The Perfect Royal Mistress (51 page)

“Meesus Gwynne.”

“Meesus Carwell,” Nell said jeeringly, with a little nod.

Muffled snickers filled the strained silence as Louise’s expression became stony.
Humor,
Nell thought,
is my prerogative, especially on my birthday.

“Meesus Gwynne, you make a mockery of my very place ’ere.”

“It seems to me, Meesus Carwell, you do that quite well indeed, all on your own.”

More laughter erupted as Louise spun on her heel and waddled from the room, followed quickly by Lord and Lady Arlington. The last image that Nell and the rest of the court had of Louise de Kéroualle was of her head lowered into her hands, the last sound the plaintive note of her cry. So that was how she did it, Nell realized. Tears and guilt skillfully aimed at a softhearted king.

Charles looked at Nell, with just the slightest expression of censure, and then he, too, was smiling. “Forgive me, sweetheart. I won’t be long. Dance awhile with my brother. Then wait for me in my bedchamber. I’ve left your birthday present there.”

“’Tis the gift I mean to give
you
that I ’ope you’ll be returnin’ for,” she cleverly replied.

The king paused to touch her cheek, then left the room. As he neared the door, Nell’s eyes caught with Lady Castlemaine’s, who had taken in the entire exchange. To Nell’s surprise, the king’s former mistress nodded to her with deference. It was a victory Nell would never forget.

“Dance with me?” she asked the king’s brother. “Now that old Squintabella ’as retired for the evenin’, I feel rather inclined to enjoy the rest of my birthday.”

“I don’t expect
Squintabella,
as you call our dear Carwell, is going any farther than her steadily enriched apartments, sadly, so I would advise you, my friend, to take care. At least until her royal child is born.”

“Well, I’m not goin’ anywhere either, Jamie. So the young mademoiselle might be well advised to take great care with the likes of
me,
since I seem to ’ave quite found my stride.”

The king found Louise huddled dramatically on the top of her bed, arms over her knees, sobbing into her hands. Lord and Lady Arlington were doing their best to comfort her as a ring of ladies looked on. “There, there, now. Is it all really that bad?” he asked.

“Eet is ’orrible!”

He sank onto the edge of the bed with her and with a nod sent everyone away. Silently, they withdrew. As she sobbed, Charles produced a handkerchief and handed it to her. He despised the incessant weeping. It reminded him too much of the sounds of his early years. Of death. Of places in his heart he did not wish to revisit.

“What is so horrible, then?”

“I came ’ere believing I would be your queen, Charles, fooleesh as zat may seem to you! And now look at me!” She went on sobbing, then blew her nose loudly into the handkerchief. “I am from a good family, you know eet!”

“One of the finest,” he softly flattered her.

“And yet ’ere I am, a whore! A grand joke for your court to laugh at!”

Charles wrapped his arm around her shoulder as she wept into the handkerchief now. “No one laughs at you.”

“Meesus Gwynne?”

“Oh, Nelly mocks everyone. That’s just the way she is. She has had a very different life than yours, and she has been forced by circumstance to manage it with humor rather than tears.”

“I want ze life I was promised by Bucking’am! I am a noble girl. I must ’ave a noble title!”

“An English title? I’m sorry,
chérie,
but you are French.”

“Zen make me Engleesh!”

He chuckled at something so preposterous, and wiped the tears from her cheeks. When she looked at him again, earnestly, openheartedly, her blue eyes were still liquid with tears.

“What do you suppose King Louis would say to that?”

Weary of English, she replied in French. “I believe he would say that if his good brother is happy, then your two countries are stronger together. Only tell me, Charles, would it please you if your lover were a duchess instead of a lowly girl with no title?”

The truth was, it pleased him greatly to have a lowly lover with no title.

Nell knew who she was, and never tried to be anything else. But his own life was not that simple. Louise was pregnant with a royal child; if she were to complain, if Louis XIV were angered, he might well put an abrupt end to his fiscal generosity. As a result of his secret promise to one day declare himself a Catholic, Charles had so far received the vast French reward of two million
livres tournois.
That could not be taken lightly.

Chapter 32

M
ADEMOISELLE DE
K
ÉROUALLE HAS NOT BEEN DISAPPOINTED IN ANYTHING SHE PROPOSED…. SHE AMASSES TREASURE, AND MAKES HERSELF FEARED AND RESPECTED BY AS MANY AS SHE CAN
. B
UT SHE DID NOT FORESEE THAT SHE SHOULD FIND A YOUNG ACTRESS IN HER WAY, WHOM THE
K
ING DOTES ON; AND SHE HAS IT NOT IN HER POWER TO WITHDRAW HIM FROM HER.

