The Perfect Royal Mistress

by Diane Haeger

  She softened again, but her expression was still hostile. “Oh, did I?”

  “More than anyone else ever has.”

  “Then tell me this, would you ever have married me if I had stayed with you?”

  For a moment, he studied her. “Based on your expression just now, I am forced to ask, if I reply to that honestly, will you have me thrown out of your house?”

  “After most of the people I’ve met at court, if you’re honest, I believe you’ll ’ave a friend in me for life.”

  He moved a step nearer, closing the chasm between them. He embraced her very gently then, and, with great sincerity, pressed a kiss onto her forehead. “Nell,” he said very gently. “You are the most exciting, funny, desirable woman it has been my great honor to know. And you were the first person I wanted to see the moment I set foot back in London. But I don’t suppose I shall ever be a marrying sort of man.”

  She smiled up at him. “You are every bit the libertine they say you are.”

  “Hopelessly, I’m afraid.”

  “Pray, tell me you’ll not disappoint me as a friend.”

  “I shall be your friend, dear Nell, above all other things.”

  Nell chuckled. “The love of revelry could do much to change that promise.”

  “But it is nothing compared to the power of our friendship.”

  “Well, I could certainly use a friend these days. And, as my friend, will you go to the duel this mornin’ between Lord Shrewsbury and the Duke of Buckingham?”

  “That’s not exactly an occasion to which one is issued in happy attendance. And I can proudly say I’ve managed to reach this ripe old age without having been invited to one directly, either!”

  “Rose and I are goin’.” She smiled. “We’re dressin’ up as boys.”

  “Now why does that not surprise me, coming from a woman who conquered the stage as a dozen different people?”

  “Seriously, Charles. ’Is Grace’s been a friend while you’ve been gone, and I couldn’t bear to think that ’e might—”

  “The only person George Villiers is a friend to is himself, Nell. And perhaps, on occasion, the king, if he thinks it might get him somewhere.”

  “You’d best be careful, Charles Sackville. I may be an actress, but your own mask’s begun to slip,” she declared. “In spite of everythin’, though, the truth is, I’m awfully glad you’re back!”

  Nell and Rose arrived at the grand estate, Barne Elmes, early enough to steal together across the soggy grass and into a loose bush large enough to conceal them. The beige coats and hats provided by John Cassells hid them well in places the low-lying fog did not conceal. As the first grand coach pulled down the gravel drive of the estate, Nell’s heart raced. She could not believe that she was actually going to watch this.

  Suddenly, all the men were present on the great open close with its thick grass waving. They saw John, who carried messages to the duke and his two seconds. Words were exchanged that they were too distant to hear. One of the horses whinnied, then pawed at the gravel, pulling against its harness. Nell’s eyes shifted from one man to the next. Their rivalry was a palpable thing.

  “I wish I knew how to stop this!” she whispered, her voice rising in panic.

  “Hush!” her sister bade her. “You know ’Is Majesty would be furious if you were caught ’ere!”

  “That Shrewsbury trollop could never be worth this!”

  “There’s two men across that field of grass who believe otherwise.”

  It happened quickly after that. A series of blades glinting in the morning sunlight as it poked through the clouds and fog. Sharp movements back and forth. A deep cry. A small puncture on Buckingham’s upper arm was the first wound. A stream of blood darkened the sleeve of his white shirt, and Nell felt her mouth go dry.

  “Please, no!” she gasped before Rose covered her mouth with her own hand.

  The six men were now moving, lunging and darting. There was little grace in it, the way the king had once described. Rather, it seemed a reckless tangle of showmanship and vengeance. Suddenly, more blood. This time it was Will Jenkins, Buckingham’s tall, stately second who took the blade. A wound like a crimson sash darkened across the front of his shirt. He recoiled in response, then sank like a stone onto the wild grass. Before anyone dared go to him, Buckingham seized the distraction and plunged his sword into Shrewsbury’s unprotected side to the sound of a deep-throated gasp.

