Sir Robert’s errand was a common one for me. Orange girls were among the few folk in the playhouse who could cross between the players and the audience with impunity, and we were happy to carry messages back and forth between the two. It was easy work, and men in rut like Sir Robert were always generous. Besides, I looked for any excuse to go back among the players, convinced as I was that I’d someday belong there.
I set my basket of oranges on the floor as our woebegone porter held the door to the tiring-room open for me. He was in theory kept there to send away all rogues with no connection to the production, or so the orders were from Master Killigrew. Big bellies and random bastards were as bad for his trade as they were for Mrs. Ross and her kind.
But just as Master Killigrew’s plan to employ a whore at the playhouse to divert the attentions of the actors from the actresses had failed, so, too, had the porter proved no lasting deterrent. Any gallant with a shilling or two to give the man could gain entrance, and did, exactly as I was doing now on behalf of Sir Robert. I slipped inside the open door, pushed aside a glittering tinsel curtain, and stepped into a place of cheerful, seductive chaos.
The actresses’ tiring-room was a small, makeshift place behind the scenes, with more the look of a brothel’s upstairs chambers than the elegant theatre that housed it. The furniture was bits of cast-off benches, chairs, and propped-up looking-glasses, with costumes and wigs, plumes and paste jewels, and pots of paint and powder scattered everywhere. The two maidservants who acted as dressers tried to put some order to this shambles, but the actresses themselves showed so little care for their surroundings that it proved an impossible task.
“Here there, Nelly.” Mrs. Corey, the first actress for the day’s performance, reached out to tap me with her comb while the dresser tugged the laces of her costume’s bodice more tightly beneath her overripe breasts. As did all the actresses, she ignored the gaping gentlemen visitors around her, like so many idle drones come to buzz about her queenly honeypot, and she paused only to brush aside any inconvenient male hands that dared become too familiar while she dressed. “Is that a letter from His Grace for me in your hand? Come now, girl, give it to me before I perish from longing!”
I skipped back from her reach, holding the folded note higher like a tantalizing prize. A playhouse is the very devil for keeping secrets. Everyone in the house knew that Mrs. Corey had gone off with a certain duke in his carriage last week, but we likewise all knew that His Grace had already ended the intrigue before it had fair begun, cowed by his wife’s unexpected return from the country.
“F’give me, mistress, but you then must perish away,” I said with my usual cheer. “This isn’t from His Grace, nor is it meant for you, either.”
“Then perhaps you should give it to me to deliver, you little hussy,” drawled one of the idlers in the tiring-room. He was a tall gentleman with a fluffed wig that made him taller still, and though his clothes were costly, his linen was grimy and greasy at the cuffs and neck, and I wondered which unfortunate actresses he hoped to seduce.
“Come, come,” he ordered, flicking his fingers to me. “I’ll play Paris, and decide which of these fair beauties deserves this honor the most.”
“Nay, sir, you won’t,” I said, nimbly dodging the long scabbard of his sword, jutting from beneath the rosettes of his doublet. Because I was small, I could slip away from him between the chairs and benches and dressing tables while the other women and gentlemen laughed and urged me onward. “It’s not for you to decide. I know who this is meant for, and I’ll deliver it only to her.”
“Obstreperous bitch,” the man snapped. “Mind your betters, and give the love note to me.”
“Better that you mind her, Pattison,” called one of the other gallants, “for little Nell’s already bested you for honor and loyalty, and refusing to betray another’s trust.”
“Trust and truth and honor among harlots!” I cried merrily, dancing around the tiring-room with my petticoats bunched in my hands. “Hey-ho, hey-ho, to Nell belongs the prize!”
To my delight, the others cheered, applauding both my dance and my song. I did love their attention, and knowing I’d pleased even this small audience. Yet I knew, too, that Mrs. Meggs would notice if I stayed away from my oranges much longer, and finally I came to a reluctant halt before the lady Sir Robert deemed his nymph, called Elizabeth: the youngest actress in the company, and not much older than myself. Because she was tall and rapturously fair, with a natural haughtiness that served well for playing noble-born ladies, and because her father had been some learned university gentleman who’d taught her to read and write and even prattle on in French, she had a place here as an actress, instead of selling oranges in the pit.
