The King's Favorite

by Susan Holloway Scott

  “Go on,” I scoffed. “I don’t know about players, sir, but any doxie worth her salt must be able to do the same with the customers if she wishes to prosper.”

  “Then likely that’s the reason why so many doxies meet with such sorry ends,” Mr. Hart said with disgust. “Doxies and actresses, too. Some drunkard in the pit flings a rotten apple at these girls, and they run blubbering from the stage, and leave me to make do without them. I’d lay a guinea that you wouldn’t do that, Nell.”

  “I’d toss the apple directly back to the bastard what flung it.” I held out my hand, pointing briskly to my open palm. “There, sir. Show me your coin, and I’ll take that wager of yours, and make myself a guinea richer.”

  They all laughed, glancing to one another in a knowing fashion. My hopes began to climb in earnest. Perhaps they truly did mean to take me on, and I felt almost giddy with expectation. But before I gave myself over entirely to such joy, I knew I must, in honesty, raise one final issue.

  “I’m honored, sirs,” I said carefully. “Most honored indeed. But when I first called upon you, Master Killigrew, you told me I’d no prospect of becoming a player for want of reading. I still can’t, sir, and likely never shall, on ’count of not being a lady scholar. So if you wish to take back your offer—”

  “Not at all,” he said with gladdening certainty. “My son Harry tells me that you’ve learned entire plays by rote, only from hearing them spoken.”

  I colored, caught in a way I hadn’t expected. Soon after the court’s return to London, my sister had begun an intrigue with Harry, as I’d known from the start they would, being so alike in temper and tastes. I was often with them, and so Harry had seen me clamber up onto a table at a tavern or alehouse and recite scraps of the company’s plays in a droll (and not always respectful) manner for the whooping amusement of others.

  “I have learned the words to many of the plays, aye,” I said cautiously. “It comes from hearing them repeated so many times. The words stick in my head, and don’t shake loose.”

  Mr. Lacy drummed his thumbs on the wide knobs of his knees. “ ‘Life, had he not his answer? What strange impudence governs in man when lust is lord of him? ’ ”

  As one they turned and looked at me, waiting with expectation for me to state what followed next. I’d not expected such a trial, nor prepared for it, but praise God it was easy enough.

  “ ‘Thinks he me mad,’ ” I continued, “ ‘because I have no moneys on earth, that I’ll go forfeit my estate in heaven and live eternal beggar? ’ ”

  Mr. Lacy nodded with excitement. “You recognized the play, then?”

  “ ’Course I do,” I said, and grinned. “It’s the start of Mistress Low-water’s first speech, from Master Middleton’s No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s. Isn’t that so, sir?”

  “How long did it take you to learn that, Nell?” Master Killigrew asked.

  I puckered my mouth, thinking. “The five days of the performance, sir, that would be my fairest guess. I wouldn’t have heard it else, though I cannot say for certain, on account of learning it piecemeal, with so much other racketing around me.”

  “It’s that ‘racketing’ that so torments our sorry lot of actresses,” said Mr. Hart. “May the devil claim every tender, impoverished divine’s daughter who’s dared trod my stage, so they won’t torture me again in this life. I tell you, Tom, Nell’s exactly what’s needed.”

  “The divine’s daughters can read, Hart,” Master Killigrew said, admitting a last smidgen of doubt at the mentions of the divine’s tender daughters. Ann and Rebecca Marshall were in fact the beauteous offspring of a Presbyterian preacher, and unlike me, so nicely educated by him that there was never a question of them reading their lines. “They can also mimic the airs of a lady with some degree of verisimilitude. It’s a question of breeding.”

  “And you don’t believe that I can, sir?” I asked indignantly. “You don’t think people would accept me playing a lady, me, from being raised too near to Covent Garden? ”

  Once again I hopped to my feet. This I had practiced, and performed, too. I called to mind Lady Castlemaine at her most haughty—the regal angle of her head, the languid air of her gaze, the graceful curve of her arm holding her fan, how she balanced her weight back on her left leg, as if always poised to begin some French dance at the palace—and composed my face and carriage to repeat it as closely as if I were her very looking-glass.

