The King's Mistress (47 page)

“Yes, now with the loss of the Princess Royal that must be put off for some time.”

“Until after Easter, I am given to understand,” Jane said.

And now there really is no reason for me to tarry here,
Jane thought.

Except …

She pushed the thought from her mind.

J
ANE HAD RECEIVED A
C
HRISTMAS GIFT OF A DOZEN BOTTLES OF
wormwood wine from Queen Elizabeth. They had been dispatched before the queen learned of Mary’s death, and arrived with a letter full of good wishes for the new year. Jane had just sat down to write back to Charles’s aunt, when Dorothy rushed in to inform her that word had come that Minette had been taken ill on the voyage back to France. Jane’s first thought was what terror that news would strike into the heart of the poor old queen, already distraught over the loss of her favourite niece, and she bent her head and prayed before she took up her pen to write her letter.
I must give her the news but not alarm her,
she thought.
Not until there is need for her to be alarmed.

And please, God, let there not be the need. Let there not be another blow to one who has withstood so many.

“I have yesterday received Your Majesty’s gracious present of wormwood wine, which is extremely good,” she wrote. “Which in all humbleness I do present my duty and humble thanks for.”

And now for the difficult part,
she thought.

“Here is no news that I know can be pleasing to Your Majesty,” she wrote on, “but yet after so many and great afflictions that Your Majesty has had, I hope nothing will have cause to afflict you more. This morning news is come that your niece has the measles a-shipboard and that the queen is returned to Portsmouth. I would give anything that I were with Your Majesty.”

I can’t leave it like that,
she thought.
Give her something to distract her.
She smiled, thinking of the old queen’s most recent letter, full of indignation that Nan Hyde should have been made Duchess of York.

“I have this morning been to wait on the duchess,” she wrote. “She lies here, and the king is very kind to her. She takes upon her as if she had been duchess this seven year. I wish Your Majesty did but see how perfectly I am mortified, but no one lives that is more Your Majesty’s most humblest most obedient servant than I am and will ever be.”

Jane reread the letter and sighed. She wanted to beg the queen to embark for England now so that at least she would be among family and friends, but she could see the proud old head shaking her refusal. When the king invited her, then she would come.
Can I tell her that I love her?
Jane wondered. She dipped her pen in the ink bottle and held it over the paper, hesitating, but could not quite summon the courage to write those words.

“Madam,” she wrote, “for God’s sake, have a great care of yourself, for if Your Majesty should come to harm that loss were never to be repaired. God in His infinite mercy protect you.”

J
ANUARY HAD COME AND GONE, AND THE CORONATION WOULD NOT
take place until April, and yet Jane had not gone home to Bentley. What held her there? she asked herself. Nothing.

Except …

On the twenty-fifth of February, almost nine months to the day since Charles had returned to London, Barbara Palmer gave birth to a daughter. The baby was called Anne Palmer, but no one thought that Barbara’s husband was the father.

Jane tried to tell herself that the news didn’t hurt, but it did, to her very soul. Whitehall echoed with the whispers, and Charles strutted amidst the crowds of courtiers. Like a rooster among the hens, Jane thought. And as at The Hague, when she had first seen Barbara Palmer, she was consumed with a helpless despair. She had given nine years of her life to the preservation of the king, nine years that had taken her from youth, with possibilities still before her, to this hell in which it seemed that her choices had slipped away while she was not looking.

It is past time I go home,
she told herself.
How much evidence do I need that Charles has forgotten me, if indeed he ever cared for me at all?

She had thought that she could not feel more miserable, but the next day she found that she could.

“James tells me that my father has been most industrious to find a wife for the king,” Nan Hyde said, smiling, as Jane brushed her hair, “and that the choice has been made.”

Jane stopped, brush in hand, blinking her astonishment. Of course she knew that Charles must have a queen, but she had not known that the search for a bride had begun in earnest, much less that the matter had been settled. Most of all it hurt that she had heard of it from someone other than Charles.

