Page 85 of Dawnlands

He was choked with remorse. He bent and took her thin hand and put it to his lips. “I hope so,” was all he could say, not knowing what he was saying, and he turned and went from the room. She stayed where he had left her, listening to the wheels of his carriage crunch on the gravel, and the sound of the horses’ hooves, until he was gone.

WINDSOR CASTLE, AUTUMN 1685

Johnnie was hesitantly walking up the long approach to Windsor Castle. On Ned’s insistence, they had taken the stagecoach to Windsor from London, and got down at the inn. Now he wished they had hired a coach. There was a queue of coaches down the long drive, waiting at the door for admission, servants shouting names, coachmen holding horses as they pawed the ground, double guards on duty, and footmen opening the doors of carriages and ushering guests drowned in silks and furs and sparkling with diamonds through the great double doors of the castle.

Ned cast one aggrieved look at Johnnie. “Is it always like this?” he asked. “The country mad for wealth and show?”

“No, no, there must be some kind of ball. What a night for us to choose! We’ll never get in.”

“Better now, than at any other time,” Ned reassured him. “Look, isn’t that gentry folk getting in over there? Maybe they’ve come to watch, and we can join with them?”

Johnnie glanced over to the side entrance where gentlemen and ladies dressed in their best but far short of the extravagant excess of the courtiers were being allowed to enter on foot. Clearly, there weremerchants and Windsor gentlemen and their families and even visitors from London come to the palace to watch the dining and dancing.

“Some sort of ball?” Ned asked the man who came up behind them.

“I’d say so!” He laughed. “The queen’s birthday and they say the king can’t do enough for her: she’s banned him from her bed for straying, and he’s got to win her favor if he wants a son to come after him.”

“No, that’s not it,” said a woman, turning round. “He spends all his time with that ugly Lady Sedley.”

“I heard that the queen was sick to death,” another gossip observed. “And she can’t bear a child anyway.”

“Then how come she’s dancing at her own ball?” someone asked.

“Anyway, the queen’s birthday,” Ned said, grasping the one piece of reliable information from this flood of hearsay and gossip. “Lucky that we’re dressed for it.”

Johnnie had bought his great-uncle a good coat with a fine waistcoat to go underneath, breeches, stockings, shoes, and fine linen; he himself wore his best velvet jacket with his embroidered silk waistcoat and his lace cravat.

“This is nothing,” Johnnie said. “Barely respectable.”

“Good enough to get us in,” his uncle reminded him as they stepped towards the footman at the door.

“Who can vouch for you?” the man demanded.

“We’re guests of Sir James Avery,” Ned said confidently. “Where’ll we find him?”

“He’s at dinner,” the man replied. “You can watch from the back of the hall.”

He waved them in the general direction of St. George’s Hall and the swell of noise guided them as they followed other smartly dressed men and their wives who had come to see the king and queen take their dinner. They were shown into a vaulted hall filled with tables for courtiers. At the far end was a high dais and on it a grand table loaded with silver and gold ewers and salt cellars and decanters.

The trumpets blared and the court turned to the entrance and sank into bows and curtseys as the king and queen walked in, their favorites behind them. The queen was draped in the finest of silks, a long train billowing behind her, jewels at her neck, twisted around herdark ringlets, in her ears, on her fingers, and around her waist. Her hand barely touched the king’s as he led her through the great hall. She turned her head away from him and ignored his court and his advisors, acknowledging only those on her own side, her ladies and the gentlemen of her household, and her particular favorites. She did not throw one look at him, not even when he whispered something in her ear and helped her up the shallow stairs to the dais. He handed her into her seat and she never once met his eyes. A manservant drew out her chair and presented her with a silver ewer of hot water and a towel. She dipped her fingers, she wiped them on the finest linen, she sat in her great carved chair. Still she did not look at her husband.

The king, red-faced in a glorious silk jacket of peach embroidered satin, awkward and pretending to be easy, addressed a remark across the high table to some men in the hall, smiled at their jests, and drank heartily. The queen beside him was like a woman made of ice.

The king’s confessor rose to his feet. There was a small rumble of dissent from people watching at the back of the hall, deeply suspicious of a Roman Catholic reading a Latin grace at the King of England’s dinner.

“They’ll push it too far,” Ned said with quiet satisfaction in Johnnie’s ear. “They always do: the Stuarts. They never understand what’s staring them in the face. They always think they know better. They always think they can dance over hard ground.”

“For Christ’s own sake!” Johnnie hissed back. “Can you stop your mouth for once? We’ve come to court as supplicants, we want a royal pardon. Don’t you dare say another word!”

Ned was silent. Johnnie glanced sideways at him to see if his uncle was offended.

Ned winked at him. “Cavalier,” he said, quite unrepentant. “Poodle.”

The two men watched the courtiers in silence as the dinner concluded.

“Look!” Johnnie said. “It’s the Nobildonna.”

Ned saw a woman of extraordinary beauty, her gown tailored sotightly that it gripped her slim waist but slid off her shoulders, showing her neck and the top of her breasts, loaded with diamonds. She had diamonds in her black hair and in her ears that caught the light and sparkled when she turned her head. When she rose and mounted the dais to lean over the queen’s bare shoulder and whisper in her ear, all eyes followed her.