The Bride

by Margaret Irwin

  He turned, glowing and rubbing his hands, to Prince Rupert, then checked, amazed by the expression on the young man’s face.

  A Frenchman had said that Rupert in his black moods could look like a soul in hell. And now, on hearing this good news of his beloved uncle, there was such concentrated pain and ferocity in his face as made Hyde shrink from him. Rupert saw him do so, and pulled himself together.

  ‘What sort of an array?’ he asked.

  ‘Why, what array could it be but a loyal triumph?’ Hyde replied.

  Rupert could not explain to himself the fear that had fallen on him at sound of the apparently simple words; nor why, when he had pictured the London crowds mustered in the streets to see King Charles go by, he had imagined them, not as a cheering mob, but all standing in a deathly silence.

  He did not dismiss that queer cold fancy from his mind, for he had learned that such fancies had generally some origin in reason, and was now seeking it.

  ‘What use is a treaty with Parliament?’ he said.

  This was too much for Hyde. ‘Is Your Highness mad? The King has made peace with his Parliament with whom he has been at war and who hold him prisoner, and you say, “What use is a treaty?” Is it of no use that he is now in agreement with the representatives of his people – that the people themselves are preparing a loyal triumph for him?’

  ‘None whatever,’ replied Rupert imperturbably. ‘The Parliament does not represent the people. If it did, there would be some Royalists in it, and no Royalist has been allowed in Parliament for years. But it makes no odds, for the people, whether inside or outside Parliament, do not count any longer. The King is not the Parliament’s prisoner, but Cromwell’s. If Parliament shows itself friendlier to the King than Cromwell approves, so much the worse for it – and for the King.’

  Lauderdale was goggling at him like an over-fed spaniel.

  ‘Cromwell,’ he said, ‘has betrayed the Church of God, even the most holy and Solemn League and Covenant and the Kirk of Scotland which the Parliament promised us should be made the Church of England. Only for that, for the sake of God’s holy Kirk, did we ever ally ourselves to the English Parliament – but Cromwell took promises for piecrusts, the lying, cheating grazier – brewer – a sweating tradesman – so rich in the possession of dirt that he passes himself off as a country gentleman—’

  The words fell thickly out of his loose mouth, the abuse dropped to a bar-and-brothel quality unusual on behalf of a holy cause.

  ‘Ah well,’ said Rupert, ‘you can’t have it both ways – church as well as cash. You got your pay when you sold the King to the English army two years ago. How much did you pocket out of it yourself? I hear you friend Argyll got £30,000.’

  Hyde heard the short contemptuous voice hurling the words like stones from a sling across the table. Now it was all up. Now there would be no more hope of attaching Lauderdale and the rest of the Moderate Covenanters to their side.

  Montrose himself, whom all these Covenanters hated with the venom of a defeated enemy since he had triumphed over their armies in Scotland, could not have done more damage. What could Hyde do now? His brain refused to work, his tongue to move; there was only one thing which might have passed it off, and that was to ply Lauderdale with brandy so fast and so deep that in the ensuing stupor he would forget all about the insult. But he had no brandy, only some thin ale – which now he remembered he had drunk. In miserable certainty he raised his eyes to the probably apoplectic nobleman, and caught him in the act of winking at the Prince.

  ‘Ah, wouldn’t Your Highness like to know?’ he said. ‘Well, all men have their price – the thing is to put it high enough. Little Warriston now, that holy man of God, he fetched away £3000 out of the pickings – not bad for the scrubby lawyer’s clerk he was a few years ago.’

  An astoundingly impudent rascal and hypocrite? Hyde wondered. No, it was not so simple. The man had had the ring of the fanatic in his voice when he spoke of the Kirk a minute ago, and now he was once again the gross cynic, careless even of his uncouth appearance since he was so sure of himself as the bluff man of the world. Not even Rupert’s cold scorn staring at him in the face could shake his confidence. One might as easily shake a hippopotamus.

