And later, in her great crimson curtained bed, Catherine lay wondering if he would come to her. After so happy a day it seemed as if their disagreement had never been. Yet nothing was any different, she supposed. For she was beginning to learn that, in spite of his easy-going manner, Charles could upon occasion be as obstinate as she. He was often supping again with Lady Castlemaine and still intended to make her a Lady of the Bedchamber. Only last night, for all Catherine knew, he might have slept with her. And if so, how dared he come? Yet, covering her hot cheeks in the darkness, Catherine knew that if he would only come back to her she would forgive him anything. “I, who have been so proud for Portugal, have no personal pride left at all!” she thought.
Her door opened quietly and he was there.
“Do I disturb you, Catherine?” he asked.
“No one in my life has ever disturbed me more!” she answered, folding defensive arms across her heart and almost hating him because he could make it beat so wildly.
“I am not good enough to kiss your little finger, Kate. I will go away if you would rather.”
If she refused herself to him he would certainly make no bluster, but go. Charles was always so civilized about these things. But then, thought Catherine, he can afford to be for he does not really care. And she knew — or thought she knew — that if she sent him away he would only go to Barbara Castlemaine or some other trollop. She could not bring herself to answer either way.
“I can, of course, go and sleep in my own stuffy room with the spaniels,” he offered. A glimmer from the nightwick flickered on the side of his swarthy face, and she could see that he was grinning as if he had read her thoughts.
She stretched out a hand and caught at one of his. “No, stay!” she implored, with a pitiful catch in her voice. “The nights are so long — alone.”
It was utterly humiliating to love a man so desperately; but once he took her in his arms she would no longer see his amusement, nor remember anything but his expert love-making and her own need of him. And perhaps she was wrong about her honeymoon being all a deceiving and his not caring at all.
“My poor lonely little religieuse!” he mocked tenderly, throwing aside his gorgeous dressing robe.
“I am not a — how you say it? — a nun!” she protested furiously, and when he bent over her to kiss her lovely hair she reached out warm arms and drew him down to her. In this horrible country where simple goodness was made a mock of she would show him that just because a woman kept her body for one man she was not necessarily inept or cold. And this time she must keep him from promiscuous beauties — compete with them. If only she knew the tricks by which they held their men — those tricks so furtively and fiercely envied by virtuous fools like herself!
The floodgates of her pent-up love were loosened, so that the surge of her southern passion surprised and shook him. It cleansed him temporarily of all desire for the counterfeit and the tawdry, and his loving became a rededication. “May I be the worst man living if after marriage I keep a mistress!” he had been wont to say, criticizing his newly wed cousin, Louis of France. And when he had first seen the sweet defencelessness of Catherine, in spite of all his worldly cynicism, he had honestly believed and hoped that marriage would cure the easy, indulgent habits of a lifetime.
“Is it foolish to give and to forgive too readily?” pondered Catherine next morning, walking alone with donna Penalva in the garden after he was gone to Westminster.
“It may seem prodigal at the time, Madame,” said the wizened little Portuguese countess, clinging to her mistress’s arm because of her physical blindness, “but if one’s love is the kind which lasts a lifetime one can afford to be foolish. For it is the place where a man is sure of unquestioning giving that he always comes back to.”
“And in order to attain that far-off felicity you think it right that a wife should be prepared to accept slights — to take second place — to forgo all decent pride?”
“I think it is not a question of right or wrong — but of how she loves. For those of us who love a man better than self or pride there is no choice.”
Catherine lingered by the lily-covered moat which had bounded her honeymoon, but her thoughts were of the future in Whitehall ... “You are a wise old woman, Marie Penalva,” she said.
The Countess listened for a moment or two to make sure that the Queen’s other ladies were still out of earshot. “How much do you love him, dear child?” she asked.
And suddenly, standing there in the morning sunlight, Catherine knew and accepted the implications of her answer. “With all my heart,” she mimicked softly, in her husband’s tongue.
CHAPTER VII
“SO COME kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure,”
sang the pretty chambermaid, puffing up the velvet cushions on the Queen’s window-seat, and quite unaware that the Queen herself had come into the room behind her.
“What is that pretty song?” asked Catherine of Braganza, startling her out of her wits.
“Oh, Madame! Just something the ’prentice boys used to whistle — out of some old play, your Majesty.” The girl was in a limp, self-effacing obeisance on the floor.
“Well, at sweet-and-twenty you sound uncommonly happy, Drusilla!”
“I crave your Majesty’s pardon —”
“In this country does one have to ask pardon for being happy?” asked the Queen, with a note of bitterness in her lovely voice.
“Oh, no, Madame, no! Not now!”
Catherine had been brought up in the belief that queens should not talk to chambermaids. But perhaps one gleaned truer information that way than sitting with obsequious courtiers. At any rate, Charles talked about race horses to Toby, his valet; and the girl, rising in obedience to an indulgent nod, looked fresh as an English rose. “Was it so very bad, then, when the Puritans were in power?” she asked.
