With All My Heart (26 page)

The whole kingdom was profoundly shocked. The regicides were to be rounded up for trial. “Forgiving, humble, bounteous, just and kind John Dryden wrote of me in his sweet partiality,” said Charles. “But this time he and all men else will find me more just than kind. Send me,” he ordered his Secretary, “a list of the conspirators. Of them all, I will spare only Essex because I owe him a life. His father died for mine.”

But Essex, in an agony of remorse, had already cut his own throat.

The plot — abortive as the Gunpowder Plot — -was over and done with and so, very soon, would be the traitors who had planned it. So small a remnant of dissatisfaction had fermented it that, unlike that Popish effort, it would soon sink into oblivion. But though thanks were offered in every church in the country for the sparing of King Charles’s life, Charles the man was not to be spared a stab almost as sharp as Death itself.

The first Catherine knew of it was when he came to her room one evening, and even then, because it was growing dusk, she was not at first aware of anything amiss. Putting down her book of evening devotions, she would have risen from the small circle of candlelight in which she sat. But he made some vague gesture which forestalled her. She saw then that he had a roll of thick parchment in his hand. He came straight to her and unrolled it for her to read. Instead of his usual indolent grace there was a brusqueness in his movements. In the stillness of the room she heard the parchment crackle sharply between his hands. It was the list of the men who had plotted to take his life. And in the steady light of her tall candles she saw that the first name upon the list was James Scott, Duke of Monmouth and Buccleuch — his own firstborn.

“Jemmie!” she cried, scarcely above a whisper.

Charles let the accursed list roll back on itself and threw it aside. “He was away in the West,” he said in a voice thick with suffering. “I thought he was just a handle for their vile treachery. No more than a headstrong, affectionate young fool ... I would have sworn on God’s Body — that he loved me ... But it is I who am the fool, Kate ...”

He was clown on his knees with his head in her lap — he, the cool, cynical King of England. Tomorrow, no one would guess at it. His eyes would be amused or mocking, his voice as crisp as ever. This was just a moment between man and wife — one of those moments which shows them to be one in something more than flesh. And it mattered nothing to Catherine that it was the fruit of his sin with which she condoled. Her pride was nothing. Her arms were about him, holding him, her pitying hands stroking his bent head. All her frustrated motherhood leaped to join forces with her wifehood, pouring out in one stream to comfort him.

He had come to her for consolation.

And after awhile as his loved body relaxed a little the thought came to her — like a warming flame through the gathering darkness — “Even Minette, whom he adored, had only his glad moments. It was always
he
who comforted and protected
her
. His heart, when it is wounded, is brought to
me
!”

CHAPTER XXIII

AS THE evidence was sorted out it seemed possible that Monmouth had not known of his associates’ intent to kill, and that he had been led to believe that the King and Duke would only be held as hostages. Certainly, he had not been present.

“But it is horrible to imagine,” protested all thinking people, “that with even the least suspicion of this foul plot he should not have quit whatever dubious company he was in and run himself out of breath, without food or sleep, to lay his fears before the King!”

And James, for his part, would have had him executed out of hand.

But Catherine understood how Charles must temporize — how he could not bring himself to destroy one so dear. She knew how the thought of his son’s beautiful head being severed tortured him through sleepless nights, and what a cruel temptation it was for him to have the final power to save. She was with him by the sundial in the rose garden when, seemingly occupied with the setting of his watch, he had said almost savagely to Bruce, who was young and whose life stretched uncondemned before him, “You are a Bedfordshire man and should know all the backways where a traitor can hide. You had better go and arrest my son, who, I hear, is skulking there.”

Catherine had not dared to speak but her eyes had met Bruce’s entreatingly, and to her surprise the young gentleman-of-the-bedchamber, out of the extraordinary love he bore the King, had dared to hedge, excusing himself on the grounds that he was not well over his sickness and would attend-to it later. Catherine held her breath, wondering if he would be put under arrest. She had never before heard a man disobey the King like that. But after Bruce had mumbled on for a moment or two and then fallen silent, she saw Charles slip the watch back in his pocket, straighten himself with a sigh of relief and give the embarrassed lad such a look of affectionate gratitude as she had seldom beheld. And then he left them without another word and went indoors, hoping for strength, she supposed, to bring himself to say those terrible words again some other day.

“I do not know how, if Jemmie were found guilty, I should ever bring myself to sign his death warrant,” he told her afterwards, with affecting simplicity.

“My poor Charles! You have but to love a thing for it to be taken from you!” she answered, thinking of all he had lost and of how only she — with-whom he had never been in love — and James, who so often exasperated him, were left.

“It is hard for you too, Catherine, who were fond of him,” he said gently. “Though God knows why you should have loved my bastard!”

