The Devlin Diary

by Christi Phillips

  At the far end of the room, a woman suddenly appears, as if—appropriately in this dream-shrouded setting—by magic. It would not shock Hannah to discover that the woman is but a vision. Behind this vision is a solid wall of gilded paneling, or what appears to be solid; could there be a secret door? That she is dressed entirely and rather extravagantly in black seems doubly portentous.

  “Has someone died?” Hannah asks.

  Arlington shakes his head while keeping his eyes on the specter coming toward them. “Not recently. She mourns her husband.”

  “How long has he been dead?”

  “Some fifteen years now.”

  An extended, even ostentatious, period of mourning. As the woman slowly comes nearer, Hannah is reminded of a black-rigged frigate steadily crossing calm seas. Her approach is accompanied by a muted trio of sounds: the dull rustle of black brocade; the lisping sibilance of her black slippers on the parquet floor; the heavy jangle of two brass keys that hang from a lanyard tied about her waist, half-concealed in the folds of her velvet mantua. Framing her face is a black silk hood in the French style, shaped with thin wire so that it holds a permanent contour. It billows out from the crown of her head, where it is secured with a large pearl set in gold.

  She comes to a stop a few feet away. She is as tall as a man and slender under the layers of skirts and petticoats. Her pale blond hair is pulled back and arranged in curls at the nape of her neck. Her face is breathtaking: fifteen years ago she must have been an extraordinary beauty. Even now, though time has taken its payment, anyone would agree that her naturally dark brows, golden eyes, and ivory complexion—untouched by ceruse or the paint pot, but complemented by a small black patch on the upper rise of her right cheekbone—add up to a face almost pitiless in its perfection. She turns slightly, with a curtsy for Lord Arlington, and Hannah sees the glaring flaw: the lower half of her left ear is missing, and a straight, thin scar runs along her jaw, from the place where her earlobe should have been to just below the left corner of her mouth.

  “Madame Severin,” Lord Arlington says.

  For the third time in as many seconds Hannah feels surprise, for in the minister’s voice—this man who reveals so little—she hears both respect and fear. She knows, with a woman’s certainty, that Arlington was once in love with the woman he now addresses. “This is the girl I told you about,” he says, speaking now with his usual dispassion. “Woman, I mean.”

  Madame Severin turns to Hannah with a subtle, knowing smile.

  “Please come with me,” she says.

  The bedchamber is at the end of a long hallway. With the exception of a fire in the grate, it is as somberly lit as the withdrawing room. Small pools of candlelight reveal fine tapestries and exotic furnishings: ornamental screens and gold vases and Oriental cabinets. In a huge four-poster bed curtained with rose-colored silk, sinking into a phalanx of downy pillows and covered to the chest with a feather duvet so light and airy that it resembles a bank of clouds, is Louise de Keroualle, the king’s mistress.

  She is ill. Hannah can sense it more than see it, for she is too far away to make out her face clearly. Madame Severin immediately crosses the room to caress her lady’s brow and whisper to her in low, soothing French. In the enormous bed, the king’s mistress looks like a fragile doll nestled in a silk-lined box.

  “Mademoiselle de Keroualle,” Arlington declares softly, confirming what Hannah already knows. “Do you know how important she is to the king?”

  “Yes.” Like every other Londoner, Hannah is familiar with Charles’s colorful and often controversial romantic life. Louise de Keroualle is the king’s newest mistress, formerly a maid of honor to his late sister, Princess Henriette-Anne, and now officially a lady-in-waiting to the queen. It’s a title for propriety’s sake only, as she has no actual duties to fulfill. At twenty-two, the mademoiselle is also the king’s youngest mistress and, among the English people, the most resented, being both French and Catholic. She has recently borne Charles a child, her first and his thirteenth. As are three of his other bastards—the king has no legitimate children, not having fathered a child upon his queen—the boy is named Charles. For all her unsuitability in the eyes of a Protestant nation, and amidst rumors that she is a spy for Louis XIV, Louise de Keroualle is acknowledged to have eclipsed all other women in the king’s affection. Not that he has renounced all the other women in his life. His longtime love Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine and mother of five of his children, still resides in a lavish suite near the bowling green and wields considerable political clout, even though she and the king are seldom intimate anymore. Nell Gwyn, the popular orange-seller turned actress, lives in fine state on Pall Mall on the other side of St. James’s Park, in a house the king gave to her. Nell’s second child by His Majesty is due in December.

