The Bride

by Margaret Irwin

  Now that he in his turn had had to fight for his throne and was a prisoner in the hands of his enemies, it was a matter of course to her that she should in her turn do what she could to help that well-beloved ill-remembered brother. So she had already sounded a pawnbroker as to the sum she could raise on the jewels, and even managed to get a considerable part of it paid in advance so that Rupert should have the cash ready to take with him to Helvoetsluys and the fleet he had raised for King Charles. She was now in high glee at her success, for nothing could daunt her spirits, not even the sordid transaction of her most treasured possessions; you would have thought it was for sheer delight in their beauty that she now sat counting them over with the help of her niece and especial favourite, Mary.

  Mary was a slight girl of seventeen with a proud, rather plaintive mouth and the eyes of a gazelle – or, alternatively, of her father, King Charles. She was his eldest daughter and never forgot it, nor did anyone else, even the Dutch, for she was still called the Princess Royal though she had left England as a child to come to Holland to be the bride of the young Prince William of Orange. That had been seven years ago, but she had never got over her homesickness for England and that noisy crowd of brothers and sisters and her vivid little mother and above all her adorably tender father.

  As they now sat talking of him with those jewels in their hands, Elizabeth thought of the shy delicate little boy who had stood beside her, speaking very little because of his stammer, while they watched the fireworks over the Thames at her merry wedding festivities nearly thirty-seven years ago; while Mary remembered the quiet man with the pointed reddishbrown beard she had loved to stroke, it was so soft and silky, who had ridden up and down on the Dover cliffs for hours after her ship had put out to sea for Holland, that he might take his last view of her.

  His last view? No, she should not have said that, even to herself. It was ill-omened, it was untrue, – she knew she must see her father again, for she had never loved anyone since then as much as she loved him.

  But next to him she now loved her aunt, this glorious woman whose beauty was still as exuberant as her spirits, who had been the ‘Winter Queen’ of Bohemia for only one brief year but had been ‘Queen of Hearts’ ever since to the tens of thousands that had come from all countries to fight for her. The Palace of the Binnenhof was less than ten minutes’ walk from her pleasant house among the lime trees at the end of the Voorhout, and Mary spent so much time in the latter that her mother-in-law, the Dowager Princess Amelia of Orange, was apt to be painfully sarcastic about it.

  It was a sad fact of nature that, much as Mary loved her aunt and her father, she thought far more about her mother-in-law whom she detested. Her pensive and tearful mood at present as she sat on a cushion on the floor and leaned against her aunt’s knee (wishing she were like her and then everyone would adore her, or, alternatively, that she was dead and then everyone would be sorry for her) was not, as she was trying to make out, solely on account of these glistening jewels that Queen Mary had worn and now must be sold.

  Her aunt shrewdly suspected this, but was not going to show it. She was busy counting up her treasures in terms of their present value.

  ‘This diamond my grandmother wore in France will pay for split peas and ships’ biscuit for some months, and what better use could it have?’ she said cheerfully. ‘Here are rubies, that is, rope and tar and sailcloth; and the emeralds the Dauphin gave her – glorious, aren’t they? Would you think their value is only 9½d. – a day, I mean, since that’s the daily wage of each of the crew, Rupert told me!’

  Mary gasped, a little scandalized. It was all very well for her aunt to make an heroic sacrifice, but to do it in this farcical fashion was almost brutal.

  ‘What would she have thought of your having to do this?’ she exclaimed, trying to introduce a more reverent spirit. But her aunt would have none of it.

  ‘My grandmother was a sensible woman, for all the nonsense people talked of her, and I am sure she would rather her jewels helped the present moment and the future than that we should gaze at them, thinking of the past, sighing, “These diamonds she wore at her wedding with Darnley,” or even “These black pearls were taken from her neck at her execution.”’

  This last was a little too bracing; Mary shuddered and reached out her hand for the necklace. ‘Those very pearls! Oh, Aunt, can you bear to think your own grandmother was executed, and she a queen? Surely the world has grown better since then?’

