With All My Heart (21 page)

And afterwards, in an anteroom where they passed her unawares, the argument still seemed to be going on. “Seventeen eligible princesses Arlington here has found for you to choose from. A far better selection than I ever had ...”

She could see James being mulish and Charles puffing out his thick underlip as he always did when he was annoyed; but they had passed beyond her hearing. Only when James was gone did she hear her husband complaining coarsely to Clifford and Arlington, “Of course, as long as he gets what woman he wants ... Though he might as well keep them in the cellars of St. James’s for all we ever see of them except clever Arabella Churchill! But judging by his usual taste in feminine charms ’tis but little loss ...”

And as the days passed, lighter spirits, like Killigrew and Buckingham, began laying wagers on it.

“York’s had more than enough managing from old Hyde’s daughter!” they said.

“Then ’tis likely he’ll choose that convent bred chit, Mary of Modena.”

“Italy should prove a useful ally.”

“And she being but fifteen, he can mould her.”

It was in the midst of all this marriage speculation that the unbelievable blow fell.

The candles had been lit and Charles and half the Court were in high spirits, watching an absurd steeplechase of spaniels which Buckingham and Monmouth were trying to organize in the Stone Gallery. “Put your money on White Lady — she will jump anything for a sweetmeat!” Charles was urging Catherine when Prodgers, one of the senior servants, touched him on the-arm. “From Paris” were the only words distinguishable above the shrill yapping, the betting and the shrieks of laughter. But the King turned instantly from the hilarious fun, with extended hand. “The letter?” he demanded impatiently, when the man failed to produce one.

“There is no letter, your Majesty,” mumbled Prodgers.

Charles put down the dog he was holding. “No letter — although a boat is in?”

“Sir Ralph Montagu has sent Sir Thomas Armstrong.”

It was only then that something in the man’s demeanour struck him with foreboding. All the happy animation was wiped from his face. Something must have gone wrong with the negotiations. “Send him to me at once,” he ordered curtly.

“He is here, Sir.”

Sir Thomas came limping along the gallery. Although he was elderly and had been wounded at Naseby, his boots were lathered with foam from his sweating horse. He looked unhappily at the company, arrested in their crazy pastime, as if he found them incongruous to his errand. But never once at the King. He was dressed from head to foot in black.

Catherine sprang up with a little cry and ran to Charles, casting a shielding arm about him; but she knew that he was completely unaware of it. His lean body was taut as a drawn bow string, his eyes upon the envoy. “Is it — my cousin, the King?” he asked. Sir Thomas just stood there with lowered eyes. “It is — Madame,” he said.

For once Charles said nothing — asked nothing. And Catherine knew that he dared not. “What — about Madame?” she asked for him.

The Ambassador’s envoy appeared to be bankrupt of words. He went down on his knees and as he did so he crossed himself. “God help me to tell your Majesty ...” he groaned.

But still Charles said nothing.

“In the early hours of Monday morning — she died ...”

“She ...” Charles Stuart brushed aside his wife’s arm, freeing his own to run a finger round the inside of his cravat as if he could not breathe. “But this time last week she was laughing — laughing, I tell you! She was alight with happiness. You must be mad!”

“Would to Heaven that I were, if it would bring her back!” muttered Sir Thomas.

“How — did it happen?” asked James, striding from the fireplace to join them.

The brief story came in pitiful, broken sentences. “She had gone back to St. Cloud. The weather has been so hot ... She bathed in the Seine against her doctor’s orders. And that same evening when they brought her some iced chicory water she was taken with violent colic — and died.”

“It was poisoned!” The words shot thickly from the King’s lips. His hands fumbled blindly before him and he lurched into a chair like a drunken man.

“That reptile, Lorraine!” supplemented Buckingham, loosening the laces about his friend’s throat.

“Did she — suffer?” asked Charles, after a long silence.

“Hideously, your Majesty.”

His face was ashen. The others had crowded close behind him and Catherine stood behind his chair, praying that in his bitterest hour she might be given the strength not to faint.

“Tell us, Armstrong,” said James, seeing that his brother could not speak.

