A Health Unto His Majesty

by Jean Plaidy

  She called to her women.

  ‘Come,’ she cried. ‘Dress me in my most becoming gown. Dress my hair in ringlets. I am going to pay a call . . . a very important call.’

  They dressed her, and she thought of the reunion as they did so. She would throw herself on to her knees first and beg his forgiveness. She would say that she had tried to go against the tide; she had believed in virtue, but now she could see no virtue in marriage with a man such as she had married. She would ask Charles to forget the past; and perhaps they would start again.

  ‘My lady, your hands are burning,’ said one of her women. ‘You are too flushed. You have a fever.’

  ‘It is the excitement because I am to pay a most important call . . . I will wear that blue sash with the gold embroidery.’

  Her women looked at each other in astonishment. ‘There is no blue sash, my lady. The sash is purple, and the embroidery on it is silver.’

  Frances put her hand to her head. ‘Dark webs seem to dance before my eyes,’ she muttered.

  ‘You should rest, my lady, before you pay that call.’

  Even as they spoke she would have fallen if two of them had not managed to catch her.

  ‘Take me to my bed,’ she murmured.

  They carried her thither, and in alarm they called the physician to her bedside. One of the women had recognized the alarming symptoms of the dreaded smallpox.

  *

  The Court buzzed with the news.

  So Frances Stuart was suffering from the smallpox! Fate seemed determined to put an end to her sway, for only if she came unscathed from the dread disease, her beauty unimpaired, could she hope to return to the King’s favour.

  Barbara was exultant. It was hardly likely that Frances would come through unmarked; so few people did, and Barbara’s spies informed her that Frances had taken the disease very badly. ‘Praise be to God!’ cried Barbara. ‘Madam Frances will no longer be able to call herself the beauty of the Court. Dolt! She threw away what she might have had when she was young and fair and the King sought her; she married her drunken sot, and much good has that done her. I’ll swear she was planning to come back and regain Charles’s favour. She’ll see that the pock-marked hag she’ll become will best retire to the country and hide herself.’

  The King heard the sly laughter. He heard the whispers. ‘They say the most beautiful of Duchesses has become the most hideous.’ ‘Silly Frances, there’ll be no one to hand her her cards now.’ ‘Poor Frances! Silly Frances! What had she but her beauty?’

  Catherine watched the King wistfully. She saw that he was melancholy, and she asked him to tell her the reason.

  He turned to her frankly and replied: ‘I think of poor Frances Stuart.’

  ‘It has been the lot of other women to lose their beauty through the pox,’ said Catherine. ‘Her case is but one of many.’

  ‘Nay,’ said the King. ‘Hers is unique, for the pox could never have robbed a woman of so much beauty as it could rob poor Frances!’

  ‘Some women have to learn to do without what they cannot have.’

  He smiled at Catherine. ‘No one visits her,’ he said.

  ‘And indeed they should not. The infection will still be upon her.’

  ‘I think of poor Frances robbed of beauty and friends, and I find myself no longer angry with her.’

  ‘If she recovers it will bring great comfort to her to know that she no longer must suffer your displeasure.’

  ‘She needs comfort now,’ declared the King. ‘If she does not have it, poor soul, she will die of melancholy.’

  He was thinking of her in her little cocked hat, in her black and white gown with the diamonds sparkling in her hair – Frances, the most beautiful woman of his Court, and now, if she recovered, one of its most hideous. For the pox was a cruel destroyer of beauty, and Frances was suffering a severe attack.

  Catherine, watching him, felt such twinges of jealousy that she could have buried her face in her hands and wept in her misery. She thought: If he could speak of me as he speaks of her, if he could care so much for me if I suffered the like affliction, I believe I would be willing to suffer as Frances has suffered. He loves her still. None of the others can mean as much to him as that simple girl, of whom it was once said: ‘Never had a woman so much beauty, and so little wit.’

