“But the dead that are on the carts? What do they do with them?”
“Better not to know,” the man muttered.
But urged by mass curiosity he took up his tale again and Catherine, still with horror on the stairs above them, stayed to hear. “Well, since you must know, I saw them at it three nights ago — and, God help me, I’ve seen ’em ever since!” The glib voice dragged with reluctance. All effort at dramatizatio was gone. “Great pits they’ve dug. Anyone helps who can hold a spade. Men from the deserted Customs docks, out-of-work stall keepers, servants from the nobility’s shuttered houses. Digging all day — shovelling in lime. At Bunhill Fields, Stepney and out at St. John’s Wood. I followed a cart from Paternoster Row and watched. A mist rising from the river, there was, so that even the horse looked like a half shrouded ghost. The cart was piled so high with corpses that two of them dropped off as they jolted over the cobbles. There were flares burning all round the great yawning pit, and I saw the man who was leading the horse back him as far as he durst and tip the cart; and as the top ones tumbled in, with legs and arms sticking up stiffly to Heaven, the other fellow, with a scarf over his mouth and a long pitchfork scraped and shovelled the more laggard of his cargo in. You could hear the thud and settling together of shroudless bodies. And then the two of them hurried away into the night to finish their ghastly work ... God knows who pays ’em, or how much it takes to tempt them to, it! All I know is that all the gold of Indies would not make me look upon the like again ...”
The man shivered where he sat, hands between knees, tankard and audience alike forgotten. The fine braggart voice had dwindled to a toneless monologue, speaking out of some hideous dream — a dream which, reversed from nature, had become the unbelievable reality. His mind was no longer in the pleasant precincts of Hampton, but had already preceded him into the City of horror to which he must return.
During those fearful days Catherine learned to be grateful for Frances Stuart’s frivolous gaiety. Although some rebuked her, there seemed to be a new gallantry about it, as though she indeed represented a defiant and inviolate Britannia. She was a Stuart and unafraid. Her smooth, childish face was taking on a new gentleness, and her scatterbrained youth developing some personality.
By the end of the month the death roll had risen to seven thousand and London, once so full of chaffering and merriment, was become a city of the dead. It seemed useless to try to carry on the government of a country at war from a place where the very ferrymen refused to carry fares from suspect landing places and where indomitable little Pepys, hurrying from one duty to another, found his hackney coach slowing to a halt and his driver dead or dying upon the box. And so at last Charles came with a great train of baggage to fetch his Queen and all her ladies, and moved the entire Court to Oxford.
“My poor people are in so grievous a state that they firmly believe the new comet to be the vision of a mighty sword hanging over London,” he told her. “You remember sitting up with me to watch for it, Kate, in the observatory I had built at Greenwich, and how the second night you really saw it?”
Both of them grieved deeply for their afflicted people and when a chastened Parliament sat in the great hall of Christ Church it was found that the King had been subscribing a thousand pounds weekly to the relief fund. Yet he was still spending money on Barbara Castlemaine and her children, whom he had established in a house nearby. “How can you give her countenance when everyone knows she is unfaithful to you and consorts daily — and probably nightly — with that lewd playwright, Wycherley?” demanded Catherine, who had hoped at such a time to be relieved of the sight of her. And Charles, explaining to her more than he would ever explain to a justly incensed Parliament, said dourly, “Because she threatens to publish my damned calf-love letters if I cast her off.” Whereby much of his lenient subservience to the woman was made plain.
Catherine could only feel that a person who held him by such means was beneath contempt and, having no more wish than he for such letters to be a joke throughout the country, she never questioned him on the subject again; adding to her maturing qualities a determination to tolerate the woman’s occasional presence to their lives’ end if need.be.
