The King's Favorite

by Susan Holloway Scott

  “Is that where the king sits? ” I asked, pointing at the centered box on the first level over the pit. “There, with the tall armchair? ”

  “If His Majesty attends this performance, yes.” Mr. Duncan’s grasp on my arm tightened as he pulled me back from the rail. “If he chooses not to come, then the royal box will be granted to the person of the next highest rank in the house. It’s Sir William’s decision to make.”

  “Well, lah, then I’ll pray the king does come, and spare Sir William the puzzle of deciding.” I hoped His Majesty would appear. Though I’d put aside my girlish dreams of him as my first lover, I missed my glimpses of his charming royal countenance at Mrs. Ross’s, and it would be a fine thing to see him here. I leaned again over the rail, my hair slipping forward as I craned my neck back to look up. The playhouse’s roof was open to the skies, to let in light and air, and a few stray swallows danced and dived above the highest gallery seats. “Do the birds ever come low, sir? Wouldn’t that make for a pretty scene, to see some righteous player queen splattered with a great stinking mess of—”

  “Sit, Nell, sit.” This time Mr. Duncan forcibly pushed me down onto the bench, holding me there with his hand on my shoulder as if I were a naughty child—which, I suppose, in a way I was. “I’m sure the birds are just one of the perils of being a player.”

  “All the world’s a critic, eh? ” I laughed merrily, and though I dutifully kept my bum on the edge of the bench, I slipped forward as far as I could to rest my forearms on the rail. “Oh, look, the orange girls have come!”

  Several girls had appeared in the pit below us, baskets of the fruit balanced coyly on their hips. They were dressed alike in close-fitting bodices cut low to display wares of a different sort, and a more cunning bunch of pretty slatterns I’d never seen. They bantered and bartered with the men in the pit as they tossed the oranges lightly in their hands, teasing the audience with becoming good humor to garner their laughter as well as their coins. It was much like Mrs. Ross’s again, with gentlemen vying for the favoring smiles of lasses born far beneath them, and both parties finding much delight in the bartering.

  And in my safe, sure, tedious place at Mr. Duncan’s side, I envied them all.

  “I’ll buy you a treat, Nell.” Mr. Duncan whistled to one of the girls and tossed her a coin. Deftly she caught it in her open palm, pocketed it, and threw an orange up to him, as neat as you please. Blushing, he handed me the fruit like it were a golden prize, and I turned it thoughtfully in my fingers.

  “I could do that,” I said, more to myself than to him. “I’d be good at it, too.”

  Mr. Duncan frowned. “Do what, sweetheart? ”

  “Sell oranges.” Lightly I tossed the fruit back and forth in my hands. “I could be one of those girls.”

  His frown deepened to a scowl. “Oh, no, I think not.”

  My chin rose with defiance. “Why not, sir? Don’t you believe I’m as fair as they, and as quick?”

  “That’s not the question, Nell,” he said crossly. “In truth there is no question. You’ve no need to sell oranges. You’re with me.”

  “True enough, sir.” I dug my thumb into the orange’s pebbled skin, knowing I’d do well to hold my peace, and my resentment with it. I doubted the orange girls had as much dull comfort as I had in my lodgings over the Cock and Pie, but likewise I was sure they had a great deal more amusement each night than I would in all my life from respectable Mr. Duncan.

  “It is true,” he said, choosing to ignore my discontent. “Now settle, and eat your orange, and listen to the music. You wished to come early to hear the orchestra. Well, there it is.”

  If I’d been in a better humor, I would have offered him half the orange by way of placation, even slipping the slices between his lips to feed him, for men did like to play big babies with women. But I was too sulky to cosset him, and instead ate the entire orange myself, stuffing the sweet fruit into my mouth three slices at a time while the small group of musicians sitting beneath the stage began to tune their fiddles. Scattering scraps of peel from my lap, I restlessly swung my dangling legs back and forth and watched the audience that was beginning to fill the benches in the galleries and in the pit.

  “That’s not the king,” I observed, pointing at the handsome gentleman with golden brown hair settling himself in the tall-backed chair I’d noticed earlier.

  “So it’s not,” Mr. Duncan said. “I don’t know who that fellow is.”

