“Frances has always been a fool.” I laughed softly as I took the tiny cup of chocolate, cradling its warmth between my palms. “ ‘Rapturously in love’! There are few things that lead to more indiscretions than that, my dear Wilson. The only trick will be how to use it to our own rapturous benefit.”
If I had seen what happened that night on the stage of a playhouse, I would have laughed uproariously, but I would have also scoffed at any possibility of it being a real occurrence. Yet it was, and all the more enjoyable to me for being such a common farce.
From Wilson, and in turn her confederate, I knew that Frances would be expecting her “rapturous” duke in her quarters at nine that evening. I also knew that Charles was in the habit of visiting her earlier in the evening, to talk and amuse himself with the few favors she would agree to share with him. That done, and in a usual state of high frustration and complaint, he would come to me in his bedchamber, or my own, where his welcome would be infinitely more warm and passionate. That was the setting of our little play; the extra characters in our cast included Bab May, Will Chiffinch, the king’s Page of the Bedchamber, and, of course, me.
There was always a small crowd lingering in the queen’s drawing room after supper in Whitehall, down the hallway from her bedchamber and the lodgings of her various ladies and maids of honor. It was easy enough for me to join this gathering, for I did by rights belong among the ladies, though I took care to stand a little to the back of the room where I could see without being at once noticed. From this vantage I could see when the king entered Frances’s chamber and closed the door after him.
At once I was off. In addition to the main hallways that linked Whitehall’s different quarters together, there were numerous secret passages and forgotten staircases. Chiffinch knew them all, of course, for they were most useful to him in his trade, and I in turn had made sure that the old man had shown them to me, as a useful bit of knowledge to posses.
Now I ran along these secret ways without being seen, through Chiffinch’s own quarters and up the last private staircase to Charles’s bedchamber. I kicked off my shoes and hopped onto the bed with a book in my hand, and settled myself to appear as if I’d been waiting there all the night long. I’d scarce done so before Charles reappeared, throwing open the door so hard that it cracked against the wall.
“Good evening, sir,” I said mildly, turning the book over like a little tent on my belly. “You seem grievously disturbed.”
“It’s Frances,” he said crossly. “At supper she seemed well enough, all pretty smiles and laughter, but when I called on her just now, she sighed and groaned and made her excuses in her nightcap, pleading some little ailment or another. And quick as that, she sent me on my way.”
“She did?” I asked, feigning great surprise. “An ailment?”
“Yes, an ailment.” Charles paused and scowled suspiciously. “What do you know of this, Barbara?”
I sighed and turned back to the pages of my book. “Why should I know anything of anything, sir?”
“Because there is nothing in this entire palace that escapes your notice,” he said with exasperation. “You know more than—who is it?”
He swung around to face the door and the polite tapping that had interrupted him. Cautiously the door swung open, and Bab May peeked his doleful face with the high forehead inside.
“Forgive me, Your Majesty,” he began, “but if you wished to review the papers with those figures—”
“Not now, you rascal, not now,” Charles exclaimed. “Cannot you see I’m engaged with this lady?”
As quick as a crab back into the sand, May scuttled away in retreat. But he’d done his part as we’d arranged between us, for his interruption was the sign that rapturous Richmond was now with Frances.
The king turned back to me on the bed. I crossed my legs in their bright green stockings, letting my lace-trimmed petticoats slip high enough over my knees to show my flowered garters and to draw his gaze. He couldn’t help from looking; he never could.
“Tell me, Barbara,” he said. “What is Frances about? What is the true nature of this ailment of hers?”
I ran my fingertip back and forth along the top of the book, my head tipped quizzically to one side.
“If I tell you the truth, sir,” I said, “you’ll vow I’m being spiteful, and not believe me, and then where shall I be?”
“Barbara, please.”
“You will promise not to fault me,” I said sweetly, “or slay me like the unfortunate messenger in that old tale?”
He took a step toward me, his face so black that I didn’t dare prolong his fury, especially since it would soon be aimed instead at my pretty, foolish rival. Besides, I wished only for Charles to break with Frances, not suffer an apoplexy.
