Royal Harlot

by Susan Holloway Scott

  “Oh, Roger,” I whispered, tracing the cypher’s delicate outline with my fingertip. The significance of his gift was not lost on me. This was no ordinary bauble, such as a man gives to his sweetheart, but a symbol of far greater meaning. “That you would grant such a pendant to me!”

  He was watching the glinting gold and glass in my hand, and I’d no notion of which mattered more to him. “I’ve spoken of you to the leaders of our group, and they agree that a lady of impeccable loyalty could be of use. There would be risks. There would be danger. I can’t deny that.”

  “Do you mean I could carry messages for you?” I asked with excitement. My teasing play with the sausage now seemed shameful bawdry. No one had ever expected more of me than that I be amusing and beautiful, and this—this was a heady expectation indeed. “You would trust me that much?”

  “In the right circumstances, yes,” he said, and the admiration with which he regarded me made me shiver. “Put the chain around your neck, Barbara. I wish to see it there.”

  Obediently I unhooked my cloak and let it fall back from my shoulders, and unwrapped the fine wool kerchief I’d needed against the cold. The neck of my bodice was cut low and wide and banded with a velvet ribbon, as was the fashion, with only a narrow ruffle of my white smock beneath for an edging. The pendant’s glass was cool against my skin, and once I fastened the chain at my nape, the heart lay at the top of the cleft between my breasts.

  “There,” I said. “This way the king shall forever be near my heart.”

  “As is right.” Yet Roger’s gaze was not as focused upon the pendant as upon the swell of my breasts below it. “Ah, Barbara, if you could but see yourself now! You are as beautiful, as serene, as any saint.”

  I’d heard that compliment often before, and it had perplexed me until I’d seen the old Italian paintings and drawings of Romish saints that still hung defiantly in many Royalist homes. I had the oval face so favored by those painters, the delicate chin and fair skin, and my deep blue eyes—that most lasting legacy of my Villiers blood—had the same heavy-lidded cast to them. I’d always thought they made me look as if I’d slept ill the night before, but Philip had told me they were the sort of eyes that made a man believe I was inclined toward lascivious amusement.

  Lightly I stroked the pendant’s smooth surface. When Roger gazed upon me, did he see only the saintly face, or the one more happily familiar with sin as well?

  “Thank you, Roger,” I said softly, reaching across the table to lay my hand over his. “You cannot know how much this pendant and the faith it represents mean to me.”

  “I’d dared to hope I’d please you, Barbara,” he said. “That is my constant goal. That, and to have you with me forever.”

  “Is it?” I asked, and idly slipped my fingers higher along the back of his hand and into the cuff of his shirt to find his wrist. I always liked the strength to be discovered in a man’s wrist, the way the bones were so different from my own.

  “It is.” His Adam’s apple bobbed upward as he swallowed, poor man. “You know I’ve countered my father’s objections to you, Barbara, my desire to see you is so vast.”

  “Objections, hah,” I murmured, unperturbed. “Your father loathes me outright, though I mean to outlive him.”

  Roger smiled weakly. “I’m not a peer like His Lordship, Barbara, but I—”

  “Hush,” I said softly, making tiny circles along his wrist to distract him from swearing vows he’d no intention on obliging. “We needn’t speak of him now.”

  “Then I’ll speak of you,” he said. “You bewitch me, Barbara. I’ve never met another lady like you.”

  “Nor I a gentleman like you.” I smiled. Even my honorable Roger had found his way from sainthood to bewitching sin. “You keep your lodgings not far from here, don’t you?”

  He emptied his tankard and thumped it down hard on the table, then rose and boldly offered me his hand.

  “Madam,” he said. “I shall be most honored.”

  While Roger knew full well that I was not a maid, on that first night I thought it kindest to hide my experience. Most gentlemen prefer it that way, to believe they are the omniscient mighty conqueror in the bedchamber, and ready to crow like a very rooster at the break of day.

  It was not a difficult role to play with Roger, either, because I did like him and appreciate the respect and regard he accorded me. Likewise, he was lean and pleasingly made, and as eager a lover as any woman could wish. Since many weeks had passed since I’d last been with Philip, I found my satisfaction swiftly and with ease, but took such care to lavish every praise on him that he insisted on repeating his performance twice more before dawn.

