The Perfect Royal Mistress

by Diane Haeger

  That evening, Nell felt pleased enough with herself, and confident enough, to host a small, informal birthday party for the king and those at court who had aligned themselves publicly with her, the Duke of York, Buckingham, Rochester, Lord Buckhurst, and Charles Sedley among them. Now that Arlington and his wife had chosen Louise de Kéroualle, Nell knew that alliances were more important than ever. And she was glad to have cultivated her own camp.

  Fortunately, the king now spent most of his evenings with her, and their intimate circle.

  “It is a lovely evening you’ve planned, sweetheart. But I would have hoped you would have seen your way to inviting the Countess of Shrewsbury tonight,” the king said. “If not for me, at least as a favor to your friend, Buckingham, who is so fond of her company.”

  Nell sank onto his lap, then kissed him seductively as the others gathered in her increasingly elegant drawing room. “Ah, one whore at a time is quite enough for you, sire,” Nell said wryly. The king laughed, and then so did everyone else, even the increasingly endangered Duke of Buckingham.

  “I, for one, think Nell is a wise woman,” Buckingham said with a smile. “We men are always better off focusing on one luscious beauty at a time.”

  “You mortal men, perhaps,” the king returned with a pompous chuckle.

  Glances were exchanged, and in the awkward silence that followed, Nell looked at Charles. They had not been speaking of herself and Louise de Kéroualle directly, but the comparison was impossible not to make. Everyone knew of His Majesty’s growing obsession with her. But Nell meant to make light of it. She had fought too hard, and come too far, to play this particular scene in her life any other way. “Then two at the utmost, Your Majesty, for even royalty has its limits,” she declared with a raucous, carefree laugh, until the others began to laugh along with her.

  Later, as Charles sat trading indecent poems with Rochester, Nell joined Buckingham outside in her garden. He had gone there alone with a glass of champagne and stood among her rosebushes, all full of fat pink and white blossoms. He turned when he heard her footsteps. She was smiling, and they embraced.

  “Thanks for bein’ ’ere, Lord Buck.”

  “Would I have missed the king’s birthday?”

  “Perhaps for Lady Shrewsbury’s sake you might ’ave.”

  “We understand each other, you and I, and we have learned from each other. One must always consider all of one’s alliances, not only the amorous ones. And, adore her though I do, my darling can be a bit, shall we say, abrasive. As for you, it is imperative that you save your strength for the most critical battles ahead of you.”

  Nell smiled charmingly. “Carwell does appear to be a worthy opponent. Although I’ve only the king’s divided attentions, and a couple of distant glimpses, to tell me that. We’ve not met.”

  “Yet.”

  “And shall we?”

  “My dear girl, knowing the king, I believe you can safely count upon it.”

  She wound her arm through his, and they strolled a little way along the brick pathway lined with orange trees, and their deeply sweet scent.

  “Did I ever tell you how I forgot Mademoiselle de Kéroualle in Dieppe on my way to escort her here from France?”

  Nell giggled, put a finger to her lips, and looked over at him. “You didn’t!”

  “I did indeed. Or so His Majesty shall always believe. It seems that I was greatly taken up with business in Paris, you see, and so, after instructing the lady to wait for me there to make the crossing, I entirely forgot her, and made my way back to England by Calais.”

  “So that was how Lord Arlington came to her rescue?”

  “And, alas, why she was not able to make the grand entrance into London she had planned. But I hope that shall remain our little secret.”

  Nell tipped her head back then and sounded that rich, deep laugh of hers that everyone at court had come to know well. “George Villiers, I do believe I love you!”

  “So long as the king doesn’t know, I say I am well pleased to hear it!”

  Nell did not see Charles again for the rest of the summer, as he had left London for his progress to Windsor, and then moved on to Hampton Court, while she finished out the run of the play. When autumn came, and His Majesty returned to the palace at Whitehall, two major changes had occurred.

  Louise de Kéroualle was officially His Majesty’s other acknowledged mistress.