  Of course, the effect would never be exact, for Her Ladyship was tall and elegantly made, whilst I was short and rounded, but that, too, worked to my favor. I could represent a highborn lady who was not quite a lady, or a lady who was not quite so highborn as she pretended; either of which, I knew, were guaranteed to make those who watched me laugh uproariously, and the harder I’d try to be the looking-glass to Lady Castlemaine, the harder, too, my audience would laugh.

  I could only pray it would work the same on these three men.

  I took one step, lifting the hem of my petticoat with dainty precision to display the toe of my foot, then another step, as if dancing my way to my carriage and six instead of across the jumbled floor of Master Killigrew’s chamber.

  “Holy lamb, Tom, she’s doing Castlemaine.” Mr. Hart whistled low with appreciation as the other two men began to laugh, too. “Mark that little sway, and the set of her chin. Oh, she’s struck the thorn on the head!”

  I paused and glanced disdainfully over my shoulder the way the countess did to everyone save the king (and perhaps, when they were alone, to him as well).

  “I’ll mark you, you low, infernal worm,” I drawled in Her Ladyship’s Whitehall tongue. “I’ll strike your wretched little thorn for you, too, and wish the Spanish pox on your blackguard’s impertinence.”

  I wore my well-crafted disdain like a precious jewel, and did not let it go except to arch a single brow. That was enough to make the three laugh again, clutching their sides and pounding their thighs and roaring until the tears slid down their cheeks to their chins.

  I seated myself on the tabouret, sweeping my skirts around my legs in final tribute to the countess. Then I relaxed and once again became my usual merry self.

  “How can you refuse her after that, Tom?” asked Mr. Hart, daubing away his tears with the cuff of his sleeve. “Damnation, I’ll take the jade beneath my wing and school her myself until she’s ready. John here can help me if she grows vexing.”

  “I won’t,” I said swiftly. “I swear to it. I’ll be only passing meek and mild.”

  Mr. Lacy snorted with disbelief. “That’s not why we want you, lass. We want you to play the sprite, the spitfire, and if the lines you’ve been given don’t suit the moment, we want you to use that clever little tongue of yours, and invent ones of your own.”

  “If it’s a sprite you wish, sirs, then I am yours. A sprite, a nymph, a fury, a fairy—I’ll be all of that, and more besides!” I grinned and kicked my heels together with purest glee. “You’ll not regret this, sirs, not for a moment, nor ever, ever shall I.”

  I wish I could claim that my journey from the pit to the stage, from orange girl to actress, was one of marvelous swiftness, or that within a fortnight every gallant and lord in London was praising my performances with rapturous hosannas.

  I wish it, but alas, alack, it would be a most grievous lie if I did. For despite the native gifts that Master Killigrew and Mr. Hart claimed I possessed, I was treated like the greenest twig—which, though I soundly denied it, I was.

  First I was given lodgings nearby the playhouse in Drury Lane, near to where Master Killigrew himself lived, and where he could watch to see I kept from mischief. As I soon learned, all the players looked after one another with a good-natured loyalty and devotion, through good and through ill. Though Master Killigrew called us a family, the arrangement also reminded me of the old times at Mrs. Ross’s house, with the actors and actresses tumbling in and out of one another’s beds on the slightest pretense of affection, or sometimes only boredom.

  But the
main thing that held our little band together was work, and being new like me was no exception. Every day but the Sabbath, I was put to a rigorous schedule of practice and rehearsals. I was given over to Mr. Lacy’s tutelage, and taught to raise my voice with emotion and not just volume, and to speak so every word rang clear to those in the highest gallery. I learned how to make my gestures have meaning and significance, and my movements seize and hold the audience’s eyes. I listened to rehearsals of the new plays, and memorized as many parts as I could against playing those same roles in the future.

  Likewise, I was put among the senior actresses, Mrs. Hughes and Mrs. Knepp and the Marshall sisters, to learn from them the art of paint and powder and dressing the hair, whether false or one’s own. I practiced how to paint my cheeks to resemble the freshest milk-fed innocent, and to line my eyes to become the veriest crone. I was trussed into stays and bodices so tightly I must needs learn new ways to breathe and speak. I practiced walking and dancing with grace beneath the staggering weight of a full court gown, for the playhouse’s stock was enriched by the glittering castoffs from the wardrobes of noble ladies. I came to see that the dress I’d worn so proudly while in Mr. Duncan’s care was dowdy and mean, fit only for a mercer’s doxy, and not for the true ladies of fashion I aspired to play.

