The King's Mistress (19 page)

More light and light, more dark and dark our woes …

“You must be gone,” Charles whispered.

Let me be ta’en, let me be put to death

I am content, so thou wilt have it so …

Jane knew that the moment of parting she had dreaded could be put off no longer. She knew she must rise, but buried her face against his chest once more.

“Don’t forget me.” Her voice was thick with grief.

“Oh, Jane, I couldn’t if I tried,” he murmured, his voice husky in her ear. “You have given me my life. You are my life, as much as my breath and heartbeat.”

J
ANE’S GREY MARE WAS SADDLED, THE PILLION GIRDED ON, AND
the Wyndhams’ servant Peters stood holding its bridle. They were leaving the strawberry roan for the king, and Jane thought she heard its nickering from the stable. Henry swung himself into the saddle and held his hand out, and with Peters’s help, Jane climbed up and settled herself on the pillion, her feet on the little planchette and her skirts smoothed down over her legs.

“Go with God,” Colonel Wyndham said, “and may your way home be safe.”

J
ANE AND
H
ENRY WOULD TAKE A DIFFERENT ROUTE HOME, BOTH
because the more direct route was shorter than the way they had come, and because it would be safer not to pass through Bristol, Cirencester, Stratford-upon-Avon, and all the other towns where they had ridden with Charles, on the chance that someone had noted and wondered about the tall dark servant and might recall them. They travelled more slowly, too, as they could not switch off the heavier weight of the two riders between the horses. They rode north from Trent as if towards Castle Cary, but turned east after only a few miles, and at the end of the first day’s travel they had reached a village called Mere.

The George Inn was the sole place of lodging, and Henry had no sooner procured them two rooms and ordered supper than Jane heard the thunder of horses’ hooves on the road. There was a shouted order, the jangle of bridles and creak of leather as men dismounted, laughter, voices, and the sound of still more horses. The door of the inn flew open and several booted Parliamentary officers strode in and hailed the landlord.

“A whole troop of cavalry,” Henry said under his breath to Jane.

“Shall we ride on?” she whispered.

“No. It would only draw attention to us if we left now, and besides, there’s no telling how far we would have to ride to find another inn. It’s nearly dark as it is.”

The eyes of some of the officers had lighted on Jane and Henry, and he raised his voice to greet them.

“Good even, gentlemen.”

They nodded to him and bowed to Jane, and she gave them a distracted smile before dropping her eyes.

“I’ll thank you if you would bring our food upstairs,” Henry said to the landlord. “My sister is ill at ease in the presence of so many soldiers.”

“Right enough,” the landlord agreed. “Lucky you came when you did, or there’d have been no room at all.”

J
ANE LAY AWAKE FAR INTO THE NIGHT, LISTENING TO THE SOUND OF
the soldiers drinking and talking below and thinking of Charles. It was a miracle he had got as far as Trent, she thought.

Keep him safe,
she prayed.
Keep him safe and get him to the coast and France. And let me see him again
. But she knew she would not see him again anytime soon, or maybe ever. She clutched the knotted handkerchief to her, inhaling Charles’s scent, holding his precious watch close to her heart.

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON’S RIDE BROUGHT THEM DOWN FROM THE HILLS
and onto the rolling plains of Salisbury. From far off Jane spotted a strange shape, which as they drew closer she saw was a circle of great standing stones.

“What is that?” she asked.

“Stonehenge,” Henry answered. “The Giants’ Dance, some call it. Very ancient. No one knows why it is there or what it is for, but it will stand long after we are forgotten.”

“Can we ride closer?” she asked as they drew even with the stones.

Henry turned off the road. It was only a short distance to the circle, and he rode around it. Some of the massive pillars had fallen and lay on the ground. Henry reined the horse to a halt and they gazed westward into the blaze of the setting sun, the great upright stones casting long shadows. The wind whipped across the grass of the plain, and Jane shivered.

“Where can they have come from? We’ve passed no stone outcroppings or anything in the land like this.”

Henry shrugged. “Who knows?”

