Little wonder, then, that I was resentful and rebellious, unfortunate qualities in any new bride. When Philip returned to London and wrote to me, I returned his letters with the same fervor as before, and met him, too, as eagerly as if I’d no husband. I was the same woman after all; I hadn’t changed a bit.
And though I continued to wear the glass cypher heart that Roger had given me around my neck, I thought of it as a sign of my loyalty to the king, and not to Roger. In a way the crystal heart was a perfect symbol for his love for me: hard, transparent, and without vibrancy or life.
But as is always the case whenever one believes life is cruel or unfair, worse was to come.
In the first week of June, I felt out of sorts and faintly ill, feverish one day and chilled the next. I said nothing to Roger, attributing my malaise to my general unhappiness and little more. Vague distempers and agues were common in London every summer, a part of the place and season. Still, my head and limbs ached and I’d lost the stomach for food, and one morning I felt so weary I could scarce crawl from our bed. When at last I finally did rise and sat at my looking-glass for my maid to dress my hair, she was the one who discovered what ailed me.
“What is this, madam?” she said, frowning down at my shoulder. “A scrape, yes?”
I twisted my head to look down to where she meant, pulling the gathered edge of my smock to one side to bare more of my shoulder. This was no scrape, nor scratch, but an angry red rash spreading beyond my shoulders to my arms and back. The maid drew back, for she knew as well as I what such a rash did signify:
Smallpox.
The maid fled to fetch others, and I staggered back to the bed on my own, weeping into my pillow with suffering, grief, and fear. A sentence of death for a prisoner in the Tower could at least be revoked, but smallpox was never so generous. Nearly all its victims perished, and the few who by miracle survived seldom escaped without faces pitted and ravaged with scars. I was only eighteen, and I knew not which would be worse: to die outright, or to live, yet with my Villiers beauty forever destroyed.
By the next dawn, I was past caring either way. Fever racked my head, and I tossed and whimpered with the pain of it. Afterward I learned that Roger had ordered all the proper curatives. The bedchamber was draped in red cloth to draw out my fever, the windows sealed shut against any breath of draft or chill, the fire kept burning high. He summoned the best physician to my side, who bled and cupped me, and Dr. Harris of our church, who prayed over my delirious self to ease my way from this life to the next.
The first redness blossomed into pimples all over my face and body, which next turned to pustules that oozed and crusted as the first fever relaxed its grip. I saw the long faces of the physicians and understood what was not said in my hearing. They’d abandoned hope. I was going to die. I did not notice when my looking-glass was taken away from the room. When I finally did see its absence, I wept again, realizing how hideously flawed my poor face must have become.
As soon as Roger left me that day, I asked a servant for paper and pen, and wrote as best I could to Philip, begging for him to come to me one last time before I died. I knew he’d had smallpox himself, and thus would be in no risk from visiting me, and I was past caring if his last glimpse of me was one of ugly deformity. All I wished was to see him one final time in this life. I vowed that my last words would be a prayer for his happiness, and that I meant to die as I’d lived, loving him above all other things. I gave this over to the servant to deliver, and prayed for the strength to survive long enough for him to join me.
I would have done better simply to pray for myself, and left Philip from my plea. His message was as faithless as always: he was sorry to learn of the illness of His Dearest Life, and wished for my complete and unscathed recovery, but he regretted that circumstance made it impossible for him to fly to my bedside. I shrieked, wondering what the pretty name and face of this circumstance could be, and hurriedly penned another note, humbling myself further miserably. What did I have to lose, facing death? I swore that if only he’d come to me, I was sure to recover, and further, that I’d then leave Roger and run off with him whenever and wherever he pleased.
To this I received no reply from Philip, and my poor heart ached at such abandonment. I longed for death, to put an end to the torment he inflicted upon me. Yet Fate had determined me for greater things, or perhaps my plain country upbringing had simply made me too strong and willful to succumb. Whatever the reason, my health began slowly to improve. My fever subsided and my strength and appetite returned, and I watched as one by one the scabs fell from my skin.
Best of all came the day that Roger himself brought my breakfast tray as I sat in the bed, propped up by pillows.
“Good day, Barbara,” he said, setting the tray onto my lap. “You look as bright as the morning.”
“You flatter me,” I said, peeking beneath the napkin to see what the cook had sent up for my breakfast. “You’re kind to bring this yourself, Roger.”
He had been kind to me in my illness, more kind than I either expected or deserved. I’d freely grant him that, and thank him for it, too.
“It’s no flattery at all,” he said. “You’re my wife. You’ll always be beautiful in my eyes. But likely the rest of the world will agree with me, too.”
He pulled my small tortoise-framed looking-glass from inside his doublet and handed it to me. I seized it, and with shaking hands held it up to my face while Roger drew back the window curtains and let the morning sun fall full upon me.
“It’s clear,” I whispered, stunned. “My face is clear, Roger, without a single pockmark!”
“I told you, you’re as beautiful as ever,” he said softly. “No one will ever know you were afflicted.”
