His Last Mistress: The Duke of Monmouth and Lady Henrietta Wentworth

by Andrea Zuvich

  “And to introduce you to Davy Jones’s players, despite their shabby standard.”

  “Not only for that.”

  “Because I read what you write?”

  And he could write. All summer he’d been bringing Anne bits of plays and even poems. Laughing, she had protested that she was no judge. She had learnt to read, because her father had admired the learned Queen Elizabeth and thought that in changing times it did no harm for all his children to have some literacy (her stepmother disagreed, to the point where Anne’s two books had to be hidden, smuggled out of the house when she came to tend her ancient cousin) and she had seen some plays, by those troupes William’s father and the Stratford council had paid, but that was all. Surely, she had said, he could find someone more fit to read his efforts? No he couldn’t, he said, and continued to bring her whatever he wrote.

  Now he said, with an odd intensity, “It’s not only because you introduced me to Davy Jones, or read my work. I like you, Anne, I like your company.”

  “But one day you’ll go away to London.”

  “Years from now. I was to have gone to university, Anne. Both my parents wanted it. But Father’s had such money troubles it’s impossible.”

  “I’m sorry. But at least you can plan such a future. For me, a woman, it’s marriage or helping rear my half-brothers and half-sisters and dwindling into an old maid who’s never been five miles from where she was born. Or an old housewife who’s never been away.”

  “Why aren’t you married? Are all the local men blind? Or stupid?”

  Anne knew she should have told him he was impertinent, or that she was unimpressed by boyish flattery, but he’d spoken so matter-of-factly. And she was flattered.

  “I’ve had offers, but none of them appealed. My father was a little choosy on my behalf; he died only last year, you see. My stepmother had one of her Puritan friends lined up for me, a pig-farmer, and I refused. That’s why she’s angry with me.”

  She glanced across at the old lady sleeping so peacefully in her cushioned chair in the sun. “I let my stepmother think I don’t like being here, that it’s close to a penance, but I love my cousin and no one could be less demanding, so it’s a holiday for me here.” One old lady, even a half-crippled and frail one, and a three-room cottage, after a ten-roomed house, three maids, a stepmother, four children under twelve, five farmhands, harvest, all the work of a busy household and a farm… “A holiday,” she repeated.

  “Holiday for me too, coming here.” William grinned and poured them both another glass of wine.

  “But summer’s lease, as you just said… Autumn soon, then winter, and I’ll have to go home when my cousin’s daughter returns.”

  “Something will turn up.” He leaned back comfortably against her bench, his head close to her knees. Roses surrounded this tiny garden, their scent heavy as smoke on the air. All the other flowers of summer, the lazy humming of bees, the occasional chatter of birds, the purling of the stream not far away, an azure sky with lambs-tails of clouds, a sun so hot William was in his shirtsleeves and Anne had taken off her shoes and stockings and her cap, and had pinned her hair high up on her head.

  Nights so hot Anne slept naked in her bed, and woke from dreams of wantonness. Dreams which, rather too often, featured this charming hazel-eyed boy. Boy. Eighteen was a man’s age, but eighteen against her own twenty-five. It was ludicrous. She should go home, make peace with her stepmother and marry the pig-farmer. When she needed gloves she’d buy them from the Shakspere shop and ask William if he ever remembered the days when he’d wanted to be an actor. Perhaps one of her children would marry one of William’s. He’d have pretty children, because he’d marry a golden-haired, blue-eyed girl with big breasts.

  “Ouch!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You kicked me.” He looked at her reproachfully.

  “Cramp. Sorry.”

  Perhaps it was William’s exclamation that woke Anne’s cousin, for the old lady stirred, blinking, and struggled up against her cushions. Glad of the excuse, Anne rose and went over to her.

  “Is there anything you want, cousin? Are you too hot?”

  “No, I like the sun. Oh, lovey, I’ve been asleep, haven’t I.”

  “Just for a little. Would you like a drink?”