“It seems almost like a church,” Jane mused. “Like the columns down the aisle of the nave, but in a circle.”

“And so it might be.”

Jane stared. The stone circle seemed to draw her in, to emanate some deep sense of power or protection, and she didn’t want to leave.

“Let’s stop for the night,” she suggested.

Henry glanced at the setting sun and at the vast emptiness around them. “It’s not much further to Amesbury,” he said. “With an inn, and beds.”

“There will be beds on other nights. Please?”

Henry shaded his eyes against the setting sun as he gazed silently at the stones, and Jane felt that he, too, sensed their power. He nodded, helped her to dismount, and tethered the horse, and they walked in silence around the perimeter of the great circle. Jane stood and watched in awe as the fiery orb of the sun seemed to balance atop one of the pillars. Deep blue shadows slanted across the grey of the stones. The sun sank towards the horizon, darkness drawing down across the whispering plains.

They gathered brush and wood and built a fire near the centre of the circle, but ate cold food they carried with them. The full moon rose gold in the purple of the sky, and Jane felt somehow, swathed in her blanket beside the fire, with the stones looming black around them, as if she was at the very centre of the universe, and at one with all people since the world had begun.

“Let’s say a prayer for the king,” she whispered. “I almost feel that from here our words will reach straight up to the ear of God.”

Henry nodded, and reached for her hand. They bowed their heads, each in silence offering up their pleas.

They lay down to sleep, huddling close together on the ground, the fire sending its bright sparks heavenward.

Jane woke with first light, the clean autumn air sharp in her nostrils. She gathered her blanket around her, and crept barefoot away from where Henry lay snoring beside the cold remains of the fire. The grass was damp with the dew, and the feel of the moisture on her feet after the days of riding made her feel vibrantly alive.

The horizon to the east was shot with pink and purple, the sun not quite showing above the rim of the plain. She picked her way along the ditch encircling the stones, marvelling at how their appearance changed depending on where she stood. A tall stone stood just outside the northeast perimeter of the circle, leaning in as though pointing the way to the centre.

“Good morning!” Henry’s voice broke the silence. He stood grinning at her, his blanket draped over his shoulders.

“Good morning yourself,” Jane laughed as she went to him. “Isn’t it glorious?”

She twirled, admiring the horizon, still dark purple to the west, and the east now rosy gold.

“Look!” she exclaimed. “How the sun appears just there, in that break between the stones. Almost like a doorway for the sunlight to pass through.”

They watched in silence as the sun rolled higher above the leaning stone just outside the circle.

“What can be the purpose? I wonder,” Jane mused.

“Perhaps we’ll never know,” Henry said. “But I’m glad we stopped.”

“Yes. Here among these stones I feel as though the power of the universe is with me, rising up from the centre of the globe and through my feet, rooting me to the very earth.”

She reached her arms towards the lightening sky, in salutation to the new day.

“I will have to try to keep this power within me. I feel that I could face anything with the strength of the stones flowing through my body.”

The day’s ride took them north to Marlborough and they spent that night in Burford. It was all new country to Jane, but Charles’s absence was a constant ache. She longed to be sharing the journey with him, to have him solidly in front of her on the horse, admiring the view, passing the ride with singing and talking, and warming the nights with love.

On Friday the twenty-second of September they reached Eve-sham. It was only forty miles from Worcester, and had quartered thirty thousand of Cromwell’s soldiers before the battle. Many of them were back again, and here Jane felt more immediately than she had since Charles arrived at Bentley the threat to his life and the completeness of the defeat of the Royalist cause. The royal arms had been chiselled from the stone market stall and lay in a heap of shards of brightly painted plaster, and on the wall was pasted the broadsheet offering a reward of a thousand pounds for the capture of “Charles Stuart, a black-haired man six feet two inches in height”.

The town was full of rumours of the king’s whereabouts. As they ate supper in the taproom of the inn, Jane and Henry listened to three soldiers arguing.

“He’s somewhere not far off, mark my words,” a big fair-headed lad asserted. “In some lurking hole.”

One of the others shook his head vehemently. “Don’t believe it. He’s long since slipped across the border to Scotland.”

