With All My Heart (11 page)

And to her annoyance she found it was the turn of careless, chattering Frances to attend upon her. “The King and the Duke have gone on to the Playhouse,” she said brightly, collecting the Queen’s jewels one by one on a small velvet cushion. Adding, with the licence of a relative, “It seems odd, does it not, that they should go there when that nice woman who helped to save Charles comes at last to Court?”

“Perhaps there is a particularly good play tonight,” yawned Catherine.

“It is not a real play by Mr. Wycherley or anybody. But Moll Davis is to dance a jig, dressed as a boy, at the Duke’s playhouse,” obliged the little chatterbox, who always had all the tattle of the town at her tongue’s tip. “And milady Castlemaine says there is a new, red-haired actress called Nell Gwynn or some such name, whose impudent songs amuse the King.”

“And milady Castlemaine hoped that you would repeat her choice morsel of gossip to me.”

“Oh, Madame!” pouted Frances. “I do but try to liven what must have been a very dull evening for you.”

Catherine rose wearily from her dressing stool. “You have yet to learn, my dear Frances, that there are some women to whom an evening is not necessarily dull just because they themselves are not the centre of it,” she said.

But afterwards, lying quiet within the drawn curtains of her bed, Catherine was so unfortunate as to overhear kind Lettice Ormonde say reprovingly, “You should not have told her Majesty about that Gwynn woman, Frances. After all, she is but a jumped up orange wench with a drunken prostitute of a mother. The king might have
laughed
— he laughs at all sorts of things — but it is incredible that he would ever
look
at her.”

And then the young Stuart girl’s pert retort. “Well, he looks at her often enough at the playhouse. They say he often goes when she is billed to play. And milady Castlemaine told me that several times the sentries have seen him before it is properly light hurrying across the gardens in that quick, quiet way of his, and along this gallery to his room —”

Naturally Catherine did not sleep much that night, and she was still wide awake when the palace servants began raking out the fires and the river beneath her windows came to life again with the raucous shouts of ferrymen. Of course, there was no truth in the squalid story ... It was just something unkind which Barbara had invented out of spite because she and Charles had been so content with each other of late. But presently, while her ladies still slept, she heard footsteps coming quickly along the stone cloister on the garden side of the palace — footsteps which she would have known anywhere. She sat up abruptly. So it was true after all — that Charles was faithless — even now while she carried his unborn babe ... Was it always to be like this? From whose bed did he come now, hurrying to beat the dawn? Surely, surely he was not sneaking from some tousled, red-headed slut of an actress?

Indignation boiled within her. She had to know, to see for herself — although, seeing him, she would still be in a world of wretched conjecture. In the anteroom where two of her women slept there was a small window overlooking the cloister. Swiftly, in spite of the vertigo that assailed her, Catherine rose from her bed. Without pausing to put on a wrap she slipped past the sleeping women and silently pushed open a casement. And, sure enough, there in the cold light of autumnal early morning, was her husband hurrying along the flagged pavement below. “Then it is true! Somehow I must get used to it,” she told herself, with a shaking hand pressed to her heart.

But although Charles hurried, there seemed nothing particularly furtive about him. The sentry at the garden gate looked as stolidly impersonal as usual, and suddenly Catherine espied two other men rounding the bedewed garth close at the King’s heels. Sandwich, the admiral, to her amazement, was one of them, and he was discussing something with a shortish little man carrying a great sheaf of documents. And almost beneath her window Charles stopped suddenly, as if he had just remembered something, so that the other two almost bumped into him. Clearly, from their conversation, they had just come from some sort of committee meeting, — Catherine had had no idea that these men were in the habit of conducting State business before she had even drunk her foreign brew of tea; and all her heart was abased to Charles in shame.

“How much gunpowder and cordage was I embezzled out of when the ‘Royal Duke’ came in to refit at Chatham?” he was asking crisply of Montagu of Sandwich. But it was the little man in the large brown wig who answered, promptly and concisely. With his sensible clothes and expert knowledge of figures he brought a breath of outside commerce into the more rarefied atmosphere of the Palace. He appeared to have put a stop to whatever leakage there had been, but seemed to have something else on his mind — something which it had not been his place to speak of in Council, perhaps; and although his manner was pleasantly respectful he was obviously accustomed to discussing business with the King. “About the drunken master of the ‘Kestrel’,” he said. “If Your Majesty will graciously pass the punishment suggested by the Board, the matter need not be left outstanding.”

