Montrose had to concede that. And there could be no doubt of Charles’ purpose now. Charles himself could not believe that he had ever doubted it. His father’s last letter before his death came into his mind: ‘Whatever you promise, keep. Do not think anything in this world worth obtaining by foul or unjust means.’
Whatever foul or unjust means he might have to use hereafter against his enemies, he would keep his promise to Montrose.
‘But what shall I do?’ the young man repeated, and his tone was that of a lieutenant asking his superior officer his marching orders.
‘Join your cousin in Ireland, sir.’ That would be the best way to keep him out of mischief both political and personal, but Montrose naturally did not advance that among his reasons. ‘Your presence there will bind together all the contrary parties. And when you have raised your troops you and Prince Rupert can sail with them in his ships to Scotland when I have made my country securely yours – a country ready heart and soul to follow you and the Prince and myself down into England against the King’s murderers.’
It was done with some art. ‘You and the Prince and myself’ – Charles to be one of that trilogy, to join Rupert in Ireland and then Montrose in Scotland and fight by their side! If he had heard those words four years ago he could not have believed them, so delirious would he have been with joy and pride. And it was the same now – but no, it was not quite the same.
There were more things in his life to enjoy than there had been four years ago. The longing for danger and hard campaigning, and the chance to prove himself a man beside the two men he most admired, had now to compete with the freedom of rollicking company and drink and pretty, laughing, easy-going women. He could give up these latter pleasures on the instant if need be, but they had already blunted the edges of that earlier sense of rapture. He knew it; and Montrose, looking at him, knew it too.
VII
Sophie found Etta in her own little kitchen, her fair head bent lovingly over a tray of pink bonbons shaped like hearts and flat Tudor roses, yellow ones like crowns, and green ones like clover leaves.
‘All for me!’ exclaimed Sophie. ‘Don’t shake your head. You always make your sweets for me.’
‘You always eat most of them. But you say you have just been guzzling hot cakes.’
‘After that miserable dinner and that run on the ice I could eat the whole trayful.’
She seemed in a fair way to do so, and with some reason, since the household funds were depressingly low at the moment; for all the horrified sympathy of the Dutch citizens, the death of the English King had not increased their tradesmen’s hopes that his sister would ever be able to pay her butchers’ and grocers’ bills. ‘Our meals might be the famous feasts of Cleopatra – plenty of pearls and diamonds but nothing else to eat,’ Sophie grumbled, ‘and now even they are gone, the best of them, to feed Rupert’s sailors instead of us!’
She rattled out her adventures, feeling twice as gay and successful as she had done even at the outset, and almost forgetting that annoying return journey à trois.
Etta was always ready to be impressed, particularly by Sophie, the baby of the family, who had delighted them all with her childish high spirits and precocious wits when at nine years old she left the care of her severe old governesses and came to live with the family for good. ‘Even the Queen took pleasure in me,’ Sophie herself had noticed, and recorded later with pride. That ‘even’ was a slap at her un-maternal mother, but it was also a record of her achievement. However deeply Sophie disapproved of her mother, to please her was the highest criterion, a difficult and often a dangerous game, for you never knew whether the Queen might order you out of the room for a pert brat, or break into delicious laughter and call you her rival Majesty, the Queen of monkeys.
But it was easy to amuse Louey, to sharpen her wits on Eliza, to be petted and admired by Etta, who was more simple than her sisters and far more maternal than her mother, had always loved to dress dolls for Sophie in her childhood (in fact, Sophie had outgrown the dolls considerably quicker than her elder sister’s secret passion for them), and now was as eager to listen to her adventures as if nobody had ever admired her own gentle loveliness. She was thrilled to hear of the impromptu skating- party, delightfully certain that it was entirely due to Sophie’s attractions.
‘He took you quite away from Carey and Craven to talk to you all alone! Sophie, is he in love with you?’
Sophie answered airily, ‘Oh, as to that, I believe he is in love with any pretty girl he happens to be with – and I am pretty now, aren’t I, Etta?’ she added with a sudden drop into earnest anxiety that quite destroyed her effect as the woman of the world.
