His thumb touches my cheek, stroking me. »
‘They are tears of joy,’ I whisper.
Satisfied, he sags over me, a dead weight. I feel his heart thudding against my breasts. Every bit of him is as hard and unyielding and solid as a statue. Except for the wet softness now where we are joined. Where the statue melts inside me.
The third time, dawn is breaking. I wake with him kneeling over me, his yard looming into my line of sight, thick and terrifying. The hair on his broad shoulders and belly is as dark as an ape’s.
I turn my head to the side and he plants a kiss on my cheek, slowly and deliberately, as he enters me.
Like a flag. I am his territory now. Conquered.
This time the sawing is slow and sonorous.
Afterwards he says, ‘How was it?’
He might bx asking my opinion of a play.
I consider. ‘Not quite what I expected.’
‘Oh? In what way?’
‘It was more like horse riding or tennis than poetry or music.’
A frown crosses his face, and I remember where I am. Who I am with. Why. ‘That is to say, it was wonderful. I was the happiest girl in the world; now I am the happiest woman.’
Mollified, he pulls back the bed curtain on his side. Instantly there are two valets there, one holding water, the other a cloth.
The one holding the bowl, the younger, stares straight ahead. Then, as if he cannot help it, his eyes flick down to where I lie, my breasts damp with the king’s sweat. Yesterday, I might have had him whipped for his temerity. Today, I am a fallen woman. Let him look.
Charles gets to his feet. I watch as the royal cock is sponged, the royal undergarments held out for him to step into. By now there is a quite a crowd around him, spraying and snipping and primping until, at last, it is no longer the man who stands there but the monarch, tugging at the lace cuffs of his frock coat.
Finally, the wig.
He takes a step forward, towards the door, which opens as if by magic.
Music. Applause.
On my side of the bed, the curtain is also pulled back. Two maids stand there, eyes downcast, waiting to do the same for me. I hear a buzz of conversation from the other room. A shout: ‘To Newmarket, Your Majesty? Or have you had enough riding for one day?’ The laughter erupts, male and hearty. It spurts into the room, thick and wet. There is a chant, singing, a dozen gruff voices roaring the refrain.
‘With a heigh-de-de-ho, old Rowley!’
I swing my own legs to the floor, stiff and a little sore. Lady Arlington is standing there, waiting.
‘There is work to be done,’ she says-simply.
I am to stay in my deshcibilU all morning, as a sign that I am wedded. My hair is brushed out, but not too much. A portrait has been commissioned of the two of us, a gift ftom the ambassador or rather two portraits: the proprieties must be observed. I will reach out with my right hand, Charles with his left, across the divide: we are not quite handclasped, but when the paintings are hung together, the symbolism will be clear. The painter will have litde luck making the king sit today, though. An hour at the most, and then he will be off to the races.
Lord Arlington appears at my side. ‘All well?’ he says quiedy.
‘All well.’
‘Ask him this morning. Before he does any other business.’
‘As you wish.’
I walk up to Charles. He turns to face me with a smile, the courtiers beside him melting into the background.
‘Lord Arlington wishes me to ask a favour.’
He raises his eyebrows.
‘The timing is also at his request.’ *
Charles nods, noting that I have understood - as Arlington has not - that this lack of subtlety is ill suited to the mood of the occasion.
‘He wishes to be Lord Chancellor.’
Charles looks genuinely shocked at the size of ArUngton’s demand. Then he says thoughtfully, ‘You pass on the request, Louise, without petitioning me to grant it.’
I shrug.
‘Arlington is a fool,’ he says quietly. ‘He should have had you ask me yesterday. Yesterday I would have given you anything you wanted.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘That is why I did not ask you yesterday.’
Charles’s chuckle makes some of the courtiers look up. ‘You would not have me appoint a fool to the highest office in the land?’
‘I would noj:.’
‘He is my olde;st friend.’
‘And he has built your kingdom’s newest palace on the strength of it,’ I say, glancing pointedly at our surroundings.
‘If not him, then, who?’
‘For chancellor? Shaftesbury.’
‘Shaftesbury!’
‘If a Parliamentarian finds that even he cannot balance the books. Parliament will have no choice but to vote more funds. And it will be hard for Shaftesbury to oppose the war if you have put him in charge of it.’ Also, his appointment will annoy Lord Arlington more than anyone else I can think of.
He nods. ‘And I suppose you were thinking about this even while we were in bed?’
‘Of course not,’ I lie. ‘I was far too busy thinking about you, my dearest love.’
‘Well, I will attend to it. Now?’
I smile across the room, to where the Arlingtons are pretending to talk to each other. ‘Oh, I think we can keep Lord Arlington in suspense a little longer, don’t you? Today I want to go the races and meet this stallion I have heard so much about. After all, I have already become well acquainted with his namesake.’
•4
Carlo
t
Raspberry ice cream: make a quart of custard; wljen cold, pour it on a quart of ripe red raspberries, mash them in it, pass through a sieve, simmer and freeze. But do not oversweeten them: the taste of raspberries is all the better for being a little sharp.
The Book of Ices
She held out until September - a full year after she first arrived in England. I have heard it said that she always meant to be seduced; that her scruples were just play-acting, her coyness a stratagem. That does not account, surely, for the fact that it took the most determined men in Europe twelve months to get her into his bed.
I hardened my heart, and tried not to think what the two of them did there.
The political consequences, however, were immediate. A pretext was found for war: the little royal yacht passed by the Dutch fleet and was not saluted with all with the solemnities due to a great warship. The Dutch apologised for their oversight, but the English announced hostilities nevertheless. The government called a halt to its debt repayments so that money could be diverted to the war. And Charles personally drafted a bill he called the Declaration of Indulgence. All men and women were from now on to be free in their hearts. Free to worship as they pleased, free to think as they pleased, free to say what they pleased.
You would have thought he had announced that henceforth all English babies would be put to the sword and all English virgins raped. The country erupted. The apprentices rioted, and burnt down the brothels. The prostitutes marched, and burnt down the
shops. Shopkeepers boarded up their shops; bakers could not sell their bread; priests denounced their own king’s libertinism from their pulpits. It was said that the army was on the verge of rising; though for who, or what, was never very clear.
‘But this, surely, is exactly what you wanted,’ I said to Hannah in exasperation. ‘You are always talking about the rights of Englishmen. Now Charles has turned them into law.’
‘Don’t you see - that is the whole problem. We have those rights because we are born with them. It is not in Charles’s power to indulge them or take them away.’ She sighed. ‘Besides, everyone knows this Declaration is suspect not because of what it says, but what it does not say.’
‘Meaning.^’
‘It’s Catholics, not dissenters, whom the king actually means these freedoms to benefit. Then, when England is Catholic again, the Inquisition will return and torture the dissenters.’
I began to see people in the streets wearing green ribbons on their lapels. It was a sign, Cassell explained, that they were for Shaftesbury and the Parliamentarians.