With All My Heart (6 page)

Reviewing her brother’s diversions in the light of a more worldly understanding, Catherine was obliged to smile. “But you must admit, milord, that if our marriage be not a success, it is not
I
who have broken our marriage, vows,” she argued.

But with more perseverance than tact, Hyde insisted that she had broken at least one of them. “Surely no woman should refuse to accept into her household someone recommended by the husband whom she has promised to love, honour and obey?”

The specious argument was the last straw. “Since his Majesty has but sent you to upbraid me— ” Catherine’s rising voice was choked by angry sobs, and she flounced away from the embarrassed Chancellor to stand with her back towards him by the window. “Love — God help me — I do,” she said, as soon as she had regained sufficient control over herself. “Honour — against my conscience — I cannot. And obey — when it comes to conniving at something which is likely to give opportunity for sin — I will not!”

She stood there tearing her kerchief to shreds and staring out at the desolate English rain, and although he could not see her face, Edward Hyde knew that the tears were pouring as desolately down her cheeks. He was miserably torn between the twin conclusions that he was a brute and that women were the very devil. Aware that he had none of his master’s subtlety in dealing with them, he yet remembered that he had a headstrong daughter of his own who had recently been making trouble. Perhaps if he were to approach this unhappy, excitable creature as a father rather than as a solemn Minister of the Crown ... “Though it is my duty to point out some sharp things which render me ungracious, I do assure your Majesty that it is for your own good,” he said, more gently.

Catherine’s response was instant and generous. She came and sat down and turned to him appealingly. “Indeed, milord, you are welcome to show me my faults,” she said, “for I begin to see that I am little beholden to an education which has so ill prepared me for this worldly life. So I pray you be seated too and guide me to some chance of future happiness.”

Gratefully, because of his gout, the once powerful Earl of Clarendon lowered himself to a chair near hers. “His Majesty has been a bachelor king for two years now,” he said, “and even were he a wheelwright or a farrier for some reason past my understanding women would still throw themselves at his indulgent head. In these matters he takes for granted the freedom of his French cousin’s Court. It is scarcely to be expected that he —”

“He and I have already spoken of these things, milord,” said Catherine hastily. “And my mother warned me that I could not expect him to — have waited for me.”

“I commend your charity and commonsense, Madame,” said Hyde, beginning to feel that he was making some headway at last. “And his Majesty for his part would have me assure you that if you will put aside these resentments and meet his affection with good humour as you used your marriage shall be full of felicity.”

“As you used ...” From where she sat Catherine could see the river and the gardens where, for so short a time, Charles had made such ardent love to her. Instead of answering directly she rested her chin upon her palm, studying her companion’s florid, round-cheeked countenance as if she would draw from him some of his many recollections of his master. “You love him very much, do you not?” she questioned quietly.

Hyde looked up in surprise, seeing in her sudden warm gentleness limitless possibilities for holding the King — holding him to the ways which were best for him and for the State which both of them had to steer through all the difficulties of a restored monarchy and the impoverishments and bitternesses which are the inevitable aftermath of civil war. If only she would not be such a bigoted little fool! “You, of all people, should know that it is difficult not to, Madame,” he answered.

In spite of his bluntness, Catherine was beginning to like the man. “Charles says you love him like a disappointed father,” she teased.

“If I occasionally criticize him adversely, it is only to his face,” he blustered truthfully.

With the swift veering of her mercurial temperament, her southern brown eyes were laughing at him. “And you always do his bidding, even against your own conscience, milord? Like coming here today, for instance?”

The Chancellor of England puffed out his fleshy lips. It was
he
who had come to do the questioning. And now this chit was making him speak of matters he had no thought of touching on. “I have great cause to be grateful to him,” he told her ponderously. “There was the unfortunate matter of my daughter, as no doubt you have heard.”

Catherine settled herself back in her chair so that her face was in shadow, her own grievances momentarily forgotten. “Tell me about it,” she begged.

Since formality seemed to be forgotten, Hyde rested his elbows on either arm of his chair and joined his podgy finger tips together with characteristic precision. “You must know that my daughter was with child by the Duke of York and he married her secretly. I knew nothing of it, but my enemies bruited it abroad that I had encouraged my daughter’s dishonour to advance my own ambition. I do not blame them over-much. It was what many men would have supposed. It was in my own house that Anne married the King’s heir without the King’s consent. Many a monarch would have had my head off for less!”

