‘His is not the only voyage of discovery undertaken in a new manner,’ Master Bacon insisted. ‘Abroad they have a readier acceptance of new ideas than we have here.’
‘But not where the discovery impinges upon religion,’ Francis protested. ‘I am thinking of the Roman persuasion and Galileo’s difficulties. Had he not died two years ago he might well have suffered again for his temerity. Yet scholars and men of science here accept that our earth revolves about the sun and not the contrary. They have suffered no persecution for their change of view.’
‘Our own mathematician, Sir Thomas Hariot, is another friend of my uncle and a follower of Galileo,’ Edmund Bacon agreed.
It was indeed a time of active, progressive thought, of surging discovery, busy invention. Another friend of Bacon’s, who was governor of Prince Henry’s household, had written a treatise on the substance nitre, based upon his own observations. To assist in calculations Edmund Gunter, followed by William Oughtred, vicar of the small village of Albury, near Guildford, had invented the slide rule, and John Nalier the system of logarithms.
‘There is a new freedom of minds here in Oxford, that beats like an insistent tide rising up a steep-set beach,’ Francis cried in his enthusiasm to his brother-in-law.
‘Now you copy Bacon in your imagery,’ Richard answered, smiling. ‘But it is true enough. The beach is steep-set and hard, built of prejudice and long-held custom. It holds back the advancing waters; we must take care the tide doth not rise too fast or the barriers might be reinforced to prevent its progress.’
‘I think we must change our image,’ Francis said. ‘A seatide in flood is an evil thing, for it renders the land infertile, kills standing trees, all bushes, drives out birds and beasts, creates a desert.’
‘Then let us exchange our climbing tide, our flood of seawater for gentle rain, soft rain. A shower of steady, life-giving rain, to make the seeds of new knowledge, of fresh invention, grow, flower and bear fruit.’
‘With the aid of new light,’ Francis concluded, ‘from that Divine Sun that moves and warms all men’s souls, even those who most seem to disregard it.’
‘Amen to that,’ Richard agreed soberly. He knew in which direction his brother-in-law’s thoughts had moved and felt both shame and anger that his own sister was responsible.
For the new house that Francis had built did nothing to content his wife for the loss of her London friends and their following at Court. And for the meretricious pleasures she had enjoyed with them.
A few weeks at Luscombe Manor, as the new house was called, brought her enthusiasm for its newness, its beauties and its comforts to pall sadly. November set in cold and wet. There was latent damp about in the new building, which persisted as stains upon walls and mildew on fabrics in spite of the lavish fires the servants built and maintained in all the principal rooms below and many of the floors above. Particularly those where the children had their nurseries.
In Master Angus Leslie’s house in Gracious Street there had never been damp or mildew. The whole interior had been warm, even too hot at times. So also at her father’s smaller house in Paternoster Row, though she remembered when she had gone to her mother to complain of chilblains on her fingers and toes, for which she had been given warm oil to rub in and wool mittens to wear.
Katharine’s true complaint at Luscombe was the lack of any interest in her life there. If her sister-in-law, Celia, had been more of her own kind she could have enjoyed sitting with her and gossiping about all mutual acquaintances. But Celia had little time and no inclination for gossip. She made it all too plain that she had no use for the self-willed Court beauty, even no praise for the sacrifice Kate insisted she made in agreeing to stay in her husband’s home for the whole of the winter. Far better for Francis Leslie, Celia thought, if he had left his complaining wife in London. She had no place in Oxford. She neither knew nor cared about those advances of knowledge, that surge of ideas that excited the men and that she herself took pains to understand to the limit of her imperfect education.
The two women had to meet fairly often, since their husbands decreed that it was good for their respective children to play together as they had when Francis was staying the year before at Richard’s house. Four Ogilvy brats, two Leslies. And the two elder boys, George Leslie and James Ogilvy now had the services of a tutor on three mornings of the week to start their reading and writing and the beginning of sums with the aid of the abacus.
