Inwardly I cringed to hear such traitorous words. Alas, that also had the sound of Rochester, and his increasing impatience with Charles. Did Charles know it, too, I wondered? Was that why he’d said nothing, only continued to stare at the broken dial?
There’d been painted portraits on the dial, of Charles and his queen and his heir the Duke of York. These had been destroyed as well, the pieces scattered like more unavoidable symbols of Charles’s unending battles with Parliament. I doubted that Rochester and the others had intended any insult—knowing them, they’d more likely been too drunk to intend much of anything—but Charles wouldn’t see it that way. He’d be bound to take it to heart as yet another attack on him and the power that belonged to the Crown. That the attack had come from those he’d considered among his closest friends and companions would only worsen his anger and his pain.
One of the other courtiers standing in our little group caught my eye, cocking his head toward the king with meaning. He needn’t have done it. I already knew that I’d been included in this hasty assembly for the express purpose of cheering the king, of teasing and coaxing him from his ill humor—my role at court. Yet I also knew my limitations. Nothing I’d say would ease the king after something like this, let alone make him laugh.
But I couldn’t let him suffer alone. Daring greatly, I reached out and rested my little hand on his arm in sympathy and mute solace.
“Find Rochester,” he said curtly to no one in particular, without taking notice of my hand, or me with it. “I would speak to him at once.”
That was all, and then he left, still so furious he could bear no other company. Sadly I watched him go. I knew better than to try to follow, and knew, too, that likely months would pass before I’d see Rochester at court again.
Whims, when they bring pleasure, can become habits. With royalty, habits can swiftly become ingrained as traditions. So it was with Charles retreating to Windsor in July, to spend the heat of summer in that bucolic retreat away from London. While he, the queen, and his closest courtiers kept their quarters in the old castle (which was, much to Charles’s enthusiastic interest, still in a near-constant state of refurbishment and construction), I kept my little party in a pleasant house in Windsor itself, directly outside the castle’s walls.
Because Charles regarded Windsor as his summer retreat, he also felt even more disinclined to formality while there, and came sauntering from the castle to my house nearly every afternoon. Our older son, Charles, was nearly six now, a handsome boy who was as quick of wit as he was of body, with a striking resemblance in every way to his royal father. Though he scarce came to his father’s waist, the two of them would go out together as often as could be arranged, whether riding, fishing, or simply tossing stones in the river to see who’d make the largest splash.
Little Jemmy was nearly five, and while breeched and ready for boyish adventure, he’d proved the more reserved of my sons, preferring my company and that of his aunt Rose to that of his boisterous older brother. He’d more my look, and, alas, my smallish stature, which made me dote upon him more. But that was well by me; I’d no intention of forcing my children to go this way or that, like pear trees pinned in awkward patterns against a garden wall. They’d the excellent fortune to be born with royal blood, and that, I knew, would see them through whatever path they chose for themselves.
To remind Charles of these happy country summers, I’d had Master Sir Peter Lely paint another portrait of me as a shepherdess. To be sure, I wasn’t shown as a true shepherdess, with a plain cap and rough petticoats looped above my dirty feet. I’m not even convinced so elegant and refined a painter as Sir Peter could have forced himself to paint a woman’s picture like that, even if I’d wished it. No, to his tastes (and the king’s, of course), I was shown as a Whitehall shepherdess, in a luscious satin gown clasped with pearls, and more jewels hanging from my ears. Even the sheep I’d garlanded with dainty flowers had fleece as freshly curled as a fop’s new periwig. The picture pleased Charles mightily, even as he asked with wry amusement if the sheep were to stand in for himself.
Charles liked it so well that I asked Sir Peter to paint another version for the king’s private cabinet. This version showed me again with the sheep, but with the bodice carelessly, beguilingly undone to reveal one full, round breast. As can be imagined, this second painting pleased the king even further than the first, who rewarded Sir Peter with an extra fee for his invention. In turn, Sir Peter, who was as clever in his business as he was with his brush and palette, ordered engravings made of the bare-breasted version, rather than the more modest one, to be sold through his studio, and I laughed heartily to see it tacked to the wall of most every tavern and alehouse in London.
