With All My Heart (9 page)

“Knew?” Catherine’s questioning glance passed from one to another of them.

It was left to the duenna of them all, the Countess of Suffolk, to answer her. “He is James, the King’s eldest son,” she said at last, without looking at her mistress.

The King’s eldest son.

Involuntarily, Catherine’s shocked mind began to make calculations. Charles must have been about eighteen — an exile in Holland or somewhere. “The King’s eldest
bastard
,” she corrected them haughtily, although her heart was hammering and it seemed that the candles on her dressing table were swaying like flowers in the wind. Catherine let them finish undressing her in silence, but she could not stop her thoughts.

“He, too, thinks I knew ... No wonder he said ‘Quite a family party!’ The oddest, most scandalous party imaginable surely! But he is grateful to me for smoothing over an awkward situation. He’d had the boy brought over against Clarendon’s advice because he loves him. But he hates scenes. I will not be such a fool as to let him guess that I did not befriend Jemmie purposely ...”

And later, lying in the darkness, Catherine let her thoughts run on. “Who was his mother? Does it matter — now? Just one of Charles’s women ... ‘Lamentably promiscuous’ his own mother had said — and she a woman accustomed to the morals of
le
Roi
Soleil
‘Don’t break your heart over it,’ she said too. So armour yourself against the years, my heart, and do not break ... I should hate this boy, more than the Castlemaine’s. This firstborn. This other James Stuart ...”

But when he came to her Charles was happy, grateful and very gentle. And it was difficult to hate young Jemmie.

CHAPTER VIII

As THE weeks wore on Catherine found herself too happy to hate anyone. Barbara Castlemaine had been presented with a fine Surrey mansion called Nonesuch. There was talk of Jemmie joining his uncle York against the Dutch to learn the art of war. And she herself became the prime consideration in Charles’s mind — she and the child she was going to bear him.

He even gave up playing the exciting new game of pell mell behind the Cockpit so that he might take her out driving in the spring beauty of Hyde Park. And the Londoners, quick to draw conclusions, cheered with joy. How much better to see the King holding his lawful wife’s hand in a carriage by daylight than striding back across the gardens from visiting the Castlemaine after dark. And because the Queen herself looked so pretty, they cheered the more.

Catherine was happier than she had been since those first days at Hampton. What mattered it if she felt distressingly ill in the early mornings and had once vomited suddenly in bed? Charles had been there, beside her; and instead of calling anyone to witness her discomfiture he had risen with alacrity and gone padding around in his nightshirt like any kind, middle class husband looking for a bowl. He had bathed her face with a towel soaked in rose water and comforted her, and had finally lifted her onto his own unsoured side of the bed before unlatching the door and summoning her women.

Catherine never forgot the ordinary humanity of that episode. Somehow, in spite of infidelities past or infidelities to come, it gave her a sense of security. All the same it was miserably disconcerting to go on with this violent morning sickness for so long. She began to worry about it, not only for herself but lest it should jeopardize the birth of her child.

“What is this place — Tunbridge — that people are talking of? Where they have discovered some miraculous wells?” she asked, remembering how so short a time ago in Portugal she would have sought out some shrine.

“A little town in Kent,” Charles told her, tinkering with expert fingers at the mechanism of one of the striking clocks he collected. “But there is nothing miraculous about it. Only medicinal. When the news sheets first began making a stir about the place I sent down one of my apothecaries, and Rupert and I spent a whole afternoon testing the bottle of water he brought.”

“And is it really true that it is good for women who are pregnant, Charles?”

“It could be good for most people, for there is iron in the soil there from which the cannon we used against the Spanish Armada were made. And iron enriches the blood.”

Catherine reached a hand across the table towards him. “Then let us go there so that I may drink the waters,” she urged. “For the sake of our son — that he may grow strong.”

Before replacing yet another minute wheel Charles gave her upturned palm a reassuring squeeze. “Assuredly you may go if you have a mind to,” he. said. “And God knows! would put everything aside and come with you if I could afford it!”

“
Afford
it?”

“It costs a small fortune to move the Court, and I seem to have to pay for the upkeep of a batch of palaces whether we live in them or not.”

Catherine’s warm brown eyes opened wide, for there had never been such financial dilemmas in Lisbon. “But are you not the
King
?”

