The Bride

by Margaret Irwin

  And the Queen in the same instant had flown to the duties of hospitality – had these careless girls offered him nothing on arrival after his long journey? There was Great Eliza with her head in the clouds as absent-minded as her own professor, and Louey so flighty and scatter-brained, would she never learn to grow up?

  Her airy scolding reduced them to awkward shamefacedness in spite of his protests that he had dined quite lately and would not take wine, but for all that she was sending for some when Eliza whispered to her and she exclaimed, ‘What, only that sour stuff of Carl’s left! – He sent us a handsome present of wine from Heidelberg some time ago, and it’s clean undrinkable,’ she explained to her guest with a wry face at the meanness of her eldest son, ‘and you who have had your fill of the finest Rhenish in Germany!’

  ‘I never drank it when I could get their light ale,’ he replied.

  She was enchanted. She always had ale brewed at her country house at Rhenen according to the English recipe, and he must taste it instantly. A page brought some in immensely long slender glasses, and the Queen drank too.

  She sat in a great carved and gilded chair by the fire, holding that long fluted glass of liquid amber in its light, her black dress and cloak framed in a golden throne, and the firelight flickering on her face. He sat opposite her and could scarcely believe in her beauty; it put that of her daughters utterly in the shade, and shadows now they both seemed to have become, sitting a little further from the fire in the colder light of the departing day.

  Eliza had taken up some knitting which she did for the Lutheran nuns to dispose of in charity; it was her compensation for the waste of time imposed by her mother’s endless succession of visitors.

  Louey, crouched on a stool, twisting her long fingers together, gazed at those two figures by the fire. Never had she seen her mother lovelier, and growing more so every minute; she drew fresh life from each new admirer in proportion to her interest in them. At worst it was ‘I never lack a fool to laugh at; when one goes another comes.’ And at best – yes, Louey had never seen her mother at her best, not even in her mad infatuation two or three years ago for de l’Epinay, for that had been a restless frenzy burning rather than illumining her, – never until now, when she talked with this man who sat so still, leaning forward in his chair, his elbow on his knee, his deep-set eyes scanning her face.

  What was he thinking of her? Was he falling headlong in love with her like everyone else who came here, and on less than a hundredth part of the attention that she was giving him? If he were not doing so he’d be an insensate dolt, she decided in an unwilling glow of admiration at the new and lovely life in her mother’s face.

  Yet they were speaking on a far from lively subject, the news that was now reaching the Continent of more and more executions in England. The Duke of Hamilton had just testified to his belated loyalty by the loss of his head, though, as the Queen heartlessly said, it was little loss to the cause he had once betrayed. But the oddest thing was that as he had escaped from the Tower for a few days the judges argued his recapture as a sign that God desired his death – ‘a sign rather,’ Montrose was saying, ‘that reason is dead in England, and only superstition rules. They have substituted the Code of Moses for the laws of England.’

  ‘And yet we had thought Fairfax was at the head of affairs there,’ the Queen answered, ‘and Rupert has spoken well of him.’

  (It was always Rupert’s opinion that was quoted now; it used to be Carl’s.)

  ‘Fairfax must be the figure-head only,’ Montrose answered; ‘it is Cromwell who reigns.’

  ‘A reign of terror,’ she cried. That man must be the Beast in the Book of Revelation.’

  ‘I have always heard that Beast was the Roman Catholic Church,’ observed Eliza dryly over her knitting. Two such enemies should not share the same symbol!’

  Louey nearly cried out to stop her. How frivolous pedantry could be in the wrong place! Eliza was making a strident effort to catch on to some shred, however tattered, of the conversation that was slipping away so fast from her and her sister, but their mother naturally did not find it worthy of notice and turned impulsively to her visitor with fresh subjects: the crimson baton that the Emperor of Germany had just presented to him, creating him a Field-Marshal of the Empire with power to raise troops anywhere in his dominions; Rupert’s great disappointment at having to leave Holland without meeting him, ‘the worst luck in the world’.

