‘Rupert ill?’
‘So he said, but George heard he had shut himself up in his laboratory and was working at his scientific experiments, as he does for days together and even turns out King Charles when he interrupts him. I had hoped he might help in a notion we had of marrying George to the Princess Anne, but nothing has come of it and now his father has decided he had best marry his cousin, Sophia Dorothea of Zelle. After all, Anne’s father may be James Duke of York and King Charles’ heir, but her mother was only Anne Hyde, daughter to old Ned Hyde the lawyer whom they made Earl of Clarendon. People who have seen it tell me that his History of the Great Rebellion is the most opinionated stuff, and practically no mention in it of Rupert.’
‘I remember his shouting down his rickety staircase at The Hague to beg Rupert to write him details of the battles he had fought’ (A tufted testy face peering over the banisters, and Rupert’s impatient shout in answer, and all the doors banging and rattling in the wind, – when had that happened and how was it she had been there? There was only one thing she remembered, it had been the day she had got Wishart’s book of the Deeds of Montrose), ‘and of course Rupert never wrote them, he never writes at all.’
‘That is because you never write,’ said Sophia reprovingly. ‘Now I write to him so often that he sometimes answers, though not more than one in ten.’
‘And he is happy at Charles’ Court? He should be. England was always his home.’
‘Oh yes, though he is bored with the Court and pays no attention to it, and his temper is more abominable than ever. The other day he took the French Ambassador by the shoulders and just lifted him out of the way because he was annoyed with him.’
‘Didn’t he once lift a mutineer over the side of his ship as though he were a puppy and threaten to drop him into the sea?’
‘That was long ago, and I am talking of now, and England. I was saying, though he is no courtier, all the Court try to copy his magnificence when he does appear at it, so Monsieur was telling me, swelling his chest out like a bull-frog and saying, “Your brother Rupert, I hear he is a leader of fashion, just like me.”’
‘Just like! With only the difference between five foot and six foot four!’
‘The whole country adores Rupert. He has done a deal for their Navy, as he once did for their Army, and helped in colonization – they have named large parts of Canada after him, and he has founded a company there which they call the Hudson’s Bay Company, for trade and exploration, and though he is just on sixty he is still one of the four best tennis-players in England, and you know what that means to them! They would give anything for him to be King Charles’ heir instead of his brother James—’
‘Who is a Papist.’
‘Yes indeed that is most unfortunate – for him. The English have set their hearts on a Protestant Succession. Only imagine, there is a strong party who actually wish to put King Charles’ eldest bastard, the young Duke of Monmouth, on the throne. He has his father’s charm and his mother’s beauty—’
‘Who was his mother?’
‘Lucy Walters, whom they called Mrs Barlow,’ Sophia answered slowly. ‘Have you really forgotten her, and all the trouble about her at The Hague that last year?’
Yes, Louey had forgotten. But Lucy Walters, that ‘bold brown insipid beauty’ and her love-affair with Charles when he was only eighteen, and her baby by him, had not meant as much to her as it had done to her sister. Sophie’s ‘last year’ at The Hague had been, for Louey, the last year of Montrose’s life. But it might not have been, had not Lucy Walters and her bastard baby, now Duke of Monmouth, come between Sophie and the young King Charles. In what pitiful tangle of changes and chances were all the threads of life interwoven and held!
Then life is not enough,’ said Louey softly, ‘that is the answer to it.’
But it was not the answer to anything said by Sophia, who wondered what had set their sister wool-gathering, just as she used to do in the old days.
‘Indeed,’ she replied briskly, ‘life is quite enough if it is the life one likes. One cannot live more than once. Why vex one’s soul if one can eat, drink and sleep, – sleep, drink and eat? At Hanover we manage very well, play at ninepins, breed young ducks, amuse ourselves with running at a ring or play backgammon, and talk every year of paying a visit to Italy.’
‘Do you ever pay it?’
‘Yes, once. I got so sick of hearing my two Dukes talk about Venice that I had to go once in self-defence, but when I got there, it was nothing to admire.’
