With All My Heart (23 page)

Catherine first heard about a specific attempt from pretty Dorothy Howard, the Lady-of-the-Bedchamber who had taken Frances Stuart’s place. “Three hired assassins hiding behind the bushes in St. James’s Park — with pistols — when the King takes his walk,” she babbled, running into the Queen’s room.

“Three
Catholic
assassins, of course!” jeered her mistress, without raising her head from her book.

“Why, yes, Madame, of course,” agreed the girl guilelessly. “About two of the clock this afternoon, that good-looking assistant in the King’s laboratory was telling me. No doubt they will set a double guard.”

Suddenly Catherine’s scanty attention was fully caught. A man who worked in the King’s laboratory could not be stupid. Suppose it were really true this time, and not part of all this wearisome, insulting fantasy? She threw down her book and seized the girl by both arms.

“This afternoon, did you say?” she demanded.

“Drusilla and Master Kirby both swear to it,” spluttered poor Dorothy Howard, goggle-eyed.

“Then come with me this instant.”

Catherine released her only to seize a wrap. Her eyes went to the clock. Ten minutes to two. It was farther to the park from the dower house but if she hurried she might just meet the King on the path to the lake where he sauntered most sunny afternoons. Breathlessly she set forth, without any dear idea of what she was going to do. She could see them coming now — a smaller string of courtiers than usual led by two tall figures whom she recognized as the Stuarts, and followed by a much smaller one who must be one of the pages bearing the usual platter of scraps for the waterfowl. “I shall come upon them suddenly at the end of the old tiltyard wan,” she calculated. But Louise, Duchess of Portsmouth, was wont to employ the same tactics, she had heard; and frequently, of late, had shared the King’s postprandial stroll as she herself had been wont to do. The absurdity of it stayed Catherine’s hurrying footsteps. Were they to arrive at the same moment it would make a rich jest for Buckingham’s biting tongue and create the sort of situation which Andrew Marvell could write so scathingly about. It was not easy, being Charles the Second’s wife! But even ridicule was as nothing compared with the possibility of danger to him. She could perhaps warn him or — at the worst — throw herself in front of him if anyone really did fire. She had much in common with Toby Rustat, she supposed, remembering with an affectionate smile how, for all his unobtrusiveness, he had ceased to mind his own business when it had been a matter of going with his master to the Great Fire.

But this particular afternoon milady of Portsmouth had not ventured forth. “So much for her affection!” thought Catherine, in a dither of fear herself.

With an ill-feigned start of surprise she fell in with the King’s party and he broke -off courteously in the middle of some technical discussion to greet her; and when she asked if she and her lady might go along to see his new pintail ducks he replied in his usual pleasant way, “With all my heart!” But there had been just that momentary hesitation — that quick alert look round — which had betrayed to her that there was no need to warn him. That he, too, had heard the latest rumour but had chosen to disregard it — until there was some question of her coming too. And even, then, since he let her come,. she supposed he could not have taken it seriously.

“I thought you did not care for waterfowl?” she said to James, for the sake of making conversation.

“I am but returning home this way,” he answered with a brevity which made her suspect him of accompanying his brother for much the same reason as herself.

Across the park rose the squat, Tudor bulk of the older palace of St. James, pleasant and familiar. But between it and Whitehall lay the long, narrow sheet of water, the winding paths, the elm trees and those innumerable clumps of bushes of which only John Evelyn knew the names. Far more bushes than she had remembered. Bushes big enough to afford excellent cover for traitors with primed pistols. She viewed them covertly and her legs trembled beneath her as she tried to talk intelligently about what James called “Charles’s wretched birds”.

“See the little grey fellow with the scarlet tuft?” their owner was saying, with calm enjoyment. “Throw him a tit-bit, Dorothy, and see how amusingly he catches it. Here, boy, pass the platter to her Majesty.”

The trouble is, Catherine thought, one cannot tell from which direction the villains are likely to fire. Would one know first by the sharp explosion? Did a bullet travel faster than sound? She longed to ask James, who had once explained it to her. But she had no head for such things. She was not of the stuff of which heroines are made. All she could do was to keep close to Charles — just in case ...