  It is no secret that Charles Stuart is dominated by the women in his life. Once a woman has control of the king’s heart—or, according to court wits Lord Rochester and Lord Buckingham, control of another part of his anatomy—he can refuse her nothing: jewels, titles, land, income from rents, taxes, or the sale of offices. Whatever his mistress desires is hers for the asking, no matter how woeful the state of his perennially cash-strapped treasury. In addition to the gifts of jewelry, clothing, carriages, and houses she has received from the king, Barbara Villiers has amassed an income of over thirty thousand pounds a year, at a time when England is once again at war with the Dutch and the sailors of the Royal Navy go unpaid. The less avaricious Nell Gwyn has acquired three homes: the town house on Pall Mall, Burford House in the Cotswolds, and a royal hunting lodge on the edge of Sherwood Forest. It appears Mademoiselle de Keroualle will profit at least as much as her predecessors; and that’s without taking into account the lavish gifts of jewels and money from courtiers, ambassadors, and foreign dignitaries who use these enticements to purchase her influence with the king. Hannah has heard that the new favorite lives more luxuriously than Queen Catherine herself. After seeing only a few of the rooms of de Keroualle’s expansive Whitehall suite, she believes it.

  “How long has she been ill?” Hannah asks Arlington.

  “Three days. And I fear she grows worse.”

  Initially Hannah thinks that Arlington is professing genuine concern for Mademoiselle de Keroualle, perhaps even a special fondness for her. “The king was displeased that the mademoiselle was unable to accompany him to Hampton,” he continues, adding, “I should not like it to happen again.” Hannah realizes that what she mistook for partiality is actually the concern of a horse owner for his prize filly. No doubt Arlington has engineered Louise’s rise from maid of honor to maitresse en titre and has benefited greatly from it. The king’s money and the courtiers’ bribes pass through his hands first.

  Hannah moves closer to look upon the mistress’s face. Louise’s beauty is the soft, placid sort: wide, dark eyes in a cherubic countenance surrounded by a mass of red-brown curls. If she were well, the rose silk curtains would mirror exactly the shade of her blushing cheeks; instead, a fevered pallor suffuses her skin, her eyes are hollowed, her lips chapped and dry. With difficulty, she lifts her head and looks at Hannah.

  “Can you help me?” she asks in her heavily accented English.

  “I can try.” Hannah looks pointedly at Arlington: she makes no guarantee. As she puts her case down, she wonders how much he knows, or suspects. Hannah announces that she would like to see the patient alone, and that she will need more light.

  To her surprise, neither Madame Severin nor Arlington protest. They leave the room with only a single glance between them, sending back the serving maid with two beeswax candles. Hannah directs her to place them on the cluttered bedside table next to a tortoiseshell comb and a pair of ruby and emerald earrings, tossed there as casually as a pair of dice.

  She examines the mademoiselle carefully, first checking the hue and temperature of her skin to help determine which of the humors—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, or black bile—are out of balance. The patient is
burning up yet complains of chills, indicating a morbidity of the blood. She is languorous, her vital spirits low. She responds to Hannah’s litany of questions with one-word answers, and even these seem to require more strength than she possesses.

  Hannah takes up one of Louise’s wrists to feel her pulse: it’s weak and sluggish. Her plump, pale, childlike hand has delicate long fingers and perfectly clean, trimmed nails. A hand that has never known work and never will. Hannah feels it trembling with fever and with fear. The king’s mistress is afraid not only of dying, she understands, but more immediately of losing everything: her beauty, her lavish rooms overlooking the Thames, her rubies and emeralds, her monarch’s love. And even though Louise de Keroualle is surrounded by wealth of a kind that most people cannot even imagine, a stab of pity pierces Hannah’s heart.

