With All My Heart (28 page)

By the time James came to her next day Charles Stuart had passed from sleep to death, and the upholsterers and servants were already draping her rooms with black, making a tomb of memories of her high curtained bed. Recalling that she was now only the Queen Dowager, Catherine rose from a couch in her sitting room and curtsied very low. “How good of — your Majesty — to come!” she forced herself to say.

“I wanted you to be assured, dear sister, that neither Mary nor I will ever drive you from your apartments if you wish to stay,” he said.

“That is generous, James!” exclaimed Catherine, who no longer cared where she lived. “And I had hoped you had come to tell me — about the end?”

“There is but little to tell.”

“Did he — speak again?”

“He roused for a moment or two after you had gone and reminded Bruce to wind that eight-day clock. And this morning he seemed to know as soon as there was light breaking over the river. The water was just how he loved it, Catherine.”

“At the flood. With the ships straining at their moorings and small waves, still salt from the sea, slapping the water steps!”

“Yes, like that. ‘Pull back the curtains,’ he said, ‘that I may see the sun shine once again.’ And after a little he sighed contentedly and was gone — on the turn of the tide.”

James moved from her and went to look down upon the river himself, as if some essence of his brother’s spirit would always stay there. But there was something else that she must ask him — something that she must be quite sure about for the rest of her life. She followed him to the window. “Did he ask for anyone else, James?”

“Anyone else?”

“Anyone but me?”

Any ambition James Stuart might have had was eaten up by sorrow. When he spoke it was dazedly, as though still missing the master mind which had so quietly directed and controlled them all. “For me, of course, his Ministers sent,” he told her, without at all understanding why she had asked.

“And you came all the way from St. James’s with a shoe on one foot and a slipper on the other!” she recalled, loving him for it and smiling for the first time in days.

“I was so afraid he would be already gone. Suddenly, in one of those seizures — and not speak to me again. But I was in his room almost constantly for three days or more after that. He gave me his keys from under his pillow and called me ‘the best of friends and brothers’.”

James was fresh from his oratory where he had been praying for his brother’s soul and his eyes were red with weeping. Catherine hated to add to his burdens, but if she did not make him remember
now
she might never know for certain. “And who else came? Try, try to remember, James!”

“The young Duke of Grafton came for his blessing. It may well be that Barbara Castlemaine sent him, but Charles was glad to see him. The lad is more credit to him than his other sons.”

“And Monmouth?”

“Charles never once mentioned his name.”

“And yet the memory of him lay in his heart! And — the fair Louise?”

“She came by the back way secretly while the curtains were drawn, and sat familiarly on his bed.”

“And was he — glad to see her too?” stammered Catherine, who had only knelt dutifully beside him.

“He was quite unconscious at the time. I am sure of it because she leaned over and would have drawn off his two rings had she not chanced to see me standing in the shadow of the curtains watching her.”

“James! Surely — not even she ...”

But he only laughed with something of his brother’s cynicism. “She is probably packing up her fine pickings by now and arranging with the French Ambassador for a passage to France. After all, if her status depends now on the goodwill of the people, there is indeed little for her to stay for!”

“But she did put it into your minds to admit Father Huddleston,” said Catherine, forgiving her in her heart.

James turned to her with a radiant smile. “And Heavenly glad Charles was to see him!” Then, searching that conscientious mind of his, he brought himself back to the careful answering of her question. “No, Catherine; though many came and went during those three grievous days I am certain that he
asked
for no one but you. It was only ‘my wife’.”

Long after James had gone to take up the new burden of his kingship Catherine sat alone upon the window seat. No traffic passed upon the silent river and the pennants of the tall ships below bridge hung at half mast; but in spite of the greyness of the day and the blinding ache of tears a living spark of happiness warmed her desolate heart. “And at the end — it was only ‘my wife’,” she repeated. “If only I could have told Maria!”

CHAPTER XXV

CATHERINE, DOWAGER QUEEN of Great Britain and Queen Regent of Portugal, sat in the throne room at Lisbon, receiving an Envoy from the King of Spain. She was a little old lady with white hair and beautiful dark eyes, widowed these twenty years, and her brother Pedro’s throne was considerably too big for her. But since Pedro was a very sick man, it was she who must receive the Envoy; with Pedro’s eldest son, the little Prince of Brazil, beside her.

The Envoy had been sent from Madrid to make peace terms and, although he had been shown every possible courtesy, his chair had been set a little lower than the throne — to show that Spain was at their feet, as the boy Prince put it. And Catherine, too, felt she owed that small satisfaction to the house of Braganza.

