With All My Heart (3 page)

Charles sauntered back across the room, catching his brother’s eye with mock solemnity. “You heard that, I trust, James!” he remarked. When he turned back to the bed he was still looking stem but Catherine fancied his wide mouth was quivering to a grin. “Does her most Catholic Majesty, your mother, imagine that we English rape our visitors on sight?” he demanded.

But Catherine only looked up at him admiringly. “What is it — to rape?” she enquired politely.

And Charles, who even in his most inglorious moments had always contrived to remain master of any situation, sank down upon her bedside stool, defeated. His Spanish, which he had been so set up about, appeared suddenly to have deserted him. “What were the good nuns thinking about?” he asked in his mother tongue of nobody in particular.

“Their devotions, undoubtedly, Sir,” murmured Aubigny with a smile.

“At least they were capable of instilling faith and hope!” added James, reviewing the plain foreign damsels with distaste, his slower mind still working upon the extraordinary measures for their protection.

But Charles was looking only at Catherine. In the embarrassing beauty of her innocence she had brought him something which, in his wildest hagglings over her dowry, he had not bargained for. Something he had not encountered for many a long day. And he was both humbled and touched. He began to talk to her about the home she had left, and the one she was coming to, trying to set her at ease. And when Charles Stuart took trouble to be kind he had a way of stealing people’s hearts. He began to tell her of the pleasant river which flowed past his palaces, and the way in which it ministered to so many of his pastimes.

“We also live beside a river — the Tagus,” said Catherine. “My mother, my brothers and I.”

“Was it very grievous saying ‘Goodbye’?” asked Charles, who knew all about the grief of partings. At his request she had dismissed most of her people, and his gentlemen had tactfully withdrawn to the window whence they were watching the cheering crowd assembled in the street below. “I, too, have someone I adore, but seldom see. A sister who lives in France,” he said. “And my young brother Henry died of the pox not long before you came. We had all been separated because of — what happened to my father. And Henry and I were just beginning to know each other —”

“Tell me about both of them,” urged Catherine, forgetting how embarrassing it was to have a strange man sitting so casually beside her bed: and when tears trembled on her dark lashes, partly for him and partly for herself, they were brighter than any of the priceless pearls she had meant to wear.

“It was good of your remaining brother to be so pleasant to me,” she said, drying her eyes with the handkerchief Charles offered her. “My mother feared he might show me resentment because he is still your heir.”

“Only until we have a son of our own,” Charles reminded her.

Catherine smoothed the embroidered CR. on the kerchief and handed it back to him with. complete confidence. “I should like one quite soon,” she said, much as if she were ordering some new furnishings.

“With all my heart!” agreed Charles. “I cannot think of anything which would make my people — or me — love you more. But now you had better rest. And presently I will send to you the Duchess of Suffolk and the other English ladies who are to attend you, and they will advise you what to wear for the wedding. I think, perhaps,
not
one of the farthingales.”

“Not —” began Catherine, with pouting mouth and ominous darkening of her expressive eyes.

But Charles was quite experienced at forestalling women’s tantrums. “I have brought you as a present an English dress. Rose satin with knots of blue ribbon down the front, which I chose especially to become your dark loveliness,” he said. “And I can scarce restrain my impatience to see you grace it!”

And after so tantalizing a compliment, neither could Catherine, although she knew that her ladies would not approve. “You see, donna Elvira, he did not send me back again!” she yawned in drowsy content, after all the company had withdrawn. “I don’t think that he even wanted to.”

Yet outside her door James of York was still looking vastly perplexed. “What good will come of it, throwing an unshorn lamb like that — to Charles?” he burst forth, falling into step with Admiral Montagu, whom he found pacing the gallery as briskly as if it were his own quarter-deck.

But Edward Montagu was mightily pleased with the way things were going. Had he not been responsible for the royal wench’s safe arrival and, sooner than humiliate her, taken the risk of severe reprimand for stuffing his holds with half her dowry in merchandise instead of gold? And was she not already proving a credit to him? So much so that he had just been created Earl of Sandwich for his pains. “The Braganzas may have wrought more subtly than you think, Sir,” he made so bold as to say. “For such is the King’s goodness of heart that her very innocence may move him to protect the lamb from the wolves. When his Majesty spoke just now of cleaning up Whitehall, he may have had in mind more than the fouled streets. And consider, I pray you, the blessing it will be to have a virtuous Queen and all things conducted more seemly, so that we can take our wives to Court again!”

And as there were many decent living men who felt the same as he all went forward with high hope.

