Royal Harlot (31 page)

And because those same crumbs might be useful to me as well, I now turned toward Arlington with the pleasantest face imaginable. “Good day to you, sir,” I said. “I’d not known you’d be here among us this afternoon.”

“What, miss such a splendid display of support for His Sacred Majesty?” He extended one hand toward the boat-crowded river and smiled at me. “You underestimate me, my lady.”

He gave a smile, or at least what passed for a smile on his disfigured face. A member of an ancient Middlesex Catholic family and newly made a baron, Arlington had served valiantly among the Royalists during the wars, and for his bravery had earned a gruesome scar that almost sliced his nose in two across the bridge. To mask the scar—and, I’d heard, to keep the lower half of his nose from drooping over his mouth—he wore a black plaster across the bridge.

I smiled in return, but with purpose, too. “I should never underestimate you, Arlington. Only a fool would do that.”

He laughed. “Even a fool only makes that mistake once.”

“Only once, because they’d learned not to trust you?” I countered. “Or only once, because they’d thus met their ruination at your hands?”

“Ah, my lady, you know me too well.” He wagged a knowing finger at me. “Such beauty is so seldom coupled with such wit. I must take care around you.”

“Indeed you must,” I said playfully, “just as I guard myself around you.”

We laughed together, as if this was a jest, but both of us knew it wasn’t. Arlington and I had the healthiest of regards for one another, and for our mutual ambitions. Staring at that plaster on Arlington’s nose, it was too easy to forget how he was one of the most clever and accomplished gentlemen in Charles’s circle, one who spoke several languages with ease, and one so skilled with flattering words and diplomacy that he could persuade others to his will without them realizing it. As Keeper of the King’s Privy Purse, he held one of the most lucrative posts at court, and one of the most important to me, too, for any moneys that Charles wished to give me came through Arlington. He also shared my hatred of Clarendon, and wished his ruin as much as I did myself. Was it any marvel, then, that we’d lately become allies?

“You will join us this night, Arlington?” I asked. “I’m sure Her Majesty will be weary after the ceremony of the procession, and the palace will be a dull place. But in King Street, I promise you that won’t be the case.”

“The court is often dull, my lady,” he said, “while the company that fills your home in King Street is always amusing. You may count on me to join you.”

“I’m glad,” I said, and I was. As soon as I’d returned to London, I’d begun to invite certain others to my house in the evening, gentlemen like the king’s raucous old friends Harry Jermyn and Tom Killigrew, who would amuse Charles away from the regimen of the palace. I made certain that the wine flowed freely, and that my cook was the best that could be found. I wanted my table to be among the best in London. I myself looked after the company, and the conversation, to keep those at the highest and most entertaining level as well.

Those first gatherings had become informal collections of politically like-minded gentlemen, too, gentlemen like Arlington: Lord Ashley, Sir Charles Berkeley, and Sir Thomas Clifford, as well as my wily cousins, Lord Edward and Lord Ralph Montagu, and the more infamous Duke of Buckingham, and even my King Street neighbor Lord Sandwich. Such diverse gentlemen were unified by a dislike of the chancellor and a fear that he would push Parliament and the country toward a more conservative point of view that was not so very far removed from the old days of the intolerant Commonwealth.

Charles had promised religious tolerance in the Declaration of Breda and this year in the Declaration of Indulgence. But Clarendon was at his chilly heart more of a Puritan than an Anglican, I think, and encouraged the fearfulness and suspicion inherent in Englishmen of anyone not of the Anglican faith. Whether Friends or Scottish Presbyterians or members of a score of other lesser sects, they were all lumped together as dissenters, while often papists were tossed into this same stew as well. Clarendon had already pushed through one statute excluding dissenters from town governments, and another that limited the livings of their ministers. Neither was well intentioned, and both were at odds with the king’s best intentions for his people.

So while these gentlemen enjoyed the hospitality I granted them, we also shared as our goal the downfall of the lord chancellor. I listened to what they said, and if I then carried what I heard and learned to the ear of the king that night in his bed, why, everyone was pleased. While Charles himself was often in attendance on these evenings, he also asked me to relay what I’d heard, especially about Clarendon, whom he increasingly distrusted.

