The Perfect Royal Mistress

by Diane Haeger

  The child she had borne, who had changed her body and caused more hair to come out in her brush than she cared to see, did little to cement her relationship with His Majesty. He was still preoccupied with that tenpenny actress with her laugh like a hen and her distasteful mass of hair the color of a Bristol bonfire. Louise rolled her eyes at the thought. It would serve the king right if she were to take a lover, as Lady Castlemaine had so publicly done. He had told her once, back in the beginning, how angry that affair had made him. How betrayed she had made him feel. Good.

  “This is all to change as well, chérie?” he asked suddenly, coming up behind her then.

  “Tout à fait, oui. All of eet.”

  “But I only just approved funds for that watered silk wallpaper you pleaded for and which they are now scraping away before my very eyes.”

  Enormously pleased with herself, Louise turned around, smiled, and kissed his cheek. “Zat was last year, Charles. Zis ees all ze latest from Paris.”

  He touched his mustache. “But you live in London now.”

  Louise shrugged. “Some sings about each of us are not so easily changed. I’ve ’ad to learn zat well enough.” She watched the king survey the work. It really was very amusing, since she had learned all of the little tricks that worked so splendidly well on him.

  “You can certainly change your penchant for decorating, my dear. At least slow it down to a reasonable pace.”

  “And Your Majesty can change your penchant for Meesus Gwynne, non?”

  Charles stood facing her. His mouth became a hard line. The mention of Nell had quickly infuriated him. She had pressed too hard, and done it too swiftly. It would do her no good in this. Only Nell seemed to have that unique ability to press without angering him. Louise switched to French. “For my sake, chéri. It really is the most humiliating thing to be faced with her.”

  “I will not discuss this.”

  “But to have a woman like her as my rival!” Louise declared in her native tongue, pressing a hand to his chest. “Will you not say she is beneath us both, what we are together?”

  “Do not speak to me of Nell.”

  She clung now to the lapels of his waistcoat. “For pity’s sake, Charles! I have given you a child!”

  “And some are saying I have given you more than you deserve!”

  Now was the moment. She felt the tears begin. They were certainly not full of sincerity, but any would do. Her full lips parted, the lower one slightly quivering. Big fat tears pooled in Louise’s wide blue eyes, then splashed onto her cheeks with perfect timing as soon as their eyes met. “I ’ave tried so to be perfect for Your Majesty! God knows eet!” She sobbed out the declaration, one she wagered sounded all the more pathetic to him in her fractured English.

  Servants and workmen milled around them. She could see his discomfort at that rising. His voice went lower. He leaned near. “And you have done an admirable job of it.”

  “Not so admirable as Meesus Gwynne!” She burst into fresh tears, weeping loudly and dramatically. A worthy performance, she thought, compared to the transparent theatrics Nell Gwynne so clumsily employed. “Do you not see how she humiliates me?” Louise wailed. “Calling me names! Imitating my Engleesh! I cannot possibly do battle wis zat!”

  “You should not allow her to get to you so,” he replied, speaking in a more gentle tone, glancing around uncomfortably, on the very verge of ordering everyone from the room.

  But she did not want that. She knew an audience always made a scene so much more effective. That much she had learned, and would use, from the great Nell Gwynne. “At least say you weel not ’ave her any more here at Whitehall, if it must continue on.” Louise’s voice quivered, then she sniffled. She added in French, “My heart cannot endure much more, Charles.”

  To her surprise, the king brought her to his chest very gently then and pressed a kiss onto her forehead. When he spoke, it was with surprising calm. “Let us have no more unpleasant talk of this, hmm? It seems we’ve enough to discuss with all of your decorating before us.”

  “Shall you come to my bedchamber zen, tonight at least?” She asked, sniffling away the last of her tears.

  “Alas, I cannot, chérie. I must work on the speech to Parliament, and I can only imagine what ungodly hour they will set me free of it all.”

  “I weel wait up for you.”

