The Bride

by Margaret Irwin

  He looked at her bowed head and wished he had not hurt her.

  ‘Every word you say is true,’ he said. ‘What you are remembering against me from last night is true also. Will you remember it against me always? I did not ask you to forgive me for it, but I suppose I hoped it. Are you telling me I may not hope it?’

  She shook her head, but she still could not look at him. He was walking up and down the studio when he next spoke. ‘I have misjudged you more badly than any man had any right to do. In spite of that, I insist on your not misjudging me. You have got to believe this, do you hear? I did not want ever to love again, I told you I never could, and in telling you that, I have come to do so.’

  He walked to the end of the room and back, then stopped before her chair.

  ‘Well?’ he said in a low voice, and then, ‘Are you never going to look at me again?’

  She raised her head at last; her strange slanting eyes were smiling at him, though her mouth trembled. ‘I will try to believe that I persuaded rather than tricked you into loving me.’

  ‘Of all damnable sophistries!’ He sat on the table opposite her and took that pointed chin between his finger and thumb, tilting it towards him. ‘You exasperate me into loving you, that’s the truth of it. I can’t dispense with the pleasure of quarrelling with you.’

  He turned her chin this way and that. ‘I’ve been wanting to do this ever since I first saw it,’ he said reflectively, and his deep voice made her shiver with delight. ‘There was a line in a play I once saw:

  “ View well her face, and in that little round

  You may discern a world’s variety.” ’

  ‘I remember,’ she said quickly, ‘and the name of the play gives the best rhyme and the best reason to your refrain of “never loving more”; and it is this, “ ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore”.’

  He seized her by the shoulders and shook her hard, then caught her to him and kissed her, both laughing until they kissed again. They seemed suddenly to have known each other for years.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘have I your consent?’

  ‘Consent? When you have given me your marching orders?’

  ‘If I only could!’

  If only she were not a princess, first cousin to his King, he could have insisted on marriage now, and they would have had at least these few brief weeks together. But ‘it is not thus that the marriages of princes are arranged’, and no one would believe that the scandal of such a hasty match had any other reason than to avoid the still worse scandal of an illegitimate birth. And she would be left to face it alone.

  He did not speak his wish, and hoped she did not read it, for the deeper they went in love, the worse might be her fate.

  But she was following her own thoughts. ‘One thing I will mutiny for,’ she said. – ‘No, I’ll tell you later.’

  ‘Why not now?’

  But she was silent except for a deep sigh of peace, leaning against him as he sat on the edge of the table, her head on his shoulder. The downward curves of her face were curiously beautiful now that he could see them thus at rest; Leonardo would have painted her like this. Her body was limp with fatigue, yet he could feel the strength and vitality of those slender limbs; she made him think of the bluebells on the moor at home, harebells she would call them, the drooping delicate head and thread-like stem that seemed too fragile to survive a breeze, yet could rise and live again after the most savage storm had beaten them to the earth. This girl had her mother’s tireless spirit and physique, she was not like Magdalen.

  ‘It’s well she’s strong,’ he thought, and the fear of what she might suffer through him, the fear he had sworn he would never feel again on behalf of a woman, stood before him once again so sharp and clear that he pressed her face against his shoulder as if to prevent her seeing it also.

  With her eyes shut against his coat she felt the tenderness of that protective hand as poignant as the stab of a knife. ‘Oh, why can’t we stay safe for ever?’ she thought, and then ‘—but if we were safe, he would not be wanting to protect me.’

  She could feel his heart beating in strong steady strokes under her cheek. ‘Don’t think so hard,’ she said. ‘I can hear every word you don’t say.’

  ‘What do you hear?’

  ‘That you are afraid for me. You need not be. If I have nothing else to look back on all my life but this moment, it will make me glad to have lived.’

  ‘I thank God for your courage.’

  ‘No, it’s sheer sense. You cannot be bound, so let us not bind ourselves even by hope. We’ll give no hostages to fortune.’

