This Towering Passion

by Valerie Sherwood

  But . . . Monty was a part of her past, the only part she still dared cling to. “Will there not be plays in London, Monty?” she asked wistfully. “Could you not stay here?”

  He shook his head. His voice was bitter. “The Puritans have ruined the theatre in London—at least for now. There’s no good place to hold a play! They pulled down the Globe, and sent soldiery to wreck the Salisbury Court and the Fortune and the Cockpit—and five years ago they even pulled down the Blackfriars, saying they needed the space for tenements!” He gave a short laugh that was more like a bark. “No, I’d like to take you with me, Mistress Lenore, but acting is a man’s profession in England—though if you could get to the Continent, women play the female roles there.

  “I’d not thought to become an actress,” Lenore told him ruefully. “Nor have I the funds to reach the Continent if I had!”

  Monty took out a large gold watch. “My patron left this to me, as well,” he said. “And it tells me that I must hurry if I’m to catch my stage. Good health to you, Mistress Lenore.”

  “Good health, Monty.”

  He limped rapidly away, and Lenore stood looking after him a little sadly.

  The encounter had taught her one thing: a road which she had thought still open to her—not with Monty’s disbanded troupe, but with some other troupe of strolling players—was now closed. She felt caught in a vise of despair that would never release her.

  CHAPTER 25

  The next day she applied for a job in a baker’s shop— and got it. It paid little, but offered lodgings above the shop and meals with the baker’s family. She was able to give up her room at the George, which she could no longer afford.

  But Mistress Potts did not desert her. She huffed and puffed from the George down to the hot, low-ceilinged room where Lenore, a big white apron almost enveloping her dress, her arms sometimes white with flour, sold heavenly smelling loaves of bread.

  Mistress Potts deplored Lenore’s leaving the George, and her visits were always sprightly. Did Lenore know there’d been so many duels in London the King had had to proclaim against dueling? Lenore dusted off her floury arms on her white apron and said with amusement that she hadn’t known it—very few duels had been fought over her of late.

  Mistress Potts missed the irony of that and rushed on. Did she know Mister Milton’s books had been declared treasonable—and Mister Goodwin’s, too? They were both in hiding! And had she heard of the capture of the cleric Hugh Peters? He’d hidden in a certain Mistress Peach’s bed —and she with a child born just two days before! The searching officers hadn’t wanted to search the woman’s bed, of course—and Peters had got clean away! But the next day, she added regretfully, they’d caught him, and now he was in the Tower. Had Lenore any news, or was she so buried under this mountain of loaves she never heard anything?

  Lenore smiled and received payment for a big loaf of bread. She turned to Mistress Potts. “I did hear that peace had been proclaimed with Spain.”

  'Peace? Oh, yes, peace.” Mistress Potts made a gesture shrugging off war and peace as trivialities. “But did you hear the Duke of Gloucester died? Of the smallpox, they do say! Well”—as Lenore was once again busy selling loaves—“I suppose I must go if I’m to be home before dark. The traffic in London is terrible these days—hackney coaches everywhere, they’ll run right over a body! You must come and see me when you’ve a day off, Lenore.”

  ‘I will.” Lenore smiled and watched her go.

  That fall London buzzed, for the men responsible for beheading the new King’s father were rounded up and tried—most of them were executed at Charing Cross. Mistress Potts hurried over to tell her that Anne Hyde had given birth to the Duke of York’s baby! And in Parliament a great debate took place on a bill that would prevent married women from leaving their husbands. A Mister Walpole stood up and said that if the bill were passed all the women in England would surely leave!

  Lenore felt downcast. With all the wild revelry of Restoration London about her, she was in as bad case as ever—worse even, for she was busy at her job from morn to dark and eked out a bare living. Though no one could charge her now with being a Royalist, she could still be brought to trial for murder, and she was no closer than ever to sending for her daughter.