—Marquise de Sévigné

C
HARLES
could not have it both ways.

As he readied the country to strike at the Dutch again with the full support of France, England’s own Parliament became hostile to the country’s king. The rumor of Charles’s Catholic sympathies had reached a crescendo. In response, Parliament delivered him an ultimatum. There would be no additional funds granted for the war effort unless His Majesty personally rescinded his Declaration of Indulgence, which he had sought in order to protect his Catholic family and friends. Furthermore, if the king meant to find victory over the Dutch, he would be forced to approve the Test Act, a bill barring anyone but avowed Anglicans from holding public office. This would affect not only Arlington and Clifford, excluding them from his Privy Council, but it would change the life of his own brother James; the Duke of York would be forced to resign his post as Lord High Admiral if he would not, along with the rest of prominent England, renounce the Catholic faith.

Charles, who, for what felt like one shining moment, had believed he had regained something of his father’s own grand ability to rule, was trapped between his ambitions for England, and his loyalty to those he loved. As the battle with Holland began on the high seas, one by one, like leaves from an autumn tree, members of his most trusted circle peeled away from his court rather than renounce their faith. Arlington was first. Then Clifford. And, in the end, the Duke of York gave up his post and prepared to retire to the countryside.

“I do not wish you to leave.”

“You have the power to put things right, you know,” James said as the brothers stood together for the last time, against the limestone balustrade facing down into the king’s vast privy gardens along the banks of the Thames. “Minette’s dying wish, and that which she fought for in France, was that England would return to her Catholic roots.”

“I took the throne a Protestant ruler, and there I shall remain to steer the course.”

“Then you do so without a brother, at least formally, by your side.”

“The loss shall devastate me. But I fear you shall get your Catholic country soon enough.”

“If the queen remains barren?”

“Aye, that.” Charles looked at James; so much of their father staring back at him, in the lines and curves of his brother’s face. “You are my rightful heir, Jamie. Whatever that comes to mean for this country.”

“And Monmouth? You know there is growing sentiment that he should succeed you.”

“My son knows he will die a duke, not a king, and I pray God he accepts that.”

“But will your subjects accept it?”

Charles gazed across the gardens to a small lake where a collection of white swans slid across the smooth surface of the water. Laughter filtered up from a collection of courtly ladies, elegantly dressed, their hair smoothed with scented pomade that caught in the air as they strolled past. “My son will not challenge me,” he finally declared. “Monmouth loves me, and he is loyal. I would stake my life on that.”

“And so how goes things in your own house, then?” James asked with just a hint of sarcasm, to chase away the dark nature of what they had been discussing. “What glorious scenes have I missed these past weeks while I was off in my final service to the Crown?”

“Louise still despises Nell, of course.”

“Of course. And our dear Nell?”

“She has taken to calling Louise Weeping Willow.”

“Not to her face!”

“You know Nell.”

James stifled a laugh. “What happened to Squintabella?”

“That as well. But, between you and me, Louise does so invite every last bit of it.”

“Sounds like tolerably good fun.”

“Not to Louise,” he sighed. “Oh, James. Truthfully, what am I to do?”

“You poor old grass widow. Two gorgeous women doing battle over you, and that doesn’t even include your still-besotted wife!”

“You really think this is humorous, don’t you?”

“Sensationally so. I
did
warn you, after all.”

“If I were to dispose of Louise, and I do say
if,
so great an insult would very well make receiving my payments from the French next to impossible, and you know how in need of money I am to keep the country.”

“The country, or your women?”

Charles rolled his eyes. “Wait until
you
are king.”

“I’m only your brother.”

“You are my heir. Monmouth knows I shall never acknowledge him as legitimate.”

“And yet there might well be forces at work, Charles, stronger even than you in the matter,” said the king’s brother.

“I shall protect your right to succeed me, James, if there is no legitimate issue.”

“You rarely see the queen, much less make arrangements to try to alter that.”

“My bed these days is quite busy enough. And on poor Catherine, I’m afraid I’ve given up hope,” he sighed. “She has barred me from taking those affections with her, as I once tried very diligently to do.”

James paused a moment before he took the subject back to where he wished it. “So you have thought about it then, forgoing your Louise?”

“On almost a daily basis, I am afraid. I should have remembered how fleeting the lure of beauty can be when it is juxtaposed against weeping and pleading.”

“Assuredly, you shall forget again the next time a beautiful young woman catches your eye. And Mademoiselle de Kéroualle has used the tactic to a
T.
She certainly has achieved more here than I ever would have given her credit for.”

“I can safely say I have learned my lesson in that particular regard.”

“Tell me that again the next time,” James laughed. “I only wonder who she shall be.”