  “He’s killed Lord Shrewsbury!”

  That was the whispered refrain around them as Nell clutched the king’s arm. They stood together that evening on the balcony to watch a glorious nighttime display of candlelit boats and barges, their banners flapping in the cool breeze as they paraded along the river. The lantern light hit the snaking water, turning it to silver before them. Around Nell and the king stood his friend John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale, Thomas Clifford, the Earl of Arlington, and their wives, watching the magnificent spectacle in the king’s honor. But everyone’s mind was on the gossip of the day.

  “Is ’e dead then?” Nell quietly asked Charles.

  “Not yet. But the wound is very bad.”

  He was still unaware that Nell had been present at the duel, and she had no intention of telling him. She thought of it now, hours later, as the most horrendous thing she had ever seen, including all of the seamy elements of the darker world that her mother had exposed her to.

  “’Tis dreadful,” Nell said, pretending to watch the magnificent display of boats and barges before them, as the warm breeze up off the water ruffled her sleeves and the curled ends of her hair.

  “Fool should never have challenged Buckingham. He’s a talented swordsman.”

  “Perhaps ’e thought ’e must. For ’is wife’s ’onor, I mean.”

  “Lady Shrewsbury has no honor,” Charles scoffed. “None worth trying to save, anyway. She’s a court whore, here to gain what she can at any expense. Everyone here knows women like that for what they are. And losing sight of that now will likely cost him his life.”

  The offhand comment wounded Nell in a way she had not expected. It reminded her pointedly that she was not so different from Lady Shrewsbury. She, too, was a mistress, a court whore. Expendable. As much as she loved Charles, and he cared for her, she must never lose sight of that, and she must work every day to keep her place, unlike a wife—or a real lady.

  It was late when the festivities finally ended, so, instead of returning to her Lincoln’s Inn Fields house, Nell remained at Whitehall. But she slept little. As she lay alone in the king’s grand bed, with long swags of tapestry fabric wrapped around heavy turned posts, her stomach was sour and roiling. Nell could deny it to herself no longer. She felt certain she was pregnant. The signs had been there for weeks, in spite of how she tried to reason them away. The reality filled her with both a sense of joy and a deep dread. Another royal bastard. The butt of more jests. More cruel poems written for a laugh by Rochester. Nell thought how a child between them would likely hasten their end. As it had with Moll Davies. How would a bulbous tottering mass go on enticing a king? William Chiffinch was standing over her holding a large cup of steaming chocolate when she woke.

  “I thought perhaps you could use this,” he said kindly, as she fought a new surge of nausea and moved to the edge of the bed, which was still covered by a spray of the king’s spaniels.

  “Where is ’e?” she asked, afraid of the answer.

  “Gone for one of his walks, ma’am.”

  “Alone?”

  “His Grace, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Earl of Rochester are with him.”

  Chiffinch covered her with one of the king’s own dressing gowns. “My wife is in the next room. She will see to something suitable for you to wear today should you wish to wait for His Majesty’s return.”

  Nell looked up at him, tall and stoic, his face giving nothing away; his voice, however, held an uncommon tenderness. “’Tis all so complicated.” She sank back onto the bed, wrapped in silk and tassels. “T
here seems so much still to learn. So many traps around nearly every corner.”

  “I can easily arrange a coach if—”

  “But what’s the right thing to do, Mr. Chiffinch? I wouldn’t want to be a nuisance. But I shouldn’t like to end up like Moll Davies.”

  “Pardon me for saying, Mrs. Nelly, but you are not at all like Mrs. Davies.”

  She smiled at that, grateful. “Thank you, sir.”

  “I would be honored if you would call me William.”

  Nell studied him for a moment. “Why are you so nice to me?”

