With All My Heart (18 page)

It was a long time since her jealousy had flared openly like that; but in that intimate hour, when all the semblance of possession was hers, she wanted so desperately to possess his senses.

There was a moment or two of silence while the shadows deepened. Catherine was grateful for them. With hands pressed to her flaming cheeks, she felt as though she had laid bare her heart before him.

“I know I am a shocking husband, Kate,” he admitted harshly, mocking himself as much as her. “But I do assure you my trust goes deeper than such matters of the flesh,” he added more gently. “Have I not trusted you, without so much as giving it a thought, not to interfere with my niece’s religion — though it is just conceivable that she may one day reign after me? It is implicit, Kate — my trust. Bound up with my respect for you ...”

“Respect!” echoed Catherine, almost as if she would cast the cold word from her. Yet more than once he had given her, as he was giving her now, the rare gift of his sincerity. And often his tenderness. And here she was creating discord like a thankless churl! But always it was his passion that she hungered for. “Sometimes — of late — when you have been so charming to me,” she began haltingly, “I have wondered, had I been some other woman — not your wife ...”

“God preserve us from such a calamity!” he exclaimed, whole-heartedly. “You women are always setting yourselves up to be intuitive — but, Lord, how little you understand us poor men!” Fleet as ever to avoid the analysis of feminine emotions, Charles dragged himself from the comfort of his chair to the protection of a fresh appointment. “While I think of it, the French ambassador is back,” he told her, preparing to take his leave.

“Colbert de Croissy? Then we are at peace again?”

“Yes. Colbert coming and Ned Hyde going,” he added ruminatively.

“That should make it possible to be on better terms with France than ever?”

“For more reasons than one, I hope so. He is coming to supper and I should like you to wear that lovely gown you have on. A pity you do not speak French like the other ladies!”

“I will begin to take lessons at once,” she promised, both pleased and humbled.

“It means we must sup in public in the banqueting hall,” he reminded her from the doorway, with an inelegant grimace.

It was while they were standing together waiting to receive their guest that she again became aware of his dislike of his surroundings. “Why do you hate this lovely room,” she asked, looking along the lighted tables laid with gold plate.

“Hate it? What do you mean?” he asked, with that aloofness with which he habitually met advances upon his privacy.

“I have never known you to come here unless forced to by some formal occasion such as this.”

“You watch me too closely.”

“I love you.”

They were talking in quick undertones so that the courtiers grouped about them might not hear, yet holding themselves ready for the State reception. And being so hemmed about by formality, Catherine found that she could quite easily say the words which in private shamed her.

The very simplicity of them must have melted Charles’s resentment. “It was from here that my father was beheaded. Did you not know?” he said tonelessly.

“Every reigning family knew — and wept for him — and was afraid for themselves. But do you mean — from this very room?”

“From that window where Dick Bellings is standing. They built out a kind of platform. Going to it, alone — not one of us with him — he must have walked across the spot where we are standing.”

His sad horror of the place communicated itself to her, so that she turned her head, as if half expecting to see that gentle, dignified figure Van Dyck had painted crossing the hall towards them. “And they expect you to eat here?” she whispered, with a shiver.

“They have very little imagination.”

“How tolerant you are!”

“Tolerance is a virtue which can soon run to seed, and become indifference.”

There was a great stir down in the courtyard as the guard sprang to attention and the Ambassador’s coach rumbled to a standstill.

“Tell me about — that gallant Protestant. If it does not hurt you too much,” begged Catherine.

Charles’s fine, tapering fingers were toying with the St. George badge suspended from his gold collar of the Order of the Garter. He looked poised and debonair as usual. Except for the timbre of his deep, cultured voice he might have been discussing the chances of Woodcock, his new horse, at Epsom races. “He walked out through that window,” he was saying. “Cromwell’s soldiers were rows deep, lest the people should attempt a rescue at the last moment. The roadway was black with weeping women and Puritans in steeple hats, and the snow white on the ground. He’d asked for an extra shirt, Toby says, in case he might shiver with the cold and Cromwell think he was afraid.
He
— my father —
afraid
!”

“Did you love him very much?”

