The Devlin Diary (3 page)

W
HITEHALL FEELS DESERTED.
The coach has deposited them at the far end of the palace, past the King Street gate, away from the main entrance where Arlington is sure to be recognized and his companion remarked upon. The secretary’s brutish bodyguards have departed along with the carriage, no doubt on another of Arlington’s egregious errands. Hannah and the minister stand in an archway of the high stone wall that edges the street, just outside a circle of flickering brightness cast by a wall-mounted torch. She assumes they are waiting for someone. She assumes. Arlington has revealed nothing.

She sets her medicine case on the cobblestone walk and peers into the moonless night, sensing the emptiness of her surroundings. She sometimes visited Whitehall with her father when she was younger, before Nathaniel, before Sarah. It seems a lifetime ago, but she has not forgotten the general arrangement. Behind the stone wall, a fathomless darkness conceals the bowling green and the privy gardens. On the opposite side of this darkness is a jumble of two-and three-storied palace buildings ranged along the Thames, where only a few scattered windows glow with light. With lodgings for fifteen hundred courtiers, Whitehall Palace is a city unto itself, with coal-yards and wood-yards,
blacksmiths and drapers, kitchens and cofferers, jewelers and hatmakers, guards’ barracks and chapels and stables. Typically alight with thousands of candles that blaze nightly for the king’s entertainments and the courtiers’ parties, tonight it has none of its usual bustle and brightness. Only once before has she seen it so forsaken: in 1665, when plague terrorized the city and the entire court removed to Oxford.

She leans back against the stone arch. Being out of the coach is a great relief, but her head still hurts with a vengeance. If she can hold very still, without speaking, without moving, the pain might retreat enough to give her a respite of sorts. But that is not possible and will not be for some hours, she is sure. She finds herself craving the medicine. A few drops would suffice, but she will not reach down, open the case, and expose her weakness to Arlington.

She glances at the minister’s impassive face. Why has he brought her here—and why in such a way? Could it be that the plague has returned and he is trying to conceal it? But why her? She is no better at treating the plague than any other doctor. There is no such thing as a cure, not here, not on the Continent, not even in the Orient, from whence it came. Her curiosity gets the better of her. “Why is no one here?” she asks.

“The king is gone to Hampton, and many of the court have followed him,” Arlington says. He does not appear to be dissembling.

“For what purpose?”

Her question is met with a tired laugh and a look of incredulity. “Purpose? No purpose is necessary. He is the king. He may do as he pleases.” As he speaks, a spot of light materializes in the garden. Silently, they watch it grow steadily larger. Soon it resolves into a man carrying a lantern. “It’s about time,” Arlington mutters.

Bearing the lantern shoulder-high, the manservant appears like a single flame emerging from the darkness, his shining boots and copper-colored hair ablaze with the fiery light. He draws near, and Hannah observes his face: clear-skinned and olive-eyed, with a fair brow and scant beard. He can’t be much older than twenty. He has a haughty nose and a firm, even defiant, mouth—a face she would find aristocratic if he were not in livery. His expression is bereft of emotion, the
blank deference preferred by those who wait upon the high and mighty. Or perhaps it is preferred by the high and mighty themselves: surely Lord Arlington is no easy master.

“You’re late,” Arlington says by way of greeting.

“Forgive me, my lord,” he replies, picking up Hannah’s case without being asked.

“Do you know where you are to lead us?”

“Yes, my lord.”

The three walk along a path through the privy gardens guided by the lantern’s small sphere of light. Without the usual clouds of coal and wood smoke belching from Whitehall’s countless chimney stacks, the air is so fresh that she can smell the plantings of thyme and lavender that brush against her skirts. As they get closer to the water, a low, swirling mist carries with it the dank odors of the river: rotting moss and mud and sewage. It creeps between the buildings, into the gardens and into the stone gallery, an enclosed walkway with flagstone floors that connects the long string of royal apartments along the riverbank. Far ahead, at the very end, a curtained doorway leads to the king’s suite of semipublic rooms. Larger-than-life portraits of England’s past kings, queens, and important ministers line the walls, appearing as huge, humorless ghosts that gaze down sternly upon them as they walk past. An average day would find the stone gallery filled with scheming courtiers, each trying to find a way into the king’s good graces for the titles, land, offices, and preferments that are his to bestow. Tonight’s tiny parade must seem insignificant to the noble spectators: a minister with a secret, a manservant with a lantern, and a young woman following closely behind, still in the dark.

