The Perfect Royal Mistress (41 page)

He stroked the back of her long hair as they moved to a wrought-iron bench and sat together. “I expect you shall keep me in line.”

“As if any woman in the world could actually do that. Would it be too absolutely absurd to name ’im Charles when you’ve other sons by that name already?”

“None are your sons.”

“Because there really is no other name that fits, and I—”

“You honor me, Nell Gwynne. More surely than I deserve.” As she nestled against him, the fragrance of musk, champagne, and orange blossoms was very strong around them. In this reunion, the pain of missing Minette eased, and he felt himself begin to breathe again in a way he had not since leaving Nell in London. “You truly do make me want to be a better man, Nell,” he confessed, and pressed a gentle kiss onto her forehead. “Even if I never achieve it, you are the only one who has ever made me want to attempt it.”

“’Tis a start, then,” she quipped.

She was refusing, he saw, to let him make promises rooted in the sentiment of the new life sleeping upstairs. Charles smiled at her and moved to draw a velvet pouch from his waistcoat. “I’ve brought you a gift to celebrate the magnificent son you have given me.”

Nell untied the ribbon, drew back the top of the box, and gazed down at a teardrop-shaped ruby pendant set in gleaming gold.

It had come from his mother’s collection—she had worn it when he was a child, and had been wearing it in the last portrait ever painted of their family. He knew the moment Nell became pregnant with his child that it was meant for her. The tears sparkling in her eyes pleased him. He had never seen much beyond avarice in the eyes of the other women upon whom he had lavished wealth and jewels. “Do you truly like it?”

She touched the jewel with the tips of her fingers. Then she looked up again, searching his face. “’Tis too grand for me, Charlie.”

“You’re the only one in the world I would ever give it to, so on that we disagree.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck then, and the depth of her kiss stunned him. He had left a vixen who he cared for, and loved to seduce, and he had returned to a complicated, lovely woman who he adored more than life. A smile spread slowly across his face.
If only
…, he thought. But he could not finish the thought.

Later that night, when the rest of London had bolted their doors, and everything was silent but for the linkboys who roamed the streets, lighting the way with their torches for hire, the king was wide awake. He slouched unnoticed, without his periwig or finery, on a wooden bench at the back of the Rose Tavern. Around him, Buckingham, Rochester, Savile, and Ogle drank tankard after tankard of foaming ale, amid a scattering of playing cards and shillings. They sat talking and laughing with the rest of the miscreant society that found their way here behind the large painted door and into the airless room, full of private nooks and alcoves, designed to harbor any dark activity that might be desired, and paid for.

The king loved to steal out like this, smell the ale, hear the clank of plates and tankards, and itch the underbelly of his own dangerously diverse society. All of his friends complied happily whenever the mood took him. But tonight Charles wanted to feel very little; the numbness of too much alcohol was a preference to thoughts of that beautiful French girl already back in Paris with his sister. He forced his thoughts from her, and from this place, and back to images of Nell. A shard of the guilt startled him. For a moment, and only that, he wished he could change. For Nell. But then the moment was gone. She would be asleep by now anyway. Thank God. That kept the guilt from advancing into something he must address. He pressed a tankard of ale to his lips, his fifth, then tipped back his head, and drank. As he finished the swallow, he saw a woman across the room. Her hair was down in long copper coils, darker than Nell’s and more coarse, but there was something invitingly similar about her. Her eyes were a deep green, and there was that same sensual rawness. Huge breasts bulged over the top of the white bodice of a dress stained with food and perspiration. She was on the lap of Samuel Pepys, who came here often once his wife was asleep. Sam would not give him away, as the loss was too great for either of them. Buckingham saw the king’s face and knew the expression well.

“Do you want me to arrange it, Charles?” his old friend slurred, drunk himself.

The king’s eyes were glazed, and it took a moment for the words to register. What he should do was go back to Whitehall and find Catherine’s bed. It was his duty, and the fate of England still teetered precariously on the entire question of what would happen if together they could not produce a live heir. Would it be their Protestant child that would continue on for England, or would his brother’s Catholic progeny shift the balance entirely? And there was still the Monmouth question. Yes, always that…
You know you married my mother in secret all those years ago! In your heart, you know that I am your rightful heir!
He closed his eyes for a moment, dizzy and distracted from the noise and heat. If not Catherine, he should at least go to Nell, in spite of how late the hour. He knew how she could soothe him just by being herself, even if it was too soon for her to give him the full pleasure he would always desire of her.

