The Darling Strumpet: A Novel of Nell Gwynn, Who Captured the Heart of England and King Charles II

by Gillian Bagwell

  “Mr. Hart!” Dicky One-Shank’s gravelly voice cut through the confusion as he stumped toward them. “The king has called for help on the fire lines. I was on course for the playhouse to raise a crew.”

  Hart turned to Nell before she could speak. “No. I’ll not hear of it. Go back to Drury Lane. You’ll be of more use there. Tell Killigrew to send what lads he can spare—actors, scenekeepers, whoever is there—with buckets. And tell him to make ready to fly.”

  BACK AT THE THEATER, NELL AND ROSE AND THE OTHER WOMEN folded the best of the company’s costumes into great chests while Killigrew packed the precious play scripts and promptbooks in a strong-box and went in search of a wagon. The frantic activity kept Nell’s mind from dwelling on the fear of what danger Hart would be in so near to the fire and what would become of her if the theater burned. Would she have to return to whoring? Only hope for the future had sustained her through the long wait in plague time. If the playhouse went up in smoke, her dreams with it, she didn’t think she would have the strength to continue.

  AS DARKNESS FELL, HART STAGGERED INTO THE GREENROOM, HIS face and clothes black with soot. Nell ran to him and threw her arms around him, not minding the reek of smoke in her relief to have him back. Then she cried out at the sight of his hands, scorched and blistered.

  “Water,” he coughed, and he gulped it down when she brought it to him. The company gathered around and he stared at them, his haunted eyes bright in his sweat-streaked face.

  “St. Paul’s has fallen,” he said, his voice flat and hoarse.

  “And Cheapside?” someone asked, and other voices chimed in.

  “Newgate Market?”

  “Thames Street?”

  “The great houses by the river?”

  “The theater in Salisbury Court?”

  “Gone,” he said. “All gone.”

  NELL SLATHERED HART’S HANDS WITH GREASE AND BANDAGED THEM in strips of linen.

  “Are you hurting?” she asked.

  “Not so much now,” he said. “Only I wonder will I be able to play the fiddle when my hands have healed.”

  Nell stared at him in horror and his lips twitched in a smile.

  “It would be a miracle, indeed, as I could never play before.”

  Nell began to laugh but it came near to turning into a sob. “Don’t frighten me so.”

  “I’m sorry. Never fear. We’ll come through it.”

  “Will we?” Nell’s fears were too enormous to voice. She looked into those dark eyes that had reassured and sustained her so often.

  “Take heart, my little love. I’ll not leave you to the wide world. While I have a home, you have one, too.”

  AN HOUR OR SO AFTER HART HAD RETURNED, A TALL STRANGER, hatless, his face swathed in a filthy kerchief, limped through the stage door. He cradled his bloody right hand against his chest, and Nell saw with shock that the sleeve of his long coat and the thigh of his breeches above his tall boots were soaked through with blood. He collapsed onto a bench, unwound the cloth from around his face, and pressed it to his hand.

  “Dear God,” Rose exclaimed, as the cloth bloomed crimson.

  “Bene darkmans,” the man said in greeting, looking up at the alarmed faces around him. “I’m sorry to intrude. I was struck by falling timbers. Crushed my arm and gashed my leg, and I’m losing blood that fast that I thought it best to get indoors before I fell in a swoon, though I feel like a cow-hearted granny to say it.” He gave a wry smile, but his face was deathly pale and he slumped back against the wall, his eyes closed.

  “Don’t move, sir, I’ll tend to you,” Rose murmured, and she hastened back with a basin of water, a sponge, and clean linen strips. Nell helped her to remove the man’s coat and waistcoat. He shuddered and set his jaw as Rose rolled up his bloody sleeve. He looked down at his limp forearm and hand and when he tried to move the fingers, he went even more pale.

  “Broken, and badly at that,” he said. Rose, kneeling before him as she gently swabbed away the blood, looked with concern into his face, and he smiled down at her. “Good thing heaven’s sent me an angel to care for me, though I’ve little deserved it.” He was very handsome, Nell thought, or would be when his long dark hair was not soaked with sweat and dirt and his face was not caked with grime, and from Rose’s blush she knew her sister agreed.

