So they sped on past a cluster of men who were playing at curling, and a line of little boys who had made a slide that glowed in the opaque sunlight; they were shooting down it one after the other with arms outstretched, a frieze of goblin figures on a streak of fire. Stout matrons were being pushed along on runner-chairs by sweating and panting men; the bunched-up figures of women were sitting on the banks of the canal while their cavaliers put on their skates; men with skates to hire were bawling their wares and prices, so were the sellers of hot cakes and hot drinks in front of their burning braziers.
Sophie was warm now, but would be warmer still with some of these inside her, Charles told her, and this would give her Watchdog Will (one of her mother’s names for Craven) a chance to catch up with them – if he wished to, ‘but it’s my opinion he’s counting your pretty Mother Carey’s chickens before they’re hatched,’ he added shamelessly.
Sophie wondered if there were not something rather indecent in this remark; she had been told that her cousin was a wild lad and that she must not laugh at all he said. But it was difficult not to laugh for sheer pleasure in escaping from what seemed weeks and weeks of being cooped up indoors with cross elder sisters and a gloomy mother, in finding herself free to move like a bird through the sharp air, free to sit on the crisp frosted grass and eat hot buttery cake and drink warm wine that made her glow and tingle all down her throat and chest and stomach and right into the ends of her toes and fingers, free to talk all alone with a young man who, in spite of the tragedy that had lately made him so much more important, was looking at her with pleasure and amusement.
Too much amusement perhaps. Why was he smiling? She had a sudden panic lest the mulled wine had made the cold tip of her nose burn red, and tried to see if this were so by squinting down at it. There was no question about Charles’ amusement now. He burst into a roar of laughter and demanded to know why she was making those frightful faces. Whatever the colour of her nose, her cheeks had come up into line with it – that was some consolation for going crimson all over. Not for worlds would she have told him the true reason for her anxious squint.
‘Oh,’ she said airily. ‘I was just going to tell you that that was what old “Gargoyle” was like, – I mean Galen, my waiting- maid before Carey. She was so frightful that I used to hide from her for hours behind the bed-curtains.’
‘Was it so necessary to set dragons to guard you?’
‘I don’t know, but they did. I inherited my father’s governess, Madame de Pless, so you can guess how old she was. And she had two daughters still older than herself.’
‘Is it possible?’ observed Charles.
‘It is not possible, but it is true. They made faces at me in turn while I said the Catechism.’
‘To test your reverence for it?’
‘No, to save time. I had to get up at: seven o’clock and recite the Precepts of Pibrac to one or other of them every morning while she cleaned her teeth, which she did with a bit of rag – like this.’
Sophie demonstrated with a corner of her delicate lace handkerchief. She made gargling noises at the back of her throat, now suave and eagerly conversational, now indignant as a clucking hen, now sanctimonious as though she were intoning a psalm in the Calvinistic manner.
Charles was enchanted. Most pretty girls he knew, particularly those of high birth, thought all the time of being pretty, and would never dream of making themselves ugly for amusement.
‘You are as good a mimic as a monkey,’ he said; and she told him proudly, ‘I am the Elected Queen of all Her Majesty’s Monkeys. The French Ambassador appointed me that years ago. He gave me the sealed charter for it in front of a large company, pretending it was some grand new honour. He hoped to tease me into a rage, but he didn’t succeed at all. I laughed as much as any of them.’
Yes, it would not be easy to get the better of Sophie, and it was surprising how much prettier she had grown lately, softer and plumper; she could use those bright mocking eyes of hers now, and her lips looked as though they would like to be kissed as well as to laugh.
‘You are far too clever for a princess,’ he told her, ‘you should be an actress. They have actresses in France and I shall bring them into England when I go back. Will you come and act for me in England?’
He said it on a note of cousinly chaff, but his dark liquid eyes (the only good feature in that ugly face, Sophie had decided) were looking at her in a way that excited her deliriously.
