Royal Harlot (42 page)

“As you wish, sir.” I curtseyed, but I did not bow my head, refusing to give him the satisfaction of breaking my gaze with his. “As you
wish
.”

With my fury making my spine as rigid as iron, I began to back away from his presence, the wide-eyed Pompey at my side. The room around us was as silent as the grave, with every eye intent upon us. If I’d any sense, I should have left then, and said not a word more. But sense had never been a strength with me, and besides, I was far too angry to hold back what must be said, even though it would be before such an audience, and at the doorway, I paused.

“I will leave your wretched court, sir,” I said, “and I will be gone before nightfall. But mark you, if you slander me further in this way, I swear I will publish every letter of love and promise that you have written for the entire world to read.”

Then borne on my fury, I turned on my heel and fled.

 
“The papers, my lady.” Wilson set the silver tray with the stack of the latest newspapers and sheets on the bed. “That was all the footman could collect.”

Wearily I opened my eyes a fraction, my head still back against the piled bolsters. A perfumed cloth lay across my forehead, which ached abominably: no surprise, really, after the trials of these last four days. To remove myself, my household, and my children and their nursemaids from the palace with no notice at all, to bring them all to these hastily found lodgings here in Pall Mall, and to do it all while enduring the displeasure of the king—who could fault me for suffering after that?

I closed my eyes again. “What do the vile tattlers say of me, Wilson?”

“You do not wish to read the papers, my lady?”

“Would I have asked you if I did?” I sighed mightily. “Go ahead, tell me. I know you and all the others have likely read them for yourselves, so don’t pretend you haven’t.”

“Very well, my lady,” Wilson said, unperturbed. “They say you’re an evil, avaricious slattern, Lady Barbary, the Great Whore of Babylon—”

“Oh, lud, they’ve been using that one for years.”

“Yes, my lady,” Wilson said. “They also say it was high time His Majesty served you as you deserve. They say he should have gone further and had you arrested for high treason against his person and taken to the Tower. They say there are preachers cursing you back to hell and the devil. And they say it is most fervently to be hoped that you never return to sully Whitehall or the king with your presence.”

“Hah,” I scoffed. “That’s not so very bad. What of the queen?”

Wilson hesitated, choosing her words with endearing care. “They champion Her Majesty against you, my lady.”

“You mean to say they treat me as a wicked, whoring, sharp-tongued shrew, come between a man and his honorable, virtuous wife.” I sighed dramatically. I’d plenty of friends—Arlington, Jermyn, Killigrew, even Bab May—who had come to me at my new lodgings already and reported much the same thing. “Her Majesty must be in heavenly Portuguese raptures, imagining she’s rid of me. Hah! If she knew her own husband as well as I, then she’d realize he meant nothing by this. Has he sent any word to me yet?”

“Not here, my lady,” Wilson said. “But they say he did call last night at King Street.”

“Did he indeed?” I smiled, more relieved than I wished even Wilson to know. I’d suspected that Charles would relent once his temper had cooled, but I’d no wish to make a reconciliation too easy for him. That was why I’d retreated here to Pall Mall, and not to King Street, to make him have to hunt a bit harder for me and the children. “So I am in his thoughts. That is good.”

“Yes, my lady,” Wilson said. “But you know he couldn’t forget you for long.”

“No, he could not.” Yet I knew I was playing a most dangerous game with Charles, one with much higher risks than any mere hand of cards. As stakes I wagered the friendship and attachment and yes, the passion, that he and I had shared for these last years, counting on the hope that he could not turn me out from his life. Against that I set our children, and whatever security I could earn for them and myself before, finally, Charles and I parted for good.

But not this time, not today. Today I still was safe, and beneath the perfumed cloth across my forehead, I smiled. I’d still a few more hands to play.

“Bring me pen and paper, Wilson,” I said softly, my resolve sure. “If I’m truly to be banished from court, then I must claim my things, yes? I vow it must be time to ask His Majesty for his permission to remove my possessions from the palace.”