I sighed mightily, as if he’d won me over only with great reluctance. “Very well, then. If you return to Miss Stuart’s bedchamber, you’ll see with your own eyes that the lady’s ‘little ailment’ takes the form of His Grace the Duke of Richmond.”
“Richmond?” cried Charles, his voice strangled. “Richmond?”
I sighed again. “There, I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” I said, turning back to my book. “But before you doubt me further, go to her room. By now His Grace is likely in her bed.”
That was exactly where poor Charles found them. The perfect virgin was shown to have feet of very ordinary clay; I’d never seen anyone fall so fast and so hard from favor at court. In his fury, Charles ordered that her name never again be mentioned in his presence. Exhausted by the furor and shamed by the disgrace, Frances eloped soon after with her “rapturous” duke, to become his boring, honest, rapturous duchess.
I consoled Charles, and pleased him well in the manner that I knew better than any other woman. The ominous significance of settling my debts was forgotten—except, of course, that my accounts had been nicely paid off to the sum of thirty thousand pounds. With Frances gone, the French ambassadors turned all their flattery and incense to me. My parlor at King Street was crowded to overflowing; even the new style in which I dressed my hair was praised and copied.
And the field again was mine to rule.
“The sword in one hand and a palm frond in the other, and a broken wheel beneath your disdainful elbow,” mused Harry Jermyn as he studied all the emblems in the new painting on Master Lely’s easel. “Oh, I say, my lady, you’re not truly having yourself done as St. Catherine?”
“I am,” I said as I walked from behind the changing screen, still tugging my gold satin robe into place beneath the flowing blue cloak. Master Lely liked to make a goodly show of drapery in his pictures, but while so much extra cloth was good for artistic virtuosity, it was the very devil to haul about in any sort of garment. “St. Catherine is a perfectly respectable saint. Where’s the harm in it?”
“The harm’s in your intention, darling, not in the pious old girl herself,” Harry said, settling his short legs on a stone bench supported by twin satyrs that the artist kept among his props. “I can guess why you’ve done it, as will Charles and everyone else.”
“Then let them guess,” I said as I took my pose against the truncated plaster column. I’d sat often enough for Master Lely to know how he hated to be kept waiting, and I wished to be ready as soon as he joined us. “There’ll be those who will speculate and invent tales whether I fuss about it or not.”
“It’s Her Majesty that will fuss, and with good reason, too,” Harry continued, leaning gallantly on his elbow. He remained one of my circle at court, an old friend of Charles’s and a casual lover of mine, whenever I felt the need of an entertaining, uncomplicated fuck. He’d also been banished once or twice by Charles for making his wit a shade too sharp, so we’d that in common, too.
“You’ve usurped the queen’s very own saint for your own purposes, you know,” he continued, “just as you’ve claimed her husband.”
“I was the Blessed Virgin, too, and she didn’t complain,” I said. “Besides, I’ve already been St. Barbara,
and Master Lely wished to paint me in this gold color. Mind you, Harry, I brought you along here to amuse me, not to be a critic.”
“But it’s by being a critic that I’ll amuse you best,” he said, twisting his fingers idly around the beribboned lovelock he’d tied into the front of his periwig. “Ah, my dear, your necklace has slipped. Shall I come adjust it for you?”
“You damned well may not,” I said, laughing at his impertinence. The long strand of pearls was supposed to represent some sort of sword belt, for it had been the painter’s idea to sling it crossways over one shoulder and between my breasts with most unsaintly emphasis. I narrowed my eyes in a menacing fashion, and aimed my palm frond at him. “Behave yourself properly, now, else I’ll have to put you out before Master Lely returns.”
“I am behaving,” he said, glancing back at the unfinished canvas. “It’s you that isn’t. With this painting, you’re taking on a sizeable challenge. By making yourself Catherine, one might argue that you’re setting yourself up as the queen’s equal, even her replacement. That won’t sit well with our Charles. He’s remarkably without humor when it comes to his doughy little queen.”
