With All My Heart (17 page)

But throughout that hideous Monday night, in spite of all that willing hands and encouraged hearts could do, the East wind still blew and the great fire still raged. Fenchurch Street, Gracious Street and Lombard Street lay in smouldering ruins. Baynard Castle and half the City churches were gutted out.

And early Tuesday morning, without fuss or ceremony, the King called out the train-band and set out to join his brother in that Inferno.

“Must you, Charles?” asked Catherine, standing in the dawn light beside his horse in Whitehall courtyard.

“
Pour
encourager
les
autres
,” he said lightly, those grim lines on either side of his mouth relaxing for the first time.

And because it was London, which he had learned to love as only a returned exile can, she made no effort to dissuade him. And as she watched him ride out into King Street she noticed that his valet followed him, keeping as close to him as the presence of his betters permitted. There was no need for a valet to go; but if so much as a breath of danger blew upon his master Toby Rustat was determined to be there. And with all her heart Catherine envied him.

Each gentleman about the Court was told off to perform some task or put in charge of some street or sector; and when evening came none of them had returned, and the night sky was so red that no candles were needed in the deserted Palace rooms. “What is that great hoop of flame stretching across the bend of the river beyond the Surrey marshes?” asked

Catherine, from the vantage point at Charing whither she had begged Lord Ormonde to take her.

“Madame, it is the bridge,” her groom told her. He had been born and bred within sound of Bow bells and by the way he spoke he might have been referring to the Holy Rood.

“The bridge?
London
Bridge
?” cried Lady Ormonde, moved from her composure at last. “Then we are completely cut off from the South bank, with no way by road nearer than Kingston?”

“It is only some of the houses upon it which are burning,” pointed out her husband. “The bridge itself is built of stone.”

“Why, only a few days ago the King and I were driving over it,” remembered Catherine, with a heavy heart. “And he showed me with so much pride the Lord Mayor’s fantastically lovely mansion over-hanging the water and a warehouse that once had been a chapel dedicated to your St. Thomas á Becket.”

But it was not only the Bridge. Soon the flames were shooting up as high as St. Paul’s on top of Ludgate Hill. St. Paul’s with its old cruciform fabric and its exquisite new portico. Smoke began to envelop that beloved, familiar landmark. Like a pillar of flame the very heart of London was burning. And the heat was so fierce that there was nothing her citizens could do but stand and watch until, with a crash that could be heard at Westminster, the massive roof fell in. In the following silence a great gasp of horror seemed to go up from thousands of throats, drowning the crackling of the flames and the shrieks of terrified women and children. Foreigner as she was, Catherine — striving to quiet her frightened horse — could feel all about her the people’s passionate, incredulous grief. And then, as if to relieve the tension, some Cockney wit — jauntily indomitable as ever — was heard to remark, “Well, at least that’s saved Master Christopher Wren the trouble o’ repairing the old place, and the Aldermen squabblin’ over whether we’re to have a dome or another steeple!”

But from that hour the wind began to drop and the fire gradually to die down. Begrimed and bemused, the City dwellers found what shelter they could. And slowly, bleakly, people living in the suburbs betook themselves to their beds although even out at Charing their gardens were white with ashes and bits of plaster and torn paper borne on the breeze. Scraps of their conversation reached Catherine’s ears as she and her escort returned in sad silence to the Palace — remarks shouted above the turmoil by people too excited and too worn out to notice that she was the Queen.

“Over ten thousand houses must have been destroyed,” they told each other.

“More like fourteen thousand, the Recorder says.”

“And thanks only to the King and the Duke it wasn’t more.”

“From the moment
they
came, things got done. Did you
see
them these last two nights?”

“Standing knee deep in water the Duke was. Giving orders here and helping there —”

“And the King in his shirt sleeves pulling aside flaming beams and passing buckets with the best o’ them. Jesting, even. Lord, how the people love him!”

