The King's Mistress (35 page)

She heard voices in the corridor and hastily blotted her eyes. She would put Charles out of her mind, and make the best out of her life here until she could go home. And she would surely not make herself look foolish and fodder for gossip by letting on that there had ever been anything between her and the king, or that she had allowed herself to hope there might be more than what had happened.

Nurse’s voice once more spoke in her head.

Hope is a good breakfast, but an ill supper.

J
ANE’S SPIRITS ROSE WHEN SHE RECEIVED A LETTER FROM
S
IR
C
LEMENT
Fisher later in the summer.

“My dearest Jane: I scarcely know what to write, it seems so much has passed in the months since we walked together on that lovely summer evening at Bentley. When I heard that you had gone, I steeled myself to accept that you must have decided against accepting me. Very soon, however, I learned that you had been forced to flee. You may imagine what torment it was to me to think of you, to wonder what dangers you might be facing, and know that I was not there to protect you. John has been to see me, and now I know the full story. My great relief at knowing that you are safe is shadowed by the knowledge of what a great distance lies between us, and the uncertainty of when I shall see you again.”

Jane lifted the letter to her nose. She fancied she could catch a faint whiff of tobacco smoke and the scent of Clement himself, and it brought him to her mind vivid and real as he had not been for her in the months since their parting. No, he was not Charles, not a warrior king.

He was a man. Take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.

The line from
Hamlet
rose to her mind, and she smiled, and then tears came to her eyes. Yes, Clement was a good man. But far off, so very far off. And God knew when they would meet again. She took up her pen and at first she could get no further than “Dear Clement”. But soon she felt she could imagine him sitting at her side, and then she could write quite easily of her life as it was now and her hope that it would not be long before she saw him once more.

I
N LATE
N
OVEMBER
, C
OLONEL
O’N
EILL RETURNED FROM A TRIP TO
Paris.

“A letter for you, Mistress Jane.”

He smiled down at her, and Jane’s heart skipped to see Charles’s handwriting. Striving for the appearance of calm, she escaped to her room. Her fingers shook as she broke the seal and read.

“My dear Jane: I have hitherto deferred writing to you in hope to be able to send you somewhat else besides a letter; and I believe it troubles me more that I cannot yet do it than it does you. The truth is, my necessities are greater than can be imagined. But I am promised they shall be shortly supplied. If they are, you shall be sure to receive a share, for it is impossible I can ever forget the great debt I owe you, which I hope I shall live to pay in a degree that is worthy of me. In the meantime, I am sure all who love me will be very kind to you, else I shall never think them so to your most affectionate friend, Charles R.”

There were no protestations of desperately missing her, no promises that he should see her soon. But he was thinking of her. And that made all the difference.

T
HE NEW YEAR OF 1653 BROUGHT EXCITEMENT AND HAPPINESS, FOR
Henry, the twelve-year-old Duke of Gloucester, was at last released from Carisbrooke Castle and sent to join his sister Mary at The Hague. The young duke and his sister Elizabeth had been held by Cromwell since 1646, and poor Elizabeth had died two years earlier, at the age of fifteen, longing for her far-flung family. Jane recalled that young Harry had not seen his sister Mary since he was two years old, when his family scattered in the face of the coming war, and she saw in his eyes the struggle to make sense of the bewildering transition from prisoner to petted prince.

The joy of Harry’s arrival was quickly overshadowed by the news that the fleet commanded by Charles’s cousin Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the dashing soldier son of Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, had been scattered by a hurricane in the Caribbean Sea. In March, Rupert limped into port in France with five ships, but the
Defiance
, with his brother Maurice on board, was missing. After a terrible period of uncertainty, word came that the
Defiance
had sunk with the loss of all on board.

“This family is cursed,” a distraught Queen Elizabeth declared, clinging to her daughter Louise, and a shiver went up Jane’s spine. Could it be true? So much loss, so much grief.

