With All My Heart (4 page)

“I am thirty-two — and a whole decade more in experience,” he said, a little sadly.

“But sitting there in your shirt sleeves you still look like William Jackson. Promise me that while we are honeymooning here at Hampton you will not wear your periwig except in public!”

To the consternation of some peacefully employed water-fowl he rose to his feet, setting the boat rocking violently. Catherine screamed and clutched, but with one lithe movement he had steadied it and was on the seat beside her. “Will it please you to make a bargain, Kate?” he offered. “I will forswear my wig if you will discard your farthingale.” But somehow in spite of it she found herself crushed, wire and all, in his arms.

“When you behave so crudely and I am angry with you I shall call you William Jackson and send you to sup below stairs,” she threatened.

“And when you love me?” he enquired, his lips persuading hers.

After an idyllic interval during which the nesting moorhens considered it safe to return to their domestic activities, Catherine pulled herself free with an ecstatic sigh. “It seems,” she said, “as though I shall have to call you Charles all the time.”

They returned to the palace in companionable silence, Charles pulling hard against the tide. “I will confess to you, rigidly brought up little royalty as you are,” he told her once, between long satisfying strokes, “that when I first came back — a year ago — I had to check myself from doing things — which I could do better than my servants. Like saddling a horse, mending an ill-set timepiece, vetting a sick dog. These hands of mine — they are so
strong
, Kate ...”

“So strong and so sensitive,” she agreed, guessing joyfully that it was the first time he had ever spoken to anyone of so personal a trial. And while he rowed she fell to pondering upon the first of those marital lessons which, lovingly conned over the years, may bring a woman understanding of her husband’s character. Charles, she saw, could never be as other kings who had lived their lives in palaces. In spite of all his inherited dignity never could he lose the warm knowledge of humanity learned in adversity and climb back again to the cold separate heights of kingship. Though he might seem to stand there, more easily regal than any Stuart, those wise, patient eyes of his would always be seeing cynically through the illusion.

And so the days of Catherine’s happiness sped by, swift and sunlit as the flowing river; until the inevitable day when State duties claimed her husband. Catherine and duty were no strangers. Even her marriage might have been a life-long personal sacrifice for Portugal had not God and the Blessed Saints bestowed such new richness of life upon her, for which she fell upon her knees night and morning in passionate gratitude. So when the great royal barge came to take him to a Council meeting at Westminster she made no remonstrance, but stood at the water gate to wave him a dignified farewell.

“We shall not have to leave our beloved Hampton yet, shall we?” she had asked wistfully, while he was being dressed in all the splendour of his formal town clothes.

“Not until the summer is spent, sweetheart,” he had assured her. “But I must go back and forth, lodging sometimes at Whitehall. For I would remind you, little witch, that while you beguile me here, poor Ned Clarendon, my Chancellor, bears the whole weight of the kingdom in his ageing hands.”

“You trust him utterly, do you not, Charles?”

“He is far more trustworthy than I!” he had laughed, taking the ring of state which Chiffinch, his gentleman-of-the back-stairs, brought him, and slipping it on his sun-tanned finger. And Catherine, watching him, had remembered with an unreasonable pang of regret how those same capable hands had looked, unhampered by lace frills, knotting a rope or straining on a pair of oars.

And her regret was not so unreasonable after all, for when he came back, although he was equally kind, she found him different — more withdrawn and distrait. “His holiday is over and cares of State begin to weigh upon him,” Catherine told herself, with admirable commonsense. “We cannot always be honeymooning, but all our lives we shall be married. And between his public duties I shall be able to give him companionship, refreshing that part of him which belongs to me and not to Britain.”

But a bout of restlessness was upon him, which had more to do with the man Charles than the king. He would go for long walks, out-distancing his handful of attendants, or take the little skiff up river without asking her to come.

“Are you trying to tire yourself out?” she remonstrated, when he came in after riding in the rain, wet and muddy as his mount.

To her surprise he had answered her brusquely in English, passing her on the stairs. “Myself — or the devil in me!” she thought he had said.