“Madame, it was — moribund as the plague!” In her eagerness to make a foreigner understand just how moribund it had been, Drusilla let her words almost trip over each other. “The theatres all closed, and preachers in steeple hats at every street corner so that one could not sleep o’ nights for dreaming about Hell. Nothing but hymn singing all Sabbath and the neighbours spying on you if you so much as smiled at a likely lad. And now — and now — since His Majesty came —”
“You are free to huggle with whomsoever you will — any day in the week — because the gentry do!”
Half laughing and half sighing Catherine waved her away to finish her duties elsewhere ... At least it was good to know that the people were the happier for Charles’s return. ‘Like my beloved countrymen, oppression does not suit them, They must be free, and proud in their freedom’, she thought, sitting down on one of the freshly plumped up cushions to look out admiringly upon her husband’s capital.
For Queen Catherine had come home to her apartments in Whitehall — apartments overlooking the busy riven And Charles had brought her there triumphantly, by water, with a lavish pageantry which had reduced even her incensed compatriots to awed silence. But it had not been the money spent so much as the artistry which had impressed her. No Venetian festival could have been more beautiful, she thought, than the escort of a thousand flower-garlanded boats; and herself and Charles in the great State barge with a pillared canopy above their heads, and the coats of the royal watermen making scarlet splashes against the blue sky and the drapery of cloth of gold. There had been music from the smaller boats and wild cheering from either bank and, as they drew nearer, the moving welcome of innumerable church bells. All her life long she would like to look back upon the Londoners’ welcome. As smooth green meadows gave place to gabled houses people had waved from windows and even clambered precariously onto roof tops. And at the Watergate of Whitehall, Palace Queen Henrietta Maria and all the household had been waiting to receive her.
“And not the least of all my pleasure that, day,” she recalled with candour, “was seeing that Castlemaine woman waiting unc
omfortably with the-rest of the crowd trying in vain to catch Charles’s unwilling eye.”
But that had been weeks ago. And gradually, insidiously, the ill-bred creature had pushed her way into every Court function, holding him by reproachful tears to his misguided promise to make her a member of the Queen’s household, so that now Catherine was obliged to put up with her hateful presence in her private apartments and to hear her boasting to the other women about the progress of her fine new baby.
Both for her own and for her husband’s sake Catherine would have given anything to find herself pregnant, “But how can he expect me to bear him sons when I am kept in such agitation and distress of mind?” she raged, all unaware that this was the very burden of both his mother’s and his Chancellor’s arguments with the half-shamed, harassed King.
Above everything in those days Catherine hated being dressed before the quizzing gaze of her husband’s mistress; for Barbara, off-shoot of the handsome Villiers family, had been born so fatally faultless of form and features that she would probably have looked just as beautiful in the bundly garments of a washer-woman as in the jewels the King bestowed upon her; whereas Catherine’s beauty depended much upon time and mood and, most of all, upon happy animation. She was only too painfully aware that in order to make the best of herself — much more to compete with this Court full of beautiful women — she needed to take thought and care. “I marvel that your Majesty can have the patience to spend so long a-dressing!” Barbara would say with every outward show of deference when Catherine, preparing to meet Charles, caused her frisseur to change the style of her curls for a second or even a third time.
Catherine could have risen from her dressing stool like a Tagus fishwife and scratched the mocking eyes out with her comb. But did she not pray particularly every morning of her life for patience? And had she not lifted herself above the level of her tormentor by keeping her promise to milord Chancellor to make no more angry scenes? “I have vast need of patience, milady Castlemaine,” she would manage to say with a kind of spirited dignity.
But, in spite of her rival’s presence, life was easier at Whitehall than at Hampton. There was always something going on to interest or distract. The teeming life of London pulsed about her so that she was intoxicated by its vigour. The City wharves were always full of shipping, foreign delegates sought audiences of the King, and discoverers of new, undreamed of countries brought strange gifts and stranger stories to the palace. So that Catherine felt herself to be living at the hub of the world. By the conversation of those around her she was introduced to a new appreciation of art and science, of which she was lamentably ignorant. Sometimes she would drive with her ladies to see the exquisite workmanship of famous craftsmen in Goldsmiths’ Row or through the noisy, congested chaffering of East Cheap. Or Charles would show her his amusing rare waterfowl in St. James’s Park, or take her to see some great East Indian merchantman come in. And wherever she went with him on such informal occasions she marvelled at the way in which he would recognise some old soldier who had fought for his father, or stop and watch some gunsmith or mason at work. “How can you know so much about their lives?” she would ask, remembering how Alphonso would scarcely notice them at all.
“It is having once been poor and honest myself!” Charles would say, in that pleasant, indolent way of his.
But however full and pleasant the days, the winter evenings were still long and empty for Catherine. Because she would not play for high stakes or join the noisy, modish throng where Barbara queened it among the men she often found herself sitting with the most faithful of her ladies and a mere handful of the dullest courtiers. All the rest seemed to prefer, the loud laughter and lewd jests, and even those who stayed knew that it did them no good to be seen too often at the Queen’s elbow. Barbara would be sure to see that they were covered with ridicule before the evening was out; and because she had a caustic kind of wit Charles, to his shame, would sometimes smile instead of rebuking her. And ridicule, as poor Catherine knew only too well, is the hardest thing of all to face.