“It was on the Sabbath. They called Monsieur, who was on the point of leaving for Paris. Madame’s friend — the one she calls Bablon — was with her — and Mademoiselle de Keroualle. As soon as the King of France heard of it, he came. He brought his own physicians and entreated them to save her. He tried to comfort her by telling her that she would get well again, but Madame knew better; and when he left her room he was sobbing. After that — they brought the Extreme Unction ...”

“Do not tell me that she just went out like that? That she was not — able to say anything, to leave some message?” entreated Charles.

Some faint glow of comfort seemed to come into the old envoy’s face. “She did, your Majesty. She lived through the night,” he said. “Her beloved Bishop Bossuet was with her at the end. But before that her first thought had been to send for the British Ambassador. Our beloved Princess sent her love to his Grace, the Duke of York, and this ring — which she always wore — to your Majesty. She told Montagu that her sole regret in dying was to be leaving your Majesty. ‘Tell my brother,’ she kept saying, ‘that I have always loved him above all things in this world ... Above all things in this world ...’ ”

Charles, who had borne so many sudden bereavements, broke from them all before he should break down. The servants who flung open the doors stared at him, afraid. He groped his way to his workroom — went in and bolted the door. Catherine alone dared to follow him, casting herself against the unresponsive panels that shut her out. “Minette! Minette! Minette!” she heard him call over and over again in anguish.

CHAPTER XVII

IN THE dark days which followed the youngest Stuart’s death, anger ran riot in London, and no Frenchman’s life was safe. Buckingham and Monmouth, in their tempestuous indignation, fed the blaze. And it was characteristic of Charles that, although in the first fury of his grief he had cried “Poison!”, he now did everything possible to restrain them until proof could be obtained. He would not condemn on suspicion even men whom he had such good reason to hate.

And time proved him to be right. Much to Louis’s relief, it seemed that his younger brother was at least not implicated in murder.

Charles sent Catherine’s cleverest surgeon to attend the autopsy which the French king had ordered. More than one hundred persons of unbiased. integrity were present, and although poor Minette herself had believed her chicory water to be poisoned, she must have been prejudiced by the cruel daily knowledge that Lorraine, and possibly her husband, would like to be rid of her; for no sign of anything but natural disease was found in her body. Moreover, as letters began to pour in from France, it was established that Monsieur, although little moved by his wife’s sufferings, had made no objection to the remainder of the water being immediately tested upon a dog. And two of Madame’s women, in their detestation of him and their devotion to their dying mistress, had courageously put their lips to the same cup in order to prove whether or not there had been such wicked treachery.

Madame had always been delicate. She had been ailing of late, she had overtaxed her strength. That was the unanimous verdict. Although, just the same, those who loved her would always feel that the misery of her marriage had been the culminating factor. “Had she been happy as she was at Dover — had I been able to keep her here — she would have lived!” Charles was heard to say repeatedly. But no one in his senses, reading Louis’s letter of condolence, could have doubted the deep sincerity of his grief. So the pact between France and Great Britain stood, not broken — as it might have been — but sealed all the more firmly between the two kings because of Minette’s death.

For days Charles shut himself in his room with only White Lady, his bitch, for company, and a silent, soft-footed Toby to wait on him. Then somehow he took up life again. But it seemed to Catherine that for a long time he lived only on the surface, giving to all a superficial geniality and hiding his real self still more deeply from the world ... He went to Newmarket as usual, riding harder and more recklessly than ever. And when in town he moved idly from one amusement to another. Although he seemed to have lost much of his interest in the replanning of the City, he was often to be seen at the Playhouse, caring little what he saw there so long as it whiled away the hour. Glad of her audacious merriment, he set Nell Gwynn up in grand lodgings in Whitehall, delighting in her generous inability to forget disreputable old friends from Drury Lane. He sent Jemmie soldiering to make a man of him. And he listened with more irritation than ever to the bickering between religious sects which began to make a contentious bear-garden of every meeting house and pulpit in the country. “Can it matter so supremely whether a man holds by total immersion or by a baptismal sprinkling, so long as he practises charity?” he would protest, with that easy tolerance of his which so exasperated the zealous.

Practising charity himself, he rescued Sir Robert Holmes from the displeasure of Parliament and made him Governor of the Wight, where the Solent would protect him in some measure from their malicious interference and where the hardy, seafaring islanders would be more likely to appreciate him. And in return, by their parsimony, the Commons forced him, their Sovereign — in-spite of all his wife’s protests — to withdraw the British garrison from Tangier.

