Catherine’s warm brown eyes opened wide, for there had never been such financial dilemmas in Lisbon. “But are you not the King?”
“My dear little plutocrat,” laughed Charles, “have you been here so many months without finding out that, for all his fine robes, the King in this country is virtually a beggar? He begs from Parliament — from all the fat squires who enriched themselves during the Commonwealth. He has only a small pittance from such personal estates as they have thought fitting to leave to him. Those ate the terms upon which wily old Monk invited me back, so that I can do mighty little without them. And, consider, my sweet — had I not been damnably hard up, should I have sold Dunkirk to the French?”
Catherine was all loving concern. “And Parliament will not — how do you say? — vote you any more?”
“For a really popular war they might,” answered Charles cynically. “But as long as I keep their country at peace they mutter like a swarm of misers and complain that I spend my wages on wine and women.”
“And do you?”
“Some of it. But nothing to what I spend on the Navy. My father, having come normally into his inheritance, was free to levy ship money; but I must build ships out of my own pocket, or not at all.”
“And they cannot see how important that is — being an island?” mused Catherine, who came of a sea-faring nation. “Well, at least they cannot mutter that they have been called upon to spend much upon your marriage.”
“I did my best for you,” Charles reminded her deprecatingly. “I saw to it that they voted you forty thousand pounds a year for your household.”
“So I understood from milord Chancellor when I first came,” said Catherine. “But I have not had it.”
Charles laid down both clock and tools and gave, her his undivided attention. “But only last week I heard milord Treasurer read out the amount when we were passing current expenditure.” His eyes had narrowed shrewdly, and she rose and faced him, her small hands beating indignantly upon the table so that all his small cogs and springs went spinning. “You mean that those — those cheating humbugs — pretend in public that I have had the spending of it. That I have not managed with far less in order to — to atone — for my delayed dowry?” Outraged, she seized a bell and rang imperiously for her women. “Bring me my household books!” she ordered. And there and then she insisted upon going through them. She was not Luiza of Braganza’s daughter for nothing!
And, to her husband’s shared amusement, she really understood them. She had, he found, been personally supervising almost every item of expenditure all the time he was twitting her about that wretched dowry. He knew, of course, that in spite of all his gifts, her own private rooms were bare to the point of austerity. Probably she preferred them so, on principle, as his mother did. But, remembering the luxury of his mistress’s apartments, it almost unmanned him to find how frugally his wife and her Portuguese people had lived. Catherine was a woman of integrity, and he admired her all the more because it was not the frugality but the cheating that she minded. But figures had always bored him, so he got up presently and took her in his arms — pen, books and all. “We will go to Tunbridge if I have to pawn my crown,” he promised, kissing the tip of her indignantly up-turned nose.
“Oh, Charles, that will be lovely!” she cried, standing on tip-toe to return his caress. “But there will be no need to do anything as unseemly as that. I shall fight, this thing out with your horrid Parliament myself. See, it is all down-here in black and white — what I received from them and how much I spent. And they must know very well that I should never have saved and scrimped unless I had supposed that you would have benefited.”
Charles knew that she would really be fighting for him — ranging herself on his side against their parsimony. And she so childlike and so small!
And fight them she did; coolly, reasonably claiming what they had promised her. It was so mean of them, she pointed out, to ignore the wealth of trade she had brought. They had just thought of her as a nonentity — a gullible foreigner — and trusted that the king was not interested enough ever to find out. And shrewd London merchants and wealthy squires who called the tune in Parliament-paid over the arrears of her income and thought the better of her for it.
