With All My Heart (10 page)

“And so — sometimes — do I,” answered Charles slowly. It was the first time they had ever spoken together of fundamental things and he, who seldom talked to women save for amusement, found himself speaking to her as though she were his other self — saying things which he had never admitted even to his own brothers. “It would be a cessation of struggle — a kind of coming home ... “

In her utter amazement, Catherine could find no words in which to voice her joy. She went to him and laid her two hands, as if in prayer, against his heart. “I would give
anything
—” she whispered.

“That is just the difference, my dear,” he sighed. “I may
wish
sometimes, but I would not give anything. For in my case it would mean giving up so much.”

He saw that she was more deeply shocked than when she had supposed him to be a confirmed Anglican. “What, then, is your religion?” she asked.

He lifted her hands and kissed them lightly. The moment of deep reality was gone. “Never to go on my travels again,” he said. “I assure you I am not worth saving. A man with mighty few principles.”

“But limitless kindness,” said Catherine, seeking to bind up some of the hurts that had been done to the trusting small boy in the Van Dyck’s picture.

He leaned back against the arm of his chair and, quirking a puzzled eyebrow, pulled her almost roughly towards him. “I have never been loved like this before,” he said, half angry because her very simplicity baffled him.

“But everybody loves you!”

“Oh, because I am a king — or for
beaux yeux
  — or because they want something,” he jibed. “But you, Kate —”

He broke off in mid-tirade, trying to accuse her because he knew so well the tortuousness of men’s minds. “But of course it is true, is it not, that my mother urged you to use all wifely wiles to convert me?”

Catherine nodded assent. Her clear, sherry brown eyes were wells of truthfulness, and he knew it.

“Yet you have never once tried to.”

Her gaze dropped before his at last, and the enchanting colour rose to her cheeks. “It is because — may the Holy Saints intercede for me I — I have been wicked enough to —”

“Lie with a heretic and like it?”

She looked up then and saw the grin on his ugly mouth. “I pray you, do not jest about such things!” she begged.

He was all contrition at once. “There at least, my sweet, you wrong me. Never was I further from jesting.” Though in part it must hurt her, for once he met her serious sincerity with his own, permitting her a glimpse of the real Charles Stuart whom so few men knew. “Because there is so little else I
can
give you, I would give you the satisfaction of knowing that none of my mother’s subtle plans or impassioned exhortations have ever moved me as you have done — by quietly living your religion and loving me.” He got up and strolled to the window, suddenly less her husband than the King. “For this once I will let you send Richard Bellings to Rome,” he said, in that grave, resonant voice she had heard him use to Counsellors. “But you must understand that having once freed myself, I cannot endure another woman trying to proselytize or meddle politically.”

“Are you not — rather hard on her Majesty?”

“Why do you say that?”

“I had supposed that you love her, since you have twice invited her to make her home here.”

“But naturally I love her, and by God's grace I will never fail in my duty to her. Did she
not
risk her life for us and do all she could for me in my exile? We Stuarts hold together. But after Cromwell freed my youngest brother from Carisbrook she had him in France and used every device to turn him from the Anglican faith he had sworn at my father’s knee to keep. Henry was but a lad, yet he kept faith, though she had the sheets torn from his bed and turned him out in anger. I sent for him then to Holland. Do you not see, Catherine, that had James and I been killed Henry would have been the last hope of our house for the monarchy. And had he become a Catholic, the English and the Scots would have had none of him. And my father knew it.”

“I would rather die than endanger you — and your monarchy,” vowed Catherine, watching his tall, dignified silhouette against the fading sunset.

“So Mam said, no doubt, to the King, my father. Yet it may well be that her meddling cost him his life.”

“But she adored him!”

“All the same, being a woman, she talked — at the wrong moment.” Charles turned, and although Catherine could scarcely see his shadowed face she knew that it was sad and stern. “Zounds, she had no thought to harm him!” he declared, in the old warm, informal way. “No one had worked more heroically for the Cause than she; and when she realized what she had done she was heartbroken.”

“Then what made her —?”

