bolder at taking it. The best times for going alone were just before or just after supper: two of the busiest times but coming when everyone’s energy was running low, and so there was a slipping and sliding, the household unravelling a little, a hint of abandon in the air and, later, a resignation. A lurching and drifting towards nightfall. A good a time as any for cutting loose.
I’d cross the drawbridge and head for the gardens. That first autumn of mine at the duchess’s was wonderful, a St Luke’s Little Summer. Crusty sea-green lavender heads bobbed under burly bees, and everywhere was strung with barely visible spider webs of improbable spans, individual threads turned into tiny lightning bolts by the low sun. The air was somehow always cooler than I’d anticipated, like water, and moving through it gave me the pleasurable sensation of being dowsed. High above me and above the indignant rooks, birdsong tweaked at the sky as if pulling it flat in readiness for lowering it down, and dusk rose around me as rich as woodsmoke. Secluded at the far end of the flower garden was a banqueting house where, in the grand old days, favoured guests would have retreated after feasts for confectionery and spiced wine. It had long since fallen into disrepair, and my friends avoided it. I, though, found myself drawn to it. Its oak pillars and posts - now woodbine-clogged and fringed with tatty blossoms - were carved with sprightly little fleur-de-lys, sinuous vines and bold bunches of grapes; it had once been really quite something. It was even glazed, and, sometimes, having eased open the door and braved the cloth-like webs to climb the ladder-staircase, I’d peer through those sea-green diamonds of glass at the duchess’s house: buildings that, despite their decrepitude, didn’t look in any danger of falling down, not least because there was nowhere much further to fall. I used to fantasise that over the years I’d furnish that banqueting house with a cosy bed and carpets and no one would know. It’d be for me alone and I felt something of a princess, I suppose, to have even the faintest possibility of it.
Evenings were nothing much at the duchess’s. Apart from on the eve of an important feast day and then on the day itself, she eschewed the dancing and masques that were popular in most noble households and instead we had to be content with card and board games in the company of Polly and Mrs Scully and whichever Scully-children had yet to be put to bed. Later, though, in the privacy of our own room, gazing up at roofbeams barely visible in the glow of the solitary wick, and ignoring Mary’s snores (mercifully, she fell asleep as soon as her head went down), the rest of us talked about boys. We discussed our future husbands: what we hoped they’d be like and what our lives with them might be like. It was as if we imagined those husbands - whoever they were - waiting patiently for us; as if, by having to take our time to grow up, we were inadvertently keeping them waiting. My mother might not have despaired, because there was nothing silly in our talk. We were careful to speak respectfully of those men: it was a serious undertaking even to speak of them, these men to whose selection our parents would give so much consideration. There was nothing resigned in our attitude towards the marriages for which we were heading. We had expectations of which we spoke spiritedly understanding ourselves to be taking them along with us into the future - if not meeting our spouses halfway, then at least part of the way.
We all pitied Mary’s future husband.
We didn’t only talk, at bedtime: sometimes we sang. Or Dottie, Maggie and I did; Alice was no singer, she maintained a dignified silence. Dottie, Maggie and I sang love songs that we’d filched from the adult world and which we didn’t fully understand, but we’d picked up threads from visiting musicians and from Polly and managed to make something of them, something that captivated us. In our bedroom and also sometimes when we were left alone in the gallery, in the gardens or the stillhouse, we offered up these little incantations - even Mary, sometimes, welcoming the opportunity to make a noise - as if trying to summon futures for ourselves.
Despite the talk of whom our parents would choose for us, we didn’t shy away from speculating which boys in the household or neighbourhood we’d marry if by some chance we had the choice. Harmless, this talk, and liberating: a choice unburdened by the various considerations which, we knew, our parents had to take into account. Liberating, but never frivolous: we relished the choice that in fact we would never have, and chose carefully. Careful, as well, to avoid any conflict between one another. By negotiation, we parcelled out the better of the boys in the household and the neighbourhood: the trio of pages, and the sons of the higher-status members and retainers of the duchess’s household such as her secretary and doctor. Not so much a choice, then, perhaps, as an allocation. Mine, that first autumn and winter, was the doctor’s second son, fourteen-year-old Rufus: a watchful lad, by all accounts a clever boy. We kept our boys to ourselves and even they themselves - especially them — knew nothing of our interest in them.
We didn’t idolise them. Our attitude to them was one of tolerance - as if they were merely, in some way, necessary. We took an interest in them, but there was no passion. What was important to us was the act of choosing. Looking back, I’m struck that our attitude to them was rather superior. In my daydreams, Rufus would be struck down, it didn’t matter how, it mattered only that he was in desperate need and that I, grave and efficient, worked wonders. I found, in my daydreams, that I had a talent for it.
Bright-button-eyed Dottie had been right, that very first night: It’s great, you wait and see. The only problem was that, in so enjoying myself, I couldn’t shake a suspicion that I was betraying my mother: my mother, by whose very best efforts I was there at the duchess’s. It wasn’t only the talk of boys of which she would’ve disapproved, or the lack of schooling. Worse than that: she’d drummed into me that I’d have to be on my best behaviour at the duchess’s, but to my surprise, I realised that it was at home that I’d been on my best behaviour. Both of us - my mother and me - had been forever on our best behaviour, whereas life in the duchess’s household wasn’t the ceremonial business that she’d believed it would be. At the duchess’s, I was free of all that: I was free and every day was one long sigh of relief freighted with the shame of my disloyalty. However happy I was, I lived day by day with a catch in my breath, a lump in my throat, a hitch to my heartbeat: the sense that I was getting away with something and the day would come when I’d have to answer for it.
Katherine Howard arrived at the duchess’s six months after I did, on the eve of Lady’s Day. That first evening, she said very little; just regarded us all with that gaze of hers, that half-smile, answering our questions which, from shyness, were limited to practical considerations. Only Mary was more personal - ‘Are your parents alive?’ - but was answered at first less readily and then rarely, Katherine giving an impression of being unable to hear while she unpacked her chest and her bags. When we woke in the morning, Katherine’s mattress lay square on to the wall in our higgledy-piggledy room and, shutting the door behind us, glancing back, I saw that it was our five that looked out of place.
Her first morning, she showed a similar effortless efficiency in the day room, copying letters as if it were nothing and gazing into space while waiting for the others to catch up. Mrs Scully was full of praise for her - ‘Very good, Katherine!’ - which rather dismayed me because it was only copying, after all, and she showed no signs of actually being able to write. When Mrs Scully left the room at the end of the lesson, Katherine remarked expressionlessly and to no one in particular, ‘What do you think she was thinking when she put that dress on this morning? “Oh, this blue’ll look good”?’
It’d been phrased as a question, but I knew full well that no actual response was required. Or none that wasn’t in accord. The new girl’s opinion was that the colour of Mrs Scully’s dress was wrong and Mrs Scully should not only have known it but also cared.
Infuriatingly, ever-eager Dottie rushed in with an excuse: ‘Not much else fits her -’ as if Mrs Scully had lots of dresses from which to choose - ‘because she’s expecting again.’
‘Yes.’ Katherine bit a nail, then examined it. ‘I can see she’s been busy.’
Busy?
At that, Alice almost caught my eye but seemed to think better of it. I didn’t like it that this new girl - or anyone, but especially this blank-faced, glittery-eyed new girl - should be passing comment on Mrs Scully. What was wrong with blue, anyway? True, it was more often the colour of servants’ livery, and, true, it was more often worn by men than by women, but so what?