  ‘Not yet certainly, if you speak of our children,’ he answered, smiling down at that sweet serious face that flashed instantly into laughter.

  ‘You are too quick,’ she complained. ‘I did not think you would have read Bacon.’

  ‘Are these, then, the grounds of your mutiny – that I am not to hope for you?’

  ‘As I promise not to hope for you. We know we love – is that so small a thing? No one and nothing -nothing - can take it from us.’

  She was clinging to him now, burrowing her face into his coat like a frightened child, all her instinctive action belying the high courage of her words.

  He soothed her head with his hand, stroking it again and again, without words, for there was nothing he could say.

  Time took on another perspective. Years did not count; they had passed as unnoticeably as the forgotten days in childhood. But this moment, a thing as light and transitory as a butterfly’s wing, blown towards them on the winds of chance among all the cross-currents of that violent and uncertain time, this moment between them now mercifully expanded as a bubble expands when it is blown – it became a world free of the outside world, where almost every country was tortured by civil wars, and this little town where they loved was a battlefield of opposing hates; a world free of time, of before and after, as long as life itself.

  XVIII

  They had gone to Rhenen for the summer; there was no point in staying on at The Hague, for Charles had gone to Breda, and with him Montrose, who had not needed Elizabeth’s passionate warnings ‘for God’s sake’ not to leave the King’s side or ‘Your enemies will work all to the ruin of yourself and your friends.’

  Queen Henrietta Maria was sending her Majordomo, the jolly Lord Jermyn, to Holland, and that boded no good; whatever the pretext of his visit, Elizabeth, speaking out of her knowledge and suspicion of her sister-in-law, was certain that its real purpose was to get in touch with Lauderdale and the Commissioners and work together against ‘wicked Jamie Graham’, though she tried hard to assure herself as well as him that this could ‘lead to nothing, as the King is constant to his principles’.

  What Montrose thought of that he did not say, nor did Louey; but Sophie thought that Charles, like the rest of men, would be ‘to one thing constant never’. She spoke of her sister’s betrothal to Montrose as his reward for his service to the King in Scotland, ‘and if it succeeds and he is made Viceroy of Scotland again it will not, I suppose, be too much for him to ask, since he will have done it through his courage and ability alone’.

  This patronizing tone from her younger sister had small power now to annoy Louey; she was too anxious. And she knew how anxious poor Sophie was too for her own concerns, and that pride of rank was only one small extra piece of armour for her to buckle on in her struggle with fortune.

  Louey, whose handsome young cousin William of Brandenburg had waited four years for her, since she was fifteen, until in sheer desperation he had married the Dowager Amelia’s eldest daughter instead, knew well that in one’s teens it is harder to wait than to do anything else. To give up is easier. Sophie was showing strong signs of giving up, or at least of securing another string to her bow.

  Her eldest brother, Carl, now installed at last as the Elector Palatine as his father had been, had invited his youngest and favourite sister to come and stay with him. The country of Germany had been a shambles during the Thirty Years’ War an
d was now a wreck; the beautiful old castle of rose-red brick at Heidelberg, that had been their father’s and mother’s happy and peaceful home for the first few years of their married life, was mostly in ruins. Carl was losing no time in getting it repaired, and hoped that part of it at any rate would be habitable by the time Sophie came to him.

  Sophie hoped so too, for at present Carl was living down in a square in the town below the Castle, at a private citizen’s house called Commissariat House, which had a low sound; there was certainly not much point in being royal these days.

  But she firmly intended to visit him for all that her mother, who had never yet tried to manage any of her daughter’s matrimonial affairs, begged her to consider seriously how she would be throwing away her chances with Charles. Sophie was in that mood of piqued pride that made her long to throw them away, if only they were sufficiently solid for the rejection to be noticed.