“It was a grievous dilemma. What did you do, milord?”

“What. I have always done. I went straight to King Charles himself.”

“And he?”

“He was furious, of course. But not with me. It was his brother he was berating. It had lost England a powerful marriage alliance and interfered with the succession. ‘Own flesh and blood as she is, I would to God you had taken her as your whore, milord Duke, rather than have done this thing!’ I cried out. I was beside myself. I went down on my knees to the King. As soon as we came home from exile he had given me my fine house, my title, Hyde Park, everything! ‘Your Majesty does not believe what they are saying. — Buckingham, Sir Charles Berkeley and the rest of them — that I plotted this thing?’ I beseeched him.”

“And what did Charles say?” Catherine’s beautiful, low-pitched voice came eagerly from the shadows.

“He pulled me to my feet and told me I was almost as big a fool as his brother. ‘Zounds, have I not known you all these years, Ned?’ he said, grasping me by the shoulder. ‘And why in the devil’s name should I believe you changed now?’ And when later on the Duke tried to get out of an unpopular situation by pretending that my foolish wench had enticed him and had had other lovers before him, it was the King who squashed the scandal. ‘What is done is done, and must be stood by and made the best of’, he said.”

A maxim which, whether right or wrong, it would appear Charles tried to conform to in his own
affaires
du
coeur
.

Hyde’s thoughts were back with his narrative. His gaze rested abstractedly upon the long vista of grassy walks which would in time be shaded by Charles’s lime trees. If the good God had permitted — instead of plaguing him with politics — he too would have enjoyed planting a garden. “One does not forget things like that,” he said, almost as if speaking to himself.

A new peacefulness pervaded the room, much as it had begun to pervade their conversation, so that it was some moments before he realized that the Queen had risen with a sigh and he must perforce scramble hastily to his feet. “I pray you thank his Majesty for his graciousness and. assure him of my future obedience and duty. I, too, would willingly go down on mv knees to him — begging forgiveness for my peevishness which I do assure you was born only of my passionate love for him,” she was saying with quiet dignity. And Hyde, prematurely elated by such success, perceived that it was none of his carefully prepared arguments which had moved her.

“I will do as you wish, Madame,” he promised; and a subtler man might have left it at that, trusting the rest to Charles’s superior powers of persuasion. But Hyde was a born mentor, and so conscientious that he was accustomed to carrying out instructions to the letter. And there was one thing, and only one thing, which his master wanted carried out at this moment. “But I would point out, Madame,” he added, “that the proof of your promise lies in accepting Lady Castlemaine.”

Catherine had for the moment almost forgotten the woman’s name. But although Charles could never ask too much of her, even to life itself, it was always with the exception of this one thing, which the very quality and depth of her love forbade. The brooding softness of her eyes changed to fire. “Let him keep his mistresses out of my sight!” she cried. “If he still insists upon having his own way in this it can only mean that he hates me and would pour contempt upon me before all the world! And sooner than give in I will charter some small vessel and return to Lisbon with my poor people whom he has so heartlessly threatened to turn out!”

Goaded by her sudden change of mood, Hyde pointed out brutally that there were plenty of his political enemies who would be only too glad to see her go; and in vain did he try to make her see that the dismissal of her people after a few months was only the normal diplomatic gambit adhered to in the case of most royal marriages, and not any personal revenge planned by her husband.

“Then why did he taunt me the other night because the whole of my dowry had not been paid?” she enquired, with that maddeningly polite, incredulous smile on her lips.

“Probably because he was exasperated beyond all endurance!” thought Hyde, knowing it to be so unlike the King. Aloud, he asked her if she did not suppose that Charles, too, had been hurt by her extravagant talk of leaving him. “And for your own sake I would advise you to please him of your own accord,” he advised, preparing to take his leave, “for do you really suppose it lies-in your power to resist if the King insists?”

“I will not despair of his sense of decency delivering me from the persecution of such a command,” she answered, amazing the poor bewildered man by such uncowed courage in the face of such an untenable position.

But Catherine knew that she was cornered. By the time the Chancellor had bowed himself out she realized that she could not even leave the house she was in without the King of England’s consent. Hampton, which had opened to her the gate of such radiant happiness, had now become a prison. Waves of helpless homesickness engulfed her. If only she could talk to her own beloved family! “Do everything to preserve the alliance of our two countries,” her brothers had exhorted her. Yet everything in her upbringing urged her to count self-respect above the temptation to placate. Although her whole married happiness might turn upon it, nothing, nothing would induce her to take her husband’s mistress into her household.

