Chapter 5
His name was Charles Blount. I had known him distantly as one of my brother’s circle, a face at gatherings I attended without ever once really noticing.
But I learned his name properly only after several more encounters had already convinced me that this attraction would not fade quietly the way earlier flirtations had.
He was not yet Lord Mountjoy in those years.
That title, and the modest fortune that came with it, still belonged to his elder brother William.
It would not pass to Charles for some years yet.
He held only his knighthood then: Sir Charles Blount, a soldier and scholar whose reputation at court rested on substance rather than spectacle.
He lacked the flamboyant charm that made men like my brother magnetic in a crowded room.
And he seemed entirely unconcerned with correcting that impression.
Where other courtiers competed loudly for attention, Charles observed, listened, and spoke only when he had something worth saying.
I found, to my growing unease, that I preferred his silences to most other men’s conversation.
And it was only later, once I let myself really look at him rather than simply listen, that I understood he was not plain at all.
We began speaking regularly at court gatherings.
Our exchanges started innocently enough.
We discussed books, politics, and the endless intrigues that consumed everyone around us.
I remember one evening at a mutual friend’s table, when the talk turned, as it often did, to the queen’s dealings with Spain.
“The ambassador will press for more than she’s willing to give,” I said, mostly to my wine cup, expecting the comment to vanish into the noise of men’s opinions.
“Why do you think that?” Charles asked.
I looked up, certain he was humoring me. He wasn’t. He was actually waiting for what I’d say next.
“Because she needs Spain frightened, not fought,” I said. “And fear doesn’t survive a battlefield. It only survives uncertainty.”
He considered this longer than the remark might have deserved. “Robert Cecil would tell you that’s a woman’s reasoning,” he said. “I’d tell him he was a fool for saying so.”
No one had defended my opinions in front of me before. Robert Rich certainly never had.
Charles possessed a mind trained in classical learning, and he spoke of history and philosophy with a fluency that matched my own education - an education few men bothered acknowledging in a woman, let alone engaging with as an equal.
I told myself, in those early months, that this was simply friendship.
I tried to convince myself that it was the easy companionship that sometimes develops between people who find each other’s company stimulating.
I had experienced flirtation before. I’d experienced the practiced compliments and charged glances that constituted ordinary court behavior.
I understood the difference between that familiar performance and whatever was building between Charles and me.
It felt slower, deeper, and more dangerous.
We found reasons to seek each other out.
A gathering hosted by mutual friends became an opportunity that I anticipated for days beforehand.
A chance meeting in a gallery stretched into an hour of conversation neither of us seemed eager to end.
I began noticing small details about him.
I noted the timbre of his voice when he grew animated discussing something he cared about.
I noticed the way his attention sharpened whenever I spoke, as though nothing else in the room mattered more.
Somewhere beneath the pleasure of his company, I recognized that I was in danger of wanting something I had no right to want.
For his part, Charles made no secret of his own growing attachment, though he approached the matter with more caution than I initially credited him for.
He was younger than Robert Rich and unmarried.
His fortune was meager compared to my husband’s wealth.
And he understood exactly what pursuing a married woman, especially one connected to the Earl of Essex, might cost him if the attachment became public.
I appreciated that caution even as it frustrated me.
Some part of me wanted him reckless. I wanted proof that whatever he felt matched the intensity of what I had begun to feel myself.
His caution made more sense to me once I understood what he already stood to lose with my family, quite apart from anything to do with me.
Charles and my brother had not always been friends.
Years before, at a tilting match, the queen had rewarded Charles for his skill with a small gold chess piece.
He wore it fastened to his arm by a ribbon, as any young man proud of the queen’s notice would.
Seeing it, my brother Robert remarked that “every fool at court seemed to have a favor now.” Word reached Charles, as court words always did.
And the two of them met privately near Marybone Park to settle it properly, with dueling swords rather than wit.
Robert came away wounded, and Charles came away, strangely enough, with a friend rather than an enemy.
I never fully understood how two men bled at each other one week and stood shoulder to shoulder the next.
But I had watched my brother collect exactly this kind of loyalty before, forged in precisely the kind of foolishness that should have ended it.
