“They are sure to have a bad crossing,” she pouted, as though rather hoping they would.
“Her Majesty always does. And she was complaining how damp England is in October,” recollected Mistress Stuart anxiously.
“It will seem even damper to poor old Father Cyprien, with his gout,” added Frances, feeling bereft of all her friends, and knowing how much the dear old man had dreaded the journey.
It was seldom that Frances spoke so caustically. Roused from her own weariness. Mistress Stuart began to realize the depth of her daughter’s dejection.
“I know how you feel about being left behind,” she said.
“Did not you too expect them to take me? Am I not a relation?” flared out Frances.
“But Dorothy and Janton are older. Dorothy can really make herself useful. Whereas you are so — so —”
“Frivolous. I know. I heard you say it to Madame de Motteville.”
“Besides, the visit was all arranged so hurriedly.”
“Because James of York has been making love to Edward Hyde’s daughter and she is going to have a baby,” said Frances, who was learning too suddenly about life.
“I suppose you heard the servants talking.”
“Actually, it was Monsieur Jermyn. Milord St. Albans, I should say. He was whispering about it to Walter’s nurse. She is very pretty, you know.”
Mistress Stuart, shocked by the sophistication of the young, closed her eyes in a gesture of helplessness.
“Her Majesty would scarcely have undertaken such a journey of that,” she said, unaware that she herself was now seriously shocking youth. “It is because the Duke of York wants to marry the girl.”
Forgetting her own grievances, Frances got up and faced her mother.
“Is it not the right thing for him to do?” she asked, her blue eyes wide with ingenuous honesty.
Mistress Stuart shifted uncomfortably in her chair.
“Well, yes, if he were — just anybody. But the King’s only brother. Were he to marry her, this Anne Hyde might one day become Queen.”
“Why? Surely King Charles himself is sure to marry soon?”
“Of course. That is another reason why his mother left so hurriedly. The wanted to have some say…”
“And then he will have sons and everything will be all right.”
“But, my dear child, suppose, for some reason, he could not…”
“He has one already,” laughed Frances. “‘Jemmie’, they call him. Milord Crofts pretends to be his father.”
“Frances! Frances! Where do you gather all this scandal? I will speak to Her Majesty and have some of these servants dismissed. Who told you this?”
“Louis the Fourteenth of France. In an arbour by the tennis court,” whispered Frances dramatically, making a gamin gesture of mock elegance.
Poor Mistress Stuart threw up her hands in despair.
“Oh, merciful God, if only your father were alive! He was wise. He would have known what to do. And now our good Queen is no longer here to advise me.”
Immediately Frances was all contrition.
‘Oh, ma chère Maman, everyone talks like that at Court. It is not really as bad as it sounds.”
“But to tell such things to a child like you!”
“I am not a child, I am only two years younger than Henrietta. In a year or two you will be looking for a husband for me.”
“The sooner the better,” murmured Doctor Stuart’s distracted widow. “And then there will be Sophie, and some sort of career to find for Walter.” But with her daughter’s warm young arms comfortingly around her, she soon felt capable of returning to the all-engrossing subject of the Dowager Queen’s journey. “As I was saying, Her Majesty is naturally worried — and very angry. If York marries this Hyde girl their child would be in the direct line of succession. And, as you know, the King is always riding his own racehorses, and might break his neck any day. Or suppose he were to die of smallpox like his youngest brother.”
“Heaven forbid!” cried out Frances, somehow realizing that England would immediately become a much sadder place.
“So the Queen hopes to reach London in time to prevent such an unsuitable marriage. Sir Charles Berkley has offered to pretend the infant is his, and even milord Clarendon was loyal enough to tell the King he would sooner his daughter took the consequences of her folly.”
“Her folly? Or the Duke’s?” muttered Frances under her breath.
For a moment or two she stood silent beside her mother’s chair, feeling decidedly sorry for this Anne Hyde. She had never in her life set eyes on the girl, but, not unnaturally, pictured her as some ravishing beauty. She could not help knowing that she herself was beautiful, and was beginning to find out how difficult it was to deny flattering royal advance. Now she began to wonder how it must feel to be placed as poor Anne was.