  And yet that morning as I lay in his arms, clothed in nothing more than the cypher heart around my neck, I felt not joy but a kind of melancholy. Was this, I wondered miserably, how Philip regarded me? That I was a pleasant diversion, yet no more? That when I spoke of a shared future he saw only as far as that night? That my heartfelt protestations of eternal love, which Roger was even now echoing so fervently in my ear, sounded as flat and unmagical to Philip as Roger’s did now to me?

  When the footman brought us a morning tray, I drank a morning draft with Roger, while he ate his hearty servings of toasted biscuits, quince conserve, and red kippers, doubtless to restore the strength he fancied he’d exhausted in the course of the night. Then to his regret, I made my farewell, contriving some excuse or another for repairing home to my mother’s house. I’d much to consider as I rode alone in the Palmers’ carriage to Ludgate Hill, and wonder, too, at this next step I’d taken on my life’s journey.

  Yet if I’d hoped to find peace at home, I was sadly disappointed. I’d scarce stepped through the door when my mother came rushing from the parlor as if the very walls around her were ablaze, her small spaniel in her arms.

  “Barbara, Barbara, you are safe!” she cried, setting the dog down to embrace me. “Oh, daughter, you’ve no notion of how I’d feared you’d come to some terrible end. Why, I was almost ready to send for the watch, to have them search for your ravaged body in the parks.”

  “You’ve no reason to worry, madam,” I said wearily, tossing my cloak and muff to the footman. “I went to view the funeral procession, as I’d told you, and then was among friends.”

  “Friends!” she exclaimed, following close behind me into the front room. “Why shouldn’t I worry when you’re with your friends, given how you consort until all hours with only the lowest rascals and scoundrels?”

  I pressed my fingers to my temples, wishing she’d not begun this same sorry tune again. “You keep your friends, and I’ll keep mine,” I began. “You don’t need to tell me again how much you despise Chesterfield.”

  “Chesterfield,” she said, and puckered her lips dismissively. “I only wish you were with His Lordship, because at least I’d know the name of the man whose bed you shared last night, like any other whoring gypsy.”

  “Madam, please, I’d rather not—”

  “Don’t lie to me again, Barbara, for I know you weren’t with His Lordship.” She waved a small salver with a letter on it beneath my nose.

  I recognized Philip’s seal pressed into the wax, as well as his hand. Eagerly I reached for the letter, but my mother swept it from my hand.

  “Not yet, daughter, not yet,” she said, holding the salver from my reach while her little dog jumped and yipped below. “I know you were not with His Lordship last night, for his servant brought this late, searching for you. Tell me where you were, Barbara. Tell me whose bed you shared.”

  With Philip’s letter my golden prize, I didn’t hesitate. “Mr. Palmer,” I said. “I was with him and no other from the beginning of yesterday until now, when his carriage brought me home.”

  My mother was so startled by this that she let me seize Philip’s letter at once.

  “Mr. Roger Palmer?” she demanded. “The youngest son of Sir James Palmer, of Dorney Court?”

  “You know he is.” I cracked the wax seal with
my thumb, my heart racing with anticipation. “Just as you’ve known I’ve been a friend to Roger for months and months. There is nothing new whatsoever.”

  Swiftly I scanned Philip’s letter, or rather, the three sentences of nothing.

  He addressed me as “His Dearest Life,” the way he always did, yet he was still vaguely away from London. He thanked me cordially for the many letters I’d sent to him, but could offer no confirmed date for his return to London. He trusted I was well, and would keep my love constant until he could hold me in his arms once again.

  He wrote nothing of love for me.

  “What is new is that you’ve clearly beguiled Mr. Palmer with your company,” my mother was saying. “Though the Palmers suffered certain reverses during the war like the rest of us, Sir James has managed to keep a good estate at Dorney Court. He and his sons are situated to do well when the king returns.”

  “When?” I asked dully, refolding Philip’s letter without reading it again. “You said ‘when the king returns,’ not ‘if.’ ”

  “I choose my words with intention, Barbara, not accident,” she said. “With Cromwell finally buried, it’s only a matter of time before the king is set properly back upon his throne. Everyone says so.”