“I might as well have taken her place,” I said brashly. “I’ve born the king three sturdy sons. That’s three reasons why I succeeded where she failed.”
He sighed. “And you’re a Villiers, full of daring and dash and not the common sense God granted a flea. What does that prove, I ask you?”
“It proves I’m willing to fight,” I said, thumping my oversized prop sword against the plaster column. “I’m a well-seasoned warrior of the battles of court, Harry, and I always play to win. Charles knows that of me, and respects it. You’ll see. He’ll fancy this picture as much as any of the others that Lely’s painted of me.”
But Harry didn’t laugh, or join in my bright declaration the way I’d expected. Instead his lumpen features turned serious and grave, his popping eyes full of uncharacteristic concern.
“Give a care to yourself, Barbara,” he said softly. “The court is changing, and things aren’t what they seem. Even, I fear, for a warrior queen like you.”
As I’d hoped, the new painting was done in time for Charles’s thirty-seventh birthday at the end of May. He celebrated it not with the queen but in my lodgings, with Irish fiddlers, French wine, and a very late night. It was close to dawn when I finally took him alone to see the painting that was his gift.
“For your collection of Lelys, dearest sir,” I said, clinging to his arm both from fondness and for support, for I’d had my share of the wine as well. “To remind you of how much I love you.”
He studied the painting, going very still.
“You don’t like it, sir?” I asked, my voice rising upward to fill the silence. “You don’t think it’s—it’s a fair likeness?”
“Oh, it’s like enough,” he said. “Master Lely seldom disappoints. But I doubt that the choice of St. Catherine was his notion, was it?”
I frowned, my pleasure in the gift gone, and too late I thought of Jermyn’s warning.
“I thought you’d like it, sir,” I said. “I thought you’d think it amusing.”
“It’s a beautiful picture, yes,” he said curtly. “But it does not amuse me.”
He shook me from his arm, and left, and came not to my bed that night, or the next eight beyond it.
In the same week, Dutch ships attacked the Medway. The English were caught completely unawares, and put up no fight. Led by two traitorous English pilots, the Dutch bombarded the fort at Sheerness, sailed boldly up the river Thames to Gravesend and then to Chatham. People fled from London into the countryside in terror, convinced the Dutch and French were invading and meant to take the city itself. But the Dutch were content with burning the four English ships they found at Gravesend, and towing away as a prize the Royal Charles, the flagship of the English fleet.
To plague, fire, and flood we now added humiliation, cowardice, and despair: a “Black Day,” as the poets called it. The country was in a panic, the navy in toothless confusion, London in ruins, and Charles’s reign a crumbling, ignominious disaster.
And no one gave another thought to my portrait as St. Catherine.
With neither money nor ships left to support the war, England had no choice but to agree to a disreputable and shoddy peace with the Dutch. Though Charles would have preferred to continue the war to a more honorable result, Clarendon insisted that peace was the only way to salvage the country. By the end of July, the Peace of Breda was signed. The war that was supposed to have refilled the country’s coffers had only emptied them further, and created nothing but ill feelings at home and abroad.
As part of the treaty, the Dutch received colonies in West Africa, Pulo Run, and Surinam in the Caribbean. England received even less, the pitiful holdings in the new world of New York, New Jersey, and New Delaware.
The bonfires that marked the end of the war in London were scattered and few, the celebrations subdued. When a medal was cast to mark the peace, I was chagrined to learn that the profile of the still-disgraced Frances, Duchess of Richmond, had been used as a model for Britannia.
I demanded angrily to know why I’d not been honored instead. “My dear Barbara,” Charles had told me wearily, “the medal is to honor peace, not more war.”
But that disgruntled summer was still far from done, as much as I could wish it so.
My cycles had always been as regular as the moon, and as easy to predict. Their regularity had helped make me certain that Charles was the father of each of my children. Thus, when by the end of July I was three weeks late, I sensed I’d gladsome news to announce to the king. He’d always been such a happy, indulgent father with our little dark-haired brood that I couldn’t imagine a better surprise to offer him now when so many other things were sadly askew.
