The Countess and the King: A Novel of the Countess of Dorchester and King James II

by Holloway Scott, Susan

  “You needn’t say more, sir.” I tried to smile. “I understand. Your character must be as unsullied as new snow until His Majesty decides you’ve suffered enough.”

  He stroked his hand along my hair, holding me close. “I’m sorry, dearest. If there were a way—”

  “It’s of no matter, sir,” I said bravely. I didn’t wish him to know how disappointed I was by his news, especially when it wasn’t by his choice to leave me again. “Truth to tell, sir, I’m not certain I could survive such a journey. If I were forced to travel all the way to Scotland in the company of all those priests and Jesuits and confessors and repressors—”

  “ ‘Repressors’?” he repeated, laughing again in spite of himself. “Oh, Katherine, you shouldn’t speak such things.”

  “Why not, sir, when it makes you merry?” I’d learned early that despite his solemn devotion (perilously close to fanaticism in the eyes of an Anglican like me), he would still always laugh if I spoke about it in a humorous fashion, as if my irreverence somehow freed him. I was the only one permitted this liberty, and I took care not to employ it too often. Yet there were times where my frustration gave wings to my wit, and I could not help myself. “Or is it that your confessors are your repressors, and I’ve erred only in my usage?”

  “Perhaps they are.” His face twisted. “But I need those good gentlemen with me to help my conscience follow the path that it should.”

  “Do you, sir?” I asked, widening my eyes with feigned surprise. “Lah, and here I believed you a gentleman grown, free to follow your own will.”

  “It’s not my will,” he said, turning immensely serious. “It’s God’s hand, as it is in all things.”

  I rolled away from him. “It is very hard for me to believe that the same God that made possible your family’s rightful return to the throne would likewise prefer that you squander that blessing by allowing a covey of black-clad priests to dictate your every step.”

  He reached for me as I slipped free, and groaned with disappointment.

  “The Holy Fathers don’t dictate anything to me, Katherine,” he said. “They offer spiritual guidance, which I choose to follow. I promise you, that if I permitted them to dictate my actions, then I would have broken with you long ago.”

  “Truly, sir?” I asked, pausing where I stood, naked save for the sunlight falling over me. Though the rest of the Court might judge me hideously thin, James praised me for being elegantly slender, and loved my body for what it was. Thus I could stand before him now in shameless, tempting glory, and if I’d any doubt, I’d only to see the desire for me in his gaze as he studied me now from the bed. “The priests tell you I’m evil incarnate?”

  “In so many words, yes,” he said, his eyes hooded and hungry as he watched me.

  “I’m honored, sir,” I said, and though I laughed, in a peculiar way I was honored. To think that I was so alluring to James that the Pope in Rome was concerned—hah, who would have guessed I’d ever have such power over any man, let alone a prince? “I’ve been called Dorinda, but never sinful Eve.”

  “That’s exactly what you are to me,” he said, his voice low and rough. “You tempt me beyond reason, Katherine.”

  “I’m glad of it, sir,” I said, “for you tempt me as well, which must by rights make it no true temptation at all.”

  Aware of how closely he was watching me, I walked slowly to my dressing table and gathered up the necklace of pearls and emerald that he’d given me at Christmas. The necklace was long, meant to be worn doubled around my throat, but now I let it fall forward in a single strand, the jewels sliding sinuously over my breasts. I shook my hair over my shoulders and down my back, and I hooked the earrings that he’d also given me into my ears, giving my head a small toss to make the stones dance and my hair shiver down across my back.

  “There, sir,” I said, smiling wickedly as I turned back toward him. “I’ve no apples plucked from the Garden with which to tempt you, but surely emeralds will do in their stead.”

  “You gave me an apple once before,” he said, his gaze intent on the pearls swinging over my pale flesh. “On the Horseguards’ Parade. Your stockings were the same color as those jewels, with orange clocks and garters. I should have realized then what you’d do to me.”

  “You recall all that?” I asked, bemused, as I came to stand beside the bed. “Faith, sir, I was but fifteen then, and a most petulant little chit, too.”