  By the end of 1664, Master Killigrew was giving me tiny silent parts, maids and fairies and slave wenches, that took no skill, and I rankled under his decision, eager for more.

  Yet when Mr. Hart counseled patience, I listened. As an actor who’d reached the apex of his craft, he played the roles of kings and conquerors with such skill and understanding that true monarchs across the Continent held him as a shining example. Even our own king had commissioned a portrait of Mr. Hart in the guise of Alexander the Great, and had it hung in Whitehall for all to admire. Thus was Mr. Hart regarded as nearly a gentleman himself, and considering how his income was close to a hundred fifty pounds a year, enough to support a house in the country as well as his lodgings in town, he was worth more than many minor lords.

  In short, Mr. Hart had no reason to take such trouble with me, nor any gain to earn from it, except from the purest nobility of his soul, and enough kind generosity determined to see his art flourish and continue in a young acolyte like myself.

  From this man who could be more royal than royalty itself I learned how to speak with a genteel good cheer, neither affected nor common, but somewhere in between the two. Because I could not read, he read every part aloud to me until I knew it by ear, though he also encouraged me to make up new lines if I forgot the playwright’s, or improve them as I saw fit. He wanted my speech to be as quick and agile as his own, and to this end he addressed me as his equal. In time I, too, began to use more fulsome and elegant language to season my wit. I put aside the Coal Yard Alley in my speech, and drew instead upon the Oxford cadence of my earliest childhood.

  Yet what drew me most to Charles (for he’d early given me leave to address him thus, by his Christian name) was that even as he instructed me, he still delighted in me as I was, and never sought to change what made me Nelly Gwyn. No other man—nor woman, truth to tell—had ever granted me such respect in all my fourteen years. He had become my greatest teacher, supporter, protector, and friend.

  Was it any wonder, then, that by December, I willingly followed where Charles Hart led me, and forgot the twenty years that stretched between us in age, and took the next, inevitable step that he proposed?

  “So where’s this almighty surprise you’ve been promising, Charles?” I asked, drinking deep from the steaming dish of chocolate before me. As had become our habit, we’d come to this tavern in Russell Street not far from the playhouse after the day’s performance was done, for supper together before Charles walked me back to my lodgings. The winter night was cold and the air outside sharp, but inside, the tavern’s dining rooms were crowded in a warm and noisy jumble. The landlord loved the playhouse, and this table near the fire was always set aside for Charles and Master Killigrew. We’d bespoke the best his cook could offer, too, and now that I’d eaten my fill of an eel and onion pie, I was eager for Charles to stop his teasing and tell me his surprise.

  “I’m beginning to think there’s no surprise at all, you dog,” I said, “and you’ve made up the whole thing just to plague me.”

  “I’d not do that to you, Nelly,” Charles said, making a righteous show of his indignation, working his brows and twisting his mouth, so that he set me to laughing. There were precious few times when he stopped performing, off the stage as well as on it, a condition we gladly shared. “How can you say such a thing of me, hussy? ”

  “I can if it’s God’s own truth.” I narrowed my eyes over my chocolate, dabbling my finger in the sweet froth on the surface. “Out with it, Charles. I’m weary of waiting.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.” He shook his head, his expression one of deep sorrow and regret. “A weary Nelly’s of no use to anyone.”

  “No,” I agreed smartly, “and worse, I’ll be a righteous torment until you tell all.”

  “Very well.” He took another endless minute to rake his fair, waving hair back from his forehead, as if contemplating what next to say. “I’ll call for trumpet fanfare first, if you please.”

  “I’ll trumpet you, Charles,” I warned. “You wretched, shambling, teasing—”

  “I know the first speaking part to be granted to Mrs. Eleanor Gwyn, of the King’s Company.” He grinned, displaying his famously white teeth. “That’s quieted you, hasn’t it?”