“And the loss of Prince Maurice is not even the worst of it,” Colonel O’Neill declared later, his eyes dark with grief. “Three years at sea Prince Rupert has been, privateering to raise gold for His Majesty’s cause. And now much of that gold is at the bottom of the sea, and surely what he has brought safe will not be near what the king needs to make an assault on England. So much travail, and so little gained by it.”

Prince Rupert arrived at The Hague in April. Jane had heard much of him when he was commanding the king’s forces in Staffordshire during the war, and was curious to see how the man would measure up to the legend. Rupert had forced the surrender of Birmingham, Lichfield, and Leicester, and there had been shocked rumours of mayhem and plunder in the wake of his victories. Parliamentary broadsheets had even accused him of sorcery, claiming that his famous poodle, Boy, was his familiar, a demon hound that could catch bullets in his teeth.

Jane thought that Rupert seemed to fill the room when he swept into Mary’s apartments.

He was about thirty, even taller than Charles, and like most of the Stuarts, his eyes and cascading curls were dark. He was also very well set up, strikingly handsome, and with more than a trace of the rogue about him. Jane felt a tingle of arousal as he kissed her hand, and not only because he reminded her of Charles.

Jane recalled Charles telling her about how he had worshipped his dashing cousin, ten years his senior, and she could well understand why. Rupert, then twenty-two and already a seasoned soldier and commander of the Royalist cavalry, had led the charge at Edgehill, the first real battle of the war, and had been with Charles during his wartime stay in Bristol.

“Ah, the beautiful lady who helped my royal cousin.” Rupert grinned down at her. “I am longing to hear the tale.”

“At Your Highness’s pleasure,” Jane murmured, blushing at the glint in his eyes.

“I know your brother John very well, you know,” Rupert said. “He was one of the best men we had in Staffordshire.”

“I thank you, Your Highness,” Jane said. “He always spoke most highly of you.”

This was not strictly true. John had fought with Prince Rupert and regarded him as a brutally effective commander, but also mercurial and impetuous.

The young Duke of Gloucester sidled up to his imposing cousin and offered a diffident bow. Rupert threw an arm around the boy’s shoulder and shook him affectionately.

“I’m glad to see you, lad! I hear you’re to be invested as Knight of the Garter soon?”

“Yes, sir, I am.” Harry flushed with pleasure at the notice from his cousin. “I was hoping that you might be here when I am so honoured. Especially as you have gone through it before.”

He glanced down and Jane saw that Rupert wore a blue velvet garter that sparkled with diamonds just below his right knee.

“I’d not miss it for the world, boy,” Rupert assured his young cousin, who seemed suddenly to stand several inches taller.

P
ERHAPS IT WAS TRUE, AS
L
OUISE SAID, THAT
M
ARY HATED THE
Low Countries. Whatever the reason, she was restless, and moved her court from The Hague to Breda to Teyling to Antwerp and back, depending on her mood, the season, and what pleasures might be found at each of the palaces. In the autumn of 1653, her household embarked on the two-day journey to Breda, a pretty town built at the confluence of two rivers. Jane smiled as she recalled Charles describing it as “smelling with delight, gallantry, and wealth”.

One afternoon Mary took Jane with her to pay a call on the Hyde family, and as the carriage deposited them at their destination Jane admired the neat brick house near the old centre of the city.

“You met Sir Edward Hyde in Paris, I’m sure,” Mary said over her shoulder as they waited for the door to be opened to them. “He was chancellor of the exchequer to my father, you know, and during the war was guardian to my brother the king, and remains Charles’s closest adviser now. The family fled England shortly after my father’s murder and they have bounced from Antwerp to Brussels, never knowing how they are to live.”

The door of the house opened, revealing the beaming face of a lady in her middle thirties who dropped into a deep curtsy.

“Your Royal Highness!” she cried as Mary raised her and kissed her. “Welcome!”

Lady Hyde’s brood of children gathered to be introduced and to look on wide-eyed as their mother visited with the Princess Royal and Jane. Lawrence and Henry were about twelve and fifteen years of age, and little Frances was surely not yet ten, Jane thought. The eldest daughter, Anne, was a pretty dark-haired girl of about sixteen, old enough to sit with the ladies over chocolate and cakes.

