Charles knew that he was behaving like a brute, but the woman who had held him in thrall for so long had nagged him to it. “Barbara is in trouble —” he began.
With a shrill spurt of laughter his wife swept the backgammon dice spinning to the floor. “One would imagine so!” she jeered, having, it would appear, learned more of the English idiom than he had supposed.
“Her husband has left her and disowned the child,” he explained, reddening with annoyance.
“One can but commend his sense of decency. Some of us are not of the stuff of which complaisant cuckolds are made. But you Stuarts seem to think you can buy anybody’s soul with a title!”
“Hold your peace and do as you are bid!” Charles shouted back in execrable Spanish. “A public rebuff from you would leave Lady Castlemaine the butt of every cheap wit in the country, and she is a proud woman.”
“So am I — and with more reason.”
“But not over merciful.”
“Is no mercy to be spared for me?”
In her desperate fury Catherine had thrown discretion to the winds and Charles, who had expected nothing but gentle acquiescence from her, was amazed. “Have I ever been ungenerous to you? Can you not come down off your righteous pedestal and put yourself in my position? Or see that some such situation as this was inevitable?” he beseeched, in a final effort to coerce her. “And if you will but accept this one demand I swear that I will put no more hard thing upon you, and that if this woman does not behave with deference towards you I will never see her face again. I ask it of you, Catherine. It touches my honour.”
“Your honour!”
“Assuredly. I would not leave her and my new born son unprotected.”
His son — whom he would see constantly if this woman were about the palace, and whom he would grow to love and who would not be hers. The words were as a sword in his wife’s heart. She stood pondering how this might be avoided, her eyes averted from the ivory crucifix before which she had prayed privily for this very gift. “Since milady Castlemaine is so promiscuous, could not you too disown him?” she suggested.
By the surprised way in which Charles’s dark head jerked up, she knew that the idea had never even occurred to him. “That could, I suppose, be your Portuguese idea of honour,” he observed contemptuously.
Glimmeringly, grudgingly, she admitted the moral hypothesis. That, having sinned, he should stand by it. Make what reparation he could. “But if I, too, should have a son,” she began, more temperately.
Immediately he was at her side, his persuasive arms about her. “Please God we shall, and soon, my sweet!” he said. “And then how trivial all this pother will seem. You will forget it and we can live in contentment again.”
To live with him in contentment ... Never again in the complete radiance of trust and dalliance from which she had been so rudely awakened. But in her bewildered misery the warmth of his caress was such physical relief that for a brief moment she almost let herself be persuaded. If she let him coax her back to love, meeting good-humour with good-humour, she would look desirable again — for hers, she knew, was the kind of beauty that depends so much upon the glow of happiness. And if she could but put all this ravaging indignation from her would not all the advantage be with her, the propitiated, magnanimous, forgiving wife? Now that she had learned from Charles to overcome her prudery, could she not match any mistress in the world in the ardour of her love for him? And keep him — keep him ...
Alas! There was no one in this strange country, save Charles himself, to whom she could turn for advice. Invariably she had listened to a constant stream of prejudices and criticisms from her own indignant people, though every ’prentice lad and chambermaid knew that this woman whose famous beauty she so much feared was a termagant and that the King, already wearied of her greed and tantrums, was a man who preferred peace at any price. And wise old Clarendon, the Chancellor, could have told her that Barbara Castlemaine was a bad habit of which marriage had half broken him, and that now was the moment when an easy, amiable wife might so point the contrast as to make the break complete.
But her sense of righteousness held her firm. And her seething sense of injury made her too bitter to win him back by wiles. Her upbringing had not taught her how to compromise with life, whereas her husband’s whole life had been a compromise.
“It would be condoning mortal sin,” she said, obstinately withdrawing herself from his embrace.
“You talk like a prig. It is those miserable, whining priests you have about you!” complained Charles, exasperated beyond endurance.
“Why revile them? You promised me religious freedom.”
“And, God in Heaven, have you not had it? Even to the point of spending hours in your oratory when you should have been serving your husband’s pleasure in bed!”
“That is all you think of with a woman,” she accused, forgetting how patient he had been with her. “We Portuguese women are not loose like the English. We are brought up to be virtuous —”
“And so ill-favoured, most of those you brought, that no man seeks to deny them the privilege. I can promise you that if you persist in making difficulties here and they encourage you, Madame, I will pack the whole clowder of them back to Lisbon!”
“And if you insist upon making this Castlemaine woman a Lady of my Bedchamber I will go back to Lisbon with them!”
