“Only the handsome folk,” I said, watching Churchill as he entered the room. He was tall and lean in his scarlet ensign’s uniform with the satin sash and knot across his shoulder, his skin browned and ruddy, his hair streaked with gold by the sun. He wore his own hair, not a periwig, nor did he need to, crowned with such a lion’s glory. I guessed him to be in his early twenties, no more, yet unlike most courtiers his age he moved with the confidence born of hard-won male experience, not swaggering bravado: a man, not a callow boy. “What place will he have in your household?”
“He’s a Page of Honor, as well as being an ensign in the duke’s guards,” she said. “He’s new returned from a post fighting in Tangier, which explains the brownness of his complexion.”
“Tangier,” I repeated, intrigued, letting the exotic name roll seductively off my tongue. “Land of harems and wicked heathen practices?”
“I doubt he could afford any harems,” Anne said. “He hasn’t a farthing to his name, poor lad, but he’s sure to prosper with a face like that. He will, I think, find life at court most agreeable.”
There was a slight edge to her voice, a barely discernible tightening of her fingers on the blades of her fan, and suddenly I remembered why I knew the Churchill name. It wasn’t the letter from the distant aunt, for I received so many like that, I wouldn’t recall any in particular. No, it was Arabella Churchill I recalled, an equally beautiful young woman who had swiftly moved from her place as the maid of honor to the duchess to mistress of the duke, and had borne him at least one bastard, maybe more. So the young rascal had lechery in his blood: all the better.
“Yes, yes, Barbara, I can read it in your face,” Anne said crossly. “Yes, that trollop Arabella is his sister, and I can only hope he will prove less troublesome than she has.”
“He won’t seek a place in His Grace’s bed,” I said. “At least I don’t believe so.”
She scowled. “That’s not in the least amusing, Barbara.”
“Oh, hush, if I cannot make such jests, then no one can,” I said. “Look at how his coat fits his shoulders, and tell me you’d not break a commandment for him.”
“That’s you, Barbara,” Anne answered primly. “Not I.”
“Well, then, I would break all ten, and willingly, too, for a face as fine as that.” I rose gracefully, smoothing my petticoats in the way I had that still would draw every male eye in the room. “He looks a little lost, don’t you think? In need of a warm welcome to court?”
Anne groaned. “Don’t devour him whole, Barbara,” she pleaded. “Leave a few crumbs to do my husband’s bidding.”
But I was already crossing the room toward him. I’d only come halfway when he’d begun looking at me with unabashed approval, and desire, too. That others were watching us in turn like players on the stage only added to my pleasure. Let them look, I thought, and let them tell Charles. He might content himself with his milky-pale French chit, but I’d capture the greater prize by far.
“Your Grace,” Churchill said, bowing low over his well-turned leg. Being a soldier, he was permitted to wear his sword in company, a pretty attraction. He’d know how to use it, too. “I’d heard much of your beauty, Your Grace, but nothing could truly prepare me.”
Slowly I opened my fan. “You know me, then?”
“Who does not, Your Grace?” he said frankly. He’d lovely eyes, gray green and bright against his browned skin. “I should know you anywhere.”
I smiled, delighted. “I assure you, sir, I only improve on acquaintance.”
“Then I pray I’ll have that honor.” Belatedly he realized he’d forgotten to introduce himself, a slight flush coloring his cheeks as he bowed again. “Ensign John Churchill. Your obedient servant, Your Grace.”
I offered him my arm, and he took it as if it already belonged to him.
“Then obey me, Ensign,” I said, teasing. “Come with me, and we’ll see if you can both give and take orders.”
He laughed, nothing shy. “I can assure you, Your Grace, you’ll not find me wanting in any area.”
Nor did I. He shared my bed that first night, and I could not recall a more splendid coupling. He was eager and ardent, young and strong: he delighted in me as much as I did in him. Though no greenhorn, he was willing to be guided in the finer points of love and seduction, and I was glad to share the delights of my lusciously won experience. As well matched as I’d always been with Charles, it was all the more pleasing with John, because I was the leader.