A small company of us were still at table after supper one night, and the conversation had turned to the Duchess of York’s latest pregnancy, and whether or not after two daughters and several stillbirths she’d manage this time to grant the duke a live son. Given how by now all hope had been abandoned for an heir by the queen, the duchess’s fecundity was of obvious interest. Listening to this discussion, I finally could contain my own news no longer.
“Likely you’ll have another son yourself this winter, sir,” I said proudly, resting my hand on his shoulder. “At least I’ve every expectation of it.”
Yet to my shock, Charles said nothing, and did nothing, in marked contrast to the well-pleased delight with which he’d received all my other, earlier announcements of this nature.
“Indeed, my lady,” he said evenly, far more interested in shelling the walnuts before him than in my news. “And when precisely do you believe this event will come due?”
“By April of the spring,” I said. “I know it’s early days, yet still I—”
“Then I fear you are mistaken, my lady,” he said, still not raising his gaze to mine. “If you are indeed with child, you must lay your brat at some other gentleman’s door.”
All other conversation around us had ceased, with every ear now listening with horrified fascination.
I took my hand from his shoulder, deliberately setting both my hands flat upon the table’s edge, so no one could later say they’d seen them shake. “Forgive me, sir, but I am right in my calculations. I swear to it. Any child I carry now is yours.”
At last he raised his gaze to mine, his eyes as hard as jet. “Lady Castlemaine,” he said, “no matter how violently you swear, that child isn’t mine, for I can’t recall a single day or night in the month of June when I did lie with you.”
At the far end of the table a gentleman sniggered. I don’t know who it was, nor did it matter, not really. He represented everyone who’d ever question the parentage of any of my children, or laugh at them behind their hands for my not being wed to their father. In my mind’s eye, I saw their small, trusting faces, and I knew I’d do all in my power to keep that trust, no matter who might laugh or jeer at
them.
Even, so help me, if it was their own father.
I rose swiftly to my feet, my hands knotted in tight fists at my side. “That’s a lie, sir, as you know full well.”
“Perhaps,” he said with maddening calm. “Perhaps not. Who knows which of us lies, eh?”
“God damn me, sir, but you shall own this child!” Anger filled my head like a storm cloud, obliterating all else. With my forearm, I swept my place clear of tableware and porcelain, sending it all crashing to the floor with a noisy clatter. “It is yours, sir, and you will own it!”
Charles stood, intending to overwhelm me by his size alone, the way he did with most other persons. “Barbara, please.”
“Please what, sir?” I demanded hotly. “Tell me that! Because if you do not have this child baptized in the Royal Chapel at Whitehall, if you are not standing as its rightful father as you have for the others, then I shall carry it myself into the palace and dash its brains out against the gallery wall before your very eyes, and for all the world to see, and know what kind of father you are.”
I shoved my chair backward and stalked from the room, too angry now to bother any further with Charles or the formality his presence should have required of me. I called for my carriage and left the palace, and at that moment I didn’t care whether I returned or not.
There are those cynical enough to believe that whenever I wished something from the king I would pick a battle with him, and then retreat and hide until he felt sufficiently contrite to grant whatever I pleased. Such a tidy notion fits conveniently with the image of me as a calculating and avaricious harpy, and thus I suppose is a convenient interpretation. Yet, if any of those same cynics could ever see me after I’d quarreled with Charles, how the force of strong words and stronger emotions tore at me until I was often sickened by it, then I’d hope they changed their opinion. For though it might seem that I was no more than a careless wanton where Charles was concerned, in fact my heart felt enormous tenderness for him, and when we fought, I often felt afterward that I’d been stabbed again and again with the sharpest stiletto. We were so much alike, the king and I, that we knew exactly what words would cause the keenest wounds to the other. Like a lioness injured defending her cubs, my suffering had no cure but solitude, away from him who had caused me such pain.
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