Lady Alice Trumpington paced clockwise around the walled garden behind Lady Russell’s house in Blackfriars on Monday afternoon. This time she reversed her direction, taking the right-hand diagonal across the center and turning left on the other side. The graveled path was just wide enough for her skirts, whose obsidian blackness swung in stark contrast to the red brick walls and profusions of flowering vines. Every now and then a breeze would straggle over the walls, lift the brim of her broad straw hat, and stir up the astringent scents of sun-warmed herbs from the meticulously tended beds.
Last summer, Trumpet had worn rose pink and leaf green, which Tom said made her eyes glow like emeralds lit from beneath. This year — her year of penance — she wore black. Taffeta in summer, broadcloth in winter, trimmed with braid and lined with silk, but still black from head to toe except for the white linen at her wrists and throat. Tom, always looking for the bright side, had shrugged and said, “At least it matches your hair.”
Trumpet chafed at the gloomy garb and at her straitened circumstances, living almost like a prisoner in Lady Russell’s house. In fairness, she’d brought her troubles on herself last summer in her ill-fated attempt to determine her own future. She’d arranged a marriage with an elderly invalid, who would soon die a natural death and leave her a widow with full legal control over her property. Unfortunately, he had been murdered on their wedding night. She’d been caught in her chemise with Tom the next morning, shredding her reputation. Still a virgin, to add insult to injury.
Worst of all, since she’d had to prove her virginity in order to save Tom from real punishment, she couldn’t even claim to be a widow. The marriage was simply voided and all her careful planning came to naught. She had to restore her reputation before she could try again, and she had much to learn about being a woman of significance. So she’d offered herself as a companion to Lady Elizabeth Russell, famously straitlaced and strong-minded. A year with her would wash Trumpet’s name as clean as a new coif and give her much-needed training in the art of widowhood as well.
She came to a stop in the shade of the arbor, where her maidservant, Catalina Luna, sat sewing. Nothing could induce Catalina to sit in the sun. Born into a Gypsy tribe in southern Spain, she’d spent her early youth traveling around Italy with a troupe of street performers, where her warm olive skin had absorbed enough sun to last a lifetime.
“We should have stayed out this morning,” Trumpet said, stripping off the gray kidskin gloves Catalina insisted she wear to keep her hands from turning brown. She had a music lesson with a master who lived in the Savoy on Monday mornings, one of the few times she managed to escape from this house. She’d decided to learn to play the virginals because the queen played them, and in hopes that the mere word would stimulate the desired resonance in people’s minds. She’d also discovered that Lady Russell couldn’t abide the sound, forcing her to go elsewhere for instruction. One measly hour of freedom.
Then she discovered that she genuinely enjoyed playing. Someday, when she and Tom finally found a way to be together, they would be terribly old, but they could beguile their sunset years making music.
“My lady wishes us home for dinner each day.” Catalina set aside the cuffs she was embroidering and poured her mistress a cup of cool beer from a stone jug.
Trumpet drank it thirstily. She glanced toward the windows of the three-story house. “Three days of captivity before we can escape to my aunt’s house. Then another two days before I get to see Tom again.” She took another sip of beer and glared at the house. “I’m longing to escape from this cage.”
“You will get a good offer soon, my lady. Then everything change.”
“They’ll just move me to a different cage.”
Catalina shrugged in that gypsy way that meant a multitude of things. “A bigger one, with a coach. Keep your dresses more clean.”
Trumpet laughed. “That would be something. And I’ll have my own house in London. I can engage Tom as my legal counselor. Although my husband will have to be a very stupid man for that to work out the way I want.”
“There are many stupid men, my lady.”
“Better still would be a man like my father, possessed by such a lust for adventure and Spanish treasure that he rarely visits his own home.” Like Tom’s father. Another thing they had in common, though Tom also had a mother, two aunts, and several sisters. Trumpet had grown up in a crumbling castle by the German Sea, tended by a few loyal servants, with occasional visits from her favorite uncle. Her father’s rare appearances had little impact on the smooth workings of the estate.
The sad truth was that she had received precious few offers of marriage, some of which were downright insulting. They thought she was desperate, nineteen years old with a name stained by scandal and few negotiable assets. She had a title to pass to her son, but that wasn’t much inducement for men of high enough station for her advisors to consider. But she’d delayed as long as she could. She’d soon have to accept the best of her bad choices, if no new ones came.
