“You have heard what is being said since you taught your bastard to wear his hat in our presence?” she demanded, closing the door sharply against the gentleman of the backstairs’ sharp ears and leaning breathlessly against it.
The King had swung round with an angry reprimand but, seeing who it was, laid down his pen. That he appeared to be writing one of his constant letters to Minette somehow enraged her all the more. “I am sorry, my dear. I had not meant to insult you,” he apologized, with an obvious effort at patience. “The young fool shall be taught to hold his tongue. But it is largely the work of his elders, building to suit themselves upon an idle gesture. I know who my enemies are.”
Catherine came closer so that his half finished letter lay unintelligibly in French before her, seeming to shut her out still more. “Who was his mother? After what they are saying — I have a right to know.”
Charles did not question it, but sat staring straight before him as if looking back into the dubious past. “A Welsh woman of extraordinary beauty,” he said quietly, expressionlessly. “Robert Sydney and a Dutch Colonel had her first and I know not how many afterwards.” He did not add that in exile, torn from the duties of his birthright, there had been so little else to do.
“I begin to understand,” said Catherine, after a moment or two, “how you must find any chaste woman dull.”
Charles had the grace to redden angrily. Her contempt, untempered for once by any extenuating tenderness, was hard to bear. Unconscious of what she did, she bent to retrieve his fallen pen and stood before his table tearing at the grey goose feathers. “How would you feel if I openly started an amour with that poet, Waller, who wrote verses to the beauty of my eyes?” she blurted out recklessly. “Or with Ralph Montagu, my Master of Horse, whom all my ladies tease for being so hopelessly in love with me? Or do I flatter myself, perhaps? Would you not even care?”
It was a new outlook for Charles, who had supposed her to be occupied with good works and prayers except when she made herself gay for him. And Catherine’s voice, even in anger, was as beautiful as her eyes. Not shrill, like most of the feminine voices which railed at him. “If your Master of Horse is in love with you he will have to be removed,” he said sullenly.
“But why is it different?” cried Catherine, defying all convention in the obstinate flame of her goodness.
He swung round then and rose to face her. He seemed to tower over her. “Because you are my wife,” he stormed. “Because ...” But suddenly those stern lines of his face broke into a disarming smile and his hands were raised to high Heaven in exasperation. “Because you are you!” he added lamely, unable to explain either to her or to himself why the thought of her sullied with intrigue was so unbearable.
In any calmer moment Catherine would have recognized that as triumph, but she was beyond all blandishments. “If you are set on this marriage — if you must honour Jemmie publicly as your firstborn — then I will not come to Windsor and stand by and see it!” she cried shrewishly.
“You are free to do as you please,” sighed Charles, opening the door for her and then trying unhappily to collect his thoughts again to catch the Paris mail.
But Catherine knew-that if she did not go to Jemmie’s wedding her husband would take Barbara, utterly wearied of her as he might be. And tired, disillusioned old Ned Hyde knew it too. “In this dangerous mood the King is capable of outraging public opinion — of antagonizing the whole nation,” he came to tell her. “So I beseech your Majesty to accompany him. Even if he now takes milady Castlemaine with him, it will still their tongues.”
“Why must one give countenance to things which one knows to be wrong? Swallow one’s indignation — bear this and that indignity for the sake of expediency?”
It was the old argument, and in his heart Edward Hyde appreciated her attitude all too well. For a few moments he forgot to be the Chancellor of England and sat easing his tired body in the chair she had had set for him. “Because we all love him, I suppose,” he sighed gustily, with the beginnings of a reminiscent smile creasing the red puffiness of his cheeks.
“You still love him?” Catherine could not forbear to ask.
He looked up then and smiled outright, albeit sadly, so that she knew what a steady comfort he must have been in trouble. “Yes, Madame. Even though Shaftesbury and the rest, who covet my place, persuaded him to send me away.”