  ‘Good God!’ Rupert was murmuring in a kind of awe. ‘And my sailors wanted to throw you overboard! I wonder what prevented it?’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Lauderdale cheerfully, for he was sometimes a little deaf when it was convenient, and had half closed his eyes with the smile still firmly printed on his mouth to prevent it from wincing. ‘A great work that of Your Highness in pulling the fleet together. To be soldier and sailor too – admirable; quite an Admirable Crichton, as we say at Saint Andrews – or should I say an Admiral Crichton, ha ha? I’m no sailor myself, mighty sick I got of wagging on the waves.’

  ‘You’d have got sicker of wagging in them,’ continued Rupert with the same quiet abstraction, unable to leave this game of seeing how many insults Lauderdale could swallow.

  To Hyde’s intense relief, though that proved sadly fleeting, his servant was knocking his apologetic tap on the door, edging his shock of hair round it. But his words brought the angry blood rushing back into his master’s head.

  ‘The Princess Louise is below, sir, and asking for Prince Rupert.’

  Lauderdale’s bonhomie at once blew up to twice its former size. The Princess Louise, one of Rupert’s younger sisters, was a mad, unbiddable girl, so Lauderdale had heard already from the sober Dutch citizens here; she was the wildest daughter in that huge family of King Charles’ sister, the Queen of Bohemia, exiled now for so many years at The Hague – just as Rupert the Devil had been the wildest, most intractable and unaccountable of all her sons. ‘And that’s saying a deal,’ they had assured Lauderdale solemnly over their pipes and mugs, ‘for his brother Maurice was locked up here more than once as a boy for his roisterings, and Wilful Ned, as even his own family call him, carried off a fine French madam and married her against the Queen of France’s consent, and Philip the youngest, a lad of eighteen, killed a man in the public street here for paying too much court to his mother and sister Louise, and indeed the only one that gives no trouble is the eldest, Carl, a decent body that’s come into his own at last by sitting quiet and waiting for it, and so now he’s gone back to his father’s home at Heidelberg. Ah, he’s the only one that’s prospered or ever will prosper, I say.’

  And Lauderdale had goggled agreement and was now goggling in double delight to get proof with his own eyes of the wildness and degradation of this royal family on the female side. The Princess Louise was an artist, she studied with the portrait- painter Gerard Honthorst, she painted pictures herself, she even sold them – that showed what like she was; and now here she was, running through the streets unattended and coming headlong up the stairs into whatever company her brother might be keeping.

  For the Princess had not stayed below, she almost at once appeared behind the servant, so quietly and swiftly overtaking him that he stepped back as he finished speaking, gaping up at her; she surely must have flown up the stairs, her shabby red cloak spreading out from her slight form like a sail in the wind of her speed.

  Its hood fell back, her face shone out, a delicate pointed face, brilliant in the flush of the cold air outside, a sudden face, its eager impulse now shot through with a flash of laughter at sight of the three men and their surprise. She did not look the sort of princess one would meet at a State banquet complete with full quota of jewels and feathers and fixed mechanic smile, she was more like a princess in a fairy-tale disguised as the woodcutter’s daughter in that old cloak.

  It was certainly not Lauderdale’s instantly awakened sensuality that conceived this romantic image of her, nor Hyde’s stout loyalty shocked to the core, nor Rupert’s rather determined indifference to the fact that the sister he liked best should behave in a way no one else’s sister behaved; yet it hovered somewhere in the air, affecting all three of them, although her words, quickly uttered,
were as practical as any message brought by a subordinate officer.

  ‘Your pardon, gentlemen. Rupert, you must get back to Helvoetsluys on the instant. Maurice has sent a messenger. There’s mutiny broken out on the ships.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘He said no more than that.’

  Rupert looked at Hyde. There was the end of his plan just now to go to Montrose.

  ‘Then I must go,’ he said, ‘and get them to sea at once, – how I don’t know, till I get the money from Rotterdam, and even that will only pay for their rigging.’

  ‘Mother has a plan,’ said Louise softly. Her tone was low, not from discretion but absorption; she was looking at Lauderdale, and under her soft gaze that bullfrog bonhomie of his seemed to reach the bursting-point in the fable.

  A fine spirited filly this, though too thin – he liked them fat himself. He showed plainly that he thought he had fascinated the charming though eccentric Princess, and so he had. Rupert saw what Louey was doing – little devil, she was drawing him in her mind, committing every grotesque feature of his huge shaggy head to memory, while Lauderdale wagged it and all but winked and made jovial insolent allusions to her courage in trusting so much beauty to run alone through the streets of The Hague.