“Never, never will I be such a fool,” she vowed, “such a wicked little fool,” her pious upbringing forced her to add. And if the Hon. Walter Stuart’s daughter was making her earnest resolve partly through adolescent fear, it was also largely through genuine reverence for all she had been so carefully taught. “And what did the King himself say?” she asked, pulling herself back to the case in point.
Mistress Stuart rose and began hurriedly collecting up some of the travellers’ scattered possessions.
“It seems he told his brother that since he had got the girl with child he had better marry her. If they both wished it, of course,” she answered over her shoulder with a kind of embarrassed reluctance, as she led the way upstairs to her own room with an armful of shawls.
Frances gaped after her in surprise. That sounded more human, she thought. And liked Charles better than she had ever done during his brief visit to the château. “They say he didn’t want Cromwell’s body dug up and hanged,” she remarked, once inside her mother’s room.
“What has that to do with it?” asked Mistress Stuart. “How you do fly from one subject to another, Frances!”
To Frances the two subjects seemed to be related because both lent assurance of tolerant kindness in a censorious world. But she was soon off on another tack.
“Her Majesty probably wants to make sure Charles chooses a Catholic queen. So she will have a busy time. Two marriages and the money,” she summed up disrespectfully. “Why do you look so surprised, madam? Are you wondering how I knew about the money? Henrietta told me about all her poor mother’s estates having been given away to the regicides, and that she hopes to get some compensation because they are now so hopelessly dilapidated.”
Sophia Stuart laid her mistress’s sable-lined cloak, which was also hopelessly dilapidated, across the back of a chair and stood absently stroking it.
“It was not only Queen Henrietta-Maria’s houses,” she said, speaking slowly and with difficulty. “Did the Princess tell you about ours?”
Frances suddenly stood very still, just inside the door, staring at her. “Ours? No. You mean our home?”
“She probably didn’t know. I have only just heard myself. It was given away. And afterwards used by the soldiery. All the best rooms were knocked about — the tapestries and portraits stolen. And after Cromwell’s death — perhaps by accident — it was burned down.”
Incredulously, Frances lifted her face to look at the painting which had so often sustained her during their exile.
“Then it doesn’t exist any more,” she said brokenly.
“When General Monk came down from Scotland he told Prodgers that it is just a shell. That is what I meant when I said the other girls had homes to go to.”
Stunned as she was, Frances’ first thought was for her mother. She ran to her and kissed her, and fell to stroking the sad-looking fur with the same small motion of impartial pity.
“You should have told me,” she reproved gently. “Then I could have tried to comfort you instead of talking smartly and adding to your worries.”
“I don’t think I really cared whether it existed or not — after y
our father died.”
She spoke dully, but gradually warmed to Frances’ loving blandishments,
“But it was your married home. It must have meant everything to you. He used to show me the terrace where you walked together. And where you grew your herbs. He was so proud of the way you ran your household. And I am such a pert, vain, undomesticated hussy. Dear Maman, let me stay here quietly until Her Majesty returns and I will help you more with Sophie and Walter. I promise you. I shall try to be less frivolous.”
“I would not wish you to be less gay. It would be like caging a bird,” smiled Sophia Stuart, happier than she had been for some time because she felt closer to this lovable, exasperating elder daughter of hers.
But after she had gone briskly to put away some of the Dowager Queen’s possessions, Frances stood for a long time before the painting, putting away her vicariously acquired memories — and in particular that part of herself which wanted to create a lovely home, just as small Sophie wanted to dress dolls. She had the sense to recognize this as the best part of herself, and she was aware that, like most precious things which must be stored away for a long time, it would need deep and careful packing. “Well wrapped up in a bale of pretence with the light protecting straw of laughter,” she thought, with one of those shining gleams of perception which sometimes illuminated her careless thoughts.
