The King's Favorite

by Susan Holloway Scott

  I hadn’t expected that, and I flushed. “Mr. Hart’s partial to me, aye.”

  “Hah.” He rested his arm on the table and his head on his hand, the better to study me, I suppose. “How is he, Nell? Half the women in London would give their eyeteeth to have your place in his bed, you know. The glorious Charles Hart! Is he worthy of his billing? Does he fuck you as heroically as he plays? ”

  My cheeks grew hotter still, and I looked down at the fork in my fingers. It made no sense, really. The earl and I were accustomed to such frank talk between us, and this should have been no different. To him it wasn’t. But I realized I’d no wish to see Charles skewered by His Lordship’s ever-sharp wit. I owed him too much for that.

  “Mr. Hart is everything a woman could want, m’lord,” I said, and angry with myself for saying even that much, I jabbed the fork into the top of the table. “Everything, mind you!”

  “But he’s not the king, is he? ”

  I looked up quickly, betraying myself, and he chuckled. “Where’s your old ambition, Nell? Where’s the lass who was so determined to rise that she’d kept her thighs tight even toiling in a bawdy house? ”

  “I’m as I always was, m’lord,” I said warmly. “Didn’t you see that this day at the playhouse? Everyone was watching me, and speaking of me afterward. That’s what I’ve always wanted, m’lord, and I’m on my way to having it. I’ve not changed.”

  He smiled benignly, falsely. “You have, sweetheart. I wouldn’t lie. You’ve grown into as fetching a morsel as I’ve ever encountered.”

  “And you, m’lord, are the same low, rascally coxcomb you’ve always been.”

  “I won’t deny it,” he said mildly, “nor will you. We’re rascals together, Mrs. Gwyn. You know it took less than two years for Mrs. Palmer to rise to Countess of Castlemaine. Being born a Villiers helped, of course, as it did the duke.”

  “The duke?” Castlemaine and Buckingham and the king’s attention to me on this day; oh, I could guess now where His Lordship was trying to steer this particular vessel, and I was just as certain I’d not let him arrive at his chosen landing place.

  “Yes, the duke, the Duke of Buckingham,” he said. “They’re cousins in some unfathomable way. He made sure she was accessible to the king.”

  “Meaning His Grace was Her Ladyship’s procurer,” I said. “Her bully-cock. Her pimp. Isn’t that so, m’lord? ”

  He winced slightly at the words, he who in most matters balked at nothing. “Meaning they are partners by blood and by friendship, and now to their mutual benefit and profit.”

  “A handsome profit sets everything to rights, don’t it?” I smiled sweetly. “But then, His Grace should know that. Recall how his grandfather earned that fine dukedom of his, by playing the catamite to this king’s grandfather James. Once whoring’s in your blood, it’s hard to get it out, eh?”

  “You tell me, Nell,” he said with a forced drawl that attempted disinterest, but came out more like a stubborn, small boy’s. “You’d know; not I.”

  “Go on,” I said playfully. I reached across the table to shove his arm. “You do so know, m’lord! Whitehall Palace’s the greatest bawdy house in London. Everyone has something to sell, and everyone has something to buy, don’t they? Even the king himself bartered himself to the Portuguese grandees when he married that plain princess, for a pile of gold and some faraway lands that no one’s heard of, anyways. And then there’s you, m’lord, and your lady, and—”

  “That’s not the same, sweet,” he said testily. “I’m not so mercenary as that. I hold the lady in the highest regard.”

  “Why, m’lord,” I said, sitting back with a jolt in my chair as if struck there with amazement. “Then you understand exactly my attachment for Mr. Hart.”

  He stared at me over his goblet, so long and hard that I began to wonder if I’d stepped too far. At last he took the crumpled napkin from the table and slowly unfolded it, smoothing the wrinkles away as best he could with the flat of his hand. Then, just as slowly, solemnly, he held it up stretched between his hands and began to wave it back and forth.

  “Faith,” I said. “What are you doing? ”

  “Why, surrendering, Nell,” he said. “I’m waving my flag so you’ll agree to show me mercy.”