“Reckon Parliament won’t begrudge him an expensive whore or two after this.”

When Charles at last came home he was just as full of praise for his people. “It was the troops and train-band got it under,” he declared. “And even greybeards and ’prentice boys lent a hand. And those poor, uncomplaining women, James. I am just come from trying to cheer them on Moorfield, and some of the children have not so much as a tent to cover them. We must appeal to the country folk to send them in food, and give shelter to as many as they can.” He stood stamping the water from his squelching boots and rubbing his reddened eyes. “I managed to save all our smaller ships in the Pool, Kate, and the docks for those at sea to come home to. But, zounds, what will they make of the desolation which is London! Over eighty churches gone, John Evelyn tells me. And St. Paul’s ... It is incredible — incredible! But one day we will build it up again — finer and more spacious than before. And before I die I’ll hear the bells of London ring again!”

His clothes were torn, his face blackened and his curled wig long since lost among the rubble. He might have been escaping from a lost battlefield or turning a kitchen spit again. But Catherine came and put her arms about him before them all. “You have done marvellously — William Jackson!” she told him, torn between tears and tender laughter. But although there were tears in his own eyes for his ravaged capital, his immediate request was commonplace. All he called for was a bath and fresh linen.

“And not you this time, Toby Rustat! You get to bed!” he ordered, as his worn-out valet would have rushed with the other servants to do his bidding.

With the liberty of long service, the old man began protesting; but Charles, seemingly indefatigable, gave him a friendly push. “Ye’re nae sae young noo, Toby,” he told him, relapsing into the tongue of their common ancestry. “Nor sae teugh a blade as when we twa went gallivanting unkenn’d frae the Hague tae Paris tae see my young sister, wi’ nae mair than a poke fu’ o’ bawbees atween us. Hoots, mon, gang an’ rest yersel’ a wee!”

While Charles took himself off to change, Catherine caught up with his disgruntled valet making for the backstairs. “That was just before he came to England, wasn’t it? What was she like then, his sister?” she asked softly, with an urgent hand on his grimed sleeve.

The tired old Scot straightened up in surprise. His inflamed eyes blinked at her. “Jist a wee bit lassie, M’am, aboot savanteen. Slender as a willow, an’ as sweet,” he answered in the same guarded tone. “A’ thae years awa’ in France he’d been her world, an’ she the one body he was de-tair-mined to see again afore he crossed the water to be King o’ Scotland.”

Even after six years’ residence at Whitehall the little man from the Lothians had a way of ignoring the rest of the realm which maddened his fellow servants and was an unending source of enjoyment to the Stuarts.

“Was she so beautiful?” insisted Catherine.

The inimitable Toby pursed up his lips consideringly. “She had but the glimmer o’t then, I’d say. Ower thin an’ ne’er a bonny goon like he gied her when she cam’ for his Coronation. I ken there were times, lang syne, when our guid Queen hadna muckle for the puir bairn to eat. But our Princess Henrietta — Minette as he always ca’s her — has that aboot her, the same as his Majesty —”

“Has what, Toby?”

“I canna put a name to it, M’am, unless it be the couthiness — the grace — that begets responding love. An’ as to my master hissel’ —” Toby was started on a topic dear to his heart; but he had been wet to the skin off and on for hours and his voice croaked into something between a chuckle and a cough.

“Yes?” urged the Queen.

“He hadna but yun decent shirt tae his back the time we went to Paris. I’d no have these up-start Sassenachs hear o’t, M’am, but mony’s the time I’ve washt’t it oot for him at the pump o’ some lousy foreign inn an’ took the lib-air-ty tae dry it oot ower nichts on my ain body!”

“The liberty! Oh, Toby, you might have caught your death of a chill. Small wonder he loves you!”

Weary as they were, the old man’s eyes glowed and twinkled. “He does that,” he agreed, with immense complacency. And then, surprising the look on Catherine’s face, he saw her for the first time not as the Queen, but as Charles Stuart’s wife. And before bowing himself off to bed he grinned raffishly, perfectly certain that — given the chance — she would have done the same herself.