But she had turned on him almost angrily then. “Surely you know, Charles, that since he returned your unfailing kindness with treachery I cannot love him any more! That any love I had for him is swallowed up in my love for you!”

And in the end there was no need for him to bring his son to trial; for Monmouth ploughed his father’s pride into the dust by turning King's evidence to save his own skin, betraying his supporters and begging for a private interview — an interview at which Charles insisted that James, whom he had also wronged, should be present.

“And what did the ungrateful wretch say?” Catherine asked of her brother-in-law, feeling that she could not make Charles go over it all again.

“He admitted his knowledge of the whole conspiracy,” said James, “except the part concerning our assassination, which, he swears, the others withheld from him because they knew he would never be brought to consent. He begged our pardons in the humblest manner and promised us his dutiful behaviour for the future. What he says may or may not be true; but how Charles can forgive him I do not know!”

“Jemmie still talks like a spoiled child, always putting the responsibility of his acts upon those who persuade him.”

“And changes like a weather-vane! But at least Charles, for all his indulgence, had the sense to pin him down to his confession by making him write it down and sign it.”

“Oh, James,” sighed Catherine. “Were he a son of mine, I would rather see him dead!”

“No son of yours — or Charles’s, for that matter — would ever play the coward!” James told her, his face all harsh with bitterness.

Catherine looked at him uncomprehendingly. “But he is — Charles’s.”

James gathered up his hat and gloves to leave her. “I was in Holland. I often saw this Walter woman,” he said contemptuously. “And God knows there were plenty of other men who might have begotten the whelp!”

Catherine would have liked to believe him; but whatever Welsh Lucy’s wantonness, she recognized too well that quirk of the eyebrow and all those small mannerisms which mirrored Charles, and which had always caught at her heart whenever she talked with his eldest son. She knew that the belief growing in James’s heart was watered by growing hatred and was certain that if ever he came into power Jemmie could expect short shrift.

But James’s power was not yet, and although the chief conspirators, Lord Russell and Algernon Sydney, were executed, Monmouth was pardoned.

“Although you have his written confession to everything except murdering you!” commented Catherine, alone with Charles.

“I was obliged to make him write it Jest it might be argued that there
was
no plot and that I sent men to their death for imaginings as fantastic as those of Titus Oates,” he explained.

“And must we have him again at Court?”

“ ’Zounds, no! He had the impertinence to come back and ask his written confession of me again — persuaded to it, no doubt, by some of his satellites who imagined it might endanger their miserable lives. Even after my repeated assurances that the incident was closed and that no one else would die for it.”

“Might he not have been prompted more by fear lest it should — at some future time — fall into your brother’s hands?” suggested Catherine.

“He could have trusted me to destroy it.”

“And did you give it back to him, Charles?”

“Give it back?” snarled Charles, puffing out his lower lip. “God’s teeth, there is a limit even to my endurance. I told him to go to hell!”

And that was the last time Catherine ever heard him speak of charming, faithless Jemmie. How often he thought of him she never knew. And she was profoundly grateful that at this time of such personal loss and shame his people poured out their love to comfort him.

Ship after ship sailed in bearing indignant letters about the Rye House Plot from his loyal subjects in Virginia, New Plymouth and Connecticut and from true Quaker hearts in the newly founded colony of Pennsylvania. A general thanksgiving service for the sparing of his life was held in the new splendour of St. Paul’s. And the London merchants entreated him to sit to Grinling Gibbons for a statue, which they set up in their fine new Exchange. It seemed that with the few rank weeds of treachery uprooted, a stronger crop of loyalty than ever grew up on all sides to protect him all his days from aught but pleasantness.

And although, for him, amours and adventures were over, Catherine suspected that these were in some ways the happiest days of his life. In mellow mood, accessible to all, he reaped the harvest of mutual kindliness which he had sown. In November he saw to it that the fierce, controversial bonfires of Guy Fawkes Day were forgotten in the wonder of fireworks celebrating her birthday. It was as if he wished to mark the day with some special fanfare of appreciation. And from the Palace windows that hard winter he took pleasure in watching his people making merry with their booths and fairs and skating by torchlight on the frozen Thames. He spent more time trying out all kinds of experiments in his laboratory and attending meetings of the Royal Society, where he listened with absorption to Sir Isaac Newton discoursing on the various orbits of the planets and to Harvey elucidating his amazing discovery of how the blood circulates through the human body.

“I am putting on weight at last,” he announced ruefully, as old Claude Sourceau, his Paris tailor, fitted him for one of those dignified, knee-length coats which so became him. And because of a sore place on his heel, which Catherine was too tactful to suggest might be the beginnings of gout, he now rode about London in a coach instead of taking his afternoon walk — a habit which pleased the citizens as well as herself since it gave them more opportunity to see him and her more opportunity to accompany him.