But she also forgot her lines and her cues during performances. If jolly Sir Robert and his belly could be sufficiently generous, then she’d be off the stage and into his keeping within the month; a certainty I found vastly cheering, and more than enough to make my smile genuine as I handed her the note.
“For me? ” she said with feigned surprise.
“Aye, for you,” I said, happy to be agreeable. “From Sir Robert.”
“Oh, Sir Robert,” she murmured, and smiled in a way that would have earned her a golden necklace, if only Sir Robert could have witnessed it. The jaded crowd around us lost interest and looked away while she opened the note and eagerly devoured its contents.
I watched, and marveled at how a scribble-scrabble of ink across a paper could make her flush beneath her paint, as much as if Sir Robert were speaking the very words aloud.
“Is there an answer you’d wish me to give him?” I asked, hopeful. If she sent a reply, then both she and Sir Robert would reward me with another shilling or two. “I’ll take it to him if you—”
“Not now,” she said, tucking the note into the valley between her breasts. “I haven’t time to write one, not if I’m to learn my lines for today. I’m to play Isabella, you know.”
“Isabella,” I said. “The Wild Gallants? Mr. Dryden’s work?”
“The same.” She unfurled the narrow scroll on which she’d copied out her part. Her lines refreshed, she closed her eyes to recite in a clumsy singsong. “ ‘On condition you’ll take it for a courtesy to be rid of an ass, I care not if . . . I care not if . . .’ Oh, a pox on it!”
“ ‘I care not if I marry him,’ ” I prompted.
“Yes, yes, that’s it,” she said, her eyes still squeezed shut in a squint of concentration. “ ‘I care not if I marry him. . . . If I marry him . . .’ ”
“ ‘The old fool, your father, would but so importunate to match you with a young fool,’ ” I continued blithely for her, “ ‘that, partly for quietness sake, I am content to take him.’ That’s the speech, isn’t it?”
Her eyes flew open, her mouth tight with suspicion. “How did you come to know that?”
“I listened,” I said proudly, and in perfect truth. “I’m here for every play, you know, and in time it’s not such a trial to learn the words by rote.”
But that was not how she saw it. “You prating little bitch,” she said slowly, biting into each word. “How dare you come to mock me so!”
“To mock you!” I repeated with astonishment. “I?”
“Yes, you, you foul, ginger-haired creature,” she said, standing and purposefully raising her voice to attract the attention of the others around us. “Who taught you those words to say to me? Who sent you to be his trained parrot, and use me so cruelly? His name, girl, his name!”
“By my soul, madam, if I’d meant to mock you, I would have done it more proper than that,” I said warmly, my hands knotted into fists at my waist. I never sought quarrels, but I didn’t turn away from them, either. “How wicked sorry it is, that you would cry a mockery when all I did was speak the selfsame lines you’re hired to say, yet cannot!”
“Mark that, Bet,” called one of the gentlemen behind me. “If Killigrew hears little Nelly can say your speeches without faltering, he’ll set her
up on stilts to take your place.”
The others laughed at such an uproarious suggestion, but Elizabeth didn’t, and neither did I.
“He’d never raise some chit like this to the stage,” she scoffed, her eyes bulging from her brow and her voice as dismissive as a serpent’s hiss. “He’d never dare replace me with the likes of her.”
“If that be the finest acting you can muster, madam,” I countered, squaring myself directly before her, “then you’ll make a piss-poor showing in Sir Robert’s bed.”
She gasped, as much from the laughter around us as from my taunt, and seized a heavy hairbrush from her dressing table to use as a weapon against me.
“How dare you speak to me so?” she demanded, her hairbrush held high. “Come here, you foul little slut!”
Easily I skipped away, my skirts flying around my ankles.
“Ooh, Sir Robert!” I exclaimed, mimicking the singsong speech she’d used to read her lines, “Ooh, Sir Robert, what a grand prick you have! You’d put the village bull to shame, Sir Robert, that you would!”
