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who had been kind to me.
    "May I respectfully offer a suggestion to Your Majesty? That might ease the pain?"
    "By all means, my dear. Anything you could do in
that
line would be deeply appreciated."
    "My father suffered as Your Majesty does. I discovered that if I had two basins, one with near-boiling water, and one with cold, and plunged his hand first in one and then the other, and then massaged it hard, he experienced some relief."
    The Queen at once gave instructions for the fetching of these necessary things, and the treatment commenced. There was no talk now of majesty being touchable only by the fingers of peeresses; the poor suffering lady was only too anxious for my experiment. Happily it worked, and with the relief that I brought the Queen came further intimacy. Soon I was admitted to the bedchamber and allowed to rub the royal neck and back. My fingers were evidently as soothing as my voice, for I now became a kind of nurse as well as reader.
    As soon as the royal entourage saw that I had established myself, all outward signs of jealousy ceased. I had now become a person to be reckoned with, to be cultivated rather than undercut. But the court must have been surprised at how little I changed. No honors were thrust upon me. The Queen accepted my ministrations placidly, with kind words and grateful smiles. But our conversations remained totally matter-of-fact. Any other woman with a good reading voice and a manipulative hand could have taken my place.
    The reader may find it difficult to credit that it was the Duchess herself who paved the way for my further favor. She summoned me to her apartments at Windsor one morning and received me with her pleasantest smile, which, I may say, was a very pleasant one.
    "I am delighted to hear, Cousin Abigail, of your success with the Queen! I have just been talking with Her Majesty, and I told her that I had depended on her unerring judgment of people to lead her in time to a recognition of your merits. I had been afraid, had I pushed you forward, that she would think I was doing a favor for a kinswoman. But now that she has found you, I can claim the credit of having put you in her way. You are just the person, my dear, to suit the Queen. You have cultivation, discretion and patience."
    I listened, astonished. Was Sarah sincere? There could be no doubt of it. She was incapable of even a minor deceit. If she wanted to hide something, silence was the only way she could accomplish it, as her husband had learned to his pain. The explanation, as I soon made out, of her willingness to share with me any portion of her favor with the Queen was twofold. In the first place, it never occurred to her that she was sharing it. She conceived of my functions as so lowly and nurselike that I could never aspire to the high, free intellectual and spiritual friendship that existed between "Mrs. Morley" and "Mrs. Freeman." Was it even imaginable that a humble, plain bedchamberwoman could be a rival to the wife of the Captain-General? And secondly, she needed me. The Duchess of Marlborough needed Abigail Hill? How could that be?
    Well, this was how it could be. The Duchess was bored with the Queen. She wanted to enjoy her great position and wield her power in the company of peers and statesmen and generals. She liked the busy world of London, where she could confer with the Whig leaders and preside at parties where the wit and fashion of the day convened. And, to do her justice, she missed her family, too; she wanted to spend more time with her handsome, bright children. Life in the small, stuffy chambers where the Queen liked to sit all day, playing cards or reminiscing about the past or giving instructions to gardeners, was anathema to her. There had even been times when I had wondered if frustration at court had not engendered an actual dislike in the Duchess for her mistress. I had once seen her take up a pair of the Queen's gloves that she thought were her own and then fling them down, muttering