There in the peaceful collegiate life of Oxford, with its halls and spires and quadrangles, its wide learning and its narrow river, it was difficult to believe that only sixty miles away hundreds were dying daily, and that the plague was spreading from the capital to towns and hamlets in all the home counties. In order to keep her mind from brooding upon it, and inspired by the academic atmosphere, Catherine set herself to improve her English; while Charles — always at his best in a crisis and his worst in boredom — whiled away the time hunting and teasing any pretty girl he chanced to meet upon the dark, austere staircases, or encouraging the wild orgies of the students whose work the coming of such glamorous company had sadly bedevilled. And in the evenings, in those stately halls of learning, he would make Frances sing French love songs at which all the men laughed and which his wife was thankful not to understand.
Yet when that young lady-of-the-bedchamber came seeking a private interview of her mistress, the reason for her tears took Catherine all unawares. “Sit here on the stool,” she invited kindly, sending the rest of her women away.
But Frances, so seldom tongue tied, remained standing before her twisting her fingers as nervously as any village wench. “Your Majesty is so good — and it is so difficult to explain,” she stammered, her lovely eyes downcast.
“Come, come, Frances,” rallied Catherine. “We have come to know each other intimately these last few months. Surely you can tell me anything?”
“Anything but this, Madame —”
Catherine stared in amazement. “Is it some favour you would ask?”
Suddenly the girl was down on her knees, her golden head against the Queen’s knee. “It is the favour of your protection —”
Catherine touched her hair reassuringly. “My dear child, being of my household you may always count upon that. But you are very beautiful and, I fear, extremely headstrong. Is.it some man, Frances?”
Dumbly, the girl nodded.
“If he has been molesting you surely it is to your cousin the King, that you should go?”
“But, Madame — it is the King.”
After a horrible moment or two of silence Frances’s tear drenched eyes looked up into Catherine’s appalled ones. “Oh, Madame, I hate to tell you! But every time he comes into a room his dark eyes cajole me. He has been writing verse and slipping it beneath my door at night. It used to be just friendship — and flirting; but now he wants me as he wants those other women. And although I keep trying to elude his advances, he still pursues.”
Catherine drew herself up rigidly, no longer able to abide the touch of her, so that the girl’s hand fell from her knee.
“The King is but mortal. It would be surprising if any man could resist the big eyes you make at them,” she said stiffly.
“I know that in the past I have been foolish,” admitted Frances, dabbing at her tear stained face. “But now —”
“And now you are in love with your cousin Charles,” stated Catherine, ignoring previous denials.
Retaliation for all the slights which she had endured was in her icy voice; but to her indignation her lady-of-the-bed-chamber began to giggle hysterically. “Yes, Madame. Indeed I am,” she stuttered. “But not with your Charles. It is Charles Lennox — my other cousin. The less important one on the distaff side.” Pulling herself together, she went on with more respectful restraint. “At Whitehall, when the King made me his Britannia — it was all very flattering — and exciting. I was young and inexperienced, and Your Majesty must know how difficult he is to resist —”
Knowing only too well, Catherine said nothing.
“But physically I have never really wanted him.”
“Not wanted him?” echoed Catherine incredulously.
“Oh, please, Madame, believe me! For months this other Charles, so much you
nger and handsomer, has had my heart.”
“Younger and handsomer!” scoffed Catherine, recalling the pretty, callow youth. But the awful prospect of a serious successor to the Castlemaine was beginning to recede, leaving her power to think coherently again.
“Besides which,” added Frances, forgetting in her flighty way the enormity of what she said, “when I take a man I have no desire to share him!”
Catherine rose abruptly and walked to the window, wrestling with the latchet and throwing the casement wide. She felt she could not breathe. “Mother of God, give me patience!” she entreated, below her breath, gazing unseeingly across a square stone-walled quadrangle. “Merciful Christ, teach me to bear humiliation as Thou didst!” Heaven knows what effort she made, what personal pride she jettisoned, standing there before the rainwashed courtyard and the arraignment of her own high ideals; but when at last she turned the object of her husband’s desires was crouching by her vacated chair, frightened as no threat of plague had ever frightened her. “I have always maintained that you were chaste — even when every other woman at Court called you ‘wanton’,” Catherine made herself say. The words came with slow difficulty, a self-imposed penance.