  “Mercy!” I laughed, as much from relief as merriment. “You don’t need mercy from me, m’lord.”

  “Oh, yes, I do.” He tossed the napkin over his shoulder with studied negligence. “I need to keep you as my friend. I can’t afford to risk a chit as clever as you are turning against me.”

  “I’ve known you far too long for that, m’lord.” I pushed my chair back from the table and rose. “Come, I’m weary, and ready to seek my bed for the night.”

  “I’ll join you, sweet,” he said softly, “and we can seal our friendship forever.”

  “More like seal its doom, m’lord.” I held my hand out to him, for the sake of our old friendship, but no more. “It most always does.”

  “Spoken like the wise old whores we both are,” he said wryly. “We know our price, eh, Nell?”

  Yet my laughter faded as I took his arm. Melancholy rose like sour ale in my throat, and with it a sadness I couldn’t explain. We still were young, the pair of us not close to twenty years, yet I wondered what in our short lives had fashioned us into the jaded creatures we were.

  But oh, what we would become. What we would become.

  “Good evening, madam,” Charles said, his voice as frosty as the air outside. “Or should I bid you good morning instead? ”

  I wasn’t surprised that he’d remained awake until I returned. This was the first time I’d chosen to dine with anyone else since we’d been together, and like every other man since Adam fussed over Eve being out of his sight in the garden, I imagined Charles would feel required to demonstrate his jealousy and unhappiness.

  With only the hearth’s embers for light, he sat waiting in his crimson dressing gown, his legs elegantly crossed and a small volume of poems open on his knee, his face turned at the exact angle to catch his profile. Even now, he remained ever conscious of his effect on his audience. Most times, this charmed me no end, but tonight I found it only irritating.

  I didn’t bother with preliminaries. “Didn’t Rose tell you I was with Lord Rochester?”

  “Rochester,” he said with withering disgust. “Yes, your sister told me. But I’d dared to hope she was mistaken.”

  “She wasn’t.” I untied my cloak and hung it on the peg on the back of the door. “I’ve known Lord Rochester for years and years. I’ve never kept that secret from you, nor shall I now. His Lordship’s new returned from France, and we supped together, as old friends will. And that is all, Charles. That is all.”

  “I’ll thank you for not treating me like a doddering fool, Nell.” He snapped the book shut and tossed it aside. “Lord Rochester may be new returned to court, but he has already acquired a most unsavory collection of friends. Sedley, Buckhurst—”

  “And now me,” I said. “Lah, likely I’m the worst of the lot.”

  “Nell, if you please, I—”

  “We’re not on the stage now, Charles,” I said, holding on to the post of the bed as I kicked off my shoes. “You needn’t play this as great tragedy.”

  I padded across the room in my stocking feet to my dressing table, and began to pull the pins from my hair. My back was to him, but I could see his scowl reflected in my little looking-glass.

  “If all you wished was to be part of the parade of willing flesh through His Majesty’s bed, you could have asked Harry Killigrew,” he said. “He’s a Groom of the Bedchamber. I’m sure he could have shown you the way up the backstairs at the palace, like all the other trollops before you.”

  “Is that what has you up in the boughs, Charles?” I demanded, twisting around to face him. “You think I went to the king this night? ”

  “You tell me,” he said sharply. “Did you?”

  “No,” I said, emphatic in my indignation. “No,
no, no.”

  He answered nothing, only infuriating me the more. I swept across the room to stand before him, my hands squared righteously at my waist.

  “As hard as I have worked—as hard as you have labored with me—to earn my fair place in the playhouse,” I fumed. “How dare you believe that I’d scatter all that just to fuck the king for a single night? That’s what it would be, too, and nothing more, and I doubt he’d even recall it at breakfast on the morrow.”

  Charles squirmed, thank God, else I might have struck him. “After the king showed such attention to you earlier in the tiring-room—”

  “Because it was the first time he’d seen me after I’d stopped working for Mrs. Meggs,” I said. “Because he spoke kindly to me, and showed interest in me, you thought I’d tumble backward and lift my skirts there against the tiring-room wall.”