“My dear little plutocrat,” laughed Charles, “have you been here so many months without finding out that, for all his fine robes, the King in this country is virtually a beggar? He begs from Parliament — from all the fat squires who enriched themselves during the Commonwealth. He has only a small pittance from such personal estates as they have thought fitting to leave to him. Those ate the terms upon which wily old Monk invited me back, so that I can do mighty little without them. And, consider, my sweet — had I not been damnably hard up, should I have sold Dunkirk to the French?”

Catherine was all loving concern. “And Parliament will not — how do you say? — vote you any more?”

“For a really popular war they might,” answered Charles cynically. “But as long as I keep their country at peace they mutter like a swarm of misers and complain that I spend my wages on wine and women.”

“And do you?”

“Some of it. But nothing to what I spend on the Navy. My father, having come normally into his inheritance, was free to levy ship money; but I must build ships out of my own pocket, or not at all.”

“And they cannot see how important that is — being an island?” mused Catherine, who came of a sea-faring nation. “Well, at least they cannot mutter that they have been called upon to spend much upon your marriage.”

“I did my best for you,” Charles reminded her deprecatingly. “I saw to it that they voted you forty thousand pounds a year for your household.”

“So I understood from milord Chancellor when I first came,” said Catherine. “But I have not had it.”

Charles laid down both clock and tools and gave, her his undivided attention. “But only last week I heard milord Treasurer read out the amount when we were passing current expenditure.” His eyes had narrowed shrewdly, and she rose and faced him, her small hands beating indignantly upon the table so that all his small cogs and springs went spinning. “You mean that those — those cheating humbugs — pretend in public that I have had the spending of it. That I have not managed with far less in order to — to atone — for my delayed dowry?” Outraged, she seized a bell and rang imperiously for her women. “Bring me my household books!” she ordered. And there and then she insisted upon going through them. She was not Luiza of Braganza’s daughter for nothing!

And, to her husband’s shared amusement, she really understood them. She had, he found, been personally supervising almost every item of expenditure all the time he was twitting her about that wretched dowry. He knew, of course, that in spite of all his gifts, her own private rooms were bare to the point of austerity. Probably she preferred them so, on principle, as his mother did. But, remembering the luxury of his mistress’s apartments, it almost unmanned him to find how frugally his wife and her Portuguese people had lived. Catherine was a woman of integrity, and he admired her all the more because it was not the frugality but the cheating that she minded. But figures had always bored him, so he got up presently and took her in his arms — pen, books and all. “We will go to Tunbridge if I have to pawn my crown,” he promised, kissing the tip of her indignantly up-turned nose.

“Oh, Charles, that will be lovely!” she cried, standing on tip-toe to return his caress. “But there will be no need to do anything as unseemly as that. I shall fight, this thing out with your horrid Parliament myself. See, it is all down-here in black and white — what I received from them and how much I spent. And they must know very well that I should never have saved and scrimped unless I had supposed that
you
would have benefited.”

Charles knew that she would really be fighting for him — ranging herself on his side against their parsimony. And she so childlike and so small!

And fight them she did; coolly, reasonably claiming what they had promised her. It was so mean of them, she pointed out, to ignore the wealth of trade she had brought. They had just thought of her as a nonentity — a gullible foreigner — and trusted that the king was not interested enough ever to find out. And shrewd London merchants and wealthy squires who called the tune in Parliament-paid over the arrears of her income and thought the better of her for it.

So by the time the first wild roses were out in the hedgerows and the curly lambs almost out-bleating their mothers, Catherine and her solicitous husband went to Tunbridge, thereby lending a lustre to that sleepy little country town. Catherine was enchanted with the place and Charles had a right busy time with all the pretty wenches who held up their faces, in confiding rustic fashion, to be kissed. There were picnics in the meadows and dancing on the green; and every morning Charles would accompany his Queen and her new lady-in-waiting to the wells, where all the fashionable world sat gossiping about the Pump Room and pretending to enjoy the bitter, brownish chalybeate water. For Catherine, to her great content, now had a young and innocent girl brought over by the Queen Mother to supplant the hated Castlemaine — a lovely girl called Frances Stuart to whom, because she was a poor relation of her husband’s, she delighted in showing every imaginable kindness. And although the happy pastoral idyll of their lives was frequently disturbed by the King being obliged to return to London to pass bills or prorogue Parliament, or to attend unwillingly to the quelling of rebellious Irish Catholics, it was observed that he always rode back post haste to Tunbridge and that Catherine, full of vivacity and charm, would set forth with her ladies, dashingly arrayed in redingotes and plumed hats, to meet and embrace him on the way. Pride and early inhibitions were forgotten; and she was learning that even the lustiest of lovers wearies at times of taking the initiative and can be inordinately pleased by a woman’s shameless show of spontaneous affection.

