The Bride

by Margaret Irwin

  The Hague was the perfect place for flirtations. ‘I never lack a fool to laugh at,’ said Sophie’s mother; ‘as soon as one goes, another comes.’ Now Sophie was taking her share of these multitudinous admirers and finding it more intoxicating than amusing.

  Among all the visitors who had begun to show her how attractive she had grown was a young German prince, Ernest Augustus, who had seemed quite lost and homesick on his visit to this foreign city, since he was travelling for once without his elder brother, George William of Hanover, for the two of them went everywhere together, he assured Sophie, especially to Venice – ah the gay life in Venice! He could not mention Venice without giggling, it seemed it was not quite proper to mention it.

  Ernest Augustus, who possessed the boneless buoyancy of those beginning to be fat, danced with her as lightly as a bubble bouncing, and all the time his solemn sentimental eyes above his blandly smiling mouth looked admiringly at the brown curls that bobbed up and down on her bare shoulders as she danced opposite him in the set, and at the feathers that streeled out from the back of her head like those of some fluttering bird of paradise. He played the guitar with her too, showing off a pair of beautifully kept, plump white hands, He taught her tender German ditties and new airs from the Italian operas – but he did not propose. They never do,’ thought Sophie bitterly.

  He was not an eligible parti himself, a third son; moreover, he and his brother George were so fond of each other’s company and the gay life in Venice that they had promised each other to remain bachelors always, unless George’s Hanoverian subjects insisted on an heir, in which case George had said he would hand over Hanover and the tiresome obligation of matrimony together to Ernest – and that was the only, and unflattering chance in that quarter of an ‘establishment’ for Sophie.

  Elizabeth teased her daughter about it just as her own mother had teased herself. Was Sophie going to settle down as a German Hausfrau, as Sophia, Electress of Hanover, when she might be Sophia, Queen of Great Britain?

  Sophie took fright and abruptly broke off the lengthy correspondence that Ernest had started as soon as he had left The Hague, on the pretext of sending her some of Corbetti’s guitar music. She was not going to do anything to endanger her chances of the English throne, especially now that there was no doubt that King Charles’ followers had come to look on her, the least important of her family, as the most likely person to be their future Queen. They gave her unwanted presents to which she had to make an adequate return, out of Lord Craven’s purse. They paid her so many compliments that she began to keep a diary in which to catalogue them, for each was as carefully treasured as a pearl added to a necklace.

  Some day she would rewrite that diary as the story of her life, and she was determined it should be a story with a happy ending. What a heroine for romance she would prove, the Cinderella princess, youngest of a family of paupers, who became the Queen of England!

  That she was indeed the sole heroine of the story she had not a shadow of doubt; her young egoism centred the whole complicated structure of Charles’ hopes, Montrose’s plans for him and the Covenanters’ counter-plans and hatred of Montrose, into factions that were fighting either in her interests or in those of Amelia’s daughter, Agnes.

  She was in a nervous and excitable state. Then came a real shock; she heard that Lucy Walters had just given birth to a fine boy, that he had big dark eyes and was the squalling image of Charles in miniature, that Charles had acknowledged him as his son, promised Lucy a pension, and would have the boy christened James after his grandfather King James I of England and his young brother and heir the Duke of York. How could Charles thus endanger his legitimate heirs, whoever they might come to be, for the sake of his careless pleasures?

  And he was not nearly so friendly with her when those odious Commissioners were by; he had been careful to get her out of the Palace before they arrived, and she was sure he pretended to them that he liked Agnes better than her.

  This was what Sophie was thinking while poor Agnes envied her enjoyment as Sophie walked beside the young King on the light brittle shell-gravel brought from the seashore three miles away. Scrunch, scrunch went the shells underfoot while the birds shouted overhead in the morning sunlight, and they two were both silent, wondering how the other would begin.

  Charles guessed she had heard something and regarded her with a wary amusement, as though he would enjoy seeing how far he could tease her without getting scratched.