  “Old enough to beguile me,” he said, despair now mixed with desire in his voice, an uneasy pairing. “More than old enough. They’ve warned me that you’ve bewitched me, you know. They’ve told me I must be strong against your powers, yet I am weak with you.”

  I chuckled, brazenly reaching to caress his cock. “You do not seem weak to me, sir,” I whispered, leaning over him. “Rather you seem most wondrously strong, and most able.”

  He groaned, his eyes closed and his hips rising upward to meet my hand.

  “Katherine, please,” he gasped. “Please.”

  “Do you wish me please to stop, sir?” I teased as I leaned close enough to whisper in his ear as my necklace thumped into his chest. “Or please to continue?”

  In a flashing move, he seized me by the waist and flipped me onto my back to trap me there beneath his body, pushing my legs apart to torment me as I’d done him.

  “What is your hold of me, Katherine?” he demanded, his breathing ragged as claimed me. “What spell do you cast, that makes me never wish to leave you?”

  “It’s—it’s only fate that brings us together, sir,” I whispered fiercely, clutching tight to his shoulders as he drove into me, over and over with growing force. “No magic. Fate, and love. Oh, sir, how I do love you!”

  He did not hear me, or perhaps, when I considered it later, he did, but chose not to. He’d told me he wished never to leave me and I’d admitted I loved him, and truly, what could come from either confession?

  He did leave me, of course. He’d no choice. The orders of kings, even brotherly kings, must be obeyed, and two days later I watched him ride out from Windsor. The sun had barely risen when they left, the sky still a pale autumn yellow. Wrapped in a dark cloak against the falling dew, I stood on the same castle parapets as I’d done to welcome him. Then I’d had much company, a cheering crowd of those who wished well to the Duke of York. Now, because of the early hour, I stood alone, where I was sure he’d see me. He turned back once on his horse, and though his face was hidden in the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat, I knew that he smiled.

  For that, surely, was fate as well.

  “IS IT TRUE, THEN?” FATHER ASKED, his manner caustic when next I saw him in his library in Bloomsbury Square. A fortnight had passed since James had returned to Brussels, more than enough for the rumors and speculation to begin anew. “That His Highness will put aside his wife so that you will be made queen?”

  “Hush, Father, don’t speak such idle foolishness,” I scolded. “You know as well as I that there’s not so much as an eyelash of truth to it.”

  He grunted, and filled my glass again with French sillery. “There’s at least two eyelashes that say that when His Highness raced across the Channel to reach His Majesty’s bed, it was in yours that he dallied the most.”

  “Not once in mine,” I declared mildly, the sillery’s tiny bubbles tart upon my tongue. “What lying dog told you that?”

  “Rochester,” Father said. “I’d like to see you call His Lordship a liar to his face, though I’ll grant it does take one to know one.”

  “Lord Rochester was at Windsor?” I asked with surprise. I was sorry to have missed him. “I didn’t see him there.”

  “It’s difficult to see much when your petticoats are tossed over your head,” he said pointedly. “But His Lordship’s health is so perilous these days that he remained at Windsor only long enough to pay respects to His Majesty and hear the latest scandals. He says no one can fathom how much the duke’s besotted with you, and I’ll wager a guinea not even you will lie to me about
that.”

  “I wasn’t lying,” I protested. “We never once employed my bed, not with Lady Portsmouth hovering with her ear to my door. We were more discreet than that.”

  “If you were discreet, Daughter, then it was the first time in your life that you were.” Irritably, he jabbed at the fire with the poker, doubtless wishing he could do the same to James. “You didn’t return with another brat in your belly, did you?”

  “No,” I said, though not without a certain regret. There was no doubt; the jostling carriage ride back to London had brought down my courses. As inconvenient as another babe might be, I loved both Lady Katherine and James so well that I wouldn’t have minded if I he had gotten me with child again. “You can stand down from the pulpit on that particular sermon.”

  I should have known it would take far more than that mild rebuke to dissuade Father from what had become his favorite topic.