For two nights he slept in his own apartments, with only his adoring spaniels for company. And one morning, venturing to go and see him there, she had caught sight of him through an open doorway, kneeling at his prayers. Kneeling desperately at his prayers, one might suppose, by the way his dark head was buried in his arms. But though her heart yearned over him as it did whenever she thought of his tragic boyhood, Catherine signed Chiffinch to silence and tip-toed away. And that night her husband came to her and she had her reward. Instead of his usual lighthearted lovemaking it was as if he tried to give her his whole self in a way which he had never done before — as if it were the last time that he would have anything unmarred to give her. It was the night of tender perfection from which a gifted heir should have been born. And yet in the very intensity of his loving she felt the same desperation that she had beheld in his prayers.

“It is to be devoutly hoped, Catherine, that our sons will take after you!” he said, when the world was brightening to a roseate June dawn. “Even my mother had to apologize for me when I was a baby. I was strong and lusty even then, it seems, but black as a Saracen and incredibly ugly.”

“I find it a mighty attractive ugliness!” laughed Catherine, sleepily.

“I have never been loved so charitably before,” he said, smoothing back the curled luxuriance of her hair.

“But everybody loves you!”

“Because I am the fount of all preferment!”

Of a sudden there was so much bitterness in his voice that Catherine knew how recently he must have been preyed upon. She was silent for a moment or two, casting about in her drowsy mind for some constant thought with which to comfort him. “You were no fount of preferment when Jane Lane rode with you through Cromwell's soldiers and scores of men scorned the price on your head,” she reminded him.

He kissed her then, very gently, without passion. “You do well to remind me,” he said gratefully. “I will try to think on it when people badger me for high places.”

He left her then to sleep and went swimming, instead of to his Chapel. And when he came to bid her farewell he was already cloaked and booted.

“Listen to the cuckoos in the meadows, Charles!” she entreated, sitting up combed, scented and delicious in her bed.

But instead of smiling down at her he stood shifting some important looking papers in his hands. His eyes were no longer warm and shining. They had that guarded look as if he were disillusioned with mankind — disillusioned most of all perhaps with himself. “There are unimaginably tedious arrangements to be made for our taking up residence at Whitehall,” he explained. “Lists to be made out for the new appointments in your household. Navy expenses to be passed. Warrants to be signed.”

“But today, Charles?” she had persisted, in spite of all her good resolutions. “Is it such a matter of life and death?”

He had laughed, but without allowing himself to dwell upon the sweetness of her eager face. “Nothing so serious as death, my love,” he assured her, bending over the bed to kiss her before hurrying away. “I would say rather to do with life.”

And although he did not return for a day or two his Secretary of State, Sir Edward Nicholas, duly waited upon her with an imposing looking document bearing the names of the Queen’s household. “For Her Majesty’s approval,” was written upon it in a hand which might have been either the Chancellor’s or the Secretary’s. But because Charles’s familiar signature was set upon it Catherine smiled and laid it on the table beside her and began immediately asking after his health. “I pray there be no cases of plague in London?” she asked anxiously, airing her rapidly improving English.

“Since your coming, Madame, we have been singularly blessed in that respect, and the people take it as a good omen,” Sir Edward Nicholas assured her.

Catherine led him on to tell her about life at Whitehall until he reminded her that the Council was awaiting his return thither and begged her — a thought nervously — to approve the appointments.

“With all my heart!” agreed Catherine, proud to be able to pronounce so glibly the gracious words so often on her husband’s lips. Almost casually, she began to read them through. Handsome Lord Ormonde was already her Comptroller, and Lady Suffolk had proved a good friend. Donna Elvira and her own Portuguese women would still be with her. She was pleased to see that Ralph Montagu, a kinsman of the Admiral, had been appointed her Master of Horse. There were several names which were unknown to her and which all looked alike in their foreign style — but of course Charles would know best.

But heading the list of Ladies of the Queen’s Bedchamber was one name which she had learned to know only too well before ever she set foot in England. Lady Castlemaine. Catherine’s heart almost stopped beating. She could hear again her mother’s brisk voice saying that evening before she left Lisbon, “Some ridiculous foreign title he has conferred upon her ... something to do with a
casa
... in return for
past
services, let us hope.”