  “Not by half!” I seized his arm, demanding more. “How do you know this? What play? What part? When, Charles, when?”

  “I know because Killigrew himself told me,” he said. “It’s a new play, of his own devising, called Thomaso, or the Wanderer, and he’s written a plum little part for you.”

  I nodded eagerly. Most of the company’s productions were of older plays, by Middleton, Jonson, or Shakespeare, but audiences clamored for new pieces, too, as fast as play wrights could pen them. Because the new parts were written to feature a particular player and display him or her to best advantage, we liked them better as well.

  “Is it a comedy, then?” I demanded with excitement. To make a whole playhouse of folk laugh; ah, what could be better than that? “Will I dance, or have a song?”

  “I believe it’s more of a somber, tragical story,” he said. “Foreign-set plots usually are, by their very nature. But that wouldn’t be amiss for your first speaking performance. You want people to recall you in a serious fashion.”

  “What’s the part, then?” I begged. “Oh, pray, tell me, Charles! A princess or a shepherdess or—”

  “Paulina, a courtesan of the first rank,” he said. “The characters are Italian, you see, and a courtesan is their cant for—”

  “I know what a courtesan is.” I concentrated on licking the chocolate from my fingertips, tasting the last of the eel pie in my mouth, salt over sweet. “Fancy me playing a whore. Don’t have to shake the tree too hard to see where that apple falls, do we?”

  “Nelly.” His sympathy was sweetly genuine; I knew him well enough by now to smoke the difference. “It’s a role, no more, and a good role at that. I play Othello, and no one mistakes me for a murderous blackamoor.”

  “That’s because you weren’t one before.” I sighed and shrugged and made myself smile. “Hey-ho, it’s of no matter. Much of being a whore is playacting, anyways. All I must do now is turnabout, and all’s fair.”

  He took my hand in his, covering mine with his mate. The fire’s light glinted on his golden hair, and lit the kindness in his eyes.

  “Mark me, Nelly,” he said softly, leaning closer to make his words for only my ears. “Every player can change his skin with ease from one personage to another, but only the wisest learn to separate their heart and soul apart from the parts they play.”

  “Ah, Hart, they told me backstage that you’d be here.” A tall gentleman with ginger-colored hair stopped before us, his g
loved hand resting lightly on the pommel of his sword. Everyone with a flicker of interest in the court recognized George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. He was still in his middle-thirties, but his once-handsome face was already marked by dissipation, strong waters, and notorious cunning, though his bearing still demanded instant respect even if he weren’t dressed in rich plum silk velvet, with yellow Spanish leather boots and a fur-lined cloak with jewels scattered negligently about his person. As a boyhood friend of the king’s, Buckingham often sat in the royal box, though generally displaying such yawning boredom that I wondered how the king tolerated his company.

  Yet a duke was a duke, and Buckingham the duke among other dukes. At once Charles was on his feet to bow, just as I popped up beside him to curtsey.

  “Your Grace, I am your servant,” Charles murmured as he bent elegantly low before the duke. No one could make a leg as fine as Charles, or sweep his hand through the air with a more perfect flourish. “I trust we entertained Your Grace this day? ”

  “Your Lord Macbeth is, as always, incomparable,” His Grace said, though his attention and his gaze had already found me, or rather, my breasts rising up above my tight-laced bodice. “I’d like to have you come to the palace tomorrow evening, to recite the best of the speeches to amuse His Majesty.”

  “Of course, Your Grace.” Charles bowed again. “I’ll be most honored to oblige.”

  “Good, good,” the duke said, his gaze still devouring me. “But tell me, Hart. Who is this delectable little baggage?”

  Charles began to introduce me, but I held my hand up to halt him and answered for myself. “You’re already acquainted with this little baggage, Y’Grace, on account of having bought your share of China oranges from me. I’m Nelly Gwyn, Y’Grace, rigged out fine, but the same inside.”

  “Mrs. Gwyn has displayed such a rare gift for amusement that we’ve added her into the King’s Company, Your Grace,” Charles said quickly, using my name as it now appeared on the playbills. Actresses, like cooks and madams, were generally called Mrs., whether wed or not. “She will be making her first speaking appearance on our stage before the end of the year.”