  He smiled at Catherine, but she knew he did not see her. His eyes were shining and his mouth tender; he was looking beyond her into the past when Frances Stuart had ridden beside him and he had been at his wits’ end to think of means to overcome her resistance.

  He turned and hurried away, and a little later she saw him walking briskly to the river’s edge where his barge was waiting.

  Catherine stood watching him, and slowly the tears began to run down her cheeks.

  She knew where he was going. He was going to risk infection; he was going to do something which would set all the Court talking; for he was going to show them all that, although he had been cool towards the lovely Frances Stuart because she had flouted him in her marriage, all was forgiven the poor, stricken girl who was in danger of losing that very beauty which had so attracted him.

  For love like that, thought Catherine, I would welcome the pox. For love like that I would die.

  *

  Frances lay in her bed. She had asked for a mirror, and had stared a long time at the face she saw reflected there. How cruel was fate! Why, she asked herself, should it have made her the most beautiful of women, only to turn her into one of the most hideous! If only the contrast had been less marked! It was as though she had been shown the value of beauty in those days of the Restoration, only that she might mourn its loss. Gone was the dazzling pink and white complexion; in its place was yellow skin covered by small pits which, not content with ravaging the skin itself, had distorted the perfect contours of her face. The lid of one eye, heavily pitted, was dragged down over the pupil so that she could see nothing through it, and the effect was to make her look grotesque.

  Nothing of beauty was left to her; even her lovely slender figure was wasted and so thin that she feared the bones would pierce her skin.

  Alone she lay, for none came to visit her. How was that possible, who would dare risk taking the dread disease?

  And when I am recovered, she thought, still none will visit me. And any who should be so misguided as to do so will be disgusted with what they see.

  She wanted to weep; in the old days she had wept so easily. Now there were no tears. She was aware only of a dumb misery. There was none to love her, none to care what became of her.

  Perhaps, she pondered, I will go into a convent. How can I live all the years ahead of me, shut away from the world? I am not studious; I am not clever. How can I live my life shut away from the Court life to which I have grown accustomed?

  How would it be to have old friends, who once had been eager to admire, turning away from her in disgust? There would be no one to love her; she had nothing to hope for from her husband. He had married the fair Stuart whom the King so desired because he had believed that, the King finding her so fair, she must be desirable indeed. Now . . . there would be none.

  She could see from her bed the buhl cabinet inlaid with tortoiseshell and ivory. It was a beautiful thing and a present from the King in those days when he had eagerly besought her to become his mistress. She remembered his pleasure when he had shown her the thirty secret drawers and the silver-gilt fittings. The cabinet was decorated with tortoiseshell hearts, and she remembered that he had said: ‘These are reminders that you possess one which is not made of tortoiseshell and beats for you alone.’

  Beside her bed was the marquetry table, ebony inlaid, and decorated with pewter – another of Charles’s elaborate presents.

  She would have these to remind her always that once she had been so beautiful that a King had sought her favours. Few would believe that in the days to come, for they would look at a hideous woman and laugh secretly at the very suggestion that her beauty could ever have attrac
ted a King who worshipped beauty as did Charles.

  All was over. Her life had been built on her beauty; and her beauty was in ruins.

  Someone had entered the room, someone tall and dark.

  She did not believe it was he. She could not. She had been thinking of him so vividly that she must have conjured him up out of her imagination.

  He approached the bed.

  ‘Oh, God!’ she cried. ‘It is the King . . . the King himself.’

  She brought up her hands to cover her face, but found she could not touch the loathsome thing she believed that face to be. She turned to the wall and sobbed: ‘Go away! Go away! Do not look at me. Do not come here to mock me!’

  But he was there, kneeling by the bed; he had taken her hands.

  ‘Frances,’ he said, in a voice husky with emotion, ‘you must not grieve. You must not.’