  “I will not hear of it. You know how you adore your rest. Now, no more tears, hmm. You know I cannot bear it when you’re sad.” He pulled her closer then and held her for a moment, then he walked briskly out into the hallway and down the long, vaulted corridor, followed by a collection of pages and guards. But his thoughts were no longer of Louise, or even Parliament, and the grand plea for more money to support himself. Nor was it of the war being waged before him.

  Nell’s face alone rose strong and bright in his mind.

  Happy, smiling. He wanted to see her, to be surrounded by the reassurance of her body, her scent, to sink himself into her happy, clever world, and forget all else. He was a king who could have anything, and usually did. But she still offered him something only she could give.

  “Ready my coach,” he declared, walking with long-legged strides.

  “Yes, sire.”

  “Inform the Privy Council that they are to gather at the house on Pall Mall within the hour. We shall conduct our business there. Then tell Chiffinch personally that if he has need of me, he will be able to find me until tomorrow morning with Mrs. Gwynne.”

  Chapter 33

  THE SETTING SUN, AND MUSIC AT THE CLOSE, AS THE LAST TASTE OF SWEETS, IS SWEETEST LAST…

  —Shakespeare, King Richard II, Act II, Scene I

  BY the summer of 1675, the war with the Dutch was over. In the end, the costly conflict gained Charles nothing but more debt, and a growing resentment from his people toward the French for their role in facilitating hostilities. By association, Catholics who lived among them were now more out of favor than before. Louise de Kéroualle, who was both, was so increasingly unpopular that it was not safe for her to walk in St. James’s Park, or ride in a coach without the window shades drawn.

  The Duke of York only fanned the flames of hostility when he took an admitted Catholic, Mary Beatrice d’Este of Modena, as his second wife. As a result, calls spread across London for the Protestant Duke of Monmouth to be named his father’s heir instead. Charles’s life, as he turned forty-five, was full of more secret dealings with France, endless wrangling with Parliament, and heated meetings with his privy councillors, who pleaded with him to consider the viability of his son as heir.

  The only part of the king’s life that lacked complication, as the months changed, was the one he shared with Nell and their friends. Everyone now referred to them by Nell’s nickname, the merry band: Buckingham, Rochester, Hyde, Buckhurst, Sedley, and Scrope. The house on Pall Mall had become a second, more intimate court, where the king and Nell entertained and dined frequently, where he could escape the other mistress from whom he found himself estranged. Charles had stopped sharing Louise’s bed more than a year before. Since making her a duchess, she had badgered him to give their son a title. Under the relentless pressure, and desire for calm, in August of that year, he did; the king saw his youngest son titled Duke of Richmond.

  It was this that turned the tide for Nell.

  She would tolerate any slight to herself, and had. But she knew her son was every bit the royal child as was the son of a Kéroualle. As another autumn approached, there was unspoken tension between the king and Nell. Charles did not address it, nor did she. But every time Nell looked at Charles, she was reminded that their son was a bastard child with no future, while her rival’s son was now a duke, living in Whitehall Palace.

  “Perhaps you should confront ’im, Nelly,” Rose offered one morning as they were plucking the sweet, ripe oranges from the trees in her little back garden.

  “And say what? Give our son a title or else?”

  “Somethin’ like that. She just shouldn’t be
allowed to get away with it.”

  “’Er lover is the king of England, Rose! She only gets as much as ’e’ll give ’er!” Nell drew her cloak more tightly around herself.

  Rose shook her head. “I still think you should speak with ’im about it.”

  “I’ve never once asked ’im for anythin’.”

  “’Tis ’igh time you start! That child ’e’s just ennobled is the ruddy son of a French spy, and all of England knows it!”

  Late that afternoon, as she lay in bed beside Charles, and a soft breeze passing through the open window rustled the velvet draperies on heavy iron poles, Nell looked over at him. Her eyes searched his face. He was relaxed, replete. She had loved him for so long, and with her whole heart. She had always given him everything that she had to give. But now there was this one thing. This grand injury. It was different from anything else because it involved her child. Their child.

  Nell ran a finger through the tufts of black hair. She felt his chest rise and fall beneath her touch, knowing all of the rhythms of his body. His eyes opened. They were black and shining. He smiled and reached over to press the copper hair back from her face.