  “You gain nothing by remaining with the duke, Katherine, and have much to lose,” he said sternly. “Can’t you see that simply by being with you, His Highness has already demonstrated his taste for infidelity? He’s a Stuart, and half French. It’s in his blood to be faithless.”

  I sighed, and let him ramble on. If the Stuart blood ran with faithlessness, then the Sedley stock wasn’t much better.

  “You’re a clever woman, Katherine. You must know it as well as I,” he continued. “No doubt he’s already jumped from you to some fat Flemish creature.”

  “Or a Scottish one,” I said, sipping my wine. “That’s where the king has sent him next, you know. To Edinburgh. Or hadn’t you heard that, too?”

  Father wheeled around to face me. “Scotland?”

  “Och, aye, Scotland,” I said. “His Majesty wisely decided that if he must banish his brother, he should at least send him off to be usefully employed for the good of the Crown. He’s to sit on the Scottish privy council, and they should consider themselves fortunate to have him.”

  “But Edinburgh, Katherine.” Father shook his head. “He might as well be on the other side of the world. What could be next? Boston? The farther he is from you here in London, the farther you and your daughter will be from his thoughts. The man’s as inconstant as a flea.”

  “But he is constant to me, Father, even in his inconstancy to His Highness,” I said, determined not to quarrel. “It is, as Lord Rochester said, the greatest wonder of the world. At Windsor, Lord Sunderland himself has told me it was so, and Lory Hyde besides, both marveling that His Highness had no other low wench tucked somewhere about Brussels.”

  Father frowned, skeptical. “I suppose Sunderland would know, given the number of spies he employs.”

  “As would Lord Shaftesbury, given that he employs twice the number.” I smiled, and emptied my glass. He was my father, yes, but on account of his Whiggish beliefs I would tell him no more: not of how I’d become a favorite of the Duchess of Portsmouth, or how she in turn had appealed to me when she’d feared for Charles, or how the Romish counselors of the Yorks’ household feared what they perceived as my power over the duke. Most of all, I didn’t tell him of how genuine that power might in time become, and with good reason, too. Because if I’d a hold over James, then he had just as great of a hold over me.

  Instead all I did was smile and tell him next to nothing. “The truth is, Father, that I am as bewildered by this as anyone else. Yet so long as His Highness pleases me and I please him, I see no reason for not continuing as we are, and set the Romish Church on its ear.”

  That at least made Father laugh, and preserved enough of his good temper for us to sup in a semblance of peace and contentment. We spoke no more of James or Scotland or even Sunderland and Shaftesbury, and Lady Sedley’s supper was much the better for it.

  But while James and I might continue as we were, the rest of our Court-bound world did not. On the same day that James returned to Brussels, Charles decided he had had enough of Lord Monmouth’s seditious mischief, and banished him, too, stripping him of his military commissions and sending him off into the Prince of Orange’s keeping at the Hague. To reinforce the fact that Monmouth was no legitimate heir to the Crown, the king also wrote and signed a statement that swore that the only woman he’d ever wed was the queen herself—a step we all hoped would put an end to Lord Monmouth’s mysterious black box.

  In London, Lord Shaftesbury persisted in acting like a madman, and imperiously decided to call a meeting of the privy council himself to discuss the Duke of York being sent to Scotland. Only English kings have the right to call such meetings, and only kings, too, can dismiss a minister and strip him of his offices, and that is exactly what Charles did to Lord Shaftesbury. To further show his power remained, Charles also announced that while a new Parliament had been elected in the summer, he would not call it to London to meet for a year, not until November 1680. My father and the other Whigs found this arrogant and oppressive on Charles’s part and smacking far too much of French absolutism, while Charles in turn believed that the firm hand of a strong monarch was necessary for the peace of the country. All of this served to reinforce James’s position as the rightful heir, and I dared to hope that he’d soon be recalled to London.