  “I didn’t say that, Nell.”

  “You didn’t have to,” I said, not hiding my unhappiness. It didn’t seem fair, having Charles question me like this when I’d stood so loyal to him with Rochester. “How great a fool do you take me for, sir? How wretchedly low am I in your regard? How much must I—”

  “Enough.” He looked up at me, his expression inexplicably sad. By the fire’s dwindling light, he looked much older, or perhaps it was only because I’d spent the evening in the company of a gentleman who was in the freshest, most vigorous flower of his youth, only three years my senior instead of twenty. “It will be your decision, Nelly. You stay with the company, or you move along.”

  It was my decision, and I’d already made it. “I’m staying,” I said, and kissed him. “I’m staying.”

  But now that the unspeakable had been given wings and the possibility of my leaving released, it could no more be unsaid than an egg is put back into a broken shell. We both knew it. In time I would leave the company, and leave him.

  The only question was when.

  Chapter Eight

  LONDON June 1665

  When I recall the comet that I’d first seen that winter night with Charles, I pictured it as a pretty sight, a rarity of God and nature, and an omen of the shining affection my new lover would bear toward me. It was, in short, an altogether pleasing star to me.

  But as the new year progressed, there were plenty of other folk around me in London who remembered that same comet with sorrow, dread, and fear. To them it became a harbinger of God’s disapproval of the king, the court, the Dutch, or perhaps even their own ill-favored mother-in-law. The comet had been sent as a warning to repent, or a symbol to heed and change ways that needed changing, and blaming every misfortune of that most unfortunate year of 1665 upon the comet became almost a religion in itself.

  If only a simple star could be called to answer for all that misery! First, in March, soon after the debut of The Indian Emperor and soon, too, after my fifteenth birthday, came the war. After months and months of sword rattling and bluster, the king and Parliament finally declared war on the Dutch. Their public reasons were just and mighty, the way reasons given for any war always are, but in private I heard from my friend Rochester that the true reasons were less glorious: that Lord Clarendon, the government’s chancellor, had pressured the king into war as a quick solution for the country’s financial ills.

  Granted, I’d neither the head nor the learning for running a country, but it seemed to me that spending a great, heaving pile of gold to declare war was an ill-thought way to earn a profit—except for those fat merchants who grew fatter still through falsely inflated prices for munitions, timbers, tars, and other war supplies.

  For other gentlemen, too young to have fought beneath the Royalist banners in the old wars, this new conflict offered a chance to display their courage and win glory on the field of battle with which to impress the sighing ladies at court. Following the lead of the king’s own brother, they clamored to don lace-trimmed uniforms and plumed hats, and to sign aboard the company of any warship that would have them. Even Rochester heard the silver trumpets’ call to arms, trading his wit for a sword and joining the fleet as a volunteer.

  In early June, all of us remaining in London heard it, too. Whether from the summer’s stillness or the heat, the ominous booming in the Channel of the fleet’s big guns echoed through London as they engaged the Dutch navy, thirty miles away to the east. For three days, we could hear the battle raging like a faraway storm that never passed. The gunfire continued whilst we rehearsed and performed, ate and drank and made love.

  Finally came word of a great victory at a place called Lowestoft, and the city was wild with delirious celebration. But the joy of victory was short-lived, followed as it was by a defeat at Bergen that was every bit as great. The reality of war came thundering home to us, and even to those at court. The Duke of York returned, but the Earl of Falmouth (Rochester’s old rival, Fitzhardinge) had been killed outright beside him, to the sharp sorrow of the court. Later I heard from a grieving Lord Rochester that he, too, had barely cheated death, when his two closest friends on board the Revenge, Mr. Montague and Mr. Wynd-ham, were both blown apart by a cannon’s ball before his very eyes. All of us actresses wept with sorrow for the souls of these brave young lives so idly (or so it seemed to me) squandered.

  Not only the court suffered such losses, of course. Everywhere I went in that hot June, I saw raw new widows and fatherless children wandering the streets, begging forlornly for their bread—a pretty price indeed for glory and dishonorable profit.

