With All My Heart (20 page)

Catherine managed to put aside the joy that Minette had given her, holding it in her mind to be cherished later, and became all grateful compassion. “Is he so very cruel, your Philippe?” she asked.

“Cruel? He is unspeakable. Listen,
mon
amie
, when I was first married I had clothes, jewels, admiration for the first time in my life — and men made love to me. It went to my head a little. I was gay, indiscreet. He would have it every man I smile at was my lover. And then Louis regretted, perhaps, that he had not married me himself. Philippe was jealous. Jealous even because the people love me. And not daring to rage at Louis he did everything possible to punish me. My husband insults me in public, and whenever we are alone at St. Cloud he sulks. There is a marriage for you!”

“And there is nothing you can do — to mend it?” asked Catherine, realizing how much effort she had put into her own.

“There is nothing to mend,” shrugged Minette.

“You mean — he does not sleep with you any more?”

Minette laughed, suddenly and harshly, so that she was again racked by coughing. “If that were all! My dear cloistered saint, surely you have heard of that painted fop, the Chevalier de Lorraine, who goes everywhere with him? Whom he fondles even in public?” she tried to explain between paroxysms. “Naturally Lorraine hates me. He would do anything to humiliate me — to get me out of his way. It became such a scandal that Charles wrote and protested and Louis forced my husband to send him away.”

An unknown world of violence and evil opened before Catherine. “So that is what Charles was going to tell me ...”

“And what I
have
told you,” said Minette crisply. “When it was first suggested that I should come to England Philippe threatened to bring that creature back — to live in the same house with my innocent little children — if I persisted in the idea. Then he tried to spoil everything by accompanying me; only Charles staved him off somehow. And finally when Louis insisted upon his giving me permission to come, Philippe returned to St. Cloud and slept with me, night after night, out of spite.”

“Out of spite?”

“Hoping to make me pregnant so that I could not undertake the journey. So that I should not have even this short respite of happiness. So that I should not see Charles. That is the kind of husband some women have. You should go down on your knees, Catherine of Braganza, and thank God for yours!”

CHAPTER XVI

FROM HER window Catherine had watched the great, tall ships weigh anchor and all the French company go aboard. And then she had seen Charles and James, now returned from London, board the royal yacht, taking Minette and Jemmie and Frances Stuart with them so as to have that last half hour
en
famille
. A few miles off shore the Fleet had anchored again, and Charles’s “Greyhound” was bobbing against the flag ship’s dark hull. Using his Dutch telescope, she had been able to make out people, like black ants, climbing from yacht to warship. It had seemed an age before the ships had disappeared into a hazy horizon and the yacht, with billowing sails, had scudded back to Dover. Charles, a detached foreshortened figure, had disembarked and was striding off the quay, the rest of the party streaming after him in dispirited groups. And later she had heard his footsteps echoing along the stone passage. And then the banging of his door.

And now a baleful silence reigned over the Castle. James and Frances were up on the battlements watching the last of the Fleet, and talking over old times no doubt. Catherine’s women whispered in corners. But she was scarcely aware of any of them, her heart being in that quiet room with Charles. And then suddenly her own door opened and was shut quietly behind her. She swung round with a flurry of skirts, half hoping that her husband had come to her for comfort. But, of course, that was absurd. It was his eldest son who stood there. Handsome, charming Jemmie — his face alight with facile emotion.

Miming the mournful silence, finger to lip, he tip-toed across to her with exaggerated caution. “
On
dira
le
chateau
de
la
Belle
Dormante!
” he remarked in a penetrating whisper, raising a laugh from the younger women. And then, with histrionic gestures towards the open window, “Is it permitted to relieve the gloom by telling your Majesty all about it?”

Catherine had to smile. She held out a hand and drew him to a stool beside her. “How dear of you to come!” she said.

No one else had thought of it. Not even James. And certainly not Andrew Marvell, the Court poet who had lampooned her so cruelly and who was no doubt already shut in his room immortalizing the scene in romantic verse. And none of them, she was sure, would give her as pungent an account of what had really happened as Jemmie, with his observant young eyes and his racy, unstudied words. Besides, no poet — however pampered — would have been allowed so intimately close.

“Is the King grievously distressed?” was the first thing she asked him. And the ingenuous young face of her visitor had clouded over. Even Jemmie had no words in which to answer that.

