Читать книгу With All My Heart - Margaret Campbell Barnes - Страница 5

Table of Contents

“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, began to shake most uncomfortably. “Even Henry Tudor did not have them all at once, sweetheart!”

But to Catherine the subject seemed more meet for anxiety than for 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 the ghost of some other Queen Catherine. 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, carissimo, 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 widened in 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 on 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 midstream. “When Alfonso 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 Alfonso 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 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 rigors 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 death to many loyal men. 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 loved 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 actually the things of which he never spoke. “Tell me, then, how you escaped after the battle,” she begged.

Charles’s shrug was a 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 overhanging 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 occurred to them to betray me.”

“Perhaps they knew that their neighbors 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 somber eyes seemed to implore forgiveness while he stretched out a hand to touch her knee. Then he took up his tale more lightheartedly, 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 also stood in daily peril, 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 maid servants 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 contemplated the close companionship he and this girl must have shared in common danger, the excited conversation 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 gratias. 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 her of the jealousy her mother had warned her to eschew. “It makes you look less stern, and so much younger.”

“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 waterfowl 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 moor hens considered it safe to return to their domestic activities, Catherine pulled herself free with an ecstatic sigh. “It seems,” she said, “as though I should 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 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 like 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 he had learned in adversity or return 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 lifelong 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 splendor 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 aging 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 Chaffinch, his groom 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 common sense. “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 with the king. He would go for long walks, outdistancing his handful of attendants, or take the little skiff up the river without asking her to come.

“Are you trying to tire yourself out?” she remonstrated, when he came in after riding in the rain, as 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 Chaffinch to silence and tiptoed away. That night her husband came to her and she had her reward. Instead of his usual lighthearted love-making 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 to sleep and went swimming, instead of to his chapel. 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 a 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 had 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 Cleveland was already her Comptroller, and Lady Suffolk had proved a good friend. Donna Elvira and her own Portuguese women would still be with her. 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 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.

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

“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.