  ‘Ah, but the Dutch are not as gallant as you Scots,’ said Louise sweetly. ‘If they were, do you think my three sisters and I would have been left to sit and spin alone all this time?’

  Rupert gave a harsh laugh.

  ‘The Scots won’t be as tolerant as the Dutch of your teasing,’ he said; ‘they’re a nation that takes things seriously.’

  ‘Especially princesses,’ said Lauderdale, ‘but I never had a chance to take one yet.’

  Now, thought Hyde, the Prince would surely demolish him, though indeed the Princess had brought it on herself. But there she kept it, for she laughed at Lauderdale and casually wished him good luck, said goodbye to Hyde, and went out instantly with her brother, to leave Lauderdale gloating and Hyde silently deploring the low manners and possibly morals learned in Dutch studios by modern young women. His mother had never left nor wished to leave their remote little country home at Dinton for more than thirty years. What was the world coming to?

  He suddenly jerked his body out of his chair, padded hastily to the door, tore it open and called in agonized tones, ‘Your Highness – hi! hi there! Boy, stop them, have they gone—? Christ in Heaven, how will I ever get at him!’

  But the boy had caught them just as they were closing the house door behind them.

  ‘What in hell—?’ demanded Rupert, turning and calling up the stair, the wind tearing in after him and rattling all the furniture.

  A puffy tufty face was hanging over the banister, eyebrows and peaked beard bristling with anxious intensity.

  ‘I beg you, sir, when once you are gone to sea to remember that which I have asked before of you – to write down all the details you can remember of the most important actions of the war in England. They will be helpful, even essential, for when I shall have leisure again to proceed in my unequal task.’

  ‘What task?’ Rupert was already swinging round again. Hyde could not believe he had forgotten – why, he had mentioned it himself just now!

  ‘My History of the Great Rebellion,’ he roared furiously, and the wind called back derisively, ‘Tu whoop – ooo!’

  The door slammed again. With their heads down and their cloaks wrapped tight about them, Rupert and Louise had gone out into the wind to push their way against it through mean little streets with absurd names, the Street of the Green Lamb, of the Raining House, towards their mother’s house at the fourway crossing of the Voorhout.

  Rupert growled, ‘If he thinks I’ve got nothing better to do than write down what happened at Edgehill and Naseby—’

  ‘You had better, or in revenge he’ll write badly of you or not at all.’

  ‘So it’s the first duty of a general to write himself up?’

  ‘Oh yes. Lord Newcastle is even now busy priming his wife as to what to write about him after he’s dead. They all do.’

  ‘Well, you’re wrong, for there’s one who’s had a book written about him by the chaplain of a Scots regiment, and I can tell you he’s written it con amore.’

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘Wishart, and his Deeds of Montrose. He saw something of his campaigns as Montrose’s chaplain in Scotland.’

  ‘Oh, but I know about that – the “Annus Mirabilis” – it ran through four editions in the Latin in one year, and now there’s the translation, but every time I ask for it it is just sold out. Rupert, there is Jan Bardaens’ little shop at the corner! If he has one, you shall give it me as your parting present.’

  ‘I’ve no time and no money, and I never intended to give you a parting present.’

  But Louey had run on full tilt, snatched the bookseller out of his little dark shop, and was already waving a small brown leather volume as Rupert caught her up.

  ‘Here it is! He has it all ready for me this time. Where are your florins? How many, Mynheer? Now you need not send me anything from Ireland, Rupert.’

  ‘There’s nothing there to send but whisky.’

  They hurried round the corner; he scarcely paused in his stride to toss the required florins to Mynheer Bardaens, whose round eyes opened indignantly at such abruptness, even from a prince, to a free burgher and, what was more, a scholar. But it was no good looking his thoughts at the Prince’s back, just as it had been no good speaking to the Princess. The pair of them had already whisked round the corner and were now going out at the end of the street by the old Spanish prison.