Catherine would have preferred to hear his story alone, but had not the heart to send her eager, curious women away. They had been with her through so much; and often, at Whitehall, their lives must have been extraordinarily dull compared with the ladies who attended Madame. These last ten days, she supposed, had been a God-sent oasis of gaiety to some of them. “The yacht seemed to stay a great time alongside,” she prompted, drawing Maria’s hand through her arm and making a little gesture of welcome when the others crowded round. It was so difficult to believe that this delightful young man in their midst had, in his high spirits, murdered a defenceless old man — and so fatally easy, because of his Stuart charm, to forget.

“The King
loaded
her with gifts. A veritable armoury of jewels. A pup from White Lady’s last litter, and even one of his favourite clocks which he had brought specially from London — and which I wager she will forget to wind! But of course, dear Madame, you saw all that before they left.”

“Yes, yes. Tell me what they
said
, Jemmie.”

“Well, at first, when we were all settled in the ‘Greyhound’, no one could think of anything to say at all. Uncle James does not help much on such occasions, except that he kept fuming about some fault in the rigging of the ‘Gloucester’. Poor Madame just held tight onto the King’s hand. If I were a woman, I would not be going back to the Duc d’Orleans for anything! If it had not been for my father himself —”

“Yes, Jemmie. What did he do?”

“He was marvellous, your Majesty. Although his voice sounded odd he kept making her laugh right up to the last, so that there was scarce time to think. ‘You must be sure to wear those gee-gaws all at once,’ he insisted. ‘I want you to outshine Louis himself.’

“ ‘Remember what happened when someone outshone him with a house!’ she said, laughing and crying both at once.

“ ‘Pooh! Versailles! It will be nothing to our new London!’ he bragged. ‘I shall bribe that husband of yours to let you come again and get Christopher Wren to clap the dome on St. Paul’s all ready for you.’ By that time he had got her up the side of the ‘Henrietta’. He lifted her on deck himself. ‘And feed yourself up, woman!’ he chided, feeling how thin she was. ‘Or next time my bo’suns pipe you aboard they will blow you away!’

“Even the sailors were grinning, bless their stout hearts!”

“She clung to him then. ‘Oh, Charles! Charles!
Je
ne
peux
pas
—’

“ ‘And speak English, will you!’ he scolded, shaking her. ‘I would have you remember that as long as you are on one of my ships you are on English soil and that every foreign ship in the Narrows dips her flag to us. And in future you must write home in English, too, lest you forget the use of it ...’

“ ‘Forget! How can I forget — anything. You have been so generous to me. I only wish that I could give you something in return!’ And then she turned to that pretty Breton girl she has. ‘Louise!’ she called. ‘Bring me my jewel box and let us see if there is anything in it good enough for my brother to keep as a souvenir.’

“But when Louise de Keroualle brought it and was fumbling with the lock, the King caught hold of her hand, key and all, and laughed and said, ‘Here is the only jewel I want to keep!’ ”

For the first time the impetuous young man stopped short, realizing what a
gaffe
he had made. But Catherine, stricken by it as she was, asked steadily, “And what did Madame say to that?”

“Faith, she looked grave the way she does sometimes in the middle of her wildest fooling — with what King Louis used to call her ‘pious look’ — and said ‘No’. Mademoiselle de Keroualle was very young, she said. The parents of Mademoiselle had entrusted their daughter to her care and therefore she must return their dear Louise as virtuous as she came. And she hardly supposed that if she were left as a souvenir —”

Catherine breathed again. Dear Minette, who had perfected the art of living
in
the gay world without being really
of
it!

Jemmie’s audacious brown eyes were quizzing her, half apologetically, but she did not reprove him. “And then they all laughed and went below,” he continued. “I do not know what they talked off, crowded in the cabin down there — with Uncle James, Arlington, George Villiers of Buckingham and the rest. All I know is that milord Sandwich was stamping the quarter-deck, mighty impatient to get away while the wind served. So that at the end, when they came up again, the men were already standing by at the capstan and there seemed no time at all. Perhaps the King meant it to be like that ...”

All light hearted jesting seemed to have slipped from the young Duke. He sat staring abstractedly before him as if at some scene which, even in the midst of the affairs of hot and urgent youth, had impressed him indelibly. Some scene in which, for all his glibness, it was not easy to make others share.

“And then they parted?” prompted Maria Penalva, softly.

“Yes, Madame. The Duke and I bade her farewell and went down into the yacht. And after what seemed a long time the King came down the ladder after us. We in the ‘Greyhound’ were swaying and bumping against the ‘Henrietta’s’ side — but for a moment I saw his face. Our bo’sun was braced on a thwart reaching up a hand to him; but he seemed quite unaware of us all gazing up at him. And halfway down he stopped. And then, as if something stronger than all Europe drove him, he clambered up again. Your Majesty knows how agile he is when he mounts a horse or plays some game, suddenly discarding that indolent pose of his ... Madame was standing by the gunwale, her face towards England, crying as if her heart would break. As our bows rose I could just see her. And he took her in his arms and they clung to each other — again and again — as if ...”