Far from any of them being caught philandering, they were just three hungry men standing in a draughty passage, each wanting his breakfast but with the same unromantic issues conscientiously in mind. “He was four points off his course with the Dogger bank close on his starboard,” recalled Charles consideringly.

“That was not the only charge, Sir,” the Secretary of his Navy Board reminded him. And Sandwich shook his bared head in friendly exasperation. “It is a question of discipline, Sir,” he urged. “If Your Majesty is as lenient with all officers who insult him in their cups —”

“What exactly did he say of me?” asked Charles. “My life is not so blameless that I could afford to enquire across a boardroom table.”

There was an embarrassed pause during which Catherine noticed that the rising sun was beginning to glorify the dew spangled garth with misty shafts of gold. She saw her husband lay a friendly hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. “Come, Pepys, out with it!” he encouraged. “I’ll wager, for all you have a pretty wife, you sometimes stray.”

Pepys looked more embarrassed than ever and would probably have been stricken dumb entirely had he known the Queen was leaning out of a window above him. But he was no sycophant. “Sober, the man is a useful navigator, Sir,” he said. “But in his cups he kept shouting above. the wind that whereas Dick Cromwell let his father’s well tilled land lie fallow, your Majesty had sown in it a fine crop of cuckolds.”

Even Charles Stuart was silent; and when he spoke again he had put on that sudden kingliness which dismissed discussion. “Give him the maximum penalty for drunkenness. I will not have my ships mishandled by sots,” he ordered. “But as I cannot in honesty take exception to what he said of me, I see no reason why other men should.”

He was off to get his breakfast immediately, leaving the two to stare after him with a kind of puzzled disapproval. “But the man held the King’s commission —” Pepys presumed to mutter. After all, as Catherine recalled, he was some kind of connection of his lordship and had rendered good service to his wife and household while the admiral was at sea.

Sandwich linked an arm in his and walked away towards the Strand. “I can well imagine, Samuel, that a man of the King’s ilk relies more upon spontaneous love than upon compulsory respect.”

“However that may be, ’tis a vast pity the other Members of the Navy Board do not bestir themselves to attend as many meetings as His Majesty,” snorted the conscientious Secretary.

“And that old Clarendon nags so tediously about his indolence. But the old bore may be right about him in other matters; for ’tis the Navy that is mistress of his heart; ...”

Their voices dwindled away down the long cloister and Catherine, suddenly realizing how cold she was, hurried back to bed. If she were shivering and shamed, at least she was happier than when she had left it. “There may be other women —” her mother-in-law had warned. And Charles himself, who, however much he had learned to finesse with the world, was consistently truthful with himself, had just admitted their numbers. Yet none of his women, perhaps, would ever mean as much to him as his ships. Catherine hugged that scrap of comfort to herself; though close on it came the thought, “And neither, for that matter, may I ... Shall I ever learn to understand this faithless, loyal, merry, melancholy man I have married?”

And almost before she had finished wondering, or her women dressing themselves, Charles was in her room, booted for one of those hard canters of his when he managed to enjoy a little privacy by the simple expedient of out-distancing all his followers. For next to a good ship he loved a swift horse.

“Now that New York is taken from the Dutch and your other Colonial news is good I suppose you will be going to Newmarket for the racing as usual,” said Catherine, salving her conscience with kindness.

Charles stood regarding her as she lay wanly in the big bed. “I had thought to postpone it this year perhaps —” he began tentatively, doing much the same thing by his own.

But deep loving had already taught Catherine something, at least, of his complexity. She could guess how he was chafing because James, not being a king, could get away to sea; and, noting his sallowness, she knew, too, in her hardly acquired wifely wisdom, that he was beginning to feel the need of long days of sport and unadulterated masculine society after the stuffiness of Court. And there, thank God, in the wilds of Cambridgeshire, there was no accommodation for women.

“Indeed you must go,” she insisted. “You look tired.”

