The King's Mistress (34 page)

“I think at Christmas two or three years ago,” Jane said. “Who could have guessed that when we next saw each other it might be here?”

Jane curtsied as Mary introduced the other members of the party.

“Colonel Daniel O’Neill and Sir Edward Nicholas, both trusted friends and servants to my royal brother.”

O’Neill, a tall man with dark hair and piercing blue eyes and a lilting Irish accent, looked to be about forty years of age, while Nicholas, like many of Charles’s advisers in Paris, appeared to be of the generation of King Charles I.

“And finally,” Mary said, “His Grace George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham. Who is practically like our brother, you know,” she added with a smile, “as his poor father was murdered when he was young, and he was entrusted to the king my father. None of us were yet born, so even Charles began life with an older brother waiting for him.”

“His Majesty has told me so much of you, Mistress Lane,” Buckingham said, bowing to her and John. He was a handsome and fair-haired man of about thirty, with a mischievous glint of humour in his eyes, and Jane suspected that Charles must in fact have told his near brother all there was to tell about what had passed between them during their travels. One of his arms was in a sling.

“How did Your Grace come to be injured?” Jane asked.

“Broke my arm in a fall when I was fleeing Worcester,” Buckingham said. He glanced around the table. “What an improbable collection of tales we have among us of our escapes from England. I, at least, was not forced to dress as a wench, as the Duke of York did.”

The young duke, who had accompanied Jane and John to visit his sister, flushed.

“Really, George,” he said. “It was bad enough suffering the indignity, without you making it known to all and sundry.”

Buckingham laughed. “I’m sorry, Your Grace. But it does tickle me, the picture of you in a gown and shawl.”

“He was not the only one put to such a measure!” O’Neill exclaimed. “I made my escape from the Tower with the aid and the garments of a laundress, if you will recall. Come, Your Grace, if you impugn the honour or manhood of all the English gentlemen who donned skirts in the cause of their liberty, you would have more challenges to answer than would suit even a firebrand like you.”

Buckingham grinned and bowed. “You are right, sir. And perhaps the rumours that the king himself was dressed as a wench helped him to avoid detection.”

The supper was a merry one, the bright glow from the fire on the hearth and the flickering candlelight chasing away the wintry darkness, and wine and laughter warming Jane’s spirits. She reached across the table to take John’s hand and he returned her smile.

Over the next days, Jane met more of the numerous exiled English Royalists who were making their home at The Hague. Besides the many officers who had fought in the wars and had escaped after Worcester, there were courtiers, merchants, clerics, and countless others who had fled England with their families after the execution of Charles I, and from the conversations she heard or overheard, it seemed to Jane that the air was alive with one thought—how to return Charles to the throne.

S
OME WEEKS AFTER
J
ANE AND
J
OHN’S ARRIVAL AT
T
HE
H
AGUE, A
letter from their father reached them.

“‘Your mother and I thank Heaven daily for the news of your safe deliverance,’” John read aloud. “‘Miraculously, Richard has also returned to us unharmed. Some thousands of the Scots captured at Worcester have been transported to the West Indies and the American colonies, and many of the English were conscripted into the army and sent to Ireland. But still the government has been quite overwhelmed by the number of prisoners and the lack of place to put them and means to feed them, and some, your brother among them, have been released, upon signing an engagement never to take up arms against the Commonwealth.’”

“Thank God,” Jane sighed.

“‘We were visited by soldiers after you left,’” the letter continued, “‘but after some questioning they became convinced that we could tell them nothing of your whereabouts and so they departed. It is the same everywhere here. They seek and search, but miraculously none else have been taken up but poor Frank Yates.’”

Jane took the letter from John and read it over to herself.

“‘After some questioning,’” she said. “He makes it sound like nothing, but, oh, John, I fear for them.”

“Yes,” John agreed. “It weighs heavily on me that I am not there to do what I can to protect them. And of course Athalia and the children.”

They sat in silence for some minutes, watching the play of the flames in the blue-tiled fireplace.

“I must go back, Jane,” John said at length. “You’ll be safe and well cared for here, but I’m needed at home and must take the risk of returning. Father doesn’t say so, but if I’m not there come spring for the planting, things will go hard at Bentley.”