  She, who had always been so buoyant, now found herself pensive as she worked, ignoring the bright-eyed overtures of the elderly gentleman from across the street who bought enough bread for a household of eight, though he lived alone. He bought it a loaf at a time, lingering over his purchase. The jaunty married man from the next block she ignored, too, for since Lenore had come to the bakery, he had taken over his wife’s duty of buying bread and never failed to try to rally the bright-haired woman who sold him the fresh loaves. The only man she talked to much was the soldier who had lost a leg at Worcester—no matter he’d been fighting on Cromwell’s side, Lenore felt a kinship with him, for he’d been but a green boy dragged into the battle— and when he left to join his relatives in Nottingham she missed him.

  In November Mistress Potts showed her a new book she had purchased called The Horn Exalted: Or, Room for Cuckolds. Mistress Potts tittered that it was very bad indeed—she had promised to send it to all her friends. London was uneasy now; even the carpenter who’d built the old King’s scaffold had been arrested, and Oliver Cromwell’s body had been disinterred from Westminster Abbey, where he’d been buried with such ceremony, and he’d been hanged in his coffin at Tyburn and reburied beneath the gallows.

  The weather, in tune with the times, was wild; the Thames had overflowed its banks again, and Mistress Potts complained she had had to be rowed in a boat through the streets of Westminster when she went to visit a friend. A plot against the King was suspected, and forty men were imprisoned, and the Commons was rewarding many of those who had aided King Charles in his escape from Worcester (several had received a thousand pounds).

  Anne Hyde, now Duchess of York, was holding court at Worcester Court, but Mistress Potts whispered the King’s mother still refused to accept her! Lenore wondered how she felt about the King’s mistress, Barbara Palmer.

  On Christmas Eve the King’s sister died of the same disease that had killed her brother—just when all believed her out of danger. But not even a royal death could stop the merriment of Christmas celebrations in England—so long forbidden by law. And although it looked to Lenore as if she was going to have floury arms and handle fresh-baked loaves for a long time, that Christmas was a bright spot for her.

  That winter of 1660-1661 was a snowy one, and Lenore, now that the baker’s wife had had another child and needed quarters for a wet nurse, was forced to give up her lodgings above the shop—although the baker granted her a small increase in wages to compensate. She moved into cheap, tiny lodgings with a grim view of the walls of Bridewell Prison—a workhouse and prison for women. Sad, pale-faced women entered those gates—and sometimes left in carts for burial. Every day it was a grim reminder to Lenore of where she could sink if her past was uncovered, and a reminder that she must take care not to entangle Lorena in her life—even though she never ceased to yearn to hold her child in her arms again—lest those grim walls enclose them both . . . and then Lorena could be torn from her to spend her young days in an orphanage, many of which were only slightly less harsh than Bridewell Prison.

  But spring came at last. At Whitehall new earls and barons were being created right and left for the forthcoming coronation. And on St. George’s Day in April, King Charles rode through Palace Yard over cloth of blue to the throne in Westminster Abbey and was crowned with St. Edward’s crown by the archbishop. Salvoes from the Tower guns proclaimed him throughout London.

  From the bakeshop where she was preparing huge crocks of dough for the next baking, Lenore looked up as those guns sounded. Her face was flushed, and she looked tired. Crowds had come to London for the coronation, business was booming, and the baker and his wife had left her with only a small boy to help her and gone to stand outside the Abbey and view t
he notables. They came back talking excitedly of all they had seen, “so many fine gentlemen in great plumed hats riding prancing steeds,” but Lenore turned away sadly and finished her backbreaking work. Out of all of Charles II’s train, there was only one fine gentleman she had hoped to see—and she had waited for him in vain for seven hours at Charing Cross.

  "The King will marry that Portuguese Princess—you’ll see!” The baker’s wife wagged her head at her husband and critically sampled a roll. “Not that she’s a beauty or will bear him children!” Her voice was contemptuous. “But for the dowry!”

  Hardly listening to the baker’s mumbled answer, Lenore stumbled as she finished carrying the last of the great crocks of dough.

  “Here, let me take that.” The baker stepped forward. “Ye must be tired.”

