Wife to Great Buckingham

HILDA LEWIS Wife to Great Buckingham G. P. Putnams Sons New York for MICHAEL with my love Never was there so kind a husband as you are. Catherine, Duchess of Buckingham, to her husband WIFE TO GREAT BUCKINGHAM WHEN I was a child the King would come visiting my home. Then, for weeks beforehand, there would be a scouring and a polishing, a baking and a brewing women would come up from Bottesford village to swell our household staff great though that was. The tailor would come from Lincoln with new liveries for the men, the seamstress with new gowns for the women. Merchants with rare wines and spices would converge on Belvoir from Lincoln and Nottingham yes, and from far Derby, even and with them musicians and tumblers sure of their welcome. Invitations would go out to great houses and Dr. Samuel Fleming, that learned gentleman and heretic, would be bidden from his rectory at Bottes ford to lend our Catholic household an atmosphere more congenial to a Protestant King for James like many a Scot dearly enjoyed a religious gossip he loved to display his own knowledge of the Scriptures. I was an only child and motherless. Of my mother I remember nothing, though my nurse told me much. She was Frances, daughter of Sir Henry Knyvitt of Charlton in Wiltshire, and she was a beauty. I have, my nurse still says, a look of her but my nurse is old and partial and I wish I could believe it. I put down my pen and take up her picture to see if I can trace some likeness. She is so lovely with her dark eyes and her dark curls and her carnation cheeks and the sweetness and the kindness all about her. She died so young yet her few years were filled with happiness. She and my father were like a couple of children, my nurse said at one in everything, even to their names Frances and Francis. And when she died the warmth and the joy went out of him. I was less than four years old when he married again Cecilia, daughter of John Tufton, my lord Earl of Thanet. She was as different as possible from my mother. My mother was dark and lively with a warmth to her my stepmother is fair and quiet she makes no show of love, nor never did, save to her own children. She did not, I am sure, mean to show this difference she is a good woman. But the difference was there and I knew it. It was my nurse that loved me and to her I whispered my childish secrets. She would scold me and slap me, too, when it was needful, for I was a high-spirited child and liked my own way. Or she would hug me and cover me with kisses. From my stepmother there was neither blow nor kiss. I heard that my father was to bring home a new wife not from himself nor yet from my nurse. He had meant to tell me himself but he had left it too late. I had my news, by chance, from those whose conversation I had done better not to hear. I had gone with an apple for my pony and, hidden by the stable door, I heard them Meg Flower and her sister Philippa that we called Philip. They had no right to be there Meg should have been in the kitchen, Philip in the poultry house. But they were forever hanging about the stables though I was too little to know why. Nor did I understand the half of what they said but the spiteful voices wounded my heart, and the wound, alas, was long ahealing. So my lords like the rest of them He gets a new wife and the saucy little lady a stepmother Stepmother. It was a word I knew from a score of nursery tales a hateful word. And, saucy little lady that was myself. I knew how Philip would slide the words out of her thin rats face while Meg would grin like a cat. Even then I feared them both and with reason though the reason I didnt yet know. A stepmothers what she wants. And a good lick of the whip to go with it Philip said, spiteful. Aye, take her down a peg or two, riding about on that pony of hers, and a couple of grooms with nothing better to do than stick at her heels. I could find better work for fine lads like that Meg laughed a hateful laugh...


Genre: Historical