 
The letter was written not by Charles but by his secretary, yet his hand was all over it. Knowing him as I did, I suspected its intention was more to teach me a lesson than actually to banish me from court, but still I knew I’d be wise to take its content seriously. In it, I was given a specific time to return to my lodgings over the hither-gate only long enough to make arrangements to have the rest of my belongings removed from the rooms.

I took special care with my dress for this appointment, for I knew the odds were very much higher for me to be met by Charles himself than by one of the palace porters that the letter had promised would greet me. I wore a gown of pale blue silk so light that it floated and shimmered about me when I walked, as if it had been plucked from the sky itself. I wore the pearl drops in my ears, but no other jewels, and beneath a wide-brimmed lace hat I had my hair dressed in a simple knot, with a few loose tendrils. I wanted to look as fresh and inviting as a summer morn, and I wanted to look young, to remind the king of earlier, happier days for us both.

I greeted the palace guards by name at their posts as I entered through the main door with Wilson as my attendant, and I took the main hallways and staircases, cheerfully calling to all I passed, as if I’d every right to be back. To a courtier, their surprise and bewilderment was so complete that I realized Charles had kept my return a secret. Did he fear I’d refuse to come back, or had he wished to keep it a secret until it was made real?

But as soon as I unlocked the door to my lodgings, I knew he’d tipped his hand to me: the windows I’d left closed and locked were now thrown open wide to let in the summer breezes, and there was a huge porcelain bowl of cut roses, white and red, on the table.

At my side, Wilson understood it all, too.

“If you please, my lady, you won’t be needing me,” she said with a philosophical sniff. “I’ll be waiting with the coachman below.”

“Don’t be impertinent, Wilson,” I said mildly as I chose one of the white roses from the bowl. “I’ll send for you when I’m done here.”

I raised the flower to my nose, inhaling its rich fragrance before I snapped the stem short and tucked it into my bodice. I recognized the flowers from the garden at Hampton Court; he must have had them brought up this morning by boat.

“Good day, Lady Castlemaine,” he said at the door behind me.

I finished arranging the flower in the valley between my breasts before I turned toward him and curtseyed. I made my smile beatific. “Good day, Your Majesty.”

Gently he closed the door after him. “You are looking well, madam.”

“As are you, sir.” It had only been six days since he’d banished me from court; strange to realize it was the longest we’d ever been parted since his return to the throne. In an odd way, I felt as if I were seeing his handsome self for the first time again, as I had so long ago in Brussels, and I was . . .
charmed
.

Automatically he came to raise me up, then hesitated, a last doubt, I suppose.

I stood on my own, giving my petticoats an extra little shake as if I’d intended that all along. “You’re not here to have me tossed out for disobeying your orders, are you? I was asked to come now, you see, to discuss arrangements with your porter for having my lodgings emptied of my personal effects. Your secretary sent me a letter, setting this time. Rather like a royal dispensation.”

“You won’t need that,” he said, “because you won’t be removing so much as a single chamber pot from these rooms.”

I looked up at him sideways, peeking slyly beneath the lace brim of my hat. “Are you taking custody of all my belongings, then, sir? Are you so vastly cruel that you would send me into the streets with only the clothes upon my back?”

“When you left last week, I’m told it took six wagons to carry off your wardrobe alone, Barbara,” he said, coming to stand directly before me. “If those are the clothes you mean, then you are supplied for the rest of your mortal days. You can have it all hauled back tomorrow.”

“You’re very sure I’ll return, sir,” I said, touching the rose at my bosom. “To have filled the empty rooms of a banished lady with flowers— that’s bold confidence, indeed.”

“I’m king,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Now pray tell me why you chose to dress to meet my porter in my favorite shading of blue silk.”

“Bold confidence, sir,” I said, “nothing more, nor less.”

He chuckled, and plucked the rose from my bodice. “Do you recall the first night I returned, when you waited for me after the procession? You had flowers at your breasts that night, too.”

“Primroses,” I said, for of course I would not forget that night, either. “Now we’ve only roses, with none of the prim.”

That made him laugh outright. “How can I send you from court, eh?” he asked, teasing the flower’s petals lightly over the swell of my breasts. “This week’s been damnably hard without you here.”