Tired out with giving eager help, and lonely for her friends, she cried herself to sleep that night. And in the days to come she was careful never again to turn her lovely head to look at the beloved picture.
Instead, she counted the weeks until the royal party’s return, and busied herself with choosing the most becoming clothes she had ever possessed in order to beautify herself as maid-of-honour at the Orleans wedding. She could scarcely wait to hear all about the merry doings at the restored English Court.
But when the prospective bride returned to Colombes, she and all the Dowager Queen’s party were in sombre mourning for yet another of the beheaded king’s children. Like her youngest brother, twenty-seven-year-old Mary, Princess of Orange, had caught the smallpox and died.
“They bled her and gave her a stiff draught of ale which made her swoon. But I am sure your clever father could have saved her,” said Henrietta, while Frances and Madame des Bordes helped to tuck her up in bed so that she might recover from the fatigue of her distressing journey. “She died on Christmas Eve. So we never had that Christmas en famille that we had all been looking forward to so much.”
“Was your Highness with her when she died?” asked devoted Marie des Bordes, thinking of the infection.
“No, chère Madame. Maman sent me away to St. James’s Palace, although she did not seem at all afraid for herself.”
“First the poor imprisoned Princess Elizabeth, then your youngest brother, and now — this,” murmured Frances, lingering to settle the pillows more comfortably. Downstairs, she had been far too overawed to ask questions about anything, in face of Queen Henrietta-Maria’s shocked and silent grief, but had been hoping for her cousin’s confidences; and Henrietta, weary as she was, was well aware of it.
“You need not think that this was the great personal loss to me that it was to Her Majesty,” she said, with an encouraging smile. “I never even saw my poor sister Elizabeth, and Mary I scarcely knew.”
“But surely you grew to know her during the weeks you were in England? All this time I have been so glad for you, that you would at least learn what it was like to have a sister, as I have.”
“Dear Frances! But, truth to tell, I didn’t see very much of her. By the appreciative way Charles always spoke of her hospitality in Holland I had expected her to be lively and gay, like you. I envied her for being the only one of us who could help him. But the fact is…” The young Princess, who was learning how impossible privacy is in a royal household, peeped round the bed-curtains to where her dressers were putting away her newly-acquired jewels, and lowered her voice. “…she seldom attended any of the fine festivities which Charles and his friends arranged for us.”
“Why ever not?” asked Frances. “Nothing on earth would have kept me away from them!”
“I am sure of that, Frances Stuart! But Mary was piqued because he was allowing Anne Hyde, who had been her dresser, to become her sister-in-law.”
Frances settled herself more comfortably on the foot of the bed behind the half-drawn side curtains. Evidently she was to enjoy a good gossip after all.
“So the Duke did marry her?”
“Yes. In spite of all our mother’s opposition. And in the end Her Majesty even consented to be the babe’s godmother — perhaps because he had called the mite Mary. You know he can be every whit as obstinate as she. Charles is a positive master of compromise — but not James.” Henrietta, who had been forced to compromise with life ever since she was born, leaned back against her pillows with a sigh. “Such people make life very difficult sometimes.”
“Did you like her?”
“Who? The new Duchess of York? Not particularly. She isn’t very interesting.”
“Is she very beautiful?”
“Mon dieu, non!”
“I took it for granted she must be, else why did your brother the Duke almost disrupt the kingdom to marry her?”
“I really cannot imagine. But men do love women who are not beautiful.”
“I suppose so,” agreed Frances half-heartedly, sliding off the bed and dancing like a piece of thistledown towards the dressing-table.
Henrietta watched her with amusement. How entertained by her Charles would be, she thought involuntarily. “There are plenty of happily married women who are not attractive as you are,” she said. “Indeed, many of them might be shocked by you.”
The departing dressers had left one inexpensive jade necklace lying on the table. Holding the two ends, Frances tried it against the whiteness of her slender throat. “What is there so shocking about looking beautiful?” she asked, with unabashed assurance. Then, with one of her lightning changes from frivolity to seriousness, she let the necklace trickle through her fingers and stood pensively in the middle of the room. “Her Majesty has had to bear far more than her share of sorrow,” she said.
