Royal Harlot (43 page)

Charles and his brother James flew to action. First Charles led his own guards to assist in the firefighting efforts, while he and his brother were rowed down the river to view the fire directly. No one could remember a fire such as this, jumping from the roofs of one neighborhood to the next and consuming all in its path.

Unlike the plague, which had concentrated its fury among the poorest Londoners, this fire ravaged rich and poor alike. Nothing was spared, from the most humble of houses to the square towers of St. Paul’s, where Roger and I had wed. The neighborhood where I’d lived with my mother when I’d first come to town was gone by the first day, and her house with it. Waterman’s Hall, the Royal Exchange, Blackfriars, the wharves along the Fleet River bank all met the same fate, as well as scores of houses, shops, taverns, and churches.

For more than forty miles around the fire the air was full of smoke and drifting ash, of scraps of burning paper and scorched canvas and silk. The bells of surviving churches tolled incessant alarms, and over the crackle and roar of the flames came the howling cries and laments of those who struggled to save a few precious belongings as well as themselves from the fire’s relentless path.

Many of the courtiers fled from the palace, some to their own estates at a distance from the city, some attending the Queen Mother, and others escaping by the Thames to the sanctuary of Hampton Court. I stayed behind, refusing to believe the fire would dare strike the palace. Yet for safety’s sake, portions of the palace closest to the fire’s path, near Scotland Yard, were torn down to make an empty break that flames could not cross.

Striving to be brave for the sake of the children and servants, hearing nothing but wildest rumor and fearing worse than that, it was only much later, when the fire finally was spent, that I learned how courageously Charles and his brother had labored to help save the city. While others around them had panicked or simply collapsed beneath the unimaginable burden, the two Stuart brothers, as well as the seventeen-year-old Duke of Monmouth, had led with tireless efficiency and little regard for their own safety.

From that first Sunday morning, Charles had directed his troops in fighting the fire, ordering burning buildings torn down to save others in the fire’s path. Whether on horseback shouting orders or standing deep in mud and water as he wielded a bucket or spade like any other Londoner, his bravery and leadership were a revelation to many of his people. Some said he’d spent thirty hours straight in the saddle, and I believed it.

After four days and nights, the fire had finally burned itself out, followed by a heavy, drenching rain that flooded the steaming ruins. Yet Charles continued to work for his people’s welfare, ordering food and fresh water to be distributed from the navy’s stores to the now-homeless crowds who’d gathered in Moorfields. With almost no attendants he walked and rode among them, offering comfort and cheer and displaying a rare empathy for the suffering among even his poorest subjects that put most of his self-centered courtiers to shame. He showed himself to all as the rarest of gentlemen, full of natural courage, resolution, and honor.

But not even Charles could change the fire’s awful aftermath. An enormous part of London had vanished, an area of over a mile and a half long and half a mile in width. Not only buildings had been destroyed, but the businesses, homes, and congregations that had been housed inside were now gone, too. There were no certain figures for the loss of life; it was simply too vast and overwhelming to calculate.

While Charles was promising that London would rebuild like a Phoenix from the ashes, a splendid new city of wide streets and buildings of brick and stone to resist any future fires, other, darker forces sought to undermine the goodwill he’d earned from his courage during the fire. The special investigative group formed by the Privy Council could not have been more clear in naming the fire’s cause: “Nothing had been found to argue the Fire in London to have been caused by other than the hand of God, a great wind, and a very dry season.”

A reasonable explanation, and one that Charles repeated again and again. But in the face of such a disaster, reason becomes less appealing. There were plenty of Londoners who believed the Hand of God might have been a Catholic one. Even as Charles sought to calm one rumor, ten more sprang up besides, like heads of the Hydra. French spies had set the fire, or nefarious Dutchmen had crept into the city to destroy it. Later, when the city authorities—who should have known better—would put up a monument to the fire and its victims, the plaque would unkindly attribute the disaster to “the treachery and malice of the popish faction.”

