The Perfect Royal Mistress (48 page)

“So
that
was how Lord Arlington came to her rescue?”

“And, alas, why she was not able to make the grand entrance into London she had planned. But I hope that shall remain our little secret.”

Nell tipped her head back then and sounded that rich, deep laugh of hers that everyone at court had come to know well. “George Villiers, I do believe I love you!”

“So long as the king doesn’t know, I say I am well pleased to hear it!”

Nell did not see Charles again for the rest of the summer, as he had left London for his progress to Windsor, and then moved on to Hampton Court, while she finished out the run of the play. When autumn came, and His Majesty returned to the palace at Whitehall, two major changes had occurred.

Louise de Kéroualle was officially His Majesty’s other acknowledged mistress.

And Nell Gwynne knew for certain what she had suspected for weeks: She was once again pregnant with the king’s child.

Chapter 29

V
ARIETY IS THE SOUL OF PLEASURE.

—Aphra Behn

O
N
Christmas day in the year 1670, Nell gave birth to a second son. She chose to name him James, after the Duke of York, who, slowly and at first reluctantly, had become one of her greatest admirers. The brothers went together to visit her as a light snow fell; London appeared coated with a dusting of sweet powdered sugar.

“He looks like our father,” James said as he descended the stairs behind the king.

The house was alive with activity, and everything was heavily decorated for the holiday with holly and ivy and big green velvet sashes. Servants were bustling about, and laughing children were dashing through the corridors.

“Praise God, he is healthy, as Nell is. I am truly a blessed man.”

“I like her, Charles. I know I gave you a difficult time over her in the beginning. I didn’t think I could truly care about her, considering everything. But I do. Everyone does.”

“As opposed to anyone in particular?”

James shrugged. “I bid you only to take care with her competition, my brother.”

“As you have with your own mistresses?”

“I am not a king.”

“Yet.”

“She is not thought of the way Nell is, Charles. The people despise your Louise.”

“They are very different women.”

“Look. There is only you and I left now from all father and mother created, from all their hopes and dreams, and I have tried only to be the counsel to you that father would have been. That Minette was to us both.”

Charles softened. “Mademoiselle de Kéroualle is a pleasant and lovely diversion, James, and she dresses up nicely for formal occasions. You needn’t trouble yourself about her beyond that.”

“They say she is a spy for France, Charles, sent here by Louis personally to seduce you, and then from her post to keep him informed of your alliances and loyalty.”

“Ah,
those
rumors.”

“You make light of something serious.”

“All of my life that has been my mode of survival, and you well know it. You cannot have forgotten, can you, what life was for us when we were sent from England, not so very long ago? I am the people’s king, and their ruler every waking hour, but I’ll be damned to hell if you, or anyone else, will tell me what to do when I wish to be merely a man.”

“Concentrate on Nell, Charles, and take great caution with her rival. I bid you that only with the greatest brotherly affection.”

Charles embraced his brother then, and, for a moment, they were silent. “And I am sorry about Anne.”

“Whatever our problems, she was my wife. I should have been a better husband before she died.”

“Perhaps to your
next
wife.”

“God willing. I did not actually believe there would ever be one.”

“I do not suppose there is any point in my asking you to consider the offer of Marie de Guise? It would go a long way to strengthening our alliance with France.”

“I thought that was precisely what you were doing with Mademoiselle de Kéroualle.”

“Bastard!” Charles laughed.

As they walked together back into the long hallway lined with ancient portraits in heavy gold, the ceiling paneled and gilded overhead, Charles slapped his brother’s back. “So there is no chance at all of a Guise alliance?” he asked again with a half-bitten smile.

“About as much chance as my asking
you
not to continue on with my lady Carwell.”

After several months in the same house, Nell and Helena Gwynne had begun to forge a tentative, if strained, coexistence. Helena had been there for the birth of her daughter’s second child, holding Nell’s hand throughout, refusing to leave the task to midwives. She helped with Charles and Jeddy, complaining little, and she seemed to have given up the urge for gin entirely. Helena was revealing a maternal side to herself, one Nell had never experienced, and it began to heal some of the deepest wounds that had long divided them.

On New Year’s Day, Rose and John Cassells were married at St. Stephen’s, a small ivy-covered stone church on the corner of Drury Lane, near the Cock & Pye. The King of England attended the small ceremony, as did the Duke of York, the Duke of Buckingham, and the rest of what Charles now affectionately called Nell’s merry band, rounding out the unlikely collection. Patrick Gound from the tavern was also among the guests.

The house, when they all returned to it, was decorated with white ribbons and garlands of ivy and roses, and everything smelled of flowers and lemon oil.

“’Is name was Rowland,” Helena said in a soft voice, her face made vulnerable, unshed tears in her eyes. Nell glanced up, moved swiftly from the joy of the wedding, and not immediately understanding. Until her mother continued. They were alone together upstairs where Nell had gone to check on the children. “And ’e was indeed, once upon a time, every girl’s fairy tale, a captain in ’Is Majesty’s army. God, but we were ’appy then.”

Stunned, Nell sank onto a hassock. “What ’appened to my father, Ma?”

“The end of ’is life was not so brilliant as the first. ’E died in debtor’s prison in Oxford, where ’e’d been assigned, Nelly. A lost soul. A disgrace. There was the two of you by then, and only me, ’eartbroken, and left to figure things out.”

“You didn’t do a very good job of figurin’.”

“True enough. And in the end, I made a livin’ the only way I could.”

“You should’ve told us, Ma. At least there was a tiny bit of ’is life Rose ’n me could ’ave ’ad to ’old on to if you’d told us.”

“I ’adn’t it to give to you. ’Twas all taken up with what came after ’e died.”

“The drinkin’ and the men.”

“Aye, that. The point is, I’m sorry, Nelly.”

Tears had come to her eyes, but Nell brushed them away with the back of her hand. She stood and looked out the windows onto the busy square. The music and laughter from the wedding party downstairs rose up around them, filling the odd silence. When she turned back, Helena was standing, too, half in shadows, and half in the slanting light coming in through the long windowpanes. But neither of them knew what more to say.

Louise rounded a corner, stalking through one corridor of Whitehall and then another, her yellow silk taffeta skirts billowing out behind her like a lemony sail. Around her, a cortege of court ladies, her wardrobe mistress, the French ambassador, and other pretty young attendants scrambled to keep up with her charging pace.

“What business have you?” asked one of the two guards posted at the king’s privy door as the collection of spaniels barked from the other side.

“I see ze king now!” she ordered in her fractured English soprano.

“His Majesty is not here, madam,” he said dryly.

“Zen ’e is
where
?”

“Not here is all I know, madam.”

Insolent fool,
she thought. But she did not know the words in English, even if she had been unwise enough to speak them aloud. Her hand went to her hips, and she looked back at de Croissy. “
Eh bien,
he promised me the evening! I have bathed and prepared myself for him! Now he leaves me to wait in my bedchamber like one of his trollops!” she raged on in her native tongue.

“He is, after all, the king, Mademoiselle de Kéroualle,” de Croissy cautiously observed.

“Et moi?”

“You are here to serve him, as are we all.”

Feeling the dark press of humiliation, Louise lifted her chin, turned from the French ambassador, and began back down the corridor, the others following dutifully. For a moment, the sound of their shoes heels echoing over the grand length of parquet floors, and the swish of her taffeta skirts, were the only sounds.

“I don’t understand any of this!” she muttered in a fast flurry of French. “He desires me, he chases me endlessly, and now that I have given in to him, I am worth not so much as an explanation when I am abandoned? He simply does as he pleases!
Dieu,
this will not stand! I shall see about this! I shall see about it all!”