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

by Holloway Scott, Susan

  “All?” I asked, staggering to my feet. “Pray God not my father, too?”

  “I am very sorry, ma’am,” the man said, “but Sir Charles and Sir George are both among those still missing, and presumed to be lost as well.”

  “No!” I wailed. “He cannot be lost! Not my father, not this way!”

  “Go at once, Katherine,” Lady Portsmouth said, embracing me swiftly by way of comfort and courage. “You must be there when they find Sir Charles, and pray to God that he lives still.”

  I urged my coachman to employ his whip, and raced as fast as was possible to Peter Street. With my footmen to make way through the crowd that had gathered, I pushed forward to where the fallen court and the tavern beside it had once stood. Now, like a tooth knocked out from among its fellows, only a gaping spot remained to mark its place, filled with the rubble of broken timbers and bricks, shingles and shattered windows. Over all was the blanket of snow that had caused the disaster, trampled and muddied by the men who struggled with shovels and bars to free those who lay buried beneath. Worst of all was the place to one side where the dead who’d already been recovered were laid in a hasty jumble upon the ground, their still, tormented faces and crushed and broken limbs exposed to those who’d come to gawk at their misfortune, the snow around their bodies stained crimson with their life’s blood. Fresh widows wept, bowed and kneeling beside them.

  I caught the arm of a man in a green cape who seemed to be ordering others about. “Has Sir Charles Sedley been found?” I demanded. “Is there any word of him yet?”

  The man looked me up and down, finally deciding from the fur on my cloak and the pearls in my ears that I must be a lady, and deserving of the slight bow he granted to me.

  “Are you Sir Charles’s lady?” he asked, with so little preamble that I feared the worst.

  “I am Sir Charles’s daughter, Mrs. Sedley.” I clutched my gloved hands together, beseeching. “I’ll give a guinea to the man who finds him!”

  “We’ve found no gentlemen as yet, ma’am, neither alive nor dead,” he said brusquely. “Them’s all from the tavern. But I should warn you that there is little hope—”

  “Parker, here!” called another man excitedly, one of a group that had been working to clear away more wreckage. “We’ve found th’ gentlemen!”

  I ran to the spot beside Parker, my heeled shoes sliding across the wet rubble while my heart beat with the hope I’d been ordered not to feel. I arrived in time to see them pull aside another beam and uncover the lifeless bodies of my father and Sir George. They’d been trapped together by the same timber, taken by such complete surprise that their rackets were still in their hands. Their faces were as pale as their white linen shirts, bruised and smudged with dirt, and far worse, covered with their own sweet blood. I shrieked and tried to reach my father, but Parker held me back, rightly realizing I’d bring only more confusion. One of the other men knelt beside my sire’s body, carefully freeing him from more rubbish. My father’s head lolled to one side and slipped free from his wig. Then I saw the great gash across his temple, and how the crimson blood marked his pallid face like some gruesome harlequin’s mask.

  Desperately I pulled against Parker’s grasp as the other man pressed his cheek against my father’s chest to listen for his heartbeat. He sat back on his heels, and smiled up at me.

  “He lives, ma’am,” he said. “Sir Charles lives!”

  I gasped. But while I longed to feel relief and joy, I could not. He lived then, but from the sad and sorry sight of him, I could not assume he’d live much longer. With a flurry of orders, I had my father wrapped with every tenderness and placed within my coach, and sent for a surgeon to meet us at Bloomsbury Square. I ordered Sir George to be taken to his own lodgings and met by a surgeon as well, for he, too, clung to life, yet had neither wife nor daughters to look after his welfare.

  The first surgeon I’d summoned tended Father as best he could, and then later the same day came a second, sent with concern by His Majesty himself. But neither of these learned gentlemen could offer much by way of answers. My father lay still and lost to us, at rest in the middle of his bed with his head neatly bound and his thoughts somewhere else entirely. He would shift and waken only enough to take water and broth, spooned between his lips, but that was all. No whispered words of endearment wrought response from him, and to see a man who was habitually so quick and full of snapping vigor be now so quiet was a frightening thing. All the surgeons could advise was peace, and time, and prayer.