  LATE THAT NIGHT, NELL SAT NUMB WITH EXHAUSTION. IT SEEMED centuries since Sunday morning, when she and Hart had woken to hear of the fire. What day was it now? Wednesday. She lay down and slept fitfully, uncomfortable on the hard floor, her dreams filled with fire.

  She was awakened by excited voices. At first the words did not penetrate her sleepy haze, but suddenly she heard what was being said and sat up abruptly.

  “It’s out,” Lacy said again.

  “It’s out?” Nell asked, scrambling up.

  “Aye,” he said. “By the grace of God. And the hard work of the king and the Duke of York, among many others. His Majesty stood in the bucket brigade himself, working like a horse through the night.”

  IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING THE FIRE, EVERYONE WAS HUNGRY FOR news, and stories and rumors flew.

  “The king is calling for proposals for a new plan for the City,” Killigrew said. “And to rebuild the churches. Eighty and more we lost.”

  “Buildings can be replaced,” Hart said. “I mourn for poor old James Shirley and his wife. It was his play The Cardinal that gave me my first great role. And now the pair of them are dead of fright and exposure for that their house burned and they had nowhere to go. It breaks my heart. Why did they not come to the playhouse?”

  “There’s to be a monument to those who died,” said Richard Baxter. “And it will be graven in stone what all do know—it was the Papists that started it.”

  “No one knows that,” Lacy said. “And they say that by a miracle fewer than a dozen were killed. But the City . . .” Nell felt an overwhelming need to see for herself.

  “Come with me, Hart,” she begged. “I want to know that something is still left.”

  THE AIR HUNG HAZY AND OPPRESSIVE, DAMPENING THE SOUNDS AND the spirits of the City. The bloodred sun cowered behind curtains of gray, and black flecks of ash rose in listless eddies, as a sudden gust of dry wind drew them up and then spat them out, so that they drifted into and became part of the wash of grit and mud that fouled the streets even as far west as the Strand. Nell felt the foul air choking her and held a handkerchief over her nose and mouth.

  As they made their way eastward, she felt a sense of dread and sadness, as if she were approaching a home in which there had been a death. As Fleet Street rose to Ludgate Hill, she clutched Hart’s elbow and gasped. It was not so much what she saw as what she did not see that produced that sensation of a blow to the stomach, for the towering front of St. Paul’s, as much a part of the landscape as the sky and the clouds, was gone. Its absence was palpable; the emptiness of where it should have stood was shocking in its blankness.

  To the north, familiar streets and houses remained. But down to the river and eastward as far as Nell could see lay a rubble of stone and charred wood. What had been the bustling streets of the City were unrecognizable, buried in debris and impassable except by foot.

  Nell and Hart skirted the desolate skeleton of St. Paul’s. Its ancient walls, which had seemed eternal, had fallen; its very stones had cracked and shattered in the heat. The lead of its roof had melted in the inferno and run into pools, now hardened into freakish frozen puddles. Curls of smoke rose and met the gray mist that hung over all—even now, fire still smoldered in the depths of the vast ruin.

  They picked their way through what had been St. Paul’s Churchyard, where London’s booksellers had stood, and here and there Nell could discern the remains of books, their leather bindings charred black, the creamy purity of their pages sodden and smeared. An orange cat streaked by, yowling, its eyes wild, its fur blackened.

  In Cheapside, parties of men with kerchiefs over their faces against the foul air were already at work at the unfath
omable task of clearing the wreckage, heaping stones into piles, and loading into wagons what was beyond hope. Here and there others picked through the rubble or simply stood and stared at the emptiness that surrounded them.

  Nell felt lost as she looked around her. She turned in desperation, striving to find some identifying marker that would provide connection between the streets of her memory and what lay before her.

  “Oh!” She stopped short and pointed, realizing that the shambles of stone on their right was what remained of St. Mary-le-Bow, and that most of the higher outcroppings that dotted the landscape were the remnants of churches, their stones having survived the fire better than the timber, plaster, and thatching of the surrounding houses.

