The new House was bound to be more contentious regarding James and the succession as well as Lord Danby and the ongoing investigation of the Popish Plot, and by the end of the Court’s usual Christmas revels, Charles was again desperately pleading with James to place the future of England first and return to the Anglican Church.
“What would make my brother do this, Katherine?” James exclaimed in impassioned anguish when he came to me one night in early February. “This day he sent both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Winchester to lay siege to me, as if my soul could be claimed by the most obstinate bidder!”
I was so unwieldy now that I’d taken to my bed, and I struggled to sit upright, as determined as James on this subject.
“Did you listen to their learned arguments, sir?” I pleaded. “These bishops are wise, thoughtful gentlemen, who wish only what is best for you. Did you set aside your stubbornness long enough to consider what they said?”
He lowered his chin and scowled, the very picture of the stubbornness I’d just declaimed. “Forgive me, Katherine, but you speak so only because you are yourself an Anglican.”
“I speak so because I love you, as does His Majesty your brother!” I cried. “You can be an English prince or an English Papist, but you can never be both. A handful of words, and you will be received joyfully back into the church of your father, the church of your country. Your people will once again love you, and all will be forgiven. But if you persist in binding yourself to Rome—”
“Because my conscience knows it is the right course!” he shouted, striking his fist against the mantelpiece. “The right one, Katherine.”
“Right in what way, sir?” I demanded heatedly, for we’d had this same battle many times before. “Right to betray your brother and his wishes for you? Right to heave England into another war that would make what Cromwell wrought seem as nothing? Right that you might be forever ruined, and lost to me?”
Overcome, I burst into anguished tears that I did not try to hide. At once he rushed to my bedside, meaning to comfort me, but I shook him away, scattering my tears over his breast.
“How can you not see it, sir?” I wept, my hands clutching my belly as if to protect the babe from its father’s willful delusions. “You will be ruined, and not even His Majesty will be able to save you.”
But James only bowed his head, his face twisted with an anguish that matched my own, and I saw that he wept, too, heavy tears that slid slowly down his cheeks.
“Charles will send me away,” he said, his voice breaking. “He has already told me that. If I do not comply to his wishes, then he will banish me, and he will lose his crown as surely as our sainted father lost his.”
“My poor dear sir,” I whispered. “Oh, my poor love!”
He was wrong, sadly, horribly wrong, yet nothing I could say would persuade him any more than a score of bishops had been able to do. Instead I held my arms open to him and he came to me, resting his head on my shoulder as we wept together; for what was right, what was wrong, and the tragedy that would surely swallow us whole.
THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, I WOKE WITH a sense of grave foreboding. I climbed from my bed and wrapped myself against the cold, and began to pace like a restless beast. Snow was falling, the sky and street the same muffled gray. There was no dawn, no true sunrise, only a lightening of the gray to white. My pains began in earnest then, and at last I called for Thomson and she in turn sent for the midwife. I wrote a letter to James, asking his forgiveness for all the ways I had failed him, my words jagged as pain made my pen sputter and jerk. I labored through the day and into the night again, making the midwife shake her head at my slow progress. I wrote another letter, a single line, begging James to come to me so that I might see him one last time before I died.
He neither came, nor replied, and now I longed for death to end all my sufferings. By the next dawn, I was so weak that as the pains racked my poor body, all I could do was mewl helplessly while the midwife’s women held my quivering limbs.
“Have courage, madam,” the midwife said. “Bear down one more time, and you shall have your child.”
My child, James’s child—and with that thought like a prayer to guide me, I bore down as she ordered. One final pain, so grave I felt sure I would be split asunder, and then blessed relief as it slipped away.
“A girl, madam!” the midwife declared, and the other women made happy wordless exclamations with her. “A brave, lusty daughter for you!”
“Is she well?” I begged pathetically. “Will she live?”
“Course she’ll live, God willing,” the woman said, cackling at my doubt. “Judge for yourself.”
She placed the babe upon my bare and shriveled belly, the now-empty place that had been her shelter these past months. Eagerly I reached down, desperate to be rejoined with her. Her; of course she was a girl, as I’d always known. She was sticky with blood and the muck of her birth, her black hair bristling from her head. Furiously she protested as the women wiped her clean, likely swearing one oath after another in whatever infant language she spoke. My daughter, yes. My daughter, Katherine, the same as I was called, and my mother before me. Yet I vowed I would love my little Katherine always, and never forget her as my own mother had forgotten me.
“She’s hungry, poor lamb,” the midwife said. “Let’s put her to your teat, madam.”
With their help, I held her close, and winced as she suckled hard.
“A strong little lass,” said the woman with approval. “She’ll take what she wants from life, that one will.”
They laughed, but I did not, for already I knew it to be true. She would be beautiful like the Stuarts, with the wit of the Sedleys, and nothing would stand in her way.
As soon as I was able, I wrote to James to tell him I was safe delivered of his daughter. This time he wrote back at once, blessing us both and promising to come as soon as he could. While I waited, I sent Thomson to find the nearest Anglican minister, and before I let myself slip into the sweet sleep of exhaustion, I watched my daughter baptized into the Anglican Church.
