“Her Grace suffers, sir? ”
“Her Grace is grievous ill,” he said. “She denies it, as does my brother, and all the righteous surgeons around her. But a simpleton could see death in the poor lady’s face and carriage, in every movement she labors to make. I know I should pray for her and her mortal soul, that it is wrong for me to do otherwise, and yet—”
“Yet all you can think upon is the welfare of the babe,” I said softly. “How can that be wrong, sir, considering everything else?”
His fingers tightened into mine. While I wore only my smock in the heated room, he’d yet to shed the heavy coat he’d worn against the winter’s cold, keeping it buttoned still, as if heavy wool and soft fur could protect him from the unhappy truths of this conversation.
“I fear how much the duchess has led my brother to her faith, Nelly,” he said. “The people would not accept a Catholic heir, let alone a king. He should remember that. He must remember that, if he is ever to keep the country at peace with itself.”
“But if Parliament—”
“Parliament,” he said with unabashed disgust. “Once I believed the best course for England would be one piloted by Parliament and king together, each with a hand upon the wheel to help steady the other. Now I’ve come to see that such amity is impossible. The members delight in challenging me for spite alone, blocking my every attempt to do what is best for the people they claim to represent. They are small-minded and suspicious, without the vision to see England’s place in the larger world, or what we must do as a country to achieve that. They do not begin to deserve the misguided trust that has been placed within them.”
I’d not expected so much from him, or the discouragement that had spilled out, either. Yet I could no more keep still now than I could with anything else.
“There are two things that all stout-hearted Englishmen fear, sir,” I said. “The Pope is one, and the French the other.”
He groaned impatiently. “Then where would your common fellow have me turn, Nell? To my hook-nosed nephew William in the Netherlands? He’s a Protestant, yes, but he’d sooner break down his own dykes to flood the houses of his fat burghers than to help me or the English. At least Louis and I can reach an understanding as gentlemen.”
“Your people don’t see it like that,” I said. “They fear you’ve betrayed them to Rome, by way of Paris.”
“They are wrong,” he said firmly, but he also did not meet my eye when he said it, a worrisome sign indeed. I’d heard the rumors the same as everyone else at court, that the treaty signed at Dover told only half the story between Charles and Louis, that there were other secret, poisonous clauses that bound Charles to deliver England’s good Protestant souls into the hands of the Pope and his minions in the Inquisition. I’d not believed that myself, not of the king I held so dear, and yet it troubled me to see him with this air of dissembling, of holding himself away from me.
“The people suspect—”
“I know what the people suspect, Nell,” he said, cutting me off. “I am their king, and I know.”
“Well, then, sir, I am glad of that,” I said, just as tartly. “Indeed, I am glad.”
Yet he did not answer, staring down at the floor, his expression so grim as to be melancholy. I rested my hand over his, and without looking my way, he took my fingers, seeking that comfort if no other.
It was little comfort to me. I sighed, longing for a confidence he would not—or could not—give.
“Forgive me, Nelly,” he said at last. “Seeing Her Grace today has unsettled me.”
“As it would anyone, sir,” I said gently. An apology like that was a rare thing from any man, and rarer still from a king. “At least the little ladyships have been raised as Protestants, sir. Everyone knows you’ve insisted on that, just as everyone sees them worship with you in the chapel.”
“Not enough,” he said, his voice bleak and heavy with everything he wasn’t saying. “It’s never enough, is it? And when I see our fine little son, Nelly . . .”
“Oh, sir,” I said, resting my cheek against his shoulder. The irony of the cards dealt to him by Fate was bitter indeed: that a man who had sired over a dozen children outside of wedlock was never similarly rewarded by his lawful wife and queen. “It’s not fair, sir, none of it.”
“No,” he said. “It never is.”
