Royal Harlot

by Susan Holloway Scott

  I was sitting at my looking-glass while Wilson brushed my hair when Roger burst into my chamber. His face was flushed and livid, and clutched tight in his hand was a letter.

  “Good day, Roger,” I said cheerfully, hoping to dispel this storm cloud before it burst and spoiled my day. “Not ill news, I trust?”

  But he was far too deeply into his rage to be coaxed from it. “Leave us, Wilson,” he ordered curtly. “Leave us at once.”

  Silently Wilson curtseyed to Roger, granting me a quick glance of sympathy before she fled.

  I waited until the door closed after her before I spoke. “What is it, Roger? What is so grievous that you send my servant away?”

  “What is?” he demanded. “What isn’t!”

  He flung the letter on the dressing table so hard that it immediately fluttered to the floor. I bent as if to read it, but instead he grabbed my shoulder so I’d no choice but to face him.

  “You already know what that says, Barbara,” he said, giving me a small shove as he let me go. “Likely you even composed the words yourself.”

  “You make no sense, Roger.” I frowned, more at being disturbed than by whatever irked him, and shook my hair out over my shoulders to show my disdain. “How can I possibly know what is written in that letter without seeing it for myself?”

  “Then I shall tell you, madam, as a reminder,” he said. “His Majesty has requested a warrant for my ennoblement. I am to be made an Irish earl, for some godforsaken bog of a village called Castlemaine, in County Kerry, with a barony in Limerick.”

  “Why, yes,” I said. If he would be angry, then I was determined to remain calm and keep my temper in check. “The king asked me my preference, and that was what I chose.”

  He stared at me with disbelief. “Do you truly think I care?”

  “You should, I suppose,” I said defensively. “It’s been the very devil to have that warrant put through. Every such request must pass through that meddlesome old goat Clarendon as lord chancellor, else it cannot be registered as an effective act. Because Clarendon hates me as much as I hate him, he tried to block it, until the king was forced to order him to do it.”

  “The king could have saved his trouble, Barbara,” he said curtly, “for I care nothing for such a shameful act as this.”

  “But you should, Roger, you should,” I insisted, wanting to explain why this particular title was so important to me. “You see, my father was Viscount Grandison of Limerick, but on his death his title went to my uncle. This way, you see, it will return to me, with my son to be known as Lord Limerick.”

  “To you, Barbara, yes, always to you,” he said, breathing heavily. “That’s how you want everything, isn’t it? Then you know the wording of this warrant, too, that the succession of this title is to be restricted to the children gotten upon Barbara Palmer, my wife. My wife.”

  I flushed at that, for though the wording had made perfect sense when the king had proposed it, designed as it was to protect his children with me, to hear the clause read now by Roger did give it an especially humiliating sound.

  “So you still possess the decency to blush, madam,” he said, his voice rising. “I didn’t believe a mare in rut would care to whom she presented her rump. Or perhaps she does choose which will cover her, and prefers a stallion with a royal pedigree to his prick.”

  “Roger, please,” I said, my flush deepening. I’d not expected such passion from him, and it frightened me. “Consider the servants!”

  “Why should I consider anyone for your sake,” he demanded, “considering how little regard you’ve shown for me?”

  “I’ll not listen any longer, not when you’re like this.” Swiftly I rose from the bench, but Roger grabbed my arm.

  “You will stay, madam, and you will listen, and answer,” he ordered. “You’re with child again, aren’t you?”

  “It’s early days, Roger, and I don’t—”

  “Answer me, Barbara. Are you with child?”

  His fingers tightened on my arm.

  “I am,” I said at last. I could scarce deny it to him, not when it was already the talk of the court. “I am.”

  “The king’s get, then, not mine,” he snarled. “My father warned me that you’d make a whore, not a wife, and by God, how I wish now that I’d listened to him.”

  I tried to twist free, my long hair tangling around us. “Please, Roger, you’re hurting me!”

  “No jury in England would convict me if I throttled you now, Barbara,” he said. “Now tell me: is Anne my daughter or the king’s?”

