He’d surprised me before, aye, but when he finally kissed me, there in the dark, it seemed as if I’d been expecting it forever. His kiss was a mirror of himself—lazy, clever, and wicked—and he tasted of smuggled French brandy and Virginia tobacco. A peer was different from a commoner. I kissed him well in return, running my hands across the clipped Genoa velvet of his surcoat, the crisp Flemish lace on the bands of his shirt, and finally lower, to the silver buttons on the front of his breeches. He hadn’t lied, either. Beneath my hand, he was hard for me.
I was more flattered than I should ever admit.
“I cannot leave the company, m’lord,” I whispered, though now we both understood my protests would be perfunctory and without significance.
“Killigrew will manage. Some other wench can take your roles for the time you’re away.”
“But for the whole of summer!”
“What is a summer but a handful of months? London is dull, and your playhouse is empty. The court is away.”
True, all true. I’d never had a holiday such as this. I wasn’t leaving the playhouse forever. I’d be back in the fall. I wouldn’t forget my lines in so short a time. Buckhurst wasn’t so much keeping me as borrowing me.
Perhaps I really was more than a little mad myself.
“But I need my wages,” I said, “to share with my mother and to keep my lodgings here.”
“I’ll see that it’s done,” he said, nipping at the shell of my ear. “A hundred guineas for the summer, let us say. In Epsom, you’ll want for nothing.”
I smiled, though in the dark he wouldn’t see it. “In Epsom,” I said, “neither will you.”
I stayed to finish out the last day of the run of the last play we gave in June. The house was at best half full, with the second act dragged longer by a thunderstorm that sent everyone swearing and rushing for cover. In the tiring-room afterward, the other actresses bid me farewell with false smiles and chilly embraces. No one forgot that Lord Buckhurst’s carriage was waiting in Russell Street for me. Master Killigrew embraced me warmly, and teased me about hunting bucks in Epsom, and promised to hold my roles against my return. He understood.
Charles Hart, alas, did not.
He waited until we were alone in the tiring-room. I was packing the last of my belongings. I was leaving my costumes here at the playhouse, as well as the paint I wore on the stage, a kind of surety that I’d return. The June days were long now, and while the last twilight faded through the window, I’d only lit a single candlestick.
“You are going, then?” he asked, leaning against the frame of the door.
“I am.” I straightened and shut the lid of the last trunk. “His Lordship wants to drive by the moonlight.”
“Whatever His Lordship wants,” he said, not bothering to hide his bitterness, “His Lordship receives.”
I sighed, for he and I had already been over this particular tedious river, and many times, too. “I’m only staying away until September. By the time the leaves begin to drop from the trees, I’ll be back to learn the new plays.”
He didn’t smile, his face all harsh, unyielding angles by the candle’s light. “If we don’t find another actress we like better for the parts.”
“You won’t.” It was the truth, though perhaps too glibly said. “Killigrew and Lacy wouldn’t hear of it. I draw too well, and earn too much for the company. You can’t afford to cast me off.”
“Mercenary bitch,” he said, and if I’d loved him as he’d loved me, those two words would have sliced my heart from my breast.
But I didn’t. “A mercenary bitch earns her own way,” I said evenly. “You taught me that, Charles.”
“Not like this,” he said. “But you’ll do well at court. That’s why you’re going with him, isn’t it? To whore your way to Whitehall? ”
I wouldn’t answer that, or remind him that I’d been a whore when we’d met, and, in the eyes of many folk, a whore with him, as well. It was all a matter of definition, wasn’t it? I draped my scarlet livery cloak over my shoulders, sadly aware of how he made no move to help.
“Can’t you wish me luck, Charles?” I asked softly. “For the sake of the past?”
But his face remained hard against me. “Madam,” he said. “All I can wish you is a place in hell.”
Chapter Ten
EPSOM, SURREY July 1667
There has been much written of my summer in Epsom, by those poor authors who wish either to display their own pious judgment of my supposed profligate behavior or, in the other camp, to earn a quick shilling by inventing lubricious lies to titillate. As is most always the case, the truth (like me) lies somewhere else altogether.