  “I do,” I said promptly. “That’s His Grace George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham. He’s one of the king’s dearest friends, and cousin to Lady Castlemaine, and you know how dear a friend she is to His Majesty.”

  Mr. Duncan’s scowl returned. “How is His Grace known to you, Nell?”

  “Oh, I know him to see, same as everyone does,” I said with breezy indifference. “His Grace visited us at Mrs. Ross’s, along with His Majesty. He always favored the fleshy girls best, you know, the ones with the biggest—”

  “I’d rather not know, Nell.” He was blushing again, and glancing about with unease to see if anyone had overheard me. “Your earlier, ah, life is of no concern to me.”

  “You know I never went upstairs with him, sir,” I said swiftly. “Not that duke, nor any other. You know that, sir, better’n anyone else.”

  “Without a doubt,” he admitted, and covered my hand with his own, resting on my knee. “I was your first gentleman.”

  “Yes, sir.” I slid closer to him so that our thighs did touch, my own little concession. “I heard about Lord Buckingham’s tastes from the other girls, and from the Earl of Rochester, too. Lord Rochester was another friend of mine from Mrs. Ross’s, you know, before he went away to Italy.”

  Mr. Duncan smiled indulgently. “That’s what His Lordship told you, to be sure. Gentlemen in such places say many things.”

  “Lord Rochester’d no reason to lie, sir, not to me.” I’d thought often of the earl, and wondered how he was faring. Other girls had sought him out because he was rich and titled and handsome as the day, but I’d liked him because his wit was as sharp as my own. The same things had made us laugh, the two youngest pups in that bawdy kennel of old hounds and bitches. He’d never once looked down upon me, the way that Mr. Duncan was doing even now.

  “His Lordship’s near the same age as I, only three years or so older,” I continued in his defense. “That’s why we were such friends, until they packed him off to Italy and France with some long-nosed tutor, to finish his schooling, they said.”

  “If he’s that young, Nell, then he was more likely sent away to keep him from Mrs. Ross’s grasp,” Mr. Duncan said, turning pious as a preacher. “That house is hardly a fit place for a young peer.”

  I pulled my hand away from his, curling my fingers into a tight knot in my lap. “If His Lordship was old enough to find his way to Drury Lane, then he was plenty old enough to consider the rest for himself.”

  He looked at me curiously. “I wonder that you should care so much about this Lord Rochester, Nell, or Lord Buckingham, or the king, or any of the others of rank at the palace.”

  “Why not, sir?” I repeated, surprised, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been. “His Lordship amused me, and I him. There’s no sin to that, sir.”

  “No sin other than you pretending familiarity.” His smile was halfway to a knowing smirk, yet also suffused with a degree of misplaced kindness. “Consider who you are, Nell, and your own station, and how much higher such nobles are than you. You’ll never be more than one more dirty cobble beneath their feet to men like that. Ah, look, the dances have begun at last.”

  I gasped, wounded by his casual disregard, but he’d already turned away from me to watch the dancers. He was finished, but I—I’d so much left unsaid that I thought the words would fair choke me. I wanted to tell him that Lord Rochester truly had been my friend, that he hadn’t cared who my father might be, that I would return to his confidence as soon as he came back from Italy. I longed to explain how Fate would carr
y me far beyond Mr. Duncan, and that he’d never be the sole star in my sky. Most of all, I wished I could make him understand that I was by nature far more clever than he seemed to believe, that a humble birth did not necessarily beget a poor wit.

  But making him understand was not my role in our arrangement. I was there to swell his manly pride, to serve his desires, and to be otherwise agreeable and unchallenging. If to be so went contrary to my natural inclinations, then that was the price of a soft feather bed and the beribboned shoes on my little feet. With a sigh of resignation, I slipped my hand through the crook of Mr. Duncan’s arm. He didn’t turn from the stage, but I could see how he smiled in profile, pleased that I’d bowed to his superiority once again.

  Yet as I watched the shambling dancers—ah, ah, if I’d only the chance, I could dance and sing and frolic so much better than that!—it was rebellion, not meekness, that swelled my heart.

