The King's Mistress (36 page)

“How wonderful!” Jane cried, taking the old lady’s hands. “You will at last be reunited with your daughters!”

She knew what sorrow it had caused Queen Elizabeth that she could not afford to keep the Princesses Elizabeth and Sophie with her at The Hague, and that they had gone to their brother’s court.

“Yes. But I wonder …” Jane found that Queen Elizabeth was regarding her with curiosity. “I wonder if you might like to come with me, dear Jane? I should miss your company very much, were I to leave here.”

The idea was startling, but immediately appealing. Jane had little in common with most of Mary’s other ladies, who were interested in little more than gowns and gossip. She would be happy to be able to resume the friendship with the Princess Elizabeth, which had budded only for them to be parted, and the court at Heidelberg was bound to be exciting and interesting. Moreover, the recent treaty between the United Provinces and the Commonwealth of England forbade The Hague from welcoming Charles. If she was in Heidelberg, she might stand a better chance of seeing him, she reasoned.

Over the next weeks, Queen Elizabeth’s war of letters with her son continued, but by early summer, the plans for the move to Heidelberg had fallen through. Jane had barely had time to be disappointed, though, when she received a letter from Charles that made her heart sing.

“My royal cousin Louis has decided that the inconvenience of having me in Paris now outweighs the expense of making it possible for me to leave. He has promised that I shall have full payment of the pension he has long promised me if I am gone from France in ten days. I have written to my sister to join me at Spa for some little time of liberty, and I hope that I shall have the pleasure of your company there as well.”

N
ESTLED IN A GREEN VALLEY IN THE
A
RDENNES
M
OUNTAINS OF
Brabant, Spa in the summertime would have seemed like heaven to Jane even without Charles’s presence, but she was elated to find him in good spirits, and his welcome of her was all that she had dared to hope for.

“My Jane!” he cried, sweeping her off her feet and into his arms. “Heaven and earth, but you are beautiful—positively blooming.”

Jane laughed as he kissed her, giddy with joy.

Mary had taken the two best hotels in the town for the royal party. Besides Lady Stanhope, she had brought only Jane and Kate Killigrew as her attendants, but Charles had arrived with a boisterous party that included Lord Wilmot, recently created Earl of Rochester, whom Jane had not seen since Trent; Colonel O’Neill; the Marquess of Ormonde; his loyal friend and spymaster Nick Armourer; and, to Jane’s joy, Henry Lascelles.

“His Majesty is right,” Henry grinned, pulling her into his arms and kissing her cheek. “You are looking most fetching—the air at The Hague must agree with you.” He tugged on one of her curls, as he had done when she was a young girl. “When His Majesty said you’d be here, I knew I must come.”

That evening seemed tinged with magic. After a supper of rabbit stew and plenty of honeylike wine, the tables were cleared away for dancing, and the room glowed golden from the dozens of candles in their wall brackets and chandeliers. Charles danced with Jane again and again, and now, as the little band of musicians struck up the tune for a country dance, he drew her close to him. Her head was pleasantly fuddled from wine and she felt a surge of desire at the feel of his hand on her back. He leaned closer, whispering in her ear.

“Oh, Jane, I want you.” The warmth of his breath sent shivers through her.

“Yes,” she whispered back, feeling herself near to swooning with longing to have him take her.

“My room is just above. Meet me on the stairs in a minute.”

His eyes were hot on her and she felt she could barely breathe as he squeezed her hand. The dance came to an end and he bowed and left the room, and Jane edged into the shadows, forcing herself to count to a hundred before she followed him.

He was waiting and pulled her to him fiercely, his mouth devouring hers, and she gasped with desire as he pulled away and led her up the stairs. He barely paused to bar the door behind them, hoisting Jane into his arms and carrying her to the bed. She moaned as his hand reached beneath her skirts, the roughness of his fingers sliding up her thighs, finding the molten core of desire at the centre of her being.

She cried out as he entered her, so hard, filling her, conquering her, erasing awareness of anything but the feel of him within her and the weight of him above her. Low animal sounds came from her throat, mingling with his guttural breaths, and they clutched each other fiercely, as if they would meld themselves into one. A wave was roaring to a crest inside Jane and she cried out as it crashed within her, gasping for breath as the sensation ebbed, leaving a shimmering, bubbling joy on the sand of her being.

