Catherine was thankful to be inside the palace again, where fires had been lighted and fresh tapestries hung. But even there grief dogged her. A letter lay awaiting her from Portugal — a shakily written letter from old don Francisco telling her that her mother was dead.
Doubly stricken as she was, her one thought was to find Charles. Charles who — however much he might hurt her by his way of life — could always.be counted on to be understanding and kind about all other hurts. With the letter still in her hand and the tears wet on her cheeks, she hurried alone to his apartments. And this time, seeing her distress, even Chiffinch made no effort to stay her.
But the King was not in his work room. Documents and maps and sea charts strewn upon table and fine French carpet seemed to explain his inability to meet her, and in the midst of them lay a half finished letter with his quill still wet beside it. It would be like him if he had heard the militia’s drums and hastened to one of the long windows in the banqueting hall to hearten them with his personal God-speed.
With a hand on the back of his pushed back chair, Catherine looked miserably round the room, so empty without him. Her glance came to rest upon the letter and suddenly she remembered it was Sunday. It must be his weekly letter to Minette, of course. And there might be no more weekly mails. Perhaps that had been the real explanation ... She leaned forward to look at it seeking only, through her tears, the comforting sight of the beloved, clear writing. She had no thought of spying, for he always wrote in French. But this time, made cautious by the imminence of war, he must have deemed it safer to write in English.
“I am very glad to hear that your indisposition has turned out to be un petit Orleans,” read Catherine, who had had no idea her sister-in-law was pregnant, “and I wish you as easy a labour as James’s wife had with her second girl, when she dispatched her business in little more than an hour. But I am afraid, ma chere Minette, your shape is not so advantageously made for that convenience as hers is ...” For a line or two the words ran on in the easy, affectionate style of his. And then, towards the bottom of the page, came the true purpose of the letter. “And now, since we can no longer write — goodbye. Believe me, nothing can alter that passion and tenderness I have for you, which is so rooted in my heart that it will continue to the last moment of my life. When this accursed war is over —”
It was some minutes before Catherine took in the full meaning of the words. But as she did so her own immediate sorrow faded momentarily into the background of her mind.
So this was what war meant to Charles. Separation from Minette.
Here, here, was the only cause for jealousy. The only anchorage for his love. His family. And more than all of them his one remaining sister. The baby born during the Civil War in besieged Exeter, whom he had never met until his exiled manhood.
“What a fool I have been!” thought Catherine. The grasping Castlemaine, Jemmie’s disreputable mother, pretty Frances, all those actress women — they were all nothing to him but passing playthings. Even Barbara, who had seemed to rule and ruin him for a time. He had but used them as he used his ministers, treating them with careless generosity and telling them nothing of his real thoughts. While here, in this quiet room, he gave expression to his heart.
Before ever he came back to his room and gathered her in comforting arms, Catherine was cured of any real jealousy of his mistresses, but in her own heart was sown ah unhappy, hopeless envy of Minette.
CHAPTER XIII
CATHERINE STIRRED from a troubled sleep. The hot dry summer had been singularly trying, with the sadly depleted population still exhausted from last year’s plague and the dull thud of gunfire still to be heard in the Channel. Someone was calling her urgently. Yet when she opened her eyes it was still dark.
“Madame! Can you not smell burning?”
Bemused with sleep, Catherine sat up to find Maria Penalva standing in her nightgown at the foot of the bed with a curtain held back in either thin hand. “Burning?”, she repeated vaguely. “Perhaps the servants have forgotten to damp down the kitchen fires again?”
“My husband is already astir and says it is nothing in the Palace,” Lettice Ormonde, her Comptroller’s wife, assured her. And Lettice, Catherine noticed, was already fully dressed.
“It is coming from the City,” cried Drusilla, the pretty chambermaid, rushing unbidden into the room. “Look, Madame! Please God it be not the Dutch!” And without so much as curtsying or “by your leave” she dragged the heavy velvet hangings apart with strong young arms and pushed open one of the long windows over-looking the river. There was no sound of gunfire, but sure enough, an unmistakable smell of burning was borne in upon the freshening September air and a dull glow made a warm, red oblong of the window.
