by Diane Haeger
She smiled up at him, reminded how much taller he was, how much more commanding in stature alone from the other men around him, and thinking how magnificent he looked in claret-colored velvet, trimmed in gold braid. “And you are as smooth as a sow’s ear. Every other woman ’ere makes me look a country cousin to ’er.”
“I happen to like the country,” the king said. Then he glanced at a group of guests in the middle of a lively branle danced to his favorite tune, “Come Kiss Me Now.” “Shall we, then?”
“I’m afraid proper dancin’ is not somethin’ Lord Buckhurst’s ’ad the time to teach me.”
“You might wait a very long time if it is Buckhurst you intend as a teacher.”
“Unless, perhaps,” said Buckingham, “you held a drink to his nose and led him away from Charles Sedley.”
The king laughed at that. Then he looked at Nell. “Forgive me. We were thoughtless. It is only knowing Buckhurst as we do, and his penchant for personal enjoyment above all other things, that sometimes makes ridicule simply too tempting.”
The couples were assembling in a circle and joining hands. They would step forward, meeting with a slight pause, then step back. The music was light and happy. The dance, he told her, was a great court favorite, easy enough to learn. Nell was listening to the sound of the flute and the low rhythm of the drum, trying to make out the steps. Hart had taught her to do a wonderfully comic jig for the stage, but this was altogether different. She tried to hide her studied frown with a carefree smile. “I ’aven’t a clue ’ow to begin!”
“Then I shall teach you.”
Nell considered it. If the king of England wished to teach her to dance in Buckhurst’s stead, who was she to object? This was a height to which a girl like her had no right to rise. Nell took the hand that the king had extended to her. His skin was warm and smooth; his grip, powerful. There was an energy between them as they touched. She smiled up at him then, doing her best to resemble the most carefree girl in the world. What the stage had not taught her, life had. She would be what he wished, the clever, carefree Nell from the King’s Theater, the one men desired. She could not compete with noblewomen on their level, but she could use what she had.
As they advanced together, the other dancers fell into deep bows and curtsies, some of them whispering. If there was such a thing as magic, this certainly felt like it to Nell.
Amid candles and lamps that flickered like diamonds, and lively music that carried Nell along on the arm of a nearly mythic figure, she danced to two songs as his partner. Then a servant approached. Coming into the dancing area, he whispered something imperceptible to the king. Charles glanced at her in response.
“You must follow Chiffinch, my dear,” he said. “It is to do with Lord Buckhurst.”
Nell followed the tall stately man, and two guards, knowing that whatever she was being led to, it could not be good. Her gown trailing on the walkway, she walked silently behind the two guards, who smelled heavily of musk and sweat. They moved along a winding path through the garden in silence, the only sound the clicking of their shoe heels and the scratching of crickets in the shrubbery. They passed a tiny caretaker’s cottage, heading for High Street, and a row of thatched houses beyond.
“It is just as they did in Covent Garden!” A man looking up was saying in disbelief. “A year has passed, and people still speak of that!”
Charles and his friends Sedley and Ogle were standing on a second-story ironwork balcony. Buckhurst, who stood behind Sedley appearing to take him sexually from behind, although both were still dressed enough to make the jest clear, was laughing hysterically. Ogle had urinated into a bottle, and had just flung it into the gasping crowd. Horrified and nervous laughter flared as Buckhurst began to strip off his clothes, and the three began to climb down a vine-covered trellis against the house. Cold reality hit Nell. For this man, she had left a public who adored her. She had abandoned a sound life she had been building all on her own for this. Suddenly, she hated herself for it.
“His Majesty has authorized me to offer you a coach back to London, madam, should you decide to go,” the servant called Chiffinch said evenly. He did not look at her as he spoke.
“The king knew about Lord Buckhurst?”
“His behavior has gained its own status, Mrs. Gwynne. His Majesty merely anticipated the possibility, and authorized me to act accordingly should the need arise.”
Tears pressed at the back of her eyes. Fighting them, Nell felt her mouth tremble. She bit her bottom lip to stop it. “I’d no idea the extent—” The words fell away.
There was no point. It was done.