“How I have missed you,” Charles murmured afterwards, nuzzling Jane’s ear as he held her close.

Of course Jane and Kate had to help Mary undress and prepare herself for bed, but after that Jane slipped away to join Charles once more, leaving his arms only when the first blush of dawn lit the sky. Kate sat up in bed when she crept into the room they shared, and raised an eyebrow.

“Sleep well, did you?”

“What sleep there was, was lovely,” Jane grinned.

The day was glorious and sunny, and Jane sat happily next to Charles as the merry party rode out to the gurgling hot springs where they waded bare-legged, not minding their soaked skirts and breeches. As Mary and Lady Stanhope were not suitable partners for raillery, Jane and Kate alone basked in the full force of pent-up male energy now released in the holiday mood. Yet Jane sensed that though the young men teased and laughed with her, they kept a certain distance, and it was Charles who was closest to her side.

That night Jane once more spent with Charles, but when she stole into her own room in the morning, she was distressed to see Kate curled in bed, pale and drenched with sweat.

“What’s amiss with thee?” Jane asked, putting a hand on Kate’s forehead. “Faith, you’re fair burning.”

“Yet I cannot stop shaking,” Kate whimpered, shivering miserably. “And my head’s pounding.”

Jane soaked a cloth in water and wrung it out, bathed Kate’s face and chest, helped her into a clean nightgown, and gave her water to drink, and Kate dropped off to sleep, but Jane was alarmed at her ragged breathing, and stayed behind to sit with her while Mary went adventuring with Charles and his coterie.

By afternoon, Kate was writhing from pain in her belly, her discomfort only made worse by vomiting. Jane’s blood ran cold when she noted the swellings in Kate’s neck, armpits, and groin, and sent for a doctor.

The ruddy white-haired man examined Kate only briefly before motioning Jane to follow him from the room.

“La peste,”
he said. “It is the plague.”

Jane’s heart stood still. The plague, and she had been touching Kate for hours, wiping the sweat from her face, bathing her pain-racked body, holding a basin and pulling back her hair while she vomited.

“It is better maybe you do not go back in,” the doctor said, eyeing her steadily. Jane was afraid, but the thought of leaving Kate alone was unbearable.

“It’s too late. If I’m to become ill, there’s naught I can do about it now.”

She started for the door and then was brought to a standstill and staggered with a wave of nausea as a further realisation struck her—Charles. Of course no one knew just how the contagion passed from person to person, but she had been so close to Kate for days, and then so close—so very close—to Charles. Was it not likely that she had borne the seeds of the plague on her and that he might even now be falling ill?

Oh God
, she prayed,
let not the wages of my foolish sin be paid to the king,
on whom so much depends
.

The doctor gave Kate a brew to ease her pain, and Jane sat with her as the light faded and the little room was engulfed in shadow, and then by the light of a candle as the world darkened to black outside the window. Kate became delirious, thrashing and moaning and calling for her mother, and Jane wept for Kate’s loneliness and pain and for her own, wishing herself home with her own mother and father, with John and her other siblings. And with Clement Fisher? He, too, hovered in the picture of home.

Kate died before dawn, her fever-bright eyes wreathed in shadow and the buboes in her groin and armpits swollen to purple-black eggs.

Jane had hot water for a bath brought to another room and soaked herself, scrubbing away the lingering scent of Kate’s sweat from her skin and hair even as the tears ran down her face. Before she dressed, she peered anxiously at her reflection in the mirror for any signs of the plague. She felt gingerly in her armpits and groin, dreading the tenderness that might be the precursor to the deadly swelling, but found nothing amiss. She put on fresh clothes and sent those she had been wearing away to be burned, but still she felt alive to every sensation of her body, terrified that fever would seize her.