So by the time the first wild roses were out in the hedgerows and the curly lambs almost out-bleating their mothers, Catherine and her solicitous husband went to Tunbridge, thereby lending a lustre to that sleepy little country town. Catherine was enchanted with the place and Charles had a right busy time with all the pretty wenches who held up their faces, in confiding rustic fashion, to be kissed. There were picnics in the meadows and dancing on the green; and every morning Charles would accompany his Queen and her new lady-in-waiting to the wells, where all the fashionable world sat gossiping about the Pump Room and pretending to enjoy the bitter, brownish chalybeate water. For Catherine, to her great content, now had a young and innocent girl brought over by the Queen Mother to supplant the hated Castlemaine — a lovely girl called Frances Stuart to whom, because she was a poor relation of her husband’s, she delighted in showing every imaginable kindness. And although the happy pastoral idyll of their lives was frequently disturbed by the King being obliged to return to London to pass bills or prorogue Parliament, or to attend unwillingly to the quelling of rebellious Irish Catholics, it was observed that he always rode back post haste to Tunbridge and that Catherine, full of vivacity and charm, would set forth with her ladies, dashingly arrayed in redingotes and plumed hats, to meet and embrace him on the way. Pride and early inhibitions were forgotten; and she was learning that even the lustiest of lovers wearies at times of taking the initiative and can be inordinately pleased by a woman’s shameless show of spontaneous affection.
Charles — or Charles’s conscience — was glad to see his oft-wronged wife so happy; but towards the end of their stay a heavy shadow, occasioned by letters she received from Portugal, began to lie across her new, gay world. Foolish, chiding letters from Alphonso, who had heard that she was conforming sensibly to a Protestant country’s way and had ceased to wear her ridiculous farthingales; and worried letters from her mother because a Spanish army was again on Portuguese soil and advancing close to Lisbon.
Anxiety tore at Catherine’s heart so that Charles, returning from a gallop across Ashdown Forest, found her in tears. “If only you could send-your ships again to help us,” she entreated, showing him the letters.
“I heard of this when I was in London, but would not worry you,” he said wearily, disliking her elder brother rather more than usual. “Or I would have told you that our Colonel Hunt has already left Portsmouth with a small expeditionary force.”
“Oh, Charles! How g-generous!”
“As Hyde will tell you it has less to do with generosity than with our political alliance. Were we at war with Spain I should expect your brother to do the same,” shrugged Charles. “And, for the love of God, why must you women always weep?”
Catherine checked herself instantly, realising that on that last visit to London he had probably been flooded, for her sake, with Barbara’s reproachful tears. “It is perhaps a weapon given to us because we wear no swords,” she suggested, with a watery smile.
He held out a forgiving hand and drew her to his knee. “Then there is small need for you to use it, since I find myself much more vulnerable to the undimmed brightness of your eyes,” he told her.
Catherine lay blissfully in his arms. Through the open casement poured the silver beauty of a nightingale’s song, making magic of the still summer evening. “If only I can bear him a son there will be nothing left to ask of God!” she thought. But soon the agony of her driven, valiant little country was tearing at her heart again. “Beloved,” she ventured, “I have been wondering for days past if you would allow me to write to his Holiness, the Pope?”
“And what can the Pope do that my soldiers cannot?” demanded Charles, kissing her white shoulder and marvelling afresh at the firm smallness of the breast beneath
his hand.
“He could acknowledge my brother’s sovereignty, and so protect our country from such ruthless rapacity. Spain is a Catholic country and even King Philip would not dare to oppose the authority of Rome.”
Charles stopped kissing her and sat up. “My dear child, it would be most unwise,” he told her gravely. “You cannot know the temper of my people. How fanatically, since the reign of Mary Tudor, they hate and fear all traffic with Rome. It is like a running fever with them.”
“But they need not know. I could send the letter secretly by one of my gentlemen.”
Charles almost brushed her from his knee. “If he were caught it might cost me my throne,” he said brusquely.
But, having seen the way his people loved him, Catherine found that incredible; and she cared for Portugal more passionately than he, with so many foreign influences and so much to forgive, could as yet care for England. “There is Richard Bellings, whom you yourself appointed to be always about me. We both know that even if he were caught no Inquisition would ever make him speak.”
Charles, too, got to his feet. Although they stood apart, their glances held. “And what weight do you suppose a message from Protestant England could possibly have with Rome?” he demanded.