“You took the queen’s side against me,” I said. “
That
was damnably hard for me.”

“She is my queen, Barbara, and my wife,” he said, and there was warning enough unspoken that I knew I’d not win that point. “I owe her that loyalty.”

“Indeed,” I said softly, arching my back so my breasts rose higher above my stays and toward the flower in his hand. “I’ve known you longer.”

“That is true,” he said, letting his fingers slide over the mounded flesh I was offering to him. “How are the children?”

“They miss their father.” I took the rose from him, running it lightly down the front of his waistcoat and along the front of his breeches. “
I
miss their father.”

He reached out and caught my wrist, stopping my hand and the rose’s progress. “Have you truly kept all my letters?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, and smiled up at him. I’d wondered if we’d come round to my threat. “Ah, such ardent love letters! I would keep those always.”

“Where are they, Barbara?”

“Where they are safe.” Deftly I slipped my wrist free of his hand. “Not with me.”

“Keep them from harm’s way,” he said, curling his arm around my waist to draw me close against him. “Because if you ever do as you threatened, then you would suffer far worse than I.”

“Oh, sir,” I said, lifting my lips toward his. “You, above all others, must know that I’d never do it.”

He shoved the lace hat from my head, the better to kiss me without knocking into the brim. “If I believed that, Barbara, then I’d be the greatest fool in Christendom.”

“You’re not a fool,” I said breathlessly, twining my arms around him as he shoved aside my petticoats. “You’re the king.”

“Remember it,” he said, lifting me onto the edge of the table so I could wantonly wrap my legs around his waist. “Remember, my lady, and forget it at your own peril.”

He took me there, sweet and languid, yet desperate, too, for after so many days apart we were like drunkards shaking in the desert without strong drink. Our lusty cries echoed from the windows, over the guardhouse and the courtyard and the street below. Before supper, everyone in the palace knew we’d reconciled, and my banishment from court was done.

And later, much later, I heard that on that same night the queen had cried herself to sleep.

 
One night in early September, when the air was still warm with summer, I was wakened in Charles’s bed to the creaking of hinges as he swung the casement open more widely. At the end of the bed, one of the dogs shifted in his sleep and whimpered without waking. I rolled over and squinted at Charles, trying in my drowsiness to find sense in his actions.

“What are you doing, dear?” I asked sleepily. “What are you about?”

“There’s a fire to the east, beyond London Bridge,” he said, leaning from the window. “I can see the glow against the sky.”

“There are fires almost every night,” I said, pulling the sheet over my bare shoulder. “Come back to bed, where you belong.”

“This must be a large one.” In the square of the open window, his cropped head was cast in profile against the night sky. “I heard the watch call it.”

“Just because the watchman calls for help from God and king doesn’t mean you must do so,” I said irritably. “It’s only a saying. No one expects you to trot over there to help in your dressing gown with a bucket in hand.”

“I suppose not,” he said, still watching from the window. “Go back to sleep. I’ll be there shortly.”

 
The next morning, a Sunday, I sat in the palace chapel with the ladies of the Duchess of York, the queen being on one of her fruitless pilgrimages to Tunbridge Wells. I’d forgotten entirely about the fire in the night, and no one else around me mentioned it, either. Though I was a Catholic (as was also Her Grace and her husband the duke, though both in secret), I was still expected to attend the Anglican services as a member of the court. For all that we usually had a bishop presiding over us, these services were far closer to Rome than Canterbury, full of music and Latin at the king’s request. Even Charles himself followed the Continental traditions, and knelt at the altar rail to take Communion, a simple act that caused much worry in stricter circles.

Yet on this particular morning, the most noteworthy event was the interruption of the service by a messenger. I recognized the man as Lord Sandwich’s old secretary Pepys, but he came to us now on his own accord, intent on informing us of a great fire spreading through the city. It was the same fire that Charles had spied last night, grown larger and more deadly with the push of the wind. No one was really surprised: London’s narrow streets and ancient wooden buildings, dried by two summers’ worth of unseasonable heat, had turned the city into so much tinder. Though London was in fact often plagued by fires, this one was already proving to be far more ominous, and nearly unstoppable.