The terrible news of Kate’s death spread rapidly through the followers of Charles and Mary, and those who were lodging in the hotel in which Kate had fallen ill hastily decamped to crowd into the other establishment. Jane, terrified at the thought that she might prove the means of the king’s death after she and Charles and so many others had undergone such dangers to keep him safe, sequestered herself in a little room at the top of the inn. She huddled by the fireplace, wrapped in a blanket, shivering with fear and sorrow. A knock at the door that evening signalled that her supper had been left on a tray outside the chamber, and she clutched the stoneware mug of soup to her, warming her hands as she sipped the golden broth.

Jane stood at the window and watched the sun drop below the horizon and the shadows lengthen across the fields. Just over the road, she knew, were Charles and Mary and all the rest of their company, but she thought she had never felt so alone in her life.

A rapping at the door startled her.

“Who’s there?” she called.

“It’s me. Henry.” Jane raced to the door and opened it. Her dear cousin stood there, and she longed to throw her arms around him, but instead took a step back.

“Henry, why have you come? You must not place yourself in such danger!”

A gust of wind from the corridor rattled the shutters outside the windows, and Henry stepped into the room, closing the door behind him.

“I had to come,” he said, and Jane saw in his eyes what she had never properly noticed before. He loved her, not as her cousin, but as a man loves a woman.

“The king and the Princess Royal are gravely concerned about the plague, as well they might be,” he said. “They are going to Aix-la-Chapelle in the morning.”

“Oh.”

Jane felt her stomach drop. She would be alone once more, truly alone, with the fear of the plague.

“But I am not,” Henry said. “I shall stay here with you.”

He sat on a chair before the fire and threw his hat onto the floor, and gave her a lopsided smile.

This was bravery, Jane thought. Not all the fighting in all the battles of the war equalled Henry’s courage tonight.

“I have a note for you from the king,” Henry said, holding out a folded and sealed paper. He walked towards the window and gazed out as Jane opened the letter with trembling fingers.

“My dear Jane,” it read. “I hope you will understand that for the sake of many more people than you or me, I must put aside my strong wish to be at your side and instead remove myself. Aix-la-Chapelle is but a day’s ride, and I swear I will not smile again until you are once more within my sight, healthy and whole.”

That night as she lay curled in bed, listening to Henry’s gentle snoring from the pallet before the fireplace, Jane could not erase from her mind the feel of Kate’s hand in hers, warm with fever and clutching for some unseen thing or person, then going limp, the fingertips turning cool and waxy pale with astonishing swiftness.

Jane woke in the morning feeling exhausted and racked with emotion, but she had no fever, chills, or headache, and found no swelling when she examined herself with her hands. When she continued to feel well the next day, her hopes rose. And when a week had passed and she showed no sign of the plague, she threw herself into Henry’s arms and wept for relief.

“Thank you,” she murmured against his chest as he held her and stroked her hair. “Oh, Henry, I can never thank you enough.”

As she smiled up at him, he bent his head to kiss her, and his mouth was on hers before she could stop him.

“I can’t,” she cried, pulling away from him, hands on his chest to keep him from grasping her to him, and her heart hurt to see the sadness in his eyes.

“Can you not love me?” he asked.

“I do, of course I do. But not—not like that.”

It sounded so cruel, she thought, but it was the truth.

“Because of him? Because of the king?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I know he cannot marry me, of course I know that. And yet—he holds my heart.”

Henry nodded silently, his eyes downcast, then met her eyes with a sad smile.

“Then there’s nothing for it but to get on as best I may.”

J
ANE AND
H
ENRY SET OUT FOR AIX-LA-
C
HAPELLE IN THE MORNING
on a hired horse, Jane riding pillion, and it brought vividly to her mind the many miles they had ridden together three years earlier, all the long way from Trent to Bentley. The countryside was glorious in the summer sun, the fields on either side of the road golden with tasselled grain and the air heavy with the scent of grapes as they rode through vineyards, the gnarled vines curling on their stakes. They sang and exchanged stories of what their lives had been like since they had last met, and the sorrow of the previous night seemed to have evaporated.

A long day’s ride brought them to Aix-la-Chapelle, where Holland met the lands of the Rhine. The royal party rejoiced when Jane and Henry made their appearance at the inn that had become their headquarters in the town, and Charles pulled Jane to him, heedless of the eyes upon them.