  Though in most ways Lady Sedley and I had little use for each other, we now joined together to preserve my father’s life. I excused myself from the frivolities of Whitehall Palace, and moved myself and my daughter into my old rooms in Bloomsbury Square. Lady Sedley and I agreed that if Father were to wake from this malevolent sleep, the first face he saw should be a dearer one than that of a hired nurse, and so we kept our vigil, alternating our hours by day and by night so that he was never alone.

  For the rest of January and into February, we saw little improvement. These were long hours for me, not only from fear for Father, but also for myself. There is nothing like so much solitude in the face of hovering death to inspire self-reflection, and to evaluate the quality of one’s own life as well.

  Now, though I considered myself a good member of the Church, I was not exactly an exemplary one. I attended services most every Sunday, and I kept awake during sermons, and I never left the poor box unattended, and surely I’d earn some special credit in Protestant heaven for all the times I’d told James he should abandon the Pope and return to the archbishop. But the private reckoning I made of my own mortal soul—of how I’d given my life over to idle pleasures, how I’d engaged in adultery with James and sinned against Mary Beatrice, his wedded wife before God, how I’d borne a child out of wedlock, how I dissembled, and swore, and employed a few special cheats at cards here and there—was not a very favorable one.

  With my poor father laid before me in his darkened bedchamber, it was easy enough for my guilty conscience to recall every time I’d flagrantly disobeyed both him and the commandment to honor him. I even tormented myself with the sorrowful details of how I’d been employed while he’d suffered his accident, how I’d been sitting in the goldsmith’s shop beside the Duchess of Portsmouth, a pair of royal whores greedily surveying their next worldly rewards, and wondered with despair if I’d somehow caused Father’s suffering. Rubies and pearls and blood and snow were all now twisting and turning in my mind together in an agony of guilt and repentance, and fear for my father, myself, and even my little daughter.

  James’s letters from Edinburgh did little to comfort me. I missed him sorely in this time, and longed for him to be close enough to offer the solace of his embrace. While his written sympathy for Father’s accident was genuine enough, the harsh words that he repeated from his Catholic advisers regarding death and final judgments were enough to terrify one of their own saints.

  But in the end, the most fearful warning regarding the fragility of mortal life came from one I’d never expected to give it, and that was Lord Rochester.

  Chapter Nineteen

  BLOOMSBURY SQUARE, LONDON

  February 1680

  I had not seen Lord Rochester in many months. I’d first been occupied with the birth of Lady Katherine and then swept up in the business of the Court, while His Lordship had spent less time at Whitehall on account of his health, and increasingly more time with his family in the country, at Woodstock and Adderbury. When he came to call soon after Father’s accident, I was shocked by the change in him, shocked and infinitely saddened, too. I recalled when I’d first met him at Epsom, how astonished I’d been by his manly beauty and grateful for his kindness to me, a small, shy, unlovely girl.

  Now his formerly rapturous beauty was ravaged beyond recognition by drink and the pox, and his once-elegant figure twisted and shrunk like a scarecrow inside his rich clothes. He leaned heavily on his walking stick, needing its support as he entered
the room, and his sight so clouded that he was forced to fumble and grope for the chair I’d placed beside Father’s bed. The only thing that remained unchanged was his famously lazy smile, there for me like a ghost drawn from past days. He was only thirty-three, yet could have easily been twice that and more.

  He gazed down at my father’s sleeping form and smiled.

  “So this is what it takes to make your father quiet,” he said. “An entire tennis court must topple on his head. I’ve never been this long in his presence without having him gabbling away at me.”

  “He’s been that way since the accident, my lord,” I said softly. I don’t know why I lowered my voice whenever I spoke around Father, when clearly he heard me not; I suppose from habit I continued as if he were only in the thrall of an ordinary sleep, and that he’d be irascible as ever if I woke him. “It is his silence that seems so wrong. The doctors warned that even if he does in time wake, he may not speak again, or be changed beyond knowing. But to think of him without his wit—oh, my lord, I could not bear it!”

