Gillian Bagwell - The King’s Mistress

This novel is entirely a work of fiction The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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First published in the U.S.A. by Berkley Publishing Group, an imprint of Penguin Group (U.S.A.) Inc., New York, NY, 2011

Published by HarperCollins Publishers 2012

Copyright © Gillian Bagwell 2011

Gillian Bagwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781847562593

Ebook Edition © July 2012 ISBN: 9780007443314

Version 2018-07-23

This book is dedicated to the memory of

Khin-Kyaw Maung

I miss you every day.

and

Ross Ireland

You left us far too soon.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Read on for an extract from her first novel, The Darling Strumpet .

Author the Author

Also by Gillian Bagwell

About the Publisher

THE AFTERNOON SUN DAPPLED THROUGH THE LEAVES OF THE oak tree. Jane Lane sat in its shade, her back against its stalwart trunk, the Second Folio of Shakespeare’s works open on her lap. She had sneaked her favourite book from her father’s library and taken it out near the summerhouse, where she could read and dream in peace.

Though what need have I to sneak? she asked herself. I am five and twenty today, and if I am ever to be thought no longer a child, it must be so today. Lammas Eve.

“On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen,” her Nurse had said of Juliet Capulet. Jane shared Juliet’s birthday, the thirty-first of July, but Juliet, at not quite fourteen, had found her Romeo, to woo her and win her beneath a moon hanging low in a warm Italian night sky. But not I, Jane thought. I have come to the great age of five and twenty, and but one man has stirred my heart, and that came to naught. An old maid, her eldest sister, Withy, would say.

What is wrong with me? Jane wondered. Why can I not like any man well enough to want to wed him? It is not as though I am such a great prize. Pretty enough, I suppose, in face and form, but no great beauty. Witty and learned, but those features are of little use in a woman, of little use to a man who wants a wife to be mistress of his estate and mother to his heirs.

What if there will never be someone for me?

She pushed the thought away. Surely there was more to think about, more to do than be merely a wife, exchanging the protection and stability of her father’s home for that of a husband’s.

She looked down again at the book in her lap, opened to The Life of Henry the Fifth , and read over the opening lines spoken by the Chorus, which never failed to thrill her.

O, for a muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention!

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene.

Yes, that was what she wanted. A swelling scene, full of romance and adventure, not this dull life in the Staffordshire countryside. She read on.

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,

Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels,

(Leash’d in like hounds) should famine, sword, and fire

Crouch for employment.

That sort of man would rouse her blood. Sword in hand, armour on his back, astride a great war horse, exhorting his men onward.

Once more, unto the breach, dear friends! …

Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”

Jane sighed. There was no king in England now. King Charles was, unthinkably, dead, at the hands of Parliament, two years since. The war had raged for years, those who wanted there to be no king had won, and now Oliver Cromwell ruled. The king’s twenty-one-year-old son, Charles, the exiled Prince of Wales, had been crowned as king in Scotland at the beginning of the year, but Jane’s father and brothers and cousins, the neighbours and the newsbooks, whether Royalist or Parliamentary in sentiment, did none of them expect to see a king upon the throne of England again.

Jane’s family had mingled with kings since time out of mind. An ancestor of hers had come into England with William the Conqueror more than six hundred years earlier, and Lanes had gone crusading with Richard the Lionheart a century after that, and fought at the side of the Lancastrians in the War of the Roses. Jane’s own great-granduncle William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, had been councillor to the great Elizabeth, the Tudor rose that had blossomed from those wars, and in living memory the family tree had borne a Countess of Oxford. And many generations back, Jane herself was descended from King Edward I, called “Longshanks” and “the Hammer of the Scots”.

But the time for kings had gone, and in their place sat a parliament. What a grey and bleak sound that word had, Jane thought. Would she ever in her life feel excitement again?

The thought again raised the agitation that had rumbled at the back of her mind all day. Her brother John’s friend Sir Clement Fisher was coming to dinner, and she rather thought he was likely to ask her to marry him. She didn’t want to, really. It was not that there was anything wrong with him. He had served honourably in the wars. It was just that she felt no stirring of passion when she was with him. But if she said no? What were her chances then?

Jane’s eyes strayed to the southeastern horizon. Somewhere that way lay London. Throughout her childhood, London had seemed a place of magic, and she had longed to go there. When she was ten, the King’s Company of players had given a performance in Wolverhampton, and her father had taken her, all that five miles away, to see them, as a special treat for her birthday . Henry the Fifth , the same play that lay open on her lap. She had never been so excited in her life as when that first actor strode onto the stage and began the speech that ran through her mind today.