The Three Crowns epub by Jean Plaidy Read Free Book Online

something.”
    “I suspect Rochester to be the author of this.”
    “That man! I would my brother would dismiss him from the Court.”
    “Dismiss his boon companion. He would rather see you gone, James … you with your scandals and your follies.”
    “I doubt I’ll ever make a scandal as great as my brother’s.”
    “He is the King. He can keep twenty mistresses at a time and the people will applaud him. You, my dear Duke, do not enjoy the people’s indulgence to that extent. And when your mistresses are murdered—well, that is a serious matter. Charles has not been involved in that sort of scandal.”
    “You are shouting,” said James. “You will be heard.”
    “Those who listen will only hear what they already know.”
    “I forbid you to talk in this way.”
    Anne laughed. “You forbid me . It is no use trying to cover up your indiscretions by playing the great duke and stern master. It will not do. I shall not endure these humiliations.”
    “You have not always been so virtuous yourself, if I remember rightly. What of Henry Sidney?”
    “Henry Sidney. He was merely my Master of Horse.”
    “And of you it seems.”
    “A fabrication which existed in your mind. It was so convenient to delude yourself that your wife was unfaithful—since you had deceived her with … how many? Or would it be impossible to count?”
    “You are overwrought.”
    “I have just been accused of murder. What are you going to do about that?”
    “I tell you, there will always be lampoons. They are written daily about Charles and Barbara Castlemaine.”
    “I do not think they have been accused of murder.”
    “Oh, come, that suggestion is not serious.”
    “Adultery. Lechery. They are to be expected in this Court. In fact, if one is not a lecher or an adulterer one is considered old-fashioned, behind the times. But murder has not yet been judged a virtue.”
    “Anne, be calm.”
    “I do not feel calm.”
    “We cannot talk with ease until you do.”
    “And you would rather leave me until I am calm? That is a good excuse. You would rather be off with that sly-eyed Churchill woman. Very well, go to her. I’ll warrant she has thought up some new request to ask of you in exchange for her favors.”
    “Is that what Sidney did? What did you have to grant him for his?”
    “You are insulting.”
    “And are you not?”
    “I have reason to be. Oh, you make a great show of being an irate husband. Banishing poor Sidney from the Court. It was such a shocking thing he did. Smiled at your wife. Showed her some pity because she must continually suffer the degradation of her husband’s infidelities paraded daily before the Court under her very nose with little regard for her feelings …”

     
    In the anteroom Mary listened. She did not want to listen; but her father had forgotten that the door through which she had gone led only to the anteroom and once there, there was no escape.
    She wished they would not talk so loudly. As she listened she kept seeing Elizabeth Villiers’s sly face. Elizabeth was right then. There was a shocking scandal about her father and her mother.
    It was so hard to believe. A short while ago he had been laughing with her; she had sat on his knee and he had been telling her stories of his adventures as he loved to. Now he was quite different. She could not believe that the kind and gentle man was the same one who was shouting at her mother. To discover that people could change so quickly was alarming; it made the world seem an insecure place.
    She did not want to hear their quarrels; she did not want to know of them; she wanted to live in a world where there were only herself and her sister Anne, where everything was pleasant and comfortable, and there were no grown up people with their sly furtive secrets which she only half understood.
    She was afraid that one of them would come into the anteroom and find her there. She would not be blamed because they rarely blamed her, they were always kind to