The house that Lord Buckhurst took for us in Epsom was near the center of the town, and set back somewhat from its neighbors—a fortunate feature, considering all the noisy mischief we did raise. The place was also sufficiently large for us to entertain a small serving staff and an ever-changing host of guests to vary our landscape. By Lord Buckhurst’s standards, a small, agreeable establishment, but by mine it was most grand, especially since, as mistress to His Lordship, I acted as mistress to his house, too.
Our house lay not far from the Wells where most visitors would repair to take the waters. These ripe-smelling waters were the reason that Epsom had become such a center of gaiety and amusement, or rather, the excuse for those who came, professing the care of their health, and instead indulging in the riding, gaming, drinking, dancing, picnicking, bowling, dining, and general lying about and abed. I myself never did once drink the waters. At seventeen, my health was fine and glowing without it, and besides, I’d no wish to experience the purging flux that the waters could effect (a grievous disaster for any mistress). But of all the rest of Epsom’s charms—ahh, those I did indulge, and as if every joyful day might be my last.
Unlike my first desultory arrangement with Mr. Duncan, I seldom left Lord Buckhurst’s company, nor did he wish me from his sight, he doted on me that much. Like the rest of his wicked, charming gang, he practiced seduction as an art for pleasure, without the burden of lasting love. As his wild girl, I was eager to oblige, and be schooled in more adventurous skills and practices, such as were common at Whitehall.
Yet though the gossips whispered otherwise, I remained in his bed alone and did not wander. He preferred it that way, as did I, and when he gave me leave to call him by his Christian name, I waggishly noted that he was my Charles the Second—a flippant jest that likely would have earned us considerable trouble in London, but in Epsom was oft repeated to great amusement.
For most of the summer, we had as company beneath our roof Sir Charles Sedley, with his ten-year-old daughter, Catherine, besides. I liked this girl, who precociously showed the quick-barbed wit she’d inherited from Sir Charles. Catherine was already the same height as I, and to her father’s endless amusement, I taught her to perform two-part jigs with me. No one stood on much formality, with the gentlemen putting aside their heavy wigs and I dressing as lightly as if I were another of the shepherdesses on the nearby Downs, and all of us shedding our shoes and stockings to drink and dance on the garden’s moonlit lawns, with the skylarks and nightingales wheeling in the dark sky overhead.
Lord Rochester came often to stay with us, and Lord Buckingham with him, and others whose names escape me now. I was delighted to reign over this rakish, raucous, highborn crew, and though I was much their junior in age, I was every bit their equal in raillery and merriment.
Yet like an insubstantial butterfly whose life spans but a single day, this lovely idyll of ours could not last long. By the end of August, Buckhurst and I had both begun to grow restless, and longed again for the purpose of our separate lives in London. The thing was done, exactly as we’d agreed.
The servants packed our trunks and covered the furnishings, and on a warm afternoon with a drizzling rain, we decamped for London. With his hat pulled low over his face, Buckhurst slept burrowed into one corner of the coach, his lips fluttering gently as he snored a
way. I couldn’t sleep for the racket he made, and instead thought ahead to the playhouse. I was eager to act again, to learn new roles and to gather up the same traces I’d let slip from my fingers for the summer. I was sure my life would seamlessly return to how it had been, with nothing about it or London changed or altered.
Alas, I was wrong—sadly, sorrowfully wrong.
“Again, Nell, with more solemnity this time, if you please,” Master Killigrew said, his patience clearly stretched. “And pray try to recall Mr. Dryden’s words as he wrote them, and not as you wish them to be.”
I groaned mightily, and let my head drop backward with exasperation. “How the devil can I be solemn, Killigrew, when solemnity is not within my nature?” I asked, more to the ceiling over the stage than to him. “I hate these damned confounded tragedies! Why won’t you let me play the comedies that I do best, the ones the audiences wish to see? ”
“No one wishes to see comedies now, Nell,” he said. “Perhaps by next month, the climate of the times will change, but not now.”