James came that evening. He held and kissed and praised his daughter, and laughed at every unpleasant squawk she uttered. I wept with joy to see her in his arms, the dearest sight ever I could imagine. Yet I also saw the fresh lines on James’s face and the bleakness in his eyes even as he smiled down at the babe.
“What is wrong, sir?” I asked softly. “What has happened?”
His bitter smile was more a grimace. “My brother has ordered me to leave England. I am banished, for the sake of the country. Her Highness and I must sail for Holland in two days, and can return only at my brother’s pleasure.”
“How long?” I whispered.
“I do not know,” he said heavily, and looked down at our daughter. “Forgive me, Katherine, but I do not know.”
Chapter Seventeen
KING STREET, LONDON
February 1679
A lady’s lying-in should by rights be a joyful event, a time where little is expected of her beyond that she recover from the trials of childbirth. She may loll as indolently as she pleases in her bed, indulged and dining on whatever she pleases for the sake of regaining her strength. Her friends and family call to offer their congratulations and to praise the new child and welcome it into the family. Gifts and gossip are exchanged, and the new mother much petted and cosseted, until, by the end of the month, she is refreshed and ready to return to her duties.
Given my own situation, however, I’d little expectations of much company. True, my new daughter was sound and ruddy, and with her round cheeks and full lips, I’d already deemed her a perfect Stuart beauty after only a week. She was also already a lady. Before James had sailed, he’d demonstrated gratifying haste in granting the letters patent that had given her both a title and a surname: Lady Katherine Darnley. I’d indulged myself in the best lace-trimmed childbed linen, ready to show myself and little Lady Katherine in finery fit to receive the queen herself.
But I’d neither sisters nor aunts to wish me well, nor brothers with wives to act in that stead. My grandmothers were long dead, and my own mother lost to me. The few friends I’d made whilst in Mary Beatrice’s household had followed her lead and swiftly abandoned me, and others I’d known from Whitehall would likewise likely judge it prudent to keep themselves clear of James’s disgrace.
Thus I was surprised and touched by the attention I did receive. Colonel Grahme’s wife, Dorothy, was first among them, bringing with her several other lady-wives of the duke’s household. Laurence Hyde’s wife, Henrietta, also called, as much a pretty sign of loyalty to my absent lover as to me, and once she did, several other, lesser ladies likewise saw the merit in paying me court. Nell Gwyn came, too, full of such drollery that she made my poor sore belly ache from laughter. Given how long I’d known Nell, her visit was to be expected, but the arrival of the Duchess of Portsmouth’s elegant coach in King Street sent Thomson and the rest of my little household tumbling over one another for the privilege of waiting upon her. I’ll grant that I was awed by her French magnificence, too, her famous beauty enriched by enough jewels to light a Court ball, and pleasantly startled by the unexpected friendship she offered.
“We must be allies, yes?” Her Grace said as she sat beside my bed, her fur-trimmed skirts arranged exactly so around her legs and her fingers arched to perfection as she sipped at her dish of tea. Her costly perfume was almost dizzying, like the most seductive incense. No wonder Charles was in her thrall. “When you are recovered, you must come to me in Whitehall. We are together in the same little boat, you know. How many other women can say they are loved by great princes?”
“Given the proclivities of the Stuarts, Your Grace,” I said, unable to keep myself from the truth even in her exquisite company, “I should say a great many ladies might make that claim.”
She raised her fine-plucked brows with genteel surprise, then laughed with a heartiness I’d not expected.
“You are sadly right, madame,” she said, every word sounding more sweet for being sugared by her accent. “But there is the love that is given for a single night, and then there is the love that is more lasting, the love we have been favored to know. His Majesty and His Highness: they are special to us, aren’t they?”
She turned to smile down on Lady Katherine, cooing in her cradle beside us. “Now you have this precious proof of His Highness’s devotion to you. Ah, how fortunate you are, madame! How blessed!”
I was indeed, and though I longed for James to return, I thought of him each time I held our darling child, and was comforted.
But on a chill afternoon in the following week, long after my enjoyable company had departed, Lady Katherine became far less darling, and no comfort at all. She fussed and wailed as if her tiny heart were broken, and refused to be comforted. Her nurse said it was the usual fretfulness that can plague any infant, yet my thoughts were full of James’s other fragile babes who’d perished over nothing. While I fussed myself and pleaded that a doctor should be summoned, the nurse assured me there was no cause.
It was clear I’d scandalized her, too, for ladies of my rank were supposed to be disinterested in the sordid concerns of their children. So that I might sleep, she took the babe away, yet Lady Katherine’s plaintive cries still came to me from far away in her nursery, and I begged to have her returned to me. I insisted on taking her myself, walking her up and down before the fire and singing songs to her as if that might soothe her, and in a dark moment of disloyalty, I even wondered if her constant cry was a manifestation of James’s habitual stubbornness. I was her mother, I told myself fiercely, and if I could not ease her suffering, then who could?
