Ladies in Waiting Read Online Free Page A

with the morning tide.
    Now, two months later, they struck sounding off Dover, ahead of a storm, and as they eased into port she prepared to wear his gift. She lay the skirt on her bed and unconsciously bent her knees as the ship shifted in the chop of the docks. She was an experienced seawoman, and so long as it was not actually raining she could be found strolling along the deck, heedless of the heaving, reading a book as she walked. This was her fourth long ocean voyage—once from England to Barbados as a child, then to Virginia and back with her father, and now to her natal soil to complete her education with her godmother, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, philosopher and authoress.
    She arranged the undergarments and finally pulled out something she knew about but had never worn—a pair of bodies, or a bodice.
    She might be an aristocrat, but she was a plantation aristocrat, who was always looking to the laborers, experimenting with the crops, testing improvements to her fleet of tiny sailboats, and above all, concocting compounds and testing ideas in Papa’s elaboratory. She wore breeches most of the time, and since their land stretched hundreds of acres, there was no one except the slaves and indentured servants to stare. If she did wear a dress, for coolness or the occasional social call, it was a loose one-piece tied at the waist and throat with a ribbon, or an unboned jacket and skirt, hemmed above the ankles. She had never laced herself into whalebone, never been in close company of a lady who did. Her father’s friends were all men, and she had neither a comrade close to her own age with whom to speculate nor an older woman to guide her. When she looked at the stiff bodice with its spider web laces, she was at a loss.
    She puzzled over the luminous copper thing but could see only one way of wearing it, laced in the front. How else was she to fasten it? One of the plumper cooks on the plantation stuffed herself into a front-knotting stomacher; it must be something like that. “Gemini, that’s wretched,” she said as she wiggled herself into the garment. A stiff board embedded in the material flattened her back from the shoulder blades down, and the neck was so high in the front that it almost choked her. Her bare back felt indecent. “Papa says this is what they’re wearing in France,” she mumbled as she secured the laces across her chest.
    Even loosely tied, the thing made it hard to breathe, and the board at her back prohibited her from bending. Why are women such fools about fashion? she wondered. Imagine, a board at your back! “I’ll make him happy in absentia this once, though I warrant Godmother Cavendish has more sense than to imprison herself in a cage of silk.”
    She pulled up the skirt, tied and pinned it into place with much cursing and a few bloody fingertips, then sallied down the gangplank to the bustling dock. They were two days early thanks to the storm’s stiff winds, and she’d have to wait at the inn until her godmother’s carriage arrived for her.
    Sailors were already unloading the crates of animals and plants her papa was sending to fill her godmother’s hothouses and menagerie. Bright jungle birds fluttered nervously in their wicker cages, while an ocelot brought from Spanish territory hissed at the unfamiliar smells. She patted him through the bars—she’d raised him from a kitten, and though he’d rake any servant who disturbed his sleep, he was fairly tolerant of Zabby’s affection.
    She felt her throat itch as soon as she disembarked. Even with the high wind across the channel the air was rank and heavy with coal soot and a smell of feces, animal and human. Past the organized bustle of the docks she could see the jumble of town: buildings crowded upon one another, leaning precariously over the muddy roads; the slow-moving trickle of gutters carrying their filth directly into the sea; men and women dressed too heavily for the season, their bodies