Yet all the more decent men at Court and half the shamed sycophants were tiring of the once amusing contest, and had begun to admire the little, lonely Queen who had learned to behave with dignified restraint and who stood alone, with a courage they secretly envied, for high principles in her personal affairs. And — had she but known it — the King himself was tiring too. All that was best in him was beginning to see her not as the amusing little innocent to be played with, but as a woman of his own to be respected. If Catherine stood out much longer clearly he must choose between the two of them. Though he might smile at his mistress’s malicious sallies and walk out in silence from her tempers, the liberties she took sickened him and he had already had a word with Will Chiffinch — that ingenious jackal of his amours — about some suitable pension for a lady in retirement.
But the. crumpling of Catherine’s fine resolution was precipitated, quite unwittingly, by a young boy of fourteen or so.
One evening when Barbara Castlemaine’s behaviour was more preposterous than usual Catherine was touched to see the lad detach himself from a group of baccarat players and take the trouble to talk to some of her neglected ladies.
“Who is that handsome boy?” she asked.
“I do not know, Madame,” answered one of her Portuguese ladies. “But I could find out if you wish.”
Catherine watched him idly for a moment or two, attracted by his grace and carriage, and by something oddly familiar in his gestures. But her lady was saved the trouble, for presently a manservant came across the room and said to him respectfully, “Your pardon, Mr. Crofts, Sir, but Milady Castlemaine would have you come and hold her little dog while she plays a hand.”
The boy nodded, but was too well mannered to leave Lettice Ormonde abruptly. And Catherine, glancing contemptuously towards the gaming tables, observed that Barbara was leaning familiarly on the King’s arm with most of the other men in the room gathered round her. “She cannot leave me so much as one unbearded boy!” she thought furiously; and, acting on the spur of the moment, beckoned the young fellow to her side. If he were summoned by the Queen even Lady Castlemaine would have to get someone else to hold her pampered spaniel.
He came with alacrity and a charming smile; and Catherine observed that in spite of his gallant bearing his warm brown hair and eyes gave him an almost womanly beauty. “What is your name?” she asked kindly.
“Crofts, Madame,” he replied.
“Your first name, I mean.”
“Jemmie, my friends call me,” he replied ingenuously.
“And how is it, Jemmie, that although I have been here fully a month I have never before seen you?”
Catherine had a way with young people. He pulled forward a cushion and knelt easily and respectfully before her. “Because I have but now come in her Majesty the Queen Mother’s train.”
“Yet you speak English so dearly that I can understand you more easily than any man I have met — except my husband.”
“I am an Englishman,” said Jemmie, gratified that she should so ignore his lack of years.
How pleasant it would.be, thought Catherine, to have an upstanding young boy of one’s own — so natural and so lively — about the Palace. '“But I suppose you live with Queen Henrietta Maria now that her Majesty has her own establishment at Grosvenor House?” she sighed.
“At first I did, Madame. But now the King, of his grace and favour, has found me rooms at the Cockpit.”
“The Cockpit?”
“That part of the Palace which lies across the street; where the tennis court and bowling green are and where the cock fighting is held.”
You do not lodge there alone, surely?”
“With Sir William Crofts, Madame.”
“Crofts? Was not that the name of one of those loyal friends who helped my husband to escape after the battle of Worcester?”
“Why, yes, your Majesty.” The boy’s face lit up with pride. “So you have heard all a
bout that marvellous adventure?”
“The King himself told me, Jemmie. So Will Crofts is your father?”
“Oh no, but he has brought me up ever since I can remember.”
“And you like it better, living at the Cockpit?”
“Indeed, yes. King Charles told Sir Will that it is time for me to study under a proper tutor. You see, when we were in Holland and France we could not afford one. You cannot imagine how poor we were, Madame; and often our lodgings were quite horrible.”
“You poor child!”
But young Jemmie appeared to be more concerned with his present good fortune. “Do you know, the King is even paying for me to have fencing lessons at Major Faubert’s Academy off Swallow Street,” he confided. “And almost every day I am able to watch him play tennis with his friends. And almost always he beats them all.”
Catherine found the subject of their discourse so completely to her liking that she forgot all about her former vexation. “He should do so, do you not think, with that long reach of his?”
But the young tennis critic laughed knowingly. “I think he would win anyway, Madame, because he plays with his head,” he declared. “Both Sir Charles Berkeley and the Duke of Buckingham have more power in their strokes and the score may be all against him and then, when you think all is lost, the King puts over a cunning one — et voila! You should come across one afternoon, Madame, and watch for yourself.”
“I will, Jemmie,” promised Catherine, sure that it would please Charles and wondering why she had not thought of it before.
But, even while hugging present happiness, the boy was not unmindful of former obligations. “Do not think me ungrateful to the Queen Mother or tell her that I prefer living with men,” he begged naïvely. “Her Majesty has been very kind to me.”
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