  “I do not know, Roger,” I said, and that in nearly perfect honesty. “I do not know, nor ever shall. I swear it, please, I swear it.”

  “Why do you need to be a countess when you’ve already title enough as the king’s whore?” He shoved me free, sending me stumbling backward.

  Yet when he turned to leave, I gathered up the warrant letter and ran after him. “Wait, Roger, please! You must accept the title, else I cannot have it, either.”

  He stared at me, his contempt so deep it made me shiver. “So there you are, Barbara. An empty title you’ve earned by spreading your legs is worth more to you than I could ever be.”

  I caught at his sleeve. “Roger, that’s not—”

  “You’ve said enough, Barbara,” he answered sharply, shaking me away. “I’ll have my things taken from this house tomorrow. It’s yours. You earned it, too.”

  “Roger, please, I don’t wish—”

  “No more, wife, not for either of us.” He looked back for one final time, not at me but over my head at the room. “I wish you luck on your course, Barbara, because by God, you will need it.”

  And like that, with as little fanfare and bother, my marriage to Roger was done.

  I would be remiss without adding a last word regarding my title—for, as Roger felt so sadly compelled to state aloud, it was in fact my title, and not his. But a title cannot be granted to a wife alone, and the fact that Roger peevishly delayed accepting his half of it was especially humiliating to me, nor did he ever take his seat in the Irish Parliament as he was entitled to do.

  Worse still were the ways that Clarendon had struggled to keep me back. Charles had purposefully chosen an Irish peerage instead of an English one, which the lord chancellor had the power to block. Yet even when the king insisted on the warrant, Clarendon had one more trick left to play. One of his dearest cronies was the Earl of Southampton, who served as lord treasurer, and together they resolved that no documents favoring me would pass through their care. Thus that pompous, self-serving pair risked treason to counter Charles’s generous will, and made certain I received no grants drawn on the treasury. Instead I was entirely dependent on gifts from Charles’s privy purse, and from the financial enticements offered by others in return for using my influence with the king.

  Charles advised me to ignore Roger’s petulance regarding the earldom, and led others in calling me Lady Castlemaine. I was not so confident, and though I held my head high whenever I was announced at court, for the first months I took care to keep the warrant, signed by the king, within my pocket in case I was challenged.

  But the truth was that I was now a lady and a countess. My enemies might quibble, but they couldn’t take the title away from me or my children. Charles had been my champion as well as my lover in this, as he had in everything else, and no one could take that from me, either. Those who’d no knowledge of the depth of our friendship saw only the weakness of my position as the king’s wedding drew closer, and looked at my swelling belly as a sign that the lure of my beauty was fading.

  There were factions that tried to promote new ladies at court to take my place, among them Lady Frances Stuart, a fresh fourteen-year-old Catholic beauty—oh, to be fourteen again, now that I was advanced to twenty-one!—who, though no true kin to Charles or the other royal Stuarts, had served as a maid of honor to the king’s sister in France.

  Others, like my older cousin Mary Villiers, Duchess of Richmond and sis
ter to the Duke of Buckingham, simply set to defaming me for their own jealous purposes; Mary might be my own kin, yes, but she loudly likened me to Jane Shore, the unfortunate mistress of King Edward IV, who was said to have died in disgrace on a dunghill.

  But I knew that Charles had sworn to care for me despite his marriage, just as I alone knew that in a way he loved me more, not less, when my body was filled with his child. Just to set these tongues to wagging further, I put out the rumor that I meant to have my lying-in at the palace at Hampton Court, at the same time as the king would be there with his ugly new bride.

  Why shouldn’t I let those tongues wag? I’d already set my sights on my next title, and the court post that went with it. Worthy of my new rank as Countess of Castlemaine, this post would bring me a salary and pension, influence, and prestige, as well as a good deal of amusement. I could justify having lodgings within the palace. My very presence would irritate and vex the queen, especially with duties that would have me participating in her most intimate daily rituals, in her private rooms. Best of all, it was one of the few high court posts that were granted to ladies alone and not bound in any way to their husbands, so I wouldn’t need to consult with Roger.