“It must be a bad fire,” said Catherine, now thoroughly awake. “You know, Lettice, only the other evening the King and that clever Mr. Evelyn of the Royal Society of Science were saying how dangerous your old beamed houses are, all overhanging and huddled together, so that one catches fire from another. Now in Lisbon —”
“It is not just a few houses ablaze, Madame,” interrupted Lettice, returning from the window too shocked by what she had seen to stand on ceremony. “It must be whole streets!” And, as if to confirm her words, when the Queen’s two tiring women came hurrying in there was a clattering of footsteps to be heard on the flagged cloister below their room, while from the river side there arose a cacophony of shouting.
Catherine sprung from her bed to join the others at the open window. Down on the Strand watermen, still struggling into their coats, were hurrying confusedly to shove off their boats, while women’s faces appeared at every casement. And all seemed to be shouting questions at a man and woman rowing frenziedly in the direction of Lambeth, their flimsy craft laden to the gunwale with household goods. “ ’Tis the worst fire ever seen!” screamed the woman, nearly upsetting the boat by clutching at her ill-laden pots and pans.
“Where?” yelled the men on the bank.
“Corner o’ Pudding Lane, it started,” called back the man in midstream. “The King’s baker was getting his ovens hot again after the Sabbath. Got some new fool of a ’prentice, they say. An’ now the whole of Fish Street is ablaze. Fair gutted out, we was —” His voice trailed away in the morning mist as he made for the hospitality of some rustic relative up river. But the fire went on. As if challenging the placid, rising sun, the angry, flickering glow was spreading.
“I wonder if the King knows?” murmured Catherine, shivering with apprehension as she slipped into the fur-lined wrap her women held.
She had not long to wonder. There was more running and shouting outside her own door now and at a sign from Lady Ormonde, Drusilla threw it open upon the spectacle of a posse of excited servants all making for the backstairs. “What is it, Dobby?” the girl asked, catching at a small, red-headed boot boy.
“London’s afire!” he piped. “An’ steward’s goin’ to let us up on the leads to see.” He was away after the rest with never so much as a glance towards the Queen’s apartments; and almost immediately the faithful Richard Bellings appeared in the doorway.
“I came in case your Majesty should be alarmed,” he said, his good-looking face dependable and solicitous.
“Then it is really serious, Richard? Do the King and the Duke know?” asked Catherine.
“Someone has just ridden in with news. Pepys of the Admiralty, I think. Chiffinch has roused his Majesty and sent over to St. James’s for the Duke. So he’ll be with them now.”
“Then let us go too and hear. You sit quietly here, dear Maria, and I will tell you later. And you, Lettice, come with me.” Instead of fluttering round like the others, Lettice was calm and full of common sense; so together the three of them crossed the landing where backstairs and water stairs met, and went through the gentlemen-of-the-back-stairs’ rooms which gave access to one end of the King’s private apartment. The rooms were deserted and Chiffinch himself, too absorbed to be aware of their approach, was stan
ding in the open doorway of the King’s bedroom. Passing him, as he sprang hastily to attention, Catherine instinctively pulled her skirts aside. She never set eyes on the man without a feeling of hateful humiliation, for she could not prevent herself from imagining the other women he must have bundled up those stairs. Caught unawares and unshaven in the unkind light of dawn he looked the pale, crafty pimp of a thing he was. And all the more so by contrast with the three vigorous men within.
She could see her husband and her brother-in-law — James fully dressed and Charles in hastily donned shirt and breeches — standing by the window. And in the middle of the room, near Charles’s great disordered bed, the Secretary of the Navy Board. The fire was no particular business of his but, although red in the face and breathless, he appeared capable as ever of giving an adequate report of all that came his way.
