Exit Lady Masham by Louis Auchincloss Page B

shook. That was the end of my resolution to leave the court. I knew that I should never leave it now, so long as my mistress lived and needed me. She had lost her husband; she had lost all her babes; she should certainly not lose any love or care or consolation that I could offer her. She was alone; I was alone. Even if she was a great monarch and I a nobody, we could share, perhaps even a bit dissolve, our common loneliness.
    I looked up proudly now as the Duchess faced me. I met her stare of hatred with defiance.
    "I suppose you heard what she said, Masham. You always do!"
    I curtsied deeply and followed her to the Queen. I could afford that last reverence to the Mistress of the Robes and Groom of the Stole. I knew that she had lost her war.

PART TWO

12
    T
here now occurred a lull in my life, lasting from the Prince's death to the middle of the year 1710, during which I enjoyed something resembling content. The magnificent Duchess, although retaining her positions as Mistress of the Robes and Groom of the Stole, with all their emoluments, virtually gave up coming to court. The Queen was perfectly willing to allow her to retain her privileges so long as she did not insist on her duties. Sarah's absence was peace at a price! Of course, at court we were never unaware of what she was up to. Whether she was reviling her poor architect at Blenheim, or bludgeoning the Whig leaders, or carrying on her private feuds with other great peeresses, the reverberations were bound to echo down the quiet corridors of Windsor or Kensington. But she was like a storm in another county; we heard the rumble and saw the flashes of lightning; we were never soaked.
    I had begun to feel a new confidence in my relationship with the Queen. I was constantly in her company now, and frequently alone with her, and I loved to listen to her memories of bygone monarchs: her charming uncle Charles, with his ugly Portuguese Queen and beautiful mistresses; her somber father, with his beautiful Italian Queen and ugly mistresses; her imperious sister, Mary, and her surly brother-in-law, Dutch William. The Queen never forgot either a kindness or an injury; those of her relatives who had found her dull and phlegmatic would have been astonished to learn how vividly their words and actions, nay, their very tones and gestures, had been recorded in the memory of this silent, watching woman. But where Anne Stuart was not like other royalties—or like other Stuarts—was in her concern for those around her. I existed not only as an audience. She wanted to be told all about
my
life and my small but rapidly expanding family.
    I should make it clear that I was not the only person to enjoy the Queen's confidence. She also saw a good deal of the lively and beautiful Duchess of Somerset. The Queen, like many quiet persons, had an occasional need for chatter and noise, and the heiress of the Percys fulfilled some of Sarah's old functions. I know that she discussed politics with the Queen, while I, at least at that time, never did. I could have done so, of course, for Harley and St. John kept me abreast of matters of state, but I fancied—and I believe now correctly—that my chief value in my mistress's eyes was precisely that I offered her a haven from the cares of her great position and that she and I enjoyed a friendship where human values replaced those of the court. I even had a kind of vanity that I was a different sort of "favorite," unique in English history, and perhaps the only person, except for the late Prince, who had loved Her Majesty for herself.
    Harley, who penetrated into everyone's secrets, divined mine and joked about it.
    "You don't seek, Abbie, like the late Father Joseph in Paris, to be a gray eminence. You are content to be merely gray! You see yourself as eminent in that you seek no eminence, influential in that you scorn influence. Ah, but it takes your keen old kinsman to see that you are the most ambitious of all!"
    Harley did not care