“Not a mark,” I whispered, tears of joy in my eyes as I ran my fingers across my smooth cheeks. I know it must sound as if I were the vainest creature in the world, concerned with my own face and no more. Yet like many women, I was known only by my beauty, even famous for it, and to have that taken from me at so young an age would have left me bereft and lost as to whom I might truly be.
Roger smiled, watching me, and I smiled in return, believing he understood my joy, and shared it.
He understood me, yes, but not the way I’d thought.
“At least my prayers were answered, Barbara,” he said slowly, “if not your own.”
Still giddy with relief, I looked at him over the glass in my hand. “Oh, Roger, you make no sense! Of course I prayed for my deliverance, just as now I’ll make my prayers of thanks for having been restored.”
“So many prayers, Barbara,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “It’s a wonder you can recall them all.”
He pulled out a folded sheet, and to my dismay I recognized it as the second letter I’d written to Philip when I’d been so ill.
The seal was broken, and I could be sure that he’d read the contents. Yet even then my first thought was not of my sworn husband, Roger, but of my lover Philip, and how he’d not come to me because he’d never received my letter. Ah, how willingly I made excuses for Philip, no matter how unworthy he was of my love, and how little in turn I’d spare for Roger!
Now I stared at the letter in his hand, my cheeks no longer flushed with smallpox, but guilt. “How did you come by that letter?”
“Your servants were mine first, and still answer to me,” he said, not so much angry as sad. “So you do recall writing to Lord Chesterfield? You don’t deny it, or blame it on a feverish delirium?”
“Of course I don’t deny it, Roger,” I said uneasily. “How can I, when you’re holding the proof in your hand?”
He tossed the letter onto the bed beside me, as if he didn’t want to touch it any longer. “I suppose I must grant you credit for honesty, if for nothing else.”
I glanced down at the letter without gathering it up. Why should I, when I recalled every fervent word I’d written?
“You knew me before we wed,” I said defensively. “You knew what manner of
woman I was.”
“I did,” he said. “But that was before you swore before God to be my wife, and all that entailed. Or have you forgotten that in your lust for Chesterfield’s bed?”
“I didn’t forget.” The letter on the bed now seemed doubly damning, yet still I was too foolishly enraptured of Philip to throw myself on Roger’s mercy, as I should. “How could I, with you to remind me?”
Roger’s lips pressed tightly together, and too late I realized my tart words had cost me whatever tender kindness my illness had inspired in him.
“That is good,” he said. “I’ll see that you’ll have sufficient time to act upon those vows in the coming months.”
I frowned, not liking the sound of that. “What are you saying, Roger?”
“That you are still my wife, Barbara. Not even the drivel you write to Chesterfield will change that.” He bowed curtly. “I’ll send your maid to pack your things. We leave London for Dorney Court in the morning.”
As long as I’d known Roger, he’d praised his family’s home at Dorney Court, in Berkshire near Windsor: how felicitous its air, how sweet its flowers, the elegance of the ancient timbers and bricks and the boundless warmth of the hospitality to be found therein. Anyone who heard his rhapsodies would believe it was a woman that inspired him, certainly not a creaking pile of plaster and wood, and I soon realized that I could never hold a candle to the sentimental brilliance of Dorney Court.
I had put off visiting this inanimate rival as long as I could. It was not only the estate itself that I dreaded, so far from my beloved London, but Roger’s mother, who’d continued to live there after Sir James’s death at the end of 1658. She was a papist, given overmuch to dogged prayer. I’d known the old man had despised me and had pleaded with Roger to break with me, but his mother’s hatred ran even deeper. Roger was her only child, and she defended him like a mother lioness does her cub. Through Roger, I learned she blamed me somehow not only for beguiling her son but also as the cause of her husband’s death. No matter what the reputation might be for hospitality at Dorney Court, I’d guessed there’d be none for me, and I was right.
Roger and I came by the river, the best way, he claimed, to see the house the first time. I saw, and I was unimpressed: a rambling, old-fashioned pile from the time of Queen Elizabeth, brick and timbers and plaster and greenery all jumbled together in the mists. Roger often lamented how badly the house had been ravaged by the parliamentary army in the war, and how his father’s collection of rare miniatures and medals had been plundered, but I suspected the estate still looked much as it had for the last century or two.
We were given chambers far from the others on account of our near-newlywed status, certain proof that Roger hadn’t confided much to his family. The main chamber had floors that dipped and chairs that creaked, and a high, water-stained ceiling that I stared at whenever I lay in bed, turned away from Roger.
I’d been a guest there for three days before Roger finally introduced me to his mother, a weary, faded woman who mercifully kept her dislike for me locked inside her black woolen mourning, along with most of her conversation. The only question she asked was whether I was with child yet. I told her no, and she then ceased to have any further to do with me, which was perfectly agreeable by my lights as well as hers.
That night, I felt Roger’s hand upon my hip.
“You needn’t have looked so shocked when my mother addressed you, Barbara,” he said in the dark, his fingers spreading as they journeyed along my hip to my thigh and back again. “A child would be a great blessing to us.”
