Royal Harlot

by Susan Holloway Scott

  But as soon as I unlocked the door to my lodgings, I knew he’d tipped his hand to me: the windows I’d left closed and locked were now thrown open wide to let in the summer breezes, and there was a huge porcelain bowl of cut roses, white and red, on the table.

  At my side, Wilson understood it all, too.

  “If you please, my lady, you won’t be needing me,” she said with a philosophical sniff. “I’ll be waiting with the coachman below.”

  “Don’t be impertinent, Wilson,” I said mildly as I chose one of the white roses from the bowl. “I’ll send for you when I’m done here.”

  I raised the flower to my nose, inhaling its rich fragrance before I snapped the stem short and tucked it into my bodice. I recognized the flowers from the garden at Hampton Court; he must have had them brought up this morning by boat.

  “Good day, Lady Castlemaine,” he said at the door behind me.

  I finished arranging the flower in the valley between my breasts before I turned toward him and curtseyed. I made my smile beatific. “Good day, Your Majesty.”

  Gently he closed the door after him. “You are looking well, madam.”

  “As are you, sir.” It had only been six days since he’d banished me from court; strange to realize it was the longest we’d ever been parted since his return to the throne. In an odd way, I felt as if I were seeing his handsome self for the first time again, as I had so long ago in Brussels, and I was . . . charmed.

  Automatically he came to raise me up, then hesitated, a last doubt, I suppose.

  I stood on my own, giving my petticoats an extra little shake as if I’d intended that all along. “You’re not here to have me tossed out for disobeying your orders, are you? I was asked to come now, you see, to discuss arrangements with your porter for having my lodgings emptied of my personal effects. Your secretary sent me a letter, setting this time. Rather like a royal dispensation.”

  “You won’t need that,” he said, “because you won’t be removing so much as a single chamber pot from these rooms.”

  I looked up at him sideways, peeking slyly beneath the lace brim of my hat. “Are you taking custody of all my belongings, then, sir? Are you so vastly cruel that you would send me into the streets with only the clothes upon my back?”

  “When you left last week, I’m told it took six wagons to carry off your wardrobe alone, Barbara,” he said, coming to stand directly before me. “If those are the clothes you mean, then you are supplied for the rest of your mortal days. You can have it all hauled back tomorrow.”

  “You’re very sure I’ll return, sir,” I said, touching the rose at my bosom. “To have filled the empty rooms of a banished lady with flowers— that’s bold confidence, indeed.”

  “I’m king,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Now pray tell me why you chose to dress to meet my porter in my favorite shading of blue silk.”

  “Bold confidence, sir,” I said, “nothing more, nor less.”

  He chuckled, and plucked the rose from my bodice. “Do you recall the first night I returned, when you waited for me after the procession? You had flowers at your breasts that night, too.”

  “Primroses,” I said, for of course I would not forget that night, either. “Now we’ve only roses, with none of the prim.”

  That made him laugh outright. “How can I send you from court, eh?” he asked, teasing the flower’s petals lightly over the swell of my breasts. “This week’s been damnably hard without you here.”

  “You took the queen’s side against me,” I said. “That was damnably hard for me.”

  “She is my queen, Barbara, and my wife,” he said, and there was warning enough unspoken that I knew I’d not win that point. “I owe her that loyalty.”

  “Indeed,” I said softly, arching my back so my breasts rose higher above my stays and toward the flower in his hand. “I’ve known you longer.”

  “That is true,” he said, letting his fingers slide over the mounded flesh I was offering to him. “How are the children?”

  “They miss their father.” I took the rose from him, running it lightly down the front of his waistcoat and along the front of his breeches. “I miss their father.”

  He reached out and caught my wrist, stopping my hand and the rose’s progress. “Have you truly kept all my letters?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, and smiled up at him. I’d wondered if we’d come round to my threat. “Ah, such ardent love letters! I would keep those always.”

  “Where are they, Barbara?”