True, Louise de Keroualle was back in England, together with another old flame of his from France, the Princess Mazarin; but neither of them was young any more and Louise had grown even plumper than herself. And Charles, as always, played the complaisant father to the Castlemaine’s tall sons. But Catherine had long ago schooled herself to tolerate and to forgive. Her love for him had been so screened of all elements of self that she was able to take a vicarious pleasure in all his enjoyments. And if his more sedentary mode of life suggested that he was growing old at least it gave her more of his company. Although she was nearly ten years his junior, the possibility that she might outlive him was something against which she deliberately kept a shutter closed in her mind. And because she had been delicate and he so strong — and life was moving along so delectably at last — living without him was something impossible to contemplate.

But at the beginning of February there came a Sunday evening which she was never to forget. In reality it was no different from any other Sunday evening. Only by contrast with what came after did it seem to hold static the whole glow and security of home — to remain with her as the epitome of all lost happiness.

Charles had come back from Evensong in the royal chapel in a particularly delightful mood, and she had been teasing him about his hearty enjoyment of a goose egg, a dish he doted on for supper. And afterwards they had all gathered in the Matted Gallery, lovely with its panelled walls and elegant portraits and painted ceiling. He had sat by the fire in his highbacked chair, resting his sore heel upon a stool. The two Frenchwomen were seated near him, with the leaping firelight winking on the Princess’s exotic jewels and making an auburn aureole of Louise’s short, curled hair. Some of his more intimate friends, such as Lord Ailesbury and Harry Killigrew, were grouped informally about him with Ailesbury’s son Bruce squatting on the hearth fondling a litter of pups. And in the background a group of courtiers were playing basset at a long table, absorbed and silent save for the occasional clink of stakes and an intermittent burst of conversation as they took up fresh cards.

Catherine sat a little apart with Lady Ormonde listening to the conversation round the fire but saying little, thinking idly what a charming group they made with the rich colours of the ladies’ dresses emphasizing the more sombre outlines of Charles’s relaxed figure. She saw him only in silhouette, the darkness of his wig and clothes relieved only by the whiteness of his cravat and a fall of lace at his wrist as he stroked White Lady, stretched in canine comfort across his knees. He had been telling Hortense de Mazarin about his escape from Worcester, a story which he told with so much humour that no one ever tired of it. The faces of his listeners were alight with tension, sympathy and laughter. “You should have seen me as a crop-headed groom!” he told her.

“And now your people have you pose for a statue as a laurel wreathed Caesar!” smiled the still beautiful Hortense.

“Besides finding it cold to the knees, I am sure that nature never intended me for so formidable a role!” said Charles, with a deprecating shrug.

“The people of Paris were putting up a statue to Louis,” Louise told them, not to be outdone. “Some marvellous Italian sculptor had made it and was bringing it over to France to finish the face from life, but it seems that he and the statue were shipwrecked.”

“Oh,
quel
malheur
!” murmured Hortense. But Charles burst out laughing.

“Why do you laugh?” asked Louise, offended.

“Because I could tell Louis where his lost statue is,” grinned Charles.

“Then why not tell us, Sir,” urged Harry Killigrew. And Catherine, watching the little group of men, saw their firelit faces warm with affectionate anticipation.

“Shipwrecked, i’ faith!” scoffed Charles, folding White Lady’s silky ears across her sleepy head. “When I was last on the Isle of Wight I saw it. My Governor there must have been doing a little privateering again!”

“Oh, Charles!” cried Louise. “You mean that the wretch stole it?”

“Better not ask me how he came by it!” chuckled Charles. “But that is not the best of it. ’Zounds, if Louis could see it now! Robby Holmes has had his own face sculptured on to it — and marvellously ill done it is! He intends it for his tomb, he says. You can have no idea how droll it looks, Killigrew, with my cousin’s elegant body and Holmes’s head on the top of it. For, like me, Holmes is no beauty.”

Even milady of Portsmouth’s patriotic indignation melted among such infectious laughter, and the fireside company went on talking idly of this and that. Catherine had had a letter from Mary, who was beginning to like life in Holland, and Charles was full of plans for spending the summer at Winchester where all was finished save the roof. “By this time next week the lead will be on my new house,” he told them. And presently he sent for one of his singing boys to entertain them with some airs by Purcell and a new love song which Louise had brought from France. Listening to the music, Charles looked rested and content, half drowsing at times, and at others beating time with the hand which was not caressing his little dog. Not wishing either to sit up late or to disturb him, Catherine made a sign to Lettice Ormonde and would have slipped quietly away. But as if feeling her departure Charles turned his head and smiled at her sleepily across the room — as though, for all the music and the people, they two were alone. A year or two ago he would have risen and escorted her formally to the door; but to Catherine that look of friendly understanding meant infinitely more.