The King's Favorite

by Susan Holloway Scott

  “I wouldn’t do that to England,” he said, and with maddening facility caught me by the shoulders and drew me close, imprisoning me against his chest. “I wouldn’t even do it to you.”

  “The hell you wouldn’t,” I gasped, struggling against him as I began to laugh, as well. What a foolish sight we must make, I thought, both of us naked and dripping and flopping about in the shallows, with his excited dogs barking and churning about in the water with us. “The hell you wouldn’t—do what, sir? I’ve forgotten.”

  “So have I,” he said, and kissed me, just to confuse me the more.

  His mouth was warm, his lips chill from the river, a pleasant, teasing combination on a warm September eve. I looped my arms around his neck so I wouldn’t fall back, and he hooked his arms beneath my knees, gathering me up to carry me, dripping and giggling, from the river. We made wet, slippery love then, lying on my discarded smock, with only the ducks and dogs as witnesses, and afterward lay side by side on the grass to watch the new moon rise.

  “I like this place,” I said with a contented sigh. My smock being soaked and stained by the grass, I’d put on Charles’s shirt, which draped hugely to just above my ankles. He’d bothered only with the old, worn pair of linen breeches he’d begun the day in, and nothing else. “Could there be another less like London, I wonder?”

  “Keep the house as long as you please,” he said. “I enjoy the quiet.”

  “Spoken like a true country lad,” I teased gently. “To a town lass, it’s all a constant racket of birds and beetles and lowing cattle, the river rushing and the trees rustling.”

  Yet I was glad he liked this little retreat of ours, here not so far from London as to be an arduous journey—we could come by boat in next to no time—yet not so close that it didn’t seem set apart from the intrigue of Parliament, Whitehall, and the court. We’d come here often during the summer months, whenever we could be spared from our responsibilities in town. Though Bagnigge Wells had curative springs like Epsom, it wasn’t a retreat of fashion, the wells being hidden away in the ruins of a broken nunnery, and the town nearby being too humble and old-fashioned to offer the taverns, bowling greens, and other amusements necessary for pleasing Londoners.

  But that was precisely why I’d liked it so. The house I’d taken was an overgrown cottage, comfortable and plain, with wide hearths and scrubbed floorboards and flowering vines that twined around the window’s sills and shutters. The silent old woman who came in to cook for us was prodigiously skilled with her kettles and grills, and treated us no differently than if we’d been Adam and Eve.

  Best of all was the house’s situation on a bend of the Fleet, giving us a private place to play in the water however we chose. I taught Charles how to fish with a hook and a line, a skill (I thought) necessary for any respectable monarch to possess. A creature of the water, he in turn gave me lessons in rowing and sailing a small boat, with often ridiculously wrongful results.

  Most of all, however, we were content to lie idle like this beneath the trees, free of the scrutiny of others and the rituals of playhouse and court. It was much as my friend Mr. Dryden did write:

  A very merry, dancing, drinking,

  Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time.

  For Charles and I laughed much, and loved whenever we pleased, which pleased us to be often indeed, and I doubt there was ever another man and woman more suited to the other’s temper and humor than Charles and I were that summer in Bagnigge Wells.

  Now I rolled onto my side to face him and propped my head on my bent arm, heedless of how the oversized shirt slid from my shoulder. He lay with his eyes closed, content and at ease, though I knew he wasn’t sleeping. With fingertips still puckered and wrinkled from the river, I traced the whorls of the dark hair that patterned his chest. Whenever we lay together, his skin always seemed so dark beside mine; even in London, he’d swim in his natural state every day in the Thames if he could, which had browned him wonderfully, though he also claimed his swarthiness came from the commingling of his French and Italian blood.

  “I remembered what it was, sweet,” he said without opening his eyes. “What I wouldn’t dare do to you or to England.”

  I still had not the energy for remembering, but jollied him by asking again. “And that was exactly what, sir?”

  “Drown and die and leave the country in the hands of my brother,” he said. “I plan to live and rule at least another twoscore years, to spare you all such a fate as King James.”