  In frustration, I looked down to the royal box, where the Duke of Buckingham sat with several other gentlemen lords. The fairest of the orange girls had joined him, summoned there, I was sure, by the duke himself. While all other eyes in the house were turned toward the stage, His Grace’s were only on the fortunate girl beside him. She bent close to whisper to him, her hand resting familiarly on the arm of his chair, and even at this distance I could see the pleasure that lit his eyes at whatever she was suggesting.

  I could do that, too, oh, aye, I could! My fate wouldn’t always be latched to a dull-wit draper like Mr. Duncan. Given the chance, I could make a duke—even a king!—laugh aloud, and look at me like that, and make him forget everything else but me!

  It did not help that the play that soon followed was one renowned for its murderous bloodshed, a story of a widow who chooses wrongly in love with the most tragic consequences. Portrayed with great skill and passion (or so it did seem to me at the time, being my first play) by Mr. Betterton and Mrs. Saunderson, this horrific tale seemed tailored directly for me, and I watched each sorrowful scene with tears spilling down my cheeks. To be sure, I’d not married an Italian duke, nor had I a mad twin brother determined on hellish revenge, but still I saw this infamous tale as a warning to me, a caution against the perils of crossing Fate.

  A fate that, I knew now, must take me through a playhouse. It wasn’t just the orange girls or the dancers, either. As I watched the players, I’d realized that what they did was not really so very different from what I’d enjoyed most at Mrs. Ross’s house: making an audience watch, drawing their gaze full upon me until they couldn’t bear to look away from fear they’d miss something rare.

  And I could do that, too, better than most anyone. I could, I could, and if I wept from frustration, well, then, I’d let those same tears temper my will.

  “You do realize it was naught but an empty story, don’t you, Nell?” Mr. Duncan asked at the end, amused by my teary show of emotion. “Silly little lass, to weep over an overripe lot of pretend Italians and a bladder of pig’s blood!”

  “Oh, aye, I am a fool, aren’t I?” I forced myself to smile up at him through my tears, and kept my smile as he settled his arm around my waist. Better that way, better to keep him happy, until I’d secured another haven.

  For however could I explain that I wept not for the murdered Italian duchess, but for my own small self?

  Chapter Four

  THEATRE ROYAL, LONDON March 1663

  “Are you sure we should be here, Nell?” My sister Rose hung back in the playhouse’s doorway, peering into the gloom past the raw, unpainted timbers. “They don’t look ready to receive company.”

  “They don’t know we’re calling, that’s all,” I said confidently, twitching my skirts to one side as I picked my way through the sawdust. I’d taken special care with my dress this day, wanting to make the best possible impression on Master Killigrew. I’d no wish to appear before him covered with flecks of wood, as if I’d just been tumbled in the lumberyard. I wore a green woolen petticoat beneath my hooded cloak; yellow stockings, the better to draw attention to my neat ankles; and a muff of dappled hareskin on my wrist. Since I’d been in Mr. Duncan’s keeping, my cheeks had plumped and my shape become rounder. I’d grown no taller, alas, and never would, but for the first time in my life, my ribs didn’t show through my flesh.

  “You’ve never been afraid of men before, Rose,” I said. From the hall ahead of us came the sounds of hammering and sawing and the general raillery and swearing common to carpenters, and nothing fearsome to any of it. “I don’t see why you should be so skittery now.”

  “I’m not skittery,” Rose protested, smoothing her bodice lower over her breasts. “And I’m not afraid of men. Especially the laboring ones. I’ll take a man what earns an honest wage over any dissembling actor with empty pockets who expects me to take him for the honor of his prick alone.”

  “You aim too low for yourself, Rose, taking any man what asks you.”

  She wrinkled her nose at me. “I take his coin first, then him. I’m not half so careless as you make me out, Nell. I know my trade.”

  “That’s not why I am here at all,” I said in a fierce whisper, “and if you pox this for me by acting like a twopenny whore, Rose Gwyn, then I vow I’ll shove you clear to the nearest dunghill and leave you there, too.”

  I raised my chin and glowered at her to prove I meant it, and with a little hop-skip, I left her to follow after me or not, as she chose. I was thirteen, and no matter how my sister might badger me, I was as ready as ever I would be to take this next step forward toward my destiny.