For a long while after he was gone Catherine sat over the fire trying to reconcile her conscience. The part of her that loved so passionately longed to ease and “gloss over” as he advised, but all the strict integrity of her was too proud to retract. Finally she sent for Father Huddleston, feeling instinctively that he must know Charles — and perhaps, God — better than any of them. “I have prayed and prayed, my father,” she said. “But how can it be right to condone in the King what we know to be wrong?”
John Huddleston’s smile was in itself a healing. “We can at least be careful not to cast the first stone,” he suggested.
“But if he seeks to make Jemmie Crofts his heir it is a great wrong to me, to the Duke and to the country.”
“But does he? Or is it only what envious men say?”
“Then you do not believe —”
“Madame, this dangerous mood — as you say milord Chancellor calls it — may be a recklessness of disappointment. A man has not the outlet of tears that women have.”
“Yet he would supplant my unborn baby — so soon. Lend so ready an ear to those who say there will be no others.”
“Perhaps it is not only that. I was with him when his young brother, the Duke of Gloucester, died. Suddenly, like the snapping off of a spring branch. For days the King was dumb with grief. Then at last he turned to me, who am. always waiting. ‘Why? Why?’ he kept saying. ‘When at last I could do something for him and all those unspeakable years of exile were over — and all his laughing, gallant life before him?’ Nothing has ever filled Henry of Gloucester’s place. But you and I know how the King loves young things; and when Jemmie Crofts came — so similar in promise —”
“And bone of his bone. How wise was milord Clarendon to oppose it!” sighed Catherine. “But I begin to see something of the tantalizing agony it must have been for Charles — to have him so beautiful — and a bastard.”
“For that sin God has indeed given him his punishment in this world!”
“And you believe that he intends no more than to enjoy and honour the boy?”
“I believe that he would not put him before his brother. Whatever their faults the Stuarts are incredibly loyal to each other.”
“And you should know. Are you aware, Father, that some tattlers say you are in secret his Confessor and that that is why he keeps you about him when all other priests are prohibited?”
“Would that I were!” Huddleston’s strong, tender mouth curved to laughter. “God knows I am unworthy of his deaf, ridiculous sense of gratitude, which is the real reason!”
“But you wait — with prayer?”
“Until he shall need me.”
Huddleston’s quiet confidence watered the seed of hope in her heart. With swift, childlike grace she knelt to receive his benediction. “My prayers join daily with your own,” she whispered.
Upheld by his words she went to Windsor and took part in the marriage festivities of her husband’s son and bore the liberties of his erstwhile mistress with gentle dignity; and on her return to Whitehall she reaped her reward. Late one evening the King sent for her and to her amazement she found several of his Counsellors present. It was seldom that he discussed business before women, and immediately she was aware of the tense atmosphere in the room.
“Milord Bristol here and these other of my loyal subjects appear to have found sudden reason to be concerned for the Popish form of marriage we went through upon your arrival in this country, Catherine, and I would have them hear your word on it,” he explained, leading her to a chair, although he himself chose to face them standing.
“Your Majest
y did so solely out of consideration for my peace of mind,” she answered defensive as a tiger.
“You hear, gentlemen?” Charles held some papers in his hand to which he referred contemptuously. “In the indictment they are bringing against milord Clarendon they have it that among other enormities he brought us together without any settled agreement as to marriage rites, and that out of bigotry you refused to be married by a Protestant priest. Therefore, they maintain, either our marriage is void or I am exposed to a suspicion of being, married in my own dominions by a Romish priest.”
“But the Bishop of London performed the Anglican ceremony the very next day at Portsmouth, and I have my women to witness that I lay virgin until then,” answered Catherine quick to appreciate the danger of the situation if Charles should be a party to their wiles.
But Charles was white with anger. Angrier than she had ever seen him. He rang for a clerk and had a copy of their marriage lines laid upon the table for all to see. If those intriguers had thought to please him by offering him escape from her to pleasanter pastures, or to push him into alliance with a more prolific queen, they had been completely duped by his neglectful dalliance. Even she, who loved him, had known little of the inner man and his few rigid principles until that hour.
