In a year’s time, Martha thought, shifting her weight to peer out the window again, Patience would be delivered of another child, with a husband and a home. Even Thomas and John Levistone would, next spring, have land on which to build. Earlier that evening Patience had corrected Martha’s mistaken belief that the men were indentured for the accustomed term of seven years; Thomas and John had in fact been hired by Daniel to work for three years in trade for prime land owned by the Taylors on the Concord. They had one more year of laboring on another’s land, and then they would have their own.
And what would she gain with her own sweat? Even the room in which she slept would have to be shared with Joanna and Will once the babe was born. And once Patience had recovered her strength and Daniel had returned, she would most likely be sent home. An unmarried woman too long in a strange household of men was a challenge to virtue, a carnal distraction not to be borne.
Well, then, she thought, spring would bring open roads, and if she had exhausted her chances for a husband in Andover, perhaps the market or meetinghouse in Billerica would bring more success. Tomorrow would be the first of April, a day of hopeful warming, and she would begin the cleaning in earnest. She would open all the doors and with sand and ashes and birch rods both dirt and despondency would be swept away with the old season as proof of renewal for the new. Perhaps, she thought, her mouth twisting into a grim smile, some journeyman, still damp from the crossing, would stumble upon their threshold and see some coveted quality beneath the gritty sweat over her lip, and the stains through her bodice, and say to himself, “Here is a woman to wife.”
And thus would things be decided; for, Christ knew, the man who had a mind to marry her would not sit and talk to her about it. He would know that at her advanced years, if she had had a choice for husband, she would already have come to the marriage bed. It would be taken as a matter of course that the set of her back and the knitting together of her brows signaled the Work of Ages. It would be taken for granted that she did not have a thought or a wish for herself apart from carrying a man’s seed in her belly.
“And if I hardly dare speak to myself of other hopes,” she whispered, “how can I speak of them to another?”
She regarded for a minute more the ebbing light on the walls, and when the candle at last extinguished itself, she felt her way to her bed in the dark.
CHAPTER 2
THE ANTEROOM OUTSIDE the king’s chambers was cold and the braziers set out to take the chill from the air were ineffective, except to further smog the air with some musklike perfume meant to cover the evil smells pooling in the darkened corners. Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, rubbed at the black plaster covering the scar at the bridge of his nose and tried to keep his breathing from sounding ill-tempered. He knew for a fact that only a few nights before, the Duke of Buckingham had, in a drunken stupor, pissed in the corner. He knew it because he had seen it with his own eyes. The stain still marked the walls like a waterfall in miniature.
It had been close to an hour that he had waited on the king after being urgently summoned, and he resisted the temptation to sit in the one lone chair that had been placed there originally for Clarendon’s use. Since the old man’s banishment, no one had risked sitting in it for fear that the ex-chancellor’s bad fortune would rub its way into the sitter’s buttocks, clinging there like a painful boil.
He watched William Chiffinch standing patiently by the door like an old hound, and when the man looked in his direction, Bennet decorously gestured with one hand and smiled politely.
Yes, I’m still here, you old satyr, Bennet thought, setting his face to a courteous mask. Bennet had his own private entry from his quarters to the king’s, but the sovereign of all England had been in a rare mood of genuine anger and had made it known that the only person he would be closeted with for the afternoon was his twenty- four-year-old French mistress, Louise de Keroualle. To be alone with one of his court favorites was Charles II’s preferred manner of releasing tension, and the length of the assignation gave testament to his towering rage after leaving Parliament that morning.
Bennet took from his pocket a small jeweled case filled with snuff and allowed himself a modest pinch, bringing to his nose a lace handkerchief given to him by his own mistress, a Spanish lady who was not young but was very supple, and still very grateful to be kept. At fifty-five the earl knew that gratitude, combined with experience, brought a certain exquisite frisson to the bedroom, not yet the desperation of a matron in her declining middle years, but more the ardent willingness of a ripening woman to please. With the certain knowledge of decay comes true passion, he mused. It trumped the demands of youthful entitlement and inexperience in matters of sex every time.
The abrupt sounds of laughter, a woman’s and a man’s, drifted from the bedchamber, and Bennet breathed a sigh of relief. It would not be long now, as he knew the king liked to laugh with his women, but only after the serious business of bedding had been exhausted.
Chiffinch must have known from the muffled giggling that he would soon be escorting the Duchess of Portsmouth back to her quarters, because he straightened his drooping posture and wiped at his seeping eyes with one sleeve. The old man was over seventy and had been, as Keeper of the Privy Closet, one of the few men, apart from Bennet, who reported directly to the king. It always roused Bennet’s suspicions when he personally could not bully, persuade, or buy a man into revealing court confidences. Unfortunately, thanks to the king’s relentless licentiousness, William Chiffinch had already made a generous fortune taking bribes from every duchess, actress, or street moll who traipsed up the back stairs to the king’s bed.
A gentle cough from inside the chamber alerted Chiffinch to the young woman’s approach and he swiftly opened the doors, allowing Louise de Keroualle to exit the royal bedroom. She floated out in a cloud of pale blue silk, disarrayed artfully off both shoulders, her plump baby face pleased and self-assured. He made a deep courtier’s bow, hiding a sudden amused smile. Nell Gwynn, another of the king’s favorites, was sometimes mistaken for Louise. He had only recently overheard Nell sharply rebuke a confused gallant by shrilling, “Pray, good sir, be civil. I am the
Nodding to Chiffinch, Bennet walked into the chamber and bowed. The king was already seated at the desk nearest his bed, papers and scrolls in an untidy pyramid, his shoes and his wig still in the chair opposite.
“Henry,” he called, motioning to the earl to stand closer. “I trust I haven’t kept you long?”
Bennet looked about the room, studying the dozens of clocks all ticking in discordant rhythms as though seeing them for the first time, and said pleasantly, “Your Majesty knows my time is his own.”
The king smiled, a cynical curling of the thick lips, and slumped back into his chair. “They’ve hurt us, Henry.” Bennet took note of the “us” and was instantly wary.
“All our work,” Charles continued, “is to be undone because Parliament will play the penurious husband to my wifely supplications. I tell you, I am quite undone.”
Bennet waited for the king to speak again, but the smile was gone, and he knew the silence was for him to offer up some advice, some scheme that would circumvent the barrier that was Parliament. He had been with the king all through the Parliamentary sessions earlier that month, and had watched him try to cajole and charm both Houses not only into giving him the funds to continue the Dutch war but to continue the Acts of Toleration, allowing his close and powerful Catholic ministers to stay in power. The ancient fearful remembrances of Catholics overrunning the seat of government with the brand and the sword during the reign of Bloody Mary were even greater than the recent memories of the black plague and the great fire that had destroyed most of London.
But all of Charles’s seduction and prevarication had come to nothing. Both Houses were clamoring for the king to nullify Toleration and pass into law the public swearing of sole fidelity and adherence to the Church of England. In exchange for the king’s assurances, Parliament would release the purse strings. There was at present a very real and dangerous threat that Parliament would try to coerce, either through law or through blunt force, the monarch into compliance. It was the same impasse that had brought Charles’s father to civil war and the executioner’s ax.
“Sire,” Bennet said cautiously. “Perhaps what is needed now is a gesture of, shall we say, grand and unifying proportions.”
The king frowned more deeply, staring through heavy lids. “ ‘Unifying’ is to our liking. ‘Grand’ is not. In case
