The Countess and the King: A Novel of the Countess of Dorchester and King James II Read online

  “Come now, my beauteous Miss Sedley, let us depart.” Father made a sweeping bow and held his hand out for me to take. “High time we quit this place for the delights of the country.”

  I grinned and curtsied, for I loved these rare times when Father played the gallant with me. He was a gallant, too, as he was most particular about his dress. His coats were cut long and of silken, plush velvet in the French fashion, his breeches extravagantly wide and cuffed with rosettes of ribbons, and his periwigs tall and full and often tied with a love-lock or two. He was especially careful of his neckcloths, snowy tumbles of point d’Espagne or point de Venice that were never besmirched by a single crumb or drop of wine, let alone my grubby infant fingers. Yet Father was also blessed with a gallant’s wit, a clever way with a jest or story, and he could make anyone laugh aloud, whether a costard monger in the park or the king himself. Was there any wonder that I believed Father the most handsome, most amusing, most perfect gentleman in all London, or that I loved him with a fervent devotion more suitable to a distant deity than a mere mortal parent?

  “Your servant, Sir Charles,” I said grandly, eager to continue the game. I shifted my doll from one arm to the other and slipped my little fingers into his hand, raising my chin high the way I’d seen the great ladies do while riding in St. James’s Park. “We must away, my good lord, away, away!”

  He laughed. “Where the devil did you learn that phrase, poppet?”

  “One of the plays you took me to,” I said eagerly, for he’d only just decided me of an age to attend the theater with him. “I disremember the title, but I thought that turn was most fine.”

  “So it is.” He raised my hand and kissed the air above it. “Then let’s away, away, little Katherine. I wish to be in Epsom by supper.”

  Humming some merry scrap of a tune, he led me down the staircase as if I were in truth a great lady. But on the last landing, I stopped and would go no farther.

  “Stay, Father, please,” I said softly. “I must bid farewell to Mama.”

  “Your mother.” In an instant all the merriment drained from his round-cheeked face. “Do you wish me to come with you, Katherine?”

  “I’ll be well enough by myself.” He always volunteered, and I always refused.

  “You are sure, Katherine?” he asked with worry, and that, too, was a constant.

  “I’m not afraid,” I said at once, more to convince myself than Father. I often was afraid when I went to Mama’s rooms—not of her, but of what I might see or hear that I’d later wish I hadn’t. “I won’t be long.”

  “Do what you must, poppet.” He tried to smile, too, as sad an effort as my own. “Mind you, don’t say where you and I are going. It would only distress her further.”

  “I won’t. I vow.” My mama wasn’t like other mothers. I had to take special care with my behavior in her presence, and consider well what I said to her. “Why should I wish to upset her?”

  “Good lass.” He bent to kiss me on my forehead, a paternal benediction. We were bound together in a thousand little conspiracies like this, Father and I, and together we understood what the rest of the world could not. Without another word, I hurried away with Cassandra in my arms, and left him to stand alone on the landing.

  Mama’s suite of rooms was at the back of the house, where she’d have only the healthiest air from our gardens, and where, too, she’d not be overheard by those passing in the street. The footman who was always stationed at her door opened it for me and stepped forward to announce me to my mother.

  “Your Majesty,” he said, bowing deeply. “Her Royal Highness the Princess Katherine.”

  “Your Majesty,” I echoed, and sank into a deep curtsy before Mama, who was seated in a tall-backed armchair before her bedchamber window.

  Now, this chair was not a throne, any more than I was a royal princess or my mother the queen. But through a sad disordering of her mind, my poor mama had forgotten that she’d been born Lady Catherine Savage, daughter of His Lordship Earl Rivers, or that she was now the wife of Sir Charles Sedley. Instead she thought herself to be the Queen of England, Catherine of Braganza, and likewise believed my father King Charles Stuart, and nothing any physician or surgeon had attempted had been able to persuade her otherwise. She was the queen, and all our household was obliged to treat her thus, or risk her illness worsening. No doubt she believed the others around her—her physician and his assistant, and her confessor, too—were members of her royal household. It was just as well if she did, for by Father’s orders, she was never left alone, from fear she’d harm herself.