  “Some more of that wine. And the rest of the story.” Her faded eyes twinkled at William. She liked his visits, for himself and for his endless fund of stories. She would have stared in puzzlement had she known she was hearing classical works that university men and great ladies knew: Homer, Ovid, Aesop. Chaucer she had heard of, and adored, for she liked a risqué story. When she’d nodded off they’d been in the middle of the Miller’s Tale. She never tired of that one. So Anne poured her another cup of wine and William took up effortlessly from where he’d left off.

  William stayed to supper, and when the old lady had been put to bed, Anne lit a candle and said, “Go on with the play.”

  “You really don’t mind?”

  “Not in the slightest. It interests me. I’ve seen some plays acted, of course, but never one being made.”

  “Mended, not made,” he said glumly.

  “Improved. I’m sure you’ll make one of your own some day.”

  “I will, you know.”

  “I just said so.”

  “You were humouring me. Speaking as you would to a child. ‘What a lovely toy horse, dear. You’ll have a real horsie one day when you’re grown.’”

  “Have it your own way.”

  That broke his sudden mood and made him laugh. For a boy just growing into manhood he was remarkably able to laugh at himself. “Know what I really want to do? To be?”

  “You’ve told me – a theatre player. One who can write plays.”

  “Oh, that,” he said with a quick, dismissive gesture. “That, yes, but I’d like to write things that would be valued by literary men, things that would be remembered. Poetry, in fact. But I don’t suppose I ever shall because only university men, gentlemen, can write that sort of thing and be taken seriously. Even if I ever do get to London and work in a playhouse, I’d be nothing but a country boy, a jobbing actor who could patch up old plays and at best write a few decent passages of new stuff.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know that.”

  “William, a week in London does not make you an expert.”

  “Nor did I say it does. But I’ve a little more than that. In Lancashire I lived with gentlemen, and I was good enough to be an entertainer, a mummer and musician, but that’s all. I know how people like that think and what they believe. I was on quite friendly terms with Ferdinando Strange, Lord Strange, you know; the Earl of Derby’s son. But when I say ‘on friendly terms’ I mean that he was kind to a grammar school boy who was tutor to his father’s friend’s children and not bad at music or playing a part when the gentry wanted entertainment. If I’d told him I wanted to make poetry or plays he would have laughed.”

  He lifted his cup and swilled the last of his wine in one fast, angry gesture. “That’s all I am or ever will be, you see. An uneducated country man, a glover’s son, fit for nothing but patching up old Italian plays for a group of country-town mummers, with no one to talk to, no one who can know or understand the sort of things I love, surrounded by illiterate yokels and tradesmen.”

  “And farmers’ daughters.”

  “Yes.”

  The silence hummed like the tension left in the air when the plucked string of a lute ends its note.

  “I’m sorry,” William said helplessly. “I did not mean that.”

  “Of course you did, and of course you are quite right. That is what I am. A yokel’s daughter who can barely read. How boring for you.”

  “I’ve hurt you.”

  “Of course not,” said Anne, so hurt she didn’t know whether to hit him or weep.

  “Of course I have. And I am sorry. But, honestly, I didn’t mean what I said in the way you took it.”

&
nbsp; “How else could I take it? At least I never pretended to be what I am not – your equal.”

  To her surprise and indignation William looked at her for a moment then swept her up in his arms, kissed her on the mouth, set her down, and shook her. “Now will you listen?”

  “You have my attention.”

  “Good.”

  “But I don’t think you should have kissed me. Or shaken me like that.”

  “But it got me your attention. If I want to spend an hour of hurt feelings and apologies and being told how cruel and heartless I am, I’ll stay at home. Plenty of that there, along with old saws about learning to cut my coat according to my cloth. Listen, Anne, and heed me. I am miserable at home, in Stratford. I want a life I can’t have, or at least not for years to come. No one at home has ever read a book, except by way of schoolwork. Nor have most of my friends. I do have friends, of course. I spend most of every day with people who’ve shot their intellectual bolt when they’ve talked about the harvest or juicy local gossip.