  ‘I have not observed it,’ said Elizabeth dryly.

  ‘No. Nor have I, really. I am sure my mother-in-law would execute me if she could.’

  And this, the true reason for Mary’s melancholy, having slipped out in the most natural and inevitable way in the world, she subsided into sobs and even reproaches. ‘I can’t think how you can be so friendly with her. She is wicked, jealous, she schemes against me all the time. She ought to be executed.’

  ‘My child, don’t be so foolish. Please remember that Amelia von Solms was my maid-in-waiting and managed to marry my husband’s uncle. Do you really think I could help you by quarrelling with my former maid and present aunt-in-law? Our village of The Hague is a small place; two royal ladies at each other’s throats are as much as it can hold as it is.’

  This made Mary weep the more in self-defence. Her aunt was the most adorable woman on earth, but she had never quite understood, nobody could, all that Mary had had to endure ever since her marriage. She had been married in May, was it true that that was unlucky? It must be – and all her ill luck was bound up in the fat resplendent person of her mother-in-law, in her beady eyes, filled with malignity, as she was convinced, whenever they glanced at Mary, and even more alarming when they rested on any of her four daughters, or, still worse, on her only son, in a basilisk stare of maternal solicitude.

  Impossible that William with his fastidious manners and fine straight hair, so gentle and grave (too grave, that was the trouble – he was always wanting other people to be lively for him, and Mary feared she was not lively enough), should have anything of his mother in him, or even, so she longed to believe, have any real affection for his mother.

  ‘She tries to make William hate me, she encourages his flirtations with other girls, even with—’ here she snatched at just enough sense through her sudden hysteria to remember that the name she had been going to say was the name that of all others she must not say, for it was that of Elizabeth’s youngest daughter, Sophia. She tried to fill up her gap by hurrying on, but Elizabeth was too quick for her and demanded the missing name.

  So Mary swerved violently from the point and said that she was not the only one to think the Dowager Amelia a dangerous woman, many others had said so.

  ‘Pouf! All women are dangerous when they have four daughters to marry.’ (Elizabeth quite ignored her own position as the mother of four daughters as she spoke – as often happened, she had forgotten them for the moment.) ‘But it is a mistake to let others talk of her. The peculiar feminine vice of discussing one’s relatives is even more dangerous than maternity.’

  Mary could not bear it. She had to justify herself, to show that it was not all mere silly tittle-tattle; she sobbed out, ‘But William admires Sophie, and that is why his mother has arranged a ballet for them both to dance in, so that he can meet her for rehearsals here every evening.’

  ‘Have you taken leave of your senses? Why should Amelia do any such thing?’

  ‘Because she wants my brother Charles to marry one of her daughters, and she is afraid of his liking Sophie better and so she is trying to damage her reputation through William. I thought I ought to tell you this for Sophie’s sake, but I knew you’d be angry, and you see, you are.’

  There was a pause, a terrible silence. Mary, her head bent against that firm shapely knee, the knee of a rider, a handsome young cavalier, rather than of a woman over fifty, dared not look up, but she felt it tremble. She had to look up, she did so, and the shock she received sent the blood throbbing into her face; her neck,
her whole body felt as though it were burning with blushes. She saw her aunt shaking, the tears running down her cheeks, but not from anger or sorrow as she had in the first wild instant imagined, but from laughter. Elizabeth tried to stop herself but could not; she shook and rocked to and fro, and at last gasped out, ‘Oh, my best niece! Who in the world can have told you such a farrago of nonsense?’

  ‘Sophie herself,’ murmured Mary, driven to her last defence. ‘She was warned of the plot and she thought it right to warn me.’