  “Don’t ever make light of such matters,” I said swiftly. “Not even in jest, I beg you.”

  I seldom gave thought to the twenty years that separated us, for though his hair was mostly gray beneath his habitual black wig, his body remained as lean and muscled as a stripling, and his energy and enthusiasm could always match my own. But he was a mortal man whom fate had treated harshly in his early days, and such suffering so often took its toll on the final span of a man’s days. I didn’t believe in tempting Fate like this, making jests about death, and I couldn’t bear to think of my life without him in it.

  “I must consider it, Nelly,” he said. “It’s impossible not to. There are a good many righteous folk who tell me my sole purpose in this life is to sire another little Stuart fellow to follow obediently after me, with him to do the same after that, ad infinitum. Which, it would appear, I am incapable of doing.”

  “Not you, sir,” I said loyally, even though it meant referring to the bastards he’d born with women other than I. “No one can fault you. Haven’t you given proof enough of that? ”

  “Alas, as every able farmer can tell you, Nell, scattered seed won’t provide much of a crop.”

  I sighed, and struck his chest lightly by way of a reprimand. “There you are, making too light of serious subjects.”

  “What else am I to do, Nell? ” he asked, opening his eyes to look at me with the melancholy that was too familiar. “You should know that better than anyone, my little jester. I can weep and gnash my teeth, or I can acquiesce with grace, and pray that the good woman who is the queen may yet be blessed.”

  “Grace won’t save England from Dismal Jimmy,” I said succinctly, using the nickname I’d given to his stolid younger brother. “Neither will praying, unless you mean us all to kneel down in a Romish church.”

  He inhaled beneath my hand on his chest, either a groan or a sigh, or something that incorporated the gloomiest aspects of both.

  “I cannot cast her off, Nell,” he said, his sorrow palpable in the twilight. “I pledged myself to her before God, and I won’t break my word. She suffers even more her barrenness than I, poor woman, and I refuse to fault her for what is not her doing.”

  There was no answer to that, leastways not one I’d venture. As a rule, marriage had never made much sense to me, and the version practiced by the nobility was the most curious of all. Most every lord kept a mistress yet claimed devotion to his lady wife. Gentlemen who strayed were rakes and gallants, but the ladies who played turnabout with lovers of their own, like Lady Shrewsbury and Lady Castlemaine, were cursed as the worst whores in Christendom.

  The royal marriage was even more perplexing. Anglican kings could be granted divorces. It would be humiliating and disagreeable, to be sure—the bishops would see to that—but it could be done. For the good of Anglican England, it should be done, as well. Charles needed to put his people at ease in this regard. Having both a Roman wife with a train of priests and a mistress who’d converted to Rome did not help his case. It was widely believed that if James ever became king, he’d not only end his brother’s tolerance toward all faiths, but begin an enforcement of the Romish church and launch the persecution of Protestants, much as French kings had done to the Huguenots. From what I’d seen of James and his stubbornness, I believed it myself.

  Yet still Charles adamantly refused to put aside Catherine, citing his sacramental vows to her, an illogical argument at best. How could it be otherwise, when he freely lay with scores of other women (including m
e, to be sure) beyond that same marriage bed?

  With a sigh, I lay back on the grass beside him and let the silence fill the space between us. He was the one who finally turned toward me, though with the falling dusk, both our faces were lost to one another in the dark.

  “Tell me, Nelly,” he said, pretending idle conversation, which I did not for a moment believe. “What think you of Monmouth? ”

  “Monmouth?” I’d not expected that, not at all. Monmouth was James, Duke of Monmouth, and Charles’s oldest bastard son by a long-dead Welsh lass named Lucy Walter. At Charles’s Restoration, Monmouth had been brought to court, given a title and a rich wife, and because he was as well made as his father and exceptionally beautiful (if rather foolish), he received endless petting and pampering from the ladies. He’d also been raised a Protestant, as pure an Anglican as any could want. But Charles had always made it clear that Monmouth would never be made his heir, or have any place in the succession.

  Until now, or so I did wonder.