Which is not to say I was overbearing or unwomanly. On the contrary, we met each other as complete equals in my bed, and delighted one another over and over. But I’d come to an age that no lady wishes. While the world still lauded my beauty, I could not look at my face in the glass in the morning without feeling pangs for what I’d lost, to never be again recovered. I was my beauty, and when my share of it would finally drain away, I’d no notion of what else would be left.
But with John Churchill, all this was forgotten. He was young and handsome, and when he called me beautiful, I believed him, and gloried in it. When I lay with him, I was young again, too.
But it did not last. God help me, it did not last.
“Your Grace, you must wake!”
I rolled over to face Wilson, standing there with her face moonishly lit by the candlestick in her hand. Surely it could not be time to rise yet: the room was still black with night, and it seemed I’d only just laid my head onto the pillow.
“Go away, Wilson, you impudent creature,” I muttered, turning my face back into the pillow. “And don’t come back until a respectable hour.”
“Forgive me, Your Grace, but you must rise,” she insisted. “The messenger from St. James’s was most urgent. The Duchess of York is perilously ill, Your Grace, and if you wish to see her again in this life, you must go to her now, before she dies.”
I dressed as quickly as I could and hurried the short distance from Berkshire House to St. James’s Palace. There were enough lights from within and carriages drawn up before the door to show that something was amiss. The servants were weeping, the women having thrown up their aprons to wipe their eyes. I found Charles in the small parlor before the duchess’s bedchamber, and sorrowfully he drew me aside. I knew he must be thinking of his sister’s death, still so recent and as unexpected as this one, and I put my arms around him by way of comfort.
“She ate a hearty dinner,” he explained in a grim whisper, “then rose from her chair, and collapsed in agony. She was brought back here and the physicians called at once, but they say there is no hope for recovery.”
I glanced through the open door, where the duchess’s bed was surrounded by the huddled figures of those closest to her. Surely she did appear beyond all mortal help, her face unnaturally swollen and ashen, her breath so faint she seemed already a corpse. Her husband the duke crouched beside her to stroke her forehead, while her two young princess daughters—the Lady Mary, nine, and the Lady Anne, only six—stood miserably to the other side, too unsure and frightened to weep.
“Have they ventured a cause?” I asked. The duchess had recently given birth to her eighth child, another daughter, though only this babe and the two older daughters had survived. “Surely it cannot be childbed fever, not after so many weeks.”
“They say it’s some blight that’s consumed her from within,” Charles said. “I fear she suffers greatly, poor lady.”
“Poor lady, indeed,” I murmured. For all that she was Clarendon’s daughter, I’d come to like her much, especially once we’d both made our conversions to Rome. “Has she been granted last rites?”
Charles hesitated, just long enough that I knew this to be a difficult question. “Her husband has decided that, yes.”
But what I learned later was that no decision was made at all, with the duke so fearful of public outcry against the duchess’s sworn faith that he let his wife die without the comforts of either a cleric or the sacrament. The suffering of her body must have been as nothing compared to tha
t of her soul, and to bear witness to such pain was to feel a measure of it.
Whether because of this or the duchess’s last illness, her bloated body decayed so swiftly that it was considered impossible for her to lie in state or be given a proper burial that was by rights her due. The scandal about her conversion that the duke had hoped to avoid occurred anyway, with her own Anglican brother denouncing her for her religion. In Parliament, too, she was not mourned, but held up only as one more ominous warning sign of the papists’ infiltration into the highest levels of the nobility. To my mind, the whole affair of the poor lady’s death was handled with unseemly haste and a shocking lack of respect.
The duchess had been but thirty-five. With her death following so closely on the heels of Madame’s at twenty-six, I was made to feel the uncertainty of my life and the frailty of all my worldly pleasures.
“What a handsome rascal you are,” I said to John, lying atop him with his cock deep within me. “Surely peace between nations is a most admirable state, if it means I can keep my warrior here with me.”