  I marched down the long passage, into the pit of the new playhouse, or rather, what would become the pit once it was done. There were no benches yet in place, no chairs in the boxes nor scenery on the stage, only piles of rubbish and workman’s leavings. If the playhouse was in fact to open within the month, as was commonly said about the town, then these workmen should have been working at double haste, rather than lolling about their labor.

  I leaned back to look up at the carpenters balanced on scaffolding and ladders over my head, like ropedancers with hammers, as they set molding into place onto the fronts of the boxes. The two nearest spied me in return, grinning down at me like wicked monkeys in the jungle. No matter that I judged my dress to be surpassing genteel; they at once saw me for what I was, and fair game for their salutes.

  “Climb up here, sweetheart,” called the younger one, his face freckled all over. “Climb up, and give me a taste of those fair lips of yours!”

  “Hah, shut your own mouth, you rogue, before the flies flit inside to taste the idleness of your tongue,” I called up to them with good humor. “Or leastways be of some mortal use, and tell me where I might find Master Killigrew.”

  They laughed, so full of merry insolence that I couldn’t help but laugh with them, my hands at my waist.

  “What’s this, then?” boomed a man’s voice from the stage behind me. “Who asks for Master Killigrew?”

  “I do, sir,” I said, turning toward him swiftly so my skirts swirled above my ankles in pretty display. “Do you know where I might find him? ”

  “Perhaps,” he said easily, “if you’ll tell me your business first. Master Killigrew is a gentleman of enormous responsibility. He can’t see everyone who wishes to, you know.”

  Yet he smiled, all melting warmth and charm, and not a hint of menace to give teeth to his stern words. With his long, well-turned legs set as gracefully as any dancing master’s, he stood on the stage tall above me and gazed down as if all these raw timbers and dust were his very kingdom. And why shouldn’t he? I’d recognized his handsome face at once. His name was Charles Hart, and he was one of the first actors of the King’s Company. Why he was here now, with the playhouse in such incomplete disarray, was entirely beyond me.

  I curtseyed deeply, though I didn’t bow my head, as was proper with my betters. Instead I tipped my chin coyly to one side as I looked up at him through the fringe of my lashes. I’d long ago learned that while some gentlemen expect groveling o
bedience from women, with others a bit of teasing humor accomplished much more, and I guessed Mr. Hart to be in this camp.

  “My business, sir, is Master Killigrew’s business,” I said. “Which is to say our business is one and the same, or could be, if we can but agree.”

  “If you can but speak to him, mistress, which is more the truth of it.” He laughed, his head back the better to display his fine white teeth. I’d noticed that he’d laughed thus whilst performing, too, and I wondered which had come first. “You must confess more to me than that.”

  “I’ll confess not a word, sir,” I said, “for I’ve no sin to my conscience what needs absolution from you.”

  “Neither sins, nor absolution?” He narrowed his eyes at me, enjoying this game as much as I. “Then no penance, either?”

  “None, sir,” I said cheerfully. “I’ll leave such notions to ill-gotten Papists, and find comfort in owing my allegiance to my king and my country, and kiss my hand to Rome.”

  “You’re a saucy little jade,” he said, pleased, I knew. “Will you give me your name, or is that fit only for Killigrew’s ears, too? ”

  “It’s Nell, sir,” I said proudly. “Nelly Gwyn. Mark you remember it, sir, because I mean to—”

  “You mean to what?” The gentleman ambling out onto the stage was Master Killigrew himself. I’d recognized him, too, from having him pointed out to me by Mr. Duncan as an important acquaintance of his. Master Killigrew was in fact the proprietor, the holder of the charter for the King’s Company, as well as a Gentleman of the King’s Bedchamber and a dear and loyal friend of His Majesty himself. He was far older than Mr. Hart, at least forty years and perhaps older. He looked weary and bent in the shoulders, and I suspected his fur-lined cap and coat were for warmth as much as for being modish, like a heathen Turk. He’d a hooked nose and a wispy beard such as I’d seen in pictures of the old king, and now he tipped his head back to look down that selfsame nose as he regarded me.