“It was just Mam’s sense of the dramatic. She always had to play a part. And the dangerous way my father doted on her, having to tell her everything. He had gone down to Parliament intending to call for his five worst enemies and impeach them. The moment was ripe. He had them in the hollow of his hand that day; and it was their lives or his. He had planned to take them completely by surprise; it was one of the few really clever moves he made against the growing strength of Parliament. But Mam had to talk. ‘Rejoice with me!’ she cried to a lady of doubtful loyalty, ‘for even at this hour the King is master of his realm again, for Pym and his confederates must be arrested by now.’ But even though she had sat watch in hand, he had in reality been delayed. You know how people with petitions always pester me as I go down to the House. You know what it is — a smile here and a promise there. And he was too courteous and conscientious to brush them aside. And by the time he arrived some cursed Roundhead had warned the five Members and they had escaped through a window — all except one who was enormously fat and got stuck, they say. Just as my father himself, who was not fat at all, got stuck between prison bars trying to escape from Carisbrook Castle before they had done with him. On the Isle of Wight, it was, and I had a French brig waiting for him down in Brook Bay; but, Heaven bless him for a guileless gentleman, he had to bungle even that!”

There was a long silence while the shadows deeped in the corners of the low beamed Kentish room. “I am not brilliant like your mother, nor have I any sense of the dramatic. Moreover, you do not dote on me at all dangerously,” said Catherine, slowly, borrowing some of his bitterness. “Therefore I think you will always find it safe to trust me.”

CHAPTER IX

“LISTEN TO what my brother Pedro says, Charles!” cried Catherine, referring to the hastily scrawled letter in her hand. “After the victory, when your British charged up the hill of Amexial and helped us to drive the invading Spaniards back, our General, the Conde de Villa Flor, cried out ‘These heretics are better to us than all our Saints!’ ”

“And Alphonso, I understand, rewarded them for their pains with a pinch of snuff apiece!” smiled Charles.

Catherine’s triumphant gaiety clouded over. “How — humiliating! For Pedro and Villa Flor and all the rest of us. Charles, have you thought lately that Alphonso is going a little mad?”

“Judging by the letters he writes you, I should not be surprised. But do not let the snuff incident embarrass you, my dear, for I offset it by ordering forty thousand crowns to be distributed among our men; and, as I told you, it is relatively easy to screw money out of Parliament for purposes of war.”

Catherine, in her unlaced cherry-coloured waistcoat, regarded him adoringly. “Small wonder the Portuguese think you are some kind of god!” she murmured.

Tunbridge Wells had done wonders for her; and after a leisurely progress through the West country where Charles had once been a fugitive, they were back again at Whitehall. A Whitehall stirring with progress and spaciousness of thought, and full of the comings and goings of scientists and sea captains. Such men were for ever gathering round a great painted globe of the world that stood before the long window in the King’s chamber. James and Cousin Rupert, Admiral Sir William Penn, the Earl of Sandwich, and frequently, of late, a fearless swashbuckling adventurer called Robert Holmes. There was gold to be got in New Guinea, Sir Robert said — knowing well that no man had more need of gold than a reinstated Stuart.

“But we are not as yet officially at war there,” warned Clarendon, who, what with the gout and a long habit of domineering, grew daily more difficult.

“Take no heed of his croaking, Holmes,” grinned Charles. “What it amounts to is that I can give you no official backing nor protect you from the claws of Parliament should you fail.”

“I am well content to take a risk on that, Sir,” grinned back Holmes, whose daring seamanship had already endeared him to the King.

All that Rupert and James could talk about these days, whether at meals or down at the dockyards, was the galaxy of fine new countries to be explored and colonized beyond the mighty Atlantic Ocean, and of Great Britain’s rivalry there with the Dutch. Although they had received the hospitality of Holland, it was natural enough for the Stuarts to hate the new Lowland republic which had repudiated their dead sister and young William of Orange, her son. So when the intrepid Dutch seized the ships of the African and East Indian Company, the British retaliated by wresting from them the thriving trade post, New Amsterdam, which they had built along the banks of the Hudson River.

“And what shall we call it?” clamoured the explorers and politicians at Whitehall, when the tremendous excitement of the news had died down a little.

And Charles, after considering a while, waved aside all suggestions incorporating his own name and gave honour where honour was due. “Now that, under the grace of God, this thriving city is ours, let us call it — New York,” he said.