Henrietta, who was soon to be a married woman, caught at the understanding words as she did at all her friend’s more adult moments these days.
“Indeed, yes,” she sighed. “And it was not only poor Mary’s death. Imagine what it must have been like to her, going back to Whitehall. Charles told me afterwards how he had arranged for her to arrive by the back way from the river so that she should not have to pass through the banqueting hall. He hates having to use it himself. So how could she have eaten there, trying to talk gaily to guests, within a few yards of the window through which her husband stepped out onto the scaffold…through which they must have brought his…”
“Severed head.” Quietly, Frances supplied the words which her cousin could not speak, and quickly changed the subject. “And did Her Majesty manage to get some satisfactory settlement about all her dower houses? Were they all destroyed as Master Prodgers said?”
“So badly that Parliament decided it would not be worth while to evict the present owners. So they granted her an annuity of thirty thousand pounds a year instead.”
Having had the spending of only a few shillings in all her life, Frances could upon occasion be keenly interested in money. But she knew only too well that there could be other considerations.
“If she had never lived in any of them — if none of them was ever her home, but just a source of income — I suppose she must have been very pleased.”
“Especially as Charles nearly doubled it.”
“But who really paid out all that money?”
“The tax-payers, I suppose. And something Charles calls the Exchequer.”
“Yet, by what that nice Master Lovell said, the taxpayers do not particularly like her.”
But the royal bride-to-be was not even listening. “And to me of their own free will the Members
voted forty thousand a year. For my dowry.”
“Forty thousand pounds!” gasped Frances, who had never owned as many farthings. She stood looking down at the grateful, shining-eyed girl in the big bed. “Of course you had probably bewitched them all with your Stuart charm. But forty thousand pounds! Imagine, after not having enough to eat!” Suddenly she leant over the embroidered coverlet to embrace her, and burst out laughing. “Oh, ’Rietta, if only they could have seen you and Dorothy and me dividing that partridge your brother James shot for us! Or how grateful I was to wear Janton’s chemises when she had grown too fat for them!”
Both girls dissolved into reminiscent mirth. Painful as such memories were, they would be always precious — and extraordinarily binding.
“I know what we will do tomorrow,” exclaimed Frances, still bound by the communal world of unquestioning, sharing, as when they had so hungrily and so meticulously divided the unexpected bird. “Let us persuade milord St. Albans to have the head groom take us to the Neuilly Fair and buy as many of those delicious Provencal sugared almonds as we can eat.”
The exhausted Princess sank back sleepily on her pillows, and the tragic gloom which had pervaded everything since Mary’s death seemed to melt away.
“Oh, Frances,” she yawned, “will you never grow up? But I am so happy to have you with me again.”
Five
If Frances had not been taken to England, at least a whole world of glittering social excitement now opened before her. Henrietta had asked that she might be one of the ladies of her new household at St. Cloud; and although both their mothers felt Frances to be too young for this appointment, she was allowed to accompany the new Madame of France everywhere. She joined in hunting parties, boating expeditions on the Seine, fêtes champêtres and formal banquets. But it was at masquerades that she was most in demand, since Philippe loved dressing-up and posturing, and few girls danced as well as his new young wife and Frances Stuart.
Because they had both been so strictly brought up, their new freedom and the intoxication of men’s flattery went to their heads like wine. Being so young, and so long starved of fun, they grasped at all the proffered pleasures, and, as if to increase the new Duchess of Orleans’ popularity, the new Spanish Queen proved very dull, and her Court all the duller, since she became enceinte. Whereas Henrietta, becomingly dressed at last, more than fulfilled her early promise of attractiveness, and charmed the hearts out of the Parisians. King Louis himself spent most of his leisure in her company. Frances, who had always been secretly alarmed by his attentions, was rather relieved. But it was noticeable that Philippe, although always vindictively jealous, already began to neglect his bride.
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