It was true, Jane knew. Her heart lurched at the mention of home. In spring the new-thawed earth would be growing a haze of green and the trees in the orchard sending forth the first tentative shoots of buds. Lambs, calves, and colts would be gambolling in the pastures. And she would not be there.

“Yes,” she said. “You must return, if you think it safe.”

The thought of parting from John after all that they had been through together overwhelmed her. She struggled to hold back tears, and John took her in his arms.

“Oh, Jane, what troubles have you endured, and so bravely. The king never had a better soldier.”

J
ANE TRIED NOT TO WEEP AS
J
OHN RODE AWAY A FEW DAYS LATER
, but with his departure she realised how truly alone she was now and how far from home.

“There, sweetheart,” Kate Killigrew murmured, gathering Jane into her arms. “You’ll see him and all your folk again before long, surely.”

“And in the meantime,” Lady Stanhope said, gently brushing a strand of hair from Jane’s tear-streaked face, “we’ll be your family as best we can.”

S
PRING HAD COME, AND THE SCENT OF BLOSSOMS WAFTED ON THE
warm breeze. Jane inhaled and closed her eyes, and Princess Louise looked up from behind her easel and smiled. Like her sister Princess Elizabeth, Louise was a lively companion, learned and a keen reader, and Jane had become very fond of her and grateful for her company.

“Shall I paint you like that, then, with your head thrown back and your nostrils open wide?” Louise asked. “
English Lady Scenting the Air,
I shall call it.”

“I’m sorry,” Jane laughed. “I’ll try to sit still.”

“You’re restless today,” Louise said, squinting at her canvas and making a few deft brushstrokes.

“I had a letter from His Majesty,” Jane said, feeling her cheeks flushing.

“Ah! And what does our royal cousin have to say for himself?”

“He is quite annoyed that the States General did not take up his offer to command some ships in their war with Cromwell. And he says he longs to visit, but has not even the money to hire a horse to get here.”

Jane ached to be with Charles again, and wore his letter inside her bosom and against her heart, with the little silk bundle holding his father’s watch.

“Surely the Princess Royal would be happy to have him here?” she asked. “Can’t she help him with money for the journey?”

“Perhaps,” Louise said. “But she’s already laid out vast amounts on his behalf, you know. Munitions, gold—she and poor William, God rest his soul, have done more than any of his other cousin kings to bring him back to his throne. And she is so much troubled just now with the Electors. Besides, with things as they are in France just now, his mother probably wants him at her side.”

After a lull of some months, the burning embers of the Fronde had flared into flames once more. Young King Louis and his mother had fled Paris to St Germain, and now most of northern France was at war, her helpless towns flanked by the armies of the Royalist and anti-Royalist factions.

“Don’t worry.” Louise smiled. “Mary hates it here. As soon as the weather is warmer and the roads are safe, no doubt she’ll pay Charles a visit, and I’m sure she’ll take you along.”

Jane was surprised to find that she had met a kindred spirit in Charles’s aunt Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, whose tart wit and forthright speech left many a court popinjay goggling in astonishment.

“I can well understand the terrors you must have faced when you were riding with Charles,” Queen Elizabeth told Jane, her slight Scottish accent reminding Jane that the lady had been born Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James VI of Scotland. “For I had to run for my life as well, you know. When my husband was deposed shortly after he accepted the crown of Bohemia, I had four little children and was eight months gone with child, and we fled from Prague in the dead of winter, given a scant few hours’ grace to escape with our lives. Poor little Rupert was left behind in the scramble, and his nurse ran after us and threw him into one of the carriages. Ten days’ ride it was to Breslau, sometimes at the gallop. That was thirty years ago, and I have been an exile and a pauper ever since.”

She sat silent for a few moments, stroking the little monkey who fidgeted in her lap before she spoke again, and behind the dark eyes Jane could see the shadows of memories.

“No one would have thought that my life would be thus, from where I began. Elizabeth of Scotland. That was what I was called when I was born, you know.” She smiled at Jane. “My father had not yet become King of England, but the winds were blowing that way. For Queen Elizabeth had no children, and my father, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, was the closest heir she had.”