  “I want what she has, Charlie. Only that.”

  He turned onto his side facing her, and propped his head with his hand. The floorboards outside her bedchamber creaked as servants passed in the corridor beyond. “You’ve always had more of me than she does. I adore you. I love you.”

  “But what does our son have?”

  He looked at her a moment more, then sat up abruptly. “He is my son, Nell, and he shall never want for anything. You know that.”

  “Anything but a proper title?” She put her hand on his shoulder. “I only want for our son what Louise’s son ’as, or Monmouth, or Lady Castlemaine’s children. A rightful place in this world.”

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. She did not try to stop him or even plead for a response. She said nothing else. He slipped on his clothes and shoes, and took up his periwig, resting on the back of her dressing table chair. He put it on his head and topped it with his plumed hat without checking his reflection in the gold-framed mirror there. He had never left without kissing her good-bye or without seeing his two sons. Today, she could see that he meant to make an exception, and her heart broke just a little bit more because of it.

  At Whitehall, Charles stood at an open window, lost in thoughts of what had happened with Nell. He could still feel her disappointed gaze upon him as he had dressed. He could never make her understand. It was not that he had not considered it. He had planned to make Nell Countess of Plymouth, or even Greenwich. He had raised the question with his Privy Council for the second time only last month. But the notion had been swiftly quashed.

  Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, who had replaced Thomas Clifford as Lord High Treasurer after the Test Act, had been particularly incensed. In the beginning, he had been sponsored in it by the Duke of Buckingham. Now, like a swift-growing cancer that takes root and begins wildly to spread, Danby had methodically carved out such an important place for himself with the king that he was eclipsing all others, particularly the Duke of Buckingham. The grand duke, who had manipulated so many, was being outwitted, and grandly so.

  “She was an orange girl!” Danby pompously reminded the king. “An actress from the streets! Surely Your Majesty need not be reminded of that!” It was bad enough, Danby said, that a French-woman was now an English duchess. But with the mood of the country what it was, such a move was dangerous.

  Words he might have said, assurances he could have given, now played across Charles’s mind. Explanations he could have given Nell about how difficult times were now, about how he had pushed so far with granting Louise’s plea that there was no room left. A bee hovered, buzzing outside the open window. It caught his eye. He had been greedy with Nell, always taking what she so readily offered. Believing it would always be there. The bee droned on a moment more, then disappeared. If I should lose you…, he thought. Ah, but then of course that is impossible… Nell would forgive him this eventually, as she forgave everything else. And he would return to her tomorrow, and tomorrow…and tomorrow.

  Danby, the Lord High Treasurer, sat up, the bedcovers falling away from his hairless chest. He was a cautious little man with a pallor pale as death. He had a weak chin, and dark, deep-set eyes that made the contrast all the more ghostly. He came to Louise’s private apartments only when he had seen for himself that the king had gone to Mrs. Gwynne’s house and therefore would make no inferences as to his motives for privately visiting a royal mistress. They were inferences that would have been well justified, considering what he and Louise had been doing with each other this past month. He found Louise to be a sulking, pouting, little pudge of a woman. But her breasts were as large as her appetite for sex, and he was only too willing to oblige her, since the king himself was no longer partaking. They were well matched in most things, particularly in manipulation.

  First to go would be Buckingham, next the famous Nell Gwynne.

  Buckingham had too much power, and he was too allied with Nell. They agreed something had to be done. Through cold calculation, and ruthlessness, Danby was close to actually vanquishing the powerful duke, supplanting him permanently as councillor closest to the king.

  “Will she receive it zen?” Louise now asked without ceremony.

  He knew what she meant. “I have counseled him as harshly as I dare against it, madam. His Majesty has now dropped the notion of making Mrs. Gwynne Countess of Plymouth, or Greenwich, as he had planned.”

  Louise smiled triumphantly. “Excellente. Can you just imagine eet?”