“Pepys won’t mind,” Buckingham murmured, his hand of cards held up to obscure his words. “The ol’ jackdaw owes me a favor for providing him an alibi last week for his wife.”

The king rubbed his eyes. When he opened them, he saw the woman whispering seductively in Pepys’s ear. Her legs were crossed, the skin of her fleshy calves glistening with sweat in the stifling room. As he watched her, the last days, the last hours, peeled away like old paint. Something about her reminded him of Nell as she was in the beginning. That first lust. The newness of what they had shared. He drank the rest of his ale, feeling more and more aroused.
Sins of the flesh,
he could hear his mother say. She was dead, and yet she still sought to remind him how different he would ever be from his father.
Why keep trying for a goal I can never attain? I will never be him…Never.

The devil take me,” he murmured, looking back at the woman, who was blurred in his vision now but still seductive to him. He took Rochester’s glass of sack and drank it too. “Talk to Pepys,” he said flatly.

Chapter 25

W
HAT’S PAST AND WHAT’S TO COME IS STREW’D WITH HUSKS
A
ND FORMLESS RUIN OF OBLIVION…

—Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida,
Act IV, Scene V

T
WO
weeks after Henrietta Anne returned to France, she fell critically ill. By the time word was sent to Charles of his sister’s condition, Minette was already dead. Theaters were closed, taverns were silenced, and so was Whitehall Palace, where black crepe was hung.

When a knock sounded at Nell’s door a few days following the official announcement, she was hopeful her visitor would be Charles. She had been able to think of little else, knowing better than most of the deep bond he had with his young sister. When Rose brought Richard Bell into the sitting room instead, Nell dashed across to him and they embraced. But the moment was broken when she looked up over his shoulder to see Charles Hart standing behind them.

Richard lifted a hand to stop her. “Don’t be too cross, Nelly. He promised he’d stay only a moment if I agreed to bring him.”

“And what did ’e promise
you
?”

She could hear the servants whispering beyond the closed door. This visit would be the new tale they would gossip about tonight after she, the baby, and Rose had gone off to bed. In truth, she thought of Richard like a dear older brother. She was not capable of anger toward him, but she would not tell him that just now.

“Before you slay me, it was Mr. Dryden who sent me,” Charles Hart said. “Can you quite imagine it? Absurd as it sounds, he thought I particularly might have some pull convincing you to take the part he wrote for you in his new play.”

“Imagine it, indeed,” she said sarcastically, unwilling to give an inch to a man who had treated her so poorly.

He moved a step nearer, and Nell felt herself take a reflexive step back. She crossed her arms over her chest and set her face. “And you, of course, ’ave no interest whatsoever in my response. You came ’ere out of…out of what, the goodness of your small and shriveling ’eart?”

“I suspect I deserved that.”

“That, and more.”

“Come on, Nelly.” He smiled, trying to recapture something from her that he believed she once had felt, his tone going humbly low. “I think you know I wouldn’t be here if there was any other way. The fact is, I’m not too proud to say it. I need you.”

“Mr. Dryden won’t do the play without you,” Richard cautiously offered. “I heard him say so myself.”

“Without myself
and
’art together, is what you mean.”

“It is entirely true,” said Hart, without his characteristic bravado.

In that oddly triumphant moment, Nell felt the overwhelming urge to order Hart onto his knees while she considered. Yet it would not alter her response. Her life now was with her son, and with the king. “I’m sorry, Charles, but I don’t think—”

“Nell, listen to reason.” Hart’s hands were out now in a pleading gesture, his expression reduced to something resembling sincerity. “The play is called
The Conquest of Granada,
and we are to play the lead roles. If it must, let it be your great swan song, one last bow to your audience, to those who have clambered at the stage door every day since you departed it! They deserve that for their support of you! Now, I know I was injurious to you in a dozen different ways these last years, and if you refuse me, I will not be able to honestly blame you; but in your heart of hearts, can you truly say there is not a part of you that does not long for that applause for which you worked and earned and so richly deserve?”

His words resonated in the silent room. They had sounded like the last poignant lines from one of their plays.

“I’ll consider it. For now, ’twill ’ave to be good enough.”

She knew she would have to speak about it first with the king. But he had not sent for her, nor visited her, in the month since his sister’s death. Whether she could continue working, now that she was mother to a royal child, had been left an open question.