The Dark Rose by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Author:Cynthia Harrod-Eagles [Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The baby was christened with great pomp and ceremony in Greyfriars church within the Palace of Whitehall, and the King gave orders for the celebrations that Londoners loved - bonfires, torchlit streets, wine running in the fountains and conduits, dancing, fireworks, street banquets, illuminated and decorated craft filling the river. The Spanish party rejoiced that the child had turned out to be a girl, but the parents of the new princess were not perturbed, and showed it. The next would be a boy - there was plenty of time; but the King dismissed those soothsay ers who had so misled him by promising him a son, and swore never again to consult them.

Nanette was astonished by how quickly the Queen recovered, for the birth had been difficult, and thirty was perilously late for a woman to bear her first child; but by the middle of October she had resumed her normal occupations. By the end of that month Parliament had settled the succession on Anne's children, and the Lady Mary was proclaimed illegitimate. Princess Elizabeth continued to thrive, and was brought to Anne in her private apartments every morning, for Anne hated to have her out of her sight.

'Ah, here she is!' she cried as soon as the wetnurse brought her in. 'How is she, nurse? Has she been feeding well?'

'Lord bless you, Madam, she is as lusty as can be,' the midwife said. Nanette always looked with a kind of horror at her uncorseted shape, the great round breasts bulging under the bodice of her dress and making wet patches where her milk leaked through. She glanced, by compari son, at the flat, smooth cloth of the Queen's bodice, drawn over her iron corset, and her tightly nipped-in waist.

Another of the penalties of being a woman -- but thank God a gentlewoman did not need to suffer it while she could hire a wetnurse to suckle her babes.

'Give her to me,' Anne commanded, and took the baby, lying on a cushion, into her arms. 'Isn't she beautiful?' she said with vast satisfaction, looking down at her daughter.

'She is that, Madam, and she has such a powerful suck that I doubt not she will grow to be a buxom maid. I never nursed such a lively baby.'

'Nanette, come look -- isn't she beautiful?'

Nanette went across to look down over the Queen's shoulder and said automatically, 'Yes, Your Grace,' but privately she was puzzled. The baby was dressed in a long white gown tucked and ruffled with the finest Flemish lace, so that all of her that could be seen was her small red face and her clenched fists. She had a little thin gingery hair on her skull above her alarmingly blue-veined forehead. Her eyes were almost always screwed tightly closed, but her eyebrows were perpetually on the move above them as if she were thinking out complicated problems. She had an indeterminate splodge of a nose, as had all babies, and a pink, pointed mouth like a mouse, which chewed tooth lessly on nothing, like an old woman's.

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