  She would talk of nothing but Heidelberg and Carl, and hotly defended his demand for the gilded leather hangings that used to be in their father’s palace and now covered the many cracks in the walls of the Wassenaar Hof. Of course Carl ought to have all the former belongings he could collect, to patch up his residence and give it some semblance of royalty again; she would not admit in the many arguments with her sisters that it was hard on their mother to find herself poorer instead of better off through her son’s inheritance to the property for which she had struggled on his behalf for nearly thirty years.

  Elizabeth was indeed so much the poorer that she had once again to set about selling her hunters, and this at Rhenen, where the hares and deer in the woods above the house, and the springy heathy soil, gave such good sport, was agonizing. A bay gelding was left for Louey, since the girl was the only one of her daughters who loved riding as much as herself, and it was a shame to deprive her of it at her age.

  Elizabeth was determined not to let herself sag under the lack of her wonted riding as she had done before. Hard walking, sawing wood, and shooting at a butt with the long-bow were now her chief exercises, and she urged ‘Jamie Graham’ to pay them a visit and see if his archery had stood the test of time since the days when he had been champion at St Andrew’s. But she knew that he could not come, indeed she urged him not to leave the King, ‘for without question there is nothing that will be omitted to ruin you and your friends, and so the King at last’.

  And always she begged him to believe that she was ‘ever your most constant affectionate friend, Elizabeth’.

  There were many visitors at Rhenen. Lord Craven was there on and off through the summer, helping with the expenses as usual, but allowing himself an occasional private treat. He found a superb floridly carved chimney-piece in the little town when out walking there one day with Louey, and for once did not present it to her mother, but had it packed up at great expense and labour and sent to his old manor-house of Stokesay near the Shropshire village that bore his name, Craven Arms. An enchanting place it sounded to Louey, in its deep wooded valley with the Tudor rooms at one end perching like nests on top of the massive Norman structure. But he had not seen it since he had lived there as a boy with his mother.

  ‘Are you not homesick for it?’ she demanded, and he replied, ‘Sometimes. But what would “home” be if you were none of you there with me?’

  Would he then never marry and have children of his own to inherit his great wealth and the beautiful houses that he let to strangers? She did not ask him, for she knew he would not, and that as long as her mother was in exile, so would he be.

  At least his love brought him more happiness than poor Eliza, who had lost all spirit since she had heard of Descartes’ death from his pneumonia. It was all the fault of the young Queen Christina of Sweden, Eliza said. ‘He has been killed by the perverse vanity of that woman who can do nothing like anyone else and so must have him drive to her palace at five o’clock in the morning to read and talk philosophy with her. Well, he’s passed out of her collection,’ she added cruelly.

  For the bereavement of her friend was not the worst thing that had happened to Eliza; it was the bitterness of her disillusionment in him. He had left behind him a letter of fulsome thanks and gratification in answer to Christina’s invitation to her Court, which Christina had made public in self-justification at his death. It proved a tragic testimony to the limitations of philosophy.

  ‘And all that he got by it is death,’ said Eliza.

  ‘“Death is a tremendous thing,”’ Louey quoted. ‘He would appreciate it better than Christina’s Court.’

  ‘Do you then truly believe in a future life?’

  ‘Ask me later. I don’t know yet.’

  There were visitors from the French Court too, talking twice as much and twice as fast as their Dutch guests. They told of the poor Queen Henrietta Maria in Paris, an inconsolable widow, only longing for the return of her son Charles, to whom she was devoted. It was cruelty to keep them apart, so they said in their bright practical voices; her only comfort had been in her little girl Minette, whose childish prattle had saved her mother’s reason under the shock of her husband’s dreadful death.