  In response, Master Killigrew chose plays for us with a martial air, and made sure that the fronts of the boxes were draped with patriotic flags and flowers. Comedies went from fashion, and the parts for actresses grew scarce. The king, when he could find time to join us in the playhouse, looked grim and drawn, and his attendants, too, were somber and subdued.

  We players watched as our audiences dwindled, with the young men and gallants who ordinarily filled the benches in the pit going off to war. Mrs. Meggs’s oranges and lemons went unsold, and rather than see them rot and turn to waste, I’d filch as many as I dared to give away to the beggars outside in the street.

  But the war was not our only trial. As if to add another measure of punishment upon poor England, an unholy hot spring was followed by a hellish hot summer. Streams turned to dust and wells went dry, and even the Thames seemed to shrink and huddle within her banks. That spring, corn and other crops withered in the fields before they’d fair grown, and the cost of bread and grain rose beyond many people’s means. The king gave leave to his suffering courtiers to attend him in their shirtsleeves, without their coats or wigs, and I heard that some ladies did not bother dressing at all, staying all the day in their lace-trimmed smocks while servants fanned them by way of relief.

  In the playhouse, we were doubly burdened by heavy costumes and paint on our faces, and by performing before the added heat of the rows of candles. The true test became one of surviving each play, of completing our lines without fainting from the heat and toppling into the pit. One afternoon, for the sake of a wager, my friend Beck Marshall and I measured our waists with tapes before we performed, and afterward by way of comparison, and because of the swelter, we’d each sweated away nigh two inches beneath our stays.

  But worse was still to come, whether due to the comet or not.

  One morning soon after, in early June, I was walking with Rose and Beck on our way to the playhouse. Drury Lane was dry and dusty, as was every London street, and though our shoes were already powdered gray with it, we held our petticoats above our ankles to try to keep the linen clean.

  “What a pretty parade we must be making,” Beck said, “and a pretty show, too, yet there’s not one gentleman to see it, or to cheer. Where could they all be, I wonder? In the park? On the river? Is there some frivolity with the court that we’re missing? ”

  “It is hugely quiet,” Rose agreed in a hushed voice. “Too quiet, if anyone’s askin’ me.”

  I tipped the wide, flat brim of my straw hat to one side so I could better see about us
. The nearest shop was shuttered, with the rest of the street deserted except for us three, and one bleary-eyed dog weaving unsteadily along the curb.

  “Mark that house,” I said, pointing. “There at the end of the street. It’s shuttered, same as this shop, and someone’s painted red crosses on the door.”

  Grimly fascinated, we slowed our steps to gawk and to wonder. The house was shut and locked tight, every window latched and the shutters bolted over them. Such was often the case when a family retreated with their household to the country, or on a journey. But no goodwife would ever permit her door to be daubed so with a paint, especially not with the message that Beck now read aloud for us. Mind you, Beck had been born daughter to a Presbyterian divine, but even Rose and I understood the look on her face.

  “Lord have mercy upon us,” she whispered with fearful awe. “Oh, preserve us; it’s the plague.”

  The plague was nothing new to us in London. Every year there were people who sickened and died from it, and tales of how this plague had come from Genoa, or that from Marseilles, as if it were smuggled in to be decanted like wine into bottles.

  But this summer had been different. Everyone seemed to have heard of someone who’d been sickened, and they weren’t just sailors or others who worked near the docks, either. In one neighborhood, it was a respected scholar of ancient texts; in another, the wife of a merchant, followed briskly by her lady’s maid, her cook, her footmen and maidservants, and her husband, followed finally by the surgeon who’d unsuccessfully treated her. Hackney cabs rolled purposelessly through the near-empty streets, with both driver and fare suddenly stricken.

  The constant bonfires for night burials lit the sky brighter than the comet ever could have done.

  In the playhouse, our audiences shrank further still. Master Killigrew insisted that we continue our performances. If the king and the court could continue, he argued, then so would we, even if we’d only a handful watching in the pit, and those few mostly drunk.