  “A little,” admitted Lenore, wearily brushing back a lock of damp red-gold hair. “I’ve been at it for sixteen hours!”

  Too tired to go home, she fell asleep at once on the pallet the baker’s wife graciously provided on the floor of the bakeshop. And dreamed of Portugal and princesses and of Geoffrey, who was never coming home.

  The baker’s wife proved right, for in June a wedding treaty was signed with Portugal—King Charles would marry the Infanta, Catherine of Braganza. Vast sums were said to have changed hands.

  Lenore had lost her job at the bakery, for the baker’s wife had angrily accused her of seducing the baker when she had found the two of them crouched by the oven. That they had only been picking up pieces of a broken crock made no difference—she had flared up and discharged Lenore. Lenore might have argued the point and got the baker to keep her, but she knew it was only a matter of time till the sturdy baker did indeed bear her to the earthen floor, for he’d been harder to handle of late, slipping up behind her for a sly pinch or a quick bear hug. The baker’s wife had near caught him at that more than once—indeed, it was a sudden ill-timed pinch that had made Lenore drop the crock of dough!

  But honest jobs were hard to come by, even for a beauty like Lenore. She worked briefly at several jobs, and for a short, terrible time was even reduced to being a laundress at Moorfields, scrubbing all day and spreading out the clothes to dry on the ground! If only she could have unlocked her heart to one of the many men who wanted to care for her, but Lenore was like a widow in permanent mourning. She wanted only one man—the one she’d never again have.

  From this work the pretty laundress rebelled and in the fall found a situation as housekeeper in the home of a widowed mercer. The elderly widower was enchanted with Lenore and twice proposed marriage. She might even have considered it, for it would have meant she could have Lorena with her, and in a prosperous household where she would be well brought up—but the mercer’s two elderly sisters were forever stabbing questions at Lenore about her background which made her fear the past would be all raked up again if she sent for Lorena. She managed to hold the mercer off, for—except that London had a heavy smog compounded of fog and sea coal smoke which coated the furnishings with grime—the job was an easy one, and she liked his younger children. But at Christmas his two elder daughters came home from school, were briefed by their aunts, and promptly schemed to be rid of Lenore, for they feared she might become their stepmother and—as the aunts had whispered—when their father died, turn them out.

  Lenore, feeling herself secure in the mercer’s regard, ignored their enmity in the rush of preparations for the holidays. On Christmas Day, Lenore—who felt the mercer’s family would be happier celebrating Christmas alone— accepted an invitation to share Christmas dinner with Mistress Potts, whose health had been poorly of late. As she left, wrapping her warm brown shawl around the russet linsey-woolsey dress she had managed to procure with her earnings, the mercer’s eldest daughter slid up to her in the hallway.

  “Where did you say you came from, mistress?” she asked Lenore in her high-pitched treble.

  Looking into that sly face, framed on both side by dangling corkscrew curls that flapped about like a spaniel’s ears, Lenore came instantly alert. “I said I came from Winchester,” she said lightly. “Where I worked for the Wynants on Candle Street just off the High.”

  “That is strange,” said the girl, cocking her head so that her curls wagged and eyeing Lenore with bright inquisitive eyes. “For I asked Gwen Custer, who lives in Winchester, and she never heard of the Wynants.”

  “Perhaps,” sighed Lenore, “they did not move in the same circles. Or perhaps they have moved away. I never heard of Gwen Custer.”

  The mercer’s daughter looked confused, and Lenore walked briskly out of the house before she could be asked any more questions. But the incident had sobered her. It had reminded her that—favored servant though she might be here, she was still a wanted woman, with a murder charge hanging over her head. Her past could still catch up to her.

  She hardly heard the sleigh bells that rang in the cold snow-washed air as she headed for the Hart and dinner with Mistress Potts. Around her children munched sugarplums and hot roasted chestnuts and played at snow forts and threw snowballs—other people’s children. Was she never to have her own beside her?