It was a heady responsibility, but a role that pleased me in many ways. Now that the court was back in London, I saw my influence only growing as the king grew to depend more upon my opinions as well as my friendship. He often spent the night with me at my house, leaving at dawn on foot to cut through the palace’s Privy Garden back to his rooms with so little ceremony or regard for his own safety that both the chancellor and the sergeant of the Life Guards scolded him for it. Yet his nonchalance amused me—to think that the King of England went whistling down my back stairs like any other skulking lover!

If I accepted a garnish here and there to promote a special notion or individual to the king’s attention, such rewards seemed fair enough.
This
was how the game was played, not by the long toil that poor Roger had so espoused, and no one was more eager to throw the dice than I.

No one understood this so well as Arlington. “Are you expecting the usual gentlemen this evening, my lady?”

I nodded, glancing past him toward the river. The royal barge must have come into sight around the Westminster bend of the river: the crowd had grown even louder, more ecstatic in their cheers, and the trumpeters waiting on the palace wharf had begun to play the heralding fanfares. Three rows of temporary benches had been thrown up on the embankment below the walkway to hold a group of young girls, waiting in their white gowns and ribbon’d caps to toss small bouquets of pinks before the queen. Now they were hopping up and down on the benches like so many pretty little chicks on their perches, fair bursting with giggling excitement.

“What of His Majesty?” Arlington persisted, shifting closer so his voice could be heard over the rising din. “Do you expect His Majesty in King Street tonight as well?”

I shrugged, the silk shawl sliding from my shoulders in the breeze. As much as I wished to please gentlemen like Arlington, I still didn’t like to reveal too much of the king’s doings. To do so would be to betray my private life with Charles, yes, and that I’d no desire to do. But to show too much to others would also be like drawing the curtain on the man whose hands make Punch and Judy strike one another, spoiling the secrets and the mystery.

“I cannot say for certain if His Majesty will be joining us,” I said. “I expect his attendance will depend upon the wishes of the queen.”

“The
queen,
” he said, scoffing. “The little Portuguese poppet may wear the crown, my lady, but everyone knows who has the surest hold on the king’s affections and interests.”

“Don’t be disloyal, my lord,” I warned, tapping his arm lightly with my fingers. “His Majesty won’t care for that.”

“No, my lady,” he said shrewdly, “but it’s no wonder he does like you. You’re the greatest beauty of the court, true enough, but anyone who believes that is all you are is grievously mistaken.”

Playfully I parted my lips a fraction and turned my head to one side to look back at him. “Like Lord Clarendon?”

“Like Lord Clarendon,” he agreed. “The Chancellor will learn that—”

But before he could finish, his words were lost in a great crashing of timber below us and screams of pain and horror. One of the raised benches holding the small girls had given way beneath their excitement, and the shattered plank had cast a dozen of the poor creatures into the muddy embankment. The fall was not so great that any of the girls was badly hurt, but still they wailed and wept with bloodied knees and battered chins and muddy stains upon their once-snowy gowns. Terrified mothers rushed to find their daughters, scooping them into their arms to ease their tears with the balm of kind words and tenderness.

Yet one little mite remained unclaimed, sprawled on the sodden ground with her cap missing and rivulets of her tears streaking through the mud on her cheeks. With a thought to how I’d hate to see my own Anne suffer so, I ducked beneath the railing and hurried down to her, giving no care to my fine clothes or how others might judge my impulse.

“Here now, duck, don’t cry, don’t cry,” I said gently, bending beside her. I fished my lace-bordered handkerchief from my pocket and used it to blot the tears from her eyes, and set her back on her sturdy small legs. “You don’t want to weep before the queen and make her sad, too, do you?”

The child sniffed and rubbed her fists into her eyes, trying to stop her tears.

“There now, be brave,” I said, pulling a yellow silk ribbon from my gown. “A girl so fair as you should never have reason to cry, you know. Let’s see how this ribbon will look in your hair, shall we?”