  “That is true.” I touched the heart pendant, thinking of what it meant to King Charles, and to me as well. If Roger kept the promise that this heart signified, then I could have a part in bringing Charles back to his kingdom. Hadn’t he said that I could be of use to the cause? And hadn’t that possibility meant so much more to me than all his other compliments to my grace and beauty?

  “Surely you must have noticed the quality of his belongings when you were there,” my mother prompted. “His furnishings, his goods. Sir James has always been clever about guarding his fortune.”

  “Roger says his father raised an entire troop of horses for the king’s cause during the war. By his reckoning, Sir James spent at least seven thousand pounds of his own estate to support His Majesty.” I’d heard often of this seven thousand pounds, perhaps too often; not only was Roger proud of his family’s generosity, but at the same time he lamented the gift with a miser’s unsavory grief.

  “Seven thousand pounds?” My mother sniffed to show she was duly impressed. “That’s a fine luxury, to have seven thousand pounds to share with the king. But that is what I mean, Barbara. His Majesty has marked such loyalty, and will reward it when he returns. You’ll see. The Palmers will have that seven thousand pounds back tenfold in offices and land. Whenever Sir James drops his bread, you can be sure it will land with the butter upward.”

  “Likely it will,” I said, turning away. “I’m going to bed now.”

  “Don’t you leave before I’m done speaking,” she said, hurrying to block my path to the staircase. “Mark what I say, Barbara. Without a fortune, you won’t have many chances as choice as this one. Mr. Palmer would make a splendid match for you, and a useful alliance for your uncle and me. True, he is only a second son, and by a second wife, so the Palmer estates won’t come to him, but Sir James will look after him handsomely nonetheless. And if you have already pleased Mr. Palmer as you seem, why, then—”

  “Of course I pleased him, madam,” I said, my voice stony. “Three times last night.”

  Embarrassment stained my mother’s cheeks through her paint, as I knew it would. “I need no unsavory details, Barbara. I’ll trust you to, ah, do what is necessary to secure the gentleman’s attachment.”

  “I’m too young to wed,” I protested, as I always did. What was it that Philip had told me so long ago—that we poor noble folk must trade away ourselves in marriage, and steal love instead wherever we might? “I’m scarce seventeen.”

  “Too old is more the truth,” my mother said tartly. “You’ll be eighteen next week. Once the king returns and there’s a proper court around him, then London will be full of girls of good family, far prettier than you, Barbara, and far younger, too. And they’ll be virgin ladies, not the Earl of Chesterfield’s soiled leavings.”

  “I’ve no desire to hear this from you again, madam.” I moved to squeeze past her, but she seized me by the arm to keep me there.

  “Chesterfield will never marry you,” she said bluntly. “You know that as well as I.”

  I didn’t answer. How could I, when she was right, and I’d Philip’s charming, faithless nothing of a letter still in my hand?

  Yet my silence only made my mother more relentless, her fingers pressing into my arm. “Mr. Palmer can marry where he pleases, Barbara. You know that, too, else you should. Men can be coaxed into love.”

  “I don’t love Mr. Palmer,” I declared, “and never shall.”

  “What, you would lift your petticoats and spread your legs for Mr. Palmer without love, but you wouldn’t accept him as your husband?”

  “But I don’t wish to marry Roger!”

  We poor noble folk must trade away ourselves in marriage. . . .

  “Your wishes are not the only thing that matters,” she said sharply. “Your uncle and I will not keep our home open to you forever, not when you refuse to help your own situation. Given your scandalous behavior, no one would fault me if I sent you back to the country and left you there to rot.”

  I pulled my arm free. “I’m your daughter. You wouldn’t do that to me. I wouldn’t let you.”

  “Don’t test me, Barbara,” my mother warned. “Better to consider well the consequences of your licentious behavior, and then consider Mr. Palmer.”

  With her argument done, she turned and left me, her petticoats briskly sweeping the floorboards and her flop-eared little dog trotting at her heels. She’d always kept her word before. I’d no reason to doubt that she would again, not in this.

  I thought of Philip, and I thought of Roger, but most of all I thought of myself, and whether I truly wished to spend the rest of my life stealing love wherever I might find it.