CHAPTER XIV

FOR WEEKS to come Londoners slept fitfully between nightmares of fire and woke each morning to the terrible realization that half their city was no longer in existence. The lovely silhouette of a long, narrow riverside town with over a hundred spires rising above mediaeval streets was gone, and so mercifully were the rat infested, over-crowded alleys leading down the slope to Thames Street and the wharves. When the ground was sufficiently cooled and cleared for Catherine and her ladies to ride out and see what damage had been done the fashionable houses and pleasant gardens along the Strand and around Lincoln’s Inn fields were still there, but once she had passed within the City wall at Temple Bar she found only half-a-dozen buildings standing up like gaunt, discoloured teeth at the beginning of Fleet Street. And from there, looking eastwards across the Fleet bridge, up Ludgate Hill and past the ruins of St. Paul’s, through the still smouldering waste where Cannon Street and Eastcheap had once been, right to the very moat of the Tower, all was fiat desolation. All along the river front from wall to wall the fire had raged, so that only a comparatively small area by the northern gates remained untouched, brooded over by the massive bulk of St. Bartholomew’s age old monastic church.

For months families lived as best they could in army tents lent by the King and bivouacs set up on Smithfield and other open places, or sought shelter in the sooty cellars of what once had been their homes. While others, searching through all those acres of devastation, could not even tell the exact spot where once their homes had stood. Yet the crippled life of London must go on. Carts came in from the country with food, and ships — their crews stricken with amazement — unloaded merchandise. And even while people struggled to clear away the debris of their old city, master builders appeared with plans and masons with cartloads of stone, and a new city began to rise. A more spacious, sanitary, stone city where large tall windows would one day supplant leaden casements, and lofty porticos take the place of timbered eaves.

But all this was a dream which would take years to materialize. And in the meantime, the Dutch, unimpaired by plague and fire, chose their moment to avenge their defeat in Sole Bay and the filching of New York. While all thinking people were hoping desperately that the talks going on in Breda would result in peace, seventy ships set out from Holland and stormed Sheerness, catching the English all preoccupied and unprepared. Almost as soon as enemy gunfire was heard in London the ominous sound of it was drowned by drums calling out the militia and charges blasting hulks to block the Thames below Barking Creek. Press gangs were busy in all the ports and every soldier in the country was called up, the King promising that whatever venture might befall he himself would be in it with them. But with half her ships uncommissioned England was powerless. Too late did a niggardly Parliament push through a levy long withheld. Though troops massed along the Kent and Essex coasts, guarding Thames mouth, the great Dutch ships circumvented them and sailed up the Medway, broke through the boom below Chatham and fired Charles’s impotent, ill-manned, home-berthed Fleet. Five of the British warships the great Dutch admiral, de Ruyter, set ablaze, while their unpaid crew made shift to swim ignominiously ashore. The flaring ships rivalled the scarce extinguished fire of streets. And then — worst humiliation of all — the Dutch admiral’s flagship made fast the “Royal Charles” and, beneath the very noses of raging Englishmen, towed her back to Holland.

To Charles it was as if part of his heart were being tugged away.

That day the English bit the dust indeed. That day, following all their disasters, they touched their lowest ebb. Fire, pestilence, rebellion, war — all these things they could encounter — but no man questioned the saying that every time one of her ships is lost the hearts of all true Britons bleed. Returning like whipped dogs to their homes, no man durst look his neighbour in the face. And, having endured more than they could stomach, something soured in them. Soured so that with distorted vision — uncleared by their accustomed humour, blurred by suspicion and intolerance — they sought some scapegoat for their common shame.