  He leaned in very close, pausing before he replied. “I shouldn’t say, Mrs. Nelly. But Mrs. Chiffinch and I had a daughter once. You are very like her. Same fire and spirit. My wife noticed it straightaway.”

  “And tell me, William, what would you both have thought of your very spirited daughter in bed with the king like this?”

  “She was once. She died in childbirth because of it.”

  Nell covered her mouth with a hand. “Pray, forgive me. I’d no idea.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “And the baby? Your grandchild?”

  “Gone to memory as well, I’m afraid. Now we’ve got only our duty to him. It keeps us both tied to this life, connecting us back to her in a way.” He turned away from her then. “If you will excuse me, I shall call Mrs. Chiffinch to find you something extraordinary to wear.” He was moving toward the door when she called to him:

  “William, thank you.”

  “Your servant,” he said with a courtly nod as he left the chamber.

  Nell went to the window. She leaned against the casement and looked down onto the formal gardens in the courtyard before the river. In the distance, she saw Charles, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Earl of Rochester, just where William had said they would be. But, between them, walked a woman, cloaked in blue velvet and ermine. At first, for the ermine-covered hat she wore, Nell could not make out who it was. Then, as the woman tipped her head back and laughed at something the king said, Nell could see who Chiffinch had forgotten to mention. It was Lady Castlemaine, the woman supposedly well out of the king’s life.

  Nell watched her link her arm with the king’s, then lay her head on his shoulder as they strolled a pace ahead of Buckingham and Rochester.

  Nell felt as if something pierced through her, going straight to her heart. She felt the press of tears at the back of her eyes. It was the suddenness of it. But she was determined not to cry, or to feel the disappointment that was almost overwhelming her. Instead, with utter determination, she forced a smile. She would not be pitied, like the queen, nor avoided like any of the others, when his eye wandered. If Nell was to outlast them all—and by God, she now meant to—she must learn to happily coexist with anyone King Charles put in her path, no matter how her heart was secretly pained because of it.

  Two months later, in March of 1669, Lord Shrewsbury died of wounds suffered in the duel with the Duke of Buckingham. As a consequence, Lady Shrewsbury was invited to live openly with His Grace. When the duchess protested so startling an arrangement, the duke asked his own wife to find other accommodations. The court was rocked by the scandal.

  Nell continued on in a revival of Catiline His Conspiracy, at the King’s Theater. Her own scandal was bitterly brewing. It was one that would not only eclipse the Shrewsbury affair, but would engulf the entire gossip-hungry court. She was pregnant with the king’s child, and when she was forced to refuse a new role written for her once again by John Dryden, scandalmongers spread the news like wildfire, saying that for the duration of her pregnancy, her influence would be diminished. The question endlessly debated in coffeehouses and taverns along the busy Strand was who was likely to challenge Nell Gwynne’s place with the king.

  Chapter 22

  AY, NOW THE PLOT THICKENS VERY MUCH UPON US.

  —George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham

  RELATIONS between England and France had become sound enough by the following spring that Louis XIV’s brother granted his wife a visit home. It was to be a great state occasion: Charles, James, and Minette, the three surviving children of the murdered Charles I, would see one another for the first time in over nine years. But the true reason for the visit was that after years of hard and complex negotiations, with their sister as the envoy, the two sides had finally agreed to a secret alliance. In exchange for substantial monetary aid, Charles had privately agreed to announce, at the time of his choosing, his conversion to Catholicism.

  Minette had been dispatched to see the highly secret document signed on behalf of France. Only Arlington and Clifford of the English king’s Privy Council (privately both Catholic) had read and signed the actual treaty. Charles was so afraid of their attempts to dissuade him that the bulk of his privy councillors—including the Duke of Buckingham—knew nothing about the real elements that had been agreed to. Instead, the others were presented a second manufactured treaty to keep them unaware. And none of them were invited to join the king and the Duke of York for the reunion in Dover. Charles was playing a high-stakes game, intent on gaining money and power. Charles I would be proud of what he had been clever enough to achieve. And that was reason enough to attempt it.