  “What do you wish me to say, sir? ” I asked bluntly. “Jamie is your Protestant duke, just as I am your Protestant whore.”

  He didn’t laugh, as I’d expected and hoped. “I mean what do you make of him as a man?”

  “He’s comely enough, I suppose,” I said carefully. “He has charm, and he can dance and amuse with more pretty tricks than a rope-dancer at Bartholomew Fair. But as a man he isn’t worth so much as your little finger. Of course, he’s still a greenhorn.”

  “He’s the same age as you, Nelly.”

  I grinned crookedly in the dark. “But he’s not had the same education as I have, has he? ”

  At last, to my relief, he chuckled. “I’d not tell him that.”

  “No, you’d best not.” I curled closer to him. “Are you considering—”

  “No.” The single word was curt, sharp, brooking no discussion. “But the boy believes it. I have been as direct and honest with him as I can, yet he is choosing to believe the false whispers of others around him, those offering hope where there’s none.”

  “Buckingham,” I said, so sure that was who he’d meant that I didn’t stop to consider before I spoke. “That’s who it is, isn’t it?”

  He paused, the kind of pause that made me wary. “What has Buckingham said to you, Nell? What has he said about Jamie?”

  “You would wish the truth, sir? ”

  “Buckingham is my friend, but Monmouth is my son.”

  And I, as his mistress, was caught in the middle. But no mind: If truth was what Charles desired, then as his friend, I was bound to tell him. I’d no doubt, either. I’d heard (and overheard) enough at the theatre, among friends in common, in Buckingham’s own house, to know I’d tell the truth.

  “When Buckingham realized you’d not accept his plan to put the queen aside—”

  “He wished to have her kidnapped,” Charles exclaimed, more amazed than outraged, Buckingham’s plan had been so preposterous, “and carried off to the savages in New Amsterdam!”

  I nodded. “I know, sir, I know. He thought it would look more properly like desertion by Her Majesty, instead of the ridiculous scheme that could only have been His Grace’s.”

  “So what has he arranged for my son, eh?” he asked, not bothering to mask his bitterness. “To fly him on eagle’s wings to the moon, with a promise of my crown on his return?”

  “He has told the boy that you wed his mother,” I said slowly, “and that therefore your marriage to the queen is an imposture, and that he would be considered your son and legal heir by every judge and barrister in the country.”

  Charles swore, something he seldom did, terrible, dark oaths that were a blasphemous mix of French, Latin, and English. “You have heard him say this, Nell, heard him yourself?”

  “I have, sir,” I said sadly. “And worse. He claims to have possession of the marriage lines from that invented wedding.”

  “How in blazes can he possess what does not exist?” he cried, sitting upright on the grass. “What can he show as proof?”

  “What does His Grace ever do, sir, but play conjurer’s tricks with the truth? ” I sat upright, too, back on my heels. “In his house he keeps a black box, bound and locked for safekeeping, that he swears contains the papers. I’ve seen it before, as fine a performance as any at the playhouse. Pledging secrecy, he brings the box out for guests, and sets it on his dining table after the cloth is drawn. He says it holds the future of Anglican England there within.”

  “For God’s sake, Nelly, why haven’t you told me of this before?”

  “Why?” I sighed, for I’d no real answer to give. “Why. Why, sir, because I’d no notion he’d told Monmouth as well. The whole thing seemed so fantastical that I’d not wanted to trouble you with it.”

  “It’s fantastical, yes, and the greatest bundle of lies I’ve ever heard,” he said sharply. Unable to keep still any longer, he now rose to his feet and began pacing back and forth across the grass where, only a few minutes before, we’d been so quiet and easy. “I’ll return to London this night, and demand he make an explanation and a full apology to the queen and to me, and—”

  “And it will do nothing.” I sliced my hands through the air. I’d not forgotten how humiliated I’d been to learn the true identity of Mr. Sillveri, or how, when I’d challenged the duke about it the next day, he’d simply made a huge jest of it, as if I were the miscreant for taking offense.

  I dropped my hands to rest on my knees. “You could put him back in the Tower again, and it would do even less. His Grace will never change, sir. You understand that far better than I, and perhaps the reasons for it that I never will.”