Though all their recent misfortunes were more the King’s sorrow and less his fault than any man’s, they began to whisper that had he been less indolent and pleasure loving and his Court less licentious such disgrace and misery never would have befallen them. Adversity brought out the sturdy old Puritan spirit, and up and down the country it was remembered that Oliver Cromwell had believed in discipline and been a good living man. And when a Quaker ran naked through the Palace precincts with coals of fire on his head calling upon the profligates of Whitehall to repent, although Charles enjoyed the spectacle as much as graceless Buckingham, he was not so deluded by laughter as to have no uneasy inkling that the poor fanatic was right. For somewhere hidden beneath his easy cynicism Charles Stuart kept a conscience. And although he could gull the wiliest statesman, himself he never could deceive.

In his uneasiness and regret he found solace in a wife who said little, but understood. A wife who had loved his lost ships as his mistresses loved jewels. Irritated by the formality and constant coming and going in his own apartments, where men were always pressing for audience, he fell into the habit on those days of slipping away to “the Queen’s side”, as the apartments to the East of the water stairs were commonly called. If it were a matter of making a bid for a separate peace with France or finding a politically useful second wife for his recently bereaved brother, he would say to such men as he wished to talk to in peace and privacy, “Let us go over to the Queen’s side.”

And besides the people he wanted to talk to there were the people he wanted to be rid of; for Charles’s kindly impulses so often outran his ability to perform.

There was the morning, for example, when he surprised his long-suffering wife by having a great carved wooden crucifix carried into her room. “My dear, I am in a devastating hurry,’ he announced, “but would have you look at this exquisitely wrought thing. A man with the extraordinary name of Grinling Gibbons carved it. Master Evelyn here found him working in a cottage turning out a mound of such masterpieces and the man only wants a hundred pounds for it.”

“The frame alone is worth that,. Madame,” urged John Evelyn, who knew more about such matters than the King. “And the original design is taken from Tintoret.”

Charles always
was
in a devastating hurry these days with the whole of London to rebuild. “I will leave our good friend Evelyn to tell you about it as I know you care for such things,” he said. “For I am on my way to meet Christopher Wren in Fish Street, when we hope to find a fitting site for some kind of monument to commemorate the fire. A tall column in the classic style, he thought, surmounted by a great ball of fire.”

Examining the crucifix after he was gone and only half listening to the scholarly Evelyn, Catherine realized that Charles was more anxious to encourage the arts than to possess it. She guessed, too, with a little spurt of wifely wisdom, that his appointment was less the reason for his hasty departure than his intolerable penury. For only that morning she had overheard him complaining that he possessed but three decent cravats in the world — less than some impudent puppy of an ensign called John Churchill who was trying to cut him out with the ladies — and discussing with Toby Rustat their hopes of further credit with the linen draper.

“Poor Charles! He probably promised weeks ago to see this protégé of Master Evelyn’s, and was then badgered into buying something expensive for Barbara’s children or some down-at-heel Royalist who had fought at Worcester,” she thought. But in spite of all her economies the state of her own exchequer was little better; and, apart from a liking for lively music, she never had professed to know anything about the arts. So, like a good and thrifty wife, she took upon herself the unpleasant duty of sending the cross away, thanking Master Evelyn civilly for his pains and damning her own taste in his eyes for ever by picking imaginary faults in a masterpiece of perfection. Very sensibly she assured him that no clever wood-carver or mason need want for opportunity with so much rebuilding going on, for which Parliament would no doubt foot the bill.

Then there was the afternoon when, forgoing his usual walk in the park, Charles sat late discussing business with Lord Arlington, the man who had waited so eagerly to succeed Clarendon in the Chancellorship.

“Without my protection they would have hounded Ned out years ago,” Charles said, after Arlington had taken his departure. “And of a truth I cannot any longer endure his domineering pomposity. You should have seen Buckingham last night imitating his entry into the High Court with the fire shovel for a mace and my new French Watch for the Great Seal!”

Catherine sent for a bottle of the Portuguese wine her brother Pedro had sent her, and poured some for Charles. Then she brought her needlework and came and sat near him by the window. “But what will Clarendon do, poor man?” she asked.