She had given up on her own wits and gambled on something, and someone, who was not real. Nell met Chiffinch’s gaze. “Thank you, sir, for the offer. But I found my own way ’ere. It’ll do me good to find my own way back.”
She left Newmarket at dawn, before Buckhurst was awake—before he could object, if he meant to at all. She was riding through the undulating, mist-shrouded countryside, in a coach she had insisted on hiring for herself. As the Buckhurst manor grew ever smaller in the rear window, then disappeared beneath an emerald-green rise, Nell at last put her head in her hands, and for the first time in a very long time, safe in her solitude, let herself weep. Until she heard the rustling…
She heard the rustling before she saw the movement.
As the hired coach swayed and clattered over the winding dirt road leading back toward London, Nell gasped when she saw her. Her little ebony face shown smooth, and her teary eyes were wide as she pressed back the corner of a blanket to look up at Nell.
“How in blazes did you manage to hide yourself in here?”
Jeddy sat up huddled in the blanket, a bare foot poking out.
“Oh, never mind. You’ll not answer me anyway, I suppose. The thing is, I ’aven’t any proper place for you to stay.”
Still the girl said nothing, only stared, eyes wide.
“I wonder if you can speak. But you must be hungry. I’ll tell the coachman to stop at the next inn.”
The little girl lunged, shaking her head in a pleading gesture that they not stop.
“I’m not sendin’ you back. I’m only fetchin’ us a proper meal!”
The child gripped Nell’s forearm with surprising strength, still shaking her head. Nell reached out and put her hand on Jeddy’s head. “It’ll be all right,” she said in a much softer voice. “I’ve no idea what the devil I will do with a little girl, but I’ll not send you back to Newmarket. All right, then?” Nell moved her hand to touch the curve of the girl’s chin in a gentle, motherly gesture. She thought how young the girl was, and how alone she must feel. Thinking of that made her heart squeeze. It was good, she thought, to feel something today besides regret.
Before she had left the King’s Theater, Nell had paid for the room over the Cock & Pye for the two months’ time she would be gone, so that her sister could have a roof over her head. It had been a great deal of money, but she had paid happily, not only because of her concern for Rose’s health, but to honor the promise she had made to care for her always, no matter what.
Holding tight to Jeddy’s tiny ebony hand, Nell opened the main door and, lowering her head, managed to make it up the steep staircase, just beyond the bar, without being stopped by Patrick Gound. That at least was one small blessing. She could not bear just yet to explain to anyone why she had returned from Newmarket early. But Jeddy resisted climbing, so that she had to drag her along. “It’s all right,” she murmured. “Come on. No one’ll ’arm you. ’Twill not be the grand room you ’ad with Lord Buckhurst, though. What I’m to do with you I’ll figure out later.”
She opened the door to her old room, aching for a bed and the peace that only sleep brought. Her mind was still a jumble of so many things. Frustration, anger, and regret were tied up like a tightly knotted bow on one of the king’s lace jabots; she felt an utter fool.
Rose looked up from a meal of fish pie set up on the rough-hewn little table beneath t
he soot-smudged window, a warming shawl around her shoulders. Her eyes were a bit brighter as she glanced up, the gray that rimmed them not nearly so dark now. Seeing Nell, she stood and absently wiped her hand on the front of her dress. “This cannot be good, that you’re back so soon.”
Nell sank onto the edge of the bed and kicked off her soft shoes. “I’ve left ’im.”
“’E wasn’t to marry ye then?”
“’E’s a perfectly content drunk. Bad as Ma, only with fine clothes, and money.”
“And what the devil are we to do with the likes of ’er?” asked Rose, with just the hint of her old cough as she glared at Jeddy, who was loitering at the door. Nell glanced at her sister, then over at the little girl of whom she had begun to feel fond. “Clearly, I’ve got to get a job to support ’er and you.”
“Where’s the sense in that? Keepin’ a child, another mouth to feed?”
“You’ll care for ’er when I’m out, ’tis that simple.”
“I’m to take a little blackamoor down the Strand with me, like some sort of proper lady, when I actually feel well enough to get out of ’ere? Ballocks to that! I’d be the laughin’stock!”