  “You’re not learned, but you are clever and interested and quick, and you don’t laugh at me because I want things few boys like me want. And I am afraid that when you said that about spending time with a farmer’s daughter and I said yes, I was trying to be funny; ironic. So I’m not as clever as I often think. And I hurt your feelings. I insulted a friend. If I hadn’t you to talk to, I’d run mad. Oh and don’t dare say you’re not my equal. In everything but book-learning you are infinitely above me, and my store of learning is small enough. So please forgive me, Anne.”

  “Are you really that unhappy?”

  William took a breath and looked at her warily. “If I say yes, will you think I only mean so unhappy I have to come and pass the time with a farm girl?”

  “Not unless it’s the truth.”

  “It’s not. I come because I like you and I enjoy myself with you. But yes, I really am unhappy.”

  Anne rose up, intending to fill their glasses, but there was no wine left. “Ale?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why are you so unhappy? Apart from what you’ve just told me.”

  William drank some ale then sat, turning the cup between his fingers. “You know my family so I don’t feel disloyal talking of them. Sometimes I think that if I’d never gone away I would have been perfectly happy with my lot, for I would have known no better. Or perhaps I’m simply at an age to be impatient with them and find them lacking.

  “My father has money troubles and my mother can’t forgive him that she’s no longer a wealthy woman with a houseful of servants and everything her heart desires. She takes no interest in any of us children except the baby. Joan, my sister, is growing up without a mother’s care, and she’s trying to manage the household with no help or thanks. My brothers are aimless. I’m the eldest so I have to hear everyone’s troubles and try to mend them.”

  “But you don’t do too badly,” Anne felt obliged to point out. “Your father still has position in Stratford. He’s been Bailiff for years, after all. And he has a good business and a very fine house. And a certain amount of money, at least.” She touched the sleeve of his doublet. John Shakspere might restrict his son’s activities, but he didn’t stint on money for clothes. In the last few years London fashions had reached the country, and William wasn’t the only young man laughing at out-dated sumptuary laws and going about embroidered Holland shirts, the best woollen cloth, even velvet and silk. His father dealt in wool and leather, so probably his elegant boots had cost nothing, or had been paid for in trade, but it was doubtful that he wore his best to visit Anne, yet that doublet was the sort of subtle green you didn’t buy in a country town’s market.

  “I bought my clothes out of my Lancashire wages. But of course you are right; many people are much worse off.” He took another swig of ale. “Perhaps you are.”

  “Most people would say I too have little to complain of. But consider my life, William. My father died last year and my family seemed to fall apart. My stepmother and I are barely on speaking terms. Bartholomew and Catherine both married as fast as they could, to get away. The four little children, my father’s second family, are dears but they are much younger than me. My stepmother is an excellent housewife and taught me to be the same, but she sincerely believes that’s all a woman can want or should expect in life; marry a man with a good house and a little money, have children, run the house and the farm.

  “Nothing wrong with that. Except that I am twenty-five and bored. Lonely, too. Bart and Kate gone, my stepmother preaching Puritanism at me and sure that books are the Devil’s work. Perhaps they are; perhaps I only prove her point. What makes me different from any other woman? – Nothing except that I’ve turned my brain with book-reading. I’m not even sure I want anything different. I’ll marry one day, probably soon. I’ve a little money that my father left me. I’m a good catch. I would like children. It’s just that I love going to plays and having pretty clothes and reading books and listening to you talking about that sort of thing. All the people I know talk about the harvest, too. And cooking. Worthy, ordinary, and dull.”

  “You a good cook?”

  “Not bad. You a good glover?”

  “Not bad. But Anne, you have friends like Davy Jones and his mummers; his wife your cousin.”

  “So do you.”

  “True. So you’re bored and I am caged. What’s to do?”