  “Nor could he, the fat little rogue, which is why it will not come to pass.” He drew off his glove and took my father’s hand with such gentleness that tears stung my eyes.

  If ever a man’s sins and excesses could have been made visible, then the proof was writ bold across the wreck of Lord Rochester. I’d committed many of the same sins as he, and I couldn’t help but see his precipitous decline as a warning. Was this the unhappy future that waited for me? Would I, too, be made to suffer so dreadfully for my many sins if I failed to change my ways?

  “You are good to come to him, my lord,” I said. “Even as Father is now, it will do him well, I’m sure of it.”

  “Oh, there’s little enough good in me,” he said, and though I believe he meant it as his old raillery, there was a resignation to his words that saddened me further. “Little enough of bad, too, now that I think of it. A dry pea clattering in an empty tankard would have more substance than I. But mark your father. He hasn’t dined properly in days, yet his cheeks are still fat as a suckling pig’s.”

  I laughed in spite of myself. “You say that only because he can’t answer, my lord.”

  “Oh, yes, perhaps I do.” He sighed. “But Little Sid’s not done yet. Every man has his time, my dear Dorinda, and God won’t take any of us before He’s ready. What does heaven need of another bad poet, I ask you?”

  “Then you should be safe as well, my lord,” I said, and lay my hand over his, and my father’s with it. “May God keep you here among us, too.”

  His smile was melancholy rather than bitter. “God will do what He pleases with me, Katherine,” he said, “and I will be ready when He does.”

  I’ve often suspected Father heard more than we realized, especially after Lord Rochester’s visit. Perhaps his old friend’s words reached him as none of ours did, or perhaps he realized how perilously close His Lordship was to death himself. I shall never know for certain, but on the following day Father began to sigh and frown, heartening signs, and soon after that he roused himself completely and returned to us. To be sure, he was so weak that he whispered rather than declaimed, and could barely keep awake more than a quarter hour before exhaustion claimed him again, but the worst was past, and each day brought cautious improvement.

  By the end of March he was well enough to sit upright in his bed and jest with the unending parade of visitors who came to him. I knew that Father had many friends, but it seemed that half of London (at least the half that frequented playhouses and Parliament, with a good deal of the Court besides) must have come trooping through his bedchamber, all ready to rejoice in his recovery and make jests about how neatly he and Sir George Etherege cheated death.

  “You would have marveled at it yourself, Mrs. Sedley,” said Sir Fleet-wood Shepherd, who had likewise been playing tennis at the time of the accident, but had escaped with much less injury to his person. “There was so much fire in your father’s play that day that it blew up poet, house, and all.”

  Father had laughed. “No, Shepherd, you have it wrong, as you usually do. The play was so heavy that it broke down the house and buried the poor poet in the ruins.”

  But Father had changed. There was no doubt of that. I do not know what rare insight was granted to him while he slept, or what horrors were revealed when his own soul hovered in the balance as he lay trapped beneath the fallen roof, but as his convalescence continued, he requested books of sermons and other theological subjects rather than his old satires and novels. I often discovered him so deeply in thought that I feared he’d fallen ill again, it took so much to startle him from it. When Lord Rochester came again to him, the two conversed alone behind the closed door for several hours, so long and earnestly that both were exhausted by it.

  Soon after, Dr. Gilbert Burnet called on Father. This worthy Scotsman was a divine of considerable energy, intelligence, and fervor, and as famous for his outspoken remarks as he was for his piety. Last year, in the midst of the worst of the Popish plot, he had won the favor of Charles by preaching moderation, and by defending James against his attackers. But he had undone that goodwill in January by writing a lengthy letter to the king that enumerated and addressed the royal sins, and Lady Portsmouth (doubtless herself one of the sins) had told me that the king’s displeasure had been long and furiously indignant.

  More purposefully, Dr. Burnet had been spending much time with Lord Rochester, addressing his questions and preparing his soul. I’d credited His Lordship’s declaration that he’d be ready for death to Dr. Burnet, and I wondered if he saw in my father another soul in sore need of tending. As curious as I was to the nature of these meetings, Father kept them private and said nothing of them to me.