Etta’s reassurance left no possible doubt on this point.
‘You are, my darling, and what is more, you love life so much you make one glad to be alive.’
‘Oh, Etta!’ Sophie breathed in ecstasy, ‘you have always been pretty, you cannot guess what it is like to learn suddenly that one is. I’ll never forget my eighth birthday, how miserable I was because some English visitors were admiring poor little Gustavus, “such a beautiful child”, and then said, “It is a pity the girl is not more like him, she is too scraggy and ugly – by the way, I hope she doesn’t speak English!” “Doesn’t speak English” – could anyone be so stupid as to think that because I had been talking French and German I shouldn’t know my own mother-tongue? How I envied Gustavus, poor angel! But then you see he died the next year, and I was alive, and came among you all here and saw such crowds of people and all sorts of different life going on – so I have the best of it after all.’
Etta’s heart was torn with pity and longing when she thought of Gustavus, the unlucky thirteenth child, christened in honour of Gustavus Adolphus and his ill-fated campaign in company with their father which had cost them both their lives – had cost little Gustavus his life too in all probability, since her mother’s anxiety had made her very ill for the first time in her life at the birth of this her last child. He had always been wretchedly delicate, but Etta felt that if she had only been older and had had the charge of him he might not perhaps have died in great suffering before he was nine years old,
Sophie felt her sister’s silence uncomfortable; she knew she had sounded heartless, and it exasperated her, for she had not felt heartless at all; she could never bear to think of Gustavus’ illness and death – it would wake her even now sometimes in the middle of the night in a cold sweat of terror lest she, who had never known what it was to have an ache or pain, might suddenly find herself ill and dying. She had only spoken with common sense and logic such as Monsieur Descartes himself would have commended. The plain fact was that it was better to be alive than dead, and so she had the better of it.
She twirled away from Etta hopping and clapping her hands to warm her toes and fingers, singing defiantly,
‘ “So I will dance and I will sing,
For sure it is the very best thing
To drive the plague away – away—
To drive the plague away,” ’
then seized Etta’s recipe book, pulled out a blank page, wrote with a flourish, ‘Sophia, Queen of Great Britain’, but would not show it to Etta, then remembered that it was as unlucky to do that as to wear your wedding-dress before you were married, and crumpled it up and tossed it into the fire as Eliza and Louey came into the kitchen.
She at once asked them about Montrose. Louey did not answer, and Eliza said, ‘He did not speak much.’
‘He did not have much chance to,’ said Louey.
Sophie was scanning them both with the critical eye of the younger sister. How unpractical they both were! Why did they never contrive to look their best when anybody important or interesting came to the house? Eliza for all her beauty had no animation, was distraite as usual; Louey, on the other hand, looked so vivid that even her silence shone, but her hair was more untidy than Sophie’s after all her driving and skating.
Etta in innocent admiration told of Sophie’s triump
hs on the ice with the young King, but Eliza was very disapproving; what had Craven and Carey been about to allow it?
‘They could not keep up with us, that is all, and if our old True Towser didn’t think it mattered, who should? You know everything is different on the ice – it is a law to itself.’
‘I am not thinking only of appearances, though that is bad enough. But it is better for you not to talk too freely with King Charles.’
‘But supposing he should want to marry me?’ faltered Sophie. ‘His Court think it probable, that’s plain, for they have all been trying to curry favour with me. I am the right age for him, and there is no Protestant princess of superior or indeed equal birth.’
‘Is that how he’s been wooing you?’ asked Louey casually as she ate a sweet.
‘Of course not,’ Sophie flushed indignantly. ‘But at least I need not fear a rival in his Catholic cousin, La Grande Mademoiselle. He went out of his way to assure me that her nose is enormous.’
‘It’s not as big as her fortune,’ murmured Louey.
Sophie rushed on in her anxiety to prove her claim to that prospective title she had scrawled and now, thank Heaven, safely burnt. ‘He said I amused him better than any actress and he wished I would come with him to England.’