He came and sat on the end of her bed. “You do not look over well yourself,” he said anxiously.

“It is but the shadow of the curtains,” she lied valiantly.

“And after all, I shall be back long before you are brought to bed,” he assured her cheerfully. “And we will go to Hampton if it pleases you.”

It did not please her and she shook her head. Hampton, as they both knew, had been a Heaven which he had broken.

“Windsor, then? Or wherever you will.”

“I will stay here,” she told him, “for I think you would like your son to be born a Londoner.”

Repentantly, gratefully he bent and kissed the palm of her little hand, closing her fingers carefully as though they could be made to hold his caress until he came again. “Then take every care of yourself for my sake,” he bade her. “And above everything avoid going abroad into the City. These mild, humid days after a hot summer we are still cursed with the plague. If I had my way I would tear down half those narrow streets and build afresh more spaciously, to let in the sun.”

Catherine promised readily, remembering how some such scourge had already robbed him of two dear ones. “Goodbye, my love, and may all your horses win!” she called gaily as he left her.

“If they do I will buy you a new dress,” he vowed, turning to smile at her as a page threw open the door. “And even if they do not, at least I can ride across the good Cambridgeshire turf again and forget poor old Ned and my everlasting Commons. ’Zounds, how I love the wind on the heath!”

CHAPTER X

CATHERINE NEVER heard whether the King’s horses won or not; neither had she any immediate need of the new dress. For a few days after Charles and most of his courtiers had left for the races not only the shadows of her bed curtains lay dark upon her, but also the shadow of Death. It was the spotted fever, her physicians said. Her aching body burned and shivered between the sheets; her tongue was swollen in a parched throat. The railed alcove in which her bed stood was packed with frightened women, anxious apothecaries and praying priests. Their faces seemed at times to be bending over her, at others to be floating afar off like white and disembodied discs. Whenever her head turned on the pillow she heard someone moan and call aloud upon her husband’s name; but in her delirium she had no idea that the cracked, desperate voice was her own.

“Will you not let us send for him now, my lady?” entreated the Duchess of Suffolk, trying to smooth back her mistress’s masses of damp, tousled hair.

“Not yet. Not yet ...”

“But the doctors say —”

Then poor, half-blind Maria Penalva, tenderly sponging the sweat from her forehead. “Oh, my dear, do you not want to see him again before you die?”

“Want to see him again?” ran Catherine’s distracted thoughts. “More than anything in Heaven or earth, God forgive me! When I should be thinking only of my own soul ...”

And then, finally, there was old Doctor da Sousa, who had brought her into the world and whom Charles had suffered to stay, telling her pityingly in Portuguese that there could be no baby-now — no baby ever, perhaps. And therefore his Majesty
must
be told.

“But he — so loves the wind on the heath!” croaked Catherine obstinately in English.

All through the night they were cupping her, physicking her, exhorting her in Latin, suffocating her. with incense.

“
Inte
Domino
speravi
...
Kyrie
eleison
…”

“Now and in the hour of our death ...” breathed Catherine, trying to compose her mind.

It behoved her to forgive all her enemies, they said.

Enemies? Who were her enemies, besides those demons of jealousy and quick temper against which she must strive so constantly? In her extremity the very word seemed to have lost all meaning. Barbara Castlemaine. Buckingham, perhaps? Or even Charles himself because he had, after all, supped with Barbara before leaving for Newmarket. But-whatever he did, however much he hurt her, Charles could be no enemy. He was her heart’s love. And was he not punished enough, poor man, since in spite of all his high hopes there would be no heir? She, his wife, who loved him so desperately, had nothing to give him. Barbara had at least given him a bastard to fondle. Jane Lane had risked her life for him. Yet she — proud daughter of Portugal as she was — could not so much as suffer the birth pangs of bearing him a son.

The fevered days ran into each other and on one of them, rallying a little, Catherine sent for a clerk and made her Will, regretting that even to those who had served her best she had so little of her own to give. And once — since even physicians and priests must eat — she was left blessedly alone for awhile with some of the most devoted of her ladies. “You heard what they said? That I may never bear a living child?” she said, exhausted but clear headed again as they propped her up gently against her pillows. “I suppose that in God’s mercy it may be better that I go like this. Then the King can marry again — someone young and full of vitality. Of good lineage — like Frances ...”

