With All My Heart (15 page)

Knowing only too well, Catherine said nothing.

“But physically I have never really wanted him.”

“Not wanted him?” echoed Catherine incredulously.

“Oh, please, Madame, believe me! For months this other Charles, so much younger and handsomer, has had my heart.”

“Younger and handsomer!” scoffed Catherine, recalling the pretty, callow youth. But the awful prospect of a serious successor to the Castlemaine was beginning to recede, leaving her power to think coherently again.

“Besides which,” added Frances, forgetting in her flighty way the enormity of what she said, “when I take a man I have no desire to share him!”

Catherine rose abruptly and walked to the window, wrestling with the latchet and throwing the casement wide. She felt she could not breathe. “Mother of God, give me patience!” she entreated, below her breath, gazing unseeingly across a square stone-walled quadrangle. “Merciful Christ, teach me to bear humiliation as Thou didst!” Heaven knows what effort she made, what personal pride she jettisoned, standing there before the rainwashed courtyard and the arraignment of her own high ideals; but when at last she turned the object of her husband’s desires was crouching by her vacated chair, frightened as no threat of plague had ever frightened her. “I have always maintained that you were chaste — even when every other woman at Court called you ‘wanton’,” Catherine made herself say. The words came with slow difficulty, a self-imposed penance.

Frances caught at her cold hand and kissed it. “And you are right, Madame. In spite of past frivolity, I am not as donna Penalva and the others think. I swear I have never given myself to any man. I value my virginity. That is why I grew frightened. Charles — the King — is so experienced — so persuasive ... And I want to go to
my
husband — as you went to him.”

“But why, in the name of all the Saints, must you come with this sordid tale to
me
?” asked Catherine, wearily.

Regaining pose, pulling her disordered laces to rights,
la
belle
Stuart excused herself. “I went first to the Queen Mother. I have known her longer and it was she who brought me over. But the plague had come and she was packing ... Besides, there had been Jemmie — and it was the kind of tale she was tired of. So Her Majesty suggested —”

“That you should try me?”

Frances nodded shamed assent. “She said you were one of the few really good women she knew outside a Convent.”

“How imaginatively kind of her!” commented Catherine, borrowing her husband’s irony. So that was her mother-in-law’s last gift to her! A challenge and a test. To some women it was given to live easily, she supposed, but never to herself!

“And Charles Lennox — he wishes to marry you?”

Frances’s face was suffused with confident happiness, but her sigh was prodigious. “In the circumstances — the King would never consent,” she murmured.

“Never is a long time,” said Catherine. “And I think you over-rate the depth and permanence of the King’s attentions. If you doubt me, you have only to consider your friend, Lady Castlemaine.” By voicing the brave words, Catherine was beginning to believe in the truth of them. Frances, she considered, had been candid and not too much to blame; and because she herself loved Charles utterly his very faults became in some sort her responsibility. “You put me in a strange position,” she said, touching the girl’s hand with a rueful and forgiving smile. “But so far as lies in my power I will help you.”

“Oh, Madame!”

Catherine hastened to stave off a torrent of effusive gratitude. “It is obvious, is it not, that I act as much for myself as for you?” she added, with uncompromising honesty.

“Then what must I do?”

“Keep near me always, and when next Lennox comes to see you send him to me. In the meantime, lest you be besieged with more nocturnal verse, I will arrange for you to share donna Penalva’s room. As every one knows, donna Penalva is almost blind and therefore whatever happens no one can blame her. But her extraordinary sharp intelligence is entirely at my disposal. Therefore hold yourself in readiness to be even more resourceful and courageous than usual, Frances. And whatever we contrive remember that the King invariably forgives women and is too civilized — and too clannish, as you Scots say — to behead his relative. The worst — or perhaps the best — that can happen to you both is to be banished from Court.”

Shocked and hurt to the soul as she was, Catherine had sufficient sense to meet the situation with grim humour. At least it was a change to find a woman who did
not
want to become the King’s mistress; and when Frances, the brightest star of all that gay company, caused a seven days’ wonder by a midnight elopement and a run-away marriage, the Queen and her Portuguese lady appeared to be as amazed as the rest. The Protestant enemies of James who had hoped for a royal divorce and had seen in this penniless, well-born girl a possible successor, were checkmated by the Queen herself. As for Charles, the affair had gone deeper than she had supposed. He was consumed by silent anger and his grief was such that he could not hide it even from his wife. But if he suspected her of connivance he never taxed her with it, and she for her part never once upbraided him or spoke spitefully of Frances. Both of them were learning marital forbearance.

And a new trouble was soon on his mind, distracting his thoughts from women. Negotiations with Louis the Fourteenth had failed, and France, honouring her treaty with Holland, was preparing for war.

“Next time I will transact my own diplomacy behind closed doors and not allow ambassadors to bungle it,” he vowed, in the privacy of his wife’s bedroom. “Left alone, Louis and I understand each other.”

No one realized better than she the hydra-headed blow this was to him. Not only did his cousin,
le
roi
soleil
, stand for undisputed, unfettered majesty; but with all his statesman’s acumen Charles believed that England needed the wealth and power and cultural grandeur of France as Portugal had needed England. And foresaw that his own escape from financial dependence upon Parliament could come about only through Louis’ support.

Catherine said little and never meddled. Only by a new gentleness did she convey to him her understanding of his dual disappointment. And one evening, after a long hard ride, he returned in high humour, reminding her of a ship that has come out of the doldrums and is curvetting before a fair wind again.

“The plague in London is so much abated that I hope to return to Whitehall in a few weeks,” he announced, coming straight to her room with a letter from John Evelyn in his hand.