Grievous, too, were the sermons offered by meddlesome preachers as well as certain strident Anglican bishops and clerics. Using vague quotes from scripture to make their cases, such hateful men claimed that God had shown his displeasure with the debauchery at Charles’s court by striving to destroy it by both the plague and the fire. They pointed at the very year—1666—saying that those three sixes within the date were the mark of the Devil himself.

And worst of all to me was how often I figured in these tales of woe and damnation. Somehow I’d personally caused this disaster for London and its king by being a Catholic woman with power, a known and flagrant adulteress, and the most evil and debauched influence possible upon England’s king.

I knew these tales were empty lies that meant nothing, yet still I felt the impossible burden of so much suffering. How could I not? That autumn, I’d little taste for the gaiety of the court. Instead I kept to myself, with my children and with Charles, when he came to me. While some gentlemen and ladies rode out with him to survey the damaged neighborhoods and offer encouragement to those who’d lost the most, for me the risk to my person was too great to consider accompanying him.

But the finger-pointing and blame didn’t end in the pulpit. Parliament, too, wanted a scapegoat for the disastrous war with the Dutch, as well as for the Great Fire. My cousin Buckingham, who had been pushed aside and denied his chance at glory in the first enthusiasm for the war, now turned his earlier exclusion to his advantage. He alone in Parliament stood free of fault and recrimination, and began to be seen as a serious leader, drawing supporters to him and away from once-strong men like Arlington.

There was a sense that the order was shifting in the court as well. Just as Buckingham had emerged in Parliament, so, too, was his old protégé Frances Stuart once again being promoted and paraded for the king’s consideration. She was eighteen, more beautiful than ever, and still, miraculously, a virgin. Charles was still fascinated by this one woman who’d never succumbed to his desires, and everyone whispered that at last she was about to give way. Buckingham was said to have gleefully predicted that by the new year Frances would replace me entirely in the king’s affections.

I refused to believe it. Yes, I’d just passed my twenty-sixth birthday, an unthinkably great age for a woman in my place. And yes, these last months I had kept myself away from many of the festivities as well as the fiercest politics of the court, needing time by myself. But didn’t the king still profess the greatest affection for me? Hadn’t he fair begged me to return to court after the foolishness of my banishment?

Then came news that shook my confidence more soberly than idle whispers ever could. It was Bab May, Keeper of the Privy Purse, who told me, not Charles himself, and directly before the first of the Christmas balls, too. The king had asked for a review of all my debts, with an eye to settling them for me once and for all. May said by his first reckonings he’d discovered I owed close to thirty thousand pounds for gambling and to assorted merchants. For the king to pay such a sum when he was having trouble paying the sailors in his navy was exceeding generous, yes, but May and I both understood the real significance of this gesture: that Charles was considering formally breaking with me.

I watched as the king led Frances Stuart in the dancing. She was dressed all in black and white, with diamonds at her throat and in her ears that made her glitter like the moonlight on new snow.

I’d kept away long enough.

Chapter Nineteen

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON
January 1 6 6 7

 
“You are certain of this, Wilson?” I asked, though I knew she never erred. “You can trust your source?”

“Yes, my lady,” Wilson said, twirling the rod in the chocolate mill as she blended my morning brew. “It was one of the lady’s maids to the queen’s maids of honor. She was asked by Miss Stuart to dress her hair, and then while she did Miss Stuart spoke most freely to her, confessing her great attachment to His Grace the Duke of Richmond and Lennox.”

“Richmond,” I said thoughtfully, hugging my knees as I sat in the bed. “I’ve never seen them together.”

“That is because his second wife only just died a few months past,” Wilson helpfully supplied. “But Miss Stuart told my acquaintance that His Grace was exactly the sort of man she’d always hoped to wed, handsome and dashing, and with a grand title, too.”

“He’s also in debt to the skies,” I said, for this was common enough knowledge. I’d never had much use for the gentleman; he seemed dull-witted and unimportant, outside my circle of acquaintance, though he was held to be handsome enough. “And Richmond is so given to strong drink that he falls into bed every night dead to the world. With him she could well be a virgin the rest of her days.”