Indolently, Charles drifted — discussing the uses of mercury with the Royal Society — going to sea in a gale so that the nation had no idea of his whereabouts for days — waiting always, it seemed, for any new interest to catch his attention.

And Fortune sent two topics of interest sensational enough to stir him — and the whole country — for weeks.

The first was the finding of two small skeletons buried beneath a staircase in the Tower. Masons who had been repairing the old Norman chapel came upon them hidden, coffinless, only a few inches beneath a flagstone. And immediately everybody remembered the two imprisoned little Plantagenet princes who were believed to have been murdered, and whose bodies had never been found. Scientific experts who were called in confirmed that the bones must have laid there, beneath the passing feet of worshippers, for nearly two hundred years — that they showed signs of strangulation and had been the bodies of a boy of about fourteen and of one a few years younger. And it was found that the villains who had hidden them there had done so in such fear and haste that a ring of apparent value had been left upon the finger of the elder boy.

The Lieutenant of the Tower brought the ring to Charles; and when the dirt of ages had been cleaned from it it was found to be remarkably like the great ruby ring he himself always wore. Charles put off an important meeting, called for his State barge and set off down river as if he were going to meet royalty. And, standing in the Tower chapel, shut away by massive stone walls from the surge and hum of London, he stood looking down very pitifully upon the sad little skeletons. “Like me, he was King of England. But only for three short months!” he said, indicating the elder one.

Back at Whitehall, he told his compassionate child-loving Portuguese wife the currently accepted story of fair young Edward the Fifth, whose father died when he was fourteen, and of his little brother Richard of York. Of how they were torn from their weeping mother — “for their safe keeping, and because it is the custom for kings to lodge in the Tower before their Coronation”, their ambitious uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had said. Of how they must have looked down from their window watching the stands being put up for their Procession, when all the time their uncle meant to smother them in their sleep before ever the great day came and wear the crown himself.

“Oh, Charles, how horrible! How could a man do that to his own flesh and blood?” cried Catherine.

“It passes my comprehension,” sighed Charles. “But it seems to have been so through the centuries where a crown was concerned. I thank God we have never had to suffer such disloyalty and suspicion in
our
family. I verily believe that James — who may ache to turn the religion of this country upside down for aught I know — would sooner have my company than hurry his inheritance by a single day.”

In shops and taverns people talked of nothing but the gruesome discovery. Mothers of living children stood gaping and weeping round the grim Tower walls, and gathered round the fireside o’ nights to harrow each other’s imagination with old tales of bygone ghosts. And the playhouse on Bankside was packed out when the enterprising producer revived a play by one William Shakespeare about the hunchback king, Richard the Third, in which the very murder scene was faithfully enacted. And the people loved the humane, athletic King they now had more than ever when he had the remains of the unfortunate little brothers brought to the Abbey at Westminster for proper burial.

“At least they will lie among the rest of us,” he said.

And Catherine, who had been helping him to compose the words for their pathetic little memorial, looked up and asked unexpectedly, “Charles, do you
know
where your father is buried?”

Charles was a long time answering. Indifferent Latin scholar that he was, he fiddled meticulously with the alteration of a phrase, and finally — because they were alone — he said, “Yes.”

Catherine looked lovingly at his diligent, down-bent head, illuminated by the light from a tall, branched candelabrum. “You were all so far away —” she murmured.

“Some loyal friends of ours begged his body of Cromwell.”

“And he let them have it?”

“Yes. Provided they buried him privately in some humble place.”

“And they did?”

Charles laughed shortly. “No. They were better royalists than that! They fooled him — and everyone else — utterly. Unknown even to my people my murdered father, too, lies among kings. Otherwise, do you not suppose I should have searched the graveyards of England?” He put the finished parchment aside and looked across at her. For a moment a flicker of amusement crossed the gravity of his face as if he found it difficult not to share with her some secret which she, particularly, might appreciate. But nearly twenty years ago he had given his word to men who had risked their lives to do this thing. And he was content to leave it as their loyalty had planned it; “Your knowledge of English history is woefully lacking, my sweet,” he said, ringing a handbell for his Secretary. “But I can assure you he has no worse a tomb than the only other ancestor of mine I have ever heard you mention.”