Yet as idyllic as our time at Windsor always was, Charles never did entirely escape the trials and responsibilities of kingship. Though thanks to the Treaty of Westminster, England had withdrawn from the war between the French and the Dutch, there was still plenty of other mischief for Parliament to foment. Once again they’d begun pressuring Charles to prove his loyalty to the Anglican faith. They refused to vote him funds until he’d signed a declaration in May that had expelled Jesuits and other Romish priests from the country, and forbid all Romish chapels save those of the Her Majesty, and of foreign ambassadors.
Like all such hateful deeds, this ceaseless persecution of the Papists by Parliament had more wickedness behind it. In truth there were so few followers of the Pope scattered throughout Britain that many Englishmen might go their entire lives without so much as meeting a single one. But in the minds of most Anglicans, popery was tangled with witchcraft and demons and sodomy and saints being burned alive, none of which was defensible. Catholics meant the French, and to most every Englishman except Charles and Lord Danby, the French would always be England’s perennial enemy.
All the new laws and acts and rants by Parliament could be reduced to two simple truths: that they feared Charles would betray them to Louis, and York, if he followed Charles to the throne, would complete the disaster by forcing every stout Anglican to convert his eternal soul to Rome. Finally, shortly before we’d come to Windsor, Charles had again prorogued Parliament, and loudly deplored the enemies within the government who sought to keep him from doing what was best for his people.
It had helped Charles’s popularity with these same people that the Catholic Duchess of Cleveland had finally conceded that her beauty, her power, and her reign as a royal mistress were through, and had gone to live in Paris. Likewise, having Louise away on her endless quest for a cure to the pox was perceived as further weakening the Catholic influences on him, just as his banishment of my poor friend Rochester from court after the destruction of the sundial was seen approvingly as Charles finally standing firm against the libertine practices of his courtiers. I will also modestly claim that having me, an English-born Protestant, so much by his side helped him as well.
Yet by the end of the 1675, none of it mattered. All of that goodwill was swept away like crumbs into the coals.
“Lightly, young sirs, lightly, upon your toes!” Mr. Smithson, the king’s dancing master, struck his long measure stick on the floor again, trying to thump a sense of rhythm into the boys who were his disinterested pupils. “You must be light on your toes, as light as if you danced among the clouds!”
He nodded at the two fiddlers in the corner to recommence their music. With his head high and his hands elegantly arched at the wrists, he demonstrated the step one more time, gliding across the long, polished floor of the gallery while the boys shuffled restlessly behind him. Losing himself in the beauty of the dance and the music, Smithson closed his eyes, a beatific smile playing on his narrow lips.
But his reverie was short-lived. He’d just crossed the center of the gallery, there beneath the watchful painted gaze of a gentleman with bulging eyes and a pointed beard, trussed up in a lace ruff from the time of old Queen Bess, when the sweet fiddle music was interrupted by the loud, pungent sound of a fart.
A
t once he turned around, glaring at the boys. The nearest one—his stockings drooping, his coat wrongly buttoned—rounded his eyes drolly, as if he’d never heard such a surprising sound, and raised his hands in perfectly feigned innocence.
“I didn’t do it, sir!” my son Charles exclaimed. “ ’Od’s blood, I vow it must have been him, for there’s no creature on earth more made for farting than an infernal Frenchman!”
“I did not!” shrieked the other Charles, the son of the Duchess of Portsmouth. He was plumper, more delicately made, more neatly rigged out—in short, more French—than my son could ever be, for all that the two of them shared the same father. “It was him that did it, not me! Tell him, Maman, make him stop!”
I rose from my chair beside the window, briskly shaking my finger at my son. “Enough of that, Charles; I know you did it. Ask the other Charles’s pardon before he begins to bawl. Faith, what low breed of courtier will you make if you can’t keep from tittering like a girl over your own jests?”