Lady Castlemaine. Her husband’s mistress. Catherine rose to her feet with a dignity amazing in one so small, and as she stood staring down at the hated name she saw all Charles’s strange restlessness clearly illuminated in new guise. She knew that when he was away in London he must have seen her and been pressed for the appointment that the woman might remain near him. “How dare he? Oh, how
dare
he?” cried her proud, hurt heart, remembering how shamelessly and passionately she had given her whole being into his keeping.

“Bring me a pair of scissors!” she called, in a voice hard as a harpy’s.

Sir Edward, who knew his master’s humour better than most, made a swift, deterring movement. “Madame, the King himself ... I beg you to consider —” he stammered.

“For the upright in mind this is a matter which needs no consideration,” cried Catherine, in her outraged young righteousness. And taking the scissors from one of her frightened women, she stabbed at the parchment, scratching through the name Castlemaine as though it had been mud.

CHAPTER IV

“ALL THROUGH Oliver Cromwell’s rebellion Barbara’s family have been our most loyal subjects. As children we Stuarts always played with the young Villiers. And it is only meet that I should grant her this preferment,” stormed Charles.

“And I am your wife and it is meet that you should not try to humiliate me,” cried Catherine.

“No one is trying to humiliate you. But surely that pompous brother of yours taught you that a King must remember services rendered. I tell you Lady Castlemaine’s father was killed in my father’s defence.”

“And I tell you your consideration for her has nothing to do with so respectable a service. It is because she is your mistress. And I will not have the woman in my household!”

They stood facing each other across the great crimson bridal bed, resentfully conscious of how recently they had lain there enamoured in each other’s arms, and secretly shocked to find themselves hurting each other with bitter words. Quarrelling like any brow-beating City merchant and his shrewish wife.

Charles’s face was white beneath his summer tan, and twin red spots of temper flamed on Catherine’s cheek-bones. His voice was blustering and hers was harsh. In a few brief hours the beauty of their honeymoon happiness had been torn to shreds and their raised voices carried through closed doors so that frightened Portuguese waiting women wrung their hands, and grooms-of-the-bedchamber, accustomed to the imperturbable good humour of their master, listened in excited groups. Already, although they could not hear their betters’ actual words, they had started the rumour of royal domestic strife which ran like wild-fire through the galleries and backstairs of the old Tudor palace, to be borne hotfoot along Surrey lanes and spilled before morning into the gossip loving streets of London and the astounded courts of Whitehall.

As if aware of this, Charles, who loathed ill manners, took a belated grip upon his dignity. “So you know?” he said, more quietly.

Catherine nodded, her mouth set in outraged self-righteousness. And the very fact that she had every reason to be both outraged and self-righteous made him all the angrier. “Surely you did not suppose that I waited like a monk until my Ministers saw fit to fix up some political marriage for me?” he demanded sulkily.

Poor Catherine made a brief, infinitely pathetic gesture with her little hands. “I — scarcely understood enough — to suppose anything,” she murmured, great tears welling in her lovely eyes.

Better than anyone in the world, Charles saw the truth of it. Her innocence had been his keen delight, and was now become in some sort his shame. Because it was not in his nature to be deliberately cruel, he went and sat upon her side of the bed and took her hands in his. “My poor child, I love you the better for it,” he assured her remorsefully. “But now that you have been out in the world a while surely you realize that I must have had other women before you came?”

“Have I ever reproached you for that?” she asked, remembering her immature jealousy of Jane Lane and some Dutch princess he had wanted, and standing unresponsively before him.

“You have been the very soul of tact and sweetness. But why this obstinate antagonism against one woman now?”

“My mother told me that what was past is none of my business. And when donna Elvira called you profligate —”

“The sex-dried old grimalkin!”

“I pointed out that you had had an unfortunate life —”

“You all appear to have discussed me very thoroughly — in spite of your need for my battleships!”