‘Nothing in Venice?’
‘Nothing but water,’ replied Sophia with finality.
A moment’s silence fell between them. The sun had set in a leaden heat-haze; that faint breeze that had freshened the evening, rustling the silver backs of the poplar leaves so that they shimmered with promise of further sunshine or of rain, had entirely dropped. Even those tiny castanets on the grasses were silent; only the crickets chirped on. The fields were deepening to grey, the woods beyond the river dark blue, the river itself nearly black, with only a hint here and there of steel in its shallows, the little town opposite was etched in ink. The scene was carved out of a thunder-cloud.
‘If Rupert had never done anything else,’ said Louey, in that low, absent voice that Sophia now remembered, ‘he has invented mezzotints.’
‘What do you say? Oh yes, that odd new method of etching. They tell me he is a very considerable artist and has done some pictures that would be thought remarkable if he were not a prince. And what of your own work? Do you still keep up your painting?’
‘Yes. It is a great advantage for me that I have to attend midnight Mass. The loveliness of awe and grave music, the picture made by the long shadows thrown by the candles in the chapel, the black robes and white coifs of the nuns, above all the flesh tints of their faces turned pale and gleaming against the darkness, make an effect that I never grow tired of studying. My dear Gerard would have revelled in it, Gerardo della Notte he was nickamed, you remember. He was a fine artist though he had the bad luck to be a Court painter, and they talk more of Rembrandt now.’
Again Sophia was conscious of a slight shock. Surely no Abbess should talk so coolly of the artistic advantages of her vocation. Had there possibly been any truth in those scandals of the Hohenzollerns as to Louise’s reasons for running away to become a nun?
‘Why did you take vows?’ she asked on a sudden impulse.
‘Because,’ said Louey, ‘the story of the God who gave up His Godhead and His human life for the world of humans has always moved me, not with sorrow or pity but with exaltation. Could anything be more glorious than to have so much to give, and give it all?’
Her voice had not changed. It was still soft and absent, as though coming from a great way off in that still evening.
‘She has something I do not know of,’ thought Sophie. ‘What is it I have missed?’ And quite inconsequently she remembered her mother’s ‘English garden’ as she had first seen it among the ruins of the Castie at Heidelberg, and the arch that her father had raised there in a single night to express all the joy and hope and fruitfulness of his love for his ‘Elizabetae, Conjugi carissimae’. That still remained standing, while on either side of it the walls had fallen and crumbled under the enemy’s guns. The fruits of that love had been death and destruction, the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, Sophia had thought; but now she wondered if perhaps Louey would see further than even those results.
Did love last longer than death? If so, Sophia herself had never felt, could never feel such love. It made her feel shrivelled and cold, shut out from immortality like the unbaptized souls of the old faith.
‘You are now a Bride of Christ,’ she said in a strained harsh voice, ‘does that make up to you for the fact that once, long ago, you were to have been the bride of Montrose?’
Louey did not answer. Sophia, looking at the face beside her, saw only a grey carved shadow against the thunderous evening sky. She went on:
‘I will t
ell you something I have never breathed yet to any living soul. King Charles has no legitimate child. His brother James is a Papist and hated by the English, nor do they want his daughters: Mary is married to a Dutch prince (and would they, after the Dutch wars, stand William of Orange on the throne?), and Anne is stupid and sickly. No, they want one of us, as they have always done. But none of all our brothers has a legitimate heir, except Carl’s Liselotte, married to Monsieur of France.
‘What a strange fatality it is on all our family! Look at us sisters – Eliza, the most beautiful, who never loved anyone unless it were that ugly little dried-up, middle-aged, middle-class philosopher Descartes, and all I could say for him as a potential husband is that certainly his works provide the best antidote for insomnia. She has never married, nor you, and then think of our darling Etta, a mother if ever there was one, dying of a miscarriage within a few months of her blissfully happy marriage.