“What breed, indeed, Mrs. Gwyn,” huffed Lady Portsmouth beside me, fussing with her fan as if to blow away all hint of the false fart. “You shame His Majesty by not teaching his son the manners of a gentleman.”
I smiled wickedly, for I’d always win such battles of wit with Louise. There was almost no sport to it, really. She’d only recently returned to court after her progress through every spa and watering place, hoping for a cure to her pox. To my disappointment, she showed no outward signs of decay, beyond being more fleshy than before. Really, I suppose it didn’t matter whether she’d been cured or not. When Charles repaired to her rooms now, it was for the suppers she served (and I will admit she kept a most excellent cook) and the brandies she poured, and not for her passionless bed.
“Mon Dieu,” she said to herself, clucking like the fashionable white hen she resembled. “No manners, no breeding.”
“Oh, I’d say our two boys’ve been bred exactly the same, Your Grace,” I observed with my customary cheer. “A king for a father, a whore for a mother, and ‘bastard’ for a title.”
She looked at me cunningly, her black eyes like currants buried in her pudding face, and her smile cracking through the paint on her cheeks.
“To speak so, you must not have heard the news, Mrs. Gwyn,” she said. “His Majesty has raised my son, and acknowledged him as his own. Lord Danby has already signed the patents to make it so. Duke of Richmond, Earl of March, Baron Settrington. If you doubt me, you may ask His Majesty himself.”
I did doubt her. How, really, could such a hideous iniquity be true? Without deigning to answer her, nor waiting for her permission to leave (long might she wait for that from me, hah!), I ran from the gallery to the tennis courts, where I knew the king should be at this time of day. I found him there, too, sauntering from the court with the racket still in his hand, laughing and jesting with other gentlemen whom he had no doubt beaten.
“Your Majesty,” I said, blocking his way without preamble or greeting. “Is it true that by your order Danby’s signed the patents to make Portsmouth’s bastard a duke?”
“Nelly, please,” he said, so chagrined I knew it was true. “This has nothing to do with you, and I promise when the time is—”
“To hell with your promises!” I cried, my words so full of pain and bitterness they nigh choked me. “How you could ennoble the brat of that cursed French whore over our sons! Our sons, sir!”
This time, I didn’t wait for him to reply, or make an offer he’d no intention of keeping. I turned and left before that happened. I was twenty-five, and I’d been at court so long that I’d not be that kind of double-done simpleton again. I won’t deny that seeing Louise de Kéroualle and her bastard moved ahead of me and my sons grieved me, because it did. But I knew my choice: I could stay with the king and smile when he handed more favors to those who ill deserved them, or leave him and the court with my pride, and little else besides.
And God take me for a fool, because I loved him still, I stayed.
Yet soon after this, an unexpected benefice did in fact come my way. No gentlemen ever did take credit for it, either. Not Charles, nor Rochester, nor any other who might have had a hand in it. Instead it was granted to me through Her Majesty Queen Catherine. Summoning me, she claimed to be most pleased to offer a post to me, shyly saying that I was the only one of her husband’s misses who’d made her laugh, and had never been cruel to her.
A curious recommendation, that, though a true one. I’d come to admire Charles’s plain little queen, her great faith (Romish though it was), her loyalty to her roving husband, her dignity in the face of genuine harpies like Lady Cleveland. We were both odd ducks at court, she by being born Portuguese, and I being born poor. She was exceeding kind to my boys, praising them and giving them sweets, and remarking their likenesses to their father. As strange as it may seem, I also felt we shared a curious bond wrought by loving Charles, and being loved by him. Perhaps she realized that unlike all the other misses, I’d been constant to him, much as she’d been herself. We never spoke of such matters, of course, nor would we. She was queen, and I was her husband’s whore.
Thus it pleased me no end when she appointed me to a post in her household, as Lady to the Queen’s Privy Chamber, with the rights to enter that place and serve her. It pleased me more to think I’d earned the esteem of such a gracious lady with it.