  ‘So you two put your heads together and ought to have had them knocked together. I thought Sophie had more sense. But all young girls like to see themselves as heroines in the midst of plots and wicked designs.’ (To Mary’s relief she did not trouble to ask who had ‘warned’ Sophie.) ‘I dare say with my usual vanity that William comes here for my sake even more than Sophie’s. Are you going to consider me too as a rival? But the biggest nonsense is the notion that Charles should be deterred by another man’s attentions. Your rascally young brother is much more likely to be spurred on by them. What was that rumour you mentioned of that trollop Lucy Walters being with child by him – a boy of his age!’

  ‘He was eighteen last summer,’ corrected Mary, who had been too much ashamed even to cry, but found her self-respect somewhat restored by this new turn, her aunt talking to her again as an equal; ‘and I am only a year younger. It is high time I had a baby rather than he.’

  If she had a baby, William would love her and her only; Amelia, his mother, would not dare to interfere, she would be nowhere, and Mary would be free to do just as she liked, and she and William and their son, who would also be William, and her favourite brother, the delightful, irrepressible, highly reprehensible Charles, would all go back to England together, for by then the troubles would be sure to be over and her father on the throne again.

  Her cousins swung into the room in a tremendous hurry, Rupert and Louey. How tall they were, how careless and arrogant, unconscious of themselves and of all else, moving and speaking with the ease of gods, so they seemed to the homesick girl, quivering from her last encounter with her mother-in-law. You could not think of Louey or Rupert suffering from a mother-in-law: the one would laugh, the other shrug, and go their splendid indifferent way. Pictures or ships’ tackle and mutiny, portraiture or piracy, these were their high impersonal element, filling Mary’s soul with envious longing for the wings not of a dove but of a seagull.

  They had heard Rupert calling orders as he came through the courtyard and up the stairs, for his and his servants’ horses to be saddled on the instant. He was only here for that instant, and to sweep up into his pockets the cash his mother had already managed to raise. He did not even thank her so very much; he seemed to know that she would do it.

  ‘This will get us to Ireland in any case,’ he said. ‘Once there, I believe we’ll make a shift to live in spite of all factions. We’ll conquer the Scillys from Kinsale and make a second Venice of ‘em.’

  There was some very ‘Scilly’ joking over this boast, and Louey was telling her mother of some repulsive Scots lord she had just met, whose portrait she wished to paint, ‘but no picture could do him justice. I will carve his tombstone after his death of a debauch of pickled pork and onions swilled down with port and topped up with brandy, for all those airs attended his rich breath—’

  ‘Nauseating girl! And how could you represent them in cold marble?’

  ‘As bloated cherubs blowing their fat sighs about his effigy.’

  ‘You’re talking in blank verse, very blank.’

  ‘And very rightly, to a mother who is always quoting Shakespeare.’

  How happy they were, the three of them together. It was not always like this. Mary usually found it a matter for wonder that her cousins, especially her female cousins, did not get on better with their charming mother. But this was one of those golden moments when they were sharing adventure together as three equals. Perhaps they would be still happier if she were not here – ‘a stranger shall not meddle with his joy’ – she remembered her father quoting that.

  Louey noticed that her cousin was so sensitive that she changed colour whenever one spoke to her; perhaps that was why she found it impossible to paint her, and even Honthorst had made a very poor job of it. Mary flushed, she smiled, the tears came up under her long dark eyelashes, and it was all because she was trying to think of some urgent reason why she should be gone that moment; but it was needless, for Rupert was going himself – his horse must be ready now, he said, and he would wait for none of his servants that were not also ready.

  ‘You cannot reach Helvoetsluys before nightfall,’ exclaimed his mother. ‘Your horse might miss his footing in the dark and land you in a canal, and this wind makes it the more dangerous.’

  ‘The wind will be behind me, under Grey Day’s tail; it will help, not hinder. I’ve ridden the distance in three hours before now. Today it might take less.’

  And he took his leave of them as casually as if he would be back tomorrow. Mary need not mind being present, but was disappointed that she need not; it would have been pleasant to have seen a touch of the tender and intimate for once in her cousin who was so much the eldest and biggest of all of them, and with a strange dark splendour about him that made you long to see what he would be like when he was just a little different.