  And Nell Gwynne knew for certain what she had suspected for weeks: She was once again pregnant with the king’s child.

  Chapter 29

  VARIETY IS THE SOUL OF PLEASURE.

  —Aphra Behn

  ON Christmas day in the year 1670, Nell gave birth to a second son. She chose to name him James, after the Duke of York, who, slowly and at first reluctantly, had become one of her greatest admirers. The brothers went together to visit her as a light snow fell; London appeared coated with a dusting of sweet powdered sugar.

  “He looks like our father,” James said as he descended the stairs behind the king.

  The house was alive with activity, and everything was heavily decorated for the holiday with holly and ivy and big green velvet sashes. Servants were bustling about, and laughing children were dashing through the corridors.

  “Praise God, he is healthy, as Nell is. I am truly a blessed man.”

  “I like her, Charles. I know I gave you a difficult time over her in the beginning. I didn’t think I could truly care about her, considering everything. But I do. Everyone does.”

  “As opposed to anyone in particular?”

  James shrugged. “I bid you only to take care with her competition, my brother.”

  “As you have with your own mistresses?”

  “I am not a king.”

  “Yet.”

  “She is not thought of the way Nell is, Charles. The people despise your Louise.”

  “They are very different women.”

  “Look. There is only you and I left now from all father and mother created, from all their hopes and dreams, and I have tried only to be the counsel to you that father would have been. That Minette was to us both.”

  Charles softened. “Mademoiselle de Kéroualle is a pleasant and lovely diversion, James, and she dresses up nicely for formal occasions. You needn’t trouble yourself about her beyond that.”

  “They say she is a spy for France, Charles, sent here by Louis personally to seduce you, and then from her post to keep him informed of your alliances and loyalty.”

  “Ah, those rumors.”

  “You make light of something serious.”

  “All of my life that has been my mode of survival, and you well know it. You cannot have forgotten, can you, what life was for us when we were sent from England, not so very long ago? I am the people’s king, and their ruler every waking hour, but I’ll be damned to hell if you, or anyone else, will tell me what to do when I wish to be merely a man.”

  “Concentrate on Nell, Charles, and take great caution with her rival. I bid you that only with the greatest brotherly affection.”

  Charles embraced his brother then, and, for a moment, they were silent. “And I am sorry about Anne.”

  “Whatever our problems, she was my wife. I should have been a better husband before she died.”

  “Perhaps to your next wife.”

  “God willing. I did not actually believe there would ever be one.”

  “I do not suppose there is any point in my asking you to consider the offer of Marie de Guise? It would go a long way to strengthening our alliance with France.”

  “I thought that was precisely what you were doing with Mademoiselle de Kéroualle.”

  “Bastard!” Charles laughed.

  As they walked together back into the long hallway lined with ancient portraits in heavy gold, the ceiling paneled and gilded overhead, Charles slapped his brother’s back. “So there is no chance at all of a Guise alliance?” he asked again with a half-bitten smile.

  “About as much chance as my asking
you not to continue on with my lady Carwell.”

  After several months in the same house, Nell and Helena Gwynne had begun to forge a tentative, if strained, coexistence. Helena had been there for the birth of her daughter’s second child, holding Nell’s hand throughout, refusing to leave the task to midwives. She helped with Charles and Jeddy, complaining little, and she seemed to have given up the urge for gin entirely. Helena was revealing a maternal side to herself, one Nell had never experienced, and it began to heal some of the deepest wounds that had long divided them.

  On New Year’s Day, Rose and John Cassells were married at St. Stephen’s, a small ivy-covered stone church on the corner of Drury Lane, near the Cock & Pye. The King of England attended the small ceremony, as did the Duke of York, the Duke of Buckingham, and the rest of what Charles now affectionately called Nell’s merry band, rounding out the unlikely collection. Patrick Gound from the tavern was also among the guests.

  The house, when they all returned to it, was decorated with white ribbons and garlands of ivy and roses, and everything smelled of flowers and lemon oil.