Catherine, now as white faced as her husband, stood trembling like a threatened thorough-bred in the middle of the room. And her tall husband stared down at her in baffled, impotent rage. Never before had any woman threatened to leave him. Terminating love affairs had hitherto been his prerogative. Long after he tired of them they always cajoled him to return, and whatever their wiles, he had always known how to manage them — good humouredly, using a little strategy or an absurdly generous recompense or perhaps the help of Chiffinch, his gentleman-of-the-back-stairs, when they became too persistent. And here was this foreigner, whom he had believed to be so meek, defying him on a matter in which she had no legal right at all. By what power, he wondered, could she so enrage and hurt him that he must needs bellow at her like a Thames wherryman, so that the very pages at the doors could hear him? Not, surely, just because she was his. wife? If so he had been a fool to let them talk him into marriage — he who for thirty years and more had sauntered through life foot free!
For hurt he undoubtedly was, in heart as well as pride, when she talked so high-handedly of leaving him.
“Better wait and see how your mother will welcome you!” he hit back brutally; and strode out and banged the door.
Poor Catherine sank to the floor, dissolved in tears. Her women came running to her and, not having been trained in any kind of independence, she sent for don Francisco and donna Elvira and was so foolish as to pour out her private wrongs before them all.
“To condone his Britannic Majesty’s way of life would be to lower the standard of your own,” her Confessor told her.
“That it should come to this — after ceding Tangier and Bombay!” bemoaned her harassed godfather, smoothing the single strand of hair he wore so strangely across the shining baldness of his pate.
“And the heartless fiend probably gone straight to that Jezebel’s bed!” shrilled donna Elvira. “Did I not tell Queen Luiza how it would be if we came to this immoral country?”
Between them they bolstered up Catherine’s indignation and inflamed her self-pity. Not one of them had the tolerance or wit to try to mend matters, instead of ranting about the prestige of Portugal. Only the half-blind and ageing donna Maria Penalva, who had been allowed to come because she had had the care of Catherine when she was small, had one word of sense to say. “Far better not to spoil your lovely eyes which the King so much admires, Madame,” she advised, sending for warm water and lamb’s wool with which to bathe her mistress’s red and swollen face, and staying with her long after the others had gone to bed, their tongues ceasing to wag only for want of further invective.
“Do you suppo
se that he will come here any more?” asked Catherine, when they were alone.
“A man needs a wife to come home to,” answered donna Penalva.
“When he has nothing more exciting to do? I do not want to be needed like that.”
“It is, perhaps, the best way in the end.”
Long after the candles were extinguished Catherine clung to the old lady’s kind, thin hand. Her sobs were small and desolate now because she no longer made pretence that they were anything to do with pride and anger. “Do you believe what donna Elvira said — that he went straight to that awful woman’s bed?” she brought herself to ask.
There was no love lost between the two old women, and donna Penalva sniffed disparagingly. “When Lady Castlemaine has not yet risen from childbirth?” she scoffed. “He is probably much disturbed himself, and if he goes to bed anywhere it will be with those everlasting yapping spaniels of his.”
“What, here you mean? In Hampton?” Some of her natural animation had come back into Catherine’s voice.
“I made it my business to ask one of those pert pages. They will tell me things sometimes because I get them to help me across the courtyards and I have the gratitude to talk to them about the way the English ships saved Portugal. They are not bad lads at heart. And they assure me that His Majesty never left the Palace, but was still in shirt and breeches at midnight acting midwife to his favourite bitch.”
“Dear donna Maria!” For the first time the little Queen, tired out, relaxed comfortably against her pillows.
“That is right. Go to sleep, my poppet, and things will look more hopeful in the morning,” soothed donna Maria Penalva. “I am not managing and capable like donna Elvira, but at least I have been married to a man who was not always faithful to me, and borne his babies and in the end been desolately widowed. And I can tell you that the first grasping, romantic years are by no means the whole of marriage.”
CHAPTER V
THINGS SCARCELY seemed more hopeful in the morning. Standing in proud dudgeon at her window, Catherine saw the State barge pull away from the Palace water stairs bearing Charles down river to Westminster. He was ever an early riser. She looked at the French chiming clock he had given her and the hours of the day lay as heavy as lead before her. Without his gay teasing and his varied interests the galleries and gardens she had loved so much seemed dead. He had been teaching her to dance and she loved it, and already the charm of English music was spoiling her for the crude pipes and harps of the few musicians she had brought with her.
Now that Charles was gone there seemed nothing to do.
She sat down and wrote a long, unhappy letter to her mother and then retired in tears to her oratory. “Oh, Mother of Sorrows, why must this have happened to me when I was so happy?” she cried aloud in bewildered desolation. “Is it to punish me because I am wicked enough to find joy with a heretic and for drinking too greedily of earthly happiness?” And then, persuaded by her Confessor, she prayed with simplicity. “Help me, dear God, to turn my husband to the true faith, so that if evil doers take him from me now I may find him hereafter!”
Then calmed and fortified, she drew her dignity about her and walked with her ladies in the garden chatting and admiring the water lilies as if nothing had happened; though her eyes were always covertly upon the winding reach of the river watching for the return of the King’s barge. But she knew that they were whispering together about the night before; and then some busybody amongst them must needs tell her that as soon as Lady Castlemaine could rise from her bed she had taken all the best furnishings from her husband’s house and moved to Richmond.