  To be free of the charges against her, she knew she would need a royal pardon—for she did not feel she could trust the courts. She had fled-—and that would be counted against her. She might well end up on the gibbet. Lenore was determined she should have that royal pardon.

  Thrice she had attempted to gain an audience with the king—though she was not sure exactly what she would have to tell him. Thrice she had been turned away from Whitehall—indeed, there had been several snickers when the good-looking baker’s girl had told them she was the Angel of Worcester.

  “Claims to be a phantom!” someone had said in a hollow, sepulchral tone as she left, red-faced, the last time. And someone else said, “A fine, juicy piece she looks to me, and no phantom! Someone should bed her down and she’d forget to pretend she’s an Angel and be content with earthly delights!”

  Grimly, Lenore had decided she would see the King in spite of his minions. Although she tried at Hyde Park— and was nearly knocked off her feet by a prancing horse and then by some footracers for her pains, and though she haunted Whitehall for a while, she did not see the King.

  When she reached the Hart, she found Mistress Potts waiting—and ready to chide Lenore for not wearing her face-mask through the streets. Lenore warmed herself at the hearth of the common room, smiling at Mistress Potts’s running summary of London gossip, and then sat down to share with her a hearty supper of roast stuffed goose and plum pudding. Afterward she hurried home to the mercer’s through falling snow, listening to the merry sound of bells and Christmas carols from jolly groups of carolers.

  But for all the merriment and idle gossip and drinking of toasts, Lenore had learned something useful from Mistress Potts.

  “You’re trying to see His Majesty in the wrong places,” shrewd Mistress Potts had chided her, for she knew of Lenore’s futile attempts to get into Whitehall. “The play’s the thing! The King’s always there at one theatre or the ether—and usually with his mistress, Barbara Villiers!”

  “Barbara Palmer,” corrected Lenore dryly. “She’s married, even though she may not be working very hard at it.”

  Mistress Potts ignored that. “Rumor has it the King’s going to make her husband an earl!” she declared vivaciously, and immediately launched into a long-winded tale of how the gentleman in the blue coat—did Lenore remember him, the one who smoked the clay pipe by the fire?—had tried to seduce her to his lodgings, doubtless for immoral purposes, but she had fended him off!

  Lenore smiled politely—Mistress Potts must indeed have recovered her health to be so exercised about her virtue! But her mind was racing ahead. At a play ... of course! Why hadn’t she thought of it? She’d heard, of course, that the new King had given Royal Patents to Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant, both of whom had been playwrights in the old King’s time, in the hope of getting London’s theatres start
ed again. These two companies were known respectively as the King’s and the Duke’s; the King’s Company was performing at the old Red Bull while building their great new Theatre Royal near Drury Lane; the Duke’s Company performed in the Salisbury Court Theatre while they remodeled Lisle’s Tennis Court in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. If she merely waited outside the theatre, she would be able to see the King as he entered—and somehow manage to speak to him.

  All the way home that night she planned how she would go about it, and the mercer’s daughters were surprised to see how preoccupied she was, hardly responding to their best-directed barbs.

  On the next day that a play was to be given, Lenore dressed in the amber silk gown in which she had watched the King’s procession enter London. It was shabbier than ever, but the fit was just as snug, and if one did not look too close, the effect was dazzling. Studying her reflection remorselessly in the mirror, Lenore decided the neckline should be lower—this was, after all, a King noted—for his appreciation of womanflesh. Frowning, she managed to lower the neckline a bit so that it showed an even more extravagant sweep of milky neck and shoulder and the pearly tops of her round breasts. The mercer had objected to her taking the afternoon off, for he had declared his gout was most painful today. He sat stiffly in a high-backed Spanish chair with his gouty leg propped up on velvet cushions, flanked by his two elder daughters, clad in rustling taffety. Both girls—so glad to be rid of Lenore on Christmas Day—now glared their disapproval of this “desertion” of their father in his hour of need.

  But Lenore was used to these bouts with gout. She was aware that the mercer was already bored with his children home-for-the-holidays and was merely being pettish about her leaving.