  “’Is name was Rowland,” Helena said in a soft voice, her face made vulnerable, unshed tears in her eyes. Nell glanced up, moved swiftly from the joy of the wedding, and not immediately understanding. Until her mother continued. They were alone together upstairs where Nell had gone to check on the children. “And ’e was indeed, once upon a time, every girl’s fairy tale, a captain in ’Is Majesty’s army. God, but we were ’appy then.”

  Stunned, Nell sank onto a hassock. “What ’appened to my father, Ma?”

  “The end of ’is life was not so brilliant as the first. ’E died in debtor’s prison in Oxford, where ’e’d been assigned, Nelly. A lost soul. A disgrace. There was the two of you by then, and only me, ’eartbroken, and left to figure things out.”

  “You didn’t do a very good job of figurin’.”

  “True enough. And in the end, I made a livin’ the only way I could.”

  “You should’ve told us, Ma. At least there was a tiny bit of ’is life Rose ’n me could ’ave ’ad to ’old on to if you’d told us.”

  “I ’adn’t it to give to you. ’Twas all taken up with what came after ’e died.”

  “The drinkin’ and the men.”

  “Aye, that. The point is, I’m sorry, Nelly.”

  Tears had come to her eyes, but Nell brushed them away with the back of her hand. She stood and looked out the windows onto the busy square. The music and laughter from the wedding party downstairs rose up around them, filling the odd silence. When she turned back, Helena was standing, too, half in shadows, and half in the slanting light coming in through the long windowpanes. But neither of them knew what more to say.

  Louise rounded a corner, stalking through one corridor of Whitehall and then another, her yellow silk taffeta skirts billowing out behind her like a lemony sail. Around her, a cortege of court ladies, her wardrobe mistress, the French ambassador, and other pretty young attendants scrambled to keep up with her charging pace.

  “What business have you?” asked one of the two guards posted at the king’s privy door as the collection of spaniels barked from the other side.

  “I see ze king now!” she ordered in her fractured English soprano.

  “His Majesty is not here, madam,” he said dryly.

  “Zen ’e is where?”

  “Not here is all I know, madam.”

  Insolent fool, she thought. But she did not know the words in English, even if she had been unwise enough to speak them aloud. Her hand went to her hips, and she looked back at de Croissy. “Eh bien, he promised me the evening! I have bathed and prepared myself for him! Now he leaves me to wait in my bedchamber like one of his trollops!” she raged on in her native tongue.

  “He is, after all, the king, Mademoiselle de Kéroualle,” de Croissy cautiously observed.

  “Et moi?”

  “You are here to serve him, as are we all.”

  Feeling the dark press of humiliation, Louise lifted her chin, turned from the French ambassador, and began back down the corridor, the others following dutifully. For a moment, the sound of their shoes heels echoing over the grand length of parquet floors, and the swish of her taffeta skirts, were the only sounds.

  “I don’t understand any of this!” she muttered in a fast flurry of French. “He desires me, he chases me endlessly, and now that I have given in to him, I am worth not so much as an explanation when I am abandoned? He simply does as he pleases! Dieu, this will not stand! I shall see about this! I shall see about it all!”

  De Croissy’s hand pressed into her shoulder then, pulling her to an abrupt halt beneath a ceiling mural full of clouds and angels. Once again, Louise turned; this time her face was crimson with rage. “How dare you touch me!”

  From behind gritted teeth, he coldly replied, “I had hoped to spare you the explanation, but you leave me no choice. We have too much at stake now, and I will not have you risk the place King Louis believes you have attained with these childish tirades of yours! Is that entirely clear? Bon. Then you should know he has gone off to that actress of his. An unpleasant truth, yet there it is. And from what I have observed, you are not so entirely indispensable to His Majesty as to go demanding his return. You would do well, as Mrs. Gwynne herself does, to tolerate his dalliances and be there, clean, pretty, and smiling, when he does again desire you, which may not be anytime soon if he sees you raging and stomping about like this!”