  “Where they are safe.” Deftly I slipped my wrist free of his hand. “Not with me.”

  “Keep them from harm’s way,” he said, curling his arm around my waist to draw me close against him. “Because if you ever do as you threatened, then you would suffer far worse than I.”

  “Oh, sir,” I said, lifting my lips toward his. “You, above all others, must know that I’d never do it.”

  He shoved the lace hat from my head, the better to kiss me without knocking into the brim. “If I believed that, Barbara, then I’d be the greatest fool in Christendom.”

  “You’re not a fool,” I said breathlessly, twining my arms around him as he shoved aside my petticoats. “You’re the king.”

  “Remember it,” he said, lifting me onto the edge of the table so I could wantonly wrap my legs around his waist. “Remember, my lady, and forget it at your own peril.”

  He took me there, sweet and languid, yet desperate, too, for after so many days apart we were like drunkards shaking in the desert without strong drink. Our lusty cries echoed from the windows, over the guardhouse and the courtyard and the street below. Before supper, everyone in the palace knew we’d reconciled, and my banishment from court was done.

  And later, much later, I heard that on that same night the queen had cried herself to sleep.

  One night in early September, when the air was still warm with summer, I was wakened in Charles’s bed to the creaking of hinges as he swung the casement open more widely. At the end of the bed, one of the dogs shifted in his sleep and whimpered without waking. I rolled over and squinted at Charles, trying in my drowsiness to find sense in his actions.

  “What are you doing, dear?” I asked sleepily. “What are you about?”

  “There’s a fire to the east, beyond London Bridge,” he said, leaning from the window. “I can see the glow against the sky.”

  “There are fires almost every night,” I said, pulling the sheet over my bare shoulder. “Come back to bed, where you belong.”

  “This must be a large one.” In the square of the open window, his cropped head was cast in profile against the night sky. “I heard the watch call it.”

  “Just because the watchman calls for help from God and king doesn’t mean you must do so,” I said irritably. “It’s only a saying. No one expects you to trot over there to help in your dressing gown with a bucket in hand.”

  “I suppose not,” he said, still watching from the window. “Go back to sleep. I’ll be there shortly.”

  The next morning, a Sunday, I sat in the palace chapel with the ladies of the Duchess of York, the queen being on one of her fruitless pilgrimages to Tunbridge Wells. I’d forgotten entirely about the fire in the night, and no one else around me mentioned it, either. Though I was a Catholic (as was also Her Grace and her husband the duke, though both in secret), I was still expected to attend the Anglican services as a member of the court. For all that we usually had a bishop presiding over us, these services were far closer to Rome than Canterbury, full of music and Latin at the king’s request. Even Charles himself followed the Continental traditions, and knelt at the altar rail to take Communion, a simple act that caused much worry in stricter circles.

  Yet on this particular morning, the most noteworthy event was the interruption of the service by a messenger. I recognized the man as Lord Sandwich’s old secretary Pepys, but he came to us now on his own accord, intent on informing us of a great fire spreading through the city. It was the same
fire that Charles had spied last night, grown larger and more deadly with the push of the wind. No one was really surprised: London’s narrow streets and ancient wooden buildings, dried by two summers’ worth of unseasonable heat, had turned the city into so much tinder. Though London was in fact often plagued by fires, this one was already proving to be far more ominous, and nearly unstoppable.

  Charles and his brother James flew to action. First Charles led his own guards to assist in the firefighting efforts, while he and his brother were rowed down the river to view the fire directly. No one could remember a fire such as this, jumping from the roofs of one neighborhood to the next and consuming all in its path.

  Unlike the plague, which had concentrated its fury among the poorest Londoners, this fire ravaged rich and poor alike. Nothing was spared, from the most humble of houses to the square towers of St. Paul’s, where Roger and I had wed. The neighborhood where I’d lived with my mother when I’d first come to town was gone by the first day, and her house with it. Waterman’s Hall, the Royal Exchange, Blackfriars, the wharves along the Fleet River bank all met the same fate, as well as scores of houses, shops, taverns, and churches.

