Lady in Waiting: A Novel by Susan Meissner Read Free Book Online

dumb. The little lady was lost in sadness, this I could see even from the doorway where I stood, and this was foreign to me. In the two years that I had been in the employ of the wealthy, I had not seen such raw sorrow. In my arms I held a garment soft as down and black as pitch. The lady’s mourning gown, which the marchioness insisted I carry on my lap the entire two-day journey from Leicestershire so that her daughter’s dress wouldn’t be crushed in the trunk. The marchioness did not tell me this directly; Bridget relayed the marchioness’s demands, and it was plain in her eyes and in her tone that it would be foolishness to let the dress out of my sight for even a moment. The little lady was to be chief mourner at the funeral of the Queen Dowager, Katherine. The gown couldn’t be anything less than perfectly appointed.
    Already I could see that the dress would have to be altered to fit thewee maiden. And I instantly wondered if I had the skill to do it. Bridget must’ve thought I did. She would not have sent me if she did not.
    I was amazed the marchioness believed the gown would fit her daughter. Lady Jane must not have grown much in the months she had been living with Lord Admiral Seymour and the widow Queen here in Gloucestershire, at least not as much as her mother expected.
    Or perhaps in her haste, the marchioness selected the wrong dress to be brought. Bridget had wondered if perhaps the marchioness borrowed the dress because there hadn’t been time to make a new one. No one expected the poor Queen Dowager would succumb to childbed fever. No one expected the household of Sudeley Castle would be wearing black that day. Not black. Somewhere in the castle, the Queen’s healthy newborn daughter lay in the arms of a wet nurse. Bridget told me not to ask about her.
    I took a step into the room, cautiously, and the dress in my arms swished my name.
Lucy
. The Lady Jane at the window did not turn her head toward the sound. I poked my head farther into the room, letting my eyes adjust to the vastness of the room’s size and the absence of the warming rays of the sun.
    Lady Jane and I were alone in her sitting room at Sudeley Castle, a great home whose exterior stones were the color of toasted bread and which were festooned with emerald vines that would soon turn copper, crumple, and skitter away. The maid who escorted me to this room had left to see after the trunk the marchioness had me bring for her daughter, as well as my own small case. I was not accustomed to stepping into a room where the only other occupant was of nobility. I hesitated.
    I had asked Bridget, as I prepared to leave, how long the Lady Jane had been away from her parents, since she was already gone from Bradgate when Bridget made me her apprentice. In truth I wanted to know
why
the Lady Jane was living away from Bradgate. Lady Jane had eleven years,naught but a year older than my sister, Cecily, who at that moment was at our Haversfield home in Devonshire, surely combing wool one moment and chasing butterflies the next. I did not think the Lady Jane had chased a butterfly in many years. Perhaps never. I had only been in the employ of one other nobleman, and his children remained at home until they married. They had not chased butterflies either. But they were not whisked away to other households. Bridget told me that it was no concern of mine why the Lady Jane left Bradgate to become the ward of Lord Admiral Seymour.
    Then Bridget told me a nobleman like our esteemed Marquess of Dorset—the lady’s father and my employer—has much to consider when God gives him daughters, and that I was not to be listening to gossip below stairs while at Sudeley or she would hear of it and have me dismissed. She very nearly winked at me.
    So it was because the Lady Jane was a girl that she was sent to live with Lord Seymour. It was because she was a daughter whose betrothal was a matter of politics and posturing that she lived in a castle more than a day’s