He kissed me lazily, for we’d not left my bed for the better part of the day, and we were so spent that lazy, indolent fucking was all we were good for.
“You’d be the prize of any soldier’s dream, Barbara,” he said fondly, his hands full of my flesh as he held me steady. “So long as the French generals can’t make up their minds to attack the infernal Dutch, I’m mightily pleased to stay exactly where I am.”
He gave an extra thrust of his hips to remind me of exactly where that location might be, and I groaned in satiate delight. “You must swear to surrender your sword only to me, Ensign, else I—hark, listen to that.”
I lifted my head the better to hear, and my heart lurched within my breast. There were certain sounds I’d recognize anywhere, and one of them was Charles’s footfall on the stairs of my house.
“By all that’s holy, it’s the king!” I cried in a frantic whisper. “Quick, quick, away!”
I rolled off him and from the bed, hunting in vain for my discarded smock while he, too, scrambled for his clothes. Still buttoning his breeches, he turned toward the door.
“There’s no time for that,” I said, grabbing him by the arm. The last thing I wanted was for my two lovers to meet on the stairs; though each knew of the other, I understood enough of male pride to see the peril of having them together in such a circumstance. To one side of my bedchamber stood a large cupboard where I kept biscuits, wine, and other refreshments as well as extra coverlets. I threw open the cupboard’s door and shoved my amorous soldier within, even as he stole a final kiss. I latched the door and dropped the key into the cup on the windowsill, kicked John’s remaining clothes far beneath my bed, and hopped back under the covers only seconds before Charles opened my door. It was as baldly done as any comic scene in a play, though with the potential for far more lasting consequences.
“Good day, sweetheart,” he said, full of smiles as he sailed his flat-brimmed hat across the room to the chair, as was his habit. “The afternoon’s so fine, I couldn’t keep at my desk another moment. There’s nothing like a brisk walk across the park to fire the blood, eh?”
“Indeed there’s not, sir,” I agreed, letting the coverlet slide lower over my breasts so he’d see I was already naked, a patent diversion, yes, but one that cheerfully works with men. “I wasn’t expecting you until later this evening.”
“I like surprises,” he said, shrugging out of his coat. But though he still smiled, I saw the change in his expression that showed I hadn’t fooled him. I should have known, of course. He’d been on the other end of such games often enough himself to recognize every sign and trick. After the afternoon that John and I had had, likely my bedchamber was as ripe as any den with our scent, and Charles had discovered the truth as soon as he’d opened the door. But still I’d carry my bluff, and see how long he’d go without calling it: for what other ruse did I have, really?
He tossed his coat over the back of the chair and glanced pointedly at the cupboard. Oh, he knew, he knew.
“I’ll have a glass of canary, my dear, to restore me after that walk,” he said. “Go on, madam, fetch it for me.”
“I—I can’t,” I said. “The door is locked, and one of the maids misplaced the key. I’ll order you a glass brought up, so—”
“Lost the key?” he said, going to stand before the cupboard. I could too well imagine John inside, listening and holding his breath. “I hope you thrashed the chit for her carelessness. But these locks are easy enough to pick. One of your hairpins, if you please, and we’ll make short work of it.”
“No!” I cried, slipping from the bed. I clutched the sheet around me as a makeshift dressing gown and hurried to join him, slipping my arm around his waist. “That is, why should we squander our time picking locks?”
He frowned sternly, toying with me now. “Open the door, sweetheart,” he ordered, “else the poor fellow shall smother inside. I’ll not be able to save you from the noose if you’re charged with his death.”
“Fetch the key, Barbara,” a muffled John called from inside the cupboard, and I’d no choice then but to obey them both. Contritely I unlocked the door, and John stepped out in only his breeches, blinking at the light as he bowed deeply to the king.
“Good day, Your Majesty,” he murmured, a brave salute, I thought, considering how he must have realized that his entire career could be at risk. One cross word from the king and he could be sent away to any English holding in the world, to languish forever at some faraway posting.