  For more than forty miles around the fire the air was full of smoke and drifting ash, of scraps of burning paper and scorched canvas and silk. The bells of surviving churches tolled incessant alarms, and over the crackle and roar of the flames came the howling cries and laments of those who struggled to save a few precious belongings as well as themselves from the fire’s relentless path.

  Many of the courtiers fled from the palace, some to their own estates at a distance from the city, some attending the Queen Mother, and others escaping by the Thames to the sanctuary of Hampton Court. I stayed behind, refusing to believe the fire would dare strike the palace. Yet for safety’s sake, portions of the palace closest to the fire’s path, near Scotland Yard, were torn down to make an empty break that flames could not cross.

  Striving to be brave for the sake of the children and servants, hearing nothing but wildest rumor and fearing worse than that, it was only much later, when the fire finally was spent, that I learned how courageously Charles and his brother had labored to help save the city. While others around them had panicked or simply collapsed beneath the unimaginable burden, the two Stuart brothers, as well as the seventeen-year-old Duke of Monmouth, had led with tireless efficiency and little regard for their own safety.

  From that first Sunday morning, Charles had directed his troops in fighting the fire, ordering burning buildings torn down to save others in the fire’s path. Whether on horseback shouting orders or standing deep in mud and water as he wielded a bucket or spade like any other Londoner, his bravery and leadership were a revelation to many of his people. Some said he’d spent thirty hours straight in the saddle, and I believed it.

  After four days and nights, the fire had finally burned itself out, followed by a heavy, drenching rain that flooded the steaming ruins. Yet Charles continued to work for his people’s welfare, ordering food and fresh water to be distributed from the navy’s stores to the now-homeless crowds who’d gathered in Moorfields. With almost no attendants he walked and rode among them, offering comfort and cheer and displaying a rare empathy for the suffering among even his poorest subjects that put most of his self-centered courtiers to shame. He showed himself to all as the rarest of gentlemen, full of natural courage, resolution, and honor.

  But not even Charles could change the fire’s awful aftermath. An enormous part of London had vanished, an area of over a mile and a half long and half a mile in width. Not only buildings had been destroyed, but the businesses, homes, and congregations that had been housed inside were now gone, too. There were no certain figures for the loss of life; it was simply too vast and overwhelming to calculate.

  While Charles was promising that London would rebuild like a Phoenix from the ashes, a splendid new city of wide streets and buildings of brick and stone to resist any future fires, other, darker forces sought to undermine the goodwill he’d earned from his courage during the fire. The special investigative group formed by the Privy Council could not have been more clear in naming the fire’s cause: “Nothing had been found to argue the Fire in London to have been caused by other than the hand of God, a great wind, and a very dry season.”

  A reasonable explanation, and one that Charles repeated again and again. But in the face of such a disaster, reason becomes less appealing. There were plenty of Londoners who believed the Hand of God might have been a Catholic one. Even as Charles sought to calm one rumor, ten more sprang up besides, like heads of the Hydra. French spies had set the fire, or nefarious Dutchmen had crept into the city to destroy it. Later, when the city authorities—who should have known better—would put up a monument to the fire and its victims, the plaque would unkindly attribute the disaster to “the treachery and malice of the popish faction.”

  Grievous, too, were the sermons offered by meddlesome preachers as well as certain strident Anglican bishops and clerics. Using vague quotes from scripture to make their cases, such hateful men claimed that God had shown his displeasure with the debauchery at Charles’s court by striving to destroy it by both the plague and the fire. They pointed at the very year—1666—saying that those three sixes within the date were the mark of the Devil himself.

  And worst of all to me was how often I figured in these tales of woe and damnation. Somehow I’d personally caused this disaster for London and its king by being a Catholic woman with power, a known and flagrant adulteress, and the most evil and debauched influence possible upon England’s king.