“But think of his grief —” protested donna Penalva.

“Oh, no, dear Maria, he has never really
loved
me.”

“Madame, you may well be wrong. Consider how he threatened to send us
all
back to Portugal, and how — ever since you begged that I who am old and dear to you might stay — he has done nothing but spoil me! He is like that,
Catalina
querida
. You must not slip from us because you have no heart to stay.”

“Only make the effort to live through this night,” urged the Duchess of Suffolk, “and I wager the King will have forgotten his sport and be home.”

In spite of her former protests Catherine, in her weakness, clutched at her ministering hand. “You mean you have really sent for him?”

“Not I, dear lady. But milord Chancellor — who should have sent long ago, but that those who have no wish for a Catholic Queen minimized the nature of your sickness.”

“His courier should have reached Newmarket two days ago,” encouraged Lettice Ormonde, “and my husband calculates that with good relays of horses his Majesty’s coach could arrive here by tomorrow morning.”

Catherine turned her head away sadly. “I doubt if I can last so long,” she murmured, swooning away from very weakness. And when-she regained consciousness her room was crowded again and hot with candlelight.

If only all these well meaning people would leave her in peace to lie a while with her burning hand in old Maria’s cool one! Maria’s loving hand, which she could imagine was her mother’s. If only they would stop suffocating her with incense! If only someone would bring a glass of ice cold water! Or open a casement ...

Once she roused herself to ask weakly for Father Huddleston. His presence would be comforting, she thought, if one must come to die. And perhaps he might even persuade her own priests to stop the dizzy swaying of the censers. But either they were jealous of their English colleague, or they could not make out what she asked for. And she was utterly in their hands, James being at sea, the-Queen mother on a visit in the country and all the Court except Clarendon away with Charles.

To make matters worse, her own beloved doctor began to quarrel with the priests, saying that the crisis was not yet — that if only the Queen could hold her own until dawn there was yet hope; while they, on their side, argued that since her Majesty had kissed the sacred reliquary they had brought and it had not cured her nothing remained for her but to receive Extreme Unction.

But although she appeared to be unconscious Catherine had caught da Sousa’s words. If only she could hold onto the thin thread of Life a little longer she might see Charles. If only she could struggle on until morning …

But there was no need.

Before midnight there was a great stir outside her door. Above the unending sibilant murmuring of prayers came the dull thud of hurrying footsteps and the sharp clang of sentries saluting. Even in the strange, lonely borderland in which she tarried Catherine was aware of it; and some faint flicker of revival began to stir in her.

Her door was flung wide and it seemed that the dense fog of people were dispersing. She was not really aware of the amazed murmur that went up from them because the King had come so soon; nor of his flecked spurs and mud bespattered appearance. But had. she been half way through the gates of Eternity she would have recognized his-.voice. He was striding towards her bed as he had that first day at Portsmouth, but with far more urgency, and she made a pathetic little gesture sketching her desire to be rid of all else.

“I know, my heart. Even a dog is allowed decent privacy when he is sick!” he was saying, in the tender, practical way of his. His strong arms were raising her so that she could breathe more easily, her wavering heart beats were steadied by his warmth. How reassuring the out-door, masculine smell of him — heather and sweat and saddle leather — close beneath her cheek! Catherine clutched at him with all the strength left in her wasted fingers, and the awesome mystery of Eternity receded, leaving her sentient in his arms.

“Take away all those hideous phials, my good da Sousa,” he was ordering reasonably. “Lady Suffolk and I will see to her, with Lady Ormonde here and our little Portuguese countess. Where is young Richard Bellings? Tell the servants to throw more logs on the fire, Dick, and open a window.” But when her posse of pious foreigners still pressed anxiously about her he rose from the bed, shooing them before him. “Take away your reliquary, milord Abbot. And get out, all of you!” he cried with concentrated fury. “You have well nigh killed her between you with your cuppings and your wailings. Get out, I say!”

“But — if her Majesty should die without ghostly comfort?” ventured her devoted almoner.

