head.’ And now she looks out the window, towards the orchard. ‘Greenwich,’ she whispers.
‘Greenwich?’
‘You want to know, madam? You want to know about me?’
I try to sit up and cannot. ‘Isabel –’
‘Yes, I have a secret!’ Isabel shouts. ‘Yes, I have a secret! Everyone has a secret! It is a part of the court garment, isn’t it? The ruff; the pomander; the garter; the secret. Yes, I have a secret.’
She moves closer to the window. ‘I used to sit in that orchard, after rainfall,’ she says. ‘I used to sit – right - there.’ And then she turns around. ‘You have a secret, madam,’ she says, her round grey eyes upon me. ‘I know nothing of what it is, only that you have one, or more than one, because you cannot be here without secrets. They make everyone behave, you see. They make everything work. I used to sit in that orchard,’ she says. I expect a pause, but then: ‘You might say that gossip annihilates secrets, but you’d be wrong about that.’ She stops a moment. ‘Of course you know that, because you’ve got something of your own, sweeting, something you’re hiding?’
A short laugh.
‘I remember,’ she says, softer now, ‘one day, when the Queen’s mother, Queen Anne, gave me a new gown. This was when I was in her service, years and years and years ago, and I had nothing, you understand, nothing but gowns that were too short and gowns that were too tight, and one gown – a blue satin one, with seed pearls – that my father spent his very last farthing on. And instead of dismissing me, instead of making fun, Queen Anne made me a gift of this gown.’
Her hands are gathered together in front of her.
‘She knew all my measurements,’ she whispers. ‘She got them all – from somewhere. She hired a tailor to make me this gown, and it was green brocade and cloth of silver and it made me feel like someone, do you understand? Someone who may well serve a great queen. She was a great queen. No one will tell you that, but she was.’ She gathers her breath. ‘When she’d made sure that it fit properly – and it did, it felt like my own skin – when she’d made sure, she wanted one thing from me. One thing, and that was to tell no one that she’d done it. It would cause an uproar, yes, among the other ladies?’ She says it just like this, like a question. ‘You’re no maid of honor, you’re not jostling for position or looking for a husband. You don’t know. But to be among them, for them to know that the Queen had made this gift to Isabel Ascham from nowhere - well. It would cause trouble, the Queen said. So she asked me, would I please be quiet about it. And of course I was.’
‘Of course you were,’ I murmur.
‘But here’s what I did do,’ she says, over my own feeble words. ‘Did I save the gown for a special day? No. Did I even wait, madam, did I even wait for the end of Lent? Because there was Lent, then, forty days of fish and penitence. But no, I did not. I couldn’t wait to wear the gown. I wore it to clean out the Queen’s wardrobe. And there it was: that gave me away. But did it give me away? No, no, it led to something far worse, because the other maids – they thought the King had given me the gown. That the King wanted me for his mistress! When I denied that, they believed it, but they were sure that some man had given it me. They knew I couldn’t afford it. And so I had to tell them, to stop them thinking this other thing. And still I’m not sure they believed me. And this,’ she says, her voice slowing now, ‘is why gossip keeps secrets. Because gossip gets it wrong.’
‘Is that your secret, Isabel?’
‘Madam, that is not what a secret is,’ Isabel says. ‘A secret is something you carry inside you like a canker. It is heavy and horrid and all your own, and you want desperately to be lightened of it, but there is only one thing worse than carrying a secret, madam, and that is being lightened of it.’
A silence. She looks around her, patting her sides. ’See here,’ she says, and she is different now; she is something of the Isabel I remember from only moments before. She busies herself with my coverlet, her ordinarily deft fingers fumbling. Watching her, I understand: there is natural grace and there is learned grace, and she must have spent a lifetime practicing grace. One upset – one memory – and it is unlearned. ‘You wanted the stories of King Henry’s court, did you not? You wanted to hear stories. Well, I have told you a story. I knew kindness from Queen Anne, and I have known kindness from – from her glorious, glorious daughter. Nothing but kindness.’
If I were reading the words Isabel speaks to me now, on paper, I am sure that I would see phrases, entire blocks of words scratched out, illegible. ‘I’m sorry, Isabel,’ I say. ‘I was bloody before, just bloody, and there’s no reason for it. I just feel so fat.’
She feels my forehead. Her hands are hot. ‘Don’t think on it, madam. I have known my share of changeable women.’ She smiles. ‘And you have every excuse! Not like me!’ We look, together, at my belly. ‘Please God it be soon,’ she murmurs. ‘Please God it be soon and I can be home again.’