King Pedro had been increasingly ill for a long while and this settlement with Philip of Spain had cost her much in anxiety and effort. After the rapturous welcome she had received at her home-coming, there had been hard years during which more and more State burdens had been laid upon her — and under the guidance of the experienced Duke de Cadaval she had learned to rule her country. But on the whole she had enjoyed it. She had enjoyed the trust her brother placed in her, the devotion of her people and the development of talents which, during her life in England, had lain dormant. Hard work had helped her to bear her grief, and it had heartened her to find that she had inherited her mother’s capability, widened and made more flexible by the example of her husband’s wisdom. Hard won humility and years of observation had enabled her to learn.

There had been the lean months of war when the Portuguese had fought brilliantly at Valenca de Alcantara, Albuquerque, Salvaterra and Carca, from which victories — thanks to the dogged courage of a united people — Portugal had emerged at last as a free, unharassed nation. And now, representing the worthy ally of the country to which she had gone as an extraordinarily innocent young bride, she was signing the Peace Treaty which the Duke de Cadaval had handed to her on bended knee.

“Is it true that the King of Spain’s daughter has a special kind of nut tree?” her nephew asked, as soon as the assembled company moved again and the tension of the solemn moment was over.

“I think that is just a
cancao
which I used to hear the children sing in England,” answered Catherine, smiling enquiringly at the Envoy.

But Prince John’s boyish enquiry had evidently given rise to more serious speculation. “Our Princesses have many nut trees in their gardens,” the Grandee from Madrid replied gravely. “And when your Royal Highness is a year or two older perhaps you will come to see for yourself. When, with your Majesty’s permission,” he added meaningly to Catherine, “his Royal Highness would be able to
meet
the King of Spain’s daughter.”

“We will think on it,” said Catherine cautiously. And, kissing the boy who had done so much to fill her hungry heart, she sent him back to his tutor.

But it had served to show her how high the power of Portugal stood.

“How I wish that Charles could see me now!” she thought, looking round the splendid throne room. And she would have been scarcely human had she not wished that his friend, George Villiers, and his poet, Andrew Marvell, could have seen her too! “With their convents and their cruel lampoons!” she thought.

And, sitting alone in the deserted throne room, she let her thoughts stray back to London. And to those few unhappy years when she had stayed on there as a widow.

Mary of Modena and James had been kindness itself to her; but the time had come when the English would no longer tolerate their religion and their lack of understanding, and when his elder daughter Mary had betrayed him and, with her husband, Dutch William, clutched at his throne. And the new Queen Mary had never once lost an opportunity of being unkind. Catherine would have left England before James’s flight to France, but she had stood out for the considerable sum of money the Government owed her. She was a hard woman to deal with, William and Mary had found.

But now, looking back, she thought only of the two things she had done for Charles’s sake. In neither of them had she been successful; but at least she had acted as he would have wished.

The first had been to intercede for Jemmie’s life. Fascinating, unstable Jemmie who had roused the West Counties into believing in his legitimacy — who perhaps had even come to believe in it himself. Jemmie, who had far better have found death on the field of Sedgemoor — for, after his defeat, he had not been able to escape as his father had from Worcester. He had been taken and tried, and condemned to death by Judge Jeffreys. And on his way to London, a prisoner, he had written to Catherine to save him. She was all he had left in the world, he said. He had always been terrified of death, had Jemmie!

Catherine remembered her feelings yet, as she had held the hurriedly written, ill-spelt letter in her hand. The mixture of horror and indignation with the faint stirrings of past love. And for Charles’s sake she, who never interfered, had gone straightway to James and implored him at least to see his nephew. She had hoped that Jemmie’s charm might work. But James was immune to it. For had he not, all his life, known the same charm united with personal courage in another? To please her he had granted the interview; but Jemmie had grovelled on his knees and James, sickened, had been adamant — punishing him more for past treachery against his father than for treachery against himself, perhaps. And Catherine had spent the day of Monmouth’s execution on her knees, thanking God that this at least her husband had been spared.

And finally her thoughts, probing through the long vista of years, had come to the time when James — at the height of his unpopularity and with what Charles had been wont to call his genius for choosing the wrong moment — had at last begotten a legitimate son. A son who set the seal upon his father’s failure. James, for a few more years, the people might have endured — but not a continuance of his line and faith. And, denying what they would not face, they had invented all manner of perjuries and plots — rivalling even the fertile inventions of Oates — and had produced witnesses who swore either that the baby had been born dead or was a changeling, and even going so far as to affirm that it had been introduced into the Queen’s bed in a warming pan.