  “You may rise,” Mama now said to me, and leaned forward to present her cheek to me to kiss. She wore a white brocade dressing gown and every jewel that Father had given her in happier days: precious rubies and sapphires and pearls jumbled together on her person, and topped by a player’s false crown of brass and colored glass. Strung among the jewels were many rosaries and crucifixes and other dangling Romish trinkets, for even in madness she had remained a fervent Papist. She’d had her hair dressed in the Portuguese manner that the true queen had affected when she’d first come to England, with stiffened curls across her forehead and over her ears.

  She smiled as I kissed her cheek, the dangling pearls of her earrings tapping gently against my face.

  “My sweet, dear Katherine,” she said to me, stroking my face lightly with her fingertips. “How do you fare this day?”

  “I’m well, ma’am.” I took comfort in the gentleness of her touch. Mad or not, she was still my mother. “How did you sleep?”

  “Sleep, sleep!” she exclaimed darkly. “I never sleep, child. Ask your father the king the reason why, and ask him, too, why he leaves my bed for another!”

  With concern Dr. Mertonne bent over my mother, the curls of his long periwig blocking her face from my sight. Father had chosen him to attend Mama specifically because the doctor was a Papist, too. Though I didn’t believe the whispers of my Rivers cousins that Dr. Mertonne had only made my mother more ill with his treatments and draughts (for surely Father would have dismissed him if that were so), I still did not like him, nor the way he hovered about Mama. Besides, he smelled foul, of stale herbs and decay.

  “Pray be easy, ma’am, and calm yourself,” he cautioned my mother, taking her wrist in his long fingers. “It’s unwise for you to become distraught over matters you cannot control.”

  “That is true, ma’am, very true,” murmured Father Bede, one of the numerous Romish priests who visited her regularly. “God’s will cannot be questioned.”

  Restlessly Mama sighed, and brushed aside the doctor so she could again see me. “You’re dressed for a journey, Katherine. Is His Majesty your father carrying you away from me?”

  The question took me by surprise. “Not for long, ma’am,” I said, hedging. “Only for a little while.”

  “Then he is taking you away,” she crowed with triumph. “Where will you go, Katherine? Our palace at Richmond? Our castle at Windsor?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said, forgetting my promise to Father. “To Epsom Wells, to join his friends and see the horses race.”

  She sank back into her chair, wilting like a flower with a broken stem. “Epsom,” she repeated softly, forlornly. “Epsom. Your father once took me there, too.”

  I expected her to speak of the king again, but instead her expression gentled, and for a rare moment the strident mask of her illness slipped from her features. Instead she once again became young and beautiful, and I smiled with wonder, dazzled by the change.

  “We were newly wed, Katherine, and your father loved me still,” she said, her voice light with the coaxing sweetness I could just remember. “He bought me a nosegay of white roses to hold, and he laughed when I picked my horses to win by the colors of their manes. I was only seventeen, yet I believed myself to be the most fortunate lady born, and your father and I the finest couple of fashion in England. Lah, lah, Sir Charles and Lady Sedley!”

  She smiled at the memory, and I smi
led, too, eager to hear more. Yet as suddenly as that happy moment had come, it scattered and vanished like petals before the wind. Instead of pleasure in Mama’s eyes, I now saw only fear, a fear I could not comprehend, and one that frightened me so much that I shrank from her, clutching my doll tight against my chest.

  My mother pressed her fingertips to her temples and grimaced as she struggled to keep her torments at bay.

  “Take care, my angel,” she warned me, her words now coming in harsh, ragged gulps. Her fingers became agitated, sliding from her temples to pluck restlessly at her hair. “Be wary of those men who would harm you, and who would order your life to suit their own, and—and—oh, Holy Mother, preserve me!”

  With a keening wail, she buried her face in her hands, sending her tawdry crown clattering to the floor.