Letting the child solemnly hold my handkerchief, I tied the length of yellow silk into her auburn hair and into a bow that left the ends dancing over her plump shoulders.

“There now, that’s very pretty,” I said, nodding at my handiwork as I held up my small round pocket-glass for her to see her reflection. “Are you pleased, madam?”

Finally the girl smiled, as enchanted as every female is by the sight of her own face.

“Mary!” A distraught red-faced woman in a green apron rushed forward to clasp her arms around the girl, who immediately buried her face in the woman’s plump, comfortable shoulder. “Oh, daughter, thank th’ merciful God that you be safe.”

“Safe as can be,” I said, standing upright.

The woman looked up at me over her daughter’s head, recognition flashing through her eyes. The shift of emotions across her face was so bold that she might have spoken them aloud: savior, lady, Lady Castlemaine, His Majesty’s whore. Abruptly she let her daughter go, shoving her down into a curtsey to match her own self-conscious effort.

“Oh, my lady, forgive me, I did not know,” she said, her face even more red with embarrassment and a certain secondhand shame. “Mary, make your thanks t’ Her Ladyship, what saved your life.”

“No thanks, mistress, no thanks,” I said, smiling at their reunion. Mutely little Mary held up my grimy handkerchief, and I shook my head. “It’s yours now, duck. You keep it, and remember the day you saw the king.”

“An’ Her Majesty th’ Queen, my lady,” the mother said, as much a rebuke to me as she’d dare make, given how much higher in station I was than she. “What’s wed t’ His Majesty.”

“And the queen,” I said, and smiled wryly as they left me to hurry back to the others. Ah, yes, wedded virtue must triumph again. The queen, the queen: however had I forgotten
her
?

I stood by myself near one of the pillars that held the awning, apart from the other courtiers from the palace, yet not among the group of toppled girls and their mothers, either. I linked my fingers together and held my hands across my brow to shield my eyes from the brightness of the sun as I watched the scene before me.

The royal barge was drawing close to the end of the wharf, and the fiddles and drums were sounding now, too, along with the trumpets. The boatmen on the wharf were leaning out across the water with their boat hooks, intent on catching the barge to draw it into shore. The rowers shipped their long oars in elegant synchronism, the drops of water raining down from the flat blades like scattered diamonds in the sun.

I could recognize the barge’s passengers now. My eye was first drawn to Charles, of course, as it ever was, seated on a thronelike armchair. He looked blissfully happy, the way he always was on such occasions, as if he’d never tire of the acclaim of his people, a soothing balm to that unhealed sore of his father’s martyrdom.

Behind him the queen was set apart under a golden canopy, the supporting pillars wrapped with garlands of flowers. Having Catherine sit separately like this was intended to display her like a precious gem to her new subjects, alone in her royal bridal splendor. But to me, who knew the truth, I saw only how distant she was from the others in reality as well as in spirit. She was dressed in white and cloth of gold, her hands clutching tightly to her own armchair, as if she feared she’d be swept over the side by this enormous wave of English goodwill.

There were others on board, too, of course, a jumble of courtiers. Beside Charles sat his eldest natural son, James, by Lucy Walters, newly retrieved from the French court, and also newly fashioned Duke of Monmouth. He was a comely black-haired boy of thirteen—in age I was curiously between father and son, with James eight years my junior and Charles eleven my senior—tall and well made, and already striving to continue the amorous career he’d boasted of beginning in Paris.

But another passenger of the same youth wanted nothing to do with love, no matter how much she was pursued. Frances Stuart, a maid of honor to the queen, continued to cling to her overvalued virtue despite the pursuit of the Duke of York and several others. I found her too simple to be truly beautiful, almost childish. Yet I couldn’t help but notice the intensity with which Charles himself was watching her now as she sat at the feet of the queen.

I took one step forward, into the sunlight, like the leading actress will step to the front of the stage to say her piece. I raised my arms and held my shawl out on either side of me so it caught the breeze from the water, dancing out around me like a strip of gold. At once Charles’s head turned toward me, and he smiled, as if I were the only woman that counted among so many thousands of others around him.