  I also learned that my sojourn at Windsor with James had become one of the least-kept secrets at Court. Though no one spoke of it directly to me, everyone knew of it, and decided now I was no fleeting and casual amour, but a mistress of standing. Others sought my favor, fawning and seeking to please me despite my royal lover being hundreds of miles away. I was included in most every entertainment at Whitehall, with a choice place close to my new patroness Lady Portsmouth and thereby to the king as well. It was almost as if my presence at Court represented James, a way to prove that though still banished, he hadn’t been forgotten. As I wrote to James in distant Scotland, this seemed an amusingly ludicrous position for me to be in, fit for a farce or other comedy. I only hoped I’d survive to the end of the performance before the audience began to hurl spoiled oranges at me for my uselessness.

  As 1679 ended and 1680 began, I was largely content, though restive. I sorely missed James, and because of his absence felt myself as much an oddity as a unicorn or other mythical beast. It did not help matters that Lord Dorset had decided to unleash another of his poetical lampoons upon me in my thin-veiled guise as Dorinda. Whatever rancor I’d caused him once by my rejection was long forgotten, and now he wrote for vengeance of another kind, his pen dipped anew in venom at my expense. It was a righteous, Whiggish pen, and I was a fit target for it, being the mistress of the loathed Duke of York. I doubted His Lordship would have dared so much had James been in London. This poem was the most astonishingly cruel yet, and also the one that most amused all those to whom he showed it:

  Tell me, Dorinda, why so gay,

  Why such embroid’ry, fringe, and lace?

  Can any dresses find a way,

  To stop th’ approaches of decay,

  And mend a ruin’d face?

  Wilt thou still sparkle in the box,

  Still ogle in the ring?

  Canst thou forget thy age and pox?

  Can all that shines on shells and rocks

  Make thee a fine young Thing?

  So have I seen in larder dark

  Of veal a lucid loin;

  Replete with many a brilliant spark,

  As wise philosophers remark,

  At once both stink and shine.

  I wept with bitter fury when I read this, safely alone where no one could see the pain Lord Dorset had again caused me. I was not old, I was not poxed, I was not—ah, but no. The only possible defense was to shrug as if words had no power over me, and pretend to laugh at the myriad petty slanders contained in those few vicious lines. I burned the sheet, taking small satisfaction in watching the cruel words twist and curl and fall into the cinders. In my heart I knew the real curse was knowing how much truth the poem had contained.

  At my twenty-second birthday, I was a mistress without a master, a woman defamed for wantonness who yet slept
in a solitary bed, a lady scorned as old beyond my years and vulgar in my tastes, a disappointment to my father for remaining constant to the prince who’d sired my daughter. I was, in short, as great a contradiction as any to be found in London, but there was far more to question about my life than this, as I was soon forced to see to my considerable sorrow.

  WHILE MY FATHER DID INDULGE IN politics to a degree likely grievous to his health, he had continued other, more beneficial practices from his youth such as tennis, swimming, and riding. He’d also continued writing, and was working on another play that he was fancifully calling Bellamira. As a result of so much activity, he was at forty still a gentleman in his prime, with none of the outward signs—gout, palsy, excessive corpulence and drunkenness, blindness, incontinence, running sores, and shortness of breath—of a former libertine’s life that now plagued most of his old acquaintances. Though Father and I were too similar to entirely give up our occasional quarrels, I was still vastly proud of him, as a daughter should be of her father, and loved him dearly, too.

  On an afternoon in late January, Father, his fellow playwright Sir George Etherege, and several others of his more agile companions were engaged in a vigorous game of tennis on a covered court in Peter Street, near Clare Market. In the middle of the sets, however, the wet snow that lay on the roof overhead proved too weighty for the supports, and the entire building collapsed, crushing and trapping those within.

  I was in a goldsmith’s shop on the Strand with Lady Portsmouth when the messenger found me, the two of us poring covetously over trays of baubles as if we each hadn’t enough jewels in our chests at home already.

  “There’s been a terrible, terrible accident in Peter Street, Mrs. Sedley,” the man declared, the sweat of his exertion streaming down his face for all it was January. “The tennis court there has collapsed, and all within were trapped.”