The hairbrush flew through the air over my head, knocking a bottle of cheap sillery (brought by one of the gallants) to the floor with a crash of shattered glass and strong waters that scattered the other actresses and their followers.
I should have stopped then and retreated with my oranges. I know that now, and I knew it then. But the laughter that I garnered for my foolishness was like the sweetest nectar to me, and I could no more abandon it than the sun could turn toward the moon.
“Ooh, sir, you are like a god!” I cried, adding a yowling moan like a tabby in heat. “Ohh, sir, fetch me now, I beg you!”
“I’ll have your head—see if I don’t!” The actress followed close on my heels—too close, in truth, and to my dismay I realized she’d chased me into a corner with no escape. She swung her arm, determined to strike me, and I ducked, thanking my maker for my slight stature. She swore and raised her hand again, and as I turned away to deflect her blow to a less painful part of my person (a sorry, practiced skill at which, alas, I was most adept), the door to the stage opened.
“Five minutes, five minutes,” the porter droned, and in that instant I darted beneath his arm and through the open door. I grabbed my basket and ran, between the men shifting the tall painted scenes, past a pair of fiddlers tuning their instruments against one another, around the actor waiting to speak the prologue, and, finally, down the stairs that led to the pit.
“Where have you been?” exclaimed my sister, catching me by the arm. “Sir Robert’s been close t’coming after you!”
I laughed, and widened my eyes for knowing emphasis. “Oh, he’ll be wanting to do far more than that, once he hears what his fair nymph says of me.”
“Of you?” Rose laughed, too, guessing before I’d even explained. “Oh, that one’s so puffed full of her own importance, she needs a good pricking.”
“She had it,” I said, “if not from Sir Robert, then from me.”
“Then he can console her afterward.” Rose nodded, most familiar with that kind of male consolation. “Did you vex her so much that she’ll go to Mrs. Meggs?”
“Let her.” I shrugged, unconcerned. “I made everyone in the tiring-room laugh. They’ll all take my side.”
“Aye, that they will.” She leaned closer to me, lowering her voice for my ear alone to hear. “Harry says she’s to be let go at week’s end, anyways, on account of being willful and misremembering her lines.”
“So he’s ‘Harry’ now, is he?” I asked curiously, the actress forgotten in an instant. I should have guessed Rose would have made herself known to Master Killigrew’s handsome son by now, and she be known to him. “And you have made his acquaintance!”
“Ahh, I must’ve misremembered myself.” She smiled slyly, then looked past me. Her gaze turned so soft and balmy that I knew I’d find Harry Killigrew standing there even before I turned to look over my shoulder. I recognized him without introduction, a sparkish dandy with exactly the same face as his father’s (albeit unlined by age and excess), lounging against the wall with an emerald-colored cloak draped over one shoulder. He blew a kiss on his fingertips to Rose, who flushed and simpered so in return that if she hadn’t already stepped outside with him to the welcoming shadows of Drury Lane, then she would this night. Thus it always was with my sister and men, and likely never fit to change.
“I know what you’re thinking, Nell,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes.”
“How you can see me at all when you won’t look away from him is a blessed wonder to me, Rose,” I said. “But fancy, how fast you’ve—”
But my words and my fancifying were lost in the sudden excitement rippling through the playhouse, as palpable and charged as lightning in the summer sky.
“The king’s coach is outside,” one gentleman was saying to another. “They say he’s here with both the duke and Castlemaine.”
“The king!” I repeated with awe. The king and his brother James, Duke of York, and the favorite royal mistress, Lady Castlemaine, in her customary spot in place of the homely queen; we’d not had such elegant, noble company at the playhouse since I’d begun to work there. “Oh, Rose, Rose, you were right!”
Her smile curved upward. “I told you Harry Killigrew didn’t lie.”
“Not this time, anyways.” I balanced on my toes, craning my neck to see over the others’ heads for my first glimpse of the king’s arrival. Everyone in the playhouse had risen to their feet, as much better to gape at the royal party as from respect for the crown. Even the players who’d just begun their first lines on the stage stopped their speeches and turned in expectation toward the royal box with the rich embroidered hangings.