Eliza gasped in indignation.‘That is not the way the marriages of great princes are arranged.’
How detestable elder sisters were, particularly when they echoed one’s own misgivings! Eliza now reminded Sophie that she herself had complained of the Dowager Princess Amelia’s ‘plots’ against her reputation, encouraging her own son Prince William to flirt with her so that Charles should think lightly of her – and at this Louey swept in with a burst of laughter that threatened to blow the whole heated discussion up the chimney.
But Sophie was as much annoyed by the laxity of one of her elders as by the strictness of the other. ‘You of all people shouldn’t laugh. Just look at the things Amelia says of you!’
‘I can’t very well, as I’m naturally the last person to hear them. What does it matter?’
‘Mud sticks,’ said Sophie sombrely, her pretty face suddenly gone heavy.
‘Only to those who stick in the mud. Climb out of it and leave that fat envious old woman to wallow in it.’
But Sophie, determined on being taken seriously, assured her that ‘good old faithful Fritz’ had himself warned her of Amelia’s plot.
‘Faithful Fritz? Is that the busy officious German footman Carl bequeathed to us when he went to Heidelberg? – a worse legacy even than his sour wine!’
Sophie flared up. Her eldest brother was her favourite, for her rather tart wit suited his own vein of cynicism (‘Timon the Cynic’ had always been Carl’s nickname). ‘You are never fair to him just because you adore Rupert, but they can’t all be knights-errant – and Rupert has never given Mother a moment’s peace.’
‘Nor has Carl ever given her a moment’s pride.’
Louey was not as unkind as she seemed, for by heading the argument away from Charles she was trying to prevent Eliza from saying something that she had been brooding over for the last few minutes, but she was not successful, for Eliza after two broken starts (‘I think you ought to know’ – ‘I am afraid I must tell you—’) now informed Sophie that Charles was not only a dissolute but an imprudent young man whose mistress, Lucy Walters, would shortly bear him a child and, if it were a boy, was determined to lay claim to his legitimacy.
Lucy was of good family, her father a Welsh gentleman of Castle Rock in Pembrokeshire; she was very beautiful in her brown, rather bucolic way, and not a day older than Charles himself – there was nothing so very improbable in the idea that he might have married her secretly. He had flatly denied it, but that might only mean that he had tired of her.
‘And that he has no more honesty than I ever dreamed of his possessing!’ cried Sophie in a strained angry voice.
‘Open your mouth,’ said Louey, swinging round on her, and crammed a sweet into it, then another and another. ‘Don’t talk about Charles,’ she said, ‘you don’t know him yet, we none of us do. You had much better eat.’ She wanted to cry, to hit Eliza, to hug Sophie. It was a shame to spoil things like this for the pretty, eager child. Even her prettiness was spoiled now she was looking such a little shrew.
If only she could marry Charles at once before that look became a habit with her. But might he not spoil things for her himself? He might, but at least that would be their own affair, and they were both so young and gay and charming that they should stand a better chance together than most royal couples. So don’t look like that, Sophie, smooth your face out and smile, for that is your best, your only weapon.
‘Love to be loved whilst thou are lovely,
Lest thou love too late.’
Could she tell her that now? No she couldn’t; she could only say to Etta, ‘If I cooked like you, I’d never paint.’
‘Humbug!’ sighed Etta on a long gasp of relief. ‘Your pictures will last for centuries.’
‘And what’s the point of that – three minutes or three centuries at the end of time, when they’re all gone together? Our cook is the only true artist,she isn’t always looking at the future like a looking-glass, not even till next morning. Take one of these, Eliza, and tell me I’m right.’
‘You are not. Art must be directed to a purpose.’
‘A whole school of purposes if you wish. You had better take one before I take them all.’
She collected a saucerful, whistling a dance tune as she did so; her nerves felt as taut and sensitive as a violin string. What would happen to Sophie, to Charles, to the man who was even now talking with him in that room above them? However bold and successful a soldier he was, everything for him must depend ultimately on his King’s character and strength to stand by him.
