Honoria laughed at her. “Now we must attend Lady Margaret.”
Dougless soon found out that the Elizabethan people worked as hard as they ate. With her hand on her full belly, Dougless followed Honoria downstairs, through a beautiful knot garden, and out to the stables. Dougless was helped onto a horse with a sidesaddle, which she had a great deal of trouble holding on to; then Lady Margaret, her five women and four male guards wearing swords and daggers, set off at a mad pace. Dougless had a hard time keeping up because she was so unbalanced, with one leg hooked over a tall wooden pommel and the other in a short stirrup. Dougless knew her Colorado cousins wouldn’t be very proud of her because she used both hands to hold on to the reins.
“They have no horses in Lanconia?” one of the men asked her.
“Horses, yes; sidesaddles, no,” she answered as she held on fearfully.
After about an hour she began to feel less like she was going to fall off at any second, so she could look around her. Going from the beautiful Stafford house to the English countryside was like going from a fairy castle to a slum, or maybe from Beverley Hills to Calcutta.
Cleanliness was not part of the villagers’ lives. Animals and people lived in the same buildings and on the same sanitary level. Kitchen and privy slops were thrown outside the doors of the dark little houses. The people were as dirty as only years’ worth of dirt and sweat could make them. Their clothes were coarse and stiff with grease and use.
And diseases! Dougless stared at the people they passed. They were marked with smallpox; they had neck goiter, ringworm, running sores on their faces. Many times she saw crippled and maimed people. And no one over the age of ten seemed to have all his teeth—and the ones they did have were usually black.
Dougless’s huge lunch threatened to come up. What made her feel worse than the sights and smells was the fact that most of the illnesses could be cured with modern medicine. As she r
ode, holding on to the saddle, she could see that there were very few people past the age of thirty, and it occurred to Dougless that had she been born in the sixteenth century, she wouldn’t have lived past ten years old. At ten her appendix had ruptured and she’d required emergency surgery. There was no surgery in the sixteenth century. But then she probably wouldn’t even have survived birth because Dougless had been a breech birth and her mother had hemorrhaged. As she thought about this, she looked at these people with new eyes. These people were the survivors, the healthiest of the healthy.
As Lady Margaret’s group rode by, the villagers came out of their huts or stopped working in the fields to stare at the procession of beautifully dressed people on their sleek horses. Lady Margaret and her attendants waved to the villagers, and the villagers grinned back. We’re rock stars, movie stars, and royalty all rolled into one, Dougless thought, and she waved at the people too.
They rode for what seemed to be hours to Dougless’s sore backside and cramped legs before they halted in a pretty little meadow that overlooked a field full of grazing sheep. One of the grooms helped Dougless from her horse, and she limped to where Honoria sat on a cloth on the damp ground.
“You have enjoyed the ride?” Honoria asked.
“About as much as measles and whooping cough,” Dougless murmured. “I take it Lady Margaret is over her flu?”
“She is a most energetic woman.”
“I can see that.”
They sat in companionable silence for a while, Dougless looking at the pretty view and trying not to think of her encounter with Nicholas the night before. She asked Honoria what a callet was and found out it was a lewd woman. Dougless bit her tongue on renewed anger.
“And a cater-cousin?” she asked Honoria.
“A friend of the heart.”
Dougless sighed. So Nicholas and Robert Sydney were “friends of the heart.” No wonder Nicholas would believe nothing bad about the man. Some friendship, she thought. Nicholas rolls about on the table with Robert’s wife, and Robert plots to have his friend executed.
“Robert Sydney is a pillicock,” Dougless muttered.
Honoria looked shocked. “You know him? You care for him?”
“I don’t know him, and I certainly don’t care for him.”
Honoria looked so puzzled that Dougless asked what a pillicock was. “It is a term of endearment; it means a pretty rogue.”
“Endearment? But—” She broke off. When Nicholas had asked her to return to the sixteenth century to cook for him and she’d been so angry, she’d called him rotten names and Nicholas had supplied “pillicock” to the list. He must have loved hearing an angry woman call him a term of endearment.
She smiled in memory. He could indeed be a pillicock.
One of the women, who was a maid to a maid to Lady Margaret, passed about little cookies made of crushed almonds.
Munching, Dougless asked, “Who was the handsome dark-haired woman sitting next to Nicholas at dinner today?”
“Lady Arabella Sydney.”
Dougless choked and coughed, sputtering crumbs. “Lady Arabella? Has she been here long? When did she come? When will she leave?” The postcard, Dougless thought. That’s where she’d seen the woman: in the portrait on the postcard she’d bought at Bellwood.
Honoria smiled. “She arrived yester eve and leaves early on the morrow. She journeys with her husband to France. They will not return for years, so she came to bid my Lady Margaret farewell.”