The Perfect Royal Mistress (50 page)

Louise tightened her grip on his arm as he pointed his silver-tipped walking stick, and they began again beneath a shady canopy of plane trees, both of them warmed by ermine and velvet. She was so at home beside him, he thought, nodding and smiling to the passersby. Yet he must break it off with her. She must return to France. He would speak with de Croissy, who would negotiate with Louis a suitable settlement for the Kéroualle family. He would take care of her, just as he had cared for Castlemaine and Lucy Walter before her. He might well be a rogue, but at least he could be a decent one. He did not speak to her as they rode back to Whitehall. It was difficult to look at her, knowing what he must do if he were to set things right with Nell, and his wife. He felt his body growing more rigid with every heartbeat. He was not good at disappointing people.

“My dearest,” he said cautiously as they rounded the corner onto King Street. He took her hand, though it felt false to him, and awkward. “I regret to say there is something we must discuss.”

The coach slowed in traffic, and Charles could see people gawking and pointing to the young, elegantly dressed beauty beside him, and asking one another whether it was Mrs. Gwynne, who they adored, or that Carwell woman. He felt himself cringe. Then, before he could say another word, Louise buried her face in her hands and began to sob, the plume in her velvet hat bobbing up and down. “Now there. What is this?” he asked her, somewhere between concern and irritation. He had never been able to bear a woman’s tears without weakening.

“I am to ’ave Your Majesty’s child!” she announced on a wail so shrill that he grimaced.

For a moment, he almost laughed at how pitiful she sounded. Then he remembered what he had meant to say before her announcement. This changed everything. Irrevocably. He patted the back of her gloved hand, then reached to her chin so that he might draw her gaze up to meet his. Her nose was red, and her cheeks were swollen, making her appear pathetically childlike as the coach pulled past the Holbein Gate. “You are a dear, sweet Fubbs,” he said as endearingly as he could manage. “And I know you will give us an exquisite child.”

“Fubbs?” she sniffed as her nose began to run, catching on her top lip. “I know not zis word.”

It was what he and James had called their childhood nanny, a cross between chubby and fat. That was the first thing he had thought when he looked at her crying. Instead of admitting this, he said, “It is a made-up word,
chérie.
One that reminds me of you, all gloriously soft and round, and so impossibly sweet.”

“I am Your Majesty’s own dear Fubbs, zen?” she asked as the sobbing slowly ceased.

He drew in a sharp breath. “Eternally.”

The coach jerked to a halt in the courtyard before the privy stairwell. He heard a groom lower the steps beyond the door. “But Your Majesty wished to tell me somezing as well,
non?
”

Charles smiled, though for what earthly reason he was not sure. “It is unimportant now.”

You are certain zen,
cher amour
?”

The king left his coach first, muttering beneath his breath as his shoes crunched the gravel. “I suppose from now on I shall have to be very certain,” he said, but only to himself.

Chapter 31

H
ER ADVENTURES WERE THE TALK OF THE TOWN AND AMUSED RATHER THAN SHOCKED THE GOOD FOLKS OF LONDON.

—De Croissy about Nell, to the French foreign minister, Pomponne

I
IT
was spring before Nell felt able to leave the safety of her house, and the reassurance of her children. After Richard was buried, she still kept her draperies closed and strung with black crepe in his honor. Her friend had deserved at least that much. But she also remained away from court because she knew, as everyone did, that Louise de Kéroualle was pregnant. For the first time in three years, carefree acceptance seemed beyond her, and she would not risk Charles’s knowing it. It hurt desperately.

Then, in April, just as Louise had done to her, Nell seized on the circumstances plainly available: She used Louise’s increasing absence from public events to reestablish her own dominant place.

In those lovely, cool months of spring, Charles rewarded her with his almost exclusive attendance upon her, and she was by his side both day and night. As sun steadily warmed the Thames, and saw the greening of the trees in St. James’s Park, Nell and Charles strolled in the park and played pall-mall, to huge crowds of onlookers who were there to cheer on Mrs. Nelly, as they called her now. In the afternoons, they often sat together in the royal box at the Duke’s Theater. When they rode in His Majesty’s coach, it was to huge applause. There was no pretense about her, the people said in the taverns and alehouses throughout London. No threat of France, or of the dreaded Catholics from her. Nell, quite simply, was one of them.