  ‘That was not luck,’ he answered sternly, ‘it was arranged.’

  By whom, she knew as well as he. Queen Henrietta Maria, though far away in Paris, still directed her son Charles’ policy, and there had been some bad passages-at-arms between her and the Marquis of Montrose. So that Elizabeth’s next remark was more to the point than it appeared when it flicked out like a whiplash at her absent sister-in-law.

  ‘My poor brother lived a martyr to his Church as well as diedit, for his wife burdened his whole life with her efforts to change his religion. Has she written to you since his death?’

  ‘She has, Madam, asking me to unite with all my countrymen and forget all former differences.’

  There was a gasp, an instant’s silence, and then an irrepressible burst of laughter from the Queen.

  ‘And how,’ she exclaimed, ‘you are to unite with the men who begin all their discussions by demanding that the King must banish you for ever from his Court is beyond the wit of man – but not, it seems, of woman!’

  ‘How does the King take their demands?’

  ‘He is only eighteen, remember, and his mother’s grip still on him. Lord, how I hate these maternal women, it is not easy to distinguish ‘em from tigresses. Their savage simplicity! That grim Solemn League and Covenant of the Scottish Kirk – and the Church of England for which my brother died, – the Queen Henrietta Maria can see no difference between them, so you are to “forget all differences”, and her son Charles to ignore them!’

  ‘And he?’ he asked again with quiet insistence, for in the pleasure of criticizing her sister-in-law the Queen seemed to forget that it was her nephew who was now King of England.

  ‘He has no love for Lauderdale,’ she assured him. ‘He is anything but squeamish, but he tells me he wants to rinse his mouth out from Lauderdale’s foul after-dinner talk when he shows himself off as an affable man of the world. But I doubt if Lauderdale ever guesses that.’

  ‘It would need a hatchet to make him do so.’

  It was Louey now who had made a brief snatch at the conversation, but it at once rolled past her again.

  ‘Charles hates to express disapproval or dislike,’ said her mother. ‘Ned Hyde says it will break his heart if he does not outgrow that infirmity. But is it always an infirmity? Some of us – Charles for one – might wish that fat old Ned himself had a touch of it.’

  She never cared what she said, she could never be afraid either of persons, opinions, or consequences, and that was one reason why men adored her.

  She had never seen Montrose before, and seemed to have known him all her life; she even knew that he had been born in that wild stormy winter when she had married at sixteen and her brother Henry Prince of Wales had died, that strong, splendid youth, and left Baby Charles, whom no one had expected to live, as heir to the English throne.

  ‘How that one winter has linked all our fates!’ she exclaimed, her lustrous eyes filled with wonder at the pitiful tangle of human life, thinking of her two brothers’ deaths, and this man’s birth, and her own marriage, when every poet in England had written in praise of her – John Donne and Ben Jonson and Will Shakespeare.

  ‘ “Stands Scotland where it did?” ’ she asked with a glancing smile at her visitor which alarmed Louey, who knew how men’s reputations rose or fell in her mother’s estimation according to their ability to recognize a quotation from her favourite playwright. But to her relief he capped it.

  ‘ “Alas, poor country!”’ he said slowly. ‘Wasn’t that the answer?’

  ‘Yes, yes – “where nothin
g is once seen to smile.” Shakespeare must have forgotten Macbeth when he wrote that, and prophesied this present day of the Solemn League and Covenant. Is it true that it is now a criminal offence to laugh on the Sabbath – or pluck berries – or dance even in the week? What has happened to the land I remember as a child?’

  ‘Darkness has fallen on it. But what does Your Majesty remember?’

  ‘My nurse singing – my elder brother and I dancing with other children to the shrill skirling music of the pipes – such memories as you must have of your childhood, my lord. Were you not one of the scarlet-gowned scholars at St Andrews and won the archery medal for your college there?’