Katharine was not a bad-tempered woman. She did not nag. She seldom even argued. But, like her mother, she had a talent for misunderstanding what was said to her and she filled in the gaps so formed with fantasy supplied by a shallow and frivolous imagination.
This had delighted Francis when he first fell in love with her. It seemed to him an essential part of her gay, youthful charm. She had in fact not changed. He knew this. He knew the fault was very largely his that he found her present conversation vapid, her opinions worthless. But it was no comfort to him. He marvelled that old Doctor Ogilvy still showed patience and tenderness towards his ageing, often querulous wife. He shuddered to think how like her mother Kate had grown, how like her she must essentially always have been.
He persevered in his efforts to come closer to her, but his forced tolerance had no obvious effect. She found the house, his pride and joy, uncomfortably large and cold, the children, whom he adored, a tiresome nuisance, his work a bore.
‘It is of no use to tell me, sir, so many times of the wonders of your discoveries in ancient books,’ she told him. ‘I do not wish to read these works, so I must take your word for it. I pray God daily for the winter to pass, and the roads become open again that I may visit my poor father and mother that I have not seen these many weeks.’
‘A mere month,’ Francis told her, irritated beyond endurance. ‘I would remind you, madam, that this is your home and here you must stay. I do not expect you to study but merely to acknowledge some interest in the most important and inspiring work that goes on in this ancient seat of learning. Your sister, Celia, hath no pretensions to scholarship, yet she displays a most pleasing sympathy with all your brother does. I cannot imagine,’ he went on, despair seizing him at the sight of her white set face, so implacably repelling every word he spoke, ‘what ’tis you find in that unsavoury stew-pot, the corrupt and corrupting Court in London. You would be well out of all contact with it.’
She did not allow her own passionate protest and utter repudiation of his ideas to find verbal expression. She said slowly, very quietly, fully accepting his authority over her, ‘I can never give up my allegiance to those noble friends who have treated me with such great kindness and condescension for so long. If I can in any way serve them I will continue to do so. I think you would be wise not to restrict me too far. My Lord Rochester hath the King’s ear and abiding affection. King James is very sensitive, very prone to see insult where perhaps none is intended.’
‘Am I to take that as a threat, madam?’ Francis asked, his own face white with sudden fury.
She did not answer but went away from him with quick steps as she always did when their infrequent open disputes reached the moment of crisis, the point at which victory or defeat became irrevocable.
The case was hopeless, Francis thought, calming himself as usual by a walk through his grounds, where the gardeners were laying out a formal pattern of flower beds and planting fruit trees against the south side of the walled vegetable plot.
He spoke to the men, who found him very knowledgeable for one who spent his time buried in books or discoursing to young men of like mind. He had told them of his childhood on the Scottish farm maintained by his father, the Laird of Kilessie. But Scottish farms and Oxford policies had nothing in common, the men knew by instinct. The master must have concerned himself to find out the local, the southern lore on gardens and though he could understand what they did and in a way advise what he wanted done, they laughed to think how he would shape with an actual spade or hoe in his unsoiled elegant hands.
Leaving the walled garden Francis continued his solitary walk into the open grassland that led to the little stream at the boundary of his property, land that in due course, with trees planted at correct intervals for shade, might be developed into lawns, but which now grazed sheep and a few goats for the milk that Celia favoured as an addition to the children’s diet.
He regained calm, but no real peace. Only some outside event or influence could alter matters between him and his wife. Such an event was close upon them.
On November the sixth in the morning the Prince Henry died of the long and wasting illness with its distressing symptoms of sickness and weak bowels that had resisted all the efforts of his doctors to cure him. The news spread rapidly to all cities and towns of the country, passing from them to the countryside and the more remote farms. It caused very genuine grief, for the young man had seemed to promise a strong ruler, honest, healthy, warlike, a total contrast to his weak, complicated, part-feared, part-despised father.
