Читать книгу With All My Heart - Margaret Campbell Barnes - Страница 6

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“All through Oliver Cromwell’s rebellion Barbara’s family have been our most loyal subjects. As children we Stuarts always played with the young Villierses. 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 defense.”

“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 enamored in each other’s arms, and secretly shocked to find themselves hurting each other with bitter words, quarreling like any browbeating 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 cheekbones. 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 Flemish waiting women wrung their hands, and grooms of the bedchamber, accustomed to the imperturbable good humor of their master, listened in excited groups. Already, although they could not hear their betters’ actual words, they had started the rumor of royal domestic strife which ran like wildfire through the galleries and back stairs of the old Tudor palace, to be borne hot-foot 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 bad 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 of my warships!”

“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 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 away towards the window. So much had gone into 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, mispronounced 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 appeared, 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 been ungenerous to you? Can you not come down off your righteous pedestal and put yourself in my position? Or see that some such position 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 honor.”

“Your honor!”

“Assuredly. I would not leave her and my newborn 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 like 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 honor,” 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 humor with good humor, she would look desirable again—for hers, she knew, was the kind of beauty that depended 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 propitiatory, 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 ardor 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. Endlessly 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 weary 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-favored, 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 cluther 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 thoroughbred 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-humoredly, using a little strategy or an absurdly generous recompense or perhaps the help of Chaffinch, his groom 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 highhandedly of leaving him.

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

Poor Catherine sank to the floor, dissolved in tears. Her women came running to her and, not having been trained in any kind of independence, she sent for Don Francisco and Donna Elvira and was so foolish as to pour out her private wrongs before them all.

“To condone his Britannic Majesty’s way of life would be to lower the standard of your own,” her confessor told her.

“That it should come to this—after ceding Tangier and Bombay!” bemoaned her harassed godfather, smoothing the single strand of hair he wore so strangely across the shining baldness of his pate.

“And the heartless fiend probably gone straight to that Jezebel’s bed!” shrilled Donna Elvira. “Did I not tell Queen Luiza how it would be if we came to this immoral country?”

Between them they bolstered up Catherine’s indignation and inflamed her self-pity. Not one of them had the tolerance or wit to try to mend matters, instead of ranting about the prestige of Portugal. Only the half-blind and aging Donna Maria Penelva who had been allowed to come because she had had the care of Catherine when she was small, had one word of sense to say. “Far better not to spoil your lovely eyes which the King so much admires, Madame,” she advised, sending for warm water and lamb’s wool with which to bathe her mistress’s red and swollen face, and staying with her long after the others had gone to bed, their tongues ceasing to wag only for want of further invective.

“Do you suppose that he will come here any more?” asked Catherine, when they were alone.

“A man needs a wife to come home to,” answered Donna Penelva.

“When he has nothing more exciting to do? I do not want to be needed like that.”

“It is, perhaps, the best way in the end.”

Long after the candles were extinguished Catherine clung to the old lady’s kind, thin hand. Her sobs were small and desolate now because she no longer made pretense that they had anything to do with pride and anger. “Do you believe what Donna Elvira said—that he has gone straight to that awful woman’s bed?” she brought herself to ask.

There was no love lost between the two old women, and Donna Penelva sniffed disparagingly. “When Lady Castlemaine has not yet risen from childbirth?” she scoffed. “He is probably much disturbed himself, and if he goes to bed anywhere it will be with those everlasting yapping spaniels of his.”

“What, here you mean? In Hampton?” Some of her natural animation came back into Catherine’s voice.

“I made it my business to ask one of those pert pages. They will tell me things sometimes because I get them to help me across the courtyards and I have the gratitude to talk to them about the way the English ships saved Portugal. They are not bad lads at heart. And they assure me that his Majesty hasn’t left the palace, but at midnight was still in shirt and breeches, acting midwife to his favorite bitch.”

“Dear Donna Maria!” For the first time the little Queen, tired out, relaxed comfortably against her pillows.

“That is right. Go to sleep, my poppet, and things will look more hopeful in the morning,” soothed Donna Maria Penelva. “I am not managing and capable like Donna Elvira, but at least I have been married to a man who was not always faithful to me, and borne his babies and been desolately widowed. And I can tell you that the first grasping, romantic years are by no means the whole of marriage.”