“Yes. He was the best of fathers. But I did not understand him. He was too good for me. His single-mindedness sometimes seemed to me like stupidity, even then when I was a lad. He endured imprisonment and walked out there to the block sooner than budge one inch from what he believed to be essential and right. James is like that too.” Charles glanced round to make sure that not even a page was within earshot. “I would not have you repeat it, even to Maria, Catherine, but feeling against James is growing so strong that only yesterday I sent the Bishop of Winchester to beg him to appear beside me, just once, in the Chapel Royal. For his own sake and for England’s. But he sent back word that he would sooner die.” Charles’s eye was on the door at the far end of the hall, his mind and body already braced for official duty. “I would have you know that I admire him for it. Envy him, even. But to me — were our positions reversed — it would always seem better to attend Mass and prevent bloodshed.”

The great doors of the banqueting hall were thrown open. There was a vast bowing and scraping. His Excellency the Ambassador of his Most Christian Majesty King Louis the Fourteenth of France was coming.

“So it is as grave as that?” murmured Catherine. There was no more time now to consider the matter. Conscious that she looked almost beautiful in the black velvet, she hurried to finish what she had to say. “James will never be beloved as you are; but perhaps in his heart he is happier.”

“I make no doubt he is,” agreed Charles, going forward to greet his welcome guest.

CHAPTER XV

MARIA PENALVA was ageing and delicate, a more shrivelled little woman than ever, and often during the cold English winters she longed to go back to end her days among her own people in Portugal. But she had promised her late friend, Luiza of Braganza, to see her daughter through the difficulties of her foreign marriage; and, half blind as she was, she saw them and the quiet fight which Catherine put up against them more clearly than most people.

“At first, when one is young, it is one’s own happiness and hurt that one clamours about,” she had been wont to tell a young indignant bride. “But as the years go by — if one really loves — it is only the happiness and hurts of the beloved that matter.”

And now she was able to watch this very miracle happening in Catherine. A patient wisdom was growing in her mind and her turbulent heart was gradually attaining some kind of peace because, loving one man to the exclusion of all else, even the sharp goads of pride and self were wearing smooth.

Maria knew well enough that when young Jemmie — almost grown to manhood — went swaggering about the town with bad companions and brutally murdered a parish beadle most wives as neglected as the Queen was would have shrilled triumphantly, “It is his mother’s base blood coming out!” or again, “What can your Majesty expect after making so much of him?” But Catherine seemed to have forgotten how Charles had insulted her by raising him to his dukedom — forgotten even her bitterness about the boy’s birth. Even when her name was linked in a cruel lampoon about the bastard merely because she had been kind to him, all she thought of was how to console his shamed and disappointed father.

Maria knew, too, how Catherine comforted Charles when the letter came from France to tell him that his mother had died.

But even shrewd old Maria could not have known about the morning when Catherine, coming hurriedly into Charles’s room to tell him the news of crazy Alphonso’s deposition in favour of her beloved Pedro, observed a woman’s small, rosetted slipper lying by his bed. And how — sooner than provoke a scene — she had brought herself to stop and say some idle thing to Chiffinch in order to give its owner time to escape from behind the bed hangings to the backstairs. “You must learn to shut your eyes,” Queen Luiza had said, that last night, in Lisbon. And, remembering her words with a rueful smile; Catherine had unobtrusively kicked the frivolous footgear out of sight. Charles had come late from the playhouse last night and the hussy with him, she suspected, had been that pretty red-headed actress, Nell Gwynn. Well, at least, thought Catherine, she took the King’s mind off his cares with her wit and her mimicry and was not always plaguing him like the rest for favours he could ill afford ... And it all hurt less now because she had come to realize that although he might share his moments of amusement with such women, he spoke of his inmost thoughts only to her. In such things, she was sure, no other woman had any part at all. Except, of course, Minette. And Minette was across the sea in France.

But England was at peace again; letters were passing back and forth across the Channel and Colbert de Croissy was busy between those two arch-schemers, Louis and Charles. And almost inevitably there came a day when Charles, after a session with the French Ambassador, flung out of his workroom like an eager boy and came striding across in search of her. “She is coming to England! Minette is coming!” he announced, finding her in the Matted Gallery.