So neither of them would give way, and both of them were supremely miserable. And their quarrel became the main topic of conversation throughout the land. It never occurred to Catherine that Charles, so long his own master, might be absurdly sensitive about being nagged into giving up his own way by a childish looking little scrap of a wife. Busybodies were not wanting, of course, to tell her that he was supping with Barbara Castlemaine again; but there was no one wise enough to suggest to her that while he plunged into a nightly round of gaiety he might be almost as miserable at heart as his sullen, neglected queen. She only knew that, whenever circumstances forced him into her presence, he would bow formally over her hand and leave her, as soon as the bare claims of politeness permitted, to talk with godless flippancy to all the most harebrained of his courtiers or to flirt outrageously with all the prettiest girls in the room. She knew that he was trying to hurt her. What she found it difficult to believe, as she surreptitiously watched his suave, dark face or overheard his witty comments, was how cynically he was loathing himself. Portuguese Catherine knew him only as the light-hearted lover, so little as another human being; and had no idea how one tender appeal, one show of faith in his better resolutions, could have helped him and brought him back gratefully to her side before the Castlemaine’s possessive wiles and reproaches had recaptured him.

“If only I could go back to the Convent!” she cried bitterly sometimes to donna Penalva, deliberately forgetting those honeymoon weeks when Charles’s initiation into ecstasy had spoiled her for any life but marriage.

CHAPTER VI

“AND NOW, as if things were not bad enough, my mother-in-law is coming!” With a dramatic gesture Catherine laid down Edward Hyde’s formal letter apprising her of the fact. Realization that her family life was reduced to a few formal notes exchanged between Hampton and Whitehall, where her husband now spent most of his time, had as much to do with her feeling of flat despair as the arrival of Henrietta Maria.

“The Queen Dowager is returning from France?” chorused her new English ladies, with an unflattering revival of high spirits.

“Almost immediately, I understand,” said Catherine, unhappily aware of how deadly her deserted Court must be for them. “His Majesty and the Duke are preparing to meet her.”

Since it was to be a family occasion, and she missed her own relations, she would have liked to go too; but the letter said nothing about it and here at Hampton she seemed to be left out of everything. From time to time news floated into her quiet little backwater about the gay swirl of doings in London; but evidently she was not wanted there. And when Charles had his mother she would be wanted less than ever. Probably, too, thought Catherine, it would mean yet another person to criticize her conduct and laugh at her old-fashioned ideas of respectability. An influential woman from the licentious Paris Court ... “She is sure to think everything her eldest son does is perfect!” she prophesied, sticking a vindictive needle into her embroidery.

“Not Charles the First’s widow!” smiled the Countess of Shrewsbury, who was old enough to remember the contentious days before the Commonwealth. “It was always her husband who was perfect.”

“She was inclined to be rather domineering with her children,” confirmed the Duchess of Suffolk, settling down to a good gossip. “And I myself think that if she
had
a favourite son it was
York.
”

The Duke was tall and florid and, as everyone knew, a fine courageous fighter; but he had neither Charles’s wit nor Charles’s charm. “I cannot comprehend how anyone could prefer —” began Catherine; then, remembering her resentment, bit off the words with her thread.

“They do say that it is because he is secretly of his mother’s faith,” whispered the old Countess, leaning close to the Queen under the pretext of passing her some fresh silks.

“Although her Majesty will want to meet both her sons, surely it will be a very sad visit for the poor lady — seeing again all the places where she was once so happy with the murdered king?” suggested donna Penalva, out of that gentle capacity she had for putting herself in other people’s places.

“But it will not be for the first time,” explained the Duchess of Suffolk. “She came on a visit with her daughters, the late Princess Mary of Orange and young Princess Henrietta — Minette, as the King calls her — soon after the Restoration.”

“To share in the rejoicings, I suppose?” sighed Catherine enviously.

“The King wanted her to, of course. But she came partly to try to prevent the York marriage. Only the Channel was so rough she arrived too late.”

“Domineering
and
interfering!” thought Henrietta Maria’s daughter-in-law.

“The Dowager Queen always did hate the Hydes,” added the gossip-loving Duchess.

“Well, if she goes about breaking up her sons’ marriages and thinks that I should be treated as I am —” muttered Catherine.