Monmouth’s voice trailed off and there were tears in his own eyes.

“As if what, Jemmie?”

“As if they could not bear to be parted for so long, I suppose,” he ended lamely.

“Perhaps it will not be for so very long this time,” sniffed one of the women, unashamedly blowing her nose.

The tale was told and the dusk gathering; and Jemmie was not one to sit in silence for long. “She was always extraordinarily kind to me when I was so poor in France,” he recalled.

“Perhaps it was because she had known poverty herself,” suggested Lettice Ormonde.

“Or for your father’s sake,” said wise old Maria.

But Catherine roused herself and flipped his smooth cheek with the bright feathers of her Brazilian fan. “I think all women are much too kind to you,” she told him.

In spite of the brittle edge there was to her voice he grinned back at her, unabashed. “Except my wife,” he said.

“Have you given her much cause to be?” she asked.

Jemmie had the grace to say nothing, guessing that she must have heard that he already kept a mistress in the town; and was relieved to see Lord Aubigny appear in the doorway to summon the Queen to Vespers.

“She is a gentle child, your wife,” said Catherine, rising and dismissing him. “Even if it be only her wealth and title you value, try to be kind to her. For I can assure you it is not easy being the wife of a man to whom other women are too kind!”

Once back in Whitehall, life went on much as usual. Charles set himself more vigorously than ever to the rebuilding of the City; and once again, in spite of the coarsening Castlemaine’s demands for dukedoms for her sons, he tried to retrench on his. private expenditure, having paid the whole of his sister’s travelling expenditure sooner than leave her beholden to her husband.

“You did like her?” he asked Catherine, pausing one sunny afternoon by the tennis court, whither she had come to watch him play.

And she, proud to have been able to hide from him every poor scrap of her jealousy, had answered spontaneously. “Meeting her was like opening one of those exquisite old illuminating Romances you have — so full of warmth and colour that, after losing yourself in them awhile, all ordinary printed books seem dull.”

And he had looked at her in pleased surprise, knowing her to be a person not given to fantasy. “I’ faith, it must be mutual,” he said. “For when I told her we hoped to have found her a new sister-in-law by the time she comes again she said that — much as she wishes James joy — we could nowhere find as pleasing a one as she now has.”

“
She
— who is so gifted — said that of
me
!” Catherine was inordinately pleased — and none the less so because Minette, in her generosity, had chosen to say it to Charles.

Although his partner was waiting for him, and the pages standing ready with their gear, he stopped to draw a letter from his pocket. “I find Ralph Montagu better placed as our Ambassador in Paris than as your Master of the Horse,” he teased, unfolding it. “For besides being out of range of your
beaux yeux
he keeps me informed most efficiently on all affairs. The French, it seems, turned out in their thousands to meet her and Louis himself would have gone but that his surly brother would not, and so malicious tongues might only have wagged the more. And listen to this. ‘She looked beautiful as an angel, so amiable, so charming; and everyone was delighted to see her again. The King received her with joy. Not so Monsieur.’ Very pithily put, Ralph Montagu! It seems,” added Charles, refolding the letter, “that Louis wished to celebrate her return by a week of festivity at Versailles, but Philippe insisted upon her returning to St. Cloud.”

“How can she tolerate him!” exclaimed Catherine, beginning to believe herself by comparison the most fortunate woman alive. “But no doubt she had great joy in seeing her children. And she must have been very tired.”

“So tired that she went straight to bed, Montagu says. But she must have been up with the lark next morning for she actually wrote to Sir Thomas Clifford in English!” laughed Charles, divesting himself of his coat in readiness for the game. “Besides which, Louis, having much to discuss with her touching her visit here, ordered her husband to bring her, if only for a few hours. But because their private conversation languished whenever he went into the room, Philippe seems to have sulked for the rest of the day and finally dragged my poor Minette away in tears.”

Happily for Charles he could forget his anxiety for one member of his family in a good, hard set or two of tennis; but as soon as he and Buckingham had laid down their racquets he was being coerced to a Council meeting to decide about a new wife for James. “Last time you took your own way, and a useful foreign alliance it cost us!” Catherine overheard him telling the reluctant bridegroom as they all left the Court. “You cannot make a fool of yourself now at your time of life.”