“And a wretched day to you, Churchill,” Charles said mildly. “But I’ll forgive you, since I know you’re here only to earn your keeping and your bread. Now go.”
“Thank you, sir,” he said, the only possible answer. He bowed again, and left the room without bothering to retrieve the rest of his clothes.
Still holding the sheet around me, I looked up at the king, sheepish, not seductive.
“How much money has that rascal taken from you?” he asked finally.
I shrugged, and the sheet slipped lower over my shoulders. I’d indulged John, yes, the way I did all my lovers, but he was poor, and I was rich, so where was the harm to it?
“More than a pittance,” I admitted, “but less than you’ve squandered on Portsmouth.”
“Then far, far less than I’ve given to you.” He sighed, more amused than angry. “Madam, all I ask of you is that, for your own sake, you make the least noise that you can, and I care not where you love.”
I let the sheet drop to the floor. “Shall you stay, sir?”
“You wicked jade,” he said, taking me in his arms. “You know I will.”
By the beginning of 1672, the effects of the Treaty of Dover were finally being felt. Against the will of Parliament, Charles pressed through a new Declaration of Indulgence. He regarded it as another attempt to guarantee the religious freedoms he’d promised so long ago at Breda; his Anglican subjects bristled, and saw it instead as granting more unnecessary favors to papists.
For the handful of us who knew the details of the secret treaty, the new declaration could only be one more step toward the day when Charles might make his conversion to the Catholic church.
I was again denounced as the evilest of influences on the king, because of my faith, and he was pressured to put me aside because of it. Nor did it help his cause to have as his second mistress another Catholic lady, and a Frenchwoman at that.
But other aspects of the main treaty were coming to flower, too. King Louis’s France was already at war on the land with the Prince of Orange’s Holland, with Charles’s England soon to follow at sea. John Churchill was already in Flanders, commanding a regiment for the French general Turenne. In the strange way of coincidence in our world, he also served with the king’s first natural son, the Duke of Monmouth, who was likewise making his name as a warrior.
In London I listened to reports of the war with constant fear for John’s safety, dreading that I might hear h
is name among the lists of those known killed. Like every other woman who has ever had the misfortune to love a soldier, I tried to remain cheerful. Given my natural humor, I succeeded. Especially since, as the weeks passed, I realized to my chagrin that he’d left me with a lasting memento of his own, and filled my belly with a most unexpected child.
And for all Charles had said he didn’t care, with this particular peccadillo he was not amused. He could count the days and weeks as well as I, and likewise knew how seldom he’d been to visit my bed, or I his. Oh, he didn’t scold or rant—that wasn’t his way—but he made sure I knew that he was spending more and more time with the French Louise. He still came daily to Berkshire House, but it was to visit the children, not me. He took no notice of my swelling belly, nor did he once enquire after my health in that regard. As far as he was concerned, this child that was not his did not exist.
I’d misstepped, misstepped badly. I was thirty-one years old, and for the sake of my other children, I knew I could ill afford to falter again.
Chapter Twenty-two
EUSTON HALL, SUFFOLK
August 1 6 7 2
“How handsome they look together,” I said, my eyes hazy with tears of joy, like every mother at her child’s wedding. “Aren’t they a perfect couple, my lord?”
Beside me Lord Arlington sighed, and to my surprise I saw the tears in those steely eyes, too. “To see my little Isabella a bride—ah, Your Grace, it both swells my heart and breaks it.”
I nodded, understanding entirely. I’d spent the most ungainly months of my confinement arranging suitable matches for my children, a most satisfying task. Being a natural child of the king was a considerable attribute, especially since Charles had always treated our children with love and regard. They’d each been granted titles and livings commensurate with their royal blood, too, and I’d had my pick of the noblest families eager to blend their bloodlines and their fortunes with the king’s. The fact that my sons and daughters were still too young to be true brides or grooms—my oldest daughter, Anne, was only eleven—deterred no one. Royal families did these things differently, and once a marriage was blessed by the church and the lawyers, then the happy pair would be returned to their respective nurseries until they were old enough to consummate their unions.
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