In four years of married life with him, Catherine had of necessity acquired considerable self-control. And because she had never before seen such unalloyed happiness illuminating his swarthy face she managed somehow to clamp down her own dismay, and to clasp her hands and say, “Oh,
Charles
!” as if the most wonderful thing in the world were going to happen. And he, supposing that she shared his delight, began pacing up and down with her in uncontrollable excitement. “I had begun to despair that he would ever let her!” he almost babbled.

“Who? The French king?” asked Catherine, stupefied by such a rush of conflicting emotions and already out of breath through trying to keep up with him.

“No! No! Her husband, Philippe, Duc d’Orleans. Louis was willing enough. Louis is civilized. Moreover, he admires my sister more than any woman in his kingdom. Too much, the malicious say. But for weeks that poisonous little popinjay has been putting every conceivable difficulty in our way.”

“Is he so very unkind to her, Charles?”

“Unkind!” snorted Charles. “Surely you know that he —” His glance came to rest on her childishly uplifted face and suddenly recalling how she had looked when she had first come to him, he decided that perhaps she did not. He and his Court must have tarnished her lovely innocence with much that was evil, he told himself bitterly, but at least not with Philippe d’Orleans’ particular brand of perversion. “Like many vain little men, he is spiteful and jealous. I abhor jealous people,” he said, more calmly. “And God knows the main thing is that Louis has at last persuaded him to let her come. He and the Queen will see her part way on the journey, Colbert tells me, and I am sending Sandwich with the Fleet to fetch her from Dunkirk.”

“And then you and James will bring her here? We must do everything possible to entertain her,” said Catherine, remembering her responsibilities as hostess.

Much to her physical relief, Charles pulled up short in his perambulation. “But that is just the trouble. That dog-in-the-manger will allow her only three days. He is the only person who does not want her, yet he will not let anyone else have her. So there will be no time to go anywhere. We shall all have to herd like cattle in Dover Castle ... And I had set my heart on giving her the most wonderful time imaginable. Something she will remember all her life. All her life ...” he repeated, falling into a reverie, his stern dark face suffused with tenderness.

“I think perhaps she will prefer to be informal and so see more of you and James,” soothed Catherine, hugging to herself the thought that at least he appeared to be expecting her to come too.

“And we must take Frances with us — and her husband, I suppose.”

This was an added pin-prick. Catherine had hoped to be rid of
her
. “Frances, Duchess of Richmond! But I thought you would not forgive that runaway marriage?”

“Oh, one must not bear animosity at a time like this. After all, she is one of the family, and she and Minette were always friends. It will give my sister pleasure. You will love Minette, Kate.”

He said the words as if there were no possible doubt of them, all unaware that his wife was thinking, “Only three days. One can put up with any kind of pain for three days. And how can I grudge them anything? I, who have him for a lifetime — or at least some part of him —”

It was not that she held anything against Henrietta Stuart — “Madame of France” as the second lady in that land was called — only that it was so hard to see that light in her husband’s eyes which she, with all her love, could not ignite!

But after that there was no time to think. Everything was bustle and preparation. Charles was so impatient that he tried to set sail from the Nore, but a storm blew up and the wind was unfavourable, and in the end he was forced to go by road to Dover and content himself with meeting the Fleet off shore with James. And meanwhile Catherine established herself in the old castle on the cliff while half the Court had to pack themselves, with their best clothes, into the small inns and fishermen’s cottages in the little port below.

She never forgot her first sight of Minette. As she saw her standing between her two tall brothers, in the elegance of her sophistication and her Paris clothes, Catherine was almost shocked by her fragility. Worn out as she must have been by her journey, there was yet a radiance about her — a lightness of voice and step — which made the vitality of her spirit shine through the pallor of her small boned face. A flush of colour high on either cheek bone accentuated the brightness of her eyes, and although her beauty was of the spirit rather than of the flesh, her naturalness and spontaneous gaiety bound her warmly to this earth. As she ran forward to greet her sister-in-law, Catherine appreciated the truth of old Toby Rustat’s words, “She has that thing about her which his Majesty has ...”