  She lifts the soft, weightless blanket to make a further examination of the mademoiselle’s body, the necessary inspection of her female parts. The mademoiselle gave birth only three months ago, and for this reason Hannah will not bleed her. Even in the overly sanguinary, she has found that bloodletting can increase a new mother’s weakness and fatigue, even engender melancholy in some cases. She scrutinizes Louise’s thighs for scurvy and her toes for signs of gout. These investigations are routine, however, an afterthought. She has already found exactly what she expected to find, almost from the moment she walked into the room.

  “You may rest now,” she says, smoothing the duvet back into place. Louise’s eyes are closed, her breathing labored but steady; she’s already sinking deep into a feverish sleep. Hannah sits down on the embroidered settee next to the bed and opens her medicine case. The removable top shelf contains jars of ointment and bottles of tinctures and syrups. The space underneath cradles instruments: a scalpel and a double-edged knife, called a catlin, for minor surgeries, a lancet for opening veins. She takes out a few simple decoctions of chamomile, fennel, and nettles and sets them on the bedside table. She’ll ask the maid to combine them with a pitcher of small beer and instruct her to give Louise one cup every hour, until Hannah returns tomorrow morning with the other medicines the mademoiselle will require.

  She extracts the most familiar bottle, a glass vial in the top right corner. This is not for Louise but for herself. The liquid inside is as dark as strong coffee, slightly viscous from the sugar solution and bitter in spite of it. Papaver somniferum, mithridate, diacordium, tincture of opium, theriac, treacle, laudanum, poppy syrup: so many names for what is essentially the same thing, her salvation. She stirs the contents with a slim glass wand, then leans her head back, mouth open. From the wand she lets six drops fall on the back of her tongue. As she swallows, the acrid taste makes her spine shiver. She has come to anticipate with pleasure this one quick convulsion, for it means that soon she will feel some relief.

  Hannah returns the bottle to its place among the others and thinks about what she will say and how she will say it. People seldom profit by being the bearer of bad news. How seriously should she take Arlington’s threat of jail? Her father once told her that she should never underestimate what people will do for love or for money, especially at court. She stands and takes a moment to prepare herself before she goes in search of Lord Arlington and Madame Severin, to tell them that the king’s favorite mistress has the clap.

  Chapter Four

  The Tuesday before Michaelmas term

  IT WAS A dream come true. Claire Donovan stood, awed and excited, in the center of Trinity College’s Great Court, gazing at the sixteenth-century structures enclosing the renowned courtyard. Each spired and crenellated building on the Great Court’s periphery was a monument in its own right: the Tudor brick-and-mortar Great Gate, the vine-covered Master’s Lodge, the imposing, peaked-roof hall, the elegant chapel. Until yesterday, she had seen the college only in photographs.

  Claire had always hoped to teach in a venerable academic institution, but until her fateful trip to Venice four months ago her ambition had never vaulted beyond Harvard’s ivy-covered walls, much less all the way across the Atlantic to England. She sighed audibly with pleasure at her surroundings. It didn’t get much more venerable than this. Founded by Henry VIII in 1546, Trinity’s antecedents stretched all the way back to 1317. Her new place of employment was not only one of the oldest schools in Cambridge but also the largest and traditionally the most aristocratic, being the college of choice of the British royal family. Its graduates included six prime ministers, numerous prize-winning physicists and mathematicians, world-famous poets, celebrated philosophers. Its members had tallied up over thirty Nobel Prizes, more than most countries. Here at Trinity, Claire marveled, Francis Bacon had cut his teeth on philosophy and law, and Dryden had sharpened his wit. Here, Tennyson had composed his first book of lyrical poetry, and A. A. Milne had penned the light verse he’d been famous for before Winnie-the-Pooh. Here, Isaac Newton had secretly written the Principia Mathematica, and Lord Byron had famously kept a pet bear. It was also here, she reflected, that Virginia Woolf had been ignominiously barred from the library (at the time, women were not admitted unless accompanied by a fellow), and here that Soviet spies Kim Philby and Guy Burgess had begun their infamous careers. Well, no one could accuse the place of being uneventful.