  I knew these tales were empty lies that meant nothing, yet still I felt the impossible burden of so much suffering. How could I not? That autumn, I’d little taste for the gaiety of the court. Instead I kept to myself, with my children and with Charles, when he came to me. While some gentlemen and ladies rode out with him to survey the damaged neighborhoods and offer encouragement to those who’d lost the most, for me the risk to my person was too great to consider accompanying him.

  But the finger-pointing and blame didn’t end in the pulpit. Parliament, too, wanted a scapegoat for the disastrous war with the Dutch, as well as for the Great Fire. My cousin Buckingham, who had been pushed aside and denied his chance at glory in the first enthusiasm for the war, now turned his earlier exclusion to his advantage. He alone in Parliament stood free of fault and recrimination, and began to be seen as a serious leader, drawing supporters to him and away from once-strong men like Arlington.

  There was a sense that the order was shifting in the court as well. Just as Buckingham had emerged in Parliament, so, too, was his old protégé Frances Stuart once again being promoted and paraded for the king’s consideration. She was eighteen, more beautiful than ever, and still, miraculously, a virgin. Charles was still fascinated by this one woman who’d never succumbed to his desires, and everyone whispered that at last she was about to give way. Buckingham was said to have gleefully predicted that by the new year Frances would replace me entirely in the king’s affections.

  I refused to believe it. Yes, I’d just passed my twenty-sixth birthday, an unthinkably great age for a woman in my place. And yes, these last months I had kept myself away from many of the festivities as well as the fiercest politics of the court, needing time by myself. But didn’t the king still profess the greatest affection for me? Hadn’t he fair begged me to return to court after the foolishness of my banishment?

  Then came news that shook my confidence more soberly than idle whispers ever could. It was Bab May, Keeper of the Privy Purse, who told me, not Charles himself, and directly before the first of the Christmas balls, too. The king had asked for a review of all my debts, with an eye to settling them for me once and for all. May said by his first reckonings he’d discovered I owed close to thirty thousand pounds for gambling and to assorted merchants. For the king to pay such a sum when he was having trouble paying the sailors in his navy was exceeding generous, yes, but May and I both understood t
he real significance of this gesture: that Charles was considering formally breaking with me.

  I watched as the king led Frances Stuart in the dancing. She was dressed all in black and white, with diamonds at her throat and in her ears that made her glitter like the moonlight on new snow.

  I’d kept away long enough.

  Chapter Nineteen

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON

  January 1 6 6 7

  “You are certain of this, Wilson?” I asked, though I knew she never erred. “You can trust your source?”

  “Yes, my lady,” Wilson said, twirling the rod in the chocolate mill as she blended my morning brew. “It was one of the lady’s maids to the queen’s maids of honor. She was asked by Miss Stuart to dress her hair, and then while she did Miss Stuart spoke most freely to her, confessing her great attachment to His Grace the Duke of Richmond and Lennox.”

  “Richmond,” I said thoughtfully, hugging my knees as I sat in the bed. “I’ve never seen them together.”

  “That is because his second wife only just died a few months past,” Wilson helpfully supplied. “But Miss Stuart told my acquaintance that His Grace was exactly the sort of man she’d always hoped to wed, handsome and dashing, and with a grand title, too.”

  “He’s also in debt to the skies,” I said, for this was common enough knowledge. I’d never had much use for the gentleman; he seemed dull-witted and unimportant, outside my circle of acquaintance, though he was held to be handsome enough. “And Richmond is so given to strong drink that he falls into bed every night dead to the world. With him she could well be a virgin the rest of her days.”

  Wilson gave a small eloquent shrug to her shoulders as she poured my chocolate. “She may have already made the sacrifice, my lady. It’s said she entertains His Grace in private, and considers herself ‘rapturously in love’ with him. Those were her words, my lady: ‘rapturously in love.’ ”