“He’d have had to be in disguise to do it,” claimed the third soldier, a little bandy-legged man with a red face.

“And there’s some that say he was,” the first man chuckled. “Dressed as a wench, I’ve heard.”

Jane kept her eyes on her food. Cromwell’s men had not given up the hunt, it was clear, but it also seemed they did not know the truth. She put a hand to the front of her bodice, feeling the lump of the watch pinned there, and said a silent prayer for Charles’s safety.

It would be a long day’s ride to reach Bentley without stopping another night, but both Jane and Henry were eager to be home, so they rose in the dark and set off north, using a different road than the one that had taken them through Bromsgrove.

When they turned off the Wolverhampton Road onto the lane that led the quarter mile to Bentley, and the house was at last within sight, Jane felt as though she had been gone for a century. The dogs barked excitedly as they rode into the stable yard, and soon the whole household had come out to greet them.

“Praise be to God, you’re safe!” Jane’s mother cried, kissing her cheeks. “But where is the other horse? And that farmer’s lad?”

“He stayed at Abbots Leigh to work on the harvest.” Now that Jane spoke it, the story she and Henry had concocted to explain the king’s absence seemed feeble and suspicious.

“Then it’s a good thing your cousin was with you!” her mother clucked, hugging Henry. “Else would you have been at the mercy of every ruffian on the road. I didn’t like the looks of that boy from the first I set eyes on him.”

“We did not expect you so soon,” Jane’s father said quietly, embracing her. His grey eyes were worried as he looked into hers. “Is all well?”

“No. Ellen—Ellen lost the baby.”

Tears coursed suddenly down Jane’s cheeks.

“Oh, poor girl,” Nurse cried, enfolding Jane against her capacious bosom. Jane’s strength left her, and she began to sob, for Ellen and her dead child, for Charles, for herself.

“I’m so sorry, Jane.” John was beside her, his eyes full of concern. “For Ellen, of course, and that your journey was harder than it should have been. Go rest yourself now, and Henry can tell me all about it.”

F
OR DAYS
J
ANE FELT UTTERLY DRAINED BOTH IN BODY AND SPIRIT
. Her whole body was battered and bruised from the many days of riding, and several times she soaked in a tub of hot water, letting it unknot the tension that seemed to grip every part of her. She ached with the loss of Charles, the fear that perhaps he had not got to safety after all, and apprehension that her part in his escape should become known.

And Michaelmas was only a few days away. She had promised Clement Fisher an answer to his proposal on that day, but she felt a sense of helpless despair when she thought of what she could say to him, for her whole life—her very being—had changed irrevocably in the intervening weeks. Her heart and mind were so full of Charles that it was hard to find room for anything else.

And another worry gnawed at the back of her mind, further complicating the question of what to say to Clement. Her monthly courses should have begun, and they had not. She tried to remember exactly when she had last bled. It had been at least a week before they received news of the battle at Worcester, she was sure, but more than that she could not recall. Could she be with child? How would she know? There must be signs, but she didn’t know what they might be. Perhaps the signs were there to see for someone who knew what to look for—Nurse, her mother, Athalia, her other sisters-in-law, the servants. There was no one she could ask.

If she accepted Clement’s offer and married him right away, at least she would have a husband if it proved she was with child. But it would be unkind and ignoble to do so without telling him the truth, and if she told him, it was very likely he would no longer want her. And even if he agreed to take her with another man’s get in her belly, wasn’t it likely that the baby itself would proclaim the truth? Anyone with an eye in his head would look twice at a dark-haired, dark-eyed child of Charles’s, and fair, blue-eyed Clement.

She agonised about what to do, and did not even feel right praying about it. She hoped that she was not with child, and then felt guilty about that. Might it not be even more sinful than lying with a man to wish that no child resulted? Especially if that child was the king’s?

At last Jane wrote to Clement, telling him she was still exhausted from her journey and distraught over Ellen’s loss of the baby, and asked if he would give her another fortnight, until the fifteenth of October, before he came for his answer. Maybe her path would become clearer by then.