Frances caught at her cold hand and kissed it. “And you are right, Madame. In spite of past frivolity, I am not as donna Penalva and the others think. I swear I have never given myself to any man. I value my virginity. That is why I grew frightened. Charles — the King — is so experienced — so persuasive ... And I want to go to my husband — as you went to him.”
“But why, in the name of all the Saints, must you come with this sordid tale to me?” asked Catherine, wearily.
Regaining pose, pulling her disordered laces to rights, la belle Stuart excused herself. “I went first to the Queen Mother. I have known her longer and it was she who brought me over. But the plague had come and she was packing ... Besides, there had been Jemmie — and it was the kind of tale she was tired of. So Her Majesty suggested —”
“That you should try me?”
Frances nodded shamed assent. “She said you were one of the few really good women she knew outside a Convent.”
“How imaginatively kind of her!” commented Catherine, borrowing her husband’s irony. So that was her mother-in-law’s last gift to her! A challenge and a test. To some women it was given to live easily, she supposed, but never to herself!
“And Charles Lennox — he wishes to marry you?”
Frances’s face was suffused with confident happiness, but her sigh was prodigious. “In the circumstances — the King would never consent,” she murmured.
“Never is a long time,” said Catherine. “And I think you over-rate the depth and permanence of the King’s attentions. If you doubt me, you have only to consider your friend, Lady Castlemaine.” By voicing the brave words, Catherine was beginning to believe in the truth of them. Frances, she considered, had been candid and not too much to blame; and because she herself loved Charles utterly his very faults became in some sort her responsibility. “You put me in a strange position,” she said, touching the girl’s hand with a rueful and forgiving smile. “But so far as lies in my power I will help you.”
“Oh, Madame!”
Catherine hastened to stave off a torrent of effusive gratitude. “It is obvious, is it not, that I act as much for myself as for you?” she added, with uncompromising honesty.
“Then what must I do?”
“Keep near me always, and when next Lennox comes to see you send him to me. In the meantime, lest you be besieged with more nocturnal verse, I will arrange for you to share donna Penalva’s room. As every one knows, donna Penalva is almost blind and therefore whatever happens no one can blame her. But her extraordinary sharp intelligence is entirely at my disposal. Therefore hold yourself in readiness to be even more resourceful and courageous than usual, Frances. And whatever we contrive remember that the King invariably forgives women and is too civilized — and too clannish, as you Scots say — to behead his relative. The worst — or perhaps the best — that can happen to you both is to be banished from Court.”
Shocked and hurt to the soul as she was, Catherine had sufficient sense to meet the situation with grim humour. At least it was a change to find a woman who did not want to become the King’s mistress; and when Frances, the brightest star of all that gay company, caused a seven days’ wonder by a midnight elopement and a run-away marriage, the Queen and her Portuguese lady appeared to be as amazed as the rest. The Protestant enemies of James who had hoped for a royal divorce and had seen in this penniless, well-born girl a possible successor, were checkmated by the Queen herself. As for Charles, the affair had gone deeper than she had supposed. He was consumed by silent anger and his grief was such that he could not hide it even from his wife. But if he suspected her of connivance he never taxed her with it, and she for her part never once upbraided him or spoke spitefully of Frances. Both of them were learning marital forbearance.
And a new trouble was soon on his mind, distracting his thoughts from women. Negotiations with Louis the Fourteenth had failed, and France, honouring her treaty with Holland, was preparing for war.
“Next time I will transact my own diplomacy behind closed doors and not allow ambassadors to bungle it,” he vowed, in the privacy of his wife’s bedroom. “Left alone, Louis and I understand each other.”