Wilson gave a small eloquent shrug to her shoulders as she poured my chocolate. “She may have already made the sacrifice, my lady. It’s said she entertains His Grace in private, and considers herself ‘rapturously in love’ with him. Those were her words, my lady: ‘rapturously in love.’ ”

“Frances has always been a fool.” I laughed softly as I took the tiny cup of chocolate, cradling its warmth between my palms. “ ‘Rapturously in love’! There are few things that lead to more indiscretions than that, my dear Wilson. The only trick will be how to use it to our own rapturous benefit.”

 
If I had seen what happened that night on the stage of a playhouse, I would have laughed uproariously, but I would have also scoffed at any possibility of it being a real occurrence. Yet it was, and all the more enjoyable to me for being such a common farce.

From Wilson, and in turn her confederate, I knew that Frances would be expecting her “rapturous” duke in her quarters at nine that evening. I also knew that Charles was in the habit of visiting her earlier in the evening, to talk and amuse himself with the few favors she would agree to share with him. That done, and in a usual state of high frustration and complaint, he would come to me in his bedchamber, or my own, where his welcome would be infinitely more warm and passionate. That was the setting of our little play; the extra characters in our cast included Bab May, Will Chiffinch, the king’s Page of the Bedchamber, and, of course, me.

There was always a small crowd lingering in the queen’s drawing room after supper in Whitehall, down the hallway from her bedchamber and the lodgings of her various ladies and maids of honor. It was easy enough for me to join this gathering, for I did by rights belong among the ladies, though I took care to stand a little to the back of the room where I could see without being at once noticed. From this vantage I could see when the king entered Frances’s chamber and closed the door after him.

At once I was off. In addition to the main hallways that linked Whitehall’s different quarters together, there were numerous secret passages and forgotten staircases. Chiffinch knew them all, of course, for they were most useful to him in his trade, and I in turn had made sure that the old man had shown them to me, as a useful bit of knowledge to posses.

Now I ran along these secret ways without being seen, through Chiffinch’s own quarters and up the last private staircase to Charles’s bedchamber. I kicked off my shoes and hopped onto the bed with a book in my hand, and settled myself to appear as if I’d been waiting there all the night long. I’d scarce done so before Charles reappeared, throwing open the door so hard that it cracked against the wall.

“Good evening, sir,” I said mildly, turning the book over like a little tent on my belly. “You seem grievously disturbed.”

“It’s Frances,” he said crossly. “At supper she seemed well enough, all pretty smiles and laughter, but when I called on her just now, she sighed and groaned and made her excuses in her nightcap, pleading some little ailment or another. And quick as that, she sent me on my way.”

“She did?” I asked, feigning great surprise. “An ailment?”

“Yes, an ailment.” Charles paused and scowled suspiciously. “What do you know of this, Barbara?”

I sighed and turned back to the pages of my book. “Why should I know anything of anything, sir?”

“Because there is nothing in this entire palace that escapes your notice,” he said with exasperation. “You know more than—who is it?”

He swung around to face the door and the polite tapping that had interrupted him. Cautiously the door swung open, and Bab May peeked his doleful face with the high forehead inside.

“Forgive me, Your Majesty,” he began, “but if you wished to review the papers with those figures—”

“Not now, you rascal, not now,” Charles exclaimed. “Cannot you see I’m engaged with this lady?”

As quick as a crab back into the sand, May scuttled away in retreat. But he’d done his part as we’d arranged between us, for his interruption was the sign that rapturous Richmond was now with Frances.

The king turned back to me on the bed. I crossed my legs in their bright green stockings, letting my lace-trimmed petticoats slip high enough over my knees to show my flowered garters and to draw his gaze. He couldn’t help from looking; he never could.

“Tell me, Barbara,” he said. “What is Frances about? What is the true nature of this ailment of hers?”

I ran my fingertip back and forth along the top of the book, my head tipped quizzically to one side.