  After one such visit, I stopped the minister in the hall to thank him for the comfort he brought to Father.

  “It is to the credit and glory of God Almighty, Mrs. Sedley, and not to me,” he said, his heavy dark brows coming sternly together. “Sir Charles is discovering his own way to salvation, and I am no more than the shepherd who guides him gently forward.”

  Gentleness was not a quality I’d necessarily ascribe to Dr. Burnet. With his rumbling voice and thick-set body, I’d always thought of him as more an avenging angel than a meek shepherd, especially if that angel were a booming Scotsman.

  “Whatever the reason, sir, I am grateful for the result,” I said. “My father is much the better for it.”

  “Thank the Lord,” he said, nodding with satisfaction. “Perhaps there is a message for you, too, in Sir Charles’s redemption. If you should ever wish to explore—”

  “No, no, thank you, sir,” I said quickly, shying from such a bold step. “I am happy as I am.”

  “Are you?” he asked, fixing me so surely with his fiery glance that I drew back, away from its powerful appeal. “God has placed you in a wondrous position, Mrs. Sedley. You have been granted the opportunity to do great good in this world, not only for His Highness the Duke of York, but for the rest of the kingdom, and all for the glory of our Merciful Lord. Consider well your every action and every word, Mrs. Sedley, consider them and act in accordance. There are consequences for everything, both in this mortal life and the next.”

  Startled by his boldness, I declined as graciously and swiftly as I could, and was relieved when the door closed after him. But his words stayed with me long after he’d left the house, and lingered with all the mighty power of a prophecy that I’d do well to heed.

  But like any prophecy, the more I considered it, the more complicated and layered its meaning became, and the more confusing as well. At first I’d taken his meaning to be the most obvious, that I should set aside my royal lover and my lascivious sin with him, choose new and more godly companions than Nelly and Louise, employ my fortune to useful charities instead of frivolous indulgences, and devote myself to my daughter’s upbringing. In short, to repent, and be a perfect Magdalene.

  But for all his faith, Dr. Burnet was not some remote hermit, but a gentlema
n who moved freely in my very secular world, and understood the finest points of the Court. What if he’d intended me to remain with His Highness and try to influence him to return to the Protestant Church? Was that how I was meant to save England? Could this “wondrous position” that he’d mentioned be no more than the lascivious postures I’d already borrowed from Aretino? Was it only through more traditional sinning that I was to find my salvation? It was a troubling quandary, to be sure, one that claimed much sleep from me as I tossed and turned beneath its burden. Yet because I was far more accustomed to drollery than piety, I couldn’t help but see the peculiar irony of Dr. Burnet’s words, too, even as I tried to decipher their meaning.

  “I understand that Dr. Burnet has addressed you, Katherine,” Father said to me one evening with his new, uncharacteristic earnestness. “He’s a very wise gentleman, you know. If he has favored you with his thoughts, then you’d do well to heed them.”

  But for the rest of the spring of 1680, Dr. Burnet devoted most of his energies to the final agonies of poor Lord Rochester. By the end of June, Father was well enough to travel by his own coach, and likewise made a final, sorrowful pilgrimage to Woodstock Lodge and his dying friend. To his regret, it was hardly the farewell both would have wished. His Lordship was so fuddled with the opium on account of his pain and convulsions that Father doubted he knew him.

  When in July His Lordship’s sufferings at last came to an end, Dr. Burnet was the one who helped ease the earl’s soul heavenward from his tormented body. Father mourned his loss deeply, as did I, for it seemed with him had gone the last of my childhood, and the last of the happier days before plots and popery, Whigs and Tories, had strangled the joy from our lives.

  Father believed that Lord Rochester had died a true Christian, and along with his own escape from death, took the nature of His Lordship’s demise as a heartfelt lesson toward his own eventual redemption. But others of His Lordship’s closest friends, including Nelly and Lord Dorset, believed the fervent deathbed conversion was more Dr. Burnet’s contrivance than any true profession by His Lordship, and remained convinced that he’d died as he’d lived, an unrepentant, doubting sinner.