  Their Dutch cousins’ palace of the Binnenhof rose to the right before them, carved out of a thunder-cloud in the bleak light of the easterly wind; they had seen it ever since they could remember, and generally double, all the walls and towers standing on their heads in the oblong lake on its south side. But now all that reflected image was broken up into turbulent dark ripples; the tiny bush-grown island in the middle of it had suddenly come alive in such a fury of blown bare branches that it was impossible to believe the storks that nested there each spring would ever find a calm enough resting-place in it again; the five avenues of bare trees all along the walled bank opposite the Palace were transformed to angry skeletons, tossing and cracking their dry bones together.

  ‘Listen to them!’ cried Louey, ‘they are shouting to you of the sea.’

  They had turned to their left, in at the gates of their mother’s house at the end of the Voorhout. Its main gables were pricked aloft like cats’ ears into the stormy sky; the wind was racing round the courtyard like a trapped thing trying to get out, it tossed up whirlpools of dust and twigs and last year’s leaves; it came from the east, from Poland and those icy mountain barriers of their father’s kingdom of Bohemia that Louey had never seen and Rupert could not remember. The wind would take Rupert west to Ireland. She wished that it would take her too.

  They were going up the steps into the house and as he went he was calling to his men to saddle the horses. They were going into the house together; in a few minutes he would come out alone and ride to Helvoetsluys to sail for Ireland, while she stayed here. But she held the little brown book in her hands, a talisman of adventure.

  As Rupert halted, giving directions about Grey Day’s harness – something about the saddle, and ‘Tighten that girth, the stirrup wants more length’ – short words shooting through the keen, boisterous air, she opened the book, peered close at the first page and gave a little cry.

  ‘There’s no frontispiece. The picture of him has been torn out.’

  ‘Then old Bardaens cheated you.’

  ‘No. He was trying to tell me, I think, but we couldn’t wait. It’s always happening. People look at his books and steal the pictures – particularly that one. I’ve never seen Montrose’s portrait yet.’

  ‘Draw it yourself then, one of your imaginary portraits, and see how near it is to the truth when he comes to The Hague.’


  ‘Is he coming?’

  ‘If Lauderdale’s faction don’t prevent it. That fellow’s like a mad bull at the mention of him.’

  ‘That’s illogical! How can they blame Montrose for having fought for his King, when they now propose to fight for him themselves?’

  ‘Beaten men aren’t logical. And Montrose beat ‘em.’ He swore softly, going up the steps into the house. Louey dared not ask more, but suddenly, striding along the passage, he told her, ‘I’d have gone to see him, I told Hyde so just now – but that’s changed.’

  And it was she who had changed it, with this news of mutiny on his ships, news that she herself had hurried to take to him. Was it Montrose’s fate that it should have happened at just this very moment to prevent the meeting with Rupert that Montrose had been urging for months past? His fate? – or Rupert’s? – perhaps even hers?

  Here they were going along the passage to their mother’s room in the house that she had lived in all her life; and a thing had just happened, fallen into all their lives like a stone falling into the canal that joined the river that joined the sea, breaking up the calm reflections of peaceful homes mirrored in the water, the ripples from it spreading out and out, reaching beyond where anyone could see.

  She opened the book she was carrying and looked at the last words on the last page: ‘And they on the third of September having a good winde put forth to sea for Norway; And the same evening Montrose himself, accompanied only with one James Wood a worthy Preacher, by a small cock-boat got into a bark which lay at anchor without the haven of Montrose, and being clad in a coarse suit, the Lord and Patron passed for his Chaplain’s servant. This was in the year of our Lord 1646, and the 34. year of his age.

  FINIS

  ‘But he is still alive,’ she thought, ‘and he is coming here, so it is not yet time to write FINIS.’

  III

  The plan of Rupert’s mother, Elizabeth, the exiled Queen of Bohemia, was that she should pawn the jewels that had belonged to her grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots. She had not seen her brother, King Charles of England, since she was sixteen and he twelve, but he had helped her all he could through her stormy disastrous life, had sent money he could ill spare to try to win back the lost territories of her German husband, on whose death he had begged her to come and live with him in England, had had her sons to stay at his Court, the finest then in Europe, and wanted to give them whole colonies to govern when most royal uncles would have thought a stud of horses sufficient.