“Oh, but she was delighted with
your
marriage, Madame!” young Lady Ormonde assured her. “Did you not read us the charming letter of welcome she wrote?”

“Making the best of a Portuguese princess instead of a French one!” smiled Catherine, who knew something of European diplomacy.

“And there was the gold toilette set she sent,” donna Penalva reminded her.

“Which I certainly like best of all my wedding gifts,” allowed Catherine, glancing with pride at the long box fitted with comb and beauty patches and mirror, before which she had so often made herself desirable for Charles.

“Well, let us hope devoutly that she does not stay long!” summed up donna Elvira, looking down her own domineering nose. “There are enough Stuarts in this country already!”

“It is
their
country!” snapped pretty Lettice Ormonde.

“And if you do not like it you can always go back to your own,” old Agnes Shrewsbury reminded her tartly.

Whether they sat down to embroider or strolled in the gardens to chat, Catherine’s Portuguese and English attendants never failed to finish up by bickering; so in order to preserve the peace she remembered that it would soon be time for vespers and bade them all bestir themselves to change her dress.

But she was still in her crimson petticoat with her dark hair curling about her shoulders when the door was flung wide and the King was announced. Although he had come by road and his cavalcade must have clattered into the courtyard, all sound of their arrival had been deadened by the rain beating against the casements and the blustering wind in the tall elms. Catherine stood petrified before her mirror with one of her priceless pearl necklaces dripping from her hand. It was the first time he had been in her private apartments for weeks.

And he was an astonishingly different Charles.

All his grim sulkiness was gone, and even his habitual pose of indolence. He was as completely natural as when he was working in his laboratory or doing things with boats. His tall riding boots were splashed with mud, and his almond shaped eyes sparkled beneath their sleepy looking-lashes. “Why, Kate, that petticoat becomes you!” he cried throwing plumed hat and leather gloves across her table as informally as though he and she had parted the best of friends but yesterday. “You’ve heard the good news? That my mother leaves Calais tomorrow morning?”

Catherine stared at him in bewilderment — at a more genial, unguarded Charles than she had ever seen. “I have been officially notified of the fact by your Chancellor,” she said stiffly.

“Ah, yes, I told Ned to write you as soon as it was known in Council, and I hoped to get here sooner to tell you myself. But. I was delayed seeing Admiral Montagu and that naval Secretary fellow, Pepys, about the escort ships.” Although his wife was still standing, he threw himself unceremoniously into her special chair, stretching his long legs comfortably before him, still full of his plans. “I have sent Ormonde to have my mother’s old apartments at Greenwich prepared so that she can land immediately and rest before coming to London. And I would have you take coach and wait upon her there.”

So, after all, she was not to be left out. This was a family affair in which a man’s mistress, however possessive, could have no part.

“B-but what about yourself?” she stammered, almost too overcome by conflicting emotions for intelligent speech.

“James and I will be sailing down to the Nore as soon as the tide serves, then embarking on the ‘Royal Charles’ to meet my mother in mid-Channel. To surprise her,” he answered as eager as a schoolboy.

Catherine, in her petticoat, came closer. “And you want me to go to meet her — alone?” she repeated, feeling very young and inadequate. She was. remembering the painting of Henrietta Maria which hung above the old-fashioned dais in the Great Hall — a dark, slender, energetic looking woman, of great dignity. The famous widowed queen whose name had been on everyone’s lips a decade ago, and whose far-away misfortunes had stirred even the girls in Catherine’s convent. A capable daughter of the great Henri Quatre of France.

Charles viewed his wife’s evident perturbation with understanding amusement. “She will probably have been very seasick and you are good at being kind to people,” he suggested, knowing full well that none of his kin was ever troubled by the elements, but seeking to dissolve Catherine’s awe. To which end he levered himself up from her chair and crossed to a window to survey the angry, swollen Thames. “Just Mam’s ill luck at sea!” he laughed, thereby reducing the stiff regality of Van Dyck’s portrait to the easy conception of a teased and human parent.

While his back was turned Catherine had signed to her women to complete her toilette; but her husband would have none of it. “That crimson thing becomes you vastly,” he repeated; and disregarding the vesper bell, he waved them all away, bidding her come and talk to him on the fireside settle and so while away an impatient hour waiting for the tide.

“Does her Majesty, your mother, always have bad weather then?” enquired Catherine, striving to hide her resentment that he should suddenly see fit to treat her so pleasantly and expect the same response.