That old friendship was the reason no one thought twice, at first, when Charles began appearing at Essex House on his own account. It was under that same cover when I finally understood how far things between us had progressed.
We found ourselves alone in a corridor. Our conversation trailed from politics into something more personal when he asked me directly whether I felt what he suspected I felt.
I did not answer immediately. I stood there, acutely aware of how close he was standing and how the corridor’s dim light softened everything between us into something that felt private despite the palace’s crowded halls just beyond.
When I finally spoke, I did not deny it. I could not have. Not with any honesty.
“I feel it,” I admitted. And the words carried a weight I had not anticipated, an admission that changed something between us permanently.
He did not touch me that evening. He did not attempt anything beyond words, but the acknowledgment itself altered the nature of what we shared.
We were no longer pretending that what we shared was a simple friendship.
We were no longer performing the polite fiction that court flirtation required.
We had named something real, and naming it made retreat considerably harder to imagine.
Word of our growing closeness began circulating within weeks, as it always did at court.
Privacy existed only in theory, and gossip traveled faster than any messenger could ride.
I heard whispers and careful comments from women who considered themselves my friends.
I saw warning glances from men who understood exactly what scandal might follow if Lord Rich’s wife and Sir Charles Blount continued appearing together as frequently as we had begun to.
Robert Rich showed little sign of noticing.
As always, he was absorbed in his own concerns.
But I understood that his indifference would not protect me indefinitely if the gossip grew loud enough to demand his attention.
I weighed the risk carefully in those weeks, turning the calculation over during quiet hours when sleep would not come.
I had built a life at court through years of careful behavior.
I had cultivated relationships and protected my reputation despite my mother’s disgrace shadowing every step I took.
Continuing what had begun with Charles threatened all of it.
It threatened my standing, my children’s prospects, and whatever fragile security I had constructed within a marriage that offered little else worth protecting.
But I thought, too, of what continuing to deny myself would cost. I had spent a decade married to a man who regarded my mind and my spirit as inconveniences to be managed rather than qualities to be valued.
I had performed contentment that I did not feel.
I had folded away parts of myself to accommodate a household that had never wanted the whole of who I was.
Charles offered something I had not realized I was starving for until he provided it: genuine partnership, intellectual equality, and the sensation of truly being seen rather than simply tolerated.
I also thought of my mother and of the choice she had made all those years ago, marrying a man the queen herself could not forgive her for wanting.
I had judged her for it once. I was a girl too young to understand what it cost a woman to want something enough to risk everything for it.
I understood her better now than I ever had.
I met with him again, deliberately this time, no longer able to pretend that our connection was accidental or incidental.
We spoke for hours, walking through gardens away from immediate observation.
True privacy, though, was impossible at a court built for watching.
Someone always noticed. I told him what marriage to Robert felt like.
I admitted grievances I had never voiced to anyone.
He listened with a patience that made me trust him more deeply than I had trusted any man beyond my own brother.
“This will not be easy,” he told me, and I appreciated that he did not pretend otherwise or offer false comfort about how the world might receive what we were choosing.
“I know,” I said.
“Your husband. Your brother’s position. And a court that thrives on scandal exactly like this.”
“I know,” I said again, and I meant it. I understood the risk we were courting even as I found myself unwilling to step back from it.
He took my hand then. It was the first time he had touched me with any deliberate intention, and I did not pull away.
Whatever consequences waited for us, whatever whispers would grow louder and eventually become impossible to ignore, I found I could not make myself care enough to stop what had already begun between us.
We chose each other that autumn, fully aware of what the choice might eventually cost. I did not yet know how far the consequences would reach or how many years the scandal would simmer before finally boiling over into public disgrace.
I did not know how many people that I loved would be swept into the wreckage alongside me.
I knew only that for the first time since my wedding to Robert Rich, I felt something that resembled the life I had once imagined for myself - before guardians and negotiations and ambition had decided my future without asking what I wanted.
Consequences would come. I understood that clearly, even in the earliest days of choosing Charles over caution. But I had spent a decade living carefully, and careful living had brought me nothing but quiet suffering dressed up as respectability.
I was finally ready to want something enough to risk everything for it. Just like my mother.