But over and over again she had thought it all out while he lay asleep. “I would ask it in return for the good offices I hope to perform for Catholics in this country. I would tell his Holiness that no desire for a crown — nothing but my ardent desire to serve the Faith — could have induced me to become Queen of England.”
“Then I have only been flattering myself that I had something to do with it,” remarked Charles, bowing ironically. “And may I ask what good offices you had the temerity to hope you might perform for us? Or was it,” he added, with that shrewd narrowing of the eyes, “to have been for me personally? A zealous wifely mission recently inflamed by my mother, perhaps?”
Instead of wincing from his sarcasm, Catherine faced him squarely. “In this matter I was thinking only of my own beloved country,” she told him candidly. “But since I love you, you must know that I wish more than anything in the world that you would become a Catholic.”
“And so — sometimes — do I,” answered Charles slowly. It was the first time they had ever spoken together of fundamental things and he, who seldom talked to women save for amusement, found himself speaking to her as though she were his other self — saying things which he had never admitted even to his own brothers. “It would be a cessation of struggle — a kind of coming home ... “
In her utter amazement, Catherine could find no words in which to voice her joy. She went to him and laid her two hands, as if in prayer, against his heart. “I would give anything —” she whispered.
“That is just the difference, my dear,” he sighed. “I may wish sometimes, but I would not give anything. For in my case it would mean giving up so much.”
He saw that she was more deeply shocked than when she had supposed him to be a confirmed Anglican. “What, then, is your religion?” she asked.
He lifted her hands and kissed them lightly. The moment of deep reality was gone. “Never to go on my travels again,” he said. “I assure you I am not worth saving. A man with mighty few principles.”
“But limitless kindness,” said Catherine, seeking to bind up some of the hurts that had been done to the trusting small boy in the Van Dyck’s picture.
He leaned back against the arm of his chair and, quirking a puzzled eyebrow, pulled her almost roughly towards him. “I have never been loved like this before,” he said, half angry because her very simplicity baffled him.
“But everybody loves you!”
“Oh, because I am a king — or for beaux yeux — or because they want something,” he jibed. “But you, Kate —”
He broke off in mid-tirade, trying to accuse her because he knew so well the tortuousness of men’s minds. “But of course it is true, is it not, that my mother urged you to use all wifely wiles to convert me?”
Catherine nodded assent. Her clear, sherry brown eyes were wells of truthfulness, and he knew it.
“Yet you have never once tried to.”
Her gaze dropped before his at last, and the enchanting colour rose to her cheeks. “It is because — may the Holy Saints intercede for me I — I have been wicked enough to —”
“Lie with a heretic and like it?”
She looked up then and saw the grin on his ugly mouth. “I pray you, do not jest about such things!” she begged.
He was all contrition at once. “There at least, my sweet, you wrong me. Never was I further from jesting.” Though in part it must hurt her, for once he met her serious sincerity with his own, permitting her a glimpse of the real Charles Stuart whom so few men knew. “Because there is so little else I can give you, I would give you the satisfaction of knowing that none of my mother’s subtle plans or impassioned exhortations have ever moved me as you have done — by quietly living your religion and loving me.” He got up and strolled to the window, suddenly less her husband than the King. “For this once I will let you send Richard Bellings to Rome,” he said, in that grave, resonant voice she had heard him use to Counsellors. “But you must understand that having once freed myself, I cannot endure another woman trying to proselytize or meddle politically.”
“Are you not — rather hard on her Majesty?”
“Why do you say that?”
“I had supposed that you love her, since you have twice invited her to make her home here.”
“But naturally I love her, and by God's grace I will never fail in my duty to her. Did she not risk her life for us and do all she could for me in my exile? We Stuarts hold together. But after Cromwell freed my youngest brother from Carisbrook she had him in France and used every device to turn him from the Anglican faith he had sworn at my father’s knee to keep. Henry was but a lad, yet he kept faith, though she had the sheets torn from his bed and turned him out in anger. I sent for him then to Holland. Do you not see, Catherine, that had James and I been killed Henry would have been the last hope of our house for the monarchy. And had he become a Catholic, the English and the Scots would have had none of him. And my father knew it.”
