Ladies in Waiting (33 page)

It is nothing,
she thought to herself.
The power, the influence—all nothing.

That’s not what I want.

I want him.

She wanted that powerful body she’d dragged from death’s door so long ago. She’d dueled with Plague itself for the right to that man. When he’d lain weak as a blind spaniel pup, she’d cupped her body around his to keep him warm. She’d bathed every inch of him, held him in his delirium, and later, when his mind returned before his strength, laughed with him and philosophized, argued and bantered as if they were the only people left in the world, alone on the island of his bed. And later still, laboring side by side in the elaboratory, in a shared love of knowledge. Shared love. That must be close to love for each other.

She wanted the mind, the body, the man. She did not need the power, the honor. She did not even need the acknowledgment of the world. That was all just a salve for her intellect. She was not an enlightened human after all, but an animal. All she wanted was the frankness of lust, the stark honesty of sex, the bright, incendiary moment of skin on skin. She did not want to be the mistress of the king, but the lover of the man. He might have been a stable boy, but he happened to be the king. She decided then and there that she would have him, and hang the rest.

No ambitions clouded her mind now; there was no confusion in her intentions. She heard a clink of glass within the elaboratory, a crash and muted curse, and entered, intent on seduction.

There was death in the room. She could scent it as well as any hound. Not blood, not illness; simple death, the inexorable state. A sturdy oak table had been dragged to the center of the room, and on it lay something covered in a heavy swath of unbleached linen.

“Zabby, my dear, I was going to send a page to search you out. Has your pretty little friend gone to be wed yet? I heard it was to be today.”

“She left just this past half hour.”

“A shame. I’d hoped to send her my blessings, and a present, though the one she’s bound to now is a richer man than I by far. It seems there’s a hole in the privy purse, cut by Parliament. But it is you I’d hoped to talk with, sweetheart. Here, sit beside me.” He took her to a crimson chaise he called the fainting couch, put there for the occasional lady spectator who thought she ought to be overcome by chemical fumes or live rabbit dissections.

“You are her friend, so I hope you can tell her, delicately, and, if I may suggest, not in writing, husbands being what they are.”

Zabby sat beside him, hardly listening, wondering how to begin. There was his thigh, a bare inch from her own. Dare she touch it? Or perhaps his hand. The hand is a good way to start, chaste, yet so full of nerves that it thrills to the lightest touch.

“Will you tell her that, for her sake, his body and property were spared? Harry Ransley and his cohorts were allowed to request the judgment of God.” It was a rarely used form of officially sanctioned suicide, in which a judgment was not passed and the public was left to draw its own conclusions. The suspect agreed to die, the state agreed to kill him, and nothing was said as to the reasons why. If the criminal was found guilty, his property was forfeited to the Crown. If he chose the judgment of God, his money and property passed as if he’d died in his sleep.

“You mean, they were never found guilty?”

“Nor did they admit guilt. They turned themselves over to a higher court, and the state’s only role was to deliver them there. Harry—Elphinstone—came from a fine old family, one that supported my father in his troubles. I did not want to see them shamed.”

“Charles, I was at his execution.” This drew raised eyebrows. “He was only hung, not drawn, not gibbeted, not torn up and hung from the city walls. He kidnapped the queen—there was a plot against her. How could he not be charged with high treason?” For a moment, Zabby almost forgot about the proximity of his dark, warm skin, and she watched his long, sensuous mouth only for an answer.

“There was no plot,” Charles said.

“But there was! I heard it that night in the park.”

“You were mistaken.” His voice was suddenly stiff.

“Charles.” She took his hand now but didn’t know if it was with lascivious intent. “This is me, Zabby. I know the truth . . . though evidently not all of it. Tell me. Please.”

His hand was rigid in hers for a moment, then turned palm up and clasped her own. “There are four people in this vast world who love me,” he said with a deep sigh. “And three people I love.”

“Oh, Charles, a hundred thousand people love you!”

He shook his head and looked out at the scene of those many years past, the one he saw daily as if he had been beneath the scaffold, not safe across the ocean. “The love of the people is the love of a whore, lasting only while I please them, while I pay them, while their lives are comfortable. What they feel, they feel for the king. For thirty years of my life, I was not a king. I was a pauper. Who loved me then? Can you guess, Zabby, who are the four who love me now?”

