The Perfect Royal Mistress (29 page)

She stood regally, every bit the noblewoman, in a dress of emerald brocade, as the doors were closed by two liveried guards, and Charles approached her, shoe heels echoing across parquet flooring. The dogs were not at his heels, which was a poor sign. She knew there was another girl—another pathetic actress, of all things—and that he had bought her a house, as he had Moll Davies.

Charles held both of her arms above the elbow in a play of sincerity, then kissed her cheek. “It is good to see you,” he said, the strain between them now a palpable thing.

“Is it?”

“Of course, it is. But I shall come straight to the point.”

“Please do.”

“I’m leaving for Windsor within the hour—”

“So I’ve heard.”

“While I am gone, I wish you to vacate your apartments here at Whitehall.”

For the first time in many years, something of the real Barbara Palmer bled though, and her face and voice filled with panic. “Leave? This is my home! Our children’s home!”

“Please do not make this any more difficult than it must be.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Did you honestly believe that I would make this moment easy on you? That after all of these years together, I would simply pack up and walk away? Good Lord, Charles, tell me, please, this is not about that two-penny bottom-feeding
actress
—”

His eyes were angry now, his expression closed to her. “Stop it, Barbara.”

“Stop what? Reminding you of our years together? Of our children?” She put her hands on his face to make him look at her, to see her as he once had. “Will you feel less guilt if you are not reminded of them here running about the gallery?”

“They will all be well cared for. You know that.”

“And me? What of me, Charles? Now that you have a shiny new jade to chase and woo, am I to be tossed out like a used-up old tavern whore?”

“Your mouth is as foul and tiresome as the rest of you has become!”

“Now
there
is a great irony! The king with the open bedchamber door, and his own personal procurer, telling
me
what is foul!”

He slapped her hard across the face—harder, she saw by his expression, than he had meant to. Her hand went up to strike him in return, but he caught her by the wrist until she jerked her hand free. “How can you possibly look at me in surprise for where we’ve gotten to? All the time you were professing your love to me,” Charles said in a seething tone, “you were bedding my best friend, and then my own son!”

“That was pure survival, Charles! The only way any woman can survive a lover with more ballocks than heart is to give him back as good as she’s gotten!”

“You knew how I was, right from the start! I never lied to you about the others!”

“I knew! And I was fool enough then to think I could change you!”

His face was mottled red now, and a vein above his brow pulsed as he closed his fists and held them up to her. “I am king of England, by God, and I shall do as I please!”

“How well I know it! But does your precious Nell know it?” Barbara’s expression was as full of anger as his. “Ah, well. If not now, she will soon enough. It’s unavoidable, really.”

A moment passed. There was a muscle still twitching in his jaw. “I’ve bought you a grand new house on Pall Mall,” he flatly announced.

She studied him for a moment and then smiled, slyly. “For me to go quietly, to leave Whitehall without a fuss, I will go there a duchess.”

“Impossible.”

“Oh, now. We both know nothing is impossible. You’ve only just reminded me that you do precisely as you please. So let it please you, Charles.” Her voice was cold and low. “Make me Duchess of Cleveland, just as we’ve spoken of for years, as you have taunted me with. I won’t go quietly for less.”

“I do despise you!”

“The feeling at this moment, I assure you, is more than mutual.”

She spun away from him then, her emerald skirts swishing across the cold floor. “Duchess of Cleveland,
and
the house. That is my price.”

Later that same afternoon, Nell sat beside the king in His Majesty’s black coach, with six pure-white horses out in front, as they neared Windsor Castle. Gilded and emblazoned with the royal crest, and outfitted in red velvet within, it was a luxurious conveyance, and Nell sank against the seat, still not quite able to fathom her good fortune. She had asked to have her sister come along for support, and the king, who had yet to deny Nell anything, happily obliged, giving Rose and Jeddy a place in the coach directly behind his own.

Like Newmarket, Windsor was one of the king’s favorite places to pass the warm months of summer, those too dangerous to remain in London for the constant risk of plague. His gaze out the coach window was distant as she took his arm and leaned against his shoulder.

“What troubles you?” she asked, pressing two fingertips onto his furrowed brow.

“I don’t believe you’d want to know that.”

“Then you’d be wrong. I’ve an interest in everythin’ about you.”

“Even if it concerns another of my mistresses?”

“So long as you’ve no idea of
me
lyin’ with her, I’ll gladly ’ear.”

A smile played at the corners of his mouth as the coach jarred and swayed. “My Nelly. You do lighten my burden, you truly do.”

“Then from now on, I’ll consider it my official job. When I’m not troddin’ the boards at Your Majesty’s theater, that is.”

“I’ve broken my ties with Lady Castlemaine. I asked her to leave Whitehall.”

“Did you now?” She paused for a moment as the coach turned, and swayed, onto a more narrow, shadowy tree-lined lane. “Did you do that because of me?”

Charles looked over at her again, then took up both of her hands in his. “It was time. That is all. I do not love her.”

“Did you once?”

“I believed I did.”

“For years, they say.”

“Aye, and other loves as well, even so. Several others.” He lowered his eyes and was silent for a moment. “This is not an excuse, knowing what your own life has been, because there isn’t one. But rather, it is an explanation. My youth was a miserable one, full of far too much sacrifice for anyone’s liking.” He closed his eyes then; images that pushed forward from the back of his mind were there now. But he would not let them forward. He could not. “The world of a king is responsibility and decisions.”