  Terror welled within Nell. Her heart raced and her palms sweated. So much of what she had known was gone, and the realization seemed to open a deep chasm that yawned before her. If so much that had seemed eternal could vanish overnight, what safety or certainty could there be in anything? The faces of Nick and the boys in the flickering firelight before the palace and in the shafts of moonlight in the park flashed into her mind like a nightmare. She felt once more Jack’s rough hands seizing her, his rank smell smothering her as he pressed her to the bed.

  Wild panic seized her and she began to run blindly toward the river. Hart called to her to wait, to stop, that she would harm herself in the treacherous ruin through which she plunged. But she could not, and she came to a halt only when she stood in the middle of what had been Thames Street. She had not known until that moment what it was she sought, but as she looked to the east, she knew. London Bridge and the Tower. Both still stood. She realized that if she had found that they, too, had been swept away, it would have been more than she could bear.

  Her strength left her and, gasping, she sank to her knees. Hart caught up to her as she burst into tears of loss, of rage, of loneliness, of fear, and of relief. He knelt and held her close, stroking her hair, murmuring softly to her as she clung to him and wept. When her sobs subsided she drew away from him a little to wipe her eyes and nose on her sleeve. She tried to find the words for what she felt, but none came. She wept again and Hart pulled her to him.

  “I understand,” he said. “The loss of so much. Like a friend you do not pay enough mind to, and then is gone, without warning.”

  “Aye,” Nell said. “Something like that. Let’s go to the bridge. I need to feel it beneath me.”

  They made their way arm in arm to the bridge and stood at the center of its span, the sweep of London before them. A brutal swathe had been cut through it, from east to west along the river for more than two miles, and northward as far as the old City walls in places. This had been the ancient heart of London—the first tracks trampled into the riverside meadows by the Romans, and those same streets trodden every day in the centuries since. And now it was gone.

  The wind whipped their clothes and hair. It smelled of the sea, and blew away the acrid reek of burning. Nell felt her heart beat within her, and the warmth of Hart next to her. And knew that she would go on, that he would go on, and that London, somehow, would go on.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AUDIENCES FLOCKED TO THE PLAYHOUSES ONCE THEY WERE finally in business again, and Nell was giddily busy, performing Lady Wealthy opposite Hart’s Mr. Wellbred in The English Monsieur , Celia in The Humorous Lieutenant, and Cydaria in The Indian Emperor. She watched the company’s shows when she was not in them, and a new girl was now selling oranges alongside Rose. She had even won the grudging approval of her mother for her advancement at the playhouse. And she had moved with Hart into lodgings in Bridges Street, just across from the playhouse.

  The happiness of her life was beyond what she could have dreamed, Nell thought, as she and Betsy Knepp climbed the stairs to the women’s tiring room. Betsy had taken Nell to her favorite frippery, where fashionable secondhand clothes could be found, and Nell clutched to her the precious package containing a bodice richly embroidered with flowers. She wore her newly purchased velvet cloak, and a black rabbit-fur muff hung from a ribbon around her neck.

  “Why, there you are, Betsy!” a voice cried from the top of the steps. “I was about to give you up as lost.”

  “Good afternoon, Sam,” Betsy said. “We’ve been shopping and we’re behind our time. Nell, this is Mr. Pepys.”

  “Your servant, Mrs. Nelly,” said Pepys, grinning. “Delighted to make your acquaintance. I enjoyed you most heartily as Lady Wealthy. Your scenes with Hart are beyond compare. I won’t detain you now, but perhaps you’ll both join me for supper after the show?”

  In the tiring room, Beck Marshall was already putting on her makeup. “Sam found you, did he?” she asked. “Good. He’s been following me around like a tantony pig, ’til I was near to lose my patience. Oh, what tackle have you there?”

  Nell and Betsy unwrapped their purchases for Beck’s admiration.

  “There were the most cunning shoes,” Nell said. “Black with a red heel. And I truly have need of a good petticoat or two. But I was too short of gingerbread to buy more than this.”

  “Get you a gent who’s flush in the pocket,” Beck advised.

  “Like that Sam Pepys, now,” laughed Betsy. “He runs the Navy Office and has dealings with the king and the Duke of York all the time, and always seems to be rhinocerical. You need a few like him, Nell, to smooth the way a bit.”

  “I’d never. I’m happy with Hart.”