“But I did not think that
now
, since you are married ... and, in any case, that type of woman one does not
receive.
”

Even Charles’s wrath and determination to get his own way had to melt into amusement at her stiff, disdainful dignity, which he guessed to be an exact replica of his mother-in-law’s. But what to do when his way of life and his wife’s were so incongruously opposed? Could. one ever hope to reconcile the strict chastity of a convent-bred girl with the easy morals of the French Court which had influenced his own adolescence? True, he, too, had been carefully brought up in youth, the cherished child of parents whom the breath of scandal had never touched. But his father’s murderers had changed all that. At sixteen he had lived with rough soldiers, then had been thrown upon a foreign world with nothing but his charm, a strong constitution and his nimble wits to help him. “When I first saw you I wrote to Ned Hyde, my Chancellor, that I must be the worst man living if I proved not a good husband to you; and I meant it,” was all he could think of to say in expiation.

“But you will not keep your good resolution.” Suddenly, impulsively, Catherine was plucking with conjugal intimacy at the fine laces of his cravat. “Oh, Charles, how can you expect me to be civil to a woman whom you have had the same pleasures with — said the same things to?”

“Not at all the same, I warrant you! And if you love me as you protest you do, how can you refuse the first distasteful thing I ask you to do? Barbara Castlemaine has promised that if you will take her into your household she will behave herself with every humility and do your bidding in all things.”

“So she herself plagued you into making this shameful appointment. That night you left me alone to go to Westminster — on State business.”

“There was neglected business enough!” protested Charles, surprised at her acumen.

But, feeling herself to be grossly deceived, Catherine would believe him in nothing. “How
could
you go straight to her when we — had just been so happy?”

He walked towards the window. So much had gone to the making of his complex character that good and bad now mingled in him beyond either his caring or his comprehension; but looking back to that hard struggle with Conscience he remembered how his whole nature had been torn. “She was about to be brought to bed of my child,” he said.

Catherine’s hands flew to her breast. “Even
that
— before
me
,” she moaned, almost inaudibly.

He had lived according to his lights, taking it for granted that princes should enjoy traditional privileges, and it was not easy for him to express the contrition which he felt. For a long time there was silence in the pleasant room garnished with exquisite furnishings. And the little bride for whom he had so carefully selected them all sat rigid in a high backed chair beside a backgammon board where the flung dice still lay as he had left them when he had broken off a game to make love to her. “And as a reward for filching my right — for forestalling what might have been my supreme happiness — your trollop is to be brought here — where you can see her whenever it pleases you,” she was saying, fumbling exasperatingly for each word in slow, ill pronounced English.

Charles knew that he was behaving like a brute, but the woman who had held him in thrall for so long had nagged him to it. “Barbara is in trouble —” he began.

With a shrill spurt of laughter his wife swept the backgammon dice spinning to the floor. “One would imagine so!” she jeered, having, it would appear, learned more of the English idiom than he had supposed.

“Her husband has left her and disowned the child,” he explained, reddening with annoyance.

“One can but commend his sense of decency. Some of us are not of the stuff of which complaisant cuckolds are made. But you Stuarts seem to think you can buy anybody’s soul with a title!”

“Hold your peace and do as you are bid!” Charles shouted back in execrable Spanish. “A public rebuff from you would leave Lady Castlemaine the butt of every cheap wit in the country, and she is a proud woman.”

“So am I — and with more reason.”

“But not over merciful.”

“Is no mercy to be spared for me?”

In her desperate fury Catherine had thrown discretion to the winds and Charles, who had expected nothing but gentle acquiescence from her, was amazed. “Have I ever been ungenerous to you? Can you not come down off your righteous pedestal and put yourself in my position? Or see that some such situation as this was inevitable?” he beseeched, in a final effort to coerce her. “And if you will but accept this one demand I swear that I will put no more hard thing upon you, and that if this woman does not behave with deference towards you I will never see her face again. I ask it of you, Catherine. It touches my honour.”

“Your honour!”

“Assuredly. I would not leave her and my new born son unprotected.”