No one realized better than she the hydra-headed blow this was to him. Not only did his cousin, le roi soleil, stand for undisputed, unfettered majesty; but with all his statesman’s acumen Charles believed that England needed the wealth and power and cultural grandeur of France as Portugal had needed England. And foresaw that his own escape from financial dependence upon Parliament could come about only through Louis’ support.
Catherine said little and never meddled. Only by a new gentleness did she convey to him her understanding of his dual disappointment. And one evening, after a long hard ride, he returned in high humour, reminding her of a ship that has come out of the doldrums and is curvetting before a fair wind again.
“The plague in London is so much abated that I hope to return to Whitehall in a few weeks,” he announced, coming straight to her room with a letter from John Evelyn in his hand.
“And the rest of us?” she urged, although she was still horribly afraid.
He glanced up at her, sensing this; and realizing with a little shock of surprise how essential a part of his life she had become. “Not yet, I think. I would sooner give the place time to air and be assured that all, is clear,” he answered, momentarily sobered. “But once we are back the Commons may listen to my diatribes about those streets; and those of us whom God has spared will take on Dutch and French with a right good heart, if needs be! Oddsfish Kate, but I shall be glad to be back in London again. Will not you, my dear?”
“Why, yes,” agreed Catherine, turning her petit point about consideringly. “But for me, be there never so many victories, there will still be one thing lacking.”
He did not answer for a minute or two, but threw his long body into her chair and his hat across the table in the way she loved, because then he seemed neither a dignified king nor a careless lover, but like any man come home to be at ease. And quite suddenly he burst out laughing. “There was a hedge my horse would not take, out Woodstock way,” he began, seeing her pleased, enquiring look.
“It must have been a very high hedge!” she commented with a smile.
Because it was a warm day his wig followed the hat, the dark hair curling damply on his forehead and giving him what she called his “young William Jackson look”. “A man came and opened the gates for me — just an honest old countryman driving his cows home. Yet he knew me at once. ‘If only Your Majesty would beget a legitimate son!’ he said, as if all the crops in Oxfordshire and all the kingdom depended upon it.”
“Perhaps they do,” said Catherine softly. “And what did you say?”
“I’ faith, I promised him I would go home and try!”
“For
shame, Charles!” The colour flooded ingenuously into her face just as it was wont to do when they were first married. “Surely you do not discuss such things with any man at a street corner or a gate?”
“And why not? It concerns them as well as me,” he argued. “ ’Tis natural enough they should want to see you with a babe in your arms. They like you, Kate. In spite of being a ‘furriner in one o’ them outlandish fardingales’ you have begun to stand for steadfastness and chastity and all the things these tough yeomen of mine really admire.”
“And yet they like you!” she marvelled slyly; whereat he pulled her to his knee and stopped her teasing mouth.
“Treason!” he accused. But she had long since learned not to be afraid of him. Scenes, she knew, he would not tolerate; but the truth, wittily spiked and pleasantly thrust, he always received good humouredly. Although whether he was in any way moved by it was another matter.
Charles kept his word to the old countryman to such purpose that before he left Oxford the women were all agog because the Queen had hope of a child again. But this time hope was short lived. A few weeks later, in her haste and excitement at the thought of rejoining him, Catherine again miscarried. Some said that it was because a pet fox of the King’s had jumped on her bed and frightened her, but she herself felt that that had made no difference. And before ever she reached Whitehall the doctors had told her that she would never bear Charles a son.
She had hoped that he would ride out to meet her, but he sent Monmouth instead. And as she came sadly through the purlieus of the stricken city in the cool autumnal air the militia were marching followed by weeping women, and leaden hued, emaciated citizens were opening their shops and striving to set the wheels of normal life moving again. Except for the red coated soldiers everybody seemed to be wearing black, and from the doorways of unkempt houses the bereaved muttered some spiteful doggerel blaming their misfortunes upon a barren, Catholic queen.
With All My Heart Page 15