‘I dare say I shall be glad of the offer,’ she said. ‘The youngest of twelve ought to work for a living. It’s true I have £40 a year of my own—’
‘No, Cousin! I never knew you were an heiress!’
‘Oh yes, I’m on an equality with your other first cousin, that tall girl your mother wants you to marry.’
‘La Grande Mademoiselle!’ he exclaimed. ‘You are on no equality with her, Sophie.’
‘She has more than £40 a year?’ asked Sophie demurely, who knew well that Mademoiselle was the richest heiress in France.
‘Yes, she has rather more than that. And in matters more essential you also fall short of her – by nearly a head in height, and by nearly an inch in the length of your nose.’
‘Is hers – so very big?’ she asked yearningly.
‘It is enormous.’
She drew a deep breath. There was nothing more of life she wished to ask. But yes there was, there was the Dowager Princess Amelia’s daughter Agnes, and though Agnes was negligible, her mother was a redoubtable old campaigner; she had climbed to her position over Great-Uncle Maurice’s dying body, for on his death-bed he had told his brother Henry to marry her. ‘What was Mother about to allow it?’ Sophie indignantly demanded of herself, for Amelia von Solms had been her mother’s maid-in-waiting. It could not be that the King of England would ever marry the daughter of a maid-in-waiting?
‘You like Prince William very much, don’t you?’ she asked suddenly.
‘I do, surprisingly so, seeing that I owe him even for this suit of mourning I’m wearing – a severe test for any friend, let alone a brother-in-law.’
‘And do you like his sisters – do you like Agnes?’ she continued more tentatively.
‘A good solid obedient girl,’ he said solemnly, ‘she would make an admirable wife to any man.’
She shot an agonized glance at him, caught his eye, and they both rocked to and fro in uproarious laughter. Sophie was ecstatically happy. So he did not like Mademoiselle; he could not like the pudding-faced Agnes; and there was no one else at all suitable for him to marry but herself.
Charles, seeing her glowing satisfaction, wondered if this were not going a bit faster than he had intended. Sophie’s rank and position as child of the Protestant champions of Europe made her a very desirable match for him in the eyes of most of his followers, for prestige would count as high now in the game as fortune. And if he had got to tie himself up with a wife already, he would rather have her than any. But he had not yet decided to commit himself. Finance was a safer subject than comparisons between cousins.
‘Who gave you your fortune, my pretty maid?’ he asked in a bantering tone that made it safe, he hoped, to pick up her hand, and a very pretty hand it was.
‘My godfathers and godmothers in my baptism,’ she replied; ‘that is, the States of Holland. They are Louey’s godfathers too, that is why she has that hideous second name, Hollandina, but they were kind enough to give me an income and not a name – in fact, nobody gave me a name. My eleven brothers and sisters had used up all in the family. I only got mine by chance – out of a hat.’
‘Were you drawn lots for, out of a hat? That ought to make you adventurous, Sophie.’
‘No,’ she answered, suddenly serious, ‘it ought to make me cautious. If nobody else looks after me, I must look after myself.’ She had noticed his change of subject and tone just now. Had she given herself away? She must show him she was not really such a fool.
But her resolution was not becoming. Sophie could look as ug
ly as she chose in the sacred cause of buffoonery and was only the more attractive, but she was not nearly so charming when she showed sound hard sense. Charles could see the pert angular fledgling again in her when she looked like that; he could also see in an odd glimpse of foresight how she would look when she was old, with nutcracker nose and grim, corroded mouth. The disconcerting vision passed in a flash; Sophie was merely looking rather sulky because she was afraid she would not have all the good things of life that a pretty girl expected as her right; she would be jolly again on another glass of this mulled wine.
He felt in his pockets to see how much money he had left on him and found he had none at all. Turning to his cousin with a pensive smile, he asked if she had any of that £40 on her now. But, as he had expected from his precocious experience of her sex, she had left her purse behind. They would have to ask for credit, and Heaven alone knew whose was the worst.
‘My mother has owed bills to all the tradesmen here for years,’ said Sophie.
