The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [219]
She had hardly had time to worry about this, however, before a letter from her husband had driven all other thoughts from her mind. He had a friend who was to make a visit to Switzerland and who would be happy to convey her with his family, at no cost to herself, and bring her back again after a month. She could bring little Betty, the daughter he had never seen. They were to leave in three weeks. As John Lisle wrote:
There being no time to carry messages back and forth between us, I shall either rejoice to see you, my dearest love, and my daughter in Lausanne; or else learn with grief but understanding, that you cannot make this journey.
What should she do? I must go, she concluded. ‘You are going to see your father,’ she told the little girl. She began to prepare and pack.
So it came as a particularly painful blow when, five days before she was to leave, a messenger arrived with news that John Lisle had been murdered in Lausanne. It was not certain who was behind it. Certainly not the king himself. At no time did Charles II ever indulge in acts of vengeance of this kind. But there were other royalists who were certainly capable of such a deed. It was said that his French mother, the widow of the executed king, might have been responsible. Alice thought so.
Anyway, she had no husband now and Betty had no father. By chance young Whitaker came calling not long after.
1670
Zephyr was blowing his gentlest breeze through the green glades as King Charles II of England went forth in his New Forest, that warm August day, to hunt.
He had been there before. Five years back, when the terrible plague was raging in London, the king and his court had come down to the safety of Sarum; and while there he had made a small tour of the villages round about. ‘When I was running away from Cromwell, after I hid in the oak tree, I came through Sarum.’ This had included a ride into the Forest. ‘I slept rough in the New Forest two nights,’ he genially told his courtiers, ‘and not even the charcoal burners knew I was there.’
And now he had decided to visit the Forest again, with a party of courtiers, for his royal pleasure.
Stephen Pride looked at his friend Purkiss and Purkiss looked at Puckle. Furzey should have been there too, but he had said he wasn’t coming, not for any king. So it was the three of them and Pride’s son Jim, who were waiting on their ponies by the gate of the King’s House at Lyndhurst, where they had been told to report, as the king and his party emerged.
Then Stephen Pride looked at King Charles II of England and King Charles II looked at Stephen Pride.
The royal visitor was certainly a memorable figure. Tall, swarthy, with that mass of curling brown hair that fell to his chest so thickly that you might have thought it was a wig, Charles II exhibited both sides of his ancestry very clearly. His fine brown eyes and the long line of his mouth were those of the Celtic Stuart family, but to these features were added the heavy nose and the sensual, cynical power of his French mother’s Bourbon ancestors. He glanced now at Pride with exactly the same cheerful cynicism he would have shown if he were addressing a pretty young serving wench or his royal cousin King Louis XIV of France.
Stephen Pride stared, but it wasn’t so much the king whom Pride was looking at. It was the women.
There were several of them. They were dressed in hunting clothes just like the men, with jaunty hunting caps. The queen was not among them that day, but there was a vivacious, dark-haired young woman who whispered something in the king’s ear that made him laugh. This, Pride guessed, must be the comic actress, Nell Gwynn, whom all England knew to be the king’s latest mistress. He noticed an elegant young Frenchwoman and several others. Were these all royal mistresses too? He