  Five months later, on a day when the April skies wept with gray rain, I married Roger Palmer in the church of St. Gregory, in the shadow of St. Paul’s. Pointedly none of Roger’s family attended, leaving my mother and my uncle as the only witnesses to this folly, and the only ones to sign the register in the vestry afterwards.

  Hand in hand, Roger and I ducked beneath the dripping portico to kiss as newly minted husband and wife. When the raindrops splattered into my hair and eyes, he laughed at my misfortune, and I crossly turned my cheek against his lips.

  Less than an hour into our marriage, then, and already it was hard to say which of us had been dealt the more sorrowful hand.

  Chapter Four

  LONDON

  May 1 6 5 9

  Winter had given way to spring, and spring to early summer, and yet none of our hopes for the Commonwealth’s collapse and King Charles’s return had come true. As everyone had predicted, the new Lord Protector Richard Cromwell couldn’t become half the leader his father had been. He was soft-spoken, hesitant, and unprepossessing, and when he reviewed the troops that had made his father so proud, he sat astride his mount so awkwardly that the men labored hard not to laugh. In London he’d become commonly known as Tumbledown Dick, while the army was more blunt about his deficiencies, and called him Queen Dick. As one of the Royalist wits sourly proclaimed, it was as if the old vulture had died, and from his ashes had risen a titmouse.

  It could not last, and it didn’t. When Richard refused to consider a separate commander in chief and tried to keep all the power to himself, as his father had done, then the army council began to meet in secret. In April, two of the most prominent officers—and those who’d been most loyal to the elder Cromwell—General John Desborough and Major General Charles Fleetwood, led a coup that removed Richard as Lord Protector and dissolved the Parliament that he’d called.

  The country was now ruled by a Council of State, a republican mask donned by the army. Also brought back to office were the remnants of the Parliament that Oliver Cromwell had long ago dissolved, now ingloriously called the Rump—a name that a
lways made me snort and laugh, no matter how solemnly it was invoked. This Rump was full of supporters for the restoration of the monarchy, and it truly seemed the time was ripening for Charles’s return.

  Even so, the Royalists seemed incapable of assembling a suitable force to bring the king back to power. Though other countries—Holland, Spain, Portugal—had sworn to help Charles regain his throne, none of them was offering the armies and funds to make such idle promises real. Since so many other attempts to retake England had ended in disastrous losses, the king’s advisors refused to let him return without this show of force, or any real willingness of the people to welcome and support him.

  For this, really, was the greater problem. While most of England had long grumbled into their ale about the weakness of Richard Cromwell and the oppression of life under the Commonwealth, few were willing to give life to those grumbles with real action. Even the noblemen among my friends, men whose families had lost the most in the wars, and who in turn sought to gain the most were the monarchy restored, seemed incapable of so much as raising a regiment from the people on their own lands. Roger’s father had told him long ago that this was not so much from lazy torpidity or disinterest, but because these fatherless young gentlemen simply did not know how such things were done, having grown to manhood deprived of the examples of their elders.

  I cannot say whether this was true or not. All I knew was that for whatever reason, Charles remained mired in Brussels with only his Lord Chancellor Sir Edward Hyde and a handful of tattered courtiers for company, while the Royalist cause did little more than plot and plan and send coded letters back and forth among themselves, like harmless schoolboys playing at spies in the attic.

  My heady dreams of taking part in the king’s return likewise lay fallow. Roger always had an excuse or reason why my services were not needed, and instead expected me to limit my activities to those of any drudging wife. As unpleasant as my life had been under my mother’s roof, at least there I’d not been expected to attend tediously to the keeping of the house and staff, or to plan dinners for my husband with the cook, or to advise the laundry maid on how he liked the sleeves of his shirts pleated, exactly so. I saw little of the reputed Palmer fortune, either, and when I begged Roger for a new gown or petticoat to cheer my spirits, he’d tell me there was no money to spare on my fripperies, and I was forced to make do with the shabby leavings that I’d brought from my mother’s house. Further, Roger wished me to be content with his company and no other, which only added to my growing unhappiness as his wife. It was as if he’d married me as one woman, and then as soon as we’d wed expected me to change into another.