In Oxford the grief was marked, though there had never been so much admiration there for the young Prince as there was in the country at large. His military bearing and interests had already produced some fears of future wars on the continent. However, his death was acknowledged to be a genuine loss to the country, for the heir was now the young Prince Charles, a totally different character, both physically and mentally of much poorer calibre than his brother. Little promise there, the people felt, and this feeling coloured the declared sorrow and prolonged it.
Katharine felt the blow deeply in its general meaning, though she had not for many years had any personal contact with the Prince.
‘I can scarce believe it possible,’ she said to Francis, brought closer to him by this shared trouble than for many years. ‘I knew him when he was a mere child when I served my Lady Chiltern.’
‘That was when Alec was occupied teaching his Highness the principles of the binding of wounds,’ Francis reminded her. ‘Lady Chiltern accepted thee as an assistant lady to her in the Prince’s household, at Alec’s recommendation.’
It was the first time they had ever spoken freely of this, her first position at Court. And of Alec by name, without rancour, only a sort of gentle sadness, remembering the dead Prince in his not so distant childhood, rather than the turbulent spirit who had so nearly wrecked their lives and certainly their marriage.
‘A post from which my Lady Chiltern dismissed me when Alec fled,’ Katharine went on. ‘I never thought then I would again be noticed.’
This was a lie, as Francis well knew. She had never thought she would be banished from the Court for ever. She had waited and schemed and succeeded beyond her early desires.
But he no longer held her faults against her. And just now she was softened, brought back to some feeling for the simple realities of life by this royal death.
‘Well, he is gone, Kate,’ he said. ‘The realm is the poorer. But God’s will must be done. We must accept this, as all else He in His wisdom decrees. Prince Henry was a good young man. He had some real influence with the King, which now is lost.’
Katharine sighed and agreed. In tune with the public feeling of solemnity, of the unpredictable strokes of Fate or Providence ascribed by most to the direct ordering of God Himself, the Leslies joined in all those forms of mourning, expressions of sorrow and loyal sympathy that Oxford University offered to the bereaved royal couple. Luscombe Manor, master and mistress, servants indoor and out, were drawn together in a feeling of community that Francis hoped might last between himself and Kate when the direct cause of it had begun to fade from the common mind.
Chapter Eleven
His hopes were soon destroyed.
When King James had recovered somewhat from the severe shock and very real grief caused by his elder son’s tragic death, he realized that he had an immediate and pressing matter to resolve.
For some weeks the young Frederick, Elector of Palatine, had been in England to meet his proposed bride and to complete the detailed negotiations for the marriage. This had been done and a contract signed. The betrothal should have followed at once, but the death of Prince Henry prevented it.
Now, with the young Elector still in the country, entertained by James at great and begrudged expense, the King decided it was time to conclude the affair as soon as decently possible. So, with little or no opposition from the Council and with great public approval, the young pair, both sixteen years of age, were betrothed and the marriage set for a date early in the New Year.
Katharine came to Francis in the first week of January with an open letter in her hand.
‘My love,’ she said, relying upon their unbroken soft mood since November, ‘I have joyous news from London. The Princess Elizabeth is to be wed in February. All the town is mad with joy. The City approves in full measure this protestant connection and will doubtless provide some handsome gift—’
‘The City?’ Francis interrupted, smiling. ‘My kinsman hath not writ to thee instead of to me? Thou hast not mistook the superscription?’
‘Nay,’ she answered, laughing in her turn. ‘I have no links with City folk. In the shadow of Saint Paul’s my father regards us as ecclesiastical, for all he teaches at rich Master Sutton’s school of the Charterhouse.’
‘Then whence comes thy letter?’ Francis asked, with foreboding. He had not noticed nor had he been told of a messenger’s arrival.
‘From my Lady Essex,’ Katharine answered. ‘It is in the nature of a summons, Francis. Subject of course to thy permission. She would have me attend her, with other of her ladies, at the wedding of the Princess.’
Francis felt his cheeks burn as rage took him.
‘It were more seemly, Kate, that this invitation included me, thy husband. Doth she imagine, this great married-unmarried lady, that thou art in like case to herself, that she ignores me and my position?’