And marking the far-off spot on his globe, he hurried off to the Queen’s apartments. For ever since he had found her poring over the
Lusiads
, in which Portugal’s national poet had immortalized the exploits of her seamen, Charles had begun to talk with her about such things, recognizing the fact that almost everywhere his own ships went the courageous Portuguese explorers had been before them. Men like Bartholomew Diaz, who first rounded the Cape of Good Hope, establishing maritime routes to the Indies and actually landing on the unknown Continent of America; and the great Vasco da Gama, whose tiny fleet had years ago reached Calcutta and torn the valuable spice trade from the rich hands of Venice. It was a bond between Charles and Catherine at which few people ever guessed.

But although only the passage to the privy landing stairs and Chiffinch’s room separated their apartments, Catherine saw comparatively little of her husband. He was a man who must always live his own life, and interests within her own household often had to suffice her. There was, for instance, the training of flighty, foolish Frances Stuart. The girl was so pretty and so much a tomboy that her goings-on began to weigh on Catherine’s conscientious mind. Instead of attending to her duties she would sit on the floor building card castles like a child, or escape with other wild youngsters, dressed up and masked, to mingle with the crowds and to cry sweet lavender or oranges in the streets, or run with flying curls through the galleries playing hide-and-seek with all the susceptible young men who shadowed her.

“She is only a child,” Henrietta Maria would say indulgently when Catherine tried to hold a family consultation.

“But a cousin of sorts, and so our dear Catherine feels herself to be responsible,” pointed out James, mindful of her kindness to his wife.

“I take no exception to her romping with these young gallants. There is safety, I suppose, in their numbers,” Catherine excused herself, with that engaging air of innocence which so intrigued the Stuarts. “But when it comes to hiding in the linen room with the Duke of Buckingham — for you know, Charles, although George Villiers
is
your friend, he has a horrible reputation among my women!”

Whereat her unregenerate husband burst out laughing. “No worse than mine, little Puritan!” he confessed.

But to the Queen Mother, who hated all the Villlers, the linen cupboard episode gave the affair a more serious aspect.

“In this instance, even Buckingham would not dare —” blundered James tactlessly.

“And for all her innocent looks,” Charles assured them, hastening to silence him, “the girl is quite capable of looking after herself.”

“She needs occupation,” snapped Catherine, wondering how he had discovered whether she were or not.

“Then I will tell you of a notion I have in mind,” he offered obligingly. “Sir Peter Lely needs a model for a painting to be engraved upon the new pieces I intend to have struck from this Guinea gold, if and when our invaluable brigand Holmes brings it. Some allegorical female figure representing the might of Britain, I thought; for which our Frances, with her little Roman nose, has just the right slenderness and curves.”

“A happy thought! And you could call the figure Britannia,” agreed James, with unwonted imagination.

But that was scarcely the kind of occupation Catherine had been looking for. And after the family were gone donna Penalva, who alone had been permitted to remain in England, complained with reason that it would only make the little nitwit more vain than ever.

All the same it passed away the dull autumnal evenings to watch Frances dress up in a white classic robe clasped about her youthful breasts with gold, hide her curls in a great martial helmet, and then, armed with shield and trident, pose in an attitude of graceful defiance — actually towards Catherine’s largest mirror, but supposedly towards all the real and imaginary enemies of Britain. All the gentlemen of the Court would gather round — to watch the famous painter at work, they said — and Charles himself was delighted when the first newly embossed coin was brought him from the royal mint.

“How apt to have a Stuart face on either side!” observed florid, modish Buckingham, turning the coin on his lace befrilled palm so that the candlelight gleamed first on the fair Britannia and then on the bewigged profile of the King.

“
La
Belle
et
Le
Bete!
” laughed Charles, flicking the gleaming thing from his friend’s hand into his pretty cousin’s lap.

But that evening, while her devotional books were being laid out, Catherine was still wondering uncomfortably about the sly, malevolent way in which Buckingham had looked at her whilst he spoke.

“It is a pity that Frances’s father, Lord Blantyre, allows her to spend so much time with the fast set in Lady Castlemaine’s house,” sighed Maria Penalva, settling on her nose the strong spectacles which Charles had had specially made for her.

“Yet, in spite of her flightiness, I am sure that she is chaste,” insisted Catherine.

But a few weeks later all thought of
la
Belle
Stuart
was put out of her head by news that Jane Lane was coming to Court. Jane Lane, whose name was so easy to remember — and whose intimate role of gallantry so difficult to forget! The girl for whom a penniless Charles had once borrowed the French King’s best horses, for whom he provided a generous pension and to whom he still occasionally wrote. The woman, it seemed to Catherine, of all others to be envied.