“After three weeks of drought the warehouses in Thames Street are crackling like dry tinder, your Majesty,” he was saying, “and with this easterly wind getting up the fire looks as if it might lick its way right up to Cheapside.”
Charles turned and saw Catherine. His face was grave and anxious, and beyond motioning to Bellings to set a chair for her he vouchsafed her no greeting. But, having always been so diffident about visiting his rooms, it warmed her to perceive that he took it for granted she should be there. “And what is milord Mayor doing about it?” he asked, continuing his conversation with Samuel Pepys.
“Old Tom Bludworth won’t be likely to do much!” growled James impatiently, drawing in his head from the open window.
“Your Grace is right,” corroborated Pepys. “He is running about the streets like a fainting woman with a silly scarf tied over his head. ‘What can I do? What can I do?’ he keeps on bleating. And all the while complaining that no one will obey his orders.”
“And will they not?” asked Charles.
“He has given them none that I know of, your Majesty. Or none that are likely to meet so great an emergency. This calamitous thing broke out so suddenly that half the people are too stunned to do ought but stand and stare. While the other half, instead of lending a hand with pump and bucket, are set only on saving their own possessions. Borrowing a cart if they can, staggering beneath their belongings over the Bridge to the safety of Bankside or offering more than their gear is worth for a boat. Those rascally ferrymen are making a fortune, milord Duke; but the fire blazes on.”
Catherine saw the two Stuarts exchange glances, and Charles nod assent to some unspoken desire of his brother’s. “Better go, James, and take some of your troops,” he said briefly.
But besides warehouses and the huddled houses of the poor Pepys had seen the gracious gardened homes of wealthy merchants writhing and twisting like burnt paper. “It will take more than troops to put it out,” he told them flatly.
“What, man! Would you have me stand by and do nothing?” snorted James, half way to the door.
“God forbid, your Grace! But with this wind only one thing can save the city.”
“Save the city!” There was incredulity and anguish in Charles’s voice as he strode back into the middle of the room, making a sign for the Navy Secretary to speak his mind and for James to stay and hear it.
“It is as grave as that, Sir,” said Pepys, holding his ground. “But gunpowder might do it. In my humble opinion the only hope is to blow up some of the houses as yet untouched. Make a clear ring of space around the burning areas and so prevent the sparks from spreading.”
A heavy silence hung in the room — as heavy as the acrid smell that filled it. Charles began to pace up and down. “It is heart-rending — deliberately to blow up people’s homes,” he demurred. “What say you, James?”
“No worse than things one has to do in war,” shrugged James, who had earned the bread of exile as a mercenary in more than one foreign army sooner than accept the hospitality of France. “What are a dozen or so homes to save hundreds?”
“Well, then, I am content to abide by your judgements,” agreed Charles. “If there be no other means send to milord Albemarle for what gunpowder is needed. Your men can despatch the business, James. Only tell that fool Bludworth to make certain every living soul is safely out before you begin blasting. And, Pepys, tell the poor devils they may borrow my Palace carts to save their bits of furniture.”
“I doubt if there will be time to save more than lives, Sir,” said Pepys, upon whose wig and lashes still clung the dust of the conflagration he had ridden from.
Charles walked briskly to a table and scrawled something upon a piece of paper. “Lest there should be any questioning of your authority, here is my name to it,” he said. “And tell them I am on my way to see that it is done.”
“I will ride with you, Master Secretary,” said James, hurrying with his long strides after the more rotund Pepys; and before they were well out of the door the King was struggling into his cravat. “Toby! To-bee! My coat and boots,” he called.
Through a smaller inner doorway, as if by magic, appeared Toby Rustat, the King’s old Scots valet, with a coat over his arm and the riding boots already in his hand. Quietly, without fuss, he removed the fine gold-embroidered coat proffered by a flustered courtier and helped his master into a plain brown one which Charles was wont to use for his morning gallops at Newmarket. For once he did not stop to brush off some almost invisible speck of dust; and Catherine, watching him, could only suppose that during long years of service he had come to anticipate the thoughts in Charles’s mind as quickly as his sartorial requirements. He probably guessed that before his master’s return the coat would be too drenched and dusty to be used again.