  ‘Will you walk with me to the lake?’ he asked, looking down at her with roguish eyes, and his tone suggested to her that he was having a bet with himself (or perhaps, horrid thought, with someone else!) as to whether she would or not.

  She would show him she could meet him on his own ground.

  ‘I’m sorry, Cousin,’ she said brightly, ‘but I should find it too painful in my condition.’

  ‘I had no knowledge of your condition. Is it interesting?’

  ‘To myself, very. I have a corn on my little toe.’ She swung round in a pirouette and dropped him a curtsey.

  ‘Ah, I can see how it has crippled you. You should swathe it in flannel as Ned Hyde does his gout. What a pair you’d make!’ He added, a touch more seriously, ‘Why avoid me? You can’t be pining for that German fellow, you weren’t really interested in him.’

  ‘One cannot be really interested in a third son, can one? unless one lives in a fairy-tale, and life these days, God knows, is no fairy-tale.’

  He laughed delightedly, ‘So that’s why you’ve given up answering his letters.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I make it my business to know what concerns me.’

  She began to pick the early tulip buds, regardless of their value and of the sticky juice from the stems that ran over her fingers; she said, fast and low, ‘Do I concern you? I thought Lucy Walters concerned you. She is very handsome and she has borne you a son and—’ she stopped, shocked at her own daring.

  ‘And you have been remiss in that last particular. We might see what could be done to remedy it. Would you like to?’

  Before his bold gaze her own fell; she blushed hotly, with rage she thought, but there was excitement in it and a strange new fear of him.

  Here was a girl worth loving, with the quick blood now warming and wakening to life at last. Strange to think she was but six months his junior and still a virgin (he would not be a girl for much!). Her jealousy, her curiosity, showed how ripe she was for him.

  ‘Would you not like to?’ he repeated, his head bent so that now his eyes were level with her own.

  ‘I hate him, I hate him!’ she told herself and struggled for words. Out they came, squeaky, gawky, ridiculous, how she hated him for that! ‘You’ve no need of me in that respect, Cousin. You had best return to your handsome Lucy.’

  He took her hand and said, ‘You do not know how pretty you are looking. You are far handsomer than Lucy Walters.’

  There was no one in sight; the cherry trees, already spangled with rosily-white blossom, shut them off from the Palace windows. His face came down towards her, shutting out the sun. If she let him have his way she would be no more than the slack-lipped women who let him have his way and then saw him go his way.

  She jerked back her head, tore away her hand and cried in a harsh strained voice, ‘That indeed is a compliment, to compare me with your mistress! Your Majesty does me too much honour!’

  ‘It was rather a lame proposal,’ he admitted. ‘But what do you expect when the lady too is lame, of a corn on her toe? How should I propose to you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said miserably. She must show how she should be treated – it was that that mattered, her whole future life, not any mere momentary question of feelings; she clutched at her memory of Eliza’s words: ‘ “It is not thus,” ’ she said, ‘ “that the marriages of great princes are arranged.” ’

  ‘In fact, you don’t trust me. “Infirm of purpose”, is that it?’

  She replied with dignity, ‘I w
ish I could be as sure of your firmness of purpose as of your friends who are seeking their own fortune in my service.’

  ‘Whom do you mean?’

  It was a slip to have said ‘my’ service, to Charles of all people; her ears went pink, but she was determined to brazen it out.

  ‘Of the Marquis of Montrose.’

  ‘He – seek his own fortune – in your service?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Sophie, now more composedly. ‘I look on him as the best of my servants. You do not imagine that he supports the faction to make Agnes your Queen, as do his enemies the Covenanters?’

  ‘And do you imagine he is seeking his own fortune?’

  ‘What else should he seek? We are past the days when knights went about the world merely to rescue distressed damsels and forlorn kings without a thought of their own profit.’

  An odd little silence fell into the air. It hung there in the sunshine among the clear colours of the spring flowers, like an invisible and alien presence.