“Catherine, of course, and . . .” It would have burned her tongue to speak Barbara’s name.

“My sister Minette is dearer to me than all the world. But we did not grow up together, and after rediscovering each other we soon parted, I to my kingdom, she to be the second lady of France. Perhaps that is why I love her so—we had not the leisure to quarrel. And Catherine loves me, yes.” He gave a rueful smile. “But there is another, who was a boy beside me, raised almost as my brother, who saved my life in war and kept me from slitting my own throat in despair in my exile.”

“Buckingham,” Zabby said, beginning to understand.

“It is very lonely, being a king. You’d not think it, the way they clamor to hold my piss-pot. I’m never solitary, but I’m always alone. Yes, Buckingham is the only thing I have left from my childhood. When I look at his face I remember who I was, when I was happy, unafraid, when I knew, as only a child can know, that the whole world adored me and I was as safe in it as in my nurse’s arms. Can you remember that feeling? Perhaps that’s what the Philosopher’s Stone brings, not eternal life but eternal childhood. Perhaps that is heaven.”

“But he has not been a good friend to you.”

“He has the very devil in him, I’ll not deny that. Maybe it is the child still in him, unable to keep his fingers from the jam pot because he knows he is too well loved to be beaten for it. He has betrayed me before, or so it seemed, but when I heard the reasons I always excused it. I can’t help it. He is my friend.”

“But he stole your wife!”

“The plot was foiled, and no one must ever know that there was a plot. That is why Elphinstone was allowed, encouraged, to request the judgment of God.” Charles did not mention that he had been tortured in subtle ways, threatened with unspeakable acts against his family, first to uncover the truth of the plot, and then to ensure that it never came to light. “If the people knew about it, I’d have no choice but to execute my dearest friend. That, or allow him to escape into exile, and to be without him . . . I know you don’t understand it, but after all we’ve been through together, I can’t part with him. He is wicked; he is Buckingham—it’s saying the selfsame thing.”

So much love for an unworthy friend,
Zabby thought,
and none for me.

“And there are plotters everywhere,” he said, lowering his voice and pulling her closer. “Plotters who don’t even know they have a plot in them.” His mouth was near hers as he whispered his deepest fears to her. “Once they know that I am vulnerable, that my friends can betray me, my own queen can be taken, they will try to seize power. There are a thousand factions who would overthrow the kingdom. Yet I walk among them, in reach of a pistol or dagger every day, and none dares strike so long as I wear that impenetrable mantle of king. But let that royal cloak unravel even a thread, let them see I am weak, or mortal, or vulnerable, and from somewhere a waiting serpent will strike. Then there will be blood—mine on the butcher’s block, or the blood of those hundred thousand you say love me in another civil war.”

He stood, dropping her hand, and looked as if he was about to begin his habitual pacing. He could never be still for long. When he was ill and feverish, she’d pressed her body to his to calm his tremors. Now, seeing his anxious fears, she stood and pressed her body to his again, and did not know if she offered him her comfort or her lust.

“You named three who love you. There is at least one more.” She raised her face to his, but he did not bend to meet her and her lips brushed his cleft chin. She stood on tiptoe to trace the black stubble of his jaw with her mouth, and though she could feel his instant response to the pressure of her hips, as automatic as a soldier when he draws his sword at the trumpeting clarion, he stood still as a stock.

“Four who love you, and three you love. I know you do not love me.” She let one hand wander up, one down. “But you desire me. Or if not me, then a woman, any woman. Please, Charles, let me be like the others.” She kissed his throat and longed for his mouth. Still he did not embrace her.

“You don’t have to love me as you love Barbara, or Frances. You don’t have to love me at all. Only treat me like your other women. I don’t care if you have them, too. I don’t care if it is only once. Please!” She pulled him even closer, her thighs pressed eagerly to his. “You desire me, I can tell! Oh, Charles, kiss me!”

He took her shoulders, and she was sure he was about to force her back onto the couch and lie on top of her. But he only separated her from his warmth and shook his head.

