The Perfect Royal Mistress (53 page)

“I will not discuss this.”

“But to have a woman like
her
as my rival!” Louise declared in her native tongue, pressing a hand to his chest. “Will you not say she is beneath us both, what we are together?”

“Do not speak to me of Nell.”

She clung now to the lapels of his waistcoat. “For pity’s sake, Charles! I have given you a child!”

“And some are saying I have given you more than you deserve!”

Now was the moment. She felt the tears begin. They were certainly not full of sincerity, but any would do. Her full lips parted, the lower one slightly quivering. Big fat tears pooled in Louise’s wide blue eyes, then splashed onto her cheeks with perfect timing as soon as their eyes met. “I ’ave tried so to be perfect for Your Majesty! God knows eet!” She sobbed out the declaration, one she wagered sounded all the more pathetic to him in her fractured English.

Servants and workmen milled around them. She could see his discomfort at that rising. His voice went lower. He leaned near. “And you have done an admirable job of it.”

“Not so admirable as Meesus Gwynne!” She burst into fresh tears, weeping loudly and dramatically.
A worthy performance,
she thought,
compared to the transparent theatrics Nell Gwynne so clumsily employed.
“Do you not see how she humiliates me?” Louise wailed. “Calling me names! Imitating my Engleesh! I cannot possibly do battle wis zat!”

“You should not allow her to get to you so,” he replied, speaking in a more gentle tone, glancing around uncomfortably, on the very verge of ordering everyone from the room.

But she did not want that. She knew an audience always made a scene so much more effective. That much she had learned, and would use, from the great Nell Gwynne. “At least say you weel not ’ave her any more here at Whitehall, if it must continue on.” Louise’s voice quivered, then she sniffled. She added in French, “My heart cannot endure much more, Charles.”

To her surprise, the king brought her to his chest very gently then and pressed a kiss onto her forehead. When he spoke, it was with surprising calm. “Let us have no more unpleasant talk of this, hmm? It seems we’ve enough to discuss with all of your decorating before us.”

“Shall you come to my bedchamber zen, tonight at least?” She asked, sniffling away the last of her tears.

“Alas, I cannot,
chérie.
I must work on the speech to Parliament, and I can only imagine what ungodly hour they will set me free of it all.”

“I weel wait up for you.”

“I will not hear of it. You know how you adore your rest. Now, no more tears, hmm. You know I cannot bear it when you’re sad.” He pulled her closer then and held her for a moment, then he walked briskly out into the hallway and down the long, vaulted corridor, followed by a collection of pages and guards. But his thoughts were no longer of Louise, or even Parliament, and the grand plea for more money to support himself. Nor was it of the war being waged before him.

Nell’s face alone rose strong and bright in his mind.

Happy, smiling. He wanted to see her, to be surrounded by the reassurance of her body, her scent, to sink himself into her happy, clever world, and forget all else. He was a king who could have anything, and usually did. But she still offered him something only she could give.

“Ready my coach,” he declared, walking with long-legged strides.

“Yes, sire.”

“Inform the Privy Council that they are to gather at the house on Pall Mall within the hour. We shall conduct our business there. Then tell Chiffinch personally that if he has need of me, he will be able to find me until tomorrow morning with Mrs. Gwynne.”

Chapter 33

T
HE SETTING SUN, AND MUSIC AT THE CLOSE, AS THE LAST TASTE OF SWEETS
, I
S SWEETEST LAST…

—Shakespeare,
King Richard II,
Act II, Scene I

B
Y
the summer of 1675, the war with the Dutch was over. In the end, the costly conflict gained Charles nothing but more debt, and a growing resentment from his people toward the French for their role in facilitating hostilities. By association, Catholics who lived among them were now more out of favor than before. Louise de Kéroualle, who was both, was so increasingly unpopular that it was not safe for her to walk in St. James’s Park, or ride in a coach without the window shades drawn.

The Duke of York only fanned the flames of hostility when he took an admitted Catholic, Mary Beatrice d’Este of Modena, as his second wife. As a result, calls spread across London for the Protestant Duke of Monmouth to be named his father’s heir instead. Charles’s life, as he turned forty-five, was full of more secret dealings with France, endless wrangling with Parliament, and heated meetings with his privy councillors, who pleaded with him to consider the viability of his son as heir.