  “I tell you, Nelly,” Charles said, his first anger now fading into something closer to despair, “he has done this to me over and over, under the empty pretense of being my friend, and pretending the greatest fealty to me, and to England. And now this, this.”

  I watched his pacing there by the palest moonlight, the silvery blades of grass bending flat beneath his bare feet, the way he no doubt wished to do to the duke.

  Now regretting how thoroughly I’d spoiled this evening, I stood, bundling my soggy, stained smock with the rest of my clothes. “It seems to be his nature to be full of the cruelest mischief and lies, and to betray those he claims to care for the most.”

  “Yet still he asks for more of me, to be my first minister.”

  “He will not change, sir,” I said firmly. “Better, far better, to correct Jamie however you can, then to try to alter His Grace’s ways. Now come, let’s back to the house. Faith, I’m so hungry, I could eat you, if you don’t take care.”

  “Stop.” He caught my hand gently, threading his fingers into mine. “That was spoken like a friend, Nelly, the truest friend I may have. Where would I be without you, eh?”

  I smiled wryly. “Likely back in London, swiving some other willing slut.”

  He drew me back against him, my back to his chest and my bum to his cock. “Can you not be serious for even a moment, madam?”

  “Serious and solemn, and grim as a Presbyterian on the Sabbath?” I glanced up over my shoulder at him. I know I was hiding behind my humor, protecting my pride and perhaps my heart with it. How could I not? “That’s not why you want me, sir, or why you come to this place.”

  “I want you with me, no matter the place or the time.” With unexpected tenderness, he lay his hand on my belly. “All this talk of babes and heirs, and you’ve never said a word of yourself.”

  “I’m not with child, sir, nor ever have been,” I answered, startled he’d make such an inquiry. “Haven’t you bastards enough? ”

  “Enough to feed, yes,” he admitted. “But I wonder why with you, I’ve not—”

  “Oh, sir, I’ve no complaints,” I said quickly. I was thankful to have no babes to my name, leastways not yet. I’d had so little true childhood of my own, that motherhood held scant attraction for me. Children were a constant trial for an actress, and I’d seen how often they could dampe
n the interest of even the most ardent gentlemen. Charles was unusual in treating his string of baseborn children with such open affection, visiting them often, if not their various discarded mothers. “My mam says it’s likely on account of me being so small.”

  “Your mother,” he said gruffly, knowing full well what manner of woman Mam was. “You’ve not made use of any whore’s physics, have you? I don’t want you poisoned by one of those sinful brews.”

  His concern for my person touched me. I realized the other side of this pretty coin, of course, that each bastard he sired with another woman was proof that his lack of an heir was his wife’s weakness, not his. Every man is vain of his potency, it seems, and my dear royal stallion wished to be the most magnificent stud in the stable. Yet still I was honored that he’d want me to bear his child, and not resort to vile herbs to bring down late courses.

  I began to turn to tell him all this. But rather than looking at me, as I’d thought, he was instead intent on some distant place or person over my head: Monmouth or Buckingham or perhaps even one of those half-dozen children of his. All I knew for certain was that it wasn’t me, and it would seem impossibly foolish to thank him now for something that had already slipped his mind.

  And so instead I kissed him as if that was all I’d ever intended, and turned toward the house and the supper that would be waiting for us there.

  There were many small ways to observe my rising status with Charles and with the court. Our visits to Bagnigge were but the beginning. Not only did he come to the playhouse as often as he could to watch me, but when I was invited to the palace, it was now as a guest, rather than as part of the hired amusement. Done was my time of wearing costumes borrowed from the playhouse’s wardrobe. Now, thanks to Charles’s generosity, I came to the palace wearing gowns of heavy, rustling silk and trimmed with foreign lace and ribbons, stitched by the same mantua-makers as were employed by the greatest ladies of fashion. As soon as I entered, I’d be welcomed warmly by Charles, as well as all my longtime gallant friends from the playhouse. More soon joined them, eager to be seen in my company to curry favor with the king.