The Perfect Royal Mistress (9 page)

Rose Gwynne’s hand went to her mouth. “What in blue blazes happened to you?”

Nell slumped against the warped door. It was not supposed to have been like that. Her life was meant to be different. Somehow, suddenly now, she felt herself on the same path as her sister. “’Tis all right.”

“The devil it is!” Rose moved across the room and put the back of her hand gently to Nell’s cheek.

“You and Ma manage it. Why should I not learn as well?”

“Because you’re different, Nelly. You are the ’ope of the Gwynne’s!”

“I’m no one’s ’ope.”

“You’ve ’eld out for so long.”

“’Tis what ’appens sooner or later, right?”

“I expect so.”

“And you make somethin’ of it, if you’re pretty enough. Ma used to say that to us. I can’t remember much else she ever said, much I’d want to remember.”

“If you’re pretty
or
very clever. That’s what she used to say,” Rose answered. “Ma used to say men always fancy the clever ones, and ’tis no tellin’ what a pretty, clever girl can achieve.”

Chapter 4

A
PRINCE OF MANY VIRTUES, AND MANY GREAT IMPERFECTIONS.

—John Evelyn on King Charles II

H
E
swam with powerful strokes through the calm waters of his private canal at Whitehall Palace. Behind him, fighting one another to keep up, was a length of aides and courtiers who fancied not the swimming so much as the bragging rights. Keeping pace with the energetic and athletic king of England was a necessity to retaining one’s place. Aware of it, and amused by it, Charles plunged beneath the surface again. Some days it was just good to be king.

After tormenting them sufficiently with his superior skill, he moved toward the mossy bank, beneath a branching oak, and stepped out of the water. His Medici skin was naturally tanned and glimmering in the midday sunlight. The others shook, shivered, and grumbled as Charles stepped toward a waiting blanket and a fresh pair of velvet slippers lined with down. Then, without turning to acknowledge them, Charles moved up the embankment and began to walk with long-legged strides as each man scrambled for his own place nearest him. None of them, not even Buckingham, would ever fully know his painful, twisted course to the Crown. To flee his father’s murderers, Charles had been forced to seek safety in France, until troops could be amassed to help him win back England. There was no other way. To accomplish his escape, Charles was forced to send all of his faithful courtiers away. All but one made their way toward Scotland, and were captured and killed. Alone, vulnerable, and entirely impoverished, Charles had been forced to depend upon the loyalty of a simple country family, one that disguised him and helped to spirit him out of England. He had been aided by Richard Penderel, a brave Royalist, and his small party of supporters. Charles was exhausted by hunger and pain when the group headed down the steep edge of an embankment to the sandy shore where there was only hope of swimming to safety. “I cannot swim, Your Majesty!” came the voice of one of the Royalist followers, the simple man who had risked his family’s safety, and his own, to help the king escape. Charles had led his guide through the water that day, and toward the safety of the other shore. The opulent life of excess and entitlement he now lived remained startling to him in contrast to that dark memory, and a dozen others like it. They were never gone, nor buried beneath comfort, privilege, and debauchery.

Charles never forgot the loyalty of the Penderel family. When his throne was restored, he saw to it that they were made comfortable for the rest of their lives.

“Come on, the lot of you stragglers,” he called out now, the dark memories put away. “I’ll not keep Mr. Wren waiting! I am told this great young architect has a plan for rebuilding London!”

Ahead of them, sitting beneath a bristling evergreen, dressed in volumes of pale blue and gold brocade, was the most recent object of his attentions, Frances Stuart. He had hoped to find her here. Beside her, on a tufted stool, built just noticeably higher, Lady Castlemaine sat. She was now the object of his greatest regret. He paused for a moment between two huge urns, the gateway to a small flight of stone steps. Then he approached the two women with utmost caution. Barbara never did anything without a purpose. By her presence, she meant to say that she knew precisely what was transpiring. Buckingham came ahead of the others, meeting the king’s stride, then, seeing the women, he leaned over to whisper, with a clever smile, “Did Your Majesty ever consider monogamy?”

“I did once, actually. But I’ve since recovered from it quite nicely.”

Both women rose, then fell to deep curtsies.

“Pray, Lady Castlemaine, tell us in what sort of conversation might you be engaging so young and impressionable a girl as Lady Stuart here?”

“Anything Lady Stuart could glean from my many years at court would be time well spent on her part, Your Majesty. The details are unimportant.”