“If this is what you have been concocting over Barbara’s supper table, I will never see the treacherous jade again!” he swore. “And because I must needs put up with your prating in Council do not imagine for one moment that I will suffer any one of you to meddle in my private affairs. Or in those of my wife. I have brought her Majesty here that you may hear the truth from her uncorruptible lips and that you may humbly beg pardon of her as best you may. Arlington and Coventry. Yes, and you too, George Villiers. There are cheap villainies at which even my easy friendship vomits. And as for you, milord Bristol, who had my brother’s word that he had witnessed my marriage, take yourself out of our sight and away from Whitehall unless you would have better acquaintance with the Tower!”
Catherine’s heart was lifted up in gratitude. All that Spring she walked serenely through life, asking nothing of her husband, seeing little of him, but knowing a new contentment. And mingling with her own quiet happiness came the delirious news of victory. James’s victory over the Dutch, whose Navy he had intercepted off the East coast. Twenty ships he and Charles’s sailors had sent to the bottom ere ever their guns came within range of England, and after four days’ courageous fighting the redoubtable Admiral Opdam had been blown to the night sky in his flagship. If, man for man, the sailors of Dutch merchantmen had no equals, it was the team work of England’s trained Navy, for which the King and humbler men like Samuel Pepys had worked so hard, that eventually told. James was the hero of the hour, and Charles, who had provided the ships partly out of his own pocket, was the popular protector of his people.
As Catherine rode beside him to give thanks at St. Paul’s, that seemingly indestructible stone heart of London, the tears that stood in her eyes were as much for the people’s love for him as for their victory. Everywhere they cheered and pressed about the two tall royal brothers, and it mattered not to them in those days of national emergency whether James went to Mass or not. Furniture was thrown from wealthy merchants’ windows to blaze their fierce relief in bonfires and within the City walls bells rocked half a hundred steeples.
Yet even as the triumphal procession passed along Cheapside and through Ludgate, resplendent in silks and jewels and velvets, with gleaming horse trappings and fanfares of trumpets, a greater enemy came creeping — silent, unsuspected and unseen — along narrow alleys and stinking, back-street gutters and from the crowded hovels of the poor crouching in unplanned confusion outside the City boundaries. An enemy which neither Charles’s forethought nor James’s courage nor all the power of Britannia’s vaunted trident could stay.
It was a hot and airless summer. Samuel Pepys quarrelled violently with a neighbour because the refuse from his cellar overflowed into his own. The Fleet ditch and Wallbrook, stagnant beneath a blazing sun, discharged their filth into a glassy Thames. And before the roses in Temple gardens had begun to bloom — almost before the shouts of victory were still — the Plague had struck at London with a scourge more terrible than any war.
CHAPTER XII
“IF ONLY the King would come!” was the burden of Catherine’s conversation throughout the beginning of that summer. He had sent her and all the other women away to safety at Hampton; and although she walked out through the gatehouse every evening to scan the London road, or rode into Kingston in the hope of meeting him, she slept alone half crazed with anxiety. For plague or no plague, he had a world of other things to see to.
First he must take his mother down to the Nore and see her safely embarked for France, and then there was a plethora of public business to transact. Negotiations with Louis to keep France out of the war, trouble with Ireland in which Charles strove as usual for tolerance, hurried conferences with John Evelyn about preparations for wounded, and heartening visits to the Naval dockyards with the invaluable Pepys at his elbow and the new young Duke of Monmouth clambering over all manner of deck tackle to talk with the crews about their guns.
But Catherine knew that Charles was often sitting at stuffy meetings while the plague raged outside, reaching right up King Street to the palace doors. That every day more infected houses were sealed with a cross upon their doors, that all night the plague carts creaked through deserted. streets collecting corpses, and that instead of pealing for victory the bells in London steeples were tolling mournfully for her dead. And that Charles, wherever he went, would be sure to rein in his horse in that pestilential air to shout up to the victims’ windows in that human way of his, asking how they did and promising — and probably paying. for — whatever help was possible.