‘Is there something in us not made to last? Etta’s death-bringing miscarriage, my odious George, who has nothing of our family in him, – yet it is I and my sons, I, a daughter and the twelfth child, who may come to stand a nearer chance to the English throne than any of us.’
‘Why do you tell me this, Sophie?’
‘Because,’ Sophie answered, ‘if you had married the Marquis of Montrose and borne him children, your heirs would have been first in the succession. The Stuarts have been one Scottish family on the English throne, the Grahams might well have been another.’
‘They might have been. They are not. As you say, the Electors of Hanover are now the nearer.’
‘You do not speak as though it matters very much,’ said Sophie bitterly.
And suddenly she wondered what did matter. Different things at different times of her life had seemed to matter with appalling urgency, but they had ceased to do so, and other things had taken their place.
‘No,’ she went on very fast, ‘the world does not come to an end because one has not been able to marry the man one wanted to marry. I know that as well as anyone, for I went to Germany to find a husband. I spent years at Heidelberg with our brother Carl and his wife, hearing both sides of their endless quarrels and their complaints of the rest of the family, sharing their silly seething intrigues, their confidences, like promises, made to be broken, until I got desperate, for though I was handsome enough I had no fortune and Carl could not afford to give me a dowry. I used Prince Adolf of Sweden with his hideous chin like a shoehorn as runner-up to Duke George William of Hanover until the unfortunate Swede actually imagined he was engaged to me and showed my portrait as that of his betrothed to Duke George. That had its effect. Duke George proposed.’
‘Duke George! But you are married to Ernest Augustus.’
‘Wait. The effect did not last. Duke George made the surprising suggestion that he should transfer me to his younger brother together with the Duchy of Hanover, as compensation doubtless.’
‘I never heard of this.’
‘We were not anxious that many should hear of it,’ said Sophia dryly.
‘But what did you say to it?’
‘I? I told Carl to settle the matter as he thought best, for, as I said to him, “I am not a heroine of romance. All I want is an establishment.” Well, I had it. And within a year or two of my establishment as Electress of Hanover, King Charles was on the throne of England, the most charming and sought-after Prince in Europe, and I might have been Queen of Great Britain.’
Again that aching phrase! It struck on Louey’s mind like the opening of a wound. And she herself might have been Montrose’s bride, might have borne his son to be King of England instead of Sophie’s Hanoverian George.
The wound gaped wider. Rupert might have been Montrose’s ally, as Montrose had planned, and the two of them worked victory together. But Cromwell’s ruinous conquest of Ireland had destroyed Montrose’s plan of cooperation with Rupert.
Was the old torture coming back? Would she never, even now after thirty years, stop seeing what might have been? And to what end? Of what use was it to try to unravel the web and weave it again to her heart’s desire? Long ago she had seen that happiness must not, could not depend on the event. The Kingdom of Heaven was within one’s own heart, or nowhere. Must she learn that all over again, thirty years after Montrose had shown it in his death?
She had to pull her mind back to listen to Sophie, who was speaking in a hurried, urgent voice as though she were indeed trying to cram thirty years into her talk, and so she herself perceived, for ‘You must excuse me,’ she was saying, ‘it is such a relief to talk like this instead of always writing, writing, and then only a very little of what one thinks. I believe I have only come to write so much because one must do something beside embroidery in those long hours sitting on the terrace while my husband dozes with his feet up on the end of my chair so that he shall rest assured even in his sleep that I have not left his side.
‘He is jealous, for he can never forget that I was content to be betrothed to his brother Duke George, nor does his brother forget it, and sometimes shows signs of regretting it, and as the two of them continue to be inseparable I have to see almost as much of Duke George as of Ernest Augustus, and you cannot imagine how difficult it is, the scenes they make, Duke George complaining when I do not take his hand, Ernest complaining when I do.
‘Two large, heavy, over-fed, slow-moving, slow-speaking men always about one, crushing one, a couple of hot bears! My only real peace is when they go off to their precious Venice together.