  I wished to be named Lady of the Bedchamber to the new queen.

  “I am huge, sir,” I announced, leaning back in my armchair, the better to display my belly to the king. We were sharing supper in my bedchamber, our table set before the open window. “I am enormous, a giantess, nay, a veritable mountain!”

  The king raised his goblet to me. “And I say, my dear Barbara, that you have never been more beautiful.”

  “Bah,” I said with disgust at my own girth. It was May, and I was wallowing through the last weeks of my second pregnancy. “They say the Alps of France are beautiful, too.”

  Charles laughed, not unkindly, but with his customary generosity of spirit toward me. Not only were these my last weeks before I’d be brought to childbed, but his last days free of his own ordeal, for word had come yesterday that the infanta Catherine of Braganza had finally begun her journey here to England for her wedding to Charles. Dutifully Charles had insisted that Parliament work late into the night to conclude this session’s business before he must leave London to play the ardent bridegroom, but he still made time each night to come to me in King Street.

  “You’re cruel to yourself, Barbara,” he said easily. “You’re not half so vast as you claim.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, likely the only part of me left that could be called narrow. I’d received him in undress, all that was comfortable, a loose gown of blue silk with a deep neckline, graced with my pearls. “I thought we’d settled that last night with the scales.”

  “Oh, those infernal scales!” he exclaimed and laughed. “Only you would do that.”

  “Only to prove my point, sir.” I’d vowed that I’d grown so large with this child of his that I outweighed him. Charles had not believed it, not until I’d ordered my servants to fetch a set of scales from the market to my parlor, and had each of us weighed, king and countess. I’d won, or perhaps I’d lost, for in fact I did weigh a fraction more than did my great, strapping lord. It had amused us both no end, but Wilson, scandalized, had reported that the men who’d brought the scales had tattled widely, and by nightfall all of London had heard the story.

  Not, of course, that I cared a fig. “I’m as big as any of your French mountains, and I defy you to say otherwise.”

  “Le Mont de Barbara?” he asked, teasing.

  “More likely Mount Barbara,” I said, “which is I fear what you must do these days if you wish the challenge of coupling with me.”

  With a sigh I pushed myself from the chair and went to stand at the open window, my palm pressed to the side of my belly. I was sure this child was a boy, for only a boy would be so restless as this one was, always leaping and tumbling within me to disturb my ease. The night was clear and warm, but what I saw was not the stars and new moon overhead, but the bonfires dancing before most houses and on street corners as far as I could see.

  “Look,” I said, not bothering to hide my glumness at such a sight. “They’ve all obeyed the lord mayor’s order and lit fires in honor of your bride’s arrival in Portsmouth.”

  “Not all,” he said, coming to stand behind me. “I don’t see one before your house.”

  “Why, sir, I must have forgotten.” Of course I’d purposefully not done so; what reason had I for such a celebration? It was my neighbor Admiral Lord Sandwich who’d been charged with bringing her to London, and how I wished he’d misread the winds or waves, and sailed with his dour little passenger to India instead.

  Now I rested my arms on the window’s sill, watching the fires light the night sky, picking out the chimneys and the square towers of St. Paul’s. The mayor’s order had included the ringing of every church bell as well, and while most had stopped by this hour, a few too-zealous bell ringers continued. “However will Her Majesty ever forgive me?”

  “Oh, she’ll forgive you that,” he said. “I’m not sure I will. People notice such things, just as they’ve taken notice of my presence here. Why do you delight in making such trouble for me, Barbara?”

  “Because you delight in tormenting me,” I said. “How can you expect me to waste my firewood on welcoming your ugly little queen to your bed?”

  “Be gracious, Barbara,” he chided gently. “How many times have I told you that though she’ll be my queen and my wife, she won’t change my friendship for you. From what Clarendon tells me, she’s little more than a child. She’ll do as I tell her.”

  I sniffed. “She’s far older than I. She’s no child.”