  The last rays of sunlight slanted across stone paths and green lawns, transforming the chapel’s ivory-colored façade into a palette of buttery yellows and burnished golds. The house of worship’s spiky stone spires pointed up to the heavens like a row of lit torches against the twilight sky, and the courtyard’s gently splashing fountain cast a long, dome-shaped shadow across the grass. Groups of tuxedo-clad men walked along the paths, talking and laughing in a carefree manner. Occasionally they were joined by a woman, who, like Claire, wore a long gown and looked a little unsteady on her high heels. They were all headed to the same place: a huge, medieval arched doorway adjacent to the hall.

  The college’s one hundred and sixty fellows—or many of them, at any rate—were gathering in Trinity’s grand dining hall for the annual fellowship admission dinner. Each year, three or four new fellows were sworn in, and a banquet was given to introduce them to all the other fellows. Although Claire wasn’t precisely a fellow—as a temporary lecturer, her status was different—she had generously been included with the other newcomers. She discreetly hiked up the top of her strapless, copper-colored satin formal another half inch and headed with the rest through the doorway and to the hall.

  The hall’s lofty hammer-beam ceiling, elaborate Elizabethan woodwork, and bay-windowed alcoves were impressive even when the hall was unadorned. Tonight, the three long, narrow dining tables traversing its generous length were blanketed in white linen and sparkled with fine china and the school’s best silver. On a short riser at the north end of the hall, the High Table waited for its illustrious guests. Above it, a sixteenth-century copy of Holbein’s life-sized painting of Henry VIII gazed magisterially down upon the room. Scores of candles filled the air with a glimmering luminescence; the milling, chatting, formally dressed fellows filled it with the pleasant anticipatory hum of a special occasion. People had already begun to sit down. There were no place cards, so everyone sat where they pleased, except at High Table, which was reserved for the master, the vice-master, the bursar, the junior bursar, the librarian, the dean, and a few of the senior fellows. Claire eagerly looked around for a familiar face to sit next to, without success. But then, there were only two faces that Claire would recognize: Hoddy, or Hoddington Humphries-Todd, a history fellow she had met in Venice, and Andrew Kent.

  She was here because of Andrew Kent. Four months earlier, Claire had traveled to Venice to attend an academic conference after she’d discovered that a Cambridge historian was going to give a paper on the same topic as her unfinished dissertation, the 1618 Spanish conspiracy against Venice. The speaker had turned out to be Trinity fellow Dr. Andrew Kent, an accomplished historian whose first book, Charles II and the Rye House Plot, had been translated into a dozen languages and made into a BBC mini
series. During their five days in Venice, Claire and Andrew had cracked a four-hundred-year-old mystery involving Alessandra Rossetti, a courtesan caught up in the conspiracy.

  First, however, they’d had to overcome their mutual antipathy. Claire had initially thought Andrew pompous, highly critical, and overly competitive. Happily, she’d spent enough time with him to learn that beneath his cool English reserve he was also thoughtful, kind, occasionally funny, often brilliant, and fully deserving of the awards and accolades that had been showered upon him. He’d believed in Claire and the results of her research so completely that he’d stepped aside to let her give the final lecture on the Spanish conspiracy, an act both generous and encouraging. Not to mention the fact that he’d coughed up three thousand euros of his own money to bail her out of a jam when she’d mistakenly taken one of Alessandra Rossetti’s diaries out of the Biblioteca Marciana, the Venice library. He’d offered her the temporary position at Trinity, and they’d begun a friendship of sorts.

  Exactly what sort she couldn’t yet say. Throughout the summer, as she’d been completing her dissertation and preparing to move to England for the next nine months, they had corresponded almost entirely by email. The tone of Andrew’s electronic missives had been friendly but not personal, and she had responded in kind. Anything else would have been unthinkable, really. As far as she knew, Andrew was still involved with Gabriella Griseri, the glamorous Italian television presenter. And now he was Claire’s colleague, and a relationship of that sort would be unwise, wouldn’t it? She certainly didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize her new job. It was a teaching position any newly minted historian would kill for. Claire could think of a half dozen former classmates who were probably gnashing their teeth with envy—and no one more loudly than her ex-husband Michael, an assistant professor of ancient history at Columbia University. Claire allowed herself a small, satisfied smile. She’d made certain that he’d known about her new job before she’d left home.