“There were three quite good possibilities,” Nan went on, happy to have the rapt attention of everyone within hearing. “The Princess of Denmark, the Infanta of Portugal, and the sister of the Prince of Parma. But—though it’s still secret, so do not breathe a word—it’s to be the Portuguese princess.”

Jane felt the blood rushing to her face. There was a roaring in her ears and she could no longer hear Nan’s voice. She longed to grapple Nan around her throat and choke the simper off her face. She clapped a hand to her mouth, whether to keep herself from vomiting or screaming, she did not know.

She turned and fled from Nan’s presence, ignoring the questioning cries behind her. She was almost to the king’s privy chamber before she knew where she was going. She stalked past the guards at the door before they had time to stop her. Charles was alone with Edward Hyde.

“I must needs speak to Your Majesty. Now.”

Hyde gaped at her.

“Well, Charles?”

The king paused only a moment before dismissing Hyde with a wave of his hand. Jane waited, but barely, before the door closed behind him.

“How dare you!” she shouted. It wasn’t a very dignified beginning, she knew, but she was past caring.

“What have I done?” Charles asked, blinking.

“You are to be married! And you have not even the consideration to tell me yourself!”

The thought flitted across her mind that at last she was alone with Charles, as she had not been in seven years, and that this scene was nothing like what she had hoped for.

“You know I must marry. I need an heir.”

“But you—you—how can you do this to me?” Jane knew the words were absurd, made no sense, but there was no stopping them. “After what I have given you?”

“I can never repay you, Jane, for what you did for me. For England.”

For you,
she thought.
It was all for you, once I knew you. I love you, not England. The you with the laughing eyes, and the strong arms that held me, and the mouth that crushed mine in the heat of your passion. My lover, the father of that babe lost so long ago. Not the king, not this stranger who sits here before me.

“Go home, Jane.” His words were soft, but they hit Jane like a blow. “You see how it is here. I am always at the centre of—of something. Some dispute, some urgent business, some suit for money or honours. During our time together, I could be myself, but I fear me I will never have such leisure again.”

“You have time enough for Barbara.”

Charles spoke so quietly that Jane could scarce hear him.

“You’re better than that, Jane. You deserve better. You would not be happy with balls and card games and supper parties and the constant backbiting that has only just begun but now will never leave off. You long for discourse that will stretch your mind, for experience that will test your strength and courage, and for attention from a man that is constant and whose fire never dies. I cannot give you that. I wish I could, but I know myself too well.”

Jane felt her heart tearing in two. She was drowning in a lake of her own blood deep within her breast. She should leave, before she made a worse fool of herself, but she could not.

“But before?”

“Before was a time out of time, a place that had no place, when you and I were all there was except the burning need to find my way to safety. That time is gone, and what we had will never come again.”

Jane stared at him. It would never come again. He had said it, so bluntly. In one moment shattering the hopes she had nursed for so many years, though she thought she had let go of them long since. He was smiling, and the smile enraged her.

“I could have—” she began. She thought of Henry Lascelles, the love shining in his eyes. Of the men she had dismissed from consideration without a thought over the years. Because always it had been Charles who held her heart. “I could have loved someone else. Been happy.”

“You shall have a pension of a thousand pounds a year. Enough that you need never do anything that you do not want to do, or bind yourself to any man except in love.”

What a fool she had been. It was all over now, it didn’t matter what she said.

“Why didn’t you tell me before that you didn’t want to be with me?”

“I did—”

“You didn’t. All you had to say was, ‘Jane I cannot love you,’ and I would have heard you.”

“But I did love you,” he protested.

Jane winced at the past tense, and saw in the same moment that Charles realised what he had said. He opened his mouth to speak, but she waved him silent and turned her back to him, choking on her tears. She felt his eyes on her and she wanted to be gone from him, away from this torture of humiliation. But she could not leave yet. All the rage and hurt and bafflement of the long years bubbled to the surface, hot as molten metal, and would not be stilled.

“All you had to say was that I should not hope.”

Her voice sounded unnaturally calm to her own ears. Torrents of pain raged within her.

“It would have hurt, but I would have survived. God knows I survived worse for you.”

