The Perfect Royal Mistress (36 page)

After three previous forays into the prison for arguments that had gone too far, George knew the threat was anything but empty. “How much do you need?”

“Well, I’ve given her what I can, but she needs a full and proper staff, gowns, shoes, a woman to dress her hair. I’ve sent to Paris for her own wardrobe mistress. Then she will need more dancing lessons, reading and writing lessons, and comportment—”

“And yet, one might be moved to ask, is Your Majesty not trying to change the very things that attracted you to her in the first place?”

“Nonsense! I have no wish to change Nell!” he declared as they paused before a massive cage. “You know how difficult it is to exist in our world. I simply desire to make the transition easier.”

“Until your next great distraction comes along?”

Charles’s face hardened.

“You are very close to the line, George. I would watch myself if I were you.”

“If Your Majesty were me, a gem like Nell would never have given you so much as a second look. Fortunately, you are far more clever, and certainly more handsome than I.”

The flattery worked, as always, and a moment later Charles softened. “I care for her, George, and I mean to give her the life she’s never had. That is
all
I mean to do.”

“Of course, you can have the money, whatever you need. I’m only suggesting you take care. We both know there will be others one day.”

“I’m not so certain.”

“And was that the lovely daughter of Lord Kildare I saw coming out of your bedchamber yesterday afternoon, finally conquered?”

“That is lust, George, a very different thing from what I have with Nell.”

“Be careful of your heart, Charles. Nell Gwynne may not always be so understanding of that, or willing to tolerate it.”

“I have told her the truth about me, and she loves me, George, truly loves me, and she takes me as I am. Not even Frances offered me that. My own, in return, is a commodity I have not considered surrendering to anyone since Minette.”

“A sister and a mistress are as different things as lust and love.”

“But if I could, one day, actually find them both in one woman—”

“Like a needle in a proverbial stack of hay, Your Majesty.”

Chapter 21

H
ER WIT WAS MORE THAN A MAN, HER INNOCENCE A CHILD’S.

—John Dryden

I
N
late November, the court returned to Whitehall so that Charles could resume the negotiations with France. The situation with the Dutch was increasingly tense. In addition, the king was forced to wrestle with an angry Parliament over his increasing alliance with Catholic France, and his just issued Declaration of Indulgence, meant to protect his Catholic friends and family from persecution. Parliament was withholding money from him because of it.

Meanwhile, Nell had agreed to work again with Charles Hart in her friend Charles Sedley’s first play,
The Mulberry Garden.
The king was in his box every afternoon to watch her delight the masses, but his own existence gave him very little about which to laugh. When he was not watching Nell, he was consumed by the complexities of making himself a significant player on the world stage. If England meant to become a force with which to be reckoned, he knew that he must maintain a delicate political balance. After the devastating losses to the Dutch, England’s national honor was at stake in it. I will make you proud. Every day he made that promise to the small painting of his father he kept in his private closet, making it a prayer.
I will see to it, Father, that what you wanted for England will happen, that your death will not be in vain.
But he knew he must also cultivate France. Catholic France.

It all played across his mind, distracting him, in the royal box, chin propped by his hand, as he watched Nell easily seduce an entire theater. She pranced across the stage and smiled to the crowd. She winked and skipped and delivered her lines so charmingly that men called out during the acts declaring their love for her, even while knowing her powerful lover loomed above them.

When it was over, he did not wait for her in the theater, but rather inside his coach, preferring to give her the moment with an adoring public, which she had earned. Buckingham, Lady Shrewsbury, and Thomas Clifford, who had also attended the play that day, had gone ahead back to Whitehall to await the king to play pall-mall. The game was all the rage now, and Charles could not get enough of hitting the wooden ball with a long mallet farther and more directly than anyone else.

A quarter of an hour later, the door of the great gilded royal coach was opened by a footman. Nell was helped up the steps, then inside, heady with triumph. Her smile was broad and infectious as she pressed a happy kiss onto his cheek. Jeddy, who went everywhere with her, pushed the train of her dress inside, then hopped up onto the seat across from her as the door was closed.

“Thanks for waitin’, love,” Nell said with a soft giggle.

“I have already waited a lifetime for you; what’s another quarter of an hour? You were brilliant today.”

“I dropped a line in the third act.”

“Not so anyone would notice. Everyone was far too busy cheering you on,” he said, taking her hand as the coach lurched forward merging onto bustling Drury Lane.

Charles reached across to pat Jeddy’s head, then smiled over at Nell. He liked the little girl because he loved all children, but mainly because the girl was dear to Nell. “If you’re not too tired, I told George and a couple of others we would join them for a round of pall-mall.”

“I’m never too tired for anythin’ with you.”

“And that
is
one of your attributes I most admire.”

The coach rattled and rocked over the cobbles on Drury Lane, then down the busy, paved Strand, and through Charing Cross, heading toward Pall Mall, where it was the custom for a great parade of coaches to ride slowly in order to be seen. The king drew a small blue-velvet pouch from his surcoat, and Nell giggled delightedly. No matter how many tokens he gave her, it was still a surprise when another arrived; it was a confirmation that he still cared for her. Inside the pouch were two perfect emerald earrings. Each the size of a fingernail, they were exquisitely teardrop shaped.

