Lady on the Coin
Page 30
It was a spring that Lennox was never to see, for on the 12th of December at Elsinore, whither he had gone on a visit to the English fleet which was then in those waters, he was taken with a sudden seizure and died.
The news was broken to Frances, who was then at Whitehall, and for days she was too stunned, too ill to ask for further details.
All she knew was that the light of her life had gone out, never to be re-kindled.
When it was possible for her to endure the journey to Cobham, she was taken there, with her mother and Mrs. Harvest to care for her, though both were sadly conscious that there was little they could do, since Frances’ sole desire was for solitude.
But presently she roused herself to ask questions of Lennox’s personal servant Flexney, who had returned from Denmark, and of Lord Essex, who had been in correspondence with Sir John Paul, the English Consul. Paul, it seemed, was with Lennox at the time of his fatal seizure.
“He had not been drinking heavily, though such is the story that has been put abroad to account for the convulsive fit that killed him,” Lord Essex said.
At this Frances showed her first sign of spirit. The lethargy of grief passed from her as she retorted.
“It is needless to tell me that, my lord. He gave me his word. No more ever than his usual two bottles of wine, which were a small matter to him.”
“Paul confirms that he was but a little merry,” Essex agreed. “Many of those who were at the Fleet banquet drank far more. It was the climate that killed him. He made light of it in his letters home, for had it been known how much the cold endangered him, he would have been recalled, leaving his mission unfinished. Yet it seems from the report of his doctor that more than once there was anxiety felt for him.”
“My lord could not have known, or he would have thrown all over and returned, rather than have left me alone and broken-hearted.” Frances was in tears, though she had shed few for weeks.
“What man in his thirties can believe that he is doomed?” Essex said. “Though he did undermine his health before ever he met Your Grace.”
“But since then — once we were married — he was splendid. Often in the saddle for hours on end, and nobody could match him on the tennis-court.”
“It was the climate,” Essex repeated. “At Elsinore, as John Paul says, it was freezing and with thick snow. Orders had been given for the Fleet to sail out of the Sound. There was the risk of being frozen in. We in this far milder isle have little conception of the Scandinavian severity. To such as are not accustomed to it the cold can be a killer.”
“My lord wrote that without furs it was impossible to live,” Frances said brokenly, “and although I did not think he meant that literally, I at once sent out extra blankets and a sable muff, and a heavy coat lined with squirrel. Oh, if only I had taken them myself — gone to him… I could have cared for him better than doctors or anyone else and he…he would have been happy.”
Essex, gazing at the beautiful, forlorn young woman, slender as a wand, her eyes enormous in her grief-ravaged face, shook his head. “It might as easily have been death for you,” he said.
“Oh, what matter! We should then have been together. What have I to live for now? He was my life.”
Essex, a little in love with Frances, as were most men who came in contact with her, and greatly pitying her, said compassionately: “He was fortunate. For five years you were his greatest joy.”
But the five years had gone so swiftly, thought Frances. If she had known, how she would have grudged every day as it passed. And she had not given enough, she told herself, as often before. All she had — but such a meagre all. She had honoured and loved him, but in a fashion which only another woman of similar temperament would have understood.
Essex reflected that she was not yet twenty-six and would recover with time. There would be no lack of suitors ready to console her. Only Frances knew that she would never wholly recover, and would never put another in Lennox’s place. Falteringly she asked the hardest questions of all.
“They told me — my mother said she had heard it was certain my lord would be brought home to England. But when? Weeks have already passed.”
Essex evaded telling her the actual details. Lennox’s body had been embalmed, and a special leaden coffin had been obtained with difficulty. This had been put into another, covered with velvet, and now waited in Sir John Paul’s house at Elsinore until it could be shipped to England.
“The King of Denmark,” said Essex, “has offered a Danish ship to bring His Grace’s body back to England, though at first there was talk of sending the Royal Charles. The final arrangements are not yet known, and the voyage itself usually takes several weeks.”
“Full six weeks when he left England,” Frances remembered.
Delays there were in plenty, and incredibly the Danish ship of mourning did not reach England until the following September. Early in August, Henshaw wrote announcing that it was on the verge of departure, and when Frances heard that the ship was expected to put in at Gravesend she nerved herself to be there.