That same evening the King nearly shocked the poor Portuguese ladies out of their senses by supping merrily in Catherine’s room, spreading the viands before her on the bed and reducing her to helpless laughter: and on her marriage morning the Duchess of Suffolk helped her with her new English clothes. And no one was more delighted than Charles to see his taste so thoroughly vindicated. For Catherine and the rose satin dress were such a success that no sooner had the Bishop of London pronounced them man and wife, and the good citizens ceased deafening them with cheers, than all the principal guests began begging one of the little blue bows as a souvenir. “And not a single one left for me to press in my prayer book for ‘ever after’!” mourned Catherine between smiles and tears, when the Duchess’s scissors had ceased snipping and the last favour had been thrown.

It was a tired little bride who was bedded that night, worn out with so much strange excitement and still indisposed; and Charles, who never lay long abed, was astir before she wakened. He had several urgent letters to dispatch which were of too intimate a nature for a secretary to attend to, and which he preferred to write while still undistracted.

In the early summer morning he stood for a while by a window absently flicking the feathers of his quill across his freshly shaven cheek, and watching life begin to stir aboard his beloved ships. For the first time in all that turmoil he had time to think of Barbara, his mistress, lying in her bed at Richmond, and of the child she was about to bear him — and for the first time he thought of her and of Palmer, her proud, cuckolded husband, with shamed reluctance. Because she had become the strongest habit in his life the temptation to write to her was great, but on this his first morning as a married man he resisted it.

Instead, with a prodigious sigh, he said his prayers and sat himself down to address a letter to the Earl of Clarendon, his Chancellor, so that the waiting courier might be getting on his way to London. Charles was glad enough to have something good to tell faithful old Edward Hyde, who had shared his exile and tried to coerce him into the paths of virtue, and who loved him like a disappointed father. “It was happy for the honour of the nation,” he wrote, “that I was not put to the consummation of the marriage the night I arrived, for, having slept but two hours on my journey, I am afraid matters would have gone very sleepily ... She cannot exactly be called a beauty, Ned, but her eyes are excellent and she has much agreeableness. I think she must be as good a woman as ever was born and you would wonder to see. how well we are acquainted already! ... Do not expect me at Hampton Court until Thursday by reason that there are not enough carts to be had to transport all our
guarde
infantas
, without which there is no stirring.”

And then to his beloved sister, so recently and so disastrously married to the little, strutting Duc d’Orleans. “Today I was married, and I think myself happier than you,
ma
ch
è
re
Minette
. But the fortune that follows our family is fallen upon me,
car
Monseigneur
le
Cardinal
m’a
fermé
la
porte
au
nez!
Tout
de
m
ê
me
, I flatter myself I was not so furious as Monsieur your husband ...”

And finally, and a little more decorously, he wrote to his new, unknown mother-in-law — thinking for her as he so often thought for others — imagining how hard the day must have been for her and how she must have been hungering for news. “In this Springtime I am enjoying the company of my dearest wife. I cannot sufficiently either look at her or talk to her,” he wrote, as the morning larks rose up to meet the new day from the Hampshire hills. “I am the happiest man in all the world.”

CHAPTER III

“I SHALL always love this place. I have been so happy here,” murmured Catherine, gazing lazily across the lawns of Hampton from the grassy bank on which she lay.

“Happier than at home in Lisbon?”

“Happier than I had hoped to be this side of Heaven!” admitted Catherine, incapable of caution or caprice in the prodigality of her new, absorbing love. “I do not wonder that your great ruddy ancestor, whose portrait hangs in the Hall, brought all his brides here. Is it really true that he had six of them?”

The hard structure upon which her head rested, which-happened to be the King of England’s shoulder-blade, began to shake most uncomfortably. “Even Henry Tudor did not have them here all at once, sweetheart!”

But to Catherine the subject seemed more meet for anxiety than laughter. She began plucking at the pink-tipped daisies which starred the grass beyond the stiff grandeur of her skirts. “He beheaded two as soon as he was tired of them,” she remarked uneasily.

At so much unexpected knowledge of the seamier side of his country’s history Charles Stuart heaved himself up abruptly, tumbling her from his heart in order to shake her gently by the arms. “Who has been putting such grim ideas into your pretty head?” he demanded.

As they sat there unconventionally on the ground, her eyes looked back into his searching dark ones with the translucence of a clear running brook. “Last evening just before the torches were lit I sent two of Milady of Suffolk’s women to fetch something, and when they did not bring it I found them huddling in a corner, frightened of some
other
Queen Catherine’s ghost. They do not like lodging here, they said. As well as I could make out from their English talk she runs shrieking and headless and wringing her hands.”

“That will be poor, frail little Catherine Howard. She cuckolded him but I am afraid Henry was a brute to his women,” admitted Charles, in the very bad Spanish which had become their most usual means of communication.

“But,
carissima
,
whoever
she is, it is not a very comfortable thing to have in my gallery!”

“A pack of old wives’ tales, my dear. And, anyway, it all happened a long time ago.”

“But donna Elvira said before we came that in a country where they —”

“Before God, I will wring that old she-vulture’s neck!” swore Charles.

