The Remarkable Life and Times of Eliza Rose (34 page)

‘You mustn’t blame him for that – ’tis his upbringing,’ her mother says. ‘But you must now both take some time to get used to your new situation in life.’

The girl nods slowly.

Her mother squeezes her hand. ‘Although you are well-born and so is he, so it would be a good match.’

‘A good match …’ the girl repeats wonderingly.

‘And we mustn’t take things too fast. But if he …’

‘
If he?
’ the girl prompts.

‘ … if he wishes to call on us from time to time, then we will make him most welcome, and we will see what transpires. And when we’re back in London and you’re living at court …’

‘I’ll be at court?’

‘Of course. Wherever your sisters are, so will you be.’ She smiles. ‘When you’re at court, there’ll be many occasions for you and he to seek out each other’s company.’

The girl smiles again, already thinking of how her new life will be in London.

‘So, go and see what he has to say,’ says the woman, and the girl bites her lips to bring some colour into them, then picks up a silver-backed hairbrush and, pausing just long enough to pass it through her long dark locks, runs out of the room and downstairs to whatever fate holds for her.

Cast of Characters

Eliza
is fictional. But she is based, as far as possible, on what it would be like to be a young woman in London in about 1670. The basis of the book came about after I read that midwives in the seventeenth century were required to take an oath that they would not substitute one newborn child for another.

Nell Gwyn
The most famous and one of the most enduring of Charles II’s many mistresses. She had two sons by him, in 1670 and 1671, and on his death bed Charles asked that whoever came after would ‘remember poor Nelly’. High-spirited and mischievous, she really
did
get her rival to take an emetic to prevent her spending the night with the king. She died in 1687.

Old Ma Gwyn
Nell’s mother, who ran a tavern and a brothel and was said to have ‘lain with an army of men’. She died, drunk, in Fleet Ditch, in 1679. Rose, Nell’s sister, was married to a highwayman, John Cassells, who was frequently in jail.

Charles II
Son of the beheaded Charles I, who came to the throne at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. He had numerous mistresses and thirteen
acknowledged illegitimate children. He loved the theatre, gambling, horseracing and women. He died in 1685 without a legitimate heir, whereupon his natural son, Monmouth, tried to seize the throne from Charles’s brother James.

The merry gang
Although the king’s gang of wits existed and certainly behaved appallingly, in this book only Charles’s son James and the Earl of Rochester are real. The latter’s verse is considered good but is mostly unprintable, and one particularly outrageous verse about the king got him temporarily banned from court.

Claude Duval
(
www.du-vall.net
) was a famous, much-admired highwayman who was finally caught and hanged in 1670, aged twenty-six. His body was embalmed and exhibited in the Tangier Tavern, and part of the epitaph on his grave reads:

Here lies Duval
Reader – if male thou art,
Look to thy purse.
If female, to thy heart
.

Aphra Behn
is usually acknowledged as the first woman to make her living by her writing.

Sir Peter Lely
Portrait painter to the aristocracy and the court beauties. He painted Nell several times, once completely nude, as Venus, with her infant son as Cupid.

Places Featured

Stoke Courcey
(now called Stogursey) is a small and pretty village in Somerset. All that is left of the castle are some romantic ruins, a moat and a thatched gatehouse.

Southwark(e)
The borough extending from the southern end of London Bridge; once the main entry to London from the south. Noted in the seventeenth century for its brothels, inns and taverns (several of which appear in Shakespeare’s plays), it was the area of London most generally associated with entertainment and pleasure.

Clink Prison
in Clink Street was the most notorious of Southwark’s seven prisons and the origin of the expression ‘in the clink’. Governors of prisons received money from prisoners for food, lodging and privileges, and this became a source of great abuse.

Fleet Prison
Secret, hurried marriages could be performed in the chapel of Fleet Prison without licence, some by clergymen imprisoned in the Fleet for debt, some by tricksters impersonating the clergy. The practice spread to nearby taverns and houses and
these would declare their purpose by showing a painted sign depicting a male and female hand clasped together.

Drury Lane
A fashionable and wealthy area in the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth it had become a notoriously rowdy place, famous for its brawls and drunkenness. There were several theatres in the locality, and it still remains London’s ‘Theatreland’.

Whitehall Palace
The chief London residence of King Charles and his court, this huge building ran the length of Whitehall and contained, as Nell tells Eliza, some two thousand rooms. Lavish accommodation was provided for two of the king’s mistresses here, while his wife had a far simpler apartment overlooking the river.

Also by Mary Hooper

Historical fiction
At the Sign of the Sugared Plum
Petals in the Ashes
The Fever and the Flame: A Special Omnibus Edition
of
At the Sign of the Sugared Plum
and
Petals in the
Ashes

Contemporary fiction
Megan
Megan 2
Megan 3
Holly
Amy
Chelsea and Astra: Two Sides of the Story
Zara

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

First published in Great Britain in September 2006 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
36 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QY

First published in the USA in November 2006 by Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

This electronic edition published in July 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Text copyright © Mary Hooper 2006
The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4088 2543 3

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