“And where is Richmond?” enquired Catherine.
“A few miles down the Thames, between here and London,” they told her.
So no wonder Charles tarried. No doubt, even now, his barge lay moored there. Complaining that she felt chilled in this inhospitable climate, Catherine went indoors. During the long tedious evening while her priests read aloud from the Saints she persuaded herself that Charles must have arranged for the Castlemaine woman to go there. So that he could lodge there every night, no doubt. No use to sit up and wait for his return, donna Elvira declared. Since the Queen rightly refused to have his paramour brought under her roof, Hampton would see him no more.
But Charles gave them the lie. He was now a married man and his good resolutions, if frail, had been sincere. Whatever his private differences with his wife, he would not have the world point scorn at her. So when Catherine had at last fallen into an uneasy doze she was awakened by his step and felt him clamber into the great bed beside her. Supposing her to be still asleep, he did not speak. They lay in silence back to back, and although Catherine lay fuming for many hours, Charles, who had had an extraordinarily busy day, slept soundly; and although she was furious with him for disturbing her, she dared not speak of it, for at least his coming had put a stop to the busy tongues which she herself, in hasty indiscretion, had set wagging.
During the ensuing wretched week never once did he sleep anywhere else; yet they always rose to wrangle, or, worse still, to sulk in silence. More than once he tried to fondle her back to reconciliation, but always her hurt pride rose like a barrier between them. She wanted no other woman’s leavings, she told him. And as life became more and more unpleasant at Hampton so he began to spend yet more time away from home. And even though he might have come straight from working with his cousin Rupert in his fine new laboratory, or from an evening at the theatre, Catherine was always firmly persuaded that he had come from Richmond.
But there came a day when, outwardly at least, they were forced to smile and speak each other fair, showing a united front to the world. For. the summer months were drawing to a close and, since the Court would soon be moving to Whitehall, plans must be discussed for the new Queen’s state entry into the capital and all the various dignitaries and new members of her household must be presented to her.
Being so sore at heart, poor Catherine was very much on her dignity for the occasion. Flaunting her foreign patriotism, she had arrayed herself in one of her bejewelled farthingales so that, sitting upon the dais of the Great Hall — that most English of all places — she blazed bizarrely beside the more sombre sartorial perfection of her husband. She would show these arrogant islanders, with their long established line of kings, that Portugal, for all her struggles, was not unaccustomed to the etiquette of state occasions. But when her brother-in-law James presented his new, ill-chosen wife, Catherine’s dignity dissolved into natural kindness.
Because Anne of York was plain and frumpy, and only Chancellor Hyde’s daughter, Catherine went out of her way to set her at ease, inviting her to sit upon a stool at her side. For the Yorks, she supposed, must be beneath the King’s displeasure too because James had married a commoner — hastily, and probably of necessity.
“Did he not even ask your Majesty’s consent?” she asked in a conjugal aside, forgetting their estrangement.
Charles smiled wryly. “James has a genius for doing the most tactless thing at the most inopportune moment,” he said.
“He might have waited until I — until we —” floundered Catherine, realizing the importance of the lady’s progeny, since the Duke was still Heir-Presumptive to the Throne.
“I scarcely think so, judging by the promptness with which their daughter Mary made her debut,” observed Charles; but to Catherine’s surprise he treated his bourgeois sister-in-law with every kindness.
With Rupert, the Bavarian cousin, Catherine could never find anything in common; but she was glad to meet again her old friend, Admiral Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, and she was graciousness itself to Chancellor Hyde, remembering how loyal a friend he had been to Charles throughout his exile. Much as she had valued the seclusion of Hampton during the first halcyon weeks of her honeymoon, she was now thankful to see the Hall packed with guests because their presence eased the strained relations between her husband and herself.
After the rural life they had been leading, the rambli
ng old Tudor palace seemed alive with a foretaste of the brilliant formality of Whitehall; and Charles appeared to be particularly anxious to make the proceedings a success. With his happy blend of unconventionality and dignity he made a point of presenting the more important of their guests to her himself, helping her to say the right thing by giving her a brief thumbnail sketch of each. But, except for those whom she knew personally, their strange foreign, names sounded all alike to Catherine; and, following a succession of sleepless nights, the difficulties of the language and the seemingly endless line of bowing men and curtsying ladies began to weary her. Their jewels sparkled dazzlingly in the pools of candlelight and many of them were so elegant in the French fashion that, while still smiling automatically, she fell into an inward reverie, regretting that she had not worn one of the charming dresses which Charles had given her. It would have pleased him, and he was being so particularly pleasant to her tonight.
“My friend since boyhood, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham,” he was prompting, as he stood tall and debonair beside her. “And milord Albemarle who, as General Monk, of the Parliamentary Army, considered me preferable to Cromwell’s snivelling son and invited me back to take again mine own.”
“The Dowager Countess of Shrewsbury, who stood firm for my father.”
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