Catherine’s pouting lips broke into appreciative laughter. Out there in the sunshine, with the young lime trees he had planted scenting the summer air, it was impossible to be seriously perturbed about ghosts. And the mellow brick range of private apartments looked too homely ever to have been the scene of such high passions and tragedies. “All the same,” she persisted obstinately, “if — whichever Henry it was — could divorce his wives whenever he was tired of them, I suppose you could do the same.”

“Do I look as if I were tired of mine?” asked Charles, taking her into his arms and kissing her until she had no thought left for the love-making of his ancestors.

“
Madre
de
Dios
, it is not decent that a woman should be so beset!” she cried at last, trying to push him away. “People from the windows can see us.”

“Alas!” complained Charles, “what is there for them to see, with you in that damned farthingale?”

“Let us move into the shade.”

“Where we shall no longer be observed?” he teased.

“No,” denied Catherine sedately. “Where the sun will be less hot.”

“The coolest place is on the river.”

“Oh, lovely!” she cried, clapping her hands. “Except that here —”

With exquisite delight her husband read the thoughts betraying themselves so ingenuously in her expressive face. “We can still be alone,” he said gently.

“Alone — in a state barge?”

“No. In a skiff.”

“You mean that you will just take a skiff — and row — like anyone else?” she asked aghast.

“Why not, my dear? The Almighty gave me tolerably good muscles.”

It was a way of aquatic progress entirely unknown to an etiquette-ridden princess, but she let him pull her to her feet — then hand-in-hand, laughing and running, to the water’s edge, where a small boat lay moored against a secluded flight of steps. “Always keep a boat at hand as a means, of escape,” he advised flippantly, as he stepped aboard and lifted a breathless little bride in after him. “Once in my direst need I spent six of the most uncomfortable weeks imaginable trying to find one.”

Too thrilled for speech, Catherine watched him divest himself of coat, hat and wig and throw them across a seat, then cast off with expert ease and pull out towards mid-stream. “When Alphonso goes on the T-Tagus he would not think of r-rowing himself,” she said, still nervously gripping the sides of their precarious looking little craft.

“Probably Alphonso has never been too poor to hire a boatman,” observed Charles grimly, staying his long, leisurely strokes to shoo aside an over inquisitive bevy of swans.

“Are not your subjects — shocked?”

“I make no doubt they were at first. But it was through their bungling experiments that I was forced to live by my wits and so come to know the value of occasional solitude and the pleasures of the common man. A lesson which one cannot unlearn, my Catalina. And now I should be hard put to it to live without these things. Even at Whitehall — in spite of all the frenzied anxiety that goes on in the guardhouse — my brother and I make shift to slip out by the privy water stairs and swim at Putney or Barn Elms most summer mornings.”

“And the crowds — do they not collect and stare as they do whenever we leave the palace at home?”

“Most of them are still abed, except the ferry men and the drovers coming in to market from the country,” laughed Charles. “And if it gives them any amusement to see their King mother-naked — oddsfish, after the dismal, psalm-singing time they must have endured these last twelve years, I am content to be their reinstated raree-show.”

Served by the tide, his skiff sped swiftly over the shining water, and every here and there a fine ducal house or a humble cottage, half hidden by hawthorn blossom, lay snug on either bank: and his companion, forgetting all her fears, trailed her pretty fingers in the cool water and thought that no other land could ever have looked so pleasant nor any other woman have felt so free. Yet in the midst of her happiness strong maternal instincts moved her to yearn over all he must have suffered. “You were only a boy when civil war separated you from your parents?” she prompted softly, watching the rhythmic movements of his manhood’s lean, athletic body.

“James and I followed them from one battlefield to another, while the younger children stayed here. I was only sixteen when I was put in command of the remnants of our Royalist army in the West. And afterwards I was happy enough in Jersey. A lanky adolescent, learning to handle ships.”

“And then?”

“For my own safety, my father sent word for me to join my mother in France. My young cousin Louis and I got on famously as long as they left us alone with his horses and dogs: but I am afraid my poor mother, who had been at such pains to train me in civility, found me very dumb and gauche. Later on, after they had — when my father was no longer alive, I sailed for Scotland, tempted by the promise of an army with which to wrest back my land from Cromwell. As you love me, Catherine, do not ask me to tell you of the rigours I endured at Holyrood beneath the precepts and preachings of the Elders of the Kirk! And for my pains, when I had marched into England, I suffered defeat at Worcester and brought many loyal men to their death. After that,” he added, with a deep sigh, “there came the long waste of years at my sister Mary’s Court in Holland. It would have been better for my soul, perhaps, had I been killed at Worcester.”

Because she did love him, his new young wife was aware of his omissions and already sensed that his family’s flight from Whitehall and his father’s execution were in reality the things of which he' never spoke. “Tell me, then, how you escaped after the battle,” she begged.

