Constantly she thought of the Town and Court and the fine life she had had there—which she had not valued at a great price then but which now seemed to her the most pleasant and desirable existence on earth. She spent endless hours dreaming of the balls she had attended, the clothes she had worn, the men who had gathered around her wherever she went to fawn upon and compliment her; she lived over again and again each small remembered episode, feeding her loneliness on them.
But more than anything else, she thought of King Charles. She considered now that he was the handsomest and most fascinating man she had ever known, and she had found to her dismay that she was in love with him. She wondered why she had not been wise enough to know it sooner. How different her life might have been! For now that she had her respectability it seemed much less important than her mother had assured her it was. What else could a woman need—if she had the King’s protection?
She longed to return to London; but what if he was not ready to forgive her? What if he had forgotten he had ever loved her at all? She had heard of his most recent mistresses: the Countess of Northumberland, the Countess of Danforth, Mary Knight, Moll Davis, Nell Gwynne. Perhaps he had lost all interest in her by now. Frances remembered well enough that once people were out of his sight—no matter how well he might like them—he promptly forgot their existence.
She tried to take an interest in painting or in playing her guitar or in working a tapestry. But those things did not seem entertaining to her, done alone. She was thoroughly, wretchedly bored.
Finally she coaxed the Duke to return to London, and at first her hopes ran exuberantly high. Everyone came to her supper-parties and balls. She was as much courted and sought-out as she had been after her first triumphant appearance at Whitehall. She knew perfectly well that everyone now expected the King would soon relent and make her his mistress, and for the first time she was almost ready to accept that position with its advantages and hazards. But Charles, apparently, did not even know that she was in town.
That went on for four months.
At first Frances was surprised, then she became angry, and finally hurt and frightened. What if he intended never to forgive her? The mere thought terrified her, for she knew the Court too well not to understand that once they were convinced he had lost interest they would flock away, like daws leaving a plague-stricken city. With horror she faced the prospect of being forced to return to her life of idle seclusion in the country—the years seemed to spin out in an endless dreary prospect before her.
And then, not quite a year from the day she had eloped, Frances became seriously ill. At first the doctors thought it might be pregnancy or an ague or a severe attack of the vapours —but after a few days they knew for certain that it was small-pox. Immediately Dr. Fraser sent a note to the King. The resentment Charles had felt against her, his cynical conviction that she had deliberately played him for a fool, vanished in a flood of horror and pity.
Small-pox! Her beauty might be ruined! He thought of that even before he thought of the threat to her life—for it seemed to him that such beauty as Frances had was a thing almost sacred, and should be inviolable to the touch of God or man. To mar or destroy it would be vandalism, in his eyes almost a blasphemy. And she still meant more to him than he had been willing to admit these past months, for she had a kind of freshness and purity which he did not discover in many women he knew and which appealed strongly to the disillusion of his tired and bitter heart.
He would have gone immediately to visit her but the doctors advised against it for fear he might carry the infection and spread it to others. He wrote instead. But though he tried to make his letter sound confident and unworried it had a false flat sound to him, for he did not believe it himself. He had scant faith left in anything, certainly not in the duty of God to preserve a woman’s beauty for men’s eyes. He had found God a negligent debtor who cared little to keep His accounts straight. But he sent her his own best physicians and pestered them constantly for news of her.
How was she feeling? Was she better today? Good! Was she cheerful? And—would she be marred? They always told him what he wanted to hear, but he knew when they were lying.
It was the end of the first week in May—more than a month later—before they would let him see her. And then when his coach rolled into the courtyard of Somerset House he found it jammed full with a score or more of others. Evidently word had spread that he was coming, and they had wanted to be there to see the meeting between them. Charles muttered a curse beneath his breath and his face turned hard and sombre.
Damn them all for their ghoulish curiosity, their cheap petty minds and malignant poking into the sorrows of others.