  They sat and talked and talked. It rained, and the garden and the waving trees, and the rustling river seen here and there through them, were like a country at the bottom of the sea – so Louey thought, talking in her heart to Montrose, as she moved restlessly through the shining rooms, noticing the blue tiles running along in a little dotted line at the base of the white walls, the china bowls of flowers, the treasures from India and Japan. This idle busy house was full of people talking, playing games, making music, thinking thoughts all so different from her own. She leaned against the window-sill and looked out on the great green shapes of the trees in the rain, and the roses on the terrace drowned in rain, and heard the quacking of ducks in the moat below, that was now domesticated to a pond.

  Behind her through the open doorway came the sound of the French voices talking neatly and precisely as if for the sheer sensual pleasure of the sound of the words – ‘a gross delicatesse’, thought Louey, ‘of the earth earthy, and yet exquisite in appreciation’. For they were talking of music, saying charming and witty things about it, and as they talked, someone picked up his lute, and the tiny music of a minuet came stealing in on all those words, intruding on them, covering that rattle of words with a tinkling yet eternal sound, ‘like the ticking of the old French clock here in this room, where the Cupids hammer out their arrows on an anvil to count the hours of advancing time’ – until those gross and appreciative voices died into listening silence, and the tune played on alone a little time, then died too.

  But the clock ticked on, the Cupids lifted and struck their hammers to tell four o’clock (and so long a time since they had struck three), the voices began talking about something else, the rain cleared and the sun shone, those visitors went away and others came, and still Montrose could not say in his letters when he would come.

  Then he came, suddenly, with no warning, one afternoon while she was out riding in a man’s coat and breeches such as she often wore while riding in the country, and she came up through the garden to see him walking on the terrace with her mother, talking low and earnestly, and her first wild throb of delight was shot through with pain that she had been away.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ she cried as she ran up the terrace steps. (‘How much time have I missed of him?’) But he had not been long, less than half an hour, Elizabeth assured her, laughing at her, yet in spite of that, Louey could see how grave she was. ‘What has happened?’ she asked at once; and now the fact that he was there was a fear, a terror, for what had happened to bring him there so suddenly and to make her mother look so grave?

  He kissed her hand, the hair falling forward over his face with suitable cavalier grace as he did so in the gesture he would make before all the world; but the grasp of those strong nervous fingers round hers was for her alone, and the hard pressure of his lips.

  It was her mother who answered her, over that bent g
racious head.

  ‘They have killed Dorislaus,’ she said.

  ‘Dorislaus?’ For a moment Louey could not remember, it seemed so oddly unimportant. Dorislaus, the renegade Dutch lawyer, whom the Parliament had had to call in to try King Charles, since they could find no English lawyer to consent to such a travesty of English justice? What could it matter that he was killed?

  ‘How can that affect you?’

  ‘It affects all of us,’ he said. ‘The Dutch have no sympathy with him, they are saying that this is more rightly to be called an “execution” than the King’s murder, to which he gave a false legality. But they cannot let one of their citizens be killed out of hand without protest, and the men who killed him were my servants and have been warned to leave the city to escape trial. That shows how little the authorities wish to proceed against them. For all that, they are bound to act, for Holland is alarmed; they complain that they cannot have all these warring factions at such close quarters in their city without danger to themselves.’

  ‘Just what they said when Rupert’s ships and the Parliament’s were shut up in the same harbour together,’ exclaimed Elizabeth, ‘and very reasonably no doubt, but they stood it, and why not now?’

  ‘They have stood it too long, Madam, that is why. There have been other plots, an attempt made by the Covenanters to murder me some time ago.’ (He did not look at Louey as he said it, but gave the information carelessly, to both her and her mother.) ‘They say that with all these attacks from one faction and another their own peaceable lives will not be safe. Prince William has had to tell King Charles that he can give him shelter no longer, and he and his followers must leave at once.’

  ‘Where for?’ asked Louey. ‘For Ireland then?’

  ‘It is not possible yet. Ormonde has not been able to coordinate Ireland as he had hoped, and Cromwell’s army is shortly setting out for there. It would be too dangerous for the King. No, he is going to Paris, to the Queen-Mother.’