“It has become a family joke,” said Charles. “When I was small my father used to jig me up and down upon his knee. For us it was riding a horse. But Mam always insisted it was the waves rocking her ship when she first came to this benighted country to marry him — a shy little foreign bride like you!”

His devastating brown eyes quizzed her, softening her reasonable animosity. It was an unfair advantage, Catherine felt. But she felt too, as often before, that even his most frivolous remarks were made purposely, prompted by a deep understanding of human nature. Certainly the thought that the imperious Queen had once been as frightened as herself should help her in the coming
rencontre
. Charles stretched his arms casually along the back of the settle so that one of his fine, long hands lay close to her shoulder; but he made no attempt to touch her ... And Catherine, wrestling with the flesh, prayed dutifully that she might become less physically aware of him. “And years later when my father and I were being driven from battlefield to battlefield,” he went on, “I can remember Mam going to my sister at the Hague and bringing back stores and arms for him through one of the worst storms in history. ‘No English queen has ever yet been drowned at sea!’ she told her shrieking women; but she admitted to me afterwards that she quite expected to be the first.”

“She must be very brave,” said Catherine, comparing the drama of the Stuarts’ lives with the tameness of her own and at the same time wondering how recently those fine hands of his had been fondling Barbara Castlemaine.

“As. brave as she has been misfortunate — losing husband, home, crown and three children,” he answered more thoughtfully. “One of the stories Mary and I enjoyed best was about our mother’s reception at some northern English port after that same awful voyage. It appears that Cromwell’s guns began pounding the house she was lodging in, and she and her ladies had to go out and lie in a ditch. In the excitement her favourite dog, an ugly old brute called Mitte, had been forgotten. Mam suddenly remembered that she had left him asleep on her bed, so she picked up her skirts and ran all the way back up the street through shattering gunfire to get him.”

Catherine began to think that there must be much of his mother in Charles. “I suppose you love her very dearly?” she said, struggling to combat a fresh cause of jealousy.

“Of course I love her. But that does not signify that we agree about any mortal thing!” he laughed. “She manages and meddles until she drives me mad. And I imagine I have been a disappointment to her ever since the day I was born.”

“You? A disappointment?”

“Why, yes. Being such an infernally ugly baby, and then disgracing her by speaking abominable French when she had cajoled all her rich European relatives into giving me refuge. And, of course, not being a Catholic — or even a good living Protestant like my father.”

Catherine had to laugh at his airy diffidence. “And now you are making her coming an excuse to escape from all your tedious Councils and Parliaments and get away to sea!” she accused.

But Charles was wont to assume a misleading air of indifference where work was concerned. “London is quite amusing now we have gaming again and two good theatres,” he told her, with one of his inimitable shrugs. “But I wager neither James nor I is ever so well content as when we have a lively deck beneath our feet.”

So it seemed that love making in Lady Castlemaine’s luxurious apartments was by no means the highlight of existence for him. “I have been in your country three whole months and never yet seen London,” Catherine ventured to remind him.

“It is not over healthy in summer.”

The lines at the side of his mouth looked stern and Catherine still wondered if it were her health he had been considering or just that he had wanted to enjoy himself without her. But his next words dispelled her doubts.

“Did I not tell you that when my eldest sister, Mary, who was so unimaginably good to me in Holland, came over for my coronation, she caught a pox in London and died?” he reminded her. “And a few months before that it was my favourite brother, Henry. He was blue-eyed and sandy — as a Scotsman, should be — and barely twenty-one ... We had planned to do so many things together and never till then had I had a spare groat to spend on him ...”

“Oh, my dear!” Touched to her tender heart, Catherine slid a hand through his arm as he sat staring before him, and without looking at her he patted it absently. No wonder he had kept her through the hot summer months at Hampton. “I will come whenever it shall please you,” she said meekly. “And in the meantime I will pay my duty to your mother at Greenwich.”

“Then I will send coaches for the Portuguese Ambassador and all your people,” he promised, rising to take leave of her.

All that night and the next the autumnal gales blew, and Catherine scarcely left her oratory where she prayed that her husband’s ship would ride out the storm. And, thanks either to her fervour or to superb seamanship, her prayers were answered. And when at last beacons were lighted from hill to hill and church bells rang out the good news that the ships were met and sighted off the Nore, she ignored her brother’s instructions about converting foreign fashion to the modest farthingale and set out for Greenwich in black velvet elegant enough to please even a Frenchwoman’s taste.