The empress of ice cream

Louise

Now the canals and lakes in St James’s Park are frozen. Charles and his brother James teach me to slide on the ice - ‘skating’ they call it, a Dutch word. They learned how to do it during their years in the Low Countries. James is the better of the two, something Charles is irked by, since in all other sports he far excels his younger brother.

Sometimes James skates beside me, holding me up: one hand pressed against my side to steady me, the other reached around me so that I do not fall, speeding me along in a great sweeping arc, the two of us propelled only by the swishing of his long legs, while I concentrate on keeping my own legs braced and steady so that I do not fall.

‘Od’s fish, he looks as if he’s about to tumble you into his arms,’ Charles grumbles.

He’s jealous. And not entirely without cause: James holds me a little harder than he needs to, his hands a little higher or a little further around than is strictly necessary.

He is a strange man. Physically, he looks like Charles - that is to say, handsome: yet somehow what in Charles has turned to charm, in James has become dourness. Questions of faith and policy trouble him. On his face there is a perpetual expression of anxiety or regret. Yet it is said that he is cleverer than his brother, and does much of the painstaking work of government when Charles loses patience with it.

His taste in mistresses is a Whitehall joke: it is said that as a kind of penance he makes sure they are always uglier than his wife.

Yet he is also Admiral of the Fleet. As such, no one is more important in advising Charles whether or not to go to war. It is also said that he secredy inclines to the True Faith. If so, he will not

have the same concerns about making war on a Protestant nation that some of the king’s ministers do. This war might even be seen as a test. Does he save his soul, or help his brother stay on the throne.^ It is a difficult dilemma for a man of devotion.

And who better to talk to him about such matters than a Catholic lady of great virtue, lately come from France.^

We spend long afternoons reading Lettres Provincmles^ and discussing Pascal on the soul.

Charles is not amused. ‘Why do you spend so much time reading with my brother

‘Your Majesty is most welcome to join us.’

‘I can’t think of anything more tedious than discussing religion with James. Even if there’s precious little else to occupy any of us at the moment. If the ground doesn’t unfreeze soon, the racing will be over this year before it’s even started.’

‘Take care you do not stretch this out too long,’ Lady Arlington warns. ‘The king is irritable when the weather is like this. It would be perfect time to spend in bed, in fact. A warm fire and a fiir coverlet, and his apartments would be the cosiest place in the kingdom.’

My tactic now when she talks like this is to look vague. ‘My own fire is perfectly warm, thank you. The se^ coal here in London is very good, don’t you find?’

That winter, one of his Parliament men circulates a poem that begins:

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, ludy, were no crime . . .

Charles sends it to me with a note: This man is one of my enemies, and a scurrilous pamphleteer, but somehow he expresses my own thoughts more eloquently than I can myself.

*

In the evenings, entertainment. The great fad this winter is for masquerades. In the Banqueting House, in the mansions of Pall Mall, we dance and gossip in disguise. I have a dozen different masks, fashioned from lace, from feathers, from silver leaf and worked leather.

And one that I am still wearing when the other masks come off.

So many layers of dressing up. I have seen the king without his mask, but not without his wig. Does he take it off, I wonder, when he takes a woman to bed.> I have a sudden image of him in his nightshirt, the luxuriant hair pulled away from his head, a soldier’s crop beneath. Dark stubble. It should be comical, ridiculous, the monarch stripped of his dignity - but instead I feel a kind of tenderness at the thought.

At the dances the king and his brother are easily picked out, both by the fineness of their clothes and their great height. But sometimes it can be hard to tell them apart. Only the king’s posture - that athleticism in the dance - distinguishes them.

And this: James flirts, a little awkwardly. He tries to talk with me, to catch my interest in some current event or gossip.

Charles only stares at me from behind the vizard, his dark, glittering eyes more eloquent than words.