His son — whom he would see constantly if this woman were about the palace, and whom he would grow to love and who would not be hers. The words were as a sword in his wife’s heart. She stood pondering how this might be avoided, her eyes averted from the ivory crucifix before which she had prayed privily for this very gift. “Since milady Castlemaine is so promiscuous, could not you too disown him?” she suggested.

By the surprised way in which Charles’s dark head jerked up, she knew that the idea had never even occurred to him. “That could, I suppose, be your Portuguese idea of honour,” he observed contemptuously.

Glimmeringly, grudgingly, she admitted the moral hypothesis. That, having sinned, he should stand by it. Make what reparation he could. “But if I, too, should have a son,” she began, more temperately.

Immediately he was at her side, his persuasive arms about her. “Please God we shall, and soon, my sweet!” he said. “And then how trivial all this pother will seem. You will forget it and we can live in contentment again.”

To live with him in contentment ... Never again in the complete radiance of trust and dalliance from which she had been so rudely awakened. But in her bewildered misery the warmth of his caress was such physical relief that for a brief moment she almost let herself be persuaded. If she let him coax her back to love, meeting good-humour with good-humour, she would look desirable again — for hers, she knew, was the kind of beauty that depends so much upon the glow of happiness. And if she could but put all this ravaging indignation from her would not all the advantage be with her, the propitiated, magnanimous, forgiving wife? Now that she had learned from Charles to overcome her prudery, could she not match any mistress in the world in the ardour of her love for him? And keep him — keep him ...

Alas! There was no one in this strange country, save Charles himself, to whom she could turn for advice. Invariably she had listened to a constant stream of prejudices and criticisms from her own indignant people, though every ’prentice lad and chambermaid knew that this woman whose famous beauty she so much feared was a termagant and that the King, already wearied of her greed and tantrums, was a man who preferred peace at any price. And wise old Clarendon, the Chancellor, could have told her that Barbara Castlemaine was a bad habit of which marriage had half broken him, and that now was the moment when an easy, amiable wife might so point the contrast as to make the break complete.

But her sense of righteousness held her firm. And her seething sense of injury made her too bitter to win him back by wiles. Her upbringing had not taught her how to compromise with life, whereas her husband’s whole life had been a compromise.

“It would be condoning mortal sin,” she said, obstinately withdrawing herself from his embrace.

“You talk like a prig. It is those miserable, whining priests you have about you!” complained Charles, exasperated beyond endurance.

“Why revile them? You promised me religious freedom.”

“And, God in Heaven, have you not had it? Even to the point of spending hours in your oratory when you should have been serving your husband’s pleasure in bed!”

“That is all you think of with a woman,” she accused, forgetting how patient he had been with her. “We Portuguese women are not loose like the English. We are brought up to be virtuous —”

“And so ill-favoured, most of those you brought, that no man seeks to deny them the privilege. I can promise you that if you persist in making difficulties here and they encourage you, Madame, I will pack the whole clowder of them back to Lisbon!”

“And if you insist upon making this Castlemaine woman a Lady of my Bedchamber I will go back to Lisbon with them!”

Catherine, now as white faced as her husband, stood trembling like a threatened thorough-bred in the middle of the room. And her tall husband stared down at her in baffled, impotent rage. Never before had any woman threatened to leave him. Terminating love affairs had hitherto been
his
prerogative. Long after he tired of them they always cajoled him to return, and whatever their wiles, he had always known how to manage them — good humouredly, using a little strategy or an absurdly generous recompense or perhaps the help of Chiffinch, his gentleman-of-the-back-stairs, when they became too persistent. And here was this foreigner, whom he had believed to be so meek, defying him on a matter in which she had no legal right at all. By what power, he wondered, could she so enrage and hurt him that he must needs bellow at her like a Thames wherryman, so that the very pages at the doors could hear him? Not, surely, just because she was his. wife? If so he had been a fool to let them talk him into marriage — he who for thirty years and more had sauntered through life foot free!

For hurt he undoubtedly was, in heart as well as pride, when she talked so high-handedly of leaving him.

“Better wait and see how your mother will welcome you!” he hit back brutally; and strode out and banged the door.