‘I am sure she doth not,’ cried Katharine, stamping her foot. ‘If this be your feeling, why did you never put an obstacle before now between me and my attendance at Court, whenever it was demanded? Why? Why?’
He looked at her steadily until her eyes fell away from him.
‘Because I would not give thee occasion for lying, for deceiving me,’ he said. ‘Not that I was ever able to prevent it. And now do not hope to do so. Oh Kate, Kate, I fear me you will ruin us both.’
This time it was he who walked away, leaving her standing, mute, shaking with fear that her intrigue with Alan Carr was already known to some traitor who had passed the knowledge to Francis.
However, her natural resilience and great obstinacy soon revived. Francis did not forbid her to go to London, though he did nothing to help her preparations.
In the end she was able to join the party representing Oxford University bidden by the Lord Chamberlain to attend. Francis was included in an invitation from the Vice-Chancellor, but refused it for himself. Richard Ogilvy was persuaded to take his place. Brother and sister therefore ventured, together with a number of dons and their wives, upon the difficult, potentially dangerous winter roads to the capital.
It was February, with recent snow frozen hard on the tracks. The party, however, was large enough to send grooms and servants ahead to clear a sufficient path and sprinkle it with sandy earth. They went slowly, stopping at Wallingford, Reading and Staines on the way. But they all arrived safely. Richard and Katharine went to their parents’ house, where they were received with joy, for the old people had seen nothing of either for the past winter months.
Mistress Ogilvy took Katharine off to her own parlour at once, to discuss with her their clothes for the great event. Doctor Ogilvy led Richard to his library, where the latter took advantage of this visit to speak about the Bodleian Library, his hope that eventually the old man’s valuable collection might find a place there.
‘The books are all marked down for thee and thine,’ Doctor Ogilvy said. ‘I think they may remain so. If I give them all to Bodley it may please thee for thy lifetime, but what of you
ng James and his brothers? Might not they wish to possess them, to share them perhaps?’
‘And so disperse what you have worked, sir, so long and carefully to put together? Surely that were pity indeed?’
‘Then thou shalt have the responsibility, not I,’ his father said. ‘I shall not alter my will and there’s an end to it.’
But he smiled so sweetly and lovingly at his son as he spoke that Richard could not argue any further. Besides, seeing how much Doctor Ogilvy had aged in the last two years and how thin and frail he looked sitting in his high chair near the fire with the curtains drawn to hide the bleak winter garden, Richard turned away in distaste and an almost superstitious dread from a discussion that grew from last wishes and parting and death.
Upstairs Mistress Ogilvy prattled unceasingly. She had contrived to find friends among City folk who would take her with them to the wedding. She had rightly guessed that Richard would join the University group and that Kate would seek out her great Lady Patroness or else her young admirer, my Lord Rochester’s brother.
‘It was she sent to me to attend her,’ Katharine explained. ‘I must hasten to let her know of my arrival. And that I am free to be of her party, seeing that Francis declined his invitation to join the scholars.’
‘I marvel he let thee go,’ Mistress Ogilvy said. ‘But he hath always been kind if not complaisant.’
‘We go our several ways and do not fall out over it,’ Katharine retorted, deliberately harsh, for she found this sort of talk embarrassing, if not dangerous. Her mother’s wild conclusions, never kept to herself, were not always obvious fantasies.
Just now Katharine had every reason for keeping her thoughts quite secret. She knew that for herself life at Oxford in any real sense was impossible. She would never feel truly at home at Luscombe. Something far grander or else perfectly homely would suit her either way far better than this well-planned and elegant dwelling. She could not face life with Francis either. He had been generous by outward standards. She was ready to agree to that. But inwardly he had left her from the moment he had discovered her first betrayal of him. He had deliberately crushed his love for her upon which he had depended. She no longer blamed herself for that, not that she had ever felt any real guilt. She suspected, rightly, that he already guessed she had betrayed him again, but would torment her by making no accusation, seek no revenge, only remove himself from her more and more.
The Dark and the Light Page 11