  Louise’s blue eyes narrowed. “How dare you! I will be queen of England one day, and I could have you drawn and quartered for speaking to me in this manner!”

  He gripped her arm then and pulled her close so they would not be overheard. “Fantasies are delightful, chérie, until they interfere with business. You will never be queen; you are already a whore. Now, you have a job to do if you wish your family in France to continue living in their newfound luxury. And I suggest you do it admirably, or you will be out on your ear and back to France, a disgraced harlot who could not keep an old lecher like King Charles from running off to a mere actress.”

  Tears pooled in her eyes, and she turned her lower lip out in a dramatic pout as it began to quiver. “This was not how it was supposed to be when I agreed to come to England.”

  “Life is difficult everywhere,” he seethed and pinched her arm even more tightly. “I suggest now that you’re here, you get creative, and make the best of it, chérie.”

  Charles rode to Lincoln’s Inn Fields with a heavy heart. He had told his advisers that he would tell Nell himself, that it would be easier for Nell, coming from him. But he knew there were no words that would suffice. In their endless hours of conversation, he had learned what Richard Bell had come to mean to her. Her first friend in the theater, Nell always proudly proclaimed. She had lobbied tirelessly for better parts for him, as he, in the beginning, had lobbied for her. Without Richard, Nell always said, she would still be selling oranges, and she most certainly would never have met the great love of her life.

  Not bothering with the formality of a knock, a royal guardsman opened the front door for the king. Charles then stepped inside before Buckingham and the Duke of York, both of whom had insisted on accompanying him. The royal physician also followed. Nell was sitting beyond the archway, in the drawing room, playing basset with Rose. Helena Gwynne was sitting out in the entrance hall on the steps holding the new baby, James, surrounded by Jeddy and Charles, who were tossing balls down the stairs and giggling together. It was such an idyllic scene that the king’s heart squeezed in his chest. She’d had too much trauma in her life already for this. He felt a thickness at the back of his throat, a burning at the prospect of what he would say, how this next moment was about to change everything. He nodded to Helena, then moved toward the archway. Nell glanced up, saw him, and sprang to her feet, smiling broadly. His appearance was not a surprise; he often came to her unannounced when he could steal a moment here or there.

  The king steeled himself a
nd took a step forward. This is mine to do, he thought. She deserves as gentle a heartbreak as I can make it for her. “It’s Richard, Nell,” he said.

  She froze, stunned, before him.

  “There has been a fire at the theater.”

  Suddenly, she was looking up, eyes wide, tears pooling there, and he was holding her arms, watching helplessly as the first tears slid down her cheeks. “God…Oh, God, no…”

  “It is a terrible tragedy, sweetheart. The theater is completely destroyed. He was trapped in one of the tiring-rooms.”

  He stood there, still bracing her, watching helplessly as she collapsed. Her mind would be hurling images at her with cruel precision, he knew. Richard’s laugh…his crooked smile…the utter kindness to her that she had always described to him. Her body jerked uncontrollably as she wept. “I just saw ’im yesterday…only just embraced ’im for the last time…’e ’ad found the courage at last to ask Beck Marshall to marry ’im. Ballocks! Oh, ballocks!”

  “Leave us, all of you,” the king commanded then, and there was no other sound but Nell’s sobbing as everyone moved across the wide Turkish carpet, through the drawing room, and back into the kitchen.

  The house, so full of life only a moment before, was still now, with the quiet accentuating every sound. The tall clock in the entrance hall that ticked away. The floorboards beyond the drawing room straining as one of Nell’s servants moved with the others. The king knew he could have his doctor administer something to make her sleep. But that would not take away the pain, only prolong it. How well he knew that himself. Instead, he knelt with her, and held her in his arms, knowing there was nothing in the world even a king could do to help. “I am so truly sorry, Nell,” he whispered into her hair.

  “Stay with me,” she bid him in return.

  She asked him for so little, Charles thought. He wanted to give her the world. Right now, he knew that all she wanted was the one thing even a king could not give her: the life of Richard Bell.