‘Mine are newer, but I’d back their weight against yours any day,’ said Charles. The difficulty is to find anyone to back either of them.’
‘Heaven has heard you, Cousin. There is someone riding towards us. Is he one of your suite?’
‘No. Wears a plaid. He’s a Scot.’
‘Do Scots have money?’ inquired Sophie innocently.
‘Not often. I’m a Scot myself, remember.’
‘Just as much as I am, and no more. If my father was German, your mother is French.’
There was a determined note in her voice; she did not know why she wished to insist that she was as much of a Stuart as Charles. Perhaps because, as the youngest of twelve, it was necessary to insist on any point that showed her importance.
The horseman she had observed was riding along the bank towards them from the direction of the town; they could still get a glimpse of it in the distance, a neat little etching of towers and walls-surrounded by bare wintry woods, looking too remote and small in the flat grey light for real people to be moving about in it and doing things that might even now be affecting herself and Charles.
This man who had ridden out from that delicate background, a tall figure in a rough frieze cloak, came up to the bank, leaped from his horse, gave the bridle to one of the little boys who were hovering like flies round the brazier of hot cakes, strode up to King Charles with a stately swagger, and went down on one knee before him. He had broad shoulders, the long lean bowed legs of a cavalry man, a ruddy weatherbeaten face, light-coloured reckless eyes set rather near together and hard as pebbles under their white lashes, and the long scar of some old sword-cut, purple in this cold air, down the side of one shiny red cheek. He looked what he was, a soldier of fortune; and he sounded what he was, a Lowland Scot, in the two words he uttered before Charles recognized him.
‘Your Majesty—’ he began.
‘Hurry, by God!’ cried Charles. ‘Then is your General here?’
‘He arrived this afternoon, sir, and sought you at the Binnenhof. On finding you absent, he went to pay his respects to the Queen of Bohemia while I rode out to look for Your Majesty.’
‘He’s losing no time then!’ exclaimed Charles. Sophie noticed with interest the look of fear behind his excitement, though it was shot through with a certain schoolboy glee.‘Now the fat will be in the fire, especially Lauderdale’s fat!’ he said.
There was fire in his own eyes, usually so sleepy. Alarm, anger, in spite of these he could not check the look of pride and awakened courage which is a young man’s admiration.
Montrose must be a remarkable man if his mere name could transform her rather lethargic cousin like this. If she had gone back with her mother she would have seen him – but then she would not have been skating with Charles; it was a pity there were so many excitements in the world that you could not have one without missing another. She sighed greedily and looked at this rugged tawny Scot and wondered if that were what his master was like, a splendid figure of a man as he stood up now with that rough cloak swung across his shoulders, and his bold eyes scanning herself with curiosity and, she hoped, appreciation.
‘This is Major-General Sir John Hurry,’ King Charles told her.
‘Urré,’ murmured the General in involuntary correction and then tried to check himself, so that his audience, instead of grasping the true quality of his fine old Norman name, only imagined that he was suppressing a hiccup. He made a good recovery in kissing Sophie’s hand on being told that she was the youngest daughter of the Queen of Bohemia.
Charles asked one eager question after another. Why had Montrose come here in spite of his commands? What hope had he in Germany? And from that odd little fish, Queen Christina of Sweden?
‘The situation in Scotland, Your Majesty, holds bigger hopes than that,’ Hurry told him portentously.
‘The situation here,’ said Charles with equal solemnity, ‘is on the contrary without any hope, unless you can save it.’
The hard eyes of the Scot swivelled round on his King in astonished inquiry.
‘The Princess Sophia and myself,’ explained Charles, ‘have consumed four hot cakes and two cups of mulled wine and have not a farthing between us to pay for them. Will you then save the situation – and my face – by following our example first?’
And Hurry, while the warm drink and his pride glowed together in his stomach, thought, ‘Here am I paying for the King’s drinks!’ as yet innocently unaware how common that honour could be.