Rose had been pretty once, full cheeked and smiling, her dark hair long and glossy. Nell understood only too well the sharp edges that their hard life had given her. She looked at her sister with patient sympathy. “With Jeddy, you’ll ’ave a bit of company.”
“Just because you’ve been on the stage, and been bedded by a lord, you’ll not to go gettin’ all ’igh and mighty on me now!”
“I don’t suppose you’re in a position to be lecturin’ me about much of anythin’, Rose Gwynne, straight from the gaol, are you!”
“That was cruel, comin’ from you, Nelly.”
Nell had not meant to say it. She had not meant to belittle her sister, whose release from Newgate prison seemed the greatest miracle of their lives. There was no one in the world to whom she was more devoted, nor cared for more. But Jeddy was an innocent child like she once had been, whose life was charted and determined by the accident of her birth, with no way of ever rising out of it. Especially not if she gave her away.
Groveling before Charles Hart was almost worse than going hungry. But there was no other choice. She knew she must return to work, and there was a limit to things she was qualified to do. If not for Rose and Jeddy, she would have gone back to selling oranges rather than bow down before Hart. But Rose was right—Nell did miss the stage, the adoring crowds, and the power and independence that that life brought.
Nell had no idea how she would ever make herself face Hart, or what she would say if she did manage to find the courage to appeal to him. In the meantime, Richard Bell had come to see her at the Cock & Pye two days after her return to London. “You have been missed!” he exclaimed as they embraced.
“You never did believe I would stay with ’im, did you?”
Richard held her out at arm’s length in the noisy tavern as his smile faded. “No, I didn’t. Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“There was nothin’ of the fantasy I made it into,” Nell said firmly. “Simple as that.”
Richard took her hand again as they made their way to a small table in the back. “You don’t need to be so tough, you know,” he said as they sat opposite each other, and leaned in so they could speak in low tones. “Not with your friends.”
“Oh, but I do. London’s a rough place for a girl like me if your backside is anythin’ softer than shoe leather. So who told you I was back in London?”
He took a long swallow of ale from a pewter tankard before he answered. “Moll Davies, actually. She came to poke about the theater and see if you intended going back on the stage. Word was that the king was at Newmarket when you were there, and that he left the same day you did. Things like that set people to talking.”
“The king’s whore believes I am some sort of competition?” A smile broke across Nell’s face. It was the first spark of happiness she had felt for days.
“Should she?”
“I saw ’im. But ’e didn’t offer to whisk me away, if that’s what you mean.”
“Did he tarry with you, at least?”
“I’d warrant the king would tarry with a rosebush if ’e thought it would bring ’im flowers!”
Richard laughed. “That is his reputation.”
“I made a mistake with Lord Buckhurst. Now I’m back, and I’ll never make the same mistake again, thinkin’ a man’ll provide for me, I can promise you that. Eleanor Gwynne pays her own way from now on, and mends ’er own mistakes.”
“Like Mr. Hart?”
“Does ’e still despise me?” She bit her lip as her expression became worried.
“Quite openly.”
“But do you suppose ’e would ’ave me back on the stage? I might’ve embarrassed ’im by leavin’, but I’d gotten pretty good for business—”
“I don’t suppose he would, Nell, no. Not the way he talks about you.”
Nell felt the heavy blow in that.
“But fortunately for you”—his eyes glittered with amusement—“it really isn’t up to him. Thomas Killigrew holds the royal warrant for the King’s Theater. And he would very much like you back.”
“Oh, you absolute angel of mercy! ’Tis the real reason you came ’ere in the first place just now, isn’t it?”
“I did think you might have a few financial complications if you’d returned to London without Lord Buckhurst, so I thought I’d see to it for myself.”
“You can’t imagine the ’alf of it! Complications everywhere!”
“When I spoke to Mr. Hart on your behalf yesterday, it seems Mr. Killigrew overheard me.”
“Overheard?”
He grinned impishly as he shrugged. “Well, I might have watched to see that Mr. Killigrew was nearby when I mentioned your return to Mr. Hart.”
“Richard Bell!” Nell lunged across the table and threw her arms around his neck. “I do swear I could kiss you!”