Nor was it then, either. On the last day of February, the Duchess of York was brought to bed of a frail, sickly child: another girl, baptized Katherine, in honor of her aunt, the queen. By the end of March, the duchess was dead, consumed by disease and riddled with such rot and sickness from within that her body was deemed too hideously decayed to lie in state. Instead, she was so swiftly buried that she was scarcely mourned by the court. When the tiny Lady Katherine died soon after, there was almost no notice taken, not even by the duke—a sad, sorry business all around.
At once, Parliament began to play matchmaker, suggesting, with indecent haste, new brides for the duke, Protestant princesses to guarantee a Protestant heir and a Protestant succession. To further prove their point (shaking their cocks like every other bellicose male in creation), they hectored Charles about the coming Dutch war that had centered the infamous Treaty of Dover with the French. Charles’s increasing dependence on Louis was the worst-kept secret in England, the rumors of exactly what he’d promised to the French in return for the golden subsidies growing worse by the day.
But Charles was king and determined to prove it. Though he laughed when his brother said he’d only marry again if his bride was a beauty, he still let his ambassadors begin pursuing Romish candidates among the availiable princesses on the Continent. He often visited the shipbuilding yards to see for himself the progress of the navy he meant to use against the Dutch. Worst of all for me, he continued to pursue the French chit Louise, who was already being met by jeers and catcalls whenever she rode in the park or attended the playhouses with the queen. I could scarce blame the people, either. Could there be any more blatant sign of Charles’s willingness to crawl into bed with the French?
And by early April, I knew I was again pregnant by the king.
I leaned over the rough stone wall, letting the breeze play against my face and ripple through my hair. From here high on the parapets of Windsor Castle, all of Berkshire seemed arrayed before me, the Thames a silvery band weaving this way and that through so many green fields. I vowed I could see clear back to London on a bright, sunny morn such as this one.
I’d left London and the dusty heat of the city for the sweet summer here in the country at Windsor. Heedful of my growing belly, Charles had granted me a handsome small house on Church Street in the shadow of the great castle itself, and there I spent the season with my sister Rose, my little son, Charles, and the king.
In many ways, the summer of 1671 reminded me of the old days at Bagnigge Wells. Charles and I fished and rambled through the woods and parks like an old farmer and his dame. We swam in the river together, I floating on my back with my rounding belly rising from the water, much to Charles’s amusement. Our son, little Charles, was a year old now, a plump, cheery child who already possessed my gift of making his father smile and laugh. Putting aside his kingliness along with his wig, Charles would settle our son high on his shoulders to carry him, gurgling with delight, about the castle, or carry him bravely between his arms as he rode.
Often we dined with his cousin, that noble old warrior Prince Rupert, who now lived in the castle’s tower, and his mistress, Peg Hughes, whom I’d known since our days together in the King’s Company. Afterward, Charles proudly showed me the improvements he was making to the ancient castle, and the repairs to parts ruined by Cromwell’s men. He took me about the scaffolding and over the rooftops, and explained to me how the fortifications had once kept long-passed enemies at bay. He introduced me to the Italian artist Signor Verrio, who was painting a series of frescoes (that is, pictures done into the plaster walls when wet; he explained it all to me, and even let me try my hand at a daub o
r two, along one edge where no one would see) exalting Charles’s return to the throne.
Having never visited Louis’s palace at Versailles, I did not recognize the overbearingly French taste in the decoration that scandalized so many other Englishmen. To me it was simply hugely rich and beautiful, and because Charles was so pleased by the castle’s rebirth, I was as well.
It was like Bagnigge Wells, and yet it wasn’t. No matter how sweet the air at Windsor might be, or how happy the days we shared, I never forgot the dark cloud of politics that hung over everything that Charles did or said. When we rode out in a carriage, it seemed to me that the cheers of his people were not quite so ready as once they’d been, or the crowds jostling for a glimpse of him quite so large. Taking his pleasure with me, Charles refused to let it vex him, and advised me to do the same.