  The silence grew, it spread between them, a whole world stretched between them. Even Sophie felt that hush fall on her brisk and confident mind and wondered if she had shocked him by referring, even so indirectly, to the possibility of their marriage.

  ‘Is it shocking to face the facts?’ she said aloud.

  ‘By no means,’ he answered dryly, ‘if you are sure it is the facts you are facing. But you can’t see other people if you look only in the glass at your own face. You can never have seen Montrose.’

  ‘I cannot abide parables,’ said Sophie furiously, grinding her foot into the little shells sprinkled on the path, scattering the fragments here and there. That this young libertine should presume to read her a moral lecture was not to be borne.

  But it did not have to be borne, for Charles was leaving her. He bowed very low, with mockingly exaggerated respect, and said something – nothing – what was it? ‘I am sorry to have offended you, Cousin,’ that was all it could have been.

  She saw him straighten that tall back of his and stalk away, a boy’s long figure, thin and stiff and black in his mourning-clothes among the fruit blossom frothing like foam in the bright sunshine; and as she saw him go away, not to the gates to ride back to The Hague to speak to her mother as she had half hoped, but up the terrace into the Palace, she had an absurd, miserable feeling that it was indeed her whole future life that she saw marching away from her up through the cherry trees into the Palace, that she had lost it as irretrievably as those momentary feelings that she had just now sacrificed for its sake.

  XI

  ‘Women,’ said Charles to himself as he went up the steps between the silly placid statues all curling themselves into affected positions – ‘it doesn’t matter whether it’s the virgin cat Sophie or the strumpet Lucy, they are all playing their own game, seeing what they can get out of you, and they’ve not even the wit to see that anybody else can be different.’

  It hit him the harder because he himself had begun to think that nobody else could really be different, that if men showed loyalty it was because they thought his side had the best chance to win in the long run. But he had not thought so when he had seen and talked with Montrose.

  At least he was that much superior to Sophie; he might be a rake and get drunk too often, and make his mother cry over his faults, and know that they would have disgusted his father, but at any rate he had been able to see what Montrose was like, and Sophie had not.

  The very fact that this did not affect him directly, opened the gates to his anger by lifting it away from just another petty quarrel. He had had personal reasons enough for irritation and disillusion – his mother nagging at him, women making demands on him, Lucy losing her shape and her looks, growing peevish and exacting, teasing him into binding his bonds to her all the closer, when he had hoped to avoid forging them altogether.

  He was suffering a physical revulsion from her big olive-smooth breasts and stupid reproachful brown eyes (though God knows she had little enough to reproach him with!) when Sophie’s contrasting freshness and bright wits had begun to attract him – but it made no odds, you could turn to a dozen women one after the other and find them all alike in their hearts, however stupid or clever their minds, and their bodies were the only thing about them worth considering.

  ‘So that’s ended it,’ he said to himself as he went into the Palace, ‘I’ve done with women.’ But he knew that he hadn’t – that he never would have done. He saw himself leading troops from Ireland with Rupert, fighting by the side of Montrose, freed of all feminine entanglements, feminine tyranny. And he knew that vision to be not even a hope, but only a wish, and one that he would never win.

  Even now, going out of the sunlight into the cold draughty noisy halls where workmen hammered and called to each other and passed in and out in ceaseless hoarse pursuit of some other workman or their tools, even now he was going at the arrangement of a woman, and the woman he disliked most in the world, the Dowager Princess Amelia, to attend an informal conference of the Commissioners together with the Moderate Covenanters and some of his own Council.

  It is true that her son, his friend William, favoured the notion and would be present, but that made him none the better pleased that he had agreed to it. William was the best of good fellows, but he was damned if he’d have his affairs managed by the female Oranges. Only this moment he had planned an overt act of rebellion, a walk to the lake with Sophie in full view of the Palace windows, which would have shown these religious meddlers and their hostess Amelia and her dumpling of a daughter exactly how much attention he meant to pay to their combined matrimonial schemes for him. It would have kept the Commissioners waiting too, and only by such unkingly bad manners could he show them what he thought of theirs.