“She is not
going
to die!” Charles told him. He was the King in this mad Protestant country and they must all needs obey him. And in the blessed silence that followed, the first breath of fresh air which she had felt for days fanned Catherine’s poor, disfigured face. “The — wind — on the heath,” she whispered, with eyes still closed but cracked lips curving into the painful vestige of a smile.

All night long Charles, who had been in the saddle for the best part of two days, kept at bay all who would have pestered her with experimental remedies. No one but her very own must touch her. The most homely, intimate tasks of the sick room, were neither beyond nor beneath him. With his own hand he spooned fresh juice from Dutch oranges into her parched mouth and helped the women to keep her body sponged and the sheets cool and changed. In her unattractiveness he cared for her pitifully, without any particular medical appliances, much as he might have done his best for a comrade wounded on the field. It was commonsense against leechcraft. And, although the risk he took upon himself was enormous, commonsense won.

As dawn broke over the City wharves beyond the Bridge, Catherine’s lashes fluttered open and she looked at him. At his drawn, unshaven face, the stained ruffs of his shirt sleeves and at his dishevelled hair. “It is — tomorrow. And you have been with me all night,” she said, on a long, contented sigh.

“It is today and you are going to live,” he told her.

“But they told me that your coach —” He had to bend down closer to hear her, and as he braced himself to do so she reached out to touch his arms, her own hands travelling up and down them in a satisfied caress. Her sunken eyes had grown bright as. stars. “Charles, you
rode
-all the way — alone!”

“None of them could keep up with me,” he grinned, almost apologetically. “Old Ned will probably have apoplexy when he hears of it!”

And then, because he had cared so much more than he had supposed, and because both of them were utterly exhausted, the slow, hard tears welled into those indolent, inscrutable eyes of his. For once in his life his emotional guard was down. “That you should always suffer from my selfishness — my bestial habits of self-indulgence —” he muttered, hiding his face against the thinness of her wasted breasts. Forgiving, mothering him, Catherine stroked his bent head, so dark against the whiteness of her nightgown. And alone, in the peace of early morning, they clung together weeping.

“I tried to live until you came,” Catherine whispered at last, still not understanding how he had come so soon. “Lettice said that if Clarendon’s messenger —”

“If I had waited for
that
laggard old fool —” scoffed Charles equally incoherently, blowing his nose and pulling himself together. “But the lad John Huddleston sent chanced to meet me taking my early morning gallop. Most of the others were still abed, and it would have meant endless delays going back to my lodgings. I’d a good horse under me and the road to London ahead. So I did, not stop to look back any more than I did after Worcester!” He began to laugh softly, picturing for the first time the astonishment that must have stricken the few men who had happened to be with him on Newmarket heath that wet and windy morning.

“So it was Father Huddleston, may God reward him! … And you missed most of the races after all ...” Catherine wanted to tell Charles that he must go now and take a bath and eat and sleep his fill because she was deliciously better and outrageously happy. But instead she drifted off to sleep.

All the same, when she saw him again he looked refreshed and suave and well groomed, as his subjects expected him to look.

“Two kings have come to wait upon your Majesty this morning,” he teased. “This one kissing your hand is your loving husband, and the cleverer looking man in spectacles on the other side of the bed is Edmund King, his personal physician, very much, at your service.”

But Catherine’s temperature had risen again during the night, and in consequence she addressed herself to the more learned of the two. “And how are the children this morning?” she enquired politely. And while poor Doctor King stood tongue tied and all present exchanged appalled glances, she turned her head drowsily on the pillow again and added proudly, “God has been very good to us, Charles. We have a boy and a girl.”

“Then you must be vastly cleverer than either of us!” improvised Charles, quick to humour her.

Doctor King felt her bounding pulse whilst Charles and Lady Suffolk, counting, compared it with their own. “Perhaps I should not have come upon her so suddenly last night, King?” Charles reproached himself.

“By-what they tell me, your Majesty came only just in time.”

“Yet now she is wandering in her wits, again.”

“But the crisis is past I do assure you, Sir. A fever of this kind, coupled with her Majesty’s condition at the time, may well recur intermittently for days; and learning of her disappointed hopes must have-been a great shock to the mind. In my opinion, Sir, her Majesty should not have been told until the fever had abated.”