Sitting at table, dancing in the torch lit hall or riding with her brothers to Canterbury, Minette was always the centre of liveliness and laughter. She had that easy charm which holds all but clods beneath its spell. And passionately Catherine envied her.

“I had desired to see the so terrible damage which has arrived to London?” she said in unaccustomed English, as soon as they were seated at table that first evening.

“It would only have distressed you,” said her cousin Frances, who had grown more gentle.

“One thing at least which Philippe’s niggardliness has spared you,” consoled James.

“We are trying to have it rebuilt in time for your next visit,” promised Charles. “We have a genius of a scientist turned architect —”

“Every single church he will rebuild,” put in a chastened and forgiven Duke of Monmouth, who had known and adored Madame when he was a small nobody in France. “Even St. Paul’s — with a great dome that will dominate the City.”

“You should see the palace Louis builds at Versailles! A hall lined with mirrors,
our
architect plans ...”

“I understand some unfortunate courtier was tactless enough to entertain him in a mansion bigger than any of his own, so he feels he must outbuild him,” chuckled Charles.

“Hundreds of peasants he has set to drain the surrounding marshes so that he may lay out gardens, and many of them were drowned. His parterres and his fountains will be
magnifique
—
incroyable
... But I am sor-ree for the poor peasants.”

They were all talking at once, as reunited families will.

“And what sort of journey did you have from Paris?” asked James.

Minette set aside the strawberries with which Charles was plying her. “As to the journey — oh, la, la! If you could but have seen us!” she cried on a trill of laughter, although she had well nigh died of it. “Milor’ Sandwich here has already heard enough of it from my people. For see, it was pouring with rain and the river Sambre had overflew —”

“
Flowed!
” corrected Charles, enjoying himself hugely. “For an Exeter woman you really speak, the most execrable English!”

“Overflowed, then. And the bridge
tout
a
fait
detruit
— quite broken. We had to refuge ourselves in a ver-ree ill smelling cottage.”

“
Le
Roi
Soleil
in a cottage!” It seemed to amuse Charles immensely to hear that his all powerful cousin had at last been brought within smelling distance of ordinary humanity.

“Oh, Louis was quite agreeable. It was the Queen who protested. She would have had us spend the night in our coaches sunk in mud to the axle. It was not
comme
il faut
, she said, for him to sleep in the same room with me — although with two of his mistresses and at least a dozen ladies-in-waiting lying on the floor I do not know what we could have done! Besides, dear Charles, I do assure you I was feeling too ill just then to sin with anybody.”

“Perhaps Queen Marie-Ther
è
se was suffering too — from the mistresses and from wishing she were as lively and slender as you,” suggested Catherine, unable to refrain from joining in her menfolk’s ribald laughter.

“And Louis?” asked James, pursuing the engaging narrative.

“Louis? Oh, he was furious with her. So he stamp out of the leetle room to sleep in the coach, but
malheuresement
he trip over Madame de Montespan and put his muddy spur right through the lace nightcap of the Marquise de la Valliere, who was lying by the fire. The Marquise was furious. And, ill as I felt, I catch his eye and then we laugh and laugh ...”

“Poor Louis! He should have known better than to crowd all his mistresses into one cottage,” said Charles, when their merriment had subsided. “But let us drink to him. And may he allow you to stay longer!”

But neither Minette nor anyone else remembered to drink to the Duc, her husband.

Minette was able to tell them about their Mother’s last days in the Convent she had founded in Chaillot. “She spoke of you both very often, the Mother Superior tells me, and with special affection of you,
ma
belle
soeur
.”

They talked for a time of the memorial to be erected to her memory, for which Charles was contributing the greater share. But their time together was so pitifully short; and in the middle of it poor James was obliged to return to London to quell a rising of the Anabaptists. It was strange of Charles to send him at such a time, Catherine thought; but perhaps James did not mind so much because Mary of Orange had always been his favourite sister. And after he was gone — although all serious motives were masked by hilarious entertainments — it seemed that Minette must often be cloistered with the King in odd corners, with Arlington and the French ambassador hovering near, talking business. That there was some secret State deal afoot Catherine did not doubt, although others — less watchful of the King — seemed unaware of it. And Minette would try to make up for the hours so lost from pleasure by dancing and talking far into the night.