And here they all stood about and ate sweets and talked of scandals and flirtations and a bastard baby as though they were the most important things in the world.
She went to her room and shut the door and knew that she need not see any of her family again that evening.
‘Now I have entered my kingdom,’ said Louey; ‘freedom and power are in my hands, there is no one to dispute them.’
A single deep-mouthed stroke answered her out of the dark stillness beyond her room. ‘Yes, there is time,’ she added, ‘but even time can speak only from outside the kingdom.’
One o’clock, and for hours now she had been enjoying the fierce deep pleasure of reading alone in her room, knowing the rest of the household to be asleep. As long as the night lasted, then only the length of the candles, and they were long, and the amount of logs for the fire, and there were still several, could set a term to that pleasure. She had got rid of her maid-in-waiting, Moll Butler, an Irish girl, a relative of Lord Ormonde’s, as soon as Moll had helped her out of her stiff whale-bone bodice and into an old loose gown lined with soft white fur, and her feet into fur-lined scarlet velvet boots.
What an orgy of comfort it was to get into such clothes after enduring those extraneous bones! Their points always seemed to find out the tender spots in her own, they were far worse for thin people than for fat, she was sure of it, and was guilty of removing first one and then another until her mother’s roving eye would rest on her in abstract speculation while she asked heaven how it was that Louey’s clothes always looked as though they were just falling off her?
And if Louey complained of instruments of torture, then girls nowadays had no control, they did not know how well off they were, they should have lived as she had done at the Court of King James I of England and seen her mother Anne of Denmark so pinched in and barricaded behind bone and buckram between the monstrous hoops of her farthingale and the bristling fortress of her ruff that she had looked like a thing carved out of painted wood – and Elizabeth rocked with laughter at the memory, quite careless how she destroyed her example by mocking it.
Eliza, devoted to the pious memory of their German grandmother, the Dowager Electress Ju
liana, whose long yellow face they had all known, framed in her widow’s weeds, could not bear to acknowledge that they had had also this unknown bedizened grandmother glittering with enormous jewels, who had danced and acted in public and blacked her face and arms to take the part of a Negress and caused scandals with handsome young men and got drunk like her husband and everybody else at his gorgeous, disgraceful Court. They had never seen her, thank heaven, and it was better never to speak of her, said Eliza; but Louey said, ‘It was she brought the best looks into the family, you can thank her for that, for if our long noses came from the Stuarts, then all the great mournful eyes that go rolling round the family come out of her portrait above her cast-iron ruff.’
It was no doubt her training as a portrait-painter that made her like to think of the unknown people, their eyes and noses, their passions and tricks of speech and twists of mind, now all dead and gone, that yet lived on in themselves.
Now that she had finished reading she roamed up and down the room and watched her shadow leap up from the red pool of firelight and shoot across the wall, a black shape now tall as a goddess, now shrinking to a crouched witch; went over to the corner cupboard for another of Etta’s sweets, tasting in it the delicious flavour of a stolen feast snatched when everyone else is asleep; pulled back a curtain, then a shutter, then a window opening on to an ice-still, ice-bright sky, spangled with stars that winked and popped like fireworks.
To breathe this air made one gasp, to watch those stars crackling with inhuman energy made one proud to be alive. They had no power over our fate, so her mother always said, for so her tutor, Lord Harington, long ago in England had taught her; the art of astrology was all nonsense, and one’s fate was one’s own affair.
From this upper window she could see the black mass of the roofs of the Binnenhof rising here and there into towers above the trees of the Voorhout. No light came up from it: the Palace, like this house, was dark and silent, the people in it all asleep – her cousin Charles, who should now be in his own palace of Whitehall far away in London, and his sensitive little sister Mary, who had come from there to marry young William of Orange. Were their fates indeed all their own affair – or had her mother’s tutor been wrong, and their future written long ago in the strange movements of the unseeing stars? And her own? And that new visitor’s, the Marquis of Montrose?
The Bride Page 14