Courage she had in plenty, even after months of grief and seclusion — and courage was needed. Surrounded by her friends and by high officials sent by the Secretary of State and by Charles himself to represent him, Frances stood there in her widow’s mourning to look with anguish upon the black-painted, black-sailed ship which brought back the body of His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador Extraordinary to his own country.
In spite of her grief, Frances could not but realize that Lennox with his love of pageantry would have been gratified by the pomp of his long-delayed funeral, and afterwards she discovered that Charles had given orders that his cousin’s body was to be interred in a manner reserved for royalty. Imaginatively, he must have surmised that this was something Lennox would have appreciated, and that such honours might relieve Frances’ long and stony grief.
They did, since this was the King’s acknowledgment that his cousin was a profound loss to the country he had served.
Nothing could have given Frances more pride than Charles’ edict that Lennox was to be buried at Westminster Abbey. There, on an autumn evening, with the lights from hundreds of candles piercing the dimness of the old building, the ceremony took place. There was scarcely one of the nobility that did not attend it, and the Knights of the Garter, wearing the Collars of their Order, were present to pay their last respects.
Curious eyes rested upon Frances, and she was not unaware of it. Buckingham, with his outwardly reverential aspect, must, she knew, be pleased that this was the end of Lennox, since he had never forgiven her. But what should Frances care? Garter Principal King of Arms was now proclaiming the dead man’s style and titles. But words other than these passed through Frances’ mind.
“Fear no more the heat of the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta’en they wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”
It was over at last, and the Duchess of Buckingham, who loved Frances if her spouse did not, was one of those who took her home to the Whitehall Pavilion, and spent the night watching over her.
From thenceforth Charles was all considerate kindness to Frances. He had given instructions that the greatest care was to be taken to see that Lennox’s personal property in Denmark was restored to her. Added to which, the valuable gold plate that had been taken from the Jewel House for use during the embassy was given to her as a present.
It was the first of many such presents, bestowed after consultation with the Queen.
The King of Denmark sent Frances his own miniature set with diamonds, this being the gift he had intended for Lennox on the termination of his embassy.
Charles personally received the captain of the Danish mourning ship and presented him with a gold chain and medal, and, on behalf of Frances who was pitifully ill again, he was sent a handsome belt and a
gold sword.
Now she was besought by all those who cared for her to pick up the threads of her life once more; to remember that she was young, beautiful, naturally joyous.
“Would not this,” asked the Queen on their first meeting after the Abbey funeral, “be his dearest wish?”
“Oh, Madame, how can I know? He never thought of dying,” Frances replied.
“Dear Frances, I think he may have done, for he took such care to make all the provision he could for you. Cobham Hall is still your home, though had not Lennox made a will securing you the life interest, it would have reverted to his sister.”
“And great resentment she bears me because of it,” Frances retorted. “She had the impertinence to write to milord Essex that she was in great fear lest the beauty of the house and park would be utterly defaced by the alterations already made and which I may continue to make. Not that I shall. It must stay now as it is. There are too many debts to be paid, and the hard task to settle all left to Sir Charles Bickerstaffe.”
“I am so anxious about you,” Catherine said. “But there will be enough for you to live in comfort, dearest Frances. The King has busied himself about this. He feels, and rightly, that he owes you a life, as much as though the Duke had died for him in battle.”
“He has told me so,” Frances said. “It may not be quite true…but I do know that Lennox, in spite of their different temperaments, was never so proud and happy as when he was given the chance to serve the King in this Denmark appointment.”
“Do not hide yourself altogether at Cobham,” the Queen entreated. “You are needed here as much as you are needed there. You are too young for solitude.”
“I doubt if I could bear much more of it and live,” Frances owned, adding with the first flicker of humour for many a day: “I am not by nature a bemoaning turtle.”
“A turtle?” echoed the perplexed Queen, and then to her delight and astonishment she heard the once familiar gurgle of spontaneous laughter.
“It was a poem that was written at the time of my lord’s funeral,” Frances explained. “Who wrote it I have no idea, but it was sold in the London streets and one of my maids bought a copy and thought it immeasurably touching. Hoping it might please me, she gave it to me after a while. It is little more than doggerel and I cannot remember the whole of it, but the last verse went like this:
‘Let none into her presence dare t’intrude
Once to disturb her graceful solitude.
She needs none of your help, let her alone,
The turtle by herself loves to bemoan.’
There was a good deal more absurdity about my sighs like perfumed incense and my panting breasts like little mournful birds drooping in their nests. It would make the King laugh.”