“Here comes Columbus!” he was saying, walking to the water’s edge to meet a lame crane that was waddling awkwardly ashore to feed from his hand. Columbus was Charles’s pride and the favourite of the whole queer collection. For Columbus had a wooden leg neatly spliced by one of his old army pensioners.

Catherine and Dorothy Howard made the usual fuss of the adventurous old bird, but the sun had gone behind a cloud and the water, ruffled by a sudden chilly wind, looked grey and steely. The enthusiasm of the handful of attendant gentlemen was as distrait as her own. And even James, who knew nothing of personal fear, seemed surly and uneasy. “Of a truth, your Majesty tempts Providence!” he blurted out at last.

“By feeding a few harmless fowl?” enquired Charles blandly.

“By walking abroad without a guard during all this ridiculous disturbance,” said James, to whom all subterfuge was alien.

Charles gave him a warning glance. It was not a subject which he cared to discuss in public.

“Today I took it upon myself to double the Guard at the gates,” persisted James obstinately. “But must you ride unattended through Windsor park or row alone up river after dark?”

Fastidiously, Charles brushed the last of the crumbs from his fine, long fingers. He might have been shaking the slime of religious faction from his sorely tried kingdom. “My dear James,” he countered calmly, “you should know the real temper of the people better than that. Surely you do not suppose that they would seriously try to kill me with you as the only alternative?”

They parted then. James strode angrily away towards St. James’s while the King’s party strolled back towards Whitehall, Charles idly discussing with Sir Charles Berkeley a performance of one of William Wycherley’s plays. After all, no violence had disturbed the autumn afternoon, and most of them felt rather flat and foolish. At the branching of the paths by the tiltyard wall he took his wife’s hand arid, bowing, kissed it. It was his usual formal gesture of farewell. But as the long curls of his wig hid his face from the others he said gently, “I should go and lie down, my dear. These scares are all poppycock, of course; but it is good to know how you and James love me.”

CHAPTER XIX

IF THE plots against the King’s life were all inventions, many an honest man lost his life on suspicion of being involved in them. Titus Oates began to be a kind of god to the people. Although he was only an unfrocked parson who had sought refuge in a Catholic seminary abroad, before being expelled from there for unsavoury conduct he had gleaned a superficial knowledge of Jesuit affairs which, added to his lying audacity, made him exceedingly dangerous. He had only to point his finger at an enemy and employ enough false witnesses, and over-zealous judges passed sentence of death. But such power could not have come into the hands of so unimportant a man had he not been secretly backed by the political enemies of James, and unimpeded in his apparently patriotic activities by Scroggs, the Lord Chief Justice of England.

The King did what he could, going down to the Law Courts, cross-examining witnesses himself and trying to instil some measure of commonsense into the morass of hysterical credulity; but life had taught him just how far the steel of authority must bend before the weight of popular opinion. And when, inevitably, members of the Queen’s household came under suspicion and she appealed to him he found himself powerless to protect them.

“But, Charles, these three servants of mine could not possibly have the least desire to harm you,” she pleaded. “It is only that those fiends of inhumanity put Prance, the goldsmith who cleans my altar plate, in irons in Newgate and tortured him until he laid some ridiculous false charge against them. They are being tried for their lives, and they are innocent!”

“I make no doubt of it. But so were many far more important people who have been executed these last few weeks,” said Charles grimly.

“Yet you go to your cock-fighting and your tennis and do nothing!”

“What
can
I do?” asked Charles, morosely. “This brilliant new man Jeffreys has the case in hand, and justice must take its course.”

“Justice! They say that he is the most merciless of all. Say rather malice! At first you went down to the Courts yourself and cross examined this Oates yourself.”

“Yes. And caught him out in a couple of bare-faced lies. But what was the use? The people
wanted
to believe him. And to prove his own loyalty Godfrey, Justice of the Peace, let him bring in the scourings of the back streets as perjured witnesses and a jury I would not have try a dog. And as soon as they had got their hangings, what happened? Poor old Godfrey is found stabbed in a ditch, so that everything looks blacker than ever for the friends of the condemned.”

“They even tried to pretend that it was done in my house and the body dragged there. You do not believe that my poor servants knew anything about
that
?”

“ ’Zounds, no!”

“I sometimes wonder what you
do
believe!” cried Catherine, in exasperation.

