With All My Heart (14 page)

CHAPTER XII

“IF ONLY the King would come!” was the burden of Catherine’s conversation throughout the beginning of that summer. He had sent her and all the other women away to safety at Hampton; and although she walked out through the gatehouse every evening to scan the London road, or rode into Kingston in the hope of meeting him, she slept alone half crazed with anxiety. For plague or no plague, he had a world of other things to see to.

First he must take his mother down to the Nore and see her safely embarked for France, and then there was a plethora of public business to transact. Negotiations with Louis to keep France out of the war, trouble with Ireland in which Charles strove as usual for tolerance, hurried conferences with John Evelyn about preparations for wounded, and heartening visits to the Naval dockyards with the invaluable Pepys at his elbow and the new young Duke of Monmouth clambering over all manner of deck tackle to talk with the crews about their guns.

But Catherine knew that Charles was often sitting at stuffy meetings while the plague raged outside, reaching right up King Street to the palace doors. That every day more infected houses were sealed with a cross upon their doors, that all night the plague carts creaked through deserted. streets collecting corpses, and that instead of pealing for victory the bells in London steeples were tolling mournfully for her dead. And that Charles, wherever he went, would be sure to rein in his horse in that pestilential air to shout up to the victims’ windows in that human way of his, asking how they did and promising — and probably paying. for — whatever help was possible.

She was thankful when she heard that he was at sea again, meeting his favourite admiral, Holmes, and listening enthralled to his tales of how he had harried the Dutch coast; and that from Spithead they were gone together to inspect the defences of the Wight — that small, vulnerable island lying like a footstool beneath the southern skirts of England, valiantly protecting the roadsteads of Portsmouth and Southampton.

But during the long summer evenings, listless after each stifling anxious day, her ladies would talk in whispers of fresh horrors culled from the outside world, their faces white with fears they were ashamed to voice. For not one of them had a nettle rash or a migraine those days without beginning to imagine she had the plague. All eyed each other with suspicion — even at Hampton. For were there not infected farmsteads a few miles away at Esher with their cattle being destroyed and soldiers set on guard? And was not the terrible Thing spreading its talons farther and farther out from the metropolis to country towns?

Unlike most of the others, Catherine and donna Penalva had never experienced even the usual cloud of anxiety that hot summers brought, and the very strangeness of the scourge frightened them. Inevitably Catherine kept recalling how two Stuarts had already been taken by some such contagion. “Snapped off like a Spring branch,” Father Huddleston had said. And the last courier from Whitehall had brought her a hurried letter from Charles, making kind enquiries after her health —
her
health, when he was already back again in London.

With the letter still in her hand, intending to re-read it in the cool of the privy garden, she paused behind a group of women huddled on the great wide stairs leading down from banqueting hall to courtyard. They had loosened the departing courier's tongue with potent Rhenish and so wrapped in horror were they that they did not even hear her approach — heard nothing but the man’s voice playing upon their tensed emotions. And if he, for his part, enjoyed seeing carefully dressed girls again and scarifying a country audience, surely any man who endured London merited so small a compensation!

“You are better off here than there, with not a boat to be seen on the river, and the grass growing in Whitehall courtyard. More than two thousand dead this week!”, he bragged, setting his empty tankard down on the step where he was resting while his horse was being rubbed down, and winking at the inquisitive buttery maid who replenished it. “And what do they do with ’em, you ask? Bury ’em? When every city cemetery was full and overflowing weeks ago! Shrive ’em? That’s a good ’un, my pretty chuck. With not enough priests to go round! No, Mistress,” he answered a more serious woman of the Queen’s wardrobe, “there’s no Holy Oil or bell brought any more. Even the church bells don’t toll now, for the reason there’s no one left with strength to pull the ropes. ’Tis no wonder the Puritans hold up their hands and call it God’s vengeance for a whoring Court and some of the greybeards turn back to the old religion and start telling their beads! But half the preachers — be they Romish, Anglican or Dissenters — are either dead or fled.”

“With neither priests nor graveyards — then what happens to the — poor dead?” quavered a very young girl’s voice out of the gloom.

Over their huddled heads, outlined against the evening sky, Catherine could see the King’s messenger stretching out his dusty riding boots and taking another thirsty swig. Obviously he needed it, for in spite of all his braggadocio his hand shook. Noting his thinness and his sense of the dramatic, it occurred to her that it would have been like Charles to give the errand to one of the hungry small part actors from his long closed playhouse.

“Ah, where indeed!” he echoed. “In spite of all the carts that go the rounds at night, I warrant there’s many a dead family left stinking behind those sealed doors, all taken within the hour, as you might say, and their neighbours none the wiser. Or, worse still, some poor stricken soul who survived the rest of his household by a day or two, doing what he could for each of them, and now sealed up in his own house knowing that when next the dreaded cry ‘Bring out your dead’ comes down the street there will be no one to push
his
poor stiffened corpse through the cobwebbed window. Only the bulging rats come up from the Fleet ditch to do the grave-diggers’ work.”

“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 —”