  But he never was – not even now, when he might never see any of them again. That possibility was too frequent ever to occur to him.

  He grumbled at having to leave without a word with his cousin Charles about Montrose, but when his mother begged him to find Charles as he rode out through the town, he said, ‘No, I can’t wait to rout him out of whatever tavern or brothel he’s in.’

  ‘Rupert!’ (His mother had given a quick look at Charles’ sister.) ‘You are not on the quarter-deck here!’

  ‘Well, I soon must be – or there’ll be no quarter-deck for me. Goodbye, Mother. Goodbye, Coz. Tell Charles to be a good boy and look out for Lauderdale. Goodbye, Louey, much the same advice would do for you if you could take it.’

  They heard him whistling as he leaped down the stairs two at a time.

  ‘It is an odd thing,’ said Louey, ‘that one never sees Rupert in really high spirits unless he has to sell half his ships, quell a mutiny, and get the fleet to sea, all in one day.’

  From below in high insolent triumph came his mare’s shrill whinny, calling to the horses in the stables as her master swung into the saddle.

  IV

  Louey was right. This icy wind whistling and shrieking in his ears, twisting the few thin trees unavailingly planted for shelter on either side of the rough road, and already beginning to freeze the drops of rain on them into slanting splinters of ice, was shrill music to Rupert. In a few hours now this frost would harden the ground into slippery iron so that no horse could travel on it. But Grey Day, his big Flemish mare, was travelling magnificently at this moment, her hooves pounding the hard earth, her long white mane streeling forward over her nose, her bulk responsive to the grip of his knees, the touch of his heel. This was the wind he had been wanting for weeks, the wind that was to set him and his ships free of their long-enforced idleness and take them west to Ireland. He would hold his own in the race against frost, against night, and against mutiny.

  The road went straight as a ruled line before him through a country flat as the sea, rough hardening mud springing into dust under his horse’s hooves, the canal beside him a darker, rougher streak of broken water. Here and there he passed a peasant struggling to tow his barge of hay or cattle-fodder against the wind, driving the end of his spar into his chest in his frantic efforts to keep the blindly obstinate boat away from the shore. The men here wore boats even on their feet, he saw the heavy sabots clumping in and out of the puddles to fight their endless battle with the water, and pulled Grey Day’s head straight again as she glanced and swerved from that plodding, pushing figure.

  A shaft of sunlight cold as steel struck on a windmill’s whirlin
g arms, on a church tower, almost black before, now suddenly white, on a thatched farmhouse huddled among trees. It vanished, leaving the land interminably the same, endlessly flat, with not a hillock nor valley, scarce a landmark of any kind to show how far he had gone. In England, now, what clusters of cottages and village greens he would have passed already, manor houses set in tall trees, streams brawling down through wooded dales, and his mare now straining up-hill, now galloping down. Here there was nothing but the changeless grey scene under the changing sky, a vast sky filled with darkening, racing clouds.

  ‘If I cross the Maas at Brielle in another hour I shall be in time,’ thought Rupert.

  He never really thought that he would not be in time, but all the way he was wondering what change each moment might not be bringing on his fleet, that fleet so subject to the winds of chance it might have been made of air and water like the cloud-ships sailing overhead. Only four fighting-ships left to him by now – no, three, since the Roebuck must go – four frigates, and the prize he had captured – and no money for them and their crews, perilously short in numbers as they were, but what he and now his mother had raised out of the pawnbrokers’ pockets.

  He had had his brother Maurice to help him, of course, and Maurice must be helping him now. He had left him in charge in his own ship the Admiral, and Captain Marshall and Captain Allen were with him, both men of experience and decision – and Maurice was Maurice, and what that was, Rupert had never thought to consider. Maurice, the faithful ‘Twin’ of their boyhood’s nickname, had at once become Rupert’s Vice- Admiral, just as he had been his second-in-command all through the war in England when Rupert had been cavalry leader and then Commander-in-Chief of the armies of his uncle, King Charles.