Such is the confidence of every new mother, I suppose, and such is the folly, too. Still my daughter cried, exhausting me if not herself, and when I gazed down at her in my arms it seemed to me in my frustration that her little face had become no more than a yawning, yowling, toothless mouth. When I heard the front door in the hall below open to admit another visitor, I shouted an order over my daughter’s cries that whoever it was be turned away. I was in no humor to play the charming hostess now, especially not when my hair was frizzled, my eyes red and bleary from want of rest, and the shoulder of my dressing gown blotched with spit and sour milk.
But next I heard the door to my bedchamber open, and I turned about sharply, meaning to chastise whichever servant had disobeyed my order. To my shock, it was no servant standing there, but instead my own father. His face was rosy from the cold, and melting snowflakes glittered in the curls of his wig. He was, of course, as impeccably dressed as always, from his well-polished boots to his lace cravat, and all in glaring contrast to my own bedraggled appearance. I had not seen him alone since last autumn, when he had as much as disowned me, and though I would happily welcome a reconciliation, I did rather wish for different circumstances.
“I’ve come to see my grandchild,” he announced, his voice raised over that same child’s cries. “A girl, I’m told.”
“She will not stop crying,” I said, tears now filling my own eyes. “I’m sorry, Father.”
“Oh, there’s nothing to be sorry about,” he said, setting aside his walking stick and holding his arms out. “She’ll stop for me.”
I paused, my weary gaze considering the perfection of his dress and how quickly my daughter would defile it. Then she wailed again, and helplessly I thrust her into Father’s waiting arms.
“There now, mite, what can the trouble be?” he asked softly. “Whatever can be so wrong in your world to merit all this racketing? What can I do to bring you ease?”
Startled, the baby gazed up at him, while he in turn looked down at her. She shuddered and gulped, but most of all she stopped crying, her teary face turned in fascination toward his. He’d always had something of a baby’s face himself, with his pursed lips and round, dimpled cheeks, grown rounder still with age, and I wondered if my daughter saw him as a kind of fellow.
“What did you do?” I asked, bewildered and more than a little jealous. What secret did he know that I didn’t? I hadn’t any recollection of him visiting my nursery when I’d been small, and he’d taken no real notice of me at all until I’d been older, the summer my mother had gone away. This newfound gift for children must have been discovered later, with his son by Lady Sedley. “How did you quiet her?”
“Oh, I treated her like any other grand lady,” he said easily, still gazing down at the babe. “All she wished was to be reminded that she is the center of her world, and the rest of us merely exist in it to serve her.”
“She’s a good child,” I said in her defense, wiping away my own tears with my fingers, for who knew what had become of my handkerchief?
“She’s a brave, lusty child, which is more to her credit than any mere goodness,” he declared proudly. “She’s a Sedley, no mistake. No weakling would roar like that.”
“Of course she’s a Sedley,” I said. “I bore her, didn’t I?”
He grunted, noncommittal. “Has her father owned her?”
“At once,” I said, and now doubly glad he had, too. “His Highness had the letters of patent drawn up directly and delivered within two days of her birth. She is called Lady Katherine Darnley.”
“Darnley,” he said, considering. “Scots, I suppose. Well, it’s better than none. It took His Majesty three years before he gave a decent name to Portsmouth’s brat. Has he seen to your other wants?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, again proud of my lover’s assiduousness. “He has been most generous in his allowances. Did you know that James Grahme now keeps His Highness’s privy purse?”
“Oh, Katherine.” He groaned. “Your life is more tangled than any Italian opera. I trust you’ll not make the same mistake twice with that one.”
“No, Father,” I said contritely, wondering if he’d somehow guessed that the colonel had been the gentleman who’d taken my maidenhead. “But His Highness doesn’t limit his regard for me to my allowance. He writes to me as often as
he can, and sends his letters by way of the royal packets. He wrote to me from the Hague, where he visited his daughter, and then from Brussels, where he is now situated.”
“And where he may now rot forever for what he has done to you,” Father said with sudden vehemence, “and for what he wishes to do to England.”
“Please don’t begin about His Highness, Father,” I begged. “For the sake of my daughter.”
He sighed, and looked back down at the babe in his arms, who had at last fallen asleep. “Have you had her baptized in our Church, or did the duke prevail?”
“She was christened an Anglican on the day after she was born,” I said quickly, knowing that would placate him. “I saw to that. His Highness was not pleased, but I acted first and he’d other matters to tend.”
“Good lass.” With the greatest of care, he laid my sleeping daughter in her cradle and drew the coverlet over her with a fond small pat. Then he led me to the pair of chairs close to the fire, where we could speak without disturbing the babe. “Lady Sedley and I would be honored if you would dine with us again, Katherine.”
I wished for nothing better, but I also knew my father well enough that certain rules must be set, or we would be at each other’s throats like thieves before the fish was brought to table.
“I would be much honored as well, Father,” I said with care, “if we can together vow not to speak of His Highness.”
He frowned and gnawed at his lip and shook his head, a jumble of little gestures that combined to show exactly how difficult a promise this would be to make.
“I know he is the father of your child, Katherine,” he said with a care that equaled my own. “But I’ll advise you as both your father and a fellow courtier that you would be wise to separate yourself from the duke as soon and as completely as is possible.”
The Countess and the King: A Novel of the Countess of Dorchester and King James II Page 31