“We cannot thank you enough, Your Highness, for your kindness and generosity in providing this house,” Lady Hyde said, looking almost on the verge of tears.

“Why, it’s the very least I could do, after the many years of loyal and wise service you have given us,” Mary smiled. “It must be very hard on you to have your husband so far away for so long. At least there will be a home for him to come to when my brother can do without him for a few weeks.”

“Have you word of His Majesty?” Anne Hyde asked. “My father wrote this summer that the king had been ill and had been bled several times.”

“He is better now, thanks be to God,” Mary said. “I’m sure the worry over money and what he is to do next affect his health.”

“My husband’s letters are full of the dire poverty of the poor young king and his followers,” said Lady Hyde. “King Louis has granted His Majesty a pension, Edward writes, but is slow to pay it.”

“Yes, poor Charles relies on money from Royalists at home for his very meals. And of course, if the French enter into an alliance with Cromwell, not only will the pension fail to come but Charles will have to leave Paris.” Mary shook her head. “He thinks of going back to Scotland, but …”

She trailed off and Jane recalled the frustration and despair in Charles’s voice when he had told her of his stay in Scotland before marching to his defeat at Worcester.

“Of course the right marriage would go a long way to helping him,” Lady Hyde said. “A princess who would give him the armies and the money he needs to take back his throne.”

“Yes,” Mary sighed,”but it’s easier said than done, I’m afraid. Charles may be king, but when monarchs go to market looking for bridegrooms for their daughters, there are many candidates whose prospects are much more certain.”

M
ARY’S COURT MOVED TO
T
EYLING FOR
C
HRISTMAS, AND JANE WAS
happy to receive a long letter from Charles, delivered once more by Colonel O’Neill along with a small package, which proved to be a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

“My dear Jane,” Charles wrote. “I recalled you telling me how much you enjoyed the book of sonnets you received not long before we met, and how it grieved you to leave it behind. I hope you will take pleasure in this little gift, and think of me when you read it.

“There is no news here but the thought that never leaves my mind—how and when I may return to England. As you will no doubt have heard, that rogue Cromwell has recently taken upon himself the title of Lord Protector. What a travesty is there—it makes the bile rise in my throat!

“Hyde believes that I will be restored from within my country rather than by the efforts of those elsewhere, and that for a rising to be successful it must be planned carefully, to have the means and men to make it happen, and given the time to ripen, or all is lost. I am sure he is right, but I chafe with inaction, and murmur, ‘If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.’

“Even as I write those lines I hear your voice in my head. You would remind me, I am sure, that the king who spoke those thoughts did not prosper, and counsel me to have patience, and so I will endeavour to heed your unspoken wisdom.”

Jane smiled with pleased amusement that Charles knew exactly what she would be likely to have told him, and could very clearly picture him shaking his head in resignation.

“My brother James is lately returned from service in the army of my cousin Louis, full of reputation and honour,” Charles’s letter continued. “I am pleased for his success and the happiness it brings him—and for the sighing glances of the French ladies, I might add—and yet it makes me only too aware that I kick my heels with nothing to do.

“I will leave off here, for I can hear you cry, ‘Pray you no more of this, ’tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon!’ Please believe that you are ever in my heart, your affectionate friend, Charles R.”

T
HE BITTER WINTER WINDS SHRIEKED THROUGH THE
L
OW
C
OUNTRIES
, and the brief respites of cold sunshine in the long black nights were never enough to warm Jane’s bones or raise her spirits. But at last, spring breathed warmth into the frozen ground, the ice on the canals cracked and then melted, and the soft shoots of new plants created a green haze over the land.

“That son of mine is finally going to bring me to Heidelberg Castle!” Queen Elizabeth told Jane excitedly one day, waving a letter.

The queen had been waging an ongoing battle with her son, Charles Louis, Elector of Palatine, to get him to provide her with either a home or money on which to live, for she, like Charles, was entirely dependent on the charity of her friends and relations for her most basic needs.