  How had she heard that? There were moments when Louey credited her mother with witchcraft. And of course it was no magic but sheer inborn knowledge of men that made her say the very thing that would please him better than any praise of his famous deeds of war. He looked years younger now in talking to her; Louey could even see what he had been like as a boy, shy and proud, with the corners of his mouth upturned like a faun’s, and freakish eyebrows peaked slightly in the middle.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I was up at St Salvator’s, but little enough of the scholar. There was too much golf to be had on the links by the sea – I still think St Andrews the best links in Scotland – and the Cupar races, and the archery contests down at Butts Wynd—’

  ‘Which you won—’

  ‘Which I won, and well I mind the supper-party we had after it with fiddlers and pipers from the town!’

  There was more of the Scot in his voice than there had been since he entered – than there had been for years, Louey guessed. Oh, how had her mother done it, built up the picture of him complete so that he could live his boyhood over again for her benefit?

  And what picture was she building now for his? The picture of herself homesick all her life for the Scotland she had known only in early childhood. ‘It is true what the Jesuits say,’ she said; ‘given the first seven years of a life, it does not matter who has the rest. I was seven when I came south to England and I have never seen Scotland since, but I have seen it always – in those placid fields by the Thames (and I have not seen those since I was sixteen), and when I went as a bride to Heidelberg and one April morning got up so early that no one saw me steal out of the Castle in a man’s coat and riding-breeches, and galloped over that covered wooden bridge to the woods on the other side where the sun would strike earliest – I could not wait for it to reach the Castle ground, by then it might all be gone – and came to a hillside where the sharp grey rocks and young springing birches made me think I was home in Scotland; and now I have not seen Heidelberg for thirty years and our Castle there is a haunted ruin – “The bread is eaten and the company broke up.” Those days are gone,’ she cried,’ ‘they are gone and they cannot come back.’

  Louey, watching her, forgot even that Montrose was doing so. ‘This is my mother,’ she thought, ‘who is old (though he’ll never know it) and was young, a girl riding through the woods on an April morning. And these things are still there,’ she thought, seeing them reflected in her mother’s great eyes as they were when Louey herself was not born nor thought of – that incredible condition of human affairs!

  Montrose was thinking there could never have been a woman like this but one, and that her own grandmother. He had sat in the house of Mary Queen of Scots in St Andrews and looked out on the bright garden that she had made within its grey stone walls, and a thousand times he had passed the thorn tree she had planted in the courtyard of St Mary’s College, a tiny sapling now grown to a tall tree showering its white blossom above his head in the stormy winds of May, and often he had wondered what that queen had been like.

  Now he thought he knew.

  ‘They still speak of Queen Mary at St Andrews,’ he told her. ‘Has it ever been said that Your Majesty resembles her?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she answered carelessly. ‘The portraits of her are bad – old-fashioned and wooden – and my father, I believe, never saw his mother, certainly he never spoke of her. For the rest, who cares to compare one old woman with another, dead more than half a century ago? Except myself – for I think I must have inherited something of her spirit that so wished to be a man, “to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields or to walk upon the causeway with a knapsack, a Glasgow buckler and a broad-sword.” But what a fool I am to talk so, sitting tamely here, with all these great girls round me!’

  Since their poverty and rank had prevented their marrying, she preferred not to think of them as of marriageable age, and the ‘great girls’, submitted to the schoolroom by that phrase, exchanged glances, Eliza of anger, Louey of rather desperate amusement.

  Louey made another haphazard dash into the conversation, not realizing that by her efforts to intrude her talk she lost the charm of its fresh sincerity. ‘All the great girls aren’t round you. What have you done with Sophie, Maman? Thrown her out of the sledge to the wolves?’

  There, she had done it, and it pleased her that she had made her mother pause in bewilderment, even some slight confusion. Her chance shot had evidently gone home to something the Queen did not wish to confess; there was a faint hesitation, an air of conscious guilt behind her airy reply.

  ‘To the wolves? Is that how you interpret the English lion? Sophie is skating with her cousin Charles whom we met on the ice, and I thought the exercise would do her good,’ she added in rather superfluous explanation.