Arlington’s man sets Hannah’s case down in front of a large mahogany door. He raises his fist and pounds twice, then bows briefly before he turns and leaves them.

A young maidservant welcomes them inside, meekly scuttling away before they can announce themselves. Lord Arlington doesn’t appear to apprehend anything strange in this, but Hannah feels uneasy from the moment they enter. The enormous drawing room is frugally lit, only a
few candles here and there, just enough so one can pass through without crashing into the walls or falling over the furniture. But even in the dim light the gilded paneling gleams, the chairs bristle with expensive brocade, the tall mirrors shimmer darkly. Intuitively Hannah knows it’s a woman’s apartment, but she rules out the queen as a possible tenant. It is common knowledge that the king has provided the pious and sickly Queen Catherine with lodgings at Somerset House a good distance downriver, a convenient arrangement for a monarch whose peccadilloes are public knowledge. The drawing room is certainly fit for a queen, however, and reminiscent of a fairy tale, except that the castle-sized fireplace is cold and the chandeliers are stripped of candles and hoisted up to the lofty ceiling. A suffocating somnolence, suggestive of death or an evil enchantment, permeates the air.

At the far end of the room, a woman suddenly appears, as if—appropriately in this dream-shrouded setting—by magic. It would not shock Hannah to discover that the woman is but a vision. Behind this vision is a solid wall of gilded paneling, or what appears to be solid; could there be a secret door? That she is dressed entirely and rather extravagantly in black seems doubly portentous.

“Has someone died?” Hannah asks.

Arlington shakes his head while keeping his eyes on the specter coming toward them. “Not recently. She mourns her husband.”

“How long has he been dead?”

“Some fifteen years now.”

An extended, even ostentatious, period of mourning. As the woman slowly comes nearer, Hannah is reminded of a black-rigged frigate steadily crossing calm seas. Her approach is accompanied by a muted trio of sounds: the dull rustle of black brocade; the lisping sibilance of her black slippers on the parquet floor; the heavy jangle of two brass keys that hang from a lanyard tied about her waist, half-concealed in the folds of her velvet mantua. Framing her face is a black silk hood in the French style, shaped with thin wire so that it holds a permanent contour. It billows out from the crown of her head, where it is secured with a large pearl set in gold.

She comes to a stop a few feet away. She is as tall as a man and
slender under the layers of skirts and petticoats. Her pale blond hair is pulled back and arranged in curls at the nape of her neck. Her face is breathtaking: fifteen years ago she must have been an extraordinary beauty. Even now, though time has taken its payment, anyone would agree that her naturally dark brows, golden eyes, and ivory complexion—untouched by ceruse or the paint pot, but complemented by a small black patch on the upper rise of her right cheekbone—add up to a face almost pitiless in its perfection. She turns slightly, with a curtsy for Lord Arlington, and Hannah sees the glaring flaw: the lower half of her left ear is missing, and a straight, thin scar runs along her jaw, from the place where her earlobe should have been to just below the left corner of her mouth.

“Madame Severin,” Lord Arlington says.

For the third time in as many seconds Hannah feels surprise, for in the minister’s voice—this man who reveals so little—she hears both respect and fear. She knows, with a woman’s certainty, that Arlington was once in love with the woman he now addresses. “This is the girl I told you about,” he says, speaking now with his usual dispassion. “Woman, I mean.”

Madame Severin turns to Hannah with a subtle, knowing smile.

“Please come with me,” she says.

The bedchamber is at the end of a long hallway. With the exception of a fire in the grate, it is as somberly lit as the withdrawing room. Small pools of candlelight reveal fine tapestries and exotic furnishings: ornamental screens and gold vases and Oriental cabinets. In a huge four-poster bed curtained with rose-colored silk, sinking into a phalanx of downy pillows and covered to the chest with a feather duvet so light and airy that it resembles a bank of clouds, is Louise de Keroualle, the king’s mistress.

She is ill. Hannah can sense it more than see it, for she is too far away to make out her face clearly. Madame Severin immediately crosses the room to caress her lady’s brow and whisper to her in low, soothing French. In the enormous bed, the king’s mistress looks like a fragile doll nestled in a silk-lined box.