Catherine had been living quietly at Hammersmith at the time; but she had left her little community of friends and gone to Whitehall at James’s request to testify before all the peers and prelates and eldermen who, in desperation, he had gathered together as a tribunal on the ridiculous charges. She was a person of integrity who had nothing to gain either way and her words would have weight, he urged. So she had stood up before them all, because she knew that Charles would have wanted that dark-eyed, luckless babe to become James the Third, and told them the truth. “I went to the Queen’s lying-in chamber as soon as his Majesty sent for me, and never left her until the baby was born,” she had testified. “And if he were not a true Prince of Wales, should I have stood as godmother at his baptism?” But even that had not convinced their contrived doubting, and poor ageing James had been forced to go on his travels again.

Clearly as if it had been yesterday Catherine remembered how strange it had felt to be walking those familiar galleries again, seeing at every turn how Charles had walked here or stood laughing there. She had peeped in passing into the Banqueting Hall and remembered how, while waiting for the French Ambassador, he had told her about his father’s execution. And, although she could scarcely bear to do so, she had passed through that lovely gallery where they had all been gathered on the last Sunday of his earthly life. Her own apartments were occupied by others, but she had glanced down at the courtyard beneath them and remembered how she had watched Charles coming from a meeting of the Navy Board while the dew was yet on the grass, and how he had stopped to talk business with Lord Sandwich and Secretary Pepys. How shocked they had been because he would not punish some officer for shouting the bawdy truth in his cups — how pleasant Charles’s voice had sounded and how long his shadow had looked in the slanting sunlight ... How long, and how inestimably dear!

Catherine started when Lady Tuke, who had come with her from England, roused her from her reverie. Because in growing old one lives so deeply with lost loved ones in the past, she was quite surprised to look up and see the terraced vineyards, grey green in the hot Southern sunshine, and to see the ships below them riding the Tagus and not the Thames, and flying the Portuguese flag. But proud ships they were, and to her something more than the foreground to a pleasant picture. For her, every bulkhead and ratline had use and meaning; and moored among them, as there so often was these days, lay a British merchantman.

“I see there is one of our ships in, my dear,” she remarked pleasantly, taking Lady Tuke’s arm because she limped a little of late with the rheumatics.

“Why, so there is,” agreed Frances Tuke, following the direction of her gaze. “But how does your Majesty always recognize a British ship so quickly?”

“By the rake of her bows — or by the quickening of my heart, perhaps,” smiled Catherine, suffering herself to be led away and made yet more resplendent for supper.

But afterwards, while the musicians were entertaining her Spanish guests and she was sitting back, a little tired, Frances Tuke appeared at her elbow with a letter in her hand. “There is a young Englishman come ashore who begs to present his credentials to your Majesty,” she whispered.

“From that ship we saw,” said Catherine. “Do I know him?”

“Oh, no, Madame. He would be too young. Besides, he is but a modest sort of youth. I sent word that he must wait. But he bears a message from his uncle, Master Samuel Pepys.”

Catherine turned in her chair, all attention. “But how strange, Frances! Only a few hours ago I was thinking of Samuel Pepys! Let me see the letter.”

It was the letter of a blind man, dictated to a clerk, so that nothing of the writer’s personality showed in the hand. But all the warmth of his spirit was in the words. “If this should find you in Lisbon, dear nephew,” read Catherine, “I give you in charge to wait upon my Lady Tuke, one of the ladies attending my once royal mistress, our Queen Dowager, for whom I bear great honour; nor if she should offer you the honour of kissing the Queen’s hand would I have you omit, if Lady Tuke thinks it proper, the presenting her Majesty with my profoundest duty, as becomes a most faithful subject.”

“Will your Majesty permit the young man to kiss your hand?” asked Lady Tuke.

“But-of course. For his uncle’s sake. I pray you tell them to prepare a lodging for him and to have him sent to me immediately.”

“But your Majesty’s guests —!” objected the wife of one of the fine Portuguese
hidalgos
, who had no means of knowing that Catherine’s world was divided quite simply into those who had known and loved Charles, and those who had not. “The reception is being such a success!”

“Yes, God has granted me success,” agreed Catherine, looking round at the glittering assembly. “But it is pleasant to be remembered in England.”

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