“Jane’s husband is bringing her at last,” Charles told her, “and I shall be obliged if you and your ladies will be present to greet her.”

“Will they be staying with us awhile?” asked Catherine, although her heart sank fearfully at the thought.

But Charles said it would be only a short visit although, for his part, he would willingly find them permanent lodgings in the Palace. It seemed that the husband — quite understandably, Catherine thought — had needed practically a royal command to bring Jane at all.

Jane’s dress, when she was presented, was that of a country squire’s wife and she wore but one of the jewels which the King had sent her; but there was a nobility about her sweet, clear-cut face which needed none at all. Catherine, although Queen of England, found herself the more nervous of the two. “For days she held his life steadfastly in the hollow of her hands,” she thought, glad that — with no will to out-shine — she had chosen to wear her quietest grey satin.

Withdrawing herself a little from Charles’s side, she watched him raise Jane from her profound curtsy and kiss her, calling her his deliverer and his ‘sweet life’, before them all. He spoke with that deep inflection which betokened affectionate gratitude; but, seeing the colour flood into Jane’s pale cheeks, Catherine knew that however good a wife and mother she might now be in Northamptonshire, she would love Charles Stuart until she died.

“You must find his Majesty very different from the cropped and leather jacketed William Jackson you served so well,” Catherine said kindly.

“It was I who served Jane,” teased Charles.

And then for the first time country bred Jane dared to look at him properly. At the tall, dignified figure with the glitter of Orders across a black velvet coat, the curled and perfumed wig, at the grave lined face and full, licentious, smiling lips and — last of all — at the fine ringed hands that once had watered and stabled her horse. “His
eyes
are just the same,” she said, her own full of tears for the fresh youth of him that was gone.

Charles led her to a chair and began telling her quietly any small anecdotes he could remember of her father, Sir Richard Lane, who had died in exile with him in Jersey; and Catherine noticed how even in that lovely moment Barbara Castlemaine must needs push her proprietary way towards him. Judging by the splendour of her toilette, it would appear that she, too, had feared a rival from the past. “Though, wife or mistress, neither of us need fear; for women made in Jane’s mould keep their vows!” thought Catherine, gladly watching Charles’s happiness as he gathered about him Jane’s brother, Father Huddleston and old Cavalier campaigners like stout Lord Wilmot, Carless and the rest; and then the gradual thawing of Lady Jane’s shyness and the breathless out-pouring of reminiscences where every other sentence began with “Do you remember?” Within that charmed circle, warmed with camaraderie, bursts of laughter and the King’s own racy yarns, Jane and the men who had escaped from the carnage of Worcester were living over again what each must have counted his highest hours. Young unfledged fighters of the future hung on the fringe of their fascinating adventure, and while the notorious Castlemaine sulked unnoticed, the Queen graciously drew Jane’s forgotten husband to her side, entertaining him as best she could in her still broken English so as to leave the spell of reunion unbroken.

It was not until the King and James left and the rest of the men were raising their glasses again in boisterous sport to the old, dangerous toast “The Black Boy over the water!” that Catherine, lingering purposely, bade Jane Lane “Good bye”. “I want you to wear this, too, in token of
my
gratitude,” she said, unfastening from her breast a brooch of exquisite Bahia workmanship.

“Oh, Madame!” exclaimed Jane. “From you, whom I have so envied!”

“I had thought rather that people pitied me,” said Catherine, lowering her voice and speaking spontaneously as she was wont to do with those whom she instinctively trusted. “But you are not of the kind who would want to be a queen?”

“No, Madame. And it is not for that I envy you.”

“Then our envy is mutual,” sighed Catherine. “You see, there is so little that I can ever do for him.”

“Yet always, whenever he is disheartened, sick — or dying — you will have the right to be there — in his room.” For a brief moment the two women whose lives had been so different clasped hands, and Catherine, crossing herself at the thought of Charles’s death, knew that Jane was right. Even now, it was she alone who could bear him a legitimate son — and there was nothing in the world, she knew, that he wanted more. So she bade her guests good night and went early to her room to rest. To rest and to thank God that, after all, one good woman whom she had feared was no menace to her happiness.