Lady Russell’s body servant appeared at the gate. She wore the standard livery of this household — black on black with more black around the edges — which made her look ordinary in stature from a distance. At close quarters, she towered over Trumpet, whose height failed to reflect her character. The servant had been chosen for her strength. Her Ladyship suffered from a malformed back which often left her helpless physically, though she remained indomitable on every other score.
Trumpet left Catalina sewing in the garden and followed the taller woman inside to the library. The interior felt cool in contrast to the garden and smelled of books and beeswax in spite of the open windows. Lady Russell sat in a thickly cushioned armchair with one hand resting on a stack of paper. Her black gown heightened the paleness of her face and the touches of color on her cheeks and in her ginger hair.
“I’ve finished my part. You may add your special touches before you make the fair copy. When you’re finished, deliver it to our messenger.”
Trumpet accepted the manuscript and took her customary seat to read it. The title, penned in Her Ladyship’s flowing script, was The Just Censure and Reproof of Martin Junior. She’d invented an elder brother, Martin Senior, to take credit for this latest blast.
“I thought we were going to give Martin Junior another turn,” Trumpet said, leafing through the pages.
“I decided to add a third voice. I want to make it clear to all that Martin is legion. He is a spirit, a force beyond the limits of one individual. They might confine the man,” she lifted her arched eyebrows, “but they cannot halt the march of time.”
No one, from the queen on down, had ever so much as speculated that Martin Marprelate might be a woman. Trumpet grinned at Her Ladyship’s subtle joke. She might chafe at her restricted life, but she’d grown fond of this extraordinary woman in the past year. Nothing daunted Elizabeth Russell. Not the queen, not the Privy Council, not the Church. Not any task or challenge. She wrote poetry, she designed funerary monuments, she managed her estates with ferocity and aplomb. Gifted in the art of image-making, she presented herself as passionless and rational, but Trumpet had learned to catch the flashes of deftly aimed humor. And she’d learned what it meant to be cared for unstintingly by a woman who had all but adopted her as a true daughter.
Trumpet read the pages quickly, chuckling at several choice phrases. “Anti-Christian beasts might be a little strong, my lady.”
Lady Russell shook her head. “This may be our last work, Alice. I said everything needful in my Theses, outlining the full program for what must be done to bring about the true, complete reformation. Martin Senior will carry our standard a few steps further. We can’t allow those impudent mockers to believe they’ve chased us off the field.”
“Never.” They traded wise looks. Neither of them was the sort to quail in the face of a challenge. “But they haven’t stopped, my lady. Mr. Clarady mentioned a new salvo that appeared on Saturday. Another anti-Martinist upstart calling himself Pasquill Caviliero.”
“We can’t address them all, my dear. And we mustn’t stoop to their level.” Lady Russell smiled her cat’s smile. “But we may feel compelled to correct any truly egregious errors.”
Trumpet murmured, “They are vanity and the work of errors.” She’d learned the trick of quoting the Bible as a form of conversational punctuation from Tom, who had learned it during his months spying on Puritans in Cambridge. There seemed to be a quote for every occasion.
She had never been overly particular about religion. She attended the expected church at the appointed times because it was simpler to comply, but she would worry about the afterlife when she got there. She had enough on her plate and trusted God to understand that. He saw everything. He could surely recognize the justice in her quest for some modicum of control over her own destiny. She knew from personal observation that women prayed twice as much as men. God must know everything about their lot in life and its unreasonable constraints.
Furthermore, she had spent a year learning Calvinist doctrine at the knees of two of England’s leading proponents, Lady Elizabeth Russell and her elder sister, Lady Anne Bacon. She had absorbed their rock-solid certainty that they were among the chosen, and therefore what they did was righteous.
That certainty — and her father’s title— helped Trumpet hold up her head when gossips cast gleefully malicious glances in her direction. Better, she’d learned that theology, especially in its more political aspects, could be as useful to a woman as a working knowledge of property law. Religion was the only sphere in which women could wield real power, if always hidden behind another name. At this stage, Trumpet only wanted power over her own life. But if managing other people’s religious activities was the only way to achieve that, she intended to be good at it.