But once I’d shifted our little household from Windsor to my house at Newmarket for the season of autumn racing, I found that those same politics melded with my own life in a way that I could not ignore. It was said that Louis himself had grown tired of how long Louise had clung to her ridiculous virginity, and had ordered the French ambassador, Colbert de Croissy, to see that she finally sacrificed that worthless bit of gristle to the English king for the sake of her country. Even the lowest page at court knew the chit’s role was to be Louis’s spy in Charles’s bed, which I thought made her rather a sorry spy. To the French, I suppose, it must have made some sort of sense.
Thus Colbert contrived the final sacrifice with Lord Arlington, arranging for Louise to be his guest at Arlington’s country seat of Euston in Suffolk, not far from Newmarket. From what I heard (for of course I was not party to it), the whole affair was one of righteous silliness from beginning to end, with Louise pretending to be a true bride, and a score of drunken gentlemen leering about her chamber to witness the bedding. She even tossed her stocking like a bride, and the tears fell so copiously from her squinting eyes that I wonder the poor king didn’t find himself washed away on the flood. I wondered, too, at what kind of pleasure he’d find between the legs of such a weeping willow, for I proudly knew how he relished a lively partner for his satisfaction.
But there’s not a man alive who won’t preen and strut after taking a well-prized maidenhead (even one that was likewise so well-aged as Louise’s: faith, at twenty-one, she was as old as I!), and Charles was no different. With a score of gallants about him, he returned to Newmarket to rejoice like a conquering hero. That rascal the Duke of Buckingham led the revelry, arriving in town with his own whore, Lady Shrewsbury, on his arm and his famous pack of fiddlers ready to add to the celebrations.
Before others, I put on as good a face as I could muster for this nonsense, but I was not pleased. I ask you, how could any woman feel otherwise? I was seven months gone with Charles’s child, ungainly and ill-tempered. I’d no patience to spare for the king playing the braggartly cockerel.
Thus when Buckingham, my partner in so much mischief, came to call on me at my house, we concocted a special prank between us to play upon Charles.
That night, the duke invited the king to join him for a frolic at the local brothel, both of them incognito for the sake of amusement, a favorite conceit of the king’s. Still flush with his conquest, Charles of course accepted the beauteous whore that Buckingham offered to him, and enjoyed her with relish, as was his wont. As the slut withdrew from the chamber afterward, Charles looked about himself to dress and rejoin his old friend.
But while he had been busily swiving, Buckingham had the king’s clothes and other belongings removed from the room. Buckingham himself had departed, too, abandoning the chagrined Charles to face the house’s bullyboy with neither clothes nor money. Nothing Charles could say would make the man believe he was, in fact, the king—faith, why should he?—and it was only when another servant of the house recognized Charles’s face from a coin cast for his long-ago coronation that he was permitted to leave in borrowed clothes.
All this was reported back to me in uproarious detail soon afterward by Buckingham, who’d been able to observe while hidden nearby. We laughed and laughed together as gleeful conspirators will, and my only regret was that I’d not been able to watch for myself.
Nor was I surprised when, the next morning, Charles came storming and steaming into my bedchamber, and not with rampant desire, either.
“Why, good day to you, Your Majesty,” I said cheerfully, rising from my little table beside the window to curtsey in my bedgown and jacket. “You’re about early this morn. Shall I send for a pot of coffee for you? ”
“Don’t play the innocent with me, Nelly,” he said, grumpy and indignant and quite charming, too. “You know last night’s events, and they have your little hands all over them.”
“What if they do, sir?” I sipped at my dish of chocolate, unperturbed. “Surely last night you had your big hands all over that whore. Or was it your new French whore? Forgive me, I disremember.”
“Was it Buckingham’s notion or yours?”
I smiled sweetly, ready with the final line of this well-crafted jest.
“ ’Od’s fish!” I exclaimed, repeating the drollery I’d used so long ago on our first night together, when we’d depended on the hapless Mr. Sillveri to pay our reckoning. “But this is the poorest company I ever was in!”
He remembered at once, both the drollery and the circumstances, acknowledgment flickering through his eyes. It took a moment longer for him to smile, and, finally, to laugh, long and hard, and I with him.