To mark her renewed place in his life, at the end of May, while Louise de Kéroualle began her lying-in, Charles surprised Nell with a new home at the most fashionable address in London, 79 Pall Mall. The grand estate on the edge of St. James’s Park was so near to Whitehall Palace that His Majesty could stroll through his own grounds and come easily to her back garden whenever he pleased. She needed a prominent home, he told her. She deserved the very best, and he was giving it to her. But truly, Charles wanted Nell as near to him as he could make her without actually installing her at Whitehall, where Louise de Kéroualle now possessed forty of the most splendid rooms in the palace. The queen spent most of her time at Hampton Court in order to avoid the growing spectacle of the ménage à trois taking firm hold in her husband’s life. The halls and stairwells of Whitehall rang day and night with the echo of Louise’s shrill demands for more, for bigger, and always for better than that for which she had already strained the royal coffers. And as long as she carried a royal child, the king refused to listen to the litany of pleas, not only from Queen Catherine, but from his brother, James, and the Duke of Buckingham as well, to count his losses and be rid of her.

Nell, wisely, refused comment on the matter.

He was with Nell nearly every night, he was exceedingly generous to her and to their sons, and she had the security and love even a proper husband could never have given her. Her two royal sons were healthy, and, after four years, Charles still desired her as he did no other.

Tonight was Nell’s twenty-second birthday. She had everything she ever could have wanted. All she had dreamed of. Gone was the desperate girl, one of Orange Moll’s collection. Now her hair was done up elegantly, braided, then strung through with pearls and tiny diamonds. Her face was powdered and patched with one square of black beside her mouth. It was there precisely to highlight her best feature, her smile. Her dress had been chosen by Charles himself. They made their way together toward the banquet hall, drawn by the music. They danced together as the court watched, and then, after a sumptuous meal, the king called everyone to gather into an alcove that overlooked the river. Candles in grand gold sconces bathed the area in a creamy golden glow. They were lit in a semicircle around a large piece of black silk draped over an easel. The king took Nell’s hand and brought her forward through the crowd with him.

“My friends,” he proclaimed loudly. “Mrs. Gwynne posed for the great Sir Peter Lely, at my command; this glorious rendering of an exquisite woman is the result.”

Charles himself drew away the drapery then to reveal a breathtaking depiction of Nell. She was recumbent on a bed as Venus, and, beside her, depicted as Cupid, Lely had painted their eldest son, Charles. It had been so long ago, Nell had entirely forgotten. And she had never known that her son had met the painter, much less found a way to secretly pose for him. And now here was the king of England presenting the large, voluptuously painted portrait to the court as if she were the most important thing in the world to him. Speechless, she glanced at Charles.

“Happy birthday, my sweetheart,” he said softly. “And, while it is a gift for you, I say that, with your permission, it shall hang in my bedchamber always so that you will never be allowed to leave my heart, or my mind.”

The flurry of applause was interrupted by the shrill sound of a woman’s heavily accented voice calling from across the room.

“In zee bedchamber which
I
visit?”

The guests parted as Louise de Kéroualle moved forward, heavily pregnant, lumbering in a dress of ivory silk that billowed and rippled as she walked, protruding at her abdomen from her neck down. Her cheeks were flushed, and her wide blue eyes were full of tears. She looked to Nell like a little girl come down in her nightdress from a bad dream, all forlorn. A rising flurry of whispers was broken by the king’s advance toward Louise. Nell could feel the tension, a physical thing, rising up in the air. She held her breath. This next moment could clearly go two ways.

“I was told you would be resting this evening,
chérie,
” he said softly, although everyone around him heard.

“So eet seems we each ’ave a surprise tonight.”

The silence grew more strained as Nell stood beside the portrait, watching the scene play out. James, next to her, put a hand gently on her shoulder. She could feel his support, and was grateful for it. Louise de Kéroualle was now so awkwardly large and plump that it was difficult for Nell to imagine her as a true rival to anyone, heritage or not. She was young, yes, but so childlike, and her English was so fractured that she made a cockney actress from Coal Yard Alley feel positively confident. Nell watched as the king tried to lead Louise, with a minimum of commotion, back toward the doors. “I don’t believe you bring ’er ’ere!” she sobbed aloud. Nell saw that her blue eyes were fending off tears so rapidly that she appeared to be squinting.

“Whitehall is my home,” Charles said a degree more forcefully, taking Louise by the arm.

“My ’ome now, as well!”

“I am king! I do as I please!”

“
I
carry your child!”

“Get in line. ’Tis a long one,” Nell quipped beneath her breath, not realizing that Lord Buck, standing on her other side, had heard her.

“Touché, my dear,” he whispered.

They exchanged a glance, each of them biting back smiles. James, from the other side, nudged her with his elbow, an action meant to command restraint. But when Nell looked over at him, the king’s brother himself was trying to contain his own smile at the awkwardness of the entire scene. A moment later, amid a crescendo of chatter and murmurs, designed by the courtiers to appear as if no one had actually witnessed the absurd scene, Louise de Kéroualle approached her. Nell met her gaze head-on.
The meeting, at last,
she thought, still smiling.