Mistress to the Crown Read Online Free PDF

stands at St Paul’s Yard beside the cathedral. She had more flesh to keep her warm; I was feeling chilled and ravenous.
    I had always trusted Margery. We had become friends at the Cripplegate School for merchants’ daughters and neither of us had found marriage easy. But there was something else that bound me to her family. Not just their help in strangling the scandal that would have dishonoured my father, but Master Shaa’s kindness in persuading Shore to let me have my little enterprise with the silkwomen.
    ‘Wait-and-see!’ My friend tapped the side of her nose. ‘A surprise.’
    ‘Oh lord, we haven’t got to watch another pair of priests being flailed around the yard, have we?’ I sat down again with great reluctance. The hour’s sermon on Divine Love, delivered by aFranciscan with a blocked nose, had been tedious. ‘Won’t your children be missing you?’ I muttered.
    ‘Lizbeth! Be patient!’
    The last thing I wanted was to watch some poor wretch doing penance for their sins. God’s mercy! I was the last person to desire to cast the first stone. Part of me was bursting to tell Margery about my encounters with Lord Hastings, but her tolerance of others’ foibles had narrowed since her marriage to the goldsmith Hugh Paddesley, a man I did not care for. Sometimes she sounded more like Paddesley than he did.
    ‘Ah, here we go,’ she exclaimed, nudging me with her elbow.
    A ragtag mob of people, who had not heard the sermon, was thickening the crowd. Alarm bells sounded in my head. Adultery! It had to be adultery! I cast a sharp look at my friend. Had she suspected I was dreaming of taking a lover? No, that was lighting a bonfire with green wood for I read no rebuke in her eyes, and Shore and Paddesley were discussing cockfighting with their friend Shelley. Nothing was untoward.
    ‘I promise you, Lizbeth!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ll be glad you stayed.’
    There was only one penitent in the open cart, a woman in a white shift with her long dark hair unbound about her shoulders. Not a common strumpet by the way she held herself. Well nourished, too, neither scrawny nor obese. The crowd whooped as the sheriff’s soldiers pulled her roughly down onto the cobbles and untied her wrists. A priest handed her a lit taper, and then with two soldiers ahead of her and two behind her with their halberd blades prodding her forwards, she began her journey of contrition around St Paul’s Yard.
    I had seen these walks of penitence before, but today the crowd’s jeers made me shudder as though someone had walked across my grave. The human cockroaches from the back lanes hadbrought buckets slopping with excrement. Soon the woman’s shift would resemble a filthy rag.
    At first she tried to keep her dignity, but as the pelting grew, she started to flinch, her body jerking this way and that like a thief on a hangman’s rope. As she approached our stand, I could see she was about ten years older than I. Her forehead and left cheek were bleeding, and spittle and dung spattered her hair and skin. The thin, putrid shift showed her nipples and she was shivering as though she had the marsh disease.
    Shore and Margery’s husband leaned over to spit at her.
    ‘Come on! Hiss !’ Margery sprang to her feet and, like the other merchant’s wives, shook her fist and jeered. I stood up with the rest but I could not abuse the poor creature. This was no prostitute snared to give the crowd its monthly dose of titillation. She could have been an erring wife or a courtesan; just a woman who had fallen into temptation.
    ‘Vile,’ I muttered, wincing as I watched the woman whimper and fling up her hands as the stoning began again.
    Flushed and pleased, Margery subsided on the bench and put her mouth to my ear. ‘That was your father’s greedy whore. She was caught last week fleecing a merchant from the Grocers’ Guild. Didn’t you hear all the hubbub? The guild has expelled him.’
    ‘Sweet Christ!’ Now I understood why her