  Louey at once felt unchivalrous, pulling her mother from her high status as goddess and a great adventurer to that of an impoverished widow and mother of an enormous family with match-making designs. And she had done herself no good; Montrose had not even turned his head towards her, only flicked a narrow glance in her direction which she feared desparingly was one of impatience at her interruption into the delightful flow of her mother’s talk.

  The interruption was brief, her mother had at once shaken off the tiresome reminder of maternity, led a fresh charge into the conversation and was galloping off the field. Certainly Montrose did not want to talk with Louey any more, did not want to talk himself, but only to sit and listen and watch.

  Elizabeth’s beauty, amazing as it was at her age, was the least of her charms, ft was her frankness, courage and gaiety that enchanted him, and a certain simple directness of thought that would make it possible to talk with her as straightforwardly as with a man, a very welcome change from the princesses he had met in other Courts.

  Already he had been pleased with that quality in her younger daughter, but in her it had been cruder, more abrupt, as she had just now shown in the untimely remark that annoyed her mother. But the Queen, with a spirit as unquench- ably young as her daughter’s, had a lifelong knowledge of the world and experience of men, and the complete easy certainty of her power over them that these had taught her.

  All this her daughter saw as plainly as himself, and ruefully resigned herself to push her stool a little further back behind her mother to where she could watch the firelight carve deep shadows on his still face.

  ‘It is no use,’ she thought, and gave up all hope that he would look at herself again, ‘she has “risen” on him, and like everyone else he can see no one else.’

  V

  Sophie had had the forethought to tell Carey to put their skates in the sleigh. Carey was Sophie’s maid-in-waiting, a pleasant rosy girl, daughter of an impoverished English lord. At the last minute the Queen had invited Carey too to jump into the sleigh, for it was a relief to see a girl about who was not a daughter. So that Sophie was well equipped with skates and chaperon when they met the new young English King skating with Lord Craven, the Queen’s oldest and most devoted friend.

  It was Lord Craven who had lent the sleigh, and earlier had given the horses, and now happened to be skating with the King on the broad canal that went all round the town, just where they were most likely to drive. Even a prosy little old gentleman, Sophie reflected (and Will Craven must be at least fifty) could
sometimes be very useful. Now he was talking to Carey, chaffing her in his humorous inconsequent fashion and encouraging her to prattle to him while King Charles’ long legs led Sophie further and further ahead of them.

  She did not much wish this at first, for it was the first time she had talked alone with him since the news of his father’s death, and she did not know whether she ought to talk in a different voice from that which she generally used (he himself did not sound different, but he looked it, he looked much older, or was that just his black clothes?). It was spoiling all the pleasure of skating with him.

  He said in a grave yet amused voice, ‘Don’t try, Cousin; even if you think of the right thing to say, I shan’t think of the right answer. There are no right things to be said about this,’ he added on a sudden savage note, and shot so far ahead on a few rapid strides that Sophie thought he must be intending to leave her, and pulled up short on her skates to wait for the others, her cheeks flaming at the rebuff.

  But he wheeled sharp round, sped back to her and close round her in a series of circles, said, ‘There! That is how it is done,’ as though he had been teaching her the manoeuvre, took her hand, telling her she would keep up better with him like that, and led her on over the ice at a pace that left her no breath to speak condolences nor time to think of them. A pair of skimming swallows in the eager air, that was all they were for the moment. His hand felt hard and strong through his glove and warm with exercise, his rather gawky young form was taller than anyone they passed, and moved with the muscular ease of a healthy young animal; she felt she would have been proud to be skating with him even if he were not the King of England.

  A weak gleam of sunshine had split the leaden sky, it painted the surface of the ice a dull copper and turned all the faces deep pink that came towards them, round Dutch faces smiling good-humouredly. ‘Look at all the Dutch cheeses stuck on top of bolsters,’ said Charles, and Sophie giggled at the comparison, could not stop giggling. The sharp air had caught her breath, so she said in excuse, they were going so fast, and where were the others? They were nowhere in sight. He told her they would let the others catch them up presently, but she must get warmed first; he could feel her hand was frozen even through their two gloves.