But as the King turned to speak to her Richard Bellings made so bold as to join them. “What is it, Dick?” asked Charles.
“I think, Sir, you should know that there is a malicious rumour abroad that we of my faith started this,” he warned, in a low voice. “Your Majesties know how the least thing inflames the Londoners on that subject. Mobs of them who have lost their homes are rounding up every professed or suspected Catholic they can lay their hands on. That is. partly why they are so out of hand ... They will listen to your Majesty but in their present temper might do His Grace the Duke some injury ...”
“Plague or fire — it is always the Papists!” cried Charles, in exasperation. “Have they no sense, since all men’s houses burn alike?” For a moment or two he stood in deep thought. Then, slowly, reluctantly, he took off the favourite old brown coat and handed it back to his valet. He sat down and signed to a hovering page to pull off his riding boots. “All the same, we will let James go first,” he said to Catherine. “He is absolutely master of his profession and will soon have the mob, if not the fire, under control. This is really a Heaven-sent opportunity for him, Dick. If they see him labouring to save their City it will still their fears and serve his popularity as well as war, when they care not whether he be a Catholic or an Anabaptist so long as he wins them victories!”
“And you, Charles?” asked Catherine.
He turned to her with that devastating smile of his, suddenly as suavely attentive as if no emergency raged. “I will stay and drink a glass of your abominable new fangled tea with you, my dear, if you and my little donna Penalva will invite me. And then go along unspectacularly by water.”
It was part of Charles’s stock in trade that he was completely without vanity. Expediency with him always came first. He minded not at all that his brother should be thought the more capable. Unlike most of the men about him he was content to hide his talents rather than to parade them, so long as he ultimately attained his own ends. Indeed, as his wife was beginning to perceive, he often deliberately hoodwinked them by a show of careless indifference in order to profit the better by his shrewdness.
And shrewdness he needed more than any man, being kept perpetually short of cash. Catherine knew only too well that, although he never reproached either of them, she and James between them — by her childlessness and his openly professed religion — had made the
restored monarchy a difficult thing to hold; so that Charles must juggle skilfully with each event as it came, seeing no security for the future. Small wonder was there for those few grey hairs of his, seeing that he had no Protestant heir and the majority of his subjects were so opposed to a Catholic one!
And in this present decision, in spite of Bellings’ fears, he was proved abundantly right. While he himself, remembering the first danger of all, went quietly down to the Tower to have the small dwellings round the moat destroyed lest gunpowder stored within the fortress should blow up docks, shipping, houses and all, James, the trained soldier, completely impervious as ever to public opinion, kept order in the City, blasting spaces in the path of the fire, organizing chains of men to bring water from the Thames, the Fleet and Wall Brook and putting the aldermen of each ward in charge of the homeless for whom they set up a camp on Moorfield, Pepys, too, got workmen from the dockyards to keep watch round the Navy Office and buried all the King’s private Naval papers in a friend’s garden.
But throughout that hideous Monday night, in spite of all that willing hands and encouraged hearts could do, the East wind still blew and the great fire still raged. Fenchurch Street, Gracious Street and Lombard Street lay in smouldering ruins. Baynard Castle and half the City churches were gutted out.
And early Tuesday morning, without fuss or ceremony, the King called out the train-band and set out to join his brother in that Inferno.
“Must you, Charles?” asked Catherine, standing in the dawn light beside his horse in Whitehall courtyard.
“Pour encourager les autres,” he said lightly, those grim lines on either side of his mouth relaxing for the first time.
And because it was London, which he had learned to love as only a returned exile can, she made no effort to dissuade him. And as she watched him ride out into King Street she noticed that his valet followed him, keeping as close to him as the presence of his betters permitted. There was no need for a valet to go; but if so much as a breath of danger blew upon his master Toby Rustat was determined to be there. And with all her heart Catherine envied him.
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