“I would rather die than endanger you — and your monarchy,” vowed Catherine, watching his tall, dignified silhouette against the fading sunset.
“So Mam said, no doubt, to the King, my father. Yet it may well be that her meddling cost him his life.”
“But she adored him!”
“All the same, being a woman, she talked — at the wrong moment.” Charles turned, and although Catherine could scarcely see his shadowed face she knew that it was sad and stern. “Zounds, she had no thought to harm him!” he declared, in the old warm, informal way. “No one had worked more heroically for the Cause than she; and when she realized what she had done she was heartbroken.”
“Then what made her —?”
“It was just Mam’s sense of the dramatic. She always had to play a part. And the dangerous way my father doted on her, having to tell her everything. He had gone down to Parliament intending to call for his five worst enemies and impeach them. The moment was ripe. He had them in the hollow of his hand that day; and it was their lives or his. He had planned to take them completely by surprise; it was one of the few really clever moves he made against the growing strength of Parliament. But Mam had to talk. ‘Rejoice with me!’ she cried to a lady of doubtful loyalty, ‘for even at this hour the King is master of his realm again, for Pym and his confederates must be arrested by now.’ But even though she had sat watch in hand, he had in reality been delayed. You know how people with petitions always pester me as I go down to the House. You know what it is — a smile here and a promise there. And he was too courteous and conscientious to brush them aside. And by the time he arrived some cursed Roundhead had warned the five Members and they had escaped through a window — all except one who was enormously fat and got stuck, they say. Just as my father himself, who was not fat at
all, got stuck between prison bars trying to escape from Carisbrook Castle before they had done with him. On the Isle of Wight, it was, and I had a French brig waiting for him down in Brook Bay; but, Heaven bless him for a guileless gentleman, he had to bungle even that!”
There was a long silence while the shadows deeped in the corners of the low beamed Kentish room. “I am not brilliant like your mother, nor have I any sense of the dramatic. Moreover, you do not dote on me at all dangerously,” said Catherine, slowly, borrowing some of his bitterness. “Therefore I think you will always find it safe to trust me.”
CHAPTER IX
“LISTEN TO what my brother Pedro says, Charles!” cried Catherine, referring to the hastily scrawled letter in her hand. “After the victory, when your British charged up the hill of Amexial and helped us to drive the invading Spaniards back, our General, the Conde de Villa Flor, cried out ‘These heretics are better to us than all our Saints!’ ”
“And Alphonso, I understand, rewarded them for their pains with a pinch of snuff apiece!” smiled Charles.
Catherine’s triumphant gaiety clouded over. “How — humiliating! For Pedro and Villa Flor and all the rest of us. Charles, have you thought lately that Alphonso is going a little mad?”
“Judging by the letters he writes you, I should not be surprised. But do not let the snuff incident embarrass you, my dear, for I offset it by ordering forty thousand crowns to be distributed among our men; and, as I told you, it is relatively easy to screw money out of Parliament for purposes of war.”
Catherine, in her unlaced cherry-coloured waistcoat, regarded him adoringly. “Small wonder the Portuguese think you are some kind of god!” she murmured.
Tunbridge Wells had done wonders for her; and after a leisurely progress through the West country where Charles had once been a fugitive, they were back again at Whitehall. A Whitehall stirring with progress and spaciousness of thought, and full of the comings and goings of scientists and sea captains. Such men were for ever gathering round a great painted globe of the world that stood before the long window in the King’s chamber. James and Cousin Rupert, Admiral Sir William Penn, the Earl of Sandwich, and frequently, of late, a fearless swashbuckling adventurer called Robert Holmes. There was gold to be got in New Guinea, Sir Robert said — knowing well that no man had more need of gold than a reinstated Stuart.
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