I stood before the makeshift stage, rigged in the street at Crosset Fryars. I’d dressed humbly, without jewels or richness, and I’d left my chair and bearers behind and walked the last way myself. In my hand was the playbill that had been brought to my door the night before. On it was a gaudy picture of the fabulous doctor who promised cures that no other physician could effect, and wondrous potions made from honest ingredients of such magical capability that other apothecaries kept them hidden, from fear of seeing all their patients returned to health and their trade gone.
I’d laughed aloud when the playbill had been read to me, so deliciously fantastical it was in its claims and predictions. I smelled a mountebank in every word, and recognized a fellow sham in the claims and exaggeration. I also believed I’d sensed something else, and thus here I’d come to see this Dr. Alexander Bendo for myself.
Two lackeys in Turkish dress and turbans came first to the stage (though I could tell their swarthy skin came from walnut stain and no foreign sun). In accents that wandered suspiciously, they related to the growing crowd how the good doctor’s skills had cured the King of Cyprus’s darling daughter, the Princess Aloephagina, shown near naked on the banner above the stage. Surely the princess must have suffered from a dreadful plaguing fever, to have caused her to have thrown aside nigh every scrap of her clothing in such a fashion.
With the crowd’s anticipation thus roused (to say nothing of its gullibility), the good doctor himself appeared to the sounds of beaten drums and crashing Turkish cymbals: The man did know his entrance, I would credit him that. Dressed in long green robes adorned with exotic furs and a curling beard that had likely come from the same source, a wizard’s cap on his head, and a huge medallion of paste jewels hanging over his chest, the doctor told tales of his cures for women (for so he’d limited his practice) and made promises of miracles that no mortal could ever keep. But such was the elegance of his phrasing and the cunning of his claims that, when he was done, women of every age flocked to the stage like fat pigeons begging to be plucked, buying his remedies and setting times for more personal consultations.
I hung back, biding my time and laughing heartily, until the crush was done and I was the last woman to be served. The good doctor took one look at me, and his eyes lit above his beard.
“Ah, madam, I can see from your face that you are in urgent need of my counsel,” he said in his peculiarly indeterminate accent. “Clearly, you must come with me at once to my lodgings in Tower Street, where I can begin to effect a cure and thus put you from danger.”
I made a small curtsey by way of agreement and to keep from laughing outright, and
somehow managed to hold my silence until we were alone together in his small, crowded rooms over a goldsmith’s shop.
“You dog!” I exclaimed, finally setting my laughter free. “You base, dissembling dung boat of a rogue among rogues! Explain yourself, my lord, and tell me how you came to be here.”
His only answer was to make an Eastern salaam to me, and as he rose, I grabbed his curling beard and tugged it free of the gum that held it to his chin, with the waxen nose peeling free, as well.
“Your servant, Mrs. Gwyn,” Lord Rochester said, laughing with me. “How long did it take you to guess?”
“The same instant that Poll read the playbill to me last night,” I said. “It had your hands in every word, though I’ll grant you’ve played it hugely fine. But why, my lord? The last I’d heard, you’d been banished to the country again.”
He took a long drink from the wine waiting on his desk, and began wiping away the paint and gum that had stuck his beard in place. “A small misunderstanding of events.”
“Small!” I exclaimed. “You and Etherege running drunk as David’s sow through the streets of Epsom with some poor sot, who gets himself run through and killed by the watch. That is scarce small, by any reckoning.”
He shrugged carelessly. “ ’Twas not my fault, as I explained to the king.”
“Not even you can explain away a corpse,” I said firmly. “A month later, and His Majesty’s still in a righteous froth against you for it. You’re fortunate he did not put you in the Tower for murder. But if he discovers you’re here in London, he still could.”
“He won’t find me here, Nelly,” he said, hanging the jeweled medallion over the back of his chair. “You’re the only one who’s clever enough to see through Dr. Bendo, and you won’t tell.”
“Indeed I should, to spite you,” I said, indignantly following him about the room as he shed the rest of his costume. “With all the trials the king must face, he doesn’t need to have you causing mischief for him, too.”
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