  But Sophie would not walk with him, and here he was walking through these empty echoing rooms instead with his hostess, being just as polite as ever to that hard-faced officious thruster (‘if she could only know how I long to wring her neck!’), and as polite now to the Brethren who were already waiting for him in the Chinese room, although, owing to his tiff with Sophie, he had come there sooner than had been expected.

  No doubt they had hoped for an earlier and private consultation with the Moderates, for there was Lauderdale goggling in a corner at Baillie, whose friend and patron he was, and the minister pursing up his precious lips like a cat that’s been lapping cream but too well-bred to show appreciation. The Duke of Hamilton, too, was being very affable to Lord Cassillis (there was no doubt these Moderates would soon manage to make their peace with Argyll), and Charles observed that he seemed ill at ease with Hyde after the somewhat short-winded entry of the Chancellor, who had found a two-mile ride a by no means pleasant preliminary to this informal conference.

  The Dowager left them, the conference began, but the Commissioners declared that before they could submit Argyll’s proposals to the King he must instantly banish all persons from his Court who had been excommunicated by the Covenant, especially James Graham, sometime Earl of Montrose.

  Charles had been prepared for this by Hyde and had his answer ready.

  ‘I will hear the whole of your conditions before I consider any part of them,’ he said.

  They consulted together in whispers, then tried again to press their demand for Montrose’s banishment from the Court, and this time for that of his chaplain, Wishart, also – a still more directly personal attack, since the King had been to hear him preach last Sunday.

  Charles only repeated his former words; he would hear the whole before he would answer any part.

  There was a little more whispering, and then Mr Robert Baillie, the principal of the two ministers and reader of the address, announced in his majestic preacher’s voice that Charles should be acknowledged their true and lawful King ‘upon condition of his good behaviour and strict observation of the Covenant and his entertaining no other persons about him but such as were godly men and faithful to that obligation.’

  There was a rustle of indigna
tion, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer pointed out that this was scarcely the way in which to address their King.

  But the Earl of Cassillis, speaking on behalf of the Kingdom and Parliament of Scotland, in a voice as harsh as Baillie’s had been unctuous, declared that, despite the Proclamation, Charles was not to be King there at all until he had first signed the Covenant and promised to enforce it on all his subjects in England and Ireland as well as Scotland, ‘to submit himself to the Kirk’s censure and renounce the sins of his father’s house and the iniquity of his mother’.

  At this staggering conclusion there started an outcry from the King’s Council which the King checked himself, though his face had gone a dark and painful red.

  ‘It comes to this,’ he said at last slowly, ‘I have and shall have no intention of altering the laws of Scotland – yet the Scots wish me to alter the laws of both the other kingdoms that I should rule.’

  He looked at Hyde, who took up the cudgels, rising to his infirm feet with an air as sturdy and tenacious as a bulldog’s.

  ‘Is His Majesty right even to say “the Scots”?’ he demanded. ‘He is not, for you gentlemen have a Government that is neither legal nor representative, one that is entirely under the domination of the Chief Elder of the Kirk, the Marquis of Argyll – a Government from which he has excluded more than four-fifths of your nobility and gentry and allowed them no jot nor tittle of a share in it – no, not even to these two noblemen present, the Duke of Hamilton and the Earl of Lauderdale. While as for the Marquis of Montrose, to give him his proper title, which you deny him, who served the late King better than any other in your country, he has been sentenced to death for that service by your Government.’

  He pulled himself up sharply, aware that his anger had made him say more than he had intended. But before he could retreat from or even qualify his rashness in his usual judicial manner, he was answered by such a storm of protest from all the Scots present as made the scene more like one of those Parliamentary riots of his youth, which he had such good reason to remember, than the council-chamber of a king.