  “Nothing, probably. I do realise that most of my troubles are not troubles at all and it is just that too many things have happened too quickly in my life. A year ago I wasn’t discontented. Perhaps in another year I shan’t be. Time cures most things.”

  “And in a little less than three years I will be twenty-one and can kiss Stratford and the glover’s shop goodbye. But in three years I probably won’t want to. I’ll be reconciled to my lot. Resigned, at least.”

  “Who knows. And you’re lucky, you can go away if you want to, do what you like. I can’t. Anyway, could your father actually stop you if you left? Could he bring you back?”

  “In law I think he could. And somehow I can’t quite bring myself just to leave. For all my complaints, I love my family. My father is proud of me and glad I am here to help him. He knows, dimly, that I am not happy, and he often curses himself that he was foolish with money and I can’t go to university. It is very hard to walk out on a well-meaning, kind man who blames himself that he cannot make you happy.”

  The silence stretched, but more comfortably now. At last Anne said, “This isn’t getting that play improved for Davy Jones.”

  “No.” But he made no move to take up the papers or his pen. “I’ve no money,” he said sadly.

  “I could lend you a little.”

  “No! No no no no no. I didn’t mean that. That’s one thing I’ve learnt from Dad’s troubles: don’t borrow, don’t lend. Especially don’t lend. He ran himself into trouble by lending money; usury’s illegal, and he was charging high interest on his loans. I’m going to make money, though, one day. No, all I meant was that I don’t have enough money to buy the books I want.”

  “Surely there are sometimes books sold at market? Davy Jones has some. There are rich men around Stratford, men educated enough to have books. Make some friends, go cap in hand to the gentry and ask.”

  “Perhaps.” Now he did take up his pen, a rather fine goose quill that Anne had obtained on a visit home. He spent a moment scanning over his papers and then began to write.

  When the candle had marked two hours’ passing he sat back, yawning and stretching. “That will have to do for now. Would you care to read it over when you have time? Try to picture it being acted out upon the stage.”

  “Very well. Though I really am no judge, Will.”

  “You’ve seen plays. It’s the audience’s opinion that counts. I wonder how much a London company would pay for a play. As much as a pound, do you think?”

  “Surely not a pound! Perhaps you could find out.”

  “Yes, perhaps. Anne, it’s late an
d I must go.”

  “Very well.” Much as she enjoyed his company, Anne was sleepy. Like most women, her day began at dawn and she would have to get up to her cousin at least once in the night. “When will you come again?”

  “Not sure. My parents are complaining I spend too much time away from home. My father is finding an extraordinary amount of business for me in the evenings.”

  “Oh.”

  “I think they suspect I have a girl somewhere.”

  “Oh,” said Anne, dying to ask if he had.

  “But I could come next Saturday. Or, no – I thought that on Saturday I might go and look over what costumes and stage things Mr Jones has.”

  “Saturday is my birthday,” Anne said.

  William smiled, but she could tell his mind was elsewhere. “Does your family make anything of birthdays?”

  “No.” But her father had. A little gift, a sweetmeat or a ribbon bought from a peddler, and something special to eat at dinner. Nothing much, but enough to note the day. Her stepmother disapproved of such frivolity. Of anything that cost money.

  “I wish I could give you something,” William said earnestly. “I cannot even ask you to dine with my family or anything like that. Well, I could, but it would be no pleasure for you.”

  Anne laughed, wondering what he would do if she said ‘give me another kiss’. “You needn’t. I don’t know why I even told you. Write me a poem for my birthday.”

  She was joking, but he nodded and said, “Very well. And I’ll come on Saturday.”

  “No no, you want to go and look at Davy’s stage things.”

  “I could do both. That’s if you’re interested. Come with me and look at the costumes.”

  About to say no, Anne realised that he was offering her something he considered a treat. “All right. I can get a village woman to sit with my cousin for an hour or two.”

  “Then I shall see you on Saturday.”

  Table of Contents

  Prologue - January, 1675

  Chapter 1 - Whitehall Palace

  Chapter 2 – 1680

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4