“I believe in religious tolerance, a strong monarchy and unity. I am also one of those bigots who believe that malice is a greater sin than a poor frailty of nature.”

“Yet you give this common informer lodgings in the Palace — and, for all I know, a pension! Paying a man to hound to death others whom you believe to be innocent!” In spite of the melancholy dignity with which she had spoken, Catherine was more angry with him than she had been for years.

“It is the man who holds the purse strings who pipes the tune,” he reminded her. “And the Commons —”

“The Commons! The everlasting Commons! Have you no authority?” In her grief for her servants and her indignation for her faith she might have been the Castlemaine railing at him.

Yet even then Charles did not raise his voice. He was the last man to hold himself blameless. “If I had, should I have let loyal old Lord Stafford die?” he asked sadly.

“But are you not King?” she cried, thumping the desk by which they stood.

“I am
now
,” he said dryly, toying absently with a pen.

Catherine stopped short then in mid-tirade. Looking up into his drawn face, she realized that for the first time he was envisaging the hitherto undreamed of possibility of his restored throne slipping from him. That he was back to the wall, fighting for his inheritance, as his father had done before him. Fighting, as he so often did, by seeming to do nothing; waiting for some propitious moment in which to seize his opportunity. Instantly, the burden of her own personal grievances dropped from her. “You mean —” she began, with a terrified little gasp.

Only the snapping of the pen between his fingers betrayed his feelings. “I mean that I will not risk going on my travels again to save any man’s skin,” he said.

Standing motionless beside him, Catherine knew that he was letting her look for once upon his bared soul, without pretence or barrier. “Not even James’s?” she asked presently, in a small voice.

“No, not even James’s! That is why I am sending him overseas.”

“Into exile?”

“For his own protection. And not, I hope, for long.”

“Then
he
must go on his travels again?”

“You do not suppose I like doing it? And I cannot even make him see that it is the only thing which will stop this seething unrest here —”

“Poor James! Then there is no chance for my unfortunate servants?”

“Very little, I am afraid. I shall do what I can for their defence, privately. But I confess to you, Catherine, I must move cautiously. It seems this Oates reptile has nosed out about your sending Dick Bellings to Rome.”

“Oh, Charles! All those years ago! How could he?”

Charles shrugged contemptuously. “In the same way that he ran to earth some of James’s blunt letters, I suppose. James has about as much diplomacy as a bull. He should air his feelings only in code, as I do.”

Horrified, Catherine sank into a chair. “But that letter I wrote concerned only Portugal. It had nothing whatever to do with this country,” she protested, trying to remember exactly what she had written in it. “Pedro may even be able to produce it.”

“And even if he could, do you suppose that Shaftesbury and his crowd, who are at the back of all this, would not find some means to suppress all but the outside of it in Court? It would probably be used as evidence that you were trying to convert England.”

Catherine buried her face in her hands. “Oh, how wrong I was to urge you to let me send it! You gave in out of kindness, I remember, against your better judgement. I did not realize then how much wiser you are than I.”

“Well, it is done now,” said Charles, laying a kindly hand on her bowed shoulder.

She sat up, comforted, and covered it with her own. So long as they were in this together, what did it matter? “But how can normal, sane people believe such things about their own kind?” she asked.

“But they are
not
sane just now. It is difficult for you to appreciate that there are greybeards still living who can remember the Gunpowder Plot in my Grandfather, James the First’s time; when the Papists really
did
try to blow up King, Prince of Wales, Parliament and all.
That
was no rumour. They caught a man called Guy Fawkes red-handed and have burned him in effigy every Fifth of November from that day to this.”

“I know. I have seen them. They are like wild beasts then, although next morning they may be feeding their babies or opening their shops with all the kindliness in the world. And after poor Godfrey was murdered they burned an effigy of the Pope too, with live cats shrieking inside, and brought it beneath my window. It was — indescribably horrible!”

“Oh, Kate, my dear, I am sorry!” There were tears of fear and sorrow running down her cheeks and Charles took her very tenderly in his arms. He could have killed the brutes who had done it. “Do not take this too hardly, beloved. My people are essentially good-natured and fair dealing. They will come to their senses soon and, given rope enough, this Titus Oates will hang himself for perjury.”

“And in the meantime innocent men must die.”