“Did someone not once say that the devil is in the details?”

“Your Majesty knows I have always been devoted to you.”

“In deed, if not always in your words.”

“One would never be wise to say any but the most glowing things of Your Majesty.”

“Since when was wisdom one of my Lady Castlemaine’s great assets?”

“Since spending eight long years at Your Majesty’s side and, if I may say so, surviving.”

A soft murmur of amusement ruffled the air behind him, and irritated Charles. He did not like to be outshone in front of his court, and certainly not by such a fading star as Barbara Palmer. Charles turned to the girl who had become his obsession. “Lady Stuart, you would be wise to take with a very fine grain of salt every utterance of the lady before you.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Frances Stuart blushed and then curtsied again. Charles saw that she had decided wisely not to enter a fray of such long and tangled standing.

Looking from one woman to the next, Charles suddenly began to laugh. Having Barbara so well entrenched at court was murder on his love life, and she knew it. As he nodded to each woman and then proceeded away, Buckingham leaned over once again. “Perhaps some things are worth trying
twice
in a lifetime, Your Majesty.”

“For the right woman, George, I think I actually might.”

“Something
must
to be done about that old fool! We are at a crucial juncture, and Clarendon could ruin it all,” Buckingham spat as he sat with Lady Castlemaine, well concealed in a grotto draped and curtained off by wisteria and thick ivy. It was far out beyond the privy garden, and past the grove of lemon trees where the former king used to stroll and the present king rarely dared to tread for the ghosts hidden there. “If he has his way, the king will be surrendering to the Dutch before a fortnight and England will be the laughingstock of the world! He will ruin everything we have worked so hard for!”

Lady Castlemaine agreed.

As Charles met with Christopher Wren, Buckingham plied the king’s mistress with brandy from a silver flask in their hidden refuge. “Nostalgia does have such a damnable way with our sovereign.” He began brushing her neck with kisses as his fingers snaked down beneath the fabric of her bodice.

“But I suspect, between the two of us, we can do battle with his nostalgia. Either through the king’s loyalty, or his prick.”

George laughed, running his other hand up her bare thigh, happy to find no pantaloons. “You
are
a wicked she-devil, and it is the thing I adore most about you.”

“The very most thing?”

“Well, perhaps the second thing.”

As he moved on top of her, as he had done a dozen times before, Barbara pressed him aside. She lowered her skirts and petticoats, and moved to the edge of the bench. Then she took a long swallow of the brandy, draining his flask before giving it back to him. “We’re better accomplices now than lovers, George.”

“I believe we are up to the task of both.”

“Alas, it should not be a task, yet it is.”

“Lady Castlemaine,” he said indignantly. “You have no plans of using me to your own ends somehow, do you?”

She leaned forward then. “I have plans to help you be rid of Clarendon, and seeing
you
made chancellor of England in his stead. Shall I not use you in that particular way?”

Buckingham groaned and fell back against the iron bench and the lattice above it. He had come to her side when called, and he had expected his usual reward. Barbara could be vicious, he thought, self-centered, lethal, but always effective. He struggled now to put his ardor away; finding the means to vanquish the chancellor would be worth the sacrifice. She was right, after all. Clarendon
did
have the element of nostalgia with which to play his hand. But Buckingham would trump him in that, as he always did. There was no one at court more ambitious, or more clever. Buckingham leaned back, crossed his hands behind his head, and exhaled deeply. “What exactly do you suggest we do?”

“We are bound to have a small setback or two against the Dutch. They are, after all, an undeniably powerful force.” She smiled with the devilment of a fully ripening plan. “And when we
do
suffer that defeat for our unpreparedness, which is all too likely, I am sad to say, the king shall be made to see the need to be rid of the old goat for his poor advice.”

“Made to see it by you and I, do I presume?”

“You know as well as I that Charles never has liked taking responsibility for things in life. Enduring his father’s murder, escaping assassins of his own, and living all those years in exiled poverty have wrought a man who is driven to make up for that by avoiding any and all critical thought for pleasure’s sake. He needs the two of us.”

Now Buckingham grinned. How perfectly her ambition met his own! As long as she was on his side, he would not show her who possessed the ultimate power. “Clarendon really is all that stands in the way of my having total influence over the king.”

“Clarendon…and me.” Lady Castlemaine laughed.

Chapter 5