She picked up a small piece of cake and held it out to the monkey. He popped it into his mouth, licked his lips, and looked at her expectantly.

“She was my godmother, you know. Gloriana, the Virgin Queen. And of course I was named for her.”

“Do you remember her, Your Majesty?” Jane asked, fascinated.

“Oh, yes. I was six when she died. I was rather frightened of her. She wore an enormous farthingale and a great standing ruff, and her face stood out so white beneath that bright red wig.” She laughed. “Of course now I see that she was just a lonely and vain old lady, like me, trying to hold off the ravages of time.”

“Your Majesty is not old,” Jane said. “And you certainly have no need of paint and wigs.”

The queen patted her hand. “Thank you, dear girl, for your kind little lies.”

“No lie, Your Majesty.” Jane smiled. “I pray I may hold what beauty I have as well as you.”

The monkey scrambled down from the queen’s lap and went to sit on a little hassock near the fireplace.

“Such times I have seen,” Queen Elizabeth mused. “Did you know that Guy Fawkes and his accomplices intended to put me on the throne, had they succeeded in murdering my father as they intended, in the Gunpowder Plot?”

“No, I didn’t know,” Jane said. “Thank God His Majesty your father was saved.”

“Yes. Better that I kept my father than be Queen of England. I was Queen of Bohemia for only a year. We were so happy to begin with. But perhaps …”

Her eyes were far away again, and then she came back to the present and looked intently at Jane.

“I think sometimes, about the choices we make, not knowing how far-reaching the consequences may prove to be. Do not you?”

“Yes,” Jane said, reflecting on how easily she had set off from Bentley with Charles. “Yes, I do.”

A
S IN
P
ARIS
, J
ANE FOUND HERSELF THE OBJECT OF CURIOSITY AND
admiration because of her adventure with Charles, and speculation as to what their exact relationship might be. She wondered the same thing herself. His letters always protested that he missed her and looked forward to the time when he would see her again, but he offered no definite plans. He was busy, she reminded herself, and his mind and time were much taken up with the business of trying to find a way to get England back—nay, with the daily worry of cobbling together enough money to eat and trying to help his straggling little court.

On this hot afternoon, Mary had retired to her bed with a headache, and her ladies, with neither duties to attend to nor leisure to do as they wished, fidgeted in the summer heat. Jane was restless and uncomfortably warm. She would go to her room, she decided, and bathe her face and chest in cool water. Halfway down the passage, she heard voices from outside. Glancing out the window, she saw Dorothy and Kate Killigrew sitting on a bench in the shade. Through some quirk of the air, their voices carried clearly.

“His Majesty and Lady Byron?” Dorothy breathed. Her eyes were wide with naughty delight. “But didn’t her husband just die?”

“Yes!” Kate laughed. “The poor man is barely cold and his widow is stripping off her mourning clothes to play the strumpet to King Charles!”

Jane froze where she stood, her heart thudding in her chest.

“But what about the Duchess de Châtillon? The Duke of Buckingham told me that His Majesty was sore in love with her.”

“And so he was. The whisper is that he asked her to marry him, and though she likes him well enough, he has not money enough even to buy new shoes, so she turned him down, and now he’s drowning his broken heart in the lewd flesh of Lady Byron.”

“Marry her?” Dorothy blew out a sceptical little puff of air. “He can’t marry her. He needs a princess, with wealth and an army. I thought he was to marry that French wench”—she wrinkled her nose in disdain—“the Grande Mademoiselle?”

“He fair scuttled that ship.” Kate shook her head. “He told some of his cronies that once he had married her, he would cut down her household and sell her properties, and that remark made its way back to her.”

“Oooh!”

“Yes, quite. So that was the end of that. No, there’s no princess in the offing and now he’s tearing his way through the Paris beauties from what I hear.”

“That’ll be a blow to you know who,” Dorothy mused. “She may fling her cap after him now.”

Jane didn’t want to hear any more. She fled to the room she shared with Kate and locked the door. So that was why she hadn’t heard from Charles. What the eye ne’er sees the heart ne’er rues, as Nurse would say.