Mortified, she cried, “Why? What’s wrong with me? I know I’m not like the other women, not really, but I’m fashioned of the same parts and I promise you . . . I promise I’ll . . .” Tears began to trickle and she lost the power of speech. She’d thrown herself at her king and he’d been repulsed by her. He’d bedded low-class actresses and kindly, sheep-faced Winifred Wells; hellcat Barbara who, rumor had it, threatened to dash his last bastard’s brains out on the rocks if he wouldn’t own him . . . yet he couldn’t bring himself to spend a fraction of his passion on her. Was she that strange? That hideous? Was a learned woman such an unnatural thing that, after seeing her in his elaboratory, he no longer considered her the proper sex? He had so many women. Why not her?

His gentle voice only made her tears fall faster. “My sweet friend,” he began, and did not know that word struck like a spear into her heart. “Whenever a woman looks at me, or whispers a word in my ear, when a man does me a kindness or pays me a compliment, when anyone inquires after my health or solicits my opinion or wonders if I liked the latest play, I ask myself one thing. And when a woman kisses me or fondles me or proclaims her undying devotion, I ask it again. It is the question by which I judge every human contact.
Would she, were I not the king? Would he, were I not the king?
Catherine passes the test, as does my dear sister, and in his own way, Buckingham, but no one else, not a man, woman, nor child in this world, save only one.”

At last he kissed her, like the brush of a petal on her lips.

“Zabby, my love, can you doubt for a moment? I love Buckingham but I do not trust him. I trust Catherine but . . . but I do not love her. She is my wife and I will never put her aside, even to save the kingdom, but I do not love her. My sister is across the channel and might as well be across the ocean. Do you wonder who the third is? Who would I love but you? You, who raised me from the dead, preserved my secrets, toiled beside me in the quest for truth. You, with your clear-seeing eyes and clever mind.”

“But don’t you desire me? As you desire Barbara?”

“What, and make you one of many? I’d not give the others up,” he told her frankly, “and you couldn’t bear that. Besides, one desires what one cannot possess. That is the trick of whores the world over, you know, from the stews to Whitehall. They make you think there is always something more, some inaccessible tidbit always just out of reach, to keep you coming back. They tease and they conceal. You’re too open to do that. I don’t desire you, Zabby, because I already have you. I know you, and love you, and possess you to the core.”

She trembled and reached for him again. “You do, Charles, oh, you do. But I want more.”

“Foolish child,” he said softly. “There isn’t any more.”

She made one last desperate attempt, despising herself even as she said it. “Am I really so ugly? I will blow out the lights . . .”

He took her face firmly in his hands and kissed her, a real kiss that made her weak and invincible all at once, a kiss that made her soul exult and sink, for the finest moment in her life, and for the certainty that it would soon end, and never happen again.

“You are a most beauteous creature,” he said with a smile curling at the corner of his mouth so that, looking back on it, she could never tell if he was in jest. “And if I weren’t so fond of you, I’d bed you in a trice.”

Suddenly, Charles was his usual brisk self again. Several crises averted, he was ready to move on. Forward, always forward.

“As you know, the College of Physicians receives ten bodies a year from the unclaimed Tyburn corpses, of which two are passed to me. His family refused to claim him, and I didn’t think he deserved a pauper’s grave, though I couldn’t exactly step in and order him buried at Westminster. So I claimed him for my elaboratory, and when he is forgotten I’ll have his remains decently interred.”

He pulled down the linen sheet and Zabby saw Harry, pale, still, with the strange marble solidity of death.

Though the taste of Charles was still on her tongue, she knew that this was all there was of love. Foolish passion, blind hope, misplaced trust, all ending in a cold slab of lifeless flesh. Had those two young lovers any idea it would come to this, that night they’d caressed in St. James’s Park?

Or, Zabby wondered with a quick, hard swallow, had they known and not cared?
Is that the secret of love, knowing it can end, must end, very likely horribly, and yet persevering despite that certainty?
She knew there was some secret that she, with all her intellectual power, could not grasp. Was Beth, in her loveless marriage, better off than she herself was simply for having known love for that brief moment? Was Harry, with his bruised throat and hemorrhaged eyes, luckier because he’d understood the greatest of life’s mysteries?