  “What a wicked child,” Dr. Mertonne snapped at me as his servant hurried to snatch up the fallen crown. “See the misery you have brought to Her Majesty! See how she suffers because of you!”

  “I didn’t harm Mama!” I cried. “I did nothing!”

  “Your appearance alone was sufficient to unsettle Her Majesty,” he said sternly over my mother’s wails. “For her sake, I must ask you to leave this room at once.”

  I refused to obey him and remained, as if my trembling defiance would somehow serve my poor mother.

  “You’ve no right to order me about,” I said, daring greatly. “You’re only a doctor.”

  Imperiously he stared down his crooked nose at me. “And what are you but a false, wicked daughter? How can you care more for your own insolent pride than for Her Majesty’s welfare?”

  “I am not wicked!” I cried, horrified. “She is my mother!”

  “She is Her Majesty the Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland,” he said sharply. “You would do well to remember that.”

  Again he seized my sobbing mother by the wrist, and with his other hand drew a small lancet from his pocket. I knew what would come next. Mama’s pale arms were already crossed over with the scars from being bled. Father had explained that this was done to bring her ease, but what I’d noticed for myself was how my mother insisted on ever more bracelets, shining silver and gold, to cover the shame of those scars.

  “Courage, Your Majesty, courage,” murmured Father Bede as he pressed a jeweled rosary into my mother’s trembling fingers. “Know that faith in our Heavenly Father brings the only real solace from earthly suffering.”

  Lost in her confusion, my mother stared at him through the tangle she’d wrought of her hair. Something in his promise touched her, for as soon as he began to speak a Latin prayer, she followed, repeating his words with whispered reverence. She did not cry out as the doctor’s narrow blade sliced into her white skin, or flinch as he pressed her arm to make her maddened blood flow, drop by scarlet drop, into the silver cup held by his servant.

  I watched, my heart racing with distress. I cannot say which I found the more wrenching: the gore of my mother’s bloodletting, the teasing sweet glimpse of what she’d once been, or the way she’d been so swiftly seduced by the priest’s prayers while I’d been left forgotten before her. Most likely it was all those things together, an unhappy brew for any child to swallow.

  I lingered for another moment, hesitating between my impulse to flee and my duty toward my mother, and the fluttering hope that she’d spare one more gentle word or glance for me. But she did not; she could not. I turned and ran from the room with Cassandra, and back to the parent whose love I didn’t question.

  Father must have guessed from my face what had happened. In wordless empathy, he held me close and led me away from the unhappiness that hung about our house like a midnight shroud of deepest mourning. Not trusting me to a servant, Father himself lifted me into the coach, and as we drew away from our house, I curled on the seat beside him, pressed as close to his side as I could manage.

  Our coach was a splendid one, elegant enough to make others point and stare as we passed them by. Yet though our family’s arms were picked out in gold on the door and the cushions on which we sat were of softest Spanish leather well stuffed with fleece, our ride was still dusty, lumbering, and jostling, and I felt every bump and rut of the road we traveled. I was thankful for the sturdy security of my father beside me and for his shoulder beneath my cheek, and as London’s houses and churches gave way to the green trees and fields of the country, I found my melancholy sorrow began slowly to jumble away. From excitement I’d not slept much the night before, and as the afternoon sun gilded the inside of the coach, I drowsed, stroking Cassandra’s flaxen hair and dreaming of the racing white horses I’d see in Epsom.

  “Was she unkind to you, poppet?” Father asked softly, waiting until we were well into the country to interrupt my pretty dreams.

  “No,” I said, the word muffled against his shoulder. I concentrated instead on pressing Cassandra’s painted hands together as if she were at prayer.

  He sighed. “Your mother means you no harm, Katherine. She does love you, after her own fashion. But she’s other affairs on her mind at present. I don’t believe she’ll be with us much longer.”

  At once I feared the worst, and twisted around on the seat to face him. “Mama?” I cried. “She’s not going to die, is she?”

  “Oh, no, no, her body’s perfectly sound,” he said quickly. “I meant that her Romish priests have proposed a fresh course for her, and she is tempted to agree.”