‘It would have been the other way round if I had married Charles, but more amusing to have had all those gay quickwitted rivals for his love, yes, even that actress from the slums of Drury Lane, than to sit on at Hanover, the half of me inactive, unused, unsharpened, while the slow oxen go trudging past below and the swans drift up and down the lake and my husband snores in the shade, and I thinking that I might have been Queen of England, our mother’s country, and the most civilized and modern Court in Europe, instead of wasting myself in a sleepy little German state.’
‘Do you feel you have wasted yourself with all your fine sons?’
But even as she asked it, Louey thought what brilliant sons Sophie might have had by Charles, while her son George, the inheritor of her chance for the English throne, had no drop of his mother’s Stuart blood to show in him.
‘Even when he was an infant I looked on him in wonder,’ Sophie broke out, ’so alien he was to us all. Is it some grotesque trick that God has played on me to show how all my care to be wise has only served to spoil my chances? You who are a nun should be able to tell me.’
Her voice had shrilled and cracked on a discordant note. She clapped her hands together and exclaimed, ‘Come, we are talking nonsense and what is worse, blasphemy. I do not mean a word of it, and as for God, I have complete confidence in Him.’
But still her sister would not answer for God.
‘I blame you for my indiscretion,’ said Sophia, ‘for your conversation has always had an untiring charm for me. Tell me more of yourself. Is it true you entertained King Charles here once when he was still in exile?’
“Yes it is true, and I do not wonder at your regrets. Of all living kings he is the only one I have heard of with a sense of humour – but then he learned it in a hard school.
‘And never forgave it. “It was not good for me that I was afflicted,” he says. Could you forgive him for the part he played towards Montrose?’
‘What right had I to forgive or not? The man he injured forgave him, and wished others to do so, that was all I knew.’
But in the growing darkness of that still, grey scene with the sulphurous light burning over the river in the far west, Louise began to speak again, slowly, almost unwillingly, the thoughts she had not put into words these thirty years. Then she had hated Charles bitterly. But she loved Montrose. She had found she could not mingle hate with her love for such a man; to do so was to desecrate it. True love cannot lead to hate. Her love had opened her spirit like a
flower, but hate had shut it, crippling her like a poison in the blood; it was a small dull-eyed thing; it saw nothing, created nothing.
‘Montrose once told me,’ she said, ‘that King Charles I was never the same man after he had permitted the death of his servant Strafford. From that moment Charles I knew himself to be doomed – and that showed him to be of a finer nature than his son’s. But remorse weakens a man as well as purifies him, and God knows we want no more tragedies. Charles II came here some years after he failed Montrose, a very gallant beggar in a frayed coat, having tried unsuccessfully to borrow even five pounds from his uncle Gaston d’Orléans. The Cardinal Mazarin was turning him out of France, he had been forbidden by the Estates to re-enter Holland, and he did not know how long he would be allowed to stay in Belgium.
‘I was glad to be able to feast him royally, glad when his fortune changed so soon after and he could return to be King of England – glad, too, to enjoy the charm of his company while he dined with me.
‘“No more tragedies,” I said just now, but perhaps the greatest tragedy of all was there, – that his, one of the finest minds of his age, could not really feel what he had done. His misfortunes and his pleasures had blunted it, rendered it imperceptive in spite of all his wits – and that was perhaps, after all, a safeguard to him. Yes, it was better in the end that he was able to take things more lightly than his father, that his emotions were dispersed and made easy by his “dissipations” of them, in every sense. For it is only by that light touch, that appearance of ease and security even when his fortunes are at their lowest, that he has been able to control the nervous, touchy, suspicious creature that England had become when he returned to her.’
She was silent again, thinking of the tired, battered man whom she had feasted and joked with in the geniality of true religion, recognizing in him the man of the future, disillusioned, good-natured, humorous, taking the world as he found it, making the best of it, showing his own kind of courage even as Montrose had shown his.
He expected nothing from human nature, least of all his own.
The Bride Page 43