“To make you sparkle,” Charles said, taking one of the earrings from her hand to insert it into the tiny hole in her earlobe.

There was a round mirror sewn into the tufted fabric of the carriage wall behind Jeddy. Nell lurched across to regard herself with the earrings, even as they swayed. Jeddy smiled, seeing her pleasure. “You’re too good to me, Charlie,” she said, settling back beside him and wrapping her arms around his neck.

“I treat you only as you have always deserved to be treated, sweetheart. And you, my girl…” He glanced across at Jeddy, who was always careful never to look directly at the king unless, as now, she was addressed. “You deserve something as well for making your mistress so content as you do, and watching out for her when I cannot be there.”

He handed Jeddy a shiny silver crown. It was the first the child had ever held. “Won’t someone believe she’s stolen it?” Nell asked as soon as it occurred to her.

“If they do ask, she shall tip up her head and say proudly that it was a gift from her king.” He looked at Jeddy again, whose black eyes were as big as saucers. “Keep it. Money is power, and power is freedom. This can be the beginning of both of those for you.”

Suddenly, a coach slowed beside them and Nell looked across, just as the king did. His smile fell as they both looked over and through the window saw the queen.

Nell felt hot color creep up her neck and onto her face at the awkward moment. The woman with slick ebony hair and expressive dark eyes sat surrounded by her ladies and was unwilling to break her proud gaze from Nell’s. For a moment, the two women were connected. The queen’s huge, dark-brown eyes shimmered. Pride mixed with great heartbreak was what Nell saw.

Nell’s gaze slid away from the window, back to the king. His face had tensed.

The king’s coach moved ahead of the queen’s then and the moment was over, but it had an impact on Nell. As they emerged from the coach minutes later, with a swish of Nell’s skirts and a flash of the king’s jeweled fingers, Charles was engulfed by a crowd of his courtiers. The incident was replaced in Nell’s mind by the overbearing solicitations of the Duke of Buckingham as he led her toward Pall Mall. Nell stood beside him, smiling wisely, yet saying nothing. Always attentive. Always learning, paying careful heed to how people spoke, and the sort of things they said. She knew now that the best tutor she could ever have was her own desire to improve.

She was joined by Lady Shrewsbury, the Duchess of Lauderdale, and Lady Arlington, all of whom had shown a drastic softening toward Nell since that first horrid afternoon in the Hampton Court gardens. Such was the power of her growing importance to the king.

Smiling and conversing, they followed the men, and their collection of pages and aides, as well as several of the king’s guard. It became a great crowd of perfumed, finely dressed courtiers, all bows, beads, wigs, hats, and plumes. It was a warm afternoon, and the wind was dry and soothing beneath the protective canopy of trees in a sentinel row down the length of the park. Charles had only just taken up his mallet, the others collecting in a ring beside him, when a diminutive man of middle age, with a wildly angry expression, approached with two of his own servants. One of them Nell recognized as John Cassells, Rose’s lover, who was in service to the king’s eldest son. The men did not stop beside the king. Rather, they drew up directly before the Duke of Buckingham, to the shock and whispers of the crowd.

“Who is that?” Nell leaned over to Lady Shrewsbury to ask in a whisper.

“That, Mrs. Gwynne, is my husband.”

“I didn’t know he had it in him,” the Duchess of Lauderdale said dryly.

“Sadly, nor did I,” Lady Shrewsbury countered.

“Sir,” the Earl of Shrewsbury said to the Duke of Buckingham in a stilted tone, “this theft of my honor must come to an end here and now. It would be one thing for you simply to go on bedding my wife. But I can no longer tolerate your open mocking of me with her to the entire court.”

George bit back an amused smile at the formality. “Do stop before you say something we all know you will regret.”

Shrewsbury was rigid as a corpse, fingering the dagger sheathed at his hip. “The only thing I regret, sir, is allowing this to go on for as long as it has. That, and marrying her.”

The ladies let out a collective gasp at the slight, delighted in the drama of it all.

“Oh, Shrewsbury, do have a heart and leave us before this gets out of hand.”

“I no longer have a heart. And all that is left to me are the shreds of my honor!”

“Good Lord, but you’re drunk!” said his wife.

“I may be drunk, but I believe this is the wisest thing I have ever done!”

There was another collective gasp of disbelief as Buckingham turned very slowly and asked, “You are not seriously challenging me to a duel, are you? And without a formal written declaration? Good Lord, no wonder your wife finds you so great a coward!”

“If you decline, sir, to meet my challenge, tomorrow at dawn in the close near Barne Elmes, it is
you
who shall be thought a coward!”

“I’ll not decline, and you’ll not survive,” George said coldly.

“You’re going to let them fight?” Nell asked the king, clinging to his arm as they walked back to the royal coach, the easy afternoon for which he had hoped now at an end.

“There is little I can do about it.”

“You’re the king of England! Can you not make a law or somethin’?”

In fact, there were many rules and customs that governed such a challenge. There were weapons to be decided—pistols or swords; the location—most often an open field; and seconds to be decided upon for each opponent. But, as to stopping the process, he calmly told her, it was an agreement between gentlemen that not even royalty could upend.