Charles — or Charles’s conscience — was glad to see his oft-wronged wife so happy; but towards the end of their stay a heavy shadow, occasioned by letters she received from Portugal, began to lie across her new, gay world. Foolish, chiding letters from Alphonso, who had heard that she was conforming sensibly to a Protestant country’s way and had ceased to wear her ridiculous farthingales; and worried letters from her mother because a Spanish army was again on Portuguese soil and advancing close to Lisbon.

Anxiety tore at Catherine’s heart so that Charles, returning from a gallop across Ashdown Forest, found her in tears. “If only you could send-your ships again to help us,” she entreated, showing him the letters.

“I heard of this when I was in London, but would not worry you,” he said wearily, disliking her elder brother rather more than usual. “Or I would have told you that our Colonel Hunt has already left Portsmouth with a small expeditionary force.”

“Oh, Charles! How g-generous!”

“As Hyde will tell you it has less to do with generosity than with our political alliance. Were we at war with Spain I should expect your brother to do the same,” shrugged Charles. “And, for the love of God, why must you women always weep?”

Catherine checked herself instantly, realising that on that last visit to London he had probably been flooded, for her sake, with Barbara’s reproachful tears. “It is perhaps a weapon given to us because we wear no swords,” she suggested, with a watery smile.

He held out a forgiving hand and drew her to his knee. “Then there is small need for you to use it, since I find myself much more vulnerable to the undimmed brightness of your eyes,” he told her.

Catherine lay blissfully in his arms. Through the open casement poured the silver beauty of a nightingale’s song, making magic of the still summer evening. “If only I can bear him a son there will be nothing left to ask of God!” she thought. But soon the agony of her driven, valiant little country was tearing at her heart again. “Beloved,” she ventured, “I have been wondering for days past if you would allow me to write to his Holiness, the Pope?”

“And what can the Pope do that my soldiers cannot?” demanded Charles, kissing her white shoulder and marvelling afresh at the firm smallness of the breast beneath his hand.

“He could acknowledge my brother’s sovereignty, and so protect our country from such ruthless rapacity. Spain is a Catholic country and even King Philip would not dare to oppose the authority of Rome.”

Charles stopped kissing her and sat up. “My dear child, it would be most unwise,” he told her gravely. “You cannot know the temper of my people. How fanatically, since the reign of Mary Tudor, they hate and fear all traffic with Rome. It is like a running fever with them.”

“But they need not know. I could send the letter secretly by one of my gentlemen.”

Charles almost brushed her from his knee. “If he were caught it might cost me my throne,” he said brusquely.

But, having seen the way his people loved him, Catherine found that incredible; and she cared for Portugal more passionately than he, with so many foreign influences and so much to forgive, could as yet care for England. “There is Richard Bellings, whom you yourself appointed to be always about me. We both know that even if he
were
caught no Inquisition would ever make him speak.”

Charles, too, got to his feet. Although they stood apart, their glances held. “And what weight do you suppose a message from Protestant England could possibly have with Rome?” he demanded.

But over and over again she had thought it all out while he lay asleep. “I would ask it in return for the good offices I hope to perform for Catholics in this country. I would tell his Holiness that no desire for a crown —
nothing
but my ardent desire to serve the Faith — could have induced me to become Queen of England.”

“Then I have only been flattering myself that I had something to do with it,” remarked Charles, bowing ironically. “And may I ask
what
good offices you had the temerity to hope you might perform for us? Or was it,” he added, with that shrewd narrowing of the eyes, “to have been for me personally? A zealous wifely mission recently inflamed by my mother, perhaps?”

Instead of wincing from his sarcasm, Catherine faced him squarely. “In this matter I was thinking only of my own beloved country,” she told him candidly. “But since I love you, you must know that I wish more than anything in the world that you would become a Catholic.”