  ‘I beg of you go away and leave me in my misery,’ she said. ‘You think of what I was. You see what I have become. You . . . you of all people must be laughing at me . . . you must be triumphant . . . If you have any kindness in you . . . go away.’

  ‘Nay,’ he said. ‘I would not go just yet. I would speak with you, Frances. We have been too long bad friends.’

  She did not answer. She believed the hot, scalding smart on the face she loathed meant tears.

  She felt his lips on her hands. He must be mad. Did he not know that there might still be danger of contagion?

  ‘I came because I could not endure that we should be bad friends, Frances,’ he said. ‘You were ill and alone, so I came to see you.’

  She shook her head. ‘Now go, I beg of you. I implore you. I know you cannot bear to look at anything so ugly as I have become. You cannot have anything but loathing for me now.’

  ‘One does not loathe friends – if the friendship be a true one – whatever befalls them.’

  ‘You desired me for my beauty.’ Her voice broke on a cracked note. ‘My beauty . . . I am not only no longer beautiful, I am hideous. I know how you hate everything ugly. I can appeal only to your pity.’

  ‘I loved you, Frances,’ he said. ‘Od’s Fish! I did not know how much until you ran away and left me. And now I find you sick and alone, deserted by your friends. I came hither to say this to you, Frances: Here is one friend who will not desert you.’

  ‘Nay . . . nay . . .’ she said. ‘You will never bear to look upon me after this.’

  ‘I shall visit you every day until you are able to leave your bed. Then you must return to Court.’

  ‘To be jeered at!’

  ‘None would dare jeer at my friend. Moreover, you despair too soon. There are remedies for the effects of the pox. Many have tried them. I will ask my sister to tell me what the latest French remedies are for improving the skin. Your eye will recover its sight. Frances, do not despair.’

  ‘If I had been less beautiful,’ she murmured, ‘it would have been easier.’

  He said: ‘Let us talk of other matters. I will tell you of the fashions of which I hear from my sister. The French are far in advance of us and I will ask her to send French dresses for you. How would you like to come to Court in a dress from Paris?’

  ‘With a mask over my face, mayhap I might,’ said Frances bitterly.

  ‘Frances, this is not like you. You used to laugh so gaily when the card-houses of others collapsed. Do you remember?’

  She nodded. Then she said sadly: ‘Now my house has collapsed, and I see that cards were such flimsy things . . . so worthless with which to build a house.’

  He pressed her hands; and she turned to look into his face, hoping for what she could not possibly expect to find; the tenderness of his voice deceived her.

  How could he love her – hideous as she had become? She thought of the flaming beauty of Barbara Castlemaine; she thought of the dainty gamin charm of the player with whom she had heard he was spending much time. And how could he love Frances Stuart who had had nothing but her unsurpassed beauty, of which the hideous pox had now completely robbed her?

  She had caught him off his guard.

  She had allowed him to see her once beautiful face hideously distorted, and he knew and she knew that, whatever remedies there were, nothing could restore its beauty; and she also knew that what had prompted him to visit her was nothing but the kindness of heart he would have for any sick animal. Thus would he have behaved for any of his little dogs or the creatures he kept in his parks.

  Of all those who had courted and flattered her in the days when she had enjoyed the power her beauty had brought, there was only one who came now to visit her – the King himself; and, because of this, when she was well and no longer a danger to them, others would come, not because they cared what became of her, but because it was the custom to follow the King.

  He had come in her affliction; she would always remember that. He had risked grave sickness and possibly death by coming to her when she had felt prepared to take a quick way out of this world.

  Now he sat there on the bed and was trying to act a part; he was trying to be gay, trying to pretend that soon she would be back at Court, and the old game – she evasive, he persuasive – would begin again.

  But although he was a tolerably good actor, there had been one moment of revelation when she had seen clearly that he had no feeling for her but one, and that was pity.

  SIX

  IT WAS SPRINGTIME, and Catherine was filled with new hope. If all went well this time she might indeed present an heir to the nation.