  “Happy only goes so far,” said Beck. “Hart’s a duck, but give me a man with plenty of chink.”

  OFFICIALLY, NO BACKSTAGE VISITORS WERE PERMITTED, BUT THE women’s tiring room was crowded each day with gentlemen on the prowl. Nell watched Anne Marshall, surrounded by a knot of admirers, and thought of the lines from a recent play: “’Tis as hard a matter for a pretty woman to keep herself honest in a theater as ’tis for an apothecary to keep his treacle from the flies in hot weather, for every libertine in the audience will be buzzing about her honeypot.”

  A newcomer entered the room and though he joined the knot of men near Anne, Nell saw him glance at her and immediately look away, and she sensed that he was watching her from the corner of his eye. Making a show of powdering her face and arranging her hair, she studied his reflection in the mirror. She knew she had not seen him before. The elegant cut and fine cloth of his coat, the delicate lace at his throat and cuffs, the gloss of the curling wig that cascaded over his shoulders, the arrogance and assurance of his carriage all proclaimed that here was a man who knew without doubt that he rested at the pinnacle of society and that what he wanted he would have.

  The stranger glanced her way again for a fleeting moment and though his eyes had not met hers, she sensed that he was as keenly aware of her as a hound of its prey, his nostrils trembling with the scent of her. She found that her belly was surging with excitement.

  “Nelly!” Sir Charles Sedley called to her from where he stood near Anne. “Come out with us? Johnny, do you know Nell?”

  The stranger shook his head.

  “Mistress Nell Gwynn,” Sedley said, as they moved to join her. “John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.”

  “Your humble servant, madam.” Rochester’s eyes did not leave her as he bowed. He was tall, standing head and shoulders above her, and the intensity of his gaze made her catch her breath. There was a leonine glint in the golden brown eyes that raked her from head to toe. She could almost feel the quickening of his heartbeat as he looked down at her and felt her own pulse throbbing in her temple as she returned his bow.

  And then she saw Hart at the door of the tiring room, and the expression of fear on his face hit her like cold water.

  “Not tonight, I thank you, Sir Charles,” she faltered. “I’m already engaged.”

  “I’M SURE I’VE NOT SEEN HIM BEFORE,” NELL SAID TO BETSY LATER.

  “No, he’s been in Adderbury with his wife.”

  “His wife?” Nell found herself unreasonably disappointed to learn that Rochester was married.

  “Oh
, aye,” said Betsy. “I’m surprised you’ve not heard the story. Quite the roaring boy he is, and her family objected to his wooing, but he’ll buckle to no man, so he kidnapped her.”

  “Go shoe the goose!” Nell was incredulous, and yet it fit entirely with her first impression of him.

  “Truly,” Betsy said. “Waylaid her carriage at Charing Cross with a coach and a gang of armed men and bundled her away. By the time the family tracked them down it was too late—they were married.”

  “I’ll warrant all the fat was in the fire then,” Nell said.

  “Well and truly,” Betsy agreed. “The king was in a rage. It was only because Rochester’s father had been one of his bosom friends that Rochester didn’t end up in the Tower. But apparently all is forgiven now. He’s taken his seat in the House of Lords and moreover he’s a groom of the bedchamber to the king.”

  NELL WAS EAGER TO BEGIN REHEARSALS FOR SECRET LOVE, THE NEW play Dryden had written for her and Hart, and could scarce wait to learn her lines.

  “This is priceless,” Hart laughed, flourishing the script. “Dryden’s got you to perfection. Listen, this is how Celadon describes Florimel. ‘A turned up nose, that gives an air to your face . . . a full nether lip, an out-mouth, that makes mine water at it; the bottom of your cheeks a little blub, and two dimples when you smile.’ And let me read you the last scene, where we agree upon how we shall live as man and wife. Oh, this part will be the making of you, Nell.”

  NELL LOVED EVERY MINUTE OF PLAYING FLORIMEL, ESPECIALLY THE scenes when she disguised herself as a young man in order to follow the lover whose fidelity she doubted. She always got an enormous laugh when she strode onto the stage in the character of an arrogant young spark, and the audience, well aware of her liaison with Hart, roared with laughter as Celadon and Florimel negotiated the terms of their marriage.