I groaned again, flinging one arm over my face. It was not my fault that the English war with the Dutch had gone so wrong, and put everyone in London in such an ill humor. While I’d been frolicking in Epsom with Buckhurst in June, it seemed the English admirals must have been equally giddy and irresponsible, for they’d let the Dutch navy sail directly into the mouth of the Thames, at Medway, and capture or burn most all the English ships moored there. The Dutch had even showed the temerity to capture the English flagship, the Royal Charles, and take it back to the Netherlands as a mocking prize of war.
And I could hardly be blamed if, because of this debacle, the king and his English ministers had been forced into acceptance of the unlovely Peace of Breda that put the king in the foulest of humors, and the rest of the court in ill-tempered sympathy with him. He fought loudly and openly with Lady Castlemaine, and had Buckingham arrested and sent to the Tower on some imagined charge of treason. Wagers were made on how few days remained before the king would demand that Clarendon resign, too, and the mob had already broken the windows of the old chancellor’s house in Picadilly. If ever the king needed to smile at a well-stepped jig, then this should have been it, though I waited in vain for a summons. For now there were no balls, no glittering suppers in the Banqueting Hall, and not a whit of the usual merriment.
Yet though absolutely none of this could be laid at my doorstep, I was the one being punished once again with the daughter’s role in a revival of The Indian Emperor, stumping and thrashing my way clumsily through these lines without a hint of a true tragedienne’s empathy.
“She should know the lines by now, Tom,” said my former lover, Charles Hart. “God knows I’ve read them to her enough times.”
“Perhaps if the words had been better read, then I’d have a better grasp of them.” I lowered my arm and glared at him across the stage. At least the English ministers had been permitted to sue for peace from the Dutch. I’d been granted no such opportunity with Charles. Since I’d returned to the King’s Company two months prior, he’d shown me nothing but relentless attack, criticizing my every word and movement. Though I’d no way of knowing for sure, I suspected that he was the real reason I’d been banished to playing these dreary dark queens and goddesses; he’d no more wish to play the romantic heroes, the Philadors and Celadons, than I wished to be his mad heroines. Most sorrowful to me was how, with his vengefulness, he robbed me of the great pleasure and release I’d always found before within the playhouse.
Philosophers claim that the deepest hatred springs from former love. If that is so, then Charles must have loved me with the devotion of the ages, for he certainly loathed me with that same intensity now.
Pointedly, he glanced down at the scroll in his hand, writ with my part as well as his, to reinforce again how I must still rely upon him in this way. “If you are in need of inspiration, madam, then perhaps you could draw upon the drama in your own life. To have a sister facing the gallows for consorting with the lowest villian—”
“You can kiss my bum for that, Charles Hart.” I tore the plumed crown from my head and hurled it at him. “Aye, mine, and my sister’s, too, you low, scurvy bastard.”
I turned on my heel and fled the stage for the tiring-room. Only the single dresser was there, tidying, but as soon as she saw my black mood, she hurriedly backed from the room to leave me alone. It was just as well. All the other actresses had taken Charles’s side against me. With the flat of my arm, I swept my dressing table clear of my brushes and paint, sending them crashing to the floor with another oath. But my anger lay too near to real sorrow, and was soon spent. I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to grow calm, and not to cry like some puling, impotent infant.
When I’d returned to town, I’d not been able to locate my sister, Rose. When I’d asked our mam, she’d only cursed her as an ungrateful bitch of a daughter who’d been granted finally what she’d deserved, and refused to tell me more. It had been Harry Killigrew who’d told me the truth: that Rose had fallen in with a highwayman for her latest lover, and that when he’d been arrested for thieving, she’d been taken up with him, and the pair had landed together in Newgate to stand trial.
Somehow Rose had contrived to get word to Harry, who’d shown her great kindness, and had obtained a pardon for her from the king for old times’ sake. As soon as Rose had been freed, she’d disappeared once again with her shameful companions, but the tale had already blossomed into full-blown scandal. The same gossips who delighted in tossing this latest clot of mud at me were also pleased with the haste with which Lord Buckhurst appeared to have parted from my company. I’d heard the hateful stories myself, about how I’d been too greedy and demanding, how he’d wearied of my commonness. How, in short, I’d behaved like the whore that I’d been born to be.