The long weeks of the walk to Yarmouth, the cold, the exhaustion, the killing of the rebel deserter, the days lying in Marjorie’s cave after the loss of the child.

“I would have turned my thoughts from you, carved you out of my heart if need be. Why didn’t you tell me? You had so many chances.”

He threw up his hands helplessly.

“You knew I could not marry where I loved; I had to put the good of the country first.”

Jane thought of poor Lucy Walter. Had she been the king’s bride, denied and cast aside when it did not suit him to have a wife?

“Your purse first, you mean.”

“Jane,” he cried. “What would you have me do? I needed money, an army to take back my country—and all I had to offer was myself as husband to some princess with a father or brother with the means to help me. I tried to find a wife, God knows, not for my contentment but out of duty, but none would have me. My person alone was not enough, without I had a throne and a crown. And now I am back, now I am king in fact, the choice rests not with me alone.”

“‘His greatness weighed, his will is not his own,’” she quoted.

“Exactly,” he said.

“You think you’re Hamlet?” There was venom in her voice.

“He wrote it because it was true!” He ran his hands through his hair despairingly. “Jane, I never led you to believe that I could marry you.”

“Marry me, no, but you said you loved me. Did that not mean anything?”

“Of course it did,” he said, moving swiftly to her side.

“What? What did it mean? That you wanted to bed me at that moment but had no thought for me as soon as I was out of your sight?”

“Of course I wanted to see you.”

“Then why did you not send for me? Why have I spent these many years—nine years, Charles!—waiting for you to want to be with me as you said you did? I loved you. I love you still.”

She was sobbing and turned away from him in shame. When she had mastered herself, she went on.

“There has been no one else for me but you. But for you, there has always been someone else. I tried to tell myself that they didn’t matter to you, that you needed the comfort, that you were sad and lonely and that I was the one you truly loved, and that the time would come that we would be together. But always it was someone else. Poor Lucy—”

“She was long gone to Taaffe by the time you came to Paris.”

“The Duchess de Châtillon,” Jane pressed on relentlessly. “Lady Byron, Catherine Pegge, Betty Killigrew—it was always someone else who had your company while I waited, longing for you. And now, now that you can do as you will—”

“I cannot!” he exploded.

“You can spend your days and nights with whom you please, whoever you must wed. And now it is still not me—it is Barbara Palmer.” She didn’t try to stop the tears now. “Barbara Palmer! So beautiful, so young. How can I compete? I can’t. I’ve given you my youth and hopes, when you never loved me, never wanted me.”

“Jane—” He tried to take her into his arms but she shoved him away, eyes blazing.

“I wish I had never seen you. I wish they had taken you at Worcester and hanged you at Tyburn. I wish England had gone up in flames and the monarchy ended and you suffered in hell for what I have been through for you.”

She was suddenly aware of the little silk bundle pinned inside her bodice—the watch he had given her when they parted at Trent, wrapped in his handkerchief. She yanked it out and held it up for him to see.

“Take it back again. ‘Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.’”

She hurled the watch at Charles, but it sailed over his head and crashed against the wall. Her last sight of him was the anguish in his eyes as she turned and fled, slamming the door shut behind her.

T
HE COACH RATTLED DOWN THE
W
OLVERHAMPTON
R
OAD, AND
Jane’s heart beat fast as the familiar turnoff to Bentley Hall came into view. The house was unchanged from when she had seen it last, but as she approached it seemed still and empty. Perhaps it was the dogs. There used to be a pack of dogs that set up such a clamour at the approach of any vehicle, animal, or person, but now only two rose from the shadows to give halfhearted barks.

The door opened, and with a shock Jane realised that the old lady who peered out at the approaching coach was her mother. Her hair had gone completely white, and she seemed stooped, and far thinner than Jane remembered her. And there was John behind her, and Athalia, both grey-haired and sad behind their smiles. She looked beyond them, and realised with an enormous tug at her heart that it was the sight of her father she sought. But he was gone, and she would never again see the love for her in his eyes or smell the comforting scent of his pipe as they sat together in his little library. Tears came to her eyes.