She was thankful when she heard that he was at sea again, meeting his favourite admiral, Holmes, and listening enthralled to his tales of how he had harried the Dutch coast; and that from Spithead they were gone together to inspect the defences of the Wight — that small, vulnerable island lying like a footstool beneath the southern skirts of England, valiantly protecting the roadsteads of Portsmouth and Southampton.
But during the long summer evenings, listless after each stifling anxious day, her ladies would talk in whispers of fresh horrors culled from the outside world, their faces white with fears they were ashamed to voice. For not one of them had a nettle rash or a migraine those days without beginning to imagine she had the plague. All eyed each other with suspicion — even at Hampton. For were there not infected farmsteads a few miles away at Esher with their cattle being destroyed and soldiers set on guard? And was not the terrible Thing spreading its talons farther and farther out from the metropolis to country towns?
Unlike most of the others, Catherine and donna Penalva had never experienced even the usual cloud of anxiety that hot summers brought, and the very strangeness of the scourge frightened them. Inevitably Catherine kept recalling how two Stuarts had already been taken by some such contagion. “Snapped off like a Spring branch,” Father Huddleston had said. And the last courier from Whitehall had brought her a hurried letter from Charles, making kind enquiries after her health — her health, when he was already back again in London.
With the letter still in her hand, intending to re-read it in the cool of the privy garden, she paused behind a group of women huddled on the great wide stairs leading down from banqueting hall to courtyard. They had loosened the departing courier's tongue with potent Rhenish and so wrapped in horror were they that they did not even hear her approach — heard nothing but the man’s voice playing upon their tensed emotions. And if he, for his part, enjoyed seeing carefully dressed girls again and scarifying a country audience, surely any man who endured London merited so small a compensation!
“You are better off here than there, with not a boat to be seen on the river, and the grass growing in Whitehall courtyard. More than two thousand dead this week!”, he bragged, setting his empty tanka
rd down on the step where he was resting while his horse was being rubbed down, and winking at the inquisitive buttery maid who replenished it. “And what do they do with ’em, you ask? Bury ’em? When every city cemetery was full and overflowing weeks ago! Shrive ’em? That’s a good ’un, my pretty chuck. With not enough priests to go round! No, Mistress,” he answered a more serious woman of the Queen’s wardrobe, “there’s no Holy Oil or bell brought any more. Even the church bells don’t toll now, for the reason there’s no one left with strength to pull the ropes. ’Tis no wonder the Puritans hold up their hands and call it God’s vengeance for a whoring Court and some of the greybeards turn back to the old religion and start telling their beads! But half the preachers — be they Romish, Anglican or Dissenters — are either dead or fled.”
“With neither priests nor graveyards — then what happens to the — poor dead?” quavered a very young girl’s voice out of the gloom.
Over their huddled heads, outlined against the evening sky, Catherine could see the King’s messenger stretching out his dusty riding boots and taking another thirsty swig. Obviously he needed it, for in spite of all his braggadocio his hand shook. Noting his thinness and his sense of the dramatic, it occurred to her that it would have been like Charles to give the errand to one of the hungry small part actors from his long closed playhouse.
“Ah, where indeed!” he echoed. “In spite of all the carts that go the rounds at night, I warrant there’s many a dead family left stinking behind those sealed doors, all taken within the hour, as you might say, and their neighbours none the wiser. Or, worse still, some poor stricken soul who survived the rest of his household by a day or two, doing what he could for each of them, and now sealed up in his own house knowing that when next the dreaded cry ‘Bring out your dead’ comes down the street there will be no one to push his poor stiffened corpse through the cobwebbed window. Only the bulging rats come up from the Fleet ditch to do the grave-diggers’ work.”
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