I didn’t know where these tales had been hatched, or by whom they’d been scattered, or how now to stop them. All I could do was to hold my head high, and laugh as if it meant nothing to me, as if I were far too fine and mad a girl to be wounded by such empty words.
I stared at my reflection in the glass before me, still struggling to control my passions. I’d be eighteen on my next birthday; not so hugely old, but not the first bright sprig of spring, either. Yet if I was older, I was likewise grown more clever. I’d learned much more of the court from listening to Buckhurst, Rochester, and Buckingham during those long, lazy days in Epsom, and their witty conversation had only further whetted my desire to join that bright world.
My time in Epsom had burnished my beauty, too. My hair was more golden than chestnut, my cheeks rosier from the summer sun, my form rounded and glowing from the fresher fruits and milk to be had in the country.
I took a deep breath to settle myself the way we did before speaking a long speech, then another. Londoners would soon demand amusement and my comic parts again, just as they’d forget the indignities of the Dutch peace. There’d be fresh scandals to replace Lord Buckhurst and me, and my sister would doubtless soon reappear on the arm of another handsome rogue.
I smiled at my reflection and tipped my head to one side to show my dimples. One day soon the king would smile again, too, and call for a pretty, witty girl to entertain him. I patted the edge of the table with my palms, a fanfare for myself. I’d make him smile the more; I’d make him laugh and take joy in my company.
Satisfied, I winked slyly at myself, then went to rejoin the others.
The news that the chancellor had resigned to the king spread through London faster than the Great Fire. On a sunny autumn morning in 1667, Clarendon had been asked to give over the seal of his office. As an additional humiliation, the old gentleman had been forced to retreat through the courtyard garden of Whitehall, there to be mocked by Lady Castlemaine, standing at her window in her smock. The old man’s departure marked the final link to the old times of the king’s father and the wars in between, and the shining new era of the present, where the king would rule by his own will alone—alo
ne, save with considerable assistance from His Grace the Duke of Buckingham.
Or that, at least, was the interpretation I’d heard from Rochester. His Grace had placed his ducal boot to the old chancellor’s bum and sent him on his way. His Grace would now rule the king, and through him the kingdom. Who would dare quarrel with that?
We’d all gathered at Buckingham’s great house overlooking St. James’s Park for an irreverent celebration of Clarendon’s loss of power earlier in the day. Hundreds of candles lit the house bright as an enormous lantern, and within, the wine was flowing faster than the deepest current of the Thames. The core of the guests were our same gang of merrymakers from Epsom—Buckingham, Rochester, Buckhurst, and me—with a great many others from the court besides.
There was no hint of Lady Buckingham, that poor, neglected lady, nor did I expect to see her tonight. I knew enough to see that while these men were all gentlemen, nobles, and peers, there wasn’t a true lady among any of us women. This wasn’t so surprising, considering the collective rakishness of the men, nor did it offend me. Why should it? In perfect honesty, I wouldn’t have known what to make of a sober, pious gentleman who was faithful to his wife, or, likely, he of me.
All of which was for the best, considering the celebratory drinking and swearing and fondling of serving maids that went on that evening. I do not know why it is that gentlemen will celebrate most any event, from the birth of their heir to the death of their foe, by roaring bawdry, yet I’ve heard them do it so often that it must be a quality bred into the male blood.
Suffice that they did, and that I was an eager party to all the mischief. As I’d discovered this summer during the balmy nights in Epsom, Buckingham loved an audience as much as I did myself. If he’d not been born to a dukedom, I do believe in time he would have made a passable actor, especially in comic roles. He was a natural mimic. Everyone was fair game for him: a puffed-up bishop, a political ally, a Cheapside fishmonger—he’d copy them all. The fact that he was willing to twist and contort his imposing ducal figure in foolish ways only made it all the more amusing.
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