“And the rest of us?” she urged, although she was still horribly afraid.

He glanced up at her, sensing this; and realizing with a little shock of surprise how essential a part of his life she had become. “Not yet, I think. I would sooner give the place time to air and be assured that all, is clear,” he answered, momentarily sobered. “But once we are back the Commons may listen to my diatribes about those streets; and those of us whom God has spared will take on Dutch
and
French with a right good heart, if needs be! Oddsfish Kate, but I shall be glad to be back in London again. Will not you, my dear?”

“Why, yes,” agreed Catherine, turning her
petit
point
about consideringly. “But for me, be there never so many victories, there will still be one thing lacking.”

He did not answer for a minute or two, but threw his long body into her chair and his hat across the table in the way she loved, because then he seemed neither a dignified king nor a careless lover, but like any man come home to be at ease. And quite suddenly he burst out laughing. “There was a hedge my horse would not take, out Woodstock way,” he began, seeing her pleased, enquiring look.

“It must have been a very high hedge!” she commented with a smile.

Because it was a warm day his wig followed the hat, the dark hair curling damply on his forehead and giving him what she called his “young William Jackson look”. “A man came and opened the gates for me — just an honest old countryman driving his cows home. Yet he knew me at once. ‘If only Your Majesty would beget a legitimate son!’ he said, as if all the crops in Oxfordshire and all the kingdom depended upon it.”

“Perhaps they do,” said Catherine softly. “And what did you say?”

“I’ faith, I promised him I would go home and try!”

“For shame, Charles!” The colour flooded ingenuously into her face just as it was wont to do when they were first married. “Surely you do not discuss such things with any man at a street corner or a gate?”

“And why not? It concerns them as well as me,” he argued. “ ’Tis natural enough they should want to see you with a babe in your arms. They like you, Kate. In spite of being a ‘furriner in one o’ them outlandish fardingales’ you have begun to stand for steadfastness and chastity and all the things these tough yeomen of mine really admire.”

“And yet they like
you
!” she marvelled slyly; whereat he pulled her to his knee and stopped her teasing mouth.

“Treason!” he accused. But she had long since learned not to be afraid of him. Scenes, she knew, he would not tolerate; but the truth, wittily spiked and pleasantly thrust, he always received good humouredly. Although whether he was in any way moved by it was another matter.

Charles kept his word to the old countryman to such purpose that before he left Oxford the women were all agog because the Queen had hope of a child again. But this time hope was short lived. A few weeks later, in her haste and excitement at the thought of rejoining him, Catherine again miscarried. Some said that it was because a pet fox of the King’s had jumped on her bed and frightened her, but she herself felt that that had made no difference. And before ever she reached Whitehall the doctors had told her that she would never bear Charles a son.

She had hoped that he would ride out to meet her, but he sent Monmouth instead. And as she came sadly through the purlieus of the stricken city in the cool autumnal air the militia were marching followed by weeping women, and leaden hued, emaciated citizens were opening their shops and striving to set the wheels of normal life moving again. Except for the red coated soldiers everybody seemed to be wearing black, and from the doorways of unkempt houses the bereaved muttered some spiteful doggerel blaming their misfortunes upon a barren, Catholic queen.

Catherine was thankful to be inside the palace again, where fires had been lighted and fresh tapestries hung. But even there grief dogged her. A letter lay awaiting her from Portugal — a shakily written letter from old don Francisco telling her that her mother was dead.

Doubly stricken as she was, her one thought was to find Charles. Charles who — however much he might hurt her by his way of life — could always.be counted on to be understanding and kind about all other hurts. With the letter still in her hand and the tears wet on her cheeks, she hurried alone to his apartments. And this time, seeing her distress, even Chiffinch made no effort to stay her.

But the King was not in his work room. Documents and maps and sea charts strewn upon table and fine French carpet seemed to explain his inability to meet her, and in the midst of them lay a half finished letter with his quill still wet beside it. It would be like him if he had heard the militia’s drums and hastened to one of the long windows in the banqueting hall to hearten them with his personal God-speed.

With a hand on the back of his pushed back chair, Catherine looked miserably round the room, so empty without him. Her glance came to rest upon the letter and suddenly she remembered it was Sunday. It must be his weekly letter to Minette, of course. And there might be no more weekly mails. Perhaps that had been the real explanation ... She leaned forward to look at it seeking only, through her tears, the comforting sight of the beloved, clear writing. She had no thought of spying, for he always wrote in French. But this time, made cautious by the imminence of war, he must have deemed it safer to write in English.

“I am very glad to hear that your indisposition has turned out to be
un
petit
Orleans
,” read Catherine, who had had no idea her sister-in-law was pregnant, “and I wish you as easy a labour as James’s wife had with her second girl, when she dispatched her business in little more than an hour. But I am afraid,
ma
chere
Minette
, your shape is not so advantageously made for that convenience as hers is ...” For a line or two the words ran on in the easy, affectionate style of his. And then, towards the bottom of the page, came the true purpose of the letter. “And now, since we can no longer write — goodbye. Believe me, nothing can alter that passion and tenderness I have for you, which is so rooted in my heart that it will continue to the last moment of my life. When this accursed war is over —”

It was some minutes before Catherine took in the full meaning of the words. But as she did so her own immediate sorrow faded momentarily into the background of her mind.

So this was what war meant to Charles. Separation from Minette.

Here, here, was the only cause for jealousy. The only anchorage for his love. His family. And more than all of them his one remaining sister. The baby born during the Civil War in besieged Exeter, whom he had never met until his exiled manhood.