  “In years, no, but in innocence, she’s worse than a child. They say she’s not been permitted to leave her father’s palace in years.”

  “That’s ignorance, not innocence,” I said bluntly. “What shall she make of you on your wedding night?”

  Charles groaned. “It’s more what I’ll make of her. Tomorrow night I’ll ride to Guilford, then to Portsmouth, where we’ll be wed, and then—”

  “Then you must do your best to get your heir upon an ugly, ignorant child,” I said. “I wish you joy of that task, sir.”

  “God only knows what they’ve told her to expect,” he said with gloomy resignation. “Likely she knows nothing whatsoever of men. The Iberians are strange about such matters.”

  I shrugged, with little sympathy for his misery. “As you say, you must perform your duty. Close your eyes and plant your little prince, and pray Her Majesty doesn’t cry too loudly when you do.”

  “Don’t jest, Barbara. It could well be that way.” He slipped his hands around my belly, over our unborn child. “Ah, someone’s dancing tonight.”

  “Someone is always dancing,” I said wryly. “I vow this is your son, sir, to plague me so.”

  “No trouble siring children with you, Barbara,” he said, his breath warm against my ear. Because I was as tall for a woman as he was for a man, we’d always fit together well, and as he pulled me closer, I could feel his cock hard against my bottom. “No duty there.”

  “Don’t neglect me when you’re at Hampton Court with her,” I said softly, stretching myself languorously against him. I would miss him; I always did when he was away from me. “You don’t wish me to be lonely.”

  “Why do I suspect you’re never lonely for long, Barbara?” he asked, filling his hands with my milk-swollen breasts. “I’ll come to you as often as I can get away.”

  “You’re the king,” I reminded him, even as I reminded him of other pleasures as well. “You decide when you wish to come back to London to me. Though if I were a Lady of the Bedchamber, I’d always be at court, and waiting for you. I’d never have to leave. I’d always be . . . there.”

  “I’ve told you, Barbara, you are on the list of names for the queen to approve,” he said. “Once we’re wed, she’ll be shown the list, and then the posts will be granted. It’s a formality, no more.”

  I pressed mysel
f more wantonly against him. “She will agree?”

  “She’ll do as I tell her,” he said. “You know me as well as anyone. I’ll not let myself be ruled by any woman.”

  “Oh, no, sir, not you.” I was thankful my face was turned away and he so preoccupied, so he’d not see how I smiled at that. I arched my back, and he grunted with the anticipation of pleasure. “But now I believe it’s time to scale Mount Barbara.”

  To Charles’s credit, he wed the infanta as he’d promised, despite the appalling show she made of her landing in Portsmouth. Though Clarendon and others in her party had urged her to adopt English dress, she and her party had insisted on clinging to the ancient fashions of her father’s court, with stiff, heavy fabrics, outlandish hairstyles that needed hidden wires for support, and wide farthingales that caught the breezes from the sea and threatened to sweep the new queen and her ladies clear back to Lisbon.

  At the sight of this black-clad party, the king’s comment to the friends who stood with him on the wharf was so amusingly frank as to be instantly, and often, repeated—“I thought they’d brought me a bat, instead of a woman”—and pleased me enormously. And while he was as determined to behave with honor and bravery toward his bride as any other man upon the scaffold, he could scarce contain his relief when the marriage’s consummation was briefly postponed. Not only was Charles exhausted from his long ride and the bride still feeling the effects of seasickness, but, as he wrote to me in a jovial note, he’d also had his nose shut in the door by the unexpected arrival of “Monsieur le Cardinal.” That made me laugh aloud, and clap my hands as well: to think that Clarendon’s great plans were undone by an inadvertent dribble of monthly blood on the queen’s smock!

  Yet somehow the deed was finally done, with hearty sighs of relief all around. The king was observed as being extraordinarily courteous and gallant to the queen, who was said to have fallen at once into moonstruck love. I was not surprised that she’d been dazzled, for the king was by nature a supremely gifted lover, and a tall, handsome one, too.