The only part of the king’s life that lacked complication, as the months changed, was the one he shared with Nell and their friends. Everyone now referred to them by Nell’s nickname, the merry band: Buckingham, Rochester, Hyde, Buckhurst, Sedley, and Scrope. The house on Pall Mall had become a second, more intimate court, where the king and Nell entertained and dined frequently, where he could escape the other mistress from whom he found himself estranged. Charles had stopped sharing Louise’s bed more than a year before. Since making her a duchess, she had badgered him to give their son a title. Under the relentless pressure, and desire for calm, in August of that year, he did; the king saw his youngest son titled Duke of Richmond.

It was this that turned the tide for Nell.

She would tolerate any slight to herself, and had. But she knew her son was every bit the royal child as was the son of a Kéroualle. As another autumn approached, there was unspoken tension between the king and Nell. Charles did not address it, nor did she. But every time Nell looked at Charles, she was reminded that their son was a bastard child with no future, while her rival’s son was now a duke, living in Whitehall Palace.

“Perhaps you should confront ’im, Nelly,” Rose offered one morning as they were plucking the sweet, ripe oranges from the trees in her little back garden.

“And say what? Give our son a title or else?”

“Somethin’ like that. She just shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.”

“’Er lover is the king of England, Rose! She only gets as much as ’e’ll give ’er!” Nell drew her cloak more tightly around herself.

Rose shook her head. “I still think you should speak with ’im about it.”

“I’ve never once asked ’im for anythin’.”

“’Tis ’igh time you start! That child ’e’s just ennobled is the ruddy son of a French spy, and all of England knows it!”

Late that afternoon, as she lay in bed beside Charles, and a soft breeze passing through the open window rustled the velvet draperies on heavy iron poles, Nell looked over at him. Her eyes searched his face. He was relaxed, replete. She had loved him for so long, and with her whole heart. She had always given him everything that she had to give. But now there was this one thing. This grand injury. It was different from anything else because it involved her child. Their child.

Nell ran a finger through the tufts of black hair. She felt his chest rise and fall beneath her touch, knowing all of the rhythms of his body. His eyes opened. They were black and shining. He smiled and reached over to press the copper hair back from her face.

“I want what she has, Charlie. Only that.”

He turned onto his side facing her, and propped his head with his hand. The floorboards outside her bedchamber creaked as servants passed in the corridor beyond. “You’ve always had more of me than she does. I adore you. I love you.”

“But what does our son have?”

He looked at her a moment more, then sat up abruptly. “He is my son, Nell, and he shall never want for anything. You know that.”

“Anything but a proper title?” She put her hand on his shoulder. “I only want for our son what Louise’s son ’as, or Monmouth, or Lady Castlemaine’s children. A rightful place in this world.”

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. She did not try to stop him or even plead for a response. She said nothing else. He slipped on his clothes and shoes, and took up his periwig, resting on the back of her dressing table chair. He put it on his head and topped it with his plumed hat without checking his reflection in the gold-framed mirror there. He had never left without kissing her good-bye or without seeing his two sons. Today, she could see that he meant to make an exception, and her heart broke just a little bit more because of it.

At Whitehall, Charles stood at an open window, lost in thoughts of what had happened with Nell. He could still feel her disappointed gaze upon him as he had dressed. He could never make her understand. It was not that he had not considered it. He had planned to make Nell Countess of Plymouth, or even Greenwich. He had raised the question with his Privy Council for the second time only last month. But the notion had been swiftly quashed.

Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, who had replaced Thomas Clifford as Lord High Treasurer after the Test Act, had been particularly incensed. In the beginning, he had been sponsored in it by the Duke of Buckingham. Now, like a swift-growing cancer that takes root and begins wildly to spread, Danby had methodically carved out such an important place for himself with the king that he was eclipsing all others, particularly the Duke of Buckingham. The grand duke, who had manipulated so many, was being outwitted, and grandly so.

“She was an orange girl!” Danby pompously reminded the king. “An actress from the streets! Surely Your Majesty need not be reminded of that!” It was bad enough, Danby said, that a French-woman was now an English duchess. But with the mood of the country what it was, such a move was dangerous.

Words he might have said, assurances he could have given, now played across Charles’s mind. Explanations he could have given Nell about how difficult times were now, about how he had pushed so far with granting Louise’s plea that there was no room left. A bee hovered, buzzing outside the open window. It caught his eye. He had been greedy with Nell, always taking what she so readily offered. Believing it would always be there. The bee droned on a moment more, then disappeared.
If I should lose you…,
he thought.
Ah, but then of course that is impossible…
Nell would forgive him this eventually, as she forgave everything else. And he would return to her tomorrow, and tomorrow…and tomorrow.