“Mademoiselle de Keroualle,” Arlington declares softly, confirming what Hannah already knows. “Do you know how important she is to the king?”

“Yes.” Like every other Londoner, Hannah is familiar with Charles’s colorful and often controversial romantic life. Louise de Keroualle is the king’s newest mistress, formerly a maid of honor to his late sister, Princess Henriette-Anne, and now officially a lady-in-waiting to the queen. It’s a title for propriety’s sake only, as she has no actual duties to fulfill. At twenty-two, the mademoiselle is also the king’s youngest mistress and, among the English people, the most resented, being both French and Catholic. She has recently borne Charles a child, her first and his thirteenth. As are three of his other bastards—the king has no legitimate children, not having fathered a child upon his queen—the boy is named Charles. For all her unsuitability in the eyes of a Protestant nation, and amidst rumors that she is a spy for Louis XIV, Louise de Keroualle is acknowledged to have eclipsed all other women in the king’s affection. Not that he has renounced all the other women in his life. His longtime love Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine and mother of five of his children, still resides in a lavish suite near the bowling green and wields considerable political clout, even though she and the king are seldom intimate anymore. Nell Gwyn, the popular orange-seller turned actress, lives in fine state on Pall Mall on the other side of St. James’s Park, in a house the king gave to her. Nell’s second child by His Majesty is due in December.

It is no secret that Charles Stuart is dominated by the women in his life. Once a woman has control of the king’s heart—or, according to court wits Lord Rochester and Lord Buckingham, control of another part of his anatomy—he can refuse her nothing: jewels, titles, land, income from rents, taxes, or the sale of offices. Whatever his mistress desires is hers for the asking, no matter how woeful the state of his perennially cash-strapped treasury. In addition to the gifts of jewelry, clothing, carriages, and houses she has received from the king, Barbara Villiers has amassed an income of over thirty thousand pounds a year, at a time when England is once again at war with the Dutch and the sailors of the Royal Navy go unpaid. The less avaricious Nell Gwyn has
acquired three homes: the town house on Pall Mall, Burford House in the Cotswolds, and a royal hunting lodge on the edge of Sherwood Forest. It appears Mademoiselle de Keroualle will profit at least as much as her predecessors; and that’s without taking into account the lavish gifts of jewels and money from courtiers, ambassadors, and foreign dignitaries who use these enticements to purchase her influence with the king. Hannah has heard that the new favorite lives more luxuriously than Queen Catherine herself. After seeing only a few of the rooms of de Keroualle’s expansive Whitehall suite, she believes it.

“How long has she been ill?” Hannah asks Arlington.

“Three days. And I fear she grows worse.”

Initially Hannah thinks that Arlington is professing genuine concern for Mademoiselle de Keroualle, perhaps even a special fondness for her. “The king was displeased that the mademoiselle was unable to accompany him to Hampton,” he continues, adding, “I should not like it to happen again.” Hannah realizes that what she mistook for partiality is actually the concern of a horse owner for his prize filly. No doubt Arlington has engineered Louise’s rise from maid of honor to
maitresse en titre
and has benefited greatly from it. The king’s money and the courtiers’ bribes pass through his hands first.

Hannah moves closer to look upon the mistress’s face. Louise’s beauty is the soft, placid sort: wide, dark eyes in a cherubic countenance surrounded by a mass of red-brown curls. If she were well, the rose silk curtains would mirror exactly the shade of her blushing cheeks; instead, a fevered pallor suffuses her skin, her eyes are hollowed, her lips chapped and dry. With difficulty, she lifts her head and looks at Hannah.

“Can you help me?” she asks in her heavily accented English.

“I can try.” Hannah looks pointedly at Arlington: she makes no guarantee. As she puts her case down, she wonders how much he knows, or suspects. Hannah announces that she would like to see the patient alone, and that she will need more light.

To her surprise, neither Madame Severin nor Arlington protest. They leave the room with only a single glance between them, sending back the serving maid with two beeswax candles. Hannah directs her to place them on the cluttered bedside table next to a tortoiseshell comb
and a pair of ruby and emerald earrings, tossed there as casually as a pair of dice.