  I frowned. “Dr. Mertonne wouldn’t permit it.”

  Father grunted, his obvious displeasure with the doctor most agreeable to me. “This will be your mother’s decision, not Dr. Mertonne’s.”

  “She would make such a decision?” I asked, astonished that he considered her capable of any decision at all.

  “She will,” he said solemnly. “I have always permitted your mother to follow the faith of her choice, no matter that it differs from yours and mine. If now she wishes to travel with Father Bede to a convent in Ghent, then I’ll not stop her.”

  “But why would she wish to leave us?” Troubled, I remembered what Mama herself had told me earlier, and how she’d warned me against the will of men. But had she meant Father, or her priest, or some other ignoble fancy of her afflicted mind?

  “She’ll be away for a time, poppet, only for a time,” Father said without answering the question I’d asked. He frowned, concentrating on brushing away some stray dust of the road from his sleeve. “Most likely she’ll already be gone when we return.”

  “While we are away?” I asked, bewildered. “So soon?”

  “It is for the best, Katherine,” he said firmly, so I wouldn’t doubt. “Nor do I wish you to believe any of this is your doing. If your mother feels a purpose to be among these other pious English ladies and the Benedictines, if she feels it will help her regain her peace, then we must oblige her. God willing, she could return to us much improved.”

  I nodded, unable to think of a suitable reply as tears stung my eyes. Because I couldn’t recall a time when Mama had not been mad, I could not imagine a future where she’d be well, either. All I knew for certain was that she’d been too beguiled by her priest and his prayers to say farewell to me.

  “Don’t fret, Katherine,” Father said, smoothing a stray lock away from my forehead. “It’s not such grievous news. This change in your mother’s situation has made me consider yours as well, and the sorry truth is that I’ve rather neglected you.”

  No child wishes to hear such a confession, though in my heart, I’d often suspected the same. Worse and worse, I thought miserably, worse and worse. My distress must have shown on my face, for Father began to make little tut-tut noises that were, I supposed, intended to soothe me.

  “It’s entirely my fault, poppet, and none of yours,” he said contritely. “I’ve been a sorry sort of father to you. I’ve left you to be raised by servants and a madwoman. You would have been better treated if I’d tucked you in a basket and sold you to a pack of Gypsies for a few shillings.”

  “Yo
u wouldn’t have done that,” I said, shocked he’d say such a thing, even in jest. “I’m a Sedley. I’m your daughter. If you had sold me to the Gypsies, why, then I’d have welcomed it, for I vow they’d not be so careless with me.”

  At once I regretted my words, spoken as they’d been from my distress rather than with filial disrespect, but Father didn’t care. Instead he laughed aloud, his eyes widening with amusement.

  “Oh, aye, you’re my daughter,” he said proudly. “I’ve only to look in the glass to see the likeness between us, and listen to the prickle in your voice now to hear it. You’d have made a fine Gypsy wench, ready to lead your band back to my house to rob me as I’d deserve.”

  I did favor Father, with the same pale skin and quizzical brows, and eyes so dark as to be black—a Gypsy face indeed, for us both. But I’d never thought that my impertinence (for so my governesses had always deemed it) could have come from him, nor that Father would find it desirable, either.

  “I would make a prize Gypsy,” I declared, emboldened, and hoping to please him further by following his lead in this foolishness. “I’d bring my fellows to our house, too, and show them the scullery window that Cook’s maid only pretends to latch at night, so the footman from Fanshawe House who’s her sweetheart can come to her after the others have gone to their beds.”

  “Is that so?” Father asked, laughing still. “Lah, but you’ve a ready wit for so young a creature!”

  I nodded vigorously, and though his laughter lingered, he seemed to be studying me with a new thoughtfulness.

  “You surprise me, Katherine,” he said. “Not about the servants, of course, for they do but ape their betters, but on account of this gift for saucy chatter. I can well imagine how you’ll make His Majesty laugh, and find favor for us both because of it.”

  I gasped. “Truly?”