“It has always been so. I, too, could weep sometimes thinking of the fine young men who gave all the laughter and beauty of their lives fighting for my father and me in battle. But kings cannot live and dwell on such things. And believe me, Kate, with any luck I shall best these hypocrites who pretend they are working in my interest. And then, please God, we shall all live in peace.” He pulled her to her feet and wiped the tears from her pale cheeks. “Now rest awhile. I doubt if James will have time to come and say ‘goodbye’ to you,” he said.

“Is he being very difficult?” she asked, between sniffs.

“He will obey me. At least one knows where one is with him. He is not like this Shaftesbury — or Shaftsbury, as James calls him — who has gotten himself so much power that he blows from side to side like a weather vane!”

But to Catherine’s surprise James did come — and straight from the King’s apartments. He told her he was leaving for Brussels and began with formal phrases of farewell; but the moment she had sent her women away he paced up and down in obvious perturbation.

“I am truly sorry,” she told him simply, realising what exile must mean to the pride of a man who had so often fought his country’s battles.

“Charles was forced to it,” he allowed instantly. And then, after a turn or two before her hearth, “I detest compromise, but he is cleverer than I. And if it will preserve the monarchy — But I would not go without his written command.”

“So that is why you came back here?”

“I will never let it be said that I fled willingly from religious persecution.” He unfolded a sheet of paper upon which the ink was scarcely dry, and Catherine laid a sympathetic hand upon the shaking one that offered it. She had never respected him more.

“Though I must command you to do this be assured that no absence nor anything else can ever change me from being truly and kindly your C.R.” she read, in her husband’s familiar hand. Then, refolding and returning it, she added with a smile, “If it is of any comfort to you, his love and regret shine through every word.”

James nodded — almost absently, she thought — and replaced his brother’s letter in some inner pocket. “But it is not that alone which I had to see you about,” he said hurriedly. “I came to warn you.”

“To warn me?”

He went and leaned against the chimney piece and spoke with his back towards her. “George Villiers is talking about urging you to go into a Convent.”

“Pah! He has done that before, after — after my second miscarriage.”

“Yes. But now he is talking about it — seriously — in Parliament.”

“In Parliament!” gasped Catherine.

“Trying to make other Members persuade the King. So that Charles may settle this succession business once and for all by begetting a legitimate Protestant heir.”

Catherine’s hands grasped the arms of her chair. She must try hard to keep a grip on herself. No good to indulge in fainting fits now ... “Does — Charles — know this?” she faltered.

“I cannot say. Certainly, he was not present.”

“And you did not tell him?”

“No. I felt that he had enough on his plate. With me — and that young fool Monmouth.”

“Monmouth?”

“He is back, as you know, and lording it in the Upper House. Elderly peers walking bare-headed before him. One would imagine he had found his mother’s marriage lines!” James swung round, red and raging. “Oh, forgive me, Catherine! I am a clumsy brute,” he apologized. “But it maddens me, Charles being so fond with him and he being Shaftesbury’s tool. Shaftesbury and Buckingham and the rest are trying to turn his head completely so that he stands as a figurehead for the Protestant cause — a kind of logical sequence to this Oates fellow’s ranting.”

“You mean — that you fear they may really try to put him in your place?”

“With me well out of the way in Brussels! What am I to do, Catherine? And he has such a way with the common people.”

“If it came to such a pass as that,” she said reluctantly, “surely your daughter Mary, who is a Protestant, has more right?”

“But after all that fuss she made she is quite subservient to her husband — and the English will not stomach a foreign king.”

They two, so deeply involved, sat in troubled silence, until James remembered that he must be getting on the Dover road to catch the packet.

“It was more than good of you to come,” she said, rising to bid him farewell; and it was only then that he betrayed what was, perhaps, the main object of his visit. “Perhaps if you were to have a word with young Jemmie —” he suggested diffidently.

With enough trouble of her own, Catherine showed her surprise. “I have no influence at all, politically. You know that,” she said.

“But he was always fond of you. And the young fool is vain rather than heartless. Emotionally, he might be moved,” pointed out James, with one of his rare spurts of insight.

“I will do what I can,” she promised. “And when is that pretty little wife of yours going to give you the son she was wanting?” she forced herself to ask, almost gaily, seeing her women coming back.

“Not yet, it would seem.”