“A fair bit of privilege, as well, I’d say.”

“My goal since the day of my father’s murder has been to sample every possible pleasure that I can, and, yes, with as many others as I can. It is the variety that wins me, and it is a fearsome, relentless draw. That is the cold truth of it.” He looked at her then, his dark eyes distant and a little wary of her feelings. “Does knowing it make you care for me less?”

“I’m no one’s innocent, Charlie. I know your ’eart and your prick are very different parts of you, indeed.”

“If you really do understand, you would be the first.”

“I rather fancy bein’ the first at somethin’.”

“Nell Gwynne, you are truly one in a million.”

“And
you
are one in three, all of you named Charles!”

He ran a hand up beneath her skirt and along the length of her thigh. “Have you ever made love in a moving carriage?”

“Another new adventure with the king of England?”

“And another new one tomorrow, I hope. And to answer your question, I find I’m rather more pleased than ever to be your Charles the Third!”

Evenings at Windsor were a continuing cycle of banquets, dancing, card parties, cockfights, and debauched games. But the comparisons to any world Nell had ever known abruptly ended there. There were also daylong hunting trips from which the women at court were excluded. Nell began to spend much of the day in the company of the wives, mistresses, and ladies of the king’s court. They were well-trained women who had a far better mastery of things, even down to how to wear their clothes. Nell was certain that the sheer weight of her petticoats, hidden beneath her new and complex fussy dresses and cagelike bodices, would be her undoing. It was so different from wearing a costume she thought, where movements were exaggerated intentionally. These women could glide in their petticoat armor, they smoothly dipped into curtsies, whereas she collapsed beneath the weight of the movement, the dress, and the underclothes contrivances.

Worst of all was that they softly chuckled when her laughter erupted quite beyond her control, highlighting the great difference between them.

Nell’s general discomfort was made all the more intense by the round of unrelenting invitations from the wives who knew Queen Catherine and Lady Castlemaine. Nell knew they tolerated her, in her new, daringly low gown with her swelling bosom and awkward new hairstyle, only because she was in the highest favor with the king. But they made it clear, as they smiled at her while she forgot not to say “ain’t,” that she would only ever be an actress and a jade.

Still, they played cards in her company, and did needlework beside her in the privy gardens, with its clipped yew hedges and blossoming rosebushes. And they gossiped incessantly. Mary Fairfax, soon to marry the Duke of Buckingham, was the least abrasive. She sewed, smiled, and said little. Anna Maria, Lady Shrewsbury, with her thick, pursed lips, turned-up nose, and deep-set eyes, made up for it. Nell thought she, Buckingham’s new mistress, was the worst.

“Poor dear
madame,
as they call our own Henrietta Anne in France,” Shrewsbury scowled as she exchanged a glance with the Duchess of York. “I do not know how she can bear her days at the French court, with a husband who finds greater worth in the company of young men than in her.”

Their heavy skirts rustled as they moved, and the air was too full of perfume.

“It is a scandal,” Isabella, Lady Arlington, concurred, tittering obnoxiously behind an intricate lace fan. She had raised it suddenly, as if there was even a modicum of modesty about her. Her position as wife of the secretary of state had made her more bold than wise.

Margaret Ashley, wife of the chancellor of the exchequer, did not do needlework, she said, as her eyesight was poor; she could focus exclusively on stirring scandalous topics for a group of bored women to contemplate and laugh over.

“His Majesty’s sister does her duty to the English Crown, first and foremost. But the Duke of Orléans much prefers to do his duty to the chevalier de Lorraine,” said Lady Ashley, bringing a bawdy fit of laughter up from all of them.

Nell bit her lip and tried again to focus on the mass of thread and fabric on the hoop before her, making it resemble something near to a rose. She had no idea how so tedious an endeavor could be either entertaining or relaxing, or how they might have spent a lifetime practicing.

They sat collected on a wide flagstone path at the center of a lush flower garden, brimming with fat, fragrant pink roses and clematis, accented by huge statues of Greek goddesses. Beside them was a stone pond full of moss and water lilies. It had been the garden of Queen Henrietta Maria, the king’s mother, before the murder of her husband, before the dark days of Oliver Cromwell, and her exiled years in France, when all of the flowers were allowed to die, and the joys at court passed away behind sober form and prayer. Now the garden was back, and for the use of anyone at court, to gossip in, or while away the hours, since the new queen was away so often.

“Poor dear. Do you suppose she has the good sense to take her own lover yet?” Isabella asked.

“Hopefully, not a young coxcomb like Lord Buckhurst,” Margaret Ashley cackled, tapping her knee. “That truly would be going from the kettle into the fire!”

They were like crows, Nell thought. Elegant, silk-clad crows. Nipping back and forth. Harsh. Crude. She was struggling not to spring up, toss down her needlework hoop, and run all the way back to London at the very moment she heard Buckhurst’s name.

His image came flooding back at her. Their time together…the awkward parting. He was in France? At the court of Louis XIV?
That
was why he had never spoken to her after her return from Newmarket? “Why is Lord Buckhurst in France?” she heard herself ask.

“Sent by His Majesty personally, sweeting. Official business for the Crown,” replied Lady Ashley nonchalantly.