“I had arranged a pension for his honourable retirement. But James says he will probably go abroad, which seems hard after so many ill hours in my service. I am hoping he will console himself by finishing a history of the Cromwellian rebellion which he was always talking about when we were in Holland.” Charles sighed prodigiously and laid aside the papers Arlington had been pestering him to sign. “And how have you spent
your
day, my dear?” he asked.

“Trying to amuse Anne’s two motherless girls. But I am afraid I do not care for them very much.”

“Mary is not bad looking,” submitted her uncle without enthusiasm.

“But sly. Oh, she is stoutly Anglican, as you have had her brought up to be. But I have a feeling that, good as you have been to her, she is not a very
loyal
little person.”

“Well, she will be a very
important
little person unless James hurries to his new marriage bed and begets a son. So quite soon, I suppose, I must begin looking for a suitable husband for
her
,” He turned in his chair to scrutinize his wife in the sombre simplicity of her mourning, reaching out a hand to touch hers as she selected a skein of silk from a small table that stood between them. “You are very good to all my odd assortment of relatives, Kate. And how well black becomes you! You look now as you did when I had Lely paint you in those fabulous pearls of yours as a bride. Do you remember?”

“Do I remember?” thought Catherine, whose heart cherished every moment of that happy month at Hampton. But she managed to laugh lightly enough. “I am afraid it is only the fading light that makes you say so!”

She sensed that he was tired, so she quietly laid aside the work she could no longer see and sat in companionable silence without calling for candles, knowing how he loved to watch the lights come out at prow and masthead over the darkening river. “Why do you come here so often now?” she asked at length, out of the gathering shadows.

“Come here?” he repeated, stirring from his dreaming and his scheming.

“You used to come only at night,” she explained, carefully eliminating all complaint or emotion from her voice. “And now you come so seldom at night but much more frequently by day. And bring all these men.”

Charles sat up straight. “Do they incommode you, my dear?” he asked, shocked by his own thoughtlessness.

“Oh, Charles, you must know better than that!” He could scarcely see her face, but her laughter was low and delicious. For the hundredth time, hearing her in the darkness, he thought what a lovely voice she had. “Your coming — and your friends’ — could never make me anything but infinitely happy. You see, there have been so many times when I have been alone, It was only that I was wondering
why
you come.”

Not a little embarrassed, he sat there thoughtfully twirling the stem of his empty glass. “For a little peace and quiet, I suppose,” he said, with a short answering laugh. “And because — just now — I have matters on hand which I dare not talk of freely save among those whom I can trust.”

A warm happiness of achievement flooded Catherine’s heart, only to be pricked like a bubble by some sharper, smaller, less mature emotion. “And at supper time do you not speak of these things in Lady Castlemaine’s rooms?” she heard herself asking sharply. The words seemed to be torn suddenly out of past hurts, and to be quite beyond her control.

A moment or two of silence showed her that he, too, was jolted by surprise — and disappointment. “Do you really suppose so? When it is common gossip that she lies with Wycherley and my own friend, Killigrew?” he asked, coldly sarcastic. “When only last night, going to ask after one of my children who has been sick, I caught young Churchill scrambling out of her window in his shirt?”

So
that
was why he had been so peeved about the paucity of his cravats! “What will you do to him — relieve him of his commission?” asked Catherine, momentarily sidetracked.

“God forbid! James says he is a remarkably good ensign. One day he may be of considerable value to his country.”

So that, apparently, was all Charles cared for Barbara’s constancy. Yet for hers — his wife’s — he did care. Had he not told her so? But — since good women must needs covet the cheap benefits of the bad — even that knowledge did not give Catherine the thing she longed for. “Sometimes trust between a man and a woman can be a kind of insult,” she said, rising from her chair and returning to the attack. “It can imply that she is not attractive enough to engender
dis
trust.”