“I must tell him about it,” Catherine smiled. “It is good to be able to laugh as well as to sigh over the past. Charles can, even when he recalls his beloved Minette, because of some of the amusing things she said. One should try to remember the happy times.”
“Our time together was nearly all happiness,” Frances said. “I am thankful that I knew I was happy. But it was so short. I cannot bear to think it has gone like a dream, and that when I die there will be nobody to remember him. It is not as though I bore a son.”
“None can understand that regret better than I,” the Queen said.
But to Frances, as the months passed, this longing to leave some memorial of Lennox which would survive through the generations became a secret obsession.
Thanks largely to the King’s generosity her means were more than adequate, but they consisted of Crown annuities and life interests from Lennox’s estates. If the plan that slowly matured in her mind was to come to fruition, she would need to be thrifty. Not so difficult for Frances, who had never squandered money, and whose remarkable dress-sense depended more on her taste and skill than on extravagance.
The greater part of her life was spent at Court, where she was rightly considered an ornament, but when she was alone at Cobham, then her dreams took possession of her. Lennox had said that even death could not separate those who greatly loved, with the soul as much as with the body, and sometimes Frances could believe it. Certainly it had been with her soul that she had loved him, and there was this constant yearning to commemorate it, to show the world that love could be stronger than death.
Strange sentiments these would have been thought to fill the mind of the beautiful Duchess, who to all outward appearances had recovered her zest and gaiety, and whom many men loved without hope of reward.
She, herself, was immortalized, Frances sometimes thought for there on the coins of the realm was her portrait, with which generations yet to come would be familiar. But who would remember Lennox?
Cobham Hall no longer meant what it had once meant to her. Catherine O’Brien’s jealousy succeeded in making her feel that she was a usurper, and finally she half reluctantly decided to sell her life interest in the estate to Lord O’Brien, and thus end the constantly recurring animosity.
It was at this time that Frances took her cousin Lord Blantyre, whom she saw from time to time, into her confidence. Due to various bequests she was comparatively rich, and was now saving industriously. When she died, she told Lord Blantyre, she wished the bulk of her fortune to pass to his son and heir, Walter Stuart, Master of Blantyre, and thence to his male heirs. But this fortune was to be used for a special purpose. It was to be invested in a purchase of lands in Scotland, and was to be named Lennoxlove. Thereafter it was to be preserved in perpetual memory of her husband and herself, enshrining their portraits and many of the ancestral treasures.
Assured by her legal advisers that such instructions could be carried out, satisfied that she would thus inaugurate another ancestral home where the Stuart clan would live, always conscious of the ancestor it immortalized, Frances was satisfied. She might have several years yet on earth, but she had found an absorbing, fascinating objective.
She was like a little girl with a wonderful secret, for only those most intimately concerned knew anything about this dream project, which as the years passed became more and more real to her. Cobham had been a splendid toy which had lost half its allure when Lennox was not there to share it, but now she firmly believed that he shared all her visions of Lennoxlove. Whether or not a new and stately mansion would be built, or some already historic estate bought and improved, scarcely mattered to Frances. All she saw was her beloved husband’s memorial, and the resurrection of the old family home that had been destroyed by the Cromwellians. The fact that her dream was a fluid one, almost allegorical, only made it the more fascinating to this inveterate dreamer, whose life was paradoxically so orderly and practical.
Sometimes the Queen, who was fond of her beyond all other women, vaguely realized that the Frances so gay, so amusing, so kind and attentive was not the whole Frances; and had her life been less open and immaculate, Catherine might have wondered if the expression she occasionally surprised was that of one who brooded upon a secret lover.
“Do you not notice it too?” Catherine asked the King. “Oh, I cannot describe it. It is a kind of remote expression as though her real being is in another world. It could be,” Catherine suggested, though doubtfully, “that she has given her true self to religion.”
The King shrugged. “It may be so. Certainly no man seems capable of making an impression on her.”
That evening a pageant of classical beauties was being shown in tableaux, and at the end those who had taken part in it paraded before the King and Queen who smiled upon Frances as she passed by, a statuesque Pallas Athene in which rôle Gascar had painted her.
How different she was, Charles thought, from the girl he had once madly desired. In this stately woman he was not particularly interested, though he would always have a kindness for her.
“Sometimes she is more beautiful than ever,” the Queen said.
And the King smiled down upon his little dark wife who could so whole-heartedly admire another woman.
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