I suppose there must have been some precedence in the party’s rank, or simply they appeared in the same order in which they’d gotten down from the carriage. Such niceties of the court were beyond my experience. I’d no interest in the shadowy, unknown gentlemen who came first to stand in the box, though I suppose they must have been highborn, too, to have such places with the king. Nor did I spare much attention to the Duke of York, as fair as his brother the king was dark, when he came forward to claim one of the other seats at the railing.
No, my anticipation was reserved only for His Majesty, my hands clutching my fruit basket so feverishly that the impressions of the vines was pressed damply into my palms. There was a final shuffle of figures in the box, and then, like that, he was suddenly there, from the dark into the light like the sun itself cresting over the horizon.
Not that he was garbed in silver or gold, or spangled with gems the way that the mighty ancient pharaohs and emperors are in the Bible. Far from it: Our English king dressed with manly sobriety, in a dark gray doublet and breeches, white linen at his throat and cuffs, and a plain black hat with a single white plume curling over the wide brim.
But instead of seeming poor or mean, like Cromwell’s grim followers had been, this true king’s unadorned dress served only to set off the innate magnificence of his person: the dark eyes that missed nothing, the full-lipped mouth with a constant hint of a smile, the lushly curling hair falling over broad shoulders.
We all made proper bows or curtseys, as was fitting. In return, the king made a gracious gesture of acknowledgment, without the slightest condescension, then took his seat, and nodded for the players to continue. They did, and once again it was as if nothing had changed, with the gallants and the vizards and the apprentices and the orange girls noisy with their usual bawdry and merriment.
“Come along now, Nell,” Rose said, prodding me gently in the ribs. “Don’t stand there staring like a statue. Make yourself useful to these hungry rogues, and call your wares.”
“That I will,” I said, shrugging her away. “That I will.”
With my head high, I sauntered down through the pit toward the royal box. With an orange in my hand, I glanced this way and that, in every direction but up to where the king sat.
“Oranges! Will you have
my oranges?” I called as beguilingly as I could, over the speeches of the players from the stage. “An orange for you, sir? My sweet oranges, sir, oh, so sweet?”
With each I sold, I came closer to the boxes, until at last I stood directly before the king, as if only by the greatest coincidence. Because of how the floor of the pit slanted down toward the stage, I was no more than a dozen feet or so away from him, closer than I’d ever been. I didn’t need to look up to know he was there, or that he was watching me, either. Beneath his crown, the king was still a mortal man of flesh and blood and desire, wasn’t he?
And at last, as I trembled within, I raised my gaze up to his, and discovered the truth for myself.
He was sitting on the edge of his high-backed chair, leaning forward to rest one forearm on the rail with studied nonchalance. The sunlight through the cupola overhead caught the gold-set ruby on his finger, a bright spark of red fire against so much dark cloth. He was watching me, aye, watching me with one dark brow cocked in amused appreciation.
Watching me.
I smiled and looked up at him beneath the shadow of my lashes. I dipped into as much of a curtsey as I could manage with the basket on my hip, more enthusiasm than grace. I chose the largest orange from my basket and fondled it in my hand like temptation itself.
“G’day, Your Majesty,” I called. “Will you buy?”
“Perhaps,” he said, his voice deep and clear. “But first you must tell me what it is you’re selling.”
“Oh, sir.” I widened my smile, making a fine display of my dimpled cheeks. This day, the best playacting wasn’t taking place on the stage, and both of us knew it. “What I’m selling depends on what pleases you, don’t it?”
“My pleasure?” He smiled down at me, and I could have melted as surely as new butter in the summer sun. “Why, lass, that’s easy enough. Something sweet, rounded, agreeable to the tongue.”
“As you wish, sir.” I raised the orange I’d been holding up for his consideration. “Here you have it, exactly as you most desire: sweet and rounded, and, I’m told, most agreeable to the tongue.”
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