Ladies in Waiting by Laura L. Sullivan

Eliza put it, that Monsieur le Cardinal still visited the queen monthly. Lady Castlemaine laughingly told all who would listen that Charles had not yet mustered up the courage to bed the sallow bat—or had not found her scrubbed clean enough—and boldly hinted that her own sons might one day sit on the throne.
    After that spontaneous public kiss, Charles and Catherine subsided to mere civility. He was polite to her before an audience, and regularly performed his marital duties. (The girls soon learned from the more sophisticated ladies to spot the telltale signs of lovemaking as the sheets were daily whisked away. Though they had no desire to probe, that knowledge, once gleaned, was inescapable, and they noted their queen’s nocturnal activities as casually as they might notice she left a capon wing uneaten or had a rent in a stocking.)
    “Poor Catherine,” Beth said as they assembled their own clothing and trinkets for the short jaunt to Whitehall. “She doesn’t speak of it, but I know she’s terribly distressed not to be with child yet.”
    “Our Friesian mare was covered for three years before she foaled, but then she dropped one every spring thereafter,” Zabby said. “The queen’s been trying only for three months. Why is everyone in a pother already?”
    “Don’t you know?” Eliza asked. “If there’s not a Protestant son of Charles, the Catholic brother takes the throne. James isn’t a popular man. All the world knows he’s Catholic, however he dissembles. If she doesn’t give Charles a son, the succession may not stand. We’ll have another civil war.”
    “She would be patient, for herself,” Beth said, folding the whatnots she’d acquired since becoming a maid of honor: dog-skin gloves and ribbons and handkerchiefs, gifts from the queen or things lent by Eliza that she later swore she couldn’t stomach and Beth might as well keep. “But now that she can understand English a mite better she hears the gossip. Oh, the cruel things! Lady Castlemaine said in her hearing that a barren woman is really a witch who eats her own children inside her womb. Don’t they care how they hurt her?”
    “No,” Eliza said bluntly. “Not so long as they think she can’t hurt them. And she can’t, until Charles elevates her to her proper place, or she seizes it for herself. She’s hardly a queen yet.”
    “She would never hurt anyone,” Beth said.
    “Even Castlemaine?” Eliza asked.
    “I think she feels sorry for her.”
    “Trust the papists to send us a saint. I’d like to slit Castlemaine’s nose. Don’t look so shocked, Beth! You should hear what she says of you, and your mother. Prue told me she told Lady Shrewsbury . . . No, don’t get snively, pet. Your revenge is being a thousand times more lovely than Castlemaine, the decayed hag. I’m surprised she hasn’t tried to pimp you to Charles yet. They do say she plays at flats.”
    Neither girl understood this.
    “Dallies with the maidens. Dances in the figgery of Lesbos. Strictly on an amateur level, of course. Then she throws her tidbits to Charles to whet his appetite for the main course—her! What dish would you say she is, Zabby? Pickled sturgeon? I warrant she’ll proposition you soon, too.”
    “No, she hates me too much for that,” Zabby said.
    A few days before, when Zabby was leaving the elaboratory after having been closeted with Charles an hour or more, Lady Castlemaine waylaid her outside the door. Before Zabby could stop her, she threw up Zabby’s skirts and gave a mighty sniff. “Nothing!” She glared down at her pale competitor, eyes flashing, as Zabby furiously adjusted her clothes. “What do you do for him in there all these hours, eh? Something too filthy for me, I warrant, and that must be a trick indeed. Have a care, fish-eyes. You think you serve the queen, but all England knows who the true queen is. I bore his son. I have his ear. He’s not yours, nor yet that preposterous short-legged Portuguese cow’s.