“Wouldn’t mind if you did.” He heard himself and how it had sounded. He quickly added, “I only meant that you’re extraordinary, and I’m fond of you, and—”
“I know what you meant, Richard.” Nell was beaming at him, her copper hair loose and full, seemingly lit by the candles on the tables in the very dark room. “So ’ow am I to do it, then?”
“According to Mr. Killigrew, who is thrilled to have the return of his star, you are to be there tomorrow morning for rehearsal. We’ve only just begun a new play, called The Indian Emperor, and he wants you to play the emperor’s daughter. It’s the lead, of course.”
“Tell me it’s a comedy.”
“It could well be with you in it, Nell! Seriously, though, I don’t know. We haven’t had a real success since you left us, and they’ve been scrambling a bit with the material. I’m not at all certain yet about this new play.”
“I’m nervous.”
“Don’t be.” He took her hand again. “You’ve got friends in the theater, and a very adoring audience who will cheer your return, no matter what material you perform.”
“I certainly ’ope so,” said Nell, shaking her head.
Nell stood back a step from the stage for a moment, cloaked in shadows, watching the others rehearse. Charles Hart was directing the actors in every nuance of what they said and did. If he could have told them how he wished them to breathe, she thought ruefully, he would likely have done that as well.
Just as Beck Marshall began a short monologue, facing Richard and Mary Knepp, Hart caught a glimpse of Nell from the corner of his eye. “Well, well. Do look, everyone, what the proverbial cat has dragged home,” he said loudly enough to silence the scene. “Or have I mixed up my metaphors, and it is chickens that have come home to roost? Eleanor Gwynne, everyone—” He held out an arm and his voice went louder, a sharp unmistakable edge to it. “The actress too good for the King’s Theater, but not good enough, it would seem, for Lord Buckhurst!”
A collection of
embarrassed chuckles sounded from the actors, then quickly faded.
“Perhaps we should speak privately,” Nell offered, stepping forward into the bright sunlight cast from the glass cupola above them.
“There is not a thing I should wish to say or do to you privately, Mrs. Gwynne. As you know, were it up to me, I would not have taken you back, no matter how you groveled. Apparently, Mr. Killigrew and I do not share the same standard.”
“I groveled to no one!”
“Unfortunately,” Hart continued, unaffected, “your return was not my decision to make.”
“And you’d do well to remember that!” Nell seethed. She was angry now. It was bad enough coming back. She’d be damned to hell if he was going to humiliate her publicly, as well. “I’m ’ere to do my job, so you’d best let me get on with it, Mr. ’Art.”
All eyes were on the lovers turned adversaries, as Charles Hart moved toward Nell in two long, commanding steps. He was close enough now for her to feel his warm breath on her face. His nostrils flared, like a bull ready to charge. “Things have changed in your absence, Mrs. Gwynne. I may be forced to take you back, and even to give you the leading role, but, as it happens it was I who was left to select and contract our current production, a wonderful dramatic story, The Indian Emperor, in which you play the tragic heroine. So, we shall see if you are more clever at adapting to drama than you were at adapting to a life of leisure in Newmarket.”
“I think she takes your point, Mr. Hart,” Richard Bell bravely interjected when no one else dared speak a syllable. Charles Hart pivoted back in response.
“You think? Since when does this theater pay an imbecile to think? You are here, Mr. Bell, to sweep up the rubbish in the pit and occasionally to fill in the background when there is absolutely no one else.” Then he added, with a cruel flourish, “Rather like in your own life. Now, shall we all get back to work?”
Nell took a copy of the script from Mary Knepp and glanced at it. Reading for her was still almost impossible, but she rarely allowed anyone to know it. Fortunately, she was a quick study, able to memorize her own lines as well as the lines of the other actors as someone ran through them with her the first time. She glanced down at the jumble of words until one jumped out. The emperor’s daughter was supposed to weep. There was no part of herself she was willing to touch to make that really happen, certainly not before a raucous London crowd bent on a good time. This play would be, she knew from the first word, a disaster. Exactly what Charles Hart wanted. Punishing her publicly would be well worth a very brief financial flop.