Whitehall--Season 1 Volume 2 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: historical, romance
ISBN: 9781682101247
Publisher: Serial Box
Published: 2016-10-26T04:00:00+00:00

For when no healing art prevail’d,

When cordials and elixirs fail’d,

On your pale cheek he dropped the show’r,

Reviv’d you like a dying flower.

“That’s a foul line, that cordials thing. Is the queen better?”

“They say the king threw himself across her bed and sobbed over her, and that she wept too and her fever has broken. If ’tis so,” Waller tapped his pencil against his tablet, “no harm to be prepared.”

And this is how Waller grows rich, Rochester mused. Rochester got out his own tablets, but got no farther than a title—“An Ode, on Mistress Eleanor Gwyn’s Ascent into Whoredom”—before the crowd stirred.

The king was arriving.

• • •

The council table was full and men were standing around the sides of the room. Clarendon looked at the king expectantly. Clarendon was pale and a field of violets bloomed under his eyes; he must have been up all night.

“What business before us, my lord Clarendon,” Charles asked, “that concerns so many of my loyal subjects?”

“Your Majesty—” Clarendon cleared his throat.

“The Newfoundland fishing, is it not? And this matter of the Blessing at Plymouth? It is admirable to see such interest in our colonial ventures, which must bring us prosperity.”

Even his old friend Harry Bennet was here. Charles, Harry had said, mock me not for my pig-wife. When you are king, you’ll must needs marry some German sow princess, who eats five chickens at a meal. Live while you can.

Divine right is divine responsibility. He’d always known that. And even if God deserts us— Charles smiled round at his court.

“But before these matters, my lords, gentlemen,” he said, “I have a matter to touch upon with you. There has been a false and malicious report, industriously spread abroad by some who are no friends to England, to me, nor to the Duke of Monmouth, that I was either contracted or married to the duke’s mother. I am most confident that this idle gossip cannot have any effect in this age.” Last night, when he’d polished that phrase, he’d felt his mouth turn wry. Now he merely smiled at them: merry Charles, the king they wanted. “Yet I think it my duty in regard to the true succession of the Crown to declare—”

And he dropped into the king’s voice.

“In the presence of Almighty God, I never was married nor gave any contract to any woman whatsoever but to my wife, our present Queen Catherine.”

• • •

The whispers started at the doorway of the Council Chamber and ran down the corridor like fire along thatch. Rochester swore under his breath, tore a leaf from his commonplace book, and scribbled a note to Jamie; no comment, just the news. His boy Will weaseled away through the crowd. Nell’s epithalamium must wait; Rochester scratched down savagely what he would not say:

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