And no sooner was the excitement over the skeletons beginning to die down than London was all agog again over a daring attempt to steal the Crown jewels. After carefully ingratiating himself with the warder and then well nigh murdering him, an Irish adventurer who called himself Colonel Blood had got as far as the drawbridge with the Crown hidden beneath his cloak, the orb ignominiously stuffed into his breeches pocket and the sceptre sawn in half by a confederate; and but for the unexpected return of the warder’s son and a regimental friend who both gave chase he would have got away with them altogether. Once again Charles went down river to the Tower, so intrigued by the cunning by which the theft had been contrived that he insisted upon interviewing the desperado himself.

“But whatever moved you to pardon him?” asked Catherine, when she heard that the man was at liberty again.

“His cool audacity mostly, I suspect,” said Charles. “It is not the first
coup
of this kind he has almost brought off.”

“But your Majesty’s crown?” protested donna Maria, who was sitting with her mistress in the palace garden.

“My dear donna Maria, even the crown was not the original,” explained Charles. “The Roundheads melted everything down the moment they got their hands on it. Most of the insignia Blood took were made specially for my coronation. It was not as if he had tried to take the Stone of Destiny.”

“I believe you really like this horrible man in the same way that you like Admiral Holmes,” laughed Catherine.

“Heaven forbid that you should compare them! For all his lawlessness, Holmes is a gentleman.”

“But you do have an odd variety of friends.”

“ ’Tis my poor up-bringing, Kate. Is it not, donna Maria, my staunch supporter?” he said, appealing to the frail old Countess and culling for her one of his most sweetly scented roses and himself fastening it in the voluminous silk of her wraps.

“Take scholarly John Evelyn, for instance — who I am sure disapproves of us — and that little Navy Secretary you often speak of as ‘friend Pepys’,” continued Catherine. “Surely no two men could be more different!”

“But both are singularly intelligent, and so one gets a rounded view of life. Evelyn, for. all his aesthetic taste, sees things with his head; while Pepys, for all his ready reckoning, sees ’em with his heart.”

Privileged by her age and the King’s kindness, donna Maria began dozing a little and Catherine caught at her husband’s hand and pulled him to the garden bench beside her. “And you, Charles?” she asked. “How do you see them?”

“I, my dear? Oh, with my heart, I suppose. But my mind is always there — at the-back of it — jeering.” For a few leisure moments his sombre eyes rested on her consideringly. “That is probably why I thank God for you, Kate, who are no fool and yet so blessedly uncomplicated,” he added.

Catherine knew that these days he paid her the compliment of answering her questions with sober truth and, thinking of all the people who came and went through the Palace to see him, she bethought her of something else she had wanted to ask. “And there is another man I have seen of late, Charles —” she began, less lightheartedly.

“What sort of man? This place is like an accursed rabbit warren.”

Catherine wrinkled her short nose, trying to give an accurate description. “A strange, tall man in some sort of clerical garb. I heard him haranguing some down-at-heel individual once in an affected, drawling falsetto. His eyes frighten me.”

“Frighten you, my child?”

“He lowers them obsequiously enough when I pass and then glares at me as if he intended, me some injury. Surely you must recall him if you have ever seen him. His chin is even longer than James’s — like a nut cracker, so that his great fish mouth appears to be almost in the middle of his face.”

Charles burst out laughing. “Oh, you mean Titus Oates? Being of extremely dubious origin the fellow considers it effective to imitate milord Sunderland’s preposterous drawl.”

“And who
is
this Titus Oates?”

“One of the biggest scoundrels unhanged, I should say! But other people appear to believe in him. He is said to have unearthed yet another Popish plot.”

“What, some other city fired? Or a plague brought straight from the Pope?”

“Oh, nothing so serious as that this time,” smiled Charles, sympathizing with her bitterness. “Just a plot on my life.”

Catherine gave a low cry, and was suddenly clinging to him so desperately that he had to laugh.

“Fond little faint-heart!” he chided. “I do not credit a word the fellow says; and neither, I should imagine, will any other sane person. All the conceited hypocrite wants is publicity.”