“Nelly, Nelly,” he said as he took me into his arms. “You are as bad a little creature as ever I’ve known.”
I laughed again, turning my face up to his. “Ah, sir, but you are worse.”
“I’ll not quarrel with you,” he said, laughing still as he bent to kiss me. “But I do believe you love me too well to wish me otherwise.”
And may God claim me for the greatest fool in Christendom, he was right. He was right.
On Christmas Day 1671, I presented the king with the fondest proof of my devotion: another son, a sweet infant with curling black hair. I named him James, in honor of the other royal brother, which pleased Charles even more. But still he made no move to grant either of my sons titles, the way he had with the bastards of the Duchess of Cleveland, and the slight wounded me to no end.
My joy in James’s birth was further tempered by other news that came that month from Whitehall. I’d already discovered that Louise had been granted lodgings at the palace in honor of her new status with the king, rooms so grand that they were said to be finer than the queen’s. I was both hurt and angered, for though I’d been Charles’s first love for more than three years now (an enormous constancy for him), I’d yet to be given so much as a closet of my own in the palace. But worse was to come, confirmed by every source.
Amidst all the frolics of last fall, the king had found time to get a fresh bastard on Louise de Kéroualle. She was due to whelp in the summer, and if it proved a boy—ah, ah, I could already feel the grip my own boys had on their father beginning to slip, and his heart with it.
Chapter Twenty
PALL MALL, LONDON March 1672
“Hush now, quiet, quiet, you pack of rogues,” I called gaily, hopping onto the cushioned footstool at the front of my drawing room so all my guests could see me. I held up my hands for silence and waited until they gave it: a useful skill from my years at the playhouse. “That’s better. Faith, sometimes I do believe a room full of my jabbering friends is more noisy than a flock of jackdaws, indeed I do.”
They chuckled, as much from anticipation of whatever I’d offer next as entertainment. My house might not have had the majesty of Whitehall, but it was a good deal more amusing and never, ever boring, the way the court too often could be. Louise was welcome to hold her stiff little suppers in her rooms, where everyone was obligated to speak French. Pish, what fun was that? At my house, I made certain that the language was always English and the jests bawdy, the food hearty and the wine ever flowing, an
d the company the best in all London.
It was a lesson I’d learned from the Duchess of Cleveland (likely the only one, too, but no matter), who’d swayed the king’s heart away from the queen by keeping the better table and more amusing house. Louise had tried to establish her position as a true lady whore with her excruciatingly correct manners, not realizing that Charles didn’t care.
He vastly preferred the challenge of a variety of folk to self-righteous peers and peeresses, and at my house, he could count on that. He liked to banter and jest if he chose, or simply to blend among the others like an ordinary gentleman. On any night, my guests could include actors, musicians, politicians, conjurers, poets, and wits, a troop of jugglers from Italy or fiddlers from Dublin, even the famous fusilier from Weymouth who’d made a name for himself not by bravery in battle, but because he could balance both his musket and that of a fellow on the tip of his nose while singing “Green Grow’th the Holly” by King Henry VIII.
After the entertainments, we’d dance or play amusing games of chance and wit. On warm nights, we’d spill into my garden, which was always kept lit by candles and cressets like a magical bower. If the mood took us, we’d ramble farther, through my back gate and into St. James’s Park. The park’s green lawns and trees that by day sheltered playing children and strolling ladies, by night became a soft-shadowed haven for lovers and libertines, with wanton moonlight to reveal as much as it hid. When I skipped out barefoot across the dewy grasses with Charles laughing at my side, I felt truly like Queen Titania with King Oberon at my side, the ethereal master and mistress of Shakespeare’s old midsummer play.
“All of you, now, I wish your indulgence for my next friend,” I continued, balanced on the footstool, “a most amusing fellow with a most pleasing voice, direct from His Majesty’s own company in the King’s Theatre. Henry Bowman, you rascal, come here and make the ladies sigh!”
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