  There was one great caveat to his complete satisfaction at the impending reunion.

  Minette’s husband insisted that the visit be not only brief, but also extend no further than Dover; Charles could not bring his sister home to London. So he could not introduce her to Nell, who had begun her lying-in at the house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He had not seen her for several weeks, at her insistence. “Wait till I can be gorgeous for you again, and I’ll warrant you, I will be!” she had insisted. He had done his best to understand. But he had wanted Nell there. Her honest, easygoing style would have won Minette’s fondness immediately. Even though his sister loved Catherine, he knew she loved her brother more.

  He stood on the dock with his brother, James, and watched the ship sail slowly nearer, bobbing on the whitecapped waves as a huge French flag fluttered in the wind. Salt spray and a spring mist peppered their faces. His heart raced like a child’s from the anticipation. Minette was the one person in the world he loved completely. When she stepped down the gangway, wrapped in forest-green velvet, Charles wiped the tears from his cheek. They were the first he had dared shed since the day of their father’s murder. He and James encircled her, standing like that for a very long time, silently shocked at how drastically poor Minette had changed. She had always been petite, but now the girl they embraced was hauntingly thin, and there were feather-gray shadows embedded deeply beneath her pale, hazel eyes. Nevertheless, she smiled up at her brothers, Charles most particularly, and then embraced them each again with all of her strength. “We are all that’s left of Father now,” she whispered to them as they stood huddled together against the buffeting winds.

  “I believe we have all three made him proud,” Charles said in reply, and his smile reflected everything—their history, their losses, and their abiding love for one another. As he glanced up, his gaze caught on the collection of ladies who were following Minette from the ship. All of them wore French fashions, lacy and more intricate than the English designs. And at the head of the little delegation, intentionally setting herself a few steps apart, strode a girl with smooth, corn-yellow hair, her back regally straight, her nose tipped up as she came toward them. Charles was instantly captivated by her face. It was smooth and oddly full, with wide, impossibly blue eyes, and a little rosebud mouth. The silk fabric at her bell sleeves and ankles ruffled in the breeze, and he watched her proudly attempt to keep everything in its proper place. Her look was so childlike, her manner so full of pride, that she reminded him of a very small girl playing dress-up. Only when Minette and James began to chuckle at him did he even realize they had been speaking.

  “I can see you have not changed,” Minette said, taking his arm.

  “Truthfully, our brother has only added more trophies to his cabinet in your absence.”

>   Realizing the implications suddenly, Minette’s smile fell. “Well, you are not to add Louise de Kéroualle to your conquests. I promised her parents myself I would protect her, and return her to them the chaste girl she is now, and I mean to do just that.”

  Charles embraced his sister again, and held her tightly as they all began to shiver from the cold breeze. “I’m here to see you. That is all I wish to do these next preciously few days that James and I have you,” he said sincerely. But his mind skipped onto other things. Louise, he thought as they strolled arm in arm together back toward shore, the little group of his sister’s ladies close at their heels. What a simply exquisite name for so luscious a child-woman…Everything else at that moment, especially his life back in London, seemed very far away.

  Chapter 23

  BUT THESE THINGS ARE PAST AND GONE.

  —Catullus

  ROSE waited down in the walled back garden of Nell’s house, amid a neat little orangery planted by the king. John had said that he would come as soon as she sent word, and she believed him. But it was a cold early morning, and she had slept little these past two nights. Finally, he came through the wooden side gate that the groundskeeper used. He was flushed and out of breath from having run, he said, half the way, because he could find a hackney coach to take him only so far from Whitehall as Covent Garden.

  “Has she had the child, then?” he asked.

  “She was safely delivered of a boy late last night.”

  “Another son for the king’s growing collection.”

  “As long as my sister is made secure by it, I’ll rejoice in their ’avin’ a dozen more.”