  It was seven years since she had come to England, and she was more deeply in love with Charles than she had been during that ecstatic honeymoon. She no longer hoped to have his love exclusively; it would be enough for her if she might share it with all those who made demands upon it. He had so many mistresses that none was quite sure how many; he had taken a fancy to several actresses whom he saw at the theatre; and, although his passion for these women was usually fleeting, he had remained constant to Eleanor Gwyn, who was affectionately known throughout the Court and country as Nelly. Barbara kept her place at the head of them, but that was largely due to Barbara herself; the King was too lazy to eject her from the position she had taken as a right; and until there came a mistress who would insist on his doing so, it seemed that there Barbara would remain.

  As to Catherine, she allowed the King’s seraglio to affect her as little as possible. She had her own court of ladies – among them poor, plain Mary Fairfax, who had suffered through her husband as Catherine had through hers. Catherine had her private chapel in the Queen Mother’s residence of Somerset House; she had her own priests and loyal servants; the King was ever kind to her and she was not unduly unhappy.

  Mary Fairfax, gentle, intelligent, and very patient, would sometimes talk of her childhood and the early days of her marriage which had been so happy, and how at that time she had believed she would continue to live in harmony with her husband all the days of her life.

  They had much comfort to bring each other.

  They talked of pleasant things; they never mentioned Lady Castlemaine, whom Mary Fairfax regarded as her husband’s evil genius almost as much as Catherine regarded her as Charles’s.

  They talked of the coming of the child and the joy which would be felt throughout the country when it was born.

  Lying back in her white pinner, the loose folds of which were wrapped about her thickening body, Catherine looked almost pretty. She was imagining Charles’s delight in the child; she saw him as a boy – a not very pretty boy because he would be so like his father; he would have bright, merry eyes, a gentle nature, and a sharp wit.

  They talked together and an hour passed merrily, but when Mary Fairfax rose to call her ladies to help the Queen disrobe, Catherine suddenly felt ill.

  Her women came hurrying in, and she saw the anxiety on their faces; she knew they were wondering: Is the Queen going to miscarry again?

  Catherine said quickly: ‘Send for Mrs Nun. She is at dinner in Chaffinch’s apartments. I may need h
er.’

  There was consternation throughout Whitehall. Mrs Nun had been brought away from a dinner party in great haste at the Queen’s command, and this could mean only one thing; the Queen’s time had again come too soon.

  Within a few days the news was out.

  Catherine came out of her sleep of exhaustion, and the tears fell slowly down her cheeks as she realized that, once more, she had failed.

  *

  The Duke of Buckingham called on Barbara.

  When they were alone, he said: ‘So Her Majesty has failed again!’

  ‘The King should have married a woman who could bear him children,’ declared Barbara.

  ‘Well, cousin,’ said the Duke, ‘you have proved that you could do that. The only thing that would need to be proved in your case would be that the King had begotten them.’

  ‘It is only necessary for Queens to bear them,’ said Barbara.

  ‘And does your rope-dancer still give you satisfaction?’ asked the Duke.

  ‘I’ll be thankful if you will address me civilly,’ snapped Barbara.

  ‘A friendly question, nothing more,’ said Buckingham airily. ‘But let us not quarrel. I have come to talk business. The King is gravely disappointed. He had hoped for a son.’

  ‘Well, he’ll get over the disappointment, as he has been obliged to do before.’

  ‘It is a sad thing when a King, knowing himself to be capable of begetting strong healthy children, cannot get an heir.’

  Barbara shrugged her magnificent shoulders, but the Duke went on: ‘You indicate it is a matter of indifference. Know you not that if the King gets no legitimate son, one day we shall have his brother on the throne?’

  ‘That would seem so.’

  ‘And what of us when James is King?’

  ‘Charles’s death would be calamity to us in any case.’

  ‘Well, he is full of health and vigour. Now listen to me, Barbara; we must rid him of the Queen.’