The two men had plunged into discussion that made Sophie feel a frivolous alien. Why was it that men talked so differently together from when they talked with a girl? She had as good a brain as any of her brothers, but neither of the men gave her any chance to show it.
Hurry was speaking of the chances in Scotland. Scots had insulted their kings in times past, called them ‘God’s silly vassals’ to their faces, rebelled and fought against them, occasionally murdered them; but never had they solemnly tried one for resisting rebellion and condemned him to death, then abolished the Monarchy for ever as an ‘unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous’ institution, as the English had just done.
Scotland’s answer to that had been the public Proclamation in Edinburgh of Charles II as King of Great Britain.
Hurry spoke of this with the elation of a gambler who has just witnessed some unexpected throw of the dice; his eyes sparkled with excitement and optimism, he evidently had some difficulty in restraining himself from telling Charles that the murder of his father had been the best stroke of luck that could have happened to him.
Argyll was actually sending emissaries to The Hague with offers of the Scottish crown – ‘Your Majesty has only to deal the cards and you will have the whole game in Scotland in your hands.’
Sophie was shocked. Scots and Englishmen always liked to talk of high affairs of state as a game, it was part of their schoolboy bravado, but surely in this case it showed a great lack of delicacy of feeling.
‘What does Montrose say to all this?’ Charles was asking.
‘He’ll hate Argyll to the death whatever happens,’ Hurry told him. ‘He owes Argyll a long score.’
‘All the more reason why Argyll should pay some of it cash down,’ replied Charles.
Hurry laughed loudly. ‘Lauderdale might even use Argyll’s wealth and influence to raise new armies for Montrose. Your Majesty’s well-known skill and finesse will discover how to humour all parties.’
(‘So he’s known for that already, is he?’ asked Sophie of herself. ‘Has he been humouring me?’)
‘Not easy to humour a man into fighting side by side with his former enemy,’ said Charles.
Hurry grinned in a way that made him look almost boyish. ‘It can be done, sir. Look at me. I fought with the Covenanters against Montrose, and many a knock he gave us. God, shall I ever forget how my cavalry and fat old Baillie’s 3,000 foot all but caught him and his handful of men when they were storming Dundee? The wild dance he led us through that foul night!’
/> Sophie could bear her silence no longer.
‘Why did you change over. Sir John?’ she asked in a chill little voice.
He was startled, for he had quite obviously forgotten the slight black figure sitting on the bank on the other side of King Charles. But he was pleased at the opportunity thus given him to state his case before his King.
‘Why, Your Highness,’ he told her in his bluff fashion, ‘I’m just a plain soldier of fortune, no more nor less, and it’s all I was brought up to be. The Urrés are gentle, but poor, and there was no money else to keep up our little place of Pitfichie in Aberdeenshire, so as soon as I was old enough my family sent me out to earn my keep in the German wars.’
Where this hearty ruffian had earned it in some far from reputable ways, Charles could swear, remembering the stories of loot and rape he had listened to so eagerly as a boy whenever he could play truant among the soldiers. But only a decorous comment would be suitable now.
‘They say Gustavus Adolphus only won his victories because half his Swedes were Scots,’ he said with his accustomed politeness, which Hurry accepted as no more than a statement of fact.
‘That is so, Your Majesty, and more thanks to those of the lower than the higher command. My superior officer was that scrubby twisted little bastard, Sandy Leslie’ (‘So he’s already forgotten again I’m here!’ thought Sophie) ‘and to hear him say every minute, “As Gustavus said to me”, you’d think he was blood-brother to the Swedish King. That was how he got his reputation as a great general at home when he brought us all back to Scotland a dozen years ago to fight for the independence of the Scottish Kirk.’
‘A dozen years ago’ Charles had seen his father start off with an army for Scotland when Charles himself was a little boy, wild to go too, cheering that jolly poet fellow Suckling as he rode past at the head of the troop he’d raised and put into white doublets and scarlet coats and huge feathers at his own expense – and then found there was no money to feed them!
The Bride Page 11