Mistress to the Crown Read Online Free PDF Page B

parents had hurried mine away. Or had my father done the hurrying?
    I searched the faces around me. Did our husbands know?
    ‘Too tame,’ Paddesley was complaining, with a sneer of nostril. ‘They could have whipped the whore around the yard.’
    ‘Aye, better sport,’ agreed Shore, which made me want to stick a dagger in him.
    ‘For my part, I cannot see what charm she held for the poor dotard,’ Master Shelley was saying. ‘Breasts like a beggar’s purse. Whereas that cherrylips a month ago.’ He whistled. His eyesskewed covertly in my direction. ‘Legs to her armpits, but this hag …’
    ‘Ah, but …’ Paddesley whispered something behind his hand. The other two laughed.
    Margery, excluded, reddened. ‘You might give me thanks,’ she muttered, taking out her annoyance on me. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’
    ‘Pleased! I found it offensive.’
    ‘Twaddle, Lizbeth! Women like her make it harder for the rest of us.’
    ‘Make what harder, Mistress Paddesley,’ quipped Shelley, elbowing her husband.
    ‘Yes, what are you trying to say, pet?’ Paddesley asked, trying to exchange a grin with me.
    Margery was already in a nose-up huff. ‘No matter. Can we go now?’
    ‘Yes, Margery, what did you mean?’ I whispered as we descended the stairs ahead of the others.
    She had to be coaxed. ‘Just that respectable wives like us are not supposed to play the games in bed that she does. If we do, we’re accused of being wanton.’
    ‘So it’s a sin to enjoy a husband’s lovemaking? How very absurd, but then I wouldn’t know, would I?’ How bitter I must have sounded.
    ‘Well, I think the whore deserved her punishment, Lizbeth. She’s the worse sort, tempting husbands to be unfaithful.’
    ‘What, you think she’s worse than a common strumpet?’
    ‘Winchester geese do it to stay alive. And it’s a business transaction for men who have too much—’ She gestured. ‘You know.’
    ‘Ah, “the fiery men who become ill if they do not have regular intercourse with a woman”,’ I said, quoting a treatise on the issue.
    ‘Exactly,’ agreed Margery. ‘Whereas that bitch’s sort does it because they enjoy it.’
    ‘So it’s her pleasure you take issue with?’
    ‘Well, yes.’
    It was a point of view I had once shared. The sisterhood of respectability. Guild wives were supposed to uphold God’s commandments to the letter. But poor Margery was feeding the incubus of Envy. If she could not enjoy the sport of the bedchamber, she did not want anyone else to either.
    I, too, had never enjoyed a man’s lovemaking. Suffered, yes. Shore had first used me when I was fourteen years old. His recent impotence was a blessing. Alas, now I was five and twenty! More than half my life gone already. But none of the London guildsmen had measured to my taste. No man except … And into my mind at that moment crept a scheme so outrageously sinful that I halted on the cobbles with a gasp.
    ‘Lizbeth, what’s wrong? Are you ill?’
    ‘Possibly.’ I laughed. Crazed might be the word.
    Yes, wild, fevered, CRAZED! Deliciously mad with a spire-high, illuminated ‘C’.

IV
    I took matters – and courage – into my own hands and trounced off to Beaumont’s Inn.
    ‘You’ll ‘ave to wait in line,’ the porter growled at me.
    Wait? There I was, anxious to give, my heart beating frantically, and ahead of me were forty people, and more arriving.
    ‘Be patient, dearie,’ said the woman behind me as she heard me sigh. ‘It’s always like this on petition days.’
    But then I saw his lordship’s steward come out and linger as though counting us. I left the line and hastened towards him but he vanished inside and the two guards protecting the entrance to the hall slammed their halberds across my path.
    ‘Take your turn, mistress,’ chortled one of them, ‘unless you’d like to take your turn wi’ me.’
    I bit my lip. ‘Very tempting, sirrah, but it’s not that business I had in mind. I’m a mercer come