Charles’s shrug was an unlosable legacy from his sojourn at his French cousin’s Court. “I have told it so often,” he protested.

“But never to me — who must care the most.”

So he tied up beneath an over-hanging willow tree, and as he leaned forward and talked his face was all dappled with shade and sunshine filtering through the swaying boughs that dipped green fingers in the Thames. “The most wonderful thing of all was the number of quite ordinary people who risked their lives to help me,” he mused.

“I would have given mine,” said Catherine, very softly.

But he did not hear her. He was back in the West of England, a young man of twenty, living the most desperately exciting hours of his life. “There was a price on my head which to some of the men who recognized me would have meant a fortune for life. Yet I swear it never even occurred to them to betray me.”

“Perhaps they knew that their neighbours would not let them live long to enjoy it,” she suggested, swatting quite savagely at a circling gnat.

“That of course is possible.”

“You are not very vain, are you, Charles?”

“I have too many things to be ashamed of. More,
ma petite
innocente
, than you could ever guess.” For a moment his sombre eyes seemed to implore forgiveness while he stretched out a hand to touch her knee. Then he took up his tale more light-heartedly, poking fun at the poor figure he must have cut in borrowed rustic clothes and a Puritan’s steeple hat. “At first I had not even so much elegance as that,” he said. “I had lost a shoe trying to get a man who could not swim across a muddy river. And there is nothing much less heroic than hobbling about in hiding with blistered feet. Yet one of my most beautiful memories is of the kind old woman who cleansed and bound them up for me. Another which I cherish is of a young priest who stood in daily peril himself for celebrating Mass, and whose calm faith in God upheld me. And there were absurd things too, Catherine. Did I tell you those accursed Roundheads came and searched one of the houses that offered me hospitality, and how I found there Colonel Careless who led the charge with me through Worcester streets, and how he and I had to hide a whole day in an oak tree? And how in the end I fell asleep across his knee and he durst not speak because of the soldiers snooping below and so suffered a veritable martyrdom of pins and needles? He and Lord Wilmot and Will Crofts helped me from port to port, that I might get away to France. But often we split up our company, and always for safety I must needs travel as a servant. You should have seen me trying to turn the kitchen spit at Long Marston!”

“
You
— turning the roasting spit!”

Presently Charles stopped laughing and, clasping his hands about his knee, looked up appreciatively into the green canopy above them. “There was a girl called Jane Lane. Colonel Lane’s daughter,” he went on ruminatively. “I was supposed to be William Jackson, her servant. She rode pillion behind me, having a local official’s permission to visit a pregnant relative at Bristol, where it was hoped we might bribe some master mariner to take me across to France. I used to sleep on a truckle bed in the kitchen quarters and sometimes, when I had helped her dismount and led the horses round to the stables, the inn yard would be full of old Noll’s soldiers. ‘By your leave!’ I would say, and push past them — praying to God that none of them had particularly noticed me on the battlefield.”

“And this Jane — was she very beautiful?” asked Catherine.

“Beautiful?” Charles’s gaze came down to earth again as if to consider the matter. “She was kind and brave, and many a time her quick wits saved me. There was the evening when she sent Will Jackson to bed with an ague because we had seen a doddering old doctor from Whitehall playing on the bowling green who would probably have recognized Charles Stuart. And then the awful moment next morning when I found myself drawing a drink at the buttery hatch next to one of my own guards. He’d fought at Worcester and was bragging to the other servants about it. ‘Seen the King?’ he answered one of the maidservants he was ogling. ‘Why, I’ve been as close to him as I am to you, Moll, and “the black boy” he’s rightly named. Not unlike this fellow standing beside me, but at least three inches taller.’ And after he had drawn all eyes upon me like that you may be sure I made what haste I could out of the buttery.”

Catherine hung upon his words. Enviously, she realized the close companionship he and this girl must have shared in common danger, the excited commentaries and crazy high spirits which must have ensued each time that momentary danger passed. “Have you ever seen her since?” she persisted.

“Unfortunately suspicion fell upon my loyal Lanes after my escape and they, too, had to fly to France. When I heard she was coming, although I had scarcely a sou, I borrowed Louis’s best horses and rode out of Paris to meet her. She is back in England now, of course, and I have written more than once inviting her to Court. At first she made all manner of unreasonable excuses: but now that she is married I am hoping —”

Whatever he was hoping, Catherine heard no more. The long, soundless sigh that passed her lips was a
deo
gratia
, Jane Lane — that was an easy name to remember, even for a foreigner. And, God be praised, the wench was married! “I like you so much better with your own short, uncurled hair, Charles!” she hurried to assure him irrelevantly, lest he should suspect the jealousy her mother had warned her to eschew. “It makes you look less stern, and so much younger.”