I curled my fingers into a ball, trying not to tense beneath his touch. By law I belonged to him, as every wife did to her husband, and though I could withhold my own pleasure from spite if I chose, I could not refuse him the use of my body. “I was no such blessing to my mother.”
“Your mother had no choice because of the war,” he said. “You know that. She sent you into the country, where you’d be safe during the war. If you had a child of your own—of our own—you’d understand.”
“I cannot say if I would or not.” Unlike most young women, I’d been raised without any siblings, in a household of two childless women who had always made it clear they kept me for my mother’s payment alone. I’d never seen children and babies as other than noisy, demanding, untidy, and costly—a plague more to be avoided than desired. Surely this impression was my own mother’s legacy to me as well; the only time when my presence had given her any pleasure was when she’d successfully pushed me into wedding Roger.
“I think you would, dearest,” he said softly, shifting closer to me on the lumpy mattress, so I could feel his thighs pressing against mine. “I’ve heard that a woman doesn’t know true contentment until she holds her firstborn in her arms.”
“Did your mother tell you that, too?” I asked, unable to contain my bitterness. I didn’t want a child now, not his or any other man’s. Childbirth was as great a fatal peril to women as war to men, and even those who survived the pain and suffering likewise bore the scars— lost teeth, withered breasts, fat stomachs—to prove it. “That you must breed your wild filly to tame the spirit from her, and make her your broodmare?”
“My mother would never say that.” He’d worked my smock over my hip, his hand insistent and slightly moist upon my bare skin. “But tell me, Barbara. Where’s the sin in me desiring my beautiful wife?”
I sighed, not knowing how to explain my unhappiness. I’d try as many of the little tricks Philip had taught me to keep myself safe, but if Roger was determined to sire a child, then as my husband, he would have his way.
Yet still Roger sensed my resignation. “What is ill, Barbara?” he said, his reproach unmistakable even as he slipped his hand between my legs. “I know by nature you’ve a warm temperament. In London, you were always ardent for love.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to will myself to keep still. I’d not lain with a man, Roger or Philip, since before I’d sickened with the smallpox, and no matter how miserable my heart might be or how artless Roger’s caress, I feared my body’s longing would betray me.
“In London I wasn’t buried among the rushes and the conies, the way I am here,” I whispered, my breath coming faster. “In London, I wasn’t fit to perish of boredom.”
“Then I must do my best to see that you are better entertained, dearest.” He rolled me onto my back and settled between my legs. It seemed he was done in less than a blink, long before he’d come near to fetching me in return. He did not seem to notice, either, kissing me afterward as if he were granting me the greatest gift imaginable, and not the other way round.
For a long time I lay in the dark and listened to Roger’s soft, satisfied huffs as he slept beside me. His seed still lay sticky upon me, yet my body and my heart together ached from unfulfillment.
I would not die of boredom at Dorney Court, no matter how much I longed to. Even I knew such a death was the purlieu of poets, not true life. But to expire from a lack of pleasure, from the joy to be found with love—now that, that seemed a hazard genuine enough.
Within the week, my life at Dorney Court did in fact become more interesting, though not in the way that Roger had meant.
I was coming back from my early walk through the gardens when I saw the carriage being led into the stable yard. I’d not heard we were expecting visitors—the house was still officially in mourning for Sir James—nor did I recognize the carriage. The horses looked weary from hard driving, as if they’d journeyed the night long on some urgent business. All the servants could tell me was that the newcomers were two gentlemen, friends of Mr. Palmer’s, and that the three of them were now closeted in the library, not to be disturbed.
By the time that Roger came upstairs to dress for dinner, I was in a froth of curiosity, demanding to know who these mysterious gentlemen could be.
“I’m surprised you haven’t guessed, Barbara.” He pulled a fresh shirt over his head, playing my suspense like a fisherman with his catch. �
�One gentleman should be well known to you by reputation, I believe. Sir Alan Broderick.”
“Sir Alan here!” I gasped with delighted surprise. Though I’d never met Sir Alan, I’d certainly heard enough of him from Roger. Sir Alan was the leader of the Sealed Knot, and was reputed to have been chosen by the king himself to further his cause in England. “Is the other gentleman party to the Knot as well?”
“He is,” Roger said, lifting his chin to tie the collar strings of his shirt in a tidy bow. “Lord Thomas Mulberry. It’s natural for Sir Alan to come to visit. He’s distant kin of yours, you know.”
“Everyone is distant kin to the Villiers,” I said, scarce able to contain my excitement. “That’s not why he’s here. Are you making fresh plans? Are you gathering forces to support the king’s return? Oh, Roger, tell me all!”
He smiled smugly, pleased he could make me beg for even something as petty as this. “In time, my dear, in time. Sir Alan and Lord Thomas will be with us for a few days. They find this house an agreeable refuge, considering the army’s ban against papists and Royalists within twenty miles of London.”
“Oh, pish, Roger, no one heeds that. Why, even here we’re but five miles from London.”
“We’re as good as a hundred, for all the army cares.”
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