  “Well, you needn’t imagine it. Now you alone of the ladies who currently share His Majesty’s life shall have a title, and your son will do so, as well. As of tomorrow morning, the warrant will be signed, and your little boy shall forever be Baron Settrington, Earl of March, Duke of Lennox, and Duke of Richmond.”

  “Before Castlemaine’s sons?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” he stammered, uncertain of the answer, and stunned by the ingratitude.

  “My son must ’ave precedence over ’ers everywhere zay are presented togezzer! So eet must be signed first!”

  “It is my understanding that the warrant for all the boys is to be signed together tomorrow. Therefore, technically, none of them would take precedence over the other.”

  With the new détente between Barbara and the king, the former royal favorite had managed to garner from Charles the promise of the title Duke of Southampton for their ten-year-old son, Charles Fitzroy. Their younger son, Henry, would be created Duke of Grafton. Through pleading and relentless tears, Louise de Kéroualle had managed to attain the same place for her child, far earlier, by his third birthday. “Zat weel not ’appen!” she ruthlessly declared.

  There was a knock on the door. Louise closed her ivory silk dressing gown over her breasts. “My son shall be first in all sings!”

  It did not seem to matter that her lawyer found her as she was, undressed, in the company of a man, smelling of sex, with the king nowhere to be found. The lawyer was French, after all, and well paid by King Louis.

  “Deed you bring zem?” she asked, before he had come fully through the bedchamber door.

  “The warrant is here, milady.” The lawyer opened a large leather valise as he was conducted into the room and walked toward a carved French writing table.

  Danby had been a worthy opponent to Buckingham, but with Louise de Kéroualle, he felt literally out of his league. It was both seductive and frightening.

  “Bon,” she said coldly. “Sign them. Danby weel be witness.”

  Sometimes, when she lay awake, alone, unable to sleep in her grand poster bed with all of its splendor, great carved wooden boys holding candelabra on either side of her headboard, and beside a dressing table covered in brocade, Nell could still see her. She was almost an apparition now, the girl standing before the king with her two rotting oranges, her m
atted copper locks, and her wide eyes. She was like a ghost, though achingly vivid. Memories of that girl in her soiled dress brought with it the wild, helpless sounds of Coal Yard Alley. The rancid, cloying odors of the narrow streets. The feel of desperation. But she was not that girl any longer. Not tentative, Nor unsure. Privilege had buried that part of herself deep beneath the well of obligation that her life was now. For herself, Nell cared little. There had been only a moment’s pain, like the prick of a needle, learning Louise de Kéroualle was to become titled. Then, when it happened, an acceptance with a smile. She could only imagine the pressure that had been brought to bear on Charles. But for her sons, her sweet boys, they were where she drew the line.

  She watched them together now: little Charles, almost four, and little James, not even two, playing with Louise’s son, the Duke of Richmond, on the vast, sloping lawns behind Greenwich Palace. They were led in it all by Jeddy, who was treated by Nell and Charles as one of her own children. Life was carefree for all of them. None of them knew the weight of obligation or disappointment. Certainly not of hunger or even shame. Nell sat beneath a fluttering white canopy at the crest of the great rolling lawn surrounded by Louise de Kéroualle; Monmouth’s pregnant wife, Anne; Castlemaine’s eldest daughter, Lady Anne Palmer, who was nearly fourteen; and Rose. Behind them were the French ambassador, the dukes of York and Lauderdale, Rochester, and Sedley.

  The king was beside Danby, speaking in hushed tones.

  Nell looked away, shaking her head. She despised the Lord High Treasurer. He took Louise’s side in all things, and nearly rid the court of the Duke of Buckingham. Her dear Lord Buck was all but invisible at court these days, and she was quite certain Danby meant for her to be next. He remarked openly and often about Nell’s humble beginnings, and she knew it was he who fought ruthlessly against any elevation for her or her children. Watching him whisper to the king, Nell grew angrier by the moment. Charles was laughing; Danby was leaning in toward him, whispering. She shot to her feet; the children were laughing, running. The summer breeze blew. Her eldest son was near enough, though. He would hear her. So would everyone else.